Hepburn shook his head. The finger dropped to his side. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket and yanked them out again.
‘Naw, you need to try harder than that, Gerry. What do you think I was doing it for? Public spirit? The repose of my soul? Nobody’s trying to stiff you here, Gerry. I just want the rate for the job.’
I stopped walking.
‘Oh there’s a rate, is there? You know the rates? What are you, a tout?’
I didn’t see him move. I felt a sort of wind at my back and then my shoulder flared in white tearing pain and something sharp and hard punched my cheekbone. My glasses skewed and the folder smacked onto the ground. The hardness slapped my cheek once more and it
sounded
like a dog was gnashing my ear.
I seemed to be lying on the ground and standing up at the same time. Something cold and hard on my face. I tried to crane round but the hardness slapped my
cheekbone
again. I was nudged from behind and my thighs banged into something; metal, a ridge, a car’s bodywork. He had twisted my arm up my back and cracked my face on the bonnet of a car. I was still there, bent over the car, Hepburn’s fist gripping my short hair, and the dog sounds were back again, the snarling in my ear.
‘Now you listen to me, you fucking Fenian piece of shit.’ Twice more he cracked my face on the hood. His spittle was drizzling my face. ‘That word you used? You know what that word means? It means this.’ He stabbed his fingers at the bone behind my ear. ‘It means one to the fucking back of the head.’ He was shaking me again, my face slamming the hood in time with his words. ‘So you ever’ – bang – ‘ever’ – bang – ‘put that word and my name in the same fucking sentence.’ He drew in a long noisy breath and let it back out. ‘I’ll do you,’ he said
softly
.
He stepped back and I crumpled off the bonnet onto the ground. I just lay there, spent.
‘A grand,’ Hepburn said.
‘What?’
I raised my head and something struck me in the eye. Hepburn was walking away.
‘That’s your bus fare, son.’ He threw the words over his shoulder.
I sat up on the hard ground. I fixed my glasses. Beside me was a greeny ball of paper. I reached out my hand and clutched it tight in my fist and held it to my chest. I looked round for the folder. It was lying in the gutter. I leaned over and pulled it towards me. When I sat up it all came up in a rush, all the whisky and Guinness in a
hissing
spate, hosing the ground between my knees. As I got to my feet, as I loped off, light-headed, to the station, dragging the back of my hand across my mouth, I kept seeing Hepburn’s pointing finger. When I got to the
station
I opened my fist. Moulded by sweat to a soggy nub was a crumpled Ulsterbank tenner.
The restaurant was large but I spotted John Rose straight away, his bleached poll glowing like a struck match. A pained look crossed his face and I smiled to show it was all right but he turned away. A waiter blocked my path and in the time it took him to hoist two bowls of
chowder
past my nose I nearly turned for the door. But Rose had seen me so I carried on, picking my way through the tables with my smile tightening.
It must be a do, an occasion, a party of sorts. Twelve or thirteen men, their jackets slung on chair backs. I was conscious of the mess on my face, the green-and-red graze on my cheek, still tacky to the touch. Was this a birthday lunch? Somebody’s retirement? A glinting cityscape of bottles extended down the tablecloth.
The faces were turned to the head of the table where Down-in-the-mouth Macpherson was telling a story. Bent low, his chin almost flush with the table, his big hands waggling like antennae. Buttery sunlight caught the facets of his bald head. The story was reaching its
climax
. I hung back but Macpherson waved me forward, procured an extra chair, and summoned a fresh glass of red, all with his fluent hands and without disarranging his syntax. In a minute I was seated, like one of the boys, with a great globe of wine in my hand, nosing its rich vanilla. ‘No problem, my darling,’ Macpherson said. ‘Just give me a minute to pack!’ He reared back. The glasses clanked under the wave of mirth that crashed over the table. The diners came to life all at once, laughing in great winded heaves. I smiled foolishly round, nodded gormlessly at the faces as they raged in savage glee,
gagging
for breath, the red mouths chewing the air.
