by John Steele
Jackie is impressed that Billy’s reach is still so wide-ranging. Then again, the airport and car hire are in East Belfast.
‘Why didn’t you keep in touch with your da?’ asks Tyrie. ‘You hurt him, so you did. Not contacting the oul’ lad.’
‘I thought it was best for him. What he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him, and, hopefully, you couldn’t either.’
Of course, he had been in contact. But always through Sarah.
‘Ach now, Jackie, come on. Family’s off limits, you know that.’
Does Rab Simpson know that? thinks Jackie.
‘Do you honestly think I’d have done anything to your da?’ says Tyrie. ‘Sure, we genuinely thought you were dead at first.’
‘Do you want a refund for the funeral expenses?’
Billy smiles and reaches into his pocket. He says, ‘Who’s to say I won’t get my money’s worth yet?’
He produces a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and offers one to Jackie, who declines. Everyone waits as Tyrie battles the wind to get the cigarette lit. Finally, he draws deeply on the filter and exhales with a lazy, blissful expression. ‘So here’s the thing. I don’t know why that wasn’t your body at Holywood. We had a couple of contacts in the RUC back then. They told us there were four bodies but we didn’t see the corpse so we didn’t notice your ring was missing, and I wouldn’t have thought to look anyway. It was Rab’s pet peeler picked that up. It was never an issue for me: the Claddagh, all that Fenian-culture-shite. I know better.’
He points at Jackie with the cigarette. The tip is glowing a fierce orange in the wind.
‘You disappeared and it doesn’t take a genius to see you had help. State sponsored, I’d say. So you were a grass, probably. But now? All water under the bridge. To be honest, why you disappeared and where you went is immaterial. This country has changed and I never suffered because of you. Never did time, never got shot.’
Don’t count your chickens, thinks Jackie.
‘The shenanigans with Tommy and Danny are another matter. But it was all a long time ago. I’m tired of churning over the past.’
Jackie is weighing his options if this goes sour. He doesn’t see any.
‘But … but … you owe me, son. You caused us all a lot of consternation. And I never made a move on your da when things started looking suspect. Not to mention I was in pieces when I thought you were dead.’
‘So …’
‘So,’ says Tyrie, ‘I need a bit of work done, and I need an outsider to do it. And you are, now, an outsider. You talk like an Englishman for a start.’
Ha, bloody ha, thinks Jackie.
‘I want you to be a trigger man.’
Billy flicks his fag butt onto the sand and spits on it.
‘I want you to shoot Rab Simpson.’
#
The IRA ceasefire in 1997 brought a glimmer of hope to the people of Northern Ireland and peace became a real possibility. The Good Friday Agreement became the focus for attempts to establish a political framework which could at least consider all parties involved. For those who lived in Northern Ireland, a healthy scepticism kept the country anchored: you can’t please all of the people all of the time could have been penned for the conundrum of the Province.
Thanks to the Agreement, many of the agents of thirty years of brutal sadism were given amnesty, released with a clean slate onto the streets of the cities and countryside they had terrorized. But they had no skills beyond butchery and intimidation. Which brings Jackie back to Billy Tyrie and Rab Simpson.
Billy talks about Rab: Simpson is originally from West Belfast, his family burnt out of their home by a Catholic mob during the mutual religious purges which began in the late sixties. Despite relocating to the east of the city, he has kept many of his contacts in the west, and these men had encouraged Rab to look into black-market rackets in cigarettes and fuel. Despite the segregation in prison, many had contacts with IRA and INLA members who were happy to form criminal alliances now that the terrorist wage had dried up. Billy Tyrie turned a blind eye to whatever schemes Rab had cooked up on the side. He drew the line, however, at drugs.
Rab claimed, ‘Loyalism doesn’t pay the bills no more,’ but Billy vetoed any UDA involvement in the drug business in East Belfast. It was like yelling ‘Stop!’ at a horde of stampeding buffalo. Heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamines and the rest came streaming in.
