The Ghosts of Belfast (The Twelve)

For Ellen Emerald Neville

“The place that lacks its ghosts is a barren place.”

—John Hewitt

TWELVE

1

Maybe if he had one more drink they’d leave him alone. Gerry Fegan told himself that lie before every swallow. He chased the whiskey’s burn with a cool black mouthful of Guinness and placed the glass back on the table.

Look up and they’ll be gone, he thought.

No. They were still there, still staring. Twelve of them if he counted the baby in its mother’s arms.

He was good and drunk now. When his stomach couldn’t hold any more he would let Tom the barman show him to the door, and the twelve would follow Fegan through the streets of Belfast, into his house, up his stairs, and into his bedroom. If he was lucky, and drunk enough, he might pass out before their screaming got too loud to bear. That was the only time they made a sound, when he was alone and on the edge of sleep. When the baby started crying, that was the worst of it.

Fegan raised the empty glass to get Tom’s attention.

“Haven’t you had enough, Gerry?” Tom asked. “Is it not home time yet? Everyone’s gone.”

“One more,” Fegan said, trying not to slur. He knew Tom would not refuse. Fegan was still a respected man in West Belfast, despite the drink.

Sure enough, Tom sighed and raised a glass to the optic. He brought the whiskey over and counted change from the stained tabletop. The gummy film of old beer and grime sucked at his shoes as he walked away.

Fegan held the glass up and made a toast to his twelve companions. One of the five soldiers among them smiled and nodded in return. The rest just stared.

“Fuck you,” Fegan said. “Fuck the lot of you.”

None of the twelve reacted, but Tom looked back over his shoulder. He shook his head and continued walking to the bar.

Fegan looked at each of his companions in turn. Of the five soldiers three were Brits and two were Ulster Defence Regiment. Another of the followers was a cop, his Royal Ulster Constabulary uniform neat and stiff, and two more were Loyalists, both Ulster Freedom Fighters. The remaining four were civilians who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He remembered doing all of them, but it was the civilians whose memories screamed the loudest.

There was the butcher with his round face and bloody apron. Fegan had dropped the package in his shop and held the door for the woman and her baby as she wheeled the pram in. They’d smiled at each other. He’d felt the heat of the blast as he jumped into the already moving car, the blast that should have come five minutes after they’d cleared the place.

The other was the boy. Fegan still remembered the look in his eyes when he saw the pistol. Now the boy sat across the table, those same eyes boring into him.

Fegan couldn’t hold his gaze, so he turned his eyes downward. Tears pooled on the tabletop. He brought his fingers to the hollows of his face and realised he’d been weeping.

“Jesus,” he said.

He wiped the table with his sleeve and sniffed back the tears. The pub’s stale air clung to the back of his throat, as thick as the dun-colored paint on the walls. He scolded himself. He neither needed nor deserved pity, least of all his own. Weaker men than him could live with what they’d done. He could do the same.

A hand on his shoulder startled him.

“Time you were going, Gerry,” Michael McKenna said.

Tom slipped into the storeroom behind the bar. McKenna paid him to be discreet, to see and hear nothing.

Fegan knew the politician would come looking for him. He was smartly dressed in a jacket and trousers, and his fine-framed designer glasses gave him the appearance of an educated man. A far cry from the teenager Fegan had run the streets with thirty years ago. Wealth looked good on him.

“I’m just finishing,” Fegan said.

“Well, drink up and I’ll run you home.” McKenna smiled down at him, his teeth white and even. He’d had them fixed so he could look presentable for the cameras. The party leadership had insisted on it before they gave him the nomination for his seat in the Assembly. At one time, not so long past, it had been against party policy to take a seat at Stormont. But times change, even if people don’t.

“I’ll walk,” Fegan said. “It’s only a couple of minutes.”

“It’s no trouble,” McKenna said. “Besides, I wanted a word.”

Fegan nodded and took another mouthful of stout. He held it on his tongue when he noticed the boy had risen from his place on the other side of the table. It took a moment to find him, shirtless and skinny as the day he died, creeping up behind McKenna.

The boy pointed at the politician’s head. He mimed firing, his hand thrown upwards by the recoil. His mouth made a plosive movement, but no sound came.

Fegan swallowed the Guinness and stared at the boy. Something stirred in his mind, one memory trying to find another. The chill at his center pulsed with his heartbeat.

“Do you remember that kid?” he asked.

“Don’t, Gerry.” McKenna’s voice carried a warning.

“I met his mother today. I was in the graveyard and she came up to me.”

“I know you did,” McKenna said, taking the glass from Fegan’s fingers.

“She said she knew who I was. What I’d done. She said—”

“Gerry, I don’t want to know what she said. I’m more curious about what you said to her. That’s what we need to talk about. But not here.” McKenna squeezed Fegan’s shoulder. “Come on, now.”

“He hadn’t done anything. Not really. He didn’t tell the cops anything they didn’t know already. He didn’t deserve that. Jesus, he was seventeen. We didn’t have to—”

One hard hand gripped Fegan’s face, the other his thinning hair, and the animal inside McKenna showed itself. “Shut your fucking mouth,” he hissed. “Remember who you’re talking to.”

Fegan remembered only too well. As he looked into those fierce blue eyes he remembered every detail. This was the face he knew, not the one on television, but the face that burned with white-hot pleasure as McKenna set about the boy with a claw hammer, the face that was dotted with red when he handed Fegan the .22 pistol to finish it.

Fegan gripped McKenna’s wrists and prised his hands away. He stamped on his own anger, quashed it.

The smile returned to McKenna’s lips as he pulled his hands away from Fegan’s, but went no further. “Come on,” he said. “My car’s outside. I’ll run you home.”

The twelve followed them out to the street, the boy sticking close to McKenna. McKenna had climbed high in the party hierarchy, but not so high he needed an escort to guard him. Even so, Fegan knew the Mercedes gleaming in the orange street lights was armored, both bullet- and bomb-proof. McKenna probably felt safe as he lowered himself into the driver’s seat.

“Big day today,” McKenna said as he pulled the car away from the curb, leaving the followers staring after them. “Sorting the offices up at Stormont, my own desk and everything. Who’d have thought it, eh? The likes of us up on the hill. I wangled a secretary’s job for the wife. The Brits are throwing so much money at this I almost feel bad taking it off them. Almost.”

McKenna flashed Fegan a smile. He didn’t return it.

Fegan tried to avoid seeing or reading the news as much as he could, but the last two months had been a hurricane of change. Just five months ago, as one year turned to the next, they’d said it was hopeless; the political process was beyond repair. Then mountains moved, deals were struck, another election came and went, while the shadows gathered closer to Fegan. And more often than before, those shadows turned to faces and bodies and arms and legs. Now they were a constant, and he couldn’t remember when he last slept without first drowning them in whiskey.

They’d been with him since his last weeks in the Maze prison, a little over seven years ago. He’d just been given his release date, printed on a sheet of paper in a sealed envelope, and his mouth was dry when he opened it. The politicians on the outside had bartered for his freedom, along with hundreds more men and women. They called people like him political prisoners. Not murderers or thieves, not extortionists or blackmailers. Not criminals of any kind, just victims of circumstance. The followers were there when Fegan looked up from the letter, watching.

He told one of the prison psychologists about it. Dr. Brady said it was guilt. A manifestation, he called it. Fegan wondered why people seldom called things by their real names.

McKenna pulled the Mercedes into the curb outside Fegan’s small terraced house on Calcutta Street. It stood shoulder to shoulder with two dozen identical red-brick boxes, drab and neat. The followers waited on the pavement.

“Can I come in for a second?” McKenna’s smile sparkled in the car’s interior lighting, and kind lines arced out from around his eyes. “Better to talk inside, eh?”

Fegan shrugged and climbed out.

The twelve parted to let him approach his door. He unlocked it and went inside, McKenna following, the twelve slipping in between. Fegan headed straight for the sideboard where a bottle of Jameson’s and a jug of water awaited him. He showed McKenna the bottle.

“No, thanks,” McKenna said. “Maybe you shouldn’t, either.” Fegan ignored him, pouring two fingers of whiskey into a glass and the same of water. He took a deep swallow and extended his hand towards a chair.

“No, I’m all right,” McKenna said. His hair was well barbered, his skin tanned and smooth, a scar beneath his left eye the only remainder of his old self.

The twelve milled around the sparsely furnished room, merging with and diverging from the shadows, studying each man intently. The boy lingered by McKenna’s side as the politician went to the unstrung guitar propped in the corner. He picked it up and turned it in the light.

“Since when did you play guitar?” McKenna asked.

“I don’t,” Fegan said. “Put it down.”

McKenna read the label inside the sound hole. “Martin. Looks old. What’s it doing here?”

“It belonged to a friend of mine. I’m restoring it,” Fegan said. “Put it down.”

“What friend?”

“Just someone I knew inside. Please. Put it down.”

McKenna set it back in the corner. “It’s good to have friends, Gerry. You should value them. Listen to them.”

“What’d you want to talk about?” Fegan lowered himself into a chair.

McKenna nodded at the drink in Fegan’s hand. “About that, for one thing. It’s got to stop, Gerry.”

Fegan held the politician’s eyes as he drained the glass.

“People round here look up to you. You’re a Republican hero. The young fellas need a role model, someone they can respect.”

“Respect? What are you talking about?” Fegan put the glass on the coffee table. The chill of condensation clung to his palm and he let his hands slide together, working the moisture over his knuckles and between his fingers. “There’s no respecting what I’ve done.”

McKenna’s face flushed with anger. “You did your time. You were a political prisoner for twelve years. A dozen years of your life given up for the cause. Any Republican should respect that.” His expression softened. “But you’re pissing it away, Gerry. People are starting to notice. Every night you’re at the bar, drunk off your face, talking to yourself.”

“I’m not talking to myself.” Fegan went to point at the followers, but thought better of it.

“Then who are you talking to?” McKenna’s voice wavered with an exasperated laugh.

“The people I killed. The people we killed.”

“Watch your mouth, Gerry. I never killed anybody.”

Fegan met McKenna’s blue eyes. “No, the likes of you and McGinty were always too smart to do it yourselves. You used mugs like me instead.”

McKenna folded his arms across his barrel chest. “Nobody’s hands are clean.”

“What else?” Fegan asked. “You said ‘for one thing’. What else do you want?”

McKenna circled the room, the boy following, and Fegan had to twist in his chair to keep him in sight. “I need to know what you told that woman,” McKenna said.

“Nothing,” Fegan said. “I’m not much of a talker. You know that.”

“No, you’re not. But a reliable source tells me the cops are going to start digging up the bogs near Dungannon in the next few days. Round about where we buried that boy. His mother told them where to look.” McKenna moved to the center of the room and loomed over Fegan. “Now, how did she know that, Gerry?”

“Does it matter?” Fegan asked. “Jesus, there’ll be nothing left of him. It’s been more than twenty years.”

“It matters,” McKenna said. “If you open your mouth, you’re a tout. And you know what happens to touts.”

Fegan tightened his fingers on the chair’s armrests.

McKenna leaned down, his hands on his thighs. “Why, Gerry? Why’d you tell her? What good did you think it’d do?”

Fegan searched for a lie, anything, but found nothing. “I thought maybe he’d leave me alone,” he said.

“What?” McKenna straightened.

“I thought he’d go,” Fegan said. He looked at the boy aiming his fingers at McKenna’s head. “I thought he’d leave me alone. Give me some peace.”

McKenna took a step back. “Who? The boy?”

“But that wasn’t what he wanted.”

“Christ, Gerry.” McKenna shook his head. “What’s happened to you? Maybe you should see a doctor, you know, get straight. Go away for a while.”

Fegan looked down at his hands. “Maybe.”

“Listen.” McKenna put a hand on Fegan’s shoulder. “My source talks only to me, nobody else. You’ve been a good friend to me over the years, and that’s the only reason I haven’t gone to McGinty with this. If he knew you opened your mouth to that auld doll, it’s your body the cops would be looking for.”

Fegan wanted to jerk his shoulder away from McKenna’s hand. He sat still.

“Of course, I might need you to return the favor. There’s work I could put your way. I’ve a few deals going on, stuff McGinty isn’t in on. If you can stay off the drink, get yourself right, you could be a big help to me. And McGinty doesn’t need to know what you said to that boy’s mother.”

Fegan watched the boy’s face contort as the other shadows gathered around him.

“Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Gerry?”

“Yes,” Fegan said.

“Good man.” McKenna smiled.

Fegan stood. “I need a piss.”

McKenna stepped back and said, “Don’t be long.”

Fegan made his way up the stairs and into the bathroom. He closed and bolted the door but, as always, the followers found their way in. Except the boy. Fegan paid it little mind, instead concentrating on keeping upright while he emptied his bladder. He had long since gotten used to the twelve witnessing his most undignified moments.

He flushed, rinsed his hands under the tap, and opened the door. The boy was there, on the landing, waiting for him. He stared into the darkness of Fegan’s bedroom.

Fegan stood for a moment, confused, as his temples buzzed and the chill pulsed at his center.

The boy pointed into the room.

“What?” Fegan asked.

The boy bared his teeth, and his skinny arm jerked towards the door.

“All right,” Fegan said. He walked to his bedroom, glancing back over his shoulder.

The boy followed him into the darkness and kneeled at the foot of the bed. He pointed underneath.

Fegan got to his hands and knees and peered under the bedstead. Thin light leaking in from the landing showed the old shoebox hidden there.

He raised his head, questioning. The boy nodded.

Fegan could just reach it if he stretched. He pulled it towards himself. Something heavy shifted inside as it moved, and Fegan’s heart quickened. He removed the lid and was met by the greasy smell of money. Rolls of banknotes were bundled in here, twenties, fifties, hundreds. Fegan didn’t know how much. He’d never counted it.

But there was something else, something cold and black lying half-concealed in the paper. Something Fegan didn’t want in his hand. In the semi-darkness his eyes found the boy’s.

“No,” Fegan said.

The boy stabbed at the object with his finger.

“No.” The word felt watery on Fegan’s tongue.

The boy’s mouth gaped, his hands grabbing clumps of hair. Before the scream could come, Fegan reached in and lifted the Walther P99 from its nest.

A grin blossomed on the boy’s face, his teeth glinting. He mimed the act of pulling back the slide assembly to chamber the first round.

Fegan looked from the boy to the pistol and back again. The boy nodded. Fegan drew back the slide, released it, hearing the snick-snick of oiled parts moving together. The gun was solid in his grasp, like the shake of an old friend’s hand.

The boy smiled, stood, and walked towards the landing.

Fegan stared down at the Walther. He had bought it a few weeks after leaving the Maze, just for protection, and it only came out of the box for cleaning. His fingertip found the trigger curled inside the guard.

The boy waited in the doorway.

Fegan got to his feet and followed him to the stairs. The boy descended, the lean grace of his body seemingly untouched by the light below.

Fegan began the slow climb downward. An adrenal surge stirred dark memories, voices long silenced, faces like bloodstains. The others came behind, sharing glances with one another. As he reached the bottom, he saw McKenna’s back. The politician studied the old photograph of Fegan’s mother, the one that showed her young and pretty in a doorway.

The boy crossed the room and again played out the execution of the man who had taken him apart with a claw hammer more than twenty years ago.

Fegan’s heart thundered, his lungs heaved. Surely McKenna would hear.

The boy looked to Fegan and smiled.

Fegan asked, “If I do it, will you leave me alone?”

The boy nodded.

“What?” McKenna put the framed picture down. He turned to the voice and froze when he saw the gun aimed at his forehead.

“I can’t do it here.”

The boy’s smile faltered.

“Not in my house. Somewhere else.”

The smile returned.

“Jesus, Gerry.” McKenna gave a short, nervous laugh as he held his hands up. “What’re you at?”

“I’m sorry, Michael. I have to.”

McKenna’s smile fell away. “I don’t get it, Gerry. We’re friends.”

“We’re going to get into your car.” The clarity crackled in Fegan’s head. For the first time in months his hand did not shake.

McKenna’s mouth twisted. “Like fuck we are.”

“We’re going to get into your car,” Fegan repeated. “You in the front, me in the back.”

“Gerry, your head’s away. Put the gun down before you do something you’ll regret.”

Fegan stepped closer. “The car.”

McKenna reached out. “Now, come on, Gerry. Let’s just calm down a second, here, all right? Why don’t you give that to me, and I’ll put it away. Then we’ll have a drink.”

“I won’t say it again.”

“No messing, Gerry, let me have it.”

McKenna went to grab the gun, but Fegan pulled his hand away. He brought it back to aim at the center of McKenna’s forehead.

“You always were a mad cunt.” McKenna kept his eyes on him as he went to the door. He opened it and stepped out onto the street. He looked left and right, right and left, searching for a witness. When his shoulders slumped, Fegan knew there was no one. This was not the kind of street where curtains twitched.

The Merc’s locking system sensed the key was in range, whirring and clunking as McKenna approached.

“Open the back door,” Fegan said.

McKenna did as he was told.

“Now get in the front and leave the door open till I’m inside.” Fegan kept the Walther trained on McKenna’s head until he was seated at the steering wheel.

Fegan slid into the back, careful not to touch the leather upholstery with his bare hands. He used a handkerchief to pull the door closed. Tom had seen him leave with the politician, so his prints around the front passenger seat didn’t matter. McKenna sat quite still with his hands on the wheel.

“Now close the door and go.”

The Merc’s big engine rumbled into life, and McKenna pulled away. Fegan took one glance from the back window and saw the twelve watching from the pavement. The boy stepped out onto the road and waved.

Fegan lay down flat in the cloaking shadows. He pressed the gun’s muzzle against the back of the driver’s seat, exactly where McKenna’s heart would be, if he’d ever had one.

2

Fegan knew the streets around the docks would be deserted. The Merc’s engine ticked as it cooled, punctuating the occasional rumble of traffic from the elevated motorway behind, where the M3 became the M2. In front of them, the River Lagan flowed into Belfast Lough. The lights of the Odyssey complex shimmered across the water. The nightclubs inside it would be thronging with the young and affluent; young enough to have no memory of men like Fegan, affluent enough not to care.

Beyond the Odyssey stood Samson and Goliath, the massive gantry cranes towering over the old shipyard. On the other side of Queen’s Island, a small airplane circled the City Airport, now renamed after the great George Best, the footballer who destroyed himself with alcohol. The plane’s engine whined and buzzed. McKenna’s shoulders rose and fell with each breath.

Fegan raised himself up to sit behind the politician, the gun still at the center of the seat-back. The sweat-damped fabric of his shirt slid across his shoulder blades. He looked around the patch of waste ground they were parked on. No CCTV, no people. Only the rats to witness it.

And the followers.

They moved between the pools of darkness, watching, waiting. All except the boy. He leaned against the driver’s door, cupping his hands around his eyes, staring at McKenna though the glass.

“Look at that,” McKenna said, indicating the stretch of land around the cranes. “They’re calling it the Titanic Quarter now. Can you believe that?”

Fegan didn’t answer.

