13

I felt wick. I felt shite. A pot of tea and three German biscuits weren’t going to help, but they were a start.

‘Fuck,’ said Maxi McDowell. ‘We’re like those fucking women knitting at the guillotine.’

Same café, same table, same company. DS Hood looked a little more relaxed. As they sat down, I said, ‘What about the boy, Bobby?’

‘No sign of him,’ said Maxi.

‘Do you think they’ve taken him?’

‘Doubt it. The rebs, they take you and disappear you for thirty years; this lot, there’s usually a corpse in the middle of the road by daylight.’ He lifted the pot. ‘Will I be mother?’

He poured without waiting for a response.

I said, ‘I was past the house. It’s a real mess. There’s flowers and wreaths piling up outside.’

‘Yeah,’ said Maxi, ‘saw that. The community are united in their grief. Bit fucking late.’

‘I stopped and had a look at the cards,’ said Hood. ‘Not a name or address on any of them.’

‘Of course not,’ said Maxi. ‘They’re sorry, but not so sorry they’re going to reveal themselves.’ He opened a packet of sugar and poured it in. As he stirred, he said: ‘How come you never see sugar lumps any more? It’s all wee packets, isn’t it? I imagine it’s to do with hygiene; you don’t want to be putting something in your tea some hobo might have been fingering.’ He shook his head and stirred some more. Then he sighed. ‘Jean was a pain in the arse, so she was, but no one deserves that.’

‘Jack was saying this morning something about her screaming and the neighbours doing nothing,’ I said.

‘As per usual, Jack is talking shite.’

‘The fire brigade say the house would have filled with smoke very quickly,’ said Hood. ‘That’s what got her, probably in her sleep. Nobody heard any screaming. And bearing in mind it was the early hours, and that if Bobby was in bed he would have been overcome, or even if he’d woken up, with his disability it would have taken him too long to get out. We’re working on the theory that he wasn’t in when the attack took place.’

‘So where was he, then?’

‘He’d hopped it,’ said Maxi, and gave a wiseacre smile.

‘I don’t blame him,’ said Hood. ‘He should get out and stay out.’

‘We’re looking for him,’ said Maxi. ‘As I’m sure they are too.’

‘You don’t think they’ll have found, like, closure, by killing Jean?’

‘Yeah, right. They’ll be even more determined to find him. Those boys, they’re like Jack Russells. Once they get their teeth into you, they never let go.’ Maxi shook his head. ‘And talking of terriers, you’re going to have to have a word with that wanker Caramac. On this morning giving us this three kinds of crap like it was our fault? He’s a whiney little guttersnipe and I don’t know how you can work for him.’

‘I can’t, as it turns out,’ I said. ‘He fired me.’

‘Seriously? How come? Did you fuck up?’

‘No. And I don’t really know why. Anyway, I’m out.’

Maxi fixed me with a look. ‘You’re not really out, though, are you, Dan? In fact, knowing you as I do, I’d say you’re about to get even deeper into it. It’s in your nature.’

‘I think not,’ I said.

He was right, of course. There was no legitimate reason for me to be shooting the breeze with two cops in a Shankill greasy spoon apart from the fact that it was in my nature to poke and poke and poke at something until I got a satisfactory result irrespective of whether I was being paid for it or not. Also, I could not ignore the possibility that I was at least partially responsible for Jean Murray’s death. Yes, she had already been the target of a long-standing intimidation campaign, but the day after I had asked Boogie Wilson, brigadier general of the Ulster Volunteer Force, to intercede on her behalf, Jean was burned to death. That was too much of a coincidence, at least for me.

It didn’t need to have anything to do with Jack, but if it was, and was intended as another warning to shut the fuck up, then they’d misjudged it badly. Even as we sat there with our tea and biscuits, he was giving it everything over the airwaves, and I suspected he’d still be at it a month down the line. Judging from the calls he was getting, and the other coverage in the local media, thousands of people across the province were genuinely upset about what had happened to Jean and were clamouring for action to be taken against those responsible.

Equally, it might have had nothing to do with my intervention, or Jack, but everything to do with a power play within the notoriously volatile command structure of the UVF. Killing Jean was the Miller boys’ response to being asked by Boogie Wilson to lay off her. This is our turf, they were saying, we’ll do what we want.

Whatever the reason, I was pissed off at having jumped to the most obvious conclusion, and then waded in like a bull in a china shop. Now Jean was dead, Bobby was missing and Jack was exploiting it to the hilt, riling up the public and coining it in at the same time. And I was still no closer to finding out who had kidnapped his son. The fact that Jack no longer cared was neither here nor there. I cared.

I looked from Maxi to Hood. ‘So what are you doing about Jean?’

‘Bugger all,’ said Maxi. ‘Not my department, and even if it was, I’m forty-eight hours from retirement.’

‘And it is my department, but I’m not on it,’ said Hood.

‘But you know.’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Sharing is caring.’

‘What’s in it for me?’

I smiled at Maxi. ‘The boy’s learning,’ he said.

‘Well then, I’ll have to make it worth his while. What would you say to, say, half a German biscuit?’

I indicated the plate. I turned it seductively. Hood studied the biscuit. Then me. He glanced at Maxi, who gave a non-committal shrug.

‘The whole biscuit,’ said Hood.

I faked a sharp intake of breath.

‘And playing hardball,’ I said.

‘Sweet tooth,’ said Hood.

I gave it some more contemplation before pushing the plate closer to him.

‘Deal,’ I said.

He made no attempt to pick up the biscuit. I suspected that it was in fact a symbolic biscuit. Instead he swept one hand across the table, pushing crumbs over the edge into his other hand, which he then didn’t quite know what to do with. He began to rub them between his palms. He may have been trying to reduce them to the size of subatomic particles, but he only succeeded in creating a worse mess than the one he’d been trying to clear up in the first place. Eventually he scraped the residue on to the floor, cleared his throat and said: ‘Well, we picked up the Millers first thing this morning, and if Jack Caramac had bothered to do any research then he’d know that. But they’ll be out by this afternoon. It’s not likely they set the fire themselves, is it? Someone will have seen who actually did it, and if they cared to tell us then maybe we could link it back, but we’re not holding our breath.’

‘She had security cameras. If they poured petrol through the front door, then they must be on tape?’

‘Yeah, you would think that. Just a couple of problems there. One, cameras melt under extreme heat. Two, you might think that maybe before they melted, some of that footage was transmitted elsewhere first? Well, for that to happen, we would have been needing the cameras to work in the first place. It’s the same everywhere, cameras and burglar alarms on the outside of a house, most of them are just there for show. Cheap shit that fools no one. As for the neighbours, well they’re all suddenly afflicted with blindness. And our regular cast of weasels, snitches and gossips are keeping it well zipped. So we have nothing yet. Maybe we’ll get there, maybe we won’t. That’s about it, for now. But early days. Unless, of course, you have something to contribute, you being about the last person to see her alive.’

He raised a speculative eyebrow.

‘What’s in it for me?’ I asked.

Hood smiled knowingly. He pushed the German biscuit back across the table to me.

I studied it. After a while I picked it up. I licked it. Then I put it down on the plate and pushed it back to him.

‘You think I’m going to risk my hard-won reputation for that? Wise the scone, wee lad.’

I got up, pulled on my jacket, and walked out of the café. Even as the door was closing, I could hear Maxi laughing.