Sacrifice of Fools

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Anyone want to watch the birth?’

  ‘Almost got to see it live, Darren,’ she says.

  ‘Aye, I heard you were up in casualty,’ Healey says. ‘How is your man Gillespie?’

  ‘He’ll not be running any marathons for a while. That Outsider lawyer he’s hanging around with is looking after him back at the Annadale Hold.’

  Darren Healey gives her the look that suggests all manner of sexual deviations. It also says that she should thank the police-person’s god that her client is in the Annadale Hold and not the morgue.

  I know, I know, Darren. I take my eyes off the ball for one second to call the office about Gavin Peterson, and they hit the boy you’re supposed to be minding with your life. But for that Outsider, he would be on the slab.

  Oh God. Willich is going to fry me.

  And then when you creep in with the dawn’s early light, Michael’s doing his Zen Bang Breakfast Routine where he pretends to move things slowly and carefully because wee Rosh has been up all night, but which somehow contrives to make the maximum amount of impact noise. I’m the one’s been out all night cruising clubs and saving suspects and somehow I’ve done something that makes you annoyed with me? She learned long before Michael that you can’t argue with a man in Zen Bang. When it starts to blur into Good Father/Bad Mother, Good Father putting his time/job/life on hold for lickkle Louise because Bad Mother’s got so many things that are more important than lickkle Louise and Daddy, it’s time to go to work, however shitty you feel. Jesus, do you think I like this? Do you think anybody would choose to spend all night alone and cold and scared deep in the weird? No. No. Leave it. You came here to get away from him. Don’t bring him in. Leave him out there under that cold drip in the corridor, all day, maybe it’ll wear him away like a stone.

  Darren Healey’s off in his disposables and bib and hat and smug grin to see if they will persuade his boss to give him his European Union Statutory Paternity Leave early. Lots of luck, Darren. Hope you never end up hiding from partner and heir behind other people’s crimes and misdemeanours.

  Word of her fuck-up has spread. On the way to hot strong black coffee Richard Crawford shouts out, ‘Hey, Rosh! Good thing that Outsider lawyer bit Gillespie’s hanging around with pulled some kind of Wonder Woman stunt, or we’d be down one prime suspect and Willich wouldn’t like that.’

  ‘Fuck off, Richard,’ Dunbar growls.

  ‘Kethba,’ Littlejohn says, sitting on Dunbar’s desk, which she wishes he wouldn’t. ‘Superhuman strength. Controlled hysteria. Like those stories you’ve heard about grannies single-handedly lifting cars that have fallen on their sons. The Shian can switch it on and off. It costs them though; they have to sleep for a day, day and a half, to recover.’

  No one’s in the mood for a Littledick lecture, least of all Roisin Dunbar. There’s information she needs from the computer before this morning’s meeting,

  Ten o’clock sharp Willich comes in. Chairs are pulled round into a ragged semicircle. Littlejohn perches on the edge of a desk at the back. There are times when he wants to be one of the lads and times when he does not.

  ‘First off, congratulations to DC Healey on the birth of a son, Wayne.’ Applause, whistles, whoops. ‘He’ll be off this afternoon for two weeks on a much more difficult job than this.’ The parents all exchange knowing looks. ‘Seriously, well done, and good luck. OK, what have you got for me this morning? Technology smuggling; what’s the word from the players?’

  ‘The hard men will pay up to six grand for a maser.’ Ian Cochrane’s been running a string of grasses since the bad days of the Troubles. Dunbar’s not sure that he isn’t too close to his sources. ‘They’re arming all their enforcers with them; they use them to keep their people in line. Seems having your head blown up is scarier than a bullet through it.’

  ‘They go for the head shot?’

  ‘I’m guessing. There are rumours of an arms race; Inla’s after some Sheenie device—’

  ‘Hey. We don’t use that name. We don’t even think it.’

  ‘Something called a Cloak of Shadows. Could be a code name. But if Inla want it, the Proddy boys want it first, except no one can tell me what a Cloak of Shadows is.’

  ‘Dr Littlejohn?’

  Heads turn. Littlejohn stands up, shrugs.

  ‘I don’t recognize the name. It suggests some hunting device, maybe with ritual connotations. If I had it in Narha, I could hazard a guess.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Cochrane whispers to Roisin Dunbar. Then, aloud, ‘I’ll go back and see what my contacts can find. Ahm, they aren’t exactly the Rotary Club…’

  ‘Let me know what you need. Second round of door-to-door?’

