Belfast Noir

by Adrian McKinty

  And in a whisper of movement, the burning tip of Kier’s cigarette is over his eyeball. He doesn’t blink.

  “The reservoir, Kier. Did he ever tell you about the reservoir? No? Then listen.”

  * * *

  “Do you know what they call this?” He’s sitting on the stone bench in the little leafy temple for wedding photographs. The club hits from the dance floor are a series of soft detonations. “The Grassy Knoll. I heard one of the waiting girls say it. It’s one of those things that once you get it into your head it doesn’t get out again.”

  Ross smells of beer. Everything tight about him has been loosed: tie, collar, cuffs, button on his pants. As if he was swelling up like a beer balloon. But he’s not drunk, and he is quick and fast. Two handfuls of collar. Up close. Hair-dryer close. His breath is rank. Meat between the teeth. Spittle flecks.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “What kind of way is this to treat your father-in-law?”

  “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Like I said, come to see my Emma get wed.”

  “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Meet a few faces I haven’t seen in a long time. Pull a bridesmaid at the disco. Wedding stuff.”

  “What. The. Fuck. Are. You. Doing. Here?”

  “Do you want to know? Do you really want to know?”

  “I don’t. I don’t care about anything you want or have to do or see or say. I just want you to tell me what the fuck you are doing here. Because you can’t be here. Because I saw that car go into the reservoir.”

  “I’m a good swimmer. There’s a trick to it, I saw it on the Discovery channel. You have to open the windows, let the water in. It’s all to do with pressure.”

  Ross shakes him, like a dog with a rat.

  “I put two clips into that car before I put it in the water.”

  “You’re not as good with that gun as you think you are.”

  “I’d fucking kill you now—”

  “It’s not that much, is it, a quarter of a million? You get that just for opening a box on Deal or No Deal. Game-show money. Won’t even buy you a house. Half a million would—half a million, that’s money—but you had to split it, didn’t you? Half for the setup, half for the delivery. Did you sample the goods? You should never do that. Sell your half and then spend it all buying it back again and snorting it up your sinuses. You can piss it away pretty damn quick in that game. Did Ems even see a penny of it? Just buy her a nice ring and a honeymoon in the Seychelles. Even that?”

  “If you fucking told her—”

  “You’ll do what? Kill me again? It’s not just you. It’s all of you. I set you up like dominoes. One takes out the next, takes out the next. All the way to the end. All it takes is one wee tap. Two wee words.”

  Ross drags him out of the belvedere, away from the lights and the music, away from the floods in the car park, away from the open door of the kitchens where the chefs smoke, into darkness.

  “I’ll fucking make sure you never say even one word,” Ross says. This is the night of fast, whispering moves: a flicker and Ross has a knife in his hand.

  “You brought a knife. To my daughter’s wedding. A knife.” He laughs. The laugh scares Ross. It’s wrong, it’s not what should happen here. It’s an unscripted laugh. “I thought Kier was thick as pig shit for believing you, but man, you take it to a whole new level. You want to deal, you want to be a player? You need something in here, son.” He taps Ross’s temple. “Do you think I’d have told you any of this if I thought there was a chance of you stopping me? I said those two wee words five minutes ago. Do you know what I said? I said: the reservoir.”

  Car headlights glare up the Grassy Knoll. Ross lifts a hand to shade his eyes. He slips out, under Ross’s knife, away from the Beast. Kier stands by the open car door. His eyes are fixed on Ross. His voice is low but the words carry over the Balearic thud from the dance floor.

  “You fucking traitor.”

  The oldest, dirtiest insult: disloyalty.

  He walks past the car. Karen is in the backseat, her white suit bracketed by men in dark suits; a groomsman on one side, Jim on the other. He’d been right about that spiderweb tattoo. Psycho. Loyalties, disloyalties. Karen’s sunbed face is grey. Grey as a ten-day drowned corpse. Her eyes are black holes. She’s crying. Mothers of the brides always cry at weddings. She looks at him, he opens his mouth to speak. Beg. Plead. Spit. None of it will make any difference now. Backlit by disco lights, Emma is a hollow ghost in a white dress at the hotel door. Her mouth is open.

  Sorry, love. I did wreck your big day after all.