When groans and sighs brought the table back to earth, everyone looked at me. I felt my sobriety like a skin colour, like a separate nationality. I gulped at the great glass of wine and some of it slopped on my shirt. I wiped it down with a napkin.
Macpherson did the intros. Simmonds was there, and Malachy Kane. The others dipped their heads or smiled tightly or tipped two fingers to their temples in mock salute while Macpherson said their names.
‘Gerry’s from the Glasgow
Tribune
,’ Macpherson said. ‘He’s working on a story. Is that right, John boy?’
Rose stiffened.
‘You holding out on us, Rosie?’ someone said. ‘That’s not very Protestant, boyo.’
‘You find out who you’re friends are,’ said someone else. ‘A time like this.’
‘Give him a break, fellas,’ said Macpherson, tipping more wine into my glass. ‘I’m sure there’s nothing in it. I’m sure this big lad from Glasgow would tell his friends if there’s something they ought to know. Though it looks like he’s already seen some action.’
They all looked at me. I tried a laugh. ‘I’m saying
nothing
.’ I fingered my raw graze; gummy, like a sucked sweet.
‘Give us a clue then, John boy?’
Rose was flushed. ‘Uh-huh. Here’s a clue.’ His mouth worked silently for a bit. ‘Four across. Eight letters: mind your own business.’ He slurped some wine. ‘Get to fuck.’
There was a pause while everyone counted.
‘Actually, John, it’s–’
‘Yeah I know it is. Now fuck off.’
Their laughter rose to a mocking cheer as Rose told it off on his fingers.
‘Let’s just say,’ said Macpherson, ‘there’s a certain Antipodean dimension to Mr Conway’s researches. Let’s leave it at that.’
The meal was over anyway. A waiter brought a pay-pad and Macpherson punched his number while the others passed the bill around, wincing camply at the damage.
‘Aye, laugh, ya bandits,’ said Macpherson. ‘It’s your turn next month,’ he said, pointing at a grinning
moustache
at the far end of the table.
The men rose in ones and twos, patting their pockets, fiddling with their phones, wielding their car keys like tiny stilettos. They fished in pockets for their share of the tip, and a messy cairn of notes and coins piled up on the tablecloth.
Soon they were gone, all except John Rose and me and an angry fat man who slumped in his chair as if he’d been shot and sneered at his very full glass.
Rose was collecting his things, getting ready to leave. I tried to gather my thoughts. The table was littered with glasses and bottles and it was hard to remember that I’d drunk just two glasses of wine. Suddenly, as though the diners had been quietly tipped off and had stolen away, the restaurant was empty. The clash of cutlery filled the air, the bare brick walls throwing the waiters’ voices around, giving their footsteps a tinny ring. The place looked like a warehouse again, as if all the wine and drapery, the ponderous napkin rings, were melting away and soon we’d regress to the bare brutal walls.
‘What’s the occasion?’ I asked him.
‘Nothing much. It’s a wee group we have. The Stringers Club. We do it once a month. None of them’s stringers any more, except me. Most of them aren’t even hacks now.’ He looked at the debris on the table. ‘They just act like it.’
I watched him notice my face and decide not to ask.
‘Oh you’re still one, are you?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘A stringer. I thought you might have jacked it in.’
He drew me a look, then shrugged and shipped
another
gulp of wine.
He hadn’t shown up that morning. We’d planned to visit Duncan Gillies’s mother, to see if she could tell us anything about her son’s death, if maybe she had heard about a Scotsman being involved. But after forty minutes I gave up waiting and went to the library. I was livid. Rose was drawing a daily wage as a fixer and he couldn’t drag his carcass out of bed. I needed to talk to him, too; I
needed
to ask about Hepburn, find out how to play it. But after an hour in the library I took a coffee break and thought about it. He’d probably been up till all hours, driving his cab. He was knocking his pan in to barely break even. And here’s me, the fancy dan from Glasgow, snapping my fingers and watching him jump. Of course he’d get
scunnered
. Anyone would. So I called his cab company and after phoning the
Tribune
to check my credentials they told me where I’d find him. I came to the restaurant to make it OK, let him know that I wasn’t pissed off.
