22

About half an hour after I threw the sausages into McGee’s yard, the dog stopped moving around. I could see it, if I jumped to look over the wall. It was lying down with its eyes closed but still breathing, giving little snorts, its side gently rising and falling.

I climbed over the wall, jumped into the yard and squatted near the kennel, just beneath the windowsill. It stank a bit there, of dog hair and rain and old scraps of forgotten food. I had time to think of what I was getting myself into, to acknowledge the anxiety slopping around my stomach. I now wished I had a real gun, but there was no going back. I had been crouching there about fifteen minutes, with small pains starting to quiver through my ankles and knees, when I heard voices coming closer as the lights went on in the living room.

Oh Jesus no, more than one of them, I thought. Please don’t come out into the yard. I raised my head a bit, looked in, and saw McGee. Next to him was Marty, in a wee black bomber jacket. He looked suddenly older. I ducked again and pulled on my Bill Clinton mask under my baseball cap, inhaling the smell of rubber and my own souring breath. From above my head, I could hear far too clearly what they were saying.

‘Sure you won’t actually be doing anything,’ McGee said. ‘You’re just the lookout. You’re lucky enough to be let into an operation at all at your age. Beer?’

There was the crack and hiss of a can being opened. First one, then another.

‘Anyway, you’re too wee to go to jail. You’re underage,’ McGee said. I got the feeling that he thought this passed for reassurance.

‘But who is it you’re doing?’ Marty said. His voice sounded high and shaky, a little breathless, as though he had accidentally slipped into waters too deep for him to swim in confidently.

‘Who said we were doing anyone? Anyway you don’t need to know. Better if you don’t.’

‘Are they in the Provies?’

‘Does it fucking matter? You don’t need to know. They’re trouble, just like the Provies. But just remember, if you squeal about this to anyone, ever, I’ll have to come after you.’

A silence.

‘Don’t worry, son,’ McGee carried on in a more avuncular tone, as if he had been kidding: ‘I know you’re going to be okay, and you’ll get a few quid towards that skateboard you keep going on about. Top lad. Okay?’

‘Aye.’

‘Aye well, come back here tomorrow after school and I’ll give you the plan of where you’ve to be at what time.’

‘All right. See you tomorrow.’

‘Are you not going to finish your beer?’ McGee called after him. But the front door closed as he was still speaking. He was slurring a little. With some relief, I realised that he was properly legless.

I could hear the sound of humming, breaking into words. McGee was singing a country and western song to himself – ‘I go out walkin’ after midnight, out in the moonlight, ju-st like we used to do’ – and rooting about in his fridge for the makings of a snack – ‘I’m always walkin’ after midnight, searchin’ for yo-u’. Then he remembered the dog. ‘Major!’ he shouted. I tensed myself. The dog made no sound, no ragged, gratifying, anticipatory panting and scrabbling. ‘Major!’ he yelled again, stung, and opened the back door. The dog was lying there, a long slab of fur spread flat out in a haze of soft rain. McGee started walking towards it: ‘What the fu—’

And he didn’t get any further then because I hit him hard on the back of the skull and jumped on his back and we were into a tussle on the slippery, cold ground. I had to be quick before he recovered himself. He kept twisting and jerking his head round to see who I was, but I forced his hands behind his back while he was still reeling and snapped them into handcuffs before he could yank off my mask. The gloves made my fingers a bit stupid but I got it done anyway.

I could confirm even from the smell of him that he’d had a load to drink. It was slowing him down.

Still, he was sinewy and vicious, working well with what he had left, trying to knee me in the groin and headbutt me at the same time. ‘Why the fuck are you wearing that mask?’ he spat out, slurring again. I knocked him to the floor with my fist. His feet skidded on the wet ground, and he fell over awkwardly on his shoulder.

My mask was tugged awry. For a second I couldn’t see anything at all but white rubber, but I jerked it back into place and got the toy gun out of my jacket pocket while he was still down, quickly, so he couldn’t get a good look at it. I pressed it to the back of his neck, put my face close to his ear and whispered very deliberately, ‘Come quietly with me or I will shoot you in the head.’ I had thickened my accent, and the cotton wool in my cheeks made my voice sound sludgier.

