In the Morning I'll Be Gone (3 page)

Prisoner 239 wrote and waited. He explored the vistas of his own mind and memory. “Society improveth the understanding,” he scribbled on the very first page of the book, “but solitude is the school of genius!”

On that final December evening, he lit a red candle stub (red wax was on the notebook), made a drawing of a fox, fixed his blanket about him, and went to sleep. No doubt he woke with the sun, and when the guards came into his cell to bring him breakfast perhaps he sensed the change in their mood and attitude. Maybe he noticed that they were smiling at him and that one of them was carrying a brand-new suit of clothes.

December. It had been a year now since I’d been thrown out of CID and reduced from detective inspector to the rank of sergeant—an ordinary sergeant, that is, not a
detective sergeant
. As you can imagine, after you’ve been a detective it’s very difficult to go back to regular uniformed police work in a border police station. The official reason why the RUC had busted me was because I’d broken a lot of chicken-shit rules, but really it was because I had offended some high-ranking FBI agents over the DeLorean case and they’d wanted to see me brought down a peg or two.

Police stations on the South Armagh border were future finishing schools for alcoholics and suicides with the added frisson of being shot or blown up on foot patrol, but what did me in was the night we had to take Sergeant Billy McGivvin home after he’d caused a drunken scene in a pub. Billy lived in my neck of the woods and I’d actually been to his house once for dinner, so I was put in charge of delivering him safely back . . .

It was nine o’clock at night and we were driving up the Lower Island Road into Ballycarry village. There were three of us. Sergeant McGivvin and myself in the back, Jimmy McFaul driving up front. In theory it was a double-lane road but in fact it was merely a widened cattle track and Jimmy had us almost over into the sheugh because a car was coming the other way.

To avoid dazzling the other driver Jimmy switched off the full-beam headlights as the car went past. I looked through the Land Rover’s bullet-proof windows but there was nothing to see: thick hedgerows on either side of the road and boggy pasture beyond that.

The Land Rover made a clunking sound.

“What was that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Jimmy said.

“It was something.”

“You think someone shot at us?”

I had heard bullets thudding off the armor plate of a police Land Rover dozens of times and none of them had made a sound like that.

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, we got to get McGivvin home,” Jimmy said.

The week before, Billy McGivvin’s wife had taken their three kids and flown the coop. A lawyer told McGivvin that she was in England and that she was divorcing him because of repeated drunkenness and domestic violence. McGivvin had decided to refute her claims by going to the Joymount Arms in Carrickfergus and getting blotto. He had begun swearing at the other patrons, calling the women “bitches” and “hoors,” and when they’d tried to make him leave Billy had pulled out his service revolver.

McGivvin was a terrible police officer before his wife had left him and no doubt now he was going to be a lot worse. That didn’t concern me. What concerned me was the possibility that he was going to throw up over my uniform, which was only two days back from the dry cleaners.

“It’s all right, mate, it’s all right,” I kept assuring him. “Soon be home.”

“Blurgghhhh,” he replied, and drooled on the plate-steel Land Rover floor.

We reached Ballycarry village without any trouble and found his farmhouse on Manse Street. Jimmy parked the Rover and dragged McGivvin out into the drizzle. We couldn’t find a key, even under a plant pot or the mat, so we had to break in through the back door.

We stuck McGivvin in the recovery position on the downstairs sofa. We put a bucket next to him and loosened his shirt buttons. There was an enormous velvet painting of Jesus marching in an Orange parade that Jimmy felt might be in vomit spatter range so we took it off the wall and put it in the dining room.

“I think that’ll do,” I said.

There was a stepladder perched ominously under the light fitting in the kitchen. An ideal place for a noose. I collapsed the ladder and shoved it under the stairs. “How many Freudians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” I asked Jimmy to change the mood.

“Dunno,” he said.

“Two: One to change the lightbulb, the other to hold the penis—I mean ladder.”

Jimmy didn’t get it.

We walked back to the Land Rover and got inside. We were just in time to hear the
Chart Show
announcing the Christmas Number 1 for 1983. It was “Only You” by Vince Clarke—rerecorded by some tedious a cappella group.

“The musical taste of this country baffles me these days,” I said.

Jimmy smiled his twenty-four-year-old smile and said nothing.

I persuaded him to switch the channel to Radio 3 and Bach took us back to South Armagh.

When we parked at the police station I noticed that the driver’s-side wing mirror was cracked. “Look at that,” I said. “Could we have hit something on the road?”

“Nah, it was cracked before we left. I’m pretty sure.”

There was no sign of blood or other forensic material.

It’s probably nothing
, I thought, and we went inside the heavily fortified barracks to complete the remainder of our shift.

We were nearing the end of the foot patrol, which as any peeler or squaddie will tell you is the most sickening part of the whole business. We were close to the police station on the top of the hill and to be shot within sight of home would be very irritating.

The village was empty. It was a quiet Saturday morning well before the market. We walked down the middle of the road along the white lines.

