There was a bunch of keys, a slippy pouch of rolling tobacco, a roll of dental floss, a box of matches, and a
silvery
clamshell phone. There was a wallet with the usual plastic and a sheaf of Ulsterbank twenties. At least they hadn’t robbed him. I put the wallet and the money back with the rest of his things.
Back in the lounge I found a bar towel and worked my way through the rooms, rubbing the doorknobs and
surfaces
, the whiskey glass and bottle. I took the bar-towel with me when I left and wiped down the wheelie-bin’s handles and lid, the windowsill, the back-doorknob.
It was colder now and darker in the alley. I stopped in the last patch of shadow, my guts sore with fear. Whoever had got to Hepburn might be coming back. Or they might still be here. But I still couldn’t move. Every time I made to leave, the slam of a door or the hissing of tyres would flare out of the night. Then I’d wait so long that the silence itself took on a charged, suspicious air. If I didn’t move soon I’d be stood there all night. Finally I
blundered
out, stumping like a fire-walker, and turned right. I’d gone five yards when a figure turned the corner up ahead. I tried to slow, to swing my gait a little, make it look like I’d been trudging for miles.
The walker came on. We were almost abreast. I caught a jagged, Cubist image of a face – pale-blue eye, a droopy grey moustache – before I dropped my head to check my watch. We passed without comment or sign but I sensed that he had stopped, that he was minded to hail me. My knees twitched, as if they might break loose of their own accord and send me sprinting free. At the corner I glanced back. The man stood on the pavement looking after me. I turned the corner briskly, crossed to the car, tugging the keys from my pocket, tugging so hard that the lining tore, and when the engine caught and I lurched from the kerb it was still in my nostrils, the reek of Hepburn’s gym, the sour citric staleness of sweat.
The air in the newsroom was stale. The air-con was down and the open windows – great square affairs that tilted a mere six inches, like a man looking out for a bus – might just as well have been closed. I sat stock still at my desk. I used to find it easy to look busy when I wasn’t. Now it was too much work. Now it was as wearisome to look busy as to be busy so I didn’t try. I didn’t try anything much but it was hard to ignore them. The smiles. The sympathetic nods. The solicitous looks. I could feel it like something physical, my dwindling status. Like the turn of a season it was vague but striking. A warmth, a vernal friendliness, from people who hated your guts. Nobody now was cursing my luck over lager tops at the Cope. Nobody now had me filling Rix’s shoes. My fingers slumped on the keys. A bulb of sweat swayed down my spine. Neve McDonald clicked down the floor and the fullness of her buttocks, chewing past in a tight wool skirt, was like a calculated insult.
Fuck it. I had no stories, I had no leads, but I sat at my desk in the fetid heat and tallied them up, my dubious blessings. I was still alive. I was still in one piece, bar the ghost of a limp and a fading black eye. I thought about Isaac Hepburn. Hepburn in a kit-bin. Hepburn in a steel drawer. Hepburn in a wooden box. He never did get his thousand pounds. It hadn’t quite worked to everyone’s mutual advantage, this arrangement of ours. To his mutual advantage anyway. He tried to sell me Peter Lyons. Then somebody killed him. But were those facts connected? If he tried to sell Lyons then he must have sold other stuff too. And if he sold to me then he sold to somebody else. The guy was a tout and in my experience touts got rumbled. And when that happened, touts got hurt. From what Macpherson told me, half the Shankill was leery of Hepburn.
I remembered the way he spoke about the higher-ups, the Blackneck brass. Bacardi generals. Chocolate
soldiers
. He was cocky, Kiwi Hepburn: reckless and
righteous
. He bristled with entitlement. In his own eyes, he wasn’t a tout. He felt they owed him and he was taking some of it back. And you couldn’t blame him. A lot of guys did well for themselves while Hepburn was buffing his boots in a draughty Nissen hut. But you couldn’t expect other people to see it like that.
I planted my elbows on the desk and slumped towards the machine, rigid fingers vizoring my face, the balls of my thumbs rotating my temples.
The cops had questioned me, of course. A PSNI
detective
flew over within days of Hepburn’s death. I took him to the
Trib
’s cafeteria and he set his little Dictaphone on the sticky table. I had visited Isaac Hepburn in the week before his death. Was that right? It was. What was the purpose of my visit? He peered at me with professional intensity; a big flake of sugar from his yum-yum was stuck to his moustache. I told him I’d been working on a story. When I declined to say what it was he didn’t insist. It didn’t seem to matter. He turned the Dictaphone off and finished his yum-yum. It was a nothing case, he told me. They’d been waiting for this to happen. Hepburn was a tout. He’d also got smart-mouthed in two or three of the wrong pubs and said some careless things about former comrades. His finale was a surprise to no one.
‘It might have been a surprise to Hepburn,’ I said.
The cop picked the sugar from his moustache: ‘It shouldn’t have been.’
