'No, I fucking don't! Christ.' He flicked at the butts and ash sticking to his shirt and jacket. Then he rubbed his tongue over the back of his hand, and made a sick face.
Mooney smiled wryly across the desk at me. 'That's one way to put him off smoking.'
I blew air out of my cheeks. I glanced at my watch. I nodded from one to the other. 'You're very good,' I said, 'but I think you're overplaying it.'
'Overplaying what?' Mooney asked.
'The good cop, bad cop routine. You see, you're being okay, but you . . .' and I nodded at Mayne, 'you're a bit over the top. You're too bad. And I really haven't done anything to justify it. I mean, are you always like this, or is it just me specifically?'
'He's always like this,' said Mooney.
I laughed. 'See, there you go, you're being the nice guy again. I think you need to work on your material.'
Mayne pointed a finger. 'I'll fucking work on you.'
'There you go again – right over the top.'
Mooney stood up. Mayne followed, but not before giving me another long, hard look.
'Well, thank you for your cooperation,' said Mooney.
'No problem,' I said.
They'd only been gone a few moments when Pat and Stephen appeared in the doorway.
'What'd they want?' Stephen asked.
I crossed to the window in time to see the two police officers cross the road to an unmarked car. They appeared to be shouting at each other. 'We've just been warned off,' I said.
'But we haven't started yet.'
'I know.'
They joined me at the window. 'The big one,' Pat said, 'he's a right wanker. We ran a story about police corruption last year and he blew a gasket.'
'You named him?'
'No, that's the point. We'd never heard of him until he came in threatening everyone.'
'Curious,' I said.
15
I phoned Toothless Bobby Malone and asked him what he was up to, and he said now wasn't a good time and hung up on me. He phoned back five minutes later and said now was a good time, but that time was money and he was saving up for a Ryan Jet and did I care to contribute. I said okay. I told him about my visit from Good Cop and Bad Cop and he laughed and said they were just protecting the case. I told him I'd heard Mayne was open to backhanders and he said, 'You're telling me this?' 'That's a different sort of backhander,' I said, and he said, 'Is it?' We were in danger of getting into a deep moral and philosophical discussion, so I cut him off at the pass by asking if he'd been able to turn anything up since Mouse's funeral.
He said, 'Yes, but I didn't have a number for you. You move around a lot, and the Telegraph said you were off with mental problems.'
'They said mental problems?'
'Nah, but I kind of guessed. Losing a mate can do that, fuck you up for a while.'
'So what do you have?'
'That it's a professional hit.'
'Professional as in . . . ?'
'As in it wasn't some amateur who left like a receipt for where he bought the petrol, or fingerprints on a door or his mobile lying around. As in there's been thousands of murders here in the last thirty years, but I can hardly think of any that weren't straightforward shootings or bombings. Someone went to a bit of trouble with this one. Tying him up and gagging him. Spreading petrol in specific points to make sure the whole building went up. We're not just talking careless smokers. One might say someone was making a point.'
I took a deep breath. 'Okay, what else?'
'Nobody's talking. Not the hookers outside, or any of the usual movers and shakers.'
'Because they don't know, or because they're scared?'
'I would say the latter, because someone always knows.'
'You'll be able to find out more?'
'It's not my shout. But if you'll settle for hearsay and gossip, I'm your man.'
'Someone was with Mouse in the office just before he died – I spoke to him.'
'I saw your statement.'
'So he must be on CCTV.'
'You'd think that, but you know how it is, there's so many hookers around there that most of the offices switch them off at nights so they won't get pulled into any legal shit every time some poor hornball gets arrested.'
'What about the post mortem?'
'I have the shortform version, it's the three lines they released to the press; the long form's proving a bit harder to come by.'
'Any reason for that?'
'Nah, I don't think so. I think they're just playing silly buggers.'
'Can they do that?'
'Pretty much. Tell you the truth, I'd have gotten more by now, but I've been off myself, what with my teeth an' all.'
'Which teeth would they be?'
