Ли Чайлд - Belfast Noir

I swivelled on my stool to look at them again. Melissa, with her blonde hair and pouting glossy lips and blue eyes, didn’t look very much like him. She didn’t look much like Davina either. They were mock-arguing about something now. She flicked her hair and cocked her head and put her hands on her waist, a pantomime of indignation, and he took her bare upper arms and squeezed them, shaking her lightly, and she squealed then threw her head back in laughter as he leant in to murmur something in her ear.

She had to be his daughter. She had to be.

“Ma’am. Excuse me.” The manager was leaning across the bar, attempting to get my attention. “Excuse me.”

“Sorry,” I said, “I was miles away.”

She had to be his daughter.

“I understand you’d like to buy a drink for the couple by the window?”

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry, I was mistaken. I mean, I thought they were someone else.”

“No problem,” he replied, smooth, professional. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

I looked at him. He waited, head politely inclined. I almost asked: Can you find out their names? Then I realised that, either way, I didn’t want to know.

WET WITH RAIN

BY LEE CHILD

Great Victoria Street

Births and deaths are in the public record. Census returns and rent rolls and old mortgages are searchable. As are citizenship applications from all the other English-speaking countries. There are all kinds of ancestry sites on the web. These were the factors in our favour.

Against us was a historical truth. The street had been built in the 1960s. Fifty years ago, more or less. Within living memory. Most of the original residents had died off, but they had families, who must have visited, and who might remember. Children and grandchildren, recipients of lore and legend, and therefore possibly a problem.

But overall we counted ourselves lucky. The first owners of the house in question were long dead, and had left no children. The husband had surviving siblings, but they had all gone to either Australia or Canada. The wife had a living sister, still in the neighbourhood, but she was over eighty years old, and considered unreliable.

Since the original pair, the house had had five owners, most of them in the later years. We felt we had enough distance. So we went with the third variant of the second plan. Hairl Carter came with me. Hairl Carter the second, technically. His father had the same name. From southeastern Missouri. His father’s mother had wanted to name her firstborn Harold, but she had no more than a third-grade education, and couldn’t spell except phonetically. So Harold it was, phonetically. The old lady never knew it was weird. We all called her grandson Harry, which might not have pleased her.

Harry did the paperwork, which was easy enough, because we made it all Xeroxes of Xeroxes, which hides a lot of sins. I opened an account at a Washington, DC bank, in the name of the society, and I put half a million dollars into it, and we got credit cards and a checkbook. Then we rehearsed. We prepped it, like a political debate. The same conversation, over and over again, down all the possible highways and byways. We identified weak spots, though we had no choice but to barrel through. We figured audacity would stop them thinking straight.

We flew first to London, then to Dublin in the south, and then we made the connection to Belfast on tickets that cost less than cups of coffee back home. We took a cab to the Europa Hotel, which is where we figured people like us would stay. We arranged a car with the concierge. Then we laid up and slept. We figured midmorning the next day should be zero hour.

* * *

The car was a crisp Mercedes and the driver showed no real reluctance about the address—which was second from the end of a short line of ticky-tacky row houses, bland and cheaply built, with big areas of peeling white weatherboard, which must have saved money on bricks. The roof tiles were concrete, and had gone mossy. In the distance the hills were like velvet, impossibly green, but all around us the built environment was hard. There was a fine cold drizzle in the air, and the street and the sidewalk were both shiny grey.

The car waited at the kerb and we opened a broken gate and walked up a short path through the front yard. Carter rang the bell and the door opened immediately. The Mercedes had not gone unnoticed. A woman looked out at us. She was solidly built, with a pale, meaty face. “Who are you?”

I said, “We’re from America.”

“America?”

“We came all the way to see you.”

“Why?”

“Mrs. Healy, is it?” I asked, even though I knew it was. I knew all about her. I knew where she was born, how old she was, and how much her husband made. Which wasn’t much. They were a month behind on practically everything. Which I hoped was going to help.

“Yes, I’m Mrs. Healy,” the woman said.

“My name is John Pacino, and my colleague here is Harry Carter.”

“Good morning to you both.”

“You live in a very interesting house, Mrs. Healy.”

She looked blank, and then craned her neck out the door and stared up at her front wall. “Do I?”

“Interesting to us, anyway.”

“Why?”

“Can we tell you all about it?”

She said, “Would you like a wee cup of tea?”

“That would be lovely.”

So we trooped inside, first Carter, then me, feeling a kind of preliminary satisfaction, as if our lead-off hitter had gotten on base. Nothing guaranteed, but so far so good. The air inside smelled of daily life and closed windows. A skilled analyst could have listed the ingredients from their last eight meals. All of which had been either boiled or fried, I guessed.

It wasn’t the kind of household where guests get deposited in the parlor to wait. We followed the woman to the kitchen, which had drying laundry suspended on a rack. She filled a kettle and lit the stove. She said, “Tell me what’s interesting about my house.”

Carter said, “There’s a writer we admire very much, name of Edmund Wall.”

“Here?”

“In America.”

“A writer?”

“A novelist. A very fine one.”

“I never heard of him. But then, I don’t read much.”

“Here,” Carter said, and he took the copies from his pocket and smoothed them on the counter. They were faked to look like Wikipedia pages. Which is trickier than people think. (Wikipedia prints different than it looks on the computer screen.)

Mrs. Healy asked, “Is he famous?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “Writers don’t really get famous. But he’s very well respected. Among people who like his sort of thing. There’s an appreciation society. That’s why we’re here. I’m the chairman and Mr. Carter is the general secretary.”

Mrs. Healy stiffened a little, as if she thought we were trying to sell her something. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to join. I don’t know him.”

I said, “That’s not the proposition we have for you.”

“Then what is?”

“Before you, the Robinsons lived here, am I right?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And before them, the Donnellys, and before them, the McLaughlins.”

The woman nodded. “They all got cancer. One after the other. People started to say this was an unlucky house.”

I looked concerned. “That didn’t bother you? When you bought it?”

“My faith has no room for superstition.”

Which was a circularity fit to make a person’s head explode. It struck me mute. Carter said, “And before the McLaughlins were the McCanns, and way back at the beginning were the McKennas.”

“Before my time,” the woman said, uninterested, and I felt the runner on first steal second. Scoring position.