In the Morning I'll Be Gone (39 page)

“And Ireland has the potential to be the biggest disaster of all, doesn’t it?”

“Oh yes. If Britain pulled out tomorrow we could be looking at thousands of casualties, right on our doorstep. It would be quite intolerable.”

“It wouldn’t be thousands, it would be tens of thousands.”

“Indeed. Would you like to hear some fortune-telling, Sean?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Thatcher has survived the assassination. She will win the next election. Easily. And the one after that. At some time point in the 1990s, perhaps ten years from now, she will resign or lose to a Labor Party that has been shifted to the right. Never again will a Labor Party advocate a unilateral withdrawal from Ireland.”

“If you say so.”

“The Falklands War and the Brighton bomb have made it an inevitability.”

“And then what?”

“The IRA are becoming increasingly marginalized. They already know that their campaign has failed. They have failed to capitalize on the momentum of the hunger strikes. We know just how demoralized they have become.”

“You’ve got one of your own on the Army Council, haven’t you?”

“I couldn’t possibly comment on that, Sean, even if I knew that to be the case, which I don’t . . . But I will say that they have already begun putting out feelers to end this conflict through disinterested third parties.”

“So that’s it, is it? That’s the next twenty years sewn up, is it?

She laughed a little. “Twenty years? I can go farther than that if you want.”

“Go on, then.”

“Sometime in the 1990s there will be a ceasefire.”

“No.”

“Oh yes.”

“Ten years from now?”

“Or perhaps longer. Fifteen maybe. But it’ll come. We’ll make a deal with the IRA. They lay down their arms and we’ll release all their prisoners, withdraw the British Army, and establish a power-sharing parliament in Belfast.”

“Paisley will never agree to that.”

“Ian Paisley will be the one leading it. The extremists will be the ones who make this deal happen, not the moderates in the middle. The moderates, I’m afraid, will be squeezed out of existence. It always happens.”

“And then what? What happens next in this great scheme of yours?”

“Well, then there will be a period of calm for a long time. There will certainly be IRA splinter groups who will commit atrocities but they will be marginalized and largely unimportant. Maybe this period will last another twenty years.”

“We’ll be long retired or more likely long dead.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“All right, I’ll bite. What happens then?”

“We cannot escape demography. By that time there should be a comfortable Catholic majority in Northern Ireland and hopefully after sixty years of European integration borders won’t even matter anymore . . .”

The penny dropped.

“So that’s when you withdraw. That’s when a united Ireland will take place.”

“European money will have been pouring in for half a century. Incomes will have risen. The middle class will have expanded. The small Protestant minority will hopefully not rise up and begin a civil war.”

“You’ll withdraw without a bloodbath. You’ll have managed the retreat.”

“We will have managed the retreat.”

I looked at her for a long time.

Those eyes had seen much. That brain had thought much. I’d been wrong about her age. She was old. She was ancient. And she had lied to me about her position in the Service. She was much higher up the chain than she had let on.

“Who are you?” I asked.

She opened her mouth and then closed it suddenly like a toad.

She waved her hand dismissively. “I am not important.”

I stared at her. I was cold. I got to my feet.

“I suppose I should go.”

She nodded. “Yes,” she said.

“I don’t expect I’ll be up this way again,” I said evasively.

“I don’t expect you will,” she said. “Let me see you to the front door.”

She walked me through the house.

She opened the door.

I stepped out into the autumn sunlight.

The door shut heavily behind me.

Rathlin. This is where the first people entered Ireland. This is where the human story of this island began.

“Like I give a shite,” I said to myself, and walked under the oak boughs away from Cliffside House.

I digested what she has told me and I tried to feel something: hope, despair, anything. But I was empty. This was a shadow play. A puppet theatre.

She pulled the strings and at the other end of them I jumped. And to mix my metaphors: she’d known exactly how much line to give me. She was the master fisher, not I. I walked down her lane and I took a short cut over the stone wall and through the heather down to Church Bay and the harbor.

I bought a packet of cigarettes and the
Belfast Newsletter
, which had just been delivered to the shop.

I climbed aboard the ferry. The
Isolde
, a sixty-foot converted Second World War cargo boat. Getting on with me were a dozen schoolkids in uniform and an old man with a horse on a piece of rope. I lit a cigarette and thought about Kate.

I felt used. Manipulated. But what had I been expecting? The job of the Prince was to rule, not to explain the game to the merest of the pieces.

