“Sean, I’m sympathetic, but I have to get back to—”
“Casus belli and now we’re talking Latin maxims, here’s one even you’ll remember from your Ballymena Academy days: contra principia negantem non est disputandum. How can I argue with her when she’s denying there’s even an argument and she keeps changing the rules?”
“Sean, I have to go.”
“Go then. We’ll talk some more when I come in in a bit.”
I dressed in a sports jacket, white shirt, red tie, black jeans, DMs. Clocked myself in the mirror, killed the fucking tie.
Under the BMW for bombs. No bombs, just the diffraction iridescence of a drop of oil floating in a puddle of rainwater.
Into the Beemer. Second gear. Third. A hard turn at Victoria Road and another onto the A2. Up to 60 mph going past the Fisherman’s Quay. Going so fast the turn into Carrick police station was impossible.
As I say the Beemer, like a greyhound, needs its morning workout.
Into the harbour car park in a squeal of breaks.
Out of the car for the first cigarette of the day.
Dog walkers. Church goers. Some of them know me. Nod a hello and stand on the pier looking down into the black water of Carrick harbour. Behind me was the big Norman Castle and in that castle the well of Fergus Mor Mac Erc, King of Dalriada, the King who brought the stone of Scone from Ireland to Scotland and that sits under the Coronation Throne to this very day. The King who started all this Thucydidian bollocks if you want to go back that far. I didn’t. I didn’t give a shit about any of it any more. “Fuck it,” I said and stamped out the ciggie and got back in the Beemer.
A kid letting his collie piss against the back wheel.
“Oi! You! That’s my car.”
“Sorry, mister, but when she has to go she has to go.”
“What’s her name?”
“I have no idea, but we call her Susie.”
Everybody’s such a smart ass these days. “Tell Susie to piss somewhere else.”
Grumbling, I drove back to the station. When I got there Crabbie had legged it in case I laid any more of my personal stuff on him. Said morning to Lawson and went up to my office and read through the transcript of Mrs Deauville’s second police interview. Crabbie was quite correct, she’d given O’Driscoll even less than she’d given us.
I wanted to know more about DAADD’s murderous ways so I called Marcus Finn in Special Branch intel and although he wasn’t in on a Sunday a young DC called Kenny Clarke said he was starving and would fill me in if I got him lunch.
“Lunch where?” I asked suspiciously.
“I’m not picky.”
“I’m not even in Belfast. I’m in Carrick.”
“Well then, I’m sorry. I’m not authorised to give out this kind of information over the tele—”
“Meet me at the Europa Grill in twenty minutes.”
“What do you look like?”
“A depressed policeman.”
“Aren’t all policem—”
Click. Twenty minutes of hardcore Beemer driving later.
“Ah, Inspector Duffy, I believe,” an amiable-looking eejit of a man in a red jumper said.
We sat in the window overlooking Great Victoria Street. He ordered the most expensive steak they had and I got one too. I’d put it on CID expenses.
“So tell me about DAADD,” I said.
“He was a kindly man, but he just couldn’t cope with family life so he left when I was eight to seek his fortune in Australia.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“Wow, tough room. You don’t have much of a sense of humour, eh?”
“No. DAADD?”
“Well, they’re your standard IRA front organisation. Not much to them really. They’ve been growing in the last few years, of course, because intel-wise we’ve been on the back foot in so many areas.”
“Back foot how?”
“Remember that chopper crash on the Mull of Kintyre?”
“I remember reading something about it.”
“Very clever idea. Get all your top MI5 and Special Branch agents with expertise in the IRA and put them all in one helicopter and then fly that helicopter into a mountain in Scotland. Great thinking. Anyway we’ve been struggling since then and that coupled with all the new money and weapons flooding in …”
“What new money?” I asked as the steaks came. Both of them overcooked.
“Tons of new money. Money from Americans and Libyans and Russians … And then, of course, there are the general intelligence failures. So many IRA spectaculars in the last five years: the Maze Escape, the Brighton Bombing, Enniskillen.”
“What does it all amount to?” I asked.
“What indeed? What indeed? A lot of our informers have turned up dead. Even some of our agent handlers.”
“Smart guy like you must have some theories.”
“Oh, there are lots of different theories.”
“Like what?”
“Incompetence.”
“That one makes sense. What else?”
He lowered his voice. “There’s the theory that the IRA have a mole in the higher ups in the RUC or MI5.”
I laughed. “Next?”