All the Colours of the Town (18 page)

‘Like you knew it was him who helped kill Gillies? OK. OK.’ He held his hands up. ‘Peter Lyons is the mystery man. Let’s look into it.’

His grin was getting wider. It was only now it struck me he’d been grinning since he came in.

‘What?’

He kicked off his shoes and lay back on my bed.
His
bed.

‘You’re gonna love this.’ He crossed his legs at the ankles and linked his fingers on his chest. ‘I went to a pub on Donegall Pass. It’s a UVF shop. I knew some of the faces from way back. So I’m sat at the bar and three guys come in. They take a corner table and one of them’s
getting
the drinks in. He’s standing right beside me and he catches my eye in the mirror. He nods at me and I nod back. I’m thinking “I know this guy” but I can’t place him. Then he orders the drinks: big Glasgow accent. And it hits me: it’s one of Maitland’s boys. I’ve spent the last five weeks tailing these guys round the East End. And one of them’s right here.’

‘One of Maitland’s crew?’

‘It’s him all right.’

‘One of Maitland’s guys is in Belfast?’

We waited for this to make some kind of sense. When it didn’t I sat down on the bed.

‘And who were the other guys? Who was he with?’

‘They’re Blacknecks,’ Moir said. ‘I don’t know them specifically, but I know the look, I know the form. He’s drinking with the UVF.’

‘The Maitland Crew and the UVF? I’ll tell you one thing,’ I said to Moir. ‘I’m coming with you tomorrow.’

‘You’re the boss,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you to Donegall Pass, see if they show up again. And I wouldn’t worry about your friends from the other night.’ He frowned at my cropped head, the newly beardless chin. ‘They’d never make you anyway, looking like that.’

Behind us came a rumble like a tube train. Then the fat hollow smack as the ball met the pins. We picked out our shoes from the rack.

‘You’ve done this before, by the way?’

I couldn’t find elevens. Lots of tens and a single pair of twelves, but no elevens. I lifted the twelves.

‘Bowling? I’m a fucking master, I’ll kick your skinny arse.’

We didn’t take the lane right beside them but the one beside that. Across the empty lane I could see them, in the corner of our eyes, as I bent to tie my shoes.

We’d followed them from Donegall Pass. That morning we drove into Belfast and ate brunch at Nick’s Warehouse in the Cathedral Quarter. Around lunchtime we drove down Donegall Pass and parked across the street from the drinking club. We didn’t have long to wait. At ten to one Moir poked me in the ribs. Across the street three men in jeans and T-shirts were climbing into a scarlet Porsche Cayenne. We followed them here to the Lagan Arena, a huge new leisure complex on the waterfront.

I haven’t bowled in anger more than twice in my life. In the eighties I resisted the hype, and then later, when the alleys had bars and restaurants attached, it somehow was never my thing. Tenpin bowling, for me, was still Tom and Jerry: Tom’s tail knotted through the fingerholes, Jerry’s arched back as the ball runs him down. Moir, of course, is a natural. His first roll sends the ball on a smart tight curve to the heart of the pins. The skittles burst like an asterisk. He gives a camp little bob and pumps his fist. My own roll fades lamely, clipping two pins on its way to the gutter.

‘You fucker.’ I plugged the holes in a bilious lime-green ball. ‘You’re a bloody pro.’

Moir laughed. ‘Enthusiastic amateur. Though I do play for a team back home.’ ‘Home’ meaning Glasgow. ‘We’ve made the City play-offs two years running.’

‘That’s great, Martin. First rate.’

As Moir leaned into his next shot, I glanced over at the three men. The tall guy waiting to bowl had short grey hair, a waxy, pockmarked skin and kindly pale-blue eyes. He cradled the ball to his chest, hefting it tenderly. His biceps bulged whitely. Behind him, sucking on a bottle of lager, was a big ugly baby of a man – short, fat, bald, his tight pot belly like a bowling ball, and hairless pudgy forearms in a bright-red outsize T-shirt. The third man, shaking his head at the shot he’d just completed and stooping for his drink, sported a ponytail. He wore a black dress shirt and jeans.

