Collusion jli-2

by Stuart Neville

  ‘Quick, they’re coming!’ a voice said.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, hide!’ another said.

  The Traveller heard hands slapping on wood as the boys tried the gates. Too late, he went to block Quigley’s, and the boys burst through.

  He put the first one down with a blow to the temple, and the sound of skull meeting brickwork cut the boy’s cry short. The other slipped as he tried to halt his momentum and landed at the Traveller’s feet.

  The Traveller swooped, threw him on his belly. Before the boy could scream, the Traveller had his throat in the crook of his elbow. The boy didn’t struggle long.

  The Traveller got to his feet and pressed his back against the gate. Heavy footsteps trudged along the alley, accompanied by deeper voices and radio static.

  ‘No, they’re gone,’ one of the voices said.

  A burst of static replied as the footsteps drew closer.

  ‘Christ knows,’ the voice said. ‘Balfour Avenue, probably.’

  Wood rattled as the cops tried the gates. The Traveller leaned against the flaked paint, braced himself.

  ‘No chance,’ the voice said. ‘I’m not doing any more running tonight. I’m too old for this shit.’

  The gate pushed against the Traveller’s back. Static crackled.

  ‘Up your arse,’ the voice on the other side of the wall said. ‘I’m going back to the car.’

  The footsteps receded towards the Ormeau Road. The Traveller stooped down and checked if the boys were breathing. They both were, but the first one he’d hit was slick with blood. The other would wake before too long with a crushing headache. The Traveller had to get this done. He went to the back door and peered through the glass into the kitchen. An old woman in a dressing gown stood gazing at a biscuit tin, her lips moving as if she were trying to remember the words of a song.

  He tried the handle, but the door was locked. The old woman looked up at the sound. She approached the door and turned the key. She opened it and stared at the Traveller for a moment. ‘Bobby, love, where’ve you been?’ she asked.

  ‘Away,’ the Traveller said.

  ‘Away where?’

  ‘Just away,’ the Traveller said. ‘Can I come in?’

  The old woman stepped back to let him enter. She stroked his arm as he passed. ‘You missed your tea, love.’

  ‘I had something when I was out,’ the Traveller said.

  ‘What did you have, love?’

  ‘Fish and chips,’ the Traveller said. He heard a television in the next room.

  She slapped his arm. ‘You could’ve brought some back with you,’ she scolded.

  ‘They’d be cold,’ the Traveller said. ‘Where’s Declan?’

  ‘He’s watching the telly,’ the old woman said.

  ‘Ma?’ a slurred voiced called from the next room. ‘Ma! Who’re you talking to?’

  ‘It’s Bobby,’ the old woman said. ‘He’s home. He got fish and chips, but he never brought us any back.’

  The Traveller went to the door and stepped through. Declan Quigley froze half out of the armchair facing the television.

  ‘How’re ya, Declan,’ the Traveller said. ‘Better sit down, there’s a good fella.’

  The old woman followed behind. He turned to her and asked, ‘Any danger of a cup of tea?’

  ‘Surely, Bobby, love.’

  ‘Ta very much,’ the Traveller said. He watched her shuffle to the kitchen before he turned back to Quigley. ‘Who’s Bobby?’

  Quigley sagged back into the chair. ‘My brother,’ he said, his voice shaking. A half-empty bottle of vodka and a glass sat on a side table next to him. ‘The Brits shot him twenty years ago. She thinks every man she meets is Bobby. Except me. Who are you?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ the Traveller said, taking a step towards him.

  ‘Jesus, I knew it wasn’t over,’ Quigley said. ‘When them three blew themselves up, then Kevin Malloy the other night. The news said it was a robbery, but I knew it was lies.’

  The Traveller reached into his pocket.

  Wait!’ Quigley held his hands up. ‘Wait a minute. I haven’t said a word to anyone. I know what happened, I saw the whole thing, I know all that stuff about a feud was bullshit. I could’ve gone to the papers and told them the truth. I could’ve made a fortune. I could’ve made enough to look after my mother. But I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut. There’s no call for this.’