  Now Kier and one of the groomsmen wrestle Ross to the front seat. Kier has the knife. He turns back to watch the end game.

  “You! Fuck you!” Spit flies from Ross’s mouth. He is crazy with rage. “You are dead! Dead!”

  He walks out into the dark.

  “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

  “Back,” he says.

  * * *

  It’s a hot summer; the last thing anyone expected; the hottest summer a generation can remember. There are water panics. Reservoirs reveal their pale, dirty scum lines as levels drop. Three fishermen, camping out in the hills up behind Holywood, cooling beer in the water, notice the shape below the surface. It looks like a car. Police and a bright red tow truck haul the shadow out of the reservoir: the slimy skeleton of an Audi. 2008 plates. Riddled with bullet holes. Behind the wheel, human bones in the remains of a cheap supermarket suit. Forensics go to work. They calculate the bones have been down there four, five years. Old bones. But the suit; the suit is split new.

  PART III

  CITY OF COMMERCE

  THE GREY

  BY STEVE CAVANAGH

  Laganside, Queens Island

  My client, Mickey Fuck, pushed his chair away from the table and said that there was no fuckin’ way, on God’s fucking green earth, that he would fuckin’ do six fuckin’ months for murder.

  No. Fuckin’. Way.

  I should say, purely for the sake of accuracy, that the surname Fuck does not appear on Mickey’s birth certificate. That particular document bears the name Michael Padraig Pearse Flannigan. It was Mickey’s predilection to season even the most basic of sentences with a liberal, and at times bewildering, peppering of fucks that earned him his infamous moniker.

  “Mickey, it’s murder,” I said. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but you’re fucked, so to speak. At the moment, the prosecution aren’t treating this as a paramilitary killing within the scope of Good Friday. We’re trying to persuade them otherwise. If they agree to treat it as a Troubles killing, then under the terms of the Belfast Agreement the maximum sentence will be two years, but at the moment they’re pleading it as a straight killing and that’s twenty-plus on conviction. You’re sixty-three, you don’t have twenty in you. Think about it, please.”

  “I don’t fuckin’ have six months either, Mack. Six months? Tell ’em to get ta fuck. Fuckin’ six months, fuck,” said Mickey, casting his eyes around the white, sanitised consultation room.

  Most of my clients these days called me Mr. Mack. The younger ones, anyway. Mickey was a client of old. We’d grown up together in the law. Not that Mickey was a lawyer, no, he was a window cleaner by trade, but his real talents lay in cunning and not-so-cunning fraud. I’d first met Mickey forty-odd years earlier, when I was a white-wigged barrister fresh out of pupillage with not a penny to my name and even less experience. At that time Mickey already had an impressive juvenile record and I’d been chosen as the jockey for his debut in the Crown Court. The venue was court one in the Crumlin Road Courthouse. I’d arrived at the court early that morning, having slept little the night before. Terrified that I would be delayed by security checks or bomb scares, I got there just after eight o’clock only to find the wrought-iron gates and bomb-proof barriers firmly locked with no sign of life inside.

  My instructing solicitor was a kindly sort who was do
ing my pupil master a favour by giving me a decent brief to kick off my career. In those early days of the Troubles you found your feet as a barrister pretty quickly. Due to the huge number of terrorist trials there simply weren’t enough criminal barristers in the Bar Library to serve the demand from clientele. Several of my brothers at the bar collected their enrolment papers, the ink still wet from the lord chief justice’s pen, and walked straight into supergrass trials or murders without the faintest notion of how to conduct even the most basic of careless driving pleas in the Petty Sessions.

  Mickey and I popped our Crown Court cherries on a charge of fraud. The genesis of the charge lay in a brace of loyalist bomb attacks on pubs in known Catholic enclaves of the city; the first bomb went off at 4:03 p.m. in the Clifton Bar on the Cliftonville Road, a public house affectionately known to the locals as the Suicide Inn. The second went off at 4:09 p.m. in the Hole in the Wall on Baltic Avenue, just off the Antrim Road. Mickey submitted a criminal injury compensation claim to the Northern Ireland Office stating that he had been hurt in both attacks. The difficulty arose due to the fact that both bombs went off within minutes of one another, on the same day, several miles apart, and unless Mickey had hijacked a passing Chinook with the aid of his trusty ladder, there was no way he could’ve been in both locations when the attacks occurred. Mickey had submitted two separate application forms for the separate incidents and if both applications hadn’t fallen across the same desk of the same diligent civil servant, Mickey might have gotten away with it. So Mickey held the hands up and after a nervy, but thorough plea in mitigation delivered by yours truly, he walked out with two years’ probation and a fine. A result. Within a few years, several solicitors’ practises were sending me work and one even remarked, “If your client’s in trouble with the peelers, just phone The Mack.”

