by John Steele
CHAPTER 30
Sunday
Morning. A hot shower after sleeping on clean sheets.
A breakfast of bacon and eggs, sausage and tomatoes, potato bread and soda bread. Eaten with gusto.
He drives into the suburbs of Belfast in under ten minutes. The city hoves into view on the Ballygowan Road like a giant patchwork of red brick and grey steel.
He parks near the rugby stadium and walks to the sturdy Victorian detached. He hasn’t called ahead. He hasn’t seen or spoken to her since last night, but Eileen Tyrie doesn’t seem surprised to find him on her doorstep at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning. She steps aside, giving him more room than is necessary to pass her in the wide hallway, and shows him into the sitting room at the front of the house. Coffee is offered and accepted and five minutes later he’s blowing on an Italian blend and fingering a biscuit. They sit at a right angle to one another on the matching sofas, Eileen facing the window. He can’t believe how hungry he is.
‘You okay?’ he says.
She gives him a look. He takes a gulp of coffee.
‘Where are the girls?’
‘They stayed over at a school friend’s last night. Pyjama party. They’d been looking forward to it for weeks.’
‘Good timing.’
‘Yeah,’ she says with a sigh. ‘Lucky me.’
They both have a chug of brew.
‘Is he alive?’ she says.
‘If he isn’t,’ says Jackie, ‘it’s none of my doing. I left him at the park. What about the boys in the car?’
‘They’ve had the fear of God put in them and they’ll be none too pretty for a while, but they’re still breathing.’
They’d called the Fergusons yesterday and brought them in on the proviso that no one would die. Mark, the Godfather, former lover of Mrs Tyrie and now buried at various spots around Cloughy mudflats, had originally been a culshie: a country boy, from County Antrim. The official line on Mark was that he had disappeared and was now a missing person. The Ferguson clan didn’t buy that and weren’t slow in taking up the offer to put the hurt on some of those involved in Mark’s ‘disappearance’. They’d been waiting – and when the car had entered the tunnel, Billy’s boys hadn’t stood a chance. Culshies were hardcore.
‘Where are Billy’s lads now?’ says Jackie.
‘Retired,’ says Eileen. There is an edge to her that wasn’t there yesterday.
He raises an eyebrow.
‘I told you, they’re alive.’ Her voice is flat. Her gaze remains fixed on the hedge outside, although he doubts she is seeing it.
He takes another sip of coffee and finds himself gasping for a cigarette.
‘You didn’t know,’ he says, ‘about the room? The room above East End?’
‘No,’ she says with a slap of finality in her tone; he wants so badly to believe her.
‘Does it surprise you that Rab did? I wouldn’t have wanted Simpson to know I had an under-age lover. Too much leverage for a man like Rab to have on someone.’
‘Not in those days. What’s a dirty wee secret like a fuck pad in comparison to murder and torture? They were thick as thieves back then. Do you think it could have been Rab who fed the information to the IRA?’
‘That Billy used the room? Maybe. It could have been a power play to get him out of the way; the UVF sold the Butcher Murphy out to the Provos happily enough.’
Eileen nods, chewing on a patch of her lower lip.
‘Or it could have been your lot,’ says Jackie.
The chewing stops and she blinks.
He says, ‘MI5 are all about manipulation. They might have been looking to remove Billy.’
She begins to shake her head, still blinking. A deep frown furrows the smooth dome of her forehead.
‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure what–’
‘I know,’ says Jackie. ‘One of their men, Hartley, was at the airport when I flew in. He was giving me a warning, telling me to keep my nose clean while I was here. He talked about you having kids and said I should leave you alone. But no one ever knew about us. I never told my colleague.’ He thinks of Gordon, and of Rebecca. ‘You never appeared in a report. Billy and Rab didn’t know about us. But that Spook knew.’
Her mouth opens a hint. He can see the glistening pink tip of her tongue on the ridge of her front teeth.
He takes a leap to see how it plays out. ‘Thank you for that night.’
Several expressions appear to be battling for supremacy among her sculpted features.
Jackie continues, ‘It was you who called in the attempt on my life. You knew Rab had set me up for an IRA hit. You called it in.’