'My brand new pearly whites. They've been like this for ever, but the wife finally had enough of watching me trying to eat a Crunchie sideways. The rest were pretty rotten as well, so I have a whole new mouthful. Big fucking op. But I've a smile like Tom Cruise now. Cost a fucking fortune.'
'I thought you were saving up for a Jet.'
'I was, but I had a discussion with my wife and she made a valid point – that you can't fuck a Jet.'
'I see,' I said.
'But now I'm back on the case, and if you'll see me right, I'll see you right.'
'I think we see eye to eye,' I said.
I left that night at a little after nine. There is a lot to putting a magazine together, and even though I'd worked like a dog, it somehow felt as if I hadn't really done anything besides push pieces of paper around. I wanted a cool beer and the sympathy of my wife. I was parked just outside the new Belfast Confidential offices. I climbed into the car, started the engine, and just as I was about to reverse there was a tap on my window; a thin, blonde, tattooed hooker was smiling in at me. I shook my head. She tapped again. I rolled the window down and said, 'Not tonight, love.'
She said, 'Your tax is out of date.'
I said, 'I know.'
She shivered.
I said, 'Cold, is it?'
And she held out a warrant card. She told me she was a police officer and she was arresting me for kerbcrawling. I said, 'Get away to fuck.'
She said, 'Also using foul and abusive language to a police officer, and resisting arrest.'
I said, 'You're winding me up.'
Then there was someone standing behind her. She glanced back, nodded, then moved to one side and there was Mayne, smiling sarcastically. He crouched down beside me and said, 'See, Starkey, how easy it is?'
I just kept looking. There were a million things I wanted to say, but sometimes you have to hold it.
'So take this as a little reminder, eh?'
He laughed to himself, began to straighten, then appeared to have a bright idea. He leaned in through my window. I thought he was going to take my keys, but he reached down past me and I moved back and closed my legs, thinking instead that he was going to give me a dig in the balls; but his hand stretched further, until his head and shoulders were half-through the window. He yanked out the ash tray and turned it upside down in my lap. Except the ash tray was empty. He turned it up to examine it, and I kind of laughed because it was such a stupid situation. He was embarrassed then, and sometimes when big men are embarrassed, they strike out. So he struck out, and clipped my forehead with the top of the ash tray, and I started to bleed. Then he gave me a wink and walked away, and the hooker, who wasn't, watched him go for a moment, then shook her head. She opened her handbag, took out a tissue and handed it to me. Then she clack-clacked away on her heels.
It wasn't a bad cut, but it was annoying. I drove home with the tissue stuck to my forehead and told Trish about my day. She showed admirable restraint by not asking about the tissue on my head. She knew it wouldn't take long for me to get there. A woman can tell you a story and you'll never need to say to her, 'Give me that again, but with more detail,' because it will all have been covered, twice. 'Half the staff walked out,' I explained, 'then the police came in and threatened me, a
nd then I nearly got arrested for kerbcrawling and then one of the original cops attacked me with an ash tray.'
She gave me a long look and said, 'Just another day at the office then.'
I nodded, and sat there, cradling my beer.
'Okay then,' she said. 'Let's just go over it once more.' And I knew that that was the rest of the night taken care of.
16
I was in a nightmare about my son, one of those ones where you know it's all in your head, but you can't get out of it. We were back on Wrathlin, and our son was dead and we were so devastated. Mouse was there, so I knew it wasn't real, and there was music in the background, from The Omen, which didn't help. Then miraculously my son was alive again, crying his little heart out in Mouse's arms, and we were so happy. Patricia and me and Mouse, we all hugged and kissed and bounced and the world was full of bright, vibrant colour and new, mystical Eastern sounds. Then as the images and sounds began to fade, the astonishing green of the island, the stiff, cool breeze, Patricia's laugh and Stevie's cry, I gradually became aware of our bedroom again, the vague furniture shapes in the dark and my wife's steady breathing, but there was still a vague memory of Little Stevie's crying. I didn't mind. It was comforting and familiar and I lay enveloped in its pleasant warmth, that lovely half-awake state that seems to last for ever.