The houses on the left-hand side were in the Irish Republic, those on the right were in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Our job was to patrol this border and prevent smuggling and the free movement of IRA arms, personnel, and money. The geography made it an absurd situation. When Northern Ireland had been created in 1921 everyone had assumed that it was only going to be a temporary solution to the problem of Ireland’s self-rule. No one seriously thought that the complicated twisty county lines of Fermanagh, Tyrone and Armagh could possibly become the permanent and policeable border between two separate countries. Yet they had and this border now ran through fields, villages, sometimes through farms and individual houses. All along it there were exclaves, enclaves, salients, and other utterly unpatrollable cartographical features.

And here in the village of Bellaughray the border ran through the center of town. Technically we were supposed to keep to the right-hand side of the road, because anything over that white dotted line would be an incursion into the sovereign territory of the Irish Republic and, in theory, a diplomatic incident; but if you did keep right you were exposed to snipers all along the County Monaghan hillside, so when I was leading the patrols, I kept us on the Eire side of the street where the houses would protect us.

Walking slowly and in single file, we reached the central Bellaughray roundabout, and now it was only three hundred yards to the station.

I had taken eight men out in full body armor and we were heavily laden with flares, radios, and Sterling machine guns. As usual it had been an exhausting patrol. We had walked across boggy fields, over sheughs and stone walls, through swamp and slurry and cow shit. We had found no trace of IRA men or petrol smugglers or sheep stealers, or sheep shaggers come to that, but nevertheless we had all put our lives on the line for the last hour and a half.

The IRA snipers were good, and thanks to Yankee dollars they had acquired sophisticated high-velocity rifles. They knew our routines and routes and could easily have been waiting for us from a concealed den or lair up to three thousand feet away.

But they weren’t. Not this morning anyway. We went through the roundabout in single file and reached the tiny Catholic chapel.

The hedge around the wee red-brick structure bothered me. It was thick and you couldn’t see through it and anything could have been lurking behind: a man with a gun, a concealed explosive device . . .

I sent Constable Williams to recon it while I signaled the rest of the patrol to drop to one knee. Williams went ahead, looked behind the hedge, and found nothing.

He gave me the thumbs-up.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s move out. Nearly home, lads.”

As was typical of these late December days the sun was more or less gone now, swallowed up in the mouths of huge chalk-colored clouds that were tumbling down from the Mourne Mountains. But even on the coldest days fear and the heavy equipment kept us drenched with perspiration. It was starkly beautiful out here under the austere slopes of Slieve Gullion. This was a hallowed landscape: Cuchulainn’s kingdom in the era of the
Táin Bó Cúailnge
and in St. Patrick’s time the
Terra Repromissionis Sanctorum
—the promised land of the Saints. No Saints about today, or sinners come to that.

I walked on point for a couple of minutes and then nodded at Constable Brown, whose face assumed the startled look of the stag in Landseer’s
Monarch of the Glen
.

“Go on, son, I’ll be right behind you,” I assured him.

He walked about twenty yards and froze. “Vehicles!” he yelled.

I looked up the street. Two cars had parked themselves laterally at the ends of the road; one was a blue Ford Cortina, belonging to Mr. McCoghlan, the local butcher, I thought, and the other was an orange Toyota that I didn’t recognize. I wondered why they had blocked the road off. An ambush? A double car bomb? Or something completely innocent?

Smoke was coming from both exhausts. I raised my fist so everyone could see it and then I pulled it down. Everyone dropped to one knee again.

“There goes my arthritis,” Constable Pike complained.

“Just get down,” I said. “And keep your wits about you.”

Eventually everyone assumed a crouching or half-kneeling stance—all the better to hit the deck if it was a car bomb and white-hot shrapnel came tearing toward us.

We waited. A raven landed in the road ahead of us and began pecking at something. The cars just sat up there, blue smoke curling from their exhausts, the engines turning over quietly. Constable Daniels started whistling “What’s New Pussycat?” more or less off key. I took out my binoculars and looked at the scene. There were two men in the two cars and they appeared to be talking.

“Hopkins, go up there and investigate!”

“Why me?” Constable Hopkins asked.

“Because it’s your turn on point,” I said.

“When Inspector Calhoun leads the patrol he always investigates anything suspicious,” Hopkins protested.

“That’s why they pay him the big bucks, isn’t it? Now get up there and investigate before I take my boot to your arse!”

“All right,” Hopkins said moodily.

“McBeth, you go with him, staggered formation, at least twenty feet behind. And both of you stay on your toes!”

Hopkins and McBeth went up to the two parked cars while the rest of us held our breath.

I knew what the pair of them were thinking.

This is how it ends.

Bang.

An explosion of cordite into the layered chevrons of ignition powder. Logarithmic expansion. The explosive thrown out of its plastic casing. Vermilion fire. An entire life lived and ended in an instant . . .

McBeth and Hopkins reached the cars and talked to the men inside and came back to us.

“Two old geezers having a chinwag. It’s all clear,” Hopkins said.

I nodded and just as I got to my feet I heard a loud crack from somewhere up in the hills. I didn’t need to give the order to hit the deck. Before I could even open my gob to bark an order everyone was already on the ground.

“Anybody hurt?” I yelled, and called the roll.

“Pike?”

“I’m OK!”

“Brown?”

“I’m all right.”

“Daniels?”

“OK.”

“McCourt?”

“OK.”

“Hopkins?”

“Despite your best efforts, Sergeant, I’m OK, too!” he said bitterly.