The Cold Cold Ground

12: BITING AT THE GRAVE

If the papers were to be believed there were two things going on in the world: the Royal Wedding and the IRA hunger strikes; one focal point was the baroque dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, the other was the middle of a sour, boggy portion of the Lagan Valley just west of Lisburn — the Maze Prison.

The Maze was built in the aftermath of the disastrous Operation Demetrius in 1971 when hundreds of IRA “suspects” had been arrested in a desperate attempt to stop The Troubles from escalating. Initially they were kept in huts at the former RAF base of Long Kesh, but eventually the Maze prison was built around them with its massive perimeter fence and eight concrete “H Blocks”.

Many of the internees had had no links whatsoever to the IRA but that had certainly changed after six months or a year’s detention by the British. The Brits have always been experts at pouring gasoline on every situation in Ireland: The Easter Rising, Bloody Sunday, Internment — all of them excellent recruiting tools for the radicals.

After Internment ended and the prisoners were released it was decided that IRA volunteers would only get jail time if they were actually convicted of a crime: murder, conspiracy to cause explosions, possession of illegal weapons, etc. Initially, however, IRA prisoners had been granted a Special Category Status because their offences were considered to be political in nature. But then in 1976, on a whim, this status had been revoked by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The prisoners had protested in various ways, most famously by refusing to wear prison clothes and smearing excrement on their cell walls.

In 1979 the Tories were returned to power but of course Mrs Thatcher had refused to “give in to terrorists” and would not backtrack on the Special Category Status. The hunger strikes had begun. I’d been sympathetic. Bobby Sands, Frankie Hughes and the others were merely attempting to return things to the status quo ante of 1976.

Bobby Sands’s election to parliament and death after sixty-six days on hunger strike had been the media event of the decade in Ireland and IRA recruiters were now having to turn away hundreds of young men and women. It did my heart no good at all to know that I was working for the same people who had been responsible for such utter incompetence.

Matty drove up to the Maze Prison walls, which were grey and thick and topped with coils of razor wire.

I turned off the tape of Led Zeppelin’s Presence album that despite a dozen listens, still sounded crap. Matty breathed a sigh of relief.

It was raining hard and the prison officer did not come out of the guard hut to check the warrant card I was holding up.

That too inspired zero confidence.

“All you need is a hijacked police Land Rover and anybody could get into this joint,” I muttered to Matty who was sitting beside me in the front seat. Neither of us were even in uniform. I was wearing a black polo-neck sweater under my leather jacket and he was wearing some kind of white pirate blouse thing that he must have seen Adam Ant sporting on Top of the Pops.

The thick steel gate slid across on rollers and I drove to a small car park in the lee of a brown concrete watch tower.

“It’s going to be terrible in here, isn’t it?” Matty said.

I nodded grimly. I could only imagine what the hospital wing of the prison looked like with a dozen emaciated men hooked up to drips — dying by heartbreaking degrees while family members wept and priests gave extreme unction.

“Aye, Matty, I think so.”

Fortunately we’d come early. It wasn’t nine so the hacks wouldn’t be out of bed yet and the rain had kept away the demonstrators we’d been told to expect outside the prison gates.

Scowling, a chubby, blue-faced man regarded me through bullet-proof glass.

“Sergeant Duffy of Carrick RUC. I’m here to see Seamus Moore,” I said.

“Sign here,” he replied, passing me a clipboard through a horizontal slit.

I signed and passed the clipboard back.

He did not inspect my ID. I gave Matty a wry look and shook my head. A buzzer sounded and a metal gate opened.

With that we were into the main prison compound.

There were eight H Blocks in separate wings for Republican and Loyalist prisoners — in fact separate wings for the various Republican and Loyalist groups. There was a Provisional IRA wing, an INLA section, a UVF section, a UFF/UDA wing and areas for various other smaller factions.

We parked the Rover and got out.

“Sergeant Duffy?” an aged, grey moustachioed, sad-faced man in a prison officer’s uniform asked me from under a giant black umbrella.

“That’s me.”

“I’m Davey Childers, RUC liaison.”

We shook hands.

“We’ve arranged to have you meet Moore in the visitor’s area.”

“He’s not in the hospital?”

“Oh no, he’s only been on hunger strike for a week. That’s not necessary yet.”

I looked at Matty and we were both relieved.

We went through a series of narrow-fenced easements topped with razor wire until we came to a bunker-like one storey building that was also surrounded by a razor-wire fence.

This place was not like the Victorian prisons of England with their imposing red-brick and neo-gothic architecture that was supposed to impress inmates with the power of the state; no, this place looked cobbled together, shoddy and temporary and the only thing it impressed upon you was how current British policy on Ireland was dominated by short-term thinking.

We walked through a set of double doors, checked in our weapons, patted an amiable sniffer dog and immediately saw a fairly healthy looking Seamus Moore sitting waiting for us at a long Formica table. He was bearded, long-haired and wearing pyjamas. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking what looked like a mug of tea.

“I didn’t know they were allowed tea,” Matty muttered.

“Don’t comment on it, we don’t want him to take the huff and storm off,” I hissed.

