The Ghost Factory

by Jenny McCartney

  He could be generous too, though. There was the time he had saved up his pocket money for weeks to buy me a birthday present, a personal stereo I had wanted so that I could listen to my music tapes without bothering Big Jacky. I remember opening the parcel, badly wrapped in blue shiny paper with about half a roll of Sellotape securing it. It was my fifteenth birthday, and Titch was watching me closely, his pale blue eyes moving from my hands opening the parcel to my face and back again, as though he couldn’t choose which to settle on. The second the paper fell away, and I glimpsed what was inside, he said breathlessly, ‘I bought it I didn’t nick it,’ because he wanted me to understand that it was a proper present, which had involved planning and self-sacrifice on his part, the very qualities that his mother and I were regularly berating him for not having.

  I couldn’t even bring myself to think about Titch’s mother. Her grief was too vast to contemplate, a Milky Way of pain. He was the only one she had. I could think about Titch, though, so long as I didn’t dwell on the dull mechanics of how he must have patiently planned his own death. It had shown such efficiency and determination, qualities his mother and I had never suspected he had. How much fear and despair had it taken to forge this strong, alien capability in him? How long had these emotions burned away in him, unremarked or smoothed over with phrases about him being ‘still a bit down’?

  He must have realised in the end that his protectors couldn’t shield him, that the forces outside were stronger than either of us. He must have understood that when his attackers shoved his frightened mother to one side to drag him out of the house, and again when he saw my battered face staring up at him from a hospital pillow. When he thought they were coming back for him, I suppose the only thing left for him to do was to go somewhere they couldn’t reach him.

  I hadn’t been able to protect him, no. The next best thing was to avenge him. He was going to be buried on Monday, and I knew I couldn’t go. To create some fitting symmetry, perhaps, I had decided that the night before his funeral I would murder McGee.

  Once, when Big Jacky had been to some church jumble sale, he brought me back a job lot of Agatha Christie detective stories. I was about twelve years old, and I started working my way through them very methodically. I used to try and guess who the murderer was shortly after being introduced to the entire cast of characters. It took a lot of willpower not to flick through to the end and find out straight away if I was right.

  At first, I would always guess the most obvious person, the one with the creepy smile and a long-held grudge and a touch too much brilliantine on their hair. Then – once I realised that it was never them – I started guessing the least obvious instead, the real trouper who was busy making all the funeral arrangements and had been a loyal friend to the deceased through thick and thin.

  It usually wasn’t that one either, though. She was sly enough, Agatha Christie, and the killer was mostly some character who had just wandered in stage left, someone you actually hadn’t thought about that much but considered pretty okay if you did.

  In real life, of course, the killer often really is the most obvious person, the one with a motive the size of a skyscraper. That’s why most genuine murder hunts end up catching The Last Person to See The Victim Alive, or the Person Who Stands To Gain Thousands of Pounds From The Life Insurance Policy. Most fat-bellied, case-hardened detectives already know that life is much simpler and killers are more brutishly transparent than in an Agatha Christie novel.

  I pictured the police interviewing the Whartons, and realised that they would say about me, with no ill intent, ‘Well, he mostly kept himself to himself.’ I really did. That wasn’t good: I was already a case-notes cliché, and I hadn’t even done anything yet. Perhaps I should have invested more energy in appearing friendly and outgoing when I had the chance. It was too late to change now. It would seem very odd if I returned to London from my good friend’s hospital bed having been transformed into a compulsive extrovert. It would look incongruous, as though I had been elated by the misfortune of others.

  It wasn’t ever going to get as far as the Whartons, though. If you imagined McGee’s murder as an Agatha Christie novel – briefly overlooking the fact that she preferred to write about the destruction of retired English colonels and genteel lady librarians rather than psychotic Loyalist paramilitaries – then the character I wanted to be was one who never appears in the book at all. He is never talked about, he is never graciously introduced to the house party in the drawing room, and so he never figures in any of M. Poirot’s magnificently complicated Belgian calculations: he can’t, because he’s not there.

