The flag was up. I opened the rusted mail box and sure enough there was a brown envelope inside. I took it out and shoved it between my flak jacket and my sweater.
Matty and a terrified-looking Constable Brown reached the Land Rover.
“Did you get the prints?” I asked.
“Are you fucking joking?” Matty said furiously. “Fucking suicide mission you sent us on.”
“Ok, calm down. Get in the Land Rover and close the bloody doors, Crabbie, get her started up!”
I holstered my revolver, reached into the front seat and grabbed a plastic bullet gun that I loaded and primed.
I walked towards the rioters.
They were the kind of kids who hung around the streets and attacked the police or fire brigade whenever they saw them. With tensions running high over the hunger strikes, one solitary Land Rover was an irresistible target.
Bottles and stones started smashing all around me.
Crabbie revved the engine and I waited until all the lads were inside before walking in front of the vehicle with the plastic bullet gun.
When the mob was twenty feet away they started directing all their bricks, bottles and stones at me. If they could put a man down or disable the vehicle they’d scarper and call in the heavy brigade who would show up with grenades and petrol bombs.
I pointed the plastic bullet gun at them.
“That’s enough!” I yelled.
Everyone froze and I knew I had about three seconds.
“Listen people! We are not DMSU. We are not the riot squad. We are detectives investigating a murder. We are going to leave this street right now and no one is going to get hurt!”
I kept the plastic bullet gun aimed at the guy on point and moved my way backwards towards the Land Rover. Their leader was an ugly ganch with a skinhead, a Celtic FC shirt and a breeze block in his hand.
“This is our patch, you fucking peeler bastards!” he said and hurled the breeze block at me. I dodged it but didn’t avoid a couple of stones that caught me in the flak jacket.
“Get in, Sean!” Crabbie yelled.
I jumped into the passenger seat of the Land Rover as an impressive hail of assorted objects came hurtling at me.
“So how did your Gandhi act go down with the locals?” McCrabban asked with dour satisfaction.
A milk carton exploded on our windscreen.
I closed the Land Rover door.
“They have much to learn about the moral authority of nonviolence.”
“I think we should be leaving now,” Crabbie said.
He turned the window wipers on, gave the engine big revs and drove slowly through the crowd. Perhaps one of them was our killer. I tried to see their faces but it was impossible through the milk and missiles. Bottles and bricks bounced off the bulletproof glass and the steel plating on the sides. The mob began chanting “SS RUC! SS RUC! SS RUC!” However, after twenty seconds of this we had successfully reached the end of the street without getting a puncture.
In another five minutes we were on the Crumlin Road and five minutes after that we were safe in Protestant North Belfast.
“Everybody all right back there?” I asked the lads in the rear.
“Everybody’s fine,” Matty said, but I could smell shit through the grill. One of the two reservists had keeked a planet in their whips.
Half an hour later, Matty opened the envelope from #44 in the CID room with myself, McCrabban, Chief Inspector Brennan and Sergeant McCallister looking on.
It was on standard A4 paper. A typed message single-spaced:
My story still has not appeared in The Belfast Telegraph!!!! You are not taking me seriously!!!!! You have until the Monday edition and then I will kill a queer every night!!!! I will liberate them from this vale of tears. The queers on TV and in the peelers and everywhere!!!! Lee McCrea. Dougal Campbell. Gordon Billingham!!!! Scott McAvenny. I know them all!!! DO NOT TEST ME!!!!! My patience is running thin!!!!
Matty carried it to the photocopier and made us half a dozen copies before setting to work on his forensic tests. It took him ten minutes to discover that the typewriter was an old manual Imperial 55.
Lee McCrea was a BBC presenter on the late-night local news. Dougal Campbell was a talkshow host on Radio Ulster. Gordon Billingham, a sports reporter on UTV. Scott McAvenny ran Scott’s Place, the only decent restaurant in Belfast. Of course they were all gay men, not out as such, but well known.
“What’s the verdict, gentlemen?” I asked.
“He’s a nutter!” Matty said.
“A nutter who can type without making a single mistake,” I said.
Brennan looked at me. “That’s good, Sean, what else jumps out at you?”
“It’s not a very comprehensive list, is it? Four pretty obvious homosexuals.”
“Aye, plus the two he’s already topped,” McCallister added.
“I suppose we better have that press conference on Monday morning,” Brennan said.
“And we better give those boys protection,” I suggested.
“I’ll call Special Branch,” Brennan said wearily.
I reread the note and sat down. I had a splitting headache. I had been hit by a dozen stones and half bricks, one right off the top of my riot helmet.
I looked out the window at the lights of ships moving down the black lough into Belfast’s deep water channel.
Brennan was talking to me but I didn’t hear him.
I watched as the pilot boat put out from under the castle to bring a cargo vessel into Carrick’s much smaller and trickier harbour.
“ … go on home,” Brennan finished.
“What?”
“I said you look like Elvis at his 1977 CBS special, why don’t you go on home?”
“I’ve things to do.”
“Just go. Have a drink, have a bath. Might be the last one you take for a while, I heard the power-station workers are going on strike.
“I can’t. I’m still waiting for the prints on John Doe.”
“I’ll wait. You go on. That’s an order, Sean.”
“Yes, sir.”
I decided to walk home. A mistake. A downpour caught me on Victoria Road. Heavy, cold rain from a long looping depression over Iceland.
Coronation Road.
The quintessential Irish smell of peat smoke rising up to meet the rain.
Light and fear and existential depression leaking through the net curtains.
#113.
I turned the key and went inside. I had forgotten about the phone tap and was surprised to see a black box next to my telephone. Kernoghan’s boys hadn’t left any trace apart from that. I stripped off my clothes, went into the kitchen and opened the empty fridge. Half a can of Heinz beans. Some yellow cheese. I ate beans and toast and lit the upstairs paraffin heater and went to bed.
I found myself dreaming of the girl hanging in the forest.
It was dusk and the stars were coming out over western Scotland and eastern Ireland and the sunken realm between the two. I’ve never liked the woods. My grandmother told me that the forest was an opening to someplace else. Where things lurked, things we could only half see. Older beings.
“
