“Bye, Beth.”
I hung up feeling happy. Two good phone calls with Beth in a row. DAADD getting us off the hook by sort of claiming responsibility for the Deauville murder, a possible eyewitness … things were looking up.
I made a hot whisky, heated up some soup for dinner, put on Ella Fitzgerald and sat in the living room with the TV on mute.
I quickly unmuted the telly. Something had happened in what looked like Gibraltar.
People had been killed. The killers had been, who? Men in balaclavas. Terrorists? No. No, the killers had been SAS soldiers and the people they’d shot were an IRA active service unit.
Damn it, I was going to have to pay attention to this. I put down the whisky and got my notebook. The BBC was being cagey with the details but RTE from Dublin were jumping right in. They said that the IRA unit had comprised two men and a woman and that they’d been planning to blow up some sort of British army post while the guard was being changed. RTE didn’t know the men’s names but the woman was a young girl from Northern Ireland called Mairéad Farrell.
The BBC said that the IRA unit had been killed in a gun battle. RTE were saying that they had been executed while attempting to surrender.
“Jesus, I don’t like the sound of this,” I said to the cat. “Thank God the weather’s terrible.” Snow and rain would deter the rioters, but for how long?
I turned the TV off and listened to comfort music while I drank hot whiskies and had only my second and third ciggies of the day.
Comfort music? Standard stuff: Schubert, Mozart, Mendelssohn.
I lit the paraffin heater and went to bed.
While the snow fell I found myself dreaming of Spain. I dreamed of palm trees and beaches and copper-haired Mairéad Farrell spread-eagled on the street in a white martyr’s blouse and Red Army Faction flares.
I dreamed of the nameless, faceless SAS men celebrating in their army barracks in Hereford. Woodbines and Carling Black Label and rugby songs. I dreamed of Tariq ibn-Ziyad, the Conqueror, and I dreamed of the great rock named forever in his honour, Tariq’s mountain, Jabal Tār?q:
I dreamed of Molly Bloom, transported to grey Dublin, lying in her marriage bed, day-dreaming of her past erotic adventures in a sunlit Gibraltar.
A dream within a dream.
… and the sea, the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the fig trees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses … Yes. Oh yes. Yes.
Mairéad and Molly. Molly and Mairéad. Two lost girls. The blood coiling under Mairéad’s twisted body, merging with the scarlet of her hair; Molly’s hair splayed over the white of her wedding sheets.
I woke before the dawn and lay in the darkness watching the indigo flame of the paraffin heater. I was unsettled by the dream and annoyed at myself for dreaming it as I trumped down the stairs wrapped in the duvet to stoke the fire. I put on the kettle and took a puff on my inhaler. As if completing a conversation I explained things to the cat. “As you well know when your legs twitch after your phantom mice it’s only a silly dream, lacking divinatory or prophetic or any other content, and a cat of your standing in the feline community and a man of my age should not be vexed by the foolishness of dreams.”
The foolishness of dreams which, in this bellicose corner of this malicious little island, had the ability to change instantly into nightmares.
11: THE LADY VANISHES
Nothing under the Beemer. Careful drive along Coronation Road to the station. Everyone in the barracks full of the talk of Gibraltar. Undisguised triumph. We got three of those IRA bastards, that’ll learn them. No appreciation that this small tactical success will have strategic consequences. As soon as the weather improves there will be riots in West Belfast and when the coffins come back for burial there will be three massive IRA funerals. So often in Ulster a tactical success led to a strategic reverse and vice versa.
I flicked through the morning papers. Mairéad Farrell did not, in fact, have red hair. It was more of a chestnutty brown. She seemed like a nice girl. They all seem like nice girls. If the SAS and MI6 were telling the truth they were plotting to blow up the changing of the ceremonial guard. Twenty young men and God knows how many civilians. If the SAS and MI6 were telling the truth. I’d met spooks and blades and they lied like they had invented the concept.
I’d only just taken a sip of my coffee when Chief Inspector McArthur came in with a huge grin on his face.
“Did you see the Newsletter this morning, Duffy?”
“No.”
He handed me the paper. The headline and pages one to three were all Gibraltar, but lo and behold there was a big picture of him on page four taking the heroin out of Francis Deauville’s lock-up.