Resurrection Man (17 page)

His father appeared to have grown smaller. There was grey stubble on his cheeks and he was wearing an old nylon shirt and blue overalls. It was a look he had deliberated over, a studied shabbiness which he had adopted. He had learned all there was to know about positioning himself against the unstable surfaces offered by the world in a way that made him invisible. He could avoid the sectarianism of the shipyard where he wished to be seen as inattentive to causes and to the kind of conscientious attention to suffering that had earlier that day led to workmates planting a bullet in a Catholic worker’s lunch-box. He had seen the man lift the bullet out of
the plastic lunch-box and adopt a studious expression as if he might extract some testimony regarding his eventual fate from its brassy and rigorous outlines.

‘Your ma’s not here.’

The sentence came out like a final repudiation of Victor who had remained in the kitchen doorway, red-eyed and haggard and tense as if he was about to mount a dark raid into the disputed territory between fathers and sons. James came across the yard and pushed past him into the doorway.

‘You’re too late. Your ma’s not here,’ he repeated as if this assertion was sufficient to fend off the terror and doubt that his adult child brought with him. Victor could sense this and was pleased by what he thought was a father’s reluctance to hand over his place on the earth. But there was more to it than that. When his father had gone into the house Victor went across the yard and opened the shed door. The loft had been built on to the top of the shed with a trapdoor separating them. The shed hummed with a formed and various pigeon noise. Victor sat down on an old kitchen chair. Every house they had lived in had possessed a place like this, a lean-to with a dusty, eternal air, and Victor often sat in them when his father was at work. There were always the old electric fires, broken toasters, objects with a dull suggestive gleam. It seemed that disuse was a built-in part of their design.

At his feet there was an Outspan box full of newspaper cuttings. He lifted it on to his knee. He knew that his father would cut out anything to do with Linfield from the Newsletter. News of victory or defeat, manager profiles or transfer rumours. A detailed record from the humble origins of the club to its ascent through the league gathering lore to itself. A history you could use instead of a city or a family with its complex undocumented inheritance.

But these cuttings had nothing to do with Linfield. The top one had a photograph of Flaps with his name underneath. Robert Craig McArthur. There was an account of his body being found in a builder’s skip with a single gunshot to the head.
Unnamed sources stated that he was involved with the group known as the Resurrection Men. Robert Craig McArthur. Victor had never known him as anything but Flaps and the full name gave his death an authority it hadn’t possessed before. He emptied the box on to the floor. They were all there, named in full. McGinn, Curran, McGrath. Some underlined, others with a question mark beside them. Full names that spoke of an existence fully lived. He realized that a name was
accomplished
and haunting, and that having read them he could not divest himself of them but they would come to him again like an old pain coming intact through the innuendo of years.

The parties in Heather’s house had died out and she hadn’t seen McClure since the night of Ryan’s visit two months before. She spent most of the day in front of the television with the curtains drawn. She watched repeat serials, fixed on their moody and elegaic characterization. At night she examined her face in the bathroom mirror for signs of adequacy. She thought about herself at forty. Like one of those women you saw on Royal Avenue with big houses on the Malone Road. A wife well dressed and smelling faintly of alcohol. A wife who was crafted and apprehensive. Rich women comfortless in the knowledge of their marred, once-beautiful husbands. Before she had come to the city she had wanted it for herself. A thin voracious mouth and an aura of expensive suffering.

At night she had the feeling that she was living in a house belonging to someone else. She felt surrounded by a missing person’s possessions. The cosmetics on the dressing table were unfamiliar. The clothes in the bedroom wardrobe seemed to belong to another woman. She found herself looking through the bottoms of drawers and behind wardrobes for evidence of the secret life that is craved in others. The yellowed letters, old banknotes, the dated pornographic magazine which catered for some longfelt pain. When she tried on clothes they seemed to have been bought for someone else. She imagined a plain sufficient body unlike her own with its tolerant poise, its air of having struck its bargains.

She missed Darkie. He hadn’t been to the house for
months and McClure told her that he had disappeared. He’s cracked up, McClure said, the head’s gone entirely. He said he had seen Darkie with the winos at the bottom of the Lisburn road. He was wearing plastic bags on his feet, he said. Darkie had contacted her once but she hadn’t mentioned it to McClure. The phone had rung in the middle of the night with a tone of imminent loss, of worst fears confirmed. When she answered it a voice she did not recognize whispered, ‘Is he there?’

‘Is who there? Who is this?’

‘Victor, is he there?’

‘He’s not here, who is this?’

‘Darkie, Darkie Larche.’

‘Darkie, where the hell are you? I thought you were dead.’