We sat down opposite and I did the introductions. Seamus was a good-looking wee skitter with green cat’s eyes, arched eyebrows and a bit of a sleekit grin; he had a violet-coloured scar running from his chin to his lower lip but that didn’t detract from his easy-going, handsome face. He was thin, of course, but he didn’t look emaciated. He was in for possession of a stolen shotgun, which had only garnered him a two and a half year sentence. Why he had taken it upon himself to go on hunger strike was a bit of a mystery to me. You could understand why a lifer or a ten-year man would do it, but not someone who’d be paroled in twelve months. Maybe it was just to establish his credentials and he’d be one of the ones who pulled out of it in a fortnight “after listening to the pleas of his family”.

“You’ve got five minutes, peeler,” he said. “I’ve got a phone interview with the Boston Herald at half nine.”

“All right. First, let me say that I’m very sorry about your wife, Seamus. I was the one who found her,” I said.

“Ex-wife.”

“Regardless. Ex-wife.”

“Suicide, right?” he asked.

“That’s what it looks like.”

“Silly bint. And she’d got herself knocked up, hadn’t she?”

“Where did you hear that?” I asked.

He laughed and blew smoke. “You hear things, you don’t know where,” he said.

His attitude needed serious work but that was not a job for me — I had to be relatively gentle with him. At any moment he could turn round and waltz back to his cell and there wouldn’t be a damn thing I could do about it.

“When did you last hear from Lucy?”

He shook his head. “Jesus. Last November? After the divorce came through. She said I owed her two thousand pound for her car which was total bollocks. We agreed to give that wee Mini to my ma. I didn’t owe her bloody anything.”

He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray, lit another and looked at his watch.

“I heard that she ran away to Cork,” he added.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Cos she sent postcards to her ma and her sister Claire. I mean, who fucking runs away to Cork? Stupid wee milly. If you’re knocked up ya go to fucking London and get it fucking seen to.”

“I would have thought you’d be upset that she’d gotten pregnant while you were stuck in here?”

“What the fuck do I care? We were divorced. She could marry fucking Prince Charles as far as I’m concerned.”

“So you haven’t heard from her at all since Christmas?”

“Nope,” he said with thin-lipped finality.

“Did you ever threaten her at all, Seamus?”

“Did I fuck. I haven’t wasted two seconds thinking about her since last year.”

“So you wouldn’t have objected if she’d taken up with someone else?”

“Are you deaf, peeler? I’ve fucking told ya, I didn’t give a shite.”

I rubbed my chin, looked at Matty, but he said nothing.

“Borrow a smoke?” I asked.

“Help yourself,” he said.

I lit a Benson and Hedges and gave Matty one.

“What makes a man want to starve himself to death?” I asked.

“For Ireland!” Seamus said vociferously.

“You know what my barber said?”

“What did your bloody barber say?” he asked.

“He said that nationalism was an outmoded concept. That it was a tool capitalists used to divide the workers and keep them down.”

He shook his head. “In a free Ireland, rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant will be united!” he said.

“Do you really believe that? Is that what’s happened in the Republic?”

He stood up. “I’ve had enough of you, peeler. I have important people to talk to.”

“Seamus, sit down. You told me you’d give me five minutes. Come on, mate. Is neamhbhuan cogadh na gcarad; ma bhionn se crua, ni bhionn se fada,” I said in the glens dialect of Irish that I had grown up with.

He was taken aback by the Gaelic and blinked a couple of times before sitting down again.

“Can you think of any reason why anyone would want her dead?” I asked.

“Somebody topped her?” he asked with what looked like genuine surprise.

“We’re awaiting the coroner’s verdict on that. It seems like a suicide but you never know. I was just wondering if anybody would have wanted her dead.”

Seamus shook his head, but I could tell he was thinking it over.

“I don’t think so,” he said at last.

There was a but in there.

“But …” I began.

“Well,” he looked behind him and lowered his voice. “The old-timers might not have taken too kindly to her getting knocked up while I’m up for me stretch.”

“Even after you got divorced?” I said.

Seamus laughed. “In the eyes of the church there is no divorce, is there?”

I was about to follow up on this but before I could a voice yelled to us from the other side of the visitor’s room.

“What is going on in here?”

I turned and saw Sinn Fein President, Gerry Adams, and another tall man that I didn’t know, marching towards us. Matty and I stood up.

Adams was furious. “Are you a peeler? Are you a cop? Who gave you permission to talk to one of the martyrs?” Adams demanded.

“Shouldn’t you wait to call them martyrs until after they’re dead?” I said.

This was the wrong thing to say.

Adams’s beard bristled.

“Who gave you permission to talk to our comrade?”

“I’m investigating the death of his ex-wife.”

The other man got in my face. “You are not permitted to talk to any of the prisoners in our wing of Long Kesh without a solicitor being present,” he said in a soft southern-boarding-school/almost-English accent.

“Seamus doesn’t mind,” I insisted.

The other man ignored this. “Seamus, get back to your section. Remember you’ve got a phone call with America this morning!”

“Ok, Freddie,” Seamus said and, with a little nod to me, walked quickly towards the exit.

“And now, you might want to be running along, peeler,” Freddie said. He was a big lad, six three and built, but he was relaxed and he wore his size well. He had a dark complexion and he was wearing a tailored blue suit and a green silk tie. His black hair was tied back in a ponytail. A little badge on his lapel said PRESS OFFICER. Adams was in his bog-standard white Aran sweater and he looked scruffy in comparison with his companion. The contrasts didn’t end there. Freddie had dark brown, almost black, eyes and a long, continental nose and he was a good-looking cove and he knew it. Adams’s vibe was all puffy left-wing history teacher, with his full beard, thick glasses and unkempt brown hair flecked with the occasional strand of grey.

