Out on Botanic the cafes and snack bars were opening up. Waitresses propped chalkboards on the pavement, the day’s specials blazoned in yellows, greens and pinks. A window cleaner was busy across the street. I watched him lather a plane of plate glass and swipe it clean with fluent strokes of his rubberised blade. He was working his way up the street and the windows he’d already done were like a row of shaven chins. He stooped to lift his twin buckets and I thought of the burnished new rotunda by the river and the clicking heels of the girls on the Golden Mile and the hopeful sprig of garnish on my breakfast plate. Maybe the
News-Letter
staffer was right. I was here to pick at scabs. I was greedy for all the old badness, the past’s bitter quota of hurt.
I wasn’t alone. Across the West of Scotland, in the clubs and lodges, the stadiums and bars, people missed the Troubles. They mightn’t admit it, but they rued a
little
the ceasefires’ durability, the Armalite’s silence. We had followed the Troubles so closely for so long. There is something narcotic in watching a war unfold on your doorstep, knowing all the while it can’t harm you. It’s like taking in one of those fabled childhood mismatches – bear against wolverine, crocodile and shark – from behind a Plexiglas screen.
Certainly the newsrooms missed the Troubles. I knew too well that quickening, that bristling at the desks when word came through of another bomb. A pub raked with bullets. A Scots Guard snipered. An ambushed patrol. How greedily we absorbed it, crowding round the teleprinter, expelling our breath in awed whistles as the rousing news came through on the wire. And then the cheerful bustle, the camaraderie as we readied the layout and left space for the photos and the recapping sidebars, and waited by the phones for the stringer’s thousand words.
The violence thrilled us. All the northern carnage. Bombs and executions just out of earshot. Army
choppers
shot down over hills that looked like Ayrshire. We were close to this slaughter. We understood it. More at least than the English did. People were fighting and dying in the name of those acronyms that littered our walls. It was our war too. Only it couldn’t touch us. Nobody here was dying. We weren’t being smithereened in our
shopping
malls and pubs. Our high streets and town crosses retained their integrity, unedited and unabridged by
fertiliser
bombs. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Warrington: the war came home to England but it never came to us. The Provos had a policy: don’t touch Scotland. Who’d want to start things here? So Scotland was exempt; insulated from Semtex and shrapnel. The cross was on our lintels and the carnage passed us by.
I remember travelling to London for a story, sometime in the early nineties, not long after Canary Wharf. We changed trains at Carlisle, the snapper and I. We were waiting on the platform when the snapper lit a smoke, crushed the empty packet and looked for a bin. There wasn’t one. Railway-station litter bins stopped at the
border.
You couldn’t have a bin in an English station in case the Provos put a bomb in it.
There was a noise outside in the corridor and
somebody
rapped on my door. ‘Hold on!’ I grabbed my jacket. The cleaner, a girl in her twenties with Elvis Costello glasses and the honey-blonde colouring of Eastern Europe, raised her eyebrows at me.
‘Yep. I’m ready. On you go.’
The corridor looked like the main road out of a
war-torn
city, a capital newly fallen to the rebels. I picked my way through a refugee column of carts and service
trolleys
, laundry bins, gape-mouthed canvas sacks. The carts carried replacement bottles of complimentary shampoo, sugars ranked like banknotes in a till, NutraSweet pink and cane-sugar brown and granulated white;
foil-wrapped
tea bags, Nescafé sachets, thimble-sized cartons of UHT milk. There were tilting towers of bedsheets and bath towels. From the half-open doors came muted thumps and knocks, the complaint of vacuum cleaners, the mollifying tones of spoken Polish.
In the lobby I sat like a schoolboy in an outsize brown armchair and watched the city. I began to wonder if Lyons had been here at all. He seemed to have left no trace, no spoor, no impression on these streets. A minicab pulled up and John Rose stepped out. I waited for the cab to move off but it stayed put. Then I realised he’d emerged from the driver’s side.