‘That’s him.’ Martin nodded at the ponytail. ‘The Glasgow guy. Tarrins or Torrance. A name like that. I’ve seen him in the scheme. He’s close to Maitland.’

As if the name ‘Maitland’ had caught his ear, the guy looked over. I turned away too sharply and hurried to play my shot: the ball caught my thigh and smacked fatly down before trundling with comical languor down the lane. Time appeared to have stopped altogether before the ball flopped hopelessly into the gutter. I rubbed my palms on my jeans; my forehead, too, was prickled with sweat.

Moir, however, was all bounce and swagger. He seemed a new man in this context, less diffident and goofy. He was home, of course, on his own patch, and the game we were playing was his. But I sensed, too, that his other life, his ‘Hey You’ experience, was playing a part. As he stepped to the line with the ball, he was in
character
. The Moir who pistoned his hips when the pins
scattered
, who shook the heat from his fingers with a feline yowl: this was a new Moir altogether.

When he’d taken his shot I leaned forward to whisper something and Moir pulled back, laughing loudly.

‘Talk normal, Gerry. Whisperers get noticed. Who’s going to hear you?’

He threw his arms wide. He was right. The stolid
thunder
of the balls, the pins’ hollow knocking, the judder and clang from the games arcade, the sound system’s rousing soft-rock: the place was bedlam.

And yet, if anyone was audible it was Moir. He greeted every strike with a ludicrous whoop, groaned abjectly when even one pin was left standing. At one point, in a lull between songs, he knocked his glass to the floor and it shattered with a prodigious pop.

The ponytailed man, about to roll, pulled out of his shot and glared across. Moir had his hands up. ‘Sorry, big man.’ He half-salaamed. When the girl arrived he made a big show of helping to clean things up. As he mopped at the spillage and dropped in the basket the bright shards of glass, Moir turned to me with a grin. ‘They know who I am now.’ He jerked his head at the stain on the floor. ‘I’m the dick who spilled his drink.’

I was still getting caned ten minutes later, when Moir went for a piss. ‘My phone’s on,’ he told me. ‘Call me if they go anywhere.’ I sat down on the red banquette. I took my phone out and checked for messages. I texted Roddy. At the edge of my vision, above the phone’s bright screen, the figures shifted. Black shadows, bending and straightening. With a flick of my thumb I put the phone to its camera setting, tilted the screen and there they were. I almost laughed. I pressed the button and that moist crisp click, like a celery stick being snapped in two, seemed recklessly loud. But the figures kept moving, reaching for drinks, stooping to bowl. I took some more shots. I kept both thumbs on the keypad; to anyone watching I was busy texting.

I shuffled in my seat. I was getting plenty of shots but none of them was right. What I needed was the Scottish guy in the frame with at least one of the Blacknecks. I wanted the evidence: the Glasgow godfather’s right-hand man getting chummy with the South Belfast UVF. But when one was bowling the others were lifting beers or stooping over the ball-return. Finally I got it – the Scotsman and the fat baby. But when I viewed the photo the fat man was in profile. The zoom brought him closer but no clearer: his cheek dissolved in a pixellated blur. I had to get closer.

I stood up and rolled my shoulders. I moved to the edge of our lane. Baby Boy stepped up to roll and the other two reached for their beers. The Scotsman said something and the grey-haired man’s smile showed a big friendly gap in his teeth. Then the Scotsman beckoned the other man closer. The grey-haired man cocked his head and the Scotsman stooped to whisper in his ear. They were facing me now. Though tilted slightly forward and shadowed a little deeply, their heads were almost
touching
. This was it. This was the shot. I edged a little closer. I had them in the viewfinder but now somebody was coming, a blur of white in my peripheral vision – the waitress, she was coming for the empties – and before she could block me I took another step. I was on the vacant lane now. I raised my hand to frame the shot. By now I no longer had both hands on the phone. There was no
pretence
now: I was taking a picture. I pointed the phone and clicked and had barely snapped it shut when they erupted from the lane, grabbing fistfuls of air as they broke towards me, the Scotsman, the grey-haired man and Baby Boy not far behind.

