In the Morning I'll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty Read Free Book Online Page B

said.
    “I’ll need a warrant card that says I’m an inspector in CID. You better stick me in Special Branch. It won’t scare the punters but it sometimes puts the wind up uncooperative peelers.”
    I couldn’t think of any more demands off the top of my head.
    “That all sounds reasonable,” Kate said.
    “Good.”
    “Good.”
    Kate offered me her hand and I shook it.
    Tom walked me to the helicopter landing pad.
    On the chopper ride back I read Dermot’s journal: the autobiography, the political theory, the knock-off poetry, a utopian plan for a thirty-two-county, democratic socialist Ireland. If this was the authentic Dermot McCann and not just nonsense he had composed to give his guards something to read, he had become a little embarrassing.
Society is intrinsically dead and Stasis is the defining characteristic of the post-capitalist regime. All consensus in the post textual narrative is used to oppress the sectarian inverse. If one examines the preconceptualist paradigm of Ireland before the Norman Invasion one is faced with a choice: either accept this rural hierarchy or embrace an anarchy of tribal kingdoms. We must build a footbridge to the past and between classes and constructed sectarian identities. And if pretextual rationalism survives the Revolution I do not believe that we will not have to choose between capitalist post dialectic theory and a form of capitalistic Marxism . . .
    Pages and pages like that. I looked for acrostics or hidden meanings but didn’t find any. Perhaps it was satire on a high level.
    We landed at Carrickfergus UDR base, where a Mercedes was waiting to take me back to Coronation Road. I kept reading in the car. The only really interesting part of the journal was the biographical material: early life in Derry, schooldays, anger at his beatings under the rough hands of the Christian Brothers, 1950s music, radicalization after 1968, protests, prison. Nothing about yours truly. Nothing about our meeting after Bloody Sunday. And nothing of that curious moment in the sixth-form study when he’d slapped me across the face for some slight that I’d inadvertently made.
    The car dropped me at 113 Coronation Road.
    I went inside and grabbed a can of Bass and sat next to the telephone.
    I called my mum and dad and told them I was back on the force with my old rank. My mum started to cry. I started to cry.
    I called McCrabban.
    “Crabbie, it’s me.”
    “Gosh, Sean, I haven’t heard from you in forever. What’s going on? I heard you quit the force?”
    “No! Me, quit? Just a rumor. I’m back. Back in CID,” I said, hardly able to contain my pleasure.
    “Really? That’s great news!”
    “I’m running a case for Special Branch. I was wondering if you’d mind me taking a wee office in Carrick. I know it’s your patch and I don’t want to impose but—”
    “Don’t think twice about it! It’ll be great to see you, Sean.”
    “Thanks, Crabbie.”
    We chewed the fat and I hung up and settled in with the case files on Dermot. Kate had also given me the full MI5 intelligence report on McCann, complete with photographs and a family tree. To my surprise I found that I knew most of it already. Dermot had three brothers and two sisters. One of his brothers was inside doing twenty years for murder, the other two had emigrated to Australia to open a restaurant. His father was deceased and his mother lived with his sisters Orla and Fiona in Derry.
    All his surviving relatives were solid Republicans who would never talk.
    I finished the Bass, poured myself a whisky, put on the Velvet Underground, and reread everything again.
    On the third go through the journal I noticed something that I’d missed the first two times: a tiny doodle of a curly-haired woman that had been scratched out. If you looked carefully through the scribble you could see that the woman was wearing a necklace that had tiny letters on it: “A” scratch, scratch, “I,” “E.”
    “Annie,” I said aloud. They