Trish turned beside me, muttered something incomprehensible, then returned to sleep. I could still hear the crying. I listened, wondering if this was a dream within a dream. Then my wife of many years farted, and I realised it wasn't, but real, very real life; but the crying continued. Maybe it was a neighbour's baby and it was carrying in the silence of the night, the way a dog's bark will. Perhaps some anxious father was trying to distract a teething child by taking him out for an early morning walk. But it still seemed too close.
I rolled out of bed and padded across to the window. I slipped in behind the curtains and peered out.
And saw a Siamese cat in the middle of our soon-to-be-lawn. Moving in circles and crying like a baby. It pawed at the soil, hesitated, looked around, then pawed again.
Topper. Looking for little bro.
I turned from the window and slipped out of the room. I padded downstairs in my faded Carpenter Joe T-shirt and pair of black boxers. I opened the back door and hissed: 'Psssssss-wsssssssss, fuck off!' and waved my arms. Topper just looked at me. It was early autumn and cold with it as I stepped out onto the damp concrete patio and repeated the warning. Topper crouched down, but still refused to move. I went back into the kitchen and spent five minutes trying to find where we'd put the pepper-grinder when we unpacked. When I finally located it I hurried back outside, only to find that Topper had vacated the scene. I crossed the lawn in my bare feet anyway – I am of that punk school which believes that wearing bedroom slippers is a clear indicator of approaching death – and began to grind the pepper over the soil. Maybe it was an old wives' tale about cats and pepper, but I had to do something. I laid it on good and thick around where I supposed we had buried Toodles, though since we'd had some heavy rain in the past few days, the first shoots of grass were now beginning to pop up, and the ground had taken on a more uniform appearance so it was difficult to tell exactly where that grave was. I emptied the container nevertheless, then turned back to the house. I glanced up in time to catch my neighbour staring out of his bedroom window. He quickly ducked back in behind his curtains. I continued up the garden, trying not to imagine the conversation he was probably having with his wife. According to the clock on the kitchen wall it was 4.35 a.m. A perfectly reasonable time to be out peppering your garden.
An hour later and I was dressed and armed with coffee and sitting at the kitchen table looking at the seven names on the list Patrick and Stephen had drawn up. The important thing to remember was that it wasn't a list of suspects. It was just some names for me to think about. Neither was it a Rich List. Even calling it a Power List was a bit of a misnomer, because although several of the names were undoubtedly powerful in the traditional sense, others were only there because they were cool and trendy or had somehow captured the public's imagination in the preceding twelve months. They might still be there next year, or have disappeared back into well-deserved obscurity.
The first of the seven potential newcomers to the Belfast Confidential Power List then was the singer Kieren Kitt. He had been one fifth of West Bell, a boy band who'd chalked up half a dozen chart hits, before being thrown out after confessing to a drug habit in . . . Belfast Confidential. But instead of disappearing off the radar, he'd cleaned up, signed a solo deal and was now a huge star all across Europe. He was coining it in, although he still hadn't cracked America, where the really big bucks were. According to the boys' brief notes, the only dirt we had on him was that he insisted on a songwriting credit on his hits, even though he'd never written a note or a word in his life. I knew enough about the history of pop music to know that this was pretty common practice – because it was the songwriters who made the big money, not the performers.
The second name was Patrick O'Brien, owner of Past Masters, just about Belfast's only private members' club. The boys had written: Exclusive, snobby, expensive, but the place to be seen. Mouse was a member, and quite a few off the Power List as well. O'Brien likes to give the impression of being loaded, but Companies House shows he's just about breaking even.
