The Psalm Killer

by Chris Petit

  ‘And you framed Willcox with the bradawl from Berrigan’s farm because Mary Ryan had the same blood group as found on the bradawl.’

  Moffat shrugged and grinned again, and Cross saw a trace of the caught-out schoolboy quite without remorse. Cross felt a spasm of self-loathing at being so eagerly drawn into Moffat’s intrigue. He asked why Willcox had agreed to confess.

  ‘Ah, that’s where it gets interesting,’ said Moffat, swinging his feet off the desk. ‘I don’t know whether I’m offending your sensibilities by saying that Willcox is of as much value to anyone as used arse paper and no one would mourn his removal – least of all his wife, if you read what he did to her. Don’t you find this country still pretty fucking barbaric at times?’

  Cross wondered if Moffat ever considered that it was partly because of men like himself.

  ‘The man’s an animal,’ Moffat went on. ‘You’ll know from his file that he was suspected of being involved in that nasty Shankill stuff, though nothing stuck. Well, we have a supergrass who’s a prepared to add Willcox’s name to the list of Butchers. Confronted by this and the prospect of going down for life, Willcox did a deal.’

  ‘What sort of deal is confessing to two murders? He’d be down for the same amount of time.’

  Moffat fiddled with a pencil and avoided looking at Cross. ‘The deal is that after a couple of years he’d go missing in the system and be quietly released.’

  Seeing the look of digust on his face, Moffat held up a hand in apology.

  ‘Don’t worry. This is not a common occurrence. In fact, I know of only one other case of it happening. But the way I see it, any time that Willcox spends away is a bonus all round.’

  Cross spent the rest of the meeting in a daze. He agreed to report directly to Moffat and that Westerby should continue building a profile of the killer. In the absence of any easily accessible computers in the barracks, Moffat pointed out that it might be easier for her to continue working from home.

  ‘I could get her clearance, but she’d be stuck somewhere very hush-hush and remote.’

  ‘What about our man calling when she’s not in the office?’

  ‘Does he call direct or through the switchboard?’

  ‘Switchboard, I think. He calls her Jill.’

  ‘So he’d ask for Jill when nobody else would?’

  Cross nodded and Moffat said, ‘I’ll talk to the telephone people and get them to divert any calls for Jill to her home. Shouldn’t be too difficult.’

  Moffat added that he would put a team on to following up the basement flat.

  ‘I’d rather have known about it sooner,’ said Moffat. This was his only mild reproof during the meeting. ‘I’d prefer to have some people I know go through it, if that’s all right with you.’

  ‘As long as I have access to anything found there.’

  ‘Of course. Perhaps you could put together a team to resift old leads, as well as trying to identify the source of the killer’s information. What is there so far?’

  ‘All the obvious things,’ replied Cross. ‘We thought he might have access to the central computer or market research files, credit card data. It’s a question of where you start, and we’re so short handed. I even wondered about TV rentals. The stuff you have to put on their forms is unbelievable.’

  The truth was Cross hardly knew where to start. Besides, if Candlestick was being leaked or fed the information in some way he’d never get to the bottom of it. But he wasn’t going tell Moffat about that.

  ‘I’ll need to talk to Willcox again.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Moffat airily, then more keenly, ‘Why?’

  ‘Willcox saw Candlestick at the time of Tommy Herron’s murder—’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘At the time of Tommy Herron’s—’

  ‘You used a name.’

  ‘Candlestick.’

  ‘Yes. Where did that come from?’

  ‘He used it to Westerby. From the old rhyme, I suppose, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker—’

  ‘But it’s not in the file.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Cross.

  Moffat became more animated than at any other time in the meeting. He found the relevant page, then made a note in the margin. Cross recognized the word Candlestick upside down. He watched Moffat underline it three times while he asked why he wanted to talk to Willcox.

  ‘Mary Ryan was mutilated, so was Breen. The Butchers cut their victims too, and we know our man was around then. What I’d like to know is how he spent the summer of 1972.’

  Cross sent out for a bottle of Scotch, told the attending constable to leave them and reconfirmed that anything Willcox said was off the record. Willcox took a couple of large swigs of whisky, pondered Cross’s request, and then took him through the whole appalling story.