Then bodies began turning up. Rab had a contact in the IRA who was also a member of the republican splinter group Republican Action Against Drugs, or RAAD, in Derry. He had told Rab of how they would execute known drug dealers, ‘independents’, in the city. RAAD could claim they were keeping their streets clean and help alienate the police from their local communities, and they could wipe out the opposition, leaving the way clear to monopolise all dealing conducted on their turf.
In East Belfast, two men were found riddled with bullets in a car near Sydenham. A man was shot in the back of the head at a house party on the Ballybeen Estate. A twenty-three-year-old girl was found dead in her Volkswagen Beetle off the lower Castlereagh Road. She had seventeen bullet wounds in her twisted body. Tyrie was incensed and wanted Simpson dead, but Rab had created a network of paramilitaries across Belfast, all plugged into the drug trade within the city and beyond. Billy had his loyal followers, but he didn’t want to risk a feud.
Then Samuel Shaw, father of Jackie, passed away. Billy had known Jackie would come back. And Jackie was deniable, still a ghost for some and unknown to many.
And now he’s standing on a wind-scoured beach on the Irish Sea coast under a darkening sky, being contracted to conduct a killing for Billy Tyrie. Just like old times.
#
For the second time that day Jackie knows that, at this moment in time, he doesn’t have a choice.
He says, ‘I’ll take him out.’
‘I know you will.’
They reach the cars as darkness settles over the coast like a blackout.
‘You’ll need something to get the job done,’ says Tyrie. ‘Don here will deliver a package to your hotel tonight. There’ll also be a photograph. Rab has changed a bit down the years.’
Aye, I noticed, thinks Jackie.
‘We’re going to go for another wee drive now,’ says Tyrie, ‘just a couple of miles.’
Jackie follows the rear lights of the Audi south along the coast for ten minutes, two men in his car. They turn left through a small pair of gates with Celtic crosses on top. The road winds up and through some scraggly trees already naked of leaves in the dark autumn sky. They pull into a small car park, not another soul to be seen.
They get out of the cars and one of the bodyguards pops the boot of the Audi and illuminates the inside with his mobile phone. It looks like someone has done their grocery shopping. The boot is full of plastic bags of varying shapes and sizes. One of them is the size of a large bowling ball, but egg-shaped. There is a round indentation about two thirds of the way down the bag, a hollow in the plastic. Behind it, Jackie knows, is a mouth caught in a silent scream.
The bodyguards grab the bags, taking a couple each, and as they leave the cars and file down steep, winding steps Jackie remembers the place from a childhood trip. It is Cooey’s Wells, ancient and holy, with healing waters and a small, broken altar. In this dark, the trees shivering around them, it is a child’s Halloween panorama.
‘This place was holy before any of us gave a shite about being Prod or taig,’ Tyrie says. ‘Norse pirates had a go at raiding here a few times, probably Celts, too. There’s always been trouble in this land. It’s in our blood, and so much has been shed, it’s seeped into the very earth.’
Jackie hears the wash of the tide beyond as they pass through a small iron gate and along a path crowded by long, ragged grass. They stop at what appears to be a gaping hole in the earth, before the moonlight coats the dark ground with a silver gloss and Jackie sees they are standing at the edge of mud flats, the sea churning softly beyond.
‘Now, you w
ill kill Simpson for me, son,’ says Billy. ‘I’m not sentimental. This boyo here,’ he points to the bags, ‘is the godfather of one of my girls.’
Bloody hell, thinks Jackie, Billy has children.
‘I remember him holding our Claire in the church at the christening. He was a friend of Eileen’s family.’
Tyrie takes the egg-shaped bag from the nearest of his men.
‘I found out about a fortnight ago he was fucking Eileen.’
He throws the bag into the black abyss in front of them and turns back towards Cooey’s Wells. He beckons Jackie to accompany him. The other men begin burying the bags in the soft, sucking mud.
Jackie wonders again whether Billy could know about him and Eileen. Is she dead, too? Will Tyrie wait until Jackie has taken Rab Simpson out of the picture before exacting revenge for their affair?
As they pass the small holy wells, with signs ordering, drink and wash, Tyrie stops again.
‘The point is, that wanker in pieces back there fucked my wife. In fucking my Eileen, he fucked me, so he did. He made a promise in the church to care for my child if anything happened to me. And then he fucked her mommy when her daddy wasn’t around. He crossed me.’
