When I got back to Antrim on the night of Hepburn’s death the farmhouse was dark but the porch was aglow with yellow light, like a glassy Tardis. I filled a tumbler with whiskey – it was Bush, the same brand as Hepburn’s – and threw it back. I filled it again, right up to the brim, and carried it up to my room.
Next morning when I came down for breakfast Martin was hunched over the News-Letter, jabbing a fork at his plate like a painter stippling a canvas. I sat down at my place. Mrs Moir had made scrambled egg and the lumpy cooling mush on my plate – a morbid electric yellow – sent me scrambling to the sink. Afterwards I ran the cold tap and sluiced it all away, paddling my fingers in the mess to break it up. Then I turned my head beneath the icy flow.
In my sprint to the sink I had upset a chair. Sheepishly, I righted it and sat down. I must have a bug, I told Martin. I was sick, I was coming down with something. Martin buried his nose in his coffee and raised his eyebrows. He nodded to the worktop where the whiskey bottle stood beside its upturned cap. I gestured helplessly – the universal who-me shrug of the bang-to-rights busted. Moir went back to his paper.
After breakfast we took some air. In the stand of trees above the farm we caught our breath and lit stubby Bolivars. From up here the farmhouse looked forlorn and unconvincing, like the picture on a place mat.
‘Would you ever come back?’
‘You mean when the folks kick it?’ He frowned and rattled the matches in their box. ‘I don’t know. I doubt it.’
He dusted a patch of earth and eased himself down and lay back, propped on his elbows. ‘At one time I thought I would never come back. Or just for Christmas and holidays.’ He shielded his eyes from the sun. ‘Now? I don’t know. Things have changed, but still. Would you bring up kids here?’
‘No. I wouldn’t.’
‘Clare would never wear it anyway. It’s nice, though.’ He waved his cigar at the landscape. ‘All this. We moved out here when I was fourteen. My mum worried about security, the isolation. But of course it was much safer than town.’
They lived in Coleraine, he told me. When Moir’s father drove him to school in the mornings, he varied their route. A different permutation every day. As Moir threw his satchel in the back, his dad was on his knees on the pavement, checking the underside of the car. They didn’t go to restaurants in Coleraine. If they wanted to visit the swimming baths or the pictures they drove to another town. Sometimes they drove west, crossing the border. That was the tremendous irony that shadowed his childhood, the truth that the family could never acknowledge: the only time they felt safe, the only time they felt normal, was in the other country, the hated Free State.
‘The doorbell.’ Moir sat up, remembering. ‘From I was yay-high, from I was a tiny wee lad, I knew that the doorbell was trouble. The doorbell would ring and everything stopped. Ma turning off the telly. Da standing at the window, peering through the net curtains. It was the postman. Or the gasman. Or a guy with a red-white-and-blue rosette. And my da would stamp off down the hall to open the door, breathing through his nose.’
He sighed and stood up, squinting out to sea.
‘What’s the word, then?’ I said eventually. ‘What happened yesterday?’
Moir had seen him again, he told me: the ponytailed Scot, Maitland’s lieutenant. He dogged him from a drinking club in Donegall Pass to a coffee shop near the university and on to a crime bookstore on Botanic Avenue. The guy browsed the Elmore Leonards and bought a James M. Cain. Moir followed him to a spruce B & B on the Lisburn Road, waited in the car for half an hour and then came home. He couldn’t keep tailing the guy on the off chance that something might happen.
He stubbed his cigarillo on a tree. We walked back down to the farmhouse in silence. Finally, grudgingly, he asked for my own news. I told him about Emer Derwent. Yes, there was a second man and the man could well have been Lyons. But so what? How could she identify him at this distance? It was hopeless. Perhaps if the gunman was still around – he succumbed to lung cancer in 1999, a bare year after his release – there might have been a chance, but I’d been working on this story for over a week and all I had now was what I began with: a photograph and an old-fashioned hunch. I also had an old-fashioned body, a dead former Loyalist Godfather, but that wasn’t part of my story. We had come to the end of the line. ‘SLÁN ABHAILE’: I remembered of the words on the Ardoyne mural: ‘TIME TO GO’.