  ‘There was a place on Downing Street and everybody knew that on Friday and Saturday nights the UVF killed Taigs there. And the cops knew it too – every Friday and Saturday night, and then the stiffs were dumped in the river and every Saturday morning the peelers would send a patrol to fish them out, but they never patrolled Downing Street of a Friday or Saturday night. And you can make what you like of that.’

  He scribbled his cigarette out in the ashtray, a proud witness of the violence he’d seen and the violence administered.

  ‘So you’re saying this was widely known at the time,’ said Cross slowly.

  ‘Well enough for the cops to issue a statement saying that any Taig in his right mind shouldn’t walk certain streets after dark. Milford Street. Union Street. Clifton Street. Up the Antrim Road and the Oldpark.’

  ‘And the Englishman you told me about?’

  ‘Now there’s one hard cunt.’

  ‘He was there, wasn’t he?’

  Willcox took a contemplative swig from his glass, nodded, lit another cigarette, and gave a harsh, appreciative laugh.

  ‘He was doing this Fenian bastard, who would have been one of the first, and he breaks off in the middle and says, “Get Mr Sheehan a drink, he deserves one,” and fuck me if we don’t all stand around knocking it back until he gets on with the digging again. And there was another he crucified to the wall.’

  ‘Crucified?’

  ‘Drove a couple of knives through his hands, and all the time the Stones playing in the background. He had a little dance by then, like a shuffle he used to do.’

  Cross felt he was hardly guessing when he said, ‘“Sympathy for the Devil”.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Willcox with a warm, cracked smile. ‘That’s the one. Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste.’

  The bottle was half empty and Willcox settled, the meat of him spread comfortably in his seat, and the position of his cigarettes and ashtray familiar enough by then for him to reach both without looking.

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Willcox, lost in reverie.

  Cross couldn’t help himself when he asked if any of them thought they were doing anything wrong.

  Willcox shrugged. ‘Nah. There’s always been hardmen in Belfast.’

  He pointed to the city’s tradition of bare-knuckle fighting, defunct since the start of the Troubles. Cross remembered stories of local champions knocking each other stupid on bits of city wasteground, cheered on by a crowd.

  ‘But they fought each other on equal terms,’ said Cross.

  ‘The Taigs weren’t fighting us on equal terms. But after we hit back they didn’t go out at night without thinking twice. They respected us.’

  There was a long silence in which Cross tried to control his emotions. He wanted to see Willcox damaged in return for all the unthinking pain he’d caused.

  The moment passed, unnoticed by Willcox, who continued to reminisce unprompted and gradually Cross, in spite of his revulsion, found himself lulled by Willcox’s matter-of-fact, boozy account of events: the then-we-did-that-and-then-he-did-that. Willcox seemed grateful for the opportunity to talk, not to unburden any guilt, but because he
liked the audience.

  ‘I wasn’t there when they did the one that got them caught, and your man had moved on too by then. I don’t know why that cunt didn’t die. They did a really first-class job on the boy. Slit his wrists up the ways, defleshed his arms, cut his throat and reversed the car over him a couple of times. One of the fellows took his shoelaces off and ties them round the Taig’s throat and uses a stick to twist them tight, like the Spanish, and someone else has this big stick with a six-inch nail and is whacking him on the head with that. Jesus, it was like a fucking cartoon. That’s why they usually gave them a head job too, just to make sure: they don’t talk again if you put a bullet in their ear. I don’t know why nobody did that time. It would have saved them a lot of grief. I tell you it really freaked the Taigs out, hearing of these bodies that had been shot and had their throats cut. They couldn’t figure that out at all!’

  Willcox grinned drunkenly at Cross, who realized with a jolt that Willcox was nostalgic for this barbarism. It was the one event that invested his life with any significance. Cross hurried him on and asked about the Englishman again.

  ‘There was him and Baker and several others, but they were the main two. Baker fucked off back to England soon after and gave himself up and tried to do a deal and name a lot of UVF fellows, but the judge saw him for the cunt he was and banged him up for life.’

