The cop troubled him. Christ knew what that little shite Toner was telling him in there. Had he got a good look at the Traveller the night before? Would Toner be able to give the cop a description? And if he could, would the cop make the connection with the man he’d seen on Eglantine Avenue earlier in the day?
The Traveller made his mind up. He didn’t care what Bull O’Kane had to say about it, he would take care of the cop when the job was done. As soon as he’d mopped up O’Kane’s unholy fucking mess, he’d indulge himself by breaking the cop’s neck.
Yes, that was how he’d do it. The cop was a big fucker, wide through the shoulders where the Traveller was narrow, but he reckoned if he could get him pinned, get a knee in his broad back – yes, a good grip, a good pull and a twist.
The Traveller ran the tip of his tongue across his upper lip. Suddenly he thought of Sofia, the scent of her, the softness of her buttocks and her belly. He shifted in the seat, his jeans pinching at him. The movement aggravated his shoulder, and he winced. The wince aggravated his eye, and he hissed through his teeth.
Sofia. Jesus, she was a good ride. He’d had his share of women, some he remembered, more he didn’t. But she was the best of them. There had never been that heat, that scalding heat, with anyone else. It burned his skin where it touched hers when he buried his face between her shoulder and her neck, the two of them shuddering together.
The Traveller decided there and then on another indulgence: after breaking the cop’s neck, he’d give Sofia a baby. When he was done here, and everyone who needed killed was dead, he’d go back to Sofia, throw her down on the bed, and tell her he was going to give her the child she’d wanted from her dead husband. After she’d caught pregnant, he’d never see her again. No sense in getting tied to a woman and a kid like that; he’d just give her what she wanted then leave her to get on with it.
So that was that. Break the cop’s neck. Give Sofia a baby. Simple, but then the Traveller had never found life complicated. He remembered his mother gathering him to her one day when he was a teenager, kissing the top of his head, saying, ‘Ah, son, you’ll always land on your feet. Just stumble on through. The devil looks after his own.’
And she was right. Even now, he couldn’t fathom why he’d taken a notion one day, left his mother’s home, got on a boat and crossed the Irish Sea. He’d wandered around Liverpool for a month, walking from one construction site to another looking for work, like generations of Irishmen had done before him. He’d eked out an existence for thirty days before finding himself in front of an army recruiting office.
He stood on the pavement looking up at the sign, at the posters in the window. He could no longer visualise the words, but he remembered the pictures. Young men in uniforms in exotic places, holding guns, climbing things, fixing things, driving things. The recruiting officer shook his hand, talked to him like a man.
A few months later, when he was still eighteen, he found himself in some fucking miserable place, one of those communist countries that had fallen apart, trying to protect processions of old women and little children as they trudged along mud roads, away from the massacres in their towns and villages. Made all that shit in Northern Ireland look like the kid stuff it was.
He’d had no stomach for the North and all its squabbling since then. Bunch of fucking selfish, childish, spoilt whiners who pissed and moaned and started throwing bricks when they couldn’t get their own way. Every time he saw some politician or other on the telly slabbering ’cause the other side got a better deal, the Traveller wished he could drag them by the hair to some village whose name he couldn’t pronounce and show them the babies torn in half by shrapnel, or a young mother raped and gutted because she was the wrong sort, her children left screaming at the memory of it for the rest of their miserable lives.
The Traveller would grab the politician by the throat, make the lying bastard look at it, make them see it all, and say, ‘There, now that’s a conflict. That’s a war. That’s hatred. That’s fear. That’s blood. That’s brutality. That’s killing for the sake of it. Look at it.’
He checked himself in the rear-view mirror. ‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘Just fucking quit it. Save it for Patsy Toner.’
The anger. Yet another symptom of losing a bit of your brain: a quick and violent temper. The Traveller breathed deep and pushed the rage back down to his gut where it belonged. He had to keep it in check, channel it, use it, not let it use him. There had been times, years ago, when he let it get the better of him. His vision would turn to a long red funnel, and some poor bastard’s brains would be spilled across a pavement, or their throat would be ripped open by a shard of glass. Not any more. He had learned to control it, keep it in his belly like a battery stores power. When he needed it, he could switch it on, just for a moment, just long enough to do the awful things that paid so well.
