Gun Street Girl (38 page)

Up into the air. Into the world of planes and helicopters.

Into the realm of birds, into the realm of the fey . . . 

A black crow flaps her oily wings past 113 Coronation Road and turns west toward Knockagh Mountain.

Perhaps it is Morrigan.

Morrigan of the black eye. Morrigan of the sorrows, the great queen, the goddess of battle, fertility, and strife.

The crow flies over hill, high bog, and rain-slicked street.

If it is Morrigan, she is looking down upon a wounded land and she is content, cawing in satisfaction at the patchwork quilt of Ulster, and at the mess on the hillside in the Mull of Kintyre.

Ireland seems to be the exception in a continent that has embraced perpetual and universal peace. But Morrigan the crow knows better. A crow will always be a crow, and to end war you must first change the nature of man.

And as the crow flies over Ulster, giddy with the stench of carrion, she looks east toward Britain and across the North Sea to those great frozen reservoirs of hate behind the Iron Curtain. Ireland is less an anachronism of Europe's bellicose past and more a prophecy of the coming future.

A breeze in the wood.

A ripple on the water.

You'll see
, the goddess whispers.

You'll see
.

EPILOGUE: A YEAR AND A HALF LATER

No, I never saw Kate again, nor will I, not in this life, but I caught Connolly's jug ears a year and a half later on the BBC news. A lot had happened since. Many cases. More violence. More death. And a girl called Elizabeth . . . but we'll get to that.

I'd almost forgotten about the mysterious Mr. Connolly.

It must have been Marching Season.

God knows what was happening in the outside world, but in Belfast it was all rain and riot.

Riot and rain and the much-delayed christening of John McCrabban's son (a heart ailment/surgery/a secret trip from me to pray for the boy's health at our Lady at Cnoc Mhuire). I put on my dress uniform and drove to the bare windy Presbyterian kirk near Slemish Mountain. They called him Thomas William, and the bairn took his name and the baptismal water without too much protest. As godfather I swore to the dour Raymond Massey—like minister that I would raise the lad in the austere mysteries of the Protestant faith if anything happened to his mum and dad.

Back home to Coronation Road.

Vodka gimlet. The BBC news.

“Holy shit.”

I called Lawson.

“Yeah?”

“Put on the news. And call Crabbie. He should be back from church.”

“How was the christening?”

“Put on the news, Lawson.”

I hung up the phone, unmuted the volume.

Yes, it was Connolly all right. The same sneery face, the pug nose, the meticulously combed hair, the jug ears, the defiantly unintelligent eyes. His real name was Colin Wilson. He was a serving lieutenant colonel in the United States Marine Corps who had been seconded to the National Security Staff of the president of the United States.

“He worked at the White House for the fucking president!” I said out loud.

Wilson was at a Senate Intelligence Committee inquiry investigating a scheme by the Reagan administration to trade anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to the Iranians in exchange for the release of US hostages in Lebanon.

The phone rang. “Sean?”

It was Crabbie.

“Are you watching the news?” I asked.

“I can't believe it . . . Or rather, I can believe it.”

“I wanna keep watching. I'll call you in a bit.”

I watched the story and then I quickly drove down to the newsagents and bought all the broadsheet newspapers to get background. The
Times
had a two-page spread on what, apparently, was a huge and growing scandal for the Reagan White House.

It was called Iran-Contra. It was the biggest scandal in America since Watergate. Sometimes you really had to pay attention to what was in the papers.

I read on. The plan had been to buy missiles that were to be given to “moderate” elements of the Iranian government in exchange for their help in securing the release of American and British hostages in Lebanon. Reagan and Thatcher had been doing deals with terrorists while declaring that they would never ever do deals with terrorists.

Channel Four news was covering the Senate hearing live.

I switched over and there was Lieutenant Colonel Wilson again.

Senator Nields was asking him a question: “Why did you go to Ireland first, Colonel Wilson?”

“A number of reasons. My mother's family is Irish. Her maiden name is Connolly. And there's always been excellent relations between this country and Ireland. We felt that the Irish would be amenable to our interests. Ireland is a place where Americans can do business,” Colonel Wilson replied.

The testimony continued. Hours of it.