‘He’s going to kill me.’

‘Who’s going to kill you?’

‘Victor.’

‘Victor’s not going to kill you, Darkie. He knows you’re my mate.’

‘He said he would kill me.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m in a wet place. Heather, I went and drunk meths the other night. It tasted nice but I’m in a damp and drippy place. I’ll catch my death.’ He giggled.

‘You’re fucking drunk now.’ But Heather realized there was more to it than that. She recognized it in his voice. The knowledge that there was something sinister abroad in the city. A surefooted presence in the shadows.

‘You never come to see me no more, Darkie.’

‘I can’t. You don’t mind the row we had in the bar, I told him he was a Catholic and all. Victor never forgets that. I’m a dead man. You wouldn’t want a dead man to come calling,’ he said sadly.

‘Remember all the times we had together Darkie?’

‘I don’t remember nothing. There isn’t nothing to remember.’

‘I’ll come and get you.’

‘I’m away now, Heather.’

‘Don’t.’

Darkie was gone. She replaced the receiver with the feeling that she had failed him.

One morning she pulled back the head of her bed to find a microphone taped to the wood. Its head was greasy and disused and the wire leading from it had been severed.

Victor came round once or twice a week. He was morose and subject to sudden outbursts. He would check all the rooms when he came in and repeat this procedure during the evening. He complained of being spied on and peered through the curtains if he heard a noise outside. He told her that he had authentic fears for his safety. He said it was a case of trust nobody, although he mentally put Dorcas aside. McClure had told him about Ryan. Come sniffing round Heather, McClure said, looking for his hole. Victor said he wasn’t worried. That he was still number one with policemen nodding to him at checkpoints. About you, Victor son. But he thought about it when he was in bed with her as she worked him towards the lasting amphetamine erection. When she did not succeed he distrusted her. The expression on her face said that she had returned to a long-held prerogative to be hapless in love but to count in her own heart when she was alone.

‘You ever fucked a Taig?’ he demanded one night. He didn’t look at her when he said it but she felt herself being manoeuvred towards the edge of a dangerous solitude.

‘I asked you a question.’ He raised himself on one elbow above her and she remembered their first meeting when he had seemed like a foreigner, practised in lost crafts of menace, his thin lips opening to utter artful words of cruelty. He took her arms in a painful grip and looked at her
thoughtfully
and she realized that he could kill her. She imagined her naked body being found like a cover from
True
Detective.
The abandoned limbs and parted lips, the pose arranged and lingered over.

‘I wouldn’t go near one in a fit, Victor,’ she whispered. She thought calmly of the newspaper headlines following her death. Strangled with own stocking. Clothing in disarray. The wistful erotic overtones.

‘What about thon fucking reporter? Did he dip the wick?’

‘Somebody I knew from home. He just come up here, Victor. I never asked him or nothing.’

He stared at her for a minute then released her arms and lay down beside her again.

‘No one you can trust. Even Willie and them boys, let you down a bagful. Act the big lad but they’d be fuck-all without Victor. Government knows about Victor, after him all the time and think he doesn’t see them, plainclothes men. Give them the slip. Contacts in the law keep Victor informed. Victor’s no dozer. Biding their time then shoot him down like a dog in the street. Lure you with women, drink, money. Bait the trap. They think Victor doesn’t know their wee game. They think he doesn’t laugh in their face.

‘The Resurrection Men. They think they know what it means but they haven’t a notion. They’ve got the head up their holes they don’t know nothing.’

‘What do you mean Victor?’ Her throat was dry so that she could barely speak. Outside she could hear traffic, the sound of voices. Light fell across his face through a gap in the curtains. She felt that their three years together had evolved towards this lull, the feeling you got walking on your own down an empty street at night – a feeling of grey pavements and unlit pavements, a suspenseful and
achromatic
terrain where you strained to hear the cold sound of a pursuing footfall.

‘Youse is the Resurrection Men,’ she said finally. ‘You and Big Ivan and Willie and Biffo. You done all them killings.’

He told her about it, laying stress on operational details and individual acts of bravery. He tried to describe what it was like leading men on a mission, a handpicked team working under the noses of the law. The feelings of comradeship. The
way they all knew a target when they saw one, recognizing the victim’s lonely charisma.

He said little about the killings themselves but he
managed
to convey the impression of something deft and surgical achieved at the outer limits of necessity, cast beyond the range of the spoken word where the victim was cherished and his killers were faultlessly attentive to some terrible inner need that he carried with him. Victor used the victims’ full names. He told her how he found himself in sympathy with their faults and hinted that during their last journey he nursed them towards a growing awareness of their wasted years and arranged their bodies finally with an eye to the decorous and eternal.

