11
Parker realized we were being followed shortly after leaving Red Hall.
I'd told him to stop the car up the road a bit from the Alliance headquarters so that I could use a public phone to call Patricia. I directed him into a shopping centre on the town's ring road and he pulled up in a no-waiting area in front and I hopped out. I found a phone just inside the door but I'd no change so I crossed into a jumble of bric-a-brac market stalls which preceded the main retail area. I stopped at a paperback bookstall and was searching my wallet for some paper money when I noticed a rack of cassette tapes for sale. I still had the tape Margaret had given me in my pocket, so I fished it out and asked the man behind the counter if he was buying.
He eyed the box vaguely, then wrinkled his eyes at it and for me. 'Not much of a demand for crap like that' he said.
'I'm only looking for a pound.'
'Keep looking.'
'50p.'
'Done.'
'You drive a hard bargain,' I said. It was all profit for me, of course. Killer profits from lover's music collection.
I called Patricia at her parents' house. Joe answered the phone. From in-law to outlaw in a matter of hours. No, she wasn't in.
'Uh, Dan, she's out. She went out.'
'You know where?'
'You know her. She doesn't say. Even as a child, Dan -where you going? Don't know. What you doing? Don't know. What you want for dinner? Don't care. Says I, don't care was made to care. Says she, piss off. What can you do?'
'What sort of form's she in?'
'Okay. Bit mopey really. I expect she'll be home to you soon, son.'
I felt a sick chuckle in my throat. Sure, Joe, sure. Home sweet home.
He said: 'You okay, Dan? You sound a bit down yourself.'
'I've been better, Joe. Listen, tell her I called, will you? And I'll call back.'
I went back to the car. We drove back out onto the ring road. Parker had been giving me a hard time over what he saw as my poor performance at Red Hall. He said I shouldn't bring my obvious problems to work with me. I wasn't in a mood to argue; he'd really know all about it if I brought my stiffening problems to work with me.
It was getting towards dusk and the traffic was fairly light; a shepherd's delight sky gave a marvellous hint of summer and The Adverts' 'Gary Gilmore's Eyes' was on the radio. It would have been quite pleasant if I hadn't been practically a triple killer. Somewhere out there Margaret's dad was on a life support machine.
Why hadn't she mentioned that her dad was someone important? David McGarry was a decent enough bloke. I'd interviewed him a few times. Even had a drink with him. He'd written a couple of plays which had enjoyed a quiet success in the Lyric theatre in Belfast though they'd been shot to pieces in London and Dublin. Knockabout comedy with a hint of social grime: Ray Cooney meets Vaclav Havel. She hadn't even given me a hint; she'd mentioned her dad a few times, even joked once about something being off the record. No photos of him in her house. Just her mother.
An admirable independence of thought, perhaps: not wishing to take advantage of her father's fame or name, slight as it was; determination to make it on her own. Maybe it was nothing of the sort. Maybe she thought his position might scare me off. Maybe she thought I might take advantage of her position to get to her father. Maybe it didn't matter much any more. She was on ice, her mother was on ice and the Alliance Party's finance spokesman was tugging at the door of the freezer.
Parker's unfamiliarity with driving on the correct side of the road meant he was keeping an eagle eye on the traffic around him.
He said: 'I have an idea we're being followed.' He said it very matter-of-factly, like it happened all the time. I could feel our car beginning to speed up.
I looked round and Parker shouted: 'Don't make it so obvious!'
'Whaddya want me to do? I've no eyes in the back of my bloody head.'
There were three cars behind us; two directly and one coming up faster in the outside lane.
'Two reds and a white. Which one? The red about to overtake us?'
He shook his head slowly, eyes in the mirror ... 'No, not the Jap. Not the Yugo. The Fiat.'
'Either way it's a sad reflection on the state of the British car industry,' I said and sat back in my seat. 'Mr Parker, never take your job so seriously that you think someone might want to follow you because of it. You're not that important.'
And the little voice said to me: they're after me. It has started.
