Brian McGilloway - Gallows Lane

‘Shut the fuck up and turn that shit off the radio, son. Just drive the fucking car,’ the man beside him said in a tone that suggested this was not a topic for discussion. James did exactly as he was told and drove off in silence, his humiliation almost palpable.

He glanced in the rear-view mirror at the two men behind him, both of whom carried shotguns. One, he suspected, was Peter Webb, though he was acting as if he didn’t know him. Even when Jamie smiled in the mirror at him, the man simply stared back, his expression unreadable. He deduced that Webb didn’t want the others to know that Jamie knew who he was, for some reason, and so decided to act accordingly. Maybe it would make him look more professional — like one of the gang. The other back seat passenger he did not recognize, though he looked kind of pimply. The man’s flat, obsidian eyes held his gaze in the mirror for a second. ‘What the fuck are you looking at, gay boy?’ he sneered. ‘Keep your eyes on the fucking road.’

James Kerr did not speak again. As they crossed the border, passing the pine forest through which the road was cut, he felt the tension in the car rise. Finally, they reached the loading bay at the back of the post office in Castlederg. ‘Do I need a mask?’ he asked his nearside passenger.

‘Wouldn’t you look pretty stupid sitting in the car with a pair of tights on your head. Act normal and no one will even notice you.’ Then the three men got out and jogged up to the back door of the shop, pulling the stockings fully over their faces.

While he waited James tried not to look around him. The main car park was at the front, so there were no other cars around him. That didn’t mean one couldn’t arrive. And if the cops came, they’d be blocked in behind the shop. Sweat began to prickle on his back. What if the plan went wrong — what then? He felt a wave of nausea wash through him and only the fear of embarrassing himself in front of the three men prevented him from vomiting. He listened for gunshots but heard nothing. Perhaps it had gone wrong. Maybe it had been a setup. Maybe they were spilling their guts inside — blaming it all on him.

Then his three companions were back in the car, screaming at him to get a move on; he slammed his foot on the accelerator and the car revved madly but did not move. He panicked.

‘Get it in gear, you useless wanker,’ the man with the black eyes beside him spat.

He tried to explain himself as he worked with the gear stick; his arms and legs seeming to have lost the ability to coordinate movement. His passenger gripped the gear stick, crushing James’s hand under his own, and shunted the stick into first. James floored the accelerator a second time and the car lurched forward and sped out on to the road. It was only as James righted the car that he realized he hadn’t even checked to see if anything was coming before he pulled out. ‘Fuck,’ he thought; ‘that was close.’

As Castlederg receded in the rear-view mirror James felt the mood in the car lighten and he too began to relax. This was his part of the plan. The others had done their bit; he was in control now — they were counting on him. His new-found confidence encouraged him and he egged the motor on a bit, edging the dial towards seventy despite the narrowness of the unapproved road they were travelling. James sensed the man beside him tense a little, his hand edging almost instinctively to grip the dashboard in front of him, and James felt a wave of heat inside him. The man was scared. Who was a gay boy now?

‘Did it go all right?’ he heard himself ask, almost without a shake in his voice.

‘Fucking perfect, Jame’s, one of the men in the back said, his Northern accent clear. This had been the man James hadn’t recognized. Yet there was something familiar about him that he couldn’t put his finger on. It began to annoy him that the men had still not shown him their faces.

‘We didn’t have to fire a shot,’ the man continued and held aloft a black bin bag, visibly loaded with blocks of something.

‘How much did we get?’ James asked and he sensed the man beside him snorting derisively.

‘Plenty, James. Plenty.’

James did not speak again as they coasted through Clady. They were close to the border now; a few hundred yards away lay one thousand quid guaranteed — the RUC couldn’t follow them into the South even if they had been on their tails. James’s mind flicked to The Great Escape and Steve McQueen. The bike trick. Fucking weird the things you think of in a moment like this.

‘Stop along here,’ the man beside him said, and James glanced in the mirror, noticing that the others had loosened their seat belts. ‘We get out here.’

Kerr slowed, looked around him. They were on a final stretch of road before the border; each side of the road shadowed by tall narrow pine trees, their lower branches bare of needles. Maybe this was where they were to burn the car. His momentary panic subsided; the car had been stolen in the South, so it made sense to burn it in the North, well away from the Guards.

He pulled to a halt along the side of the road, the car on the edge of a ditch which dropped down to the forest floor ten feet beneath them. His passengers had got out of the car in the time it took him to cut the ignition and release his own seat belt. The one with the dark eyes had come round his side of the car and was opening his door for him. James leaned half out of the car, smiling. But the man did not return his smile. He raised his foot, using it to shove James back into the car. Then he lifted his shotgun, snapping a shell into place. Then everything exploded in colour, and sound, and shadow, and heat and burning. Through his own blood which stippled the windscreen James thought he saw a flock of crows take to the air soundlessly, their wings beating almost a reverberation of the blast.

The rest Costello had already told me. Village gossip concluded the story thus.

The car was discovered halfway down the ditch, in a wooded area just north of the border. Three of the gang had run into the South on foot and so were safely out of the jurisdiction of the RUC. The fourth — the driver, James Kerr — had been left in the car injured with a gunshot wound to the shoulder. At first the RUC officers who found him suspected that he had been shot in pursuance of the robbery. But soon they learned that no shots had been fired during the heist. The only logical, but confusing, conclusion was that the boy, Kerr, had been shot and left for dead by his own associates. It was presumed that they deliberately left him on the North of the border to keep An Garda out of the case. Relations between the two police forces — North and South — were famously frosty. Even if Kerr survived and fingered his associates under interview, they were fairly safe from extradition to the North. As it was, Kerr was unable to name anyone, either through misplaced loyalty, or because they hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him who they were. It looked as though, from the beginning, they had intended Kerr to take the blame, dead or alive. The RUC got their arrest, which meant they eased off pressure on the case. Many wondered why the gang had hired Kerr in the first place; the only reason seemed to be that he knew how to drag race cars around the borderlands better than anyone.

‘But that’s not wholly true,’ Bardwell said, as we walked along the River Foyle, the strengthening sun sparkling in shattered light off its surface. ‘When Jamie worked out that he’d been set up as a fall guy for the gang, he named Webb, loud and clear, to the RUC. Yet Webb was never arrested, never questioned; his name never appeared during the trial. It was as if the police didn’t believe Jamie, or didn’t want to believe him.’

‘Did he have any idea why?’