Dewey Street is just a few twists and turns away from Comanche Station. Jean Murray’s Housing Executive semi featured brand-new double glazing, with wire-mesh security grilles and scorch marks up the brickwork. There was one security camera facing down above the front door, and another covering the tiny garden. There were probably others around the back. As I parked outside, I saw a couple of kids sitting on a wall opposite. Teenagers. One skateboard between them. Cropped hair, neck chains, trackies, trainers, sullen looks. I nodded over and they nodded back. When I walked up to the front door and rang the bell, one of them shouted, ‘Whaddya want with that cunt?’
I said, ‘A cunt’s a useful thing.’
They were still thinking about that when a man’s gruff and tobacco-thick voice said over the intercom, ‘What?’
I said, ‘Hi, ahm, my name’s Dan Starkey . . . I’m working for the Jack Caramac show. Would it be possible to talk to Jean Murray?’
‘You’re talking to her.’
‘Oh.’ I’d heard her on the radio and knew her voice was deep, but this was much further down the scale. ‘Sorry, the speaker . . . Anyway, could I have a word?’
‘What about?’
‘I’d really prefer to do it without the neighbours listening in.’
After a moment she said, ‘How do I know you’re not sent from them to shut me up?’
‘Ahm, you don’t.’
‘You have ID from the station?’
‘Sorry, don’t have any. Jack’s employing me privately.’
‘So how do I know?’
‘You don’t. Don’t I look trustworthy?’
I beamed up at the camera. Something that was halfway between a snort and a laugh came out of the box, and thirty seconds later I heard a single bolt being drawn back and the front door opened. Jean Murray was standing there, cropped red hair, freckled, housecoat, slippers, fag hanging out of her mouth.
‘Sorry, I’ve a stupid cold, my voice has gone.’
I said, ‘Shouldn’t you have better, bigger deadbolts than that?’
‘Aye, you would think that, but they tell me if a petrol bomb comes through the windies, you’re not going to want to spend ten minutes trying to get out of the house. It’s half a dozen of one, about four of the other. Come on in.’ She stood to one side, and I moved past her. She stepped back into the doorway and glowered at the kids across the road. ‘Why don’t youse go and play outside your own house?’ she yelled.
‘Fuck off, tout!’ one shouted back.
‘Fuck off yourselves!’ Jean yelled and slammed the door shut.
Jean showed me into a front room. Although it was still early afternoon, she had three lamps on to counteract the filtering effect of the security grilles. There was a large TV with an untidy pile of DVDs beside it. A leather sofa and chair with what looked like cigarette burns and dotted with used tissues. A hearth with a lit gas fire, and above it half a dozen framed photos of a boy, taking him from a rotund baby on to primary school, cherub-faced and smiling, and then one for each year of secondary school. These later ones showed the biggest changes – from slightly chubby in a neat uniform with a tidy hairstyle to beanpole, ragged tie, greasy hair and acne. You could see it in his eyes, too: from innocence to defiance.
‘This Bobby?’ I asked.
‘Robert. Yes.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Shooting people.’ She thumbed above her. ‘On the Xbox upstairs. You’d think he’d have had enough of guns, but he’s at it all day. Zombies, mostly.’
‘Not at school?’
‘Well his attendance was random at the best of times, but he hasn’t been back since . . . all this shite started.’
‘I understand you’re a single parent, but was there a Mr Murray?’
‘Not that it’s any of your business, but Mr Murray skedaddled years ago. Do you want a cup of tea?’
‘No. No. Thank you.’
She sat on the single chair. She lit another cigarette. ‘Suppose you’ve come to break the news; Jack’s throwing the towel in as well? Fucking typical.’
‘No. Jack’s as . . . committed as ever. It’s more a private thing. Jack’s being threatened; it may well be over this. He’s asked me to look into it.’
‘Threatened? Fuck, he should try living here, I get it every day. Scared to leave the house, so I am. Thank Christ for internet Tesco or we’d starve to death. Threatened how?’
I told her about Jimmy, about him being kidnapped for an hour and the jammy note.
‘The fuckers,’ she spat.
‘So what I’m really trying to do is find out who might be doing this, so maybe if I can get them for threatening Jack, that’ll take some of the heat off you and your boy as well?’
‘You really think?’
‘Well it might help to—’
‘Ah, you’re pissin up the wrong tree there, mate. I’m sorry if they’re hassling yer man because of my boy, but you know, at least he can do something about it. He has the money for people like you. He can move house if he has to. He can look after himself. What am I gonna do? I’m on my own here. You know how many times the house has been attacked? ’Cos I don’t. Lost track. They’ve burned my wheelie bins, my car, tried to burn me out, smashed the windies I don’t know how many times. And they’re going to keep doing it till they get him, get him dead. That’s all they want. Dead or out of the country, that’s what they want.’
‘You wouldn’t consider moving?’