Kill me.

Later when he was asleep Heather got up and went to the kitchen where she made tea and sat at the table in her nightdress. She had heard hundreds of stories about the knife murders. After each one there had been rumours about what they did to their victims. It reminded her of the periodic rumours about satanic rites in the old graveyard at home. Tombstones defaced, cats disembowelled, the presence of virgins. Lurid and necessary small-town fictions. It was said that the Resurrection Men wore pointed hoods and that they drained their victims’ blood and drank it. She had been in the Eglantine Inn one night when a man who worked as a porter in the morgue at the Royal Victoria had described the limp, bloodless cadavers. People had crowded around him in silence. He spoke with a strong, gravelled voice full of
authority
and the crowd had approved of this. It was what they expected from someone who tended the dead.

She had always liked this time of night before. If she was with a lover it was a time for a factual domestic seriousness with long considered silences. If she was on her own she could sit and think, be wily with herself, and develop a sense of
getting to the bottom of things. The house at night lent itself to that. Full of ticking silences with everything in its place and stilled so that you had room to be particular about yourself and your life.

But it wasn’t working for her tonight. There was the distorted, uneasy silence of a horror film. Something was abroad that she didn’t like. There was a scant rattling in the dry shrubs at the front door, a prowled quiet around the house.

She had always liked Victor’s hands. To lie back and allow them to go where they wanted. They had a brevity of touch, skilled in nuances, that made you feel as if he was executing a flawless sexual design. Suddenly she pictured him crouched over a corpse holding a knife. The same intentness on his face that she saw in bed, seeking the pattern, the deep-set grain, with dreamy inventive movements. She got up from the table and walked to the sink where she was sick in a matter of fact way, abandoning herself to the rhythm of it.

She lay in bed beside him. She thought that if there was someone else in the room they could see the whites of her eyes like a picture of fear showing how she had made herself come back into the bedroom, take off her dressing gown, lie down. She was facing away from him, hoping that he wouldn’t turn into her in his sleep, put his arm around her to hold her breast. A feeling she usually loved, replete and dozing. But not tonight. Not this night with the shadows gathering,
darkness
manifest.

Coppinger had obtained the autopsy reports from the last two killings and agreed with Ryan that they had been carried out by a different person. The wounds were repetitive, unlike the earlier attacks where the injuries seemed somehow tailored to the age and status of the victim. There was evidence of carelessness, panic, reluctance.

The media coverage of the killings increased. The victims were profiled, their last movements traced. The minor details of their final hours were examined for signs of mishap or an unexpected involvement with fate. Neighbours spoke on
television
. Careworn women who managed the sentences of
condemnation
with care, exercising a vocal thrift. But the victims continued to emerge as being nothing out of the ordinary. It seemed that they insisted on it. The usual Friday night drink, small gains at the betting shop, routine ailments. This seemed to fuel public fear. No one wanted to be blamed for having lives of their own choosing and doing things that seemed marginal and slightly forlorn when those lives came under scrutiny.

Ryan wasn’t asked to write on the subject. The task was assigned to senior staff reporters, men who wrote non-committal reports which managed to sound burly and
authoritative
. He rarely saw Coppinger at the office. His sports reports were left in the postbox at night. Reading them Ryan found himself thinking about the disciplined solitude of a prison diary.

He was at home when Margaret rang. He had stopped going out to bars, preferring to bring home a bottle of whiskey. When he was drinking alone in the house he could work up to an impressive sense of ruined dignity. He had yet to take his first drink when the phone rang and he picked it up expecting to hear his mother’s voice. No one else called him at home now.

‘I thought I’d ring you,’ she said. ‘This friend of yours was round here earlier tonight.’

‘What friend?’

‘He sat for about an hour even after I told him you weren’t living here any more.’

‘Who was it?’

‘I gave him a cup of tea.’ Ryan realized that she would say who it was when she was ready, but that she wanted to determine the extent of his complicity first.

‘He said he knew you well. I said how well and he started to imitate you. The way you hold your nose when you’re thinking. He did that. It’s not that I mind. He was funny.’

‘Margaret.’

‘What?’

‘Did he have a name?’

‘It was a Protestant-sounding name. Some wild Belfast name. You know like one of those names, when you say it, you have to screw up your face and squint like you’d a fag in your mouth. McClure, it was. Billy McClure. Called me missus all the time. Hi, missus, pass us a drop of thon milk there.’

‘Listen, Margaret, can I come over?’

‘I suppose so. When?’

‘Now.’

‘Right now? I don’t see why not. Come on over, like.’ She spoke the last sentence in an imitation of McClure’s accent. East Belfast chant. Rising to a falsetto on the last word of the sentence with an intimation of fear.