He stiffened slightly then, became calmer and more alert, as though I was finally talking a language he properly understood.

‘Where are we going?’ he said. Not so much of the swagger now.

‘Somewhere to talk.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Bill fucking Clinton,’ I said.

We went inside the house, me still pressing the gun into his neck. I had to watch him like a hawk. He was fast and tougher than me and looking for a way out. Any moment, even with his hands tied, everything could turn around.

‘What kind of gun is it?’ he asked. I could hear him calculating.

‘One that kills people,’ I said. ‘Now shut the fuck up.’

It wasn’t a good position to be in, threatening a fella like McGee with a fake gun. It was like going into a showdown during the Cold War with an Airfix model of a nuclear bomb. He could sniff out weakness. I was worried he was going to push it so far that in normal circumstances I’d have had to give him a warning shot, and all he’d get would be a soggy potato pellet.

So long as he could only feel it and not see it, I was probably all right. If you’re a drunk hardman and a cylindrical metal object is pressing into a vulnerable spot, you tend to make the most obvious assumptions.

‘What the fuck did you do to my dog?’

‘He’s all right.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘No he isn’t. He’s still breathing.’

‘He looks dead. What did you do to him?’

I didn’t like to see the dog there in the rain getting cold. I wanted to put a blanket over him but I couldn’t let go of McGee. It would be a fatal signal of soft-heartedness. The whole thing was losing momentum anyway. There was too much chat. The action was starting to sag. Any minute now we’d be sitting around in a circle crying and discussing what went wrong in our childhoods. I had to up the ante. I shoved the gun hard into his neck again, so hard it must have really hurt. I could feel a bead of sweat running down my back, a fingertip’s trace of liquid panic.

‘I’m going to put your coat on you with the hood up, and walk out the door with you next to me. Don’t say anything,’ I said. Then I had a brainwave.

‘There’s someone wants a word with you,’ I said. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you. He just wants a word.’

That eased it. A ‘word’ was something he could handle. The waiting presence of a shadowy third party made sense. It felt like business. The scenario fell into some kind of imaginary order. I was no longer his weird nemesis, just a brusque escort to a deal. This had happened to him before, in one form or another. Through the fog of his drunkenness, he could start to weave links back to that protection racket, this drugs supply, create phantom strategies, foresee a future. People always want to imagine the best.

‘Calm down,’ I said.

He was chewing it over.

‘Is it over that deal on the building sites? I made sure everyone got their cut.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He just said to get you over. He’s got some new racket. The sooner you go, the sooner you’ll be back home. He just wants a word. Got your keys in your jacket?’

Nice touch, I thought, the implication that he would need them again in the near future.

‘Aye. Why the handcuffs?’

‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘That’s what he said. But don’t make a big song and dance or someone will call the peelers, and that won’t be good for you or me. If you start that carry-on I’ll have to shoot you and run.’

I draped his coat across his shoulders and started hustling him out the door. On the way I quietly took his spare house keys off the peg and slipped them into my jeans pocket. I’d come back later maybe and sort out the dog.

I pulled my hood down over my mask, and we walked together to the end of the street. It was a wet night, late now, and the pavements glistened. No one passed us. They were all in their houses with the curtains drawn, sticking the kettle on for one last cup of tea before bed. If anyone had seen us, sure we were just two tipsy messers going off to a fancy-dress party. I stopped outside Big Jacky’s shop and took out the keys I had borrowed from Phyllis.

‘Why are we stopping here? This is a newsagent’s,’ he said.

‘He’s waiting downstairs,’ I said, and I shoved him through the door and hustled him downstairs into the cramped, gloomy cellar where Big Jacky used to keep the cleaning supplies and the extra stock. I saw Phyllis had been keeping it in order, full marks to her. It was crammed with stacked boxes of Tayto crisps and Kit-Kats.

‘He’ll be in here in a minute,’ I said, ‘but he wants you to wear this across your eyes.’ I took out a long, clean rag from my pocket, to use as a blindfold.

‘I don’t fucking want to wear that,’ he said, furiously. He started shoving his shoulders around again, roaring and kicking boxes at me, trying to trip me over and knock off my mask. I knew exactly why he didn’t want to put it on. It’s the kind of thing they make people wear before they get shot.

