Stupid o’clock.
I drove up Coronation Road and turned right on Victoria Road. The estate was deserted. The Beemer purred down Victoria Road past the graveyard and the butchers, past Lawson’s house and the supermarket.
We came to a rest at the newly installed traffic lights, which, of course, were red, even though there wasn’t another car around for miles.
I put one of Lawson’s CDs in the player. It wasn’t the LA rap one that he and all the kids at the station and even John Peel were calling a classic. It was a band called The Butthole Surfers from Texas. I looked at the CD case while the light stayed red. The album was called Hairway to Steven.
The light went green and I turned right.
The BMW wanted to stretch itself.
Up the Marine Highway, heading for the city.
Belfast: beautiful in its brokenness.
All cities will look like this in the far future: ruined and fractured, walled and utilitarian. This is Earth’s only city. A Belfast that vibrates in the present and the past and in the days to come.
Burned-out cars. Bomb sites. Wet horses tied to girders. Dead televisions in the rubble.
Like the man said. The dead man in the forest outside Derry with his strange map and his interesting opinions. We were once creatures of the savannah, whose lives were mapped by the journeys of the great migrating herds across the rift valley. We can’t live like this. Stationary, on top of one another. It’s bad for our mental health.
It was so windy the cranes were swaying at the shipyard and the army helicopters had been grounded. Good night for a smash-and-grab raid somewhere with the choppers down and the police huddled in their barracks. Remember that if Special Branch forces me to resign and I’m looking for a career change.
I drove up the Antrim Road, past Our Lady of Lourdes, past the zoo, and then I curved down again through the empty city streets to the Shore Road.
I knew where I was going.
The address from the personnel file.
I parked the car outside the Assistant Chief Constable’s house on the Belfast Road. A big granite three-floor job on the water’s edge of Belfast Lough. I put on gloves and a balaclava. I took the Glock from the passenger’s seat and put it in my raincoat pocket. I examined the lock-pick kit to make sure everything was in order.
I got out and walked to that big iron gate.
Rain was pouring down my neck between my raincoat and my Che T-shirt.
Sea spray was splashing against the gable wall.
Lightning again hit the power-station chimney.
I looked at the Beware of the Dog sign.
“Dog better beware of me.”
I climbed over the gate and dropped down the other side.
Way to deal with an attack dog is to offer it your left arm. He’ll bite it and hold on and then you punch him in the eye with your right fist. No need for a gun. Amateurs and farmers shoot dogs.
I stood there, waiting.
No dog.
I walked down the long driveway past the rose bushes.
Onto the porch with its empty milk bottles and a garden gnome in an English bobby’s uniform. Strictly against regulations, that. Standing order 222, “Display nothing in your car or your house that might indicate that you are a member of the RUC.”
Have to have a word with him about it.
Yale 1970s front door lock. Easy peasy. Leaky tumblers. Pick it with a screwdriver if I needed to. Lock-pick kit it anyway. Tension wrench in bottom of lock, pick in top. Feel for the tumbler, turn, hey presto the door is open.
Safety chain behind the door.
Pliers from lock-pick kit could snip through it in a second but there was no need. It had been placed too close to the catch, with too much slack, and it wasn’t that tricky to lift it off with my gloved fingers.
I stepped into the house.
I walked into the hall and then into the living room with its big windows and the view over Belfast and North Down.
I caught my balaclavaed reflection in the glass.
Why are you doing this, Duffy? Why do you always have to be so fucking theatrical? You weren’t always this way. Don’t you remember that row you had with your philosophy tutor at Queens when he was recommending the stance Camus takes in The Myth of Sisyphus? Melodramatic and narcissistic and false you called it. You were right then, you’re wrong now.
I mean just look at you: raincoat, gloves, gun, balaclava. It’s pathetic. Age hasn’t matured you. It’s made those traits that were ticks in the twenty-five-year-old into full-blown affectations in the thirty-eight-year-old. And affectations is putting it politely. Haven’t you grown up at all? You have a child, for Christ’s sake, isn’t that supposed to wise a man up?
I stood there looking in the window glass, saying nothing. Frozen there half in and half out of the rain, an image flickering in the lightning like a ghost.
I sighed, gently closed the front door and sat down on the sofa.