The Cold Cold Ground

22: THE CONVERSATION

In and out of the whiteness. In and out of the silence. Faces:

Mum and Dad. Laura. Matty. McCrabban. Brennan. McCallister. Doctors. Nurses. My mum again, holding my hand. Tears on her cheeks. Tears on her good blue dress. Fear in her blue-grey eyes.

Night.

An alarm.

A crisis.

Doctors younger than me. An old man I did not know. An old man startled from sleep, muttering words over me and holding a crucifix above my forehead. “Domine sancte, Pater omnipotens, aeterne Deus, qui, benedictionis tuae gratiam aegris infundendo corporibus, facturam tuam multiplici pietate custodis: ad invocationem tui nominis benignus assiste; ut famulum tuum ab?gritudine liberatum, et sanitate donatum, dextera tua erigas, virtute confirmes, potestate tuearis, atque Ecclesi? tuae sanctae, cum omni desiderata prosperitate, restituas.”

A night boat. A night boat crossing the Irish Sea. A journey through darkness. The moon smothered by fragments of the dark. The stars mouthing hermetic songs.

A curlew on the lava beach. Auguries in the movement of the birds …

Time passed.

I could tell the different nurses by their perfumes.

I could sense the difference between the shifts.

I could tell when I was awake and dreaming.

“Ach, you’re doing much better now,” the one with the lovely Scottish accent said, touching my bruises with her fingers.

I had had surgeries to remove shotgun pellets from my stomach, right lung, ribcage and one that was nestled against my aorta.

The surgeries had been long though not difficult.

Then there had been complications.

Haemorrhaging.

An immune system attacking itself.

I had been put in an induced coma for four weeks after they had trepanned my skull to relieve the pressure on my brain.

For another fortnight they had kept me medicated and semiconscious.

When I became fully aware of where I was, it was the middle of July.

Six weeks of intensive care followed.

My condition moved from “critical” to “serious” to “improving”.

I wasn’t starved for visitors.

My mum and dad. Aunts and uncles dredged up from all over Ireland. Most of Carrickfergus RUC.

Laura.

Eventually I was moved to an open ward.

I got to know the heart patients and the car-crash victims.

The world outside the hospital continued without us.

Prince Charles married Lady Di in St Paul’s Cathedral.

Shergar won the Derby by ten lengths.

The Deputy Chief Constable came by to tell me that I had been recommended for the Queen’s Police Medal. He also told me that he personally had seen to it that I would get my full pay, minus my uniform allowance, until I could return to duty, but that to do this I would have to wave my claims under the Victims of Terrorism Compensation Act.

I signed his forms and he went away happy.

My dad went round my house, ripped out the stair and rebuilt and repainted it.

He told me that everyone on Coronation Road had been “asking for me”.

The riots continued.

The hunger strikes continued, but it was clear that they were winding down. The families of the hunger strikers appealed to the Primate of All Ireland, Cardinal Daly; he pleaded with the men in the H Blocks and many of them began ending their fast.

Seamus Moore came off along with several others.

Michael “Mickey” Devine was the last man to die on 21 August 1981. I’d known Red Mickey in Derry. Not a bad lad. He’d been arrested and sent to prison for possession of a stolen shotgun.

In the English papers the suspending of the hunger strikes was portrayed as a massive victory for Mrs Thatcher. She had not given in to the terrorists. She had won.

Nevertheless, she quietly sacked her Secretary of State for Northern Ireland — the incompetent Sir Humphrey Atkins — and brought in James Prior. Prior immediately flew to the Maze Prison and promised that if the hunger strike was formally brought to a close then the British government would “strongly consider all of the prisoners’ demands”. Journalists began leaving Belfast for new trouble spots around the globe.

In my world it was much the same.

The “gay serial killer” case was closed. Billy White was tagged as the chief suspect. Shane Davidson had been his accomplice. Two repressed self-hating secret homosexuals. They had killed Tommy Little and Andrew Young and all the others …

They were disowned by the UVF and their families. Who knew why they had done it? As a pathology or because of some dispute with Tommy Little and then the others to cover up their crime? Who can see into the hearts of men?