There’s something intimate about cowardice, something deeply and shamefully yours. A virtuous act is impersonal; it belongs to us all. ‘I just did what anyone would have done’ is the stock response of your have-a-go hero. But cowardly acts aren’t like that. They carry your tang, your DNA; they are knit tight into your flesh. When we boarded the ferry that afternoon my cowardice hung about me like the smell of shit. I was surprised that other people couldn’t smell it, didn’t shy away in righteous disgust.
I’d like to pretend there was some other motive. Some misgiving, a sense of propriety, some diligent qualm that stopped me writing about Hepburn. What I found in the kit-box, I might have decided, wasn’t a scoop or a page one lead. It was a dead human being. A human being who had stood me drinks and revealed his unexpected love of trees and – OK – cracked my face on the hood of a car and tried to extort a thousand pounds.
But I’m a journalist.
Isaac Hepburn was all of these things. Isaac Hepburn was also a story. His death in a sweat-stained boxing gym: that was my bread and butter. What stopped me was fear. If I wrote the story my status would change. I would cease to be a bystander, an impartial spectator; I would step into the story – if I wasn’t there already – and who knew what might happen? The kit-box wasn’t just Hepburn’s coffin: it was a portal, another innocent-looking stick of furniture – looking glass, wardrobe – that led you into a secret realm. In the stories, the hero tends to take a breather on this threshold, weighing the lures of alternate worlds, before pushing through to a fabulous fate. I paused too. But because I’m a coward and not a hero I gently lowered the kit-box lid and skulked away from the gym.
I had closed the door. I’d come home to Scotland, glad as hell to roll off the ferry onto Galloway soil. Still, though, there was a question of accounting, of tallying the cost. Financially, things were clear enough. I had squandered a couple of grand, depleting by another few mites the Tribune’s dwindling war chest, and I couldn’t come up with a story. I could live with that. The moral account, though, was less cut and dry. I had tramped through Belfast for a week, sowing confusion, salting old sores. Had I done any good? Had I left the city better than I found it?
The word ‘truth’ comes in handy at junctures like this. I’d been seeking the truth. But even the worst redtop goon, the crummiest door-stepping keyholing scum-sucker, was better than me. He didn’t pretend to be George Washington. He didn’t care about the truth. He hurt people. He messed up their lives. He boosted his paper’s sales. I hurt people too, but I hurt them in the name of truth, so that was OK. But the truth didn’t help Mrs Gillies. The truth didn’t help Emer Derwent. And nothing I did had made anything better.
I fetched a can of Coke from the vending machine and pressed it to my neck, rolling it backwards and forwards till the chill wore off and the can was slippy with sweat and condensation. Forget the whole thing is what I wanted to do. Go back to the turgid round of committee reports and Garden Lobby briefings and the childish contentions at FMQs. But when I turned to my empty screen I kept seeing Emer’s wee boy, poking out from behind his mother’s skirt, and I kept seeing a curly-haired man with a chubby little girl in his arms and wondering what he would do when the shutter clicked.
The story I wanted wasn’t the story of Hepburn’s death. The story I wanted was whatever had happened in 1983, whatever Peter Lyons had seen or done on the damp winter streets of Belfast. And that story was closed off, sealed up, a tin missing its label. I’d been close to the story – at times it had seemed like the fading shape of a dream or a word on the tip of my tongue – but I couldn’t re
ach it. I thought of the blank brick wall of the Citizen building, the blind frontage of the Northern Star Athletic Club. Belfast was that kind of place. You had to know what you were looking for before you could find it.
The cursor pulsed on the snowy screen. I didn’t even cover the death, Hepburn’s killing. We were on our way home when the story broke. Moir took a call on the ferry. He stalked off down the observation deck, slowing and speeding up and then slowing again as he took in the details. ‘We have to go back,’ he told me. ‘Turn right around and go straight back across.’ I spat over the railing. Ireland had vanished, the eye no longer able to partition land from sky. What good would it do? I asked him. Would it turn back time? Would we get there before the story broke? Face it, I told him: we’ve missed the story. We didn’t get the story we came for and we’ve missed the story we could have got. Let’s give it up as a bad job. In the end we had a bite to eat in Stranraer and drove on up to Glasgow.
