Divorcing Jack (9 page)

'No show.'

'YOU OKAY? YOU SOUND A BIT STRANGE.'

'Yeah, sure. Okay.' I laughed. Mouse, be in my shoes now.

'WHAT SORTA TROUBLE YOU IN, KID?'

'You don't wanna know. Mouse. But listen. I don't know what's going to happen in the next few days for me, but I don't think it's going to be very pleasant. I may need some support. You there for me?'

'OF COURSE.'

'Thanks, mate.'

I put the phone down. I sat down in front of the TV, watched a discussion programme without taking anything in. I was lost. Floundering. How long did I have before they caught up with me? Maybe only a couple of hours. Margaret's mum must have said to her husband where she was going. He'd be worried about her failure to return. But there'd been no phone call. Maybe she planned to stay the night with her after hearing about the attack on the house. Then he wouldn't be worried about her until the following day. Or maybe he'd already gone abroad. So they'd find the bodies. Launch a murder hunt. Who would the chief suspect be? The mad woman who'd smashed all the windows in the house. How long would it take to identify her? All the neighbours had watched her attack the house and then drive off. One was bound to have had the common sense to take down her number. So they wouldn't be long in getting her. She had a motive. But no murder weapon. Probably an alibi. Then they would come for me. My fingerprints were all over the house. A taxi to the house. Meeting a neighbour outside. Drinking a pint of milk. Feeding the dog and myself. How do you explain to the police, to anyone, how you behave after finding a lover murdered, and accidentally killing her mother?

I put the bloodstained shirt in the washing machine and turned it on. I went upstairs and sat under the shower. If not Patricia, who? And why? She hadn't mentioned anyone called Jack to me. She was surely too young to have been divorced from him. The only people she had mentioned were her mother and father and Pat Coogan, ex-lover and Paper Cowboy. Coogan was in prison, I'd killed her mother. That left her dad. Perhaps if I explained to him before the news broke . . . No, madness, madness, he would probably kill me himself. I was down shite street without a petrol bomb.

The door bell went. I pulled on a pair of trousers and a T-shirt. They clung uncomfortably to my damp heat. I walked slowly downstairs. My arms felt heavy as I went to open the door, like they were handcuffed already. It hadn't taken them long.

I opened the door.

Parker said: 'Morning, Mr Starkey, ready to meet the prime minister?'

Brinn stood with his back to us by a large bay window as we were shown into a musty book-lined room. Red Hall, built back in the twenties, had been acquired by the Alliance at a knock-down price from an aspiring newspaper tycoon who'd over-estimated an Ulster interest in free newspapers and beat a hasty retreat back to London, where they appreciated his kind of product. It wasn't quite a mansion, but it looked good and had fine gardens. The Alliance offices took up most of the space, but Brinn and his family occupied a suite of rooms on the first floor.

Security was lax. There were two men on the big rusty gates who checked our ID, but neither appeared to be armed. Down in the hall we'd been searched, but it was the haphazard patting of coats and trousers that you used to get on the way into shops in the city centre. The sort of body search you could sneak a bazooka through.

Brinn looked out at a concrete marina bristling with masts. Seagulls stood lazily in the sun. Without turning he said, 'You know they said they were going to landscape that marina when they built it. It looks like the Maginot line.'

He turned towards us and strode briskly across the room. He put out a hand to Parker, shook strongly.

'You'll be Parker,' he said. 'Good trip?'

'Fine, thank you, sir.'

He crossed to me.

'And you'll be Starkey.' A warm handshake. His paleness, his thinness were accentuated by the strong sunlight coming in from the window. 'I must say I enjoy reading your column. Very smart. Could probably do with a little humour in some of my speeches, eh? What do you think?'

'Never does any harm, Mr Brinn.'

'Mind you, I'm not entirely sure all of your humour would go down with the voters that well. What was it you said about this town last year? "The cosy gold coast of Northern Ireland where paramilitary organizations hold coffee mornings, with an Armalite in one hand and a packet of Jaffa Cakes in the other." That was it, wasn't it? I was very impressed with that. Summed up the place just about right, I thought. Used to be a great wee town this, great place for holidaymakers from Belfast, Mr Parker. Used to get on the train, be here in twenty minutes. Like Rockaway Beach in your New York, Mr Parker, eh? An Armalite in one hand, hah! Might be on something of a sticky wicket if I used that line, eh?'

