The Cold Cold Ground

10: SITTING DUCKS

We suited up in riot gear and all the boys checked their Sterling sub-machine guns out of the armoury, except for me, naturally, because I still hadn’t managed to return mine from Coronation Road.

On the way out the door Chief Inspector Brennan saw us.

“Where are you boys headed like it’s fucking Christmas?” he asked.

“The Falls, we’re going to do a drop on Tommy Little’s house.”

“Tommy Little is?”

“Victim number one.”

“Oh yeah. You wouldn’t mind if I tagged along, would you? Bit of a fug now after all the excitement of the press this morning,” Brennan said.

“Nah, sir, better not, be a bit of a tight squeeze,” I replied, unwilling for this to become even more of a charabanc ride to the circus.

Brennan was not to be deterred. “Won’t be a tight squeeze for me. I’ll be sitting in the front.”

Cut to twenty minutes later: McCallister driving, Brennan next to him in the bird-dog seat, me, Crabbie and two gormless constables in riot gear, sweltering in the back. One of the constables was a woman. First one I’d seen in Carrick. Her name was Heather Fitzgerald and her cheeks were so red it was like they were on fire. Nice looking wee lass with her emerald eyes and curly black hair, timid as a mouse, too; it would be a real shame if we all copped it in some roadside bomb and she got that pretty face blown to smithereens.

“What’s the address?” McCallister asked as we hit West Belfast.

“33 Falls Court off the Falls Road,” I said.

Falls Road was not as bad as we’d been expecting. Sure there was a mad press scrum outside the Sinn Fein advice centre and there were police checkpoints and a couple of army helicopters up, but most people were just getting on with their business, going to the grocers, the butchers, the milk shop and of course the pub and the bookies.

Falls Court was another one of those murderous dead-end streets that peelers hated and number 33, naturally, was right at the end.

“Alan, when you get to the house, turn us round, keep the engine on, me and the constables will deploy and prepare to give covering fire while Crabbie and Sean can go inside and do their fancy-pants detecting,” Brennan said.

“Sounds good to me,” I concurred.

“And if you hear shooting, come out,” Brennan added with a grin.

He was enjoying this, the old goat.

The Land Rover stopped and Brennan and the two reserve constables disembarked, pointing their Sterlings at the cardinal points of the compass.

Crabbie and I walked over to #33. It was the last house in a typical red-brick terrace which had a huge new mural of Bobby Sands and Frankie Hughes on the gable wall and above them in big white letters Patrick Pearse’s quote from 1915: “The fools, the fools, they have given us our fenian dead!”

Crabbie and I looked at the mural and each other. We both were thinking the same thing: aye, this is how you grow a movement.

There were two men sitting on plastic chairs outside #33: short hair, spiderweb tats, denim jackets, white T-shirts, drainpipe thin bleached jeans, DM boots. They were IRA enforcers and they were probably packing heat. If we’d wanted to we could have arrested them for that but why give ourselves the aggravation?

I didn’t know why they were sitting there or why the front door of the house was open.

The constable I had sent over had put up some yellow “Police Evidence: Do Not Enter” tape on the front door, tape which was now lying in a heap at the men’s feet.

“Is this Tommy Little’s house?” I asked.

“What the fuck do you want, peeler?” one of the men asked.

“Oh, I don’t know, world peace, an explanation for why they stopped making Puffa Puffa Rice, news that Led Zeppelin have finally got a replacement drummer for Bonzo … that kind of thing,” I said.

The IRA men were unimpressed by the banter. “You’re not welcome around here and if I were you I’d tootle on home,” the other man said, a greasy character with quite the face full of zits.

I pulled out my service revolver. “Let me be clear about this, sunshine, I don’t tootle anywhere!” I said and went inside.

I heard the other IRA man stifle a guffaw.

Crabbie followed me in.

We saw immediately that we were too late.

The house had been completely stripped. No furniture, no carpets, no pictures on the wall, nothing. It was as if Tommy Little had never existed.

We went upstairs but that was stripped too.

They had already sold or burned Tommy’s stuff, no doubt distancing themselves from every aspect of his life. Nobody wanted the complication of being mixed up with a gay serial killer just when they were getting their biggest propaganda victory in decades.

“It’s like Trotsky. They’re erasing him from history,” I said.

We went back downstairs to Flunky #1 and Flunky #2.

“What did you do with Tommy’s gear? The Salvation Army?” I asked.

Flunky #2 shook his head. “We dumped it all at a Proddy bonfire.”

“Does he have any next of kin apart from the brother in Oz? Kids, nephews, nieces?” I asked. Nothing had come up in the files but there was no harm in asking.

“Tommy wasn’t the fucking parental type, was he?” Flunky #1 said.

“No friends, family, nothing like that?” I asked.

“Tommy’s fucking dead to us! Fucking queer got what was coming,” Flunky #1 muttered.

“These lads are no help. Let’s get out of here, mate,” Crabbie said.

“Tommy was murdered by some nutcase and I want to find out who killed him, so if either of you can think of something, give me a call, please.”