“You’re not Freddie Scavanni, are you, by any chance?” I said to the second man.

He was taken aback. “What of it?” he asked, visibly nonplussed.

“I’ve been trying to have a wee talk with you too,” I said. “I called up Sinn Fein twice yesterday, I got nowhere.”

“We don’t have wee talks with the peelers,” Freddie said.

Adams and Freddie turned to go.

“Hold the phone, lads, this’ll only take two seconds,” I begged them.

“We have a busy morning, we have to get back to headquarters,” Adams said.

“I just need one second of your time, boys,” I said, getting in front of them.

It was alleged that Gerry Adams was on the IRA Army Council and thus could pretty much have anyone in Ireland killed at any time if he wanted. His “Get out of our way, constable, or you’ll regret it” stare was therefore a solid down payment on a year’s worth of nightmares.

“Aye, let’s get some fresh air, Gerry,” Freddie said.

“Wait! You’re going to want to listen to this: I think we can help each other,” I said.

“How so?” Adams asked.

“I spoke to you, yesterday, Mr Adams, I’m the lead investigator into the death of Tommy Little and I need to speak to Mr Scavanni about Tommy. Tommy was on his way to see Mr Scavanni when he disappeared.”

I had hoped to maybe surprise Adams with this information but he obviously knew it already. It made sense. Scavanni wouldn’t still be working for the movement if he hadn’t been investigated and cleared by the IRA.

“Now what we probably have on our hands here, Mr Adams, is a serial killer preying on homosexuals. That’s a pretty sensational story and as soon the Ripper Trial concludes in England, the British tabs are going to be desperate for something like that until the actual Royal Wedding. This is where our interests coincide. You’d like the press to keep its focus turned on the hunger strikes but if this serial-killer story gets momentum, it’s going to be bad news for you and your lads. Imagine dying for Ireland and nobody cares because the new Irish Ripper has taken all the headlines. They’re not going to like that, are they?”

Adams shook his head dismissively “I don’t like your flippant tone, young man. It’s trivializing an important matter. Now, if you don’t mind-”

“An IRA man is mixed up with a gay serial killer? Is that really a distraction you can afford to have this summer? Wouldn’t you rather have your boy Scavanni cooperate with us, tell me what he knows, help me catch this nutcase and hey presto: distraction over, hunger strike number one story again and the brave struggle by your volunteers can resume its rightful place on all the front pages.”

Adams looked at Scavanni who merely shrugged.

I could see that it made sense to both of them.

“Again, I don’t like your tone, but in this case I suppose our interests do converge. We, uh, we have not made much progress finding out who killed Tommy Little,” Adams said.

“Mr Scavanni?” I said.

“I’m not sure how I can help. Tommy never made it to see me that night but if you want to chat about it come to my office at noon today. Bradbury House #11,” Scavanni said. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes.”

“See, I knew we’d all become fast friends,” I said with a wink at Matty.

“Maybe we could all go to the pictures some time,” Matty said dead pan.

“Aye, if those cheeky boys would only stop blowing up all the cinemas.”

They walked away from me in disgust.

When they were gone Matty and allowed ourselves a little laugh.

I was quite pleased with our work and after we got back in the Land Rover I put in a tape of Stiff Little Fingers. It was bucketing now and the rain was coming in sideways from Lough Neagh. Matty was no Stiff Little Fingers fan and was less impressed with what we had achieved. “That was a waste of time,” he muttered.

“We got an interview with Scavanni.”

“What’s that, another bloody trip to Belfast? Another pointless interview. He’s IRA, he’s not going to tell us anything. And if he did, what difference would it make? He says Tommy Little never made it to his house and if that’s a lie the IRA would have found out about that and he wouldn’t be standing next to Gerry bloody Adams, would he?”

It was a valid point but I didn’t like Matty’s negativity.

If McCrabban disagreed with you he just sat there and said nothing.

And if he agreed with you, he also just sat there and said nothing.

“I just don’t see where this gets us in either investigation,” Matty went on.

“We’ve made progress! I don’t think the husband had Lucy killed,” I replied as I flipped the volume and the window wipers to maximum.

“We didn’t think he’d had her killed before. We didn’t think anybody had her killed,” Matty protested.

We drove through the gates past a long line of protesters, journos and other rabble gathering outside the fence.

“Bloody hunger strikers, they’re never going to win,” Matty said sourly.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you ever root for the underdog? You’d be on the side of the Sheriff of Nottingham.”

“We are the Sheriff of Nottingham, Sean.”

I pulled over the Land Rover at a spot where cameramen were jostling for position on a little hill that gave you a shot down onto the H Blocks themselves.

“Hey friend, I’ll give you twenty pounds if you’ll let me take some snaps from the roof of your vehicle,” a Yank photographer said to me as I walked round to the passenger’s side.

“The cheek of ya. This isn’t Bongo Bongo Land mate. We are the incorruptible representatives of Her Majesty’s Government. I will, however, accept a hundred-quid donation to the police widows benevolent fund and you’re to be quick about it.”

