Pecking him on the cheek, I slip my hand under his T-shirt and run my fingers down his spine. He’s been playing rugby and his hair smells of mown grass.
Dave and I have been sleeping together, on and off, for nearly two years. Ruiz would smirk over the “on and off” part. It’s the longest relationship of my life—even discounting the time I spent convalescing in hospital.
Dave thinks he wants to marry me but he hasn’t met my family. You don’t marry a Sikh girl. You marry her mother, her grandmother, her aunties, her brothers…I know all families have baggage but mine belongs in one of those battered suitcases, held together with string, that you see circling endlessly on a luggage carousel.
Dave tries to outdo me by telling stories about his family, particularly his mother who collects roadkill and keeps it in her freezer. She is on a mission to save badgers, which includes lobbying local councils to build tunnels beneath busy roads.
“I don’t have anything to drink,” he says apologetically.
“Shame on you,” says Ruiz, who is pulling faces at the photographs on the fridge. “Who’s this?”
“My mother,” says Dave.
“You take after your father then.”
Dave clears the table and pulls up chairs. I go through the story again. Ruiz then adds his thoughts, giving the presentation added gravitas. Meanwhile, Dave folds and unfolds a blank piece of paper. He wants to find a reason not to help us.
“Maybe you should wait for the official investigation,” he suggests.
“You know things get missed.”
“I don’t want to tread on any toes.”
“You’re too good a dancer for that, ‘New Boy,’” says Ruiz, cajoling him.
I can be shameless. I can bat my big brown eyelashes with the best of them. Forgive me, sisters. Taking the piece of paper from Dave’s hand, I let my fingers linger on his. He chases them, not wanting to lose touch.
“He had an Irish accent but the most interesting thing is the tattoo.” I describe it to him.
Dave has a laptop in the bedroom on a makeshift desk made from a missing bathroom door and saw horses. Shielding the screen from me, he types in a username and a password.
The Police National Computer is a vast database that contains the names, nicknames, aliases, scars, tattoos, accents, shoe size, height, age, hair color, eye color, offense history, associates and modus operandi of every known offender and person of interest in the U.K. Even partial details can sometimes be enough to link cases or throw up names of possible suspects.
In the good old days almost every police officer could access the PNC via the Internet. Unfortunately, one or two officers decided to make money selling the information. Now every request—even a license check—has to be justified.
Dave types in the age range, accent and details of the tattoo. It takes less than fifteen seconds for eight possible matches. He highlights the first name and the screen refreshes. Two photographs appear—a front view and a profile of the same face. The date of birth, antecedents and last known address are printed across the bottom. He is too young; too smooth-skinned.
“That’s not him.”
Candidate number two is older with horn-rimmed glasses and bushy eyebrows. He looks like a librarian caught in a pedophile sweep. Why do all mug shots look so unflattering? It isn’t just the harsh lighting or plain white background with its black vertical ruler measuring the height. Everybody looks gaunt, depressed, worst of all, guilty.
A new photograph appears. A man in his late forties with a shaved head. Something about his eyes makes me pause. He looks arrogant; as if he knows he is cleverer than the vast majority of his fellow human beings and this inclines him to be cruel.
I reach toward the computer screen and cup my hand over the top of the image, trying to imagine him with a long gray ponytail.
“That’s him.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
His name is Brendan Dominic Pearl—born in 1958 in Rathcoole, a Loyalist district of north Belfast.
“IRA,” whispers Dave.
“How do you know?”
“It’s the classic background.” He scrolls down the screen to the biography. Pearl’s father was a boilermaker on the Belfast docks. His elder brother, Tony, died in an explosion in 1972 when a bomb accidentally detonated in a warehouse being used as a bomb-making factory by the IRA.
A year later, aged fifteen, Brendan Pearl was convicted of assault and firearms offenses. He was sentenced to eighteen months of juvenile detention. In 1977 he launched a mortar attack on a Belfast police station that wounded four people. He was sentenced to twelve years.
At the Maze Prison in 1981 he joined a hunger strike with two dozen Republican prisoners. They were protesting about being treated as common criminals instead of prisoners of war. The most celebrated of them, Bobby Sands, died after sixty-six days. Pearl slipped into a coma in the hospital wing but survived.
Two years later, in July 1983, he and fellow inmate Frank Farmer climbed out of their compound onto the prison roof and gained access to the Loyalist compound. They murdered a paramilitary leader, Patrick McNeill, and maimed two others. Pearl’s sentence was increased to life.
Ruiz joins us. I point to the computer screen. “That’s him—the driver.”
His shoulders suddenly shift and his eyes search mine.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Why? What’s wrong?”
“I know him.”
It’s my turn to be surprised.
Ruiz studies the picture again as if the knowledge has to be summoned up or traded for information he doesn’t need.
“There are gangs in every prison. Pearl was one of the IRA’s enforcers. His favorite weapon was a metal pole with a curved hook something like a marlin spike. That’s why they called him the Shankhill Fisherman. You don’t find many fish in the Maze but he found another use for the weapon. He used to thread it through the bars while prisoners were sleeping and open their throats with a flick of the wrist, taking out their vocal chords in the process so they couldn’t scream for help.”
Cotton wool fills my esophagus. Ruiz pauses, his head bent, motionless.
“When the Good Friday peace agreement was signed more than four hundred prisoners were released from both sides—Republicans and Loyalists. The British government drew up a list of exemptions—people they wanted kept inside. Pearl was among them. Oddly enough, the IRA agreed. They didn’t want Pearl any more than we did.”
“So why isn’t he still in prison?” asks Dave.
Ruiz smiles wryly. “That’s a very good question, ‘New Boy.’ For forty years the British government told people it wasn’t fighting a war in Northern Ireland—it was a ‘police operation.’ Then they signed the Good Friday Agreement and declared, ‘The war is over.’
“Pearl got himself a good lawyer and that’s exactly what he argued. He said he was a prisoner of war. There should be
A palm glides over his chin, rasping like sandpaper. “Some soldiers can’t survive the peace. They need chaos. Pearl is like that.”
“How do you know so much about him?” I ask.
There is sadness in his eyes. “I helped draw up the list.”