Margaret opened the door wordlessly and walked behind him down the corridor humming. He felt that she should be nervous, bestow a long searching look. He expected her to acknowledge the estrangement they had worked at and
maintained
. To be equal to its nervous arts. He glanced into rooms as he passed but he no longer felt that any part of the house belonged to him, the furniture picked out between them in the early years of their marriage.

When they got to the living room she sat on the sofa with her legs curled under her. She didn’t look at him, reminding him that all permissions had been revoked.

He sat in an armchair opposite her and told her about McClure. His undercover associations. The murders and his proximity to the Resurrection Men. His impression was that McClure was seeking him out. The quietness that descended whenever McClure’s name was mentioned. The fatal hush.

He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. He felt that he had struck the correct pose, holding her eyes with his, using a measured tone. She was watching him as if he was performing a high-wire act with a tension in her eyes that was almost devotional, willing him across the great empty spaces between words. He watched her face. He realized that he had not considered how she would react to all this. He waited for her to curse him, reach for his face with her nails, throw him out along with the danger he had brought with him, along with the shirt he had worn for six days, the livid disarray of his life, the rank, outdoors scent of a former husband.

‘Has he threatened you, this McClure?’ Her voice showed an old concern left over from the years before they were married. He remembered late-night talks and his faltering confidences describing the miseries handed down by his father. Heirlooms of his house. He recalled the settings for these talks. The living room after her family had gone to bed, the huts on the beach, the back seat of a borrowed car. Places of luminous shelter where she tended his minor tragedies with thoughtful, unhurried sex. At eighteen the same serious
attention
to detail, the same determination to grasp what was worthwhile and proved in love.

‘I was worried about you,’ he said, ‘when I heard that your man was over here.’

‘No,’ she said slowly. He could see her reviewing McClure’s visit in her mind. ‘No, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with me. When I think about it he seemed excited, but I don’t think it’s got anything to do with me.’

‘He’s killed people, mutilated them. He came up with the Romper rooms. He invented a form of communal assassination and called it after a children’s programme.’

‘He sat where you’re sitting and admired the house. Where I got the wallpaper, how hard it is to keep a light-coloured carpet. He asked how long we’d been separated. It was, like, a kindly question, how hard the world can be and it’s not anybody’s fault. But most of all he talked about you. How he liked your journalism even though you’re a Catholic. “From the other side of the house” was the way he put it. He said that he was worried about how much you were drinking. The point is that it was all to do with you.’

‘He knew that you’d ring me. It’s a way of telling me how much he knows about me.’

‘Did you have anything to eat this evening?’ she asked suddenly.

‘The problem is I haven’t a baldy what he wants with me. Why all this attention.’

‘Did you eat anything today? This week maybe?’

‘Half the time I think he’s leading me towards something serious and half the time I think he’s just playing with me.’

‘If you told me you were coming I could have got food in.’

Like his mother she had insisted on food and mealtimes. It had added to the murderous churlishness he had felt like muscles balled under the skin. But once they had separated he began to see sense in the way the two women thought about meals. Skills of the kitchen, the handing-down of recipes, the use of linen. He saw that they were right in their
attention to foodstuffs; he saw them moving gravely in the kitchen, involved in the ornamented passage of food to the table. Drawing out the theme of order, the theme of necessity.

She laid the table in the living room and ate with him. They spoke little. Remarks about their jobs, repairs needed to the house. When the meal was over they talked about friends and acquaintances – each name produced and news of each added carefully, their lives inspected for damage or unrest.

‘I never got talking to you properly at the funeral,’ she said finally. Her tone was careful. He realized that she was watching him closely, fearful of one of the silences he had worked into the fabric of the marriage until they had only wan
commonplaces
with which to gauge the extent of their failure.

‘I mean you never really talked about what you felt, your da and all.’

He thought back to the day before the funeral when they had stood outside the house. Strangers, seen at a distance. Their mute, pained faces barely discerned. Their movements weighed down by an inaccessible personal history.

‘All I felt was that I should have felt more.’

‘You must have felt something. You were away with it. There was no talking to you. All you could feel was strain coming off you.’

‘It wasn’t really like he died. It was like he just ran off. Sneaked off. It wasn’t like death, like gone for ever. It was as if he was in some other place, walking around pleased with himself.’