  Talking of Baker, Willcox showed a solitary moment of self-awareness, saying that it didn’t take a hardman to frighten people. Anybody could do it. You could terrorize your next-door neighbour if you had a hammer in your hand. His point – so far as Cross could grasp, because the alcohol was turning Willcox incoherent – was that on the whole none of them was a hardman by nature. Willcox became increasingly maudlin, revealing glimpses of a softer side, a cruel sentimental streak that made his hardness all the more frightening.

  ‘Maybe I’m going beyond the normal awareness in this situation, but there are things I picked up over the years. We didn’t know what psychological warfare was, we just did it. Couldn’t even spell our own names at the time, didn’t even know what the terms were.’

  ‘Who taught you?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t Baker. He’d gone broody by then, so that leaves your man.’

  ‘Who taught you to torture and murder Taigs?’ Cross asked carefully.

  ‘Fuck it, man!’ Willcox banged his fist on the table, making Cross jump. ‘The Brits were running around shooting Protestants and they were supposed to be our friends, pretendin’ they were IRA so we’d get all charged up and start our own war with the Taigs.’

  Overlapping images suddenly snapped into focus and Cross glimpsed how everything ultimately linked up, not in a conspiratorial sense but as a series of initiated, random connections, a sequence of undercover moves and precautionary measures whose outcome could only be guessed at. The events of the past months had taught him one thing: to look not just at the event but at the shadow of that event, and to seek out the hidden hand. In the case of the Shankill killings, Candlestick was the shadow.

  He pushed Willcox on Candlestick’s role but the drink had almost done for him and the gaps in his speech grew longer.

  ‘Are you seeing the point in all of this?’ Willcox finally said with a rush. ‘Your man was the one that started all this, taught them how. They were just a bunch of blouses before then – some of them hard enough, like Lenny Murphy – but scared shitless when it came down to it because they thought an army of big Fenian fuckers was going to walk down the Shankill Road and bugger them all to kingdom come. Then your man went out and dragged the first Taig off the street. But it was for a reason – that’s what we didn’t see, like it was to teach fellers like Lenny and what a headcase he turned out. Hardman numero uno. And where did he learn it from? Your man. It was your man who said to Lenny and I was there and I heard him as sure as I’m sitting here now; here’s your man, all quiet and conspiratorial like: “Why don’t you slit the little fucker’s throat before you shoot him, seeing how you’re a master butcher?” Master butcher! Lenny worked in a fuckin’ hardware store and as fuckin’ polite as they come to the old girls on the other side of the counter. And McCabe, another hardman. Who taught him? McCabe had knocked a Catholic on the head and bundled him into a black taxi and adjourned to a local pub and was drinking, and he didn’t have a clue what to do until your man turns up and then they nearly come to blows when he calls McCabe a yellow bastard. So here’s McCabe all of a sudden: “Fuck it, I’m a hardman.” And he’s all for cutting off this Taig’s head and sticking it up on one of the fences in New Lodge. And after that it was just a question of whispering with them, like he was prompting. He said to Lenny: “You’re a fucking artist. When they start handing out prizes for this, you’re top of the class.” Are you getting this? I’m saying he was the one who turned us on. Wound us up and watched us go, then fucked off to whatever he had to do next.’

  The hidden hand. ‘When did you learn he was working for the British?’

  Willcox ignored the question and instead said, ‘And what the fuck does that tell you?’

  ‘That the killings were in some way sanctioned.’

  ‘I said that right at the start! The whole fucking deal was about the Brits wanting us turned into some fuckin’ army and I’d say with this Shankill thing someone wanted a reign of terror. I know they did because I heard Tommy Herron say it.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘You’re daft to even want an answer. Who tells the man who tells the man who tells the man? But I’ll say one thing about your man. He was the best. Lenny and McCabe, that was just flattery telling them they were good. But your man – he made those Taigs sing like they were in an opera, and close to the end it was like him and the Taig were at one with each other. Compared to all the other shit and confusion, I don’t know – it was like a fucking miracle of clarity hearing some Taig make his last confession at the hands of a master.’

  Willcox grinned blearily, leaned his head on his hands, slumped forward on to the table and began to weep.

  52

  Belfast, May 1972

  ‘I KNOW nothing about it, for God’s sake! I’m just an ordinary fellow, like the next man,’ squeaked Sheehan.

  ‘Talk, you Fenian fuck,’ yelled a voice in the crowd.

