The phone rang and Moir nodded, once, as if the call had underscored his last remark. It was Martin. He was coming over. He’d be with us later that night.
The Moirs were suddenly busy. Mr Moir whipped off his apron and washed his hands at the sink. Mrs Moir vanished upstairs to change the sheets on Martin’s bed. Mr Moir seized a fistful of cutlery and started laying the table. His movements were precise and ladylike. He seemed to feel he’d overstepped the mark in some way, that his ragged bluster was out of place in this sun-shot room, and now he centred the place mats and straightened cutlery to show how really reasonable he was. I drifted outside to smoke.
For the rest of the day I kept to myself. I walked round the farm. I read some Wodehouse in my room. It was close to ten when Martin arrived. He’d helped put the paper to bed and caught the late ferry. A copy of the early edition was in his holdall and I leafed through it while Martin ate some supper and fielded a string of questions about Clare’s pregnancy. When his parents climbed to bed I told him the story, filling in details I’d scrimped on the phone. I told him about John Rose and Isaac Hepburn and Duncan Gillies’s mother. I told him again about the beating and the drive north. We were in the yard now, sucking on Bolivars. The night was mild – I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt of Mr Moir’s – and not quite dark. An icy stripe of blue sharpened a stand of trees on a nearby hill and the yard felt secret and safe in the soft blue gloom.
‘What about the guy who gave you the photo?’
‘Hamish Neil? I don’t know. His number’s gone dead. I’ll try to find him when we get back.’
‘And Hepburn?’
‘Who knows? One day he’s plaguing me for a thousand quid, the next he’s not taking my calls.’
We talked it all out. We would stay for a few days, use the farmhouse as base. Martin would look up his contacts, do some digging in the city. He was pacing the yard, talking it through, working out his movements. His cigar end weaved like a fiery bee in the failing light. It was his gig now; he was taking over. I couldn’t care less. For the time being, I would stay here in Antrim, drinking tea and walking in the glens. That suited me fine. I was in no hurry to get my name on a plaque on the newsroom wall.
Next morning it was sunny when I woke. Moir was in the doorway in a dark-blue suit.
‘What’s the occasion?’
‘Church,’ he said. ‘You fancy coming?’
The kirk was on a shelf of land near the brow of the hill. We climbed the road, single file, stepping onto the grassy verge when a car swung down on its way to town. When the engine sounds died and the crickets started up we set off once more, slow as marriage, so that Martin and his father wouldn’t sweat in their Sunday suits. The little gate clinked behind them and the Moirs joined the others at the church door, old men and women with their faces tipped skywards, catching a final few rays. I climbed on up the twisting road.
From the crest of the hill the valley fell off and then rose again to the headland. The service would last an hour; time enough to reach the headland and get back. I hoped the Moirs weren’t offended. I could have faced any number of things on that bright morning, but an hour of earnest Presbyterian decency wasn’t one of them.
Out on the point a little chapel shone, its spire brilliant white in the sun. I set off down the slope.
When I came to the base of the hill I saw that it wasn’t a chapel at all but a disused lighthouse. A stony path led to the top. The stones hurt my feet so I climbed on the grass, which was thick and deep, wind-bent into spongy clumps that buoyed you up and sapped you at the same time. Little black spiders skittered through the whitened stalks, just below the surface. The sun baked my scalp and the breeze smelled pleasantly of whin-blossom and wild garlic.
At the top I startled a black-faced ram; he scuttled off with a kilt-swing of his heavy fleece. This was the only coast, I reflected, the only plot of land from which Scotland could be seen. There it was: Lowlands, Highlands and Islands, ranged in gradations on the other side, muted and cool and innocently blue. I could see Ayrshire and jagged Arran. Cumbrae and Mull and the Paps of Jura. It seemed both near and impossibly far.
They had rowed it, I remembered. The Covenanters – the original Covenanters. Those principled, grim Presbyterians, hated and harried by prelate and king. This stretch of water – the Sea of Moyle, the North Channel, the Sheuch – was the hinge of their kingdom. During the Killing Time the Scots sought refuge here; Peden the Prophet had sojourned in Ulster when the redcoats flushed him from his Ayrshire glens. At other times, the Irish sought succour in Scotland. Forbidden to worship in their own meeting houses, the Antrim Presbyterians rowed across to Ayrshire on Sunday mornings, and rowed back to Ulster after divine service.