  The Traveller thought about arguing, explaining the nature of things to this man, but what was the point? He sighed and took the knife from his pocket. The blade opened with barely a sound. Best to do it quiet.

  Quigley took a swig of neat vodka from the bottle and coughed. ‘There’s no call for it,’ he said, putting the bottle back on the table. ‘It’s not fair.’

  The old woman’s voice shrilled from the kitchen. ‘Do you want a biscuit, Bobby, love?’

  ‘You have any Jaffa Cakes?’ the Traveller called back.

  ‘No, love. But I’ve got Penguins.’

  ‘Aye, that’ll do.’

  Quigley seemed to shrink in the chair. ‘Christ, I’m tired,’ he said. ‘So tired. Maybe I should’ve run, but who’d look after my mother? So I’ve been sitting here waiting. I haven’t slept in months. I can’t eat. I’ve lost a stone and a half. I should’ve killed Gerry Fegan, you know. Or tried, anyway.’

  The Traveller stopped. ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ Quigley said. He started to cry. ‘I was too scared. He was too … big.’

  ‘Big?’

  Quigley looked down at his shaking hands. ‘Like nothing could hurt him. Like nothing could stop him. Like if he set his mind to killing someone, then they were already dead. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.’ He looked up at the Traveller. ‘Until now. Promise me you won’t touch her.’

  ‘I won’t,’ the Traveller said.

  Quigley stared hard at him. ‘Promise me.’

  ‘I won’t touch her,’ the Traveller said. ‘I swear to God.’

  Quigley unbuttoned his shirt collar, pulled the fabric away from his throat, and laid his head back. ‘Make it quick,’ he said.

  ‘No, not the throat,’ the Traveller said. ‘You’ll piss blood everywhere. All over your ma’s carpet, up the walls, fucking everywhere. Just close your eyes. I’ll make it easy.’

  Quigley’s head dropped, and he wept. Tears blotched his shirt. ‘What a fucking waste,’ he said.

  ‘Quiet, now,’ the Traveller said. ‘It’ll be quick, I promise. Close your eyes.’

  Quigley squeezed the armrests and closed his eyes. His breath quickened. He whined. The Traveller switched his grip on the knife to underhand and leaned on the chair. Quigley inhaled, held his breath. The Traveller made one, two, three thrusts, burying the blade to the hilt each time before drawing it out again.

  Quigley breathed out, his exhalation bubbling as it thinned. He coughed. A small red bloom, about the size of a rose, spread on his chest.

  The old woman screamed ‘Bobby!’ and drove a knitting needle into the Traveller’s upper arm.

  18

  Lennon showered, the water hot as he could stand. He scrubbed himself pink and buried that hard little ball of filth so deep down inside himself he could barely feel it. It was always the same. He’d do it knowing he’d hate himself for it, and afterwards swear he’d never do it again. The burning guilt would last a day or so before he could wash it away and forgive himself.

  He turned his mind from the Scottish law student, her sighs and moans and affection as transparent as her underwear. Instead, he thought about Roscoe Patterson’s words. Lennon knew Patsy Toner all too well. He’d interviewed many a thug with Patsy Toner in attendance. The slimy little shit called himself a human rights lawyer. The only human right Patsy Toner cared about was the right to get paid.

  Lennon hadn’t seen Toner around the interview rooms and court hearings for quite some time. Logically, he could put it down to the killing of Brian Anderson. When the bent cop was found
dead in Toner’s borrowed car, followed by the bloodbath near Middletown, the party moved swiftly to distance itself from the lawyer and the rest of Paul McGinty’s lackeys. Toner’s human rights work would naturally have dried up, but there were still plenty of petty hoods and lowlifes who needed representation. Party backing or not, Patsy Toner was a seasoned defence solicitor, well used to dealing with the PPS and the courts.

  But no, Lennon couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the little lawyer and that stupid moustache of his. He’d make a point of looking him up.

  Lennon shut the shower off and stepped out into the steamy bathroom. He towelled himself down and wrapped himself in a dressing gown. The en suite bathroom was small but beautifully appointed. It was one of the main features that sold him on the flat. That and the river view. He stepped into the bedroom, his head shrouded in the towel. The memory came to him as it always did: crying as a child when his mother dried his hair too roughly after bath time.

