The Psalm Killer

by Chris Petit

  As she moved beneath him, physically joined but off in a world of her own, Cross found that each thrust took the form of an unwelcome question in his bursting head. How often? Where? For how long? Who? She sometimes went away, more frequently recently, for a night or two at a time, to conferences, she said. He wondered how many of them had been excuses. He drove at her harder, to blot out his despairing thoughts and Deidre responded, locking her legs round his back to take him deeper. Tight anger dominated the building tension to their release. Deidre’s loud shrieks of abandon took him by surprise. She was usually quiet because of the children.

  Afterwards they avoided each other’s eye. Their desperate coupling had left him even more wary.

  When Cross found he could not sleep he got up and checked on the children. Fiona was rolled into a ball on the bottom bunk, hardly visible under the blankets. Mattie lay on his back, uncovered. Cross rearranged his bed-clothes and stood watching, calmed by their quiet breathing.

  He took a whisky and sat in the living room – the drawing room as Deidre preferred. Her family had provided the luxuries. Their money had paid for the Liberty furniture, as it would no doubt pay for the children’s education. None of it felt like his. Even the house, in a well-to-do enclave that he could not have afforded on his own, was bought with the help of the O’Neills. It left him feeling like a tenant in his own marriage.

  His own background was far more modest. He had been raised in the drizzle of 1950s suburban lower-middle-class conformity, his father the voice that announced over the tannoy at Bristol’s Temple Meads station.

  His mother, after the agony of his birth, could never face another. Cross had overheard her say so. In his presence, unspoken conversations hung in the air, restricted to commonplace observations, a habit he had unintentionally carried on into his family. He wondered if his children would grow up feeling that they had been similarly censored. Perhaps his own memories of himself as a child prevented him from loving them as he should – watchful, secretive and untrusting, eavesdropping, prying into grown-up drawers, searching for some clue that would explain the tedium of the house to him. He knew his parents were different when he wasn’t there, like the time he had found them dancing to Doris Day singing ‘Que Sera Sera’ – evidence of another life, spoiled by his entry.

  At night he lay under his blankets listening to Radio Luxembourg on a cheap transistor with an earplug. Station interference made him feel like he was beaming into a forbidden world of American songs that conjured up an infinity of space to set against the confinement of his room. He dreamed of riding the railroads. They would move to Arizona where his stetsoned father, marshalling freight in Santa Fe, would become a source of pride.

  The radio that fired these dreams was his greatest treasure, stolen off a boy at school. He was never suspected and never confessed, and luxuriated in the guilt, which he accommodated better than the vague sense of shame his parents inspired in him during pointless Sunday afternoon drives – the mobile equivalent of the static boredom of the household. He remembered the shock of once seeing his mother naked, on opening the bathroom door she had forgotten to lock, and not being able to understand what she was doing. Years later he realized she had been sitting on the edge of the bath masturbating. Once or twice a year he heard his parents’ bed creaking.

  There had been Mass every Sunday with his mother who went out of Catholic duty, while his father lay in and Cross worried that he wouldn’t see him in heaven. He felt a frustration he could never articulate, beyond feeling that life would go on like that always, never getting better or worse. Waiting at bus-stops in the rain.

  He became a policeman by chance, through being friendly with a young constable who asked him to make up the numbers in a local cricket team. Cricket was the only sport he ever showed any aptitude for. Cross, bored with school and desperate to leave home, applied for the force and was accepted.

  At the scene of his first murder he learnt something about himself. A woman had been brutally knifed to death by her drunken boyfriend in a house in a street that Cross had walked down every day on his way to school. He expected to be horrified by what he saw but found himself quite calm. The sad messiness of an interrupted life, the graphic evacuation of violent death, the aftermath of murder, all drew him until the scene stuck to his mind like glue, as though he had been waiting all his life to find himself in a room like this and for the discovery of such naked emotion. He needed passionately to know what could have caused this dark spill of violence, in such contrast to the bloodlessness of his own existence. He wanted to understand. He wanted to know the man who had done it and, above all, why.