A sheep was bleating on a distant farm. Its thin hard protest rose on the air, shrilling the green peace.
I walked back down to the church. Across from the gate was a green wooden bench, its fat planks tacky in the heat. The final hymn was in progress, its muffled vehemence making no impression on the peaceful scene. A butterfly rose from the long grass and tumbled up between my knees. Then the door opened and the minister stood on the greeny cobbles, his white hair astir, Geneva bands curling in the breeze. His parishioners filed out, each shaking his hand and trading a few words. They gathered on the cobbles, fishing for hankies and squinting into the sun. I was sorry I hadn’t joined them. The minister’s smile was open and warm and I regretted that I, too, couldn’t grasp his hand and swap meaningless words about the weather. Then the Moirs appeared and I crossed to meet them.
We ate lunch at the farmhouse, big hunks of bread and an old-style broth with lentils and ham and square, white, black-eyed slippery beads of barley. Martin came downstairs with two rod cases and propped them by the door. Then he disappeared and came back with a big triangular net.
‘You’re sure about this?’ I asked him.
‘What?’
‘Fishing on a Sunday?’
‘Fuck off.’
He went into the kitchen and came back with a bulky cool-bag and dumped it with the other stuff. At some point I’d have to tell him I couldn’t fish. He’d loaned me some gear: green waders and a waterproof waistcoat with too many pockets.
In the car I asked Moir if his father had taken him when he was young. No, he said, his dad never fished. Never had time. He’d taught himself in the summer holidays. Bought his first rod from the tackle shop in town and got the man to show him how it worked. Keep your wrist between ten o’clock and two. Then he’d just practised. All summer long on the banks of the river, forwards and backwards, ten to two, working the rhythm.
We turned down a dirt road through straggly pine trees and stopped in a clearing. I could hear the river as we fetched the gear from the boot. When we set off down the bank the noise got louder, the soft low roar of the falls. Then we stepped out of the trees and there it was: a yellowy Niagara, drumming into a deep brown pool.
Chapter Seventeen
Upstream from the waterfall an island cut the river in two. Martin stopped on the banking and rooted in the cool-bag. We sat on the grass with our sandwiches – chicken and dill pickle – and drank off a beer. The beers were cool but not cold and Martin gathered the cans in his arms and clumped off down the bank. He lodged the cans in the shallows, twisting them into the gravel bed. He stamped back up and lifted his rod.
‘You take this stretch,’ he said. ‘I’ll try the other side.’
He waded on out to the island and disappeared into the trees.
I was glad he wouldn’t be there to watch me fish. I’d fly-fished as a boy, but I was never any good. My rhythm would slip and the line would get tangled and bellyflop down in a knotted clump.
I lifted the rod and side-stepped down to the edge. The surface was glassy and still, but green weeds were streaming in uniform lines. I almost faltered, stepping down off the bank, when the water pushed at my boots. The current was heavy and fast. I could feel the weight and the cold, the stream’s heavy thrum through
the waders’ lined rubber. I froze for a moment, finding my feet.
The boots Moir had loaned me – they flared above the knee, in musketeer fashion – were slightly too small. They squished my toes and forced me to walk on my heels. The stones underfoot were soft with moss. I could feel their shift and give as I edged out into the stream. When the water reached my thighs I stopped wading and made a pass or two with the rod, but the long loops of line overtook one another and tangled down in the usual mess.
Back on the bank I eased down and opened a beer. Sunlight was glazing the water. I took off my shirt and laid it on the grass. A ladybird clung to the shoulder. I pointed my finger in its path and it clambered onto the nail. It was tiny and moved with surprising speed. Above the knuckle its orange legs waggled as it crested each hair. It pressed on up my arm, labouring over the hairs like a minuscule ship in a boisterous sea. When it reached the elbow it turned and started back down. I pressed my other index finger in its path and it raced up this, moving faster now as if eager to get to the end. It couldn’t see far enough to make its escape. I brought my arm up to my mouth and puffed, a breath that wouldn’t have doused a match, and it sailed off into the grass.
