In the Morning I'll Be Gone (13 page)

“A letter for you, Sean. Found it in your pigeonhole,” he said, plonking the white envelope down on my desk.

He had never brought me coffee or my post before and there was a hesitancy about him.

“Cheers, mate, what’s the special occasion?”

He was reluctant to look me in the eye.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Have a seat, mate, and tell me what’s on your mind,” I said.

“Ach, it’s nothing, you’ve got a letter to read, I’ll talk to you later, OK?”

“Are you sure?”

“Aye. I’ll see you later.”

Strange, I thought, and opened the envelope, which had no return address on it and had been mailed to “DI Sean Duffy, Carrickfergus RUC, Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim.”

It was a brief handwritten note on cream writing paper:

Dear Inspector Duffy,

I hope it would be convenient for you to meet me in the Rising Sun Café in Cornmarket Street, Belfast on Saturday June 26th at 10 a.m. to discuss an arrangement that may be mutually beneficial. I would appreciate it if you do not ring my home or RSVP by post as I am quite sure that my calls and post are being regularly intercepted by British Intelligence and I would like to keep this meeting discreet.

I would further appreciate it if you would be so good as to destroy this letter without photocopying or transcribing it first. I have looked into your background and I feel that I may rely on your discretion in this matter.

Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile
.

Yours faithfully

Mary Fitzpatrick

“Well, well, well,” I said to myself.

There was a knock at the door.

I put the letter quickly back in the envelope.

“Come in,” I said, and Matty stuck his head round the door.

“Sean, I was wondering . . .”

“Have a seat,” I told him.

He sat. “A glass of Mr. Walker’s amber restorative?” I asked.

“Don’t mind if I do,” he said, and I opened my desk drawer, took out two paper cups, and poured us both a healthy measure of Johnnie Walker Black.

“What’s on your mind, Matty?”

“Well, you see, the thing is, there’s no future here, is there?” he began.

“You’re moving to England and you want me to write you a job reference!” I announced.

“How do you do it, Sean?”

“They used to call me the Great Stupendo. I did children’s parties and Butlins.”

He grinned. “It’s not England. It’s Scotland. I’m applying to join the Strathclyde Police and I need two references and I was wondering if you could write one of them for me.”

“Of course! I’d be happy to. If you think it’ll help.”

“You’re a detective inspector, Sean, and you’ve got the Queen’s Police Medal. I think it’ll help.”

“Why Scotland?”

“There’s nothing here, mate. It’s fucked. We’re all fucked. Someday I’ll want to have kids. Can you imagine bringing up kids around here?”

I swallowed my Johnnie Walker.

“Nope, I can’t.”

“I mean . . . don’t think I’m bailing on youse, but there comes a time in a man’s life when he has to look out for number one . . .”

“Jesus, mate, you’re not bailing on anyone. You’ve done your bit and I’d be happy to write you a reference. You’re a terrific police officer.”

Matty looked shyly at the floor, finished his whisky, and stood up.

“Thanks, Sean, and if, uh, if you could keep this under your hat . . . I don’t want any shit from upstairs until I have this thing in the bag.”

“Mum’s the word, mate.”

“Ta.”

Matt had no reason to feel guilty. Getting out was the smart move.

I closed my office door, finished the Johnnie Walker, and reread the letter. Then I held it over the metal wastepaper basket and set fire to it with my lighter.

The very last bit,
aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile
, meant something like “a beetle recognizes another beetle” or perhaps more pejoratively “a cockroach recognizes another cockroach,” or if you wanted to turn it into criminal argot: “a rat recognizes another rat.”

The meeting with Mary was going to be interesting.

Cornmarket was a pedestrianized shopping precinct off Royal Avenue. This was the original market street of Belfast when the city was little more than a row of houses along the Farset river.

As Dublin had stagnated Belfast had prospered through linen manufacture and heavy engineering. Grand Victorian banks and building societies had grown up around the city hall, and by the time of the First World War Belfast was building fifteen percent of the ships of the British Empire. But after partition from the South in 1921 there had been little economic development or prosperity. In the Second World War the city had been heavily blitzed by the Luftwaffe and it suffered anemic growth after VE Day. The
coup de grâce
had come in the period from 1969 until 1975, when this part of Belfast had almost been wiped off the map by endemic IRA bomb attacks. Hundreds of shops, offices, and factories had been burned to the ground.

In 1976 the authorities blocked off vehicular traffic from the city center and made all civilians entering Belfast go through a series of search huts, where they were patted down for explosives and had their bags examined for incendiary devices. The streets around Royal Avenue were then flooded with police and soldiers, and although this was extremely inconvenient for all concerned, it had worked, and now Belfast city center, paradoxically, was one of the safest places to shop in the world.

The Rising Sun Café dated back to the 1890s, when it had been an elegant tearoom. However, smoke damage from various nearby incendiary devices and an ugly 1982 refit had robbed it of much of its original chintzy charm. The elegant booths had been replaced with plastic tables and chairs: the wide black and white tiles had been ripped up and the bare concrete underneath covered with brown linoleum.

I arrived early for my meeting with Mary Fitzpatrick but she had arrived even earlier. As I entered the Rising Sun, a waitress asked me whether I was Mr. Duffy.

I said that I was and I was escorted to a private dining room at the back of the café where, to my surprise, I found that many of the original Victorian features were still in place.

Mary was sitting at a table with a silver teapot in front of her.

The waitress led me to Mary’s table and then excused herself.

“I didn’t know this room existed,” I said.

