“Pretty good alibi that, in a coma, in hospital, in Derry,” McCrabban said.
“Indeed,” I agreed.
Silent drive home in the car.
Snow flurries. No radio reception to speak of.
“He doesn’t look a bit like the artist’s sketch, anyway,” Crabbie announced as we neared Carrick. “The strange, tall DAADD assassin who eccentrically has drinks with the person he later assassinates.”
“Aye, none of it really fits,” I agreed and dropped the lads at the station before heading up Coronation Road.
Beth met me in the hall with a can of Bass. Now that I had formally committed to leaving this street, she was much happier. This estate, these people, were only temporary constructs to be put up with for a while. My class-war comments had hurt her too and she was pretending not to be mortified by these DUP-voting, country-music-listening, self-immolating-in-chippan-fire Proddies.
“Did you take your inhaler?” Beth asked.
“I did.”
“And no cigarettes?”
“No. Only two. Thank God I’ve been busy, how does anyone quit smoking when you’ve got nothing to occupy your mind?”
“Don’t ask me, I never started. How’d the funerals go in Belfast?”
“Don’t ask me. I was only there for half an hour and then we went up to Derry.”
“Derry? Really?”
“Yup.”
“That was a fast run there and back.”
“Thank you. Glad somebody appreciates it. What have you been doing all day?”
“Watching your offspring. Reading. Which I’m going to get back to. Watch Emma, will you?”
“My pleasure.”
I sat in the living room by the fire and played with Emma. Put the record player on. “This, Emma, is Luigi Boccherini, now people are going to tell you that he’s courtly, old-fashioned, even boring, but you just listen to the warmth of that melody, eh?”
Emma was ignoring me and trying to choke herself to death on a Lego brick. I removed the brick from her gob and helped her make a tower. Warm house, girlfriend, baby girl and kitty – what more could a man ask for? Yeah, the missus was a bit on the high-maintenance side but I was fighting an age gap. Nah, take your pleasures where you find them and this was the good life.
At 6pm I made us some dinner, put on the BBC news and my jaw dropped.
It was on every channel.
I called Crabbie immediately. “Are you watching this?”
“I was just going to pick up the phone and call you,” he said.
The IRA funerals at Milltown Cemetery in Belfast had been attacked by a rogue, presumably deranged, Loyalist gunman called Michael Stone. He had fired an automatic pistol into the crowd of mourners and thrown hand grenades at Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. Three were dead and dozens were wounded. It could have been many more. And what made it worse, somehow, was that the whole thing had been captured live on television. Michael Stone had thrown his grenades and run towards the motorway where the crowd had caught up with him and almost beat him to death.
It was the worst incident of the Troubles since the Enniskillen bombing back in November when the IRA had blown up a dozen civilian mourners at a Remembrance Sunday service. That had been a bad one. The father of a nurse who’d been murdered – Marie Wilson – had gone on Irish television and publicly forgiven the bombers in an act of Christian charity. This had shamed the IRA and since then the bombings had wound down and we thought things were actually going to change. But I suppose nothing ever changed in this three-hundred-andfifty-year-long blood feud.
Beth came into the living room. “What’s happened?” she asked, seeing my face.
I told her. And we watched the news footage. “I hate this whole fucking country,” she said and I could do nothing but nod my head in agreement.
14: A TASTE OF HONEY
The next morning we had to report for duty as normal but nothing felt normal about that day. We knew there were going to be riots and if the Belfast police were overwhelmed they would be calling for support from the surrounding districts.
I had a little meeting with Crabbie and Lawson in my office. “I imagine they’ll be looking for officers to do riot duty. It’ll be over-time and danger money but I don’t want either of you doing it. I’m not banning you from doing it, but I’m telling you it’s fairy gold. You can get seriously hurt. And we’re detectives. A cut above the ordinary peeler, you know?”
It was the same speech I gave every year during Marching Season. There was an element of hypocrisy in it because sometimes I did riot duty and crowd-control duty when I wanted to (when Muhammad Ali came) and sometimes you couldn’t help it, when we were ordered into a DMSU team; still, when we had the choice I preferred not to go and not to let my men go.
“It’s easy money,” Lawson said. “And some of them boys on the nights get triple and even quadruple time! That’s barrister’s money!”
“Let them get their triple time. We’ve a murder and a disappearance to solve.”