You can bury a body, but you can’t bury the past.

Sometimes, doing the right thing can change your life forever. When vet Conor Maguire agreed to dispose of a corpse for his wife’s desperate brother, Patrick, he prayed that would be the end of the matter. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Now Conor is returning to Belfast after five years self-imposed exile. He wants to rebuild his shattered life with the family he left behind, but the past won’t leave him alone. Patrick has risen through the ranks of gangland criminality, and wants Conor’s help once more. This time he isn’t asking nicely.

Dead and Buried

John Brennan

Copyright

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2015

Copyright © John Brennan 2015

John Brennan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9781474030762

Version date: 2018-09-20

JOHN BRENNAN

was born in Edinburgh in 1974, and relocated to London to work in advertising in 2001. He is married with three children.

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Title Page

Copyright

Author Bio

1992

Present Day

1993

Present Day

1994

Present Day

1995

Present Day

1996

Present Day

1997

Present Day

1998

Present Day

1999

Present Day

2002

Present Day

2002

Present Day

2004

Present Day

One Year Later

Extract

Endpages

About the Publisher

1992

WHAT had woken him? A voice?

No – there was no voice – only the strident double-tone of the phone, and then, from under the covers, Christine sleepily asking, ‘What time is it?’

The bedside clock told 3.12.

As Conor reached for the receiver, the cold air of the bedroom raised goose flesh on his arms and chest.

A thoroughbred with a torsioned colon up at the McGill stables. A sheep hit by a lorry out on one of the high roads. A cow that can’t calve in some godforsaken byre down Ballycullen way. That’d be it. Conor turned over the possibilities in his head: breech birth, prolapsed uterus, dead calf…

‘Conor – fucking hell.’

This wasn’t any Ballycullen farmer. He half-recognised the voice through the layers of panic. ‘Patrick?’

‘Fuckin’ hell, Conor, man – you have to help me.’

Patrick Cameron – Christine’s little brother. Conor swallowed; kept his voice level.

‘What’s up?’

‘I’ve done something…something stupid.’ On ‘stupid’ Patrick’s voice broke into a strangled sob. Pissed again, Conor supposed. Patrick liked a drink, no question. Hadn’t he done for the best part of a bottle of Bushmill’s at Conor and Christine’s wedding in the summer and made a twat of himself on the dance floor?

How many have you had? Conor wanted to ask. But with Christine listening he couldn’t ask that. So instead: ‘What’s the problem?’

‘I think I’ve killed somebody.’

Jesus. Conor thought his heart had stopped. He cleared his throat.

‘Say again?’ he managed. Calm, professional, just another late-night call-out…

But Patrick only sobbed into the phone. Then he said, ‘Come out, Con. I’m outside. Come outside.’

It was a freezing night, black and cold and hard as iron.

Conor, closing the front door quietly behind him, made out Patrick jogging back from the callbox at the end of the road. Right down the middle of the empty street, between parked cars, his feet a soft crunch and skidding in the frost. As he passed under the streetlamps, he saw the bloodstains. On his tracksuit bottoms, on his face and hands. He was only a rag of a lad, Paddy Cameron. Twenty-two years of age but could’ve passed for eighteen. A scallywag, to hear Christine tell it – a sharp-edged little scanger, to hear anyone else.

He approached slowly, hands shoved deep in his pockets like he was searching for a lost bit of change. ‘What’d you tell Chris?’ he whispered.

‘Had to go out to Nesbit’s place to foal his mare. The poor girl’s six months pregnant, what am I going to tell her?’ Conor glanced anxiously over his shoulder, but all down the street the upstairs windows were unlit. No one awake on Rembrandt Close – no one watching.

He fixed Patrick with a stare. ‘So?’

Patrick rolled a plug of chewing gum over in his mouth and then, with a half-shrug, said, ‘In the car.’

‘What’s in the car?’

‘He is.’

Conor wanted to turn, run back indoors and lock the door. But something stopped him. He followed Patrick to the car. Already his brain was working to the inevitable conclusion: phone the police. There’s no harm seeing what you’re dealing with, but then walk back to the house and phone the fuzz. No, better, use the phonebox. Keep Christine out of this for as long as you can.

The knackered old Escort was parked by the kerb beneath a broken streetlight. Patrick opened the rear door. The car light came on like a flashbulb.

‘Turn that fucking thing off,’ Conor hissed. Patrick reached in and killed the light – but Conor had seen enough. The body sprawled face-down on the back seat. Unmoving – the right arm crooked awkwardly – the left hanging limp. Patch of blood on his back.

With the smell of blood in the air, Patrick started muttering. ‘Christ almighty, Con. Christ.’

‘Quiet.’ Conor closed the car door and leaned on it. ‘It’s all right,’ he lied. ‘It’ll be fine. Just – just tell me what happened.’

Patrick was trying to light up a cigarette but his hands were shaking too hard.

‘Forget the fucking cigarette,’ said Conor. ‘Just tell me what you did.’

Patrick shrugged and shoved his cigarettes back into his jacket pocket. His eyes were wide and white in the darkness.

‘It was self-defence, Con,’ he said.

‘How did I know you were going to say that?’

‘I swear to God, man, it’s the truth. What d’you take me for?’

‘You promise me now?’ He felt like a schoolteacher – or anyway Patrick looked like a schoolkid, skinny and pale and finally finding himself in a jam he couldn’t talk his way out of.

‘I promise. I never meant, I never wanted—’

‘Okay.’ Conor cut him off before his voice could break again. More bloody tears were the last thing they needed. Besides, he’d had enough of this. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to go back to Christine. ‘So we call the police,’ he said, digging into his jeans pocket for change for the callbox. ‘We explain. There’s no law against—’

He’d never have thought Patrick had it in him. The kid’s shoulder hammered into his chest; his forehead jolted Conor’s chin – Conor, thrown off balance by the suddenness of the attack, was stunned for a half-second. Patrick’s bony left hand took a tight hold on his right wrist.

‘No police,’ Patrick hissed. His face was wild and close.

‘Get to fuck,’ Conor said.

With an easy half-turn of his arm he broke Patrick’s grip on his wrist. Patrick had caught him off-guard but Conor still had four inches and forty pounds on the kid. Besides, he kept himself in shape – Patrick always looked like he’d been weaned on smack and potato crisps.

He pushed Patrick back with one hand. ‘You can forget about that stuff,’ he said firmly.

But Patrick was still scared. Mad scared.

‘No police.’

‘All we’ll say is—’

‘No police.’

Then there was a gun in Patrick’s hand. The move, dragging the weapon sharply out and up from the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms, was fast, efficient – practised. Conor froze.

‘No,’ Patrick said again, ‘police.’

The kid was aiming the gun right between his eyes. Only six inches away but jumping around so much he might still have missed.

Still, though – the odds were all in the kid’s favour. This was Patrick’s game now.

‘Patrick…’

‘Shut your fucking face and do as you’re fucking told.’

Conor tried to swallow and couldn’t. Mouth dry as dust. He tried to think. It wasn’t easy with the gun barrel quivering in front of his face. They didn’t teach you that at veterinary school.

Patrick was a kid who’d been around. Not a killer, no – but hardly an innocent. So why was he crying like a baby and waving a gun around in the middle of the street at 3am in the fucking morning?

‘Who is he?’ Conor managed to say.

Patrick shrugged with one shoulder.

‘It’s nobody now,’ he said.

Connor wanted to take him by the scruff of his scraggy neck, shake some sense into him. He mastered his anger with difficulty.

‘So who was he?’

Patrick wouldn’t meet his eye.

‘Just a – just a feller.’ Patrick looked up, turned his plug of gum over in his mouth. With what seemed like a childish sort of boldness or bravado, he added, ‘One of your lot.’

‘My lot?’ Conor’s mind raced. ‘A Catholic?’

A nod.

‘Someone – Patrick, is this someone I know?’

Patrick bit his lip and didn’t answer. It came to Conor so suddenly, so horribly, that he forgot about the gun in Patrick’s hand – forgot about calling the police, forgot about getting back home, back to Christine.

He turned and wrenched open the car door. The outline of the still body was clear in the dim light. Reaching in, Conor took hold of a coat sleeve and hauled. The leather of the car seats creaked; a wheeze of air hissed horribly from the dead man’s lungs. The heavy body rolled reluctantly onto its side. Behind him Conor heard Patrick’s voice: it sounded like he was pleading now, ‘Oh, Con.’

With his hand still clutching the canvas coat sleeve Conor looked down at the half-shadowed, half-turned face of the dead man. Cold bile rose sharply in the back of his throat.

‘It wasn’t supposed to happen,’ he heard Patrick say.

Conor stared at the dead man’s face and the dead man’s empty blue eyes looked back at him.

Coleraine Road, spring of ’74

‘Quiet now. They’re coming. They’re—’

‘Quiet, he says. Be quiet yourself. And duck down. He’ll see you.’

There was rain in the air and you wouldn’t have wanted to go out without a jacket. Winter wasn’t forgotten. But still – it felt like summer, it felt like a holiday, that day.

‘They’re coming in!’

‘Shut your bloody hole, will you, Con.’

Lefty was first – Lefty McLeod, the Lieutenant. What would he have been then? Twenty-six, twenty-seven? George Best sideburns and a face as long and pale as a ballet shoe. Hadn’t got any better-looking in the two years he’d been away. He came in, grinned, winked.

‘No one here, yet, Colm,’ Lefty said in a loud voice. ‘Must all be – must all be busy or something, I s’pose.’

As if he hadn’t seen Con and Robert and Martin giggling and nudging each other behind the settee.

And then in he came – Him, the big feller, Colm Murphy, fresh from a three-year stretch in Long Kesh, bold and bearish as ever, curly blond hair overlong and pushed behind his ears, blue eyes bright, all six-foot-four of him filling the doorway.

‘Well!’ he said. ‘It seems like the Maguire boys don’t give a tinker’s cuss for the homecoming hero! It seems like the Maguire boys—’

And he probably had more of the same to say but the Maguire boys couldn’t wait long enough to hear it. Robert got there first – first to throw his arms round Murphy’s waist, first to feel Murphy’s heavy hand ruffle his hair. Martin, the youngest, was gratefully gathered in under the big man’s arm.

Conor hung back. He was thirteen – too cool for that stuff.

‘It’s good,’ Colm Murphy said, ‘to be home.’ He held Conor’s eye while he said it – and Conor held Murphy’s eye right back. He knew how it was for the boy. He stepped forward – Robert and Martin still clinging to the hem of his coat – and put out a hand.

‘Conor,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to see you again. A young man,’ he added.

Conor shook his hand. ‘Welcome home, Uncle Colm,’ he said.

Murphy kept hold of his hand for a moment longer, and smiled. God, Conor thought his heart was going to burst.

His ma and da came in then, with kisses, handshakes, how-are-yous, how-was-its. His da drew out a bottle he’d been saving. He was forever drawing out bottles he’d been saving and they were always piss. But no one cared, least of all Colm Murphy. He might’ve been the king of Long Kesh but a prison’s a prison, and Murphy knew better than anyone that off-licence whiskey tastes better to a man that’s free than the best champagne to a man that’s not.

‘Here’s to you, Colm,’ said Conor’s ma.

‘Sláinte. Thank you, God bless you,’ Murphy said, lifting his half-full glass.

And now Colm Murphy was lying dead in the back seat of Patrick Cameron’s clapped-out car. No more Uncle Colm and goodbye to Coleraine Road, Conor thought. All that was gone, now – those days were dead. Patrick had killed more than a man.

The dimmed headlights led the way over the dark roads to Dundonald. Patrick sat in the passenger seat with the gun in his lap. Conor just drove. His hands were cold on the wheel: they’d rolled down the windows to try to let in fresh air, though it’d done no good. He tried not to think but thoughts kept coming to him, things he could do, things he’d seen in films.

Patrick hadn’t got his seatbelt on, Conor noticed. So why not slam on the anchors, send him into the windscreen – he’d have his gun off him in a second, turn around, back to the town, to the police.

But he knew he wouldn’t do anything. Apart from anything else, this was Patrick, for God’s sake. His wife’s little brother. Family. So Conor just drove.

The faint nightlights of the Kelvin farm were visible on the hill and the dashboard clock showed ten to four when Patrick broke the silence.

‘D’you remember something?’ he said out of nowhere. ‘I remember something.’ There was a note in Patrick’s voice that told Conor that, whatever it was that Patrick remembered, Conor wasn’t going to like it. Patrick went on. ‘It was four or five years back,’ he said, ‘and you and Chris had just started going out. We were in the car. You were taking us somewhere – trying to show Chris what a great feller you were, palling up with her little brother, like. You were driving us out to Bangor. D’you remember?’

He did. He nodded stiffly. Kept his eyes on the empty road.

‘And then you got that phone call. From that farmer over at Coldholme.’

Another nod. ‘Jimmy Price.’ Of all the damn things to talk about.

‘And you didn’t want us to come, did you? You said it was “vet stuff”. But Chris wanted to see what you did at work and hell I did too. Anyway you’d promised us a day out. So you turned the car round and you drove all the way out there at Coldholme. And what did we find?’ Patrick let out a low whistle. ‘What – did – we – find?’ he repeated.

They’d found old Jimmy Price, first thing, white as a sheet, cap in his hands, waiting at the farm gate. He’d said the lad and the lass’d best stay in the car, Conor, son, it’s not pretty; no it’s not – but there was no stopping them now and besides, Conor had thought, how bad could it be? Jim had led the three of them out to the third barn. Hell, it was barely even a barn – just an exposed tumbledown, with three walls and a dirt floor and four bare beams jutting from the ruined roof.

There was a smell in the air of blood and faeces and fear. In the middle of the barn a lean-looking black mare staggered in mad circles. A yard and a half of coiled intestine drooped from the gash in her belly.

‘Jesus Christ, Conor,’ Jimmy said.

Conor felt Christine’s hand grip his arm and he heard Patrick behind him gag and then heard the spatter of the kid’s breakfast on the ground.

He’d read about this sort of thing. He dropped to one knee and squinted at the wound: a reckless two-foot slash – Stanley knife? Screwdriver? – all the way from her vulva to her middle.

‘Why’d anyone do it?’ Jimmy demanded shakily. Conor could only shrug. You heard reports of this stuff. Who knew why the people who did it had to do it? Something to do with sex, something to do with religion, something to do with madness.

He straightened up and warily moved closer to the circling mare. With every step she trod her own wet guts into the shit and dirt of the barn floor.

‘Cush, now, cush,’ he said, knowing how much good it’d do.