‘Shut up,’ I hissed at him. ‘He’s bringing a friend from England. The fella doesn’t want you to see his face before you hear what he’s got to say.’ I threw in some more flannel for his drunken logic to tangle with: ‘He doesn’t want a witness before he’s got a deal. If you can get through this, there might be some decent money in it for you.’

He quietened down then and let me tie it on him, knotting it tightly. I guided him to an old brown chair in the corner, a recliner with padded, threadbare cushions, and pushed him back on to it: he sank down almost gratefully. I remembered sitting on it as a child, as Big Jacky did the accounts. If you leaned right back on it a footrest zapped out, and it felt a bit like a bed. Or a boat, or an aeroplane, or whatever I wanted it to be. Today: a little prison, maybe.

‘Cup of tea?’ I said.

There was a kettle and a mini-fridge at the back.

‘Take off this fucking blindfold,’ he said, shaking his head. Now he had it on he hated it even more.

There was something in the arrogance of his tone that angered me. I sprang towards him and hit him very hard and quickly then with my right hand across the side of the head, enough to send his brain bouncing off the inside of his skull. The force and exhilaration of the violence surprised me; how easy it would have been to carry on. But I stopped there. Not yet. I needed time to think. His nose started to bleed, with some of the blood soaking into the edge of the blindfold, blooming like a poppy across the white material. I saw him freeze. He knew he had miscalculated.

‘Don’t swear at me again,’ I said quietly.

‘Okay,’ he said.

I went to the small sink in the corner and boiled the kettle. Two small cups, a teabag in each one. I put a lot of milk in his so it didn’t scald his mouth, and mixed it nice and strong, mashing the bag against the side of the cup with my spoon until the tea came pulsing out in dark-brown clouds. Then I stirred in a good few of Phyllis’s little pills, with sugar to mask the taste.

I walked back and held the tea to his lips.

‘Tea,’ I said, gently. ‘Have a wee drink. He’ll be here in a minute. I’m having one myself.’

He hesitated for a minute and then started drinking. It was cold in the cellar and the tea was warm and sweet. I watched him gulping sloppily and gratefully, the skin on his jaw shaded with dark bristles, the smell of stale alcohol rising in waves from his pink mouth. A disgrace of a human being – but still, in all his little machinations, a significant piece of work. He was more bearable with the blindfold on. You could conjure him up some humanity.

When he had finished, dribbling the last bit on to his T-shirt, I took the cup away.

‘He’ll be here in a minute,’ I said again.

I sat on a hard chair next to him and drank my own tea.

Then I picked up an old blanket from the corner of the room and put it over him. He didn’t move, except to cough now and then.

The room was quiet, with that sour hint of damp that clings to cellars. A light bulb with a rosy, floral shade over it hung incongruously from the ceiling, as if a little girl had tried to decorate a nuclear bunker. Phyllis’s doing. As the period between his coughs lengthened, I took a walk around, checking what had changed. It was tidier, certainly. Phyllis had a fussy gift for personal organisation that Big Jacky had never demonstrated. There was a pillow in the corner. She kept a small canvas holdall down here with clean underwear, clothes and a face towel in it, and a make-up bag decorated with sprigs of flowers, in case she had go out and meet her friend straight from work. Phyllis loved all that stuff. Too much boredom in her life had led her to make a mild cult out of preparedness.

McGee was asleep now, snoring, full of stewed booze and rotten convictions. His mouth hung half open, a skinny line of congealed blood snaking towards it from his right nostril. A slim gold chain with a miniature dagger on it dangled from his neck. I thought of him carefully picking it out in the shop and handing over the money.

I sat and looked at him. If I were going to smother him, now would be the moment. That pillow would do, held down with sufficient force. There would be a brief, gurgling struggle and then it would be over. What was left of Titch would be lowered into the ground tomorrow, to the sound of his mother’s sobbing. McGee deserved this. It had a finality about it. I got out the thick roll of masking tape and wound it round his legs several times, tying them tight together. Then I did a few more loops to fix him to the chair.