The
Guardian
said that Wilson had been a naive blunderer right from the start. He had acquired an Irish passport and taken the name John Connolly and, without telling the CIA about his plans, had flown to Ireland to see whether he could buy weapons from the IRA. The IRA hadn't liked the smell of him so he'd gone to the Loyalist paramilitaries instead. The Loyalists hadn't liked the smell of him either, but they'd liked the money.

It was obvious that American spooks had been involved in the Michael Kelly case, but I had never understood why. And never in my wildest dreams would I have cooked up something so completely crazy. And yet there it was. Was this the dumbest administration in history? Or only dumb because they got caught?

I got a can of Bass and called McCrabban back.

“It's definitely him,” I said. “He's on Channel Four right now.”

“What do you want to do about this, Sean?”

“About what?”

“Now we know everything. The whole story. Do you want to reopen the case files on the Michael Kelly murders?” Crabbie said.

A younger Sean Duffy would have reopened the case files. Would have pulled the temple down about his ears. The me of five years ago. Maybe even the me of two years ago. But this Sean Duffy had learned his lesson.

Sleeping dogs. Whatever you say, say nothing
. Choose your cliché.

“I don't think so, Crabbie.”

“Me neither,” he said.

“We really should have let that one go to Larne RUC,” I said.

“Aye. But you weren't to know. I wasn't to know,” he murmured.

“No,” I agreed.

“No.”

“Nice christening today,” I said.

“It was.”

“I'll let you get back to your family.”

“OK, Sean, take care now.”

“You too, mate.”

He hung up.

I turned the TV off and lay there on the sofa watching the street get dark.

I finished the beer and went to the shed, where I'd put Kate's picture so Beth wouldn't ask any questions about her.

I opened the box.

Kate in Oxford outside the brasserie on Banbury Road. Half tore. Smiling happily in a way she never smiled.

I should have been with her on that helicopter.

If it hadn't been for my injuries I would have been.

If I hadn't been pushed down the stairs . . .

Perhaps she would even have sent me instead of her and maybe that would have been best for all of us.

Maybe.

AFTERWORD

This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person living or dead is entirely coincidental. That being said observant readers will have noticed that I have borrowed several elements from several real historical incidents of the time period: the tragic death of Olivia Channon at Oxford; Lt Col. Oliver North's bizarre attempt to obtain anti-aircraft missiles using an Irish passport and the pseudonym John Clancy (borrowing the surname of his favorite spy novelist) during the Iran-Contra affair; the events surrounding the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement; the Chinook helicopter crash on the Mull of Kintyre in which an entire cadre of MI5 agents based in Northern Ireland were killed; and the theft of Blowpipe and Javelin missiles from the Short Brothers factory in East Belfast. As this is a novel I have been able to bring together fictional characters who would never have met in real life and I have taken the liberty of compressing events of slow gestation into a tighter time frame.

DI Sean Duffy is a fictional character too, who just happens to live in the house where I was born and grew up: 113 Coronation Road, Victoria Estate, Carrickfergus. Duffy's neighbors are imaginary constructs bearing only a passing resemblance to the actual residents of the estate in that time period, although I did in fact know a guy who kept a lioness in his council house.

ABOUT . . . ADRIAN MCKINTY

Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. After studying philosophy at Oxford University, he moved to the United States, living in Harlem for seven years where he worked in bars, bookstores, and building sites. In 2000, he moved to Denver, Colorado, to become a high school English teacher. His debut crime novel,
Dead I Well May Be
, was shortlisted for the 2004 Dagger Award. His first Sean Duffy novel,
The Cold Cold Ground
, won the 2013 Spinetingler Award and was shortlisted for the 2013 Prix du Meilleur Polar and the 2015 Prix SNCF du Polar. The second Sean Duffy novel,
I Hear the Sirens in the Street
, won the 2014 Barry Award for best crime novel (paperback original) and was shortlisted for best crime novel at the 2013 Ned Kelly Awards and for the 2014 Theakston Award for best British crime novel. The third Sean Duffy novel,
In the Morning I'll Be Gone
, won the 2014 Ned Kelly Award and was named one of the top-ten crime novels of 2014 by the American Library Association's
Booklist
.