'I'm serious.' His eyes were darting from front to wing mirror and our speed was still picking up. You can do a fair rate of knots in a Saab. The Fiat was keeping pace with us.
Which was odd for a Fiat. I noticed it behind us just after eaving Brinn but paid no heed. Then it turned into the shopping mall with us and waited about a hundred metres down the car park. Then when we left it followed.'
I tucked myself further down in my seat and turned lightly more discreetly back so that I could just see he car around the leather headrest. It was a Fiat Panda and it sounded like it had been souped up for rallying. There were four people in it. Four men. It was difficult to be sure, they were lying about thirty yards back, but hey didn't look like police. Even fastidiously turned-out plainclothes cops look like cops, albeit fastidiously turned out.
'Maybe they've never seen a black man before.'
The first shot shattered the rear window.
Glass showered over the back seat. Somebody shouted Holy fuck' and it was a split second before I realized that hat disembodied voice came from me. I could see powdered glass on the back of Parker's tight black hair.
Parker pulled the wheel savagely to one side and we half mounted the kerb. We began mowing the wild grass verge it speed, Parker's foot full down now on the accelerator, he was hunched down beside the wheel so that his eyes could barely see the road before him. I was down there with him. In movies you sometimes hear amplified heartbeats at times of particular tension. There was nothing Hollywood about this. I could hear Keith Moon playing the bongos in my chest.
I chanced a dwarf glance back and saw the Fiat beginning to draw level. It had moved to the outside lane for the shot it us and was now angling in to stop us dismounting from he verge. A skinhead with a pistol was leaning out the window, waving the gun and shouting, but the roar of his jwn engine was taking his words away. He had the letters FTP etched on his forehead and a wild drunken leer on his face. He couldn't have been more than eighteen years old. But you don't need the key to the front door to kill someone.
Parker's white eyes, wide and scared, darted towards me, but his face cracked in a defiant grin. 'Traffic cops?' He shouted.
Before I could answer he threw the car sharply to the left to avoid a bus stop planted solidly in the centre of the verge and we were fully on the footpath; the Fiat moved closer to the verge as the skinhead raised the gun again to fire.
Abruptly Parker slammed on the brakes and we skidded to a halt in a cloud of torn grass, brakes squealing like cows in an abattoir. The Fiat shot past us, tried to brake too fast on too little tread and somersaulted onto its back.
Parker clapped his hands together and yelped. The Fiat was still spinning when he pushed the Saab into gear and raced across the verge towards our assailants.
I screamed: 'What the fuck are you doing?'
The car bounced down off the kerb; he corrected the slight hitch in trajectory and aimed it dead centre at the Fiat.
'Hey,' he said, 'I'm from New York. We do this for breakfast.'
We rammed the side of the car, slamming shut a door which had just begun to open. It crumpled inward and I heard a high-pitched scream from inside.
'They've got fucking guns,' I yelled.
Once was enough for him. Parker slipped the car into reverse and circled back and away. We were about a hundred yards away when the Fiat's driver's door opened and a leather-jacketed youth tumbled out, raised himself on one knee and aimed a gun at us. From that distance they sounded like caps in a toy gun. He missed.
'Jesus Christ,' I said.
'People swore to me when I came here I wouldn't see any action. They swore.'
'I've lived here thirty bloody years and I still haven't seen any action. You're just lucky.'
'What do you reckon that was in aid of?'
'God knows. Charity week.'
We were driving back down the way we had come. Parker indicated left as we approached the shopping centre again.
'This doesn't seem like a sensible time to think about doing the shopping, Parker. They may still be after us.'
'We should call the police, or the army, or whatever goddamn militia you have that deals with this sort of thing.'
'In cases like this we call the Boys' Brigade. They can handle anything as long as you don't fuck with their lamps.'
Parker stopped the car and said: 'What?'
I shook my head. I was blabbering.
'I don't think it would be a good idea to call the police.'