The sick bastard had taken her tail, and hadn’t been too neat about it. Her eyes as well. Conor dropped to his knees again and unfastened the clasp of his medical bag.

‘Everybody out,’ he said.

Patrick laughed. It was a hell of a noise, there in the quiet car, out there on the dark road. Conor was aware of the cold sweat on his arms and back.

‘So you did the deed,’ Patrick said. ‘You did what had to be done. And then – d’you remember?’ His voice now became softer, intent. ‘We had to take her away, didn’t we? Jimmy was going to call the knacker’s yard but you said no, something to do with regulations, proper procedures – you’d deal with her.’ Another laugh. ‘So there we were. You, me, Jimmy and his boys heaving this mess of an animal into the trailer. Guts all over. Blood everywhere.’ A pause. ‘And d’you remember,’ Patrick asked, ‘what you said?’

Conor shook his head. He didn’t remember. He only remembered the mare – and the look on Jimmy Price’s face when they closed up the tailgate of the trailer.

‘I was snivelling about all the blood,’ Patrick said. ‘And you said, “grow up”. It’s only blood, you said. It can’t hurt you, Patrick. And I thought, what a man!’ And then that laugh again – God, Conor wished he’d shut his bloody hole. ‘You were my fuckin’ hero that day, man.’

Conor drove on, watching the road. Grey hedgerows glided past, and the gold sovereigns of a fox’s eyes twisted out of sight. They still hadn’t passed another car, and Conor was guessing they wouldn’t. Patrick tapped the barrel of his gun on the dashboard, reflectively, as though he was deep in thought.

‘You said you didn’t give a damn about blood,’ he said. ‘You said, “blood means nothing to me”.’

Conor swung the car off the road, veering sharply through an iron gate and into a narrow cobbled car park past the sign: D. Kirk and D. Riordan, Veterinary Surgeons. He braked. The car rocked back on its heels.

Patrick turned in the passenger seat and hooked an elbow casually around the headrest. ‘There’ll be no one around, right?’

Conor shook his head. ‘Kirk’s away in Antrim till tomorrow night. Riordan’s on his holidays. There’s no one here.’

Patrick nodded briskly. ‘OK. It’s time we did to this old feller what you did to Jimmy Price’s poor black mare.’

That’s not Colm Murphy, Conor told himself. In the dead cold dark of the practice car park they’d hauled the body out of the car and slung it awkwardly in a tarpaulin. Heavy, like you’d imagine. Murphy always seemed like he was made out of iron, or he’d been quarried from Fermanagh limestone.

In the dark they’d carried it across the yard to an outhouse a little way behind the main practice building. Conor fumbled with the keys to the padlock. Patrick stood and shivered. The cold, Conor noticed, had shaken the bravado out of him – or maybe it was the dark, or the smell of the body and the blood – or just the thought of what he’d done, and what would happen next.

And then, once they’d dragged the body in its bloodstained tarp inside, and the door was deadbolted behind them and the bitter white striplight in the rafters had flickered into life, Conor leaned on the broad stone bench that stood in the centre of the floor and looked down – forced himself to look down – at Colm’s still, pale face. His rounded, bullish features were composed, his eyes shut (had Patrick done that, Connor wondered – had Patrick, unable to bear the scrutiny of the dead man’s empty gaze, closed Colm’s eyelids for him?). They’d laid him flat on his back, arms at his sides. The tarp was draped across the gunshot wound in his chest. Conor took note of Colm’s clothes: a shabby grey jumper, no shirt underneath; unbelted jeans; shoes with no socks.

He looked up. ‘Now. Before we do anything else, Patrick, you tell me how it happened.’

Patrick was again white-faced, fidgeting, trembling – a kid again.

‘Listen, Con, just—’

‘You tell me now,’ Conor said.

So Patrick told him. He was just doing a bit of work, he said – he never meant for anything like this to happen.

‘What work?’ Conor pressed. ‘Work for who?’

‘For Jack Marsh.’

That figured. Marsh. A name he knew. A name everyone knew. He’d used to be a redcap, British military police, Conor had heard, but he wasn’t police any more. You couldn’t exactly say he’d gone off the rails – by all accounts he’d been bent from day one – but now he didn’t even bother to hide it. Didn’t have to hide it. No one could touch Jack Marsh in Belfast. He held the city in the palm of his hand.

So why wouldn’t a chancer like Patrick wind up on Marsh’s payroll? A bit of work. Conor didn’t want to know what that meant.

‘And?’

Patrick shrugged. It looked like the kid didn’t want to talk about it – didn’t even want to think about it. Tough.

‘What happened?’

‘He went for me. Lost his rag. Didn’t know I was – didn’t know I was packing,’ Patrick said, his hand straying to the butt of the gun tucked in the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms.

You fucking liar, Conor thought. Colm Murphy, fifteen years a Provo commander – a soldier, a man of discipline, and, more than that, a man with a calling – a man with more on his mind than the crooked property deals and blackmail shakedowns that the likes of Jack Marsh made their money from – and he lets himself get called out by a snot-nosed little bastard like Patrick Cameron?

But Conor let the kid go on talking.

‘I didn’t mean it to happen,’ Patrick said again.

‘When you carry a gun,’ Conor said, ‘these things tend to happen whether you mean them or not.’ He paused, squeezed the bridge of his nose between his finger and thumb. What time was it? Maybe five, or quarter to. But he’d learned to live with sleeplessness. You just had to decide not to be tired. It was just a choice you made. ‘So. You shot him,’ he prompted.

Patrick’s wide-eyed gaze drifted to the corpse on the floor. Thinking, Conor guessed, of who Colm was, and who he, Patrick, was – wondering, maybe, how the hell all this happened. Maybe David felt the same way as he stood over the body of Goliath, Conor thought. Only that was the end of that story, and this was just the beginning of this one. ‘I guess I did.’ Conor noticed that Patrick had to bite down hard on his lower lip to keep it from quivering. He knew the kid was thinking the same thing he was: what happens now?

Because you couldn’t kill a man like Colm Murphy and just walk away. It wasn’t like a gangland hit, a kingpin knocked off in a turf war – it wasn’t just business. Murphy didn’t live in a world where everything had a price and a ten grand kickback to the right person bought you absolution. Murphy’s world was tough, sure – but the people who moved in it mattered to him, and he mattered to them – hell, Murphy was a god on the Falls Road, on Conway Street, on Workman Avenue. Every Republican in Belfast loved the man, and even the people who hated him at least hated him good and hard.

Murphy would be missed. Conor thought of the Lieutenant, Lefty McLeod. If he knew what Patrick Cameron had done – if any of Murphy’s boys knew…

When Conor was a kid, he’d heard that Neil Burke, a lad a couple of years above him at school, seventeen or eighteen he would’ve been, had been picked up by Murphy’s boys one afternoon and driven out to an industrial estate beyond Ballynafoy. They killed him, shot him dead – but before they did that they ran roofing nails through the palms of his hands.

Burke had nicked the wrong guy’s car and gone joyriding with it in the wrong part of town. That was all it took, sometimes. They called it justice. Maybe they even thought it was justice.

But what they did to Neil Burke would be nothing compared to what they’d do to the man who killed Colm Murphy. Come to that, Conor thought, Jack Marsh wasn’t likely to be too happy, either, about one of his hirelings putting so much heat his way.

Patrick was staring at him with wide wet eyes. He’d shoved his hands into his pockets to hide his shakes but Conor could see him shaking anyway. Trembling all over.

‘What’ll we do, Con?’ he quavered.

Conor ran a hand through his sandy hair. Here and now, he told himself. Focus on what’s here in front of you.

‘I guess we have a job to do,’ he said.

He was stooping to pull aside the tarp covering Murphy’s body when he heard Patrick say, ‘I mean I didn’t even know it was Murphy’s house.’

Conor’s head jerked up. ‘What’s that?’

‘It was just a house, I mean a big house, sure, and a nice car in the drive, but still, I just thought it was—’

‘You went to his house? Is that where this happened?’

‘Jack just said there was some money there or something, a good few grand, and a cut of it for me if I could lay my hands on it…’ Patrick was gabbling now, his tongue running loose as his fear built. ‘He came out, in the garden. I swear I thought no one was home, I thought it was empty, God I swear I didn’t even know it was his house—’

‘Wait.’ Conor raised a hand. He could feel the blood thump in his temples. ‘So. You went to his house to rob him. And when he didn’t like it, when he didn’t let you just waltz away with his money, you shot him. Have I got that, Patrick?’ Patrick just stared at him. ‘You know,’ Conor said, ‘that Colm Murphy has a wife and three kids in that house? What were you thinking, Patrick? Were you ready to kill them too?’

In half a voice Patrick muttered, ‘It’d be no worse than some of the things Murphy did in his time.’

Conor had never hit anyone in his life but in that moment he was damn near to breaking Patrick Cameron’s neck for him. He breathed hard out through his nose. Then he turned decisively away and walked towards the workbench that ran along the left wall of the outhouse. He could feel Patrick watching him as he spooled a length of electric flex off its wheel.

‘What’re you doing, Con?’

‘See the furnace?’ Conor gestured without turning round. The black furnace stood in the opposite corner. ‘See the size of it? It’s four foot across, three foot deep.’

Patrick didn’t answer. Conor heard him swallow and shuffle his feet. He tried to concentrate on unwinding the flex.

‘What would you say Colm was, Patrick? Six-three, six-four?’ He couldn’t remember when he’d felt so angry. He cursed himself: it was a brutal anger, a stupid anger – but still. Colm Murphy was dead and Conor wanted Patrick to pay. ‘Death,’ he said, turning round at last, ‘hasn’t made him any smaller.’ He leaned across the bench and slotted the plug of a powerpack into the plug socket in the wall.

Patrick’s mouth was hanging open.

‘There’s plenty of time.’ Conor gestured again at the furnace. ‘The thing takes a while to get hot enough.’

‘You mean we have to—’

‘Not we,’ said Conor, hating himself even as he said it, even as he reached under the bench to draw out the powersaw they used for heavy ops, bull bones, horse bones. ‘Not me. You, Patrick. You.’

He flicked the switch on the plug socket from white to red. The powersaw began to sing.

Within two minutes their green veterinary overalls were soaked through. His hands and forearms were a brazen blood red – Patrick’s a deeper red even than that.

At first, Conor could hear the kid whimpering as they worked – and it was work, this, with the heaviness of the saw, the stubborn bulk of flesh and bone, and the mounting heat from the thrumming furnace. Conor helped where he could: now redirecting the swaying saw-blade – ‘Not there; here, here the cut’ll be cleaner’ – now wiping Patrick’s face with his cuff when the sweat and tears and blood ran into his eyes and made him blind. And Conor was kidding himself if he thought the wetness on his own face, the salty taste on his own lips, was nothing but sweat.

They’d lifted Murphy’s body onto the table to do their work. Just a piece of meat, Conor insisted to himself, just another dead thing to dispose of – but all the same they kept Murphy’s face covered with the tarp.

When they got near the end, Conor noticed that Patrick was no longer crying. He could no longer hear his sobbing over the whine of the powersaw. He looked at the kid’s face, and wished he hadn’t. Patrick was still bone-white – but now his jaw was set and his eyes were clear – and, when he glanced up to meet Conor’s eyes, you could almost have said there was a smile on his skinny face.

‘You saved my life tonight, Con,’ Conor heard him say. He said it while he pushed down on the saw, while the sawblade dug into the flesh of Murphy’s shoulder – said it over the pattering of the spurting blood and the thick sound of the blade’s edge meeting bone, and biting. ‘I’ll remember it, you know. I came to you when I had nowhere else to go. And there you were.’ He glanced up again – there, again, the sickly, cold, crooked smile. ‘I’ll remember this,’ he said again.

All at once he threw the lever to kill the powersaw and the song of the whirring blade subsided to a deathly silence. Blood dripped in a syncopated rhythm from the tabletop and in between the tiles on the floor. They were both breathing hard; they both looked down at the tabletop, at what they’d done – at what’d once been Colm Murphy.

The furnace topped twelve hundred degrees when it was fully heated. It was fully heated now: its breath stung Conor’s raw eyes as he drew open the heavy doors.

‘In he goes?’ Patrick paused, panting.

‘In he goes.’

The legs went in first, heavier than they looked, like the foundations of a Colossus. Next they fed the arms, the elbow joints stiff already. The Catholic church didn’t burn bodies. No, they’d rather you waited till you got to Hell for that, Conor thought grimly. And now here were the mortal remains of Colm Murphy – not buried, not blessed – no, just burned, without a prayer said, without a candle lit. The torso went next.

‘Ashes to ashes,’ Conor murmured as he fastened the doors closed. The words felt empty. Conor looked at Patrick, his hair black with sweat. It was a scared, stupid kid who walked in here two hours since, Conor thought, as he began peeling off his overalls. Patrick followed suit. Not a kid any more. Then what? A man? Not yet.

In the bleak electric light the two of them silently stripped. Their bloodied clothes, their shoes, their overalls, the drenched tarp: all followed Murphy into the furnace. Last of all, the head – bagged up, the features pressing through thick plastic. Conor worked over the table and floor with a jet hose and the last of the Colm Murphy’s earthly remains was washed down the drain. Patrick, meanwhile, dug out fresh boots and overalls from the storeroom.

Then, outside in the first grey glow of dawn, they stood and watched the cold stars fade. Conor breathed deep, told himself that the air was clear here, that each new breath was making him better, cleaner, more innocent.

Patrick sucked on a cigarette and said through the smoke, ‘What now?’

Conor thought fast.

‘Go home,’ he said. ‘Clean the car. Not too clean, though – don’t draw attention. Find a backlot somewhere, do it there. Throw a blanket or something over the back seat – those bloodstains won’t come out easy.’ He looked hard at Patrick. ‘Don’t talk to anyone; not about this, and not about anything. Go to bed and stay there. Lay low. Forget everything.’

Patrick nodded slowly, then ground out his cigarette with his heel.

‘Right you are,’ he said. He squinted up at Conor. ‘I’m sorry about, y’know’ – a vague wave of one arm – ‘all that with the gun.’

‘Good.’

‘Suppose I was out of order.’ Patrick nodded again, thoughtfully. ‘You saved my life tonight, Con.’

‘Yeah. You said.’

‘I mean it.’ Patrick put out a hand. ‘I won’t forget this.’

Conor paused – he thought of Colm, and he thought of Christine, and he thought of what they’d just been through, him and Patrick, and he thought of how fucking tired he was – and he shook Patrick’s hand.

