The Ghost Factory

by Jenny McCartney

  Nixon had regretful blue eyes and a heavy, blurred jawline, but then sometimes he’d get a bit blustery and muscular, just enough to hint that he was the sort of guy who hung out with hardened gunmen. You could tell that the interviewers enjoyed that even more. They went briefly malleable, like an East End glamour-bird offered a drink by one of the Krays.

  He didn’t sound that authentic to me, though: he had picked up his style of talking from the IRA spokesmen, who used it to remarkable effect, and the two sides were at it all the time, oozing their way across the airwaves, competing for who could sound the most emollient.

  Liam Blake was one of the IRA men who organised that notable day of carnage in the early 1970s when more than twenty different bombs exploded right across Belfast, a sunny afternoon suddenly darkened by grey smoke, flying shards of metal and spurting crimson rain. Shoppers ran screaming from one explosion into the path of the next. A family friend of Murdie’s was killed that day, and one evening at our house he started talking about it, normally enough at first, until he said: ‘Och he was so funny, that wee lad. He could do these impressions of anybody, he could do—’ but the last word seemed to stick in his throat and he stopped very abruptly. He got up and walked quickly over to the window and stood there stiffly for a while, turning his head away from us and staring out at the street. After a bit Big Jacky got up and poured them both a drink and they began talking about the football. I had wanted to know more – in which part of the city, how exactly it happened – but I didn’t ask him about it again.

  Blake, however, now spoke almost exclusively in a voice polished with piety, a thoughtful social worker issuing case reports. It did my head in just to hear it. Between them the assorted paramilitaries talked so gently that everyone was thoroughly deafened, and hardly anyone could hear the swish of baseball bats up alleyways at all.

  Forget all that, I thought. I turned the radio off and got up. I would take a shower, clean my teeth, go to work, see Eve, my heart sang. Tomorrow I would write to Phyllis.

  Twenty minutes later, on my way out the door, I glimpsed a letter with my name on it in familiar handwriting, beaming from a pile of bills on the beige mat: Phyllis had written to me. I tucked it into my coat like a warm promise to read on the bus. It was a cold day, but the sky was a pale, icy blue and the sun bounced off the pavement. The leaves on the hedges shimmered. My coat was exactly thick enough to keep the wind from bothering my body, and I felt an uncomplicated joy in being alive.

  Once I had sat down on the top deck, I scythed Phyllis’s envelope open with my thumb and pulled out the letter. It read:

  Dear Jacky,

  I am sorry but I have some terrible news. Titch has killed himself. He did it two days ago, hanged himself in his room. His poor mother came home and found him and called the ambulance but it was too late to save him, he had already passed away. He had been very down as the weekend before there was a pot of paint thrown over their front door and he said to his mother he was sure they were going to come and get him again. His mother is in an awful state I have been doing everything I can for her, getting her shopping and helping to sort out the arrangements. He is going to be buried on Monday, don’t you be tempted to come home, you have had enough trouble already, but we all know you will be thinking of him. He was awful fond of you as you know and never stopped asking how you were doing,

  Love, Your Aunt Phyllis

  Titch. I got off the bus at the next stop, and walked back to the Whartons’ with my heart beating very fast. Titch dead. The enormous shot of pain hit me like the injection of a drug.

  My course of action suddenly seemed very clear, as if a hazy world had become a place of pure, sharp lines. Two things were about to happen. I was going to go back to Belfast and kill McGee, and when I had done that I would go to Titch’s grave and lay a wreath in front of his headstone. Then I would leave for good.

  From the Whartons’ house, I called into work. The manager, Hassan, answered the phone, and I heard my own voice saying: ‘Hassan, I’m so sorry. My mother has just had a heart attack and the doctors say it’s very serious. I’ll have to go back to Ireland to see her, and I might be a week or so. I’m sorry about this but there’s nothing I can do.’ I sounded breathless as I spoke, but not for the reason I was telling Hassan.