He climbed onto the bonnet, took some nice shots and gave me two crisp fifty-pound notes.

I gave one to Matty and kept the other.

Matty put the Land Rover in gear and headed for the M2 motorway.

“Where to?” he asked.

“Betty Dennis Florist on the Scotch Quarter in Carrick,” I told him.

We avoided the rush hour and were back in Carrickergus in fifteen minutes.

A dock strike had been called so there were panicked queues of people outside the supermarket and the grocers but no one wanted to waste their few coppers on flowers so I had no problem at Betty Dennis’s. I bought carnations, which are a nice neutral sort of flower. Boring yes, but neutral.

“Carrick Hospital,” I told Matty.

We parked the Rover and walked to reception with the flowers.

Hattie Jacques. Unsmiling.

I gave her the flowers.

“These are for Dr Cathcart,” I said.

“I’ll make sure she gets them,” Hattie said.

“Is she in at all?” I asked.

Hattie gave me a severe look. “Dr Cathcart has given me explicit instructions not to let you or any policeman into the surgery area. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to work to do.”

Matty grinned, slapped me on the back and steered me back outside into the rain.

“That’s harsh, brother, the good doctor is not a fan. You were shot down, mate! Shot down like the Red Baron,” Matty said.

“The Red Baron shot the other people down.”

“Not in the end, Sean. Not in the end!”

“Shut up! Shut up and drive us to Lucy Moore’s house. I wrote the address out on the map.”

“Will do boss, will do,” he said and laughed again.

Lucy’s parents lived on a large farm not far from Carrickfergus. Her father Edward O’Neill had been an old-school Nationalist, one of the few Catholic MPs in the Stormont Assembly and he was still well respected in Republican circles. There had been two girls, Lucy and Claire, and a son, Thomas. Claire was a contracts lawyer based in Dublin and New York. Thomas was a barrister in London. Lucy must have been the black sheep marrying a ne’er do well like Seamus Moore.

We parked the Land Rover and were shown in to the conservatory by Daphne O’Neill, a prematurely aged, grey-haired lady.

Edward was sitting by the window with a blanket over his knees. He was a big man brought low, like an exiled king or politician.

We drank tea.

Talked.

Neither Lucy’s mother nor father had anything to add. They were in mourning for a lost girl.

The worst thing in the world that could happen had happened.

Chief Inspector Brennan had already informed them about the baby.

They were bereft. Adrift in a sea of grief. They showed us the postcards and letters Lucy had sent from the Irish Republic. We, of course, had the photostats in our file and the originals gave us nothing new.

“Did Lucy drop any hint at all that she might have been pregnant to either of you or possibly to Claire?”

Lucy’s mother shook her head. She had high, arched cheekbones and a dignified white bun. Tears had been pouring down her face and she was somehow extremely beautiful in all that pain.

“Not a peep and she wasn’t showing or I would have noticed at Christmas.”

“Was she seeing anyone? A boyfriend or anyone new?”

“No! Not that we knew of. After finally divorcing Seamus? No. She had a lot of friends in the Sinn Fein crowd, but we all thought she’d lay low for a while. Oh Lucy, my darling, darling girl. I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it at all!”

“Is the baby still alive?” Mr O’Neill asked.

I was choking and I looked at Matty for help.

“We have every reason to think that it might be,” he said hesitantly. “Certainly we found no traces of a body in Woodburn Forest. Nearly two dozen infants have been left at hospitals and missions in the last week.”

The room grew quiet. Mr O’Neill cleared his throat and stared out the window. The long seconds became a minute.

“I know what some people say. They say it’s an Irish tradition. That it’s an ironic commentary on the famine. I don’t find anything ironic about it. Do you, sergeant?”

I was genuinely baffled. “Sir?”

“In India the Jains starve themselves to death to obtain purity in the next life. The philosopher Atticus starved himself in Rome because he had become sick and wanted to hasten the end. In Ireland there has never been honour in such a course. I don’t know how this so-called tradition got imported into our country!”

I had no answers for him. Clearly he blamed the hunger strikers for guilting Lucy into killing herself.

“Mr O’Neill, if we could find out where she’d been staying for the last six months it would help us a lot to piece together-”

“We don’t know!” Mr O’Neill snapped. “I wish we had known.”

“Perhaps one of Lucy’s friends would know?” I asked.

“We’ve asked everybody again and again!” Mr O’Neill said, banging his fist into the flat of his hand to emphasise his words.

“We’d like to talk to them anyway,” I said.

Mrs O’Neill calmed her husband down and they gave us half a dozen names, all of whom Carrick CID — that is, Matty and Crabbie — had interviewed after the initial disappearance.

Still we went back to the station and made the calls. Nobody had heard from Lucy since her disappearance, nobody had any insights into boyfriends or a pregnancy. The friends were Catholics, we were the police … it was a brick wall.

“Where to now?” Matty asked.

I looked at my watch. “I suppose we’ll go see our new friend Freddie Scavanni.”

We drove into Belfast along the M5. Burnt-out buses. A wrecked Saracen. A post-office van on fire. Soldiers walking in single file.

We parked the Land Rover at Queen’s Street RUC station.

Because of endemic fire bombs, blast bombs and bomb scares the roads into the city centre had been blocked. No cars were allowed into the heart of Belfast and all shoppers and civilians were searched at one of a dozen hastily built “search huts”.

