Nine Inches

by Colin Bateman

  You don’t have to be compatible musically, but it helps. Trish and I weren’t exactly like for like, but she dipped into mine and I dipped into hers, and when we fought she knew exactly where to hurt me. She had melted, scratched and frisbeed dozens of my favourite records over the years, but the point was that she knew which ones to go for. Not the most valuable, but the ones that meant the most.

  Leontia, it became clear, liked to talk. I don’t mind that when it’s two-way or interesting, but it was all in one direction. I didn’t particularly want to hear about her husband and how much she loved him. I didn’t need to know about everything he did for her, how good he was with the kids and how hard he worked, for with every second of bigging him up she managed to diminish herself; I had had no reservations about our fling, but the more she talked, the worse I felt for him. I had spent most of my life avoiding a conscience, but now I was developing one on behalf of someone else. Besides that, she snored like a fucking elephant.

  Either way she conspired to keep me awake most of the night. In the morning, in the cold light of sobriety, we didn’t quite know what to say to each other. She had on last night’s make-up and revolutionary hair. She wanted to make me eggs and bacon and all we lacked were the eggs, and bacon. There was bread, but she had to pick the blue corners off it. Burning the toast wasn’t the worst. She caught me staring at the tub of butter as we sat at the kitchen counter.

  She said, ‘What?’

  I said, ‘Nothing. It’s nothing.’

  ‘What’s nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. Just. I hate people who leave jam in the butter. And crumbs.’

  She blinked and said, ‘Hate’s a bit strong.’

  ‘I don’t mean hate,’ I said. She smiled. ‘Loathe is probably a better word.’

  ‘Does Trish not leave crumbs in the butter?’

  Her eyes narrowed. So did mine.

  ‘Does whatever the fuck his name is, your hubby, churn the butter himself? ’Cos it sounds like he does everything else perfectly.’

  ‘Oh – I see now.’ She put her hands on her generous hips. ‘You’re jealous!’

  ‘That’s right, jealous of Mr Prick Perfect.’

  ‘Jealous.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s it. Spot on.’

  ‘He’s not perfect, I never said he was perfect.’

  ‘I know he isn’t, because otherwise you wouldn’t be over here fucking me and leaving crumbs in the butter, would you?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, you were too drunk to fuck.’

  She had clearly never heard of the Dead Kennedys. I could have had my hands on it in an instant.

  We glared at each other.

  Until I said, ‘Well I’m not too drunk now.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said.

  Leontia was in the shower, I was on the balcony drinking a Diet Coke and listening to the radio. I was looking for something good, but all I found was Jack Caramac.

  He was explaining to any listeners who were just tuning in that the entire show was being devoted to one subject: last night’s tragic event. And for the next eternal minute he said everything but what last night’s tragic event was: he ranted about anarchy on the streets of Belfast, he railed against the intimidation of working-class people by paramilitary gangsters, and he harangued the police for being ineffectual, for being cowards, for betraying the very people who were most in need of their help, the vulnerable, the disenfranchised, the poor and the needy, and most of all for deserting Jean Murray in her time of need.

  I sat up, straighter.

  ‘Jean Murray,’ said Jack, ‘a friend of this show, a friend of mine, a tireless campaigner for peace, who stood up for the youth of this city, who dared face down the hooded thugs who ply their drugs on our unprotected streets, Jean Murray who died a most horrific death last night, petrol poured through her door and set alight, screaming as she burned to death, trapped in her own home while her neighbours stood helpless, or too frightened, to do anything to help her. This show is dedicated to our Jean.’

  Fuckety fuck, fuck, fuck.

  13

  I felt wick. I felt shite. A pot of tea and three German biscuits weren’t going to help, but they were a start.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Maxi McDowell. ‘We’re like those fucking women knitting at the guillotine.’

  Same café, same table, same company. DS Hood looked a little more relaxed. As they sat down, I said, ‘What about the boy, Bobby?’

  ‘No sign of him,’ said Maxi.

  ‘Do you think they’ve taken him?’

  ‘Doubt it. The rebs, they take you and disappear you for thirty years; this lot, there’s usually a corpse in the middle of the road by daylight.’ He lifted the pot. ‘Will I be mother?’

  He poured without waiting for a response.

  I said, ‘I was past the house. It’s a real mess. There’s flowers and wreaths piling up outside.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Maxi, ‘saw that. The community are united in their grief. Bit fucking late.’

  ‘I stopped and had a look at the cards,’ said Hood. ‘Not a name or address on any of them.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Maxi. ‘They’re sorry, but not so sorry they’re going to reveal themselves.’ He opened a packet of sugar and poured it in. As he stirred, he said: ‘How come you never see sugar lumps any more? It’s all wee packets, isn’t it? I imagine it’s to do with hygiene; you don’t want to be putting something in your tea some hobo might have been fingering.’ He shook his head and stirred some more. Then he sighed. ‘Jean was a pain in the arse, so she was, but no one deserves that.’

  ‘Jack was saying this morning something about her screaming and the neighbours doing nothing,’ I said.

  ‘As per usual, Jack is talking shite.’