  I could tell he was dismayed: it meant a couple of days of difficulty for him, trying to find a suitable barman to stand in for that length of time. But he had courteous manners, and he was not the sort of man to take a mother’s illness lightly. After all, I had never missed a day before. I had noticed that the well-being of his own large, extended family weighed unusually heavily on him. He seemed permanently oppressed by a father-in-law’s medical bills or a cousin’s interminable legal studies in Morocco. His face, above a forcefully starched collar of blinding whiteness, always looked crumpled and wearied.

  ‘That’s terrible news, Jacky,’ he said, after a brief pause of reckoning. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll sort something out here. I do hope your mother recovers. Give us a call in three or four days and let us know how she’s doing.’

  ‘Of course I will, Hassan. Sorry about this.’

  ‘No, no, I’m so sorry about your mother.’

  For a second, I felt bad for lying about my mother’s life-threatening illness. I had never done that before: it was pretty low. But Titch was dead. And then I thought the reason that most people worry about using something so terrible as an excuse is because they fear that perhaps their mother really will die soon, as fate’s punishment for lying.

  My mother was already dead, however, and it had happened to me before I ever thought about lying. Any debt I owed to fate was pre-paid in full almost before I could talk. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I could, with every justification, use the excuse of my mother nearly dying – or, indeed, having just died – again and again throughout my entire life, until I became far too old myself for it to carry any credibility. Fate had handed other people all the benefits that came from a real live mother, and coolly denied them to me, like some hard-faced cloakroom attendant who lost my only coat on a freezing night and never said sorry. Why should I also turn down the few famished advantages that could flow from bad luck?

  I briefly wondered, though, what my mother would think of me killing McGee, and felt a pang of guilt. She had probably had high hopes for me: Big Jacky said she used to sing me to sleep every night. I pushed her out of my head. I had had a long run of bad luck. She had died, Big Jacky had died, and now Titch. My existence so far had been like some bloody Shakespearean play, littered with corpses.

  That run would surely end with the eradication of McGee, and then a new, cleaner life could start for me, a lucky life with love in it and maybe success too. If I let the chance to end things slither away from me now, the thought of my own weakness would chafe at me for ever.

  The thing was, I needed to do what must be done quickly, before the anger that gave me the energy ebbed and I started to think too much. The Whartons knew that my mother had died years ago, so for them it was Titch that I reheated and hauled back to the border between life and death. I scribbled a note that read: ‘Good friend seriously ill, have had to go to Belfast. Back in a week or so.’ I left it on their kitchen table, anchored by a coffee mug. Then I packed some things in a bag – underwear, toothbrush, a suit, and the majority of my worn, filthy-soft little bundles of cash – and headed out into the street towards the coach for Scotland. One thought thudded round my head, almost too big to be absorbed into my bloodstream. Titch was dead.

  20

  Belfast

  How do you shop for a murder you haven’t yet planned? I was sitting on the neatly made bed of a Belfast hotel room, a brightly lit people container shaped exactly like a box. The planners had fitted the maximum number of these small, profitable boxes into the enormous concrete box that constituted the building itself. In one hand I held a piece of lined paper and in the other a pencil. The only words written on the paper were: rubber
gloves.

  There were several cast-iron principles for carrying out a successful killing, I had decided. The first was obvious: that nothing I did should arouse any suspicion. Above all, I had to appear very normal, which was difficult because I was feeling so strange. I’d sort of lost perspective on what normal meant, but – seen dimly from a long way away – I thought perhaps it might manifest itself as a sort of cheerful blokeishness. If placed under any stress, I decided, I would try to exude a mild, friendly laddishness, the way a cuttlefish squirts out ink to blind its adversaries.

  One of the chief obstacles to organising a murder is that you suddenly realise just how pointlessly nosey other people are about your most mundane business. Under ordinary circumstances their inquisitiveness would be tolerable, but when a dark intention is already planted in your brain every gasbag taxi driver or shop assistant is transformed into a potential police witness. You can picture them giving their statement to the investigating officer, swollen with self-importance at the drama of being asked, brow furrowed with the strain of remembering, until – from somewhere in the slop of their memory – they finally dredge up some nugget of detail to sink you for ever.