The colour is draining from that beautiful olive skin again and the fine lines at the side of the wide, sensual mouth seem more deeply etched than ever, punctuating her surprise.
‘I asked Billy if he knew about the set-up last night. He didn’t answer but I know he did. I know because you must have found out and saved me.’
Her eyes are somewhere else again. Probably twenty years ago.
‘Why?’ he asks.
‘Back then,’ she begins, then stalls. ‘At that time,’ she starts, then falters again.
Finally, she says, ‘What else could I do?’
Jackie understands. It was the same for him back then. But not now. They are both different people.
‘Is that when Five recruited you?’
‘Around that time,’ Eileen says. ‘I thought you were dead. I was sick of Billy and scared of Rab. I thought they’d help, take them away.’
‘But they didn’t.’
‘They wanted to contain them. Keep them in place and limit the damage with my information.’
‘An acceptable level of violence, right?’
She gives him a mirthless smile. ‘Exactly. This was never going to end. My informing, their violence, all of this.’
She gestures to the window with both hands outstretched. She looks as though she is offering her wrists to a pair of handcuffs.
‘I found out you were alive; that you didn’t die that night, at least. And part of me hated you for it. You got away, clean. I lost myself then. I did some things I’m not proud of, things I’ll never forgive myself for. But I couldn’t give up and I couldn’t disappear. I have the girls to worry about. I couldn’t leave them with their father. So I’m still here.’
‘And he isn’t,’ says Jackie. ‘Billy never knew about MI5?’
‘No.’
‘Rab’s dead. You’re free now. Free of Five too, if you play them right.’
She hangs her head and looks at him out of the corners of her eyes, sideways.
He takes a breath. He puts his hand in his pocket and pulls out an envelope and hands it to her.
‘That’s a photograph. It’s of you and Rab Simpson. One of those things you’re not proud of, I’d imagine.’
She throws the small flat object on the floor as if it carries a plague strain.
‘Do with that copy as you see fit.’
‘Copy?’ She whirls on him. ‘Copy? What the fuck, Jackie, there’s more of them?’
‘You’re part of this, Eileen. You were married to Billy, you know people. You pulled the Fergusons into last night’s shenanigans. Christ, you could have a lot more clout with MI5 than I think. I have to protect myself and my family and this photograph is my insurance.’
He’d been surprised at how comfortable she was last night, her authority over the Fergusons and her callous disregard for Billy’s men. Men who’d murdered her lover, but who’d probably protected her, maybe cared for her girls and played with them as children. And after the last four days, he wouldn’t put anything past her, or any of them, the people who still live in that world of forty, thirty, twenty years ago.
‘I would never …’ she begins, then thinks better of it. They both understand. Whatever pushed her to make that call to Branch twenty years ago has gone. They are strangers now.
Eileen says, her voice very quiet, ‘I was drunk. No man wou
ld come near me and then, one night, Rab called over while Billy was away. He had to leave some package for him and he’d just bought the house at Ardenlee. It wasn’t long after he’d been shot, and he was different for a while, calm. He invited me to come over and have a look at the new place and he was … nice.’ She crosses her arms and legs. ‘We drank too much, he asked me upstairs and, before I knew it, he had a camera out.’
‘As I said before, this isn’t about you,’ says Jackie. ‘Anything happens to my sister or her family, this photograph goes to the local media, the PSNI and UDA East Belfast Brigade.’
Once again, she understands. He hopes she sees enough of the man she cared for back then to trust him to keep the photo under wraps. And to use it if he has to.
‘Thanks for the coffee,’ he says and stands to go.
She joins him, keeping her distance from the photo on the sofa.
‘I have to get ready,’ she says. ‘I’ll be taking the girls to church when they get back.’
He thinks of the small funeral church of two days ago.
‘I suppose there’s no point in asking you to say a prayer for me.’
‘Do your own dirty work,’ she says, as he steps out the door.