I hemmed. He knew his stuff. Probably had as big a file on me as Parker had. Bigger. I wondered how warm his greeting would be if he knew what I'd been up to. Prime minister has tea with double murderer.

There were three chairs arranged in a semicircle in the centre of the room and we sat down, bathed in the sunlight, and I immediately felt sleepy.

Parker said: 'I'm glad you could spare the time to speak to me.' He produced a micro-recorder and set it on a flimsy table before him that looked to be on its last legs.

As if he could see what I was thinking, Brinn said: 'I refer to it as my decaffeinated coffee table.' He didn't smile, but dared us to and we accepted.

Parker said: 'A lot of people back in the States are very hopeful that a solution to the Irish question might be just around the corner.'

Brinn touched his chin for a moment, trained his eyes on Parker. 'I understand,' he said, 'that you used to be in peanut butter.'

Parker's mouth fell open. 'Excuse me?'

'I understand that before you became a journalist, you worked in a peanut butter factory.'

Parker looked shaken. His eyes darted to me for an instant. 'Why, yes, briefly.'

Brinn nodded. 'A peanut butter factory. A motor factory. Started writing for a union newspaper, picked up by a weekly newspaper outside New York, then moved to Boston.'

'Yes, I. . .'

Brinn abruptly stood up and crossed to the window again. With his back to us he said: 'You see, gentlemen, the value of accurate information, of detailed information. It is the secret of good journalism, and it is very certainly the secret of good politics. Information can be the making or breaking of a man, the making or breaking of a campaign.'

He lapsed into silence. Parker looked across at me. I shrugged. He shrugged back. We shrugged together.

Brinn turned towards us again. 'My point, gentlemen, is that we're both in the same business, one you don't need any qualifications for at all, except a little experience in life, so let's not beat around the bush.'

There was a wide smile now that seemed to breathe colour into his face and an animated look in his eyes. 'Let's dispense with all the usual crap. Let's start with your toughest questions, then we can relax and have some tea.'

Parker, giving a little appreciative nod, drew a small notebook from inside his jacket and began to rapidly flick through several pages of questions. Brinn had taken the initiative masterfully. He may have been talking nonsense, but it was masterful nonsense.

I said: 'Do you believe in capital punishment for murder?'

Parker gave me a look that said: butt out.

'For terrorists?' Asked Brinn.

'All murder is terrorism.'

'But not all terrorism is murder.'

'Are you playing with words or answering questions?'

'I'm playing with questions. Do you know what my party policy is on capital punishment?'

'Yes.'

'Well?'

'I'm not asking party policy. I'm asking your views.'

'But you're not suggesting my view could be more important than that of the party?'

'It could be. I believe your party's success is as much to do with you as its policies.'

'An interesting point of view.' He turned suddenly to Parker. 'Found your question yet?'

Parker's head snapped up. 'Exactly how much of your body is covered in burns, Mr Brinn?'

'Does it matter? Are you not more interested in mental scars?'

'Are you going to admit to mental scars?'

'I'd be a fool not to.'

'So what mental scars do you carry?'

'Well, I'm not very fond of fire.'

Brinn returned to his spot by the window. 'You know,' he said, 'I have a small boat out there. Sometimes I go and sit in it for hours at a time, just listening to the wind and the rattle of the masts. It's very relaxing. Maybe that's a mental scar. I never used to appreciate things like that. That bomb made me appreciate the finer things in life. And most all of them are free. The wind, the rain, the sea. With the exception of marina fees, of course.'

'You do much sailing?'

'Never left the harbour. I just like sitting in my boat. I'd drown myself for sure if I got as far as the waves.'

Most of the books that lined the walls were paperbacks, which was either a nice common touch or a piece of bad public relations. A lot of orange-spined Penguin Classics. A whole row of Hardy, complete Shakespeare, even a Bukow-ski. The bottom two rows near the door were children's books. Hopefully his son's.

'Are you going to talk to the terrorists?' Parker asked.

'No.'

'Simple as that?'

'Yes.'

'What if they renounce violence?'