  That would mean, of course, that the murder is never solved. It couldn’t be, because the readers never saw the killer, or if they did, they didn’t even register his existence. It’s as if at the end of the Christie novel the murderer should turn out to be a petrol-pump attendant who was never actually mentioned, but who filled up Lady Motterly’s chauffeur’s tank during that journey to London which merited one line on page 153. It would never happen because it would make for a rotten book, and Poirot could never explain why he had alighted upon the petrol-pump attendant in the first place. That’s why it would make for such a successful crime.

  The first thing I had to do was learn how to stop looking like me. The person skulking around near the scene of the murder had to appear quite different from John Mason, the cheerful, forgetful guest at a city centre hotel. I had once read an article in a Sunday supplement about how easy it was to change your appearance just by altering the shape and furniture of your face. The man pictured in the article had begun by stuffing cotton wool into his cheeks, to give himself jowls and pouches where none had previously existed. In the before and after photographs, he had turned from a trim, distinguished man to a bloke who had let himself drift to seed via the time-honoured route of ready-made TV dinners and value packs of lager.

  I got up early on Friday morning and crossed the hotel lobby in a hurry, to avoid any contact with nosey Marie. In a city centre café, I ordered their biggest mug of tea and a bacon and soda-bread sandwich. The tea was powerfully strong and hot, and the springy bread melted down at each bite to hit the sinewy crunch of salty, crisp bacon. For a moment I almost forgot that something terrible had happened and another was about to happen. If only I could have frozen that wonderful moment with my mouth full of bacon sandwich and hung suspended in it like a doughy chrysalis for a month. But then I remembered McGee, and the bread jarred in my fast-drying throat and made me cough.

  It all looked so achingly familiar. I had missed Belfast, with its broad avenues and crammed shops full of earnest girls out shopping arm-in-arm with their mammies. I watched them in stores in Royal Avenue as they mulled over clothes intensely for minutes at a time and then rejected them with a small, haughty turn of the head, letting the scorned cloth fall back into the hanging rack.

  I had missed the wee fellas on the corner near the City Hall, hawking the Belfast Telegraph by yelling ‘Telly’ in a long, strangulated howl, as though the word had been first stretched and then plaited. I had missed the bespectacled assistants in the handsome bookshops, who took enquiries very seriously and all looked as if they attended Leonard Cohen appreciation conventions in their spare time.

  I couldn’t enjoy the city with the same confidence I used to, though. I felt like an ex-husband tiptoeing back into the house where his former wife now lives with her thuggish, heavily armed lover. One clumsy move, one broken vase or clatter of falling cutlery, and my unwelcome presence would be advertised to all. I didn’t want to bump into anyone I used to know, and have to struggle through ridiculous explanations. The sooner this business was concluded, the sooner I would seal it off tightly, like a dirty parcel headed straight for the bin. If no one else knew anything about it at all, it would be that much easier for me to dump.

  I was working on a disguise, so I started off in Belfast’s best joke shop, the one I used to plague Big Jacky to take me to as a child in search of plastic flies
and smoke bombs. The line-up of rubber masks featured the usual suspects, Dracula and Dolly Parton, with a sprinkling of more recent favourites, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, along with Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley as an appeal to home-grown waggery.

  I chose the Clinton, because it was the only one with a tight enough elastic strap to sit right. With its red blobby nose and symbolic topping of ridged grey hair, it didn’t look altogether unlike Mr Wharton. The face was creased in permanent joviality, revealing a generous spread of rubberised American teeth. I felt good when I had it on, wobbling my head from side to side like a giant puppet. It made a start.

  Then I selected a wee black metal gun entitled ‘The Spud Gun’, designed to shoot out raw potato pellets at high speed. When I picked it up it had a surprising and pleasing weight in my hand. There was also one moustache – a luxuriant dark brown thatch – that matched my hair colour, and with some trimming it could be convincing enough. I was hunting for the moustache glue when the assistant padded up, sporting a light veneer of friendly concern on top of a well-entrenched expression of solid boredom.

