21

When I got back to the hotel I hurried through the lobby in case Marie was on duty, alive with questions about my evident shopping trip. Each time I shut the bedroom door behind me and flopped on the bed I felt a rush of relief. But this time as I lay on that bedspread, staring at the Monet print, the plan was beginning to take more detailed shape, like a small, dark cloud thickening on the horizon.

It started with a dog.

I remembered a story that Big Jacky once told me, about a fella who used to bet on greyhounds, and a wee scam he had going to fix the races. The owners of the greyhounds kept their prized beasts in the backyards, monitoring their diet carefully in the run-up to a race, coddling them like fragile plants in a frost.

But the night before a race this fella and his friend would go around chucking steaks over the yard wall to the dogs they wanted to lose, and the hungry animals fell upon the gift of meat with slavering joy. Come the big day, to the bemusement of their owners, these dogs – normally flashing miracles of muscle and rippling grey silk – would toddle out of the enclosure with all the urgency of a bloke offered his third helping of Christmas pudding after the Queen’s Speech.

And I remembered, too, that McGee had a dog: a sleek, densely powerful Alsatian called Major in which he took palpable pride. Major was tethered in his yard, apart from when McGee took him on parade round the streets, inspecting the sites from which he and his da collected ‘donations’.

The dog wasn’t mistreated – McGee was too meticulous about it for that – but it didn’t have much of a life: it was all hard, cold angles and short leashes, between the yard and the street and the outside kennel, and God knows there wasn’t much warmth emanating from McGee. The animal doubled up as a security guard. No one would dare attempt to get into McGee’s house through the backyard when the dog was there. Major was ferociously alert. Sometimes you could hear him barking at the milk van or the postman.

That’s the thing about a dog: when you have one, you start to rely on it. It’s human nature to trust a dog, even among those who show very little humanity to speak of. I read once that Hitler had his dog Blondi with him in the bunker, and he appeared to be utterly devoted to her right up until the moment when he ordered his cyanide pill to be tested on her, watching as the capsule was forcibly crushed between her long, elegant jaws to make sure that it was fatal.

The dog served him until its sudden end, and then – after Hitler and Eva Braun took cyanide themselves – their dog-handler shot each one of Blondi’s puppies. That’s where loyalty to a headcase gets you.

Still, a person who made as many enemies as McGee shouldn’t rely on anything or anyone.

It came to mind that Phyllis had a packet of sleeping pills that she kept in the bathroom cabinet. To get hold of the pills, though, I had to get back into my old house.

It’s complicated to kill someone, even when you are doing it with an organisation behind you, which I wasn’t. It takes a lot of planning. Think of all the work that used to go into those multiple demises that the IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries regularly arranged for us in Northern Ireland: the industrious collection of information on the target, the spying and strategising, the agreed division of roles, the justification for the attack, the overcoming of doubts, the squashing of compassion, the rush of adrenalin, the cleaning of a gun, the priming and planting of a bomb, the cool anticipation of the aftermath, the finalising of the press statement, the shooting or the explosion, the shredding of flesh. And after that came the strenuous maintenance of self-righteousness in the face of the screaming, the weeping, the disbelief.

There’s so much to get right.

The people who were the softest targets, usually, were those who had a routine. In most places a routine makes a life easier, but in my country it helped to finish it off. People settled into patterns, the shapes that fall naturally in a week. They opened their grocery store at the same time each day, or locked up after work, or went to church or Mass on Sunday. And then right in the middle of the irreplaceable ordinariness, instead of the next polite greeting to a customer or the anticipated lull of the afternoon tea break, instead of the short drive home, just as the leg of lamb was spitting hospitably in the oven or the kettle bubbling towards tea, what on earth oh my God what on earth should come walking purposefully towards them but Death?

Here’s a routine: Sunday night was Phyllis’s bingo night with her friend Julie. Off she went, lipstick on, wee bag zipped and clamped to her side, bit of excitement sure, wouldn’t miss it for the world. From a distance, I watched her leave. I wore a baseball hat tugged low over my eyes, glasses, and the stick-on moustache, with cotton wool jammed in the pouches of my cheeks. I sported a little pot belly from a small cushion I had taped around my middle. I moved differently, slouchily, as though my stomach was already pushing forward in expectation of its next can of lager. I carried the rest of my kit in the backpack, along with a packet of cooked cocktail sausages I’d bought in Marks & Spencer downtown.

I slipped into the house with my old key, looking quickly around to see if anyone was watching, and shut the door sharply behind me. For a second I stood against it and closed my eyes, breathing in the sweetish, wood-polish smell of the house. It was my house – all those years here with Big Jacky – and yet it didn’t feel like mine any more. You go away even for a short time and things shift irrevocably. I had become a burglar, nervily tiptoeing around the furniture of my own life.

I took it all in: the flaking paint, the sideboards suddenly full of knick-knacks – she’d got them all out of the cupboard and put them on parade. She’d got rid of the sofa without even asking, the forgiving old sagger with the wooden frame where Big Jacky and I had been so happy, and replaced it with something squashy, floral and horrible from one of the sofa shops in town. I felt a surge of fury. As I turned to see what else she had done, the corner of my jacket caught one of the ornaments – a grey, glazed pigeon – and it crashed to the floor, shattering with surprising force and scattering little fragments across the room.

I found a dustpan and brush under the sink, swept up the pieces and put them in one of the plastic bags Phyllis kept compressed in a drawer. The handle of the pan felt sticky in my hand. I was beginning to feel overheated and tense. No point looking for a bin outside now. I went up to my old bedroom, and shoved the broken pieces far back under the single bed, into a light grey snowdrift of undisturbed dust. She wouldn’t come across them there for a while.

Under there too was a small box of my old toys, including just the item I was hoping to find: a pair of police handcuffs, complete with keys, that Big Jacky had long ago unearthed at some charity shop or other. They had once been my most prized possession. I knew precisely how they worked, because at the age of nine I had played cops and robbers all around the house for weeks on end with an extraordinarily forbearing Big Jacky, and at least fifty per cent of the time I got to be the cop.

I carried on, encouraged now. Phyllis’s stuffed little packet of sleeping pills sat in the bathroom cabinet, exactly as I had pictured it. Best just to swipe one whole metallic sheet, I thought, and that way she would think it had fallen out somewhere. Anyway, I might need them all later. Down in the kitchen, I took a sharp knife and made a small, deep incision in the end of a cocktail sausage: I pushed a pill inside, and watched the puckered meat close back over it, like a tiny arsehole obediently receiving a suppository. Three pills into each sausage, three sausages in total, wrapped in foil and put in my pocket. Oh, and the keys for the cellar to Big Jacky’s shop. All done.

Then I started watching the clock.

Phyllis usually came back from bingo just before eleven, after a couple of drinks with Julie. It would be disastrous if she saw me. I would get entangled in the sticky web of her panic and never make it anywhere near McGee. I went through the house, setting it straight, carefully eradicating any clear taint of my presence, and stepped out into the cold night. There weren’t that many people about now, as the pubs hadn’t closed yet. The authorities had scaled down the British army patrols, with their jolting cargoes of jumpy young soldiers looking out warily from the back of Land Rovers, and the darkness meant that the disguise could pass with less scrutiny.