Ли Чайлд - Belfast Noir

Ten minutes after I sent the exclusive through to the news desk, I got a three-word reply back from Mike Mortimer: The job’s yours.

I double-punched the air and looked round at the dozen or so others in the room. My subordinates. My staff. My minions. I owned them now.

Not for long though.

My desk phone rang.

It was her. Shit. Shit. Shit. And I knew before she’d the first word out that she’d come home from London a day early.

“I got your note,” she said, choking back a scream. “Five years, and it comes to this. You dirty, low-down bastard. You couldn’t even tell me to my face.”

“I can’t talk now,” I whispered. “I’m in conference.”

“You’re scum.”

The phone line went dead and I felt a momentary pang of guilt.

Within seconds it rang again.

“Mr. King?”

“Yes.”

“Thomas Cook Travel here. Just to confirm we got you on that flight from Belfast International to New York at four thirty tomorrow morning. First class, one way, eight hundred pounds.”

“Perfect. Many thanks.”

I hung up and waved through the window wall to Mike Mortimer, who was clearly on the line to the higher-ups bumming about his upcoming Pulitzer. He gave me a big thumbs-up, then made a drinking gesture with his free hand. I shook my head no then flicked my eyebrows upward so he’d understand it was woman trouble. I was going to miss him. The gutless prat.

The desk phone rang again. The final call. Long distance this time.

“Mr. King?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Joanne here from St Kitt’s International Finance. We’ve processed that payment to your account. If you’d like to call into our Manhattan office on Fourth Avenue any day this week and sign the authority, you can make the withdrawal.”

“The full amount?”

“Well, we’d prefer you’d leave the account open . . .”

“Naturally—will do.”

“But there’s no problem with you taking out, say, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars—as long as you leave in the other ten.”

“Good to hear.”

“Oh, and bring your passport.”

“I will indeed.”

Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Plus the ten grand sterling wedding gift Sami had handed me in an envelope before I left the Berkshire. A lot of bread for a guy who three weeks ago had no ass in his trousers and no needle to sew them.

Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Just a few cents shy of one hundred and eighty thousand pounds. And no one knows I have it, and no one’s going to miss me when I’m gone.

Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. By rights, of course, it should have been a straight two hundred grand. But then I had to give Spotty John his ten percent finder’s fee. After all, a deal is a deal. The poor dead idiot. I told him not to buy that Merc.

PART IV

BRAVE NEW CITY

CORPSE FLOWERS

BY EOIN MCNAMEE

Ormeau Embankment

UTV News live shot, 5:23 p.m., 23/05/13

Press conference. CID say they are concerned about the whereabouts of Lorna Donnelly, age seventeen, from Lisburn. Last seen leaving her place of work on 13/05/13. The lead detective is DI Jim McCaul. McCaul is early forties, CID, short sandy hair. Lorna’s parents sit to either side of McCaul. Lorna’s mother is Kay. She keeps her eyes on the floor. As if she keeps some private grief under scrutiny. If she takes her eyes off it, it might get away from her. Lorna’s father is Norman. An older man. He is strongly built. There’s a steroid mass under his blue shirt. Tattoos on his arms.

McCaul holds up a photograph of Lorna. She is younger in the photograph. Her hair hangs about her face. She looks sullen. A teenage runaway. McCaul thinking about teenage runaways from the films, some backwoods couple on the lam leaving behind a trail of multiple homicides. Bound to each other by a darkness of their own making.

He shows a still taken from CCTV at Belfast Met where Lorna attends a part-time course. She’s looking at the camera in black-and-white. McCaul thinks that her face is desolate. He knows that it will haunt him. As though she had seen some horror. Not just seen. He remembers the words they used in chapel in the days when he went to chapel with his wife. Gazed upon. She looked as if she had gazed upon horror. Record this look is what she seems to be saying. Remember it.

Traffic cam #1, Shaftsbury Square, 9:48 p.m., 20/05/13

First breakthrough. Lorna standing at the cash machine on the corner of Botanic Avenue. An overexposed night scene, a lens flare from the top right-hand corner, people passing through the frame looking stealthy and achromatic, part of some grisly underclass. There’s always the feeling that you’re witnessing someone’s last moments. Even like now when you are witnessing someone’s last moments. The juddery rewind, the uneven tail speed.

CID say do every bar and club on the street. Take the CCTV footage. Spend fourteen-hour shifts watching every frame. Nobody’s going home until it is all seen.

Submariner Bar, 11:22 p.m., 20/05/13

Saturday-night CCTV. Security men at bar doors. Girls in heels and beehives. The camera not picking up the detail that gives the place its modish jolt. McCaul observes the ’50s look right down to the scratchy film stock from nostalgia shows. The girls are Doris Day–blonde beehive and falsies. Brassy and tottering with Smirnoff naggins in their handbags. Knowing tarts. Security in evening dress and black tie, hair slicked back so you’re thinking Kray Twins, Ronnie and Reggie. The night gathering in layers. Somebody’s going to get their smile widened with a razor. Somebody’s going to end up as motorway road fill.

Security bantering with the beehives. Lorna walks past them. Not belonging in the scene. Not belonging with the ’50s look. Lorna wearing a puffa jacket, jeans, and trainers. As soon as he sees it he knows that she is no longer alive. McCaul imagines the clothes scattered across waste ground. You see them in cellophane bags, evidence tagged. A livery for the modern dead.

Submariner barcam, 12:15 a.m., 21/05/13

The anti-pilferage camera’s focussed on the bargirl who has her back to the camera. But it picks up the end of the bar in longshot. Lorna’s leaning on the bar talking to someone just out of shot. She’s intent. Stabbing the Formica with her finger. A man’s hand rests on the bar. That’s all you can see. As she talks the hand doesn’t move. She keeps talking. You’re thinking amphetamine rush. The bartender’s a sallow girl, Latvian, product of some gritty Baltic seaport. Life in the places left behind after history has had its way. CID says bring her in.

Donegall Pass PSNI Station, interview suite intercam, 8:20 a.m., 25/05/13

The bartender is Michaela from Riga. Says she doesn’t recognise the screen grab of Lorna. Doesn’t remember who she was talking to. She looks bored. McCaul imagines a cheap flat by the docks. A boyfriend with a Saxon T-shirt and a minor criminal record.

CID comes into the room. CID says they’ve found a body in the river.

Ormeau Embankment, SOC cam, 9:32 a.m., 25/05/13

The water is brackish. The halogen light picking out weed fronds, the frame of a bicycle. McCaul standing at the edge of the water. The weed streams seaward on the ebb, the tidal flux. McCaul thinks of Lorna borne downstream toward the open sea and the channel markers and the Mew Island light.

Sony HVR-Z7U HDV divecam, 11:16 a.m., 25/05/13

The camera on a long exposure. She’s snagged on debris. Her hair flares out from her head. The diver’s gloved hand comes into shot as he reaches for her. She sways like some mythic Rhinemaiden. Her lips are slightly parted. The tide turns her face toward the camera. Her eyes are open and the diver is fixed for a moment by her sombre, violated gaze.