'Why?' He stared into my face. 'We've just been shot at. We could be dead.' His eyes narrowed suddenly. 'You think they were the police?'
I shook my head. 'They were Protestant paramilitaries.'
'Protestant? How can you tell?'
'Two ways, really. One: they fucked up. Proddies have a habit of fucking up operations like this. They outnumber the IRA ten to one but couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery. Correction. They usually do organize a piss-up in a brewery before they try anything and that's why they fuck it up.'
'And two?'
'The skinhead who shot at us. He had FTP written on his head.'
'FTP. Tattooed? What's it mean?'
'No, just written. Like with a felt pen. It stands for Fuck the Pope. It's a dead giveaway. Actually, they're improving. Usually they can't spell FTP.'
Parker lit a cigarette. It was the first time I'd seen him smoke. His hands weren't shaking. He offered me one. I turned it down. Mine were.
'But why on earth shoot at us? What did we do to them? They couldn't have mistaken us for Alliance workers, could they? Maybe that's it. A political attack in the run-in to the election.'
I said nothing.
'Why not call the police, Starkey?'
I closed my eyes. Rubbed my brow. Scratched my nose. I had no idea why they attacked us. But it wasn't a case of mistaken identity, of that I was sure. It was me they were after and in some way it was connected to what had happened to me over the last few days. Paranoid. Paranoid. Paranoid.
Parker asked again: 'Why not call the police, Starkey?'
I turned to face him. 'It's a short story,' I said.
We sat there in the car park and I told him everything that had happened to me over the past few days. He went through most of a packet of cigarettes as I went over it again and again. Confessional. It wasn't a case of getting it out of my system. It would always be in my system. But it was a relief to tell someone.
When I had finished Parker rolled his window down and spat. 'I hate cigarettes,' he said. Exhaust fumes smelt refreshing.
'That's quite a story,' he said.
‘I wish it was a story. But it's fact.'
‘I can see why you mightn't want to call the police. Still, you don't know that they were after you. They could have thought we worked for the Alliance. That's the obvious conclusion.'
'They could.'
'But we still can't call the police.'
'No.'
'So what then? Are you going to go on the run? You seem pretty certain that they'll be after you.'
'I don't know. I've never been in this situation before.' And I laughed. 'Stupid, isn't it?'
'Of course you could be a double killer.'
'I could.'
'And there's no reason why I should believe you.'
'Nothing besides the close, trusting relationship we've built up over our years of working together.'
'Apart from that.'
'You could always make a citizen's arrest.'
'There's that.'
'And it would make a good story for your paper. Whatever you do, it will make a good story for your paper.'
'It will.'
'Of course it would make a better story if you could track down the real killers.'
'There's that.'
We sat in silence. The car park was beginning to empty as darkness descended. It was a little before 10 p.m. Parker switched the car radio on and we listened to 'Alternative Ulster' by Stiff Little Fingers until the news came on. There was little extra information. Two police officers had been bitten by Patch as they entered the upstairs bedroom where the bodies were found. The cold-blooded killer had apparently eaten a meal in the house after the killings. David McGarry was in a critical condition in a private hospital. There was an emotionally charged interview with Brinn in which he promised that whoever was responsible would be found and that 'this act of mindless depravity only strengthens my resolve to bring a lasting peace to this Province'.
Parker said: I'm going to have to think about this. I honestly don't know what I should do.'
'I didn't do it. I didn't kill Margaret. Her mum - it couldn't be helped. It was just a crazy accident.'
'I don't think you did it, Starkey. It would just have been an awful lot simpler if you had.'
'Sorry.'
'That's okay. It says a lot for marital fidelity.'
'It does. And I need a drink.'
'We could go to a bar.'
We went to a bar and had a drink. Neither of us enjoyed it. I was sure everyone was looking at me.
'You're a well-known columnist. Maybe they recognize you.'
'No. They can tell. I know they can tell.'
'Look on the bright side. You can write about it after it's all over. Do you not feel a column coming on?'