  Tracey Agnew’s as bright and glowing as ever. All that jogging keeps the arches supple and the tits firm. Lucky you have time for it. ‘We got seven who hadn’t been in for the first round. One saw Ongserrang going in, another couple were at the Queen’s Film Theatre on the night, but remember seeing an Outsider on a small motorbike pay a call that afternoon. It was a pizza delivery bike.’

  ‘Our friend Ounserrat Soulereya. Does she check out? DC Thomas?’

  ‘She’s legit. The Not Afraid of the River Hold.’ (Sniggers, ‘What the hell kind of a name is that for anything?’ Thomas smiles and continues) ‘has confirmed that she is a qualified genro appointed by them to protect the interests of one Sounsurresh Soulereya, originally of that Hold.’

  ‘The name sounds familiar.’

  ‘It could. Sounsurresh Soulereya is actually a bit of a minor celebrity: one of those Outsider models who’re the fashion at the moment. She came over here with her kids; it was in the papers.’ Murmurs and nods. ‘She came over to visit the family she was born into.’

  ‘This isn’t unusual,’ Littlejohn says. He’s been feeling ignored on his perch at the back. ‘They’re a much more mobile people than we are. It’s likely that the father of her children is still resident in that Hold, and she wants them to meet him.’

  ‘Anyway, she didn’t go home. When she failed to turn up at a photographic shoot, her people got worried and sent this lawyer to find her. When I called, they thought it was because we had found a body. They were quite relieved to find out we hadn’t.’

  ‘So what’s Gillespie doing with her?’

  ‘The Hold she was visiting was South Side of the Stone, down at Islandhill. The one where Ongserrang went.’

  ‘Connection? Agnew, check it out. Right, now you’ll be fascinated to know that DS Dunbar has found another possible player in the game. This is while Mr Gillespie is getting his head kicked in by party unknown.’

  Dunbar chokes back embarrassment.

  ‘In fact, I think we’ll have her up to the front to tell us all the good news.’

  Fuck you, boss.

  The team hoots and slow hand-claps as she pins up her printouts on the board next to the shots of blood-sprayed rooms and headless bodies on slabs annotated with computer-printed arrows. She got three prints from the machine. One is a grainy long-lens image from a RAM camera of a man standing in front of a Chinese grocer’s window with a single lacquered duck hanging in it. It is night. One is an enhanced clipping from a newspaper of a heavy, beefy man in a terrible anorak and a dog collar, with another man partly hidden behind him. It is day, it is wet, they are standing on the steps of the City Hall. The photograph suggests they are part of a much larger crowd. The last is a prison full-face and profile, with a number under it. There are fingerprints, iris scans and the intimate bar-codes of a DNA profile along the bottom, and a name.

  ‘Gavin Peterson. You may remember him; he got sent down for fifteen for his part in a series of sectarian murders committed by the Red Hand Commandos back in 1995.’

  ‘I was part of the team put him away,’ Willich says. ‘I was in Antrim Road then, in the RUC days. We wanted the bastard in for life. He was running the North Belfast Commando; he carried out those killings personally, but his defence brief did a demolition job on our evidence. We were
lucky even to get fifteen for illegal weapons and conspiracy.’

  ‘He got out last year after some kind of prison conversion or something, and walked straight into a job as head of security for the fragrant Reverend McIvor Kyle.’ She taps picture three. ‘Gavin Peterson then.’ Picture two. ‘Gavin Peterson now.’ Picture one. ‘Gavin Peterson at two forty-seven this morning, leaving the premises of Mr Lee Pak Yu, who is running a frook club from the upstairs storeroom of his Oriental grocery on Little Howard Street, in our parish. If you look carefully, you can see he’s carrying a package of some kind. Peterson had a meeting with Gillespie and the Outsider Ounserrat Soulereya at the club. They did time together in the Maze. They both have paramilitary backgrounds; everyone knows the Dee Pees and the UDF are in with the Free Men of Ulster.’ She looks around the faces: anyone going to object? Anyone going to stand up and declare that McIvor Kyle is a good man and holy, and stands truly for God and Ulster? Any of you ones who leave anonymous tracts in my desk drawers about how Catholics too many earn salvation by turning from their church of error. I know you’re there, the police draws you like flies: Dee Pees and Free Pees and Ee Pees. Right-wing fellowship churches, wee gospel halls, suburban faith tabernacles with thousand-strong youth choirs; Lodge and Order and Temple. The Orange and the Black. Prior claims to your loyalties? Remember the first commandment, and keep it wholly: the Northern Ireland Police Service is a jealous god and shall have no other gods before it.

