All the Colours of the Town

by McIlvanney, Liam

  We looked at each other and then down at the fence and the sagging wires. The animal had strayed. It had pushed through a break in the fence, wandered the tracks, its hooves sinking into the stones, and at some point the stones weren’t there and the cow stumbled into the void. It looked like a set-up, a practical joke. In all three dimensions, the cow precisely fitted its oblong shaft. It occupied its slot the way a Bible fits a slipcase.

  There was no stench, no massing of flies. The beast was newly dead. We looked out over the fields, all distant and stilled and smoking in the early sun, but the fields gave nothing away. It was hard not to posit some element of design, some malignant bias in whatever force had weakened the fence at just this point, had drawn the heavy beast up the banking, its sharp shoulders working, and brought it to this cow-sized grave.

  We stood there for a minute or two. We bounced a couple of stones off the broad back and prodded it with the toes of our Sambas. Then we tramped off up the track.

  All this came back to me on my last night in Belfast when I saw Isaac Hepburn for the final time. I’d been driving back from Bangor.

  FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD, THAT HE GAVE HIS ONLY BEGOTTEN SON, THAT WHOSOEVER BELIEVETH IN HIM SHOULD NOT PERISH, BUT HAVE EVERLASTING LIFE. JOHN 3:16.

  That was daubed in foot-high letters on the side of a barn. I thought it over while I drove to the city. I hadn’t seen Hepburn since he’d cracked my face on the bonnet of a car, but for some reason the crude white letters brought him to mind. It worried me that he hadn’t been back in touch about his thousand pounds. It made me wonder if something had happened. It occurred to me, too, that if he wanted to earn a grand, instead of just extort it, there were things he could do. Like tell me who else was present when Eamonn Walsh got shot. I decided to pay him a visit, give him the thousand right there and then if he would tell me what he knew about the Walsh assassination.

  I parked in the Donegall Quay multi-storey and checked my wallet. Nearly four hundred. There was a Northern Bank on Donegall Square and I took out the rest of the cash and went for a coffee at the Linen Hall Library. The sheet of paper Hepburn had left at the hotel was still in my wallet. My throat dried up as I punched the number but it went to voicemail. I left a message asking Hepburn to call me. There was no point driving back to Antrim if I was hoping to see Hepburn that night, so I killed some time in the library and then took in a rerun of Badlands at the Queen’s Film Theatre. By ten o’clock I was in the Cloth Ear Bar of the Merchant Hotel. My phone sat mutely on the table beside a glass of sparkling water. Hepburn still hadn’t called. I could try the gym but he wouldn’t want to do business there, at least not when other people were around.

  I toyed with my fizzy water for another hour and then fetched the car from Donegall Quay and drove to Hepburn’s gym. It was after closing time now but maybe I’d catch him before he went home. I parked round the corner. The street was empty. Tarmac glistened in the sodium glare. Puddles threw up tangerine smears. The teens on the disabled ramp – that parliament of crows – had flapped off to another perch. A big-bellied bottle of cider stood daintily on the top step.

  The storm door was closed, the fanlight dark. I pressed the intercom, held it down for a count of five. Beyond the door the sound ground dully on but the grille failed to crackle into life. I glanced back at the street; the lighted pinks and greens of curtained windows. A late bus changed gears on a distant street.

  Down the side of the building was a narrow roadway. I followed it to the car park at the rear. A cough-drop-shaped security light burned in its strutted cage. The ground had a slimy cast in the orange light. There was a single car in the lot, a Saab 9-5, black, four years old. Nothing moved. The building’s back wall had a sullen, shuttered look. But a window on the lower left was a lighter grey than the rest. If I stood on my tiptoes I might just see in.

  There was nothing to see. Security bars. A dim pearly haze through net curtains. A wheelie bin stood by the door. I dragged it over and scrambled up on top, but there was no gap between the curtain and the top of the window.

  I jumped back down. I squeezed my good hand between the bars and knocked the window, clacking my ring on the glass. Nothing. No shadows swayed. The curtains just hung.

  I stepped back and studied the building again. There were three steps up to the narrow back door. I jumped them and rattled the handle. Next to the door was a big boxed-in unit for the air-conditioning system. On the far side of this, above a low step, was the fire door. Craning out over the air-con, I could just make out a hopeful strip of shadow. The door wasn’t flush with its jamb. I stepped round the air-con unit and clenched my fingertips on the half-inch strip of fire door and strained, one-handed, like a climber on a ledge. The door gave and I worked my fingers into the gap.