“Few people do. I know Cameron, the owner. It’s a nice quiet place to meet in the center of town without any prying eyes. Neither of us will be running into any old friends.”

“I imagine not.”

“I hope you’ve not told anyone about our meeting.”

“I haven’t.”

“Not even your sergeant?”

“Not even him,” I said, pouring myself tea from the pot.

“You knew Dermot personally, didn’t you, Inspector Duffy?” Mary asked.

There was no point trying to dissemble. “Yes, I knew him.”

“And you knew Orla too, didn’t you? Orla, Fiona, all the McCanns.”

“I knew them.”

“And you even knew my Annie a bit, didn’t you?”

“I knew Annie a little bit.”

“After you left I asked Annie about you,” she said, looking at me with her dark piercing eyes.

“Oh?”

“She remembers you right enough.”

“Does she?”

“She said that you and she and Dermot used to go to concerts in Belfast. Dublin once.”

“Is that so?”

“She says that you drove them down from Derry because you had a car.”

It was probably true—there had been a lot of rock concerts at the tail end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies. “It rings a bell. Dermot didn’t drive then so I could well have taken him to a couple of shows.”

“But of course you were a peeler by the time of the wedding, which is why
we
never met,” Mary said.

“I wasn’t one of Dermot’s closest friends anyway. And I certainly didn’t blame him for not inviting me to his wedding. It wouldn’t have been safe.”

She nodded and took off her coat. She was wearing a black jumper over faded blue jeans and boots.

She poured me some more tea and remembered to offer me the sugar bowl.

The waitress came back a moment later with a selection of cakes and pastries that she left on the table.

“Help yourself,” Mary said.

“I will, they look lovely.”

I grabbed a bun and a lemon slice.

She reached into her purse and pulled out a photocopied document and placed it on the table in front of her. I could see that it was some sort of report or file.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Eat your wee bun and I’ll read it to you.”

“OK.”

She opened the file.

“So you joined the police out of Queen’s University and after two years in Enniskillen and South Tyrone you became a detective in Belfast. You did well there, were promoted to the rank of detective sergeant, and were sent to Carrickfergus RUC. You solved a few cases and were promoted to detective inspector. But then you got yourself mixed up with the FBI DeLorean sting and it all started to go wrong for you, didn’t it?”

“What exactly are you reading there! Is that my personnel file?”

“Never you mind. Last year you supposedly ran over some wean in a Land Rover you were driving, only you weren’t driving, were you?”

“How do you know all this?”

“You resigned. And you were off the force.”

“Yes.”

“Which leads me to the conclusion that it was an
external
agency that brought you back in. An external agency that could only be MI5 or perhaps some intelligence unit within Scotland Yard. And why would they do that?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I think they brought you back solely for the purpose of finding my errant ex-son-in-law,” she said.

“I can neither confirm nor deny any of that.”

“I didn’t expect you to.”

I sipped the tea. It was too strong now and it tasted bitter even with the sugar.

“So now we know where we all stand, don’t we?” she said.

“Well, you know about me but I don’t understand why you’re meeting me.”

“You’re an interesting fellow, Duffy. You don’t present yourself very well. You sell yourself short. I think you believe the reason MI5 recruited you to look for Dermot was because of this personal angle. Because you had a previous relationship with him. You knew Dermot and his clan and you think that’s what makes you special.”

“Go on.”

She smiled again. “But that’s not the only reason they wanted you. MI5 recruited you because you’re good. And
that’s
what makes you special. You’re good at what you do, Duffy, that’s why they want you. That’s why I want you too.”

“It’s flattering to hear you say that but MI5—if indeed it was MI5—has more than enough bright people already, trust—”

She put up her hand to cut me off. “Let’s begin. In your dealings with Annie she never had you to our house in Ballykeel, did she?”

“No. I don’t believe so.”

“And you weren’t at the wedding, so you never got to meet Lizzie or Vanessa?”

“No.”

“Vanessa’s my eldest. She’s a doctor in Canada. In Montreal. Married to another doctor. They’ve a wee boy, my only grandchild. They’ve called him Pierre. I call him Peter.”

“Very nice. Do you get out there often?”

“I’ve been there once. It was enough. Jim doesn’t like to fly.”

She closed the file she had on me, carefully ripped it up, and put the remains in the nearest swing bin.

“Montreal’s supposed to be lovely,” I said to keep the conversation going when she sat down at the table again.

She ignored this. “You’re not supposed to have favorites among your children, are you?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m an only child and I have no kids.”

She reached into her bag again and gave me a passport photograph of a tall, pensive, attractive girl with ginger hair. She was wearing a field hockey uniform and standing in front of a goal.

“You can keep that,” she said.

“Why?”

Next she passed over a brown folder sealed with two thick rubber bands.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“This is a copy of the RUC report into my daughter Lizzie’s murder. Lizzie was my youngest. The apple of my eye, you could say. Shouldn’t say that, I suppose, but there it is. She was so funny and so sweet. There wasn’t a vile bone in her body. She deserved more than this.”

“Your daughter was murdered?”

“It’s all in there. It’s not the complete file but I’m sure you can get that easily enough. I didn’t want to look at all the grisly photographs and the autopsy report, but this should be more than sufficient to give the gist of what happened.”

I took off the rubber bands and opened the binder.

“It’s what they call a cold case now,” Mary continued. “They never found out who did it and the detective on the investigation has long since been assigned to other duties. Two years ago I hired a private detective but he didn’t come up with anything either and he advised me to drop it.”