I handed them each one of my cards which had my name and the number of Carrick CID.

Flunky #1 looked at the card and looked at me.

“Are you a Catholic?” he asked.

“Yeah, I am. Well spotted.”

He spat on the ground. “You’re a fucking traitor, that’s what you are. Taking the fucking King’s shilling. How do you sleep at night?”

I leaned in close so that my nose was an inch from his pointy neb.

“Usually on my left-hand side, with a big, fluffy pillow and my favourite Six Million Dollar Man pyjamas,” I said in a gravelly Clint Eastwood voice.

Flunky #2 and Crabbie both laughed.

We walked back to the Land Rover and everyone got inside.

“Any information?” Brennan asked.

“A total bust,” Crabbie said. “They’ve stripped the house and are moving somebody else in already.”

Brennan raised his eyebrows at me. “What did I tell you?” he said.

“You were right, sir,” I replied.

“All right, Alan, take us back to Carrick, warp factor 7,” Brennan said.

We drove back onto the Falls Road proper. Brennan made us stop at a paper shop to buy the early edition of the Belfast Telegraph. Disappointingly our press conference hadn’t made the front page, which was dominated by the headline: “Four More Join Hunger Strike”.

We did make page 3 though and there was a nice picture of Sergeant McCallister under the headline “RUC Investigate Homosexual Double Murder”.

“They could have given us more coverage,” Brennan complained. “I mean it’s nice to have a real crime for once. A normal everyday non-sectarian murder. That’s man bites dog around these parts. That’s news. I have half a mind to call their editor”.

We were nearly at the junction of the Falls Road and the new dual carriageway when McCallister slammed on the brakes.

I looked through the windscreen and saw a hijacked Ulsterbus on fire, parked laterally across the lanes and blocking the road. It must have been set alight in the last five minutes because we were the first cops on the scene and it hadn’t even been reported yet on the police radio.

Suddenly there were four massive bangs on the steel plate of the Land Rover’s right-hand side.

The two reserve constables yelped.

I looked through the peephole. Someone was shooting at us from the two-hundred-foot high Divis Tower, which in a city built on mud flats, was the fifth tallest structure in Belfast.

Two more heavy bangs on the side of the Land Rover and stray bullets dinging into the pavement. Originally Divis Tower and the whole Divis Flats complex around it had been a model slum-clearance project but it quickly degenerated into a high-rise ghetto completely controlled by the IRA.

“What the fuck is that?” Brennan yelled.

“Fifty calibre machine gun, sir,” Sergeant McCallister replied placidly. “Seen ‘em in the army, unmistakable.”

“Jesus! Can it punch a hole in the armour plate?” Brennan asked.

“Maybe. I don’t really know,” McCallister replied.

Brennan turned round to look at the four of us in the back. His eyes were wild with excitement. I didn’t like it.

“All right, lads and lasses, we’ll deploy out the back, train your fire on the muzzle bursts, that’ll give the bastards something to think about!” Brennan said as more of the fifty-cal tore up the road all around us (difficult to aim those things, I would imagine).

Sergeant McCallister looked at me and shook his head.

He didn’t want to say anything but he hoped I would.

“Uh, sir, I don’t think that’s a good idea. They’re probably waiting with an RPG. As soon as we open these back doors they’ll fire it and we’re all cooked,” I said, thinking that one of us had to say something.

“We can’t just let him shoot at us!” Heather said, her cheeks redder than ever with her blood up.

“No, by God, we can’t! We’ll teach them a lesson they’ll never forget!” Brennan answered her.

“Sir, we can’t fire into Divis Tower. It’s full of people,” I said.

“Sir, it’s actually a standing order for West Belfast, the rules of engagement do not permit return fire into the Divis Flats complex without permission of a Divisional Commander,” Sergeant McCallister added firmly.

There was another burst of fifty cal fire that shook us and sent fragments of steel plate sheering from the Land Rover’s side. It was like being inside a pin-ball machine.

Inside a pin-ball machine with the added frisson of imminent death.

The reserve constable whose name I didn’t get began throwing up between his legs.

“So what do you suggest, ya lily-livered scoundrels?” Brennan yelled.

“Sir, if they hit a tyre we’ll be stuck here so I suggest we drive around the bus and then maybe call the army, this is more their scene,” I said.

“Just fucking leave! What about the big picture? We’re here to enforce law and order. We can’t run away from every bloody fight.”

Yet, much to Brennan’s chagrin, run away we did.

We drove round the burning bus, reported the shooting to the army and sat in humiliated silence all the way back to Carrickfergus Police Station.

We parked the Rover and were all very impressed by the big chunks the fifty-cal had carved in the armour plate.

My good kit had a stink of vomit in it now, so I stripped it off, changed into my jeans and desk-drawer emergency Deep Purple concert T-shirt. I got one of the bored looking reserve constables to leave my suit at the dry cleaners and cornered Sergeant McCallister at the coffee machine. “Did you make that thing up about the rules of engagement?”