A long line of uniformed civilian searchers patted you down, looked into your bag and waved you on past the canine officers. Once through the search huts you were free to walk the area around the City Hall.

This inner area was still heavily patrolled by the police and the army and with all these precautions it meant that the square mile of Belfast City Centre was one of the safest shopping precincts in the world. Bombers couldn’t get in and muggers, rapists and shoplifters couldn’t get out. Still, the search huts were a major fucking hassle and sometimes it took fifteen minutes to get through.

Of course plain-clothes detectives could just show their warrant cards and skip to the head of the line.

We heard “fucking pigs” and “SS RUC” behind us as we pushed through.

The civilian searchers were usually women and usually attractive young women at that, so it was a mixed blessing avoiding their attentions. The reason they were universally called civilian searchers was so that they could be distinguished from the agents of British Imperialism: the police, the army and prison officers. It was hoped that the IRA would never issue a communique designating them as “legitimate targets” and so far they had not. Unlike Matty and me, of course, who could be killed with impunity.

We walked to Bradbury Place and found Bradbury House in a cobbled street near Pottinger’s Entry. It was an older building that had recently been renovated and divided into various subunits: an optician, a travel agency, a hairdresser.

Suite #11 was on the second floor.

It was packed with chippies and painters and men in white boiler suits laying down phone lines.

Scavanni was standing there with one of the sparks examining a complicated fuse box that must have been put in shortly after World War Two.

He saw us and came over with a hand out although he looked annoyed as if he hadn’t really expected us to actually show up. I shook the hand.

“Mr Scavanni, if we could just steal you away for a few moments,” I said.

He sighed. “All right, Sergeant Dougherty, this way.”

“Fucker forgot your name,” Matty muttered as we followed him along a pastel-shaded corridor.

I shook my head. “No. He didn’t,” I replied.

Scavanni’s office was new and had nothing in it apart from a phone, a desk and a few plastic chairs.

He sat behind the desk, took his watch off and set it on the table.

“You have fifteen minutes,” he said.

Behind him there was a view of the Cornmarket where they had executed Henry Joy McCracken and the other leaders of the northern branch of the United Irishmen during the 1798 rebellion. That rising had been the last time when Protestants and Catholics had been on the same side; since then it had been divide and conquer in spades.

“The clock’s ticking,” Scavanni said.

“What is all this?” I asked pointing at the offices.

“It is an adjunct press office for Sinn Fein. We’re getting a thousand calls a day for interviews and quotes. We just couldn’t cope on the Falls Road.”

“And what do you do for Sinn Fein, Mr Scavanni?”

“I’m just a lowly paid staffer.”

“And what do you do for the IRA?

He rolled his eyes at me. “Sergeant, I have absolutely nothing to do with the IRA.”

“Why was Tommy Little coming to see you the night he disappeared?”

“Admin stuff. Nothing that interesting.”

“It might have been a wee bit interesting. It was a sudden change of plans, wasn’t it? We’ve been told that Tommy was on his way to see a certain Billy White and then he got a phone call and then he said had to come see you too.”

Freddie didn’t flinch. “Talking to Walter, were you? Yes. I called him. I just wanted to have a chat about getting more cars. Tommy was one of our drivers and we’ve been having to double and triple up on cars for American journalists.”

“You called him? To talk about cars?”

“Yes. Check the phone records.”

“We will,” Matty said.

“So was this a long conversation?”

“As far as I recall we settled the whole thing in about a minute. I asked him if he could make more cars available for the US media and he said he’d take care of it.”

“So if it was all settled why was he coming to your house?”

“I have no idea why Walter told you that he was coming over to see me, but I do know that he never made it.”

“Did you see him at all on Tuesday night?”

“No.”

“Do you not find that a bit strange, that he said he was coming to see you but then he didn’t?”

“Yeah, it would be strange if he hadn’t been shot in the head somewhere between Belfast and my house.”

“Where do you live, Mr Scavanni?”

“Straid.”

“Where’s that?”

“Near Ballynure,” Matty said.

“And you’ve no idea why Tommy felt the urge to come and see you in person?”

“None at all. I asked him if he could sort out more cars for the American hacks and he said that he’d take care of it. I thought the matter was settled.”

“What did Tommy do for the IRA?” I asked.

“I have no idea. I know very little about the IRA. I’m a press officer for Sinn Fein,” Scavanni said.

“Will you be going to Tommy’s funeral?”

Scavanni shrugged. “I’m very busy. And I didn’t know him that well.”

“We’ve been told that Tommy’s death is something of an embarrassment. No military honours, no firing squad, nothing like that,” I said.

“There’s no point asking me. I have no clue.”

I was getting nowhere with this character. I looked at Matty and gave him a kick under the desk.

“You father came over from Italy?” Matty asked.

“He did.”

That was it.

There was no follow up.

Jesus, Matty.

“How do you feel about homosexuals, Mr Scavanni?” I asked.

“I think they’re great. More women for the rest of us,” he said sarcastically.

“How does Sinn Fein feel about homosexuals?”

He laughed. “We don’t have a policy.”

“Where were you on the evening of May twelfth?”

“I was at home watching TV.”

“Alone?”

“Alone.”

“What time did you go to bed?”