After a while it felt like nothing, as if taking a life was like taking a breath. Somewhere inside of him, in some deep unreachable place, the Traveller knew he was unwell. That was why he didn’t like doctors. He imagined they could see that dark spot on his heart, that black place where his rage kept his conscience prisoner, muted, sedated, anaesthetised, bound up by tangled images of children’s torsos stacked in piles, flies picking over the meat, the blood sticky beneath his boots, the stench punching him in the—
‘Fucking quit it,’ he said to the mirror. He brought his fingers to his bad eye and rubbed it hard.
The bright, scorching pain blasted all thought away. He gritted his teeth and swallowed a scream. A warm, thick wetness rolled down his cheek. He wiped it with his sleeve, looked at the thin streaks of yellow on the material.
‘Fuck,’ he said.
He got hold of himself just in time to hear the coarse bark and clatter of a diesel engine starting up. Was it the cop? The Traveller listened to the engine grumble as he watched the gate beyond the van, blinking away the blurring in his right eye.
There it was, the Audi, the big cop’s head just visible through the tinted glass. It pulled out into the traffic and disappeared from view.
The Traveller inhaled cool air through his nose, let it out through his mouth. The rage was barely contained, like a blister beneath his skin, ready to burst. It would be bad for Patsy Toner.
35
Lennon shook as he drove. As soon as he pulled onto the Sydenham bypass, he regretted it. His chest heaved and hammered, his palms slicked the Audi’s leather steering wheel. He needed to pull over, get his head clear. Without thinking, he took the Bridge End exit and headed south.
Images and sensations flickered across his mind, but he couldn’t grasp them. As the old Sirocco Works factory site, now an expanse of wasteland, passed on his right, he turned left. Republican murals everywhere, fallen martyrs twenty feet high to tell both locals and passers-by who owned these streets. He met the peace wall, the most inappropriately named of constructions, a barrier of brick and wire standing thirty feet high, slicing the community across its belly. He followed it as far as he could before dead ends and junctions forced him to a quiet street where no one walked. He pulled to the kerb, the Audi’s tyres crunching on litter and broken glass.
As the engine died, he looked around him. The peace wall stood to his right, to the west, making the houses feel like barracks in a prison camp. Coats of red, white and blue paint had chipped and faded from the paving stones. The remaining rags of a Union Jack fluttered from a flag pole. The red-brick buildings had shuttered windows and doors, their eyes and mouths sealed shut by steel, blinded and muted by … what?
Lennon looked up and down the road, and then he realised. This was just one of many abandoned streets, deserted by fleeing residents who could no longer stand the running battles, the showers of bricks and bottles, the petrol bombs setting light to their roofs. One by one, on each side of the peace wall, the families moved out, piling mattresses and good tables and old mirrors that once belonged to grandmothers into hastily borrowed vans or trailers.
Did anyone l
ive here now? He searched for signs of someone, anyone, making a life on this street. Not a soul. Less than a mile away, millions were being pumped into brownfield sites, building apartments, shopping centres, technology parks. Just across the river, property was changing hands for prices never imagined only a few years before. One-bedroom flats sold for a quarter of a million, snapped up by investors looking to make a killing out of Belfast’s peace boom, desperate to get rich before the bubble burst as it surely would. And here, not ten minutes away, stood two rows of empty houses with generations of memories rotting away along with the mortar and woodwork, all because small-minded thugs couldn’t see beyond the world of Them and Us.
Nausea gripped Lennon’s stomach, turned and kneaded it. He pushed the car’s door open and leaned out, breathing hard, swallowing bile. ‘Jesus,’ he said. His voice sounded hollow in this lost place.
Lennon spat on the pavement. The day’s warmth faded fast. The air cooled his skin. He smelled smoke, a fire burning somewhere, old wood and tyres.
