It was like driving to a familiar destination and arriving with no memory of the journey. Connor couldn’t recall heading for his bedroom, springing open the panel beneath his bed to reveal the safe that was set in concrete beneath the floorboards. He had no memory of opening it and reaching into the darkness for what was there, waiting for him.
Yet now he sat in front of the TV, watching the news reports from outside the uni, the Glock 17 he had not held in more than a year clenched in his hand. He looked down, at once horrified and comforted by the gun’s presence, the solid, undeniable weight of it in his hand. He turned it slowly, letting the light play across the glossy black barrel. It was pristine, a year in the darkness doing nothing to dull its lustre.
He considered, his eyes darting between the gun and the television. Now that the initial shock had abated, doubt was creeping into his mind. Could it be a coincidence? After all, it was a popular book. Could he be wrong?
He snatched for the remote, rewinding the live stream of coverage to Donna’s report. His hand tightened on the Glock as the still images of the crime scene flitted across the screen. He paused it when it came to the last image, felt the reptilian part of his mind hiss when he saw the book lying among the debris. He studied it, felt the first trickle of relief when he realized it wasn’t the same edition as the one that had been delivered to their flat in Belfast.
The book that had ruined his life.
Connor had never meant to become a police officer, especially not in Northern Ireland. It had, he told himself, just been one of those things. He’d gone to Belfast to study at Queens University, partly because he wanted to be close to his grandfather, who ran a garage half an hour away in Newtownards, and partly because he wanted to get away from the constant low-level disapproval of his father.
From the moment Connor was born, Jack Fraser had never wavered in his conviction that his son would follow in his footsteps and become a doctor. But despite this conviction, and his constant attempts to mould Connor in his own image with tales of his life in medicine (‘It even gave me a wife, son – that was how I met your mother’) and even downright blackmail, it became apparent that he had failed.
Connor had thought his decision to study psychology would placate his father – he could still become a doctor. Instead, it widened the schism between them, Jack Fraser drunkenly dismissing his son’s choice as ‘the easy way out for a kid with a weak stomach and a weaker work ethic’.
A month after he left school, Connor moved to Belfast, setting himself up in a small flat a short walk from the main university campus, in an area of town called the Holylands. It had gained the name thanks to the divine intervention of a devout developer who had named the streets Damascus, Jerusalem, Cairo, Palestine and Carmel. He arrived in Belfast by ferry, taking his worn-down but much-loved Ford Focus with him so he could drive down to Newtownards and see his grandfather at the weekends.
Life fell into a soothing rhythm for Connor, studying during the week, nights out with other students at Lavery’s, the Bot – or any other place that served cheap beer – then drive east at the weekend. Jimmy O’Brien was glad of the company. A stroke had taken his wife when Connor was only twelve. At the funeral, Connor remembered his mother beseeching Jimmy to come back to Scotland to live with them and ‘see Connor grow up’. It was an offer she continued to make over the years, and Jimmy always declined. He had his garage, the pub and ‘the lads’. What would he do if he moved away from the town where he had built his life with Grace McAteer? Who would tend her garden? Who would visit her grave?
It was on these weekend trips that Connor began the heavy lifting that would sculpt him into the image of his grandfather. Jimmy O’Brien had been an amateur bodybuilder in his time, channelling his fury at the Troubles into the iron instead of the pipe bomb. In an outhouse in the corner of the garage, past where the husks of scrapped cars sat piled like giant Jenga pieces, Jimmy had amassed a collection of weights and machines. When the garage was closed he would take Connor there and train him in the ‘bang and clang’, always with a Bushmills sloshing in an overfull glass. Over the course of his first year in Northern Ireland, Connor bucked the first-year student trend of losing weight and put on just over a stone and a half, most of it muscle.
And then, just at the point when women were starting to pay attention to the body he had built in his grandfather’s garage and the university gym, he met Karen. It was her voice that first drew her to his attention: her clipped Edinburgh accent shrieked to him across the hushed calm of the McClay Library. He didn’t feel homesick, but there was something about her tone that stirred a hollow wistfulness in him, as though she had reminded him of something he hadn’t known he was missing.
He struck up a conversation with a corny joke: he’d come all the way to Belfast, he said, to meet the prettiest girl in Scotland. He had felt himself cringe even as he spoke, had known he’d blown his chance with her at that moment. But then she had smiled, and somehow he had known it would be okay.
