‘I don’t remember that.’
‘There was a car bomb in the centre of town.’
Duggan shook his head. ‘She wasn’t there that night. You and I met in Liverpool Betty’s and talked about it. You asked could you bring her along.’
Tony frowned with bemusement. ‘That’s not what happened.’
‘I remember the night I asked you. You wanted to do something for your brother; you asked to be more active. I asked you to do the run for me. The cops were keeping a bit of an eye on some of us at the time and you were a new face. You said you wanted to bring her with you; you thought it would be good cover to have a couple there.’
‘You said that,’ Tony laughed.
‘Does it matter?’ Barr asked.
‘It matters if we’re hoping to remember where the hell Martin Kelly is,’ Tony hissed, concerned now. ‘I remember that night.’
‘So do I,’ Duggan said. ‘But not the way you’re telling it.’
‘And do you remember what was in the car?’
‘I remember,’ Duggan said. ‘I’m not stupid. I’ve not forgotten those days. Even if the rest of the country has.’
‘No one’s forgotten them.’
‘Of course they have,’ Duggan said. ‘We were soldiers sent out to fight and when the war was over, we were the villains. People apologising for things we did, things we were told to do by them. “That should never have happened.” What the fuck does that mean? The things that happened, they happened exactly the way they were meant to. Like this. This bullshit, going back here.’
‘It’s the right thing to do,’ Barr said, feeling it was the only part of the conversation to which he could make a contribution.
‘That’s easy for you to say, son, it’s not your bullets lodged in whatever’s left resting in that hole in the forest now.’
‘Nothing can be done with them,’ Barr said. ‘They’re not allowed to investigate–’
‘Seriously? Since when did we trust them? They link Kelly to other killings, they’ll know I did it.’
‘But they can’t do anything about that.’
‘But they’ll know it was me!’ Duggan snapped. ‘And I don’t want that.’
‘Why?’ Tony asked. ‘They knew you did other things.’
Duggan folded his arms. ‘But this one was different. Martin was my friend and I had to shoot him anyway because of what he did. What others said he did.’
He stared at Tony, but seemed to address Barr as he added, ‘And this whole time since, I’ve been asking myself, what if we got it wrong?’
Chapter Seventeen
‘What if this is wrong?’ Tony asked.
They had parked in the car park to the rear of Watson’s restaurant. Tony had picked up the car from the church grounds as instructed. The key had been lying under the mat in the footwell on the driver’s side. He’d gone early, hoping to see whoever left the car, but it was already parked there and, when Tony slipped his hand on the bonnet, the engine felt cold.
He’d driven to Karen’s to pick her up. She’d invited him inside briefly, while she got herself ready. Her place was a one-bedroom flat, with a kitchenette abutting the living area. It was neat and clean, as Tony had expected. An oversized sofa dominated the lounge area; it was old, the velour worn on the armrests, but Karen had covered it with a knitted throw to brighten up its drab brown.
She came out of her bedroom, pulling on a waist-length leather jacket. She wore jeans and a striped blue T-shirt. She’d put on make-up, he thought, but not so much as to be obvious. But he couldn’t tell whether she saw the meal as a date or a favour to Duggan.
‘You look really well,’ he managed.
She smiled. ‘Thanks. You don’t scrub up too badly yourself.’
He considered what he was wearing: jeans and a checked shirt. He’d hardly gone to town, scrubbing himself up.
Beyond her, he could make out the edge of her bed, a cabinet next to it with a picture in a frame sitting atop. He felt a frisson of excitement, a desire to be in there, to see more of her personality; the flat reflected her neatness, but nothing else.
They passed the thirty-minute journey in affable small talk. The car over-revved a little on the clutch and Tony was aware of not drawing attention to themselves, so he drove carefully, both hands on the wheel, afraid to take his eyes off the road for too long.
They found the restaurant after a few wrong turns and having to stop to ask for directions. Tony had been reluctant, in case someone remembered them later if anyone asked, but Karen had dismissed this as being a ‘typical man’ and, afraid to prove her right, he’d capitulated and pulled in. The youth who directed them barely even glanced at them anyway, lifting his head long enough to indicate with a light nod the direction in which they needed to go.
When they reached the restaurant, though, they realised that the car parking extended all the way around the place. Tony circled around a few times.
‘Where should we park?’
‘He said the back,’ Karen said. ‘There’s a few spaces over there.’ She pointed across to three free spaces either side of a street lamp.
‘Maybe we need to park it somewhere darker?’ Tony said. ‘If someone doesn’t want to be seen.’
Karen nodded. ‘It’s up to you. Someone over at a car in a dark corner’s going to look like a car thief. Out in the open’s less likely to raise any suspicions.’
‘Boot in or out the ways?’
‘In might make more sense,’ Karen said.
Tony nodded, reversing into the spot.
‘Are you sure this is it?’
Karen glanced out at the building in front of them. ‘That’s Watson’s.
‘What if this is wrong?’ Tony asked, suddenly.