  7

  HIS childhood was a solitary one spent in the fields of East Anglia, trapping rabbits and hunting coypu, scanning the horizon for movement. After the big skies and childlike openness of the Fens, where everything could be read from a distance, Belfast was a maze to get lost in, where the darkest deeds stayed secret. After a lifetime outdoors, he found himself drawn to the dark interiors of Belfast. After he had done with Herron he realized there was nowhere else to go.

  So lonely baby. It was the only song for him. I found a new place to dwell. He remembered the first time he had heard the message, coming to him over the airwaves. It was on his parents’ radio while they were out and he had got up and searched through the dial until he found it: so lonely baby. His father wouldn’t allow it and called it the devil’s music and beat him if he caught him listening. So lonely I could die.

  His background conformed to a pattern often found in his kind: a history of childhood abuse, parental violence, cruelty to animals, an absence of nurture. There were spells in orphanage-type approved schools, hangovers from a stern Victorian tradition of hypocrisy, where he suffered the humiliation of men inserting their things up his anus and beatings, and after that the army, where he fought back. He was the wild card that could result from an institutionalized upbringing: the unreadable and unknowable beneath the surface conformity. Army training, combined with his canny feel for the lie of the land, honed his lethal skills. Being an agent for others he found easy: he felt immune from people anyway, watching them like they were through a window. Lying was easy too, as he didn’t understand what truth was beyond what the naked eye took in. A dying animal caught in a gin trap, watched with intense curiosity, was nothing beyond what it was: a dying animal. Sometimes when he looked at these creatures afterwards he realized that they had been damaged, but he had no memory of how they came to be like that. He saw nothing wrong in this behaviour – it was merely an illustration of what he felt others did to him. Just as some people painted or wrote to express themselves, he destroyed things. But it took time to understand that this was his vocation.

  When he arrived in Belfast he knew there was something still missing about himself and waited to discover what it was. He wondered if it mightn’t connect with the sense of secrecy that pervaded his childhood, the time spent watching, waiting, hidden. He found what he was looking for in the clouded eye of a tortured man. The dumb, uncomprehending pain of the animals he killed was replaced by a terrible sense of recognition in the eye of his beholder that he was facing his nemesis. Now and at the hour of our death. He knew then that his destiny was destruction, killing people. Had he stayed in England he might have avoided this awful calling, but let loose in the grand labyrinth of Belfast, with its tortuous history, he became magnificent. Killing was something – the only thing, perhaps – he was very good at and when it worked it was accompanied by an insight so intense that it blinded in its revelation. Now and at the hour of our death. So lonely baby.

  Nowhere else to go, except in deeper.

  8

  BLAIR was Special Branch, working out of Cross’s barracks, a tall, sharp-faced man of thirty whose well pressed trousers fell short of his over-polished shoes. Cross was in awe of Blair’s huge hands and feet, and whatever trick it was that let you see the menace behind his jokes. He wore his rigid plain clothes like a uniform of arrogance,
and crowned the ensemble with an unlikely biker’s quiff which contradicted the sober double-vented blazer and grey slacks. If anything, Blair looked like an off-duty footballer, the hard man of the defence.

  He came to Cross’s office, something he had not done before, ostensibly to congratulate him on the outcome of his hearing, which he regarded as an example of the kind of bureaucracy the RUC could do without. Blair was a realist. Given the vacillations of Westminster, someone had to take the war to the IRA.

  ‘What do you think, skip?’

  He called everyone that. Cross shrugged and wondered about the real purpose of the visit.

  ‘Who’s the wee lass?’ asked Blair, pointing to a Polaroid on the notice board. It was a hospital picture of the young woman who had crashed the Range Rover. It showed her clean of make-up, hair flattened by the pillow. She looked about thirteen.

  Blair turned to Cross in surprise. ‘She’s the one that led the patrol boys such a dance? She looks like she’s about to receive holy orders.’

  Cross said they were still trying to identify her. He was surprised no one had come forward. In a tight-knit community like Belfast it was usually only a short time before someone did.