  Mickey’s current trouble was much more worrying. Murder was a serious business and, it has to be said, out of character for a career criminal like him. Although a diehard Republican, Mickey stayed out of the paramilitary ranks.

  “The judge has decided that this will be a jury trial,” I said. “She’ll be pissed off because she bent over backward to give me the nod to six months on a plea in a Diplock court. If you turn that down, she’ll hammer you in sentencing if you’re convicted after a fight in front of a jury.”

  My young instructing solicitor, Mr. O’Neill, nodded in agreement.

  Mickey ran his hands over his thinning Cliftonville football shirt. Where once bright tattoos adorned his forearms, now only faded remnants clung to flaccid skin. The tattoo of a Celtic badge on his wrist now appeared to resemble a poorly realised quiche. Phlegm whistled through his breath, the result of a lifetime of smoking dog-ends and roll-ups.

  “It’s like Noel fuckin’ Edmonds says, no deal,” replied Mickey.

  Gathering my brief together in readiness to depart, I was about to remark that the Deal or No Deal presenter, Noel Edmonds, although undoubtedly wise when it came to opening mysterious boxes, might not in fact be the best person from whom to take counsel when one was faced with a murder charge, when I felt a jagged pain in my left hand. The sharp end of a brass fastener, which held my brief together, must’ve raked across my skin. I sucked hard on the cut at the base of my index finger and tasted metal, not knowing if it was from the brass or the blood.

  Mr. O’Neill and I left the holding cells beneath Laganside Courts, the heavy cell door closing behind us with a resounding clang.

  “We’d better go and tell the prosecutor and judge that the deal’s off. We’d better check who the—” began Mr. O’Neill, before I interrupted.

  “Whoa, hang on there now. Let’s not kill ourselves here. We’ll get a coffee and a smoke first.”

  * * *

  Standing in the paved garden outside Laganside, I pondered my client’s predicament. The prosecution would put forward a strong circumstantial case: our man’s van was seen parked outside the victim’s flat a week before the murder and, worst of all, they had a DNA hit.

  The murder of Willy Stoke had gone unsolved for over thirty years. The historical enquiries team reviewed the case some months previously; a single droplet of blood on a photograph, found near the body, which had never before been tested for DNA, revealed a precise match for Mickey. What had been a ropey circumstantial case thirty years before now looked strong. Back in 1982, just days after the body of Stoke had been found in his living room by his wife Betty, the Royal Ulster Constabulary had hauled Mickey in for questioning once they’d traced the van back to his address. At the time, the van and the droplet of blood, which was of the same type as Mickey’s, along with several hundred thousand others, simply wasn’t enough to sustain a conviction.

  Unfortunately, Mickey initially denied ever knowing or meeting Willy. Mickey had lied to the police. He had known Stoke and admitted as much when he was interviewed again thirty years later. The DNA changed everything. Trying to explain how your blood came to be on a Polaroid found beside the body of a dead man was difficult enough. With Mickey’s false statement to the police, conviction looked inevitable.

  As far as judges and juries are concerned, the innocent don’t lie and DNA is king.

  “What do you think?” asked Mr. O’Neill.

  “I think he’s foolish turning down six months. But if he says he’s innocent, we’re obligated to take his instructions and do our best to challenge the prosecution. We just need to sow some reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. Easier said than done.”

  My instructing solicitor was in his midtwenties, passionate, and skilled. As a young lawyer he still worried about his clients, about their lives, about their fate. He hadn’t yet learned the self-preservation of detachment, but having said that, I too felt deeply worried for Mickey because I believed him to be innocent. And that creates its own unique pressure.

