Terry Brankin Has a Gun. Malachi O'Doherty
Terry was walking along Bedford Street, past the Grand Central Hotel where the building’s height, or something, magnified the wind.
‘Can you talk?’ said Ig, expecting Terry still to know his voice.
‘Have you not been shot yet?’ said Terry, lapsing into the old humour.
Ig liked that too and said, ‘The peelers are coming to see you – the Cold Case crowd.’
‘Which cold case have they in mind?’
Ig was one of the few people on earth who knew how many old cases Terry could help with if he was minded to.
‘Magheraloy.’
They were silent together for a moment.
‘You’ll keep it tight, won’t you?’ said Ig.
‘Why Magheraloy?’
‘That journalist mate of yours, Hardwick, did a big doc on it for Channel Four. Have you not seen it? That’s what’s got people demanding something be done. I hope you didn’t tell him too much.’
Terry watched the lunchtime crowd moving round him. Familiar faces from the local BBC, solicitors and shop girls, weary men in suits drudging towards retirement, snappy young people brisk with ambition and purpose, and he wondered which of these he might have been himself if he had not been the man he was, what stories they carried that were as grim as his own. He didn’t bother to wonder how Ig knew what the police were planning. He’d learnt not to ask.
The Cold Case Review team was a branch established for political reasons to review the files on paramilitary killings. They were never going to just let the bloody Troubles be over. Still, it was work for him too. Solicitors were making good money out of unfinished business. An amnesty for old killers would not put him out of work, but it would shift the balance towards more domestic stuff: divorces and conveyancing, claims against the Housing Executive for people who’d fallen down steps. And he got to fight some of these old murder cases with the confidence that his clients wouldn’t suffer too much if he lost. If the organisation they had been part of was on ceasefire and the offence dated from before the peace deal, they only did two years. That was a concession in the big Agreement.
When he got back to his office, he nodded to his receptionist without breaking his stride. At his desk, he eyed some files disconsolately then braced himself and picked up the phone to call Nools.
‘My past is catching up with me.’
‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being.’
So she was not alone. He put down the phone. He’d call her again later. Terry then searched his computer for news of the most recent political developments, to see if there was any suggestion why the police were concentrating now on the Magheraloy bomb. Over 3,000 people had died in the Troubles. The Magheraloy bomb accounted for just three of them: 0.1 per cent.
He scanned the morning headlines. It all looked familiar. The parties were agonising over education reform and hospital closures. A unionist had launched a tirade against the Republican Party leader, Dominic McGrath, saying he had the blood of innocents on his hands and that he was the spawn of Satan. It was the sort of thing somebody or other said about Dom every week in life. He was surely used to it. Another dour unionist, trying to make a name for himself, challenged McGrath to name republican dissidents who had been disrupting traffic with bomb hoaxes and petrol bombing Orange halls. ‘You know these men; you trained them.’
Terry knew it was many years since old Dom had trained anybody. He had known McGrath as well as anyone ever had – if anyone ever had. Then he dipped into the Northern Ireland blogs and found a comment on the Cold Case Review. It read: ‘Let’s face it – the last thing anyone in power wants is another political crisis, so even if the Cold Case team was to find McGrath’s DNA or prints on a gun that killed a peeler twenty years ago, they would do nothing about it.’
He couldn’t resist typing below it: ‘I don’t know. The deal’s done so Dom is expendable now. Letting him go down now would do less harm than a cover-up being exposed.’ Then he changed his mind about posting it. He’d be tempting fate. By the same logic he was even more expendable himself.
***
Kathleen tidied the living room, vacuumed the carpet, pushed armchairs aside to check under them, dusted the mantelpiece and wondered if they really had to have a gauche piece of prison art on it: a Celtic harp made with matchsticks and signed ‘Boomer’, whoever the fuck Boomer was. She cleared the fireplace and reset it, picked up newspapers and magazines, and wondered how much a policeman would tell about them by spotting Mojo, The Literary Review and Modern Woman. She wanted to be finished before Terry got home because she knew it would annoy him that she was tidying up for any visitor, let alone for a peeler.
She moved on to the kitchen. She lifted up the hinged top of the hob and wiped round the hotplates, took out the little metal dishes that gathered grease, wiped them, then replaced the tinfoil she kept padded under them to be doubly sure. There was a smell from something. She’d find it. She worried less when she kept working, scrubbing as vigorously as if she was angry, trying not to be angry with Terry.
***
Terry had just one meeting that afternoon, with the loathsome Benny Curtis. Benny was an Ulster loyalist who worked to a simple theory: his men would have a better chance of getting off in court if they were represented by Catholic lawyers like Terry Brankin. It didn’t always work. Benny wanted to talk about that.
A tall, lean man in a silky grey suit, Benny didn’t look like a thug. He hadn’t the muscles of the hard men who pumped iron in the gyms nor had he the bulbous gut of the men in pubs and drinking clubs who mostly slabbered and bragged but could be put to use for pickets and mob violence. He was more like a salesman, with a front of plastic charm. Terry had seen his type in other paramilitary groups. McGrath was one of them. Benny walked into the office, disregarding the receptionist. Men like Benny didn’t ask permission to talk to anybody.
‘Do sit down,’ said Terry, confident that the loyalist would recognise the sarcasm in his tone, not that you could rely on subtlety with men who were used to solving problems by the most direct route.
‘That case was a fuckin’ waste of money. I’m wondering whose side you’re on.’
‘I’m a lawyer. I’m on the side of whoever is paying me.’ Then Terry played for time by fetching the case folder from his drawer and poring over its loose pages.
‘It was open and shut,’ said Benny. ‘We opened it and they shut it.’
‘He wasn’t going to get off.’ Terry thought that had been obvious from the start and was tired saying it.
‘Because some half-blind Fenian bitch swears it was him she saw in the dark across a street and with a mask on?’
‘She used to babysit him. It’s a killer detail.’
‘It was your job to make her look stupid.’
‘The judge in the end believed her because he couldn’t accept that a woman would send down a man she had nursed on her lap if she wasn’t sure,’ Terry said.
‘That’s precious little he knows about human nature then, isn’t it?’
Despite this outburst, Terry trusted that Curtis would moan then make no real difficulty for him. They had sat across from each other at this desk many times and though they had never discussed their own backgrounds in detail, each knew that the other understood the paramilitary world, and had killed. One good reason to be wary of detail was that they might find out things about each other they would be more comfortable not knowing.
Terry said, ‘Are you guys getting any grief from the Cold Case crowd?’
‘Fuck’s sake, don’t talk to me. It’s worse than having nits.’
‘So how do you deal with them?’
‘Mostly we just tell them to fuck off. Otherwise you’d be getting a lot more business, wouldn’t