The crash when I turned was the waitress’s tray. I hopped over the smashed glasses and set off up the lane, fists pumping, my too-big bowling shoes snapping on the varnished wood. The sudden loud burst of static was the sound of six bowling shoes crunching through glass.

Through the jangling gloom of the games arcade and into the light of day. The central plaza. Light. Air. Milling families, balconies in shiny tiers, the escalators’ italic slant, the big glass bell of the atrium roof. I seemed to see it all from above, in brilliant vista-vision. Brighter, sharper, louder than it was. Pounding through the plaza I was gauging speeds and distances,
calculating
angles. Like the arcade games players I was thinking two steps ahead: the parents with the double buggy and dawdling three-year-old; the volatile knot of teens
horsing
around by the water-feature. Someone stepped out from behind a telephone kiosk dragging a wheeled valise and I vaulted the thing without breaking stride.

I was making for the escalators. It occurred to me to stop and simply shout, holler for help. Maybe one of the guards would come running, the security men in their rust-coloured shirts; their vizored caps and regulation goatees. But here were the moving stairs and I took them at a running jump, landing too high and almost toppling back as the mechanism lurched upwards. But I clutched for the guardrail and steadied myself and pounded on up the ribbed steel steps. Towards the top a woman held a girl by the hand. I was gaining on them, they were
blocking
the way, but as I came up behind them the escalator debouched us and I slalomed past and off across the floor.

I didn’t look back. Ahead of me was the cinema, a
multiplex
that took up most of this storey. At the entrance I slowed and forced myself to walk, crossing with care the carpeted foyer. The place was airy and open plan. I passed the ticket counter with its vacant snake of
red-roped
stanchions. The kiosk for sweets and popcorn, the Häagen-Dazs concession. All the programmes had
started
; there was no one about. Down a dark, carpeted
corridor
to the screens, I broke into a trot. On either side were lighted numerals like the ones outside airport
departure
gates. No ushers stood by the doors: the screenings were underway. I glanced back down the empty corridor and pulled on one of the double doors.

It was pitch-black in the theatre. Green
Exit
signs
floated
in the gloom. Then the scene shifted – a bright exterior, a city street – and the whole auditorium was washed in grey light, showing banks of seats, the attentive heads. Two rows down there was a vacant seat in the middle of the row. I squeezed past the knees, the bodies half-rising with little irritable grunts and sighs. I slumped down low and turned up my collar, leaned my cheek against my knuckles.

The film was a romantic comedy. The American actor and his European girl – her accent sounded German – were sitting in their car in a city-centre street. The car – it could only be hers, although the man sat behind the wheel – was comically small and British. They bickered in low voices while the man consulted a map spread out on his lap. A gendarme was striding towards them, his
silhouette
already primed with comedy – the pillbox hat, the girlish short cape. But now the Yank was stamping on the pedals and the Mini screeched out from the kerb and wobbled towards the roadblock, picking up speed as the gendarmes scattered.

It wasn’t a rom-com; it was an action thriller. For the next ten minutes the cops pursued the couple through the Paris streets. The mini slalomed through pedestrians, stuttered down flights of steps, outfaced oncoming
traffic
and went crashing along the banks of the Seine. I was counting in my head, as slowly as I dared, each block of sixty drawing me closer to safety. I stayed till the finish. Twice the door opened and somebody left or came in but I stared straight ahead.

When the credits came up we all filed out. I kept my head down, clamped my phone to my ear. Through the foyer, panicking a little as the crowd thinned, and then down the escalator and out to the car park. I made it to the car and there was Martin in dark glasses, perched on a stanchion. He started to laugh. I laughed too. We were snorting and sniggering like schoolboys as we hauled on the doors. Holy fuck. Moir produced a hip flask and we each took a burning pull. We didn’t stop laughing till we hit the Antrim Road.

