Campbell went to close the wardrobe door, but something caught his eye. Something small and oblong, pushed into the farthest corner. He reached down and lifted it out. It was a long flat wooden box coated in black vinyl. The sort of box loose jewellery might be stored in. He sat on the edge of the bed and opened it.
Letters, all unopened, all postmarked HM PRISON MAZE, all emblazoned with
Return to sender
. Campbell flipped through them, twelve in total. The most recent was at the top. He hesitated for just a second, then tore it open.
It was one page of small, neat handwriting. The words and letters were impossibly uniform in size and spacing, as if the writer were afraid of revealing anything of himself. It was dated the fourteenth of December 1997. A little over nine and a half years ago. Campbell held his breath as he read.
Dear Mother,
Father Coulter was here today doing his visits. He told me you are very sick. He said you have cancer. I asked my new psychologist Dr. Brady and he said they would probably let me out to see you if I ask them.
Please let me see you. I am sorry for what I did. I am sorry I let you down. I know you are ashamed of me. I don’t blame you. I am ashamed of myself.
Please let me come and visit you. If I could take back what I did I would. I know you have mercy in your heart. I had no mercy in my heart when I did those things but I have now.
Please have mercy. Please let me see you before you get any sicker.
Your son,
Gerald.
Campbell closed his eyes for a few seconds, feeling the paper’s texture between his fingers, listening to his own heartbeat. He opened them again and folded the letter before slipping it back into its envelope. Using his fingertip, he smoothed the tear over as best he could and returned the letter to the box. It fitted neatly into the back corner of the wardrobe, in the dark where he couldn’t see it.
“Fuck!” he said, startled at the vibration of his phone. He pulled it from his pocket and looked at the screen. Number withheld. It could be anybody. He thumbed the answer button and brought it to his ear. “What?”
“We’ve found them,” Patsy Toner said.
36
“There you go,” the young man said, dropping the sponge into the bucket. “Not the tidiest ever, but you wanted it quick.”
Fegan pressed two twenty-pound notes into the acne-faced kid’s hand. “Thanks.”
“You all right, mate?”
Fegan pushed his shaking hands down into his pockets. “I’m grand,” he said, and turned to the car.
Viper Stripes, they were called. A pair of ridiculous white bands that drew a line from the green Renault Clio’s nose, over the hood, along the roof, and back down the tailgate. They were supposed to look sporty, but Fegan thought they looked stupid, though no more so than the other little cars parked in front of Antrim Motor Kit. They all had spoilers, bulbous wheel arches and lowered suspensions, and they were all driven by spotty youths in baseball caps.
Fegan had stopped at a beauty spot along the coast and removed the number plates from another green Clio. They were now stuck over Marie’s plates using permanent tape he had bought in a hardware shop in Ballymena. It would take a most attentive police officer to recognise the car as belonging to a missing woman.
Ten or fifteen years ago it would have been impossible to drive from the coast, through two large towns, and on to Belfast without meeting a roadblock. An army or police checkpoint would have been a certainty along Fegan’s route, but not today. Many times he’d been pulled from a car by Brits or UDR, and searched at the side of the road while uniformed men ripped out the vehicle’s innards. The young men in their modified cars would be outraged if that ever happened to them, though their fathers, Protestant and Catholic alike, had endured it every day for decades.
The weather had turned. The warm sunshine of the previous weeks had begun to wane, and clouds hung low overhead. The world was turning grey, and Fegan felt a heaviness inside as he opened the driver’s door.
He lowered himself into the car, started the engine, and moved off. The Clio jerked at his clumsy gear changes; it had been a long time since he’d driven. He joined the system of roundabouts that led to the M2 motorway. In less than an hour he’d be in Belfast.
37
“Jesus, you’re a fucking mess,” Campbell said.
“Fuck you,” Eddie Coyle said, forcing the words through the narrow opening of his mouth. Fegan had knocked out two teeth and dislocated his jaw. He looked like someone had molded his face from purple and yellow plasticine and sewn the pieces together.
“Shut up,” McGinty said from behind his desk. He pointed to the chair next to Coyle. “Sit down.”
McGinty had furnished his moderately sized constituency office with functional items, as befitted the party’s socialist dogma. Images of Republican heroes like James Connolly and Patrick Pearse decorated the walls. A map of Ireland divided into the four provinces hung above an Irish Tricolor.
“Our friend inside Lisburn Road station headed off a call from a hotel owner this morning,” McGinty said. “We were due a stroke of luck after the balls you two made of things.”
Campbell pointed to the ceiling, then his ear.
McGinty shook his head. “We’re clean. The place was swept for bugs this morning. As I was saying, our friend did well. He’ll get a nice bonus for his troubles and - despite my better judgment - you two get the chance to put things right. Do you think you can manage not to completely fuck it up this time?”
Campbell and Coyle did not answer.
“If I didn’t need to keep as few people in the know as possible, I’d have given this to someone else. But, as it’s a delicate matter, it’s up to you two.”
“Where are they?” Campbell asked.
“Portcarrick. It’s a little village up on the Antrim coast. Very pretty. There’s an old hotel on the bay called Hopkirk’s. They arrived there late last night, apparently. Gerry Fegan, Marie McKenna and the wee girl.”
Campbell knew the answer, but asked the question anyway. “What do you want us to do?”
McGinty gave him a hard stare. “Take a wild guess.”
“And what about the woman?”
McGinty’s eyes flickered for just an instant. “If she gets in the way, do whatever you have to.”