“I don’t know. Eleven?”

“What were you doing the whole night?”

“Watching TV.”

“And you went straight to bed?”

“Yup.”

“And you fell asleep?”

“Almost immediately.”

I frowned and bit my lip.

“Frankie Hughes was dying on May twelfth. Hunger striker number two. All of Sinn Fein must have been abuzz with excitement and you just went to bed?”

“There was nothing I could do for Frankie. And I knew that the Wednesday was going to be an emotional and busy day. And busy it was, I can tell you that.”

Freddie pointed at his watch.

“Look, I’m sorry but … time, gentlemen, please.”

We got to our feet and on the way out I did one more question Columbo style: “You didn’t know Lucy Moore, did you?”

“Lucy who?” he asked with a blank face.

“Seamus’s wife.”

“The wee doll who topped herself?”

“Aye.”

“’Fraid not. What’s she got to do with anything?”

“Sweet Fanny Adams, by the looks of it,” Matty grumbled.

“You speak Italian, Mr Scavanni?”

“Of course.”

“Che gelida manina … you know what that means?”

“Well, obviously the dialect is important … something to do with hands?”

“Yeah.”

He pointed at his watch again. “Officers, please, it’s been fifteen minutes.”

He gestured to the door with a look that told us that if we had any more questions we shouldn’t hesitate to “fucking get lost”.

I took Matty to the Crown Bar and we got a fantastic pork rib stew and Guinness for lunch. A couple of lasses were sawing away on fiddle and acoustic guitar giving us Irish standards about the famine, horses, the evil Brits …

“What do you think, chief?” Matty asked.

“About Scavanni?”

“Aye.”

I took a sip of the Guinness. “I think he’s hiding something,” I said.

“My vibe too.”

“Did you notice the typewriters? All electric.”

“Aye. Did you hear what he said about Tommy? ‘I have no idea why Tommy told Walter that he was coming over to see me.’ What’s the implication behind that?”

“That Walter is lying?”

“Or maybe that Tommy was lying to Walter? And what was with his wee bit of cluelessness about Lucy when he knew that that was the reason for our visit to the Maze this morning? Was he so concerned with concealing something important that he decided to conceal everything?”

“You’ve lost me,” Matty said.

We finished our excellent lunch, chewed the fat with the peelers at Queen Street cop shop, spent twenty minutes checking the phone records at British Telecom (Scavanni had indeed called Tommy Little on the night of May 12) and arranged an appointment with Billy White.

We retrieved the Land Rover and drove to Rathcoole Estate in North Belfast.

This was a Protestant ghetto made up of bland, grim, tower blocks and rows of dismal terraces. There were few services, much concrete, much sectarian graffiti, no jobs, nothing for the kids to do but join a gang.

They didn’t throw petrol bombs at us as we drove into the estate but from the four iconic tower blocks we got a good helping of eggs and milk cartons.

We pulled into the strip mall and easily found Billy White’s joint wedged between a Bookies and an Off Licence. It was grandly named the “Rathcoole Loyalists Pool, Snooker and Billiards Hall”.

The graffiti on the walls all around announced that this was the territory of the UVF, the RHC (the Red Hand Commando, yet another illegal Protestant militia) and the Rathcoole KAI, a group I hadn’t heard of before.

The hall had a bullet-proof grille, speed bumps in front of it and half a dozen guys in jeans and denim jackets hanging around outside.

Matty and I parked the Rover, walked through the riff-raff and went inside the place.

There were a few pool tables and more men in denim playing darts and snooker.

“Are you the peelers come to see Billy?” one of them asked, a giant of a man whose skinhead was brushing against the nicotinestained ceiling.

“Aye,” I said.

“Let’s see some ID,” he demanded.

We displayed our warrant cards and were shown into a back room.

An old geezer was sitting behind an unvarnished pine desk in a scary, claustrophobic little room that would have given the Fuhrerbunker a run for its money. There were UVF posters on the wall and a large what you might call naive art portrait of Queen Elizabeth II sitting on a horse.

Behind the old man were cases of cigarettes of every conceivable brand.

The old man was watching a gardening programme on a big TV.

“Are you Billy?” I asked.

The old man did not reply.

I looked at Matty. He shrugged. We sat down in a couple of plastic chairs.

The old man looked at me suspiciously. “Are you from the taxes?” he asked.

“No.”

“From the excise?”

“We’re from the police, we’ve come to see Billy.”

“And you’re no here from the missionaries of the apostates?”

“I don’t even know what that is. Is Billy around?”

“He’ll be back in five minutes. He’s just getting more petrol for the generator. We had no electricity last night.”

“Neither had anybody,” Matty said.

“Would you like some tea?” the old man asked.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Matty said.

The old man went out the door and came back a couple of minutes later with three mugs, a bottle of milk, sugar cubes and a packet of McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive biscuits. He added milk and sugar to both mugs and stirred them with his nicotinestained forefinger.

“Ta,” I said when he handed me a cup.

The old man started nattering away, first about the buses and the football but eventually somehow the trenches and the Great War where, he said, he was the only survivor from a platoon of men in the Ulster Volunteers on day one of the Battle of the Somme. I looked at my watch. This was some five minutes.

“I’m just going to step outside,” I said.

I went through the games room, opened the front door and took a breath of God’s free fresh air. It was raining now and all the men in denim were inside waiting their turn at the snooker tables.