Jackie is meeting Tyrie’s gaze as best he can in the deep gloom. One of the bodyguards is trudging back towards them.
‘You’ll shoot that cunt Simpson,’ says Tyrie.
He starts up the steep steps back to the cars. The bodyguard gestures for Jackie to follow suit while the others bury the dismembered body in the stagnant mud behind them. In recognition, Billy stabs a thumb behind his shoulder without bothering to look.
‘Don’t you cross me, either.’
CHAPTER 9
1993
The Cregagh Road was buzzing with activity as they neared the small shop belonging to James Maguire. Until that point in time, there had been nothing outstanding about James, other than his status as the youngest retailer on the road. Golden Discs did well, saving the youth of the area a trip into the city centre if they wanted to pick up the latest dance, indie or rock CDs.
Those milling about the road at two in the afternoon were generally older than Golden Discs’ customer demographic. Plenty of pensioners visiting the local bakeries, butchers and greengrocers, or housewives picking up provisions at Stewarts, the local supermarket. Many knew Jackie’s face as his mother had often shopped here. Some of the people strolling by had visited their house from time to time in the past.
Today, he couldn’t meet their gaze. Those who dared to look at him at any rate.
He couldn’t stop his face reddening at the thought of these decent people, people who had loved and respected his mother and pitied and despaired the alcoholic wreck his father had become, seeing him walking next to Rab Simpson on a clear spring afternoon.
Rab was well known in the area. His latest claim to fame had been an incident at the King James public-house last week. Rab had been enjoying an afternoon Harp at the bar when a sales rep for a drinks supplier called in. The rep began a pitch on the joys of Jameson whiskey. The King James offered Bushmills, and only Bushmills, as an Irish. The barman said as much. The sales rep wasn’t having it. He’d had the same experience in many bars east of the River Bann, he said, but had yet to meet an unsatisfied convert.
Rab had already put a few Harp lagers away. He was also blissfully unaware that Harp was brewed in staunchly Catholic and republican Dundalk, just over the border in the Republic of Ireland. The town was a popular spot for fugitive republican terrorists and IRA hit teams enthusiastically pursuing a policy of religious cleansing by assassinating Protestant farmers and their sons in the borderlands of Counties Down and Armagh.
But all that mattered to Rab was that this sales rep, probably a Fenian sales rep, was coming into a good loyalist bar in a goodProtestant area and bad-mouthing a good Protestant whiskey – Bushmills; not to mention selling papal piss like Jamesons. So he sacrificed the rest of his pint and smashed the glass over the rep’s head. Then he excused himself and nipped out the back of the bar to a storeroom, to fetch a hammer and nails. Returning to find the rep kneeling on the floor, a sickly pink blend of blood and lager soaking his lacerated scalp, he hauled the man to his feet and led him to the front of the bar before nailing the rep’s right hand to the door.
So it was no wonder that Mrs McCauley, a member of the Ravenhill Presbyterian Church choir, the Women’s Institute and good friend to his mother in her last days, gave Jackie and Rab a withering stare before she entered Gibson’s Newsagents.
The Prodigy was playing as Jackie and Rab entered Maguire’s shop. James Maguire, standing behind the counter, looked up with a pre-packaged smile for the punters when the chime above the door jangled.
He had refused to pay his fee to the UDA for two weeks. The fee was a subscription in order to keep the road a safe and prosperous environment for local residents and for those from further afield to do their shopping. Protection money by any other name.
Looking at the delicate man behind the counter, mousy hair scraped back in a severe ponytail, Jackie was surprised and impressed by Maguire’s resolve. He looked like you could spit through him, yet Maguire had told four goons to fuck off in the space of a fortnight. But not Rab, who didn’t handle such low-grade work as doing the collection rounds. He was only called in when there was a problem to be dealt with. And with Jackie’s newfound status in the gang, he was being tutored in the finer points of paramilitary violence and intimidation from one of the best in the business.
Maguire didn’t know Jackie from Adam, but he obviously recognised Rab Simpson. Colour draining from his hollow cheeks, he said, ‘Look, I don’t want trouble. I’m just trying to make a living, you know?’
