All the Colours of the Town

by McIlvanney, Liam

  I didn’t know John Rose. No one at the Trib had met him. He’d been stringing with us for barely a year. His copy was good. A little flashy, a little heavy on the power-chord intros, but he knew his way round a sentence. We didn’t use him that much, since nothing much was happening, but Ireland still sells papers in Glasgow and every few weeks I’d see his by-line under a six-hundred-worder.

  My pint appeared on the bartop, a brown commotion settling upwards to the creamy head. I lifted the glass but a young guy was squeezing through to the counter, his Action Man crew cut bobbing under my nose, his bleached denim shoulders almost bumping my pint. I eased back to let him through but he turned and brought his face right up to mine.

  ‘Sorry?’ I missed what he said. He had an earring in his eyelid, a silver hoop below a tonsured eyebrow.

  ‘Gerry Conway?’

  ‘Aye. Yes!’

  ‘I’m John Rose.’

  I put my pint down to shake his hand.

  ‘Good to meet you, John. Jesus, for a minute there I thought I was claimed.’

  He ran his hand across his scalp.

  ‘Yeah? Well, the night’s young. Never know your luck. Come on, we’re over here.’

  He led me to one of the snugs, the wooden booths that lined one wall. We sat down and he reached over to turn the snib that locked the door. Peace. The hubbub muffled.

  ‘This is my first.’ He lifted his half-drunk pint from its beermat. ‘I don’t like drinking on duty.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t worry,’ I said, lifting my own. ‘Anyway, you couldn’t come into the Crown and drink tomato juice. What’s your background, John?’

  ‘Background?’

  ‘How’d you get into this game?’

  He shrugged. ‘Same as anyone else. It was kind of a growth industry around here at one time. We made a lot of news. There was plenty to go around. Sorry, is this like an audition? I thought I’d got the gig.’

  ‘You have, John, you have. I was just curious.’

  A head appeared briefly at the partition. I reached for my drink. Rose was frowning at his pint, twisting the glass on its beermat. I asked him for his verdict: on the peace process, the current situation. He brightened a little and gave me his spiel, the potted briefing he’d prepared for these occasions.

  I didn’t interrupt. I nodded weakly and buried my nose in my pint as he spoke about the ceasefires and Good Friday and the various agreements. He had a lot to say about the paramilitaries. There were so many acronyms he sounded like an adult spelling out words so a child won’t hear. He took a pull at his beer every few sentences and wiped his palm down his mustard Fred Perry. I’d known he was new, of course; but why had no one warned me? He looked barely out of his twenties. Our previous Belfast stringer was a proper hack, an old-school ex-Street staffer called Maurice Brand. Maurice Brand news-edited the Mirror for twenty years and then came back to Belfast in semi-retirement. He had a string with us and with one or two English papers. He boosted his Streeter’s pension by driving Yanks and Brits around the city. I only met him once – bigfooted him, in fact, in the early nineties. When a story grows arms and legs a paper wants its own guy on the case. They parachute you in and the stringer gets bumped. It happened to Maurice with the Shankill Bomb. Maurice broke the story and I stepped in. He wasn’t bothered. He met me at Aldergrove airport and drove me into town. He took me to the shattered shop, the street still smoking in rubble and dust, the great jagged hole in the heart of the terrace, a torn line of bricks like a crow-stepped gable.

  I spoke to a couple of truculent locals. Maurice fixed a meeting with the RUC investigating officer, who gave me ten minutes in his mobile incident-centre and answered my questions with polite contempt. Then we had a pint in Benny Conlon’s A1 Bar, and Maurice spoke out of the side of his mouth, making eye contact from time to time in the big whiskey mirror. He sucked peppermints – he may have been giving up smoking – and the whiffs of mint and whiskey mixed with his droll reminiscences of torture and death. He gave me the low-down on various celebrated killings of the early Troubles – the betting shop murders, the Black-and-Decker case, the Markets crucifixion; eerie details that never made it to the papers.

