Belfast Noir

by Adrian McKinty

  Donegall Pass PSNI Station, interview suite intercam, 8:20 a.m., 25/05/13

  The bartender is Michaela from Riga. Says she doesn’t recognise the screen grab of Lorna. Doesn’t remember who she was talking to. She looks bored. McCaul imagines a cheap flat by the docks. A boyfriend with a Saxon T-shirt and a minor criminal record.

  CID comes into the room. CID says they’ve found a body in the river.

  Ormeau Embankment, SOC cam, 9:32 a.m., 25/05/13

  The water is brackish. The halogen light picking out weed fronds, the frame of a bicycle. McCaul standing at the edge of the water. The weed streams seaward on the ebb, the tidal flux. McCaul thinks of Lorna borne downstream toward the open sea and the channel markers and the Mew Island light.

  Sony HVR-Z7U HDV divecam, 11:16 a.m., 25/05/13

  The camera on a long exposure. She’s snagged on debris. Her hair flares out from her head. The diver’s gloved hand comes into shot as he reaches for her. She sways like some mythic Rhinemaiden. Her lips are slightly parted. The tide turns her face toward the camera. Her eyes are open and the diver is fixed for a moment by her sombre, violated gaze.

  NI Forensic Mortuary, security cam (ext.), 7:10 p.m., 25/05/13

  The undertaker backs the Mercedes hearse to the entrance. The black tin coffin is slid onto the morgue gurney. The footage is flickering. The speeds are always wrong. Everything’s silent-move era. The undertaker’s a gothic villain in a top hat. Death’s attendants coming for you at ten frames per second.

  NI Forensic Mortuary, postmortem suite 4, 9:03 a.m., 26/05/13

  The camera is high-definition. Nothing is to escape the lens here. This is not the place for difficult-to-piece-together recollections, the lyric fragments of the street traffic and retail security cams. There is to be no room for error. These are the forensics. The bloodwork. The pathologist and his female assistant make a Y-shaped incision in Lorna’s torso.

  They record the organs as healthy. They record no evidence of recent sexual activity. They record several depressed fractures to the cranium consistent with blows from a heavy object. Bone fragments are removed from the brain. They record that there is no water in the lungs. They observe that Lorna was dead before being placed in the water. They record that her hair colour is black. They record that her eye colour is green.

  Interflora, security cam, Lisburn Road, 3:44 p.m., 20/05/13

  Lorna’s workplace. The manager says they don’t normally keep the security camera footage but there is some from the previous Saturday. McCaul watches her moving behind the counter. There was a grace which McCaul had not expected. Good at the job. The shop manager said she was a natural. Knew the Latin names of the flowers. This seemed important to her, the manager said. Putting names to the flowers. The night blooms.

  Donegall Pass PSNI Station, interview suite intercam, 9:28 a.m., 26/05/13

  CID says don’t talk to the parents at home. CID says bring them in. Did she drown? Norman says. There will be water in her lungs if she drowned, he says. Then he smiles. You never think you’re going to ask if there was water in your daughter’s lungs, do you? You never think you’re going to put that into a sentence. I know what happens when someone drowns, he says. Kay gets up and walks about the room with a sideways gait as though something is about to fall on her head. Will fall on her head if she doesn’t keep moving.

  McCaul keeps trying to see Norman’s arm. He’s trying to make out the tattoo. Two flowers interlaced, he thinks. He can see the petals.

  Castlecourt Shopping Centre car park, L2 cam, 11:43 a.m., 26/05/13

  Norman and Kay’s car is parked on level two. Norman has reversed into the space. Edging the car between the concrete trusses. Blue Renault Megane, Reg. No. BOI 3655. He’s attentive to her. Taking her arm as they walk toward the car. Opening the door.

  Westlink, traffic cam #7, 3:50 a.m., 21/05/13

  Going back over the footage from the night Lorna went missing. Traffic light on the Westlink. Trucks heading south and west off the late ferries. Taxis going west. Focussing on the northbound traffic, running the registrations through number plate recognition. What are you looking for? the traffic controller asks.

