Ли Чайлд - Belfast Noir

“Jesus,” Laura said, whistling softly, sitting back now, regarding the corpse with a little more respect.

“Which is probably why he shot himself in the face. Having to carry all that shit around with him ever since.”

“And he doesn’t want a wake?”

Healy shook his head. “He wanted to be prepped and cremated. That was it. I want none of the shit, he said.”

“I understand that,” Mark said. “Once you know the tricks of the trade, it takes away the magic.”

“You don’t know the tricks of the trade yet; you used far too much fluid on the last one,” Healy said. “In five hundred years’ time, if they dig him up, he’ll still look like he did last night.”

“Like Lenin,” Mark offered. “Except without the ear falling off.”

“Did John Lennon’s ear fall off?” Laura asked, pausing mid–lipstick application. “That’s sad too, considering he wrote such beautiful songs.”

Healy shook his head as Mark, behind his book again, struggled to hide the shaking of his shoulders as he laughed.

“I don’t think Scarlet Passion was Mrs. Owens’s colour, Lar,” Healy said. “Not since the 1940s, anyway.”

* * *

The following morning, just before dawn, Healy was back at the office, getting the hearse ready for the drive south. Laura had made him a packed lunch, as if he was going on a school outing. She’d filled a Tupperware box with the remains of the previous evening’s lasagne. Healy hadn’t had the heart to point out that, while the hearse contained many things, a microwave oven was not one of them.

The drive down the M1 was uneventful. The road was busy, lorries and buses spraying the ground water in their wake in iridescent arcs. The address that Mark Kearney had handed him the previous day listed the coffin as being at a house on the outskirts of town. When Healy finally found it, after being sent to the same field twice by his sat nav, a small man, greying brown hair, glasses, came to the door.

“I’m Healy.”

“Congratulations. What do you want?”

“Big John sent me to collect remains.”

“Did he now?” The man straightened up, pulling himself to his full height. “Leave me the keys. You can go and sit in the living room. We’ll be half an hour.”

Healy handed over the keys as instructed, then turned back to the car. “You wouldn’t have a microwave in there, by any chance, would you?”

* * *

Twenty-five minutes, and one lukewarm lasagne later, he was back on the road. The coffin, polished pine, had already been loaded into the back of the car. A wreath, saying Granda , had been laid alongside it, showing through the rear windows. Healy noticed the dirt on the plastic flowers, figured they’d lifted it off someone’s grave to make their ruse look more realistic.

As he got into the car, something struck him. He sat in silence, afraid to turn on the ignition, absurdly, he realised, listening for ticking.

“What’s wrong?” the small man asked, blinking furiously behind his glasses.

“It’s not going to explode, is it?” Healy asked. “If my girlfriend phones me? It’s not going to kill me?”

“That’ll not be a problem,” the man said.

“What is in there?” Healy asked conspiratorially.

“You can use your phone,” the man replied. “Except to phone the cops. That call will kill you. Eventually.”

The first stretch of the journey, he thought he was going to be sick. He found that, as he drove, his gaze flicked repeatedly to the rearview mirror, to see if he was being followed, either by the cops or by the people who’d loaded the coffin into the hearse. Every pothole in the road seemed to shake the car violently, every sharp bend brought back memories of stories he’d heard in school about mercury tilt switches. He remembered Tommy Hasson stealing thermometers from the school’s chemistry lab, saying he would sell them for the mercury. Tommy ended up blowing the fingers off his right hand in an accident involving fireworks and a hammer. He was thirteen at the time. Tommy Five Fingers they called him after that. Though never to his face, of course.

Healy was back on the easy bit of the M1 within twenty minutes. This return leg was quieter than the journey down, little traffic heading north in the middle of the morning. As a result, when the marked garda car pulled out from the lay-by and merged into the traffic behind him, Healy noticed it almost instantly. He told himself that they’d picked someone up speeding, but they seemed in no hurry to catch up with anyone. He knew it wasn’t him; if anything, he was going too slowly, keeping on the inside lane, overtaking only when absolutely necessary. His concern was twofold: not only did he not want to be stopped for a traffic violation, but he was also still not convinced by the small man’s assertion that whatever cargo he was carrying wasn’t going to blow up.

The garda car maintained its distance behind him. He wasn’t sure if he was being followed or not. He reckoned if they were actually tailing him, they’d have been more surreptitious about it, maybe used an unmarked car. Instead, they had quite literally announced their presence, sitting in the Garda Only bay along the side of the road, driving behind him now in a white car with fluorescent yellow stripes up the side.

For a few moments, he toyed with the idea of deliberately speeding, hoping they’d pull him over and search the coffin. Whatever he was carrying wouldn’t make it to the streets of Belfast and he’d be able to say it’d not been his fault. But he realised that he didn’t even know the name of the people who had given him the coffin, only the name of the supposed remains inside, Martin Logue. Plus, if they asked who’d told him to collect it, he’d have to grass on John Kearney. He’d never survive that. His best bet would be to get clear of the cops and abandon the hearse in a field somewhere. Claim he ran out of petrol. Except, if they were following him, they’d be able to check. He thought he’d been clever, filling up the tank the previous day in preparation for the run; now he cursed his foresight for having deprived him of an excuse to dump whatever it was he was bringing north.

He ran through the alternatives in his mind. Explosives, obviously, but the glasses man seemed to have discounted that. Drugs? Big John did sell some to supplement his income. Guns? Again, a possibility. Maybe there actually was a dead person in the coffin. Or a living one? A kidnap victim?

“Hello!” Healy shouted over his shoulder. “Is there anyone in there?”

Silence.

Maybe they were gagged.

“Tap on the wood if you can hear me,” Healy said, then waited, aware that if someone actually did tap on the wood, he’d probably shit himself with fear.

Silence.

The car was still behind him. In fact, it stayed behind him for almost the entire way to the border, before finally overtaking all of the traffic and speeding ahead of him, cutting off the motorway at the next junction.

He allowed himself to relax a little, turning on the radio, hesitating briefly as he did so, lest the radio waves detonate whatever was in the coffin. If, of course, whatever was in the coffin was detonable.

He crossed the border just south of Newry, instantly on the lookout for any PSNI vehicles that might have been waiting for him, perhaps alerted by the gardai. In the end, it was not until he was passing the sign for Cloughogue Cemetery that he spotted them.

The car was a silver Vauxhall, unmarked in contrast with the garda car, but unmistakable nonetheless due, mostly, to the dark green tint of the bulletproof glass on the windows of the vehicle. He’d no idea how long they’d been behind him. He’d checked at the border, but hadn’t spotted them.