Moir came across from the other side. I could tell by his face that he’d caught one.
‘Let’s see it,’ I said.
He grinned and opened his knapsack and held it wide. A green mottled thing, its brutal mouth gaping.
‘We’ll eat that tonight,’ he said and then looked at my knapsack. I shook my head and he grinned again and took another look at his fish. Then he laid the bag in the shade of a tree.
‘Have a beer,’ I told him.
‘In a minute.’
Moir went back in. He waded out to the middle and started working the rod – forwards and back, forwards and back – like a charioteer lashing his horses. Each time it landed his fly kissed the water and kicked up a spritzing corona of spray. Pretty soon he had a bite. He stepped smartly backwards to the bank, yanking on the rod and reeling it in, yanking and reeling, till he hoisted it clear, flexing and flapping, water spouting from its flukes, a beautiful grey-green fish. He swung it round to land it on the grass and his eye caught mine: a leer of manic triumph raked me.
It was bigger than the first one.
He took a knife from his pocket and shucked the fish open and shook its guts into the water. He packed it in the bag and then fetched two beers.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You need to know where to look. If you don’t know where to look it can take you a while.’ He said he’d been fishing this stretch of water since he was ten years old. It took him six months to get his first bite.
The late sun was still warm, beating on my scalp. I climbed down to the water, dropped to the bank and thrust my arms into the stream. The cold made my vision swim, chilled my forearms to tubes of glass. The pulse in my wrist ached with cold. I splashed my face and the back of my neck. Then my phone was ringing and I dried my hands on my T-shirt.
‘Gerry!’
‘Hello, Elaine.’
‘Gerry. What happened? Martin told me. Are you OK? What happened?’
‘I’ve got a black eye and a sore shoulder. I think I’ll live.’
‘You’re OK? Really?’
The cold still sang in my hands and arms and I pressed a fleshy forearm to my brow.
‘I’m fine. Honestly.’ I laughed. ‘Don’t worry.’
A rasping sigh tore through the earpiece.
‘Are you not too old for these games?’
‘What games is that?’
Moir was climbing the bank with more beer.
‘Fighting in pubs. Falling down drunk. You’re a grown man, Gerry.’
‘I wasnae drunk!’ Moir tossed a can and I caught it in my free hand. ‘I wasn’t drunk. I got jumped in the street. Three guys gave me a doing.’
‘Did you know them? Was it to do with what you’re working on?’
‘What did Martin say?’
Moir looked over.
‘He said he didn’t think so. But then he’s a shite liar. Right you! Get back up those stairs!’
‘Oh put him on. Elaine! Hey, Elaine! Put him on. Are they still up?’
‘It’s past his bedtime, Gerry. He’s got to learn.’
‘He’s up now. Put him on.’
‘Two minutes!’ I could hear her stamping through to the kitchen. I set the beer down and got to my feet and started climbing the hill.
‘Hullo, Dad.’
‘Hullo, kid! How we doing?’
‘Fine, Dad. Dad, are you on an island?’
‘I’m in Ireland, kid.’
‘Ireland?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Is Ireland in Scotland?’
‘No, champ. It’s a different country.’
‘Is it nice?’
‘It is. Do you know what I’m looking at right now?’
‘No.’
I was halfway up the slope. You could see a dancing strip of sea and a block of mauve that was either Ayrshire or a stand of cumulo-stratus.
‘Scotland.’
‘You can see Scotland from there? Cool. What does it look like?’
‘I don’t know. Sort of purply-blue. Far away.’
‘Can you see our house?’
‘Well, I don’t – actually, yeah. Yeah, I think maybe I can.’
‘Hold on. I’ll be back in one minute.’
Like a drumroll, the footsteps faded out and back in.
‘Did you see me?’ He was out of breath. ‘Did you see me waving?’
‘Of course I did.’
‘Are you waving back?’
Yeah. I’m waving.’
‘I didn’t see you.’
‘Of course you didn’t. That’s ’cause it’s foggy over here.’
*
We ate Moir’s trout with new potatoes and carrots from the garden. After supper we sat outside with the last of the beer and played knockout whist till the daylight failed.
