‘Go on, love. It’s best if you let me handle this – whatever this is.’
Kathleen knew what she looked like walking into the hotel lobby but she was past caring. She had no plan yet for how she would get clothes in the morning, but she hadn’t the energy to think about that either. The night porter gave her a key and asked if he could help her in any other way.
‘Would you have a toothbrush, maybe?’ she asked.
He opened a drawer and took out a little plastic toiletries bag. ‘You’ll find most of the essentials there.’
At a glance she saw a toothbrush, toothpaste, skin lotion, a nail file, condoms and Alka-Seltzer. She thanked him and went to the lift.
The room was an enormous bridal suite, more like three rooms than one. The sumptuous bed seemed almost a sarcastic comment on the state she was in. She undressed and buried herself in the comforting darkness. With the drapes closed, it could have been the darkest hour of night and not the advancing daylight of early morning. So she expected she might sleep. She’d give it a try.
Five
Terry Brankin sat on the kerb watching firemen fight the blaze and waiting for the police. He looked at the house he had lived in for seven years, watched it burn and felt as if he had never really got to know it. He was thinking of the day he and Kathleen had first viewed it and discussed whether they could afford it. He remembered the legal delays and the day he got the key, the way they had walked around from room to room and spent their first night on a mattress on bare floorboards, feeling rich and poor at the same time.
They had planned how to decorate and furnish it and had worked slowly on it, Kathleen having to organise the other houses too, making them fit for tenants and cleaning up after them. The moment they had anticipated, at which they would feel contented and secure, their work on the house done, had never really come, and now it was a crackling shell. He remembered climbing onto the roof himself to put cowls on the chimney pots, arguing with Kathleen about the colour of the frontage and watching her spend whole days managing the window boxes. He had said she was daft to spend thousands on kitchen furnishings that were just cupboards out of a flat-pack store. And he knew that in the sixty years the house had stood before he had taken ownership of it, others had loved and died in it, strangers had accumulated memories that would be sharpening in their minds now if they knew it was burning down.
The next to arrive were a couple of constables, who asked him if he would like to come down to the station and make a statement, there being nothing that they could do here until the fire service was finished hosing down the flames. He sat in the back of their car and endured their small talk.
‘An awful thing to happen, Mr Brankin.’
He was trying to work out who might have burnt his houses, and already he was suspecting the police themselves. Inspector Basil McKeague of the Cold Case team knew that he had killed the Lavery family and got away with it. He might be happy that someone should torch nearly everything Terry owned. Maybe George Caulfield, Nools’s husband, had seen him leave the house and found an old-fashioned explanation for their meeting up. George had never liked him. There were loyalist paramilitaries who fancied they had defended Ulster against the IRA. Some among them might have done it. Even Benny Curtis. Who knew how complicated and perverse were the workings of that nasty mind? Benny might say it was nothing personal. But why not just shoot him on his doorstep? Well, because that would be breaking a ceasefire, while burning his house down could be passed off as vandalism. Or maybe somebody below Benny in the hierarchy of his mob was aggrieved that Terry wasn’t doing enough to keep men out of jail. There were also the other republican groups, at least four of them, all of which occasionally shot someone or burnt a house or shop, to remind everyone they still functioned. But what gripe would they have with Terry Brankin? None that he could think of. Maybe they thought he was a tout.
It could have been somebody who knew the Laverys. That’s a possibility, he thought. But there were other attacks that Terry had been involved in that nobody was currently talking about. The Cold Case team might get round to some of them too. It might be one of those cases the arsonists were avenging. And there were the hoods he had shot in the legs, maybe a dozen of them, any one of whom might have taken a notion to avenge himself. It’s funny how little of that there is in Belfast. And there were the rattled neighbours of noisy students who had burnt the odd car in protest, or daubed a house with paint, though never one of his own. All these thoughts he turned over in his head as the inane young peelers in the front of the car prattled on about how it was almost like the Troubles coming back, a bad night like this.
Who else? ‘Come on,’ he urged his brain. ‘Think! Who else might have done this?’
It was Ig who had called to tell him that the Cold Case crowd were digging into him, so Ig had known first and had had time to think through the implications. He’d had time to plan. He would have been able to put a team together; he had men at his disposal for what he called ‘operations’. But why? What advantage would Ig get over the Cold Case detectives by burning his houses?
Well, suppose he confessed to McKeague and let him build a case. What would happen then? Ig wouldn’t have too much to worry about, would he? He hadn’t been there. He had come in only afterwards to debrief Terry and make sure he wasn’t going to embarrass Dom McGrath. That was it! If Terry confessed to the Magheraloy bomb and told the whole story, that story would have to include the information that it was Dom McGrath who had ordered the operation. McGrath was now a respectable politician at the head of a party in partnership government, running Northern Ireland. But why didn’t they just come and talk to him? Probably because he was outside the movement now and wasn’t to be trusted.
At the police station, he was kept waiting in the reception area with one truculent drunk and a maudlin woman with one shoe on, but after the constables had reported the fire to a senior officer, he was invited through to a more comfortable room and offered a cup of tea. As a solicitor handling occasional criminal cases and legal claims against the police, he had been in the station before and most of the staff knew him to see. And, having seen senior officers being civil to him, they did the same.
In came Sergeant Jamie Spick. Terry had met him many times over the years when he’d been in the station to sit with clients or vet identity parade line-ups, and he was always civil. ‘Och Terry, this is a bad one. What are we looking at here?’
‘Five of my houses burnt down, including the one I live in.’
‘And the missus?’ said Spick.
‘I’ve sent her up to the Welly Park. They’ll look after her.’
‘Well look, you keep your spirits up and give me a call for anything at all that you need.’
He was at least playing it friendly, making it easy for him.
‘Now let me fill you in on what’s going to happen here. I mean, you know it all yourself but it’s as well to focus. In here, they’re going to be asking two things: is this an insurance stitch-up or is it violence against the person? Of course you didn’t burn your own houses down, but the peeler mind works that way, ticks that box. OK? The insurance company is going to be asking if this is civil disorder, in which case, it’s the government that pays out, or if it is arson of the old-fashioned kind, in which case, they pay. But you know all that.
‘One other thing,’ said Spick. ‘After you’ve done the paperwork, there’s an Inspector McKeague wants a word with you. I don’t know what that’s about. I thought they’d kicked him upstairs.’
Spick left him then with a warm firm handshake, and for an hour Terry took questions from a sergeant writing up his statement. At