  John Rose would have been skiting Matchbox cars across his kitchen lino when all this happened. Watching Animal Magic with a bowl of Smash in his lap. We talked it through anyway. He’d been briefed about Peter Lyons, the New Covenanters, Lyons’s retreat from Belfast, the three killings in the week before Guy Fawkes Night, 1983. Until last week he’d never heard of the New Covenanters. Why should he have? He knew Peter Lyons through reading the Trib but he’d never heard of a Belfast connection. He asked a few no-brainers and nodded at my answers. And then, quite abruptly, we had nothing to say. We were like two nervous teens on a date. I twisted my pint on the tabletop. Rose footered with his eyebrow ring. The pub-talk rumbled on beyond the booth. He’d been nettled by my question, and I couldn’t hide my chagrin at his age, his clothes, the sleeper in his eyelid. It was a relief when he got up to take a piss.

  I looked at my watch. I tilted my glass to get the dregs of my pint. Above my head the ceiling was extravagant – all carved, dark wood, lacquered fleur-de-lis and looping leaves. On the stained-glass windows there were fronds and ferns. Above the walls of the booth rose wooden columns carved like palm trees.

  ‘It’s a jungle in here,’ I said, as Rose eased back into the booth. He reached to turn the snib: there was a panel of frosted glass in the door, with struts of wood forming the spars of a Union flag: ‘How come it survived? Why did no one blow it up?’

  ‘Who knows,’ said Rose. ‘Pure fluke. They blew up nicer places than this.’

  ‘It’s more like a church.’

  ‘It is a church, basically.’ Rose looked around. ‘Italians built it. Craftsmen from Modena. They were over here building chapels and they did this place on the side. Moonlighting.’

  ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Succour.’

  A barman’s head poked over the partition. Then his arm drooped over and Rose passed him the empties.

  ‘So what are you looking for, exactly?’ Rose had taken a notebook from his back pocket. He fished a short blue pen from his Levi jacket and set it on the table, where it rolled towards me and skittered onto the tiled floor.

  I bent to pick it up. I’ll tell you what I’m looking for, I thought. I’m looking for a proper stringer. A guy with a slouch hat and nicotine fingers. A guy who knows what he’s doing.

  I held out the bookies’ pen.

  ‘Tools of the trade?’

  ‘Fuck off!’ He snatched it back and wagged it at me. ‘It fits my pocket is all.’ He looked up slyly. ‘Way things are going, though? You’d make a better living at that game than this. You were saying.’

  ‘OK.’ I took a pull of Guinness. You’re making a decent living this week, I thought. We were paying him a ton a day, plus expenses. For two or three hours’ work. ‘First thing. I need details of the three murders. I want the cuttings – the first reports, any follow-ups, reports of the trials. Maybe talk to some of the hacks if they’re still around.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll take you round the Tele, the News-Letter. You can check the files. Anything else?’

  ‘I want to talk to the players, guys he’d have known at the time. Get a sense of what he was up to.’

  Rose frowned. ‘Who, though? Do we know who his contacts were; assuming he had any?’

  I opened my holdall and took out the photo. I wiped a beer spill with my sleeve and set the photo on the table.

  ‘Dear dear.’ Rose shook his head, leaned over the picture. ‘The gang’s all here. Look at the nick of that. Where’d you get this?’

  I shook my head. ‘Doesn’t matter. Before your time anyway, eh?’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘I’m saying you’ll not know anyone.’

  ‘Yeah?’ He jabbed his bookies’ pen at one of the heads. ‘There’s Kiwi, for a start.’

  ‘Who?’

  I craned round t
o see. A broad-nosed, noble face, the chin canted high. His blond hair was long, but thinning. A fat brown moustache glorified his upper lip. He wore a black roll-neck sweater under a cracked leather jacket. He was a good head shorter than the others in the photo but you couldn’t miss it. Something in the eyes, the way he carried himself: this was the gaffer.

  Rose supped his pint. ‘Isaac “Kiwi” Hepburn. He ran the Upper Shankill back in the seventies. Old-school Blackneck.’ He looked up. ‘You know what a Blackneck is?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Real stickler for discipline. Compound commander in the Kesh.’

  The eyes were hooded, the head slightly cocked. The leather suit jacket barely compassed the chest; stress lines creased the leather round the single button.

  ‘Right. So, what, as in the fruit? The bird?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Kiwi.’

  ‘That’s from the Kesh. It was the shoes. He’d always have a tin of boot polish open, giving his shoes another shine. He made his guys line up for inspection, every morning. Checked their fingernails and teeth, the shine on their toecaps. Like the bloody Boys’ Brigade.’

