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.
“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.
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
