“What are you thinking about then?”
The lie of the previous sentence? Special Branch railroading me into a jail cell? The fact that ACC Strong and CI McArthur could no longer be counted on to back me up against the bureaucrats and bullshit artists … Take your pick.
“CS Lewis was a good friend of Louis MacNeice, who grew up just round the corner from here. MacNeice would come back to Carrickfergus often to visit his parents and sometimes he’d bring WH Auden or CS Lewis with him. They would walk around Carrick together, maybe they even walked down this very street.”
“Really?”
“Cool, huh?”
“It is, actually.”
And thus distracted, Beth returned to her book.
We went to bed at midnight, checked on the girl, left food for the cat. Slept.
Three am is when they come. The Devil’s Hour. When most terminal patients slip away in hospices and hospitals. When the human body is at its weakest. When even the bakers and milkmen are still asleep.
Drizzle on the quiet street and the hills beyond.
No watchers. No dog walkers. Nothing.
Cloudless night. Sickle moon. Constellations rotating about Polaris. Orion. The Great Bear. The Little Bear. Everyone asleep. But not me.
Living room. Staring at the embers. Worries. I looked for something gentle to put on the record player.
Peggy Lee. Peggy Lee singing about Entt?uschung – nothing more comforting than that.
Then an odd thought came to me. Something ACC Strong had said: Hearsay evidence and missing files, is that what you’re telling me, Duffy? And now you’ve been seen going into a known IRA man’s house at five in the morning?
If he didn’t know about the Special Branch investigation until I mentioned it, how did he know that I’d arrived at Ken Kirkpatrick’s house at five in the morning? Had I said that to him? I didn’t think so.
Was it possible that Strong was my secret persecutor? Had he set Special Branch on me? Is that how it worked in the upper levels of the RUC? You prove your ability to command by being prepared to sacrifice your own men?
What motivation could he have for doing that? Would my scalp and a few other scalps and a vigorous internal anti-corruption campaign help prove to Mrs Thatcher that he was the one she should appoint as the Chief Constable’s successor?
It was strange, too, that Internal Affairs were coming after me at the same time as the IRA’s Army Council and the bloody papers.
Strange, but not, perhaps, a coincidence?
My head hurt.
Phone ringing in the hall.
At this hour!
Probably the Carrick switchboard and I was not duty detective tonight.
I picked up the receiver. “What is it? You’ve probably woken the baby!”
“Get out of the house, Sean! They’re coming for you. Get out now!”
I believed it instantly. It was Ken Kirkpatrick from the Derry IRA.
“Beth and Emma are with me!”
“That won’t stop them. Get them out, Duffy. Now!”
I slammed down the phone and looked through the hall window. A Ford Transit van was parking itself right outside the gate.
I ran upstairs, three steps at a time.
I shook Beth awake and put my hand over her mouth.
“Mmmfff?”
“IRA hit team. They’re going to kill us all. We have to get out!”
I ran into Emma’s room, scooped her up, took Beth’s hand and stopped at the top of the stairs.
Too late.
A sledgehammer smashed through the front door and it came off its hinges.
If we went down the stairs we were all dead.
Once before my home had been invaded but I’d had more time then. Time to think. Time to move the paraffin heater. I had no time now.
No time. No gun. And a wife and child to protect.
I opened the bathroom door and pushed Beth inside.
Emma began to cry.
“Up there!” a voice said from the bottom of the steps.
I closed the bathroom door as I heard men charging up the stairs. “We’ll go out the bathroom window onto the washhouse roof and into the back garden,” I whispered.
The window had recently been painted. Would it open?
I tugged and it wouldn’t budge.
Men nearly at the top of the stairs.
I gave Emma to Beth, took off my T-shirt, wrapped it around my fist and smashed the window through. I lifted Beth and Emma up and shoved them through.
“He’s in there!”
A bullet came through the bathroom door. And then two more bullets. I jumped head first through the bathroom window, scraping my back on the broken glass as a machine gun tore through the bathroom door’s handle and lock.
I got half a hand up to stop myself landing face first on the washhouse roof but I still bashed my nose.
Blood in my mouth. Ringing in my ears. I turned to see a man in a balaclava standing in the bathroom with an AK-47. Another man behind him.
Beth had already jumped down into the garden with Emma. I rolled off the roof, fell, landed on the wet grass with a thump, got up and dragged them towards the hedge separating us from the Bridewells’ garden.
Machine gun bursts and tracer set the night on fire.