John Rose did the story, filed eight hundred words the following day. You had to admire his cheek.
Moir didn’t have time to brood. He was busy again with his gangland stuff. His team were preparing another splash. They were in the office more often now, the Hey You, talking strategy with Rix, working out the angles. They stayed in character, lounging on desks in their jeans and stressed leathers, popping gum and rubbing their four-day beards. They swaggered to the lift in loose formation. People kept out of their way, flattened themselves against corridor walls.
The heat was vicious. I was mopping my breastbone with a hankie when Moir stepped out of the lift. He was pointing right at me, grinning and wagging his finger. He bounced over, laughing, and gripped my bicep. He was pumped, his pupils as fat as a cat’s.
‘We’ve got him! Gerry, we’ve only got him!’
I buttoned my shirt.
‘Who? Maitland? When?’
‘No, Gerry. Lyons! We’ve got Peter Lyons!’
He laughed again.
‘Come here!’ He hauled me out of my seat and pulled me over to his desk.
‘Watch this.’ He commandeered a chair and pushed me into it. He drew his own chair in and tapped his space bar.
‘You ready? Watch this.’
He scrolled through some emails and found the one he wanted. He clicked on a thumbnail photo and it scaled up onto the screen. He turned the screen towards me.
A big bay window framed the shot. Two men in conversation over a low coffee table. The one on the left wore glasses that caught the light, but the hair and nose and the bandsman’s jawline left no doubt: it was Peter Lyons. The other had a ponytail. His glossy black shirt looked oddly familiar.
‘It’s not, is it?’
‘Our friend from the bowling alley? You got it in one. William James Torrins; racketeer, enforcer, bad-bastard-in-chief to our beloved Walter Maitland.’
‘And boon companion of the Minister for Justice.’
I looked at Martin. His grin just kept getting wider.
‘When was this?’
‘Yesterday evening at six o’clock.’
‘Fucking dancer! Congratulations, Martin.’
Moir looked suddenly solemn.
‘This is yours, Gerry. This is your story. You’re going to write it. You have to write it.’
I stood up. The castors squeaked as I wheeled the chair back to its proper desk.
‘Did Rix put you up to this?’
‘C’mon, Gerry.’
‘This is Rix’s idea.’ I turned to face him. ‘You never hear of a dry patch, Martin? I thought you were bigger than this. Here’s a thought: whyn’t you let me write my own stories, all right? And you write your own. How does that sound?’
‘This is your story.’ He gripped my shoulder. His smile was expansive, evangelical. ‘This is your story. You set it up, Gerry, you put us onto Lyons. All I did was keep my eyes open.’
‘You kept your eyes open.’
‘I did. I tailed him. Ever since Belfast I’ve been on the guy’s case. He was at Maitland’s place this morning. When he left I tailed him. I had a hunch’ – he laughed at the cop-show idiom. ‘I had a hunch and when he got to Bearsden I knew it was good. I thought he might be headed for the Drum but he drove right into Bearsden. I tailed him to a big villa on Roman Road and belled Gavin Doig. He took that with a long lens without leaving the car. Gerry, it’s your story.’
Four hours later the story was done. It was my story now. It had my meanness and spite salted through it. It fairly shone with crooked irony. It was full of words like ‘complicity’ and ‘clandestine’ and ‘conflict of interest’. I made no allegations but I managed to make it plain that the Justice Minister was in the gangster’s pay. I mentioned the famous suits, the hand-tooled brogues, the collection of contemporary Scottish art. I mentioned the Havana cigars. I mentioned the seventy-pound haircuts. (Last Easter Lyons’s wife had sent him for a haircut and he spent the first ten minutes of a lunch date at Ferrante’s bitching about the price.) Aspersions, hints, asides, insinuations: the piece was a shiny cage of gossamer threads, each of them tied to the photograph, the image that would ‘rock to its tottering base the ruling coalition and quiver the collective backbone of the Scottish legal establishment’. Torrins became Maitland’s consigliere and I catalogued (with help from Moir) the juiciest items on Maitland’s CV. I called in my contacts and lined up the quotes. I had an unnamed QC declaring that Lyons should resign. I had an unnamed cabinet colleague intimating the same. I had the Nationalists demanding that Parliament be recalled so that Lyons might make a statement to the house. ‘There may be a perfectly innocent explanation for all this,’ the QC observed in my closing par. ‘But we sure as hell need to hear it.’
