by John Steele
He began shaking his head but she said, ‘No,’ with a force that stopped him dead. ‘I know I have looks, Jackie. If I’d been born somewhere else, I might have been able to do more with them. Jesus, if I’d been born a bit further up the road. But where I am, I make the best use of what God gave me.’
She was on her knees now, legs neatly folded under her.
‘Billy has guile and ruthlessness. Rab is a psychopath. Frankly, Jackie, I deserve them.’ She leaned forward and touched his lips. ‘But I don’t know what has brought you close to them. You’re smart, no matter how much you pretend otherwise. You’re hard when you need to be but you’ve no stomach for their violence.’
He felt suddenly exhausted. Used up.
‘You bring me here when you want me. And at the minute, when you’re finished you still want me. But that won’t be forever. Someday, I’ll not be enough for you to stay around. So you might fool yourself otherwise, but I’m no more than a good-looking fuck to you either, Jackie.’
Eileen kissed him before he could speak.
‘Don’t spoil this by lying. To me or yourself.’
Then she unfolded her legs, locked them around him, and salved the raw wounds of his existence.
CHAPTER 12
Friday
He doubts they are armed and counts his blessings. The Slavic man disappeared from Roselawn, but he and his companion were parked a few doors down and across the street from Sarah’s house as he left the wake. It was a good old Presbyterian wake, which is to say it was like the cliche of an Irish wake – loud, boisterous, plenty of craic – with tea and sandwiches instead of booze.
He’s thankful. He needs his wits about him now. He said his goodbyes with promises of a call later. Now, the two men are a couple of car lengths behind him on the Knock dual carriageway. He nears Belvoir Forest Park in the south-east of the city. As a young teenager, he would follow the river tow-path; five minutes along the path and you wouldn’t believe half a million people lived around you. Long grass, trees, a sheep meadow; then thick, silent forest, a favoured spot with joggers, dog walkers, lovers. It has had darker patrons too: bodies, some of them children, have been found buried beneath the trees or bobbing in the river.
He pulls the car into the parking area at the edge of the forest, locks it with the Ruger inside and takes off at a jog through the evergreens. He hears the tailing car crunch to a halt behind as he keeps a steady pace into the forest. Jackie thinks the men will follow because that is what Simpson would have told them: Keep the fucker in sight, don’tlose him. He listens for feet on the dirt path or snapping twigs onthe forest floor and hears only cloaking silence, so he slows his pace and crouches in a clump of tall grass. They are probably debating what to do, forestalling the inevitable. Perhaps Simpson is bawling them out on a mobile phone, screaming at them to follow.
Jackie is glad he resisted the impulse to bring the gun. It is an obvious advantage, but a liability against two men should he be overpowered. What he did bring is the jack from the car, which he pulled from the boot through the gap at the bottom of the rear seat back-rest. He’s confident they will not try to kill him: Tyrie is still breathing, the job not yet done.
Sound disturbs the perfect solace of the forest, a deliberate whisper of boot on dusty forest floor and hoarse, ragged breathing. He sees them walking through the trees like characters sneaking around in an old cartoon. They don’t appear armed, although they could be carrying concealed weapons.
When they are within spitting distance he stands and walks at a brisk pace from the grass and drives the car-jack into the base of the nearest man’s skull. The man crumples and begins screaming. His companion barks in a foreign language and freezes, stunned. Jackie approaches him at speed, seeing him flinch with each step, and batters the left side of his head with the blunt metal. This second man falls to his knees and begins sobbing.
He returns to the first man and delivers a sharp kick to the kidney. He has worked enough on their heads and knows it is much more difficult to render a man unconscious than most people think. Besides, he wants to deliver a message and needs at least one of them sensible. A final kick to the testicles is enough. Satisfied, he returns to the sobbing man. Blood covers the man’s face on one side. He looks terrified. Compliant.
Jackie brings the car-jack down on his right shoulder. Another scream follows.
‘Where are you from?’ he asks.
He is met with a shambles of foreign invective. Pink spit bubbles and flies from the man’s lips, mixed with tears and snot. Jackie slaps him hard across the face, avoiding the congealing blood on the battered skull.