  ‘I hear she ran down some bum,’ said Blair.

  ‘The bum was already dead. He’d been dumped.’

  Dumped bodies suggested sectarian, said Blair.

  ‘Unclaimed. Why bother killing some bum?’

  ‘Unless he’d strayed into an army night patrol and got shot by mistake.’ The possibility struck Blair as funny and he gave a hee-haw laugh.

  ‘He wasn’t shot.’

  ‘Then it was probably some martial arts cowboy.’

  Just his luck if the dead man turned out to have been killed by some over-keen psychotic corporal, Cross thought, and tried to reassure himself that army cover-ups did not yet extend to housing corpses in barracks’ deep freezes.

  ‘Let me talk to the boy,’ said Blair with a loose smile, and Cross realized why he was there. He had heard that Blair ran informers and sniffed around the cells for kids to turn. It was a world everyone knew about but preferred to pretend did not exist.

  The two detectives that came to Vinnie’s cell were not the ones who had questioned him before. They asked if he was going to co-operate and he said yes, without knowing why. They said no more and left.

  When they came back Blair told Vinnie to come with them. Instead of taking him to the interview room, they went outside to a car park at the back of the building.

  ‘Here’s your things,’ said Blair. It was the stuff they’d taken away at the desk. Vinnie inspected the scuffed plastic bag cautiously.

  ‘Are you saying I can go?’

  ‘What about a wee drink to celebrate?’

  ‘Is that an offer I can’t refuse?’

  The two men stood grinning like he was some sharp wit. Blair said, ‘The spitting image of Al Pacino.’

  Vinnie felt obscurely pleased. He fancied the resemblance himself.

  They drove to a pub near the city centre with Vinnie ducked down on the back seat as they left the barracks. The two men behaved like everything was normal, talking about a film they had seen. They asked if Vinnie had seen it too. He had and didn’t remember it very well.

  ‘You can call me Heinz, by the way,’ said Blair. ‘Did you like that film? I expect you’re not easily scared by a wee bit of horror, a wild boy like yourself. Me, I was peeking through my fingers.’

  Vinnie wondered what kind of joke name Heinz was. The man’s hair reminded him of old Teddy Boy photographs of his father.

  The other one said, ‘After the shite we deal with there’s nothing like a horror flick for comic relief.’

  ‘This is Eric.’

  Eric was younger, though the paleness of his eyes gave him a look of weariness that made him seem older. Vinnie tried to remember the name of the girl he had seen the film with.

  They toyed with him before getting down to business, drawing him into their idle conversation, letting him get light-headed on lager and appreciate the easy atmosphere of the bar. The word informer was not used, but none of them was under any illusions.

  ‘Hey, I’m no tout,’ said Vinnie, and protested his innocence until Blair interrupted.

  ‘It’s not as simple as that. What about the amnesty you signed?’

  ‘I signed no such thing.’

  He felt queasy. How did they know?

  ‘A wee word to the boys that you were joyriding again and you’re limping for the rest of your days.’

  ‘Or we lock you up,’ Eric chipped in. ‘And there’s no telling how long. We can lose you in the system for years. And that’s before you even come to trial.’

  ‘The Rah’d never let me near them with my record,’ said Vinnie.

  ‘We’ll think of something.’

  ‘They despise us hoods.’

  ‘Weren’t you in the Fianna?’

  ‘And got thrown out.’

  The Fianna was the boys’ section of the IRA. Their knowledge of the amnesty and the Fianna made Vinnie see that they already had him boxed in.

  Eric leaned forward. ‘Spelling it out in simple letters. One, go to prison. Two, you walk out of here, we tell the Provos and you’re broken legs. Three, stick with us and mum’s the word.’

  They droned on, as insistent as a couple of metronomes, swapping to let the other take over, each relaxed, like nothing was at stake.

  Vinnie tried to remember more about the film they’d been talking about. There had been amphetamines and cider before, and the smell of her shampoo and taste of her mouth in the dark were strong in his memory. In the frightening bits she had buried her face in his chest and squealed, which made him wonder about her Proddy orgasms. It was the only time he had gone out with a Prot, the first he’d kissed.

