Belfast Noir

by Adrian McKinty

  “I can’t believe you nicked her fucking perfume,” Donna says.

  Tanya stares at me as if she’s going to be sick.

  Donna takes the bottle from me and uncaps the lid. She aims it at Lisa.

  “Fuck off,” Lisa says. “You’re not spraying that shit on me.”

  “Spray me then,” I say, and they all look at me. “Go on,” I say, “spray me.” I roll up the sleeve of my jumper to bare my wrist.

  Donna aims the nozzle. A jet of perfume shoots out, dark and heady and forbidden-smelling.

  “Eww,” says Tanya, “that smells like fox. Why would anyone want to smell like that?”

  I press my wrists together carefully and raise them to my neck, dab both sides. It’s the strongest perfume I’ve ever smelled. The musty green scent makes me feel slightly nauseous. It doesn’t smell like a perfume you’d imagine Davina Calvert choosing. He must have bought it for her; it must be him that likes it. I wonder if he sprays it on her before they go out. If she holds up her wrists and bares her throat for him.

  “What are you going to do with it?” Lisa asks.

  “We could bring it into school,” I say, and all at once my heart is racing again. “We could bring it into school, and spray it in his lesson. We could see what he does.”

  “You’re a fucking psycho,” Donna says, and she laughs, but for the first time ever it’s tinged with awe.

  “You can’t,” Tanya’s saying, “I’m not having anything to do with this,” but we’re all ignoring her now.

  “Me and Lisa have Spanish tomorrow,” I say, “straight after lunch. We’ll do it then. Right, Leese?”

  “What do you think he’ll do?” Lisa asks, wide-eyed.

  “Maybe,” I say, “he’ll keep us behind after class and shag our brains out on his desk.” I say it as if I’m joking, and she and Donna laugh, and I laugh too, but I think of the condom hidden in my pocket and the tingling feeling returns.

  That night I lie in bed and squeeze my eyes closed and play the scene of them meeting in Granada with more intensity than ever before: and when I get to the part where he undoes her halterneck top and eases her skirt off and lies her down on the bed, my whole body starts shaking.

  * * *

  The next day in Spanish we did it, just as we’d planned. Before class started we huddled over my bag and sprayed the Poison, unknotting our ties to mist it in the hollow of our throat. We were feverish with excitement. He didn’t know how close to him we’d gotten.

  I had his condom with me too. I’d slept with it under my pillow and now it was zipped into the pocket of my school skirt: I could feel the foil edge rubbing against my thigh when I crossed my legs.

  Mr. Knox came in, sat on the edge of his desk, and asked us what we’d been doing over the weekend.

  My heart was thumping. I suddenly wished I’d prepared something clever to say, something that would get his attention, or make him smile, but I hadn’t and I found myself saying the first thing that came into my head, just to be the one who spoke.

  “Voy de compras,” I said.

  “I’m sure you go shopping all the time, but in this instance it was in the past tense.” He looked straight at me as he spoke, his crinkled eyes, a teasing smile. He seemed surprised, or amused, to see me talking. I was never one of the confident ones who spoke up in class without prompting. “Otra vez, señorita.”

  Señorita. I’d never been one of the girls he called señorita before. I imagined he’d called Davina señorita. His accent in Spanish was rolling and sexy. Hers would be too, of course. They’d probably had conversations of their own, over and above everyone else’s heads.

  “Fui de compras,” I said, locking eyes with him.

  “Muy bien, fuiste de compras, y qué compraste?”

  “What did I buy?” The cloying smell of the perfume was making me dizzy and I couldn’t seem to straighten my thoughts.

  “Sí—qué compraste?”

  “Compré . . . compré un nuevo perfume.”

  “Muy bien.” He grinned at me. “Fuiste de compras, y compraste un nuevo perfume. Muy bien.”

  “Do you want to smell it, Mr. Knox?” Lisa blurted.

  “Lisa!” I hissed, delighted and appalled.

  “Gracias, Lisa, pero no.”