  ‘The fire brigade say the house would have filled with smoke very quickly,’ said Hood. ‘That’s what got her, probably in her sleep. Nobody heard any screaming. And bearing in mind it was the early hours, and that if Bobby was in bed he would have been overcome, or even if he’d woken up, with his disability it would have taken him too long to get out. We’re working on the theory that he wasn’t in when the attack took place.’

  ‘So where was he, then?’

  ‘He’d hopped it,’ said Maxi, and gave a wiseacre smile.

  ‘I don’t blame him,’ said Hood. ‘He should get out and stay out.’

  ‘We’re looking for him,’ said Maxi. ‘As I’m sure they are too.’

  ‘You don’t think they’ll have found, like, closure, by killing Jean?’

  ‘Yeah, right. They’ll be even more determined to find him. Those boys, they’re like Jack Russells. Once they get their teeth into you, they never let go.’ Maxi shook his head. ‘And talking of terriers, you’re going to have to have a word with that wanker Caramac. On this morning giving us this three kinds of crap like it was our fault? He’s a whiney little guttersnipe and I don’t know how you can work for him.’

  ‘I can’t, as it turns out,’ I said. ‘He fired me.’

  ‘Seriously? How come? Did you fuck up?’

  ‘No. And I don’t really know why. Anyway, I’m out.’

  Maxi fixed me with a look. ‘You’re not really out, though, are you, Dan? In fact, knowing you as I do, I’d say you’re about to get even deeper into it. It’s in your nature.’

  ‘I think not,’ I said.

  He was right, of course. There was no legitimate reason for me to be shooting the breeze with two cops in a Shankill greasy spoon apart from the fact that it was in my nature to poke and poke and poke at something until I got a satisfactory result irrespective of whether I was being paid for it or not. Also, I could not ignore the possibility that I was at least partially responsible for Jean Murray’s death. Yes, she had already been the target of a long-standing intimidation campaign, but the day after I had asked Boogie Wilson, brigadier general of the Ulster Volunteer Force, to intercede on her behalf, Jean was burned to death. That was too much of a coincidence, at least for me.

  It
didn’t need to have anything to do with Jack, but if it was, and was intended as another warning to shut the fuck up, then they’d misjudged it badly. Even as we sat there with our tea and biscuits, he was giving it everything over the airwaves, and I suspected he’d still be at it a month down the line. Judging from the calls he was getting, and the other coverage in the local media, thousands of people across the province were genuinely upset about what had happened to Jean and were clamouring for action to be taken against those responsible.

  Equally, it might have had nothing to do with my intervention, or Jack, but everything to do with a power play within the notoriously volatile command structure of the UVF. Killing Jean was the Miller boys’ response to being asked by Boogie Wilson to lay off her. This is our turf, they were saying, we’ll do what we want.

  Whatever the reason, I was pissed off at having jumped to the most obvious conclusion, and then waded in like a bull in a china shop. Now Jean was dead, Bobby was missing and Jack was exploiting it to the hilt, riling up the public and coining it in at the same time. And I was still no closer to finding out who had kidnapped his son. The fact that Jack no longer cared was neither here nor there. I cared.

  I looked from Maxi to Hood. ‘So what are you doing about Jean?’

  ‘Bugger all,’ said Maxi. ‘Not my department, and even if it was, I’m forty-eight hours from retirement.’

  ‘And it is my department, but I’m not on it,’ said Hood.

  ‘But you know.’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Sharing is caring.’

  ‘What’s in it for me?’

  I smiled at Maxi. ‘The boy’s learning,’ he said.

  ‘Well then, I’ll have to make it worth his while. What would you say to, say, half a German biscuit?’

  I indicated the plate. I turned it seductively. Hood studied the biscuit. Then me. He glanced at Maxi, who gave a non-committal shrug.

  ‘The whole biscuit,’ said Hood.

  I faked a sharp intake of breath.

  ‘And playing hardball,’ I said.

  ‘Sweet tooth,’ said Hood.

  I gave it some more contemplation before pushing the plate closer to him.

  ‘Deal,’ I said.

  He made no attempt to pick up the biscuit. I suspected that it was in fact a symbolic biscuit. Instead he swept one hand across the table, pushing crumbs over the edge into his other hand, which he then didn’t quite know what to do with. He began to rub them between his palms. He may have been trying to reduce them to the size of subatomic particles, but he only succeeded in creating a worse mess than the one he’d been trying to clear up in the first place. Eventually he scraped the residue on to the floor, cleared his throat and said: ‘Well, we picked up the Millers first thing this morning, and if Jack Caramac had bothered to do any research then he’d know that. But they’ll be out by this afternoon. It’s not likely they set the fire themselves, is it? Someone will have seen who actually did it, and if they cared to tell us then maybe we could link it back, but we’re not holding our breath.’

  ‘She had security cameras. If they poured petrol through the front door, then they must be on tape?’

