Cut to:
Beth’s parents’ house in Larne. Any other girl would have gone to pieces. Hospital time. Shock. PTSD. But as I said: hidden depths, bottom, holding it together – for now – for the sake of Emma and me.
“How are you doing, sweetie?”
“I feel like we’re in the bottle city of Kandor.”
“The what?”
“Your knowledge of Superman is as bad as your knowledge of Philip K. Dick.”
Her turf-blown features, looking at me, right through me. Elizabeth of the waves. Elizabeth of the holding it together.
I kissed her.
She tasted of red wine and tears. No wonder for either.
“Where are your folks in this great pile?”
“They’re in the front room with Emma.”
“Who’s upstairs?”
“Nobody.”
“Come on.”
“Sean, no, we can’t, your car’s running, I—”
We ran up to the bedroom.
Ten minutes was enough.
You want the best sex in the world? Ever? Have three men in balaclavas fire Kalashnikovs at you and your girlfriend and miss. And fucking miss.
Cut to: Carrick Library.
Long days, long nights and then:
Lawson staggering towards me from the microfiche machine. He had a box of film and a photocopy in his hands. He looked terrified.
“I found it,” he said in an awed whisper. “It was here all along.”
Here all along, like an unexploded bomb from 1968. You can kill a man and disappear his wife and disappear the files but you can’t unmake what happened.
History knows.
And Morrigan knows.
And Death knows.
“What is it?” I asked.
“We can’t discuss it here. I’ve photocopied the story and put the microfilm back in the box.”
“You certainly win the tinfoil-hat award. OK, then, if we can’t talk here we’ll go to my office.”
“We can’t go to your office, sir. We’ll have to go to Ownies or somewhere neutral like that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We can’t go anywhere near a police station.”
“Oh shit,” I said.
“Oh shit indeed,” Lawson replied.
22: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE LIKELY LADS
It was 1968. That Wunderjahr when bliss was it in that dawn to be alive and to be young was very heaven. The kids had had enough of their parents’ wars and their parents’ rules and, most of all, their parents’ music. Paris was erupting, London was erupting, San Francisco was erupting and even dear old Stone Age Belfast was erupting.
After fifty years of discrimination over jobs and housing, Catholics had taken a leaf out of Martin Luther King’s playbook and begun demonstrating for equal treatment in the state of Northern Ireland. Demonstrations had led to riots and counter-demonstrations from the likes of Ian Paisley and his rabble. Violence descended like a black cloak over Ulster and twenty years later it was still here. In 1968 one of those little acts of violence was the shooting of a couple who had rammed a police checkpoint. A police checkpoint manned by auxiliaries, by the B Specials, who had shot at them with their .303 Lee Enfield rifles left over from the war.
The story itself barely got a mention, and the coroner’s inquest a hasty month later only gleaned a couple of paragraphs and two sad little black-and-white snaps of a boy and a girl.
The young couple were Maria McKeen (seventeen) and Patrick Devlin (nineteen), driving Patrick’s father’s Morris Minor. It was the same week a dozen other people died. The overburdened coroner was brief and to the point. The young couple were going to the Grand Opera House for a show. They were late, but that was no reason to charge through a police checkpoint, especially in these troubled times. The police had no choice but to assume they were terrorists fleeing justice. A tragic case indeed, but no criminal charges were necessary.
The three B Specials manning the checkpoint were Francis Deauville, Harry Selden and, wait for it, one John Strong who later transferred to the RUC and began rising up the ranks.
Rising up the ranks to Assistant Chief Constable.
John Strong. Read the name, but don’t even say it out loud.
“What does this mean?” Crabbie asked in a whisper.
“Let’s go find out. Don’t mention this to anyone. No one. If anyone asks what we’re working on tell them that post office robbery from 1986.”
“What’s that thing you’re always saying about paranoia, Sean?”
“Not me. William Burroughs. A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what’s going on.”
“That was it,” Crabbie said.
Don’t trust whitey and whitey is fucking everywhere.
We walked out of Ownies and went to the station to research the case.
There was no case.
No criminal charges. Nothing in the files.
“We need to talk to the parents,” I said.
The electoral records told us that although the Devlin family had moved to England the McKeens were still here, living way up the coast in Cushendun.
BMW.
A2.
The causeway road.