‘But forgetting this,’ he said warningly, ‘is exactly what you’ve got to do.’

An hour later Conor stood in the shower letting the scalding water rinse the sweat and blood from his skin. He didn’t cry. He felt like he was empty of everything except memories. He heard Christine banging on the bathroom door. It must’ve gone six; she’d be wanting to get ready for work. He closed his eyes and turned his face to the streaming hot water.

But closing his eyes didn’t help – all he saw was Colm Murphy’s face.

‘Ten years old – that’s a grand old age.’ A younger Murphy, this – even stronger, even louder, even bolder. His eyes sparkling. His arm round Conor’s shoulders. ‘Where’d’you play, Con? Right wing, is it?’

‘Aye.’

‘A wee Jinky Johnstone, are you, then?’

‘No,’ brave Conor said. ‘I’m Davie Provan.’

‘Davie who?’ Murphy laughed. ‘God, I’m behind the times. I can’t keep up. Well, Davie Provan, happy birthday to you – and I s’pose you’ll be needing this.’ And with a flourish Colm wrapped him in a thick cotton shirt – a shirt in green and white, with hoops and a proper shamrock badge and all – a Celtic shirt.

‘Wear it with pride,’ Colm said.

Now, in the searing shower, Conor reached out a trembling hand and turned the temperature dial, turning it up so that it was too hot to take – and then he just stood, taking it anyway, feeling his white skin burn red.

Present Day

THE HORIZONS seemed too narrow: everything seemed cramped, hemmed in, somehow. And there was too much bloody traffic. Still, Conor thought: this is Belfast. Even if it’s not the same Belfast you left behind, he added to himself.

He swung his Land Rover into a parking space outside the Cherry Tree pub, killed the engine and wound down the window. He could hear music coming from inside. A young lad with a ribbon-wrapped present under his arm walked by and went in through the rear door of the pub; before the door swung closed, Conor heard voices, music, laughter. Sounded like a good do. He wondered which voice was Ella’s.

Felt like his necktie was strangling him. Not used to it. He loosened his collar button uneasily and glanced at his reflection in the rearview. Look at yourself, Maguire, he thought – white as a sheet. What’s to be afraid of? What’s the worst that could happen? Two months ago you were handling a lion that came out of its anaesthetic earlier than it should’ve – and now you’re scared to death by the thought of a teenage girl’s birthday party. Get a grip.

But he couldn’t deny it. Again he glanced in the mirror – scared, and old. Hair starting to grey at the temples. Crow’s feet creasing the skin around his eyes. You look, he thought, like a middle-aged man. You look like a father.

He’d chatted to Ella a few times over the web. But how much can you learn about someone that way? – especially when you’re in an internet café in the arse-end of Mombasa and too busy fighting with a dodgy dial-up connection and shooing away the kids trying to sell you postcards to listen.

His daughter, he’d painfully come to accept, was practically a stranger to him. And then there was Christine. God only knew how she’d react. It was a miracle she’d even agreed to have him there.

Gathering up his card and gift – a handmade necklace he’d picked up in Nairobi – Conor struggled to think of the positives. Well at least his own family wouldn’t be in there. The Maguires didn’t stoop to socialising with Protestants. Hadn’t his own mother stayed home the day he married Christine? ‘That Prod woman’ was one of the nicer names old Mags had for Conor’s ex-wife.

Not that he wasn’t looking forward to seeing that crowd later on – his ma, and Martin, Robert – maybe his sister Patricia would be up from Cork, even. But he was glad they weren’t here. There was enough potential for trouble already without adding the Maguires to the mix.

He got out of the car and took a breath. Shot his cuffs, straightened the lapels of his corduroy jacket. Here goes nothing, he thought.

A thumping bass beat rattled his eardrums when he stepped through the door of the pub. That’d take some getting used to, after the deep quiet of the savannah. He paused and surveyed the room – God, it was full of kids.

Only they weren’t kids. They were sixteen, seventeen, like Ella – they were young men and women. Wondering who this jetlagged old bastard is that’s just come in through the door. He couldn’t see his daughter, so he headed for the bar. A pint would take the edge off his nerves. He pushed his way through a crowd of laughing young people: a redhead in a black minidress, an Asian guy with a punk haircut and chainstore suit, a blonde in a blue halterneck, a skinny guy with glasses and bottle of beer…

‘Guinness, please, pal.’

He leaned on the bar and watched the barman draw the black beer into a straight-sided glass. Now you know you’re home, he thought. You had a job on even getting the stuff in bottles out in Kenya. He was lifting the glass to his lips when the girl in the blue halterneck half-turned, and he caught her profile. His stomach flipped.

Christ Almighty. Ella.

Conor had half a second to notice with angry disapproval that the skinny kid in the glasses had his right hand resting in the small of Ella’s back, and another half a second to tell himself not to be so stupid, that she wasn’t twelve years old any more and that he’d given up his right to play the protective dad quite some years ago.

And then she saw him, came to greet him, Ella, his daughter, a perfect smile splitting her freckled face, a delighted shriek ringing out even over the racket from the sound system. She threw her arms round his neck – and Conor thought: what the hell were you so worried about, man? As he held her close he could smell her perfume, something fresh, delicate, a grown-up’s scent – but beneath that he could smell her: her skin, her hair, her own scent, the way his daughter used to smell, all that time ago.

With her hands on his shoulders, Ella took a step back to look him full in the face. She was a beautiful girl, he could see that. A beautiful, seventeen-year-old girl with his wife’s blue eyes and his baby daughter’s smile. She was lightly made-up. God, the rows she and Christine had had over the lippy and eyeliner his daughter had pinched from Chris’s dresser, when she was eleven. And she was tall, taller than Christine. Her hair was styled in an asymmetric fringe, the rest of it collected with a slip at the back of her head.

‘I’m so glad you came,’ she said.

‘Hello, Ella. Happy birthday.’

‘Look at you, Dad – with your tan. Call yourself an Irishman? Where is it you’ve been again? Marbella?’

‘Close. Exclusive little resort you wouldn’t have heard of.’

‘Ooh, some chichi spot full of the filthy rich and fabulous, was it?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Rich widows and cocktails on the veranda?’

‘Try vultures and endemic malaria.’ He grinned. ‘Hell, it’s good to see you, darling,’ he said.

Ella nodded and blinked and he saw her pinch her lips together, gulping back a sob. He reached out a hand, but Ella had turned away – and now she had the skinny kid by the elbow, and was saying, with a sudden forced bubbliness, that his name was Kieran, that he was her boyfriend, and Conor found himself shaking the skinny kid’s hand.

‘Hi, Kieran,’ he said, doing his best to be friendly. This was uncharted territory.

Kieran’s shake was confident and unhurried. ‘How about you, Mr Maguire,’ he said. ‘So you’ve been away?’

‘Yes, I have.’ Conor said, tucking his hands into his pockets. He felt daft talking about it. ‘Africa. Kenya. I’m a vet,’ he added.

Ella slapped his arm. ‘You needn’t sound so apologetic about it,’ she told him, with a what-are-you-like wave of her hand. To Kieran she said, ‘He’s a great vet. You have to be, don’t you, Dad, to treat, you know, lions, cheetahs, bloody elephants…’

Conor shrugged. ‘They’re all asleep by the time I have anything to do with them,’ he said. ‘I don’t chase them down personally.’

‘Makes a change from goldfish and guinea pigs, anyway, I bet,’ Kieran put in, and Conor laughed – but a part of him cringed, waiting for the question, waiting for Kieran to ask: so why’d you leave?

But Kieran only swigged his beer and said, ‘Africa, so. Not been there yet.’

‘But you’ve travelled?’ asked Conor, happy to change the subject.

‘Oh sure, sure.’ Kieran winked, startlingly. ‘Wanderlust,’ he said. ‘Itchy feet. I’ve been places, all right. Italy. The States.’ He paused for a beat. ‘Portmuck.’

Ella laughed. Conor was surprised to find that he’d finished his pint. That was the nerves. He might even start to enjoy this party, after all.

‘You’re looking beautiful, Ella,’ he said. ‘You look…’ he paused, thought twice, and then said it anyway, ‘you look like your mother.’

And it was true. The blonde hair, the freckles, the sea-blue eyes as big as the world – the look that could freeze you solid just as well as it could melt you to a puddle. Ella smiled.

But then Conor heard a sharp intake of breath behind him. Ella’s eyes went wide. He turned, knowing already who he’d see.

‘Holy mother of god,’ said Christine, and dropped a tray of drinks. The partygoers around her scrambled to get out of the way of the smashed glass – more drinks were spilled, more dresses wine-stained, more neckties sloshed with Guinness. The spilled drinks fizzed and frothed across the floor.

Conor glanced at Ella over his shoulder. ‘You never told her I was coming?’

Ella bit her lip. ‘Oops,’ she said, but her sea-blue eyes were laughing.

Christine hadn’t come alone. As a grumpy-looking member of the bar staff swept up the broken glass, she turned to the man lurking behind her.

‘This is Simon. He’s a teacher – a lecturer, I mean.’ Another handshake. This one wasn’t so warm. ‘And this is Conor,’ Christine added. Her tone said no further explanation was necessary.

Conor and Simon exchanged glad-to-meet-yous. God we’re a pair of lying bastards, Conor thought. He supposed Simon was thinking the same.

Simon was slender, lightly bearded, casually dressed in grey cords and a polo shirt. Dublin accent. His salt-and-pepper hair was swept back. He carried himself loosely, lazily, like an athlete at rest. Conor didn’t like the way he dangled an arm around Christine’s shoulders – but then, of course, that was exactly why Simon was doing it.

Christine remembered about the spilled drinks. Simon promptly volunteered to go to the bar for replacements. Conor proffered a twenty-pound note – ‘I was the silly bugger that made her drop them’ – but Simon waved it away, made it clear that he was the one who bought Chris’s drinks now. Conor and Christine were left alone.

He hadn’t spoken to her since the day she threw him out of the house. After that, the only relationship they’d had had been one conducted through solicitors’ letters.

‘He seems like a good guy,’ he tried, lamely.

Christine had her arms folded defensively across her chest. ‘He is,’ she nodded.

Conor groped for words. He wanted to say that she looked beautiful – he wanted to say that he was sorry – oh, Christ, he wanted to say so many things, but not one of them could you say over drinks at your daughter’s 17th birthday party.

So he gave up. ‘A lecturer, eh?’ he said. ‘Impressive.’

‘It is. He is. Modern languages. Five languages, he speaks.’ She smiled distantly. ‘Remember what you were like in Paris that time? Took you half the weekend to pluck up the courage to say bonjour to the hotel doorman.’

Conor had to bite back a retort – he wanted to explain to her that he’d changed (and he could explain it in Swahili if she wanted, or in Kikuyu or Maasai) – he wanted her to see that he was different, that his world was bigger now, that this place, Belfast, it wasn’t what he was about any more.

But all he said was: ‘And even then I got it wrong, remember?’

‘You did. Bon jwah!’ Christine smirked. Then she looked away, and then down at the floor, and then she looked him in the eye. ‘How’s the family?’ she said.

And Conor was glad that at that moment Simon came back with his hands full of drinks. He was glad because the only thing he could think of to say in reply was: you’re my family.

IT WAS dark outside the mullioned pub windows and Conor was settling into his fifth pint of Guinness and was kidding Kieran good-naturedly about his support for Glentoran – ‘Do they still have a football team even? When I left, Glentoran was the place Nor’n Irish Under-21s went to die’ – when someone jostled his elbow and a voice at his ear said, ‘So where is she? Sorry I’m late. Where’s the birthday girl?’

A wave of nausea hit him hard. This was a voice he hadn’t heard in a long time – a voice he’d hoped he’d never hear again. Conor noticed Kieran eye him curiously, and struggled to hide his feelings, keep his grip. His felt his hand begin to tremble and he stuffed it quickly into his jacket pocket.

Everywhere I turn, Conor thought – everywhere I look there’s a ghost from the past. Or – God, he hated the thought – but maybe, Conor, he told himself, you’re the ghost here. The ghost at the feast.

He drained his glass and turned. ‘Hello, Patrick,’ he said.

But Patrick was already gathering Ella into his arms, telling her happy birthday, flattering her dress and her haircut, and now he was kissing Christine, joking with Simon, saluting Kieran with a forefinger cocked sharpshooter-style – quite the fucking life and soul, Conor thought.

What was Patrick now? Pushing forty, surely, but he didn’t look it. His suit was well-cut to his slim-hipped figure, his urchin pallor replaced by a healthy tan, his necktie silk, his narrow shoes new-looking, his smile wide and white and wealthy.

Eventually he caught sight of Conor. If he was surprised he didn’t show it.

‘So!’ he cried. He seized Conor’s hand with his right and his left gripped Conor’s elbow. ‘Not just a birthday, but a homecoming! A double celebration.’ He lifted his chin and made an unshowy gesture towards the bar. Then he turned back to Conor. ‘I put a case of Roederer behind the bar,’ he said.

‘Roederer?’

‘Champagne, son,’ Patrick said, and thumped Conor’s shoulder. Conor felt himself darken. But again Patrick acted as though the two of them were the closest of friends.

‘It’s good to see you, Con,’ he murmured, pulling Conor close to him with a hand on the back of his neck. ‘Glad you’re back. All of us are glad you’re back.’

Conor wasn’t about to ask who he meant by all of us.

‘Aye, well. I don’t know how long I’ll be stopping around,’ he lied.

Patrick lifted an eyebrow.

‘Is that a fact?’ He nudged Conor in the ribs. ‘’Cause I heard the prodigal son’d returned to take over Kirk’s practice. Did I hear wrong?’

Shit. How could Patrick have known that? The best he could do was a non-committal shrug – but anyway Patrick was soon off again, working the crowd like a presidential candidate, calling for champagne glasses, high-fiving, glad-handing, throwing comical dance shapes as the sound system pounded.

And Conor was left with an empty Guinness glass and a feeling he wasn’t sure he could put a name to. He felt like he’d been hit by a truck. He ached. He’d barely been back in Belfast two minutes, and already here was Christine, and here was Patrick.

The music died and a teaspoon chimed against a champagne flute and he heard Patrick’s voice say, ‘Attention, please, ladies and gents. Presentation time.’

Craning his neck over the crowd, Conor watched uneasily as Patrick took giggling Ella by the hand and drew her away from her knot of friends.

