All the Colours of the Town (10 page)

I put them back in the files. Hardly even files. Three folded oblongs. I fingered the cheap, damp-feeling card, its coarse, pulpy grain. Stacked on the desk the files looked empty. Back home, in the
Tribune
library, a
murder
file had a certain bulk. It might be three times, four times as thick as this. For all the city’s hard-man swagger, its razor kings and ice-cream murders, Glasgow wasn’t Belfast. A life meant something in Glasgow, a death
mattered
, in a way it didn’t here. I lifted the files. There was something seedy in their lack of heft. The deaths of these three men were almost weightless. The story moved on. New victims appeared. The photographs changed; a
different
set of crooked grins, a new crop of dated haircuts.

There was a photocopier in the corner. I bought a copycard from the girl at the desk and copied everything in the files. When I got back to the hotel there was a
package
waiting for me; cuttings from the
News-Letter
, reports on the three murders, with a note from John Rose:
More to follow. See you at ten
. I took them upstairs and tossed them on the table. I fetched a Red Label from the minibar and sat down to read. 

‘“British as Finchley,” she called it. You can see her point, round here. The Troubles might never have happened.’

We were on the Malone Road, heading down towards Queen’s.

‘Shite,’ said Rose. He dropped the Forester into third. ‘The Troubles reached everywhere, Gerry. There were people killed on these streets too. The Provies topped a judge outside a Catholic church just round the corner there.’ He floored it abruptly to beat the lights. ‘The Peelers shot a Blackneck in a stolen car down there, on Elmwood Avenue.’ We were passing Queen’s, the
cheerful
red-brick castle with its neat yellow lawn. ‘There was a law lecturer, the Provies shot him dead in University Square.’ He jerked his thumb out the window. ‘Just there. The Troubles were here all right. The difference being, in this neck of the woods you could kid on things were normal. There’s no murals here. No flags and bunting, coloured kerbstones. It could be anywhere. Fucking arse-piece!’ He leaned on the horn and gave the finger out the window to a minicab that cut us up. ‘Except it isn’t.’

For the next hour we drove round the city. The Shankill and Falls. Oldpark and Andersonstown. There wasn’t much to see. The tight blank streets. Boxy houses stained with rain. Nothing I couldn’t have seen at home. The sky was overcast, a muted, no-weather cotton-wool gauze. Only the hills, swelling dark at the end of each street, lent some colour to the scene. And then we turned a corner.

The mural reared above us, a whole gable end, detailed and luminous, like a rent in the fabric of everyday life. Rose parked the Forester and we got out to look.

I was edgy at first, sniffing the air, alert for some
movement
, for the challenge that must issue from these tight black windows. My suit was too rich, too blue; its nap practically glowed. I edged close to the car and then edged further off. The car seemed aggressively large in these poky streets, high on its chassis like a preening dog. ‘Baby on board’; ‘National Trust’: the signs in the back made my forehead prickle.

But no one seemed to notice. People clicked their wrought-iron gates, tugged their terriers’ leads, lifted shopping from their boots, bumped their buggies onto the pavement. They never glanced our way. Only the teens by the lock-ups, circling on their bikes like
baseball-hatted
sharks, seemed conscious of our presence. At each lazy revolution their cap-peaks flipped towards us. Their tyres crackled on the gritty ground.

The mural showed a street scene. A typical group of locals – an old woman with a shopping bag, a young mum with a buggy, two teenage boys, a girl dressed for Irish dancing – watched complacently as a British Army foot patrol marched towards the vanishing point. ‘TIME TO GO’; ‘SLÁN ABHAILE’. It was edged in Celtic
patterns
, braided knotwork running a border round the image. Nothing was left blank: the backdrop of houses was lovingly rendered, and the drumlins’ gradations of olive and lime and bottle and jade. It had the smudgy proficiency of pavement art. I looked around. The cars at the kerbside, the satellite dishes jutting from the walls, the baseball-hatted teens: these things seemed
anachronistic
, unconnected to the world of the mural, even though the scene it depicted was the scene before our eyes – the same hills, the same sad houses. There was
something
comforting in the bright image, something kin to the vividly miniature and implausible worlds of
snow-domes
. It looked like a portal to a greener realm, a
window
on a technicolour Oz.