“There’s a fortune being made out of that land. It’s good times, Gerry. The contracts, the grants, all that property they’re building, and everybody’s got their hand out. But, Jesus, they’re naming it after a fucking boat that sank first time it hit the water. Isn’t that a laugh? This city gave the world the biggest disaster ever to sail the sea, and we’re proud of it. Only in Belfast, eh?”

McKenna fell silent for a few seconds before he asked, “What do you want, Gerry?”

“Make a phone call,” Fegan said.

“Who to?”

“Tom. Tell him to close up. Tell him you dropped me off and you went to see someone at the docks. If he asks who, tell him it’s about a deal you’re doing.”

McKenna’s laugh betrayed his fear. “Why would I do that? Why would I phone anyone?”

“Because I’ll kill you if you don’t.”

“I think you’ll kill me anyway.”

Fegan looked up to the rear-view mirror. He could just make out McKenna’s eyes in the darkness, his glasses reflecting the light from across the water. “There’s dying and there’s dying, Michael. Two very different things. You know that.”

“Jesus.” McKenna’s shoulders shook as he exhaled. “Oh, Jesus, Gerry. I can’t.”

Fegan raised the Walther’s muzzle to the base of McKenna’s skull. “Do it.”

McKenna bowed his head and sighed. His mobile phone’s screen washed the car’s interior with a blue-green glow. The phone beeped and burbled in his trembling hand before he brought it to his ear.

“Yeah . . . Tom, listen, just lock up and take the cash home with you . . . He’s all right. I put him to bed. I’m over at the docks . . . To meet a fella . . . Just business. Listen, gotta go. I’ll pick up the cash tomorrow . . . Yeah, all right . . . See you then.”

The phone beeped once, and its soft light died.

McKenna turned his head. “Do you remember when we were kids, Gerry?”

Fegan smelled sweat and fear, McKenna’s and his own. Enough memories were stirring without this.

McKenna continued. “Do you remember that time the Brits got us for bricking them? What were we, sixteen, seventeen? Remember, I threw the first one and went running. Wee Patsy Toner was too scared to do it, so he came running after me.”

He craned his neck, trying to see Fegan. Fegan jabbed the gun’s muzzle against the back of his head until he looked straight ahead. Ahead to where the followers waited. Except the boy. He still stared through the driver’s window.

McKenna laughed. “Not you, though. You were never scared. Not of anybody. You stood your ground. You waited till you saw the whites of their eyes before you chucked yours. Remember, you hit one of them in the face. Their heads were poking out the top of the Land Rover and the brick hit him right in the nose. Blood pissing everywhere.”

“Enough,” Fegan said. Memory cursed him.

“And then they chased us up the Falls. Jesus, do you remember? You and me laughing, and wee Patsy screaming for his ma.”

Fegan pressed the gun harder against McKenna’s skull. “I said enough.”

“And they got us in Brighton Street. Christ, they kicked the fuck out of us, didn’t they? Oh, that was a beating. And do you remember . . .” McKenna’s shoulders shook with laughter. “Do you remember they got hold of wee Patsy, and he pissed himself all over one of them?”

A smile found Fegan’s lips and he wiped it off with his free hand. “They broke his arm for that.”

“That’s right,” McKenna said, the laughter dying in his throat. “And we joined up the next day. Broke your ma’s heart, that, didn’t it?”

“That’s enough.” Fegan’s eyes burned.

McKenna’s voice turned to a snarl. “It was me got you in, Gerry. Me. I got you in with McGinty and the rest. They’d have never taken you without me. Don’t you forget that. You’d have been nothing without me, just another Catholic boy on the dole.”

“That’s right,” Fegan said. “I’d have been nothing. I’d have done nothing. And those people would be alive. That boy would be alive. He’d have a wife, children, a home, all of that. We took that away from him. You and me.”

McKenna’s voice boomed inside the car. “He was a fucking tout. He squealed to the cops. He was dead the second he opened his mouth.”

A stillness settled in Fegan. “That’s enough,” he said.

“Gerry, think about what you’re doing. The boys won’t let it go, ceasefire or not. Stormont or not. They’ll come after you.”

A tear traced a warm line down Fegan’s cheek and he tasted salt. “Jesus, I promised myself I’d never do this again.”

“Then don’t, Gerry. Listen, it’s not too late. You’re drunk and you’re depressed, I know. You’re not at yourself. There won’t be any trouble if you stop now.”

Fegan shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Thirty years, Gerry. We’ve known each other thirty—”

The Walther barked once, throwing red and grey against the windscreen. McKenna slumped forward onto the steering wheel, and the Merc’s horn screamed at the night. Fegan reached forward, pulled him back against the seat, and silence swallowed them.

He climbed out of the car and used his handkerchief to open the driver’s door. In the scant light from across the water he saw McKenna’s dull eyes staring up at him, his designer glasses cracked and hanging off one ear. Fegan put another bullet in his heart, just to be sure. The pistol’s hoarse shout rippled across the Lagan towards the glittering buildings.

Fegan wiped the wet heat from his eyes and looked around him. The followers emerged from the dark places and jostled for position around the open door, glancing from Fegan to the body, from the body to Fegan. He studied each of them in turn, his eyes moving from one to the next. He counted them as they retreated to the shadows.

The boy wasn’t among them.

One down.

Eleven to go.

ELEVEN

3

“That’s him,” McSorley said, pointing to a blurred image on a stained sheet of paper. It showed an elderly man unlocking the door of a post office.

Davy Campbell turned the page on the tabletop to get a better look.

Soft target, he thought. Typical.

McSorley slurped at his beer and wiped his mouth clean. His denims were at least fifteen years too young for him. Hughes and Comiskey lounged on the other side of the booth. The drink had already reddened their eyes, and it was only lunchtime.

McSorley addressed them. “You two hold on to his wife, and me and Davy will take care of him.”

Campbell looked out the window to the sun-baked car park, the two rusted vehicles sitting there, and the mountains beyond. No traffic moved along the road on the outskirts of Dundalk. The diversions for the new motorway’s construction had whittled down business at the Player’s Inn to the extent that Eugene McSorley could talk aloud about his plans without fear of eavesdroppers. In a few months four lanes would carry traffic from the heart of Dublin all the way to Newry, just across the border in the North, and then on to Belfast. The port town of Dundalk would be bypassed altogether, along with the Player’s Inn.

The Gaelic football memorabilia on the walls used to impress the tourists who landed by the busload on their way through to Dublin. They didn’t know how bad the food was until it arrived on chipped plates, wallowing in grease. The football shirts and trophies displayed around the bar looked a little sad now the only customers were this shower of shit.

The landlord’s father, Joe Gribben Senior, had been on the 1957 Louth team that won the Sam Maguire Cup, and Joe Gribben Junior would never let it be forgotten. Born and raised in Glasgow, Campbell had no interest in Gaelic football. And Joe Gribben Junior wisely had no interest in this discussion, so he stayed at the far end of the bar, out of earshot.

Comiskey leaned forward and waved a finger at Campbell. “How come he gets to go? Why’ve I got to stay with the auld doll?”

Campbell reached out and seized the finger. “Get that out of my face before I break it off.”

“Quit it,” McSorley scolded as he separated their hands. “Davy’s going with me ’cause he knows what he’s doing. All you know how to do is sit around and scratch your arse, so shut your trap and do what you’re told.”

“Away and shite,” Comiskey said. He sat back and folded his arms.

Campbell returned his stare until the other backed down. Were these really the best men McSorley could gather up? Taking a post office might raise enough cash to get some decent weapons, but what was the point of putting them in the hands of people like Comiskey? He’d probably shoot his own toe off.

Not for the first time, Campbell wondered what the fuck he was doing with this lot. They called themselves Republicans, truer to the cause than those sell-outs north of the border, but they could barely organise a round of beers. One insane act nine years before had almost wiped the dissidents out. The disastrous bombing of Omagh killed twenty-nine civilians and two unborn twins on a summer afternoon in 1998, just months after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. What little support the breakaway Republican groups had evaporated overnight. The changes in the North were swelling their numbers, however, as more and more foot soldiers drifted to the dissidents; they feared becoming nobodies again now the movement had no further use for them. The peace process had left many idle hands, and the devil was busy doling out work.

Some of the boys had objected to Campbell’s presence, seeing as he wasn’t even Irish, but his reputation had travelled ahead of him from Belfast. When he crossed the border to Dundalk, McSorley sought the Scotsman out and made him his right-hand man. The dissidents were made up of gangs like McSorley’s, some larger, some smaller, all loosely affiliated under a common cause. Soon, maybe this year, maybe next, they would pull together and be a real threat once more. Until then, they would continue bickering amongst themselves while knocking over country post offices.

A job’s a job, Campbell reminded himself. He sighed inwardly and let his eyes wander while McSorley recited the plan for the tenth time.

His eyes stopped at the silent television over the bar. A photograph of a familiar face was replaced by footage of men in white paper overalls and surgical masks examining a Mercedes.

“Look,” Campbell said.

McSorley was too wrapped up in his own plan to notice, so Campbell slapped his shoulder.

“What?”

“Look.” Campbell jerked his head at the television. “Hey, Joe! Turn that up, will you?”

The landlord obliged and the refined tones of an RTÉ reporter said, “A police spokesperson has refused to speculate on who might have been behind the killing of Michael McKenna, but security analysts have indicated that Loyalists or dissident Republicans are primary suspects.”

“Well, fuck, it wasn’t me,” McSorley said.

Comiskey and Hughes laughed. Campbell did not. A tingle of excitement sparkled in his stomach. He swallowed and pushed it down.

The reporter went on. “Although there had been rumors of a rift between Mr. McKenna and the party leadership, an internal feud has been ruled out by all observers. Security analysts have, however, specu - lated on the further political ramifications of Michael McKenna’s murder. As a senior Republican, and a member of Northern Ireland’s Executive at Stormont, his killing has the potential to destabilize the hard-won settlement in the North just as the newly formed government finds its feet.”

“Fuck me,” McSorley said. “Someone finally got Michael McKenna. Thank Christ for that. I won’t have to look at that slimy bastard’s face on the telly any more.”

The television switched to archive footage of McKenna being interviewed in front of his office on Belfast’s Springfield Road. Hughes and Comiskey jeered when the camera zoomed in on the party’s logo. As the report wrapped up, the northern correspondent said, “Police forensics officers remain at the scene.”

“They’ll find fuck all,” Campbell said. “Their forensics are shite. I’m surprised they found the bloody car.” His hand went to his pocket, feeling for his mobile phone. He wondered if he’d missed a call.

McSorley snorted. “Whoever it was, I’ll buy him a pint. Here, Davy, you knew McKenna, didn’t you?”

“Pretty well,” Campbell said. “He didn’t take it too kindly when I left to come down here. Said he’d break my knees if I showed my face in Belfast again.”

“Looks like someone did you a favor, then.”

Campbell gave it a moment’s thought. “Maybe. There’ll be trouble, though. The boys in Belfast won’t let that go. Somebody’s going to pay. I’ll tell you that for nothing.”

McSorley chuckled, his red-lined cheeks glowing.

“You look pretty chuffed about it,” Campbell said.

“Chuffed?” McSorley grinned and swept back his greying hair. “I’m as happy as a dog with two cocks and two lamp-posts to piss on. As the old saying goes, Davy, tiocfaidh ár lá. Our day will come.”

He draped his arm around Campbell’s shoulder and leaned in close. His breath stirred the coarse hairs of Campbell’s beard. “Those bastards in Belfast have had it their way too long. They cashed in and left us swinging. Tell you what, I’ll get a round in and we’ll drink a toast to whatever cunt killed Michael McKenna.”

Campbell stood to let McSorley slide out of the booth, relieved to be free of his embrace. McSorley stopped halfway to the bar and came back to Campbell. He reached out his hand. Campbell gripped it in his.

“We need boys like you, Davy,” McSorley said, squeezing Campbell’s fingers. “I’m glad you’re with us.”

McSorley released Campbell’s hand and turned away. Campbell wiped it on his jeans. He slipped back into the booth and noticed Hughes and Comiskey’s attention.

“What?” he said.

Comiskey gave him a lopsided smile. “You might fool him, Davy, but you don’t fool me. Just remember, I’ll be watching you.”

“Is that right?” Campbell raised his eyebrows and returned the smile.

“That’s right. You put a foot wrong and I’ll have you, boy.” Comiskey placed his elbows on the table, formed a pistol with his fingers, and mimed cocking it. “Click-click, Davy.”

“Ready when you are, pal,” Campbell said. He held Comiskey’s gaze just long enough to make his point before turning his eyes to the mountains beyond the window. He thought of Michael McKenna’s corpse lying in a car in Belfast, and his gut twisted with a mix of sweet anticipation and cold unease.

4

Two officers sat across the table from Fegan, and Patsy Toner at his right hand. The interview room in Lisburn Road Police Station had the bland clinical feel of a hospital.

“And Mr. McKenna just let himself out after he put you to bed?” the older officer asked.

“Mr. Fegan has already answered that question,” Toner said. His rumpled navy suit looked like it had been slipped over his bony frame in a hurry.

“Well, I’d like him to answer it again. Just for confirmation.” The officer smiled.

“As far as I know, yeah, he let himself out,” Fegan said. “I was drunk. I passed out as soon as I hit the pillow.”

The truth was he’d slept very little the previous night. It took him an hour and a half to work his way through the streets, avoiding CCTV cameras on his route home. He climbed a wall into the back yard of one of the derelict houses two streets away from his place and hid the gun under some wood in a crumbling shed. He slipped quietly into his home and went straight upstairs. For the first time in two months he lay down in peace, but the ringing in his ears and the memory of the boy’s savage grin kept him staring at his ceiling. Sleep evaded him until light crept through the crack in the curtains.

“Fair enough,” the officer said. “That’ll do us for now.”

As they walked to Toner’s car, Fegan asked, “How did you know to be waiting there for me?”

Toner smiled and said, “We’ve got a friend inside. Have done for years. He rang me as soon as he heard the Major Investigation Team were going to question you. He doesn’t see much action these days, but he’s still useful to have.”

Toner had a good career as a solicitor. Small and thin, he still looked like the boy Fegan had run with all those years ago, despite the thick moustache. He claimed to be a human-rights lawyer when he talked to the press, though Fegan knew exactly whose rights he fought for. And his Jaguar proved they paid well.

Toner cleared his throat as he started the engine. “I’ve to take you to see someone before I bring you home,” he said.

“Who?” Fegan asked. He let his hand rest near the door handle, ready to pull it and run.

“An old friend.” Toner gave him a reassuring smile as he pulled away.

Fegan moved his fingers away from the door handle and steeled himself. He was grateful for Toner’s silence as the Jaguar made its way north along the Lisburn Road, stopping every few dozen yards for pedes trian crossings. Designer boutiques, restaurants and wine bars passed on either side. Students and young professionals crossed at the lights.

They think the city belongs to them now, Fegan thought. If the peace process meant they could buy overpriced coffee without fear, then perhaps they were right. A young woman in a business suit crossed in front of the Jaguar’s bonnet, a mobile phone pressed to her ear. Fegan wondered if she was even born when they scraped the body parts off the streets with shovels.

He turned his mind away from that image, angered at his own bitterness. The quiet after weeks of clamor unsettled him. Now that the followers had left him alone, now the chill at his center and twists in his stomach had abated, he found the clarity disorienting. But seven years of shadows and glimpses would not end for the passing of Michael McKenna. The eleven were there somewhere, just beyond his vision, waiting. Fegan was sure of that.

Eventually, Toner turned left onto Tate’s Avenue, heading west across the city. Back to where they belonged.

The exterior of the old Celtic Supporters Club had seen better days. Tricolors and footballs decorated the sign above the entrance, but the paint flaked away to expose rotting wood. Behind metal grilles, the grubby painted-over windows made the building appear blinded.

Toner led Fegan inside. The sole afternoon drinker kept his eyes on his newspaper as they entered. A smell of stale beer and cigarettes laced the dimness; the smoking ban would never be enforced in places like this.

They went to the rear of the club and entered a dank and narrow corridor with doors to the toilets at either side, and another marked PRIVATE at the end. As Toner went to open the door to the back room, a flash of pain burst in Fegan’s head, a lightning arc between his temples. He stopped and leaned against the wall. A chill crept inward from his limbs, crawling to his core like icy spider webs.

Toner looked back over his shoulder and said, “Jesus, Gerry, what’s wrong?”

Fegan breathed deep. “Nothing,” he said. “I’m tired, that’s all.”

Eleven shadows moved along the corridor, past Toner, and became one with the darkness beyond. Toner came back to Fegan and put a small hand on his shoulder.

“He only wants a word,” Toner said. “Don’t worry.”

Fegan brushed Toner’s hand away. “I’m not worried; I’m hungover. Come on.”

He pushed past Toner, went to the door, and opened it. His heart lurched at the sight of the man who waited there.

Vincie Caffola’s bald head reflected light from the bare bulb above. Boxes and barrels had been moved to the outside of the room, and a single wooden chair placed at its center. Plastic sheeting covered the floor, and Caffola wore new overalls that struggled to contain his bulky shoulders.

“Gerry, how’re ya?” Caffola’s smile made Fegan’s stomach turn.

“All right.”

“I’ll wait in the car.” Toner patted Fegan’s back and disappeared the way they had come.

“Take a seat,” Caffola said.

Fegan sat down, placing his hands on his knees, fighting the urge to cover himself. The light bulb above swung lazily in the draught from Toner closing the door. It made Caffola’s shadow sweep across the wall. Other shadows followed it, crossing one another, solidifying. Fegan swallowed and blinked against the ache settling behind his eyes.

“Bad news about Michael, eh?” Caffola wore a grim expression.

Two forms stepped out of the dark corners, young men long dead. Blood and black earth streaked their uniforms. Fegan focused on Caffola even as they raised their hands to form pistols with their fingers.

“Yeah,” he said. “I thought it was all over.”

“It’ll never be over.” Caffola paced the floor. The two Ulster Defence Regiment men moved with him. “Not till the Brits get out. I made my position clear to McGinty and the rest of them. I don’t like what’s going on. Supporting the peelers, sitting at Stormont, all that. But I go with the party, no matter what.”

“You were always loyal,” Fegan said.

“Yeah, loyal.” Caffola seemed to like the word. He clapped his hands once. Back to business. “So, I need to find out what happened to Michael. He left you home last night. What time?”

“About quarter past, half twelve. Something like that.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No, we didn’t talk much. I was pissed.” There had been a time when Caffola took orders from Fegan. The admission of his weakness shamed him.

“Did he say anything about these boys he was doing business with?”

Fegan looked up at the big man. “What boys?”

“A bunch of fucking Liths.” Caffola’s mouth twisted as if the word had a foul taste. “Dirty bastards. I swear to God, this place is getting so full of foreigners it won’t be worth getting the Brits out. Fucking Lithuanians, Polish, niggers, pakis, chinks. You walk through town any day you hardly hear an Irish accent. All foreigners. And Dublin’s worse. Have you been there lately?”

“No,” Fegan said.

“Fucking foreigners everywhere, dirty fuckers serving you food. I can’t eat out any more ’cause some black bastard’s got his hands all over it.” Caffola shuddered.

