All the Colours of the Town (19 page)

‘Which one do you want to be?’

I pointed to the lion. He thought about it and then handed me the elephant.

‘Are you a goodie or a baddie?’

‘Eh, I think the jury’s still out, son.’ The blank look. I smiled. ‘I’m a goodie. What do you reckon?’

‘Well.’ He considered it. ‘Yes, you’re a goodie. We’re both goodies.’

We played for a bit on the carpet, moving the creatures around. At one point he stopped and put out his hand to touch my face.

‘Kyle! Stop that!’

‘It’s OK.’

He brought his hand up to my cheekbone, his prim mouth rigid, eyes full of commonplace wonder.

He patted it lightly, the contusion, the purplish crust, and he peered into my eyes to check my reaction.

‘Is it sore?’

‘It’s a bit sore.’

‘Will you die?’

‘No, I’ll be OK.’

He nodded. He turned to his mother.

‘He won’t die. It’s a bit sore, but he’ll be OK.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Yes.’ Then he jumped up in anguish. ‘Need to go! Need to go!’

‘On you go then!’ The feet pummelled up the stairs. ‘And wash your hands!’

I got to my feet.

‘I should go too.’

We stood on the path in the hot sun.

‘You’ve got a photo, I take it.’

I slipped it out of my shoulder bag.

‘Which one is he?’ Her fingertip circled the heads. I took her finger in mine and brought it down onto Lyons’s face. She took the photo in both hands and brought it up close to her nose.

‘Who is he?’

I shrugged, but the photo was blocking her face.

I cleared my throat. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, and put my hand out and tugged the photograph down, gently, tugged it out of her hand and slipped it back in the
envelope
. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

She crossed her arms over her chest.

‘Do you know him, though?’ She looked out to sea, shielding her eyes with her hand. There was a ship out there, a tanker right on the skyline, low and long and red. The kind of ship that never seems to move. When she looked back to me she kept her hand where it was.

‘I do, yeah.’

She nodded. The boy skidded round the corner and hid behind his mother, shy again now that the stranger was leaving.

‘Will he go to jail?’ she said. ‘When you write your story?’

‘There is no story.’ I fastened my bag. ‘There’s not enough evidence. Or any evidence, really. I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time. I’ve brought it all back and I can’t help you.’

‘But if it’s him,’ she said. ‘If you know it’s him. Can’t you do something anyway? Name him as a suspect?’

‘He’s not a suspect. We can’t prove anything. Look, even if I wrote the story they’d never put it out. My
editor
would stop it.’

She looked back out to sea.

‘I’ll keep on trying,’ I told her. ‘If there’s anything else you remember, give me a call. But I can’t write the story just now. There’s just not enough there. I’m sorry, Mrs Derwent.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’ She put her arms behind her, feeling for the boy. ‘It’s nice to know anyway. That I wasn’t mad. That I didn’t make it up. Come on, Kyle and say bye-bye.’

The blond head poked out for a second. Out on the street a car door closed.

‘Come out and say bye-bye.’

Her skirt twitched as the boy pressed tighter in and then the head flashed out, eyes shining wide. I hunkered down and when the head poked out again I roared and pawed the air in a tigerish swipe.

The boy squealed. When he peeked out next I did it again. And then again but this time the head stayed put. The smile fell and the eyes – big now, unblinking – seemed to flatten and pale. A gate clicked behind me and the boy was rushing past.

‘This is my husband – Ian.’

The man came up the path with the boy in his arms, the little legs clamped round his waist.

‘This is the man from Scotland.’

I got to my feet.

‘Gerry Conway.’

He hoisted the boy and tried to free his hand. We shook hands awkwardly. He looked at his wife.

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

‘Great.’ He lowered the boy to the ground. ‘And did you get what you needed?’

‘Yeah. You know.’ I raised my shoulders, weighed two invisible somethings on my palms. ‘Yeah. Listen, thanks for everything. I’ll let you know if anything …’

‘Fine.’

They waved in unison from the doorstep as I pulled away. The old guy over the way had gone inside. His paint pot still stood on the pavement; his empty kitchen chair.