The story was done. It was Friday afternoon: the desk would get it legalled tomorrow. The last thing to do was to contact Lyons and give him right of reply. I didn’t want to do it. For two years, on any given Sunday, Peter Lyons had known without opening the paper at least one of the stories that would go out in my name. I wanted to damage Peter Lyons, I wanted to hurt him. But more than that I wanted to surprise him. I wanted his phone to ring on Saturday midnight. I wanted his people to get him out of bed: ‘Have you seen the paper?’ I wanted to have him jump in his car and drive to an all-night garage, to stand there in the forecourt with the paper in his hands, lost to the shouting drunks and passing cars, the distant whine of sirens. But that could only happen if he didn’t know what was coming. I didn’t want to phone him but I knew I had to.
I had his mobile number, of course, and his home numbers in Glasgow and Edinburgh. But I was going to do this by the book. I checked my watch: four o’clock. What I ought to do now was phone the Government Press Office at Victoria Quay and ask for the Justice Desk. Then the Justice Desk’s director, or one of his junior POs, would take my details and contact Lyons. In an hour or so, Lyons would call back. I’d tell him what we were going to run and he’d give his comment.
That’s what I should have done. What I did instead was answer some emails, shut down my Mac and go for a walk. The sun was still warm and a nice breeze came up off the river. I slung my jacket over my shoulder and walked right into town, into the cool high canyons of the city centre, the big blocks of glass and steel and shadowed sandstone. I walked right up Hope Street in bright sunshine and onto Sauchiehall Street. A busker with an electric guitar and a baby amp was playing ‘Three Times a Fool’ by Otis Rush and I stopped to listen. I’d been planning to walk to the Mitchell and say hello to Doug Haddow but I cut up Rose Street to the GFT.
I sat in the GFT bar with a bottle of Beck’s. An Italian film was starting in forty minutes. I had another Beck’s and bought some chocolate raisins at the kiosk and took my seat. The film was good. It was a Mafia movie with almost no action. A stylish, well-groomed middle-aged man is living in a Swiss hotel. He doesn’t do much. He walks the corridors, takes his meals, plays cards with an elderly bankrupt couple who used to own the hotel. Sometimes he phones home, but his kids never want to talk and he
has nothing to say to his wife. Mainly what he does is smoke cigarettes with ferocious, disdainful elegance and stare gloomily out of the window. And once a week he takes a suitcase full of money to a bank and has the tellers count the contents by hand.
Piece by piece, we learn his story. Eight years ago, the man was working as a broker. He made a catastrophic loss on the stock exchange. The money he lost belonged to the Mob. To pay them back he is living this half-life, cut off from his family, holed up in the barren luxury of a Swiss hotel, toting his valises to the bank. The Mob knows he didn’t mean to lose the money, so they haven’t killed him; but they haven’t let him live properly either. He’s in limbo, and he shows no real interest in redeeming his life until a waitress at the hotel begins to talk to him. Normally he’s rude and uncommunicative with the hotel staff but this girl gets under his guard. He falls in love. And this man, who for eight years has shown no emotion, no spark of volition, decides to act. He knows it’s hopeless, he knows he can’t beat the syndicate, but he acts anyway. When a pair of renegade gangsters steals one of the suitcases, he shoots them dead. But he doesn’t give the money to the Mob. He keeps it. He buys the waitress a new BMW. Finally he’s summoned to Sicily to explain himself. Modestly but resolutely he explains his position: he is keeping the money. The Mob have taken enough of his life; he is taking the money as compensation. The gangsters are perplexed, bewildered. In the end, irritably, almost reluctantly, they kill him.
After the movie I walked up Garnethill, past the Art School to Charing Cross. I stopped for a drink in the Arlington Bar. Further up Woodlands Road I stopped again at the Halt. In the lounge I met a guy from my old five-a-side team. I bought him a drink and he bought one back. After a while we started on the whisky and pretty soon it was shutting time. I walked home, stopping at the Philly for a fish supper.
All the Colours of the Town Page 22