  ‘Fancy dress party?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, tomorrow night,’ I said, without elaborating. He took the items to the till and started totting up the cost. How the lies piled up. As I paid and walked away I could see him fussing over the masks with a slight frown on his face, re-hanging the Dolly Parton one at the front.

  At the end of the day’s shopping, I had a canvas rucksack that contained the bones of my alternative identity: the Clinton mask, the moustache and the potato gun.

  In a second compartment was a baseball cap, a dark blue canvas bomber jacket, a grey sweatshirt, a pair of trainers, some balls of cotton wool, and brown-rimmed reading glasses from Boots. There were also two small cushions from the home section of a department store.

  In the third was wide brown masking tape and a pair of fine leather gloves from an old-style gentleman’s outfitters. The gloves were especially nice: supple, stretchy black leather, lined with silk. I caught myself regretting that they would have to be burned later on.

  In the late afternoon, I stopped off at the bar of the Miller Hotel near Botanic Station and ordered myself a pint of Guinness. The barman’s face had long ago settled into a comfortable grouchiness, but his manner was friendly. An idea struck me.

  ‘Do you have many functions on here?’ I said, jerking my head towards the rooms behind me.

  ‘A couple of things every weekend,’ he said. ‘Weddings and work dos, stuff like that. Never ends.’

  ‘Got one on tomorrow?’ I said sympathetically.

  ‘Aye, a big wedding reception, about 120 people. They’re setting up some of the flower arrangements for it over there.’ He sighed: ‘The crazy money people spend on flowers.’

  In the corridor outside the lounge bar I could dimly see some uniformed women reverentially carrying around small pyramids of lilies and greenery. A board outside the ‘function room’ bore the gold, stuck-on words ‘Conway and McManus: Sat: 3pm’. That could be John Mason’s wedding party, a sop to throw to Marie if necessary. I started walking back to my hotel through the late afternoon throng of chattering schoolchildren. As I was about to pass the Whistle, I ducked down a side street and took a diversion. The last thing I wanted was to bump into Murdie, or – worse still – any of his regular clientele.

  I often found myself wondering whether McGee ever regretted what he had done to me and Titch. Here I was, having thought about McGee nearly every day since the beating. It seemed odd to think that I probably never entered McGee’s head at all. This was a hate affair, but the dynamics were pretty much the same as those of unrequited love. As time passed my rage had fermented and thickened while McGee was free to carry on without a backward glance.

  I tried not to brood on it, but I fiercely regretted the way I had lied and begged to him when I was frightened. Since a beating was coming anyway, I might as well have hung on to my dignity. The memory of how I had acted burned away at me, when I let the thought resurface. I hadn’t yet realised that one of violence’s slyest tricks is to make you feel dirty for having been on the wrong end of it.

  I resented my preoccupation with McGee. I had never wanted someone like him in my thoughts at all. What did he think happened to us afterwards, the people he left cringing and bloodied on the ground, curled up like smashed hedgehogs? He didn’t think about us, of course. We were done deals, finished business. The idea that one of us might come back to destroy him would have seemed absurd.

  I pictured him sprawled out on a cushion on his living-room floor, relaxing after his gym session, watching mafia films back to back surrounded by half-drained cans of tepid beer and empty takeaway cartons as the light died outside. Over-muscled stock phrases must sit around in his head, I imagined, ready to club to death any puny dissenting thought. ‘That wee shit had it coming to him’, ‘He should have shown me some respect’, ‘Nobody messes with me or my family’, ‘Let that be a warning to any other wee fuckers trying to take the piss’.

  This last phrase was the precise point, in my imagination, at which I usually walked through the door and shot McGee dead.

  Except that I wasn’t going to shoot him. It is difficult to get hold of a gun in London unless you hang around with gunmen, and I didn’t. Any such attempt would mean involving at least two other people in my plans.