  Rose grinned. His eyes were a little pouchy. Maybe he wasn’t as young as all that.

  ‘He still about?’

  ‘Kiwi? Aye. He runs a boxing club.’ Rose glanced at his watch. ‘Among other things. And this is your man?’ He was tapping Lyons.

  ‘That’s him. Peter Lyons, Minister for Justice.’

  ‘Big handsome man. The housewives’ favourite.’

  ‘Yeah. What about the others?’ I was getting nervous. The pub was still busy and heads popped over the partition now and then to check whether the snug was occupied. A barman might come back looking for empties.

  Rose grimaced, his lower lip jutting. ‘Nah. Hard to tell at this distance; must be, what, twenty years? Folk’ll have changed. But, naw, no other celebrities there.’

  I lifted the photo and fed it back into the plastic wallet and the wallet back into the envelope.

  ‘This Kiwi guy; Hepburn, is it? Can you set up a meet?’

  Rose shrugged, tilted his head and I saw now – the sunlight catching his hair – little pewtery glints at the temple. ‘Leave it with me.’ He swirled the last of his pint. ‘Let’s head.’

  The Telegraph offices were in the city centre, at the top of Royal Avenue. We walked across town, past the City Hall, up through the shoppers on Donegall Place.

  ‘You think he’ll see me?’

  ‘Who, Hepburn? Yeah, he’ll see you. He may play hard to get for a day or two but he’ll see you.’

  ‘You seem pretty sure.’

  ‘Catch yourself on, Gerry. When the Troubles were here? This guy was a legend, a celebrity. His name in the papers, all the hacks and politicos hanging on his words. What’s he got now? He’s some baldy old man in a wee red-brick house. Of course he’ll see you. Here we are.’

  We pushed through the green glass doors to reception. The security guard set a form on the counter, spun it towards me with a jerk of his wrist. I reached inside my jacket for a pen. Rose was at my elbow, his breath sour with whiskey and porter.

  ‘Anything else I can do just now?’

  Yeah, I thought. Get a job you like.

  ‘Thanks, John. I’m fine. This is me for the afternoon. I’ll see you tomorrow: ten o’clock OK?’

  The guard palmed my form and tossed a visitor’s pass onto the counter. I clipped it to my jacket. Rose headed off – back to his snug at the Crown, I supposed; ‘first of the day’ my arse – and I clumped down the stairs to the Telegraph library. A cheerful, denim-shirted girl laid down her Harry Potter to show me round. It was much the same as our place. A bank of PCs along one wall. A huddle of chipped Formica desks. Strip-lit aisles and yards of box-files. All the recent stuff was computerised. Anything prior to ninety-five it was actual clippings, accessed via the card index. Murders were filed under surname: normally that of the victim; less commonly that of the lead detective; occasionally – if the guy was a real celebrity – that of the killer himself. My three were simple enough. Gillies, Pettigrew, Walsh: the three victims. I noted the shelf marks, retrieved the slim pink files and dropped them on an empty desk.

  It didn’t take long. Each file began with the first reports, the deadpan declarative sentences. A man was found murdered in North Belfast. The body of a man was recovered from a vehicle. The follow-up pieces carried head-shots: the gormless, unwitting grins of the victims, snapped at some long-gone function. There were backgrounders on recent killings, the back-and-forth of neighbourly death. And in one case only – the shooting of Eamonn Walsh – the report of the trial. (The report wasn’t long: a UVF hitman got snagged by forensics and went down for life. His tariff was thirty-five years.) And that was it. Three abbreviated lives, three shakings of yellowed paper.

  I put them back in the files. Hardly even files. Three folded oblongs. I fingered the cheap, damp-feeling card, its coarse, pulpy grain. Stacked on the desk the files looked empty. Back home, in the Tribune library, a murder file had a certain bulk. It might be three times, four times as thick as this. For all the city’s hard-man swagger, its razor kings and ice-cream murders, Glasgow wasn’t Belfast. A life meant something in Glasgow, a death mattered, in a way it didn’t here. I lifted the files. There was something seedy in their lack of heft. The deaths of these three men were almost weightless. The story moved on. New victims appeared. The photographs changed; a different set of crooked grins, a new crop of dated haircuts.

