Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (7 page)

Audacious?

When she was nine, someone wrapped a dogturd in newspaper, placed it on her doorstep, set it alight, rang the doorbell then fucked off. Her father answered the door and immediately began stamping on the flaming parcel, covering his slippers in shit. That was roughly how audacious the Black Spirit’s activities were. Neither perpetrator had the guts to look their victims in the eye.

It wasn’t the only thing they had in common, either. They were both bullies, both cowards. They picked on the little guy and then they ran away.

Teachers the world over faithfully preached the message that bullies were cowards. In her classroom, the bullies had smirked, the way she pictured the terrorists smirk. Load of shite, they were telling themselves. They weren’t cowards; cowards shat it, and they shat it from no‐
one. They were some of the hardest guys – and girls – in the school, no question they could look after themselves in a barney. But funny, they didn’t go picking fights with the other hard cases. If they wanted to look tough, surely that’s what they should have done?

Don’t be stupid.

Human experience taught that when people wanted to look tough, they picked on easy targets. A short‐
arsed megalomaniac picked Jews. A Lilley‐
livered political mediocrity picked single mothers. A deludedly ambitious cardinal picked gays. A bloated Ugandan dictator picked Asians. And endless halfwit nonentities in Leeside had picked the wee darkie lassie with the funny name.

Consequently, she had serious anger‐
management issues around the whole bullying thing. And the whole racism thing, and the whole sexism thing, though they were really just parts of the same whole. Her parents and her brother had all handled the abuse a lot better. Mum and Dad, having been expelled by Amin with a two‐
year‐
old son and a baby well on the way, perhaps had a wider perspective on it. A council house in Renfrewshire was a bit of a comedown from the lifestyle they’d once built for themselves, but under the circumstances it was sanctuary, and if some of the locals called them names or left turd‐
bombs on their doorstep, then it was still a lesser form of racial abuse than what they’d already survived.

Her brother, James, had always been thick‐
skinned and easy‐
going to the point of irritating. He got his share of verbal and physical abuse, arguably more than her, being older and therefore first into each of the educational snake‐
pits. It just never seemed to get to him; at least not in any way that he let anyone see. Perhaps that was how he coped, in combination with being too bloody affable to make many enemies. It helped that he was good at football, which accorded a certain respect as well as the protection of his fellow school‐
team members. When he reached secondary age, he also had the subsidiary benefits of going to Parkhead every other Saturday, which seemed to place him in a context that made him easier to accept, even to the bampots. Maybe especially to the bampots.

She had never enjoyed any comparable advantages, being far too short to get picked for netball, the only game the girls were ever offered at St Mary’s primary school. At Sacred Heart secondary, she did make the hockey team, but sporting prowess was not the same source of kudos among the female peer group. Clique politics and popularity power‐
struggles were far more important. Athletic ability only counted for something if it was one of the in‐
crowd that had it; hence the hundred metres was a big deal in first and second year when Maggie Hanley won it. When the wee darkie girl with the funny name won it in third year, it was because Maggie wasn’t interested in ‘that wee lassie stuff’ any more (though the wee darkie girl with the funny name remembered Maggie looking pretty fucking interested as she overtook her with ten metres to go).

By that age, she’d been too long the outsider to want anything to do with the fake sorority of all that fickle factionalism. Bereft of anything substantial that they had in common, the cliques were usually united solely by who they didn’t like. Across the various parties, this tended to be a reciprocal list, but most of them had room on it for her too. This was because she ‘didn’t make it easy for herself’, which she took to mean she didn’t drop to her knees in gratitude whenever one of these bitches condescended to actually be polite to her for a change. The other inference was that she had to expect a certain amount of racial abuse and she shouldn’t be so sensitive; or to state it more simply, she should know her place. And to put this attitude into full perspective, it had to be appreciated that the source of the quote was the assistant headmistress.

The occasion was significant too. After years of Pilate‐
class hand‐
washing on the part of the teaching staff any time she reported being punched, kicked, spat on or merely insulted, it was suddenly a serious matter the first time the abuser came off second best. She had ‘over‐
reacted’, she was ‘hyper‐
sensitive’, even ‘volatile’. Yeah, maybe she was. Maybe it was that junior‐
sibling syndrome, being ultra‐
assertive, over‐
competitive, always wanting to leave her mark or have the last word. Or maybe it was that since the age of five she had been taking shit in the classrooms and playgrounds of schools where other than herself and James, the closest thing they had to an ethnic minority was the Byrne twins from Dublin.