  ‘Yeah, you would think that. Just a couple of problems there. One, cameras melt under extreme heat. Two, you might think that maybe before they melted, some of that footage was transmitted elsewhere first? Well, for that to happen, we would have been needing the cameras to work in the first place. It’s the same everywhere, cameras and burglar alarms on the outside of a house, most of them are just there for show. Cheap shit that fools no one. As for the neighbours, well they’re all suddenly afflicted with blindness. And our regular cast of weasels, snitches and gossips are keeping it well zipped. So we have nothing yet. Maybe we’ll get there, maybe we won’t. That’s about it, for now. But early days. Unless, of course, you have something to contribute, you being about the last person to see her alive.’

  He raised a speculative eyebrow.

  ‘What’s in it for me?’ I asked.

  Hood smiled knowingly. He pushed the German biscuit back across the table to me.

  I studied it. After a while I picked it up. I licked it. Then I put it down on the plate and pushed it back to him.

  ‘You think I’m going to risk my hard-won reputation for that? Wise the scone, wee lad.’

  I got up, pulled on my jacket, and walked out of the café. Even as the door was closing, I could hear Maxi laughing.

  14

  I parked about thirty metres beyond Comanche Station. I watched McDowell and Hood saunter back up Snugville Street and into their work. They were a mismatched couple – he the burly uniformed copper who took no prisoners and inspired equal amounts of respect and fear in the local community, and he the plain-clothed, clean-cut young detective fresh on the job but whose mild accent suggested that working-class west Belfast wasn’t his natural environment. I’d hung out with enough police in my time to know that there were pretty strict demarcation lines between uniformed and plain clothes, between beat cops and CID. Hanging out socially was virtually unknown. Of course, we weren’t exactly social, and they were using me as much as I was using them, but still, there was something odd about their match-up. I suspected that Maxi had spotted Hood struggling and had decided to take him under his wing. Not so much his protégé as the runt of the litter.

  I sat there for a long time. Nobody was actually blaming me for anything, but I still felt responsible. Everything in life has a knock-on effect. If a butterfly beats its wings, and all that cack. You can’t go back to the butterfly and pull its wings off for daring to beat them in the first place. I could have just driven away, gone back to my office and waited for the next case to come through the door, or, more probably, retired to the Bob Shaw to contemplate love and life and lust. But I didn’t. I sat on, The Clash on the iPod, watching Comanche Station, debating what to do. Maxi was right, I was already in, and all I was really waiting for was someone or something to drag me even further down a dark road.

  Ahead of me, outside the entrance to the station, where there might once have been concrete barrels to deter car-bombers getting easy parking, where there might once have been huge security grilles and armed cops keeping watch out of security towers, but which was now open-plan and carefree, half a dozen men in various denims and tracksuits were gathered, smoking and yakking and waiting.

  I glanced at my phone. It was three fifteen. I’d been sitting there for two hours. I’d left a message for Boogie Wilson not long after I’d heard about Jean, but as yet, no response. I tried the number he’d given me again, but it went to voicemail.

  I switched off the music and phoned Patricia.

  I said, ‘When you pass a certain age, you can’t sit in a car all day without having to pee about six times. I’ve a Diet Coke bottle I could do it in, but what if I want a number two? You never see that in the frickin’ movies, do you?’

  She said, ‘What do you want? I’m at work.’

  ‘Just wondering how you were.’

  ‘I’m fine. What do you really want?’

  ‘Can’t I phone you for a pleasant chat? Has it really come to this?’

  ‘Dan, I’m not here to entertain you when you’re bored.’

  ‘Who says I’m bored? And why not?’

  There was a long silence.

  Eventually I said, ‘It’s very quiet. Are you sure you’re at work?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you prove it?’

  ‘Dan, will you stop it?’

  ‘So you can’t prove it?’

  ‘Dan, for fuck—’

  ‘You’re getting very defensive. Where are you really?’

  ‘I’m in work, Dan. Swear to God. Who do I share an office with?’

  ‘Uhm. Mindy?’

  ‘Cindy. Now listen carefully. Cindy, will you assure Dan that I’m in work and not in bed with my lover?’

  A woman’s voice, slightly removed, said, ‘Dan, this is Cindy. Trish is right here with me in work
and not in bed with her lover. Today, anyway.’

  Patricia giggled. So did Cindy.

  ‘Proves nothing,’ I said. ‘Especially if Cindy is your lover.’

  ‘That’s right, Dan, now I swing both ways. Protestant and Catholic.’

  I sighed.

  She sighed.

  Four more men sauntered past my car and approached the others in front of the station. It was an al fresco meeting of the Miller Support Group. The brothers were still inside being lightly grilled.

  She said, ‘What is it, Dan?’

  ‘I got fired. By Jack.’

  ‘What’d you do wrong?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything wrong, but I like that it’s your natural assumption.’

  ‘It’s the voice of experience.’

  ‘Well on this occasion I was fired because Jack reckons he got the threat thing all wrong and there was never actually a problem.’

  ‘Dan, that doesn’t sound like you were fired. That sounds like he changed his mind, like he’s entitled to do. Did he pay you?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose.’

  ‘So, what’s your problem?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You probably do.’

  ‘It’s the whole Jean Murray thing. You know.’

  ‘I don’t know. What are you talking about? What did you do to her?’

  ‘I . . . didn’t . . . Trish, you have heard the news?’

  ‘What news?’

  ‘I thought you listened to Jack’s show?’