Fegan’s mind chased memories as he watched the two UDR men aim at Caffola’s shaved head, executing him just as the boy had McKenna. His breath caught in his chest when the memory snapped into place. It was in a room like this, in Lurgan, twenty miles south-west of the city.

The old Ulster Defence Regiment was once made up of part-time soldiers recruited from the local population. Like the police, they were almost entirely Protestant. Some were also Loyalists abusing the job to target Catholics while they patrolled country lanes and smaller towns. A unit of six had been ambushed in a landmine attack near Magheralin. Two died instantly, two lay broken but still alive at the roadside, and two fled across the fields. A gang of local boys who were there to pick off the survivors caught them within ten minutes and brought them to a shebeen on a housing estate on the edge of Lurgan. Caffola and Fegan reached the drinking club within the hour.

Vincie Caffola was better at getting information than anyone in the movement. He was a big man, but slow. He knew how to inflict pain, he was an artist in that way, but he was no good in a fight. Fegan came along just in case.

The two UDR men were bleeding hard, both crying with pain and terror. Their mouths gaped, dripping red from shredded gums as their teeth lay scattered on the floor. They’d given up the little they knew an hour before, but Caffola kept going. He was kneeling on the floor, pulling out a toenail with his pliers when, suddenly, the foot he was working on kicked out, throwing him off balance. Caffola landed on his back, and the UDR man was on his feet, his bonds falling away. Caffola just lay there, staring up at the screaming soldier, unable to move. Fegan put a hole through the soldier’s head before he took his second step. The other, still fixed to the chair, squealed as his friend’s body hit the floor. Fegan silenced him with a shot to the temple. He looked down at Caffola, still sprawled in the blood and teeth, and told him to clean this fucking mess up.

Now Fegan considered his possibilities. If Caffola’s questioning became physical, Fegan was confident he could handle the big man. But there’d be no escaping. The boys would be after him. He decided to be still.

“I don’t know any foreigners,” he said.

“So you don’t know this cunt, then?” Caffola went to a cupboard door and opened it. A tall thin man was curled up inside, bound hand and foot, gagged. He stared out at them, shaking. Red blotches stained his grey suit.

The two UDR men moved back into the dark corners. Fegan lost them among the shadows, and the pain behind his eyes faded to a murmur.

“No,” he said. “I’ve never seen him before.”

Caffola reached down and pulled the gag away from the man’s mouth. He pointed to Fegan. “Do you know him?”

The man looked to Fegan, then back to Caffola. He shook his head.

“You sure?”

The man lifted his bound hands and began to plead in some Slavic language. Caffola placed a hand on either side of the door frame to brace himself and swung his boot into the cupboard, punctuating his words with the sound of leather on flesh. “Speak . . . fucking . . . English . . . you . . . dirty . . . bastard . . . or . . . I’ll . . . kick . . . your ... face . . . in.”

“Stop!” the man wailed. “Please, sir, stop!”

“Out you come,” Caffola said as he grabbed a handful of blond hair. He heaved and the man came screaming after. “I need the chair, Gerry.”

Fegan stood up and went to the edge of the room.

Caffola hoisted the man up onto the chair and indicated Fegan. “Do you know him?”

The man shook his head.

“He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him,” Fegan said.

Caffola held a hand up to silence his old comrade. “All right, I just wanted to be sure. Now let’s see what he does know.”

The man’s terrified eyes darted between Fegan and Caffola. His breath came in shallow rasps. A bitter, stale smell filled the room.

“Who is he?” Fegan asked.

“This is Petras Adamkus,” Caffola said. “Say hello, Petras.”

Petras looked from one man to the other.

Caffola gave him one hard slap across the cheek. “I told you to say hello.”

“Hello,” Petras said in a small, high voice.

“Better,” Caffola said. “Now, let’s get down to it. Why did you kill Michael McKenna?”

Petras gaped up at him.

Caffola slapped him again, harder. “Why did you kill Michael McKenna?”

Petras held his bound hands up. “No, no. Michael my friend. We make business. Good deal. Good girls. Young girls. No hurt him.”

Caffola drew back his heavy fist and launched it at the Lithuanian’s chin. It connected with a wet smacking sound, and Petras’s head rocked back, tipping the chair. He landed hard on the floor, blood dripping from his already swelling lip.

Caffola smiled at Fegan. “Brings it all back, doesn’t it?”

When he took a pair of pliers from his pocket, Fegan asked, “Can I go?”

“No stomach for it any more?”

“No.”

“All right,” Caffola said. “You say you had nothing to do with it, that’s good enough for me.”

Fegan opened the door to the corridor. A spark flared in his temple, and he looked back over his shoulder. The two UDR men raised their fingers to Caffola’s bald head.

“Another time,” Fegan said.

“Yeah,” Caffola said as he lifted the Lithuanian back onto the chair. “See you again, Gerry.”

Fegan turned his back on them and walked through the corridor and the bar beyond, out onto the street where Patsy Toner waited in his Jaguar.

5

The Minister of State for Northern Ireland, Edward Hargreaves MP, teed off in afternoon sunlight. He shaded his eyes as the ball soared up and away into the sky above the Old Course at St Andrews. It drifted, veering to the left, and began a slow descent. It bounced three times and disappeared into a patch of gorse.

“Bastard,” he said, and handed the club to the caddy without looking at him.

“Bad luck, Minister,” the third man present said as he placed his tee. A gun bulged at the small of Compton’s back as he bent over.

Hargreaves was glad his new Personal Protection Officer was reasonably affable, unlike the sour fellow he’d had before, but did they have to give him someone so good at golf? Compton’s perfect swing sent the ball off to land precisely between two bunkers, an easy chip away from the green.

Today had been rotten so far, and would likely worsen. The phone at Hargreaves’s hotel bedside had woken him at eight, bearing bad news. Hargreaves had found Michael McKenna to be entirely objectionable on the few occasions they’d met, so he felt no grief, but the trouble his killing would stir could derail years of hard work.

The hard work of Hargreaves and the Secretary of State’s predecessors, admittedly, but still.

God help him, he might even have to visit the forsaken place again this month. He’d just returned from a solid week there, and surely that was enough? Had it been up to Hargreaves he would have cut the hellish waste of land adrift years ago. But there were those in government, and in royalty, who felt some misguided sense of duty to the six counties across the sea, so it was his burden to carry.

Now Northern Ireland’s factions had finally agreed to share governance amongst themselves, Hargreaves’s role was largely a matter of passing papers on to the Secretary for signing, so it wasn’t altogether a disaster. Just as long as the natives behaved, that was.

The phone in his pocket vibrated. The call he dreaded. He answered it with a heavy heart.

A woman’s voice said, “The Chief Constable is ready to speak with you now, Minister. It’s a secure line. Go ahead.”

“Good afternoon, Geoff,” Hargreaves said. “What have you got?”

“Not a great deal,” Pilkington said.

Hargreaves didn’t like the Chief Constable, but he respected him. Geoff Pilkington was a hard man who had worked the streets of Manchester before climbing the ranks. He was one of the few Chief Constables who had done any real police work in his career, rather than using a public school and Oxbridge education to grease his way into the position. He took grief from no one, but had a keen political savvy that belied his rough exterior. He knew when to shout, and when to whisper. If Pilkington had aimed for Parliament instead of the senior ranks of the force, Hargreaves was sure he’d have been in the Cabinet by now. He had taken the top job in the Police Service of Northern Ireland as it completed its transition from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and it had been a testing time. But he had weathered it, achieving the impossible by earning the respect of the whole of Northern Ireland society, albeit begrudgingly from some quarters.

“Who was it?” Hargreaves asked. “Loyalists? Dissidents?”

“Neither, we think. It was done at close range, no sign of a struggle. We’re pretty sure it was someone he knew.”

“His own people?” Hargreaves walked after his ball, Compton and the caddy following.

“Unlikely,” Pilkington said. “There’s been no indication of a split. Even if there was, they wouldn’t want to rock the boat. Not now they’ve got their feet under the table at Stormont.”

“Then who? I have to tell the Secretary something.”

“We know he was doing business with some Lithuanians, bringing illegals up over the border from Dublin. Girls, mostly, for the sex trade.”

“I didn’t think McKenna’s lot were into all that. More the Loyalists’ forte.”

“The official line from the party is no criminal activity at all, but they don’t control what individuals choose to do. Leaves people like McKenna with a little more freedom to operate. If there’s money in it, they’ll do it. And whatever the party says, the money still flows uphill.”

It never ceased to amaze Hargreaves that people would vote for criminals in full knowledge of their nature. He doubted there was a more cynical electorate in the world. The average Northern Irish pleb could read between the lines of a speech better than any professional political analyst, disbelieving every treacherous word. Yet still they voted as predictably, election after election. He wondered why they didn’t just have a sectarian headcount every four years and be done with it.

He’d desperately hoped for a Cabinet spot, anything, in the last reshuffle. As it turned out, he didn’t even get Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the job no one wanted. No, he was the fucking assistant to the job no one wanted. He ground his teeth as he walked.

“So, do you have anything to link them?” Hargreaves asked.

“Not directly. We’ve very little solid information to go on at the minute.”

“What do you have?” Hargreaves stopped to allow Compton and the caddy to catch up. He would bring Compton jogging in the morning, get him match fit.

“We’ve got his last movements. He owned a bar on the Springfield Road. His brother’s name’s on the licence, but it was his. He gave a drunk a lift home from there, then the barman received a call from him thirty to forty-five minutes later. He said he’d left the drunk home, then gone to the docks to meet someone on a matter of business. We’re still checking CCTV footage from the route, but what we’ve got so far shows him driving alone. The last camera caught him on York Street, turning under the M3 flyover and into the docks. We reckon whoever did it met him there. Forensics are still going over the car, but I doubt they’ll get much. It was a clean job. Professional.”

Hargreaves felt a small trickle of relief. “So, we don’t think it was political, then? I don’t need to tell you how troublesome it would be otherwise.”

“No, Minister, you don’t. Early indications are a business deal gone sour. We’ve already questioned the drunk, but he didn’t know much, despite who he is.”

The trickle of relief halted, and Hargreaves set off towards his ball again. “What do you mean? Who is he?”

“Gerald Fegan. He’s suspected of as many as twelve murders, two while he was on compassionate leave from prison for his mother’s funeral. He was convicted of the butcher’s shop bombing on the Shankill in 1988. Three died in that, including a mother and her baby. He was a foot soldier, and one of their best, or worst, depending on your point of view. A killer, plain and simple.”

“And he isn’t a suspect?”

“Not at the moment. He’s been quiet as a mouse since he got early release in . . .”

Hargreaves heard the shuffling of paper.

“At the start of 2000. From what I understand, he’d been suffering some psychological problems before his release, and he’s taken to drink in recent times.”

The trickle of relief started again. “I see,” Hargreaves said as he neared the gorse patch that had devoured his ball. “So, it’s not political. Let’s try and keep it that way, shall we?”

“Of course, Minister. The politicians on all sides are gearing up to make the most of it, but that’s only to be expected. Don’t worry, we’ll keep a lid on it.”

“Good man,” Hargreaves said. He hung up and returned the phone to his pocket as he kicked at the gorse. “Now, where’s that bastard ball?”

6

The whetstone glided along the guitar’s neck, skimming the frets. Fegan loved the sensation it sent through his hand, his wrist, on into his forearm and up to his shoulder: the feeling of oiled stone sliding on metal. As the boat-shaped block swept from one end of the fingerboard to the other, it ground away years of wear. Too much pressure would destroy the frets. Not enough would leave the finish uneven, and the guitar unplayable. It was a question of balance and patience.

Ronnie Lennox had taught him that.

Fegan had spent hours in the Maze Prison’s workshop, watching the old man at his craft. Ronnie hated being penned up with the rest of the Loyalists, so the guards let him pass the time in his own corner of the woodwork room. The Republican prisoners tolerated his presence when they had the use of the place, thinking him harmless, and even let him teach them a thing or two. Fegan always paid close attention. Ronnie’s delicate hands bore a myriad of scars, decades of cuts and abrasions earned at the shipyard. He’d been a ship’s carpenter before he did the awful thing that sent him to prison. Like so many men who worked there, he had been left with the wheezy rattle of asbestosis in his chest.

Fegan remembered Ronnie’s hands most of all, and he knew why. They were like his father’s. When he could get the work, Fegan’s father had also been a chippie. Except, since he was Catholic, the shipyard never had any use for him.

Mixed in with the bad times, when he came home drunk and stinking, there were good times. Like the day, when Fegan was very small, that his father borrowed a car and took him and his mother to Portaferry on the shore of Strangford Lough. They went across the Lough and back three times just for the pleasure of riding the ferry. Then his father went to the pub while Fegan and his weeping mother got the bus back to Belfast. He didn’t come home for three days.

Of details from those good times, few as they were, it was his father’s hands Fegan remembered best. He recalled the coarse and bony feel of them, the hardness and the warmth, long fingers stained orange by nicotine.

Fegan was nine years old when he last held them. It was in his parents’ small bedroom on a cold morning. The wallpaper bubbled and peeled with damp. He remembered how the mildew smell mixed with his mother’s floral scent when she entered. She sat down on the bed, picked up a hairbrush, and scraped it across his scalp.

A few minutes passed before she asked, “Who were you talking to when I came in, love?”

“No one,” he said.

The boar hairs scratched like nails. His collar felt like fingers wrapped around his neck, making a tickly sickness at the base of his throat. He watched her in the mirror over her good mahogany dressing table. He stood with his hands on the cool wood. Her eyes were red and wet.

“You were talking to someone. Was it your friends? The ones you fib about?”

“No,” he said.

She swiped the hairbrush across his backside and the sting forced him up on his tiptoes, his buttocks clenched.

She resumed brushing. “Don’t be telling lies today of all days, Gerald Fegan. Who were you talking to?”

He sniffed once and stared hard at her reflection. “Daddy,” he said. The brush stopped at his crown. The bristles gnawed at his scalp. She blinked once and a crystal bead escaped her left eye. “Don’t,” she said.

“It was Daddy.”

“Your Daddy’s going in the ground today.” She placed the brush on the bed beside her and gripped his shoulders hard. Her breath burned his skin. “They’ll screw the lid down soon, but it’s still open. I didn’t make you look at him because I knew you didn’t want to. But I’ll make you look at him now if you tell me fibs like that. Do I have to make you look at him?”

Fegan wanted to shake his head to please her, but his desire for her to know was greater. “He was holding my hand,” he said.

She spun him around to face her. Brilliant light flashed in his head as her palm slammed against his cheek. He staggered, but she held firm to his shoulders.

“You listen to me, Gerry.” Her face became pointed like a bird’s, pale and fierce. “No more of this . . . this . . . devilment. No more. Do you hear me?”

He opened his mouth to argue, and another lightning bolt struck his cheek.

“Not one more word. You don’t see anyone. You don’t talk to anyone. You turn away from them. Do you want people to think you’re mad? Do you want to end up in the hospital with all the soft-headed old men living in their own filth?” She shook him hard. “Do you? Is that what you want?”

Blinded by tears, Fegan shook his head. He wanted to wail but the cry stayed trapped in his chest. It swelled between his ears until at last air came tearing into his lungs. It burst out again in hacking sobs. He collapsed into his mother’s bosom and let her arms circle him.

“Oh, wee pet, I’m sorry. Shush, shush, shush. Quiet, now. If you’re quiet they’ll leave you alone. Always be quiet.”

She took his wet face in her hands and smiled. “Turn away from them and be quiet. The devil can’t go where he’s not wanted. Do you understand?”

He nodded and sniffed.

“Good boy,” she said. “Now go and polish your shoes.”

Thirty-six years ago. Fegan didn’t like to think of time, and how he could never hold on to it. But sometimes it couldn’t be avoided. He was twenty-six when he went inside and thirty-eight when he got out. The seven years since had drifted past almost unnoticed. Nearly half a lifetime wasted. Fegan shook the thought away and turned his mind back to his task.

He sat at the table beneath his window, his shirtsleeves rolled up. In the daytime it gave him light to work. At night, a desk lamp arched over the tools placed neatly about him. For this job he had masking tape, files, wire wool and olive oil. He set the stone on some newspaper and used a soft cloth to wipe away the swarf, the tiny specks of metal left by the abrasion on the masked-off pieces of fingerboard.

The radio on the sideboard murmured soft blues music. Fegan didn’t understand it, the droning chords and the mournful voices, but he had a notion of learning to play the C.F. Martin guitar when it was finished. Ronnie had said it was a collector’s piece, but guitars weren’t for collecting. They were for playing, he said. So Fegan listened to the radio while he worked, hoping some of its music might seep into him.

When the music stopped and the presenter said the news was coming up, Fegan reached across and turned it off. Everyone was talking about McKenna. Politicians, cops, security analysts - the reporters had even started interviewing one another in their rush to squeeze every last drop of blood out of the story.

Fegan picked up the whetstone and ran it along the fingerboard again, back and forth, the rhythm soothing him. Nine o’clock. He hadn’t had a drink tonight. Like every other night, he promised himself he wouldn’t. Somewhere beneath his heart he knew he would break that promise. He knew they would come again tonight, even though he had given McKenna to the boy. They wanted more.

They wanted Caffola.

Fegan swept the stone back and forth, smooth movements flowing from his arm. Be quiet, he thought. Turn away from them and be quiet.

Balance and patience.

A tingling gathered in his temples the way electricity hangs in the air before a storm. He closed his eyes and let the stone’s rhythm fall in step with his heart.

Balance and patience.

Sparks flashed behind his eyes.

Fegan put the stone down and lowered the guitar to the felt sheet that protected its lacquered finish. He stood, went to the sideboard, and poured two fingers of Jameson’s and the same of water. The whiskey warmed his center as the shadows crept along the walls.

Balance and patience.

7

“So, who do you think got McKenna?” McSorley asked as he hauled the steering wheel to the left.

Campbell looked back over his shoulder to where the old man lay on the van’s cold floor, whimpering inside the pillowcase that had been placed over his head.

“Don’t worry about him,” McSorley said.

Campbell returned his attention to the winding country road, involuntarily pressing his foot against the worn carpeting, trying to brake for McSorley. He’d waited for his mobile to ring all day. He had to force himself not to check for missed calls every ten minutes. The anticipation gnawed at him.

“Well?” McSorley prompted. “Who do you reckon?”

“Whoever it was has got to be fucking crazy,” Campbell said. “Or stupid. They won’t get away with it. The boys won’t let it go. They’ll break the ceasefire if they have to.”

The van hit a pothole and Campbell had to brace himself against the dashboard. The old man cried out as he bounced between the van’s inside wall and its floor. Comiskey and Hughes were back at his tiny cottage, holding his wife until Campbell and McSorley returned with the contents of the post office safe. It was only a short journey into the village.

“I suppose you’d have been one of the boys going after him, eh?”

Campbell tried to read McSorley’s face, but darkness obscured all but the watery sheen of his eyes. “Might’ve been.”

“No need to be shy with me, Davy. We’re mates, eh? You don’t talk much about what you got up to in Belfast.”

“Not much to talk about.”