‘Now,’ Patrick said, ‘I’m no good at speeches, so I’ll keep this short.’ He slipped his hand quickly into his jacket pocket and drew something out. It glinted. ‘My favourite niece is seventeen today. Everyone knows, I s’pose, about the five A-levels she earned last month.’ A ripple of applause, until Patrick held up a raised palm for silence. ‘Now, I’ve no A-levels myself – and not enough O-levels to trouble the scorers – but even I know this is a girl that’s going places. And a girl who’s going places can’t be expected to go there on the bloody bus, now can she?’ He held up his hand, dangling a set of car keys. ‘Happy birthday, darling,’ he said, as Ella’s mouth dropped open in delighted surprise. ‘It’s parked outside.’

Conor followed Ella out into the street. He heard whoops from the girls and admiring murmurs from the men. Something flash, no doubt. He wondered how much Patrick had forked out. The generosity of the present set off an uneasy feeling in Conor’s gut.

‘It’s an Audi A1,’ said Patrick behind him. He turned to see his brother-in-law standing alone on the deserted dance floor with a half-empty champagne flute resting easily in his hand. Behind him a barman, having gathered up a trayful of empty glasses, disappeared through a door into the kitchens.

Patrick walked towards Conor. ‘Reliable. Brand new. Ten grand.’ He stopped. ‘So c’mon, Con,’ he said, loosening his tie. ‘Tell me all. What’ve you been up to all this time?’

‘Working. Vet stuff. You know,’ Conor said.

‘Sure, sure.’ Patrick was eyeing him narrowly, half-smiling. Conor felt like there was a joke here somewhere – a joke he wasn’t in on.

‘It’s just what I do,’ he said gruffly.

‘Of course it is, son, of course it is. And it’s a good thing you do, you know. I’m proud of you. And now you’re home – well, I’d like you to keep in touch.’

Son? Who the hell did he think he was?

If Patrick noticed Conor’s irritation then he hid it well. He reached into his jacket and produced a silver clip of business cards. ‘Here. Take it.’ Conor took the card Patrick offered and turned it over in his fingers. Just Patrick’s name and a mobile number.

‘A business card without a business,’ Conor commented.

Patrick shrugged. ‘Diversification,’ he said.

Conor managed to avoid Patrick for the last hour, as the champagne flowed. He drifted in and out into the fresh air, and even accepted the offer of a cigarette from one of the barstaff at the door. When he returned inside, the DJ was packing away his gear at the far end of the room and the guests were collecting bags, jackets, coats. Conor went to the toilet and, as he emerged, Christine called over from the door. ‘Patrick!’ She didn’t even look at Conor. ‘Patrick, Simon’s taking us home now. Come kiss the birthday girl goodnight.’

‘Sure I will,’ Patrick smiled. Conor wanted to stay where he was – stay where he was and get good and drunk while the bar was still open – but Patrick, with an insistent arm round his shoulders, pulled him out into the street. The last partygoers gradually dispersed. Minicabs milled in the road. Conor hung back moodily while Patrick hugged Ella and Christine goodbye.

Suddenly something caught his attention: the whirr of a camera, and the glint of a lens, from a car parked across the street. Conor knew cameras. That wasn’t any partygoer’s Polaroid or Boots throwaway. That was serious hardware – a funny thing to bring to a birthday party. Conor tried to squint through the black windscreen of the car but he could make nothing out in the 1am darkness.

Ella interrupted him with a hug and a warm kiss on his cheek.

‘You didn’t have much fun,’ she said, apologetically.

He managed a smile. ‘I’m just happy to see you,’ he said, and meant it. ‘Happier than I can say.’

Ella smiled her mother’s smile. ‘Welcome home, Dad,’ she said. Then she was gone. A car door banged and an engine started.

As Simon’s saloon drew away carefully from the kerb, Conor moved cautiously over to the wooden benches outside the pub, where Patrick was sitting smoking a cigarette. Patrick nodded amiably as Conor took a seat beside him.

‘Nice evening,’ he said.

‘It is.’ Conor glanced across the street. The car was still there. He licked his dry lips. ‘Patrick,’ he said.

‘That’s me.’

‘Listen,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t look now, but there’s someone with a camera in—’

He started in surprise as Patrick cut him off with a theatrical roar of laughter. He shook his head and with a flick sent the half-smoked cigarette spinning into the darkness.

Then he looked delightedly at Conor, tongue lolling on his lower lip. ‘The coppers, you mean?’

Conor was bewildered. ‘Coppers? I—’

‘Yeah, the Belfast coppers are still my biggest fans.’ He nudged Conor knowingly, then leaned forward and directed a camp wave towards the glowering parked car. ‘Evening, ladies!’ he called. Then he sat back, chuckling. ‘Don’t worry about it, son. Occupational hazard.’ He slapped Conor’s knee. ‘They watch and watch. But they never see a thing. The bastards,’ he said, with a smile and a wink, ‘can’t lay a finger on me.’

Patrick rose, and straightened the sit of his well-cut trousers, and set his hands on his hips, and sighed.

‘What a night,’ he said, expansively.

Conor said nothing. He had nothing to say – nothing that he could put into words.

1993

SUNSHINE. A weak, watery, February sort of sunshine, but still. Conor stood staring out of the living-room window with a mug of tea cradled to his chest.

‘If you’re not doing anything, Con,’ Christine called from the kitchen, ‘you can fetch some clean glasses out of the washer.’

‘Mm-hm.’

‘And maybe put out some crisps or biscuits or something. Nibbles. There’s a dish here.’

‘Yeah.’

Christine poked her head out through the kitchen door. ‘And if you’re not too busy, Con, d’you think you could take your head out of your arse for a second?’

‘Mm? Okay – will do.’

Christine laughed. Wiping her hands on a tea towel, she came offer to stand beside him in the window bay. He blinked at her as she took his arm in hers.

‘Look at you,’ she said. ‘On another planet. She was a little devil last night, wasn’t she?’

‘Mm?’ For a second he was lost. He was thinking of that night – was it only four months since? Four months ago that Patrick had been standing in the street – right there – covered in another man’s blood.

Colm’s blood.

‘Ella.’ Christine tutted at him. ‘You remember her. Still, if she can cry like that there can’t be much wrong with her. That’s what my nan would’ve said.’

Conor smiled. That morning he’d stood over the baby’s cot for a full half hour, just watching her sleep – impossibly tiny, impossibly beautiful – his daughter. She was snoring; she got that from her mother, along with those eyes. He’d wondered what he’d ever done to deserve her. And he’d wondered if he could ever be the father she deserved.

‘Barely two weeks old,’ he said. ‘What in the world has she got to cry about?’

‘Listen at you. The wise old man.’

‘It’s the sleeplessness. Makes me look venerable.’

‘Makes you look wrinkly, you mean.’ She squeezed his arm. ‘We’ll have an early night, tonight, will we?’

‘And we’ll have earned it, too.’ He kissed the top of her head.

Christine let go of his arm. ‘C’mon, soldier, let’s get this place shipshape. There’s a bag of those posh crisps in the cupboard. I put three cans of your dad’s beer in the fridge – will that be enough?’

‘Yes. He’s slowed down lately.’

Conor started to walk towards the kitchen but Christine stopped him with a hand on his arm. ‘God, look,’ she laughed, taking up an orange cushion from the sofa. ‘Should I hide this? Should I have had more green about the place?’

Conor smiled. ‘It might not take much to start my folks off fighting,’ he said, taking the cushion from her, ‘but I don’t think even they could take your taste in soft furnishings as an incitement to riot.’

‘Even your ma?’

Conor paused. ‘Best to be on the safe side.’ He punted the orange cushion out of sight behind the sofa, and headed to the kitchen.

While he shook the crisps – Antique Cheddar & Braised Shallot flavour, or some damn thing – into a dish, he heard Christine whistling ‘The Wearing Of The Green’ in the living room, and he laughed.

Then the doorbell went. That shut her up.

Conor leaned out to give her an it’ll-be-fine wink – she, fidgeting with her hair, smoothing her dress, mustered a pallid smile – then went to get the door.

In the hall, at the foot of the stairs, he looked up into the stairwell. Little Ella Catherine was sleeping soundly up there. Enjoy it while you can, sweetheart, Conor thought. Then he opened the door.

‘Afternoon, fáilte, welcome to the house of sleeplessness,’ he grinned, spreading his arms.

Five pale faces looked back at him.

‘Sleepless nights,’ said his mother. ‘You don’t know a bloody thing about it.’ A rough hand on his cheek, a glancing kiss like an off-target right hook. ‘Bless this house.’ She shouldered past him into the hall.

Mags Maguire had been born angry. Her sons supposed that mostly she was angry because she’d not been born a man. If she had been she’d have been running the country by now – and she’d have chased the British into the sea a long time ago.

The rest of them trooped after her into the house: the youngest brother Martin, with a smile and a handshake and his girlfriend Hazel – and the eldest brother Robert, dressed as if for a funeral. Last of all his dad, Declan, rumpled and unshaven like always, knackered-looking like always.

He pulled Conor into a rough hug. ‘How’re you doing, son?’

‘Well, Da, well. Good to see you.’

‘Good to be seen.’ He widened his eyes momentarily in warning. ‘Don’t go upsetting your ma,’ he said.

Conor had to laugh. He ushered his dad across the doorstep, closed the door behind him and followed his family into the living room.

Mags had already taken up residence on the sofa. Declan lowered himself painfully into the seat beside her; Hazel, at Christine’s insistence, took the armchair, and Martin perched on the chair-arm. Robert sat on Mags’s other side.

‘It’s a lovely place,’ Hazel said politely to Christine.

‘Ought to be, the price they paid,’ Mags sniffed. ‘But you’ve done it nice, I’ll give you that.’ She treated Conor to a half-smile.

Conor glanced at Hazel. She’d only been seeing Martin for a couple of months – but from her trembling hands and anxious eyes Conor could see that life as a prospective Maguire daughter-in-law was already taking its toll on her nerves. He was glad Christine had been made of stern stuff.

‘What’s that?’ asked Martin. He was pointing to a framed black-and-white photograph that hung in an alcove over the television – a kid playing on a street, framed by the overhanging branches of a tree, the houses behind deliberately out of focus.

Conor grinned. ‘D’you have to ask?’

‘Con took that himself, you know,’ Christine put in. ‘He’s got a real eye for a picture.’

Martin leaned closer to the photo – then he laughed. ‘God,’ he said. ‘That’s Coleraine Road! I didn’t recognise it – it looks—’

‘It looks nice,’ Declan chuckled. He slipped off his glasses to blink at the picture. ‘No wonder you didn’t recognise it.’ Then to Conor he said, ‘You’re a real artist, son – you’ve made Coleraine Road look like a place people might live.’

Robert wasn’t laughing. ‘They were good times we had there,’ he said.

Conor shrugged. ‘It’s just a snapshot.’

‘I like it,’ volunteered Hazel hesitantly. She looked at Mags. Everyone looked at Mags, seated like some Roman emperor at a gladiatorial contest, thumb poised to deliver her verdict. But it seemed like she wasn’t listening. She was inspecting her fingernails, holding her left hand in her right. The expectant silence persisted. Conor opened his mouth to say something, anything.

Without looking up Mags said, ‘That pretty picture you have on your wall. On that very road Martin Donaghy went down in ’72 with a British bullet in his back.’ She turned over her hand and her fingertip traced the lines of her palm. ‘Just around the corner is where the Red Hand put a knife in the ribs of young Danny Kennedy. I helped his mother lay him out.’ She still didn’t look up. She only sniffed, and turned over her hand again. ‘That’s the pretty picture you have on your wall,’ she said.

After a moment, Declan reached over and took her hand in his. Conor glanced at Martin, and then at Christine. Her look said: do something.

‘Drinks?’ Conor said, with feeling.

It was Christine who took the opportunity to escape to the kitchen to fix the drinks: bitter for Declan, lager for the lads, wine for Hazel, whiskey for Mags. Conor felt easier when she’d left the room. Poor lass didn’t deserve a family like the Maguires. Did anyone?

While she was busy with bottles and glasses Martin asked, ‘So how’s the wee girl?’

‘God, Mart,’ Conor shook his head. ‘You can’t imagine. She’s grand. She cries like a thing possessed, but she’s beautiful.’ He looked at Mags, saw she was smiling. ‘She’s perfect,’ he said.

‘She’ll be a bonny one,’ Declan said.

‘She is.’

‘I’m happy for you both,’ Martin said. Conor noticed that his brother’s hand was entwined with Hazel’s. Good luck to you, he thought.

Suddenly Mags cleared her throat in a businesslike way. A ripple went round the Maguire men – glances exchanged, postures subtly shifted.

‘You know,’ Mags said, ‘the police have dropped the investigation into Colm’s killing.’

Conor felt a quickening in the pit of his stomach.

‘Disappearance,’ Declan corrected her.

‘Don’t give me that, husband. You know better.’ She shook her head. ‘Four months. Four months is all it’s been! And that’s that. “Dead end.” “Trail’s gone cold.”’ She jabbed a stubby finger at the arm of the couch. ‘Tell me this. Would it’ve been a dead end if it’d been a Prod carried off and shot in the night? Would the trail’ve been allowed go cold if it’d been that bastard Paisley stolen from his wee children, or that fat-faced bastard Hume killed in cold blood at barely fifty years of age?’ She folded her arms. Conor shrugged one shoulder uneasily. ‘Ah, c’mon now, ma,’ he said.

Mags glared up at him.

‘Don’t you dare “ah c’mon now ma” me, son,’ she snapped, and it should’ve been funny – but hell, it wasn’t.

‘She’s right, Con,’ Robert said severely, hunkering forward in his seat. ‘She’s right and there’s no denying it.’

Conor rolled his eyes. ‘Let’s not talk politics today, can we?’

‘This isn’t politics,’ Mags said, as if the last word were in some way distasteful. ‘This is Colm.’

I just don’t think—’

‘No, you don’t. You don’t think, Conor, son.’ Mags was getting into her swing now. ‘All that studying you done, and sometimes I think you’ve learned nothing.’

This was too much. ‘I learned I didn’t want to spend my life fighting a war that never ends.’

‘Well good for you.’ Mags’s narrow lips creased in a bitter smile. ‘Oh, don’t tell me. You’re going to start crying at me over what the boys done in Warrington, aren’t you? You’re all heart, Conor. Go on. Tell me what a wicked thing that was that we did.’

It was the ‘we’ that turned Conor’s stomach. He looked away – he couldn’t look his mother in the face.

Warrington, England. The bomb. Two wee boys dead.

‘That older boy,’ Hazel said, her voice quivering. ‘The one who didn’t, didn’t die right away – they turned off his, his machine today.’