Next morning Moir drove into Belfast after breakfast. I couldn’t sit in the house all day so I walked into the village. I felt like someone passed unfit for service, kept from the action by flat feet or weak eyes. Young mums with buggies; kids by the war memorial; old men in khaki and brown: I skulked among the non-combatants. In a shoe-shop window I caught my reflection. The beard. The battered face. The shaggy hair. A man on the lam, a fugitive from justice.
There was a barber’s on the Diamond. I slumped on a splay-legged bucket seat while a jug-eared teen and an ancient, crease-necked farmer took their turns in the chair. I watched them bow their heads to the clippers. In a barber’s chair everyone looks like a baby.
‘Give me a number two all over.’
The barber raised his eyebrows in the mirror.
‘You sure?’
‘What the hell.’
He shrugged and lifted the clippers from the bracket on the wall. He rooted in a box for the proper attachment. The clippers buzzed fatly into life.
‘Holiday?’ he said. He pressed my head down and started on my neck.
‘Yeah.’
‘Golf?’
‘No,’ I said. My voice was hollow and deeper than normal, talking into my chest. ‘Fishing.’
He nodded. ‘Any luck?’
‘Yeah, I got a good-sized trout last night.’
‘Did it put up a fight?’ I glanced up; he was looking at my face, the swollen eye, the purple crust on my cheekbone.
‘Well, it got a couple of jabs in but I floored it in the end.’
He grinned. A radio played quietly in a corner: the archaic RP of Radio 3 purling softly on between big-band classics.
He ran the clippers in fluent swipes along my skull and the hair hit the cape in whispering clumps.
He did one side and then stopped; tugged to free the clippers’ cord and drag it round the other side. I looked up. The mirror was a split screen: one half shaved to a quarter-inch crop; the other half rumpled and lush. I turned sideways. Before a
nd after. The man with two heads.
When the other half was shaved he put the clippers away. A Tibetan monk peered into the room with a startled expression. The barber undid the burgundy cape and lifted it clear with a matador’s flourish. The monk came out into the late-morning sun, blinking and rubbing the back of his neck.
On the way back to the farmhouse I stopped at a chemist’s for a packet of razors. I shaved in the bedroom’s tiny sink. The air on my naked cheeks felt wet and cool. There was nothing else to do after that so I lay on the bed. The sun warmed my face. It glinted on the chromium buckles of my holdall, stranded there on the desk by the window. A yellow corner of card poked out: the Telegraph folder. They were still in three bundles: Gillies, Pettigrew, Walsh. I took the Gillies pile back to bed and lay down again to read the cuts. I practically knew them by heart, but there might be something I’d missed.
The cuts told the same jerky, join-the-dots story. The body in the alley. The suppositious Catholic mob. And then the correction, the revelation: Gillies was shagging a prisoner’s wife and a UVF nutting squad beat him to death. And that’s where the story ended. The only question that mattered, the question of attribution, had finally been answered. With the killing rightly ascribed, chalked up to the proper mob, there was no more to report. This was a war: no one gave a damn about the perpetrators’ names, no one wanted to read about the rank and serial numbers.
I put the cuts down. There was little enough to go on, but the image wouldn’t leave me. Lyons sweating and grunting, elbowing through the scrimmage to land another kick on the writhing form. Lyons as part of the kicking, stamping mob that murdered Duncan Gillies. I gathered the sheets together and put them back in the folder.
Then I started on one of the other files: the murder of Eamonn Walsh, the report of his murderer’s trial. It was a long report. I’d read it several times but this time a three-line par towards the bottom pulled me up short. I sat up in bed. I read it again. It was a par about the daughter, Walsh’s daughter, the seven-year-old girl who’d been found in the street in her bloodied nightdress. She’d been interviewed by police. She said there were two men in the house that night. She hadn’t witnessed the killing, but she’d seen two men in the hall as she came downstairs. No one else saw the other man. The killer maintained he was working alone. The wife, who saw the killer’s arm drop to his side and then heard the report and then watched her husband die, confirmed that there was no one else involved. The girl’s testimony was dismissed as the confused recollection of a traumatised child.
All the Colours of the Town Page 18