McSorley gave a chesty laugh. “Oh, aye. I bet there’s not.”

His face took on a sickly glow as they cruised into the village, its street lights washing them in orange. “I heard a story about you and some boy who tried to set up Paul McGinty. I heard you beat the life out of him.”

“Yeah?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Well, people talk. You can believe whatever you want.”

The van’s headlights picked out the green

An Post

sign and its brakes whined. The engine juddered as it died. McSorley gave the old man one quick glance and turned back to Campbell.

“Some of the lads don’t trust you,” he said, his eyes narrow.

“You mean Comiskey?”

“Him and some of the others. They think it’s a bit funny, you just upping sticks and coming down here to us. Seeing as you were so close to McGinty and all. Some of the lads are worried about you.”

Campbell let his hand wander to his thigh. His jeans stretched tight over the Gerber knife in his pocket. “Are you worried?”

McSorley’s tongue pressed against the inside of his cheek, making his stubble bristle. “I don’t know. It could be McGinty sent you down here to keep an eye on us, see what we’re up to. Or it could be like you say: you just wanted to see some action.”

Campbell kept his eyes locked on McSorley’s. “Like I said, you can believe whatever you want.”

A sly grin spread on McSorley’s face as he nodded. “I think you’re all right, Davy, but I’ll tell you this.” He raised a finger at Campbell. “You ever prove me wrong, you better run like fuck, ’cause I’ll skin you alive.”

McSorley splayed the bills out between his fingers. The balaclava didn’t mask his fury. “Three hundred and twenty fucking euro?”

Campbell felt a guffaw climb up from his belly, but he trapped it in his mouth. The woollen mask made his beard itch.

The old man cowered on his knees in front of the open safe. McSorley grabbed his pyjama collar with his free hand.

“Three hundred and twenty? I didn’t do all this for fucking three hundred and twenty, you miserable auld shite. Where’s the rest?”

The old man raised his shaking hands. “That’s all there is, I swear to God, that’s all.”

McSorley shook him back and forth. “Quit talking shite and tell me where it is.”

“I swear to God, that’s all. We only open half days. There’s some change in the till. You can have that if you want.”

“Christ!” McSorley released the old man’s collar and shoved the notes into his pocket. He pointed to the counter at the front of the shop. “Davy, go and empty the till. And fill the bag up with fags. That’s all we’re going to get. Fuck!”

Campbell went to the till. The next morning’s meagre float lay in its open drawer. He scooped up bills and coins, guessing them to total no more than forty or fifty euro, and dropped them into the sports bag. The shelves behind the counter were stacked with cigarettes and he swept them into the bag, on top of the money, feeling like a petty thief.

Feeling like it?

No, that’s exactly what I am, he thought as cigarette packets fell at his feet. Like a fucking druggie stealing fags to feed his habit.

He cursed under his breath.

“Come on,” McSorley shouted. He dragged the old man by the wrist, not even bothering to bind and gag him again.

“I’m coming,” Campbell said, shoving the cigarettes down into the bag.

McSorley stopped at the door. “I said come on, for Christ’s sake!”

“All right!” Campbell pulled the zipper shut and hoisted the bag over his shoulder. He followed McSorley and the old man out to the street.

McSorley dragged his whimpering captive to the back of the van and opened the doors. Something across the street grabbed the old man’s attention: a light at a window.

“Help.” The cry was weak, but he tried again. “Help!”

McSorley went to cover his mouth, but the old man found the strength to push his hand away. “Help me! Help!”

Campbell walked towards them.

“Shut up or I’ll fucking do you one,” McSorley hissed as the old man writhed in his grip.

The bag slipped from Campbell’s hand, and he peeled the balaclava back from his face.

“Help me! Somebody! Help!”

The rage was white-hot and glorious as Campbell let it rain down on the old man’s head, and the force of it sent McSorley reeling. Blow after blow, the anger burned brighter, until the old man was a limp shape dangling from the van’s lip.

“Davy!”

Campbell drove his fist into the old man’s gut.

“Jesus, Davy, stop!”

He kicked at the old man’s knee.

McSorley grabbed Campbell’s waist and pulled him back. “That’s enough, Davy. Come on.”

Campbell tore McSorley’s arms away and spun to face him. “What do you think I am?”

McSorley stepped back, his hands up.

“Eh? What do you think I am? A fucking shoplifter?”

“Davy, calm down a minute.” He pulled the balaclava from his head.

“A thieving junkie? You think I came all the way down here to steal fucking cigarettes from old men?”

McSorley’s mouth worked silently, his eyes white circles around black points.

“Fucking amateurs!” Campbell turned on his heels and grabbed the bag from the ground. He threw it into the back of the van and bundled the old man’s legs in after it. “Come on to fuck,” he growled.

Without asking, he climbed into the driver’s seat and sparked the engine. McSorley didn’t take his eyes off Campbell as he hoisted himself into the passenger seat.

They drove in silence, McSorley giving the Scot sideways glances, while Campbell thought of the hole in Michael McKenna’s head, and the killer whose own life was surely forfeit.

8

Michael McKenna’s big house in the suburbs didn’t sit well with the party’s socialist manifesto, so Fegan wasn’t surprised his wake was held elsewhere. Instead, people paid their respects to McKenna at his mother’s terraced house on Fallswater Parade, a small red-brick two-up-two-down. It stood in a row of identical houses just off the lower end of the Falls Road, the jugular vein of the Republican movement in Belfast. Back in the bad times, people had compared this part of the city to Beirut. Fegan had always thought of it as the road home, leading as it did to the apex between the Springfield Road and the Falls, where his mother’s old house stood.

As Fegan approached he tried to count the men crowding the tiny walled garden. They spilled onto the street, smoking, laughing and swapping stories. He gave up when the number passed twenty. He edged through them, returning the respectful nods and mumbled greetings. He knew most of these men, hard lads all, and liked none of them. They came from all over Belfast: Andersonstown, Poleglass, Turf Lodge, and some from the Republican enclaves in the north of the city and the Lower Ormeau. Fegan recognised a few faces from outside Belfast, places like Derry and South Armagh. A few wore shirts and ties to mark the solemnity of the occasion, more wore leather blazers, and the remainder dressed as casually as they did on any afternoon.

Fegan caught a young man glaring at him from the living-room window of the house next door. He probably owned the Volvo estate whose bonnet some of the boys rested on. Not that he would complain. He realised he’d been noticed and dropped the curtain in front of the window. Fegan imagined many of the street’s newer residents would eye this gathering with apprehension. The property boom had driven the young middle classes into parts of the city they’d never contemplated before. Pensioners who’d never seen money in their lives suddenly found themselves with hundred-grand nest eggs to cushion their dotage.

Fegan went inside. The narrow hallway was shoulder-to-shoulder with mourners, and he had to fight a sense of drowning as he dived deeper into the house.

“Gerry!” A small, elderly lady waved from a dense forest of black leather and green-striped Celtic shirts.

Fegan squeezed through the mass of bodies until he reached her. “Mrs. McKenna, I’m sorry for your trouble.”

She stretched up to embrace him. “Och, my boy’s gone, Gerry. Some bastard went and shot him. Here’s him fighting for peace and they shot him.” Her eyes were damp and angry as she looked up at him. “May God forgive them, for I won’t.”

“Where is he?” Fegan asked.

“Up the stairs, in his old bedroom. Sure, you know where it is, love. You spent plenty of time up there when you were kids. It’s a closed coffin.” Her voice cracked and her lip trembled. “I couldn’t look at him like that, not my handsome boy.”

“I’ll go up and see him,” Fegan said before giving McKenna’s mother one more hug.

He fought his way to the foot of the stairs and slowly made his way up, one step at a time. The smell of body odor rose with the heat and thickened as he climbed.

McKenna’s old room was at the front of the house, overlooking the street. A respectful quiet lay between the four walls, and Fegan was grateful for the relative peace. The few mourners in here whispered amongst themselves, and Fegan’s sweat cooled on him. He could think of worse places to be than in a room with Michael McKenna’s coffin.

Fegan made the Sign of the Cross as he approached the casket. This was a modest box, far beneath what a man of McKenna’s wealth might expect to rot in, but the humility of its grain, molding and fittings was not an accident. Tomorrow it would lead a procession along the Falls Road draped in an Irish Tricolor and Fegan would walk behind it, possibly even carry it some of the way. He was not a man of words, but he knew what hypocrisy meant. Still, hypocrisy was not rare among his old comrades, or in the party. He could live with it.

He first met Michael McKenna on a hard bench outside the principal’s office in the Christian Brothers School. They both awaited a caning on a warm June afternoon, just a week or so from the end of term. Fegan couldn’t remember what his caning was for, but McKenna’s was for fighting. McKenna was a year older than Fegan, and as stocky as Fegan was skinny. He had blood on his knuckles. They sat in silence until Brother Doran called them in.

Fegan took his strokes without making a sound. The corners of his eyes twitched as the WHAP! of bamboo on palm ricocheted off the office walls. He focused on the picture of the Virgin that hung above Brother Doran’s desk and set the pain aside. Turn away and be quiet, he thought. Brother Doran’s face grew more florid with each swipe. After five, he rested the cane on the joint between Fegan’s thumb and the heel of his hand.

“You’re a stubborn little bastard, aren’t you, Fegan?” he said.

The cane swished as it cut the air. It caught the joint hard. Fegan’s hand dropped away and he shifted his feet to center his balance. A small sun burned in his hand, but again, he set the pain aside. He raised it for more as a blood blister formed beneath the skin.

Brother Doran stared into his eyes as his jowls trembled. “Stand in the corner, you impudent little shite.”

Tears lined Michael McKenna’s cheeks by his third stroke. The fourth was half-hearted as Brother Doran seemed to tire. He dismissed the two boys with an angry flourish.

As Fegan walked along the corridor outside, McKenna called, “You tell anyone I cried and I’ll beat your head in.”

Fegan stopped and turned. “Go fuck yourself,” he said.

McKenna blustered up to him, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “What did you say?”

“Fuck off,” Fegan said. He turned and resumed walking.

Two balled fists slammed into his back, and he staggered forward. He regained his balance and spun to face McKenna, his right hand ready.

McKenna took a step back and jabbed at him with a grubby finger. “Just you watch yourself, right?” He turned and ran in the opposite direction.

The next day, McKenna stopped Fegan in the playground and demanded to see his hand. Fegan showed him the purple and brown blood-blossoms on his palm.

“Fuck me,” McKenna said. “Is it sore?”

“What do you think?” Fegan said.

“Looks it. Do you want to meet up later?”

“What for?” Fegan asked.

Lines appeared on McKenna’s forehead as he shuffled his feet. “Just, you know, for a laugh and stuff.”

Fegan thought about it for a few seconds. He didn’t do that kind of thing. No harm in trying, though. “All right,” he said.

He made many friends that summer. His mother didn’t approve. She reminded Fegan that Michael McKenna’s older brother was doing time in Long Kesh for having a gun. Fegan didn’t care. It felt good to have friends.

Most of those friends were now in McKenna’s mother’s house, swapping stories of the old days, and Fegan dreaded listening to them. He stepped back from the coffin and crossed himself once more.

The quiet in the room faded to utter silence. Fegan became aware of his own breathing and a presence behind him. He turned and saw a woman, ash-blonde and pale, tall and willowy, in the doorway. She was dressed simply and elegantly in a black trouser suit and white blouse. Fegan stepped aside as she approached.

She extended her hand to the coffin, stopping when her fingertips were within millimeters of its glossy sheen. Her grey-blue eyes fixed on something Fegan couldn’t see, something far away. A small ache entered his heart as he wondered if she would weep at some memory of the man inside the box. She inhaled as she came back to herself. She blinked once and mouthed four words. Fegan’s ache turned to something darker when he traced the shapes her lips made.

You had it coming.

As she turned from the coffin, her eyes caught his and she froze, locked in Fegan’s knowledge of her words.

You’re right, he wanted to say. He got what he deserved. Instead, he gave her the smallest of nods.

Her cheeks flushed and she headed for the door. One of McKenna’s three sisters stood by it, watching the blonde woman. When Fegan saw the hate in Bernie McKenna’s eyes he knew who the woman was.

Marie McKenna, daughter of Patrick and Bridget McKenna, niece of the late Michael McKenna. Seven years ago, at around the same time Fegan was first getting to know his followers, Marie McKenna had scandalised her family by taking up with an officer of the hated Royal Ulster Constabulary. Even worse, he was a Catholic cop at a time when joining the police was still an act of treachery. She was already in poor favor amongst many Republicans as she wrote for one of the Unionist rags, the Telegraph or the Newsletter, Fegan couldn’t remember which. A romance with a peeler cut her off from all but her mother.

Gossip, shunning, even death threats against each of the couple were not enough to separate them. But pregnancy was. When Marie’s belly began to swell two years into their relationship, the cop made his excuses and left. For the sake of Bridget McKenna, Marie was begrudgingly allowed back into the family. Had she accepted an offer, made in kindness, to sort out the absent father, then perhaps the community would have opened its arms a little wider to her. As it stood, she was a pariah.

Fegan could see the loneliness, the isolation, on her skin, just as he felt it on his own. The ache in his heart returned, heavier than before.

Marie kept her eyes focused down and forward as she left the room. Her aunt scowled as she passed, and Fegan heard the word “Bitch!” hissed after her. Heads turned to follow her progress through the bodies packed on the landing, and whispers cut the thick warm air.

Fegan felt an inexplicable, irresistible urge to go after her. He fought it for a moment, but its strength dragged him to the door and out onto the landing, cutting the same path through the gathered people as she did. He was a tall man, but still he struggled to see over the mourners. There, between two shaved heads, he caught a glimpse of blonde hair, turning at the top of the stairs. He made it to the banister and watched Marie struggle down the steps for a second before he resumed his attempt to follow her. By the time Fegan reached the top step, she was at the bottom. He began picking his way down, watching her as she embraced McKenna’s mother, then seeing the mother’s mouth curl as Marie headed for the door.

He lost her in the sunlight as he neared the bottom, and was making for the street when a hand caught his upper arm. Startled, Fegan turned, his weight on both feet, ready to fight. A bolt of bright pain flashed in his temple.

“Jesus, Gerry,” laughed Vincie Caffola. “I thought you were going to split me then.”

Eleven shadows moved between the mourners, taking shape, dissolving again. Two came alongside Caffola, the vague forms of their arms lifted to aim at his head. Turn away and be quiet, Fegan thought.

He focused on the bald-headed thug’s eyes. “What do you want?”

Caffola smiled and put a hand on his shoulder. “Me and some of the boys are going to the pub after. You fancy it?”

The two UDR men made guns with their fingers. Fegan tried hard not to see them.

“All right,” he said. “Look, I’ll see you later. It’s too crowded here for me.”

“You should hang around a bit,” Caffola said. “McGinty’s coming over soon. He was saying he hadn’t seen you in ages.”

“No, I’ll go on.” Fegan pulled away from Caffola. “Sure I’ll see him tomorrow. At the funeral.”

“Suit yourself.” Caffola slapped his back as he left. “I’ll see you later.”

Fegan gulped cool air when he got outside, relieved to be free from the crushing stomachs and shoulders. Men were still gathered in front of the house, smoking and swapping stories. Again, he returned respectful nods and mumbled greetings until he was clear of them. He gripped the lapels of his jacket, flapping them to cool his body. He wiped a slick layer of sweat away from his brow and began his walk home.

The eleven followed.

“Don’t you lot get tired?” he asked. He turned to look at them. Eleven dead people, big as life, trooping along the pavement and looking right back at him. A laugh escaped his belly, and a giddy wave passed across his forehead. None answered his question, so he asked another.

“What was that about in there? What was I doing going after her? What was I going to say to her if I got her?”

The woman, her baby supported in one arm, stepped ahead of Fegan and turned to face him. She brought a finger to her lips. Shush. With the same finger she pointed over his shoulder. Fegan heard a car draw up, then slow down beside him. He looked towards it. A Renault Clio, a new one. The passenger window lowered with an electric whirr and Fegan stopped walking.

“Can I give you a lift?” Marie McKenna asked, her blonde head dipping to see him from below the car’s roofline.

Fegan looked back towards the house, then in the direction he’d been walking. He looked at his followers. The woman with the baby gave him a single nod.

“All right,” he said.

Fegan kept his hands in his lap and his mouth shut for the duration of the short journey. His knees pressed against the Clio’s dashboard, but the heavy silence caused him more discomfort. He almost wished the followers were in here with them. Marie had been on the verge of saying something from the moment he lowered himself into the car, but she seemed unable to let it out. Now, parked outside his house on Calcutta Street, off the Springfield Road, she struggled visibly with whatever she needed to say.

He was just about to thank her and go when she said, “I didn’t mean it.”

“Mean what?” he asked, even though he knew.

“What I said back there, by the coffin.” Marie stared straight ahead.

“I didn’t hear you say anything.”

“Yes, you did. I didn’t say it out loud, but you know what I said.”

“I suppose so,” he said, unable to put his heart into a lie.

“Well, I didn’t mean it. Please don’t tell anyone I said it.” She turned to face him. Fegan expected to see pleading in her eyes. Instead, they were cool like slate. Only their tiny movements betrayed her.

“Why would I tell anyone?” he asked.

“I know who you are. I know you were his friend. It must’ve really offended you. I’m sorry. Please don’t tell anyone.”

Marie’s voice cracked and her eyes softened. Fegan wondered if she feared him, and he hated the idea. Once he might have taken pleasure in it, but now it clawed at him.

“I won’t tell anyone,” he said. “I’m not . . . with them any more. I don’t . . .”

She waited while he struggled. “Belong?” she asked.

Fegan reached for the door handle, uncertain whether to stay or flee. “That’s right,” he said.

“I know the feeling.” A tentative smile flickered on Marie’s lips. “You can’t choose where you belong, and where you don’t. But what if the place you don’t belong is the only place you have left?”

Did she expect an answer? She had enquiring eyes, like the psychologists in prison. Fegan considered it. “Then you get on with it, or get out,” he said.

“Okay.” Her smile bloomed to fullness, and she reddened. “Listen to me, questions, always questions. Well, thank you for understanding. And I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean it.”

“Yes, you did,” Fegan said. The words fell from his mouth before he was conscious of the thought.

Her face paled, the red sinking beneath her skin. Her smile disappeared. “What?”

“You meant it,” he said, opening the passenger door. “And you were right.”

Fegan climbed out and stepped onto the pavement. He bent down and looked back into the car at her. “He deserved it,” he said before swinging the door closed.

Marie stared back at him through the glass for endless seconds before swinging into the traffic, tyres squealing, forcing a black taxi to brake. Its horn blared as the Clio disappeared down the street.

Fegan turned in a circle, looking for shadows. “What’s happening to me?” he asked.

9

Blankets of gloom filled the bar, layer on layer, concealing those men who wished to drink unseen. Fegan moved among them, avoiding their eyes and words. He sipped Guinness, not whiskey, to keep a clear head for his work.