I finished my fag, lit another, and read the paper while I waited for us to get going.

“MRS. GANDHI ASSASSINATED,” the headline screamed.

Murdered by her Sikh bodyguards in retaliation for her assault on the Golden Temple. I read the report, which went on for four pages.

It was horrific stuff. There had been retaliatory massacres of Sikhs in Delhi, gun battles in the streets.

The Brits certainly had buggered up India.

On page five another story caught my eye:

CONSTRUCTION COMPANY HEIR SHOT DEAD

Harper McCullough, CEO of McCullough Construction of Ballykeel, County Antrim, was shot dead last night by two masked men, as he drove out of the company car park shortly after 7PM. No terrorist group has claimed responsibility for this attack. A police spokesman has not ruled out robbery or an attempted kidnapping as a—

I carefully folded up the paper and threw it in the rubbish bin. The last of the passengers got on: a couple of wee sprogs also in school uniform.

“All aboard that’s going aboard!” the pilot said.

We sailed out of the harbor and into the chop.

We rode under the black sky.

We navigated the green waters . . .

The Antrim coast advanced. Rathlin Island and the Kingdom of Scotland receded.

I should never have come. I had always been curious to a fault. It was better not to know. Life was easier lived in the dark.

Ballycastle loomed out of the sea mist. The row houses, the school, the proving ground for the horse fair.

“Fenders away!” the pilot said as we glided into the harbor.

He nudged the ferry up to the pier and they threw securing ropes to men in oilskins who fastened the boat to concrete bollards.

“Sheets tight!” the pilot said when the
Isolde
was securely tied to dry land.

He cut the engines.

A deckhand lowered a wooden gangway. The schoolkids ran through the rain to the waiting school bus. The horse and man went more gingerly down the ramp.

I cupped my hands around the Zippo lighter and kindled life into a cigarette.

I went down the springy wooden gangway and walked to a sheltered overhang at the pilot house.

Dry land.

Ireland.

Land of my fathers and of my birth. I had no love for it. All it was fit for was the ash from my cigarette and the slurry from the heel of my shoe.

A klaxon sounded on the far pier where the hundred-and-twenty-foot-long daily car ferry
The Lady of the Isles
was about to depart for Campbeltown in Scotland.

I was seized by a wild impulse.

Run for it.

Flee.

Get on the boat and escape to Britain and leave all this . . . all this madness behind.

Yes! Get out. They’ve got their plan but you don’t have to be part of it.

Go to Scotland, England.

Go.

To do what?

Something else. Anything!

“All aboard that’s going aboard!” the skipper of
The Lady of the Isles
yelled through a megaphone.

Was there anything keeping me here?

I was beyond their words.

I was free of honor and obligation. What use was a cop? A cop was a pawn. A cop was never in the endgame.

“Last call for Campbeltown!” the harbormaster shouted. “Last call for the port of Campbeltown!”

He looked at me. He sensed my interest. He was a trim man with a black beard, a black coat, and a cap that was reassuringly nautical.

I caught his eye.

The futures split.

The paths diverged . . .

For an instant.

For the merest instant.

And then they merged back into one.

I shook my head, took a final draw on the cigarette, and threw it into the sea.

I turned up the collar on my coat and walked toward the car, readying myself for what was evidently going to be a long, long war . . .

I was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. After studying philosophy at Oxford University, I emigrated to New York City, where I lived in Harlem for seven years, working in bars, bookstores, building sites, and finally the basement stacks of the Columbia University Medical School Library in Washington Heights.

In 2000 I moved to Denver, Colorado, where I taught high-school English and started writing fiction in earnest. My first full-length novel,
Dead I Well May Be
, was shortlisted for the 2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and was picked by
Booklist
as one of the ten best crime novels of the year. The sequel to that book,
The Dead Yard
, was selected by
Publishers Weekly
as one of the twelve best novels of 2006 and won the Audie Award for best mystery or thriller. These two novels, along with
The Bloomsday Dead
, form my trilogy of novels starring hitman Michael Forsythe, the DEAD trilogy.

In mid-2008 I moved to St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia, with my wife and kids. My book
Fifty Grand
won the 2010 Spinetingler Award and my last novel,
Falling Glass
, was longlisted for Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year.

Visit Adrian at
http://adrianmckinty.blogspot.com/
, and on Twitter
@adrianmckinty.