Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

A very tall man, six six, two hundred and forty pounds, clothed in a baggy, expensive blue suit with narrow lapels. His face showed worry lines and had a gray, bitter edge to it. He had an oft-broken nose and salt-and-pepper hair. He was sipping tea and looking at the jazz records, the piles of old newspapers and the other shit. Fit and tough, and I would have pegged him for a bouncer or a debt collector if it weren’t for the big mustache, which told me he was a peeler. So — an English cop. A cop from Scotland Yard. He came from the Samson Inquiry. I knew immediately why he was here and why he’d followed me. I knew immediately I was fucked.

I stuck out my hand. He shook it. Scars over his knuckles. His hand was rough. Christ, this was definitely no desk jockey, or at least he hadn’t always been one.

I sat down. He opened a briefcase and removed a clipboard.

“I’m Commander Douglas,” he said with an unpleasant grin.

“What’s a commander?” I asked him. He looked at me, didn’t know if I was taking the piss or not.

“In the Met, the Metropolitan Police, it’s the rank above chief superintendent.”

“Fancy that. If I was still a peeler I’d salute ya,” I said.

“Well,” he said, baffled, irritated.

“And you know who I am,” I said.

“Yes. I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Lawson.” He said it so quietly I could barely hear him.

“What about?”

“Well, I want to be very informal, Mr. Lawson. If I’d wanted to, I would have had you arrested, we could have talked in Belfast or in London, tape recorders, lawyers, all that,” he said with a grim little smile.

If he had meant to put the fear of fucking Jehovah in me, he had. I hid my panic in my beard, stuck my hands in the dressing gown pockets.

“Fire away, Commander. I’m ready.”

“You don’t, Mr. Lawson, seem surprised to see me,” he said.

“Well. Your Keystone-Kop-following-me routine for the last couple of days gave the game away, didn’t it?”

“Yes, well, I like to keep an eye on a suspect for a few days before I go charging in. You can only get so much from the files.”

“What do you mean by the word suspect ?” I said.

His smiled widened. Ugly, like a crack in a granite craphouse.

“What I mean, Mr. Lawson, is that you don’t seem surprised to be being interviewed by a detective from Scotland Yard.”

“I assume you’re from the Samson Inquiry,” I said.

He nodded.

In 1994, after years of pressure from the Irish lobby in America, the British government in London had launched an inquiry into the Royal Ulster Constabulary of Northern Ireland to find out three main things: Was the police force biased against Catholics, was there a shoot-to-kill policy when dealing with IRA men, and finally, was there widespread corruption? They’d put John Samson, an assistant chief constable from the Metropolitan Police — an outsider — in charge and given him free rein to investigate all aspects of the RUC’s operations. Samson had seconded about twenty officers to help him, most also from the Met. Many, many people in the RUC were worried about the inquiry. I’d never shot anyone and I wasn’t in charge of recruitment, so Douglas had to be part of the corruption team. I’d heard that in the last few weeks Samson’s investigation was reaching a climax and he was soon to show his preliminary report to the prime minister. It made me very nervous. I sat on my hands.

Douglas took a sip of the tea and put down the jazz record. Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. Obviously not a connoisseur, just grabbed the one disc he’d heard of. He had a wedding ring, married, about fifty-five. The right age to be a chief super, so no high flyer he, just a plodding efficient copper, the dangerous type. He had a gun, too. They’d issued it to him. You could see it protruding through his jacket lapel. He gave me a contented look. It scared me.

“Why did you resign from the Royal Ulster Constabulary?” he asked, lighting himself a cigarette and putting the ash into one of Mum’s long-dead-plant pots.

“What?”

“Six good years as a policeman and suddenly you pack it in. Why did you resign from the RUC, Mr. Lawson?”

Well, Commander, I’d had enough of the police, it wasn’t the place for me. I didn’t want anymore to be part of a predominantly Protestant force, largely seen by Catholics as a repressive instrument. My father, as you probably noticed, is a progressive; me, too. I realized I was in the wrong line of work, I resigned.”

“I have your dossier. Joined at eighteen, made detective after three years. You know who makes detective after three years? At the age of twenty-fucking-one?

“No, but you’re going to tell me,” I said, attempting insouciance.

“No one makes detective at that age. No one. Practically unheard of.”

“Yeah, they hated the way I saluted them. They wanted me in plain-clothes. Honestly, that was the reason. Buck McConnell told me that.”

“You were quite brilliant, Mr. Lawson. In Belfast it’s an accelerated learning curve, but even so, a detective at twenty-one? After three years? You were destined for great things. You obviously had mentors. Inspector John McGuinness, Chief Inspector Michael McClare, Superintendent William McConnell. I’ve read all their comments about you.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point, Mr. Lawson, is that you were an outstanding police officer. I pulled your police boards. You finished top of your class. And your IQ test. The top third of the ninety-ninth percentile.”

“No serious person believes IQ tests anymore. And the ninety-ninth percentile, five billion people on Earth, at least fifty million people with that score. No shakes there, mate,” I said.

“And your A-level results?” Douglas said with a smile.

“What about my university results? That throws a spanner in the works, doesn’t it,” I said. “I was a total failure at university. I flunked out in my second year.”

“Your mother was dying throughout your second year at university. I would say you were distracted.”

“Well, ok, so I’m the original Jesus Christ, what exactly—”

“You worked on fourteen cases in your first two years as a detective and all fourteen were broken. That represents a fifty percent higher success rate than the RUC’s norm. You solved two closed-book homicide cases.”

“Yeah. You know, I’m not being modest here but you’re from England and you probably think the quality of peelers over here is equivalent to what it is over there, but it’s not, mate. Most of the coppers I worked with were hoodlums, drunks, thickos, the other day I was in a bloody bar fight with two of them, it really—”

“What I’m suggesting, Mr. Lawson, is that you were destined to rise very high in the RUC and yet for some reason, out of the blue, you resigned. I checked, you’d just passed the sergeant’s exam. Hell, you could have been a detective inspector by thirty. It makes no sense. There was no reason given in the report. But I want to know. Why did you resign, Mr. Lawson?”

“Look. I’d had enough, I had two really ugly domestic violence cases. Murders. I had one where a child was killed. That doesn’t take much solving, but it takes some time to get it out of your head. I had just had enough.”

“Lies,” he said, stubbing the cigarette violently into Mum’s pot.

“What?”

“I am not a very patient man, Mr. Lawson,” Douglas said, angrily.

“Look it up, that’s in your files. That was my case, Donovan McGleish, had him arrested. Life imprisonment they gave him. In the Kesh. Don’t call me a liar.”

“You’re too young to be a burnout. That’s not why you resigned,” he said, stroking the mustache. He picked up his clipboard and read something. His cuff went up on his shirt. There was a tattoo on his wrist. A pair of wings. An ex-paratrooper. A hard case. Just great.