He had always thought of killing as work. Just a job to be done, with no care or feeling behind it. He hadn’t considered himself a craftsman, more a skilled laborer. Not like those assassins who made it art. It only took a certain hardness of the soul, a casual brutality, a willingness to do what other men wouldn’t. He supposed he had a talent for it, just as Caffola had a talent for inflicting pain. And that talent had earned him respect.

But where did the line between respect and fear lie? All those knowing nods he’d received over the years - were they made out of reverence or the worry he might turn on those giving them, break them, like he had so many before? The twelve, now eleven, who had shadowed Fegan for seven years marked the lives he had wiped out. But he had scarred many more.

Although he hadn’t meant to, he’d killed three in the butcher’s-shop bombing. He knew there were also men and women who had lost arms, legs and eyes because of the same bloody act, damning them to lives of anguish. The struggle to grasp the weight, the shape, the realness of it had kept him from sleep for many years. He didn’t need the shadows of the dead for that.

As Fegan moved through the drinkers he tried to keep his mind from the past but it had a way of finding a route there without his help. He thought of the woman at the graveyard, the twelfth follower’s mother.

“You’re Gerry Fegan,” she’d said. She was small and grey. Her anger burned him. “You’re Gerry Fegan and you killed my wee boy.”

Fegan rose from the miserable bunch of daffodils he had placed on his own mother’s grave. He searched for something to say, anything, but could only think of the awful thing that had happened to her son.

“Where did you put him?” she asked. “I come here every Sunday. I walk around the gravestones and I read the names. Sometimes I forget myself, and I look for his name. I know I won’t find it, but I look anyway. Sometimes I have to think for a minute because his name won’t come to me. It’s like he never lived at all.”

She took a step towards Fegan, her shaking hand reaching out to him. “Tell me where you put him. Please. That’s all. Just tell me where he is.”

He remembered the boy’s blood as McKenna worked on him.

He remembered how red it was.

“Gerry, how’re ya?”

Fegan blinked the memory away and turned to see who had slapped his shoulder.

Patsy Toner grinned up at him from behind his moustache. “McGinty was asking for you today,” he said. “At the house. You should have stayed.”

“What’s he want with me?” Fegan took a sip of Guinness.

“He doesn’t like to see a good man go to waste. You do all right out of that Community Development job he set up for you. With his connections he can keep that job funded for years and you don’t have to lift a finger for it. Just cash your checks, and nobody cares.” Toner sighed and placed a hand on Fegan’s shoulder. “You did your time so the party looks after you, but you need to give something back. Nothing much, just a wee job now and then. You’ll get paid, like.”

“I’m not interested,” Fegan said, turning to go.

Toner gripped his elbow. “It’s not as simple as that, Gerry. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors. Things haven’t been so smooth between Paul and the leadership, if you know what I mean. He needs to know who his friends are. Just listen to what he has to say, and do whatever he tells you.”

Fegan jerked his elbow away. “What are you, his messenger boy?”

“I’m just saying.” Toner held his hands up and smiled. “That’s all, Gerry. Just letting you know the situation. Sure, McGinty’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Fegan said, leaving Toner standing with his palms up and out, like a man surrendering.

Fegan made his way to the back of the bar, to the darkest corner, behind a computer quiz game no one ever played. It gave him a good view of the room and the drunks moving between its shadows.

Just a wee job now and then, Toner said. Fegan knew what sort of wee job he was talking about. There were many errands a man like McGinty needed doing. Even now the politicians had taken over the movement, even though they were shifting away from the rackets, the extortion, the thieving, people still needed to be kept in line. Competition for the bars and taxi firms needed quashing. Drug dealers needed discouraging from selling in certain areas - unless they paid their dues, of course. Come election time, reluctant voters needed gathering up and escorting to the polling stations where they would be reminded whose name to mark. And then there were the many hundreds of people who only existed on election days.

The last election, just two months ago, had been the watershed. For the first time the country’s voters went to the polls knowing they would elect a real government, that at last it was over. Over for who? Fegan thought. The headaches started around then. The shadows darkened, the faces grew clearer. He had tried to turn away, to be quiet, but still they came.

Then the screaming.

By the time Toner shoved a bundle of polling cards into Fegan’s hand, he hadn’t slept for a week. He only voted once - some nobody campaigning about fuel tax got his mark - and threw the rest of the cards in a bin. The boys ran a sweepstake on who would cast the most votes. Eddie Coyle had won, having voted twenty-eight times between eleven different polling stations. He got nearly five hundred quid which his wife promptly took from him. McGinty gave him an extra five hundred on top, and Coyle wisely kept the reward secret. Five hundred was a small price for McGinty to ensure he kept his seat. The talk on the streets was the leadership wanted to pass McGinty over. He was tainted by the old ways, no matter how hard he tried to play the politician. But if he kept his vote solid, the leadership couldn’t discard him like they had so many others on the climb to government.

A familiar spark flared in Fegan’s temple. Icy webs crawled towards his center. A commotion at the bar’s front door announced Caffola’s arrival. Fegan had expected him to be here when he came an hour before, otherwise he would have spared himself the ordeal of being among these people. He decided to remain in his shadowy corner for now. It was early yet. Plenty of time.

As the ache behind his eyes deepened, Fegan watched.

Caffola’s cranium and gold earring reflected the dim lighting. His thick neck melded with his broad shoulders to give the impression of power and strength. He was strong, all right, Fegan knew that much, and vicious. It would be hard, but Fegan could take him.

When and where? Tonight, if he could. Somewhere away from here, possibly in Caffola’s own home. The thug was already drunk; his staggering gave him away. He might leave early. Fegan could follow him. Or he might be invited to someone’s home to drink the night through. If Fegan knew where, then he could go there, enter through some open window, and finish Caffola in his stupor.

Balance and patience, he thought as the shadows gathered. Balance and patience.

Caffola cornered Fegan in the toilets, backing him against the cold tiles. As red-faced drunks blinked at the urinals, pissing down their own legs, Caffola’s spittle made cold pinpoints on Fegan’s face. The alcohol on Caffola’s breath mixed with the reek of urine. Fegan swallowed bile.

“I think the world of you, Gerry,” Caffola slurred. His eyelids looked like they weighed a tonne. “Swear to God. You and me. Mates. Right?”

“Right,” Fegan said. The pressure behind his eyes pulsed.

“I’m only telling you ’cause I respect you, right?” Caffola placed his left hand on Fegan’s chest. His right hand pressed against the tiles above Fegan’s shoulder.

Fegan kept his eyes on Caffola’s. “Right.”

“McGinty’s worried about you. You used to be the boy. I mean, everyone knows you were the boy, right?”

“Right.” Fegan ignored the chill at his center.

“But now you’re staying away, you’re drinking, acting all mad and stuff. It’s no good, Gerry.” Caffola rested his palm on Fegan’s cheek. “I’ll tell you that for nothing. I’ll tell you that for sweet fuck all. McGinty wants to talk to you. Get things straight, like. He’s worried, but I told him. I says, Paul, don’t you worry about Gerry Fegan ’cause Gerry Fegan’s fucking sound, right?”

“Right.”

“He’s the boy, right?”

“Right.”

“Then McGinty says to me about Michael, that you was the last one seen him.” Caffola’s eyes darkened. “And that Lithuanian cunt. I gave him a proper going-over, like. And all the time he says he knows nothing. Even when I was showing him his own teeth, he says he knows nothing.”

Fegan tried to step away from the wall, to slip by Caffola. The big man pushed him back against the tiles.

“You see my problem, Gerry?”

Fegan looked over Caffola’s shoulder. The bathroom was empty now, except for the eleven shadows taking form around them. Two separated from the others, hands raised. Could he do it here? No, there’d be no way out.

“You say you’d nothing to do with it, I believe you. That’s what I told McGinty. I stood up for you, Gerry, so don’t make a cunt of me. Right? You talk to McGinty tomorrow.” Caffola’s finger stabbed at Fegan’s chest. “You talk to him and do what he wants, right?”

“Right,” Fegan said, remembering a time when Caffola was afraid of him. Yes, he could do it here, do it now. He could get out before anyone knew what had happened. Get out and run. Leave everything and run. Caffola’s throat looked so tender, his Adam’s apple bobbing over the collar of his shirt.

The door burst open, tearing Fegan’s attention away from the other man’s neck. “There’s trouble brewing,” Patsy Toner said, his little face shining with glee. “There’s peelers all over the place and kids making a barricade. There’s going to be a row. A proper kicking match.”

Caffola looked from Toner to Fegan, beaming. “Fucking class,” he said.

“How the fuck did this start?” Caffola asked, incredulous. He indicated a burning mound of mattresses, wooden pallets and rubbish in the middle of the Springfield Road, just a few feet from the corner where McKenna’s bar stood. A mob of thirty or so youths, children mostly, surrounded it, chanting.

Half a dozen PSNI Land Rovers idled thirty yards down the street. They looked less intimidating these days, painted white with colorful stripes instead of the battleship grey of the past. The peelers milling about weren’t in riot gear yet, but it was only a matter of time before suitably dressed reinforcements would arrive.

Fegan felt a strange stirring inside, a quickening of the spirit, as he watched them. The followers had left him; their shadows receded. He stayed on the footpath, close to the wall, as Caffola and Toner paced.

“Kids,” Toner said. “There’s more patrols about because of the funeral tomorrow. Some of the kids took exception to it and started chucking stuff. The peelers lifted a couple of them, so some more started throwing stuff, then a couple more got lifted and so on and so on.”

A grin cracked Caffola’s face. “Jesus, we haven’t had a proper ruck in ages. I wonder if we can get some petrol bombs rustled up quick.”

“There’s hardly time,” Toner said. “We might get a few, like, but not a proper stock. Nobody’s prepared for it these days.”

Caffola sighed. “Aye, I suppose that’s a good thing, really.”

“Aye,” Toner said. “We can still get the bigger kids to fill some wheelie bins with bricks and stuff. Tom’s got a big bin full of bottles in the alley behind the bar. Some of the kids could steal that, maybe.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Caffola said. The adrenalin seemed to have sobered him. “Somebody better let McGinty know. Do you want to ring him?”

“All right,” Toner said, fishing a mobile from his jacket pocket.

Caffola turned to Fegan, rubbing his hands together, a smile lighting up his face in the growing darkness. “What about it, Gerry?” he asked. “You up for it?”

“I’ll hang about,” Fegan said. “See what happens.”

“Good man.” Caffola patted his shoulder.

Young men and older boys swelled the mob. Fegan knew the cops would hold back, hoping the drama would fizzle out. Most times it would, leaving nothing more than a blackened mess for the road sweepers to clean up in the morning. Not tonight, though. Fegan could feel it like thunder in the air. The atmosphere crackled with it.

He looked up at the sky. Things had developed too quickly to get a helicopter in the air. In the old days, the Brits would have scrambled two or three of them from their bases in Holywood or Lisburn, and would’ve had the area covered in minutes. They’d be out for the funeral tomorrow, hovering high above the crowds, but the sky stayed clear this evening.

A boy, red-haired and wiry, twelve at most, pulled a lump of burning wood from the mound. He half ran, half hopped six paces and hurled the blackened timber with every bit of his strength. It clattered to the ground, throwing up red sparks, midway between the smoldering mound and the waiting policemen. The other boys gave a triumphant cheer.

“For fuck’s sake,” Caffola said. “Hey!”

He waited a moment then shouted again. “Hey! You!”

The red-haired boy turned.

“Yeah, you,” Caffola called. “C’mere!”

The boy approached slowly.

“What are you at?” Caffola asked. “Are you stupid?”

“No,” the boy said.

“Well, for fuck’s sake quit acting like it. Cover your face with something so the cameras don’t get you.”

“Okay,” the boy said. He pulled a wrinkled handkerchief from his pocket and returned to his comrades at the burning mound, tying the square of soiled material into a mask over his nose and mouth.

“Kids know nothing these days.” Caffola shook his head. “When we were kids we’d have had this place wrecked by now. Petrol bombs, concrete slabs, catapults with ball-bearings.” He grinned and pointed down the street to the Land Rovers. “And them cunts, they’d have been firing plastic bullets at us. Changed times, Gerry.”

“Yeah,” Fegan said. “Changed times.”

These streets had seen more riots than just about anywhere in the world. From the civil rights protests of the late Sixties, when Fegan was too small to know what it meant, to the groundswell of anger at internment in the early Seventies, when young men were imprisoned without trial. Journalists gave kids five-pound notes to throw stones and bottles at the Brits, hoping to set off another battle for the cameras. Then the anguish of the hunger strikes in the early Eighties when ten men starved themselves to death in the Maze, fanning the embers on the streets. No payment was needed then; rage seethed in the city, and anything could ignite the flames. Mob violence, children as weapons: those were the tactics of the time. A photograph of a bleeding child, no matter how they got injured, packed more power than a dozen bombs. Political animals like Paul McGinty learned that early on and acted accordingly. Fegan had seen it so many times before, this wasteful anger bubbling over into violence. It tired and excited him all at once.

More men wandered out of the bar and onto the street. Some remained inside, preferring to drink in peace rather than get involved.

Patsy Toner snapped his phone closed.

“Well?” Caffola asked.

“He says go ahead,” Toner said. “Just don’t let it get out of hand. Don’t touch any property. Don’t fight anyone but the peelers. There’s lots of press about for the funeral so they’ll all come over here once it gets going. McGinty’s going to turn up in an hour or so. Make sure everyone knows to settle down then so the press sees he calmed the situation.”

“He always was the smart one,” Caffola said. He slapped his palms together and smiled. “Right, let’s go.”

10

A riot is like a fire. It has a life of its own, and does as it will. But it can be fanned or quelled. Fegan knew that as well as anybody. The police and the kids were the kindling, paper and dry wood. Men like Caffola were the naked flame, ready to set them alight. Others, like Father Coulter, were water to douse the burning. But Father Coulter wasn’t here this evening, so Caffola sparked and blazed unabated. Morbidly fascinated, Fegan watched him work.

Caffola moved between groups of boys and young men, slapping backs and issuing commands. They obeyed without question.

Within minutes older boys were off fetching ammunition. They returned quickly, wheeling it in plastic bins. Their missiles were gathered from the nearby derelict houses and patches of waste ground. Bricks, bottles, concrete fragments, scrap metal. Everything they needed. Two boys in their mid-teens appeared at the corner pushing the bar’s bottle bin, its innards clanging and clattering as the wheels juddered across the tarmac. They stopped out of view of the cops.

The peelers huddled and passed orders back and forth. Their stance changed. They knew this one wasn’t blowing over. Some strapped body armor across their torsos and donned helmets.

Within ten minutes Caffola got a phone call telling him there were six containers of petrol in a back alley two streets away. He instructed the boys to wheel the bottle bin over there. “And grab whatever you can off washing lines for rags,” he said. He pulled a ten-pound note from his pocket and pressed it into one of the boys’ hands. “And here, get some sugar. Remember to mix it in the petrol so it’ll stick, right? And get some crates off Tom for carrying the bottles back.”

“Right,” the boy said. He and his friend wheeled the jangling bin back around the corner.

Soon masonry began to fly. Sporadically at first, but the bombardment gathered pace. The peelers stayed behind their Land Rovers for now, content to let things simmer until they had enough officers to deal with the situation.

The first news crew pulled up in a van behind the police line. Word had started to spread. The mob around the growing pile of burning debris swelled. Caffola stood with his hands on his hips, watching it all unfold, his nose tilted up as if he were sniffing violence on the air.

Fegan’s nostrils flared too, the old scent waking memories in him. “How bad?” he asked.

“Not too bad,” Caffola said. “Just a bit of a scrap. Nobody’ll get killed.”

Fegan looked to Caffola’s throat. “You sure?”

“Aye. It’s not the Eighties any more. Fuck, it’s not even the Nineties. A few stitches, that’ll be the height of it.” Caffola’s belly jerked with a sudden laugh. He pointed towards the row of Land Rovers. “You see her?”

Fegan followed the line of Caffola’s finger. He saw a young policewoman hunkered down, her back to them, as she talked to her colleagues. Blonde hair crept out from under her cap, and the image of Marie McKenna flashed in Fegan’s mind. He shook it away.

Caffola nudged him. “At the back of the Land Rover. You see her?”

Fegan almost said yes, he saw her, but he caught himself, hoping Caffola would pick another target if he kept quiet. No such luck.

“Watch.” Caffola lifted an empty bottle from the bar’s windowsill. He ran a few steps, the bottle suspended over his right shoulder. He threw his body forward and released the missile.

It rose in a slow arc, then descended towards the policewoman. Fegan willed it to miss, to splash impotently at her feet.

Miss, miss, miss

, he thought. He closed his eyes until he heard it crash on the tarmac.

He opened them to see the cops scatter, taking shelter behind the Land Rovers.

“Fuck,” Caffola said. He winked at Fegan. “Close, though.”

Fegan breathed deep. He knew this was Vincent Francis Caffola’s last night on earth.

With that thought, his temples sparked and a cold wave rippled through him. The setting sun cast long shadows. Shapes emerged from them, solidified, and drew near. The two UDR men flanked Caffola, their arms raised, their fingers aiming. The rest circled Fegan. The woman, her baby restless in her arms, smiled at him.

Engines roared and brakes squealed at the police line. Men in full riot gear streamed out of six more Land Rovers. They wore helmets with clear visors, fireproof balaclavas masking their faces, and thick body armor. Their gloved hands held riot shields and batons.

They were ready. The mob was ready. Fegan was ready.

Caffola turned to him once more, grinning. “Fucking class,” he said.

At first, the police maintained their line. As lumps of masonry came in waves they simply raised their shields to deflect each missile. A senior officer, distinguishable only by his gait, paced behind their ranks, barking orders. Fegan couldn’t hear them from this distance, but he knew what they were just the same.

Steady. Hold your line.

Things changed when the first petrol bombs arrived. One of the kids came half running, half staggering, struggling with a crate loaded with petrol-filled bottles. He remained out of sight of the police line, signalling Caffola from the side street, his back against the wall. They had selected the larger bottles, filled them with a mixture of fuel and sugar, and plugged the tops with petrol-soaked rags.

Fegan clenched and unclenched his fists, fighting the adrenalin already coursing through him. The followers circled, watching.

At Caffola’s signal, boys ran to the corner to fetch the deadly bottles. Smoke from the burning pile of mattresses and wood obscured the details of their actions from the police, but there could be no surprise in what was to come. The petrol bomb had always been the weapon of choice on these streets.

Fegan didn’t see who threw the first one. He saw only its fiery ascent, smoke following its fall. There was the sound of shattering glass, then the WHUMP! of the liquid igniting ten feet from the peelers. Those nearest took a step back and their commander scolded them as the mob cheered.

The next was thrown by the same skinny red-haired boy Caffola had instructed to disguise himself only a short while before. He gave the throw everything he could, but it landed twenty feet from the line, its fuel scattering everywhere and failing to catch light. The boy kicked at the ground in frustration.