He nodded. “Of course I did. How would I bloody know the rules of engagement for West Belfast?”

I made a mug of sweet Irish breakfast tea for Constable Fitzgerald and gave it to her when she came out of the ladies toilets, looking pale and trembly.

“That was some fun today, wasn’t it?” I said.

She took the tea gratefully. “I’ve never been in a gun battle before,” she said.

“Not really a battle if only one side was shooting,” I said.

She was walking to the gloomy area for the reservists but I led her over to my desk by the window. “Sit over here where there’s light,” I said.

I let her rest her cute bum on my leather swivel chair.

“You have a nice view,” she said.

The tide was out and the beach was littered with shopping trolleys, beer cans, plastic bags, decaying seaweed, the remains of a Ford Escort which had been driven off the Fisherman’s Quay in 1978, dead fish, dead jellyfish, raw sewage and oil.

“Aye, it’s a lovely view,” I replied.

She sipped the tea appreciatively.

“This is good, what is it?” I explained the arcane secrets of the Tetley tea bag.

“So where are you from?” I asked.

“Greenisland now, Islandmagee originally,” she said.

“Is Islandmagee nice?”

“It’s very nice. When you go there it’s almost as if there are no Troubles.”

“I’d love to visit some time.”

She put down the tea and picked up one of my arrow and question mark-filled pieces of A4 paper. I had written in block capitals: “HOW DID HE SELECT HIS VICTIMS?”

“How did he select his victims?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but if we can find out then we might-”

There was a tap on my shoulder. It was McCrabban. He was smiling sleekitly at me. “Sorry to interrupt your work, Sean, but there’s a call for you on line #4.”

“Excuse me,” I said to Heather and pushed the button on line #4.

“Is that Sergeant Duffy?” a voice asked.

“Who’s this?”

“You don’t need to know my name, but we met earlier today,” he said.

Flunky #2.

“Go on,” I said.

“Tommy Little had a boyfriend. His name is Walter Hays. I don’t where he’s living now. We kicked him out.”

I wrote it down in my notepad. “Walter Hays. Got it. I’ll find him. Thank you,” I said.

Flunky #2 didn’t hang up.

“Is there anything else?” I asked hopefully.

“I read the Belfast Telegraph today.”

“Yes …”

“Tommy Little was not a man to hide anything. Everybody knew Tommy Little was queer.”

I didn’t see where he was going with this. “Ok, so what does that mean?”

“So you have to ask yourself, Sergeant Duffy, why were Tommy Little’s proclivities tolerated?”

“Why were his proclivities tolerated? What are you trying to say-”

But then it came to me. If Tommy Little was only an occasional driver for Sinn Fein officials he would have been kneecapped and drummed out of the movement long ago.

But he wasn’t an occasional driver, was he?

“They were tolerated because Tommy Little was important. Tommy was a player, that’s it, isn’t it?”

“Have a good evening, Sergeant Duffy.”

The line went dead.

I grabbed Crabbie and Matty and took them into one of the interview rooms and told them what had happened.

“What does this mean?” Matty asked.

“It means, Matty, that the RUC files are wrong about Tommy Little. That’s what it means. He was big,” Crabbie said.

“I want you to find out how important. I want you to bug Special Branch and MI5 and army intelligence if you have to. Somebody knows who this guy was and I want to know too,” I said.

Matty nodded.

I turned to McCrabban. “And you and I are going to find out where Walter Hays is living now and we are going to pay Mr Hays a wee visit.”

I walked out of the interview room and smiled at Heather.

“What time does your shift end, love?” I asked her.

“Seven,” she said.

“Have you ever eaten Indian food?”

“No.”

“Do you fancy a quick bite after work? Unwind a bit after the day’s events, you know?”

She looked sceptical. “Its not spicy, is it? I don’t do well with spicy.”

I shook my head. “Nah, where did you hear that? It’s fine. Listen, if I’m not back by seven would you do me a favour and wait for me? Get changed out of your kit and wait for me, ok?”

“Ok,” she said and gave me a beautiful smile.

Crabbie came out of the interview room with a piece of paper. “Stone walls on Tommy Little from the Brits of course but Special Branch say they’ll look into it. Meanwhile here’s Walter Hays’s address: 99 New Line Lane, Ballycarry.”

“Let’s take the Beemer,” I said. “I’ve had my fill of Land Rovers today.”

We went downstairs past the noticeboard. Someone had cut out the picture of Sergeant McCallister from the Belfast Telegraph. Unfortunately for Alan his mug was right under the word “homosexual”. The station wits had deleted the rest of the headline.

“Is this what passes for comedy around here?” I asked.

“Don’t ask me. I’m more of a Laurel and Hardy fan,” Crabbie said.

“And of course they slept in the same bed, didn’t they?”

Crabbie sighed, “That’s what’s wrong with the modern world, Sean. Cynical people like you. It was a more innocent time back then. But those days have gone forever.”

“They have indeed, mate, they have indeed.”