For the rest of the morning we toured the murals. North and south and east and west. The Nationalist ones were earnest and kitsch – full of slogans and doves, tags from Heaney and Yeats, historical parallels with Gaza and Mississippi. As if in reaction, the Prod ones were ugly and crude. A brash kind of anti-art. Everything wooden and tight, the lettering clenched and slightly askew. Gunmen in jeans and black jackets, their limbs stiff as guns. There were murals of the Somme, murals of the shipyards. Some of them were oddly jokey. A bug-eyed stomping skinhead in outsize Doc Martens lashing a
bulbous
drum. A Loyalist Tom bearing down on a Leprechaun Jerry. They were slapdash and happily naff. The newer ones were different again, less partisan and bellicose, they featured footballers and folk heroes instead of hoods and gunmen. George Best and Davey Crockett. On one gable end C. S. Lewis beamed down on the Protestant streets from a wintry Narnian backdrop.

‘What’s with the saltires?’

This was the other thing. Almost every Loyalist mural featured a bright-blue Scottish flag. We were standing on the Newtonards Road. Above us, the whole side wall of a derelict factory honoured the veterans of the Ulster Volunteer Force. Three black-jacketed, balaclava’d
figures
toted AK-47s in a tableau framed by billowing flags. On one side was the Ulster flag; on the other a Scottish saltire. Rose seemed puzzled at my question. Conversation had petered out a few murals back and for the last half-hour we’d been driving in amicable silence. He cleared his throat.

‘The what?’

‘The Scottish flags. The St Andrew’s cross.’

I’d seen them all morning. Flapping from flagpoles and telegraph poles, painted on gable walls.

‘Like that one there. Look.’ I pointed at the wall: a red and white Ulster flag on one side, a blue and white saltire on the other. ‘Scottish saltires. They’re everywhere.’

We stood before the wall, tilting our heads like
connoisseurs
.

‘The flag of Scotland? Yeah, it’s all Scottish stuff now. That’s the latest wheeze. We’re not Brits any more. We’re Ulster Scots.’

‘We?’

He shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know a haggis from a pork pie, but there you are. There’s money in it too. There’s a guy they have at Stormont, a species of clerk; he
translates
all the debates into Ulster Scots. That’s all he does.’ He laughed. ‘They put street signs up – some shitpot town on the Ards peninsula, they put all these signs up in Ulster Scots. Then they had to tear them down.’ He grinned. ‘The natives thought they were Irish.’

The traffic ground past at our backs. A pair of tourists in crocus-coloured anoraks joined us at the mural. We nodded hello and the guy fumbled in his pocket,
producing
a small silver camera.

‘Can I ask? Would it trouble you?’

The accent was north European: Swedish, possibly Dutch. He showed me the button to press.

‘Sure. No problem.’

They shuffled together in front of the mural and the guy put his arm round the girl. I crouched down to get them in the frame. Above their heads a tangle of painted guns. I wasn’t sure whether to ask them to smile.

‘Here we go,’ I said.

‘Thank you.’ The guy gave a little bow as he took back the camera. He grinned. ‘Now we have all of them, I think. What you call a “full house”. All of the political murals.’

‘Very good.’

‘Tomorrow we go to London Derry. We see the city walls. The “Free Derry Corner”.’

He gave his funny little bow again. He stowed the
camera
in his anorak and they strolled off, hand in hand.

Rose was sitting on a garden wall, texting. He looked across and I tapped my watch, jerked my thumb towards the car.

‘Had enough?’ He slid down off the wall.

*

For two days we drove around the city. Rose had set up meetings with local hacks – news editors, long-serving staffers. They left their screens and pulled out chairs for me and brought me water in squishy plastic cups. They gave me their time. They were eager to accommodate me – the
Tribune
remains, for some reason, a name that
carries
weight in the trade – but they couldn’t help. They drummed their fingers on their lips and clucked their tongues as they sought to recall the week in question. They’d never heard of Peter Lyons. When I mentioned Isaac Hepburn they brightened and offered variations on the same two or three anecdotes. In the end they were baffled by my urgency. I was like one of those Japanese jungle-fighters, emerging into the daylight after twenty years, still primed for battle. No one had told me the war was over. They couldn’t share my hunger for the truth about a Scottish politician and that long dead week in the early 1980s. They’d sooner be discussing house prices. They were just glad it was over. It was time to move on.