Death knocks. That jump in your guts when you spotted the house. The cellophane glint on the pavement, footie scarves tied to the railings. That’s what I dreaded most, in my early days at the
Trib
. Send a boy to do a man’s job. That’s how it works – at the
Tribune
and everywhere else. Boy struck by bus. Boy stabbed in brawl. You’re almost a boy yourself but the Desk sends you out to the house. You get to put the lovely questions. How does it feel? What was he like? Did he play sports? Was he good at school? It was nothing but grief. Even if you did get a quote, you never got credit; the chief reporter would write it up. There are plenty of things I’m not proud of, but I’ve never felt as toxically cheap as when I swallowed my phlegm and thumbed those doorbells.

Get a collect. That’s what the Desk told you. If you do nothing else, just get a collect, get a photo. Sometimes they shouted and raved; women lashed out with their chipped fingernails. A man tossed a hot mug of tea in my face. But mostly they were helpful, cowed, pitifully pleased by the attention, asking you in and offering
coffee
. Wounded as they were, they tracked your gaze from dresser to mantelpiece, hoping to learn from your eyes what their possessions said about them. They wanted a sign, some clue to why it had happened, why trouble had come to their door. You felt like the cops. We perched on their sofas in our outdoor clothes and made them feel guilty.

At the first lull you’d cross to the dresser. ‘Is that him? May I? What a happy looking boy. Could we borrow this? We’ll bring it straight back.’ Sometimes they wouldn’t want to give it. In that case the snapper might sneak a photo of the photo but this was tricky and the quality was never good. Much simpler just to swipe it. On the way out you’re shaking the mother’s hand and the
snapper
hangs back and two days later she works out what’s missing: the school photo’s gone from the top of the telly.

That’s why I jacked it. That’s why I moved to politics, took the job with the swivel chair. I couldn’t hack it any more. I couldn’t push the doorbells, face the bruised looks, the questioning eyes. I wanted out. And now I was back. The same damp chill in my stomach. The same cold sweat on my brow. No matter that this death was twenty years old. No matter that the woman was expecting me: the jump in my gut was exactly the same.

I got there early. I found the house, a big lemon-yellow place on the shore road. Ballyholme Esplanade. The nice end of town. Two doors down an old guy perched on a kitchen chair, painting his front gate. He dipped his brush in the Hammerite pot and watched me pass.

I had forty minutes to kill. I turned the car around, found a parking spot in the town centre. The shops on the seafront had candy-striped awnings and I walked down the shaded parade. Coils of sand twisting over the pavement. Gulls screamed and hooted, dwindling in
yellow
air. From up ahead came a muted metallic clatter and a harsh sizzling fizz. I ducked into the gloom.

‘You frying?’

A teenage girl at the counter, her bleached hair up in a scrunchie. Further along, a balding guy in a white tunic, busy with the fish. The bald guy looked at the lassie and then at me. I saw him notice my eye.

‘Ten minutes,’ he said. ‘Ten minutes we ready. What you want? A fish supper?’

‘Aye.’

‘Ten minutes. No problem.’

When I came back the place was full. A squad of site workers in boots and dayglo waistcoats were horsing around but the owner waved a package at me – ‘fish
supper
’ – and beckoned me to the front of the queue.

Along the seafront the houses were painted in
ice-cream
colours. Strawberry, lemon, pistachio, mint. Gulls stamped about on municipal bins, flapping at apertures, tugging scraps of paper like hankies from a sleeve. The benches on the esplanade had little plaques attached. I looked for the dates, the ones that might have been Troubles deaths, the ones that certainly weren’t. I chose the most recent:

The batter was crisp and the haddock was fresh, its flesh moist and milky-blue. I ate the fish first and then started on the chips. One of the chips had a blackened end. I left it till last and then tossed it into the road. A gull appeared and flapped awkwardly up as a car approached. Then it stalked back into the road. Another car passed and the gull rose again in a bad-tempered tangle to come stilting back with tight embarrassed steps. Finally a van ground past and smeared the chip to the road and the gull launched up and lifted out to sea, trailing disdainful orange feet.

The old boy was still painting his gate when I parked in front of the house. He craned round, hands on thighs, to get a proper look. He was wearing shorts: I caught a glimpse of pale bluish shin and a rumpled dark sock.