Patsy Toner said Marie and Ellen were there.
In the middle of the killing, on an old farm near Middletown, Marie McKenna and Lennon’s daughter. They had survived, fled the country, but what had they seen? What had Ellen seen? He coughed and spat.
He tried to replay the conversation, to put the events in order. Once Toner had got going, he had recited them in a kind of monotone, as if he’d recounted the story to himself so many times the words had lost all meaning. A madman, a killer, cutting down Paul McGinty’s faction, body upon body. At times Lennon had wanted to grab him, shake him, tell him to stop.
Lennon knew some of the names: Vincie Caffola was pure thug, Father Eammon Coulter an apologist for murderers, Brian Anderson a disgraced cop – the papers were full of stories of the backhanders he’d taken, the colleagues he’d sold out, after his killing. And Paul McGinty was the worst type of politician, just two steps from the gutter. A gangster who fancied himself as a statesman, a working-class hero, rather than the money-grubbing, power-hungry parasite he really was. Politics was simply a way to put a respectable face on his greed.
And Toner had confirmed it: it all started with Michael McKenna, Marie McKenna’s uncle. Marie had kept her background from Lennon when they first met, but she couldn’t hide it for long. She had told him over dinner, tried to play it like it was nothing, as if her father and uncle’s past had nothing to do with her present. But she was smarter than that. He could see it in her face as she spoke. She knew what it could mean for Lennon and his career, associating with the niece of a known paramilitary godfather, the daughter of his brother and lackey. She knew he would be compromised, his loyalty suspect, particularly given his own background.
The look on her face said: Here’s your get-out. Leave now, with your dignity intact, no harm done, no foul.
Lennon stuck with her. Looking back, he sometimes wondered why, but really, he knew. He was getting tired, his early thirties nudging his mid-thirties, forty looming on the horizon. He’d started to feel old when he trawled the bars, the women looking younger and younger until they seemed mere girls, and the pursuit grew uglier by the night.
When things began to unravel, his great mistake was to tell Wendy about it. She had never given him a chance when they were both single, but when she saw him in a real relationship with another woman, saw that he could make it work, that changed. Her friendly interest in his love life, her fond wishes for his happiness, turned to flirting and questions he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. When he told her how Marie’s nesting instinct had started to grind on him, how he no longer felt in control of his own life, Wendy’s eyes glittered. She began to sit closer, her thigh brushing against his more often, her hand resting on his forearm for longer.
Night after night, as he lay listening to Marie’s shallow breathing, he fought to keep his mind away from the sensation of Wendy’s hand on his skin, to stop imagining the softness of her lips. He questioned himself in the sleepless hours. Is this what I want? Is this, a life with Marie, what I really want? The same answer came to him every time.
It’s what I’ve got.
Lennon and Marie made love once more before it ended. He had been adrift for days, unable to tell her what kept him from sleep, even though she knew something was badly wrong. That evening they lay together, his head on her breast, desperately hoping her warm flesh would soothe him into reason. They moved together slowly, easily, just as they had done hundreds of times before. Her hands found him as he kissed her, pushing aside fabric. He slipped off her nightdress as she writhed beneath him. He entered her and they established the calm rhythm of familiarity. As his climax approached he tried not to imagine Wendy’s body moving like that, her eyes closed, her mouth open to him. He buried his face in Marie’s shoulder to block it out.
They said nothing, lying there, holding each other. When they separated he saw she was crying. With his fingertip he traced the path the tears had taken.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘We proved the point, didn’t we?’
‘What point?’
She got out of bed and wrapped herself in her dressing gown. ‘That we can go through the motions when we have to.’
He watched her leave for the bathroom and felt suddenly ashamed to be naked.
It had been a grey day, cold outside, half-hearted raindrops on the window. Six weeks gone, she told him. Maybe this would bring them back together, she said. Maybe this would heal the rift that had grown between them. He had smiled and took her in his arms, told her everything would be all right, even as the panic bloomed in his gut.