  His mother.

  It had been almost a month since he’d last gone to see her in the nursing home. Not that it made much difference to her. Maybe he’d go down to Newry tomorrow evening. Short notice, but the routine would work regardless. He would send a text message to his younger sister Bronagh stating the time he meant to call with their mother. He would receive no reply. If his time clashed with any other family member, they would quietly reschedule. It suited everybody to do it that way.

  When Lennon’s mother had first heard a whisper that his brother Liam had joined the local boys, had volunteered for the cause, she had begged him to reconsider. She told him he’d wind up in prison, or worse, shot dead by the cops or the Brits.

  Liam had smiled as she ranted, then he wrapped his arms around her, told her not to listen to rumours. He had no interest in fighting anyone. Sure, he had a job with a local mechanic, fixing farm machinery. He had a future. Why would he piss it away on such nonsense?

  Lennon remembered Liam making eye contact with him over their mother’s quivering shoulder, and Lennon knew he was lying.

  He also knew Liam was lying when he turned up with that black eye.

  Lennon had been home from university a month, earning pennies in a local petrol station. The diesel the station sold was hooky stuff, stripped agricultural fuel from one of the plants that were hidden all over the countryside. Everyone knew Bull O’Kane ran them, but everyone knew to keep their mouths shut, even if their cars wound up with ruined fuel pumps from the bootleg diesel. It might cost a grand or more to fix a knackered engine, but opening your mouth to complain would cost you a lot more. It would signal you as a tout, and touts never came out of it well, if at all.

  Liam had been breathless and cheery, but unscathed, when Lennon met him for a pint after the hurling match. But he didn’t argue when Liam arrived home in the early hours of the following morning with blood seeping from the welt under his eye and told their mother he’d caught a swipe from a hurling stick at the game.

  Later, as birdsong began to drift into the bedroom the two brothers shared, Liamlay staring at the ceiling, his muscled forearms behind his head, his big chest rising and falling. Lennon watched him in the half-light, fear and love and resentment fighting for dominance of his heart. He jerked, startled, when Liam spoke.

  ‘I’m not a tout.’

  ‘What?’ Lennon sat up in his bed.

  Liam’s voice quivered in his throat. ‘Whatever happens, whatever you hear, I’m no tout.’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

  Liam paused, then said, ‘Someone else is covering their tracks, laying it on me. If anything happens to me, you remember that. Tell Ma and the girls. Don’t say nothing to anyone else, though, or you’ll wind up in the shite yourself.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Lennon said. ‘But what’s going to happen?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Liam said. ‘Maybe nothing. Probably nothing.’ He rolled over onto his side, his eyes glinting in the early light as they met Lennon’s. ‘Look, forget I said anything. I’m just blowing, all right?’

  ‘All right,’ Lennon said.

  ‘Listen, we’re all proud of you getting your degree. You stick at it, right? Get the master thing, whatever you call it, and the doctorate. You get out of this shit-hole and make something decent for yourself. You hear me?’

  Yeah,’ Lennon said, the word drying to a whisper in his throat.

  ‘Right,’ Liam said, burrowing down into the bedclothes. ‘Get some sleep.’

  Lennon lay back on the bed, but sleep did not come. Looking back across those sixteen years, he sometimes imagined he knew at the time it would be his last real conversation with his brother.

  Sixteen years since Liam died. The anniversary had been just two months ago. Sixteen years since Lennon had applied to join the then Royal Ulster Constabulary, making an enemy of almost everyone he’d ever known. Sometimes, when the dawn crept across his ceiling like that time back in Middletown, he cursed the choices he’d made.

  Some said that when you’re on your deathbed, it’d be the things you didn’t do that you’d regret. Lennon knew that was a lie.

  He rubbed the towel back and forth across his scalp and walked to the open-plan living area.

  A stack of letters lay open on the coffee table. On top was a mortgage reminder. He’d pay that tomorrow, phone up and swear it was the bank’s mistake to decline the payment. Two or three credit card statements lay beneath that. They could wait another week or two. So long as he kept the mortgage and the car payments on track, he could survive. Particularly if he didn’t think about it too much.