  There was no alarm, no shrilling of bells. I stepped inside, let the door bump gently shut, the latch half-engaging with a cushioned click, the push-bar nudging the small of my back.

  For a moment everything was black. A squall of panic rose and fell. Take it easy, Conway. Breathe deep. Then I turned to my right and collided with someone.

  I threw my arms up in the dark, ready to grapple, to parry the blows. Nobody moved. My breathing rasped like a pack of dogs. I sensed a displacement of air, as if a large body had passed nearby. I put my hand out again and a cold, tacky surface kissed my palm. I put out my other hand, put my arms right around the thing and hugged it. A punchbag. I was in Hepburn’s gym.

  There was a flashlight in the Forester’s glove compartment and I thought about nipping back. But I stayed where I was and the room slowly bloomed into view, the planes and the contours asserting themselves. The big square scaffold of the ring. The heavy bags, one gently swinging.

  My breathing eased. I wiped my palms down the crease of my trousers.

  I opened the door to the rest of the club. It was lighter here, the street lights piercing the slatted blinds. There were doors across the hallway. I stepped up to one, its push-panel glinting dully and shoved it firmly, once, without crossing the threshold. Before it swung back, the door disclosed a steel double sink, a row of implements on hooks and a slab-topped table in the centre of the room. The next door had two panels side by side: a forked little man and a woman’s triangular skirt.

  I didn’t go in. I moved down to a door marked PRIVATE. STAFF ONLY. A TV was on; tinny histrionics and incidental music. I held my breath and used one knuckle to knock. I used it again a bit harder. The voices on the telly didn’t object, so I turned the handle.

  It was somebody’s office. A gunmetal desk and a blue swivel chair. A standard lamp explained the haze I’d seen from the car park. The telly – it sat atop a four-door grey filing cabinet in the corner – was tuned to a hospital drama: gesticulating doctors breezing through crash-doors. I crossed to turn it off and tried in turn the four locked drawers of the filing cabinet. There wasn’t much else in the room. A PC workstation against one wall. A gas fire. A wastepaper basket of scuffed red metal. A desk-tidy on the floor, its holdings of pens, rulers and paperclips strewn on the carpet. On the back wall a Mondrian calendar, open at May. Above the fireplace a large naked oblong of unfaded paint where something had been moved or knocked from the wall. I moved around the desk and found it on the floor, a framed photo, face down, its glass cracked in a sun-ray pattern.

  Some of the glass dislodged as I lifted the frame, ragged shards tilting onto the floor. I shook the rest into the basket and laid the frame on the desk. The photo showed a boxing ring after a fight. A handsome man in a dinner suit and black bow tie stood between two sweaty fighters, his arms around their shoulders, his one-button tux still buttoned. He had wavy hair and a professional smile and he looked like a minor celebrity, a regional newscaster or football pundit. The boxers wore coloured vests. Their gloves were off. Their chests and faces shone in the overhead spots. The one in the red vest had a glazed, sleepy look. His right eye was hooded and his other eye looked at the floor. His bandaged hands hung stiff at his sides. He wante
d to be anywhere else but having his photograph taken. On the newsreader’s other side, the blue-vested victor was all smiles. He stood loosely, in a slouch that was almost sexual, and his gaze – bright-eyed and knowing – met the camera full on. Behind the three figures was a jostle of bodies, among them Isaac Hepburn, a towel tucked into his tracksuit top, his smile pointing just where it should.

  I laid the photo on the desk, next to the shattered frame. The desk had three drawers, each of them empty. The room smelled of rolling tobacco, the brownish whiff of Old Holborn. A tin ashtray held the skinny white dowts of three roll-ups. Two of the dowts were folded and crushed; the third was straight and a little longer than the others. Next to the ashtray a bottle of Bush and an empty shot glass. When I turned the glass over a drop slithered down to the rim. I raised the glass and shook it, took the hot, pill-sized fizz on my tongue. I unscrewed the bottle and filled the cap, a medicinal jolt, and tossed it back. It sizzled right down to my gut. It felt right at home. I gave it a friend and then re-screwed the cap.