Rab turned the sign on the door over, from Open to Closed.
He walked up the centre aisle of the shop, flanked by racks of CD cases as drum and bass hammered off the walls. As he got closer, Maguire said, ‘I’ve no problem with youse. I’m local, live just off the road, like. But I can’t afford to be giving my money to youse when I’m competing with Virgin in the centre of town.’
Jackie hung back at the door and kept an eye on the street outside through the large shop window, while watching Rab and Maguire.
When he reached the counter, Rab said, ‘Come round here a wee minute, will ye? I can’t be talking to you over this counter.’ As Maguire sidled around to the shop floor Jackie was taken aback by just how rail-thin the man was, tottering on gangly legs like a newborn foal.
Rab turned to Jackie and said, ‘Who’s this we’re listening to?’
‘The Prodigy.’
‘Load a’ shite.’
Maguire, with a dumb look on his face, said, ‘Do you want something else on?’
Jackie said, ‘We’d need to make a move soon and head on. Maybe it’s better just to get this done.’
At this Maguire’s skin seemed to tighten across his skull-like face, as though someone were turning a tourniquet at the back of his head. He said, ‘I swear to youse, I’d give youse the money if I could, but I’ll be out of business if I just give my profits away like that.’
Rab said, ‘You’d be surprised what you can do, if you put your mind to it.’ He plucked a CD case from the rack behind him and popped it open, revealing the shiny silver disc inside. ‘Taking a bit of a chance keeping the CDs in the cases, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Some wee fucker’ll have it and be away out the door before you can stop him.’ He squinted at the disc and read out, ‘K-L-F. Are they a splinter group of the UVF then?’ Pleased with his own joke, he gave a chuckle. Jackie glanced outside again. Rab took the disc out of the case and held its edge between his thumb and forefinger, giving it a gentle squeeze. The disc warped in his grip, then returned to its original flat shape.
‘They say you can do anything to these things. Scratch them, burn them, whatever, and they’ll still play.’ He tensed his wrist and the disc warped further. Maguire was gaping at the shiny plastic. After a couple of seconds the disc splint
ered in two with a sharp crack. ‘But, you see, mucker, anything’ll break if you put enough pressure on it.’
Jackie turned to check out the street through the large shop front window. Mrs McCauley had exited the newsagents and was standing in front of the shop, sorting out her shopping bags.
He turned back at the sound of a high-pitched yelp and a grunt of effort. Rab had Maguire in a headlock and was gripping a jagged shard of the broken CD in his free hand, inching the barbed point of the shard towards Maguire’s right eye. Maguire was frantically trying to hold Rab’s arm away from his face. Neither man spoke but Jackie could hear a whine from Maguire piercing the thud of the drums and bass line. His head began pounding with the rhythm. Stupidly, he tried to listen if this was the same track as when they’d entered the shop before realising it was his own pulse. Rab’s hand began bleeding as the CD bit into his palm. ‘You wee fucker,’ he said, half laughing. ‘You’ll fucking pay, d’you hear me?’
Just tell him you’ll pay, Jackie willed, just tell him. The splintered point of the shard was an inch away from Maguire’s eye and Jackie could see the gaunt shop owner was weakening. He looked out at the street again. Mrs McCauley was still fiddling with her shopping bags in front of Golden Discs. Turning back to the struggle inside he saw Maguire had a frenzied look, his mouth silently agape, his eyes wide and frantic. When they settled on Jackie the man’s fear felt like a physical force, gripping and shaking him, and he turned away.
‘Ach, Mrs McCauley, how are you?’ shouted Jackie. ‘I haven’t seen you about the road for a while.’
He stood in line with her through the window, blocking Rab’s view. The old lady looked up, startled. The music had stopped in the shop, the track ended along with the sounds of struggle. Mrs McCauley gave him a look of suspicion and peered around him.
‘Aye, I know Mrs McCauley, I must call over and see you for a wee cup of tea. I’ve just been a bit busy, like.’
The woman’s scornful look became sharper as she slowly approached the window.
‘This is my mate, Rab Simpson. Do you know him?’