  Lennon took a beer from the fridge and went back to the sofa. The leather cooled his skin where the shower had scalded it. He prised the cap off and took a swallow. He made calculations in his head: how much he needed for bills, how much for food, how much for diesel for the car. When he couldn’t make the figures come out right, he stopped counting.

  The phone rang. He answered it.

  ‘Your first day back on MIT starts early,’ DCI Gordon said. ‘Two dead on the Lower Ormeau. Amess, apparently. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. You’d better be waiting for me.’

  ‘You’re late,’ Gordon barked as Lennon entered the hall. The DCI waited in the doorway to the living room.

  ‘I came as quick as I could,’ Lennon said, squeezing past a photographer.

  ‘Not quick enough,’ Gordon said. You only live along the river a bit. You been drinking?’

  ‘Just the one,’ Lennon said. He peered past Gordon’s shoulder.

  ‘He’s confirmed dead,’ Gordon said. ‘At least one stab wound to the chest, probably more. We’ll let the photographer get some snaps before we go in.’

  ‘You said two. Where’s the other one?’

  ‘Out the back,’ Gordon said. ‘Only a young fella, too. Looks like he busted his head on the wall. It’s dark as a coal miner’s armpit out there, and the rain’s coming on. We’ll get a tarpaulin over the yard and get a proper look in the morning. The forensics team will come down from Carrickfergus first thing. I want you here to oversee it.’

  Lennon leaned over the threshold and scanned the room. The victim, a man with curly dark hair, sat with his back to the door, his arms hanging limp over the sides of the chair. A side table had been tipped over. A vodka bottle and a glass lay on the floor. It didn’t look like the victim’s place, though. Old woman’s furniture, fussy wallpaper, frilly things and tacky ornaments. ‘Anyone else here?’ Lennon asked.

  ‘The victim’s mother’s just gone.’ Gordon stepped back to let the photographer through. ‘She’s on her way to the City Hospital. Looked like she got a belt in the mouth. They had to sedate her, kept screaming “Bobby did it.” A neighbour says Bobby was her son. A soldier shot him when he drove through a checkpoint twenty years ago.’

  ‘We can cross him off the list, then,’ Lennon said. He pointed at the body. ‘So who’s our friend?’

  ‘Well, that’s interesting, as it happens. The deceased is kno
wn to us. In fact, he’s been a guest of ours on more than one occasion.’ Gordon smiled. ‘This is – was – Mr Declan Quigley, former driver for the late Paul McGinty.’ Gordon looked at Lennon. ‘What?’

  ‘Declan Quigley,’ Lennon said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Paul McGinty’s driver.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘It can’t be a coincidence,’ Lennon said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Kevin Malloy the other night. He was wrapped up in that feud too.’

  Gordon put his hand on Lennon’s shoulder. ‘Look, that feud business is long over with. Don’t go jumping to conclusions or you’ll miss something. Declan Quigley was a scumbag. Scumbags know other scumbags, and there’s no shortage of them in Belfast. You’re no good to me if you’re not looking at all the possibilities. Understand?’

  ‘I understand, it’s just that—’ Lennon trapped that thought behind his teeth.

  ‘Just what?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Lennon said. He would make a point of calling on Marie’s landlord tomorrow. The last time Lennon questioned him it turned up nothing, but he’d been subtle, edging around the real questions. This time he’d be a little firmer.

  The photographer squeezed past them.

  ‘On my desk in the morning,’ Gordon called after him. He nudged Lennon. ‘Come on. Take notes. And watch where you put your feet.’

  Lennon took a pad and pen from his pocket as he followed Gordon to the centre of the room. They both faced Quigley’s body.

  ‘Hmm,’ Gordon said. ‘Does anything about Mr Quigley look odd to you, Detective Inspector Lennon?’

  ‘Yes it does,’ Lennon said.

  ‘Why?’

  Lennon hunkered down by the side of the chair. He pointed with his pen. ‘No defensive wounds to the hands or the forearms. A stab victim will usually try to shield themselves, even try to grab the blade.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So either the attacker moved so fast Quigley didn’t see it coming, or he just let it happen.’