Resurrection Man (5 page)

Later that day Willie Lambe and Big Ivan picked up Jimmy Craig, Ian Morris and Frames McCrea for the burglary. They brought them to the back room of the Pot Luck where they waited for Victor. The atmosphere was relaxed. Big Ivan went to the bar to get twenty Embassy Regal for Ivor Morris. The Pot Luck team were courteous, enquiring after wives and
girlfriends
. They apologized for the drab surroundings and the delay in Victor’s arrival. They spoke among themselves in hushed, sympathetic tones. Willie Lambe kept looking
nervously
at his watch and Jimmy Craig reassured him. Take her easy there, Willie. We know Victor’s kept busy, man can’t be in two places at once. Frames McCrea was the only one who said nothing. After Frames had got out on bail he had started to look old. His forehead was deeply lined. He suffered from waking suddenly at night, intimations of mortality. It seemed as if he had discovered an exhausting and terminal truth while he was in full flight through the city centre in a stolen car. One hundred and sixty-four checkpoints. People pointed him out in the street. The site where he had launched the car over a checkpoint on to the motorway ramp was visited by children, and he had not developed the means to fend off their awe, the grim reticence of the exalted and solitary.

The mood changed when Victor came in. He wanted a flawless exercise he said. He was talking in terms of
operational
details. He had arranged for three separate cars to be waiting outside and that someone be waiting at the lock-up garage where the kneecappings were to take place. He talked about integral planning. He had adopted an officer’s stance, legs apart, his hands behind his back holding the Browning loosely. He talked about the robbery. An innocent old woman robbed in her home then tied up and left alone until a neighbour released her. The joint pains. The thoughts of her grandchildren, their bright and eternal faces under blond hair and her uncertain efforts to retain their names. He talked about the evening sun shining in through her bedroom window on to the faded wallpaper. His voice was kindly and
reproachful
. Craig and McCrea hung their heads but Ian Morris looked him straight in the face.

‘We never done it, Victor,’ he said, ‘we never done a thing like that.’

Victor nodded to Big Ivan who hit Morris with his fist on the side of the head. Willie Lambe hit Craig. Big Ivan kicked McCrea. Victor continued. The three men had spent the day in the Gibraltar buying drinks from the proceeds of the robbery. The barman had described the notes smelling of mothballs. The money the old woman had kept to pay her funeral expenses, a bitter-scented currency of dissolution. Willie Lambe hit Craig backhanded. Big Ivan kicked Morris in the kidneys and headbutted McCrea.

‘Me and you’s mates, Victor,’ Morris said. ‘You know me. I wouldn’t go and rob one of our own for fuck’s sake.’

‘Fucking graverobbers,’ Big Ivan said, knocking him over.

‘Old lady could of died, fucking circulation suffocated the fuck out of her tied up like that,’ Willie Lambe said, thinking about his own mother, the way her feet got cold at night.

Victor knew that it could go on like that all day. He stepped forward and put the barrel of the Browning against each man’s forehead in turn and told them they had thirty seconds to tell
the truth and shame the devil. The gun barrel left a mark between each man’s eyes and their faces were tense and fixed so that they looked like the members of a sect devoted to moments of urgent revelation. In the end it was Frames McCrea who gave them the details. It was a spare account. They had ignored the fact that they would almost definitely be caught. This blindness, he seemed to be saying, had led him to question his motives. Craig entered a plea for clemency. Morris turned to Willie, pointed at his temple with a forefinger and raised his eyebrows. Willie shook his head, smiling.

‘No problem Ian. No nut jobs today. We’re just drilling kneecaps.’

The three men were escorted outside and into the cars. Big Ivan, Hacksaw McGrath and Victor were to be the firing party. Willie Lambe had to leave to bring his mother to the shops. Big Ivan was annoyed at the inclusion of Hacksaw. Hacksaw was a mad dog, Big Ivan said. Victor explained that Hacksaw needed to be blooded as part of a precision operation.

On the way to the garage Victor talked to Ian Morris about greyhounds. Morris was an acknowledged expert and had formulated a plan for introducing Arab racing dogs to the city’s tracks. He kept two of them in his backyard. Salukis. So far they had refused to let him get within five yards of them. He had been brooding on this, watching them from the kitchen window, the fine-boned disdainful way they had of walking, their lack of proper import documentation. He imagined them running at Dunmore Park, describing the anatomy of a desert wind in heart-stopping record circuits. Victor was sympathetic.