  The whiskey put a brighter slant on things and I breezed out of Hepburn’s office and glanced through the rest of the rooms. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for. At first I was trying to find Hepburn. Then I thought I might find something I could use against him, a clue, some giveaway spoor of his criminal doings. The lounge bar was dark: a tiny marina of upturned chairs. The reception desk was tidy and bare. Nothing moved in the cool of the toilets; the urinals shone bluely and I walked down the row of stalls and pushed open every door.

  Back in the gym I was heading for the fire door when I remembered the seats. The padded benches down one wall doubled as storage bins; their cushioned seats came off and boxing kit was stowed in the space underneath. When I lifted the first seat, the leatherette slurped as it came unstuck, and the reek billowed up – salty, urinous, the heady fermentations of sweat. A crumpled punchbag. A mound of gloves with laces agape. In the second was a stack of rubber mats and a white snarl of skipping ropes. Then I bent to the third.

  It looked at first like a piece of kit, a punchbag or a rolled-up mat, but there was something in the roundness, some telltale slope or curve that made me reach into my pocket. By the Zippo’s wavy flame I could see the rise of Hepburn’s shoulders under the light-blue weave of Hepburn’s jacket. I reached down for the grey hair and tugged on it. The head was the head of a deep-drowned man. The eyes rolled whitely, the lids half-closed like the eye of the beaten boxer in the photograph. There was a ligature of sorts, a cord or wire cutting into his neck. I dropped the Zippo and the seat clattered shut.

  The sound cannoned through the empty gym. Was it just the seat banging shut or was it something else, a door closing in another part of the club? I hunched there on my knees, bracing myself against the silence. The wooden floor was biting into my knees but I held myself rigid, breathing in minuscule sips, until the panic died. I was halfway across the gym when I remembered my Zippo. I felt around on the floor in front of the benches. Nothing. It must have fallen in as the seat banged shut.

  The seat eased up with another squelching kiss. The Zippo wasn’t there. I slipped my hand between Hepburn’s shoulder and the rim of the seat-box and started to paddle blindly with my fingers. They brushed something warm and metallic and I dragged it up against the wooden side until it clattered onto the floor. It gleamed in the darkness: the Zippo. I stowed it in my pocket and stood up. Then something occurred to me and I dropped to my knees again. I opened the lid once more and worked quickly through Hepburn’s pockets.

  There was a bunch of keys, a slippy pouch of rolling tobacco, a roll of dental floss, a box of matches, and a silvery clamshell phone. There was a wallet with the usual plastic and a sheaf of Ulsterbank twenties. At least they hadn’t robbed him. I put the wallet and the money back with the rest of his things.

  Back in the lounge I found a bar towel and worked my way through the rooms, rubbing the doorknobs and surfaces, the whiskey glass and bottle. I took the bar-towel with me when I left and wiped down the wheelie-bin’s handles and lid, the windowsill, the back-doorknob.

  It was colder now and darker in the alley. I stopped in the last patch of shadow, my guts sore with fear. Whoever had got to Hepburn might be coming back. Or they might still be here. But I still couldn’t move. Every time I made to leave, the slam of a door or the hissing of tyres would flare out of the night. Then I’d wait so long that the silence itself took on a charged, suspicious air. If I didn’t move soon I’d be stood there all night. Finally I blundered out, stumping like a fire-walker, and turned right. I’d gone five yards when a figure turned the corner up ahead. I tried to slow, to swing my gait a little, make it look like I’d been trudging for miles.

  The walker came on. We were almost abreast. I caught a jagged, Cubist image of a face – pale-blue eye, a droopy grey moustache – before I dropped my head to check my watch. We passed without comment or sign but I sensed that he had stopped, that he was minded to hail me. My knees twitched, as if they might break loose of their own accord and send me sprinting free. At the corner I glanced back. The man stood on the pavement looking after me. I turned the corner briskly, crossed to the car, tugging the keys from my pocket, tugging so hard that the lining tore, and when the engine caught and I lurched from the kerb it was still in my nostrils, the reek of Hepburn’s gym, the sour citric staleness of sweat.

