‘What’s with the saltires?’
This was the other thing. Almost every Loyalist mural featured a bright-blue Scottish flag. We were standing on the Newtonards Road. Above us, the whole side wall of a derelict factory honoured the veterans of the Ulster Volunteer Force. Three black-jacketed, balaclava’d figures toted AK-47s in a tableau framed by billowing flags. On one side was the Ulster flag; on the other a Scottish saltire. Rose seemed puzzled at my question. Conversation had petered out a few murals back and for the last half-hour we’d been driving in amicable silence. He cleared his throat.
‘The what?’
‘The Scottish flags. The St Andrew’s cross.’
I’d seen them all morning. Flapping from flagpoles and telegraph poles, painted on gable walls.
‘Like that one there. Look.’ I pointed at the wall: a red and white Ulster flag on one side, a blue and white saltire on the other. ‘Scottish saltires. They’re everywhere.’
We stood before the wall, tilting our heads like connoisseurs.
‘The flag of Scotland? Yeah, it’s all Scottish stuff now. That’s the latest wheeze. We’re not Brits any more. We’re Ulster Scots.’
‘We?’
He shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know a haggis from a pork pie, but there you are. There’s money in it too. There’s a guy they have at Stormont, a species of clerk; he translates all the debates into Ulster Scots. That’s all he does.’ He laughed. ‘They put street signs up – some shitpot town on the Ards peninsula, they put all these signs up in Ulster Scots. Then they had to tear them down.’ He grinned. ‘The natives thought they were Irish.’
The traffic ground past at our backs. A pair of tourists in crocus-coloured anoraks joined us at the mural. We nodded hello and the guy fumbled in his pocket, producing a small silver camera.
‘Can I ask? Would it trouble you?’
The accent was north European: Swedish, possibly Dutch. He showed me the button to press.
‘Sure. No problem.’
They shuffled together in front of the mural and the guy put his arm round the girl. I crouched down to get them in the frame. Above their heads a tangle of painted guns. I wasn’t sure whether to ask them to smile.
‘Here we go,’ I said.
‘Thank you.’ The guy gave a little bow as he took back the camera. He grinned. ‘Now we have all of them, I think. What you call a “full house”. All of the political murals.’
‘Very good.’
‘Tomorrow we go to London Derry. We see the city walls. The “Free Derry Corner”.’
He gave his funny little bow again. He stowed the camera in his anorak and they strolled off, hand in hand.
Rose was sitting on a garden wall, texting. He looked across and I tapped my watch, jerked my thumb towards the car.
‘Had enough?’ He slid down off the wall.
*
For two days we drove around the city. Rose had set up meetings with local hacks – news editors, long-serving staffers. They left their screens and pulled out chairs for me and brought me water in squishy plastic cups. They gave me their time. They were eager to accommodate me – the Tribune remains, for some reason, a name that carries weight in the trade – but they couldn’t help. They drummed their fingers on their lips and clucked their tongues as they sought to recall the week in question. They’d never heard of Peter Lyons. When I mentioned Isaac Hepburn they brightened and offered variations on the same two or three anecdotes. In the end they were baffled by my urgency. I was like one of those Japanese jungle-fighters, emerging into the daylight after twenty years, still primed for battle. No one had told me the war was over. They couldn’t share my hunger for the truth about a Scottish politician and that long dead week in the early 1980s. They’d sooner be discussing house prices. They were just glad it was over. It was time to move on.
I could sympathise with this. I could sympathise with the broken-veined News-Letter staffer who quoted the Glasgow homicide rate – wasn’t it the highest in Europe? – and wondered if I hadn’t enough to get on with at home. But I had a story to write. I wanted to know what Peter Lyons had done. I wanted to know if a fact, properly primed and planted, could still make a difference.
We were driving down the Shore Road.
‘No word on Hepburn?’
He grimaced. ‘Kiwi’s a hard man to reach. I’ll try again later.’
I dropped Rose in the centre and headed for Botanic.
The Grania was deserted. An electric fan wafted to and fro on the bare front desk. The empty restaurant was set for dinner, napkins propped like dunces hats, a dark-blue shine on the cutlery.