  Candlestick pummelled away at Sheehan with a mounting frenzy. This was directed less towards his hopeless victim, squealing his high-pitched squeal but trying to stay brave in the hope that Candlestick would keep his promise to spare him, than at the baying mob, watching and doing nothing. Fuckers fuckers fuckers, he thought, his fists seeking out the tender parts of Sheehan’s body – soft unmuscled gut and genitals beneath. There were sick jokes when Candlestick kicked him in the balls, about how the Taig’d not be giving his missus one that night, to which the reply came that it was just as well because they bred like rabbits. Candlestick found the raucous banter pathetic.

  He broke off for a drink. Men crowded round offering to buy it for him while Sheehan lay ignored.

  ‘Just a glass of water from the tap,’ said Candlestick to the barman. The others swilled their beer while Candlestick stood silently and contemplated his work. Baker was still saying nothing, brooding, upstaged.

  ‘Give Mr Sheehan a drink, if he wants one,’ Candlestick said to the barman. ‘He deserves it.’

  Sheehan took a Guinness and held it up in salute to Candlestick, who hated the presumption of the gesture.

  He took the glass after Sheehan had finished and rammed it into his head. Sheehan threw his hands up and buckled sideways, blood flowing freely. Candlestick broke away from him and confronted the crowd. It would only work if everyone was a party to the violence.

  ‘Your turn,’ he said to a lardy youth called Willcox who wouldn’t look at him. The crowd was drawing back, reluctant to be involved, when Candlestick spotted a young man he knew only as Lenny and recognized the glint in his eye. Candlestick beckoned silently. Lenny stepped forward and hit Sheehan with an uppercut that snapped his he
ad back. He told Lenny to select others.

  ‘Make them do it, even if they don’t want to, starting with that fat cunt Willcox.’

  They shuffled forward to take their turn while Candlestick stopped for a drink. He allowed himself a lager. He felt the tense and inarticulate rage inside him appeased. He noted Willcox coming back for a second helping, grunting with pleasure as he laid into Sheehan.

  The fine line between beating and torture was not crossed until Sheehan, pressed to reveal information that he did not possess, suddenly became defiant. Candlestick determined to break him, in spirit and in body. He split matchsticks, drove them under his fingernails, then set them alight, exalting in the mounting terror on the man’s face. Sheehan protested his innocence, clinging to the shreds of his new bravery. Candlestick burned his flesh with cigarettes, leaving tarry scars on the soles of his feet and hands. He did his tongue next, while Baker yanked his mouth open and Sheehan jumped and squirmed like a man with a thousand volts put through him. The crowd roared approval and drummed out a deadly tattoo with its feet. Still he did not talk. How could he, thought Candlestick, he’s got nothing to say.

  The knife had an eight-inch blade and was as sharp as a razor. Two men held Sheehan down while Candlestick cut the fabric of Sheehan’s grimy shirt and grey vest, to reveal white, sunless flesh. He held the knife point to Sheehan’s throat, to the hollow at the base he found so desirable in women. Sheehan held still, knowing that if he squirmed the knife would puncture him. Candlestick drew it in a delicate line down over the man’s thorax and abdomen, then across from nipple to nipple, cuts so graceful that Sheehan hardly felt them. The cross was almost invisible to the eye until the blood came in pearly drops.

  Sheehan looked down, watching the blood start to flow freely, with a look of puzzlement. Then he started crying and began to name names, and Candlestick saw that it was because he had not hurt him in this instance that he had broken him. Had he smashed his fingers or yanked out a tooth, Sheehan might have resisted longer, but he was undone by delicacy.

  He named republican families around the Antrim Road and the ones with members in the Provisionals. Candlestick knew he was making up this litany, singing for his life with no thought of the consequences. Pulling more names out of Sheehan, he was reminded of gutting an animal, the swift pull of slippery membrane as he dragged it free of its casing. As he looked into Sheehan’s pain-clouded eye, he felt the first stirrings of something familiar from his childhood, the same sense of power and control he had over trapped animals, except now he could talk to the victim and make him answer and drum into him more than just dumb fear. It was the split second beyond terror that he searched for, when the void was glimpsed. He found it in Sheehan and after that they both knew that he was going to die.