  * * *

  A low December sun glimmered from the revolting face of Belfast’s latest office building—a monstrous mixture of ugly metal and concrete newly adorned with To Let signs partially obscured the view of the Waterfront Hall which was, by contrast, a beautiful structure.

  It was all part of the new Belfast.

  Following the Good Friday Agreement, the state had either pulled down or let rot their old institutions of justice such as the Crumlin Road Courthouse, the Maze Prison, and the old Petty Sessions building, as they were seen by some as houses of oppression, as monuments to the past conflict, and reminders of the horrible, public wounds we had visited upon one another. Now, in this part of the city centre, it was all about the new grey, the new shining pillars of justice and rejuvenation; as if the city was wiping itself clean and starting afresh. So the new Laganside Courthouse had been erected, officially opened, officially declared too expensive, and officially left to deteriorate. It sat opposite the Royal Courts of Justice and the Bar Library—both clothed in sterile, neutral, independent stone, brick, and glass.

  That was how it had to be.

  The city centre had to be for all religions, and so the ubiquitous, shining grey had quickly become the nascent colour. Whereas the Ardoyne rejoiced in tricolours and every shade of green, so too the Shankill kept their houses and kerbs in the Union Jack, and each side of the divided city painted their gables and drenched themselves in the rich colours which formed their history, their protection, their identity, their flag, and they lived under the terrible weight that came with it.

  In Belfast, colour was joyful, territorial, and frightening. And so the heart of the city embraced a comforting blanket of grey. That grey served as my comfort too, my goal in every case; it was my job to shade the prosecution’s black-and-white into wonderful, doubtful grey. Whilst I sought out that pallid doubt, I too remained colourless, cloaked in grey, so that I could invite all people from every shade of the conflict to my door.

  “Come on,” said Mr. O’Neill, “we’ll seat the jury.”

  * * *

  “Appearances, gentlemen,” said Her Honour Judge Henrietta Booth, a rather plu
mp woman with a keen legal brain and about as much common sense as a root vegetable.

  “I appear for the Crown,” said David Fossett QC.

  “If it please Your Honour, I appear for Mickey Fu . . . er . . . I mean, I appear for the defendant, Mr. Flannigan.”

  Court Fourteen in Laganside sat at the top of the house. The courtrooms of the fourth floor were reserved for the most serious of criminal trials, and the sheer size of the rooms added drama and gravitas where none was needed. A small public seating area at the back of the court seemed almost an afterthought to the designer. The space was reserved for the accused in a long dock which could hold perhaps twenty defendants and then three rows of legal benches: solicitors at the back, junior barristers in the middle, and Queen’s counsel closest to the highly elevated judiciary. If you sat in the public gallery, even if you were able to see around the dock, the judge would appear as if he or she were sitting atop Mount Olympus.

  Jury selection isn’t what it used to be. In the last few years the government had done away with the defendant’s right to challenge the selection of a juror without cause. Prior to the change, one would be supplied with a list of potential jurors which included their names, addresses, and occupations, and the defendant enjoyed the privilege of challenging up to twelve jurors without having to state a reason. The challenges normally took the shape of a religious parade; one would not want Billy Wilson from the Woodstock Road sitting as a juror when the defendant was Bridie Connolly from the Lower Falls. This perceived religious bias was not enough for a challenge for cause anymore. Since the change in the law the defendant can only challenge for just cause and jurors are selected anonymously, by number, at random. Justice by lottery.

  With twelve random souls seated, the prosecutor, Mr. Fossett QC, opened the case for the Crown. Fozzy, as he was known, bore a startling resemblance to a flustered duck. As he reached his peroration, his robes fluttering with bold sweeps of his arms and his yellow jowls flapping about his pouted lips, he told the jury that the defendant’s DNA had been found in a droplet of blood smeared on a photograph discovered beside the body of the late Mr. Stoke. He continued, “The photograph, ladies and gentlemen, is of the deceased’s wife, Elizabeth Stoke, but that need not concern you. What is of concern is the blood. It is the prosecution’s case that the victim was probably holding the photograph when he was attacked and bludgeoned to death by the defendant. In the ensuing struggle, as Mr. Stoke fought bravely for his life, he must have injured the defendant in some way and the defendant’s blood found its way, quite by chance, onto the photograph, leaving for you, members of the jury, the key to the identity of the killer.”