All the Colours of the Town (9 page)

Rix had warned me not to blab. To tell no one I was going to Belfast. It would get back to Lyons soon enough; but the later he learned, the better my chances of getting the story. Rix was really buzzed. We were on to
something
big, he could feel it. The photo had piqued him but what really got him was the story that Orchardton told me.

Carrickfergus. I’d heard the song so often, at parties and lock-ins, that the town itself, with its round, grey, English-looking castle, seemed implausible. I stopped for a wayside slash in a lay-by near Newtownabbey then joined the motorway into the city. In a little while Belfast loomed out of the night, a stipple of silver. The street lights were on, and the neon signs, but the dusk had yet to deepen into dark. A livid stripe of sky, frog’s-belly
yellow
, lowered on the western hills. The squat skyline stood out blackly. I swung through the darkening streets,
scouting
for landmarks. The place had changed. Across the Lagan a burnished rotunda would be Waterfront Hall. Glassy new apartment blocks had mushroomed in my absence. But it was still the same old city: open, low, curled like a dog in its basket of hills.

Something else hadn’t changed. The police station at the top of Donegall Pass still looked like a badly wrapped parcel, swathed in wire and grille-work. I turned up Botanic, past the newsagents and minimarts, the smart bars and tatty flats and the late-weekend revellers, the strutting, short-sleeved lads, the microskirts and clacking heels.

Grania Lodge was near the top end of Botanic. I parked beside a silver Audi. A mumbling bald guy with a Vandyke beard signed me in and gave me a plastic key card. I took my bag straight to the bar and ordered a Baileys. Large. A girl brought it over on a tray with a complimentary bag of nuts.

The bar was quiet. A middle-aged couple had low
bedroom
voices for each other in the far corner. A solitary business type in a polo shirt let his lager go flat as he tapped on the keyboard of his book-sized Sony Vaio. I’d almost finished my Baileys. The girl broke her stride as she passed my table but I waved her off. I drained the glass and shoogled the ice cubes, let them rest against my upper lip, numbing the flesh. I left a folded fiver under the glass and headed for the lift.

Even now, my nights were defined by twin itches, paired anxieties that traded places around nine o’clock, like shift workers. Before nine I was anxious to call the boys, to hear their voices, get a fix of their innocent
nonsense
before they went to bed. Bedtime was half-past eight. If I phoned before nine I could usually count on the thumping of bare feet and the vehement whispers as they fought for the phone. After nine it was too late to call. But after nine, especially when nine o’clock found me in the snug of the Cope or studying the damp patch over my sofa with a bracer at my elbow, it could seem like a good idea to call anyway and speak to Elaine.

‘The boys are in bed,’ she would say on these
occasions
, though we both knew I knew this. Sometimes I’d pretend to have lost track of time. Elaine had developed, I came to realise, a strategy for dealing with these phone calls, a code of conduct. The code didn’t permit her, for instance, to cut these calls short, to put me off with an excuse, even when she might have company. These calls were a duty: I was still raw, still hurting, and she felt obliged to see them through, to fill a respectable space with small talk. At the same time, she resisted all attempts to nudge the conversation into murky waters, and met my innuendos, my coaxing remember-whens with a caustic briskness. The deeper, the more night-time fuzzy my tones, the crisper grew her diction. There was something operatic in these exchanges, my lumbering
basso supplicato
dogging her bright evasive trills. Even when I knew that Adam wasn’t present, it sounded as though he was listening in.

The next morning, these calls to Elaine pained me more than my hangover. I’d come to treat them as lapses, to count the days between them like someone in rehab.

In the hotel room I dumped my holdall on one of the twin beds and crossed to the window. Good. A decent view: a long curved street and cars parked up both sides. The beds had that tight, starched, angular look. The bathroom was clean, the minibar full. I took a miniature Red Label and a bottle of Beck’s. The beds were firm. I chose the one nearest the door. My Nokia was open on the other one. I took a pull on my Beck’s and then snatched up the phone and with my free hand scrolled down to Lainie’s number, still filed in my address book under ‘Home’. The number was engaged.

I called John Rose instead. Rose was the
Trib
’s Belfast stringer. He’d be showing me round for the next few days. He didn’t answer. I left a message. I opened the whisky. I stood at the sink and added some water. There was salt in my hairline, a frosting of white on my
spectacle
lenses. I took the glasses off and rubbed my tired face. When did I get so old? I looked like my dad in the
strip-lit
glare. Something broad and brutal in the features. I looked like one of the men in the photo.

The Crown Liquor Saloon. The one Belfast boozer that everyone knows. Corinthian pillars, snib-locking snugs, aproned barmen. It’s like the set of a costume drama, some Edwardian extravaganza with high velvet collars and brown bowler hats. I had aimed for a note of irony when proposing it to John Rose, over the phone, on my first night in the city. It was late when I reached him; he was tired-sounding, curt; and though I’d been to Belfast before, and had drunk my way up and down the Golden Mile, there was only one name I could muster.

It was a little after one when I got there. I stood across the street, heels on the kerb, while a gearshifting cab ground past. As I crossed the road I slowed and paused and stopped right there on the broken white line to take it all in once more – the foursquare glinting jewel-box, its enamelled facade a Pompeii of lacquered tiles, aqua,
cornelian
, emerald, pearl, glinting like a bag of midget gems – before an elongated blare stung me onto the pavement and in through the pinned-back doors.

The place was heaving. I plunged in to the gloom, doggy-paddling through the lunchtime crush towards the gantry and flung a hand on the bar. An apron loomed and I ordered a Guinness.

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 to 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.