The disused railway line. Out by Fardalehill, on the
western
edge of town. As kids we used to go there after school. It ran from the lemonade factory to the woods at Knockentiber. You left the council blocks and crossed a field of sleepy Friesians. A barbed-wire fence creaked and moaned as you held down the strands. Then a running jump to clear a muddy burn and up a shallow banking to the track.

The place had an air of recent abandonment. Brown rust bordered the shiny rails. Broken glass and faded Coke cans. The sleepers chipped and rotting in their bed of stones. On hot days we’d head for the woods, down the straight long track in the stink of creosote. It could give you a headache, the flare of sun in the polished steel, the flat rails turning a molten gold.

Walking was hard. The sleepers were too far apart. The stones kept poking your soles, rocking your ankles with their rumbling shift and give. Sometimes we’d scoop up a fistful – they were narrow and sharp, like Neolithic tools – and heave them in the air, making them zing off the blinding rails.

There were weeds between the sleepers, great green wagging thistles. No trains had run there in years, but you felt a shiver when you walked that track, a tingling in the space between your shoulder blades. Every eight or nine yards your head was drawn back, angling to catch it – a tremor in the rails, an angry diesel bearing down with an outraged blast of horn.

There were shafts along the track at intervals of fifty yards, neat oblong wells sunk into the banking. No one knew what they were for. One cold spring day we were crunching up the track, Davey Merchant and I, when we found a dead cow. A big black Friesian, trapped in a shaft.

All you could see were the shoulders and back, a dull blue sheen on the matted hair. The hide was like a square of choppy sea, rising in little peaks at the spine and the shoulders, the haunches and neck. You couldn’t see the head, just the column of the neck; the impact had forced the head between the knees.

We looked at each other and then down at the fence and the sagging wires. The animal had strayed. It had pushed through a break in the fence, wandered the tracks, its hooves sinking into the stones, and at some point the stones weren’t there and the cow stumbled into the void. It looked like a set-up, a practical joke. In all three dimensions, the cow precisely fitted its oblong shaft. It occupied its slot the way a Bible fits a slipcase.

There was no stench, no massing of flies. The beast was newly dead. We looked out over the fields, all distant and stilled and smoking in the early sun, but the fields gave nothing away. It was hard not to posit some element of design, some malignant bias in whatever force had
weakened
the fence at just this point, had drawn the heavy beast up the banking, its sharp shoulders working, and brought it to this cow-sized grave.

We stood there for a minute or two. We bounced a
couple 
of stones off the broad back and prodded it with the toes of our Sambas. Then we tramped off up the track.

All this came back to me on my last night in Belfast when I saw Isaac Hepburn for the final time. I’d been driving back from Bangor.

That was daubed in foot-high letters on the side of a barn. I thought it over while I drove to the city. I hadn’t seen Hepburn since he’d cracked my face on the bonnet of a car, but for some reason the crude white letters brought him to mind. It worried me that he hadn’t been back in touch about his thousand pounds. It made me wonder if something had happened. It occurred to me, too, that if he wanted to earn a grand, instead of just extort it, there were things he could do. Like tell me who else was present when Eamonn Walsh got shot. I decided to pay him a visit, give him the thousand right there and then if he would tell me what he knew about the Walsh assassination.

I parked in the Donegall Quay multi-storey and checked my wallet. Nearly four hundred. There was a Northern Bank on Donegall Square and I took out the rest of the cash and went for a coffee at the Linen Hall Library. The sheet of paper Hepburn had left at the hotel was still in my wallet. My throat dried up as I punched the number but it went to voicemail. I left a message
asking
Hepburn to call me. There was no point driving back to Antrim if I was hoping to see Hepburn that night, so I killed some time in the library and then took in a rerun of
Badlands
at the Queen’s Film Theatre. By ten o’clock I was in the Cloth Ear Bar of the Merchant Hotel. My phone sat mutely on the table beside a glass of sparkling water. Hepburn still hadn’t called. I could try the gym but he wouldn’t want to do business there, at least not when other people were around.