The third was the charm. An older boy, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, lit the rag on his bottle and made his way out from behind the burning barricade. Air rippled around the flame as the boy held the bottle over his shoulder. He ran five steps and launched it. He froze and watched the petrol bomb arc upwards. The now hundred-strong crowd held its breath as the bottle reached its zenith, then fell, twisting and turning, leaving a smoky trail. Policemen scrambled backwards as the accuracy of the shot became apparent. It splashed at their feet, throwing flames around them, and the roar of the mob was deafening. As Caffola laughed and slapped his shoulder, Fegan watched the four cops touched by the fire drop and roll, their colleagues swatting at the flames with their gloved hands.

More petrol bombs flew, and more found their targets, some crashing against the Land Rovers, some making little hells at the feet of the police. Every successful hit brought another chorus of triumph from the boys and men surrounding Fegan. The eleven followers gathered around him, rapt in the spectacle.

“They’ll charge soon,” Fegan said, his temples throbbing, his heart racing. “They’ll run at us, drive the Land Rovers at us, try to break us up. They’ll want to scatter everyone into the side streets.”

“Yeah, I know,” Caffola said. He winked. “I’ve done this before, remember?”

“I remember,” Fegan said. He remembered everything. The charge, and the scattering, would be the key; his chance to get Caffola away and on his own.

Any minute now, he thought. He looked back to the police line. The Land Rovers maneuvered into position. They would come first, the cops following. The mob quieted, the boys and men bracing themselves. Caffola gave a girlish giggle as the police commander’s voice drifted on the breeze. The Land Rovers’ engines revved and the cops raised their batons.

“Here they come,” Fegan said.

11

The youngest boys ran first, fleeing just as the charge started. They screamed and laughed as they streamed past Fegan. The older boys held their ground longer, jeering, launching bricks and bottles even as the Land Rovers reached the barricade. Fire licked the armored vehicles as they broke through the mound. Burning debris flew in all directions. The cops came behind, roaring as they waved their batons.

“C’mon,” Caffola said, grabbing Fegan’s sleeve.

They ran to the side street, arms and legs churning, and ducked into an alley. They dodged old bicycles and plastic bins as dogs barked from inside the walled yards. Caffola’s laughter echoed in the narrow space.

They emerged onto a patch of waste ground and kept running, aiming for the streets opposite. When they reached the other side Caffola headed for one of them, but Fegan pulled him towards an alley. “No, this way,” he gasped.

Caffola followed him, and they ran until they reached a dead end. As they slowed to a halt, Caffola bent double, letting out a long moan.

“Jesus,” he said between desperate heaves of air, “I’m not fit for this any more.”

“Me neither,” Fegan said as his ribs screamed. He leaned against the wall, his head swimming. The pain behind his eyes swelled until he was sure his skull would not contain it. He pressed his palms to his temples and sucked air through his teeth.

Caffola grabbed his stomach with one hand and a bin with the other. “Aw, Christ,” he said. His mouth opened wide, and Fegan heard a splashing sound. The sour stink of vomit reached him and he covered his nose and mouth.

Fegan screwed his eyes shut. The pain came in hammer blows, smashing against his forehead. Even with his eyes closed, he felt them, the eleven, pushing at his consciousness. Without knowing why, he breathed deep and opened himself to them. A last bright bolt flared in his head, and the pain evaporated. He kept his eyes closed for a moment, letting the sudden cool giddiness wash over him. He opened his eyes, unsure of what he’d see.

The followers gathered in the alley’s dimness. They kept their distance, watching. The two UDR men stepped forward. Their faces burned with hate and savage pleasure.

Fegan turned his eyes to Caffola. The cold beginnings of rain dotted his face and forehead as he watched the other man retch. He looked back to the UDR men. Their eyes glinted in the gloom of the alley while the other darkened forms moved behind them. Their lips parted in toothless grins, loose red flesh revealed within.

Fegan closed his eyes again and wished for another way. As foolish as it was, he wished for another life away from this. He wished for peaceful sleep and bloodless hands.

He wished.

Fegan sighed, opened his eyes, and reached into his pocket. He took out a pair of surgical gloves. As he slipped them on he asked, “Do you remember those two UDR men in Lurgan?”

“What?” Caffola straightened, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“In Lurgan,” Fegan said. “It would’ve been about ’87 or ’88. Do you remember? You tortured them till one of them fought back. You fell on your arse and I had to finish them for you.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Caffola said, a smile coming to him as he fought for breath. He coughed and spat. “They screamed the fucking place down.” Caffola’s brow creased as he looked down at Fegan’s hands. “What’re those for?”

As the rain began in earnest, the two UDR men drew closer. The downpour didn’t touch them.

“They want you,” Fegan said.

“What are you talking about, Gerry?” Caffola leaned back against the wall, his chest still heaving.

“The UDR men.” Fegan crouched down, searching the wet ground as the evening grew darker. “They want you.”

“What’s going on?” Caffola stepped away from the wall.

Fegan found what he needed and stood upright. “I’m sorry,” he said. He couldn’t be sure if he was apologising to the UDR men or to Caffola. Maybe both. He walked towards the other man.

Caffola backed away, his hands up. “What are you doing, Gerry?”

“What someone should have done years ago.”

Backed into the deepest corner of the alley, Caffola could go no further. “It

was

you, wasn’t it? You did McKenna.”

“That’s right,” Fegan said as he raised the brick over his head. In what remained of the evening light, he saw the other man’s eyes flash in realisation. Before he could bring the brick down, Caffola launched himself forward, his shoulder ramming into Fegan’s chest.

They hit the ground hard, and Caffola’s weight crushed the air out of Fegan’s lungs. The brick rattled against the wall. Their legs tangled as Caffola scrambled to his feet and he fell again, this time at Fegan’s side. Fegan pulled at the other’s jacket, trying to get a firm grip, and he heard the tearing of cloth. Caffola swung his elbow back, catching Fegan’s cheek. For a moment he was free and managed to find his feet before Fegan grabbed his ankles, bringing him down again.

There was a loud, sickly crunch as Caffola tried to break his fall, instead breaking his wrist. His scream echoed through the alley. Fegan straddled his back, reached for the brick, and raised it above his head once more. Caffola craned his neck around and gave one last cry before Fegan drove the brick into his temple.

Fegan felt Caffola go limp beneath him, and he threw the brick towards the followers. They stepped aside as it bounced into the darkness. The two UDR men approached and hunkered down so they were at eye level with Fegan. They aimed at Caffola’s broken head. Blood coursed from the wound on the bald man’s temple, and his glassy eyes fluttered as he moaned.

“All right,” Fegan said. He leaned down and pinched Caffola’s nose between his gloved fingers, covering his mouth with his palm. He let his weight settle on the other man’s back and, as the body began to jerk, Fegan squeezed tighter. A slick wet heat covered his gloved hand as Caffola began to vomit again, and Fegan applied yet more pressure. At last, he felt Caffola’s life slip away beneath him.

Fegan closed his eyes and searched his heart, looking for some sense of what he’d just done. He found nothing but the cold hollowness of his wishes.

He took his hand away from Caffola’s face, letting the vomit spill onto the ground. The rank odor and the warmth on his palm reached down to his stomach.

Turn away and be quiet

, he thought. He looked up at the followers. The woman stepped forward, carrying her baby, her floral dress pretty in the gloaming. She nodded and gave Fegan her small, sad smile.

The two UDR men were gone. Nine followers remained.

“Who’s next?” Fegan asked.

NINE

12

Campbell stared at the ceiling, his heart thundering, wondering what had woken him. He was a light sleeper - he needed to be - and the slightest stirring could rouse him. His mobile rang again, and he knew what had pulled him to waking. He reached over to the bedside locker and grabbed the phone. He squinted at its little display. Number withheld, it said. His heart rammed against his breastbone.

He thumbed the green button and brought the phone to his ear. “Yeah?”

“Come in,” an English-accented voice said.

“Now?” he asked, keeping the hope from his voice. “I’ve just got my way in here.”

“Change of plan,” the voice said. “This is urgent. Number one priority. That’s from the top.”

“Where?” he asked.

“Armagh. There’s a car park by a chapel, opposite the council buildings. Do you know it?”

“Yeah, I know it.” Campbell swung his legs out of bed. He rubbed his face, his beard prickling his palm. “There’s cameras all over that place.”

“They’ll be looking the other way.”

“Fucking better be. When?”

“An hour.”

“I’m in Dundalk. I’ve got to get packed up, get out of here, get my car, and there’s roadworks—”

“An hour.” The phone died.

“Fuck,” Campbell said.

His clothes lay on the floor where he’d thrown them the night before. He dressed quickly and quietly. A wardrobe leaned against the wall, its doors hanging at odd angles. He took a holdall from inside and stuffed it with the few garments he owned. His mobile and a set of keys were the only personal items remaining. Pocketing them, he stepped out onto the landing.

Gurgling snores came from the adjoining room. He pushed the door open and looked inside. Eugene McSorley lay sprawled on the bed, fully clothed, a beer can still in his hand.

Campbell wondered if he’d ever come back and finish what he’d started here. It had taken months to bring this about, to work his way into the gang. So far it had come to nothing. But still, McSorley might make a nuisance of himself if someone didn’t keep tabs on him.

An idea flashed in Campbell’s mind. He could cross the room and silently dispose of McSorley. It would be so easy just to kneel on his chest and put the correct pressure on his throat. He gave it a few seconds’ thought.

“Fuck it,” he said, and moved away from the door. He descended the stairs and let himself out. The sun was only beginning to creep above the houses opposite as he climbed into the old Ford Fiesta. Its tired, wheezy engine coughed into life and he pulled away, heading for the port where his own car, his real car, was safely locked away.

Fifty-two minutes after his phone woke him, Campbell steered his BMW Z4 Coupé into the car park by the chapel. Its engine burbled as he pulled alongside the anonymous Ford Mondeo. Like his own car, the Mondeo’s windows were tinted, obscuring its occupants from casual glances. He could just make out the shapes of two men in the front seats. His shadow stretched long in the early sunlight as he climbed out of the BMW. Armagh’s cathedrals loomed over the small town, reminding him it was actually a city. The man in the Mondeo’s driver’s seat reached across and opened its rear door.

Campbell lowered himself in and said, “Let me guess. McKenna, right?”

The two men exchanged glances. The one in the driver’s seat, the handler, passed Campbell a palmtop computer displaying a photograph of two men. It was poorly lit, but he could make them out, standing on a street corner.

“You know them?” the handler asked.

“Yeah,” Campbell said. He swallowed his confusion and focused. “Gerry Fegan and Vincie Caffola.”

“Tell us about them.”

Campbell thought about it for a moment. “Gerry Fegan’s from before my time, but he’s a legend. Everybody talked about him in Belfast. A vicious bastard. He did twelve years. Last I heard, he was hitting the bottle pretty hard. Sits and talks to himself while he gets pissed, apparently.”

The handler looked back over his shoulder. “And Caffola?”

“He’s an animal. Thick as pig shit, but dangerous.”

“Not any more, he’s not. He’s dead,” the handler said. “His body was found in an alley last night. He had a broken wrist and a gash on his temple, but not enough to kill him. Early reports say he most likely passed out, then choked on his own vomit. There’ll be a post-mortem this morning.”

“Fuck me,” Campbell said. He felt his calm mask slip. He caught it and wetted his upper lip.

“You’ve heard about Michael McKenna’s demise, obviously.”

Campbell smiled. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer fella.”

The man in the passenger seat spoke for the first time. “It’s no laughing matter,” he said. “This is going to cause some major problems for us.”

Public school

, Campbell thought. The handler was Army, maybe even ex-SAS, going by his haircut and the scars on his face. He’d seen action. But this other was government. Northern Ireland Office, probably, one of the bureaucrats who’d run this place when it was too busy fighting to run itself. Chinless office clerks at the helm of a country drowning in its own blood.

Not for much longer

, Campbell thought.

“I don’t need to tell you how delicate the situation is,” Public School continued. “The political process is on the right track, at last, but it’s as fragile as ever. We can’t afford any upsets, not with the money and time that’s been invested. Relations between McGinty’s faction and the party leadership have been strained enough as it is. We can’t have it turning into a feud. Have you seen any news this morning?”

“No,” Campbell said. He hadn’t even turned on the car radio for the journey across the border.

“Well, it’s not pretty. As soon as word got out Caffola was dead, what should have been a minor skirmish turned into a major riot. It only settled down in the last few hours. The leadership want to play it down, but our friend inside tells us McGinty is going to say the police did it, even if it’s proven to be an accident. He’ll make a song and dance about it at McKenna’s funeral today. He’ll make out Caffola was beaten by the police, then left to choke to death in an alley. We’re told he’ll threaten to withdraw support for the PSNI, even though the party hasn’t approved it. He wants to stir up some headlines for himself, show the party leadership he’s not going to be sidelined. Problem is, talk like that will rattle the Unionists. If they think the party wants to back out of policing, they might walk away from Stormont, and the Assembly will collapse. Again.”

“And you’re sure the cops didn’t do it?” Campbell thought it was a reasonable question.

“We’re not sure of anything,” Public School said.

“So, where does Gerry Fegan fit into this?” Campbell asked, thinking of the tall, thin man he’d met only once. It was on an industrial estate north-west of Belfast, and it had been bloody. He thought about it as seldom as possible.

“That’s what we need you to find out,” the handler said. “Fegan was the last person to see McKenna alive. It seems he was also the last to see Caffola. A bit of a coincidence, don’t you think?”

“Why don’t you nab him, then?”

“He was questioned last night,” the handler said. “Said he and Caffola got split up when they were running from the police.”

Campbell snorted. “And you think he’s above telling lies?”

“Our friend inside says McGinty believes him. Fegan’s been keeping his head down for years. There’s no reason he would turn on his friends now. Besides, there’s nothing to actually tie him to McKenna’s killing. All evidence says he was at home at the time, piss-drunk.”

“Then who did kill McKenna?” Campbell leaned forward, following the blood-scent.

“McKenna was dealing with a Lithuanian, Petras Adamkus, on some people trafficking. A very shady character. The leadership had got wind of it and were putting pressure on McGinty to nix it. The last contact anyone had with McKenna was when he phoned a barman and told him he was meeting someone on business at the docks. Next thing we know, McKenna’s brains are all over his windscreen, and Mr. Adamkus is nowhere to be found.”

“But you’re not satisfied with that,” Campbell said.

“No, we’re not,” the handler said. “On the surface it looks like the party cleaned up their own mess over McKenna and Adamkus, and it suits them to blame the police for Caffola’s death. We know Caffola wasn’t happy with the political end of things, particularly the party supporting law and order. The party won’t tolerate dissent in the ranks. They’ve done it in the past, taking out one of their own and blaming the security forces or the Loyalists, so it would be par for the course. Still, something doesn’t add up.”

“And you want me to find the missing pieces.” Campbell sat back, burying a peal of excitement deep inside himself.

Public School shot the handler a condescending smile. “You said he was bright,” he said, his voice oily. He peered around the headrest at Campbell. “We need you to go back to Belfast, tell them you’re not happy with the dissidents, that you want to come back into the fold. See what you can find out about Fegan. If he’s behind it, deal with him. Or tip the party off and let them do the honors.”

“They’ll tell me to fuck off,” Campbell said. “They know I was running with McSorley’s lot in Dundalk. McGinty won’t like it. Have you no other mug to do it?”

He knew the answer.

“We’ve never had an agent as close to McGinty as you,” Public School said. “Our friend inside will smooth things over for you. Besides, if I’m correctly informed, Mr. McGinty owes you a pretty big favor. You’ll be welcomed with open arms. Trust me.”

“Not for a second,” Campbell said.

Public School gave him a hard look. “There’ll be a generous bonus, of course. Fifteen thousand for going in. Another fifteen if you’re able to resolve matters to everyone’s satisfaction.”

Campbell looked from Public School to the handler and back again. “Twenty-five first, twenty-five after. And I want what I’m owed for Dundalk. It wasn’t my decision to leave.”

“You’re a mercenary bastard, aren’t you?” Public School said, smiling. “All right. I’m sure you’ll give us our money’s worth.”

“Every penny,” Campbell said. He tried not to picture Gerry Fegan’s blood-spattered face or the bodies at his feet.

13

Fegan stood among the gravestones, sweat drawing cool lines down his back. It had been the warmest spring he could remember. Black Mountain loomed over the graveyard, its craggy slopes bright and hard in the May sunlight. Father Coulter droned on by the graveside amid polite coughs and gentle weeping.

Fegan looked around the cemetery. It was a decent turnout, a few hundred, but not as many as he’d expected. Some had chosen to stay away. Fegan had heard grumblings, loud whispers, as the mourners gathered. Some called it an insult, a slap in the face. Certain men, certain politicians, should have been here to bear the coffin, to stand solemn-faced by the graveside. Their absence glared like a sore.

As Fegan scanned the crowds he watched for a flash of ash-blonde hair, a long and slender frame. She was here somewhere, but she was keeping her distance. And why did he care?

“God knows,” he whispered to himself.

He took a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his forehead and the back of his neck. His eyes were dry and heavy, and his skull was full of sand. The cops had kept him until nine this morning and he’d had barely two hours’ sleep before he’d had to get up for the funeral. He savored the peace, but it didn’t last long enough.

A haze of pain hovered around his temples, and shadows moved at the edge of his vision. He pushed them away. In this place, among these people, the shadows were sure to gather and pick out the living. Fegan was certain of it, and wondered how long he could hold them back.

Luck had been with him so far. But then, he’d always been lucky when it came to killing. He had a knack for it. Last night’s riot had provided the perfect cover. If his luck held, it would even look like an accident. He had stashed the brick deep inside a bin five streets away, and then found the makeshift petrol-bomb factory. He took one of the bottles and used the fuel it contained to burn the gloves.

He had returned to the Springfield Road, wanting to be seen there, away from Caffola’s body. McGinty was already negotiating with a senior police officer in view of the cameras, the man of peace restoring order to the troubled streets once more. Not for long, though. As soon as cops searching for petrol bombs discovered Caffola’s body, all hell broke loose.

Fegan spent the rest of the night in the company of the police. Their questioning had been half-hearted and perfunctory. They did not grieve over the loss of Vincie Caffola, and Fegan doubted they would expend much effort on the investigation. He left the station unafraid of being charged with Caffola’s killing.

Now, in the windswept graveyard, he covered his mouth to yawn. The pressure increased in his head and he shuffled his feet for balance. Chills washed through him, and he wrapped his arms tight around his midsection.

Father Coulter’s service over, it was time for politics. A platform stood by the grave, and two men took up position holding a banner that read

Building for Peace, Building for the Future

. Another man joined them, holding a portable amplifier with a microphone. Fegan’s stomach churned, knowing who would follow.

Paul McGinty, fifty-five years old, tall and handsome, stepped up to the podium. Low whispers crept through the crowd; it should have been one of the party leaders up there, eulogising the departed. Instead, McGinty faced the mourners, his countenance grim. The breeze tousled his hair as he waved for the applause to stop. The assistant raised the microphone to McGinty’s mouth.

He greeted the assembly in forced Irish, as was the custom. Some embraced Ireland’s native tongue, others did not. Fegan didn’t care for words, English or Irish, so it meant little to him.

The formality over, McGinty began his speech.