  ‘Peterson’s Gillespie’s buyer,’ Willich says adamantly. ‘And the lawyer, the Outsider, she’s the supplier.’

  At the back of the room, on the corner of his desk, Littlejohn is rolling his eyes.

  ‘If we’re going with the arms smuggling theory.’

  The room is suddenly silent. Not even the creak of chair leather, the squeak of stressed tube steel, the soft sift of cigarette ash to the floor.

  ‘You think there’s something wrong with this approach?’

  ‘No. But…’ But. Yes. But those buts. You have to. They force you. Deep breath. ‘Gillespie and the Outsider went to another club before the frook joint. Club Ochre, on North Street. He caught me; I know, I got careless. He went to great pains to let me know exactly what he was doing and where he was going and who he was seeing. He was at Club Ochre because Sounsurresh Soulereya had been at the opening a couple of weeks back. From there he was going to the frook club on Little Howard Street to find a businessman called Gerry Conlon, the Gerry Conlon who owns GreenGene, who seems to have made some arrangement with Sounsurresh Soulereya. Now, why tell me this? Why lead me, not to Conlon, but to Peterson, if it’s going to further implicate him? This does not make sense.’

  ‘Then it could have been Peterson’s boys gave Gillespie a digging,’ Richard Crawford says.

  ‘Why, if Gillespie’s the contact?’ Dunbar says. She doesn’t like the shade Willich’s face is going; apoplectic red.

  ‘Maybe he’s asking too much.’

  ‘Or maybe word got back to Gerry Conlon,’ Ian Cochrane says. ‘Wants his mucky little secrets kept quiet.’

  Bless you my son, Dunbar thinks at Ian Cochrane. Willich’s holding up his hands.

  ‘Hey hey hey. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Too much good solid bobbying gets flushed down the crapper by wanting everything at once. OK, we need a fast result, but we need one that’s going to stick. So we do it methodically, we do it thoroughly, we do it slowly. OK? This is good work. This is a good lead. DI Cochrane, have another word with your grasses, see if they’ve heard anything about the Free Men. Dr Littlejohn, any chance you could pick a team to make some inquiries among the Outsiders about this Cloak of Shadows thing? I am going to have a little chat with Mr Gavin Peterson. Dunbar, you made the connection, you come with me. But first, a wee word in my office?’ That headmasterial lowering of the head and lift of the eyebrows. Jesus. Six of the best.

  Willich’s office is a box room with a view of the back of the DSS. Come Christmas, you can watch the civil servants banging in the car park. He’s got a big computer because everyone has to have a big computer but the screen saver has been sending its lissajous looping around his screen for five uninterrupted years. There’s room for a desk, a chair, and one other person standing.

  ‘Dunbar, do you know what the Eleventh Commandment is?’ People are moving slowly beyond the ribbed glass door, trying to overhear.

  ‘Never, ever, contradict the boss, boss.’

  ‘You made me look like I didn’t know what I was doing out there.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘You know what keeps this place going? There’re thirty highly intelligent, highly ambitious, highly determined people out there; do you know what stops them tearing each other’s throats out? Respect. Yes, it’s like the Lion King. You question my competence, you challenge my authority, I lose respect and once that’s gone it never comes back again. Never. And instead of a team we’ve got thirty individuals who don’t like each other much, spending more time fighting each other than fighting the enemy. So, whatever you may think, you keep it to yourself. You got that?’

  ‘Yes sir. It won’t happen again, sir.’

  ‘Damn right it won’t. You see, I can forgive — just — you fucking up by getting spotted in that night club. I can even forgive you — though it will take time, and a hell of a lot of good behaviour from you — for taking your eyes off your client and letting him get the shit beaten out of him. But the unforgivable sin, the sin against the Holy Spirit, is to make me look stupid in front of the pack. So, you will never, ever, do that again.’ He waits for a response.