  “Are you sure? I think you’d like it.”

  “Gracias, Lisa. Who’s next?” He gazed around the room, waiting for someone else to put their hand up. I’d said it. I couldn’t believe I’d said it. I felt the colour rising to my face. Lisa was stifling a fit of giggles beside me but I ignored her and kept my eyes on Mr. Knox. He hadn’t flinched.

  At the end of class we hung about, taking our time to pack our bags, and wondering if he’d keep us behind, but he didn’t. We left the room and fell into each other’s arms in fits of giggles—but we were both exaggerating, kidding ourselves that we weren’t disappointed. Or at least I was. Maybe for Lisa it was just a big joke. I don’t know what I’d expected, exactly, but I’d expected something: a moment of recognition, something.

  My last lesson of the day was maths, where I sat with Tanya—none of our other friends were taking higher maths. We walked out of school together. Tanya lived up by Stormont and it was out of my way, but I sometimes walked home with her anyway. My mum had gone back to work since my dad moved out and I didn’t like returning to an empty house. And today, there was the increased attraction of knowing that this was the way Mr. Knox must drive home.

  We walked down Wandsworth Road, crossed the busy junction, then along the Upper Newtownards Road. When we got to the traffic lights at Castlehill Road, by Stormont Presbyterian, I kept us hanging about. I made sure I was standing facing the traffic. I was waiting for the Alfa Romeo to pass us: I knew in my bones that it would, knew that it had to.

  When it did, I turned to follow it and didn’t take my eyes from it until it was gone completely from sight. And by the time I turned back, something inside me had shifted.

  I spent an hour that night learning extra French vocab and practising my Spanish tenses, determined to impress him the following day, to make him notice me.

  The next day I walked home with Tanya again, and the day after that, and pretty soon I was heading home with her every day. It was a twenty-minute walk from school to hers, and most days by the time we reached the Upper Newtownards Road his car would be long gone. But I took to noting which days he held his after-school language club for sixth-formers, or had staff meetings, and on those days I’d try to time our journey; persuading Tanya to come to the mini-market with me and killing time there choosing sweets and looking at the magazines, then lingering at the traffic lights by the church in the hope of seeing his car. On the days that I did, even just a flash of it as it sped past through a green light, I’d feel like I was flying all the way home.

  Lisa and Donna were friends again, and Lisa still didn’t invite me on their Cairnburn nights, but suddenly I didn’t care. Three Saturday evenings in a row I let my mum think I was going to Lisa’s, and I walked the whole way to Mr. Knox and Davina’s house, and I moved past two, three, four, five times, and saw both cars in their driveway and the lights in their windows and once even caught a glimpse of him in an upstairs room.

  It had to happen. I knew it had to happen.

  The days you were most likely to see his car, I’d worked out, were Tuesdays and Wednesdays: one Wednesday, as I kept Tanya hanging about at the end of her road, Mr. Knox’s Alfa Romeo finally pulled up at the lights.

  He was right beside us. Metres away. It was real: it was happening. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.

  “There he is,” I said, and Tanya followed my gaze and replied, “No, wise up, what are you doing?”

  “Mr. Knox!” I yelled, and I waved at the car. “Mr. Knox!”

  His windows were wound halfway down—he was smoking—and he ducked to look out, then pressed a button to wind them down fully.

  “Hello?” he said. “What is it, is everything okay?”

  “Mr.
Knox,” I said. “We need a lift, will you give us a lift?”

  “Stop it!” Tanya hissed at me.

  “Please, Mr. Knox!” I said. “We’re really late and it’s important.”

  The lights were still red but any moment they’d go amber, then green.

  “Please, Mr. Knox,” I said. “You have to, please, you have to.” I had taken to wearing a dab of Poison every day I had a French or Spanish lesson—even though Lisa told me I was a weirdo—and I could still smell the perfume, Davina’s perfume, on me, and I wondered if he could too, creeping from me in a slow green spiral.

