Ли Чайлд - Belfast Noir

My client, Mickey Fuck, pushed his chair away from the table and said that there was no fuckin’ way, on God’s fucking green earth, that he would fuckin’ do six fuckin’ months for murder.

No. Fuckin’. Way.

I should say, purely for the sake of accuracy, that the surname Fuck does not appear on Mickey’s birth certificate. That particular document bears the name Michael Padraig Pearse Flannigan . It was Mickey’s predilection to season even the most basic of sentences with a liberal, and at times bewildering, peppering of fuck s that earned him his infamous moniker.

“Mickey, it’s murder,” I said. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but you’re fucked, so to speak. At the moment, the prosecution aren’t treating this as a paramilitary killing within the scope of Good Friday. We’re trying to persuade them otherwise. If they agree to treat it as a Troubles killing, then under the terms of the Belfast Agreement the maximum sentence will be two years, but at the moment they’re pleading it as a straight killing and that’s twenty-plus on conviction. You’re sixty-three, you don’t have twenty in you. Think about it, please.”

“I don’t fuckin’ have six months either, Mack. Six months? Tell ’em to get ta fuck. Fuckin’ six months, fuck,” said Mickey, casting his eyes around the white, sanitised consultation room.

Most of my clients these days called me Mr. Mack. The younger ones, anyway. Mickey was a client of old. We’d grown up together in the law. Not that Mickey was a lawyer, no, he was a window cleaner by trade, but his real talents lay in cunning and not-so-cunning fraud. I’d first met Mickey forty-odd years earlier, when I was a white-wigged barrister fresh out of pupillage with not a penny to my name and even less experience. At that time Mickey already had an impressive juvenile record and I’d been chosen as the jockey for his debut in the Crown Court. The venue was court one in the Crumlin Road Courthouse. I’d arrived at the court early that morning, having slept little the night before. Terrified that I would be delayed by security checks or bomb scares, I got there just after eight o’clock only to find the wrought-iron gates and bomb-proof barriers firmly locked with no sign of life inside.

My instructing solicitor was a kindly sort who was doing my pupil master a favour by giving me a decent brief to kick off my career. In those early days of the Troubles you found your feet as a barrister pretty quickly. Due to the huge number of terrorist trials there simply weren’t enough criminal barristers in the Bar Library to serve the demand from clientele. Several of my brothers at the bar collected their enrolment papers, the ink still wet from the lord chief justice’s pen, and walked straight into supergrass trials or murders without the faintest notion of how to conduct even the most basic of careless driving pleas in the Petty Sessions.

Mickey and I popped our Crown Court cherries on a charge of fraud. The genesis of the charge lay in a brace of loyalist bomb attacks on pubs in known Catholic enclaves of the city; the first bomb went off at 4:03 p.m. in the Clifton Bar on the Cliftonville Road, a public house affectionately known to the locals as the Suicide Inn. The second went off at 4:09 p.m. in the Hole in the Wall on Baltic Avenue, just off the Antrim Road. Mickey submitted a criminal injury compensation claim to the Northern Ireland Office stating that he had been hurt in both attacks. The difficulty arose due to the fact that both bombs went off within minutes of one another, on the same day, several miles apart, and unless Mickey had hijacked a passing Chinook with the aid of his trusty ladder, there was no way he could’ve been in both locations when the attacks occurred. Mickey had submitted two separate application forms for the separate incidents and if both applications hadn’t fallen across the same desk of the same diligent civil servant, Mickey might have gotten away with it. So Mickey held the hands up and after a nervy, but thorough plea in mitigation delivered by yours truly, he walked out with two years’ probation and a fine. A result. Within a few years, several solicitors’ practises were sending me work and one even remarked, “If your client’s in trouble with the peelers, just phone The Mack. ”

Mickey’s current trouble was much more worrying. Murder was a serious business and, it has to be said, out of character for a career criminal like him. Although a diehard Republican, Mickey stayed out of the paramilitary ranks.

“The judge has decided that this will be a jury trial,” I said. “She’ll be pissed off because she bent over backward to give me the nod to six months on a plea in a Diplock court. If you turn that down, she’ll hammer you in sentencing if you’re convicted after a fight in front of a jury.”

My young instructing solicitor, Mr. O’Neill, nodded in agreement.

Mickey ran his hands over his thinning Cliftonville football shirt. Where once bright tattoos adorned his forearms, now only faded remnants clung to flaccid skin. The tattoo of a Celtic badge on his wrist now appeared to resemble a poorly realised quiche. Phlegm whistled through his breath, the result of a lifetime of smoking dog-ends and roll-ups.

“It’s like Noel fuckin’ Edmonds says, no deal,” replied Mickey.

Gathering my brief together in readiness to depart, I was about to remark that the Deal or No Deal presenter, Noel Edmonds, although undoubtedly wise when it came to opening mysterious boxes, might not in fact be the best person from whom to take counsel when one was faced with a murder charge, when I felt a jagged pain in my left hand. The sharp end of a brass fastener, which held my brief together, must’ve raked across my skin. I sucked hard on the cut at the base of my index finger and tasted metal, not knowing if it was from the brass or the blood.

Mr. O’Neill and I left the holding cells beneath Laganside Courts, the heavy cell door closing behind us with a resounding clang .

“We’d better go and tell the prosecutor and judge that the deal’s off. We’d better check who the—” began Mr. O’Neill, before I interrupted.

“Whoa, hang on there now. Let’s not kill ourselves here. We’ll get a coffee and a smoke first.”

* * *

Standing in the paved garden outside Laganside, I pondered my client’s predicament. The prosecution would put forward a strong circumstantial case: our man’s van was seen parked outside the victim’s flat a week before the murder and, worst of all, they had a DNA hit.

The murder of Willy Stoke had gone unsolved for over thirty years. The historical enquiries team reviewed the case some months previously; a single droplet of blood on a photograph, found near the body, which had never before been tested for DNA, revealed a precise match for Mickey. What had been a ropey circumstantial case thirty years before now looked strong. Back in 1982, just days after the body of Stoke had been found in his living room by his wife Betty, the Royal Ulster Constabulary had hauled Mickey in for questioning once they’d traced the van back to his address. At the time, the van and the droplet of blood, which was of the same type as Mickey’s, along with several hundred thousand others, simply wasn’t enough to sustain a conviction.

Unfortunately, Mickey initially denied ever knowing or meeting Willy. Mickey had lied to the police. He had known Stoke and admitted as much when he was interviewed again thirty years later. The DNA changed everything. Trying to explain how your blood came to be on a Polaroid found beside the body of a dead man was difficult enough. With Mickey’s false statement to the police, conviction looked inevitable.

As far as judges and juries are concerned, the innocent don’t lie and DNA is king.