I took the stairs at a jog. My room had been cleaned. Cushions were propped on the straight-edged bed. Traffic noise buzzed at the open window. A fizz of Mr Sheen in the air. There were new supplies in the bathroom, mint-thin tablets of soap, round-topped bottles of bodywash.
The first square of toilet roll folded to a point. The folder was where I’d left it, under the Bible in the bedside drawer. I fetched a Red Label and spread the cuttings out on the desk in three separate piles. Three hands of cards. Three dead men. Duncan Gillies, Gary Pettigrew, Eamonn Walsh. Three victims of the Troubles in the week before Guy Fawkes Night, 1983. I poured the whisky and added water. Two were non-starters. Gary Pettigrew was an off-duty RUC corporal, killed by an IRA car-bomb as he left his mother’s house. (He went to see her every Sunday after church, parking in her driveway while the pair of them ate lunch. This little rhythm, this tick of family life, was enough to get him killed.) Eamonn Walsh was a Belfast solicitor, murdered at home by the UVF. A lone gunman put two bullets in his chest from a range of five yards. The UVF described Walsh as an active Republican, a high-ranking Provo, something the family denied. The gunman was caught on the same night. He worked as a croupier in a riverside casino and wore his work clothes under his overalls when he murdered Eamonn Walsh. The RUC pinched him at the blackjack table; traces of blood in his collar. A red miasma down the edge of his cuff, as if the diamonds and the hearts were bleeding. His sentence was thirty-five years.
The one that intrigued me was Duncan Gillies. The file on Gillies was slightly thicker than the rest. It was thicker because the early reports were wrong. Gillies was beaten to death in an alley near his house in a Protestant district of South Belfast. He was Protestant but his street bordered a small Catholic enclave called The Den. The RUC thought his killing was sectarian. A post-mortem timed the beating to the early hours of Sunday morning. Gillies had been drinking. He’d been at a club, maybe, or a city-centre party, and had taken a short cut through the Catholic estate. He’d been challenged by the locals and set upon, his body dumped at the Protestant end of the alley that connected The Den with the Loyalist streets. There were calls for the alley to be closed. Resident groups in both areas wanted barriers put in place. Another peace line was started.
But then the story changed. A ‘source close to the UVF’ suggested Gillies’s death had been ordered. A graffito went up near the victim’s home: ‘Lundy Gillies, Traitor to Ulster.’ A new theory emerged. Gillies was involved with a prisoner’s wife. The usual warnings were given – his car had been trashed the week before, its tyres slashed, its windscreen blinded with paint. But Gillies wasn’t listening. He carried on, trysting with the woman in local pubs, seeing her home through the narrow streets. He was flaunting the affair, taunting the hard men, daring them to act. He’d left them no choice. Gillies wasn’t murdered by Catholics. His own side topped him, in a bit of internal housekeeping that went too far.
I threw back the last splash of whisky. A muffled jangle in the room behind me: the tinny bar-chords of The Clash’s ‘White Riot’. My jacket was on the bed; I fished the phone from its inside pocket.
‘We’re on,’ he said. ‘Good to go. Tomorrow morning. Get new Duracells in that Dictaphone! I’ll pick you up at ten.’
‘What’s this?’
‘I spoke to him,’ said Rose. ‘Isaac Hepburn. Kiwi. He wants to meet.’
Chapter Nine
Out on Botanic the cafes and snack bars were opening up. Waitresses propped chalkboards on the pavement, the day’s specials blazoned in yellows, greens and pinks. A window cleaner was busy across the street. I watched him lather a plane of plate glass and swipe it clean with fluent strokes of his rubberised blade. He was working his way up the street and the windows he’d already done were like a row of shaven chins. He stooped to lift his twin buckets and I thought of the burnished new rotunda by the river and the clicking heels of the girls on the Golden Mile and the hopeful sprig of garnish on my breakfast plate. Maybe the News-Letter staffer was right. I was here to pick at scabs. I was greedy for all the old badness, the past’s bitter quota of hurt.