I patted my breast pocket. The Dictaphone was there, with a new pair of AAs and a fresh cassette. I’d read up on Isaac Hepburn. I’d googled him. I’d stood for an hour at the ‘Troubles’ section of Belfast Waterstone’s, tracking him through the indexes of half a dozen books. Hepburn was a Loyalist hero. He shot an IRA man in Ardoyne in the winter of ’82. This was enough to make him a legend. At that time, the only people killing IRA men were other IRA men. The Provos’ nutting squad, the unit that dealt with informers, dumped its regular quota of ruined
volunteers
on the verges of B-roads in Antrim and Down. But nobody else – not the Blacknecks, not the UDA, not the Peelers, not the Brits – had got close to a Provo in months. They were too well briefed and too canny. They were too bloody good. They slept in different places every night. Their own homes had bulletproof windows; front doors in reinforced steel. They were too special and too ordinary. They didn’t cut about in top-range motors and high-end sportswear. They kept their heads down and did their jobs. You couldn’t get near them.
But Hepburn did. He found a way. He was friendly with a British Army corporal. They drank in a hotel bar near Thiepval Barracks. This lad was manning a
checkpoint
when a white Opel was stopped, the driver a
mid-ranking
Provo. The corporal ran the reggie through the computer and got an address in Ardoyne. He passed it to Hepburn in the bar that night. The next evening Hepburn cycled into Ardoyne wearing a Celtic top. When he came to the address the white Opel was parked at the kerb and the mark was on his way down the path tossing the car keys in his palm. Hepburn shouted his name and the mark stopped with his hand on the car door. The first
bullet
caught the guy’s arm and his car keys splashed to the ground. The next two thumped into his chest and dumped him on the pavement. His head lolled over the kerb. There was a drain right underneath and when Hepburn knelt down and lodged the barrel behind the mark’s left ear the blood flowed cleanly through the bars. Then Hepburn stood up, lodged the gun in his waistband, pulled his Celtic top over it, mounted his bike and cycled out of Ardoyne. He crossed the Crumlin Road and was back on the Shankill within ten minutes.
John Rose came in, shaking his head. He dunked his keys in the empty ashtray.
‘Sorry, big lad,’ he said. ‘No go. He’s pulled the plug.’
The chair creaked as he dropped into it, his arms
bouncing
on the armrests. He took his smokes from his pocket and dropped them on the table.
I nodded, reached for my coffee and then sat back.
‘OK. See, that’s interesting because yesterday this was a done deal. Good to go. Your words.’
He looked around for the waitress.
‘Yeah, well, things change. That was true yesterday. It’s not true now.’ The waitress had seen him. He lifted my coffee cup and pointed at it, then held up two fingers. I never said anything. He got a cigarette in his mouth and fumbled for a lighter. His eyes, when they turned in my direction, had narrowed slightly. He took the cigarette from his mouth. ‘It’s not the doctor, Gerry. You don’t phone up and demand an appointment. You don’t get seen within two working days.’
‘Right.’ I sighed. ‘Tell me this. I’m wondering. Do you even know Isaac Hepburn? Do you actually know the guy? Because I’m beginning to doubt–’
The keys hissed as he fished them from the table.
‘Fuck you.’ He stuffed his cigarettes into his jacket pocket. ‘Smart cunt. Fuck you. Let’s see how far you get.’
The door thudded open in his wake and his boot heels rattled the steps. The waitress came over to close the door properly.
The coffees arrived. I finished mine and was halfway through his when the door banged again. He was
standing
over me, breathing heavily. He wrenched the cup from my grasp and smacked it down on a nearby table.
‘Come on to fuck if you’re coming.’
He was already out the door. I shrugged into my
jacket
and hurried out.
We drove without talking. Something in the boot kept rattling around as Rose swung fiercely into the corners.
‘What?’ Rose said.
‘This.’ I gestured round the car’s interior. The
no-smoking
signs. The licence on the dash.
‘Yeah,’ said Rose. ‘Like I make a living wage as a stringer. Wise up, Gerry.’
He swung into the car park of an old Victorian villa. The house had long thin windows and pointed eaves that gave the place a morose expression. Rose himself had a face like thunder. He killed the engine.
‘I’ll wait for you here.’
I told him I would call a cab.
‘This is a fucking cab. I’ll wait for you here.’ He took a book of number puzzles from the glove compartment and turned the radio on.
*
I climbed an ugly disabled ramp and pressed the buzzer. There was no sign, no hoarding, no banner. It was like that in Belfast: either they spelled it out in foot-high
capitals
(‘YOU ARE NOW ENTERING LOYALIST TIGERS BAY’) or they told you fuck all. Only once I’d been buzzed inside did I see the name above the
corkboard
in the hallway: The Northern Star Athletic Club.