But I knew. There had never been a gay serial killer. Northern Ireland was not the soil in which serial killers grew. If you wanted to murder a lot of people you joined the paramilitaries and used that as cover for your sociopathic tendencies …

Anywhere else this case would have been big news, but Ulster in 1981 had other things on its mind.

I tried to forget it. I had physiotherapy to do and water therapy and exercises.

I began exercising in the hospital. My mum bought me a Sony Walkman. Crabbie brought me a mix tape of country standards. Matty brought me a mix tape of Adam and the Ants and The Human League.

I learned to walk again and I listened to music and an audiobook novel Laura brought me called Midnight’s Children.

One morning in the papers I read that at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg the case of the Dudgeon v UK had been decided against the British government. A panel of judges had ruled 15:4 that Northern Ireland’s laws against homosexuality violated the European Convention on Human Rights. Mrs Thatcher’s Attorney General said that the law in Northern Ireland would have to be changed. That homosexual acts between consenting adults would have to be made legal.

The Catholic Church objected. The Free Presbyterian Church objected. The political parties objected. The paramilitaries objected. Something had brought the Protestants and Catholics together at last. But there was little they could do. Britain couldn’t leave Europe, or renounce the Treaty, the law was going to change …

I got a new doctor. An intern from Nigeria. He told me that as soon I could walk fifty feet without a stick he would let me go. In a week I proved it to him by walking from one side of the ward to another.

I was released from hospital on September 23.

Laura drove me back to Coronation Road. My grass had been mown and roses planted in my garden. The hall was filled with cards and letters. I could barely get through the front door.

Chief Inspector Brennan came to see me and told me to take my time before coming back to work.

I told him I would.

The next day Bobby Cameron came to see me. He brought bacon, milk and sausages. He told me that I had taken out a six man UFF assassination team and that under normal circumstances, me being a fenian and all, I’d be well advised to leave Northern Ireland, or at the very least Coronation Road.

“But these aren’t normal circumstances, are they?” Bobby said with a sleekit grin.

“Aren’t they?”

He pointed heavenwards. “They see it as a rogue cell that they would have had to take out anyway. And Bobby and Shane being queers and all? You fucking did them a favour. What an embarrassment.”

“So they’re not going to kill me?” I asked.

“Only if, in the course of a future investigation, you step on anyone’s toes.”

I grimaced. “It’s my job to step on people’s toes.”

“And you’re still a peeler and a fenian peeler and a bit of a famous fenian peeler at that, so the other side will still be trying to kill you, won’t they?”

“I suppose they will.”

Bobby walked to the front door. “Congratulations on your police medal. Say hello to her majesty for me. I’ll see myself out.”

Out he went.

Days, nights. Autumn turning into early winter. I went walking around Carrickfergus. Along Coronation Road and the sea front and sometimes all the way to Whitehead and back.

I grew stronger. I began lifting weights. Eating steak.

I went to the range at the UDR base and practised my shooting.

I had been home ten days when the great Maze hunger strike was formally ended at last. Two days later Secretary of State James Prior announced that IRA prisoners would be allowed to wear their own clothes, have separate cells and free association: “political status” would be returned in all but name.

For the first night since April Belfast had no rioting.

It was over.

The very next day the man came to see me.

He rang the bell just after I had gotten back from a run.

I was in sweat pants and my Ramones T-shirt.

He was dressed in a tweed suit and hand made shoes. It was a relatively dry day but he was wearing a raincoat, a trilby and carrying an umbrella. He was about sixty years old with a handsome face, sunken blue eyes and a grey pallor. He reminded me a little of Sir John Gielgud and his voice had the same commanding authority although tinged with a West Country accent.

“Detective Sergeant Duffy?” he said when I answered the door.

“Yes?”

“My name is Peter Evans. May I speak with you for a moment?”

I was breathing hard.

“Are you quite well?” he asked.

“I’ve just got back from a run. Let me get myself a drink of water, go on into the living room.”

I got my water and followed Mr Evans into the living room.

He had sat himself down on the leather sofa and was examining the copy of The Thin Red Line that I had left there.

“A good book?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I was in Burma under Orde Wingate, quite an extraordinary fellow. Unorthodox.”