‘Chocolate Button’ had been her unwanted nickname since Primary Two, applied because she was small and brown, get it? Chocolate was, in fact, the prefix for any number of hilarious remarks, all of which only got funnier the more she heard them. If she was a Proddy, she would be a Chocolate Orange. No, please, stop, these pants have got to do me all day. Granted, it wasn’t the most offensive term she would hear (‘She’d diarrhoea an’ she thought she was meltin’ – ha ha ha ha’), but the term itself didn’t matter. What mattered was that she heard it every day, and every time it was used, the intention was to remind her that she was different and she didn’t belong.

That was why she ‘over‐
reacted’ and ‘brought shame on the school’ during a third‐
year hockey match against St Stephen’s. ‘All’ her opponent had done was sing the chorus of that Deacon Blue song, Chocolate Girl, every time she came within earshot. The girl hadn’t meant any offence, she said later (though it had sounded more like ‘mmm hmm hmm mmf hmm mmf’). She had heard it on the radio at lunchtime and just couldn’t get the song out of her head all afternoon.

Sure. Same as the Sacred Heart winger didn’t mean to hit her. The hockey stick accidentally flew out of her hand and into the poor girl’s face. Twice.

But did it solve anything? No. Did it change the other girl’s racist attitude? Probably not. Did it make her instantly popular and respected in the eyes of her classmates? Don’t be daft.

And did it make her feel better?

Oh, fuck yeah.

It was an epiphany.

Like she was reborn. It would be facile to say that she found her vocation in that violent catharsis, but its roots could certainly be traced back to there. In that moment, all the mouths that had ever called her chocolate this or darkie that became as one: one that was spitting teeth, dripping blood and thoroughly wishing it had stayed shut.

Her parents hadn’t been entirely enamoured of the idea when she professed her intention to join the police. Their experience of uniformed authority had understandably not made it something to which they wished their children to aspire (though to be fair, in their adopted home, they had been reassured enormously by the gormless plods telling them ‘we’re looking into it’ after each instance of harassment, vandalism or flaming jobbies). She therefore acquiesced when they suggested she go to university first, an undertaking they were undoubtedly sure would shake this undesirable notion from her head. It didn’t. She flirted with new ambitions on a daily basis – that’s what university is for, isn’t it? – but flirting was as far as it went: she and the polis were betrothed.

Campus extra‐
curricular activities often led graduates down previously unforeseen paths, but in her case, she hadn’t been able to plausibly envisage any financial or long‐
term prospects in Tai‐
kwon‐
do, Shorinji Kempo, Karate or pistol‐
shooting. There was, however, one line of work in which she reckoned they might prove useful.

The degree came in handy too, not least the languages, which had tipped the balance in her favour when she pitched for the Interpol liaison post. Her mother was Belgian by birth, so she and James picked up a solid grounding in French as both a product and necessity of eavesdropping on their parents. To that she had added Spanish and Dutch at university, this last proving the most prized by her senior officers due to so many investigative roads leading to Amsterdam, where she found herself cultivating links with Interpol. This led in time to a three‐
month placement in Brussels and ultimately her liaison role for the Strathclyde force. It wasn’t a post ever likely to occupy her full‐
time, more a responsibility that fell to her as and when, but it made her contacts, got her face known far and wide, and consequently opened a lot of doors.

It was in Brussels that she got her inside gen on the Black Spirit. She was there when he hit Strasbourg, one of the ‘classified’ atrocities Wells had alluded to. He engineered the collapse of a disused flyover on the autoroute at the height of rush hour, killing seven people instantly and twenty‐
eight more in the ensuing pile‐
up.