A black Mercedes Benz 450 SL pulled up. It was your classic hood auto beloved of terrorists, pimps and African dictators.

Two men got out.

One of them got a drum of petrol from the boot and began rolling it round the back of the club. He was a young guy, blond hair, about twenty-two. Good-looking imp wearing brown slacks and a plain black T-shirt.

The other guy lit a cigarette and nodded at me. I knew that this was Billy. His hair was mostly black but with a Sontagian grey mohawk up front. His bluey-green eyes were sunk deep in his head and the lines around his mouth were deeper still. He had a square Celtic face, which reminded me a bit of Fred Flintstone or Ian McKellen.

“Are you the peeler who’s been ringing up looking for me?” he asked.

“Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy from Carrick RUC,” I replied.

“Is that a Catholic name?”

“Yes.”

He laughed a nasty wee laugh. “Ok, so what’s this all about?”

“Tommy Little.”

“Let me guess, you interviewed Walter Hays and he said that Tommy was coming over to see me? Is that right?” he said with animal cunning.

“That’s right.”

“You want to know how I know that?”

“You have telepathic abilities?”

“Because the IRA has already been on the phone to me, asking me when I saw Tommy last. Very polite they were too.”

Of course the IRA and the UVF were sworn enemies who in theory tried to kill each other at every opportunity. In practice, however, there were many contacts between the two organizations. They cooperated to reduce friction between the two communities and to facilitate the distribution and the collection of protection money.

“When did you see Tommy last?”

“Tommy came over here about eight o’clock the night he was topped. The Tuesday.”

“Why?”

“We had business to iron out.”

“What business?”

“It’s not relevant, copper,” Billy said with menace.

Like with Gerry Adams and Freddie Scavanni I knew where the power lay here. It was all with him. I had to go softly softly: he could terminate this interview any time he wanted and I’d never get another chance to talk to him again.

“Was it about drugs?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“I’m homicide, not a narc,” I said.

“Off the record then?”

“Off the record.”

“Swear it on the fucking Pope’s life.”

“I swear on the Pope’s life.”

“All right. Well, I can tell you’re dying to know so I’ll put you out of your misery. Some very bad lads had killed an enterprising young man up in Andy town who we had given a safe conduct to; and I was a bit concerned about this and I was also wondering what had happened to the three bags of brown tar heroin that this young man had been carrying.”

My mind was racing. Brown tar heroin? A safe conduct? What had Tommy Little to do with all of this?

“And what did Tommy say to that?” I said placidly.

“He didn’t say much of anything. We went into my office and he gave me two of the three bags and asked me if I was happy with that and I said that I was.”

“What time was this at exactly?”

“Like, I say, about eight.”

“How long did your meeting last?”

“Two minutes.”

“And then he was gone?”

“And then he was gone.”

“And you never saw him again?”

Billy shook his head but didn’t speak.

“You never saw Tommy again?”

“No.”

Billy was dressed in a red tracksuit, with Adidas sneakers and a golden chain around his neck. He had a spiderweb tattoo on one side of his neck and a red hand of Ulster on the other. It was very much the look of your middle echelon Protestant paramilitary, and yet there was something about it that didn’t quite fit.

This was the external. This was the image he was projecting. But there was more going on underneath. Billy was clever and his accent wasn’t Rathcoole at all. There was more than a hint of Southern Africa still.

“You were a copper too for a bit, weren’t you, Billy? In Rhodesia?”

“Copper? Is that what your file says? Give us some credit. We were practically running that country. Only thing holding it together. Those were days. High times! That place could have been paradise. Look at it now! We should have killed Mugabe when we had the chance and we did have the chance, believe me.”

I could imagine some of those high times: prison beatings, raids into Mozambique, torching villages, burning crops …

“How many people did you kill in Rhodesia, Billy?”

“More than enough, copper. More than enough,” he said chillingly.

I rubbed my chin. Was any of this relevant? He was a stone-cold killer but I knew that already. “You ever hear of a wee girl called Lucy Moore?”

“Who?”

“Do you know who Orpheus is?”

“What?”

“Are you a music lover, Billy?”

“Of course.”

“Do you like the opera?”

“The what?”

“Opera. Wagner. Puccini.”

“No fear.”

“Not your line?”

“Not my line.”

We looked at one another while Billy lit himself a cigarette. He offered me one and I took it. A plane was landing at the Belfast Harbour Airport and I watched it stick rigidly to its landing vector along the shore of Belfast Lough.

“Let me get this straight. Tommy Little came over to see you on Tuesday night at about eight o’clock. He was defusing a potentially serious dispute about who owned the heroin of a dead drug dealer. He stayed here for five minutes and then he left and you never saw him again.”

“That’s about right,” Billy said and again there was that look in his eyes that I didn’t quite like. If this was the truth it was not the whole truth.

“What did you do after Tommy left?”

“I played snooker until about twelve and then I went on home.”

“Witnesses?”

“Everybody in the club.”

“They’d swear on oath that you were the Shah of Iran.”

“That they would,” Billy laughed.

“How do you feel about queers, Billy?”

“Me personally?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t give a fuck. Who cares what people get up to in their own bloody home.”

“Very enlightened. What would you do if you found out one of your boys was a queer?”