  I’ll know it when I see it, McCaul says. He asks the controller to scroll back on the reg numbers. The controller says that he’s been doing this job too long and does McCaul think six years with a joystick between your finger and thumb watching night traffic is long enough. Zoom. Freeze. Rewind. You wouldn’t believe what comes off the ferries. Eastern Europeans. Asylum seekers. Prostitutes from countries you couldn’t even pronounce. Bartered. Trafficked. This is a haunted road. Sometimes I’m afraid to even look at it. I can’t sleep at night.

  McCaul sends the night’s data to DVLA. Checks the night traffic against the Registered Keeper and Owner database.

  There’s many a man out there like me, the controller says. Watchers of the night. Legions of us.

  Surface car park, security cam, Howard Street, 6:45 p.m., 27/05/13

  The Latvian bartender is standing by McCaul’s car. Michaela. He crosses the car park. She’s wearing knee boots and a coat with a fur collar pulled up round her face. The defence team will later ask to view the tape. CID says that evidence from it will be inadmissible.

  She tells him that she remembers seeing the girl now. She thinks she was talking to one of the regulars but she can’t remember who it was.

  When she leaves McCaul seizes the car park tape. Watches it in the station. He sees himself approaching Michaela. It looks illicit. It looks like some furtive assignation in an occupied city of long ago. You could see tramlines in the car park surface. The grid lines of long-gone streets. Men in belted coats standing at intersections, drab-suited kapos. Cold War phantoms. Letting you know you’d come under their remit. Their ghost authority. He remembers how she’d looked. Her breath in the cold air. Her blue eyes. The harshness of her accent. Her wintry gaze.

  DVLA comes back. They’ve cross-checked. They’ve found a blue Renault Megane ROI 3655 registered to Norman Donnelly.

  CID says Lorna made two complaints about Norman. Withdrew both complaints. Child protection was consulted. What was involved? McCaul says. Usual, the child protection officer says. Bring Norman in, CID says.

  McCaul’s mobile rings. Michaela. He had a tattoo, she says. Who had a tattoo? The man she was talking to. Was it a flower? McCaul says. No. It wasn’t a flower, she says. Come in tomorrow and draw it for me, he says, thinking that if it isn’t a flower then it isn’t Norman. He puts the phone down. Her accent stays in his head. A hoarse damaged sound. He remembers the way she put her hand on his sleeve. The earnest way she looked into his face. As if she was saying, We can retrieve something from this. As if she was saying that there was something to be found among the human ruins.

  CID says don’t get involved. CID says observe the code of conduct.

  Donegall Pass PSNI Station, interview suite intercam, 8:20 p.m., 27/05/13

  It’s a perspective you’ve seen a thousand times before. The suspect sits on his own at a plain table. It’s a camera but you feel as if you’re looking through a one-way mirror. You’re waiting for the suspect to turn to the mirror glass with a knowing look. But he doesn’t. Norman sits at the table with his head down and his hands hanging between his thighs. Slumped. Big man brought to his knees. McCaul asks him if Lorna got her interest in flowers from him. Flowers? Norman says. You’ve got flowers tattooed on your arm, McCaul says. Norman rolls up his sleeve. It’s not flowers, Norman says. It’s twin screws. Submarine propellers. Submarine crews get them done like that.

  She was jealous, Norman says. What do you mean jealous? McCaul says. And then the penny drops. Norman looks at him. As though this was a weakness that he might be forgiven.

  We sank a ship with torpedoes, Norman says. I dream about it. We were a week out from Ascension Island. We sank the Belgrano two hundred and fifty miles south of the Falklands. Tarry corpses floating in the cold water. Gouts of foul air vented from the sinking ship.
Bunker oil alight on the surface.

  McCaul doesn’t know why he’s being told this. Norman looks at him as if his dreams give him rights.

  I waited until she was asleep, then I hit her with a hammer. I wrapped the body in a sheet and drove it down to the embankment and put it in the water. I threw the hammer into the river. When I put her in the water I thought of corpses afloat in the wake of the Belgrano. The screeching of gulls.

  Forensic laboratory, Belfast, technician cam, 9:10 a.m., 28/05/13

  Forensics work the car from front to back. The white dust suits. Coming right down to the matter of things. The nub of it. Picking through the microfibres. Finding strands of Lorna’s hair in the boot. Finding traces of her blood.