He thanked me for the coffee and left for his plane.
The heat was getting tiresome now. Sweat was spotting my silent keyboard. I sifted through the crap on my desk for a packet of tissues. The day’s papers were scattered everywhere. That morning’s
Scotsman
carried a piece by Kirsty Dewar. A crackdown on knife crime:
stop-and-search
powers to be upped throughout Strathclyde. The story had Lyons all over it. It should have been mine. It would have been mine – its pre-packaged sentences and banal quotations would have been up there on the screen, ready for Sunday’s paper – if I’d never gone to Belfast. I tried to feel resentful about this but I knew it was all I deserved.
I didn’t deserve to write a story. Last week I’d walked in on the biggest scoop of my career and I was too scared to touch it. I ought to have written the piece of my life. I ought to have sat down that night in the Grania and tapped out Sunday’s splash. I ought at least to have called the police and given my statement. But I crept away from Hepburn’s gym and drove up the Antrim Road like a sneak, like a timid adulterer. The houses were dark. It felt as though I were fleeing the city, as though a great
catastrophe
were coming and instead of raising the alarm I was slipping out through a wicket gate. Whenever I eased off the clutch my knee juddered wildly. There and then I decided: I’m telling no one. Nobody knew where I’d been. It was an impulse that had taken me to Hepburn’s gym and not even Martin had known.
When I got back to Antrim on the night of Hepburn’s death the farmhouse was dark but the porch was aglow with yellow light, like a glassy Tardis. I filled a tumbler with whiskey – it was Bush, the same brand as Hepburn’s – and threw it back. I filled it again, right up to the brim, and carried it up to my room.
Next morning when I came down for breakfast Martin was hunched over the
News-Letter
, jabbing a fork at his plate like a painter stippling a canvas. I sat down at my place. Mrs Moir had made scrambled egg and the lumpy cooling mush on my plate – a morbid electric yellow – sent me scrambling to the sink. Afterwards I ran the cold tap and sluiced it all away, paddling my fingers in the mess to break it up. Then I turned my head beneath the icy flow.
In my sprint to the sink I had upset a chair. Sheepishly, I righted it and sat down. I must have a bug, I told Martin. I was sick, I was coming down with something. Martin buried his nose in his coffee and raised his
eyebrows
. He nodded to the worktop where the whiskey bottle stood beside its upturned cap. I gestured helplessly – the universal who-me shrug of the bang-to-rights
busted
. Moir went back to his paper.
After breakfast we took some air. In the stand of trees above the farm we caught our breath and lit stubby Bolivars. From up here the farmhouse looked forlorn and unconvincing, like the picture on a place mat.
‘Would you ever come back?’
‘You mean when the folks kick it?’ He frowned and rattled the matches in their box. ‘I don’t know. I doubt it.’
He dusted a patch of earth and eased himself down and lay back, propped on his elbows. ‘At one time I thought I would never come back. Or just for Christmas and
holidays
.’ He shielded his eyes from the sun. ‘Now? I don’t know. Things have changed, but still. Would you bring up kids here?’
‘No. I wouldn’t.’
‘Clare would never wear it anyway. It’s nice, though.’ He waved his cigar at the landscape. ‘All this. We moved out here when I was fourteen. My mum worried about security, the isolation. But of course it was much safer than town.’
They lived in Coleraine, he told me. When Moir’s father drove him to school in the mornings, he varied their route. A different permutation every day. As Moir threw his satchel in the back, his dad was on his knees on the pavement, checking the underside of the car. They didn’t go to restaurants in Coleraine. If they wanted to visit the swimming baths or the pictures they drove to another town. Sometimes they drove west, crossing the border. That was the tremendous irony that shadowed his childhood, the truth that the family could never acknowledge: the only time they felt safe, the only time they felt normal, was in the other country, the hated Free State.
‘The doorbell.’ Moir sat up, remembering. ‘From I was yay-high, from I was a tiny wee lad, I knew that the
doorbell
was trouble. The doorbell would ring and everything stopped. Ma turning off the telly. Da standing at the
window
, peering through the net curtains. It was the
postman
. Or the gasman. Or a guy with a red-white-and-blue rosette. And my da would stamp off down the hall to open the door, breathing through his nose.’
He sighed and stood up, squinting out to sea.
‘What’s the word, then?’ I said eventually. ‘What
happened
yesterday?’
Moir had seen him again, he told me: the ponytailed Scot, Maitland’s lieutenant. He dogged him from a
drinking
club in Donegall Pass to a coffee shop near the
university
and on to a crime bookstore on Botanic Avenue. The guy browsed the Elmore Leonards and bought a James M. Cain. Moir followed him to a spruce B & B on the Lisburn Road, waited in the car for half an hour and then came home. He couldn’t keep tailing the guy on the off chance that something might happen.