There was a curved reception desk like a dentist’s, and a girl in a black polo shirt and tracksuit bottoms came out from a back room and smiled.
I told her I was here to see Mr Hepburn.
‘And you are?’
‘Gerard Conway.’ I said it nice and clean. She looked at me neutrally for a count of three.
‘OK, Mr Conway. Why don’t you have a seat for a minute? Would you like a coffee? A cup of tea?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
I sat on a leather banquette by the door. Grunting and slapping sounds came from the gym and an odd hollow boom like a Lambeg drum.
‘You’re the war correspondent?’ A blocky torso was squeezing through the hatch. A fat finger tapped a
wristwatch
. ‘You’re a bit late, fella. The war’s over.’ He wheezed and held out his hand. ‘Isaac Hepburn.’
His hair had thinned and the face had filled out and the beard was a tight white goatee. But the eyes, with their hard, hooded brightness, were just as they were in the photo.
‘Gerry Conway. Nobody told the doctors.’
‘What’s that?’
His grip was moist, surprisingly light.
‘The war’s over? Nobody told the doctors at the Royal. The knee surgeons.’
He tutted. ‘Och no, son. It’s much more civilised now. Now the bad guys phone the ambulance in advance. They wait till they hear the siren before pulling the
trigger
. It’s a whole new level of service. Why are we talking about this? I’ll show you the gym.’
A sparring match was in progress. Hepburn raised his hand and moved into a half-crouch, as if to say
Keep going, boys – don’t stop on account of me
. The boxers – a skinny, long-haired galoot with strawberry splotches on his torso and a shorter, thickset, swarthy, purposeful crophead – never wavered. A man at ringside glanced over with no expression and then turned back to the fight.
‘What would you like?’
There was a bar at one end of the gym, six feet of
lacquered
pine with half a dozen tables in front. A big guy in a blue sleeveless vest was sitting at one of the tables with a Nintendo DS Lite. He was jabbing the stylus at the
little
screen. I recognised the beeps and pings of Brain Trainer. He wore half-moon reading glasses which he tossed on the table when he went behind the bar and frowned at us.
I looked at my watch. ‘Let’s not go daft.’
I ordered a mineral water. Hepburn had a tomato juice.
We took our seats. Hepburn looked at me and then scanned round the club. He looked back at me. ‘Yeah.’ I cleared my throat. ‘Yeah, this is a nice place.’
‘I’m glad you think so.’ He sat forward. ‘And it’s not just a gym, either. We’ve had some government money – a peace dividend, you could call it – but mostly we raised it ourselves. Raffles, charity boxing bouts.’ He knocked on the tabletop, dark mottled red like a tenderised steak. ‘Actual granite, this is.’
‘Nice.’
The booming noise was the noise of the ring, the
boxers’
boots on the canvas floor. My money was on the short guy. No one had thrown a punch yet, but you can tell a lot from how a fighter moves. The small guy was everywhere, eel-like, all flourish and swank. He bobbed about with beautiful side-stepping slides; he feinted and weaved. There was a contemptuous excess to his
movements
, a scornful slickness. The tall guy stumped about in his wake, jabbing empty air, stopping now and then to hitch his shorts.
He was hitching his shorts when the small guy stepped in and tagged him, two head-snapping lefts that tipped him onto the ropes.
Hepburn frowned. The big guy bounced off and wrapped the other in a stiff-armed clinch.
‘There’s no prejudice here.’ Hepburn tapped the actual granite. ‘You can’t afford bigotry in this game. Once you’re through these ropes all bets are off. Everyone’s equal in there.’
Try telling the big guy, I thought. He took a dull one on the ear as we watched. He listed a little but kept coming on.
‘That’s an interesting idea. Beating the shit out of each other brings the warring tribes together. Hasn’t worked so far, has it?’
Hepburn smiled tightly. ‘You’re a cynic, Mr Conway. That’s your job. If we were all as cynical as you we’d still be at war. Once you’ve been what we’ve been through, then you can talk.’
I let that go. We watched the tall guy taking more
punishment
. If he was suckering the short guy it was time to spring the trap.