  Still, I wasn’t quite ready for an interrogation when I checked into the hotel and the girl at the wood-veneered reception desk downstairs suddenly said, with an expression of benignly professional concern, ‘Here for business or pleasure?’

  She was in her mid-twenties, rake-thin with resolutely over-plucked eyebrows and reddish hair swept back into a sleek ponytail. A laminated name badge identified her as ‘Marie’. Why ask? I thought. It was the most anonymous of all hotels, surely, designed for the budget businessman and the economy traveller, bristling with trouser presses and stripped of room service. But they had probably told her at the training course to be bright, to ask customers perky questions in order to show that you cared. Part of me wanted to retort sharply ‘Neither!’ or ‘Business!’ but people pick up on irritation and it sticks in their minds like a sharp stone.

  ‘Pleasure, I suppose,’ I said. ‘I’m over for a friend’s wedding, and then I’m going to take a few extra days to see some relatives.’

  She looked up quickly, more keenly interested than I had anticipated, and said, ‘Where’s the wedding?’

  Indeed, where was the wedding? What a stupid thing to say in the first place. I had forgotten that women love to talk about weddings. It’s like casually mentioning to a gang of small children that you’re going to visit a chocolate factory tomorrow and expecting that to be the last word.

  I scrunched up my face and hid my eyes with my hand in mock-shame, buying extra time. Scatty me.

  ‘I haven’t looked at the invitation again since I came over,’ I said. ‘I think they’re getting married in the City Hall, and then the reception’s in a Belfast hotel, so it’ll be within taxi distance, wherever it is. But I hope I’ve got the day right, at least.’

  ‘Just as well I asked!’ she beamed, buoyed up by my masculine disorganisation.

  I gave her a smile as wide as Belfast Lough, and as icy cold inside: ‘Just as well you did. I’ll dig it out from the bottom of my case and have a look.’

  ‘And will none of your relatives put you up?’ she said.

  She was getting a wee bit flirtatious now, as I stood there filling in some endless, detailed form about the room. Name, date of birth, residence, favourite colour, make and style of underpants, approximate rate of hair loss, last time you can remember eating tofu, views on the afterlife. I wrote in a fake name: John Mason. Christ, why had I done that: wouldn’t it have been better just to be me, after all – officially, at least – I had nothing to hide. Too late. It would look weird if I scribbled it out now. John Mason, who the hell was he, what kind of name was that? How many more multi-headed questions were going to fly like rogue missiles out of that thin, magenta-smeared slot of a mouth?

  ‘Och, no, the houses are all full,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a bit of work to do as well, and you know how it is if you try to get anything done in anyone else’s house.’

  ‘Get a bit of peace here, eh?’

  Thank God she hadn’t asked what kind of work I did. What kind of work did some eejit called John Mason do anyway? I had only chosen the name because it sounded solid.

  ‘Yes, a bit of peace is just what I need.’

  My nerves were pretty frayed when I finally hurried upstairs with my bag, and closed the door behind me. I stared for a while at the sickly reproduction of Monet’s water lilies that was hanging on the wall in a blue plastic frame. Poor Monet, I thought, endlessly shrunk and copied into such blandness.

  Then I got out the paper and started to write the list of things I needed, beginning with rubber gloves. After a few minutes, I crossed out the word ‘rubber’ twice, and wrote in ‘leather’ instead. I didn’t want to leave any fingerprints for the police to find, but I wasn’t going to kill McGee wearing a pair of yellow Marigolds, as if I had popped in to do the washing-up and then changed my mind and suddenly murdered a man because the water wasn’t hot enough yet to really get the grease off the pans.

  Underneath ‘gloves’, I wrote: find out where wedding reception is. I knew she would ask me again. She’d dug up her wee bit of information like a terrier, and she wasn’t going to let up until she’d tugged out some more. Tug, tug. Who was the bride? Was there a decent buffet? I bet she even knew someone who was going to the very wedding I was going to pretend to go to.

  Maybe I’d have to murder Marie as well, I thought, and flatten her in the trouser press. I laughed for a bit at that, and I started thinking about how best to destroy the list once I had written everything down and memorised it.

