Ли Чайлд - Belfast Noir

The jury, who up until then had only theory and conjecture, felt like they were getting the truth; I could see it, they were riveted to every word.

“Did you see her afterward?”

“No, she wouldn’t see me again. She blamed me, you see, for the photo and what happened after.”

“Why didn’t you tell this to the police?”

“I didn’t want to hurt my wife. Jesus, I’d put her through enough in our marriage. I just wanted the past to stay buried,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion.

“What happened to Betty Stoke?”

“She killed herself a year later; hung herself in her sister’s bathroom.”

Mickey broke down and the courtroom seemed to pause in the silence that only comes from the deafening truth. Then sound flooded the room: Mickey crying in the witness box and Agnes sobbing in the gallery.

The jury saw the pain. It had been a cruel thing to do to Agnes. I hadn’t given her any warning of this because I wanted the jury to see her reaction, her pain, and feel it themselves, making it real.

Mr. O’Neill handed round the last paper clipping, from 1983, just three sentences:

A Belfast woman committed suicide yesterday. She was found by her sister. Police are making no further enquiries.

The clippings added corroborative force to Mickey’s evidence. Mr. O’Neill and I had done all that we could. Fozzy did his best to catch Mickey in a lie during cross-examination, but his evidence remained consistent because it was the truth.

Closing speeches were short, and the jury took less than an hour to bring in a verdict of not guilty.

Mickey turned in the dock, desperately seeking out his wife, but Agnes had gone.

Within ten minutes of the verdict I put a pint of Guinness and a shot of whiskey in front of Mr. O’Neill and Mickey respectively, as we took our seats in Rumpole’s just a couple of hundred yards from the courthouse. The pub no longer bore that name, but for me it remained Rumpole’s. Its clientele consisted exclusively of hard men from the markets, lawyers, and judges, whom would all frequently join forces to throw the police out of the bar whenever they attempted to evacuate the area because of a bomb scare.

Mickey sniffed and supped his Powers, his head low despite the acquittal.

“I’ve lost her,” he said.

“She’ll come round, it was thirty years ago,” said Mr. O’Neill. Technically, he was correct, but Mickey and I both knew that for Agnes, the betrayal was fresh, public, and brutal.

Blood dripped onto my beer coaster. I’d opened the cut on my finger.

“If you keep fuckin’ pickin’ at that cut it’ll never heal,” said Mickey.

Glancing through the window, I sucked at the fresh blood. At that moment, snow began falling on the city, covering everything in a clean, white veil.

ROSIE GRANT’S FINGER

BY CLAIRE MCGOWAN

Titanic Quarter

As soon as she walked into my office, I knew I was in trouble.

Well, okay. I don’t have an office. Ma’s front room. But I knew it all the same. It’s not every day a good-looking older lady wants to see me, and she’s crying.

I tried to be professional. “How can I help you, madam?” I thought she’d like that. She was in her early forties, I’d say, and wearing more jewellery than a Turf Lodge wide boy after a ram-raid at Lunn’s.

“Are you the detective?”

“That’s right. Aloysius Carson, private eye.”

“It’s your ad in the phone book?”

“I doubt there’s another PI of the same name.”

“I was expecting someone older.”

“Most people are. Older. But lots are younger too.”

She looked round the front room/office, none too impressed. I’ve tried to get Ma to move the baby pictures but she isn’t keen. “I suppose you might know where young people go? Being one yourself.”

“I might,” I agreed. “We go all kinds of places. School. The bus. McDonald’s. Are you missing a young person?”

“This is my daughter Rosie,” she said. From her bag she took out a photo in a frame. That was a bit weird. Nowadays people normally show you something on their phone.

“Why’s it in a frame?”

She gave me a funny look. “I didn’t want to take it apart.”

“Can I hold onto it?”

“The frame’s silver.”

I put it down carefully on Ma’s coffee table. I often think that if I had a nice big desk I’d get a lot more respect from people. “Rosie’s missing?”

“We haven’t seen her for two days. It’s not like her.”

“Called the police?”

She shook her head. “We’re afraid she might be in some kind of trouble.”

“How old?”

“Eighteen.”

That was the same as me, but I didn’t say. I thought it might not inspire the necessary confidence in my abilities.

Rosie smiled out of the picture. It was a posey one, where she was leaning on her hand, but even so she was the kind of girl I would stare at all the way home on the bus and not be able to say a word to. Gavin would call her a grade-A hottie , but he watches too much American TV. She had that reddy sort of hair that Ma says is called strawberry blonde.

I took out my notepad and tried to look businesslike. “You said she might be in trouble?”

She made a face. “There’s a boyfriend.”

“There’s always a boyfriend,” I said wisely.

“Not with Rosie, this is the first. His name’s John Joe. John Joe Magee.”

And that name told me the situation was about to get a whole lot stickier.

* * *

You might ask yourself how I came by such a name as Aloysius Carson. The truth is, my parents had what we call a mixed marriage . He was a Prod, God rest him, she’s a Taig. Love across the barricades, that sort of thing. They still cared about that in the ’90s, decade of my illustrious birth. So I’m not really one or the other. Usually, people like me to be, and which one depends on who I’m taking to. So I could see the problem Mrs. Grant had right away. I could tell the family were of my father’s persuasion, shall we say, and Rosie’s fella wasn’t just a Taig, he was the nephew of super-Taig Nasher Magee. You know the name? If I showed you a picture of a top UVF man called Charlie Forster, all shot up like a colander, you’d remember. Nasher did that, while he was banged up inside the Maze. They still don’t know how.

So I did what I always do when there’s a difficult case: I promised Mrs. Grant I’d get right on it, and when she’d gone I ate a Pot Noodle. Would you not let me make you a sandwich? Ma always says, but I like it. The hard twisty bits getting soft and untangled. That’s what solving a case should be like.

The next thing I do is some meticulous in-depth research. As long as you persuade your ma to get broadband then you’re laughing. I was on Google in seconds and learned that Rosie Grant was the daughter of “successful tyre magnate and member of the Orange Order Harry Grant.” That explained the jewels dripping off the mother; they were loaded.

Then I looked up Nasher Magee. He’d been out of jail since the Good Friday Agreement and owned a pub off the Falls Road. John Joe was Nasher’s favourite nephew. Only son of his only brother, who’d been shot by an army patrol in 1993. He’d brought the boy up as his own, given him a stake in the business. I wondered how in the world someone like Rosie Grant, at her posh Protestant girls’ school, had even met a body like John Joe Magee.

I decided onsite research was best, so I told Ma I’d be back for dinner—shepherd’s pie—and I hopped on my bike. It’s got ten gears, so it’s pretty speedy.

The pub was called Wolfe Tone’s, even though oul’ Wolfe was actually a Protestant fella, which just goes to show nothing ever makes sense in this place. I got off and sidled round the walls. All the windows were barred, and from inside came the sound of a football match in Irish.