I toyed with my fizzy water for another hour and then fetched the car from Donegall Quay and drove to Hepburn’s gym. It was after closing time now but maybe I’d catch him before he went home. I parked round the corner. The street was empty. Tarmac glistened in the sodium glare. Puddles threw up tangerine smears. The teens on the disabled ramp – that parliament of crows – had flapped off to another perch. A big-bellied bottle of cider stood daintily on the top step.

The storm door was closed, the fanlight dark. I pressed the intercom, held it down for a count of five. Beyond the door the sound ground dully on but the grille failed to crackle into life. I glanced back at the street; the lighted pinks and greens of curtained windows. A late bus changed gears on a distant street.

Down the side of the building was a narrow roadway. I followed it to the car park at the rear. A
cough-drop-shaped
security light burned in its strutted cage. The ground had a slimy cast in the orange light. There was a single car in the lot, a Saab 9-5, black, four years old. Nothing moved. The building’s back wall had a sullen, shuttered look. But a window on the lower left was a lighter grey than the rest. If I stood on my tiptoes I might just see in.

There was nothing to see. Security bars. A dim pearly haze through net curtains. A wheelie bin stood by the door. I dragged it over and scrambled up on top, but there was no gap between the curtain and the top of the window.

I jumped back down. I squeezed my good hand between the bars and knocked the window, clacking my ring on the glass. Nothing. No shadows swayed. The
curtains
just hung.

I stepped back and studied the building again. There were three steps up to the narrow back door. I jumped them and rattled the handle. Next to the door was a big boxed-in unit for the air-conditioning system. On the far side of this, above a low step, was the fire door. Craning out over the air-con, I could just make out a hopeful strip of shadow. The door wasn’t flush with its jamb. I stepped round the air-con unit and clenched my fingertips on the half-inch strip of fire door and strained, one-handed, like a climber on a ledge. The door gave and I worked my
fingers
into the gap.

There was no alarm, no shrilling of bells. I stepped inside, let the door bump gently shut, the latch
half-engaging
with a cushioned click, the push-bar nudging the small of my back.

For a moment everything was black. A squall of panic rose and fell. Take it easy, Conway. Breathe deep. Then I turned to my right and collided with someone.

I threw my arms up in the dark, ready to grapple, to parry the blows. Nobody moved. My breathing rasped like a pack of dogs. I sensed a displacement of air, as if a large body had passed nearby. I put my hand out again and a cold, tacky surface kissed my palm. I put out my other hand, put my arms right around the thing and hugged it. A punchbag. I was in Hepburn’s gym.

There was a flashlight in the Forester’s glove
compartment
and I thought about nipping back. But I stayed where I was and the room slowly bloomed into view, the planes and the contours asserting themselves. The big square scaffold of the ring. The heavy bags, one gently swinging.

My breathing eased. I wiped my palms down the crease of my trousers.

I opened the door to the rest of the club. It was lighter here, the street lights piercing the slatted blinds. There were doors across the hallway. I stepped up to one, its push-panel glinting dully and shoved it firmly, once,
without
crossing the threshold. Before it swung back, the door disclosed a steel double sink, a row of implements on hooks and a slab-topped table in the centre of the room. The next door had two panels side by side: a forked little man and a woman’s triangular skirt.

I didn’t go in. I moved down to a door marked
PRIVATE
. STAFF ONLY. A TV was on; tinny histrionics and incidental music. I held my breath and used one knuckle to knock. I used it again a bit harder. The voices on the telly didn’t object, so I turned the handle.

It was somebody’s office. A gunmetal desk and a blue swivel chair. A standard lamp explained the haze I’d seen from the car park. The telly – it sat atop a four-door grey filing cabinet in the corner – was tuned to a hospital drama: gesticulating doctors breezing through
crash-doors
. I crossed to turn it off and tried in turn the four locked drawers of the filing cabinet. There wasn’t much else in the room. A PC workstation against one wall. A gas fire. A wastepaper basket of scuffed red metal. A desk-tidy on the floor, its holdings of pens, rulers and paperclips strewn on the carpet. On the back wall a Mondrian calendar, open at May. Above the fireplace a large naked oblong of unfaded paint where something had been moved or knocked from the wall. I moved around the desk and found it on the floor, a framed photo, face down, its glass cracked in a sun-ray pattern.