  He took a drag of his cigarette and dropped it out of the window. “Where are you going?”

  Tanya hissed and grabbed my arm but I wrenched it free. The lights were amber and as they turned green I was opening the passenger seat and getting in. There I was, in Mr. Knox’s Alfa Romeo. It was happening.

  “Where do you need to go?” he asked again, and I said: “Anywhere.” He looked at me and raised an eyebrow and snorted with laughter, and I thought he might tell me to get out, but he didn’t, he just revved the engine and then accelerated away, and in the wing mirror I caught a glimpse of Tanya’s stricken face, open-mouthed, and I looked at Mr. Knox beside me—Mr. Knox, I was there, now, finally, in Mr. Knox’s car, me and Mr. Knox—and I started laughing too.

  * * *

  Afterwards, I couldn’t resist telling Tanya. I told her how he kissed me, gently at first and his lips were soft, then harder, with his tongue. I told her how he undid my tie, and unbuttoned my shirt, and how his fingers were cool on my skin. I told her how he slipped his hand underneath my skirt and traced his fingers up, then hooked his fingers under my panties and tugged them down.

  “He didn’t,” she said, big-eyed and scared, and I promised her, “Yes, he did.” And her shock spurred me on, and I said how it hurt at the start. I said there was blood. I said it was in the backseat of his Alfa Romeo, in a cul-de-sac near the golf course, and he’d spread his jacket out first, and afterward he’d smoked a cigarette.

  Once I’d told Tanya, I had to tell Donna, and Lisa, and when Lisa looked at me with slitted eyes and said I was lying, I got out the condom and showed them: as proof, I said, he’d given it to me for next time.

  I hadn’t counted on Tanya blubbering it all to her mother: all of it, including the time we went to his house. We got in such trouble for that, but the trouble he was in was worse.

  Even though I cracked as soon as my mum asked me, told her that I’d made it all up, she didn’t believe me—couldn’t understand why I’d make it up or how I’d even know what to make up in the first place. In a series of anguished phone calls she and Tanya’s mother decided Mr. Knox had an unhealthy hold over me, over all of us.

  There’s no smoke, they agreed, without fire.

  They contacted the headmistress and that was that: Mr. Knox was called before the governors and forced to resign, and I was sent to a counsellor who tried to make me talk about my parents’ divorce. And then, in the autumn, we heard that Davina had left Mr. Knox: had taken her babies and gone back to her mother’s. It must have been her worst nightmare come true, the merest suggestion that her husband, the father of her two children, would do it again. She, more than anyone else, would have known there was no such thing as innocence.

  I think she was right.

  I don’t believe it was a one-off.

  What happened that day is that he drove me five minutes up the road, then pulled a U-turn at the garage, and drove back down the other side and made me get out not far from where he’d picked me up and said, “Now this was a one-off, you know,” and laughed.

  But I can still see his expression as he dropped me off: the half-smile, the eyebrow raised even as he said it wasn’t to happen again.

  It had happened before. And there’s a certain intensity that only a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl can possess: I would have redoubled my efforts at snaring him.

  If only I hadn’t told Tanya.

  * * *

  I lifted my glass of wine and took a sip, and then another. Mr. Knox and Melissa were still giggling over the cocktail menu, flipping back and forth through the pages.

  “Excuse me,” I said, turning to the bar and addressing the nearest barman. He didn’t hear me; carried on carving twists of orange peel. “Excuse me,” I said again, louder.

  He raised his finger: one moment. But I carried on.

  “You see the couple over there? By the window? The man with the black hair and the blonde girl?”

  He frowned and put the orange down; looked at them, then back at me.

  “Can I pay for their drinks?” I blurted.

  “You’d like to buy their drinks?”

  “Yes, whatever they’re having. All of it. I want to pay for all of it.”

  “I’ll just get the bar manager for you. One moment, please.”