I picked up the pillow and stood beside him, staring down at him.

And then what? How to dispose of him? I hadn’t quite thought that bit through. I couldn’t just leave him here afterwards for Phyllis to find, stiffening among the coupon stacks. If I could keep him here for a day it might be possible to come back in the night with a wheelie bin, cram him in and wheel him far away.

I began to feel very tired. You might think that killing someone you hate will free you, but unless you plan to make a habit of it and rack up so many you can’t count, it just bonds you to them for ever. Looked at that way, murder is a stronger glue than sex. I don’t suppose you ever forget someone you kill, unless you’re in the thick of war and can’t even tell who it was. This stuff soils you, becomes difficult to scrub off. With each ebbing breath, they will etch themselves on your memory.

I was lousy at covering my tracks. I could end up doing time for McGee, mouldering in jail for the main chunk of my life, watching as paramilitaries got early release while I – classed as what the police used to call an ‘ordinary decent criminal’ – was held in for the full stretch, enjoying the blocked toilet in the tiny cell and the boiling sugar water thrown in my face by McGee’s resentful fellow-Loyalists.

I had thought that the destruction of McGee would make me feel exultant, but now I could actually touch the possibility it just felt squalid, the mental equivalent of getting dog shit on your shoe. I wanted him out of the cellar. Even in his stupor his presence was leaking potential harm. I knew with sudden certainty that I didn’t want to kill him. But if I didn’t kill him now, how was I going to stop him killing me?

By the time he finally came round, he would be beginning to puzzle everything out about the place he was in, about ways of punishing me by threatening people I loved. So far this whole exercise had been the equivalent of flapping a cloth at a killer hornet. If I was going to let him live I had to disable his capacity for revenge.

A few hours passed. I was in a fix. I had to go with anything I’d got.

Suddenly I had a thought: I went over to Phyllis’s wee cosmetic bag and dug out her lipstick, a surprisingly lurid shade of poppy-red. There was an eyeshadow in there too, and blusher. The lipstick went smoothly on to McGee’s half-open mouth. I kept it very neat around the edges, as though he had applied it himself with furtive pride. I didn’t want him to look like he was dressing up for a hearty masculine laugh, like a rugby player on tour. It had to look sincere.

After that I smeared a bit of blusher on to his cheeks, and gently scissored off the blindfold before dusting blue eyeshadow all over his eyelids with a wee brush. I took the blanket off him, slowly so as not to wake him up. Then, with a few decisive snips of the big scissors Phyllis kept for cutting newspaper twine, I sliced down the middle of his T-shirt and carefully set Phyllis’s cream lacy bra across his chest, over the pallid skin with the bulldog tattoo, the pimply forest of chest hair.

I braced myself and pulled his jeans and underpants down so that the tops of them hovered on his thighs. What was exposed was unedifying. A line had been crossed. Several lines.

He started to stir a bit, so I stepped back, waiting. He moved some more and then let out a long, wounded roar, like an animal pinched awake in pain from its den. His eyes opened and stared ahead of him into space, with a dawning consciousness that was slowly filling up with rage. He tried to move his arms, but they were still tied behind him, so he began to shake from side to side, roaring again in purest frustration. In the midst of this frenzy, his gaze came to rest on me. I was no longer wearing the Clinton mask or the other layers of my disguise. Immediately he became still, as though absorbing the full implications of my presence. There was a pause.

‘You wee fucker,’ McGee said, quietly, as though confirming something he had always known.

I said nothing.

‘Why am I here?’ he yelled, jerking the top half of his body off the chair. The suddenness of his movement made me step backwards.

I let his question hang in the air for a second or two. It was almost too big to answer.

‘Why do you think?’ I said.

I felt sick but exhilarated, to have him on the spot.

‘I don’t fucking know.’

McGee was still groggy, but I thought he could do better than that.

‘Have a think,’ I said.

‘Because I beat up your mate and you?’

‘That’s a start,’ I said. ‘Beat up? That’s a nice way of putting it.’

‘What are you going to do now, then?’ he said.

‘I was going to bump you off,’ I said.

‘Why didn’t you?’ he asked.

Then he answered his own question: ‘You haven’t the bollocks.’