Conor looked at her. You’re tougher than you look, Hazel, girl, he wanted to say. He noticed Martin put a protective hand on her shoulder. Christine, too, took a step closer, towards Hazel. God knew what she thought she was going to do. If it came to taking sides, Conor supposed, it wouldn’t take Chris long to make up her mind.

But it was Conor that Mags had in her sights. Mags just shrugged. Conor made himself meet her eye.

‘The boy was twelve years old,’ he heard himself say.

He saw his da pass a weary hand across his brow. Mags straightened her back and replied, ‘Jackie Duddy, Patrick Doherty, Bernie McGuigan, Hugh Gilmour, Kevin McElhinney, Michael Kelly, John Young, William Nash, Michael McDaid. I could go on.’

It didn’t surprise Conor that Mags could reel off the dead of Bloody Sunday like a kid listing off the Celtic first eleven. After all this was a woman who, when Conor as a boy was refusing to finish his cabbage or his cauliflower, would say, ‘And there’s Bobby Sands starving his poor self to death for you.’

Conor always wanted to say, ‘I never asked him to.’

He was aware of Robert nodding slowly and sententiously at Mags’s side.

‘You don’t care about your own people, Conor,’ Mags said. ‘You’re too busy with…with your cows and your chickens.’

Conor tried to bite back his anger.

‘Cows,’ he muttered, ‘don’t kneecap other cows ’cause they come from the wrong end of the farm.’

‘Only because they haven’t got Armalites,’ he heard Declan murmur under his breath. Martin laughed nervously – but now Mags was on her feet. All five foot one of her.

‘I’m talking about your people, son,’ she hissed at Conor. ‘We’re talking about family.’

‘Family!’

‘Aye, family. Don’t you ever forget that, son. However bloody clever you think you are.’ She cast a sidelong look at Christine and then added, ‘And however many Proddy slags bat their eyelashes at you.’

‘That’s enough!’ Conor shouted. ‘You’ve a bloody nerve! Coming to our house, taking about family.’ He looked sideways. Had Christine heard? It didn’t matter. ‘You don’t come to your own son’s wedding! You don’t have a thing to say or a question to ask about your first bloody grandchild!’

Mags stood her ground. She hardly blinked.

‘You—’ she began, but Conor had had enough.

‘Your own damn daughter,’ he cut her off, and saw her flinch, ‘left the bloody country just to get away from you. You drove her out, you and your war!’ He paused, took a breath. Mags’s face was always pale, but now it was bloodless with fury. ‘And you talk to me about family,’ Conor finished.

And that was that. Mags was out of the door before the final words were out of his mouth. Robert close behind. Declan, then, slope-shouldered, apologetic, but following Mags because following Mags was just what he did. Conor felt helpless as went after them. The full bowl of crisps still lay on the table. Cheese and bloody onion.

Martin led Hazel out and then paused on the doorstep. ‘Con,’ he said, struggling for words. ‘Don’t think… I mean, you know…’

‘I know.’ Conor nodded. ‘It’s all right. Look after yourselves.’

‘You too. Say sorry to Christine for me. For all of us,’ he added breezily. ‘See you again soon, I’m sure.’

Then he had to go – Robert would’ve driven off without him otherwise.

Conor, returning to the living room, found Christine with a glass of whiskey in one hand and a glass of wine in the other and an enquiring look on her face.

‘That went as well as could be expected,’ Conor sighed. He took the glass of whiskey from her and drank it right down.

Present Day

HE HAD a crick in his back and a smear of pigshit on his cheek. His trousers were ripped where a boar had tried to get over-friendly with his left leg. He was sweaty, dirty, smelly and knackered.

Christ, I’ve missed this, Conor thought.

He’d spent his morning vaccinating Barry Lever’s pigs, all forty of the squealing little blighters.

‘Must be wishin’ you were back in Africa,’ Barry had grunted as together they manhandled another bad-tempered sow into the crush cage.

Conor had just smiled. He’d been smiling all day, feeling good to be back on the farms, back in the Castlereagh countryside doing the work he loved. He’d wanted to say, Barry, man, you don’t know how lucky you are.

But he knew that Barry’s wife was poorly with her heart and that his eldest lad had been suspended from school for drinking or drugs or something – and that if Barry missed another mortgage payment the farm was going to the wall, pigs and all – so he didn’t say anything.

After he’d packed up his kit and eased the gloves off his bruised hands he walked with Barry to the gate where his Land Rover was parked.

‘I’ll get my bill to you in a couple of days,’ he said as, bent over with a hand on the gatepost, he worked off his heavy boots.

‘I’m sure you will,’ Barry said ruefully. ‘The usual? Arm and a leg?’

‘No, I’ll do you a discount. Just a pound of flesh’ll do.’ He straightened up. ‘Listen, I’ll not charge you for my time today, Barry. Just the vaccine and the kit. I know how it is.’

Barry Lever frowned. ‘I don’t want—’

‘Don’t be so precious, Barry.’ Conor put his hand on the young farmer’s shoulder. ‘Besides, it’s not charity I’m offering. If it makes you feel any better it’s just plain old self-interest. Farmers like you pay my wages. I can’t afford to see guys like you struggle. Fact is, I need you more than you need me.’

Barry grinned slowly. ‘So you’re saying you’re a parasite,’ he said. ‘Like – like a mange mite.’

‘Well, that makes you a mangy pig, of course, but yeah, you could put it that way.’ Conor laughed. ‘I’ll be seeing you, Barry. Take care now.’

The farmer nodded, tugged his cap – ‘S’long, Conor’ – and trudged back across the farmyard. Conor watched him go. Then he stooped to pick up his boots and turned to unlatch the gate. The sun was warm and gentle. For a moment he paused with his hand on the top bar of the gate. He flexed his bruised fingers thoughtfully: the sunshine felt good on his skin. But sunshine meant Kenya and Kenya meant Kipenzi – the one thing Conor did miss about Africa.

Mzuka, she used to call him, poking fun at his pale Belfast complexion – mzuka, ghost.

She was an ecologist at the university in Nairobi, though you’d never guess it – a dancer, you’d think, or an artist. Slender as a reed, hair cropped short, skin the colour of strong coffee – or, when the late savannah sun caught it a certain way, the colour of red gold – or sometimes, in the quiet darkness of their shared tent, Conor recalled, the colour and scent and softness of black sable.

She’d thought he was a pasty Irish lunk and he’d thought she was a snooty African princess. Maybe neither of them was far wrong, come to that. He’d been lumbered with the job of driving her out to Olmisigiyoi, where a big bull had been found dead – she was studying the effects of pollution on elephants in the district, and she’d wanted to take a look, run some tests.

Normally Conor would’ve been interested himself. Sure, he’d had his reasons for leaving Ireland, but he’d had his reasons for choosing Kenya, too, and the Maasai Mara. Doctor Nkono, from the Mara Conservancy, had talked it up, of course: lions, rhinos, cheetahs, migrating animals in their millions – a far cry, Mr Maguire, from barnyards and piggeries…

Nkono hadn’t been kidding. Since Conor had been there he’d been waiting for the novelty to wear off, waiting to start feeling bored by it all, to look at a teetering doe-eyed giraffe as if it were no more remarkable than a double-decker bus on Chichester Street, to watch the crowned cranes dancing in the morning mists like he’d watch the pigeons cooing and crapping in Donegal Square.

It hadn’t happened.

But still – he didn’t much enjoy being treated like Kipenzi Kamande’s chauffeur.

They didn’t talk much on the drive out. Conor had tried to make conversation at first – where’re you from, how long’ve you been an ecologist, got kids, got a husband – but she wasn’t having any of it. Gave him nothing but a regal sneer and a vague wave of one slim hand. Suit yourself, madam, Conor had thought angrily, grinding the gears of the jeep. They’d driven the rest of the way in silence.

Later, she’d told him that she’d felt awkward and shy – and that she’d have liked to talk, only she couldn’t understand his accent.

Ten miles out of Serena the antique jeep gave out.

‘Damn.’

‘What? Why have you stopped?’

‘Not me. The car.’ He slid out of the driver’s seat and popped the bonnet. Steam. Smoke. The red-hot engine hummed sadly.

‘Do you know anything about cars?’ Kipenzi asked, leaning on one elbow out of the passenger window.

‘Nope.’

‘Neither do I.’ She said it with something like a smile. You won’t find it so bloody funny when we wind up stuck here all bloody night, Conor thought irritably. He scanned the horizon. Nothing to see but a stand of pot-bellied baobab trees and a skein of ibises silhouetted against the setting sun.

‘That’s that, then,’ he said to himself.

Kipenzi had climbed down from the passenger seat and was rooting in the back of the stricken jeep.

‘Afraid we’re stranded,’ he called. ‘I suppose we’re going to have to—’

She turned, shouldering a sheaf of blankets and swinging a half-gallon water can from one hand. ‘There’s a stream a mile to the south-east of here,’ she said. ‘Do you know how to filter water? We have fruit and a loaf of bread and there are Osuga berries near the stream. Doctor Nkono will be driving this way in the morning. We will sleep in the car. The temperature can fall to minus ten at night. Anyway we will have to wind up the windows to keep out,’ she smiled wryly, ‘unwelcome guests.’

Conor felt like he ought to make a contribution. ‘I’ve got a mosquito net,’ he offered.

‘Does it work on leopards?’ Again the fleeting smile.

There weren’t any leopards, in the end. They ate the fruit and bread perched on the tailgate of the jeep. When the sun went down, Conor made himself as comfortable as he could under a blanket in the passenger seat; Kipenzi curled up cat-like in the back.

While the stars came out in the deep sky, they talked: family, work, travel, food (Kip spoke three languages and had lived in Brazil and Japan, but she’d never had a bacon soda farl from Kenny Hegley’s on Cloister Street). When the red sun rose in the morning they were still talking. At eight, when Doctor Nkono pulled up in his dust-caked 4x4 alongside the stranded jeep, he found Conor dozing in the driver’s seat, and Kip sound asleep with her head on his shoulder.

Conor came round to find the doctor shaking his arm. ‘Good morning, Mr Maguire,’ he said.

It took Conor a second to register it all: the dazzling sunlight, the doctor’s wry, kindly smile, the thought that he’d spent the night sleeping rough in the African savannah, the ache in his back, the scent of Kip’s hair on his clothes.

Belfast seemed every one of the six thousand miles away in that moment – and a million years ago.

But here you are, Conor told himself as he manoeuvred out of Barry Lever’s yard and pulled onto the Belfast road. You kissed Kip goodbye for good, and here you are – home again.

He didn’t notice the car behind him until he was deep into the city suburbs. At a red light on Montgomery Street he squinted in his rearview. Yeah, that was it, all right: the car he’d seen outside the Cherry Tree that night, after Ella’s party. The cops.

Conor fought down a rising panic. Sure, there’d been a time when the police in Belfast knew his name and his face; there’d been a time when they were more than keen for him to – what was the phrase? – help them with their enquiries. But now? He was clean. He’d been out of the damn country for nearly six years, for Christ’s sake. But then the police, like everyone else in Belfast, had long memories.

He drove carefully, mindful of road signs, signals, speed limits (he could hear Mags’s voice in his head: give the bastards nothing) – easing the Land Rover through the thickening traffic on Albertbridge Road.

Before Short Strand and the river he swung the car into a layby and braked. He breathed a quick prayer: please God let them go past. In his right-hand wing mirror he watched the black car move alongside – and then slow – and then stop.

The darkened nearside window hummed open. There was no one in the passenger seat. The driver, keeping one hand on the wheel, leaned across and motioned for Conor to wind down his own window. Heart thumping, he pushed the switch. The window rolled down; the traffic fumes and the dank Lagan air caught in Conor’s throat. He swallowed uncomfortably and met the driver’s eye.

‘Hello, Conor,’ she said. Yeah, the coppers round here knew him, all right –and he knew them. This was a name and a face he’d have been glad to forget. He nodded stiffly.

‘Hello, Detective Galloway.’

‘Surprised to see you round these parts again.’ Galloway’s accent was softly but markedly Glaswegian.

‘I’ve been away.’

‘I know – I remember you leaving.’ A bleak smile. ‘Sort of sudden, wasn’t it?’

‘An opportunity came up. You know how it is.’

Traffic was getting tailbacked behind the black car. A horn beeped irritably. Galloway sighed. ‘Look at me, holding up traffic. Now, Conor – you’ve five minutes for a chat with an old friend, haven’t you?’

‘Yeah – yeah, I suppose so,’ Conor shrugged. It was easier to play along – to pretend that he had a choice in the matter.

‘Great.’ She smiled. ‘Follow me. Try and keep up.’ The darkened window rolled up. The black car moved off.

Conor signalled and pulled out in its wake. When he moved his left hand from the wheel to shift gears he felt it tremble and he gripped the gear lever till his knuckles showed white.

Detective Lisa Galloway. He’d been wondering if he’d see her again, hear her voice again – and hoping like hell that he wouldn’t.

‘I’m not trying to play games with you, Conor,’ Galloway said. ‘I’m just trying to do what I’m paid to do.’

They’d driven to a rundown pub on Laganbank Road. Galloway had led him to a table outside – so she could smoke, she’d said with a self-critical grimace. ‘Keep meaning to quit,’ she said, ‘but bad habits die hard in this job.’

Conor guessed that the truth was she didn’t want to be overheard.

They were the only drinkers on the windblown terrace. Conor could hear TV football commentary coming from inside the pub – then someone shouted something, and someone else swore loudly. Then someone started up a chant: hello, hello, we are the billy boys… Rangers fans. At least there was no chance of bumping into any of his relatives here. He sipped his half of bitter and watched Galloway warily as she settled on the bench, set down her glass of vodka and coke, and fired up a cigarette. She’d lost weight since he’d last seen her, and she’d been skinny as an alleycat then. And she looked older – of course she did; it’d been six years. There was a permanent crease in her brow. Bags under her eyes – not a lot of laughter lines. This is just what work and worry and this city and this country do to you, Conor thought.

In her straight black trousers and dark boxy jacket you’d not look twice at her if you passed her in the street – but she was still a good-looking woman, underneath it all. The bones of her face were fine and strong and her dark hair was glossy. Through a cloud of white smoke Galloway said, ‘It was funny, the way you left, Conor.’

‘Funny?’

‘It was just at the same time Jack Marsh disappeared, wasn’t it?’

Conor fidgeted uneasily with a beermat. Any hope this would be a friendly catch-up evaporated. He wished she hadn’t said it. He wished he’d never heard it. It took all the guts he had to meet Galloway’s eye.

‘Don’t know what’s funny about that,’ he said.