‘Where the fuck to? England?’ She cackled. She stubbed out her fag and lit another. Her fingers were as yellow as her teeth. ‘You think I have the money for that? Anyway, this is our home. Why should we be chased out by a pack a hellions? Nah, fuck ’em, we’re here to stay. If we go anywhere, it’ll be out in a fuckin’ bax, so it will.’
I said, ‘What about Bobby? How’s he coping with it? Can’t be easy losing a leg like—’
‘Never mind the fuckin’ leg, it’s his fuckin’ attitude is driving me up the wall. And he had that before they shot him. Teenagers should be locked up until they get some sense into their fucking heads. You tell them one thing, they do the other. One minute they’re your best friend, the next they’re screaming their head off at you. Caught him taking money from my purse the other day and scalped the fucking hide off him. Wouldn’t even make ye a fuckin’ cup of tea.’
I nodded. ‘So can I have a word with him?’
‘What for?’
‘It’s just useful to get stuff straight from the horse’s mouth.’
‘No point, he says nuthin’ about nuthin’. Anyways, we all know who’s behind it. Those Miller boys are bad fuckin’ news, so they are.’
There was no arguing with that.
When I’d been covering the Troubles, the Millers would still have been in short trousers, but they were all grown up now, and had risen through the ranks of the UVF to the point where they now ran 1st Battalion, which covers the whole Shankill area. Thomas ‘Windy’ Miller and his brother Rab still had a boss, a brigadier general, who was supposed to keep them in line. They were supposed to sit down regularly and agree common policies with him and the six other battalion commanders, the so-called brigade staff, but they were still pretty much a law unto themselves. The perceived wisdom was that it was better to keep them within the organisation and try and exert some measure of control over them, rather than force them out and give them a reason to form their own paramilitary group where they would answer to no one. Through thirty years of the Troubles, Loyalist paramilitaries had killed twice as many of their own men through internecine strife than they had their Republican enemies. Nobody wanted to see that kind of open civil war on the Shankill again. That was the real reason the high command left them alone, and why the police themselves never came down too hard on them. In the larger scheme of things, Bobby Murray’s missing leg meant nothing.
‘They’re, ugh, not really the sort of guys you should be messing with,’ I said.
‘So everyone keeps telling me, but why the fuck not? Who are they to tell me and my boy to get out? Who are they to fuckin’ cut my boy’s leg off? They’re too big for their fuckin’ boots, that’s what I say. You know something? I saw that fucking Windy Miller in the fruit shop down the road, and I went right up to him and said what the fuck do you think you’re doing pickin’ on my wee lad, he’s only fucking fourteen, and do you know what he did? He got out of there as quick as he fuckin’ could, he ran away, so he did. Big man issuing commands to hammer my wee lad, but couldn’t even stand up to me in a frickin’ fruit shop. Big man. Big fucking man.’
She extinguished her half-smoked cigarette and tried to light another one, but her hand was shaking too much. She had a tear in her eye. She stood and went to the bottom of the stairs that opened directly into her living room.
‘Bobby!’ she guldered. When there was no response, she amped it up. ‘BOBBY!’
‘What?’
‘There’s a man here to see you!’
‘What about?’
‘He’s trying to help. Will you come down and talk to him.’
‘NO!’
‘Bobby! He’s come special to see you.’
‘No! Tell him to fuck off!’
Jean raised her eyebrows at me, and came back into the room. ‘See what I mean? Apparently you’re to fuck off. The language of him! Sorry, he’s just at that age.’
‘Not a problem,’ I said. I stood up. ‘Listen, thanks for seeing me. It can’t be easy.’
‘I don’t think it’s supposed to be easy. Not for the likes of us.’
There was nothing I could really say to that. I reached into my jacket and took out one of my business cards. I flicked it between my fingers for a moment and then handed it to her. She studied it.
‘It just says Starkey. What exactly do you do?’
‘Mostly I interfere in difficult situations and set off a chain of events completely beyond my control.’
Jean managed a smile. ‘You sound like a fuckin’ laxative.’
‘Got me in one,’ I said.
It was scary how close to the truth she was.
I said, ‘Give us a bell if you think of anything that might help, or there’s anything else I can do.’
I moved past her out into the hall and reached for the door lock.
‘Dan, is it?’
I turned back to her. ‘Aye.’
‘My wee fella, he’s no angel, but he’s not the worst kid in the world. He doesn’t deserve this, doesn’t deserve any of it. And I’m not going to let them get away with it. Jack Caramac or no fuckin’ Jack Caramac.’
As I approached the car, I saw that PEDOFIAL had been scratched into the paintwork in very large letters.
The two boys were lolling on the wall opposite.
‘You do this?’ I asked.
‘Nah,’ said one.
‘And even if we did, what’re you going to do about it, pedo?’
I shook my head. I opened the door and climbed in. I started the engine and pulled out. I stopped beside them and rolled down the window.
‘For your information,’ I said, ‘that’s not how you spell paedophile. And even if I was one, I still wouldn’t fuck youse, youse fucking gormless inbreds.’
And then I drove on.