Coyle mopped drool from his chin with a stained handkerchief. He leaned forward in his seat. “And the wee girl?”
McGinty swivelled in his chair to look out the window at the greying sky. He wiped his mouth and looked at his hand, as if expecting to see blood there. “I said do whatever you have to.”
“No way I’m doing a wee girl.”
Squeezed between tight lips, Coyle’s words were hard to hear over the van’s rattling engine. It had been bought from a scrap dealer that morning. Red paint and rust had flaked at the touch of Campbell’s finger. He drove.
“It probably won’t come to that,” he said.
“But it might.” Coyle dabbed at his mouth.
“We’ll see. Do you know how to get to this place?”
“Sort of. Head for the M2. Keep going till you hit Antrim, then Ballymena. After that, we’ll have to go by the road signs.”
Campbell headed east across the city, onto the Falls Road and past the imposing Divis Tower, once a focal point of violence in the city. The top two floors of the twenty-storey block of flats had been commandeered by the British Army in the early Seventies for its views over the city. Because it stood at the heart of militant Republicanism, they could only access it by helicopter. Campbell had often wondered what it was like for the residents in the floors below, hearing their enemy’s footsteps above their homes, and the thunderous clatter of the helicopters bringing soldiers in and out, day and night. The army had abandoned it two years ago. Campbell imagined they were as glad to leave the tower as the residents were to see them go.
The van joined the Westlink, which in turn would lead them to the M2 and north towards the rugged Glens of Antrim. He winced now and then as the van’s jostling sparked painful flares in his side. The heavy clutch pedal did little for his injured thigh. The stop-and-start of traffic, backed up by roadworks to the south where the M1 joined the Westlink, only made it worse. What use was progress if all it caused was traffic jams? Peace had cost the people of Northern Ireland dear, but Campbell wouldn’t have been surprised if road congestion irked them more than anything else.
He looked across to Coyle in the passenger seat. “Tell me something. What is it with McGinty and that woman? There’s got to be more to it than her shacking up with a cop. What’s the story?”
“That’s none of your business,” Coyle said.
“Aw, come on.” Campbell shot him a grin. “Just a bit of gossip for the road, eh?”
Coyle sighed and shook his head.
“Jesus, come on, you miserable bastard. Why not tell me?”
“Three reasons.” Coyle counted them on his fingers. “One, you’re a cunt. Two, asking questions about Paul McGinty’s personal life is a fucking good way to get your legs broke. Three, talking hurts like fuck. Now shut your fucking mouth and drive.”
38
The air was heavy with coming rain as Fegan watched Patsy Toner’s office from the bus stop opposite. The solicitor ran his practice from rented rooms above a newsagent’s shop on the Springfield Road. His Jaguar was parked outside. It was seven o’clock and the sky made a grey blanket over the city.
A headache came in waves, punctuating the swells of nausea. The windows of an off-licence two doors down gleamed in the bruised evening. He ignored it. He knew Toner would come out soon. The lawyer would want to go drinking. Then Fegan would find out why the followers wanted that cop. When he knew who he was, he’d draw him out, get the cop to come to him.
Then he’d do it.
The RUC man would leave Fegan, just as the others had. Then Campbell and McGinty, tomorrow or the day after, and he would be free. He closed his eyes and pictured it: a dark, quiet room where he could lay his head down without fear of screaming.
Alone.
That word was bitter-sweet. He could close his eyes in peace, but he would be alone. He would have to run, leaving Marie and Ellen behind. At least they’d be safe and, really, that was all that mattered.
He opened his eyes as a chill crept to his center. Shadows gathered to him.
The light in Toner’s window died.
“He’s coming,” Fegan said.
He made his way across the road, squeezing his hands into a pair of surgical gloves. The Jaguar’s passenger side faced out, and Fegan hunkered down at its rear door and gripped the handle. A narrow staircase descended from Toner’s office to the doorway below. Fegan heard the door wheeze open and closed, and the jangling of keys. Toner talked on his mobile phone.
“So, it’s sorted?” he said. “Fucking glad to hear it. So long as they don’t make a balls of it.”
Fegan held his breath, readying himself.
“Let me know when it’s done. I’ll have a drink to celebrate.”
He heard a beep as Toner disconnected, then a whir and clunk as he unlocked the Jaguar.
Wait
, Fegan told himself,
wait, wait
. . .
He pulled the handle the moment he heard Toner open the driver’s door and slipped quietly onto the back seat as the solicitor lowered himself in. Fegan waited for Toner to pull the driver’s door closed. When it thudded home, Fegan pulled his own door shut.
“Fucking Christ!” Toner twisted in the seat, his mouth open wide, his eyes gaping first at Fegan’s face, and then at the pistol in his hand.
“Hello, Patsy,” Fegan said.
He made Toner drive first east, then north. Horns blared on the Westlink as a rusted red van bullied its way through traffic ahead of them. The congestion eased as they climbed towards the M2’s long sweeps. Fegan risked one glance across the river to the Odyssey complex, its lights coming to life for a busy Saturday night. Less than a week ago he had pulled the trigger and settled Michael McKenna’s debt. He realised it had been no more than a hundred yards from this stretch of road.
“Hurry up,” he said to Toner.
Twenty minutes took them to an industrial estate north-west of the city. As the sky darkened, Fegan instructed Toner to park up between the low buildings, out of sight of the rumbling motorway. He had been here before, nine years ago, when the two UFF boys died badly. Now those same UFF boys paced in the drizzle, hate and pain on their faces, touching themselves in the places where Fegan had opened them. He couldn’t return their stares.