‘Bollocks have nothing to do with it. I still might if I feel like it,’ I said. I let out a stray hoot of laughter at seeing his mouth working foully through the clown’s lipstick.

I fancied a smoke so I lit one up and sat down further away on a wooden box, watching him.

‘What the fuck’s so funny?’ he said.

‘Look at the state of you.’

He squirrelled his chin down on to his chest to try and see himself and caught a glimpse of the bra and the misplaced jeans. At that he started howling and struggling all over again.

‘You fucking pervert,’ he said. ‘What have you done to me?’

A pause for thought.

‘Did you touch my dick?’

‘Nope,’ I said, and took another draw on my cigarette.

The inhalation made a gentle burning hiss, fraying the fine paper. I loved that sound, the controlled fizz of the little flame. I felt tired and peaceful. A big cloud of blue-grey tobacco smoke came floating out of my mouth.

‘Nice make-up,’ I said.

He glared at me. He looked like a cross between Mata Hari and Desperate Dan. He started trying to crunch his mouth up so he could see it if he looked down. He must have seen a smear of something red, because he started to struggle again.

‘Why are you keeping me here?’ he shouted.

‘Because I want to talk to you.’

‘About what?’

I stuck the blanket back over him. His cabaret weirdness was too overwhelming otherwise and I couldn’t concentrate.

‘Why you kill people. Why you beat Titch. Why you hammered me.’

‘You hammered me first.’

‘I hit you in a bar. You hammered me with three mates and a bat with rusty nails in it. And before that you beat Titch into the hospital for a packet of Jaffa Cakes.’

‘It wasn’t about the Jaffa Cakes.’

‘What was it about?’

‘Respect. Order. Somebody has to keep order. Without it the entire place would fall apart.’

‘Look around you. What order? Why did it have to be you?’

‘What the fuck am I supposed to do? Let him nick from us every day? Let him shove my da over while people laugh? He’s lucky I didn’t stiff him.’

‘You did stiff him. He killed himself last week, because of what you did. Didn’t you know?’

There was a second when he looked surprised. Then he just stared blankly back at me, the bloodshot eyes glazed with drink.

‘You killed him,’ I said, flatly.

I wasn’t going to let it rest there: ‘Just like you killed all those other people who didn’t deserve it.’

‘What does that mean?’

I felt a flash of anger at him even asking.

‘You know damn well. Your outfit. Going around shooting wee Catholic lads walking home at night. Going into pubs and shooting oul fellas when they’re drinking a pint and watching the World Cup. Is that what you’re proud of? Is that the “war”?

‘Nobody asked you to do it. When the IRA murdered Prods, the families came on TV and begged you not to do it to anyone else. You didn’t give a shit. You just went on doing it.’

It was true, what I had said. I remembered the time they had shot a young Catholic workman while he was in his car eating his lunchtime sandwiches. His mother was on the television news, propped up by relatives. She had a dazed bleakness in her eyes that was hard to forget.

McGee remembered something he had heard from the people who made theories to hang around the corpses. His voice took on an air of self-importance, like a child at a recital.

‘We had to make the Catholic population turn against the IRA. It was a necessary strategy.’

‘How long before you decided your strategy wasn’t working? How long before you decided it was wrong?’

Silence. I kept on.

‘Why don’t you just admit that killing Catholics gives you a buzz and spare us all the fucking pretence?’

I realised I was shouting. Better tone it down. Still, that riled him.

He sat up and hissed at me: ‘If you want to wring your hands over dead Taigs, go ahead. I won’t. The Provies killed my uncle, and he was never even into anything, just meeting his friend in a hotel when one of their bombs went off. They had to scrape him off the walls to have something to put in the coffin.

‘If it wasn’t for us defenders the Provies would already have murdered all of youse in your beds, like the cowardly wee shites that you are.’

‘Defenders? My friend is dead because of you. Why would we need the IRA to murder us, when we’ve got you?’ I yelled.

He glared back at me and said with slow deliberation, ‘I didn’t murder you or your big fat mate. More’s the pity. Wish I’d whacked you both.’

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ I said. ‘But sure what chance did you ever have, growing up with your vicious oul da and that looper McMullen?’

