I Hear the Sirens in the Street

4: MACHINE GUN SILHOUETTE

The alarm was set to Sports Talk on Downtown Radio which was a nice non-threatening way to start the day. The conversation this morning was about Northern Ireland’s chances in the 1982 World Cup. The topic, as usual, had gotten round to George Best and whether the thirty-five-year-old had any game left in him. The last I had heard of Best was his notorious stint playing with Hibernian when he was more famous for out-drinking the entire French rugby team and seducing the reigning Misses World and Universe in the same weekend.

I turned off the radio, made coffee, dressed in a black polo neck sweater, jeans and DM shoes, went outside. I checked under the BMW for any mercury tilt explosives but didn’t find any. Right about now seven thousand RUC men and women were all doing the same thing. One or two of them would find a bomb and after shitting their pants they’d be on the phone to the bomb squad, thanking their lucky stars that they’d kept to their morning routine.

I stuck on the radio and listened to Brian Eno on the short drive to the barracks. Wasn’t a big fan of Eno but it was either that or the news and I couldn’t listen to the news. Who could, apart from those longing for the end times.

I thought about Laura. I didn’t know what to do. Was I in love with her? What did that feel like? If she went away it would hurt, it would ache. Was that love? How come I was thirty-two and I didn’t know? Was that bloody normal? “Jesus,” I said to myself. Thirty-two years old and I had the emotional depth of a teenager.

Maybe it was the situation, maybe Northern Ireland kept you paralysed, infantilised, backward … Aye, blame that.

I nodded to Ray at the guard house and pulled into the police station.

As usual Matty was late and before we could get rolling Sergeant Burke told me that Newtownabbey RUC needed urgent assistance dealing with a riot in Rathcoole. It was completely the wrong direction, I was a detective not a riot cop, and I outranked Burke, but you couldn’t really turn down brother officers in need, could you?

With Matty grumbling things like “this isn’t what I signed on for”, and “I could be fishing right now”, we burned up the A2 to that delightful concrete circle of hell known as the Rathcoole Estate.

“Good Friday night?” I asked Matty when his moaning was over.

“Oh, it was a classic, mate. Since I wasn’t allowed out, it was a fish supper, a six-pack of Special Brew and a wank to Sapphire and Steel on the video.”

“David McCallum or Joanna Lumley?”

Matty rolled his eyes.

We arrived at Rathcoole to find that it was only a half-hearted sort of riot that had been running since the night before. About thirty hoods on the ground throwing stones and Molotovs from behind a burnt-out bus, maybe another two dozen comrades offering them assistance by tossing petrol-filled milk bottles from the high-rise tower blocks nearby. The cops under a Chief Superintendent Anderson were keeping well back and letting the ruffians exhaust themselves. I reported to Anderson while Matty stayed in the Rover reading The Cramps’ fanzine: Legion of the Cramped. Anderson thanked me for coming, but said that we weren’t needed.

He asked if I wanted a coffee and poured me one from a flask. We got to talking about the nature of riots, Anderson venturing the opinion that social deprivation was at the root cause of it and I suggested that ennui was the disease of late-twentieth-century man. Things were going swimmingly until Anderson began banging on about “it all being part of God’s plan” and I decided to make myself scarce.

“If we’re not needed, we’ll move out, sir, if that’s okay with you?” I said and he said that that was fine.

It was when we were safely back in the Rover and heading out of the Estate that we were hit by a jerry-can petrol bomb thrown from a low rise. It exploded with a violent whoosh across the windscreen and it was followed a second or two later by a burst of heavy machine-gun fire that dinged violently off the Land Rover’s armoured hull.

“Jesus Christ!” Matty screamed while I put my foot on the accelerator to get us away from the trouble. More machine-gun fire tore up the road behind us and rattled off the rear doors.

“They’re shooting at us!” Matty yelled.

“I know!”