“You know what we’d do.”

“You’d kill him?”

“We’d have to. The higher-ups would demand it.”

The drizzle turned to rain.

“Are there any more questions?” Billy asked.

“One or two,” I said.

“Then we better go inside.”

We went to the stuffy back room. Billy turned off the TV and kicked out his grandfather. He sat behind the desk.

“Shane, get in here!” he called and his young, blond-haired assistant came in. Shane sat down next to Billy, facing us. He was winsome and pretty and annoying and perhaps there was even a shade of Jupiter and Gannymede. Perhaps.

“You are?” I asked Shane.

“Shane Davidson. Davidson with a D.”

“Sergeant Duffy wants to know if Tuesday night was the last we ever saw of Tommy Little?” Billy said.

Shane’s eyes narrowed. “Of course it is,” Shane said, looking at Billy with a glance I could not interpret. Matty saw it too and gave me the minutest nod.

“Holy shit, lads! You didn’t have a falling out with Tommy and fucking shoot him, did you?”

“Don’t you read the papers, mate? Tommy was killed by some nutcase doing in queers. Although I say nutcase, but the truth is, I’ll bet you most people think he’s doing everybody a favour,” Billy said.

“And besides, we know better than to fuck with Tommy Little!” Shane said.

“Aye, we do. The Great White Chiefs would kill us before the IRA ever did,” Billy added.

“What exactly did Tommy do for the IRA? What was his position?” I asked

Billy laughed and slapped his hand on the table. “Yon boy’s been dead four days and you don’t even know who he was? Christ, are you the Keystone Cops or what?”

“What was Tommy Little’s job for the IRA?” I insisted.

“You really don’t know?” Shane said again, sending his boss into hysterics.

“No.”

“Tommy Little was the head of the FRU,” Billy said.

“Tommy Little was the head of the IRA’s Force Research Unit?” I said incredulously.

“That he was.”

“That’s an Army Council position,” Matty gasped.

“So, you can see why anybody who killed Tommy would have to be a nutcase, wouldn’t you?” Billy said.

Yeah I could.

All the other angles had collapsed.

Tommy Little was the head of the FRU — the IRA’s internal security unit. The FRU was responsible for uncovering police informers and MI5 moles within the organization. They were the most feared group of men on the island of Ireland. Scarier than any of the paramilitaries, Special Branch or the SAS.

When the IRA got you, they’d kneecap you or shoot you in the head. When the FRU got you and they suspected that you were a police informer or a double agent the fun could last for a week. Torture with arc-welding gear, with hammers, drills, acid, electric shocks. Castration. Blinding. Dismemberment. These were the methods the FRU used to get at the truth.

No one but a lunatic would ever fuck with the FRU’s big cheese.

The blow back would be swift and terrible.

You’d have to be crazy.

I got to my feet. Matty stood next to me.

“Here, gents, take your poison,” Billy said offering us half a dozen cartons of cigarettes each.

I shook my head.

“Go on, lads, they’ve called a dock strike. Ciggies are all gonna be out of the shops by morning,” Billy said.

“Fuck it,” I said in a daze and took a carton of Marlboro. Matty took one of Benson and Hedges and we got a case of Virginia pipe tobacco for McCrabban. We walked out of the office into the wet battleship-grey Rathcoole afternoon. “Back in the Rover?” Matty asked.

“Let’s walk for a bit, clear our heads.”

We walked among the drab tenements and crumbling 1960s tower blocks. Everything was achromatic and in ruins less than twenty years after it had gone up. A massive social engineering experiment gone horribly wrong. “Where do you think the women are, Matty?” I asked. “It’s all men, here. No women, no kids.”

“Inside washing the clothes, hitting the weans, cooking the chips.”

I stopped at a twenty-foot-tall graffito: Look Out, Look Out, The Rathcoole KAI’s About. “What does KAI stand for?”

“Kill All Irish.”

“Kill All Irish. Nice. Rathcoole is from the Irish Rath Cuile meaning ‘in the centre of the ring fort’. Once this was a royal palace for the kings of the Ulaidh. Now look at it. Concrete towers and row upon row of soulless terraces.”

“If it was a palace these scumbags would still have messed it up, believe me,” Matty said.

I looked at my watch. It was four o’clock. Where had the day gone? “We should go home,” Matty said. “If Tommy Little was Force Research Unit, The Angel of Death wouldn’t go near him with a ten-foot pole. This is obviously the wrong angle. These boys are not that stupid.”

“Aye, I know. All right. All right, we’ll get back in the Rover. We’ll head off, but I want you to drop me round the corner away from the prying eyes in the tower blocks.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I am going to go round the back of those derelict tenements and I’m going to sneak into one of them and wait for our boy to come out.”

“Billy?”

“I’m going to wait for Billy’s wee friend, Shane. I think he knows something he’s not saying.”

“Everybody in Belfast knows something they’re not saying.”

We got in the Land Rover. Matty drove me to a doomed basketball court that was now a rubbish dump filled with skips, shopping trolleys, prams and the odd burnt-out, hijacked car. I got out of the passenger side and put my gun in my raincoat pocket. “You be careful, Sean, ok?” Matty said.

“Careful is my middle name. That and Aloysius but you don’t need to tell anybody that.”

He smiled and I walked through the swirling circles of garbage to the abandoned terrace.