Three steps to the doorbell. I stepped back down to the path, felt the old guy’s gaze on the back of my head.

I took up my death-knock stance. Head slightly bowed. Hands clasped in front of the crotch. The upward glance as the door swings open.

‘Mrs Derwent?’

‘Mr Conway.’ She nodded, as if she’d known what I would look like. She held the door wide. ‘I want to thank you for coming.’

The hall was dark after the bright daylight. When she closed the door behind me my eyes took a second to adjust and for a spell I wasn’t sure where she’d gone. I put my hand out vaguely.

‘This way.’

She was halfway down the hall. I followed her into a bright white kitchen with French windows. She strode to the windows and drew them a little closer and then she turned and presented her hand. She was small, a neat
little
false blonde with coppery skin and glossy green eyes. She was heavily pregnant.

‘Have you eaten?’

The circular table was set for two. A big ceramic salad bowl frothed greenly in the centre.

‘Actually I had a fish supper at the front,’ I said. She frowned. ‘Though I could certainly manage a little, what is that – Niçoise?’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘It is. Please.’ She gestured to the free chair as she took her own.

We ate in silence for a while, passing the pepper and salt and the bowl of Parmesan. Then she asked about my job, what the paper was like, did I like working there? I better like it, I told her; I was good for nothing else. When the salad was finished she rose and crossed to the sink. There were blueberries in a colander on the draining board. I watched her move. You always did this with the victims, scrutinised their movements, trying to trace some residue of trauma. As if she’d roll her hips another way, her gait would be different if her dad hadn’t died on their living-room carpet. And in any case she was moving now with that universal late-pregnancy waddle, leading with the pelvis.

‘When are you due?’ I asked her. She set a bowl of
blueberries
in front of me.

‘August 18th. If I last that long.’

‘You do look – I want to say ripe but that’s not right.’ I lifted a handful of blueberries. ‘Blooming.’

She smiled.

‘When you called,’ she said. ‘After you called, I put the phone down and cried. I’m not sure why. I think it was maybe relief.’ She picked through the berries in her bowl. ‘I’ve always known this day would come. I knew it wasn’t finished, that even the legal, the public part wasn’t done with. I even thought …’ She paused and looked up, almost shy now. ‘I even thought you might be him.’

‘The other man?’

She nodded. The door opened then and a boy came in, a toddler, his face pouchy and smeared.

‘I was scared, Mummy.’

‘Why were you scared? I was right here. Did you have a good nap?’

He nodded. ‘Yes. Mummy I want juice.’

‘OK, Kyle. Did you say hello? This is Mr Conway.’

‘Gerry,’ I said.

The boy looked gravely at me and started to whine for his juice.

‘Right, Kyle. OK.’ She rose with difficulty and waddled to the worktop. ‘You want coffee?’

‘Thanks.’

We took it in the garden. We sat at a wooden table under a multi-coloured parasol and the boy played beside us on a tartan rug. She spoke about her childhood, the Belfast house with its gloomy green-black shrubbery, the doorbell like a blinded eye. Her parents had a good life, she said. Her father’s law practice was thriving and they entertained a lot, there were parties most weekends. The doorbell – that white porcelain hemisphere that scared her when she passed its vacant gaze – would keep on sounding. She remembered the voices, how she would creep downstairs and listen from the landing. On other nights there were clients – ‘clients’ was a word she learned early: spare, self-effacing men, who would stand in the hall till her father was ready.

Of her father himself she remembered very little.

‘I remember when he came to say goodnight. How the cover tightened when he sat on the bed. The scratch of his chin and the smell of cigarettes. His silhouette in the doorway when he switched off my light. But I don’t
really
remember him. Kyle, sweetheart.’ The boy looked up from his toys. ‘Kyle: run in and get the picture of Grandad. Bring it to Mummy.’