I wasn’t alone. Across the West of Scotland, in the clubs and lodges, the stadiums and bars, people missed the Troubles. They mightn’t admit it, but they rued a little the ceasefires’ durability, the Armalite’s silence. We had followed the Troubles so closely for so long. There is something narcotic in watching a war unfold on your doorstep, knowing all the while it can’t harm you. It’s like taking in one of those fabled childhood mismatches – bear against wolverine, crocodile and shark – from behind a Plexiglas screen.
Certainly the newsrooms missed the Troubles. I knew too well that quickening, that bristling at the desks when word came through of another bomb. A pub raked with bullets. A Scots Guard snipered. An ambushed patrol. How greedily we absorbed it, crowding round the teleprinter, expelling our breath in awed whistles as the rousing news came through on the wire. And then the cheerful bustle, the camaraderie as we readied the layout and left space for the photos and the recapping sidebars, and waited by the phones for the stringer’s thousand words.
The violence thrilled us. All the northern carnage. Bombs and executions just out of earshot. Army choppers shot down over hills that looked like Ayrshire. We were close to this slaughter. We understood it. More at least than the English did. People were fighting and dying in the name of those acronyms that littered our walls. It was our war too. Only it couldn’t touch us. Nobody here was dying. We weren’t being smithereened in our shopping malls and pubs. Our high streets and town crosses retained their integrity, unedited and unabridged by fertiliser bombs. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Warrington: the war came home to England but it never came to us. The Provos had a policy: don’t touch Scotland. Who’d want to start things here? So Scotland was exempt; insulated from Semtex and shrapnel. The cross was on our lintels and the carnage passed us by.
I remember travelling to London for a story, sometime in the early nineties, not long after Canary Wharf. We changed trains at Carlisle, the snapper and I. We were waiting on the platform when the snapper lit a smoke, crushed the empty packet and looked for a bin. There wasn’t one. Railway-station litter bins stopped at the border. You couldn’t have a bin in an English station in case the Provos put a bomb in it.
There was a noise outside in the corridor and somebody rapped on my door. ‘Hold on!’ I grabbed my jacket. The cleaner, a girl in her twenties with Elvis Costello glasses and the honey-blonde colouring of Eastern Europe, raised her eyebrows at me.
‘Yep. I’m ready. On you go.’
The corridor looked like the main road out of a war-torn city, a capital newly fallen to the rebels. I picked my way through a refugee column of carts and service trolleys, laundry bins, gape-mouthed canvas sacks. The carts carried replacement bottles of complimentary shampoo, sugars ranked like banknotes in a till, NutraSweet pink and cane-sugar brown and granulated white; foil-wrapped tea bags, Nescafé sachets, thimble-sized cartons of UHT milk. There were tilting towers of bedsheets and bath towels. From the half-open doors came muted thumps and knocks, the complaint of vacuum cleaners, the mollifying tones of spoken Polish.
In the lobby I sat like a schoolboy in an outsize brown armchair and watched the city. I began to wonder if Lyons had been here at all. He seemed to have left no trace, no spoor, no impression on these streets. A minicab pulled up and John Rose stepped out. I waited for the cab to move off but it stayed put. Then I realised he’d emerged from the driver’s side.
I patted my breast pocket. The Dictaphone was there, with a new pair of AAs and a fresh cassette. I’d read up on Isaac Hepburn. I’d googled him. I’d stood for an hour at the ‘Troubles’ section of Belfast Waterstone’s, tracking him through the indexes of half a dozen books. Hepburn was a Loyalist hero. He shot an IRA man in Ardoyne in the winter of ’82. This was enough to make him a legend. At that time, the only people killing IRA men were other IRA men. The Provos’ nutting squad, the unit that dealt with informers, dumped its regular quota of ruined volunteers on the verges of B-roads in Antrim and Down. But nobody else – not the Blacknecks, not the UDA, not the Peelers, not the Brits – had got close to a Provo in months. They were too well briefed and too canny. They were too bloody good. They slept in different places every night. Their own homes had bulletproof windows; front doors in reinforced steel. They were too special and too ordinary. They didn’t cut about in top-range motors and high-end sportswear. They kept their heads down and did their jobs. You couldn’t get near them.