Galloway ignored him. ‘Strange case,’ she said thoughtfully, looking out over the scalloped grey-green river. ‘Feller like Marsh – he was always so careful, you know?’

‘I don’t suppose he was short of enemies.’

‘No, you’re right there.’ She smiled – like this was a private joke between the two of them. ‘For a start I think the army would’ve had him shot if they were still allowed. Dealing dope to cadets was one thing – he was a good soldier, after all – they could turn a blind eye there. Then they caught him selling small arms to villains out of Deysbrook Barracks.’ She laughed. ‘They couldn’t overlook that.’

Conor nodded. He knew the case history inside-out. Marsh had taken his dishonourable discharge and done his time.

Galloway sipped her drink and swallowed slowly. ‘Marsh landed in Belfast around the same time I did.’

‘Sounds like destiny.’

Galloway didn’t say anything. Conor stayed silent while she took a long pull on her cigarette. He studied her pale hands and her narrow hazel eyes.

She looked up suddenly, her eyes meeting his. Conor looked away.

‘I don’t want any trouble, Detective,’ he muttered.

Galloway laughed. ‘Now what on earth would you mean by “trouble”?’ She smiled. Conor didn’t smile back. Abruptly, Galloway stubbed out her cigarette and folded her hands on the tabletop. Here we go, Conor thought.

‘Whoever killed Jack Marsh—’ Galloway began.

Conor stopped her with a raised hand. ‘You’re talking like Marsh was definitely killed. But you never found him, did you? I mean, you don’t even know if he’s dead. No one does,’ he added.

Galloway’s eyes were stony. ‘Don’t push your luck, Mr Maguire,’ she said quietly. She took a drink and began again. ‘Like I said, I don’t want to play games. I’ll tell you what we want.’ Again her eyes met his. ‘Patrick Cameron,’ she said.

Conor leaned back in his seat, his mind racing. ‘What d’you want with Patrick?’

‘He was close to Marsh. Very close.’

‘Maybe he was. What’s that got to do with me?’

‘Don’t play dumb, Conor – you’re smarter than that.’ Galloway brushed away a crumb of cigarette ash in an irritated gesture. ‘Patrick Cameron’s your wife’s brother,’ she said.

‘Ex-wife.’

‘You’re family,’ Galloway insisted.

Conor shrugged. ‘Not any more.’

Galloway was bluffing, he thought. If they had anything on him – anything that’d stick – he wouldn’t be sipping a beer on a riverside terrace. No, he’d be in an Antrim Road interview room, with some smooth solicitor telling him it was fess up or face ten years in Maghaberry.

It’d be hard time, too. Not political time, Provo time, Colm Murphy time – the time that got you songs sung about you and free drinks on the Falls Road. Just hard, dirty, criminal time.

So they’d got nothing on him.

He stayed silent, turning his beer glass on its mat, till Galloway threw back the last of her drink, set the glass down hard on the tabletop, and said: ‘Life’s hard enough in this town, Conor.’ She stood up and shrugged the strap of her bag onto her shoulder. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

Conor stood up. ‘Is that a threat?’ Suddenly he felt very aware of his height – or, rather, he felt aware of how he towered over the detective – of Galloway’s smallness, her fragility. The wind off the river dishevelled her hair and she smoothed it awkwardly with her left hand.

‘It’s been nice talking to you again, Conor,’ she said, and Conor thought: at a time like this, after a talk like this – what sort of person could say something like that?

‘I’d best be getting on,’ he said. ‘I’ll be seeing you, Detective.’

Galloway held out her hand and he took it uncertainly. ‘You will,’ she said.

IT WAS It was one of those new estates where all the streets were named for historical figures – painters, here. So there was Turner Drive and Monet Crescent and Stubbs Avenue.

And Rembrandt Close. His home. Turning carefully through a T-junction – the three O’Neill kids, he remembered, were always kicking a football around there – he told himself: it’s not your home any more.

And then he had to try and ignore the question that came to him next, demanding an answer: if this isn’t your home, Con, where the hell is?

The estate didn’t look as brand-new as when he’d left it, but not much else had changed. The odd house had new window frames, or a new car in the driveway. But there across the road, giving his lawn a regimental crewcut, was old Len Swallow, same as ever – and, when Conor wound down the window, even the smell of the place was the same: lilacs, Christine had taught him, from a mauve-blossomed bush by the front door of number eight. The Maguire place.

He’d thought it’d be weird, coming back here. But it wasn’t.

He was still feeling a little otherworldly as he climbed out of the car – but a sharp knock at an upstairs window shook him out of it. He started in alarm. He looked up, saw it was Ella, smiling, pulling on a hoodie, tapping her wrist in a ‘you’re late!’ gesture – and he cursed himself for being so edgy. It was that bloody policewoman.

He waited, leaning on the car, for Ella to make her way downstairs. Galloway. Jesus – he could hardly believe how quickly he’d been drawn back in, how quickly she’d renewed her grip on his life. He straightened up when he saw Ella appear in the doorway. She had a puppy in her arms.

They exchanged hugs and Ella gave him hell for being half an hour overdue and he, thinking quickly, blamed the damn traffic on Albertbridge Road. Then he sized up the puppy with a professional eye.

A bitch. Six weeks old or so. Patterdale, but not pure-bred – something of a Welsh in the tail, something of a Border in the muzzle – a good-enough looking little mongrel.

‘What d’you call her?’

‘Gracie.’

He lifted the squirming puppy out of his daughter’s arms. ‘Black and tan,’ he noted, running a calming hand along the puppy’s flank. ‘Don’t tell your grandmother.’

‘Eh?’

‘Never mind. Before your time. Where’d you find her?’

‘She’s a present from Kieran. She’s lovely, isn’t she?’

‘Oh. Yeah.’ Again Conor felt jealousy stir – where was bloody Kieran, he thought, when you fell and broke your wrist at six years of age, and was it Kieran sat up with you all night when you got the croup when you were a wee baby, and was it Kieran slogged around every toy shop in Belfast on Christmas Eve because you wanted—

He stopped himself. And where have you been ever since, Con? Four thousand miles away, that’s where.

‘I’ve decided I – I want to be like you, Dad,’ he heard Ella say suddenly, nervously. He blinked. He wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that.

‘How’s that?’

‘I’m going to be a vet.’ She took the puppy impatiently back from him, kissed its ears, muttered some babytalk. But when she looked up she was serious. ‘I mean it. I’m doing really well in science, and I’d love working with animals and – well, I want to be like you.’ She smiled. ‘Whatever mum – well, whatever anyone says.’

Conor smiled ruefully. ‘C’mon. I’m not your careers advisor today. I’m your driving instructor. Got the keys?’

‘Yep.’

‘Then get Gracie here back in her basket, and let’s get going.’

They kangaroo-hopped down Rembrandt Close and turned without signalling into Canaletto Way.

‘Slower. That’s the way.’ Conor steadied the Audi with a gentle hand on the wheel.

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry – it’s your first time, after all. Turn here – mirror, signal.’

As she rolled the wheel through her hands Ella started to say, ‘It’s not my first…’ but then she stopped, and bit her lip.

Conor had a go at playing the easygoing dad. ‘It’s okay,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Kieran take you out for a lesson?’

Ella frowned at the road ahead. ‘Not Kieran.’ An anxious sidelong glance. ‘Simon.’

‘Oh.’ Simon – five-languages Simon, university lecturer Simon – Simon, the new man in Christine’s life.

‘He just showed me how to start the car, and we just drove round.’

With a smile and a calmness he didn’t feel Conor reached over and squeezed Ella’s shoulder. ‘It’s fine. It’s good that you get on. Brake. Down to first. Off you go. I’m glad he’s able to help.’ He settled back in his seat. For a minute he watched the road in silence. Then he said, ‘Did he have fun?’

‘When I turned right onto the Stubbs Street roundabout I thought he was going to piss himself.’

Conor laughed. He knew Ella was only saying it to make him feel better. He didn’t care. It did make him feel better. Now they’d broached the subject, Ella started to talk more freely. Her mum hadn’t been seeing Simon for all that long, she said – Simon was all right; she really didn’t know him that well.

‘Well, as long as your mum’s happy.’

‘I wouldn’t say she’s happy exactly.’ The Audi turned a corner, bumped a kerb. ‘She’s always – well, she’s very tired from her work. Stressed.’

Conor nodded. ‘I know how that can be,’ he said.

Ella drove on. After a while – after a few narrow scrapes past parked cars, a few daring dashes through gaps in traffic that barely left the wing-mirrors with an inch to spare – she said: ‘Stop doing that.’

‘What?’

‘That thing. With your foot. Every time I do anything your right foot jerks like you’re slamming on a brake pedal. I can see it out of the corner of my eye. It’s making me nervous.’

Conor smiled. He hadn’t even known he was doing it. ‘I’m sorry. You’re doing great.’

‘I haven’t even hit anyone yet…’

‘True, true. But is that only because the kerbs keep getting in the way?’

‘If you don’t shut up I’ll drive us into the river.’

‘You wouldn’t…’ he began – then broke off suddenly. A black car in the rearview – that was what it was.

Ella sighed and slapped one hand on the wheel. ‘God, Dad, what is it now?’

‘Right here,’ he said sharply, pointing at a turning that led back into the estate. Ella indicated, braked – they had to wait for three oncoming cars to pass before they could make the turn. The black car followed. That damn woman. Didn’t she ever let up?

‘You okay, Dad?’

Conor forced a grin. ‘Yeah, of course. Sure. You know I love white-knuckle rides. Left here – then a right. Ah, that’s only an amber – go straight on.’

It isn’t sacred ground, for Christ’s sake, a part of him insisted. It’s a residential estate in Sydenham. And Galloway can go where she likes – she’s the law.

He found himself holding his breath as Ella rounded a bend and the poplars at the end of Rembrandt Close came into view. In the rearview, the black car followed – then slowed, and turned, jerked through a hasty three-point-turn – even the car looked somehow angry – and drove away.

Conor breathed out heavily as Ella drew up outside number eight, mounted the kerb, ran over a tub of geraniums, and stalled. There was a moment’s silence.

‘So?’ Ella said, throwing up her hands.

‘Mm?’

‘Did I pass?’

Conor smiled.

‘One or two minor faults,’ he shrugged, opening the door, ‘but I think we’ll get there in the end.’

Christine was in the kitchen when Conor followed Ella inside. She was sitting at the pine table, sifting through some students’ papers. She didn’t look up. Conor paused uncertainly in the hall. The wallpaper was the same, the carpet was the same. But something was different. More flowers, in more vases, for one thing – and fewer pairs of boots and grubby running shoes cluttering up the floor. No jackets slung over the banister.

‘Coffee, right, Dad? Two sugars?’

Ella was already breezily taking down coffee cups from the cupboard, filling the kettle, rattling in the cutlery drawer for a teaspoon.

Christine finally noticed her ex-husband hovering in the doorway. She smiled – a tired smile, but it’d do for Conor.

‘Hello, Con,’ Christine said – a little warily, it seemed.

‘Hi.’

He moved into the kitchen and leaned with an elbow on the worktop, then thought that might be presumptuous and straightened again. Christine went back to sorting her papers. She taught English to immigrant workers at a college out on Limerick Road – Conor guessed that was how she’d met Simon.

‘How’s work?’ he tried.

Christine sat back in her chair and blew out a breath. With a smile she gestured at the spread papers and said, ‘Never-ending.’

‘She works too hard.’ Ella set down one cup of coffee on the table at Christine’s elbow and another – Conor’s – just opposite. His old place at the table. Ella did it like it meant nothing, but from the way her glance flickered from her mother to her father it was obvious it meant more to her than that.

Conor, taking the chair Ella indicated, hoped it didn’t mean too much. They’d hurt Ella once – that is, he had.

Ella’s mobile buzzed. ‘Oop!’ She checked the screen and her eyes widened. You little actress, Conor thought wryly. ‘Kieran! Oh, gosh, I promised I’d ring him. Sorry – got to go. Thanks for the lesson, Dad.’ She pecked his cheek. ‘See you soon.’

‘S’long, sweetheart.’

The kitchen door banged behind her. Conor, shifting uncomfortably in his chair, said, ‘I’ll finish my coffee and be off. I can see you’re busy.’

‘God, I’m always busy,’ Christine smiled. She rolled back the sleeves of her faded blue sweatshirt and stretched her arms wearily. ‘A coffee-break won’t hurt.’

‘Was Ella right? Have you been overdoing it?’

‘Someone has to do the work.’

The language school, she said, was a madhouse – ‘everything done on the hoof, everything improvised, nothing planned’. Every day was like turning up knowing you’ve got to go up on stage, but there’s no script, and you don’t know who you’ll be acting with, or who’ll be in the audience, or whether there’ll be an audience.

‘These are people,’ she said, ‘that don’t know where they’ll be in a month’s time, a week’s time, even.’ She smiled. ‘It teaches you your business, I’ll give it that. In my first six weeks I learned more about teaching than I ever did at college. It’s a lot of responsibility.’

Conor remembered how proud he’d been when the language school down on Ulsterville had opened. Chris had teamed up with a couple of the girls she’d graduated with – they’d all sunk their savings into it, plus whatever they could beg from the banks or scrape up in government grants. They’d never been short of students. Just short of cash.

Tammy, one of Chris’s partners in the business, was half-Mandarin: they’d started out expecting students from Donegal Pass, Chinatown, and from the Asian communities in Upper Bann or Foyle.

‘But now,’ Christine said, ‘Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian. Then Arabic, Kurdish, Pashto, Bengali, Tamil…’ She laughed, shook her head. ‘Are you up and running at the practice yet?’ she asked.

‘Getting there.’ Conor smiled wryly. ‘Dermot’s got one more week. Not sure he’s ready to go, though.’

‘You can’t blame him,’ Christine said sympathetically. ‘It’s been his life, hasn’t it?’

Dermot Kirk and Donald Riordan had run the practice for years. They were good vets, both of them – knew every farm and farmer in Northern Ireland, hell, pretty much every damn animal – and they knew one another, too: partners in the practice since the sixties, they might’ve passed for brothers, or twins, even.

But Riordan had died a few years back. Heart failure. Dermot had written to Conor in Kenya to tell him; the handwriting had been spidery, frail, wayward. Dermot had the steady hands of an expert surgeon, even now he was, what, sixty-five, seventy? – but they’d trembled when he wrote that letter.

Chris had always got on with Dermot. He was a prickly old lad with a face like a bag of spanners but there was something in him that Christine responded to – gentleness, maybe. Mercy. Strength. On his better days Conor sometimes thought that maybe she saw the same things in him.