The third name was Christopher 'Concrete' Corcoran – and the first name so far at which I could have pointed the finger and shouted, 'He did it!' without having a shred of evidence to connect him. Concrete was a West Belfast hard man, equally at home with bomb or bullet who, when things got too hot for him in the city, moved to the country where, instead of retiring to tend cows, he set about putting the 'Bandit' into 'Bandit Country'. The end of the fighting had proved a windfall for him. Buying a farm which literally straddled the border, he'd found a hundred ways to use its position to smuggle goods back and forth – petrol, DVDs, computers, guns – whatever was cheaper on one side or the other.
With the Army mostly gone, and police checkpoints politically contentious, Concrete had had virtually free rein for a few years to build up his many and nefarious businesses. The cops were at last making some kind of an effort to put him away, but he was difficult to pin down. He claimed he was just a farmer trying to make an honest living. I knew all of this not just from working as a journalist, but because it was common knowledge. The boys' note merely said he was thought to be responsible for one in every three CDs and DVDs sold in the Province, and almost half of all the designer-label clothes available in the country were probably bootleg copies imported by him.
The fourth name was Jacintha Ryan. In brackets after it, the boys had merely written: Cars! Production of her high-spec sports car, the RA Jet, was due to begin once her state-of-the-art factory was built in West Belfast. She'd told me she was 'giving something back' to the land of her birth. She was rich and successful and Mouse, driving about the city in his prototype Jet, was one of the best adverts she could have.
The fifth name was Liam Miller, and my first thought was that the boys were joking, because Miller was the kind of card-carrying charlatan that gave card-carrying charlatans a bad name. He had allegedly trained as a psychiatrist, but had developed into a kind of all-round lifestyle guru with his own UTV chat show – 'the empowerment hour' he called it – dispensing medical, social, DIY, gardening and horoscopic advice in a twee, ingratiating manner which had, inexplicably, become hugely popular. People really loved it, and many a slack-jawed woman lived her life according to Liam Miller's pronouncements. If you didn't get enough of the TV show, he was also constantly on sell-out tour, and if you couldn't make the gig there was always the book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Donaghadee. He was a purely local phenomenon, and I suppose you had to admire him for what he had achieved with such obviously limited talents. Trish swore by him. 'There's that fucker on TV again,' she would say. Was he the sort to phone Mouse up and say:' Stop your fucking interfering or you're a dead bunny'?
More likely: 'Stop your blessed interfering or I'll come round and pebble-dash your house.'
Numero six was the ex-Liverpool striker Terry Breene. I'm a Liverpool fan, so Terry, the boy from the backstreets of Belfast who went on to wear the number ten shirt at Anfield, was always a bit of a hero. That was in the early 1980s, of course. His career was finished by injury prematurely, and he drifted for a few years, became a fixture of the tabloids for his sex 'n' drugs 'n' easy listening lifestyle before cleaning up and getting back into football, managing a succession of smaller English clubs with varying degrees of success, including one (losing) FA Cup Final. After his last club fired him he'd lain low for a while before suddenly re-emerging in Belfast, using his not-inconsiderable fortune to purchase Linfield Football Club, that fiercely Protestant outfit which plays at our national stadium, Windsor Park. Like all new managers and owners he had predicted a bright new future for the club, but it was early days yet. Good material for the Power List? Well, potentially. Anything against Mouse? No idea.
The final name was the one I'd written. May Li. We would have to tread carefully. I'd already asked the boys to run a background check on her, but it wouldn't do any harm to check her out myself. Feed her a few glasses of wine, see if I could loosen her tongue at all. Maybe she'd let something slip, maybe . . .
'Dan?' I snapped around to find Trish standing in the doorway. 'What are you doing?' she asked.
'Nothing,' I said.
'You're staring into the void and you've got that kind of ecstatic look you get when you're lost in a sexual fantasy.'
I laughed. 'Bollocks. I'm thinking about murder.'
'Well, whatever turns you on.' She came across the kitchen, tying her dressing-gown, then filling the kettle again. She yawned. 'So, how's it going?'
I turned the sheet of paper round to show her. 'Well,' I said, 'I've narrowed it down to the seven names I started with.'
Belfast Confidential Page 10