#
Sunday lunchtime. Beef, roast spuds, boiled spuds. Broad beans, peas, steaming carrots. Sarah glowing. Tom happy to see his wife so happy. The two kids – teenagers – wary of Jackie. Then amused by how giddy their mother is and then losing themselves in the banter. The craic is great. Uncle Jackie, he thinks.
Ice cream and jelly for dessert and now he is no longer hungry. More craic. Uncle Jackie guffaws and realises he hasn’t laughed with honest-to-God joy in a donkey’s age. Sarah tells a funny story from their school days and calls him ‘my brother’ and he feels a warmth spread through him. She and Tom talk about going back to work tomorrow and the kids ask about Jackie’s job. His niece is particularly interested in the horses on the land where he lives. She wants to be a vet.
At the end of the afternoon they have coffee and a slice of cake Sarah bought yesterday and he is satisfied.
#
Evening. A coffee in the departure lounge and a hollow ache in his belly at being alone again. He’d left Sarah at her home. But he had had to drive out to Bangor to return Rebecca Orr’s car and pick up the rented Toyota. He swallowed memories of the abattoir of Ardenlee as he made his way to the airport, gripping the wheel until his knuckles seemed almost translucent. The flight is one of the later departures on a Sunday night and the terminal is quiet, the shops closing. He’s almost glad when his name is called over the Tannoy system: it promises something to occupy the next few minutes.
A member of the ground crew is waiting for him at the desk and accompanies him to a door along a narrow corridor. She opens it, revealing a large man in a suit who ushers him inside and steps to the left. Stuart William Hartley is sitting behind a simple, cheap-looking table. He has a blossoming purple bruise across the bridge of his busted nose and a bandage on his temple. The large man in the suit gestures towards the plastic chair opposite Hartley and Jackie sits down.
‘Your nose looks almost as bad as mine,’ he says, fingering the empty space where the Claddagh ring had been.
‘Like mine, it seems yours has been broken,’ says Hartley.
‘You should see the other fella.’
‘I think I have. Photographs of him anyway. Or what’s left of him.’
‘I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘I’m in no doubt that you do, but it isn’t an issue that concerns me.’
‘If it’s more information you’re after, no can do. I don’t move in those circles any more.’
Hartley breathes through his battered nose. The nasal burr is stronger than ever and the bruising extends out below his eyes, giving his expression a permanent, almost comical glare. He looks at the be-suited man, perhaps for reassurance, and plays with a ball-point pen.
‘Billy Tyrie shot himself in the early hours of this morning. Local residents heard a gunshot and called the police. They found his body draped over the railings of a memorial to the victims of a bombing atrocity committed some twenty years ago on the lower Ravenhill Road.’
Jackie looks Hartley in his dark-ringed eyes. ‘Are you sure he shot himself?’
‘It would appear so, according to early reports from the pathologist and crime scene boys.’
‘He’ll be sorely missed,’ says Jackie. ‘If that’s all, I’ll be going. I have a flight to catch.’
‘By all means. I just thought you’d want to know. I suppose this means you’re last man standing, quite an achievement considering your competition.’
‘They were only competition if you played the same game,’ says Jackie. He puts his hands on his knees, ready to get up.
‘I also wanted to pass on our thanks for a job well done.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘I did say last man standing,’ says Hartley. His glance flits to the suit and back to Jackie again. ‘I believe you know who our asset has been in the Ravenhill UDA.’
Jackie, palms still planted on knees, looks at Hartley. The man is licking his lips. Then he waits. He knows Hartley can’t help himself.
‘Eileen Tyrie was our primary source of intelligence on the activities of Billy’s little tribe until the end of the Troubles. As our Billy was a true believer, he cultivated some pretty nasty friends in Scotland and England in recent years. The usual right-wing headcases. Even a couple in mainland Europe.’
Jackie leans in to the table, listening hard as Hartley goes on.
‘But he’d lost his way, had our Billy, and Rab Simpson was a threat to him. Simpson was a different animal altogether: unpredictable, more vicious, no beliefs or standards left but the pursuit of wealth and power. Unlucky for him he wasn’t born in Surrey and working in the City.’
Hartley laughs at his own little joke.