‘I’ll end up having to run the old bugger out of the place at the point of a gelding knife,’ Conor said, and Christine laughed.

For a second it felt like it used to between the two of them. But, Conor told himself, it’s not – and you’ve no right to sit here acting the man of the house and pretending that it is.

‘Simon all right?’ he forced himself to ask.

Christine gave him a look that pinned him to his seat. ‘Why do you say that?’

He shrugged. ‘Just asking. I mean, you two are—’

‘Us two are none of your bloody business,’ Christine snapped. Then she paused, and closed her eyes, and touched her fingertips to her brow. ‘Sorry, Con,’ she said. She managed a smile. ‘Knackered.’

‘It’s fine,’ he said.

‘And me and Simon – well, it’s nothing serious. He’s a good guy. It’s just – well, let’s just say it’s not serious.’

Conor took another mouthful of coffee and swilled the dregs in the bottom of his cup. He could feel her eyes on him. Man, those eyes. What the bloody hell was he doing here?

‘How about you?’ she said. It seemed to Conor she didn’t even try to hide the tension in her voice. ‘Anyone special in your life?’

Conor’s stomach knotted up. He thought of Kipenzi, and that night on the savannah, and all the things they’d told one another – and he thought of the day he’d met Christine, and the breaking Belfast dawn when he’d kissed her for the first time, and their wedding day at St Dunstan’s.

‘Me? No. No one special.’

I’m sorry, Kip, he added, in his head.

Then the telephone rang in the hallway. ‘I should get that,’ Christine said.

Left alone, Conor sat back in his chair and let his gaze drift around the familiar kitchen. He’d sawed and fitted the worktops himself, liking the feeling of building something for his family with his own two hands – he and Christine had turned up the handsome Belfast sink in a reclamation yard out Antrim way – the old-fashioned wine glasses arranged on a shelf by the window had been a wedding present from Christine’s grandmother. ‘They’re no use to me,’ she’d said, ‘since the doctor said I’ve not to drink so much wine any more’ – and Christine had told him later that the old girl had taken the doctor at his word, and switched to gin.

But the last time Conor had been here the chimneybreast had been crowded with framed family pictures. They were gone now, except for a pinned-up snapshot of a teenaged Ella, blonde and tousled and smiling in a sunlit meadow – Fermanagh, near Christine’s parents’ place, Conor guessed.

Something on the windowsill caught his eye. A shell, a cockleshell. Deep-ridged and the palest sea-blue. It wasn’t anything special, you could’ve found one pretty much the same on any Atlantic shore from Inishowen to Mizen Head. Only Conor knew where this one came from. He’d picked it up on Carrickfinn beach in Donegal. He’d rinsed the sand off it in the rolling white surf, and he’d given it to Christine. Christine had admired it, and stroked her thumb across its sea-blue surface, and slipped it into her skirt pocket. Then she’d kissed him.

Their honeymoon. Twenty years since.

Conor shook his head sharply and drained the bitter grounds in the bottom of his coffee cup. He couldn’t let himself think like that. There was too much at stake.

Christine came back into the room and with an irritable sigh dropped wearily into her chair.

‘Something up?’

‘Just college stuff,’ she said, a little abruptly.

‘Just asking.’

‘I know. It just makes me tired talking about it.’ She pushed a hand through her uncombed blonde hair. ‘Makes me tired thinking about it.’

‘Students bothering you?’

She nodded. ‘I wouldn’t mind if they were asking for extra tuition or asking me to check the spelling on their job applications or whatever – but this is something different.’ Another sigh. ‘Two girls have dropped out of class.’

‘Not so unusual, is it? Maybe they went home, to, to…’

‘Maybe,’ said Christine. ‘They’re wanderers, these kids – they go wherever they can get work, and money, but I thought they might have said goodbye.’

‘Do they owe you money?’

‘The opposite, which makes it weirder. Both had paid up till the end of the month.’

‘Teenage girls can be difficult to predict.’

Christine smiled. ‘You’re telling me.’

When he left, there was no kiss goodbye. Christine just smiled half-heartedly and said she’d see him around – he said he hoped so, and left her to her paperwork and her cold cup of coffee.

Turning the corner out of the estate, he spotted Lisa Galloway’s black car parked up on the opposite side of the junction.

She’d pushed the Marsh connection hard, but that didn’t mean she knew anything.

Whoever killed Jack Marsh…

Conor switched on the radio to block out his thoughts.

1994

‘RIGHT – all of you together. Say “cheese”.’ Click, whirr. ‘And another one for luck – ah, wait – the sun’s gone in – let’s wait for the light to be right…’

‘Gets a posh digital camera and he thinks he’s David Bailey,’ Christine heckled from the back of the posed group of graduates.

‘Just want to do you justice,’ Conor grinned.

The college had laid on a few bottles of white wine after the ceremony, and Christine’s class had made short work of them. Conor helped himself to a couple of glasses, too – ‘Photographer’s fee,’ he winked at the steward with the tray. It was good to see Christine letting rip: three years of college was hard enough work without taking eighteen months out to have a baby. She’d earned this.

It was getting on for evening by the time the rest of the new teachers had finally drifted tipsily away. Conor linked his arm with Christine’s and produced a bottle of Prosecco from his rucksack. ‘Reinforcements,’ he said.

Christine whooped. ‘My hero,’ she said, and, aiming for his mouth, kissed him on the nose.

They shared the bottle of tepid, slightly fizzy wine under a sycamore tree in Ormeau Park.

‘We’re proper grown-ups now,’ Christine said, resting her head in Conor’s lap and looking up into the branches of the tree. ‘A teacher and a vet.’

‘More than that,’ Conor said. He turned a curl of her blonde hair round his forefinger. ‘We’re a family.’

‘Yeah,’ Christine sighed.

Little Ella was with her uncle Martin and her auntie Hazel. Auntie-to-be, anyway. Martin and Hazel were set to be married in the spring. They sipped the wine and watched the slow sun set and talked about the future – the things they could do, now they were grown-ups.

‘We could go abroad. How about that? You could teach English.’

‘South America would be nice. Or Africa. Think you’d be good with elephants?’

‘Sure. They’re nothing but oversized cows.’

‘Or the Galápagos Islands. You could look after the tortoises and I could teach English.’

‘To the tortoises?’

‘No. To the Galápagese. If there are any. Are there any?’

Conor shrugged. ‘Dunno. Never met any.’

‘I’d find it hard without my family, though.’

A scowling image of Mags Maguire crossed Conor’s mind.

‘I think I could live without mine,’ he said thoughtfully.

‘Well, I couldn’t. I’d miss our Patrick too much.’

Patrick. A name he’d been trying to avoid. Patrick the petty crook, Patrick, with his little jobs for Jack Marsh, Patrick the killer, Patrick the butcher.

Patrick, the little bastard who’d made Conor into a liar and – and worse.

‘You’d get used to it,’ he managed to say.

‘I wouldn’t like to have only tortoises for company,’ Christine insisted.

Better a tortoise than a snake, Conor thought. But God, don’t let that little swine spoil today. He ruffled his wife’s hair affectionately.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘time I was off. You’re meant to be meeting your fellow beaks at the Havana in ten minutes, remember?’

They walked hand-in-hand to Ravenhill Road and Conor helped Christine into a cross-town cab. He flagged down a second cab for himself. He was surprised when he tripped over his own feet climbing into the back seat – more pissed than he’d thought.

‘Home, James,’ he told the driver. ‘Rembrandt Close, Sydenham. And don’t spare the horses.’

On the way, Conor found himself explaining to the driver in detail exactly why it was the right time for Billy Bingham to step down and by hell if a team can’t beat Lithuania on its own damn turf it has no business going to the World Cup.

And then he found himself standing in the dusk on the pavement outside his house.

He was surprised, on opening the front door, to hear the sound of male voices laughing in the living room. Had Martin got the boys round for an evening’s baby-sitting?

In the living room he found Hazel, rocking Ella in her arms, and Martin, on the settee, and, standing arms folded with his back to the fireplace, Patrick Maguire. Like a summoned spirit.

‘Daddy’s home,’ Hazel cooed to the baby.

‘Half-cut, by the look of it,’ Martin laughed.

‘Hiya, Conor,’ Patrick smiled.

Conor sobered up in the time it took him to say, ‘Hello, Patrick.’

‘Christine’s not here,’ said Conor, feeling stupid.

‘I came to talk with you actually,’ Patrick said. ‘Business. You mind if we take a drive?’

Another night, another car racing through the Belfast suburbs. But this time it was Patrick driving, and Conor all nerves and nausea in the passenger seat. And, thank God, no body on the back seat.

Hazel and Martin had just shrugged and smiled and said yeah, that was fine, they didn’t mind keeping their baby niece company for a little while longer.

‘Going to tell me where we’re headed?’ Conor asked.

‘Just wait and see.’ Patrick chuckled, not taking his eyes off the road. ‘Calm head, Con.’

Easy for you to say, you smart little bastard.

The kid seemed to be playing games with him: feinting to stop the car outside some run-down bar or club, then moving off – signalling, to Conor’s alarm, to turn onto the Falls Road, just at the junction with Coleraine Road, but then wheeling the other way, into the city – even pulling into the staff car park at Grosvenor Road police station, for Christ’s sake, before quickly, laughingly, three-point-turning the car back onto the road.

‘Are we taking the scenic route?’

‘Just enjoy the sights, Con.’ Patrick was lounging low in the driver’s seat, one arm hanging out of the window. ‘God, this is a fuckin’ beautiful city.’

At first Conor thought Patrick was just trying to wind him up – he didn’t know why, but then who knew why a nutcase like Patrick Cameron did anything?

Then he realised. This wasn’t for his benefit. It was for Patrick: Patrick needed to feel in control, strong, smart – needed to psych himself up.

For what though?

At last the kid pulled the car onto a sliproad, took the road down by the Opera House, and then dropped into a dark entryway under an out-of-order traffic barrier. A car park beneath Bankmore Street. The rooflights were all broken or on the blink. Someone’s been watching too many B-movies, Conor thought.

Patrick spun the wheel. The car’s headlights scoured the concrete columns, the deserted bays, the forbidding signs – ‘no smoking’, ‘no pedestrians’, ‘no exit’ – as he steered the car to a lower storey and eased into an out-of-the way space. He killed the engine and the lights died.

‘So are you going to tell me why we’re here?’ Conor said into the silence.

Patrick gave him a look that told Conor what he already knew.

Jack Marsh was half a head shorter than Conor but his waist was slender and his tailored grey shirt was tight around his shoulders and biceps. His face was marked with scars – could’ve been from scrapping and shrapnel, could’ve been from teenage acne. His pale eyes bulged slightly. His pupils were restless and he blinked frequently, sharply, always re-sighting, refocusing. He carried his jaw high. His hair had been trimmed to a military crop.

‘Dr Maguire,’ he said, with a smile. Ten years in Belfast had done nothing to wash the sound of the Mersey out of his accent.

‘Mister Maguire,’ Conor corrected him. Reluctantly he took the hand Marsh held out. Marsh’s handshake was quick, firm, unconsidered – the shake of a man who didn’t have to impress anyone – a man who knew full well what you thought of him, and didn’t give a damn.

They stood facing each other in the gloom of the car park. Conor couldn’t see anyone else but he was sure Marsh wouldn’t have come alone, even to meet a pair of no-marks like him and Patrick. How many guys did he have waiting in the shadows?

I could die here, Conor found himself thinking. At first he felt weirdly dispassionate about the idea. This guy, he thought, could fucking kill me, right now, just for the fun of it, and no one would ever know – it’d be like I’d just vanished into thin air.

Then he thought of Ella and Christine – of them waiting for him to come home, of Chris never understanding what had happened to him, of Ella growing up without him. He felt tepid sweat leach from the skin of his palms.

‘I’ve been wanting to thank you, Conor – I can call you Conor, can’t I? – for helping young Patrick here out with that bit of difficulty he ran into,’ Marsh said. ‘You’re a resourceful feller.’

Conor didn’t see the point in saying anything.

Patrick, anxious, leaned in between the pair of them. ‘I told him, Con, what you done for me,’ he said. Then to Marsh, ‘He’s a good lad, boss, is Conor.’

‘I know that.’ Marsh nodded approvingly. ‘Brave. Loyal.’ He lifted his chin to meet Conor’s gaze. ‘We can use men like you.’

Conor breathed in through his nose. It felt like his guts were in knots – like they’d twisted into a tight ball that now sat heavy as lead in his empty belly. He needed to piss. He clenched his fists. He knew what he needed to say – and he knew he’d have to be nuts to say it, here, now. His voice sounded like someone else’s. ‘You used me once,’ he said. ‘It won’t be happening again.’

Marsh smiled. Again Conor knew: this man could kill me – he could make me just disappear.

‘Is that a fact?’

Conor shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet. ‘It is, aye,’ he said, and braced himself to take a blow, or to fight, or to run. If he lashed out and made for the exit, how far would he get? Christ, Marsh probably had guys on every door.

Marsh only smiled wider. ‘Can we talk privately?’ he asked, with theatrical politeness. He extended a hand to the open door of Patrick’s car. ‘In the vehicle?’

Conor nodded without certainty. He felt so fucking stupid. That night, he should have just gone to the police. All that crap about loyalty, about Colm, it was the darkness crowding him. He should have punched Patrick’s lights out, called the police, and been back in bed by dawn. Why hadn’t he? Had he really thought Christine would be angry for handing over her little brother? Look at him now – standing there like a bloody Jack Russell beside his master. If the smooth fuck wasn’t grinning too!

Conor didn’t have anything more to say. But then he’d known he was living on borrowed time. Marsh wasn’t going to let him off the hook so easily. There was every chance he wasn’t going to let him off the hook at all. Get in that car, Con, he told himself, and you might not get out again. Again, he felt disembodied. Scared too, yeah, and…so damn disappointed with himself. You made this bed for yourself. You could’ve made it differently.

He slid again into the passenger seat while Marsh settled himself at the wheel, smartened his rolled shirtsleeves, smoothed an eyebrow in the rearview, adjusted the sit of his black trousers.

Through the side window Conor saw Patrick reach for the rear door handle. And he saw Marsh, with a negligent gesture, flick the central-locking switch in the driver’s door. Patrick tugged twice at the handle, then wised up. Shrugged. Stepped away.

Just the two of them.

‘Now look—’ Conor began, but Marsh held up a hand.