  Windsor Park Drive, Lisburn, Panasonic HS-DC1, 9:15 p.m., 28/05/13

  They fetch Kay at home in Lisburn. A neat estate. A neat house. Diamond-pane windows in PVC. A neighbour comes out with a VHS, starts to record. Follows them up the path. The neighbours’ gardens are bare. This one is subtropical. There are moon lilies. There are giant ferns. Pale orchids. Lorna. The man filming the arrest tries to get closer.

  The house shows little of Lorna. There is a submarine photograph framed in the hallway. Men in singlets sport on her decks. They put their arms around each other and smile up at the camera.

  Kay is sitting at the kitchen table. Kay is ready for them. She is wearing a coat and scarf. She stands up when they come in. It’s not right, she says. It’s not right. A man and his daughter. It’s against nature. McCaul holds her by the arm as he leads her down the path. The crime scene people are parked beside the squad car. They’re walking up the path in dust suits. They look like ghosts beside the pale ghostly lilies. A stench of decay in the air. What the fuck is that? one of them says. McCaul tries not to gag. The smell seems to go to the heart of everything, the god-rot at the centre.

  Amorphophallus konjac. A tuberous plant of the arum family. At nightfall the sexual parts of the plant expand, emitting a smell of decaying flesh.

  Nepalese lilies, Kay says, voodoo lilies. She doesn’t break stride or look around. They were Lorna’s favourites, she says. She liked filthy things like that. She was drawn to them. The amateur cameraman gets too close. A uniform pushes him away. The camera yaws, falls to the ground. Stays there, lens open to the night as the owner scuffles with the police.

  On the way McCaul rings CID. Check what Lorna studied at Belfast Met. They come back. She studied horticulture and botany.

  Belfast Harbour Airport Departures, security cam, 10:15 p.m., 29/05/13

  Michaela’s in the queue for the eleven p.m. departure to Riga. She takes out her phone.

  Donegall Pass PSNI Station, evidence room cam, 10:45 p.m., 29/05/13

  McCaul can see himself on the monitors writing in the evidence book. He signs out the VHS of home-movie footage that the evidence team has taken from the Donnelly house. The very fact that you are on camera makes you look furtive, up to something. Other cameras are recording. The rain-lashed station car park. The wildly tossing trees. The Westlink camera records leaves whirling across the empty traffic lanes. The harbourmaster’s camera records the passage of ships outward bound into the storm-tossed shipping lanes, the North Channel, and the darkness beyond.

  His phone rings. Michaela. He told me stories about being in submarines, she says. He fooled me. I was sleeping with him. He left bruises on my body. Lorna saw us together. She came into the bar that night. She was going to tell Kay about Michaela and him. He told Lorna what would happen to her but she didn’t believe him. Michaela says that he is a very violent man and she is afraid of him. McCaul tells her that she has nothing to be afraid of. He asks her where she is. He tells her to come into the barracks in the morning and make a statement. She says she will. She promises.

  Belfast Harbour Airport, Stand 2, airbridge cam, 10:45 p.m., 29/05/13

  Michaela walks down the airbridge. She steps into the aircraft. She likes McCaul. But then she liked Norman as well. She runs her hand along the dented alloy then steps into the aircraft and the camera loses her. There are weather fronts sweeping down from the north. Soon she will be aloft, storm borne.

  HMP Maghaberry, remand wing security cam, 11:10 p.m., 29/05/13

  The landing is empty. You see only the cell doors. Norman is locked down. Norman is dreaming of subs moored at Holywell, the streaked plating. Subs under the ice pack. The stressed hull, veined and streamlined. Ghost wolf packs hunting in the frozen northern seas.

  Ravenhill Reach apartment complex, stairwell cam, 12:10 a.m., 30/05/13

  McCaul walks up the stairs to his apartment door. He lets himself in and then he’s alone. Alone in an empty flat. He looks at his phone. He thinks about ringing his ex-wife. They are on good terms. He can visit any time he likes. He lifts the phone and puts it down. She would smell it off his clothes. He can see her backing away from him. The odour of the night around him. The corpse flowers. He’d heard church bells in the city all day. He doesn’t know what they’re for. He gets up and goes to the window. The lights of the city glow orange on the underside of low clouds to the east. Ascencion. He sees his reflection in the glass, ashen, exhausted. An apostle of bad faith. He goes to the cupboard under the stairs and takes out the VHS and sets it up. He doesn’t know what he’s going to see.