An ‘official’ inquiry blamed structural fatigue, accelerated by the vibrations of haulage traffic. It was never made public that the disaster wasn’t an accident, let alone who had been behind it. There was no paymaster on that occasion, no Looney‐
Tunes collective trumpeting their responsibility, hence the option to keep the truth quiet. This one he had done for his own satisfaction, a little ‘fuck you’ to the European Parliament, which had recently agreed new international protocols to speed up the extradition of wanted terrorists. The protocols would, according to their architect, ‘drive a high‐
speed road between the courts of every nation’. Extradition wasn’t even something the Black Spirit was likely to be bothered about, not unless he was planning to get himself arrested any time soon. It was sheer sabre‐
rattling, a reminder to the authorities that his dick was still bigger than theirs.

The fall‐
out turned into an all‐
hands drill across every Interpol bureau, which was why she got access to files and individuals she would otherwise never have been allowed near. Interpol was like the Internet: it wasn’t so much a body in itself as a means of connecting other disparate entities. It was therefore constructed around a number of nodes, which ranged from fully‐
staffed offices to individual liaisons such as herself.

Brussels being the nearest thing Interpol had to an HQ, she met a number of terrorism intelligence experts there, people who had followed the Black Spirit’s ‘career’ from the start. They knew a shitload more than Wells, and their attitude to their subject was a great deal less reverential, mainly because they had seen the bodies. The men and women who had been on‐
site to collect the Black Spirit’s calling cards kept their disgust beneath – but close to – the surface, where they needed it, to drive the fight no matter how bleak it looked.

Enrique Sallas had been involved in the hunt since Madrid, and he knew better than most how bleak it could get. He had been on the force thirty years and told her he had never encountered a phenomenon that scared him more.

‘This is a guy who truly doesn’t give a fuck, and I don’t even mean about the victims. That goes without saying. But this guy doesn’t give a fuck about the causes he’s assisting either. He doesn’t even give a fuck about the money, that’s my opinion. He does it because … he can. He does it because it makes him feel good. We can’t negotiate with him, we can’t compromise with him. A change in politics can’t sideline him. One conflict is resolved, he’s offering his services where the next one emerges. Others call him the Black Spirit because of the picture on the card. I think of him as the Black Spirit because I fear he will always be with us, in one form or another. He is bloodlust, he is murder, and he will shape‐
shift and remanifest wherever hatred is to be found.’

Impassioned as he was wont to become, even Enrique didn’t miss the irony that the Black Spirit was trading on a mystique they had played a large part in giving him. It wasn’t just Wells who couldn’t help but be fascinated by this shadowy figure, even if only because he posed so many questions. She was guilty of it too, though she might put that down to foreign terrorism naturally seeming more exotic than the version she was familiar with. In the UK, terrorism meant Ulster sectarianism, a repetitive cycle of violence in which the horror was the only thing greater than the boredom. From a professional perspective, if she was interested in moronic neds obsessed with Anglo‐
Irish history, she could always volunteer for Old Firm match‐
duty.

Having said that, there were few better illustrations of terrorism’s perverse allure than the vicarious thrill‐
seekers and their braindead paraphernalia at Ibrox and Parkhead.

She remembered overhearing some of James’s halfwit mates talking about a banner they had seen at the match one day. It had incorporated the tricolour and the Palestinian flag, and read: ‘IRA – PLO. Two peoples, one struggle.’ They thought it was ‘really cool’. None of them ventured to explain the cool part about nail‐
bombs and dead children, but there was no question this romantic‐
sounding ideal had some kind of aura for young and simplistic minds. Fighting for freedom, battling against oppression, blowing up the Death Star. The question was, would ‘the struggle’, any struggle, still have the same aura if guns and bombs weren’t involved? Well, nobody had ever turned up at Parkhead or Ibrox with a ‘Gay Rights’ or ‘Free Tibet’ banner. It was about boys and toys. No guns, no glory.

However, the not so young and simplistic were fascinated too, so maybe it was something deeper, perhaps even something primal. In the uncertain, ever‐
changing adult world, was there something paradoxically comforting about believing there was a manifest embodiment of evil on the loose out there? Were we like the boys in Lord of the Flies, dreaming up ‘the beast’ because it was less frightening to believe in a malevolent being than to confront the chaos of the truly unknown? Perhaps the Black Spirit was a repository for our fears and insecurities about crime, violence and ultimately death: we could combine them all as one totem and fear that; rather than have countless numbers of them scuttling around our heads like hatching insects.