  Some time later I called Hassan’s mobile phone, knowing he wouldn’t answer in the evening rush, and left a short message telling him of my mother’s death. Then I ate a banana and a stale bread roll I had in my bag, cleaned my teeth and fell asleep.

  In the middle of the night I woke up with the sensation of falling through the pitch-black air, and I remembered that I was supposed to meet Eve in the coffee shop at eight o’clock the night before. I pictured her sitting waiting for me, the cast of disappointment slowly settling on her face as the waitress circled the pickings of the dead evening like a skinny blonde buzzard.

  Eventually Eve would have requested the bill and walked out. How long would she have waited for me – half an hour, an hour? The knowledge that I’d let her down kept stabbing me, but I suffocated the regret with the thought that she was better off without me, even if she didn’t know it. I could never go back to her now anyway, all messy and bloodstained after what I was about to do.

  On the coach that dragged itself out of the grey, clogged suburbs of London and way up to the fields and craggy heathery patches of Scotland – punctuated with tidy wee flowerbedded towns and stone kirks – and on to the wind-battered, salty ferry port of Stranraer and over to home, I had thought about Titch. He was the closest thing to a brother I’d ever had. You don’t choose your brothers, after all, and I hadn’t ever chosen Titch. He was just always there.

  After my mother died, Big Jacky had got friendly with Titch’s mother, through chatting at the newsagent’s, I suppose. As the two jagged halves of broken couples, they had sometimes helped each other out with looking after one another’s children. I don’t think there was ever any romance between them – certainly, the thought had never occurred to me at the time – but then there were vast tranches of Big Jacky’s interior life that were unknown to me.

  I used to go to Titch’s house after school, or whenever Big Jacky had to be somewhere else, and we’d mess around together in the yard for hours with toy cars or magic putty or anything Titch’s mum could come up with to stop us from yowling that we were bored. Sometimes I’d stay the night at his house. She’d put us in the room with the big double bed, mumble the protective incantation of the Lord’s Prayer and then kiss us both good night. I always loved the bit when she tucked us in and whispered ‘sleep tight, don’t let th
e bugs bite’ before switching off the light and plunging us into darkness. For that, I was even willing not to make a fuss about Titch snoring as he lay on his back, starfished in his blue pyjamas, although sometimes I would close in his arms and shove him hard over on to his side.

  The thing is, I knew him so well. I knew that he was lazy, and that he sometimes stole things he fancied from shops, although he never took so much as a piece of chewing gum from me without asking. He had been very greedy since he was little. By the time he was three his mum had to put all the biscuits up in a cupboard high out of his reach, because otherwise he would wolf them all down when she was distracted with cleaning the house. She told me that she used to come back downstairs to see a trail of empty packets and the telltale pink pastel crumbs of Fondant Fancies on the floor, and Titch sprawled out on the sofa quietly enjoying some kind of monumental sugar rush.

  It was only later, when he was about twelve, that he started the shoplifting, and even then it wasn’t because he really wanted the things he took. It was the only real grab for independence that he had. He was a lot slower than the rest of us, and a little part of him knew that he was never going to join the Foreign Legion, or go hitchhiking round Ireland on his own, or chat up beautiful girls on holiday in French campsites and lure them laughing into his tent. He would never have put it exactly like that, of course, but he sensed it all the same. He was so close to his mother, so dependent on her bottomless love for him, that if he hadn’t occasionally practised some minor subversions to proclaim his difference from her he would simply have melted into her and ceased to exist.

  The stealing grieved his mum, who was so honest you could have given her a million pounds in cash to look after and found it untouched a year later. She tried hard to stop him from doing it, and eventually – after tears and recriminations – she realised that it wasn’t going to stop, and came to a practical arrangement with the understanding Mrs Hackett, whereby Titch’s mum regularly paid off in full whatever losses Titch incurred. And so even Titch’s secret rebellion became part of a scheme quietly regulated and operated by his mother, although it was rarely spoken of at all. I sometimes wondered if that was why he had tried to nick stuff from old McGee in the first place: to start his own game afresh.