  Book Three

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The air in the newsroom was stale. The air-con was down and the open windows – great square affairs that tilted a mere six inches, like a man looking out for a bus – might just as well have been closed. I sat stock still at my desk. I used to find it easy to look busy when I wasn’t. Now it was too much work. Now it was as wearisome to look busy as to be busy so I didn’t try. I didn’t try anything much but it was hard to ignore them. The smiles. The sympathetic nods. The solicitous looks. I could feel it like something physical, my dwindling status. Like the turn of a season it was vague but striking. A warmth, a vernal friendliness, from people who hated your guts. Nobody now was cursing my luck over lager tops at the Cope. Nobody now had me filling Rix’s shoes. My fingers slumped on the keys. A bulb of sweat swayed down my spine. Neve McDonald clicked down the floor and the fullness of her buttocks, chewing past in a tight wool skirt, was like a calculated insult.

  Fuck it. I had no stories, I had no leads, but I sat at my desk in the fetid heat and tallied them up, my dubious blessings. I was still alive. I was still in one piece, bar the ghost of a limp and a fading black eye. I thought about Isaac Hepburn. Hepburn in a kit-bin. Hepburn in a steel drawer. Hepburn in a wooden box. He never did get his thousand pounds. It hadn’t quite worked to everyone’s mutual advantage, this arrangement of ours. To his mutual advantage anyway. He tried to sell me Peter Lyons. Then somebody killed him. But were those facts connected? If he tried to sell Lyons then he must have sold other stuff too. And if he sold to me then he sold to somebody else. The guy was a tout and in my experience touts got rumbled. And when that happened, touts got hurt. From what Macpherson told me, half the Shankill was leery of Hepburn.

  I remembered the way he spoke about the higher-ups, the Blackneck brass. Bacardi generals. Chocolate soldiers. He was cocky, Kiwi Hepburn: reckless and righteous. He bristled with entitlement. In his own eyes, he wasn’t a tout. He felt they owed him and he was taking some of it back. And you couldn’t blame him. A lot of guys did well for themselves while Hepburn was buffing his boots in a draughty Nissen hut. But you couldn’t expect other people to see it like that.

  I planted my elbows on the desk and slumped towards the machine, rigid fingers vizoring my face, the balls of my thumbs rotating my temples.

  The cops had questioned me, of course. A PSNI detective flew over within days of Hepburn’s death. I took him to the Trib’s cafeteria and he set his little Dictaphone on the sticky table. I had visited Isaac Hepburn in the week before his death. Was that right? It was. What was the purpose of my visit? He peered at me with profession
al intensity; a big flake of sugar from his yum-yum was stuck to his moustache. I told him I’d been working on a story. When I declined to say what it was he didn’t insist. It didn’t seem to matter. He turned the Dictaphone off and finished his yum-yum. It was a nothing case, he told me. They’d been waiting for this to happen. Hepburn was a tout. He’d also got smart-mouthed in two or three of the wrong pubs and said some careless things about former comrades. His finale was a surprise to no one.

  ‘It might have been a surprise to Hepburn,’ I said.

  The cop picked the sugar from his moustache: ‘It shouldn’t have been.’

  He thanked me for the coffee and left for his plane.

  The heat was getting tiresome now. Sweat was spotting my silent keyboard. I sifted through the crap on my desk for a packet of tissues. The day’s papers were scattered everywhere. That morning’s Scotsman carried a piece by Kirsty Dewar. A crackdown on knife crime: stop-and-search powers to be upped throughout Strathclyde. The story had Lyons all over it. It should have been mine. It would have been mine – its pre-packaged sentences and banal quotations would have been up there on the screen, ready for Sunday’s paper – if I’d never gone to Belfast. I tried to feel resentful about this but I knew it was all I deserved.

  I didn’t deserve to write a story. Last week I’d walked in on the biggest scoop of my career and I was too scared to touch it. I ought to have written the piece of my life. I ought to have sat down that night in the Grania and tapped out Sunday’s splash. I ought at least to have called the police and given my statement. But I crept away from Hepburn’s gym and drove up the Antrim Road like a sneak, like a timid adulterer. The houses were dark. It felt as though I were fleeing the city, as though a great catastrophe were coming and instead of raising the alarm I was slipping out through a wicket gate. Whenever I eased off the clutch my knee juddered wildly. There and then I decided: I’m telling no one. Nobody knew where I’d been. It was an impulse that had taken me to Hepburn’s gym and not even Martin had known.