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.” Etcetera.It was funny how these soul-searching crises of sexual confusion always coincided with the approach of one of Angela’s law exams.And funny also how Angela was less uncertain of her desires and orientations when she was licking ice-cream off Jenny’s stomach on summer Sunday afternoons after a stroll round the Botanies.She was used to it.It would pass.But now wasn’t a good time; Jenny felt at the moment that she should be the one being indulged a bit of erratic or self-pitying behaviour.Still the phone rang.Wearily, she reached over and picked it up.“Hi Jenny, guess who?”“I don’t need to,” she said gravely.“I already knew.Why do you think I let it ring so long? It’s a fucking circus over here, and Callaghan was just saying he gave this entire situation a Parlabane factor of nine, making it only a matter of time.and now here you are.”“It’s nice to be wanted.”“You’re not fucking wanted,” she said, trying to sound mordantly humorous but failing to hide the harassed tones in her voice.Jack Parlabane.Or, to give him his full name, Jack Bloody Parlabane.Also known as Trouble.Jesus Christ’s arrival had been precursorily heralded by the appearance of John the Baptist.Parlabane’s had been preceded by a ridiculously mutilated corpse overlooked by a gigantic jobbie on a mantelpiece.It could not have been more appropriate.Carnage, chaos and dead people seemed to surround him like an aura, and after his passing, there was always plenty of shite to clear up, with Jenny usually the one left wielding the shovel.His involvement infallibly ensured that a situation would imminently go out of control on a scale she seldom had the stomach to anticipate; and if it was already disintegrating, Parlabane was a guarantee that you hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.However, it remained a fluctuating matter of internal debate for Jenny whether he was more trouble than he was worth.She knew that her career had been enhanced by having been the one who put the collar on certain high-profile scumbags whose deeds would have remained undetected without his unorthodox and frequently unnerving interventions, notably that NHS big-noise last year.But there was, at the same time, the gnawing question of what opportunities may have been lost to the time she spent either clearing up after him or trying to warn him off for his own good.Because that was the real fear.Parlabane wasn’t a catalyst; he didn’t stroll through the wreckage and the rubble, oblivious to the havoc he was precipitating.He was a danger to himself and others.While he could often be the one who saw through the facades, who had the intuition and the sheer balls to break a case right open, there was always and equally the possibility that he’d bring the whole thing down on top of himself and anyone else who happened to be in the vicinity.All of which made him the last person she wanted anywhere near her on a day like today.“Are you okay, Jen?” he asked, concerned.He had once described her as “as phlegmatic as a spittoon at a bronchitics’ convention”.It wouldn’t take much for him to clock that all was not peachy.“Look, nothing personal, Jack, but fuck off,” she said quietly, eyeing the testosterone casualties stomping loudly about the office.“That’s not an instruction, it’s a piece of advice, you hearing me?”“I’m listening, but I’m not picking up much sense.Qu’est-ceque c’est le Hampden?”“You want to know the score?” she replied in an agitated near-whisper.“Well as I’m sure you know, somebody just popped the Conservative Party’s chief meal-ticket, with the result that they’re wheeling out the fucking dancing girls in putting on a show of official reaction.The building’s suddenly full of guys with stern faces and smart suits but no name-badges, if you know what I mean.It’s like a bad ’tache society reunion.Nobody knows who the fuck these guys are, but the vibe is that they get to ask the questions and you get to do whatever the hell they say.”“G-men types?”“If it’s G for goon squad, aye.Call it a hunch, but I’ve got an irrational suspicion they know absolutely bugger-all more than anyone else, as the word is that the men in custody aren’t saying much that anyone wants to hear, and what they are saying is posing more questions than it answers.”“What do you mean? What are they saying?”I’m not getting into this, she thought.Not today.“I don’t know,” she said.“I don’t want to know and that’s just as well, because it’s pretty clear us plain old cops aren’t supposed to ask.But whatever it is, it has obviously not been enlightening and constructive.That’s the problem: these morons are always ten times as dangerous when they don’t know what they’re looking for.“Listen to me, Jack, I knew a guy who was on duty in Brighton the night of the bomb in ’84.He said they got orders to round up every Irish person they could find.I mean every Irish person.Like fucking shamrocknacht, you know? He says they lifted pretty much anyone with an Irish accent, Irish name, anyone who’d ever visited Dublin for a stag night, anyone who’d ever drunk a pint of Guinness and anyone who’d ever been to Parkhead.Panic, Scoop.Panic and the political need to be seen to be taking massive and decisive action.“That’s what’s brewing here.They’ve got four guys in custody with – literally – blood on their hands, but they still don’t know what the fuck’s going on, why the thing went down, anything [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]