‘It’s no biggie,’ I told Rose. ‘We were due a break. We’ll do it tomorrow. It’s not a problem.’
Rose looked at the floor.
‘What, tomorrow’s out too?’
He fiddled with his eye-ring; his gaze tracked lazily round the room.
‘Well, Jesus, John. You’ve got to do
some
thing for the money. It’s not a retainer.’
‘See, that’s the thing. The money? It’s not worth it any more, Gerry. It’s not worth the grief.’
The fat man surfaced briefly from his chins as the
waiter
reached for his glass. He shook his head with
surprising
vigour and jabbed a minatory finger in the air. Then he slumped back down and got on with his scowling.
‘Grief? John, c’mon. I gave out a bit yesterday. I’m sorry about that. But I had to see Hepburn. You can see that, can’t you? I needed to see him. Look.’ I dropped my voice. ‘I saw him again yesterday.’
‘Yeah?’ Rose checked his watch.
‘John, it’s not good. He wants money.’
Rose’s frown deepened a little.
‘He told me some stuff. About Lyons. He was dropping hints. About the Gillies thing. But now he thinks we’ve made a deal and he’s asking for money. A grand.’ I gripped his wrist. ‘
A grand!
’
‘OK, Gerry, calm down.’ Rose glanced at the fat man and then back at me. He centred his glass on its coaster. ‘So where do I come in?’
‘What you talking about, where do I come in? What the fuck do I do? What do I do?’
‘Gerry, you do whatever you want.’ He shook his head. ‘Why you even telling me this? You asked for the meeting. I set it up. You were pretty fucking insistent as I remember. I got you the meeting. I had to pull some strings but I got you the meeting. Now you’re not happy with how it went. Fine. That’s not my problem: that’s your problem. Tell me this: did I mislead you? Did I give a wrong impression about Kiwi Hepburn, that the guy was a Lollipop Man or
something
, a fucking Sunday School teacher? Did I? The guy’s a gangster, Gerry. He’s a class-A thug, a sociopath. You want to meet these people, I’ll set it up. That was the deal. You want me to babysit too? That’s a whole different thing.’
He drained the last mouthful of wine.
‘Well that’s very handy to know, John. Thanks for
looking
out for me. What is it, did he speak to you? Are you feart? Is that it? Are you scared of Hepburn?’
‘It’s not that.’ He looked at the ceiling. He practically rolled his eyes. It was as if there was a third party present, to whom my obtuseness was apparent. I looked across at the fat man but his eyes were closed. Rose was embarrassed; not for himself but for me.
‘What is it then, John?’
He fingered his empty glass, flicked it with his finger so the crystal sang.
‘There’s other things involved, Gerry. If you could go after Hepburn and leave it at that, no one would care. But you can’t. You can’t get Hepburn without pulling other people into the picture. And they won’t let you do that. There’s too much at stake. Don’t ask me any more because you don’t want to know.’
He shook his head and shucked himself into his jacket. He made a fist and knocked it against my bicep.
‘You be good now, fella. Take care. It was nice working with you.’
His chair scraped as he stood to go.
‘So that’s it?’
‘What else do you want?’
‘You’re sure about this?’
He laughed: ‘Oh yeah.’
‘OK. Fine.’ I thanked him for all he’d done. I told him the paper would pay him anyway. He paused at the door.
‘And, Gerry?’
‘What?’
‘Your story. It’s going nowhere, right?’
‘Well, it’s going to be harder now, if that’s what you mean. I could have used your local knowledge and all that. But fuck it, you know?’
He let the door swing to and walked back. His hands were light as they rested on my shoulders.
‘Trust me, Gerry.’ His eyes looked into each of mine in turn. ‘It’s going nowhere.’
He double-clapped my shoulders and turned on his heel. The fat man opened one eye and reached for his glass of wine.