I hammered down the clutch, switched back into third gear and accelerated round a bend in the road. I got us a hundred yards from the corner and then I hand-break-turned the Land Rover in a dramatic, tyre-squealing 180. Fire was melting the Land Rover’s window wipers and licking its way down towards the engine block. If it reached the petrol tank … I grabbed my service revolver and the fire extinguisher.

“You’re not going out there without a bullet-proof vest are you?” Matty said, horrified.

“Call the incident in, ask Anderson to send down help and tell them to be careful,” I barked and opened the side door.

“Don’t go out there, Sean! That’s what they want! It’s an ambush.”

“Not with half the police force just up the road. They’ve long gone. Two quick bursts on a machine gun and they’ll be heroes in the pub tonight.”

“Sean, please!”

“Call it in!”

I got out of the Land Rover, pointed my service revolver at the surrounding low rises but no one was around. Keeping the revolver in one hand and the fire extinguisher in the other I sprayed foam over the windscreen and easily dowsed the flame.

I climbed inside the Rover to wait for back up. We sat there for twenty-five minutes but Anderson’s lads never came so I told Matty that we’d write up the incident ourselves later since we had actual work to do this morning.

“Unless – that is – this offends your forensic officer sensibilities and you feel compelled to go back to the scene of the shooting and gather shell cases, pieces of jerry can and other assorted evidence?”

“Bollocks to that!” Matty said and we took the A2 north again. Unfortunately the petrol bomb had burned the rubber off one of the tyres and we limped back to Carrickfergus RUC to get a replacement Rover.

This day was destined never to get going. Brennan was in his office now with a nasty look on his once handsome face. I tried to avoid him by sneaking to the incident room while Matty was signing out a new Rover, but the bugger saw and summoned me.

“Hello sir, what are you doing in on a Saturday morning?” I said.

“My duty, Duffy, my duty. What progress have you made on your murder victim?” he muttered, putting his feet up on his desk. He was wearing slippers and some kind of dressing gown and he hadn’t shaved. Had he been secretly here all night? Was there trouble on the home front? Should I offer him my big empty house on Coronation Road? Before even the possibility of an Oscar & Felix scenario formed in my brain, I reconsidered: he was a Presbyterian and no doubt he’d take my offer as some kind of insult to his pride.

“A couple of promising leads, sir. We have Customs and Immigration getting us a list of names of Americans who entered Northern Ireland in the last year and we’ll cross reference that with any who are the right demographic and have served with the First Infantry Division. I’m optimistic that we should be able to ID our victim pretty soon.”

“Good,” he said with a yawn. “What else?”

“We found a name in that suitcase our victim was locked up in. Matty found the name, I should say – good police work from him. It was an old address label and we’re going to follow up on that this morning.”

“Excellent.”

“If you don’t mind me saying, sir, if you’re looking for a place to stay I’ve got a big empty house on Coronation Road,” I blurted out despite myself.

Brennan looked at his slippers, took his feet off the memo pad and hid them under his desk. He was pissed off that I’d accurately deduced his home situation. He had presence, did Brennan, like a fallen actor once famous for his Old Vic Claudius now doing Harp lager commercials on UTV.

“You know what you could do for me, Duffy?”

“What, sir?”

“You could build a fucking time machine, go back forty-five seconds and shut the fuck up after I say the word ‘excellent’, okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you look bloody terrible. What’s the matter with you? The flu?”

“No, sir, Matty and I were out in a Rover and someone threw a petrol bomb. I had to go out and extinguish it.”

“Someone threw a petrol bomb at ya? Did you write it up?”

“No, sir, not yet.”

“See that you do.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you read the papers this morning, Sean?” he said in a less abrasive voice.

“No.”

“Listened to the news?”

“No, sir.”

“You have to stay abreast of current events, Inspector!”

“Yes, sir. Anything interesting happening?”

“General Galtieri has decided that his personal manifesto, like all the very best manifestos, needs to be unleashed on the world in a rainy windswept bog, filled with sheep shit.”