Inside the garage there were three clean revolvers sitting neatly on a workbench. A rotating Castrol sign moved gently on its axis when they entered. McCrea seemed relieved to enter the familiar gloom, strewn with car-parts, a place devoted to the principles of dismantling. Victor told them to lie face-down on the floor. Craig said that he didn’t want to ruin the new suit he had bought the week before. Big Ivan
pointed out that he was going to shoot him through the trousers anyway. This hadn’t occurred to Craig. He lay down, grimacing as he lowered his body on to the floor. Victor told the Pot Luck men to stand over each one and wait for his signal. They were to fire a single shot into the back of each knee. He paused for a moment to permit a gathering of thoughts.

Afterwards he would wonder in private what was going through Frames McCrea’s head. Whether he had seized on some imaginary reserve of immunity left over after Constable McMinn had knocked him sideways off Amelia Street into the side of a parked lorry where he had stayed with his head resting on the wheel and the speedometer jammed at
eighty-three
until firemen arrived to cut the clutch pedal from around his foot. Perhaps the circumstances had awakened the impulse to flight that had led him towards stealing cars in the first place. Victor saw him get to his feet and look around slowly. Victor was surprised to see a faintly aggrieved look that he had seen on his own mother’s face often. It expressed resentment at the encroachment of life and of the memories she had made for herself, their slow accumulation and drag. He began to run towards the garage door. To Big Ivan it seemed as if he had discovered another gravitational field within the confines of the garage. His legs seemed to be moving with the same buoyant steps that men with bulky suits had made on the moon. Out of the corner of his eye Victor saw Hacksaw raise his revolver and aim with the preoccupied and stately air of a child sighting on an imaginary Indian. He shot McCrea once in the back so that he fell forward on to his face and lay without moving. Victor went over to inspect him then told the others to resume their positions, reflecting that you only ever achieve an approximation of what you desire.

Artie Wilson was transferred from Crumlin Road to the Down shire Hospital with a psychiatric report stating that he was suffering from paranoid delusions. He thought that someone was going to kill him. Staff at the Downshire tried to reassure him. They explained to him that the hospital doors were locked against killers that might stalk his nights. Allegorical figures with shuffling walks and pale speculative eyes. They
understood
his fears. There is something about an institutional corridor which lends itself to raw fear. The shining tiles. The antiseptic distances.

Wilson, who was from the Village, had been convicted of selling cartridges for an unlicensed shotgun to a Catholic and given two years. The two men had shared receding memories of duckhunting at dusk on Lough Neagh. Crouched in a punt offshore waiting for the clipped arctic beat of wings coming towards them out of the darkest part of the October sky, until it seemed a kind of grace to be there as witness to vast and incurious migrations from the North. They knew there had to be consequences. Wilson had asked to be held in solitary
confinement
in Crumlin Road prison to protect him from the loyalist prisoners. It gave him time to think about the nature of betrayal. He borrowed books about the great traitors from the prison library. Lundy, Casement. It seemed to him that his own error in consorting with a Catholic was minor compared to these men whose deceits were concerned with the future of nations.

At the Downshire they counted the knives after dinner and
locked up toxic paints after art therapy class which led him to think about suicide. On television he watched pictures of girls who had been tarred and feathered for going out with British soldiers. They were left dangling from lampposts like crude fetishes designed to ward off a vengeance of intimate
proportions.
He remembered having seen it happen in the Village to a girl who was engaged to a Catholic. The women had shaved the girl’s head indoors while the men stood around outside with the tar and feathers, smoking and chatting. It seemed a form of initiation prescribed by custom.

When he was returned to Crumlin Road he would lie awake at night in the pilgrim darkness waiting for the metal shutter of the judas hole to slide back.

At the beginning of September he was released on two weeks’ parole. At home he was quiet and reflective, attentive to his family and to his parole officer. He was surprised at how difficult it was to find his way back to his old life. It seemed to be a thing requiring skills of navigation accompanied by prayers and invocations and he was ignorant of them. On his last night he opened the front door to a smiling man in a black leather jacket who said he wanted to buy a shotgun.

‘You must have the wrong house.’