I found the mural and parked beneath it. A British Tommy in tin hat and puttees, tramping into the
foreground
with a rifle clamped to his chest. His frame had the ominous angularity, the spidery slouch, of a cartoon skeleton; something from a heavy-metal album cover. But the face was rubicund, cheery – the smutty, rum-flushed phiz of a squaddy in a Great War postcard. Behind him were vague muddy battlefield scenes and a hopeful
sunset
, with a lot more yellow than pink. In the bottom
corner
, in white lettering on the dark battlefield: ‘THE SOMME’. And in a ribbon arching above the lot, the old Laurence Binyon line about when we would remember them.
The street was quiet. The Forester’s door cannoned shut and my heels knocked the tarmac as I crossed the street. The number was stencilled in orange on a white tile by the drainpipe. Twenty-six was the right-hand side of a squat ex-council semi. All sharp angles and tight red brick. A sentry-box porch with its canted roof. I crossed the garden – a blanket-sized pit of white chips – and thumbed the bell. It jangled woozily in the dimness behind the door and above my head a clacking noise, an odd hollow knocking, started up.
I stepped backwards onto the path.
Above the porch, on the slated upturned V, was an ornamental windmill. A tiny figure in a flat cap, wielding an axe. When the blades turned in the wind he bent to his work, chop-chop-chopping a block of wood.
‘I don’t want it.’
I lowered my gaze to meet a pair of flat green eyes in a long joyless face. She wore black slacks and a yellow short-sleeved sweater, patterned with small perforations. The skin across the nose had a waxy tightness. She’d been a looker, no question. A breaker of hearts in the distant seventies. An unlit ciggy jiggled in her fingers.
‘What?’
‘Landscape gardening. Jehovah. Patio doors. Whatever it is you’re selling.’
‘Yeah? That’s too bad. I’ve come about Duncan.’ I told her who I was and who I worked for. When I dug a card out of my wallet and held it out she took it and dropped her hand to her side and kept her eyes fixed on mine. ‘There’s something I’d like to talk about,’ I told her. She flapped the card a bit as if she was drying it and held my gaze.
‘It’s about Duncan,’ I said again. ‘Could I maybe come in?’
The living room was off the tiny hall. There was an armchair in the far corner, under an alcove, and a sofa along one wall. In the middle of the back wall a door led through to the kitchen.
I sat down on the sofa. Mrs Gillies stood.
‘Go on and sit down,’ she said sourly.
‘Sit down yourself,’ I said. ‘You’re making me
nervous
.’
I meant it as a joke but my mouth was sticky, my breath coming through in a turbulent rush.
She perched on the armchair, knees tight together and at right angles to her body. She lifted a lighter from the alcove shelf and lit her cigarette. She kept the lighter gripped in her fist.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to bring this all back. I know it’s not easy.’
She blew smoke at the ceiling.
‘Excuse me.’ She rose quickly and stepped through to the kitchen. I thought at first I’d touched a nerve, but I could see her through the open door as she took the oven gloves down from a hook and opened the oven. A big orange casserole pot appeared on the hob. She lifted the lid and stirred the contents and put it back and slammed the oven door.
‘Sorry,’ she said, without conviction, as she took her place on the armchair and lifted the cigarette from the ashtray. A thin grey reek – as of half-cooked meat – threaded itself into the room. It smelled like my mother’s stovies, those lukewarm slabs of tattie and carrot and square pale sausage I forced down every Sunday in the early eighties. I told her I might have some news, some fresh information on Duncan’s death.
She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward to tap some ash. She recrossed her legs and stared out the window. She managed to contain her excitement. I pointed this out.
She smiled pleasantly. ‘That’s because I don’t believe you.’
‘Right.’
The room was hot. A bulb of sweat slipped coldly down my ribs. I asked for a glass of water.
‘There’s whisky, if you want it.’
‘I’ve got the car.’
‘I saw that.’
I shrugged. I lifted my hand and brought finger and thumb together until they almost touched. She nodded and turned to the sideboard. When we were holding our drinks she crossed her legs and leaned forward.
‘What age are you?’
I told her.
‘And your name is what again: Collins?’
She reached for the card and we both said my name at the same time.
‘And you come from Glasgow, Mr Conway?’
I told her I did.
She cocked her head and pouted.