‘No,’ he said. A quick shake of his head. ‘I talk first. I’m going to need you again, Conor. I’m going to need you to do a few more jobs.’

He didn’t look at Conor as he spoke. He looked at the wheel and the dash, as if he were reading from notes, from a script – or from a contract.

‘I—’

‘You’ll let me fucking speak or you’ll be talking through a mouthful of broken teeth. Interrupt me again and I’ll have your fucking tongue sliced down the middle.’ Now he looked at Conor. ‘Simple rules, simple courtesies,’ he said.

Conor sat silent. He gripped one hand with the other to keep them from shaking.

Marsh resumed his recital. ‘Earlier today,’ he said, ‘three members of the Ulster Volunteers were murdered on the Shankill Road. Now, I’ve been made aware of who was responsible. I have their names, addresses, descriptions, registration numbers.’ He ticked the items off on his fingers. ‘And I have made plans for…reparation.’

‘Revenge.’

‘No, no, no.’ Marsh waved a dismissive hand. ‘Not revenge, Conor. Nothing so impractical. Favours, Conor, favours for friends. I do a brisk trade in favours. Revenge is messy, hot-headed, liable – as you good folk of Ulster know so well – to get out of hand. Favours are simply good business.’

‘I won’t. I couldn’t. I…this is…you’re—’

‘What this is and what I may be,’ Marsh interrupted him smoothly, ‘are none of your concern. The fact is, Conor, that you’re implicated. And, therefore, you can. You will.’

Conor thought of Colm Murphy. Implicated – yeah, that was one word for it. Guilty was another one. Guilty was the word they’d use on the Falls Road – hell, the word they’d use on Coleraine Road – if they had any idea what he’d done. Betrayal was another one. Fucking Judas. Stinking Rat.

Marsh wouldn’t have to kill him. There’d be Irishmen queueing up to do the job for him if word got out – if even a whisper got out.

‘Old Colm,’ Marsh said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘He was very close to the Maguire family, wasn’t he?’ A low whistle. A gesture with palms spread. ‘It takes a considerable man – a man of substance, Conor – to take sides against his own family. His own blood.’

Conor could feel the tense muscles of his jaw quivering. Hold it, Con, he urged himself. Stay cool. Don’t rise to it.

‘I’ve never taken sides,’ he said, slowly, deliberately. He didn’t look at Marsh – he looked out of the window, out into the darkness. ‘I’m my own man. I’ve my own family—’

‘Oh, yes, the family…’

Marsh left the word hanging, and Conor felt his bowels threaten to turn liquid. A mixture of anger and panic. ‘You listen!’ he hissed, his finger jabbing the air between them. ‘You fucking listen! You even go near my family, and I’ll—’

‘Steady, Conor,’ said Marsh. ‘You’ve got the wrong impression.’

Conor’s whole face seemed to be trembling. He felt like a child, playing a grown up game he could never win. ‘I don’t take sides. I won’t work to an agenda.’

Marsh laughed softly.

‘“I don’t take sides”,’ he quoted Conor back at him. ‘That’s quite a thing. That takes some balls. “I don’t take sides” – in this Godforsaken country. That’s quite a thing to hear, from the man who threw the sainted Colm Murphy on the fire.”

‘I’m not a fucking Republican,’ Conor said desperately. ‘I’m not a Loyalist. I’m not – I’m not bloody anything.’

He felt Marsh’s hand grip his knee hard, and turned his head to see Marsh leaning towards him, eyes bright with a fierce amusement.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ the old soldier said. ‘All that matters, Conor, son, is that you’re mine.’

Present Day

CONOR tussled with the key in the stiff lock and slammed closed the door to the studio apartment. He looked up and down the street. No sign of Galloway, thank God. Maybe she’d realised he really didn’t want to be part of whatever plan she was cooking up.

He crossed the road from the flat to the parked Land Rover, wondering if it was even worthwhile keeping the place on. Be easy enough to doss down in the practice, he thought. The rent wasn’t too much – although, to a man who’d been out of the country for a while, it seemed a damn sight over the odds for a damp attic flat in Knock. It wasn’t like he had money to burn. The cash in his pocket had gone a lot further, back in Kenya. It’d bought him a clean-swept apartment with running water and its own generator – and he’d got used to the mosquitos, didn’t mind being woken in the night by the saw-toothed roars of leopards and lions (especially after Kip had told him that a lion that roared was a well-fed lion. When they were hungry, she’d said, you never heard them coming).

He’d given Ella a driving lesson the day before. No Galloway then either. Three weeks in, Ella was starting to get the hang of it; at least, she no longer seemed like quite so much of a risk to life and property. She’d asked him, halfway through making a bollix of a three-point-turn, if he could spare a bit of cash.

‘Kieran and me, we’d like to, to have a weekend away.’

‘Would you now? First a flash new car, and now fancy holidays. Ah, when I was your age—’

‘I’m just asking, Dad.’

Conor had sighed. He’d had to say no. The job in Kenya hadn’t paid much, and right now any spare money he had had to go into the practice. Ella had been disappointed, but she’d seemed to understand.

‘I knew Mum’d say no,’ she’d said with a mock-pout, ‘but you used to be such a soft touch.’

Still am, Conor thought. Soft but skint.

The Land Rover roared and gurgled unpromisingly as he manoeuvred through the directionless grey drizzle and traffic to the practice. He missed Kenya on days like this. Hell, who wouldn’t? It wasn’t just the sunshine; he missed the colour. Here, it seemed like there was nothing but grey: grey sky, grey buildings, grey asphalt, the slow grey river.

He thought of Kip. He wondered where she was now. And he realised, with a guilty pang, that it was the first time he’d thought of her in weeks.

Outside the city, as he approached the practice, the feeling of colourlessness started to lift. The trees lining the road seemed refreshed by the rain. A bright cock pheasant was startled out of the thick roadside foliage by the roar of the Land Rover. Ah, let’s be fair, Conor thought: old green Ireland has its moments, too, after all.

He pulled up in the practice courtyard, killed the engine, climbed down – and paused.

Tyre tracks, in the muddied yard.

Not fresh, but not too old, either. Made last night, if he was any judge. He’d done a little tracking out in Kenya. Never thought he’d be putting it to use in a Castlereagh car park.

He didn’t have to move far from the car to see that the main door to the practice was ajar. Dermot? No – his car would have been here. Conor checked his phone. No signal as always. The place was a blackspot – but there was a landline in the practice building.

What the hell would a burglar want to nick from a vet’s surgery? he wondered. Not much money kicking around. An old computer, a few bits of kit, but specialist stuff, nothing you could sell on the streets, surely.

He remembered Dermot had said something about drugs – about kids getting off their heads on bloody horse tranquillisers, nowadays – the old vet had shaken his head in sorry bewilderment. Well, yeah, Conor thought, there was plenty of stuff in there that’d put you on another planet – if you were so desperate for a hit you didn’t mind taking your life in your hands, and didn’t mind delivering the stuff into your bloodstream with a nine-inch cattle syringe…

He started to cautiously towards the door, cutting across the yard at an oblique angle. At the corner of the building there was a clutter of unused fencing material: a half-sack of cement, set hard – a reel of wire – a rusted boltcutter. Conor stopped. He picked up an offcut of two-by-four as long as his arm, and hefted it in his right hand.

With his left, he pushed gently at the half-open door. ‘Who’s there?’ he called. ‘I’m armed!’

No answer.

Whoever it was in there might have a knife, a gun – God knew what. And they’d most likely be desperate. The length of plank felt suddenly puny.

He crept inside. The light was off – but there was a dim glow from the far end of the adjoining corridor. Just the familiar smells: lingering odours of wet fur in the waiting area, a cloying whiff of asepsis from the clinical rooms beyond.

And something else.

Perfume?

He strained his ears but the place was silent bar the imperturbable ticking of the waiting-room clock.

There was no one in the consulting room and no one in the cage-lined corridor where the practice’s few in-patients served their time. At the far end, a bandaged Westie whiffled in its sleep. Conor relaxed a little, but kept the length of two-by-four ready in his hand as he eased open the door to the operating theatre.

The racks of instruments were undisturbed, the drug cabinets closed and locked. No sign of a burglary. No sign of anything untoward.

Then he saw the bundle on the operating table, wrapped in black polythene. He knew straight away it wasn’t an animal carcass.

Not again. It couldn’t be happening again. Marsh was dead.

Conor stepped into the room. There was a note fastened to the wrapping with a scrap of gaffer tape. Not Dermot’s handwriting, and besides, the old boy was over in Donegal visiting his sister for the next couple of days. Conor tore it free of the tape – could hardly read it, his hand was trembling so hard. He squeezed his fingers against his thumb to stop the shaking. Messy handwriting.

For old times’ sake?

Conor’s stomach lurched, and he crumpled the note in his fist. He looked again at the bundle. A part of him still hoping. From a farmer maybe? But it was too big for a dog. Wrong shape for a pig or a sheep.

There’s a phone in the other room, he thought. You don’t even have to look, do you?

But he needed to.

He took a scalpel from the drawer. His pulse pounded in his temple, his throat, his thumb tight against the scalpel’s shaft. It wasn’t fear he was feeling, not any more. He already knew what he was going to find. This was a feeling of oppressiveness: dull, cold, nausea. He incised the plastic sheeting and gently drew it back.

‘God almighty,’ he mumbled.

She couldn’t have been any older than Ella. Naked. Skinny – frail, even. Her hair was dyed a blazing peroxide white and she’d a model’s high cheekbones. Her head was tilted back and her long pale throat looked exposed and vulnerable. Conor drew the sheeting further away. Ribs jutting. A tattoo above her right breast. Track marks on the inside of her arm.

‘God almighty, Patrick,’ he said again.

He stepped back from the table, from the girl’s body. He dropped the scalpel onto the steel worktop.

It was as if the last five and a half years hadn’t happened, as if Jack Marsh had risen up from his grave. But he knew this couldn’t be Marsh. Not a woman. Before it’d been men: men who’d crossed Jack Marsh, or got in his way.

Conor steadied himself with a hand on the worktop. What the hell was Patrick involved in? Conor swallowed hard. Fuck Patrick, he thought – what am I involved in, now?

Conor dragged his gaze away from the sallow face of the girl on the table. He looked up, and caught his own reflection in the polished steel panels of the wall cabinets. He flinched at the sight. From nowhere a phrase came into his head. From a poem, a poem he’d read at school, or at college – a war poem.

His face, Conor remembered, like a devil’s sick of sin.

He re-wrapped the slender body in the polythene as best he could and walked back out into the corridor, closing the door quietly behind him. There was a basin in the consulting room. Conor soaped and rinsed his hands and splashed his face with cold water.

The girl – what would she have been? Seventeen, eighteen? Reluctantly he pictured her skinny body, the hollows at her hips and her jutting ribs, the deep eye-sockets in her once-pretty face. What could a slip of a girl like that possibly have done to hurt Patrick Cameron?

He stood up. He knew what he had to do. Maybe he’d known all along, from the moment he’d seen the bundle on the table, when he’d spotted the tyre-tracks in the yard, even.

For old times’ sake?

‘Not this time, Patrick,’ he said.

Being in the library took him back to his student days. Hours he’d spent, back then, in the low-lit hush of the Queen’s reading room, hunkered down over textbooks and medical dictionaries, cramming for the finals that he knew he’d never pass, hadn’t a hope in hell, wondered why he bothered…

He’d done his best to drink the campus bars dry of Guinness the day his results came through. God, but he could use a drink now.

He found Lisa Galloway in the ‘Criminology’ section. A copper’s idea of a joke. She was leafing unconvincingly through a thick volume on Theories of Criminal Justice. Galloway had always struck Conor as someone who’d learned her job the hard way.

She looked up as Conor took a seat opposite her at the table. The low angle of the green-shaded lamp gave a sinister cast to her smile.

‘Hello, Conor.’

‘Detective.’

‘How’ve you been?’

‘Fine.’ Conor leaned forward, placing his hands flat on the tabletop. ‘Listen, Detective. I just want to say what I’ve come here to say.’

Galloway shrugged. ‘Go ahead. I’m listening.’

‘Come closer. I don’t want to shout.’

‘Okay. It’s a library, after all.’ She smiled again, then drew in her chair and leaned across the table, propping herself on her elbows, until her face was just a few inches from his. ‘Better?’

‘Aye.’ Conor nodded grimly.

‘So go ahead.’

He told her about the tyre-tracks in the yard and the body on the operating table. He told her about the track marks on the girl’s arm and, reluctantly, he told her about the note. When he’d finished, he sat back in his chair and folded his arms. Easy part over. Galloway met his gaze: he’d thought, momentarily, that he’d seen her eyes widen, read a quickening of interest in her expression as he’d told his story. But that’d gone, been quickly hidden, if it’d ever been there at all – and now she was watching him levelly. This was where the test began.

‘And the note’s from Patrick Cameron?’

Conor nodded.

‘How d’you know?’

‘I just do.’

‘Quite a big favour to ask,’ the detective said thoughtfully.

‘I’m family.’

‘I’ve got a brother-in-law. My sister’s husband. Pete. He lives in Lisburn.’ Galloway rested her cheek on the heel of her hand. ‘I might ask him to give me a hand shifting a washing machine or to borrow his hedge trimmer. I’m not sure how he’d take to me leaving dead bodies on his patio.’

‘Well, I’ve got, y’know. The facilities.’

‘The furnace.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And that’s all?’

‘Unless you know better.’

‘This wouldn’t,’ Galloway said, ‘have anything to do with you running away to Africa?’

‘I didn’t run anywhere,’ he said. ‘A job came up abroad. I took it. Lots of people do the same. Wouldn’t you? Do you want references? Doctor Paul Nkono, Mara Conservancy, Dr Kipenzi Kamande, University of Nairobi. Did you think I was hiding out in the jungle while I was away, Detective? I was working.’

‘Okay.’ A wintry smile. ‘Let’s leave that for now.’

Conor nodded, breathed out through his nose: ‘Okay.’

He felt sure that, in the gloomy quiet of the library, Galloway could hear his heart pounding against his ribs – could hear the giveaway tremor of panic in his voice. Hell, the way she looked at him, he felt like the woman could read his bloody mind.

‘Cameron’s testing you,’ she said suddenly.

‘I’ve a feeling he’s not the only one.’

‘What d’you mean by that?’

‘Never mind.’ Conor ran a hand through his hair. He tried to think clearly. ‘Testing me. Why would he do that?’

‘Why indeed? What I do know, is that you and I are going to have to start being straight with one another. This is business. You want your life back. I want Patrick Cameron – and I’m going to get him.’

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