‘Leave my da out of it,’ he said. ‘He brought us up the best he could. And don’t talk about McMullen.’

‘Where’d your ma go?’ I asked. I meant it to sound harsh, but for a moment my tone faltered into normality.

‘What’s it to you?’ he said.

‘I just want to know.’

‘She pissed off and left us. I was seven, brother was nine. Probably off to Scotland with some fancy man. Covered her tracks. Didn’t want to be found, Da said, but he kept trying. That’s all. Happy now?’

‘Did you love her?’

‘She was my ma. But she left us. So I don’t love her now. What are you, a therapist? Shut the fuck up and let me go.’

‘What are you doing with that wee fella?’ I asked.

‘What wee fella?’

‘The one in your house. I could hear you talking. You’re planning something.’

‘D’you know him?’

‘No, I’ve just seen him around. So you’re getting kids to do your dirty work for you now?’

‘He’s doing nothing. Just keeping an eye out for us.’

‘What will you do if I let you go?’ I asked.

The silence stretched out taut, and then pinged back with a low, hoarse: ‘Kill you.’

‘If that’s the way, don’t you see I’ll have to finish you off now myself?’

Nothing.

‘That’s one idea. Here’s another. You leave me and my family alone and in exchange I don’t make the photos of you public.’

His eyes snapped open. ‘What photos?’

‘The ones I took when you were asleep, when you were wearing all the make-up and the bra like it’s your special thing. I gave the film to a friend who came to the door when you were knocked out. If anything happens to me or anyone I know, he’ll get them developed at Speedy Snaps, and send them to your da and all his mates. Then later I’ll come back and kill you anyway.’

‘You wouldn’t do that.’

‘I would. I understand they do posters too. Great big posters for the gable walls.’

‘I’ll burn Speedy Snaps to the fucking ground.’

‘Which branch?’

He glared at me with his red, blue-shadowed eyes.

‘Let me out.’

‘I don’t take orders. That’s the deal. Do you want it?’

A moment’s contemplation.

‘Aye.’

‘I’ll be leaving today. Remember what I said.’

‘Where’d you get the gun you had last night?’

I didn’t like that question. With his nose for violence and its hardware, he had started to scent something not quite right about the gun.

‘Never you worry,’ I said. ‘Rest assured it works.’

‘Okay. I agree. Just let me go.’

I looked at the clock. It was only just gone six in the morning. In an hour Phyllis would be arriving to unlock the shop. There was the whole day ahead.

There’s a point sometimes where you take a risk, not because you actually think it’s a good or clever idea, but just because you’re so very tired. I had exhausted the possibilities of the situation. I had realised now I wasn’t going to kill him, and I suppose he had too.

I went and got the Spud Gun and put it in my pocket, fumbling so he could see just enough of the movement but not the item itself. Then I ran a facecloth under the hot tap, wrung it out, and gently scrubbed Phyllis’s make-up off his face. He shut his eyes. I got most of it off, but his eyes still looked faintly exotic, as if stained by woad. A swollen, purpling bruise was spreading next to his nose.

The make-up stuff and the pretend camera hadn’t been very classy, I had to admit, but they plugged into his screwed-up values that stuck pride and shame in all the wrong places. Fellas like him fear mockery more than pain. I didn’t want a reconciliation with him. I just didn’t want him squatting in a corner of my conscience for the next fifty years.

I went behind him and unlocked his hands, and then started sawing through the masking tape on his legs. He opened his eyes, and for a second his gaze flicked across the scars on my arms as I hacked at the tape. When it finally came loose, he moved his arms and legs tentatively, wincing a bit as the feeling came back.

He got up off the chair with difficulty like a wretched old man, tugged up the jeans and nearly fell down again because his legs were so stiff. I stood at a distance and watched him as he righted himself. The expression on his face was hard to read. I had thought that maybe he would take a run and try to belt me one, but he didn’t. I threw him an old T-shirt in place of the rag that was hanging off him, and he put it on, and then found his coat. Phyllis’s bra lay, appallingly, on the floor. The whole thing felt embarrassing, like the morning after a costume party in which everyone present was out of their nut on drugs.