  There was a photocopier in the corner. I bought a copycard from the girl at the desk and copied everything in the files. When I got back to the hotel there was a package waiting for me; cuttings from the News-Letter, reports on the three murders, with a note from John Rose: More to follow. See you at ten. I took them upstairs and tossed them on the table. I fetched a Red Label from the minibar and sat down to read.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘“British as Finchley,” she called it. You can see her point, round here. The Troubles might never have happened.’

  We were on the Malone Road, heading down towards Queen’s.

  ‘Shite,’ said Rose. He dropped the Forester into third. ‘The Troubles reached everywhere, Gerry. There were people killed on these streets too. The Provies topped a judge outside a Catholic church just round the corner there.’ He floored it abruptly to beat the lights. ‘The Peelers shot a Blackneck in a stolen car down there, on Elmwood Avenue.’ We were passing Queen’s, the cheerful red-brick castle with its neat yellow lawn. ‘There was a law lecturer, the Provies shot him dead in University Square.’ He jerked his thumb out the window. ‘Just there. The Troubles were here all right. The difference being, in this neck of the woods you could kid on things were normal. There’s no murals here. No flags and bunting, coloured kerbstones. It could be anywhere. Fucking arse-piece!’ He leaned on the horn and gave the finger out the window to a minicab that cut us up. ‘Except it isn’t.’

  For the next hour we drove round the city. The Shankill and Falls. Oldpark and Andersonstown. There wasn’t much to see. The tight blank streets. Boxy houses stained with rain. Nothing I couldn’t have seen at home. The sky was overcast, a muted, no-weather cotton-wool gauze. Only the hills, swelling dark at the end of each street, lent some colour to the scene. And then we turned a corner.

  The mural reared above us, a whole gable end, detailed and luminous, like a rent in the fabric of everyday life. Rose parked the Forester and we got out to look.

  I was edgy at first, sniffing the air, alert for some movement, for the challenge that must issue from these tight black windows. My suit was too rich, too blue; its nap practically glowed. I edged close to the car and then edged further off. The car seemed aggressively large in these poky streets, high on its chassis like a preening dog. ‘Baby on board’; ‘National Trust’: the signs in the back made my forehead prickle.

  But no one seemed to notice. People clicked their wrought-iron gates, tugged their terriers’ leads, lif
ted shopping from their boots, bumped their buggies onto the pavement. They never glanced our way. Only the teens by the lock-ups, circling on their bikes like baseball-hatted sharks, seemed conscious of our presence. At each lazy revolution their cap-peaks flipped towards us. Their tyres crackled on the gritty ground.

  The mural showed a street scene. A typical group of locals – an old woman with a shopping bag, a young mum with a buggy, two teenage boys, a girl dressed for Irish dancing – watched complacently as a British Army foot patrol marched towards the vanishing point. ‘TIME TO GO’; ‘SLÁN ABHAILE’. It was edged in Celtic patterns, braided knotwork running a border round the image. Nothing was left blank: the backdrop of houses was lovingly rendered, and the drumlins’ gradations of olive and lime and bottle and jade. It had the smudgy proficiency of pavement art. I looked around. The cars at the kerbside, the satellite dishes jutting from the walls, the baseball-hatted teens: these things seemed anachronistic, unconnected to the world of the mural, even though the scene it depicted was the scene before our eyes – the same hills, the same sad houses. There was something comforting in the bright image, something kin to the vividly miniature and implausible worlds of snow-domes. It looked like a portal to a greener realm, a window on a technicolour Oz.

  For the rest of the morning we toured the murals. North and south and east and west. The Nationalist ones were earnest and kitsch – full of slogans and doves, tags from Heaney and Yeats, historical parallels with Gaza and Mississippi. As if in reaction, the Prod ones were ugly and crude. A brash kind of anti-art. Everything wooden and tight, the lettering clenched and slightly askew. Gunmen in jeans and black jackets, their limbs stiff as guns. There were murals of the Somme, murals of the shipyards. Some of them were oddly jokey. A bug-eyed stomping skinhead in outsize Doc Martens lashing a bulbous drum. A Loyalist Tom bearing down on a Leprechaun Jerry. They were slapdash and happily naff. The newer ones were different again, less partisan and bellicose, they featured footballers and folk heroes instead of hoods and gunmen. George Best and Davey Crockett. On one gable end C. S. Lewis beamed down on the Protestant streets from a wintry Narnian backdrop.