'Last time I said that in a bar I nearly got arrested.'
‘I wouldn't mention getting arrested. Bad luck.'
The bar was filling up now as last orders approached. I left Parker to order another drink and went and found a phone. I called Patricia. Joe answered.
'Hi, Dan. Yeah, sure, she's here.'
Oh, God, here we go. Patricia, did you kill my girlfriend? Is that how to approach it, or skirt round the issue to see if she gives anything away?
'Stick her on, would you?'
Sure. Oh, hold on. Trish? Trish! Hold on, she's just away to answer the front door. Just be a moment.'
Joe set the phone down and I could hear him padding off. And then in the distance, a hundred miles distant, I heard a high-pitched scream, a shattering of glass and a gunshot and someone in a weak, weak voice saying, 'Patricia, Patricia .. . Patricia?' and that someone was me.
12
Parker booked me into a guesthouse in South Belfast. It had seen better days, but then so had I. Three floors and an all-enveloping smell of boiled cabbage. Twelve pounds a night, breakfast included, in advance. The breakfast wasn't in advance. If it proves anything it proves I retained my sense of humour. I'd little else left. Parker said he'd find out what he could and get back to me as soon as possible. I don't know what he expected to find out when I was the one that knew the city backwards. I wasn't much help. I was having trouble thinking straight. I was thinking curved.
I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. A lot of people must have done that in that depressing room, lonely, miserable people. A ceiling which had once been cream was stained yellow with nicotine. When I moved, the bed squeaked. It wasn't the sort of establishment where the beds enjoyed a lot of nocturnal movement; the only thrashings that kept the neighbours awake were nightmare-fuelled.
I was booked in under the name of Paul Cook. He was the drummer in the Sex Pistols. I owed Parker twelve pounds for the room and another hundred pounds for the telephone I smashed to pieces in the bar in Bangor, plus my grateful thanks for getting me out of there before being beaten to a pulp by a couple of bouncers with an over-protective attitude to newfangled equipment . . .
There was a small black and white television in on
e corner of the room. The reception was poor. There was a brief interview with Margaret's next-door neighbour. Only the back of her head was shown out of fear for her safety.
She recalled her sleep being disturbed by a man screaming, 'You f 'n' move and I'll kill you.' She'd thought about calling the police but had fallen back asleep while thinking about it. A police inspector reiterated that a major manhunt was under way and the killer or killers would be apprehended, but said that he couldn't reveal if any specific lines of inquiry were being followed for operational reasons. They repeated the interview with Brinn I had heard on the radio earlier, and added to it condemnations from the other legitimate political parties of any importance, the Unionists, the Social Democrats and the Conservatives. Government restrictions stopped them broadcasting the actual voice of a Sinn Fein councillor, but his words were read out by the newsreader. He denounced the killings as sectarian but blamed them on the continued British presence in Ulster. The reporter, in a concise piece of supposition, suggested that it was an attempt by the paramilitaries to disrupt the elections.
No one mentioned my wife. It was early days for that yet. Patricia was dead. That much was obvious. Possibly her father. Possibly her mother. Parker had gotten enough sense out of me to find out exactly where her parents lived and had stopped at the first phone box we could find after escaping from the bar and phoned the police. He had spoken to them in a truly appalling Irish accent. They would be staking out the house now, fearful of an ambush. When they went in they would probably find it smashed up. There might be a body, or two, or three, but they wouldn't approach them until they had made sure they weren't booby-trapped.
I drifted off into a sweat-drenched sleep. Some time during the night I found myself walking along a dirt track in the deep south of the US. There was a huge black man painting the front of a small cottage a heavenly shade of blue. As I got closer I realized that it was Parker. When I reached his rickety garden gate he climbed down from the ladder and stood back to admire his work. I was about to apologise to him for my earlier unintentional comments about his receding hairline when I noticed that he had missed a spot or two of paint up in the top right-hand corner of the cottage.
'Bit of a bald spot there,' I said.
Divorcing Jack Page 9