Karen looked across at him, held his gaze steadily in hers. ‘What? The restaurant? Or the whole thing?’
‘It just feels… wrong in some way.’
‘Don’t over-think it. We’re doing nothing wrong,’ Karen said. ‘We’re going for some food and then driving home in a car a friend lent us for the evening.’
Tony wasn’t sure, but she sounded so convinced herself, and the hand she laid briefly over his on the gear stick was so warm, so soft, that he nodded. ‘You’re probably right,’ he said.
‘First lesson learnt,’ Karen smiled. ‘I’m always right.’
As they walked away from the car, he felt an urge to double-check that he hadn’t locked it inadvertently and went back and tried the handle, then closed the door softly. The doubt still assailed him once they were inside the restaurant.
Sitting at the table, Tony could see Karen’s eyes again, was reminded that she’d claimed to have eaten her own twin.
‘Is it odd?’ he asked, apropos the thought, which he had not shared with her.
‘Is what odd?’ she frowned.
‘Your twin.’
‘I don’t have a twin.’
‘I was looking at your eyes,’ he explained, a comment which caused Karen to blush and glance down at her hands. ‘You joked that you ate your own twin. Do you feel like you had a twin? Really. Is it odd not having one?’
‘I don’t know. I never had one to know the difference.’
Tony blushed now, feeling silly for having asked the question and compelled to try to explain himself more clearly.
‘I mean, do you have a sense of one? An absence?’
She smiled. ‘I’d never thought of it like that,’ she said. ‘An absence? I suppose I was aware that I was alone when I was growing up. I missed having a friend. Did you have only the one brother?’
Tony nodded.
‘Do you miss him?’
‘He’s an absence, definitely,’ Tony said. ‘I was away from home at university and that, so we didn’t spend as much time together recently as we used to, you know? So, we kind of drifted a bit.’
He paused. He’d not, he realised, really thought about Danny being gone. Moving to Scotland had taken him from the things that would most have remi
nded him of his brother; he could, on some level, imagine that Danny was still OK back at home. That in some other world, Danny had stopped for a burger, or left the game early because the scoreline was already clear and he’d wanted to beat the crowds at the gate.
‘It was the randomness of it,’ he said, finally. ‘Like it could have been anyone walking on that path. He could have been early, or late. Or not gone to the game, or met a girl or met his friends, or stopped for a drink somewhere.’
Karen did not speak, though she held his gaze, her expression soft.
‘I needed someone to blame,’ he said. ‘My dad didn’t; he just accepted it as fate, or accident, or whatever. But I couldn’t do that; someone had to be to blame, and someone had to be held accountable for what they did. Accident didn’t kill my brother; a Brit did, you know?’
Karen nodded, her eyes glistening in the light thrown from the small tea candle in the holder on their table.
‘If you have someone to blame, you have something you can do,’ she said. ‘We need to feel active; like we’re doing something about what happens to us. I understand that.’
Midway through dinner, Tony excused himself to go to the toilet. He walked back by a circuitous route that allowed him to go outside for a moment, in the hope he might spot anyone near the car but it sat exactly where he had parked it, seemingly untouched.
They chatted through dessert about a mutual friend of a friend they both knew back home and about Karen’s job; she worked on the reception desk at a health centre.
‘That was where I met Martin Kelly,’ Karen explained. ‘Before I met him through Duggan.’
It took Tony a moment to remember who Martin Kelly was. ‘I don’t know him,’ Tony said. ‘I know of him; I’ve seen him a few times, but we’ve not spoken or anything.’
‘He’s a creep,’ Karen said, instinctively rubbing her upper arm.
‘Is he a dealer?’
Karen nodded.
‘Why is Duggan in with him, then? At home Duggan’s crew would have kneecapped him.’
‘He’s useful,’ Karen said. ‘Besides, whose drugs do you think he’s selling?’
‘For Duggan?’
‘Not for Duggan per se,’ Karen said. ‘But the money he makes, he’s paying a tithe up the chain. Besides, he’s everywhere, meets everyone. No one suspects him because he’s already suspicious.’
‘There’s a logic in there somewhere,’ Tony said.
‘How did you know he was a dealer?’
Tony sensed from the way in which she bristled slightly when she asked the question that she was afraid they had met through a transaction.
‘I met one of the kids I used to teach a while back in Liverpool Betty’s. I thought she was on something. At the end of the evening, I was waiting to use the toilet and when the door opened, Kelly came out zipping himself up and she was getting off her knees with a ten spot in her hand. I’m guessing she didn’t have the tenner on her to pay.’
Karen grimaced at the mental image his story had conjured.
‘He’s a creep,’ she repeated.
They drove back to Glasgow after ten. Tony wanted to check the boot, to see if anything had been placed there, but Karen advised him not to. She’d relaxed throughout dinner, having had a few glasses of wine. At the end of the meal, Tony had paid for them both and she’d not protested or offered to go half, which made him think she saw the evening out as a date. But as he drove, he wondered if she’d allowed him to pay so that it looked like a date, which was, after all, the cover which Duggan had suggested when he asked them to bring the car into Paisley.