I could sympathise with this. I could sympathise with the broken-veined
News-Letter
staffer who quoted the Glasgow homicide rate – wasn’t it the highest in Europe? – and wondered if I hadn’t enough to get on with at home. But I had a story to write. I wanted to know what Peter Lyons had done. I wanted to know if a fact,
properly
primed and planted, could still make a difference.

We were driving down the Shore Road.

‘No word on Hepburn?’

He grimaced. ‘Kiwi’s a hard man to reach. I’ll try again later.’

I dropped Rose in the centre and headed for Botanic.

The Grania was deserted. An electric fan wafted to and fro on the bare front desk. The empty restaurant was set for dinner, napkins propped like dunces hats, a dark-blue shine on the cutlery.

I took the stairs at a jog. My room had been cleaned. Cushions were propped on the straight-edged bed. Traffic noise buzzed at the open window. A fizz of Mr Sheen in the air. There were new supplies in the bathroom,
mint-thin
tablets of soap, round-topped bottles of bodywash.

The first square of toilet roll folded to a point. The folder was where I’d left it, under the Bible in the bedside drawer. I fetched a Red Label and spread the
cuttings
out on the desk in three separate piles. Three hands of cards. Three dead men. Duncan Gillies, Gary Pettigrew, Eamonn Walsh. Three victims of the Troubles in the week before Guy Fawkes Night, 1983. I poured the whisky and added water. Two were non-starters. Gary Pettigrew was an off-duty RUC corporal, killed by an IRA car-bomb as he left his mother’s house. (He went to see her every Sunday after church, parking in her
driveway
while the pair of them ate lunch. This little rhythm, this tick of family life, was enough to get him killed.) Eamonn Walsh was a Belfast solicitor, murdered at home by the UVF. A lone gunman put two bullets in his chest from a range of five yards. The UVF described Walsh as an active Republican, a high-ranking Provo, something the family denied. The gunman was caught on the same night. He worked as a croupier in a riverside casino and wore his work clothes under his overalls when he
murdered
Eamonn Walsh. The RUC pinched him at the blackjack table; traces of blood in his collar. A red
miasma
down the edge of his cuff, as if the diamonds and the hearts were bleeding. His sentence was thirty-five years.

The one that intrigued me was Duncan Gillies. The file on Gillies was slightly thicker than the rest. It was
thicker
because the early reports were wrong. Gillies was
beaten
to death in an alley near his house in a Protestant
district
of South Belfast. He was Protestant but his street bordered a small Catholic enclave called The Den. The RUC thought his killing was sectarian. A post-mortem timed the beating to the early hours of Sunday morning. Gillies had been drinking. He’d been at a club, maybe, or a city-centre party, and had taken a short cut through the Catholic estate. He’d been challenged by the locals and set upon, his body dumped at the Protestant end of the alley that connected The Den with the Loyalist streets. There were calls for the alley to be closed. Resident groups in both areas wanted barriers put in place. Another peace line was started.

But then the story changed. A ‘source close to the UVF’ suggested Gillies’s death had been ordered. A graffito went up near the victim’s home: ‘Lundy Gillies, Traitor to Ulster.’ A new theory emerged. Gillies was involved with a prisoner’s wife. The usual warnings were given – his car had been trashed the week before, its tyres slashed, its windscreen blinded with paint. But Gillies wasn’t
listening
. He carried on, trysting with the woman in local pubs, seeing her home through the narrow streets. He was flaunting the affair, taunting the hard men, daring them to act. He’d left them no choice. Gillies wasn’t
murdered
by Catholics. His own side topped him, in a bit of internal housekeeping that went too far.

I threw back the last splash of whisky. A muffled jangle in the room behind me: the tinny bar-chords of The Clash’s ‘White Riot’. My jacket was on the bed; I fished the phone from its inside pocket.

‘We’re on,’ he said. ‘Good to go. Tomorrow morning. Get new Duracells in that Dictaphone! I’ll pick you up at ten.’

‘What’s this?’

‘I spoke to him,’ said Rose. ‘Isaac Hepburn. Kiwi. He wants to meet.’