‘So when we heard you were coming back, thanks to our friends in GCHQ, we made sure Billy heard you would be in Belfast through our friend Eileen. Billy tasked you with getting rid of Simpson. We had no qualms about it.’
‘And you think it was me shot him in Ardenlee.’
‘Trust me, you needn’t worry. We all know Rab Simpson was shot in a drug deal gone wrong.’
‘And Billy?’
‘Billy’s a bonus. Eileen was going to try a story on you anyway, push you in the right direction. We thought you’d find it hard to resist playing the white knight. Turns out that wasn’t necessary. We picked up your Estonian friends at Belvoir Forest Park, and they were only too happy to lay out Rab’s proposal for you.’
And you let it play out, knowing the bastard had threatened my family, thinks Jackie. He sizes up the distance between them, gauges how much more damage he could do to Hartley before the suit pulled him off. But there is no point. It wouldn’t change anything and it definitely wouldn’t change a man like Hartley. Born into the right family. The right school, the right clubs. He’d always be comfortable, always have influence with the right people, always have money and a sweet retirement fund at the end of the day. Men like him had, quite literally, nothing to lose.
‘And Eileen?’ says Jackie. He remembers the dead, flinty chill in her voice this morning.
‘With a bit of luck, she’ll have a seat at the East Belfast Brigade command table. First woman in a senior role within the organisation.’
‘And you won’t be needing me again? I’ll be back to visit family from time to time.’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
Jackie rises and waves a hand behind him, a vague farewell. Just before he reaches the door, the suit’s hand on the handle, he turns.
‘You realise you can’t trust her. For all you know, she could have been in bed with Simpson, too.’
‘Hardly,’ says Hartley, superiority regained now the length of the room stands between them. ‘She’s quite the businesswoman. She wouldn’t get into bed with someone as unstable as Simp
son.’
Jackie takes his wallet out and fishes a Polaroid out of it. He looks at it and whistles, keeping the back of the photograph facing Hartley so the man can only see a scribbled date and a place name written in Rab Simpson’s hand.
‘Oh, I don’t know, Stuart,’ he says. ‘You’d be surprised.’
Then he nods at the suit, who duly turns the handle and opens the door for his departure as Jackie slips the wallet and Polaroid back into his pocket.
#
The Airbus A319 roars into the sky bound for the south-west of England. As it peels away from the city below, it leaves the shipyard, Victoria Park and the east of the city, sprawling into the Castlereagh Hills, in its wake. And as it gains height, making good speed along Belfast Lough against a lively headwind, it passes the commuter town of Holywood. The blinking lights of coastal Bangor wave a final farewell as the plane banks over the huge black chasm of the Irish Sea.
Jackie Shaw rubs his face with his hands and breathes deeply. He looks forward to collecting his car on the other side and the silent drive through the countryside to his small flat in a converted stables. He looks forward to a full night’s sleep and waking in the morning without a slow twisting of his guts, and he looks forward to looking at his face in the mirror after the scars of his homecoming have healed. This trip is over, he is still in one piece and he believes his family is safe.
And he is smitten once again with the city of his birth. The hills, mountains and lough, which corral it into the Lagan Valley. So for now he makes a conscious effort not to grip the arms of his seat and wills himself to relax. He rubs a bare finger on his right hand, his Claddagh ring gone but his soul taken by the city that shaped him. Then a jolt of turbulence clouts the plane and he whispers a short prayer. An image of a gored Rab Simpson flickers in his mind’s eye and, as he takes a long, deep breath, he remembers one of his mother’s favourite passages from the Good Book.
Be sure your sins will find you out.
END
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to: Dave Busby, for getting the ball rolling; David and Ewan Cameron for their time and honest feedback; Leslie Rich for encouragement and a great soundtrack for writing; Robert Dinsdale, my editor at Silvertail; Shona Andrew, for making the book look good; Humfrey Hunter at Silvertail, for his honesty and patience, and for taking a chance on me; Ruth Dudley Edwards; Colin Bateman; Christopher Zuk; Reza, Iman and Najiba for listening to me harp on; my mum for instilling my love of reading; and my dad for spinning so many great yarns. Now, I hope, it’s my turn.