Some of the glass dislodged as I lifted the frame, ragged shards tilting onto the floor. I shook the rest into the
basket
and laid the frame on the desk. The photo showed a boxing ring after a fight. A handsome man in a dinner suit and black bow tie stood between two sweaty fighters, his arms around their shoulders, his one-button tux still buttoned. He had wavy hair and a professional smile and he looked like a minor celebrity, a regional newscaster or football pundit. The boxers wore coloured vests. Their gloves were off. Their chests and faces shone in the
overhead
spots. The one in the red vest had a glazed, sleepy look. His right eye was hooded and his other eye looked at the floor. His bandaged hands hung stiff at his sides. He wanted to be anywhere else but having his
photograph
taken. On the newsreader’s other side, the
blue-vested
victor was all smiles. He stood loosely, in a slouch that was almost sexual, and his gaze – bright-eyed and knowing – met the camera full on. Behind the three
figures
was a jostle of bodies, among them Isaac Hepburn, a towel tucked into his tracksuit top, his smile pointing just where it should.

I laid the photo on the desk, next to the shattered frame. The desk had three drawers, each of them empty. The room smelled of rolling tobacco, the brownish whiff of Old Holborn. A tin ashtray held the skinny white dowts of three roll-ups. Two of the dowts were folded and crushed; the third was straight and a little longer than the others. Next to the ashtray a bottle of Bush and an empty shot glass. When I turned the glass over a drop slithered down to the rim. I raised the glass and shook it, took the hot, pill-sized fizz on my tongue. I unscrewed the bottle and filled the cap, a medicinal jolt, and tossed it back. It sizzled right down to my gut. It felt right at home. I gave it a friend and then re-screwed the cap.

The whiskey put a brighter slant on things and I breezed out of Hepburn’s office and glanced through the rest of the rooms. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for. At first I was trying to find Hepburn. Then I thought I might find something I could use against him, a clue, some giveaway spoor of his criminal doings. The lounge bar was dark: a tiny marina of upturned chairs. The reception desk was tidy and bare. Nothing moved in the cool of the toilets; the urinals shone bluely and I walked down the row of stalls and pushed open every door.

Back in the gym I was heading for the fire door when I remembered the seats. The padded benches down one wall doubled as storage bins; their cushioned seats came off and boxing kit was stowed in the space underneath. When I lifted the first seat, the leatherette slurped as it came unstuck, and the reek billowed up – salty, urinous, the heady fermentations of sweat. A crumpled punchbag. A mound of gloves with laces agape. In the second was a stack of rubber mats and a white snarl of skipping ropes. Then I bent to the third.

It looked at first like a piece of kit, a punchbag or a rolled-up mat, but there was something in the roundness, some telltale slope or curve that made me reach into my pocket. By the Zippo’s wavy flame I could see the rise of Hepburn’s shoulders under the light-blue weave of Hepburn’s jacket. I reached down for the grey hair and tugged on it. The head was the head of a deep-drowned man. The eyes rolled whitely, the lids half-closed like the eye of the beaten boxer in the photograph. There was a ligature of sorts, a cord or wire cutting into his neck. I dropped the Zippo and the seat clattered shut.

The sound cannoned through the empty gym. Was it just the seat banging shut or was it something else, a door closing in another part of the club? I hunched there on my knees, bracing myself against the silence. The
wooden
floor was biting into my knees but I held myself rigid, breathing in minuscule sips, until the panic died. I was halfway across the gym when I remembered my Zippo. I felt around on the floor in front of the benches. Nothing. It must have fallen in as the seat banged shut.

The seat eased up with another squelching kiss. The Zippo wasn’t there. I slipped my hand between Hepburn’s shoulder and the rim of the seat-box and
started
to paddle blindly with my fingers. They brushed
something
warm and metallic and I dragged it up against the wooden side until it clattered onto the floor. It gleamed in the darkness: the Zippo. I stowed it in my pocket and stood up. Then something occurred to me and I dropped to my knees again. I opened the lid once more and worked quickly through Hepburn’s pockets.