‘So tell me, Mr Conway from Glasgow. Why would you know anything about it? Why in hell’ – it was barely a whisper, the merest exhalation of breath – ‘why in hell would you think that?’
‘I’m a journalist, Mrs Gillies. I get paid to find things out.’
She frowned. ‘And you’ve found out, what, exactly?’
I put my glass on the floor.
‘I know one of the men who did it. At least, I’m pretty certain. Did you ever hear that a Scotsman was involved? Did you ever hear something like that?’
‘Mr Conway, are you here to tell me what happened to Duncan, or to ask?’
There was something bad in the smell from the kitchen, a ribbon of foulness it was hard to ignore. I
started
again. ‘Mrs Gillies.’ The green eyes swung lazily round. ‘Mrs Gillies, a group of men beat your son to death. They hit him so hard for so long that he died. I want to find out what happened.’
Maybe it was just timing; the meat was on the turn between raw and cooked. In ten minutes it would be all cooked through, the badness gone.
‘They weren’t
trying
to kill him. It was an accident, it was a fluke.’
‘A fluke? They hit him with bats. He had seventeen separate fractures. A punctured lung. They ruptured his spleen.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘I did the identification, mister. I know what he looked like. I know what they did to him. One of the animals still lives round the corner.’
‘I’m sorry. But then you know what I’m talking about. It was no accident. If they didn’t set out to kill him they didn’t go out of their way to make sure they didn’t.’
The meat didn’t smell any better.
‘Would you mind if I opened a window?’
She flapped her hand impatiently and turned her head to take another drag.
I wrestled with the latch. It wouldn’t come.
‘Aren’t you a little,
delicate
for your line of work, Mr Conway?’ She rose and set her cigarette down and tugged up the sash with her thin bare arms. She sat back down and plucked her cigarette from the ashtray and held it beside her head, gripping her elbow in her hand. The smoke plumed up in a straight grey line.
‘If it was me,’ I said. ‘If it was my son who’d been bludgeoned to death, I think I might feel bitter. I might even want them caught, the guys who did it.’
‘The Christian thing is to forgive.’
She looked at me with those flat green eyes.
‘
Do
you forgive them?’
‘What are you, a priest? What do you care?’
A clock boomed portentously. I craned round. Against the back wall was a grandfather clock, ludicrously huge in the tiny room. I waited for the air to settle.
‘The men who did it. Do you know their names?’
‘Of course I know their names.’
‘You said one of them lived around the corner. Were the others local?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘And no one else was involved, that you heard of?’
‘No one else was involved. That I heard of or not.’
I jumped in my chair. My heart buzzed and fluttered. It was my phone, wheezing and trilling in my shirt pocket. I dug it out and turned it off, but not before I’d clocked the number on the screen:
Norman Rix
.
‘I’m sorry.’
The spire of smoke wavered as the shoulders rose and dropped.
‘You’ve got the wrong end of something, mister. There was no Scotsman. You’re away the wrong road.’
I slipped the phone back in my pocket. It hung there, fraught with the unappeased wrath of Norman Rix. I would have to talk to him later. I would have to have something to tell him. I tried again.
‘See, I think maybe you weren’t told the proper story.’ Her head drew sharply back, twisting around as if a
hornet
were circling her nose. She reached for her glass. I pressed on. ‘I mean, I don’t think you know the full story.’
The glass stayed where it was.
‘There was no Scotsman.’
‘That’s what I mean. Things were hazy, lots of
confusion
around. Thing like this? Rumours are started, people muddy the waters. It’s what happens with events like this. People speculate, they paint little scenarios.’
‘Mr Conway. You’re not listening. There was no Scotsman.’
‘But what I’m saying, there could have been. They could have been lying. Maybe they were covering up. Which people saw it? Maybe they got it wrong. Who were they?’
‘I don’t know.’ Her beads clicked as she shook the question away. ‘People. They didn’t see any strangers.’
‘But how do you know they’re telling the truth?’
She tapped her ash impatiently. Her head gave an odd little jolt and something fizzed in the flat green eyes. She stared right at me. ‘Because it was me. All right? Because I saw it all. From that window there’ – she gestured to the hallway. ‘I saw it.’