He could no more be a father than he could a surgeon or a priest. He would fail. He would let his child down, just like his own father had. Still, he held Marie close, his soul crumbling as he lied to her.
* * *
Lennon stirred and remembered where he was. A breeze leaked in through the Audi’s open door, cool air exploring a deserted street. Something snagged his attention, a movement at the periphery of his vision. He turned his head and saw an old Peugeot 306 pull in to the kerb in front of his car. Its engine grunted and wheezed, struggling to cope with the power forced upon it by boy-racer modifications. Its suspension had been lowered, alloy wheels and low-profile tyres fitted. Its rear windows were blacked out and a dark band obscured almost half of the front windscreen. Lennon could make out three forms inside, all wearing Rangers football shirts.
He considered easing his legs back into the Audi, pulling his door shut. His anger wouldn’t let him. He watched the three of them climb out of the Peugeot. They wore trainers and tracksuit bottoms, just like the boy whose body Lennon had inspected in a backyard less than a mile from this spot. But that might as well have been a different planet; in life, that boy was as alien to these youths as prey is to a spider, even though they dressed and spoke the same. Just different coloured shirts, that was all.
The driver was the leader. Lennon watched him closest of all.
‘’Bout ya,’ the driver said.
His friends flanked the Audi, eyeing it as they passed on either side.
Lennon said nothing.
‘You lost?’ the driver asked.
‘No,’ Lennon said.
‘What you doing here?’
‘Nothing much,’ Lennon said.
The driver’s friends reached the Audi’s rear. One of them leaned on the boot, ran his hands along the back, looking for the release to open it.
‘Where you from?’ the driver asked.
‘Somewhere else,’ Lennon said. ‘Tell your mate to take his hands off my car or I’ll break his fucking face.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
The driver snorted. ‘Here, Darren? C’mere!’
Lennon let one hand slip inside his jacket, released the catch.
Darren lumbered around from the back of the Audi. He was tall and heavy-set, with red cheeks beneath pig-like eyes and a blond crew cut. ‘What?’
The driver pointed at Lennon. ‘He says he’s going to break your face if you don’t leave his motor alone.’
Darren put a hand on the Audi’s roof and leaned down to Lennon, his breath smelling of the cheap fortified wine all these toe-rags drank. ‘You what?’
‘Get your dirty hands off my car or I’ll kick your face in,’ Lennon said. ‘You and your mates. Now fuck off.’
‘Your car?’ Darren asked. He pulled a knife from his pocket. ‘This is my car. Now get the fuck out of it.’
In one smooth motion, Lennon seized Darren’s wrist with his left hand and pressed the Glock 17 beneath his chin, the Glock 17 that had been in his right hand since the driver had first called his friend over.
‘Drop the knife, you stupid fat fucker,’ Lennon said.
Warm liquid splashed on Lennon’s ankles as a dark stain spread on Darren’s tracksuit bottoms. The knife clanked on the kerb and disappeared beneath the Audi. The driver sprinted for the Peugeot. The third youth called after him, ‘What? What’s wrong?’
The Peugeot’s overburdened engine coughed into life, and its tyres screeched as they fought to put the power down on the road. It roared away from the kerb, barely missing the Audi. Lennon followed it with his eyes until it disappeared around the corner.
Darren cried. The other youth came closer, saw the pistol, and ran like hell.
‘Just you and me, then, Darren,’ Lennon said.
Darren whimpered. He smelled of stale sweat and fresh urine.
‘You and your mates,’ Lennon said. ‘I suppose you’d call yourselves Loyalists, right?’
Darren didn’t answer. Lennon pressed the Glock’s muzzle harder into the loose flesh beneath his chin.
‘Answer me.’
‘Yeah,’ Darren said.
‘Funny, that,’ Lennon said. ‘Your mates don’t seem too loyal. Tell me, who are you loyal to?’
Darren’s nose dripped snot on Lennon’s sleeve. Lennon pushed the muzzle deeper into his flesh until the pressure against his windpipe made the stocky kid cough.
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