‘Poland? Slovakia?’
‘Estonia.’
‘You work for Simpson?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘You’re following me for Simpson.’
It isn’t a question, but he kicks the man’s leg to get confirmation.
‘Yes!’ It’s a child’s cry, frantic.
‘Not any more. He asks you to follow me again, you say yes. Then you go for a drink. Go to the beach. Fuck your girlfriend.’
The man nods, eager. Jackie looks back at his companion, lying in a heap, shoulders rising and falling in exaggerated gasps.
‘Names.’
‘I am Petri, he is Ion.’
‘Give me your mobile phone, Petri.’
The man pauses, unsure. His fear of Jackie is wrestling with his fear of Rab Simpson.
‘Give me the phone or I’ll break your arms.’
He hands over his mobile.
Jackie says, ‘Do you know Shanty McKee?’
‘The junkie? Yes, I know him.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘Toronto Street. Number 42.’
Jackie nods, then glances at the fallen Ion. ‘If I see you or him again, I’ll kill you.’
‘I understand.’
He nods and walks back towards the car park, swinging the car-jack as he goes. It was a chance he’d had to take, confronting the men. The blow from the makeshift weapon looked bad but wouldn’t do lasting damage, and violence was a language everyone could understand.
Christ, I buried my father this morning, thinks Jackie.
#
The creature stares out from a pitted, ravaged face. A broken face on what is left of a broken man. His features have contracted as his teeth have rotted and fallen from his head, and his eyes look lidded and stupid. His ears seem huge as his skin has stretched, crawling over his skull and revealing the ugly skew of a broken jawline. The skin is old parchment, blistered and burned through in places, as though someone has taken a lit fag-end to it. The arms, covered in tattoos and track-marks, are sinewy threads hanging limp from a sleeveless vest.
Shanty McKee is a heroin addict.
Jackie says, ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’
A phlegmy cough. It could be a laugh. Shanty says, ‘You haven’t either. I recognised you soon as I saw you at the memorial.’
‘You must be, what, late thirties now, Shanty.’ He looks twice his age. ‘You’ll be dead in a year or two if you don’t knock this on the head.’
‘Sure, I’m dead already.’
Jackie is shocked by the change in the man, a withered wraith sitting in a living room bare save for a TV and battered sofa. The room is dominated by the blackened maw of a derelict fireplace strewn with fag butts and needles. Piles of dog shit are scattered around the carpet.
The back door was unlocked. Jackie had parked a few streets away, then sprinted through the rabbit warren of back alleys forming the spine of the terraced streets on the lower Ravenhill Road. Counting the wooden gates into the tiny back yards of the houses, he’d climbed over and been ready to force the back-door but it gave with a gentle push.
Shanty looks like he’d give with a gentle push himself. Fold in on himself, his ribcage snapping like the bones of a bird carcass, dried in the sun. The dog had greeted Jackie. No yapping or growling, just a brief sniff. He’d found Shanty in the living room, lying
with his back against the wall in a shaded corner holding a shoe-polish tin. There was a dirty brown mixture in the tin: heroin and water. Gollum and his precious.
‘Give us the needle, will ye? Once I shoot this skag, I’ll tell you anything you want.’
The drug slang sounds strange coming from the old-man face. Jackie has the needle in his right hand. He’s squatting on the carpet, down on his haunches. He doesn’t want anything but the soles of his boots touching the surface.
‘So you knew me soon as you saw me. Who’d you call to report? Petri? Ion?’
‘Them Russian boys live next to the One Stop?’
‘Estonian.’
‘Same thing. No, never had a word to say to them. They’re shit scared of Simpson, just work for him so they aren’t burned out of the road. ’Mon Jackie, give us the skag.’
Shanty scratches his left arm. His tattoos are blistered with track-marks and scabs. The Red Hand of Ulster on his upper arm is stretched and bloated, an infection festering beneath it.
‘Who did you report to when you saw me, Shanty?’
‘Ade, Adrian Morgan.’