I sat opposite him in the recliner. “You’re MI5, aren’t you?”

“We don’t like to use that name.”

“You’ve come here to put the fear of God into me, haven’t you? Have you seen Laura? You better not hurt her.”

“Oh, there’s no question of that. Oh, my goodness, no. We’re quite sure about you both. We’ve had many conversations about you and Dr Cathcart.”

“We won’t talk. We get it,” I agreed.

He smiled. “Yes, we know. I told them that all the way back in June. I said, gentlemen, these two young people are good eggs.”

The proverbial cold chill. Of course if we hadn’t been good eggs we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We’d be dead.

Evans sighed and tapped The Thin Red Line.

“War is so much easier than this business that we’re in. You know who your friends are and, most of the time, who your enemies are. Usually they’re the ones shooting at you.”

“But you work in the grey area,” I said.

“Not quite. In my world everything is binary. Black and white. Friend and enemy. Traitor and hero. The problem is that today’s friend is tomorrow’s enemy and vice versa. It can be confusing. It can destroy the finest minds. I had a colleague, an American colleague, who rose to the top of a well-known agency but became convinced that everyone working in that agency was a traitor. Everyone was in a conspiracy except for him. The President, the Vice-President, they were all working for the Russians. Poor chap. He couldn’t trust anyone in the end. He used to speak about the ‘wilderness of mirrors’, a line from Eliot I think (not my bag, the modern stuff). Anyway, a wilderness of mirrors where faces were reflections of reflections and nothing was as it seemed.”

“Would you care for some tea?” I asked.

“That would be lovely.”

I made it and brought chocolate biscuits, which Mr Evans seemed inordinately excited about.

“You’re getting the Queen’s Police Medal,” Evans said.

“So they tell me.”

We sipped our tea and I looked through the window at the rag and bone man’s balloon-filled cart making its melancholy way down Coronation Road.

“What have you come here to talk about, Mr Evans?”

He laughed. “Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio, and I wasn’t even very brevis!”

“Why don’t you just tell me what you want to tell me?”

He nibbled at his biscuit and smiled. “Three quick things and then we’re done, Sergeant Duffy. Firstly, I want to tell you that we’ve thoroughly examined your psychology assessments and I believe we can trust you and Dr Cathcart completely. So please put any residual uneasiness out of your mind.”

“I will.”

“Secondly, the so-called ‘gay serial killer’ case is now closed both officially and unofficially. You do see that, don’t you, Sergeant Duffy?”

“Yes.”

“Thirdly, we do not want you going near Stakeknife. We don’t want you going to his office in Belfast, or his house in Straid … or to his home in Italy where he will be until the end of the month.”

“Italy?”

“A little town called Campo on the northern shores of Lake Como. Charming place by all accounts. Tells everyone he got it from his grandfather. There’s a little article about it in August’s … in fact, hold on a minute … I just happen to have …”

He reached into the pocket of his raincoat and placed August’s Architectural Digest on my coffee table.

I looked at the magazine, looked at him.

He smiled and got to his feet.

He pointed at the room.

“Love the colour scheme. Striking. Such a breath of fresh air after all the usual dreary Sybil Colefax stuff.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I suppose I should be jollying along. Just wanted to check in. For a long time everything was so delicate, so finely balanced, but now, well, the hunger strikes are over and we have a new broom as Secretary of State and …”

“Everything’s changed?”

“Yes … well … look, it was awfully nice meeting you.”

He reached out his hand.

I shook it.

“I’ll see you out,” I said.

I opened the front door and he walked onto the porch.

“When do you return to duty, Sergeant Duffy?” he asked.

“I was thinking about next week but the Chief says I can take until the end of October if I want to.”

Evans put on his hat and waved to a man in a black Daimler who turned the engine on and threw his cigarette out the window.

“It’s been my experience, Sergeant Duffy, that after a traumatic event the best thing to do is to leap back into the saddle as soon as you can. Although you have been through so much that perhaps it would be best if you take a little holiday abroad first.”

“You think so?”

“Oh yes. Yes indeed.”

“Then perhaps I’ll go.”