‘What?’
‘It happened right there in the alley. I saw it. There were three of them did it and I knew them all. And there wasn’t any phantom Scotsman. OK?’
She stood up and turned to the table. ‘I need another even if you don’t.’
I left my chair.
‘Saw it or watched it?’
The glasses rattled. She turned, defiant and scared, and I gripped the skinny wrist.
‘You knew!’
‘He had it coming.’
‘You set it up!’
‘Running around with a prisoner’s wife. It’s not like he wasn’t warned.’
‘You set it up! Your own son!’
I had backed her against the table. The bottles rattled and trilled. The front legs of the table were an inch off the ground. We stopped then, frozen in some dramatic dance-step. I wanted to laugh. The woodcutter chipped at his block for a frantic few seconds and then he stopped too. She shook her hand free and the table settled back with an outraged crash. She poured a shaky drink and gulped it. She poured another and then one for me. She sat down heavily, glared at me over the jiggling rim.
‘They were only going to scare him. That’s what they told me. Knock him about a bit. That woman was
poison
. She was pure poison for him. I wanted it stopped. I didn’t want–’ She stopped; her teeth knocked the glass as she threw back the rest.
‘You didn’t want him hurt?’
‘It’s not how it seems. Everyone knows that the wives – well, you can’t expect a woman of that age to live like a nun. But they’re discreet. They do it out of town. They go to the mainland. This was right in people’s faces. They couldn’t just ignore it. If I hadn’t told them where he’d be they’d have got him anyway. Someone would have put a stop to it.’ The two fingers that gripped her cigarette came to rest against her temple. ‘I thought I’d get it stopped before it got that far.’
I finished my drink. The whisky was rough, flaring in my gut.
‘Even as a boy,’ she said. ‘He never cared for politics. He never ran with the Tartans. He liked clothes and girls and football. Normal stuff.’ She shrugged. ‘Normal
anywhere
else.’
She stood up.
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mr Conway. The guy you’re talking about?’ She took my empty glass, cradled it to her chest. ‘He wasn’t involved.’
*
The air had freshened. The clouds had that swelling,
bulbous
look, like frozen explosions. The fat-cheeked
squaddy
wore a sneering, knowing expression as I gunned the engine and took the corner. I pulled up short. Right across the middle of the street, ten or twelve feet high, was a blind brick wall. The Peace Line. Something
shocking
and raw in its blank red expanse, like the stump of an amputated limb. I three-point-turned and retraced my route.
I wasn’t driving anywhere in particular but I wound up at the river. I locked the car and went for a walk. In front of the Custom House the skateboarders were taking turns to grind the handrail down to the plaza. When I turned my phone on it rang straightaway. I didn’t
recognise
the number. At least it wasn’t Rix.
‘They seek him here.’
‘Hello, Peter.’
‘They seek him there. You’re not taking my calls?’
I watched the skateboarders bump down the rail.
‘What do you want, Peter?’
‘Is this not supposed to happen when you’re on the way
down
? People stop taking your calls. I’d say you’ve got this a bit back to front.’
‘What do you want, Peter?’
He spat a tiny laugh.
‘The fuck’s going on, Gerry? You’re in
Belfast
? What the fuck?’
A fat adolescent boy waddled past. He had both hands clamped to a burger and was tearing a chunk with his teeth. He looked like he was playing the harmonica. His T-shirt said:
I Hear U, I’m Just Not Listening
.
‘I’m working on a story.’
‘Yeah, I know. You didn’t think to ask me about it? You don’t think I deserve at least that?’
‘You’ll get a chance to comment when the time comes.’
‘Oh I think I’ll do more than comment.’
I let that pass.
‘I don’t know what you think you’re going to find.’
‘Yeah? See, I think maybe you do.’
‘You’re a real prick, Gerry.’ He was lighting a cigar: I could hear the struck match and the rapid puffs as he sucked it alight. He might have been blowing kisses. ‘What’s brought this on, anyway? This sudden urge to do your job. Why start now? Let me find your stories. Is that not how it works?’