I was disgusted with myself, sitting here in Assistant Chief Constable Strong’s living room at midnight, getting his carpet all wet.
The bold move would be to put something on his stereo. Something loud, Beethoven if he had any. He comes down in his dressing gown, bleary-eyed, holding his service revolver in front of him and I’m sitting there on the sofa waiting for him, like a stone cold motherfucker.
I take off the balaclava and he sees it’s me.
“It’s all right, Margaret,” he says to the wife and then comes over to the stereo and turns it off.
“What’s the meaning of this, Duffy?” he says.
And I stand up and I tell him that I know what he’s done. I let it all out. “You had me lifted in Derry! You gave me up to the IRA! Your own man. To protect your arse!”
Yeah something like that.
I put my head in my hands and sighed.
I looked at the Glock in my right hand.
I got up and, still dripping, walked over to the stereo, rifled through the CDs. There wasn’t any Beethoven anyway. No classical music at all, in fact.
A black Alsatian walked into the living room from the kitchen. It wasn’t expecting to see me and after a moment’s shock came over and sniffed my hand. I took the glove off to let him better get the measure of me. An intruder who deserved to get bitten or a friend of the family?
He must have smelt cop because he licked my wrist and lay down on the living-room rug. I rubbed his belly and he liked that.
It was time to go now, time to flee, but Dozy Duffy didn’t go.
Dozy Duffy found himself walking upstairs.
He opened the door at the top of the stairs which was a bathroom. Another door which was a child’s bedroom, with a fifteen-year-old boy sleeping in a race-car bed that was nearly too small for him. Another bedroom was a spare room and another bedroom was the master bedroom.
Moonlight was illuminating the face of Assistant Chief Constable Strong and the long red hair of Mrs Assistant Chief Constable Strong, whom I’d met once at the police club in Kilroot.
Look at you two lying there. You don’t know how close you are to death, how close that boy is to losing a father. I’m boiling with fury. I’m an avenging angel for my own daughter who, but for a stroke of luck, would be fatherless.
And Maria McKeen and Patrick Devlin and all the others you have betrayed.
Look at you. A killer by proxy. A coward.
I have come for you, Strong.
I shook my head again.
No.
Theatrical. Ridiculous.
I closed the door, walked back onto the landing and down the stairs. I patted the dog and went out into the rain. I carefully closed the front door behind me. There was no way to put the safety chain back on the hook but chances were they wouldn’t notice that, or they’d think they’d forgotten to do it. Or they’d think it was elves.
The dog was watching me through the frosted glass part of the door. It began to bark.
Of course.
I ran down the path, climbed the gate, quickest ever look under the Beemer, got in and drove; I was a good bit away when I saw the bedroom light come on in the rear-view mirror.
“That was a close one.”
I accelerated up the A2 and kept accelerating as the dual carriageway became the M5. I drove into Belfast but the city was deserted. I don’t know what I was expecting or hoping for. An ambush? A riot? None of those things.
Back out of the city along the Shore Road. To Carrickfergus. The North Road and finally up to Knockagh Mountain. It always comes back to here.
I got out of the Beemer and walked around the monument and watched the lightning stab great red electric forks over the glacial valley. Some strikes as far away as the Galloway hills in Scotland.
The rain poured down onto me.
And I was not baptised and I was not cleansed and my anger did not abate.
But a thought was growing.
A plan.
A way of getting the bastard. A way of getting all of them.
What was the thing that they feared the most?
Blackmail. Blackmail had started this ball rolling.
Yeah, it would be theatrical and I’d just renounced theatrics in that big speech to myself. But fuck it. Foolish consistency/hobgoblin, all that jazz.
I grinned and took a hit on my asthma inhaler. I got back in the BMW, stuck in NWA’s “Fuck Tha Police” and for the final time in this case I drove to Derry.
25: THE OFFER
I parked the Beemer two roads over and checked the street for Special Branch observation teams. Last thing I needed was internal affairs dicking with me now. No vans, no Volkswagen campers, no eejits sleeping in cars.
Harry Selden couldn’t believe it when he came downstairs to wonder why his stereo had suddenly come on and he saw me standing there listening to Willie Nelson Live in his living room. He was wearing a navy blue dressing gown and slippers and holding an ancient-looking shotgun that would probably take us both out if he squeezed the trigger.
“What the hell?”
“Put the gun down, Harry, I’m unarmed and I’ve important things to discuss with you. Do it now, before I’m forced to tell you my Willie Nelson joke.”
He turned off the stereo and lowered the shotgun.