‘I don’t think so. It’s not a bad evening. Good for shooting.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Ducks.’

‘Too much glare. They’d come in at you out of the sun before you knew where you were,’ Artie Wilson said, knowing he was lost.

‘Or Taigs.’ There was a black Capri on the other side of the road with another man leaning on the bonnet looking at him with the kind of passionate disinterest people reserve for victims of serious car accidents lying on roadside verges. Victor took a revolver out of its pocket and pressed it to Wilson’s side just below his heart.

‘Or traitors,’ he suggested in a whisper.

In Castlereagh Interrogation Centre Victor was fingerprinted then photographed front and profile. Looking good, Victor. He knew that these photographs were important, that in the future they could be released to the press. When he took a comb out of his pocket and smoothed his hair back none of the
policemen
objected. There was a silent acceptance of his sense of privilege. He was escorted from room to room gently. He began to suspect that they had a good case against him.

He was brought to an interview room. He recognized the detective who entered.

‘How’s about you, Herbie. Haven’t seen you this good while. Thought you was transferred.’

‘I seen you though, Victor. I was keeping a wee eye out for you.’

Victor laughed out loud to show he was aware of the direction things were taking. That he knew how policemen were attracted to the ominous statement.

‘You’re a hard nut, Victor, isn’t that right?’

‘See my new motor when you were watching me, Herbie? The Capri?’

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me where you got the money to buy it?’

‘That’s right, Herbie, I’m going to break down and confess.’

‘I know you are Victor. You’re going to cry like a baby and tell us you wish you never done it, you just don’t know what come over you.’

‘Capri’s a flying machine, Herbie. Give us a shout someday, I’ll give you a run in her.’

Each man chose his words carefully. They knew that ordinary speech was inadequate to the occasion. The exchange was carefully staged. At the start they were using the tones of flawed irony employed in gangster films, weary and laced with knowledge of the relentless nature of human greed and cruelty. Later they would move towards the process of questioning, a language of lovers prone to nuance and revelation, sensitive to pain.

‘You’re a good-looking boy, Victor, a real charmer.’

‘You know how it is, Herbie.’

‘We got some eye-witnesses in a line-up downstairs to admire you, Victor. Women and all. Just dying to get a look at the great Victor Kelly. Seen you do Artie Wilson, so they did. I’m sure you won’t object.’

‘You know me, Herbie, always willing and eager to help the law.’

‘This won’t take a second, Victor.’

Victor joined four other men in the identification parade. The others all wore leather jackets, cheaper than the one Victor had. The brightness of the room highlighted the lines on their faces. They exuded an air of disappointment, unfulfilled lives. Somewhere it seemed they had been found wanting and brought, haggard and unshaven, to this windowless room, a place of unwavering judgement. There was a stir when the
eyewitnesses
were brought in. They waited in the darkness behind the bright lights. Victor could sense their attentiveness, the way they held their breath in the face of the choice they were about to make.

‘Face front.’

Victor turned into the lights and gave them a dangerous smile which he had practised in front of the mirror. It was a Cagney smile, elegant and derisive. It showed that he had invulnerability to spare. Then he began to walk towards the lights. At first no one reacted. The other men in the line-up exchanged glances. He stepped in front of the lights and peered into the darkness with one hand shading his eyes. He looked bewildered now, deprived of familiar landmarks. Two uniformed policemen grabbed him from behind.

‘I’m fucking innocent,’ he shouted. ‘I never done nothing. I’m a victim of brutality. I been wrong accused of this crime. I got mental conditions the police took advantage of.’

Hand-cuffed to two policemen Victor waited outside the line-up room. The detective came out.

‘Good try, Victor.’

‘You like that, Herbie?’

‘Very good. You should of been in fucking films.’

‘Sorry about the identification evidence, Herbie. As you say, I don’t know what come over me. And here’s you with all this evidence you can’t use no more since my brief’s going to get up on the hind legs in court and say your honour this here evidence is flawed because my client went and made a show of himself in front of the witnesses and that’s why they’re identifying him and after all the trouble you took.’

‘Is that a fact Victor?’

‘Afraid so. You see I always took this keen amateur interest in the law and it says all the people in a line-up’s got to behave the same way. Still and all, it’s good to see you take it generous.’