“General who? What?”

“Argentina has invaded the Falkland Islands.”

“The Falkland Islands?”

“The Falkland Islands.”

“I’m not really any the wiser, sir.”

“They’re in the South Atlantic. According to the Mail they’ve got ten thousand troops on there by now.”

“Shite.”

“You know what that means for us, don’t you? Thatcher’s going to have to take them back. It’s either that or resign. She’ll be sending out an invasion fleet. They’ll be getting troops from everywhere. I imagine we’ll lose half a dozen regiments from here.”

“That’s going to stretch us thin.”

About half of the anti-terrorist and border patrols in Northern Ireland were conducted by the British Army; we, the police, could not easily pick up the slack.

Brennan rubbed his face. “It’s bad timing. The IRA’s gearing up for a campaign and we’re going to be losing soldiers just when they’re surging. We could be in for an even trickier few months than we thought.”

I nodded.

“And spare a thought for what will happen if it’s a debacle. If Thatcher doesn’t get the islands back.”

“She resigns?”

“She resigns, the government collapses and there’s a general election. If Labour wins, and they will, that’s it, mate – the ball game is fucking over.”

The Labour Party under Michael Foot had a policy of unilateral withdrawal from Ireland, which meant that they would withdraw all British soldiers and civil servants. Ireland would be united at last under Dublin rule which was all fine and dandy except that the Irish Army had only a few battalions and it was a laughable idea that they would be able to keep the peace. What it would mean would be full-scale civil war with a million well-armed, geographically tightly knit Protestants against the rest of the island’s four million Catholics. There would be a nice little bloodbath until the US Marines arrived.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said.

“Best not to.”

He picked up his copy of the Daily Mail.

The headline was one word and screamed “Invasion!”

I noticed that the date on the paper was April 3rd.

“Are you sure this isn’t all some kind of belated April Fool’s joke?”

“It’s no joke, Duffy, the BBC are carrying it, all the papers, everybody.”

“Okay.”

“We won’t get our knickers in a twist. We’ll take all this one day at a time.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Back to work. Get out there and wrap up this murder investigation of yours.”

“Yes, sir.”

I pushed back the chair and stood.

“One more thing, Duffy. ‘A chaperone for a conquistador perhaps’?” he said, tapping his crossword puzzle with his pencil and then thoughtfully chewing the end of it.

It was easy enough. “I think it’s an anagram, sir,” I said.

“An anagram of what, Duffy?”

“Cortes,” I said trying to lead him to the solution but he still didn’t get it and he knew that I knew the answer.

“Just tell me, Duffy!” he said.

“Escort, sir.”

“What? Oh, yes, of course … now piss off.”

As I was leaving the office I saw Matty struggling to get a long knitted scarf out of his locker.

“No scarves. Accept it. The Tom Baker era is over, mate,” I told him.

Hard rain along the A2.

Matty driving the Land Rover.

Me riding shotgun, literally: a Winchester M12 pump-action across my lap in case we got ambushed on one of the back roads.

I put a New Order cassette in the player. They’d gone all disco but it wasn’t as bad as you would have thought.

“Did you hear the news, Matty?”

“What news?”

“You have to stay up with current events, Constable. The Falklands have been invaded.”

“The what?”

“Argentina has invaded the Falkland Islands.”

“Jesus, when was this?”

“Yesterday.”

“First the Germans and now the bloody Argentinians.”

“You’re thinking of the Channel Islands, mate.”

“Where’s the Falklands then?”

“Uhm, somewhere sort of south, I think.”

“I suppose that’s Spurs fucked now, isn’t it?”

“How so?”

“Half their team’s from bloody Argentina. They’ll be well off their game.”

“The Chief Inspector wants us to think about the geo-political consequences.”

“Aye, geo-politics is one thing, but football’s football, isn’t it?” Matty said, putting things into a proper perspective.