A Box Full of Darkness (Wilson Book 5) (22 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Wilson looked through the rain-streaked window of flight BE 361 as it circled over East Midlands Airport. He had managed to cut short the session with McDevitt in the Crown and was back in his apartment in time to call Lee Dixon and arrange a meeting. Then he went on the Internet and booked the early-morning flight at an extortionate rate. As soon as the plane landed, he left the terminal and made for the taxi rank. He glanced at his watch. It was 8.15. He wasn’t expected at Dunmurry until 9.00 and when he didn’t show Sinclair and Jackson would raise the hue and cry. That wasn’t his problem. He was more than pissed off with being watched by people who were supposed to be his colleagues. There was a short queue for taxis. After a short wait an aged BMW 520 pulled up beside him.

‘Where to, mate?’ the driver said through the open passenger window.

Wilson gave him an address in Ottawa Road.

The driver looked him over. ‘Get in,’ he said.

Wilson settled himself in the back seat.

‘You ever been to Leicester?’ the taxi driver asked as he moved off.

‘No.’

‘Know anything about Ottawa Road?’

‘No.’

‘You a copper?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Only two types of people go to Ottawa Road, coppers or chavs and you ain’t no chav.’

‘What the hell is a chav?’

‘You don’t have chavs on the Emerald Isle?’

‘Depends what they are.’

‘Louts who go around dressed in fake gear and looking for trouble.’

‘We have those.’

‘People around Ottawa Road think a barbecue is six chavs warming their hands over a burning car. If you’ve got business there, I hope you’re wearing a stab vest.’ The taxi driver looked in the mirror. ‘But I think that maybe you know how to handle yourself.’

‘Thanks for the advice.’

The cab left the airport and continued onto the M1, the main arterial motorway in England that connected London with the North. They entered Leicester after a fifteen-minute drive and twenty minutes later they drew up in front of the address Wilson was seeking in Ottawa Road. The area, and in particular the structure they stopped in front of, was slightly rundown. The building was a block containing eight maisonettes, four on either side of a central entrance. The block was in urgent need of refurbishment and had obviously been built by the local authority probably in the mid-1950s.

‘Twenty quid,’ the taxi driver said, ‘including the danger money.’

Wilson fished the £20 note from his pocket and passed it across.

‘You goin’ to be here long?’ the driver asked.

‘No idea,’ said Wilson about to alight.

‘If you’re goin’ back to East Midlands you might have a problem gettin’ a taxi here.’ The driver removed a card from the small leather bag on the front passenger seat. ‘Give us a call when you’re ready and one of our guys will pick you up.’ He passed the card back to Wilson. ‘By the way, that’s a chav.’ He pointed at a young couple walking in their direction. The boy was wearing a Nike baseball cap, a Burberry jacket, Levi jeans and Nike trainers. The girl, who looked no more than thirteen, was pushing a pram. She had stringy blonde hair and her face was an orange colour that certainly could not be found in nature.

Wilson took the card. ‘Thanks. He pushed open the car door as soon as the young couple had passed. The taxi moved off immediately. Wilson stood on the footpath and looked at the maisonette block. The eight units were two-storey and typical of a design that was in use throughout the United Kingdom. The bottom would be the living/dining/kitchen area with the bedrooms on the upper floor. The ground floor of each unit was separated from the footpath by a miniscule grass-gated garden. The accommodations were intended for families and Wilson hadn’t considered that Dixon might not be alone. There were no numbers visible on any of the entrance doors. He was looking for No. 2 so he assumed that either the maisonette on the extreme left or the extreme right ground floor would be No. 1. He decided to make the extreme left No. 1. He pushed the gate open to what he assumed was No. 2. The garden was completely overgrown and a soiled single mattress was propped up against the wall at the side of the front door. The mattress was laid on top of the wooden skeleton of what had once been a coffee table. Wilson pushed the bell. His watch said that he was on time but there was no movement from inside. After a few minutes, he rang again. A window from the upper floor opened.

‘If you’re selling something, you can fuck off.’ The voice was slurred either through sleep or alcohol. 