‘Don’t know him from Adam.’
‘He’s from somewhere about the Holy Lands, near Queen’s. He supplies Rab sometimes.’
‘With drugs.’
‘Aye. Wingers, some heroin.’
‘Wingers?’
‘Y’know, ecstasy. Wingers. When you’re winged off your tits, like.’
Jackie examines the syringe he’s taken from McKee, just long enough for Shanty to get a good look at it, before he lets it dangle close to the floor.
‘Where would I find this Morgan? What’s he look like?’
‘He likes the Realm, the club near Botanic station. He’ll be there tonight. Beard, shaggy brown hair. Has a tattoo on his neck, some kind of Buddha thing. He’s young, mid to late twenties. Can I shoot up now?’
‘You were always a sleeked wee shite, Shanty. But working for Rab Simpson, after all the man did to you …’
‘Ach Jackie, you have to put things behind you and move on, isn’t that what all the politicians are telling us now? It’s all in the past.’
‘No Shanty, it’s all in here, isn’t it?’
Jackie taps the syringe, tosses it over and stands up. His joints crack. He watches, fascinated, as Shanty injects himself with the filthy water from the shoe-polish lid. The man pierces his ankle as his arms are used up. Shanty looks like he’s being eaten alive by a monstrous parasite.
Which, Jackie thinks, he is.
#
Eileen answers on the second ring. He can’t deny it still gives him a rush to hear her voice. Every man has his drug, he thinks.
They arrange to meet in the gardens of Belfast Castle as the first dark descends over the city.
Irish people laugh at Americans for so few of them possessing a passport, yet there are some natives of Belfast who have never seen swathes of their hometown. There are those in West Belfast who have never ventured five miles to the east, and vice-versa. This is why here, in the gardens of the Scottish baronial-style great house, the couple feel safe from detection.
Eileen looks more beautiful than he ever imagined, untouched by the years. Motherhood has given her face an angular edge – serene, he thinks – and the lines that bracket her mouth fascinate him. He is shocked to find how much he wants to kiss them.
‘You have kids,’ he says.
‘Two girls, Wendy and Claire,’ says Eileen, ‘sixteen and eighteen. And you?’
‘No. Probably just as well. I’ve moved around a lot since leaving.’
She glances at his hand. ‘The heart is still pointing out on your Claddagh.’
He keeps his counsel. In truth, he’s surprised by how intense it is being near her again. After a time, he says, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘For what?’
He is that wee boy in her presence again, stumbling over his words while she is poised, in control. ‘For going. No word. No goodbye.’
‘It was a long time ago. It wasn’t like people didn’t just disappear then. When we realised you weren’t dead, well, I was disappointed.’ She looks at the far eastern shore of Belfast Lough. ‘The betrayal was worse. Your betrayal of me. You weren’t the man I thought you were. You were no angel, but I thought you were better than them. And then, when it looked like you killed the others …’
‘Eileen, whatever I was in those days, the only time I felt like the man I wanted to be, was when I was alone with you.’
What would she think if she knew he’d been RUC? Would it be better? Would he be less of a fraud? Maybe she knows already. Billy and Rab have danced around it, but if they had contacts in the force, something could have leaked. Whatever the truth, she doesn’t ask why he ran.
He says, ‘I saw Billy. Claire’s godfather was with him.’
‘Mark,’ she says, ‘his name is Mark.’
‘Was Mark. If anything happens to yourself or Billy, God forbid, somebody else’ll have to step in to take care of your Claire, because Mark certainly won’t be doing it.’
He waits for a slap, physical or figurative, but none comes.
‘He can’t bear for another man to have me, but he can’t be bothered to touch me himself. I suppose two decades and a couple of kids, people do grow apart.’ She straightens the hem of her skirt. ‘He doesn’t know about us. Never even suspected. But he does think you were a tout.’ She studies his face. ‘You don’t have to worry. It’s all water under the bridge. He came out of Good Friday with a clean slate, like the rest of them. He doesn’t want to get his hands dirty again.’
‘And my da? If Billy suspected, why was he left alone?’