He stubbed his cigarillo on a tree. We walked back down to the farmhouse in silence. Finally, grudgingly, he asked for my own news. I told him about Emer Derwent. Yes, there was a second man and the man could well have been Lyons. But so what? How could she identify him at this distance? It was hopeless. Perhaps if the gunman was still around – he succumbed to lung cancer in 1999, a bare year after his release – there might have been a chance, but I’d been working on this story for over a week and all I had now was what I began with: a
photograph
and an old-fashioned hunch. I also had an
old-fashioned
body, a dead former Loyalist Godfather, but that wasn’t part of my story. We had come to the end of the line. ‘SLÁN ABHAILE’: I remembered of the words on the Ardoyne mural: ‘TIME TO GO’.
There’s something intimate about cowardice,
something
deeply and shamefully yours. A virtuous act is impersonal; it belongs to us all. ‘I just did what anyone would have done’ is the stock response of your have-a-go hero. But cowardly acts aren’t like that. They carry your tang, your DNA; they are knit tight into your flesh. When we boarded the ferry that afternoon my cowardice hung about me like the smell of shit. I was surprised that other people couldn’t smell it, didn’t shy away in righteous
disgust
.
I’d like to pretend there was some other motive. Some misgiving, a sense of propriety, some diligent qualm that stopped me writing about Hepburn. What I found in the kit-box, I might have decided, wasn’t a scoop or a page one lead. It was a dead human being. A human being who had stood me drinks and revealed his unexpected love of trees and – OK – cracked my face on the hood of a car and tried to extort a thousand pounds.
But I’m a journalist.
Isaac Hepburn was all of these things. Isaac Hepburn was also a story. His death in a sweat-stained boxing gym: that was my bread and butter. What stopped me was fear. If I wrote the story my status would change. I would cease to be a bystander, an impartial spectator; I would step into the story – if I wasn’t there already – and who knew what might happen? The kit-box wasn’t just Hepburn’s coffin: it was a portal, another
innocent-looking
stick of furniture – looking glass, wardrobe – that led you into a secret realm. In the stories, the hero tends to take a breather on this threshold, weighing the lures of alternate worlds, before pushing through to a fabulous fate. I paused too. But because I’m a coward and not a hero I gently lowered the kit-box lid and skulked away from the gym.
I had closed the door. I’d come home to Scotland, glad as hell to roll off the ferry onto Galloway soil. Still, though, there was a question of accounting, of tallying the cost. Financially, things were clear enough. I had squandered a couple of grand, depleting by another few mites the
Tribune
’s dwindling war chest, and I couldn’t come up with a story. I could live with that. The moral account, though, was less cut and dry. I had tramped through Belfast for a week, sowing confusion, salting old sores. Had I done any good? Had I left the city better than I found it?
The word ‘truth’ comes in handy at junctures like this. I’d been seeking the truth. But even the worst redtop goon, the crummiest door-stepping keyholing scum-sucker, was better than me. He didn’t pretend to be George Washington. He didn’t care about the truth. He hurt
people
. He messed up their lives. He boosted his paper’s sales. I hurt people too, but I hurt them in the name of truth, so that was OK. But the truth didn’t help Mrs Gillies. The truth didn’t help Emer Derwent. And nothing I did had made anything better.
I fetched a can of Coke from the vending machine and pressed it to my neck, rolling it backwards and forwards till the chill wore off and the can was slippy with sweat and condensation. Forget the whole thing is what I
wanted
to do. Go back to the turgid round of committee reports and Garden Lobby briefings and the childish
contentions
at FMQs. But when I turned to my empty screen I kept seeing Emer’s wee boy, poking out from behind his mother’s skirt, and I kept seeing a curly-haired man with a chubby little girl in his arms and wondering what he would do when the shutter clicked.
The story I wanted wasn’t the story of Hepburn’s death. The story I wanted was whatever had happened in 1983, whatever Peter Lyons had seen or done on the damp winter streets of Belfast. And that story was closed off, sealed up, a tin missing its label. I’d been close to the story – at times it had seemed like the fading shape of a dream or a word on the tip of my tongue – but I couldn’t reach it. I thought of the blank brick wall of the
Citizen
building, the blind frontage of the Northern Star Athletic Club. Belfast was that kind of place. You had to know what you were looking for before you could find it.
The cursor pulsed on the snowy screen. I didn’t even cover the death, Hepburn’s killing. We were on our way home when the story broke. Moir took a call on the ferry. He stalked off down the observation deck, slowing and speeding up and then slowing again as he took in the details. ‘We have to go back,’ he told me. ‘Turn right around and go straight back across.’ I spat over the
railing
. Ireland had vanished, the eye no longer able to
partition
land from sky. What good would it do? I asked him. Would it turn back time? Would we get there before the story broke? Face it, I told him: we’ve missed the story. We didn’t get the story we came for and we’ve missed the story we could have got. Let’s give it up as a bad job. In the end we had a bite to eat in Stranraer and drove on up to Glasgow.