‘A medal,’ Lennon said.
Toner smirked. ‘You wear it much?’
‘I never collected it.’
‘Why not?’
Lennon took another hit of the cigarette, winced at the hot gravel in his throat. ‘Didn’t feel like it,’ he said. ‘So tell me about last night.’
Toner told Lennon about walking back to his shitty flat, approaching his front door, seeing the man in the old Mercedes estate dousing his face with water, and just knowing.
‘Knowing what?’ Lennon asked.
‘That he was there to kill me,’ Toner said, suddenly looking even smaller. ‘So I ran like fuck. Into the building, up the stairs, into my flat, and out the back down the fire escape. I kept thinking, Jesus, if there’s another one round the back, I’m fucked. But there wasn’t. There was just him.’
‘Who was he?’
‘I don’t know,’ Toner said.
‘Did you get a look at him?’
Toner shook his head.
‘Who do you think sent him?’
Toner sighed as his eyes went distant and watery. ‘I’m going to tell you this because I’ve got to tell somebody before I go off my head. It’s been eating away at me for months. I’ve been scared shitless.’ The lawyer’s voice rose to a whine. ‘I can’t eat. I have to drink myself unconscious just so I can get some sleep. I wake up every morning and first thing I do is puke.
‘I kept telling myself it was over and done with, all settled, all swept under the carpet. But I knew. I knew someone would come for me. And then I heard about Kevin Malloy, so it was just a matter of when. I knew they wouldn’t let me go.’
‘Who’s they?’ Lennon asked.
‘They?’ Toner gave a short, sharp laugh that choked in his throat. ‘“They” is fucking everyone. The cops, the Brits, the Irish government, the party, fucking Bull O’Kane.’
Lennon eyed Toner, wondered if he had lost it. ‘That’s a lot of people,’ he said.
‘Collusion,’ Toner said, his voice dropping to a low, angry hiss. ‘Everyone talks about collusion, how the cops and the Brits and the Loyalists were in it together. To hear some people talk, you’d think the Loyalists couldn’t take a shit without MI5 or Special Branch wiping their arses for them.’
Lennon laughed. ‘Look, I know about the Loyalists. Everybody knows—’
‘Everybody knows it all, but no one says anything. Look, collusion worked all ways, all directions. Between the Brits and the Loyalists, between the Irish government and the Republicans, between the Republicans and the Brits, between the Loyalists and the Republicans.’ Toner ran out of breath and his face reddened. He pulled hard on his cigarette and coughed. ‘All ways, all directions. We’ll never know how far it went. All the small things, all the big things. Loyalists supplying Republicans with fake DVDs and Ecstasy tablets. Republicans wholesaling laundered diesel and bootleg vodka to Loyalists. Feeding off the hate, letting on they’re fighting for their fucking causes when all the time they’re making each other rich. And the killings. How many of our own did we set up for the Loyalists to take out? How many of their own did the Loyalists set up for us? How many times did I get a taxi to some club or other on the Shankill with a name in an envelope, and two days later, some poor cunt from the Falls gets his head took off?’
‘I don’t understand,’ Lennon said. ‘What’s all this got to do with someone having a crack at you last night?’
‘Paul McGinty,’ Toner said. He raised his waxy hand to count on his fingers. ‘Michael McKenna, Vincie Caffola, Father Coulter, that cop who got shot in my car.’
Lennon’s chest tightened at McKenna’s name. He smelled blood, followed the scent. ‘The feud. I read the inquiry report. Some Scottish guy, an ex-soldier, was in the middle of it all. He stabbed the priest. He wound up dead in the shootout near Middletown, along with McGinty.’
‘Davy Campbell,’ Toner said. ‘He was an agent.’
‘An agent? How do you know that?’
Toner stared hard at Lennon as he ground his cigarette into the tabletop. ‘Because I got him in.’
Lennon felt the heat of his own cigarette as it burned closer to his fingers. ‘What, you mean—’
‘Yeah, I was a tout. I fed information about McGinty to MI5. They passed it on to Special Branch and Fourteen Intelligence Company, and anyone else they felt like sharing with. Like I said, collusion goes all ways, all directions.’
‘All right,’ Lennon said. He dropped the cigarette to the ground and crushed it beneath his heel. ‘So tell me what really happened.’
Toner let a long sigh out, his small chest deflating. He took another cigarette from the packet, didn’t offer one to Lennon, and started talking.
34
The Traveller recognised the cop’s Audi in the hotel car park. ‘Fuck,’ he said.
He steered the big Mercedes around the scruffy quadrangle of potholed tarmac until he found a spot behind a van. It would obscure him from the Audi’s position, but he could still see the car park’s exit. He’d be able to see the cop leave, and then he could go in after Toner. Room 203, Orla had said.
He lowered the driver’s side window a couple of inches. The breeze had started to cool as late afternoon approached. It felt good on his stinging eye. He adjusted his position so his bad shoulder didn’t rest against the seat back.
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 live 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.
Collusion Page 16