  Memory Lane Photographic Studios, Crumlin Road, 04/08/04

  The Memory Lane people have added a fancy intro. A Day at the Beach, featuring Kay Donnelly and Lorna Donnelly, directed by Norman Donnelly.

  Kay and Lorna come into the shot. Norman working the camera. You’d say Lorna was eight or nine. She’s wearing a swimsuit with a short frilled skirt attached to the waist. The film stock degraded, chemicals leaching off. Nothing lasts. She has sand grains stuck to her legs. Kay is sitting on the sand wearing a one-piece swimsuit. Her black hair is cut in a bob. She is wearing dark glasses and a sun hat. You can tell she doesn’t like the camera being pointed at her. She hunches her shoulders, gathers herself in, and waves it away. There was a time when she would strike poses for him. Do some risky things for him. But not today. She understands the importance of not leaving traces. She senses what’s coming down the line. Lorna dances for the camera. It’s a trick of the light, maybe, but Norman doesn’t seem to be able to get her into sharp focus. She runs into the waves then back up the beach and into the sand dunes. She turns to look down at her mother and father. The sun dazzles. Impossible to get a clear shot of her. Then she ducks down behind a dune. You can’t see me, she calls out.

  You can’t see me.

  You can’t see me.

  PURE GAME

  BY ARLENE HUNT

  Sydenham

  Ed pulled his Renault to the kerb beneath a tattered Union flag on Island Street and turned off the ignition. He sat listening to the engine cooling, to the rain beating against the roof, the hiss and rumble of traffic from the M3 motorway a quarter of a mile away. He forced himself to inhale slowly and deeply, trying to quell his jangling nerves. The meet had been set up three weeks earlier, and even though he had been assured that his credentials would hold up there was always that fear in the pit of his gut that this time, this one time, someone would throw a spanner in the works, and he’d never see another dawn.

  Six p.m. came and went, then six thirty. He cranked the window down a little, felt the winter air against his skin, heard the Bangor train rattle past on the other side of the redbrick industrial buildings. A plane took off from the airport, its lights climbing into the black, probably headed for London Gatwick. Another two circled overhead, ready to land.

  Where were they? He wiped the condensation from the glass with his sleeve and glanced at the dash clock. Almost seven: maybe they weren’t coming. Maybe something had spooked them? It was more than possible. These men could not have gone under the radar for this length of time without being paranoid and wary. Someone opened the back door, jumped in, and slammed the door shut.

  “What about ye?” a voice said in hard-core West Belfast
.

  Ed’s eyes darted to the rearview mirror. He took in the face of the man grinning at him: young, shorthaired, midtwenties, cracked lips, ugly. Sean Lavin. Dangerous territory for him, the east of the city, unless he knew the right people.

  “You’re late.”

  “Aye, sorry about that,” Lavin said, sounding anything but sorry. “Willie’s on his way, we’ll take his car.”

  “What’s wrong with mine?”

  “We’ll take Willie’s.”

  Lavin removed a packet of cigarettes from inside his jacket. He shook one out, placed it to his lips, paused.

  “D’ye mind if I smoke?”

  “No.”

  Lavin lit up, inhaled, and sent jets of smoke through his nostrils. Ed licked his lip: he hadn’t smoked a cigarette in almost fifteen years, but now, right at that second, he’d have given plenty to accept one and smoke it to the nub.

  They sat in companionable silence. Lavin smoking, Ed watching the street. A little after seven, a silver BMW slowly passed the Renault. Ed tracked it with his eyes, thinking: A great white in urban waters. A little further on it pulled over to the kerb, and sat there idling menacingly.

  “Let’s go.” Lavin tapped his shoulder. “If you’ve a phone with ye, leave it here.”

  Ed removed his mobile from his pocket and placed it in the glove compartment. He and Lavin got out. Ed locked the car and hoped he’d see it again.