‘Mr Dixon,’ Wilson shouted before the window shut. ‘It’s Ian Wilson from Belfast.’

‘I’ll be down,’ the voice said as the window closed.

Wilson stood close to the door as the rain, which had held off while he was in the taxi, began to fall again. His back was already soaked by the time the door creaked open.

‘Come in!’ The man who opened the door stood aside so that Wilson could enter.

Wilson walked into the small hallway. The carpet showed signs that it had started life as a grey colour but it was now a darker shade of black. The wallpaper on the wall leading to the upstairs was faded and peeling. The Dixons, if indeed there was a Mrs Dixon, were certainly not known for being house-proud. Wilson was ushered into the room to his left. He deduced that it was the living room if only because it contained a 40in flat screen TV, a two-seater settee and a battered faux leather club chair. The carpet resembled the one in the hallway and he could see the indents where a coffee table had stood; possibly it was the discarded wooden skeleton he had seen in the front garden. There were a half dozen empty beer cans at the side of the club chair.

‘Take a seat,’ Dixon said brushing some loose pages of a newspaper off the settee.

Wilson looked at his host. Dixon was emaciated. His fair hair was long and lank on his head. He eyes were red-rimmed with dilated pupils either from excessive alcohol or drugs. A scraggy fair beard hung off his pointed chin. His thin body was covered by a tee shirt that was several sizes too large for him and training bottoms hid what Wilson assumed were pipe-thin legs. His face was pale and thin causing the nose to jut out from two caved-in cheeks. Except for his face, every exposed part of his skin was covered in tattoos. His right arm had a tattoo of an inverted dagger with wings on the top. Wilson knew that Dixon should be about sixty but he looked older. He tried to imagine the narrow face as it might have been forty years before. The faces of the men in the photograph of the MRF were engraved on his brain and he ran through them to see if Dixon was the real thing. He searched the face and saw the likeness to the young man on the extreme right of the photo. Dixon was the one cradling a Sterling machine gun and leaning against a car. Although he might not have been aware of it, he was aping the arrogant look that had been made famous by the young Clyde Barrow. In the photo, he looked young, hard, and dangerous. It wasn’t a look that had stood the test of time.

‘I forgot all about you.’ Dixon sat in the club chair and removed a rolled cigarette from the pocket of his training bottoms. He lit the cigarette and the air was filled with the distinctive smell of marijuana. Dixon sucked the smoke in and held it. He looked at Wilson then took a second toke holding the smoke in his lungs until he burst out in a fit of coughing. ‘Medicinal,’ he said when he saw the look on Wilson’s face. ‘My body got fucked up serving Queen and country, my body and my fucking mind. Did I mention money on the phone?’

Wilson removed an envelope from his inside pocket.

Dixon smiled exposing a row of black gapped teeth. ‘Give it here!’ He held out his hand.

‘When we’re finished,’ Wilson said.

‘No money, no talk.’ Dixon leaned back and sucked on his cigarette again. ‘I’m not about to betray my country and my colleagues without the readies.’

Wilson wanted to get on with business before Dixon became too stoned to be sensible. Reluctantly he leaned forward and passed him the envelope.

Dixon took it and flipped the lid open. He quickly counted out the £500 it contained. ‘Right, we’re in business. What do you want to know?’

Wilson explained that he was a police officer and that he was investigating the shooting of two young men in Beechmount Parade in 1984. He already knew that the shooting had been carried out by some kind of undercover unit of the British Army and that the RUC had colluded in the clean-up and the cover-up. He was led to believe that Dixon had been one of the men in the car.

Dixon coughed and put out the cigarette before slipping the remnant into his trouser pocket. ‘Fucking hell, I can hardly fucking remember what happened two days ago.’ He stared laughing and descended into a fit of coughing. ‘When he lifted his head, his eyes squinted at Wilson. ‘Hey, where did you get my name? And my fucking address and telephone number?’

‘Does that matter?’