  ‘What more do you want me to say?’ Dunbar says. ‘I saved Gillespie’s ass.’

  ‘The Outsider saved his ass. Now, if we’re done here, let’s go spoil Gavin Peterson’s Lord’s Day.’

  The sign’s the size of a hoarding and it says ‘Faith Tabernacle, Christ Centred, Full Bible Salvation, Minister: Rev McIvor Kyle, BD Hons, DD, All Welcome’, with a painting of the Reverend McIvor Kyle at the top so there’s no mistake, but Roisin Dunbar knows what anyone with even a vestigial spirituality knows, that you can’t build a holy place out of red brick. God is a function of architecture: the Outsiders have got that right. Build in grand perpendicular, send Gothic piers and vaults shooting up and fill the spaces between them with glowing lights, and the God of Mystery will abide there. Build in the intimate, woody, inward-looking enclosures of contemporary Catholicism and you will meet the God of Harmony and Tranquillity. Build in housing-estate red brick, fit the thing out with PA and overhead projection screens, wrap it in a car park, and the God of Shopping Centres dwells therein.

  The place looks like a gun battery. Those tall slit windows will retract and put out big black muzzles. That shallow domed roof will slide back for howitzers and siege mortars. The front line of the war against Romish error. The Verdun of the Reformation. A meaner deity than the God of Shopping Centre inspirits here. The God of Heavy Ordinance. The God of Protestant Armageddon. They want it. They really look forward to that final battle when they drive the forces of Popishness from their holy Israel. No nuns and no priests and no rosary beads, and each day is the twelfth of July. Jesus. But you don’t get a look in here, do you? You’re too soft and forgiving and loving and lefty; these are Old Testament believers.

  The church seems to grow taller and wider and heavier as Roisin Dunbar drives across the thousand-space car park. It’s an hour after the end of the morning service but there are still a lot of cars. Dissenting Presbyterianism runs long on Volvos, Rovers and Toyota people movers. All those good little Protestants they’re encouraged to spawn.

  ‘I bet you feel out of place here.’

  ‘Any twenty-first-century person would feel out of place here.’

  After-service hangers-on stare as Willich and Dunbar come through the brass double doors. The big, cold vestibule is glassed in with illuminated Lives of the Martyrs. Deaths of the Martyrs, more accurately. Above the Junior League of Church Loyalty table a naked, inverted,
spreadeagled man is being sawn in half. The books in the wire book carousels are all by McIvor Kyle. They have names like Thy Quickening Ray, or Thy Great Vouchsafefulness, and photographs of sunsets on the cover. The cassettes in the wooden cassette rack also have pictures of sunsets on their covers, and names like Ten Studies in Ephesians or The Vestments of Royal Priesthood. Those that aren’t by Reverend McIvor Kyle are by a group of fat men smiling up into a quickening ray from out of the sunset. These men are called the Revival Trumpets.

  An usher who smiles far too much directs them to the offices, which are buried like a command bunker under levels of protecting masonry. Roisin Dunbar can’t resist a look into the big church. You could fit an Outsider landing craft under the domed roof. It must be half a mile up to there. The seats are tiered, but she doesn’t see a cinema or a theatre; it’s an arena, a colosseum where dramas of death and blood are acted out every Lord’s Day. Stark white walls, high bright windows. The decor runs to red plush, Bibles, crowns and swords. ‘Ulster for Christ’ says the fresco behind the pulpit. Other way round, surely, Pastor Kyle.

  She can’t get the smell of furniture polish out of her nose.

  Another over-smiling usher in a too-neat suit tells them the Head of Security is in today. Knock, enter, out with the warrant cards.

  ‘DCI Willich, and this is DS Dunbar, from Donegal Pass Police Station. We’re making inquiries concerning the murders of five Outsiders in University Street. We’d like to ask you a few questions.’

  Hitler in the bunker. No SS defending the German people with their curved, triangular shields, but pictures of beloved Bible stories made horror stories by over-literal painting, superintended by photoportraits of Pastor McIvor Kyle and King Charles III. He visited a Shian sacred space last month, the self-styled Defender of Faith, your semi-divine monarch. Said it was a truly transcendent spiritual experience.

  ‘Sit, please. Chief Inspector Willich now. Things have changed a bit since last time we met. Can I get you tea, coffee?’