  My heart was pounding. It was impulsive, and utterly stupid. My friends hadn’t even arrived yet; we’d still be sitting here when Mr. Knox asked for his bill in a drink or so’s time, and how would I explain it to them, or to him: because the barman would point me out as the one who’d paid for it. Even if I asked them not to let on, not to give me away, my name would be on the credit card slip, so he’d know. Or would he? Would my name mean anything to him, all these years later? Surely it would. Surely it must.

  I swivelled on my stool to look at them again. Melissa, with her blonde hair and pouting glossy lips and blue eyes, didn’t look very much like him. She didn’t look much like Davina either. They were mock-arguing about something now. She flicked her hair and cocked her head and put her hands on her waist, a pantomime of indignation, and he took her bare upper arms and squeezed them, shaking her lightly, and she squealed then threw her head back in laughter as he leant in to murmur something in her ear.

  She had to be his daughter. She had to be.

  “Ma’am. Excuse me.” The manager was leaning across the bar, attempting to get my attention. “Excuse me.”

  “Sorry,” I said, “I was miles away.”

  She had to be his daughter.

  “I understand you’d like to buy a drink for the couple by the window?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry, I was mistaken. I mean, I thought they were someone else.”

  “No problem,” he replied, smooth, professional. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  I looked at him. He waited, head politely inclined. I almost asked: Can you find out their names? Then I realised that, either way, I didn’t want to know.

  WET WITH RAIN

  BY LEE CHILD

  Great Victoria Street

  Births and deaths are in the public record. Census returns and rent rolls and old mortgages are searchable. As are citizenship applications from all the other English-speaking countries. There are all kinds of ancestry sites on the web. These were the factors in our favour.

  Against us was a historical truth. The street had been built in the 1960s. Fifty years ago, more or less. Within living memory. Most of the original residents had died off, but they had families, who must have visited, and who might remember. Children and grandchildren, recipients of lore and legend, and therefore possibly a problem.

  But overall we counted ourselves lucky. The first owners of the house in question were long dead, and had left no children. The husband had surviving siblings, but they had all gone to either Australia or Canada. The wife had a living sister, still in the neighbourhood, but she was over eighty years old, and considered unreliable.

  Since the original pair, the house had had five owners, most of them in the later years. We felt we had enough distance. So we went with the third variant of the second plan. Hairl Carter came with me. Hairl Carter the second, technically. His father had the same name. From southeastern Missouri. His father’s mother had wanted to name her firstborn Harold, but she had no more than a third-grade education, and couldn’t spell except phonetically. So Harold it was, phonetically. The old lady
never knew it was weird. We all called her grandson Harry, which might not have pleased her.

  Harry did the paperwork, which was easy enough, because we made it all Xeroxes of Xeroxes, which hides a lot of sins. I opened an account at a Washington, DC bank, in the name of the society, and I put half a million dollars into it, and we got credit cards and a checkbook. Then we rehearsed. We prepped it, like a political debate. The same conversation, over and over again, down all the possible highways and byways. We identified weak spots, though we had no choice but to barrel through. We figured audacity would stop them thinking straight.

  We flew first to London, then to Dublin in the south, and then we made the connection to Belfast on tickets that cost less than cups of coffee back home. We took a cab to the Europa Hotel, which is where we figured people like us would stay. We arranged a car with the concierge. Then we laid up and slept. We figured midmorning the next day should be zero hour.

  * * *

  The car was a crisp Mercedes and the driver showed no real reluctance about the address—which was second from the end of a short line of ticky-tacky row houses, bland and cheaply built, with big areas of peeling white weatherboard, which must have saved money on bricks. The roof tiles were concrete, and had gone mossy. In the distance the hills were like velvet, impossibly green, but all around us the built environment was hard. There was a fine cold drizzle in the air, and the street and the sidewalk were both shiny grey.

  The car waited at the kerb and we opened a broken gate and walked up a short path through the front yard. Carter rang the bell and the door opened immediately. The Mercedes had not gone unnoticed. A woman looked out at us. She was solidly built, with a pale, meaty face. “Who are you?”

  I said, “We’re from America.”