“Comrades,” he said in his carefully maintained West Belfast accent. “Today would have been a sad day without the news that came to us last night. But it is sadder still for the passing of Vincent Caffola, a tireless community worker and party official. And I have much to say about his passing, but ladies and gentlemen, I must first pay respect to the man who was buried here today.

“Michael McKenna was a great man.” McGinty paused, his blue eyes taking in the cemetery as applause and isolated cheers rippled through it. “Michael McKenna was a great man because he believed in the fight for justice and equality on this island, and he fought for justice and equality every single day of his life. It is a tragedy for all who knew him that that goal was just within his reach when his life was taken.”

Pain, bright and fiery, burst in Fegan’s skull. “Christ,” he hissed.

A few heads turned in his direction. He ignored them.

The shadows moved in from the edges of his vision. The pain flared again, brighter than before.

“Christ. Not now.”

One of the funeral-goers, a stocky man in his mid-twenties, turned to scowl at him. Fegan stared back until the scowler turned away.

He closed his eyes and breathed deep, willing the pain and shadows to recede. A cry almost escaped him when he opened them and caught a glint of ash-blonde. He turned his head towards it, searching. There, another flash, between the black-clad bodies. He watched as she emerged from them, her face glowing in the spring sunlight. Her hair fluttered in the breeze, and she calmed it with her delicate hand. She caught him staring and froze.

Fegan’s heart lurched in his chest as his eyes locked with Marie McKenna’s. He wanted to raise his hand to wave, but it hung useless at his side. Time became an abstract notion, a meaningless measurement. Then her eyes slipped away from his, and time moved on. She retreated back to the throng, losing herself among them, sparing him only one glance over her shoulder.

Only when he’d lost her did Fegan realise the nine followers surrounded him. The pain dissolved, leaving a feathery lightness behind his eyes. The woman rocked her baby and smiled at him.

“What’s happening to me?” he asked her.

The scowler turned to face him again. “Shut up and listen to the speech.”

Scowler’s friend tugged on his elbow and whispered in his ear, “That’s Gerry Fegan.”

Scowler’s face greyed. “Sorry,” he said, and turned back to the platform.

Fegan watched the followers move among the living, studying the mourners as if they were creatures in a zoo, sometimes touching them. The woman stayed close to Fegan. Her skin caught none of the sunlight beating down on the cemetery, and the breeze did not disturb her black hair. She smiled up at him again, her fine features showing none of the hate she must have felt.

Turn away and be quiet

, Fegan thought. He ignored her and concentrated on McGinty’s speech.

‘Vincent Caffola’s murder,” he blustered, “And it can only be described as murder, throws us back to the bad old days. The days when the young people of our community lived in fear of the RUC. The bad old days when sectarianism was the law. When bigotry was the law. When instilling terror into the Nationalist and Republican people was the law.”

A rumble of agreement rolled through the faithful. McGinty paused, letting it subside.

The woman turned her black eyes to the politician as the baby writhed in her arms.

“But I say no more,” McGinty continued. “No more will our community stand by and allow such brutality to go unchallenged. Last night a good man, a tireless worker for his people, was viciously assaulted by the forces of so-called law and order. He was beaten until he passed out, his head split open, his wrist shattered, and left to choke to death on his own vomit. And still they say we should support an institution steeped in the traditions of oppression and fascism.”

The crowd rumbled again, louder now. McGinty let it pass, his eyes marking the beat.

“But I say no more. I will not rest, my party will not rest, my community will not rest until those responsible are brought to justice. And that will be the test, comrades. When those witnesses I spoke to this morning, those witnesses who saw Vincent Caffola dragged into an alley by the forces of so-called law and order, when they go to the Police Ombudsman and tell what they saw, will justice be served?”

The crowd inhaled in expectation, and McGinty held his chin high. The audacity of the lie shouldn’t have surprised Fegan so.

“And if it isn’t . . .” McGinty’s chest swelled as he sucked in air. “I WILL SAY NO MORE!”

An angry roar tore through the men and women; fists stabbed the air.

“I will say no more. The test will have been failed, and I will not hesitate to recommend the party withdraw its endorsement of the PSNI. We know the implications of that action, and believe me comrades, the decision will not be taken lightly. But that is the choice faced by the British Government, by the Ombudsman and by the police service that claims to represent all sections of our society.”

Fegan wondered at McGinty’s conceit, at his temerity in making such threats. The leadership would never have approved it, Fegan was positive. But then, he had no stomach for politics. Not any more. The cause he once killed for was long gone, swallowed up by the avarice of men like McGinty.

Sometimes he wondered if he had ever believed in any of it. As a boy, he’d seen the scars left on his community. He remembered the raids, the cops and the Brits breaking down doors. They pulled young men out of their beds to imprison them without trial at Long Kesh, the old RAF base that would later become the Maze, or on the prison ship at Belfast Docks. He remembered the anger, the hate, the poverty and the unemployment. The only way to have anything, to be any - thing, was to fight. Get the Brits out, seize power from the Unionists, take freedom at gunpoint. That’s what they said, and he believed them.

But there was more than that. Fegan had been a solitary boy, quick with his fists but slow with words. When McKenna befriended him thirty years ago, it seemed to be a path to a bigger world. A world where he mattered. McKenna fought for Fegan to be brought along on the camping trips across the border, to the forests and lakes around Castleblaney, where he and the other boys played soldiers and shot air rifles at paper targets.

McKenna called it a youth club. Fegan’s mother called it indoctrination.

Paul McGinty drove them on the first trip, picking them up in an old Volkswagen Camper. McGinty was not yet in his late twenties, but everyone knew his name. He had been interned at Long Kesh a few years before. He went in a snot-nosed thug, and came out six months later quoting Karl Marx and Che Guevara. He sat at the camp fire reading aloud from

Das Kapital

while the boys ate beans and passed cigarettes around.

Now McGinty stood dressed in a designer suit, about as far from the young revolutionary of Fegan’s memory as a man could be.

Somewhere between Fegan’s sentencing for the murder of three innocents in a Shankill butcher’s shop and his release twelve years later, the world had changed. South of the border, in the Republic of Ireland, the old parochial ways vanished, washed away by money and the country’s new vision of itself. The North had become the poor relation, the bastard child no one had the heart to send away. The struggle for the North’s reunification with the rest of Ireland was rendered pointless.

The rest of Ireland didn’t want them any more.

So the longing for freedom, whatever that was, had given way to the lust for money and power. The paramilitaries, Republican and Loyalist alike, maintained the façade of their political ideals, but Fegan knew the truth. Sometimes he wondered if, deep inside, he’d always known the true desires of men like Michael McKenna and Paul McGinty.

Fegan looked again to the nine followers wandering around him, the three Brits, the two Loyalists, the cop, the butcher, the woman and her baby. What was it for? To line McGinty’s pockets?

The woman stared at McGinty, as did the butcher who died with her. Slowly they raised their hands, forming them into pistols. The woman turned to look at Fegan, her soft smiling lips like a knife wound.

She nodded.

Fegan shook his head, his mouth open.

She nodded again. Fegan wanted to turn and run. He closed his eyes and tried to force the followers back to the edge of his consciousness. Lightning arcs flashed between his temples. He gritted his teeth and pushed, but the shadows resisted. Air escaped his lungs in a slow hiss of defeat. He opened his eyes, resigned to the followers’ presence.

But they had more to tell him.

Father Coulter approached.

The three Brits watched him move among the crowd, shaking hands with the mourners. The priest was a squat barrel of a man, with thick grey-black hair. From Sligo originally, Fegan thought. The Brits’ arms stretched and aimed at Father Coulter. But why would they possibly want him?

Then, one memory finding another, Fegan knew. As the sun seared the back of his neck, he closed his eyes and remembered.

The family, three girls and their parents, squealed in unison when the blast rattled their windows. They were safely tied to one another upstairs, well away from any glass that might shatter. Fegan and Coyle had made sure of that. As the rumble faded, rolling off across the rooftops, a silence fell. Then moaning came from the street outside. Moaning grew to crying, and crying grew to screaming.

Fegan peered out through the crack in the door. He looked at Coyle. “You didn’t get them all.”

“Fuck,” Coyle said. “What do we do?”

“You tell me. You planted it, you triggered it.”

“Do we go and finish them?” Coyle’s voice edged on panic.

Fegan took the pistol from his pocket and held it out butt first.

“Fuck, no!” Coyle said. “I can’t do that. You do it.”

“Christ,” Fegan said. “You’re grand when you’re fifty feet away, but you don’t like getting close.”

“I did my bit.”

“Not too well.” Fegan nodded to the door. “Listen to them.”

“They must’ve split up. How am I supposed to know they’d split up?”

“They do three-and-threes all the time. You should’ve waited till the first three was past and the other was coming up. You would’ve got all of them.”

“Christ, what do we do?” Coyle pleaded again.

Fegan sighed and pulled the balaclava down over his face, leaving just his eyes and mouth exposed. Coyle did the same and followed Fegan to the street. They walked quickly towards the drifting smoke at the corner. There the remains of a litter bin were scattered across the road and the window of the shop it belonged to was blown inward. Street lights reflected off the glittering fragments of glass and sweet wrappers.

Fegan didn’t pay any attention to them. Instead he looked at the six bodies on the ground. Three of the British soldiers were dead, but three still jerked and shivered. Two of them had even escaped with their limbs intact. They might have been called lucky, had it not been for Fegan. The other survivor had lost most of his right arm - he was the screamer - and shock had now reduced him to quivering silence. It was a small bomb, designed for maximum casualties within a localised area, with minimal wider damage to the surrounding property.

A woman scampered out of the house next to the shop, pointing to her living-room window. “Look what you did! I’ll be hoovering up glass for a month.” She noticed the men on the ground and crossed herself. “Oh, Jesus, them poor boys. God love them.”

Fegan aimed the pistol at her forehead. “Go back inside,” he said. The woman did as she was told without another word. Fegan readied himself to finish the job, but he and Coyle both spun on their heels when they heard the rapid slap-slap of shoe leather from behind them.

“Oh, no,” Father Coulter said as he slowed to a stop, breathless. “Oh, no, no, no. Oh, God.”

“We’re not finished here, Father,” Fegan said. He moved from body to body, kicking the soldiers’ weapons away.

“Let me give them their Last Rites, for God’s sake,” the priest said.

“When we’re finished.”

Father Coulter stepped closer to the nearest three, his eyes widening as he looked from soldier to soldier. “These men are alive,” he said.

“You’d better go, now, Father,” Fegan said. “Come back in a few minutes.”

“No,” Father Coulter said. “These men can be saved. I can’t let them die, no matter who they are.”

“Come on, Father,” Coyle said, ‘you hate the Brits as much as anyone. All those times you took the boys in, hid them, gave them alibis.”

Father Coulter’s mouth opened and closed for a few seconds. “No,” he said, ‘that’s not true.”

Fegan shot Coyle a warning look. He turned back to the priest. “All right, Father, they haven’t seen our faces. We’ll let them live if that’s what you want. But you’ll have to explain why you stopped it when you’re asked.”

Fegan stepped in close to Father Coulter and whispered, “You’ll have to tell McGinty when he comes calling, and believe me, he

will

call. You’re a brave man, Father Coulter, but are you that brave?”

“I . . . I . . . I . . .” Father Coulter stammered. Something forced his stare to the ground. “Oh, Christ.”

“Please,” one of the Brits hissed, tugging at the priest’s trouser leg, blood trickling from his ears, his helmet gone. “Help me,” he whispered through blackened lips.

Father Coulter jerked his leg away and took a step back. Fegan chambered a round and pressed the pistol to the back of the soldier’s skull. “Your choice, Father.”

“Jesus, Gerry, quit it,” Coyle said.

“Shut your fucking mouth,” Fegan said. “If he wants to judge me he better be ready to go all the way.”

He turned back to the priest. “You hear that, Father? You stand there in chapel every Saturday night, every Sunday morning, telling us to turn from sin. All the time you’re taking handouts from McGinty to keep your mouth shut, to see nothing, to hear nothing, to turn away and be quiet. And the next Saturday, the next Sunday, you’re telling us to take the other way. There’s always another way, right? Now’s your chance to prove it. Tell me to take the other way and I’ll do it. But you better be ready to stand over it. You better be ready to answer to the boys who run these streets.”

Father Coulter blinked at him. “Please, this isn’t . . . it’s not . . .”

Fegan pressed his pistol’s muzzle harder against the back of the soldier’s head. “What’s it to be, Father? Have you the guts to practise what you preach? Or will you shut your eyes and say nothing like you always do?”

As the Brit held out his hands, as he whimpered on the ground, the priest’s face went slack. He looked to Fegan once, and then looked to the ground. He turned and started walking.

“No!” The soldier tried to crawl after him. “No! No, no, please! Help!”

Father Coulter’s stride was broken only slightly by the booming discharge as it resonated through the street.

Fegan kept his eyes closed until McGinty’s speech was finished. When he opened them, she was there, facing him.

“Hello,” Marie McKenna said.

Fegan blinked, unable to respond. The followers lost themselves amongst the thinning crowd.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said.

“It’s okay.” He scrambled for something else to say but could find nothing.

“Are you going to the house?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Just for a while.”

“Do you need a lift?”

“No, I’m all right,” he lied.

“Oh. Well, I’ll maybe see you there.” Marie smiled and left him among the gravestones.

Fegan stood in the May heat, waiting for the crowd to dissolve. When he was sure she had left, he began walking to the cemetery gates.

In his younger days Fegan had been glad of women, and the ease with which he could work his way into their beds. Some of the lads, like McKenna, had the words to charm them. But Fegan had never needed that; his reputation was enough. He knew they relished the danger of it, and he was happy to use them. Since leaving the Maze he’d had only a few encounters, moments here and there to scratch the itch, but that was all.

Marie McKenna troubled him. She was clearly not to be toyed with, but he didn’t know how else to deal with women.

“What’s happening to me?” Fegan asked himself. The isolation of his voice sounded strange among the gravestones. He swallowed his questions, put his head down, and kept walking. He stopped at the gates. A long silver car waited there, its engine running.

The tinted rear window rolled down and Paul McGinty, smooth-skinned and handsome, smiled out at him. “Hop in, Gerry,” he said.

14

When the Northern Ireland Office and the security forces worked in unison, they could be impressively efficient.

A pity they don’t do it more often

, Campbell thought as he tossed the holdall on the bed. They’d organised a flat in the Holylands, the warren of streets called so in honor of their names - Palestine Street, Jerusalem Street, Damascus Street - not their inhabitants. It was a smart move, putting him here. The area was almost entirely populated by students attending Queen’s University, the sprawling complex of Victorian and modern buildings at the bottom of the Malone Road. The students came and went at all hours of the day and night. They were noisy and careless of their environment. Campbell could slip in and out without drawing attention.

He went to the window of the small living room. He was on the top floor of a house on University Street, just off Botanic Avenue, overlooking a church. Students, shoppers and workers slipped past one another on the pavement below. His rusted Ford Focus sat at the curb across the way. He’d picked it up in a retail park just south of the city. An extra mobile phone and a Glock 23 were waiting for him in the glove box, the phone never to leave the flat and only to be used to dial one number.

It had almost broken his heart to swap his BMW for the Focus. The journey from Dundalk to Armagh, then up the motorway, was the first time he’d driven the Z4 in a month. He had to remind himself it was this work that paid for the car. But then, why do it if he never got to enjoy the spoils?

That was a good question, one he asked himself constantly. He was thirty-eight years old and had been an impostor for the last fifteen. He could admit a perverse pleasure in living a lie. The permanent risk of discovery had a strange sweetness. There was certainly a dark thrill in watching those around him accept a counterfeit, but surely there was more to it than that?

He had spent many nights staring at one ceiling or another, turning it over in his mind, but every time he came close to the answer he looked away. One day he might have the strength to see that part of himself.

When he joined the Black Watch Royal Highland Regiment at the age of twenty, David Campbell had no concept of where his life would lead him. He was following the path of many boys from Glasgow, and knew full well he’d end up in Belfast, patrolling the streets, dodging bricks and bottles. The first time a woman spat on his boots, he had stopped in his tracks, staring at her in shock.

“Fuck away off home,” she’d said.

“Ignore her, lad,” the sergeant called from behind.

Belfast was a different place now. When Campbell approached the city just an hour before, he was impressed by the number of cranes dotting the skyline. These metallic signals of prosperity towered over every corner of Belfast; in the west where the Republicans’ power was strongest; in the east where the Loyalists held sway; in the south where the city’s wealthy had always lived; in the north where Protestant and Catholic fought over every inch of ground.

The city’s invisible borders remained the same as when Campbell first walked its streets holding a rifle eighteen years ago. The same lowlifes still fed off the misery they created, deepening the divisions wherever they could. The same hatreds still bubbled under the surface. But the city had grown fat, learning to mask its scars when necessary and show them when advantageous.

He turned from the window, went back to the sole bedroom, and dumped the holdall’s contents into a drawer. A flash of color caught his eye. There, among the worn clothes, pistol and loose rounds, lay his old Red Hackle. He lifted it, feeling the plume between his fingers. He hadn’t been able to wear the Black Watch’s traditional insignia for long.

Campbell was just five days past his twenty-third birthday, with less than three years of service, when he had been called to see the Commanding Officer. Lieutenant Colonel Hanson was a gruff man with a deeply lined face, who instilled fear into all under his command. Campbell’s chest fluttered as he knocked on the door.

“Enter,” a voice barked from inside, the Scots accent thick and hard.

Campbell opened the door, stepped inside, closed the door without showing the colonel his back, marched five paces, snapped his heels together and saluted. The colonel casually returned the gesture from behind his desk. Campbell kept his eyes straight ahead, ignoring the third man present.

“You may sit.” The colonel indicated the empty chair facing him. Campbell did so.

“Congratulations on your promotion, Corporal,” Colonel Hanson said.

“Thank you, sir.”

“I’ll get straight to the point. Have you heard of Fourteen Intelligence Company?”

“I’ve heard rumors, sir,” Campbell said. His nervousness intensified. Fourteen Intelligence Company was undercover, annexed to the SAS. It didn’t officially exist, but it was no secret. Fourteen Int did the dirty work, the stuff no one owned up to, the kind of things ordinary people go to prison for.

“Then you’ll know Fourteen Int is charged with intelligence gathering, and plays a vital role in our operations in Northern Ireland. It works closely with, but independently of, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Special Branch, MI5, Force Research Unit and regular Army. It handles agents and informants in all the paramilitary groups in the Province and has saved countless lives.” Major Hanson indicated the third man, seated to his right. “This is Major Ross.”

“Good morning, Corporal,” Major Ross said. He wore no uniform but was instead casually dressed. His accent was Birmingham, or maybe Dudley.

“Good morning, sir,” Campbell said. Sweat trickled down his ribs.

Major Ross lifted a file from the desk and opened it. “David Patrick Campbell. Born in 1969 to a mixed-religion marriage, rare in Glasgow, and raised Catholic. Do you practise?”

“Sir?”

“Your religion. Do you go to Mass?”

“Not since I was at school, sir.” Campbell kept his back stiff, his hands on his knees.

