“There you go,” the young man said, dropping the sponge into the bucket. “Not the tidiest ever, but you wanted it quick.”
Fegan pressed two twenty-pound notes into the acne-faced kid’s hand. “Thanks.”
“You all right, mate?”
Fegan pushed his shaking hands down into his pockets. “I’m grand,” he said, and turned to the car.
Viper Stripes, they were called. A pair of ridiculous white bands that drew a line from the green Renault Clio’s nose, over the hood, along the roof, and back down the tailgate. They were supposed to look sporty, but Fegan thought they looked stupid, though no more so than the other little cars parked in front of Antrim Motor Kit. They all had spoilers, bulbous wheel arches and lowered suspensions, and they were all driven by spotty youths in baseball caps.
Fegan had stopped at a beauty spot along the coast and removed the number plates from another green Clio. They were now stuck over Marie’s plates using permanent tape he had bought in a hardware shop in Ballymena. It would take a most attentive police officer to recognise the car as belonging to a missing woman.
Ten or fifteen years ago it would have been impossible to drive from the coast, through two large towns, and on to Belfast without meeting a roadblock. An army or police checkpoint would have been a certainty along Fegan’s route, but not today. Many times he’d been pulled from a car by Brits or UDR, and searched at the side of the road while uniformed men ripped out the vehicle’s innards. The young men in their modified cars would be outraged if that ever happened to them, though their fathers, Protestant and Catholic alike, had endured it every day for decades.
The weather had turned. The warm sunshine of the previous weeks had begun to wane, and clouds hung low overhead. The world was turning grey, and Fegan felt a heaviness inside as he opened the driver’s door.
He lowered himself into the car, started the engine, and moved off. The Clio jerked at his clumsy gear changes; it had been a long time since he’d driven. He joined the system of roundabouts that led to the M2 motorway. In less than an hour he’d be in Belfast.