And it was. For five years. He’d got to know Karen MacKay, who had come to Belfast to study English with the aim of being a teacher. They dated casually at first, then more seriously. By their final year, they were living together in Connor’s flat, making the trip down to see Jimmy every weekend for Sunday lunch.
It was comfortable. Routine. Which was why they started planning to stay in Belfast. Karen would do her teaching diploma then find a position – as with everywhere else, Northern Ireland was desperate for teachers. Connor was considering getting a job with the NHS. But then, one night, the decision was made for him.
He was in the Apartment, a bar on Donegal Square that looked out onto the Baroque splendour of Belfast City Hall. The main bar was on the first floor, its floor-to-ceiling windows giving impressive views of the building, which was bathed with floodlights like a model on a catwalk. He was idly sipping on a pint and watching the square below, waiting for Karen to finish her shift at a restaurant nearby, when a sudden commotion drew his attention. Down on the street, a young, straggly-looking man sprinted diagonally across the road, narrowly missing a bus that was just pulling into the stop. He was running from two police officers who were sprinting after him, moving quickly despite the bulk of their stab vests and the weight of their belts. Connor heard them cry out for the man to stop, the shouts sending those on the streets below scattering and drawing other customers in the bar to the windows. The man – he was young, Connor saw, little more than a child – stopped, spun around with his hands on his head, a look of bewildered panic and utter hopelessness on his face. Even from thirty feet away, Connor could see the kid was seriously malnourished, with the pale, greying skin and nervous tics of an addict.
The officers were on him in a second, reaching out, grabbing, seizing. They spun him around roughly, crowding in on him. The panic gave way to terror on the kid’s face and tears fell. Still the police shouted, intimidating and overpowering him. One raised his radio from his shoulder to his mouth, spoke into it. Cuffed now, the kid was frogmarched away to the half-hearted cheers of the crowd outside and murmurs of approval from those inside the bar. Connor watched him go, a police van pulling up at the other side of the square. The kid’s head darted from officer to officer, and in his mind, Connor could hear his pleas.
He had heard them before, just as he had seen the look of pleading desperation, the day he had turned on Gordon Jeffrey.
Connor watched the police van pull away. He drained his pint, then went looking for Karen. At that moment he knew, on some level beyond reasoned thought, that he would join the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Not to arrest terrified kids in the way he had seen those officers operate, but to do it better.
For himself. And Gordon Jeffrey.
Despite her initial misgivings, Karen eventually agreed with his decision. With his natural physical presence and years of study he excelled at the training and became a probationary constable six months after he had graduated. Karen got a job teaching in Dunmurry and they moved into a flat in St George’s Harbour, overlooking the Lagan.
And then came that night. And the book that had destroyed their life.
Connor sighed, pulled himself out of the memory. The news channel had moved on to another story, this time about the murder of a country rather than a single person. He weighed the gun in his hand. It could be a coincidence . . . But he had to know. For himself. And for Karen.
He placed the gun on the coffee-table and picked up his phone. Called the number from memory.
‘Hello?’
Connor felt his breath catch in his chest as the voice from his past dragged him back to Belfast. His eyes settled on the gun.
‘Hello, who is this?’ Impatient now.
‘Simon? Si, it’s Connor Fraser . . . Yeah, I know, the ghost who walks. Listen, I’m after a favour. Need a wee check on Jonny Hughes. He on anyone’s radar these days?’
There was a long exhalation of breath down the phone as DS Simon McCartney collected his thoughts. ‘Christ, Connor, I would have thought you’d heard,’ he said.
‘Heard what?’ Connor asked, his free hand reaching for the gun.
‘Well, it’s just that . . .’ A sharp crack in the background drowned Simon’s voice, followed by the sound of him swearing. ‘Sorry, Connor, I’m down at Corporation Square. There’s a power of building going on here.’
Connor knew the area. Not far from the Cathedral Quarter, heading down to the harbour and the Lagan. It was the latest part of Belfast to benefit from the investment that had come with the end of the Troubles; hotels, offices and apartment blocks springing up like blossoming flowers. But the development was looking increasingly fragile, the hard frost of Brexit threatening to kill it off as the EU pulled the plug on the money that was flowing into the town.
‘No problem,’ Connor said, dragging himself back to the present. ‘What were you saying about Hughes?’
‘Well, that’s the thing, there’s nothing to tell. He’s gone. Three months ago. Got hit by a car on the Shankill, just outside the leisure centre. Whatever you wanted with the Librarian, it’s a bit late now, Connor.’