It was black and white: a youngish dad with a plump baby girl in the crook of his arm. His free arm hangs down, a smoking stub wedged in his fingers. He wears a stripy shirt, flat-fronted trousers without a belt. His
side-buckled
shoes are shining like shellac. There’s a back gate behind him and a white explosion like a too-bright cloud edging into the shot at the height of his head. I lean
closer
, spot the washing line bisecting his head: it’s a shirt or a bedsheet, twisting in the breeze.

‘They said he was an IRA man,’ she said.

‘Was he?’

I passed the photo back.

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. My mother died last year and she always said it was a lie. He was never a Provo, she said. But he was a Catholic. And he was good at his job. Of course Republicans would want him to defend them. Why wouldn’t they? He got a lot of them off. He even got compensation for some of them.’

She told me about that night. How she crept
downstairs
and saw a man in the hallway. The open door and the night air cold on her bare legs. The man’s smile. His funny accent when he spoke. And the noise in the living room, another man bustling out and the two men
vanishing
into the night. And the mess in the living room. The chaos. The blood. The burnt smoky smell.

‘At first,’ she said, ‘I thought it was a joke. A kind of game.’

She smiled and I thought of the photo, her smiling dad. I liked the look of him. Pursed, ironic lips. The dark curls thinning at the front. His head cocked forward so he’s looking up at us, peering over invisible spectacles, and the stoic mockery in his eyes comprehends it all – himself, the photographer, the very genre of the family snapshot. When the shutter clicks he will do something daft, snap the fag-end to the ground and hoist the girl onto his shoulders, jounce her round the garden, her fat limbs
jiggling
to the rhythm.

‘And the man in the hall,’ I said. ‘Would you know him? What did he look like?’

She shook her head. ‘I was seven years old. He was nice. He was a nice man. He smiled and he wore glasses. He spoke funny. A thick accent. I think he had a green coat but I couldn’t be sure.’

The boy came over and stood beside her. ‘Mummy, can I go inside and play with my aminals?’

‘OK, honey.’ He toddled off. ‘It’s like telling a dream. You know when you have a dream and then you tell it to someone, you put it into words? And the words change it? You need words to tell it, but the words take over and you can’t get back to the actual dream. That’s what it’s like. I don’t really know what happened any more because I’ve told the story so often.’

‘But there
was
a second man? You didn’t dream
him
?’

‘He wasn’t a ghost, Mr Conway. He was standing as near to me as you are now.’

The boy came over and climbed on her lap for a kiss. Then he went inside to play.

‘But didn’t they investigate?’

‘What’s to investigate? They had the killer. They had a result. Why keep digging? It was easier to decide the wee girl was seeing things. She was confused. Anyway, when no one believes you, you stop telling. Sometimes I thought they might be right, I thought I’d made him up. Then I thought he was an angel. They told me an angel had come down to take my daddy up to heaven. I said, “I know! I saw him.” “That wasn’t the angel,” they said. “That was the bad man. The bad man shot your daddy and the angel took him to heaven.” “I know,” I said. “I saw them both. I saw the bad man and I saw the angel too.”’

She placed her hands on her belly then and winced, a sweet grimace, as the child inside her kicked.

‘You know the worst thing? The neighbours. Neighbours are supposed to rally round. But people changed, once it happened. The people in the street. Even though he was innocent, that didn’t matter. It was like we’d brought it to their doors, just by being ourselves. Being Catholic. The other kids stopped having me round.’

She shifted in the chair, pressed her palm to the small of her back.

‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘To be fair, the neighbours weren’t alone. My aunties came to visit a lot. After it happened. They were just as bad. We should move south, they said. Or go to England.’

She said ‘England’ as she might have said ‘Japan’ or ‘Kazakhstan’.

The boy was back in the garden.

‘I’ve made a display, Mummy. Come and see. Come
on
!’

She grimaced at me.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘No problem.’

We laboured up the lawn like a refugee column of two. The boy kept racing ahead and then rushing back, urging us to hurry.

In the living room he stood beaming over a plastic menagerie of animals. The animals were arranged in
family
groups: dogs and monkeys and horses and bears. Leopards and pigs with their litter of young. He lifted a lion and an elephant and held them out.