Across the table Margaret was supporting her head with her hands under her chin, her eyes full of the urge to
revelation
. He could see the small hairs on her arms, the delicate vein structure, the slightly moist creases in the crook of her elbow. It seemed a prayerful pose. He imagined dipping his face in the angle of her elbow, smelling a scrubbed, celibate fragrance. Here was a woman who did not wear perfume, who bathed after sex, who was scrupulous with regard to the world and its details. He remembered that when she was young she
would always write her name in full. Margaret Elizabeth Clarke. It was a full account of herself. He wondered was this what lay at the bottom of her questioning about his father’s death. A desire that she or anyone belonging to her should not leave unfinished business behind them.

‘You can’t tidy it up,’ he said, ‘you can’t make it neat or just end it. I can’t tell what I feel, I don’t know.’

‘OK, OK.’ She covered his hand with hers. He sat with his head bowed. Fathers go on, he thought. They endure and accept blame in their memory. They refuse forgiveness to their own fathers. They invent their lives full of incident and hand them on for the instruction and punishment of sons.

The telephone rang at 3 a.m. News of the sleepless. He crossed the living room from the sofa and went into the hallway. Margaret’s bedroom door was open. He could see the edge of the bed and a hand flung out. She always slept easily and deeply with an air of just reward. These hours of rest vouchsafed to herself. He walked slowly. He knew that the phone would not stop ringing before he reached it. It rang with a tone of imminent loss. As soon as he picked up the receiver he knew that it was McClure. There was a pause before he spoke in which Ryan could hear traffic noise in the background.

‘Staying over at the wife’s?’ McClure said. His tone
suggested
that this was predictable, that he had long ago
fathomed
Ryan’s motives and found them mean and everyday.

‘What’s it to you?’

‘Couldn’t blame you. Nice tits on her.’

‘Leave her out of it, McClure. She’s got nothing to do with it.’

‘Everybody’s got something to do with it.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I got a bit of information for you.’

‘What is it?’

‘There’s going to be arrests.’

‘Who’s going to be arrested?’

‘The Resurrection Men. Some of them anyhow. They’re going to be lifted some time this next week.’

‘How come you know?’

‘People tell me things. I got a sympathetic ear.’

‘What do you want me to do about it?’

‘Anything you want, Mr Journalist. Point is they’re not lifting the big man.’

‘Who’s the big man?’

‘Fuck me, you really don’t know, do you?’

‘How should I know?’

‘You’ve got a lot in common. Two of you like meat on your woman.’

‘Fuck does that mean?’

‘I’ll be in touch. I’ll tell Heather you were asking for her.’

McClure hung up. Ryan sat down on the floor, still holding the receiver. The night suddenly seemed full with as much cold promise as it could possibly hold. The telephone emitted a low note. He felt drawn into a dextrous conspiracy but felt the certainty that he would be there to witness what happened and nothing more. A minor figure not admitted to the benefits of tragedy. He felt manipulated; McClure had recognized the part of his life given over to the smallest kind of anticipation and meanness in the face of others’ pain. A man who came to his former wife’s house to trouble her with the residuals of love. There was something he had missed in the reference to Heather. He saw himself drawn to a type of woman who would recognize that her time with a man was limited and be dignified about it so that whatever end it came to would be fitting and sufficient.

After a few minutes he walked back down the corridor and stood at the doorway to her bedroom looking in. Light fell across the bed. At first he thought she was asleep, her body gathered under the bedclothes. A thoughtful arrangement of her limbs contrived for serenity. But as he began to move away she sat up quickly, pushing her hair out of her eyes.

‘Who was it on the phone, your man McClure?’ He nodded. She drew her knees up to her chin and studied him.

‘What did he want?’

‘He was giving me some information is all.’

‘What are you supposed to do with it?’

‘I don’t know. I feel like I’m being asked to take part in something. All of a sudden I’m part of a conspiracy. I feel like I could be arrested.’

‘That’s a bit dramatic.’

‘Maybe. Coppinger was saying about the courts here, the way they are. No juries, evidence being given behind screens by unidentified witnesses – soldier A, soldier B, that kind of thing. The strange charges they come up with. Conspiracy with persons unknown to murder persons unknown. I was arguing it was a denial of justice. Coppinger says it’s all just a
mechanism
for dealing with different forms of complicity. He says this town has invented new ways of getting involved, like it’s all just one big experiment in human guilt.’

‘He called round the other night.’

‘What sort of form was he in?’

‘Acting all jovial. He looked tired, worn out. He kept falling asleep, just dozing off in the middle of a sentence. We’d both pretend he wasn’t doing it. He’s got cancer.’

Ryan felt himself adjusting his face towards disbelief, picking out the elements, a passage of emotion recollected with difficulty.

‘He’s got it in the throat. Couple of months they told him. He didn’t want me to tell you. Says you’d only call it a cheap metaphor. He thinks you’ll laugh at him.’