But Hepburn did. He found a way. He was friendly with a British Army corporal. They drank in a hotel bar near Thiepval Barracks. This lad was manning a checkpoint when a white Opel was stopped, the driver a mid-ranking Provo. The corporal ran the reggie through the computer and got an address in Ardoyne. He passed it to Hepburn in the bar that night. The next evening Hepburn cycled into Ardoyne wearing a Celtic top. When he came to the address the white Opel was parked at the kerb and the mark was on his way down the path tossing the car keys in his palm. Hepburn shouted his name and the mark stopped with his hand on the car door. The first bullet caught the guy’s arm and his car keys splashed to the ground. The next two thumped into his chest and dumped him on the pavement. His head lolled over the kerb. There was a drain right underneath and when Hepburn knelt down and lodged the barrel behind the mark’s left ear the blood flowed cleanly through the bars. Then Hepburn stood up, lodged the gun in his waistband, pulled his Celtic top over it, mounted his bike and cycled out of Ardoyne. He crossed the Crumlin Road and was back on the Shankill within ten minutes.
John Rose came in, shaking his head. He dunked his keys in the empty ashtray.
‘Sorry, big lad,’ he said. ‘No go. He’s pulled the plug.’
The chair creaked as he dropped into it, his arms bouncing on the armrests. He took his smokes from his pocket and dropped them on the table.
I nodded, reached for my coffee and then sat back.
‘OK. See, that’s interesting because yesterday this was a done deal. Good to go. Your words.’
He looked around for the waitress.
‘Yeah, well, things change. That was true yesterday. It’s not true now.’ The waitress had seen him. He lifted my coffee cup and pointed at it, then held up two fingers. I never said anything. He got a cigarette in his mouth and fumbled for a lighter. His eyes, when they turned in my direction, had narrowed slightly. He took the cigarette from his mouth. ‘It’s not the doctor, Gerry. You don’t phone up and demand an appointment. You don’t get seen within two working days.’
‘Right.’ I sighed. ‘Tell me this. I’m wondering. Do you even know Isaac Hepburn? Do you actually know the guy? Because I’m beginning to doubt–’
The keys hissed as he fished them from the table.
‘Fuck you.’ He stuffed his cigarettes into his jacket pocket. ‘Smart cunt. Fuck you. Let’s see how far you get.’
The door thudded open in his wake and his boot heels rattled the steps. The waitress came over to close the door properly.
The coffees arrived. I finished mine and was halfway through his when the door banged again. He was standing over me, breathing heavily. He wrenched the cup from my grasp and smacked it down on a nearby table.
‘Come on to fuck if you’re coming.’
He was already out the door. I shrugged into my jacket and hurried out.
>
We drove without talking. Something in the boot kept rattling around as Rose swung fiercely into the corners.
‘What?’ Rose said.
‘This.’ I gestured round the car’s interior. The no-smoking signs. The licence on the dash.
‘Yeah,’ said Rose. ‘Like I make a living wage as a stringer. Wise up, Gerry.’
He swung into the car park of an old Victorian villa. The house had long thin windows and pointed eaves that gave the place a morose expression. Rose himself had a face like thunder. He killed the engine.
‘I’ll wait for you here.’
I told him I would call a cab.
‘This is a fucking cab. I’ll wait for you here.’ He took a book of number puzzles from the glove compartment and turned the radio on.
*
I climbed an ugly disabled ramp and pressed the buzzer. There was no sign, no hoarding, no banner. It was like that in Belfast: either they spelled it out in foot-high capitals (‘YOU ARE NOW ENTERING LOYALIST TIGERS BAY’) or they told you fuck all. Only once I’d been buzzed inside did I see the name above the corkboard in the hallway: The Northern Star Athletic Club.
There was a curved reception desk like a dentist’s, and a girl in a black polo shirt and tracksuit bottoms came out from a back room and smiled.
I told her I was here to see Mr Hepburn.
‘And you are?’
‘Gerard Conway.’ I said it nice and clean. She looked at me neutrally for a count of three.
‘OK, Mr Conway. Why don’t you have a seat for a minute? Would you like a coffee? A cup of tea?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
I sat on a leather banquette by the door. Grunting and slapping sounds came from the gym and an odd hollow boom like a Lambeg drum.
All the Colours of the Town Page 11