‘He was never a threat. Billy felt sorry for him, thought he’d been betrayed by you too, left alone in that wee house to rot.’
‘And he kept Simpson off my da too?’
She gives a soft snort. ‘Rab couldn’t have cared less about your dad. If it didn’t involve hurting Catholics or making money, it was a waste of his time.’
Twilight is advancing at speed now and the lights are blinking on across the city below. Jackie thinks of Shanty’s arms and says, ‘I saw Rab, too. He’s changed a bit.’
Eileen’s eyes flicker in the dying light of the day. ‘He was shot in the face. Some kind of feud with some cowboys over in West Belfast. He had reconstructive surgery. Had the money to iron out a few kinks while he was at it.’
She says she has tried to keep Billy’s past and present dealings as secret from her girls as possible, but now they’re older and beginning to suspect. She wants to get away now, spits out a brittle laugh as she remembers Jackie’s pleas for her to leave all those years ago. But it’s too late. She’s scared of what Billy might do, she’d have nothing, she’s too old to start over now.
Excuses, thinks Jackie. You’d be amazed how you can change the entire fabric of your life in a heartbeat when you don’t have a choice. He remembers the flight to England, relocation in a Home Counties town that felt like living in a retirement home. He petitioned for relocation abroad, took a posting with the Royal Hong Kong Police Force in the last days before the handover. A new world, huge and welcoming, that opened up and gripped him like Shanty and his drugs. He travelled; he consumed foreign lands, cultures, people, living his life in far-flung corners.
But now, in the deep, black pool of the lawns in front of the castle, with the lights scattered below as beautiful a sight as any he has seen in all his travels, he says, ‘Aye, well, I’d better get back into town.’
Her profile is like a cameo. You’re still a beautiful woman, he thinks. But you’re tainted, like the rest of us. And you’re the death of any man who thinks he can have you.
He turns and walks back to his car, conscious that despite this time together, he hasn’t felt the touch of her skin once.
CHAPTER 13
1993
Jackie fingered a revolver, heavy and reassuring, tucked under his left armpit. He didn’t usually wear a shoulder-holst
er, didn’t usually carry a gun on his daily business, but sitting in a car in the incendiary Short Strand, he felt better with a little loaded heft.
It was a chilly day, not like spring at all, in the first week of April. The Ravenhill bombing was over a month ago and some of the local boys felt it was high time for a response, but Billy was all about the long game and hitting IRA commander Cochrane when the time was right. So Jackie was sitting in a rented car, tarted up to resemble a taxi, waiting for Danny Moore to walk around the corner. Danny worked in the bus depot in the Short Strand. Jackie or Tommy could squeeze thirty to forty minutes of surveillance on Cochrane’s house at most. Their cover: a bored taxi driver waiting for his pre-booked fare to finish a shift at the depot. Danny, a Ravenhill man with quiet sympathies towards the UDA, worked there and could keep an eye on developments in the republican area for long stretches.
Jackie had never been in the RUC’s E4A so he was no surveillance expert, but he knew they were doing this as well as could be expected. Tommy and Jackie rotated static surveillance on Cochrane, never staying in one location for more than around forty-five minutes. At night they could use the roof of a building opposite which Danny had scouted.
But it was still anathema to Jackie. When the IRA shot a police officer, or any other poor bastard, it was almost always from behind.
The surveillance had yet to yield much. Like any good terrorist commander, James Cochrane was well aware of how many of his counterparts among loyalist factions, members of the security forces and, possibly, rivals in the republican INLA would sleep better at night knowing he was six foot under. He stringently avoided all routine and at night a reinforced door protected him, along with a couple of discreetly placed guards in their own parked cars.
Danny turned the corner and strode over to the car in his Citybus uniform, opening the passenger door and collapsing onto the seat.
‘How’s our boy?’
Jackie smiled. Danny wasn’t in the UDA, but was clearly enjoying the residual thrill.
‘I don’t think he’s at home. The wife was talking to a neighbour a few minutes ago and she looked happy enough. She looks pissed off when he’s there.’