  ‘How much is it worth?’ he heard someone ask, then realized it was himself.

  ‘Depends what you give us,’ said Eric genially. ‘The top-quality boys get six hundred a month, sometimes. Tax free.’

  ‘Tax free, skipper,’ echoed Heinz. ‘No fucking around with the Revenue. Just between us.’

  ‘I still can’t see it,’ said Vinnie.

  ‘One more thing you should know.’

  Vinnie looked at them and saw that the choice had never been his.

  ‘The name of the girl,’ said Heinz.

  ‘Still in a coma,’ said Eric.

  ‘What’s her name, Vinnie?’

  ‘I told the other peeler, I just met her.’

  ‘Maureen?’

  ‘Something like that. Or Marie.’

  ‘It’s Maureen. And her second name?’

  ‘Kelly?’

  ‘McMahon. Maureen McMahon.’

  It meant nothing.

  ‘Who’s her da, Vinnie?’

  ‘Mr McMahon.’

  He wasn’t trying to be facetious.

  ‘Try Eamonn McMahon.’

  Vinnie was still puzzled.

  Heinz added, ‘Maureen McMahon, only beloved daughter of Eamonn McMahon. You know what they say about the Ardoyne Provos.’

  The sentence hung in the air.

  ‘If McMahon knew, you wouldn’t last two days, in prison or on the street,’ said Eric. ‘Come in with us and your slate’s clean.’

  ‘Don’t worry, skip. We’re safe hands. We’ve not dropped one yet.’

  They left the pub and drove to a district Vinnie didn’t know with wide avenues and stopped in the apron of a large modern hotel on the outskirts of the city, parking in a corner in the shadows, away from the overhead lights. Most of the spaces were empty, showing neat white lines painted on concrete. The remains of the day’s rain lay in puddles.

  Telephone numbers were given, which he had to commit to memory. They gave him a name and showed him a photograph of a middle-aged man that looked like it had been taken from a surveillance car. Vinnie knew him by sight and the bar where he drank. Blair told him to see what nights the man went there and the sort of people he met.<
br />
  ‘Nothing to it,’ Blair said. ‘Just sitting in bars, drinking. That’s all we’re asking.’

  At least it was a normal bar, thought Vinnie, and not a barricaded republican drinking club.

  Vinnie was given twenty pounds for his time. Fuck you, he thought, on your mothers’ graves.

  9

  RAYMOND Wilson sat next to his sister in their overneat front room, staring at them dourly. Cross was struck by the accuracy of Westerby’s description of them, particularly of Margery, who really did look like she was in a time warp. Westerby had thought that she was perhaps re-enacting the part of their mother, an observation that Cross was sceptical of, though now saw was shrewd.

  ‘How many members do the Carriers of Christ have?’ Cross asked Margery and her brother replied, ‘You would have to ask each apostle.’

  ‘And how many apostles are there?’

  Wilson’s look said the question was stupid. ‘Twelve, of course.’

  ‘And each apostle has how many disciples?’

  Wilson spread his hands in a gesture of infinity.

  ‘How many copies of your pamphlet do you publish?’

  ‘You would have to ask Apostle Barnabus. He is in charge of publication.’

  Tiring of Raymond, Cross turned to Margery and asked how many members of the Carriers of Christ were known to her personally. She looked flustered and referred the question to her brother, who sat in stubborn silence.

  Cross sighed and passed Wilson a copy of the newspaper advertisements. ‘They were placed by you.’

  Wilson made a show of pretending the print was too small to read. Cross bluntly pointed out that it was his name on the booking form.

  ‘What does it mean? “This prayer must be published after the third day,”’ Cross asked.

  ‘It was on the third day that Christ rose. We are merely his carriers. Isn’t that so, sister Margery?’

  Margery Wilson mumbled that it was. Cross was having trouble keeping his temper.

  ‘What do the initials C.S. stand for at the end of the advertisement? ’