  I imagined asking Francis casually, for example, ‘Hey, where would I go about getting a handgun?’ His nostrils used to flare excitedly at any whiff of illegality like a horse’s snuffling above a ripe apple. He wouldn’t have been able to get me one himself, but among his so-called ‘underworld connections’ he probably knew someone who could.

  I couldn’t bear the thought of being united with Francis in any kind of conspiracy, though. It was in his nature to blab. First he would gab to his coke buddies, excited for once to have some bona fide tale. Then, if he found out that I had actually used the gun, he would try and shed responsibility like a tight, itchy suit. One sharp query from an interested police detective and he would flood the room with wet confessions. It was clear that a real gun might create all kinds of unnecessary mess. So that’s how I had ended up with the Spud Gun, and the rudiments of a plan.

  21

  When I got back to the hotel I hurried through the lobby in case Marie was on duty, alive with questions about my evident shopping trip. Each time I shut the bedroom door behind me and flopped on the bed I felt a rush of relief. But this time as I lay on that bedspread, staring at the Monet print, the plan was beginning to take more detailed shape, like a small, dark cloud thickening on the horizon.

  It started with a dog.

  I remembered a story that Big Jacky once told me, about a fella who used to bet on greyhounds, and a wee scam he had going to fix the races. The owners of the greyhounds kept their prized beasts in the backyards, monitoring their diet carefully in the run-up to a race, coddling them like fragile plants in a frost.

  But the night before a race this fella and his friend would go around chucking steaks over the yard wall to the dogs they wanted to lose, and the hungry animals fell upon the gift of meat with slavering joy. Come the big day, to the bemusement of their owners, these dogs – normally flashing miracles of muscle and rippling grey silk – would toddle out of the enclosure with all the urgency of a bloke offered his third helping of Christmas pudding after the Queen’s Speech.

  And I remembered, too, that McGee had a dog: a sleek, densely powerful Alsatian called Major in which he took palpable pride. Major was tethered in his yard, apart from when McGee took him on parade round the streets, inspecting the sites from which he and his da collected ‘donations’.

  The dog wasn’t mistreated – McGee was too meticulous about it for that – but it didn’t have much of a life: it was all hard, cold angles and short leashes, between the yard and the street and the outside kennel, and God knows there wasn’t much warmth emanating from McGee. The animal doubled up as a security guard. No one would dare attem
pt to get into McGee’s house through the backyard when the dog was there. Major was ferociously alert. Sometimes you could hear him barking at the milk van or the postman.

  That’s the thing about a dog: when you have one, you start to rely on it. It’s human nature to trust a dog, even among those who show very little humanity to speak of. I read once that Hitler had his dog Blondi with him in the bunker, and he appeared to be utterly devoted to her right up until the moment when he ordered his cyanide pill to be tested on her, watching as the capsule was forcibly crushed between her long, elegant jaws to make sure that it was fatal.

  The dog served him until its sudden end, and then – after Hitler and Eva Braun took cyanide themselves – their dog-handler shot each one of Blondi’s puppies. That’s where loyalty to a headcase gets you.

  Still, a person who made as many enemies as McGee shouldn’t rely on anything or anyone.

  It came to mind that Phyllis had a packet of sleeping pills that she kept in the bathroom cabinet. To get hold of the pills, though, I had to get back into my old house.

  It’s complicated to kill someone, even when you are doing it with an organisation behind you, which I wasn’t. It takes a lot of planning. Think of all the work that used to go into those multiple demises that the IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries regularly arranged for us in Northern Ireland: the industrious collection of information on the target, the spying and strategising, the agreed division of roles, the justification for the attack, the overcoming of doubts, the squashing of compassion, the rush of adrenalin, the cleaning of a gun, the priming and planting of a bomb, the cool anticipation of the aftermath, the finalising of the press statement, the shooting or the explosion, the shredding of flesh. And after that came the strenuous maintenance of self-righteousness in the face of the screaming, the weeping, the disbelief.