‘The thing is Victor you’re going to have to stay with us for a while till I get this sorted out and see if we can’t come up with an accomplice and figure out a way to let him know that this running round the place, shooting everybody in sight, is not a very mature activity and maybe he’ll tell us a story and maybe you being a famous person’s going to be in this story.’

‘That’s very fucking comical, Herbie, you practise that or something?’

‘Natural talent is all, Victor, natural talent.’

It was a shock to Dorcas when she heard that Victor was in the prison for murder. Although she knew that in times of rioting and disorder in the streets the police and courts were subject to errors in their thinking it never entered her mind that Victor would fall victim. It was exactly the ordeal a mother dreads. She was in a crippled apprehension for news in the first week but no information was forthcoming to her. Day after day she went to police stations to sit in grim thoughts while the police took not a blind bit of notice of her. The idea that she once placed faith in the police was a source of bitter laughter.

It was a normal thing in such circumstances to blame God
and be in dismay. But this was a temptation to which she resisted with all her might. Instead she took Big Ivan’s
suggestion
that it was a case of mistaken identity. Though when Big Ivan said it first she felt at that moment that Victor was not himself but somebody else unknown. Or like identity withheld until next of kin are informed. She thought that it was a strange thing in families to become suddenly unknown to each other through thought or deed.

During those four weeks before he was released she had to go each Thursday on a minibus to visit, along with other women who had family in Crumlin Road. She did not wish to pass unnecessary judgement, but simply to say that some of them lacked anything which could be described as manners. She would pass over many of the things that came out of their mouths as words were not adequate. She was often fit for nothing by the time the minibus passed through the prison gate.

Being searched was a further tribulation, being sometimes required to remove garments, which was a large matter and not helped by the commonplace remarks of other women.

She regarded it as a sad matter for a mature woman to be in a place where men were caged like the beasts of the field. It recalled to her the cattle pens at the docks that were a part of her childhood, the pens being full of the sound of metal gates to wake the dead and a smell that rancoured in your nostrils as well. She thought at the time that all those animals bound for slaughter was an offence to innocence.

In addition it was not permitted by regulation to bring Victor a few small things of comfort, such as Tayto crisps or soda bread. There was also an atmosphere of damp to
compare
to their first house where clothes left in a wardrobe went mouldy overnight. It was an ease to her worry, though, that Victor was a Trustee prisoner from the start. Trust our Victor, she would say, and shake her head so that it could be seen that she was rueful but also proud.

When she went into the visiting room he was usually sat
there before her with that grin on that made you want to slap and also hug him. Of course she could not lay a hand across the table in light of warning notices that attempts to make physical contact will result in immediate termination of visit. At first it seemed that the desk where they sat was a great gulf separating mother and son. He was dark-skinned by nature but underneath he was pale. James told her once that sunlight was necessary to put vitamins in the skin. One of the foolish things he would say with the intention no doubt of putting the fear of God into her heart. A man who would go to football matches but would not come to visit his son. She knew there was nothing in it. But still a mother’s natural woe.

Well son, she would always begin, and then they would sit there with nothing to say like persons who are facing a great jeopardy. She would feel as if her tongue and lips had betrayed her or that somehow words had been denied. She felt these encounters onerous. It was not something she could easily bear except that Victor seemed to have a light of
understanding
of this problem in his eye. At such times it seemed as if the whole room had stopped in a description of eternity. It occurred to her that speech itself is a cruel deceiver or kind of hoax which could not be relied upon. This fact was an ache felt in her breast. It left a taste as if of ashes in her mouth. When it seemed they had reached a pitch of silence to overtake endurance, a type of humming in the ears, Victor would find words like a man describing with hesitance a turning point in his life or a time he thought he would die but didn’t. He told her the routine of his day, which did not vary. The quietness of his nights without a soul. She saw then that he would not go to seed or fall into brooding. Someone, he said, had told him how great men had found thoughts to guide them for the rest of their lives during dreary prison nights. The result was she felt assurance and when people on the street stopped to ask her, how’s Victor? she was able to answer them with
cheerfulness
. Although she had misgivings from the start that the world would seek to thwart his high objective. It brought a
nightly tear to her eye to think of him there in a dark cell turning things over in his head and perhaps going to the window to stare through the bars. She wondered if she had found the words to advise him would he have taken her advice so that she was not now heartrended.