“You left school at sixteen, no real qualifications, despite having above-average intelligence. Various menial jobs, a few stretches on the dole, before you joined the Black Watch. Why did you sign up?”

Campbell shifted in his seat. “There was nothing else to do, sir. No job. No future.”

Major Ross smiled. “I see. And what did your parents make of it?”

Campbell stared at Major Ross while he searched for a lie.

“Answer the major,” Colonel Hanson said.

A lie wouldn’t come, so Campbell was left only the truth. “I wasn’t speaking with them at the time, sir.”

“And why was that?” Major Ross asked.

“We’d had a falling-out a couple of years before, sir.”

“Over what?”

“I’d rather not say, sir.”

Colonel Hanson’s face reddened. “You’ll answer the question, corporal.”

“I had some trouble with the law, sir. My parents didn’t take it very well.” Campbell looked down at his hands.

“Some trouble with the law,” Major Ross echoed with a sly smile. “That’s one way to put it. You kicked the shit out of a nightclub door-man is another way.”

Campbell looked the major in the eye. “The charges were withdrawn, sir.”

“Yes - very conveniently for you, several witnesses changed their stories. You wouldn’t have had anything to do with that, would you, Corporal?”

“No, sir.”

Major Ross looked back to the file. “Your record since joining the Black Watch has been good, but not exceptional. With your brains you should have been corporal a year ago. You’re a quick thinker, you’re tough, but you lack discipline. I’m told you’re good in a scrap. In fact, I’m told you’ve got a serious mean streak. You came close to a court martial last year after assaulting a protester at a Loyalist parade. Care to comment?”

“It was self-defence, sir. The charges were dropped.”

“Conveniently for you, yet again.” Major Ross smiled and placed the file back on the desk. “You’ve no family that you’re in contact with, and no friends outside this barracks, correct?”

“Yes, sir.” Campbell watched the two officers share a glance. “Can I ask what this is about, sir?”

Colonel Hanson went to shout some admonishment, but Major Ross raised a hand to silence him. “I want you to come and work for me,” he said.

So in the following months Campbell began to spend days at a time in England, at RAF Cosford and the Commando Training Center in Lympstone, being brutalised for the good of the country. When he flew back to Belfast he frequented some of the bars he and his colleagues had been warned to avoid. He wore a Glasgow Celtic shirt to pubs where matches were being screened, cheering loudest when they scored against Glasgow Rangers. An insider in Fourteen Int’s pay introduced him to some men, vouching for him. He answered questions about his Black Watch regiment, about the patrols he walked in. When they got more specific, when they asked about times and dates, he played coy. When he was discharged from the Black Watch a few months later for a contrived disciplinary breach, he grew less shy with the details. He worked his way into the enemy’s ranks, a little deeper every day, while once a week he met a handler in a car park or a country lane and reported on what he’d learned. Occasionally he would check a savings account, opened under another name, to see he had been well paid.

The first time he had to kill to protect his cover was difficult. They’d warned him it would happen eventually, but even so, the image of executing his old sergeant still woke him in the night, even fifteen years later. It was the wild hope in Sergeant Hendry’s eyes that burned in Campbell’s memory. Not the begging, not the weeping, but the moment Hendry recognised him, believing he was saved. Hendry’s hope died an instant before he did, when he watched Campbell’s finger tighten on the trigger.

Campbell shivered, suddenly cold despite the sun breaking through the bedroom window. The church bell signalled two o’clock. It was time to go. Time he went to McKenna’s bar to meet his contact.

15

McGinty’s imported Lincoln Town Car floated along the lower Falls Road like a magic carpet. The boys had swapped rumors about how much it cost to bring over from America. They said the leadership considered it distasteful, a vulgar display unbefitting the current climate. A glass screen separated Fegan and McGinty from Declan Quigley, the politician’s driver.

“You never got a driving licence, did you, Gerry?” McGinty asked.

“No,” Fegan said.

“Me neither. I can’t afford to take a chance on driving without one these days, so . . .” McGinty waved a manicured hand at the car’s black leather interior. “As needs must,” he said.

Fegan felt as if he was in a steel cocoon. The tinted windows appeared black from outside, and he imagined the car could withstand any attack from bullet or bomb.

“You wanted to see me,” he said.

“We’ll get to that,” McGinty said. Fegan could see his rictus smile from the corner of his eye. “I was hoping we could catch up a wee bit first.”

“All right,” Fegan said.

McGinty patted Fegan’s knee. “So, what’s the story? What’s been going on?”

“Nothing much.”

“How’s the Community Development job going?”

“I cash the checks.”

“You’re entitled to it, Gerry. You gave us twelve years. We won’t forget it. That job will keep paying as long as you want it, no questions asked.”

Fegan spared McGinty a sideways glance. “Thanks,” he said.

“Shame about Michael, eh?” McGinty said.

“Yeah,” Fegan said.

“And Vincie Caffola now, too.”

Fegan kept his eyes on the glass divider and the road beyond. They passed the right turn into Fallswater Parade, moving further away from McKenna’s mother’s house. The gable walls were painted over with murals, propaganda messages written as art. “You really think the peelers did it?” Fegan asked.

“Maybe,” McGinty said. “That’s my public position, anyway.”

“You said you had witnesses.”

“Of course I do, Gerry.” McGinty gave a short laugh. “Of course I do.”

He placed his hand on Fegan’s knee and kept it there. “The thing is . . . look at me, Gerry.”

Fegan closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them, turning to face McGinty.

“The thing is,” McGinty continued, ‘somebody might have done me a favor, all things considered.”

“How?” Fegan asked.

McGinty smiled. “Well, Michael, God rest him, was getting mixed up in things he shouldn’t have. See, times have changed. Some of us - not all, but enough of us - want Stormont to succeed. On all sides. Us, the Brits, even the Unionists. This is a different world. The bombs won’t work any more. The dissidents put an end to that in Omagh. The people won’t tolerate violence like they used to. Then 9/11 came along. The Americans don’t look at armed struggle the same way. Used to be we could sell them the romance of it, call ourselves freedom fighters, and they loved it. The money just rolled in, all those Irish-Americans digging in their pockets for the old country. They don’t buy it any more. We’ve got peace now, whether we like it or not.”

Fegan watched the murals drift past, images and slogans, portraits of Republican heroes next to expressions of solidarity with Palestine and Cuba. Another mural declared Catalonia was not part of Spain. Fegan couldn’t say if it was or it wasn’t, but he sometimes wondered what it had to do with anyone on the Falls. Then there was an image of George Bush sucking oil from a skull-strewn Iraqi battlefield, declaring it

America’s Greatest Failure

.

McGinty continued, “We’re walking a tightrope, and we can’t go upsetting the balance. Sure, the Brits allow us a certain leeway these days - you know, turn a blind eye to keep things stable - but we’re pulling away from all the shady stuff. We have to. We can still embark on our little enterprises, turn a few pound, so long as we’re careful. So long as we keep it quiet. But I’m in a difficult position now. I’ve put the years and the work in, along with everybody else. I put my neck out just like the rest of them, and I want my share of the rewards. But if I want my place at Stormont, then I have to be clean. Spotless, you understand.”

McGinty’s smile dissolved. “But Michael had become a problem. I told him to keep out of trouble, that any shit he got into would stick to me, but he didn’t listen. People smuggling, for Christ’s sake. The Liths were bringing in girls from the South, and Michael was dipping his toe in the water. Fair enough, there was good money there, but Jesus, kids? I mean fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds. Even the Brits wouldn’t let that go. He should’ve left all that to the Loyalists; they’re too stupid to know any better. If he’d been caught he could have done me a lot of damage. The leadership was concerned about him. They went to the old man about it.”

Fegan’s thigh tensed and he ground his shoe against the Lincoln’s carpeting as McGinty squeezed his knee.

“And then there’s Vincie. Now, don’t get me wrong, Vincie was a good volunteer. Best interrogator we ever had in Belfast. But he was mouthing off, how he didn’t like us sitting at Stormont, how he didn’t like us supporting the peelers, how we were selling out. And you know how the old man is, Gerry. Bull O’Kane doesn’t like dissent in the ranks. It unsettles people. I was called down to the farm just last weekend, and he told me to sort things out. Clean house, you know? Get everyone in line or I’d be out.”

Fegan knew the farm he meant, a few acres of land and a modest house that straddled the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, where County Armagh became County Monaghan. O’Kane ran his empire from that remote bolt-hole, and Fegan sometimes heard whispers of how much cash the old man turned over. Millions, some said, maybe hundreds of millions. He buried it in property investment all over the world - England, Spain, Portugal and America - and kept layers of paperwork between him and the money.

These days, most of that money came from the endless demand for cheap fuel. The Bull ran dozens of laundering plants on farms along the border, each churning out millions of gallons of chemically stripped agricultural diesel - government-subsidised fuel intended for cash-strapped farmers. This diesel was processed, cleaned of its dye, and resold to petrol stations, motorists, hauliers and anyone else who wanted to get their hands on cheap fuel. Bull O’Kane now fought for Ireland by poisoning its countryside with chemical waste.

“How is the Bull these days?” Fegan asked.

“Oh, you know Bull,” McGinty said. “He’s kicking the arse of seventy, and he could still take any man came near him. Still as smart as a fox. You only met him a few times, didn’t you?”

“Twice,” Fegan said, his mouth drying at the memory. He swallowed. “It was a long time ago.”

“Anyway,” McGinty said, ‘the point is if someone had a personal thing, some score to settle with Michael McKenna and Vincie Caffola, they just might have done me a favor in the process. They might have done my cleaning-up for me, so to speak. Do you understand, Gerry?”

Fegan remained silent as McGinty’s hand patted his knee again.

“The fact is Michael McKenna and Vincie Caffola were becoming liabilities. The party’s no poorer without them. Now I’ve got an excuse to see off some foreigners who were eating into my business, and a new stick to beat the peelers with. Who knows, if I can convince the media the cops killed Vincie, we might be able to squeeze the Brits with it.”

“I see,” Fegan said. He could see both their reflections in the glass facing them. His own face appeared skeletal next to the other man’s.

“You were always smarter than you let on, Gerry,” McGinty said. “You could have done well for yourself if you’d wanted to. Anyway, my point is this: if someone unknown to us, a man working alone, had some bone to pick with Michael McKenna or Vincie Caffola, I might be prepared to overlook his transgression. Just this once. As it happens, he’s done me a good turn, so we can let it go.”

McGinty took his hand away from Fegan’s knee and draped it around his shoulder. “But that’s all. So far, no harm done. But no more, or I might have to take action. One thing, though.” McGinty leaned in close, his breath warm on Fegan’s ear. “He better not take me for an arsehole. Ever.”

Fegan cleared his throat. “I’m sure he won’t.”

“Not if he’s half the man you are,” McGinty said as he took his arm from around Fegan’s shoulder. “Now, to business. I’d like to see more of you around, Gerry. You always were a good fella to have about. There’s always work for a man like you. I need to know who my friends are in these trying times. Who I can trust, you know?”

“I try to keep myself to myself these days,” Fegan said.

“Fair enough, but you can’t become a hermit on us. It’d do you good to be active, you know, shake away the cobwebs.”

“I suppose.”

“And the drink, Gerry. You’ve got to knock that on the head. I’ve been hearing stories about you lately. About you sitting in McKenna’s bar, getting hammered. I hear you’re talking to yourself.”

“I’ve been cutting back these last few days,” Fegan said, truthfully.

“Glad to hear it. The drink killed my father. Yours too, if I remember right.”

Fegan turned his head away, looking to the street outside. Kids rode bicycles in the sunshine. The Lincoln turned right, then right again, doubling back towards Fallswater Parade. “Yeah,” he said.

“So, anyway, I’ve a wee job for you.”

Fegan turned back to the politician.

“Don’t worry,” McGinty said, smiling. “It’s nothing heavy. Thank God, very little is nowadays. Just a message I need you to deliver.”

Fegan thought about it for a moment and said, “All right.”

“Marie McKenna, Michael’s niece.”

Fegan’s fingernails bit his palm. “Yeah.”

“Seems you’re on friendly terms with her. She gave you a lift yesterday.”

“I don’t know her.” Fegan said. “Not really. I never talked to her before.”

“Well, she offended a lot of people, shacking up with a cop like that.” McGinty watched the houses, the murals and the flags sweep past his window. “Having a kid to him and all. There’s a lot of people would like to make their displeasure known to her. But Michael made sure she was left alone for her mother’s sake. Now Michael’s gone, it might not be so easy to keep them away.”

“They split up years ago,” Fegan said. “Why would anyone care now?”

“People have long memories, Gerry. Especially when it’s somebody else’s sin. We remember Bloody Sunday. We talk about it like it was yesterday. But we forget about the people who died in the days before and the days after. It’s human nature.”

I remember my sins

, thought Fegan.

They follow me everywhere

. He wondered if McGinty remembered his.

“I’d like you to have a wee word with her,” the politician said. “No threats. Subtle, like. Advise her she might be wise to move on. Across the water, maybe.”

“You want me to tell her at the house?” Fegan asked.

“Oh, no, not at Michael’s mother’s. She has a flat off the Lisburn Road, on Eglantine Avenue. Call by there later and have a chat with her. Like I said, keep it friendly. All right?”

Fegan couldn’t return McGinty’s smile. “All right,” he said.

16

The house on Fallswater Parade brimmed with black-garbed friends and family, but not as densely packed as the day before. Today, Fegan was able to breathe. He tried not to stay in one spot too long, lest some old acquaintance should corner him and grind him down with stories of past days. He filched a can of beer from the table in the living room and slipped out to the hall.

McGinty and Father Coulter were in the house somewhere, eating sausage rolls and slapping the faithful’s shoulders, but Fegan avoided them for fear of seeing shadows.

A moment of indecision gripped him. He had to stay a respectable amount of time, just for appearances, but where could he drink his beer in peace? Upstairs, in one of the bedrooms? No, that would be intrusive. The yard would be full of smokers. Where, then?

He remembered the alcove under the stairs. There was a telephone table with a seat in there. He could slip in, sit down in the semi-darkness, and if anyone questioned him he could say he was just resting his feet.

Fegan squeezed past a group of men and ducked into the small alcove. When he realised Marie McKenna had the same idea, and was already perched on the seat, he could only stare at her, his back bent, his head pressed against the underside of the stairs.

“Hello,” she said. He couldn’t tell if her eyes glittered with bemusement or fright. Maybe both.

“Hello,” he said. “I was just . . . ah . . .”

“Finding a place to hide,” she said, small lines forming around her grey-blue eyes as she smiled. “Me too.”

She held a glass of white wine. Lipstick smudged its rim. Fegan wondered what it tasted like.

“I’ll find somewhere else,” he said, backing out.

“No, there’s room,” she said. She shifted further along the seat, leaving space for Fegan’s wiry body. He hesitated for just a second, then slowly lowered himself to rest beside her.

“I wanted to talk to you, anyway,” Marie said. “To apologise.”

“What for?” He opened the can of Harp lager and took a sip. The fizz burned his tongue.

“For being all . . . well, weird, yesterday. I said some things I shouldn’t have.” The wine rippled in her glass as her hand shook.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Everyone does things they wish they hadn’t.”

“True,” she said. He caught the residue of a smile as he turned to look at her.

“Why did you come here?” Fegan asked. The question was out of his mouth before he could catch it. He looked back to the beer can in his hand.

Marie stiffened beside him. “What?”

Nothing

. That’s what he would have said if he wasn’t losing the remnants of his mind. Instead, he said, “They don’t want you, but you came here anyway. And yesterday. Why did you do that?”

She breathed in and out through her nose three times before saying, “Because it’s my family. For better or worse, it’s where I came from. I won’t be driven away, no matter how hard they try.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” he said. “If they don’t want you, why bother?”

“Do you read much?” she asked.

He turned back to her. “No. Why?”

“There’s a little book called

Yosl Rakover Talks to God

. It turned out to be a hoax, but it appeared to be written by a Jewish man hiding from the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. The most awful things have happened to him, but in the end, he stands up to God. He says, ‘God, you can do what you want to me, you can degrade me, you can kill my friends, you can kill my family, but you won’t make me hate you, no matter what.’ ’

Marie gave a long sigh. “Hate’s a terrible thing. It’s a wasteful, stupid emotion. You can hate someone with all your heart, but it’ll never do them a bit of harm. The only person it hurts is you. You can spend your days hating, letting it eat away at you, and the person you hate will go on living just the same. So, what’s the point? They may hate me, but I won’t hate them back. They’re my family, and I won’t let their hate push me away.”

Fegan studied her skin’s tiny diamond patterns stretching across the back of her hands, the fine ridges of the bones, the faint blue lines of her veins. “I’d like to read that book,” he said.

“Well, you can go to the library. I don’t have it any more. When I was seventeen, my father showed my copy to Uncle Michael. Uncle Michael made me tear it up. He said it was Jewish propaganda. He told me to remember what the Jews were doing to the Palestinians. I remember thinking it strange at the time. He didn’t say the Israelis; he said the Jews. I don’t think he’d ever met a Jewish person in his life, but still he hated them. I just didn’t understand it. Funny, I hadn’t thought about that book in years, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since Uncle Michael died.”

A minute of quiet passed, both of them sipping their drinks, before Marie said, “Seeing as we’re asking difficult questions, why did you come in here to hide?”

“Too many people here I used to know,” Fegan said. “I can’t listen to them.”

“You’re a respected man around here,” she said.

“They don’t respect me. They’re afraid of me.”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

Fegan plucked at the beer can’s ring-pull. “You know what I did?”

“I’ve heard things,” she said. Her shoulder brushed against his and he shivered. “Listen, I’ve known men like you all my life. My uncles, my father, my brothers. I know the other side, too, the cops and the Loyalists. I’ve talked to them all in my job. Everyone has their piece of guilt to carry. You’re not that special.”

The last words were softened with kindness.

“No, I’m not,” he said. Somehow, he liked that idea.

“Anyway, I don’t think you’re like that now,” she said. “People can change. They have to, or there’s no hope for this place. Are you sorry for what you did?”

“Yeah.”

“It shows. On your face. In your eyes. You can’t hide it.”

Fegan wanted to look at her, but he couldn’t. He ran his finger around the can’s opening, feeling it bite at his fingertip. Words danced just beyond his grasp.

“I should go,” he said, raising himself off the seat. He stepped out of the cubby-hole and turned, ducking down to see her. “Can I come and see you later?”

Marie’s mouth opened slightly as she considered it. “I don’t know,” she said. “I was going to take my wee girl out for a walk after tea, if the weather stays clear.”

“I could come with you.”

She closed her eyes and inhaled. After an eternity, she opened them again and said, “Okay. You can come with us. I live on Eglantine Avenue.”

She told Fegan the house number. He smiled once and left her in the alcove.

17

The Minister of State for Northern Ireland had been sitting in the back of the car for more than twenty minutes, and they had travelled less than two hundred yards. Compton and the driver sat up front, staring at the back of a bus. The constant blaring of horns and rumble of London traffic did nothing to ease Edward Hargreaves’s headache. The vibration of his phone only soured his mood further.