‘So that’s it, then?’ he said.

‘Aye.’

I walked beside him to the foot of the darkened stairwell. When he finally reached the stairs he groped for the rusted handrail, still disoriented, taking a moment to steady himself. As I watched him I imagined that he understood now that this incident had evened up the score, that after this we could leave each other alone.

‘Remember what I said,’ I murmured again, waiting for him to go.

At that he wheeled around sharply, as though some fresh energy had suddenly surged in him, and lunged for my neck. His hands clamped tightly round my throat, pressing hard, and I began fighting to breathe. There was a shocking amount of force just in his fingers and though my own hands quickly came flailing up to prise them off he held his grip. As my field of vision started shrinking and blackening I thought dumbly ‘so this is it now this is how it ends’ and for a fragment of a second I was furious and then despairing at having fallen so stupidly into my own trap.

Then he let go just as rapidly. The assault had established what he needed to know: during it, I hadn’t reached for my gun. While I was still gasping for shreds of air he brought his face closer to mine, stinking of sweat and beer, and said with a small smile I didn’t like, ‘Watch out for yourself, Jacky. Sure I’ll be keeping a good lookout for you.’

He began walking slowly and jerkily up the stairs. On the fifth step he turned round with a sarcastic grimace of mock-terror and added ‘you, and your wee gun’ – and then carried on.

The upstairs door clanged shut. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands in the sink. They were shaking very badly as I turned on the taps and I noticed that my legs had involuntarily followed suit, buckling and trembling like those of some blitzed accordion player. I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror above the bowl: the red, exhausted eyes, the drawn, sick face. On each side of my throat was a livid puce impression of McGee’s thumbprint. I started to wash my face, lathering up Phyllis’s pink, flowery-smelling soap.

He hadn’t wanted to kill me here. It wasn’t a venue he had thought through himself, and maybe the crazy threat of the photographs had worked as some restraint. Still, as the warm water coursed down my aching neck it was dawning on me that from whichever angle you looked at things, he was out on the loose again and I had made yet another of my serious mistakes.

When I finally got some balance back I started tidying up the scene, stuffing everything into a black bin liner before Phyllis got in for the early morning deliveries. It took a while, but not half as long as if I’d had to fold McGee in there as well. I tied up the bag and carried it with me as I locked up and walked out into the cool air, gulping the oxygen down like ice-water. Along the way, I shoved it all – the torn clothes, the bloodstained rag – into a public rubbish bin. As I walked away I felt a small jangling in my pocket: McGee’s spare house keys. I hesitated for a second and then hung on to them, just in case. In case of what, I didn’t know.

Back at the hotel, as I went to get the key to my room, Marie was waiting for me on reception, alert as a terrier, ears cocked, fresh up from the rabbit hole.

‘Big night last night?’ she said. ‘Was the wedding good? I noticed you didn’t come back.’

Her face wore a roguish expression I didn’t care to engage with. My scarf was looped to hide my sore neck and even to look at her mouth moving around as she talked made me weary.

‘Aye,’ I said hoarsely. ‘What a wedding.’

‘Did the bride look nice?’

‘Beautiful,’ I said.

‘And the bridesmaids?

More banter. I thought of McGee, trussed up with the mad smear of red lipstick on.

‘Quite something,’ I said.

‘I bet you’re not feeling too chatty today,’ she said, knowingly.

I widened my eyes in humorous assent. Speech was, increasingly, beyond me.

I had a sleep and called Phyllis later from the hotel room, to ask about Titch’s funeral. She thought I was phoning from London. For once she didn’t give me too many details, except to say that Titch’s mum was so deep in grief that she had seemed not to be fully there.

His mum had brought along Titch’s brand new puffa jacket which they had bought together in the city centre the week before he died. She stood at the graveside clutching it tight as he was buried. Phyllis said it almost looked as if Titch’s mother was holding the warm jacket for him because she thought he might need it again later on the way back to the house, but of course no one mentioned that, they just tried to make sure she got through it. The da turned up half-cut with an enormous floral wreath that said SON and made an exhibition of himself caterwauling and crying my poor boy, my poor son, again and again until everyone wished he would give over and go home.