'Then they won't be terrorists.'

Parker got him onto the importance of American economic aid. My eyes started to flicker. I'd heard it all before. Parker listened intently, his eyes darting nervously to the microcassette from time to time to check that the tape was still rolling. Several times my head nodded forward and I shook myself awake ... I tried sitting back, out of the sun, but it made no difference. It was as if the rays were chasing me round the limited circumference of my seat and instead of imbuing me with life they were sucking it out of me.

Brinn stopped in the middle of a sentence. 'Are you all right, Mr Starkey?'

I gulped and said: 'Uh, yeah. Sorry.' But even with that I could feel the bile in my throat and I swallowed hard. I shivered, shook my head. 'In fact, no, I don't feel all that good. Perhaps you could excuse me? This is your interview after all, Mr Parker. I'll go for a wander round the garden and get some fresh air, if you don't mind.'

I stood up. Brinn said, 'Not at all.'

Parker just glared at me.

As I closed the door behind me I heard Brinn say: 'He looks a bit under the weather, doesn't he? A hangover you think?'

One of the security men downstairs showed me to a small bathroom. I locked the door and bent forward until my head was in the pale-pink sink, the taps grinding into me just above the ears. I turned both taps on and enjoyed the cold water as it sprayed against my hair from either side, gradually growing hotter on the right until I had to jerk my head away to stop the burning.

I shook my head like a dog and looked into the speckled mirror above the sink. The droplets on the glass made my reflection appear out of focus. The way my life was. I pushed my sleeve across the mirror, but it made me look worse: fuzzy, indistinct, unidentifiable; the way I would have to be to escape, if it came to that. Where were they now, the police? Was Patricia being questioned somewhere, was she confessing it all? Patricia whom I had betrayed.

A phrase came back to me then, a phrase I had heard once and never forgotten. It had been another journalist, one of the first I'd worked with. A woman, maybe his wife, had accused him of having an alcohol problem. 'Yeah, two hands and only one mouth,' he'd replied. It had seemed hysterical at the time. Where would I be now if I'd not gone out drinking by myself after that stupid interview? Solo drinking, the sign of the alcoholic. Maybe they'd give me a reduced sentence for having a drink problem.

I dried my hair on a fading towel that might once have matched the pink of the bathroom suite and left the house by the front door. They didn't ask me about Parker on the way out.

I leant across the front of the car for a few minutes, wide awake now in the fresh sea air, and looked back up to Red Hall. I wondered if the Alliance appreciated the irony of having inherited a headquarters with a name like that. It was a party which espoused a milky socialism if you cared to read the small print of its manifesto. But its real message was reconciliation. It had failed to appreciate the historical lesson that if you try to kick with both feet you tend to fall over. I could see Brinn seated by the window, gesticulating animatedly, Parker's head nodding beside him.

A shrill scream twisted my head away from the hall. At first I could see nothing. There was a low wall about twenty yards in front of me that cut the garden in two, dividing the marching rows of flowers in bloom that shadowed the driveway to the front door from a rough lawn that was slightly overgrown and showed the crazy pattern you get from wind buffeting. The cry came again, sharper, and I realized it had come from the few feet of garden masked by the top of the wall.

Nobody else appeared to have heard it. I ran across to the wall and jumped on top of it. A boy, maybe four, was lying flat on his back, a figure bending over him.

I shouted, 'Hey!'

A woman looked round. 'What?' She said. The boy was laughing, screaming in mock pain. She had been tickling him. She was in her late thirties, maybe, small, not thin but not fat.

I said: 'Sorry, I thought...'

She smiled and said: 'No bother. We're only messing around.'

I turned to go back to the car, but the woman said: 'You're Dan Starkey, aren't you? He said you were coming. I enjoy the column.'

I turned back to her. I sat down on the wall and smiled down at the boy.

'Thanks,' I said.

It must have come out weakly. She said: 'Are you okay?'

'Sure.'

'Hangover?'

'Jesus

'I'm sorry.'

I bit back the flash of anger. It wasn't her fault. I pushed a smile where it didn't want to go. 'Nah, I'm sorry. If I write about alcohol all the time I can't really expect much more. No. Not a hangover. Flu, maybe.'