The sudden flash of red lights in front of them shook him from his thoughts and he braked as he realised the cars in front of him had stopped. Flicking on the hazard lights, he glanced in the rearview to check that the drivers behind him would see in enough time to stop. The last thing he needed was an impact from behind that might necessitate opening the boot in front of others.
Karen craned in her seat, winding down the window to see what lay ahead.
‘Shit,’ she said, her face blanching. ‘It’s the police.’
Tony felt his stomach turn. ‘What’ll we do?’
Karen gathered herself. He could see she was calming herself, breathing slowly, her hands raised in front of her, as if in placation.
‘If they stop us, we say we borrowed the car from a friend. We didn’t even look in the boot.’
‘They’ll not believe us.’
‘There’s no fingerprints on the boot door,’ she said. ‘None of ours anyway. And no gloves or anything in the car. Are there?’ She twisted in the seat, glancing behind her, then opened the glove box in front of Tony, which was empty.
He realised with some relief and greater gratitude, why she had told him not to check in the rear. He slowed his own breathing, wiped the sheen of sweat from his hands onto his trouser leg. He felt light headed, looked around to see if he could pull in, or turn; but they were on the motorway and he was hemmed in on all sides.
As they inched forward, he could see the blue flickering of the police lights illuminating the trees edging the roadway. He guessed there must be more than one vehicle for the flickering seemed to overlap at times, and separate at others, working to its own, free rhythm.
‘It’ll be fine,’ Karen was saying. ‘We’re moving forward, which means they’re not stopping anyone. Not for long anyway. Have you your licence?’
‘It’s Northern Irish,’ Tony said. ‘I’m guaranteed to be pulled in. Maybe we should get out and run.’
‘How far do you think either of us would get? We know nothing. That’s it. Not our car, not our whatever is in there.’
As they neared the police lights, Tony realised that the two lanes of traffic were being funnelled into one with traffic cones. A policeman stood at the point where they merged, his high-vis jacket gleaming in the approaching cars’ headlights.
Tony thought he would vomit by the time they’d reached where the officer stood. He had a torch in one hand, its top covered with a red cone. As they drew abreast him, he held out the torch, indicating that they should stop.
Winding down the window, the cold night air caught him by surprise, taking the breath from him.
‘Evening,’ he muttered.
‘Wait a minute, sir,’ the policeman said, glancing down at him, then across at Karen.
He walked away from the car and watched further up the roadway, where Tony could now see more blue lights pulsing into life.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘An accident,’ the policeman said, his hand outstretched, telling them to remain where they were. ‘That’s you now, sir,’ he said, waving him on. ‘Drive safely.’
They crawled past the scene a few hundred yards later. Two ambulances had just arrived, having clearly driven the wrong way up the motorway, to get to the site of the crash. A car had been upended, its underbelly exposed to the fluorescent glare of the motorway lights. The person inside remained strapped, upside down, while the paramedics lay on the ground talking to them through the opened window.
Despite the sight of the accident, Tony felt elated at having successfully made it through the checkpoint. He glanced at Karen who shared his smile. Without thinking, he reached across and took her hand. She held his for a moment, giving it a reassuring squeeze. He felt his excitement build at his very centre, felt himself buzz with it.
‘Thank fuck,’ he muttered.
They parked the car back in the churchyard below Bellgrove, right where they had collected it some hours earlier. After he had locked it up, Tony felt compelled once more to check the boot, to see what exactly they had been transporting past a police cordon.
‘Don’t look,’ Karen said. ‘It won’t do any good.’
Tony laughed, half pleading with her to understand, to share his curiosity. ‘I have to know,’ he said. He moved around the rear of the car and, pulling down his sleeve over his hand, opened the rear door. The space lay empty. He pulled up the carpeted i
nterior of the boot to where the spare wheel was kept and there saw something wrapped in a plastic bag, beneath the jack.
For the first time since they’d seen the police lights on the motorway, he began to question the wisdom of what they had done. He wondered whether Duggan had lied, whether indeed they had been bringing drugs for Martin Kelly and his like to sell to school kids in the pubs around Glasgow.
He looked across to where Karen stood, a distance apart, her hands wedged in her jacket pockets. She watched him, but showed no interest in what was inside the car boot.
Carefully, keeping his hands covered, he lifted the jack away. Beneath it, the blue-black body visible through the clear plastic wrapping, lay a pistol. He’d seen them in Derry, when the police were patrolling, but had never been so close to one before. He wanted to touch it, wanted to feel its hardness, its coldness. He felt once more that elation he had felt on the motorway, but something else beneath that, too.
He carefully laid the jack back into place, fixed the carpeting back and shut the door, then walked across to where Karen stood.
‘It’s a–’ he whispered, but she silenced him with a raised hand.
‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘I don’t need to know.’
Tony felt a little deflated that she would not share with him his excitement, not allow him to reconcile that with the other, more insidious feeling he’d had all evening, that underlying sense of dread.
The Last Crossing Page 8