‘It fucking matters to me, mate.’ Dixon was fighting the drowsiness and the marijuana. ‘The crowd we have in London are all about saying sorry to you fucking Paddies about what happened in Northern Ireland. Nobody is saying nowt about the bombs the IRA bastards planted all over our country. You lot bloody attacked us and we retaliated. Just like we did with that shower in Afghanistan and Iraq.’

Wilson could almost see the paranoia oozing out of Dixon’s pores. ‘Nobody’s coming after you. We’re just trying to clean up some of the old cases. Anything you tell me will be in strictest confidence and your name won’t appear anywhere in my report.’

‘Says you.’

‘OK, give me back the money and I’m out of here.’

‘Steady on, mate. Just tryin’ to make sure that I don’t get banged up for serving Queen and country to the best of my ability. That was during my first fucking tour in Northern Ireland. I was a wet behind the ears, kid.’ He smiled wistfully. ‘I wish to God I was twenty knowing what I know now.’ He looked down at his bony knees. ‘I wasn’t like this back then. I were fit as a fiddle. I passed the fucking SAS training and they shunted me off to Palace Barracks as part of the Military Reaction Force. We were going to take on the IRA at their own game. If they were bad lads, we was going to be fucking worse. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the fuckers. I were a stupid little bastard. All out to kill some poor fucker.’ He took a toke of the joint, held the smoke and released it ‘Any poor fucker. The officers was a lot of toffs. It was all “when we was in Kenya and Malaya” when they was briefing us.’ Dixon had a faraway look on his face as though he was reliving the experience. ‘The toffs did the intelligence work, the squaddies did the dirty stuff.’

Wilson took out the photograph of the men and handed it to Dixon.

‘I remember this photo,’ Dixon said. ‘That’s me cradling my fucking Sterling SMG. Look at me. I were a fine young fella. It were a rough bunch of lads.’

‘You remember the night of the Beechmount Parade shooting?’ Wilson asked.

‘Not exactly like yesterday.’ Dixon stared at the photo. ‘We regularly drove about Belfast at night looking for well-known IRA men. That night there was three of us and a fella from the RUC Special Branch. He were supposed to be our spotter. He knew all the faces. Taffy were the sergeant in charge. John Rowlands were his real moniker but everybody called him Taffy. He were a mad fucking bastard and he hated the IRA more than any one of us. He were always tryin’ to get us into a ruck. If we didn’t find a “face” we was looking for, Taffy would be on for doin’ something that would draw the fire of the IRA. Then it would be OK Corral time. Anyway, it started off pretty quiet. We was patrolling around the Divis Flats area. It were odds on that we’d run into some “faces” in that area of Belfast. But everything were quiet. No bloody action were bad news for Taffy. He were always ready for a bit of action. My mate were driving. Taffy were riding shotgun and the RUC bloke and me was in the backseat. We was out for about an hour and Taffy were gettin’ a bit fucking nervous. He started talking about doin’ something to draw the bastards out. That’s when we drove past the football game. That’s it; Taffy shouted and told the driver to turn around. When the car came back across the road it were on the side where Taffy and the Special Branch bloke was sitting. Taffy shout stop and we was looking directly down the street. Then Taffy gave the order to lower the windows and fire a couple of bursts. That would surely bring the IRA out for a bit of shooting. They was supposed to fire the burst high but Taffy were wound up tighter than a drum. I saw everybody hit the deck and I assumed that nobody had been hit. Then we sped off. I looked at the RUC bloke’s face and he were white as a ghost. He started shouting at Taffy that he were a mad fucker and that people had been hit. We called it in and left the RUC to clean up. They had to oblige since one of their men was involved. We drove back to Palace and started to get our story straight. We was fired on by the IRA and we returned fire. There were an investigation but as long as we stuck to the story nobody were bothered. Nobody were supposed to know that we was out and about looking for “faces”.’ Dixon stood up and left the living room.

Wilson could hear the sound of a stream of water and assumed Dixon had left a toilet door open somewhere. Considering the state of the house, Wilson had no desire to visit the facilities.

When Dixon returned he was carrying a Sterling SMG. ‘I kept it when I were demobbed. Lots of weapons went missing around that time.’