“The Sydenham International,” Patsy Toner said.
“By the City Airport?” Lennon asked.
“That’s it,” Toner said.
“Give me half an hour,” Lennon said.
The Sydenham International Hotel hadn’t aged well. It hadn’t been able to keep up with the wave of shiny new establishments that had mushroomed all over Belfast during the last few years, and its days were surely numbered now there were some decent hotels by the airport.
Lennon entered the dowdy reception area. The owners had done their best to spruce the place up, but failed. He peered into the dimly lit bar and saw Toner hunched over a glass in the darkest corner. Lennon took his time, let the lawyer sweat. He got himself a pint of Stella at the bar. The barmaid, who was just a little too old for her exposed bellybutton ring and fake tan, didn’t return his smile.
He crossed to Toner’s table. The lawyer had dark rings under his eyes and a sour odor about him. “What’s up?” Lennon asked.
“I need a smoke,” Toner said. Lennon followed him out through a pair of patio doors to what passed for a beer garden: a patch of potholed tarmac and a couple of picnic tables with tattered parasols, along with a few buckets of sand for cigarette ends.
Toner placed his drink on a table and sat on the attached bench. He took a packet of Embassy Regal out of his pocket and offered one to Lennon. Lennon rarely smoked, even when he drank, but he took one just to get the lawyer on his side. He sat down opposite.
Toner sparked up with a cheap lighter and did the same for Lennon, smoke clouding the space between them. Lennon noticed Toner’s left hand again; waxy and thin, like it had been locked in a cast, the muscles atrophied.
“Someone tried to kill me last night,” the lawyer said.
“I know,” Lennon said.
“At my flat,” Toner said, his hands and voice shaking. “Someone tried to shoot me.”
“I know,” Lennon said again, but this time it was a lie. He had guessed as much about the attempt from what Hewitt had told him, but he didn’t know about any shooting.
“You ever had a gun pointed at you?” Toner asked. “You ever been shot at?”
“Yes,” Lennon said. “A few times. But then you should know that, shouldn’t you, Patsy?”
“What?”
Lennon inhaled nicotine, let it sizzle through his brain. “Years ago, I was only a few months on the job, still a probationer.” He exhaled a thin wisp of blue, wishing Toner smoked something heavier, like Marlboros or Camels. “Before the ceasefires. I was on a patrol in the city center, just off Royal Avenue. Some of your lot ambushed us. Two of my friends died. I took a bullet in the shoulder, just under the armored vest.”
“My lot?” Toner smiled under his mustache. “Nobody’s my lot. Not any more.”
“Well, back then they were. Three boys were lifted for it within twenty-four hours. I was there to testify on the first day of the trial, but I never got a chance. You had the case thrown out on a technicality. The searches weren’t sound, so that was that. Two decent young men dead, I get a nice big scar to show for it, and three pieces of shit walk free. They probably killed again. How much did you make out of that case?”
“I remember you now,” Toner said. “You got a commendation or something for that, didn’t you? There was another survivor. You saved him.”
“A medal,” Lennon said.
Toner smirked. “You wear it much?”
“I never collected it.”
“Why not?”
Lennon took another hit of the cigarette, winced at the hot gravel in his throat. “Didn’t feel like it,” he said. “So tell me about last night.”
Toner told Lennon about walking back to his shitty flat, approaching his front door, seeing the man in the old Mercedes estate dousing his face with water, and just knowing.
“Knowing what?” Lennon asked.
“That he was there to kill me,” Toner said, suddenly looking even smaller. “So I ran like fuck. Into the building, up the stairs, into my flat, and out the back down the fire escape. I kept thinking, Jesus, if there’s another one round the back, I’m fucked. But there wasn’t. There was just him.”
“Who was he?”
“I don’t know,” Toner said.
“Did you get a look at him?”
Toner shook his head.
“Who do you think sent him?”
Toner sighed as his eyes went distant and watery. “I’m going to tell you this because I’ve got to tell somebody before I go off my head. It’s been eating away at me for months. I’ve been scared shitless.” The lawyer’s voice rose to a whine. “I can’t eat. I have to drink myself unconscious just so I can get some sleep. I wake up every morning and first thing I do is puke.
“I kept telling myself it was over and done with, all settled, all swept under the carpet. But I knew. I knew someone would come for me. And then I heard about Kevin Malloy, so it was just a matter of when. I knew they wouldn’t let me go.”
“Who’s they?” Lennon asked.
“They?” Toner gave a short, sharp laugh that choked in his throat. “‘They’ is fucking everyone. The cops, the Brits, the Irish government, the party, fucking Bull O’Kane.”
Lennon eyed Toner, wondered if he had lost it. “That’s a lot of people,” he said.
“Collusion,” Toner said, his voice dropping to a low, angry hiss. “Everyone talks about collusion, how the cops and the Brits and the Loyalists were in it together. To hear some people talk, you’d think the Loyalists couldn’t take a shit without MI5 or Special Branch wiping their arses for them.”
Lennon laughed. “Look, I know about the Loyalists. Everybody knows—”
“Everybody knows it all, but no one says anything. Look, collusion worked all ways, all directions. Between the Brits and the Loyalists, between the Irish government and the Republicans, between the Republicans and the Brits, between the Loyalists and the Republicans.” Toner ran out of breath and his face reddened. He pulled hard on his cigarette and coughed. “All ways, all directions. We’ll never know how far it went. All the small things, all the big things. Loyalists supplying Republicans with fake DVDs and Ecstasy tablets. Republicans wholesaling laundered diesel and bootleg vodka to Loyalists. Feeding off the hate, letting on they’re fighting for their fucking causes when all the time they’re making each other rich. And the killings. How many of our own did we set up for the Loyalists to take out? How many of their own did the Loyalists set up for us? How many times did I get a taxi to some club or other on the Shankill with a name in an envelope, and two days later, some poor cunt from the Falls gets his head took off?”
“I don’t understand,” Lennon said. “What’s all this got to do with someone having a crack at you last night?”
“Paul McGinty,” Toner said. He raised his waxy hand to count on his fingers. “Michael McKenna, Vincie Caffola, Father Coulter, that cop who got shot in my car.”
Lennon’s chest tightened at McKenna’s name. He smelled blood, followed the scent. “The feud. I read the inquiry report. Some Scottish guy, an ex-soldier, was in the middle of it all. He stabbed the priest. He wound up dead in the shootout near Middletown, along with McGinty.”
“Davy Campbell,” Toner said. “He was an agent.”
“An agent? How do you know that?”
Toner stared hard at Lennon as he ground his cigarette into the tabletop. “Because I got him in.”
Lennon felt the heat of his own cigarette as it burned closer to his fingers. “What, you mean—”
“Yeah, I was a tout. I fed information about McGinty to MI5. They passed it on to Special Branch and Fourteen Intelligence Company, and anyone else they felt like sharing with. Like I said, collusion goes all ways, all directions.”
“All right,” Lennon said. He dropped the cigarette to the ground and crushed it beneath his heel. “So tell me what really happened.”
Toner let a long sigh out, his small chest deflating. He took another cigarette from the packet, didn’t offer one to Lennon, and started talking.