A Secret Worth Killing For

‘You tell me, Amy Riordan. Tout? Caught on the wrong side?’

‘Unlucky in love?’ she chipped in.

‘We need a name.’ Carne tensed. ‘We will investigate and we will find out what happened to him. Doesn’t matter who he is, or what company he kept. Or where it leads. Or who gets embarrassed. Or who ends up in a dock.’

‘That’s why I love you.’

She approached him, gave him a kiss on the cheek and put her arm round him. They enjoyed the trust of a relationship where physical contact could not impinge. Amy made no secret of her sexuality and Carne felt revulsion at older men salivating after women half their age. Instead he almost saw her as his consolation – the daughter he had never had.

He could feel a prickle in his eye; perhaps it was the life lost in the grave, the loneliness of the unpeopled hills, or the memory of loss. He needed to leave this place.

‘Over to you,’ he said. ‘Just find me a smoking gun.’

Instead of driving north to join the motorway, Carne turned east. He could not yet face the desultoriness of the weekend office and its few occupants counting up their overtime. He wanted air, space, and time. He headed towards his favourite sight: the sculpted shapes of the Mourne Mountains rising stealthily from the sea to form their elevated pattern, even on as grey a day as this. He drew up to the vantage point he had made his own, switched off the engine and sat as still as the mountains in front of him – a hiding place where memory could not be disturbed.

There was something about the interdependence of each summit that made every peak play its part in a communal enterprise of nature, a harmony that never failed to restore his inner peace. They seemed to be saying temporary matters, lives, people will come and go – but we will always be here watching the absurdities of your brief lives. Perhaps they would be saying that about the loss of just one life more than twenty years ago.

But then it struck him, unprompted by the word itself, that they would instead be mourning; and that, like each peak, all life was mutually dependent. To dismiss one was to dismiss all. Whatever the aloneness of his own life, he would not write off another human being for the sake of convenience.

Enough poetic melancholy. A young man had not walked into a muddy grave in an isolated field to lie down for a rest: someone, more than one person, had buried him. This many years on, he knew there’d be pressure to let it lie – politics, amnesties, leave the Troubles behind. But, to him, a killing was a killing, wherever and why ever it happened. The rest was mealy-mouthed excuse-making. He would never allow himself to compromise with murder.

Carne switched on the engine, accelerated hard and turned north. There was one man he needed to talk to. He pushed the number for Castlereagh switchboard and engaged the hands-free set.

‘Detective Sergeant Poots, please,’ he demanded. Carne tapped his thumb impatiently on the steering wheel as he cruised through the rolling hills of South Down. Thirty seconds later, the familiar gruff voice was on the line.

‘Yes, boss.’

‘Billy, your great age is finally going to come in useful. Early- ’90s disappearances – I want the almanac.’

‘Christ, I thought we’d left all that behind.’

‘To the contrary. We have a new body in a field without a name.’

‘Ah, a ghost is coming alive.’

‘Ghosts indeed,’ said Carne. ‘That’s your department, Billy. Let’s get resurrecting him.’

CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_c2461494-071c-53b9-aea7-8829fa6d38cb)

October 1993

It’s the same boy who was in the library two days ago, the one she gawped at, the one she’d never seen before. Only this time he’s got there first and taken her seat. Maire wonders if it’s coincidental or deliberate, then chides herself for being so soft. He’s probably not given her a thought. Nor should she give him one. That’s not what she’s here for, and not what she’s spent the last two years for.

This is the final year – the year she will propel herself on the future that will transport her from home, family, place, class. From the past. It’s the year she’ll get away. For twenty-six months – she counts them – she’s stuck by the rules she agreed with her brother and devoted herself like a nun. No distractions, no entanglements, head down. No staring.

But two days ago it was impossible to avoid the curl of brown hair falling so silkily on his collar, seeming to surface from nowhere. She’s buried in the close print of an American court’s judgement not to return an IRA killer of a British soldier because it’s a political act. It excites her. Law is not just dry argument or sterile litigation: it can bring political change, too.

She relaxes to let the moment of revelation sink in. Her eyes settle idly, unintended, twelve feet away on the other side of the study table and somehow lock onto him. He sits ramrod straight, head forced downwards with an awkward angularity, glued to the thickly bound volume on the rectangular oak slab, a statue of concentration. She reckons he’s in his mid-twenties, glinting brown hair falling in soft waves over his ears and neck – and that one curl in particular. His pencil is held tight between his teeth – good, white teeth. She can see part of one leg encased in weathered blue jeans crossed over the other. He still has a black leather jacket on – it outlines broad shoulders and a flat stomach. He reads on. She stares longer than she means before rebuking herself and forcing her eyes back to her book. He never looks up – not that she notices, anyway. Thank God!

Now he’s back.

She’s suddenly conscious of the beads of sweat on her flushed cheeks, invisible to others, a torrent to her. Outside it’s a balmy autumn’s day, the early mist clearing, the sun breaking through. As she skirted the river on her twenty-five-minute walk to the library, warmth seemed to rise even from the water itself, the trees alongside glowing islets of deep ochre. Right now, the perspiration is an embarrassment, which only seems to feed the sweat.

She’s hung her overcoat on the hooks outside. Within the overheated library, she raises her arm to remove her jumper. It sticks to her T-shirt, raising it above the waist of her jeans. She quickly pats down the shirt to cover herself. The jumper removed, she shakes her hair – and uses the movement as a cover to cast him the quickest of looks.

Where to sit? She can’t go too near him and places her books at the opposite end of the table. But, if she raises her eyes, she will be forced to look inwards, unable to escape him as there is nothing beyond except the unbreachable wood panelling of the library walls.

She sits down.

His eyes seem held by an invisible glue to the thickly bound legal volume. After a few minutes, she glimpses him running his hand through his hair and furrowing his brow. She feels him straining to understand the complexities he’s buried in. She trains her own eyes to her book.

A vibration in the table hints at his repeating the action. Twice. Each time, she holds her face down. Then, a furtive glance. Like two days before, he doesn’t respond. As if he hasn’t even seen her.

The minutes pass, she sticks in a frozen immobility. She takes a deep breath and lets out a sigh. No reaction. She feels her concentration wavering – unusual for her. She restrains herself for what must be a full hour, but then can’t help a peep at him. She senses him lifting his chin and turning towards her. It’s a tracer bullet, stunning her into dropping her head. Flopping from the executioner’s blow. Her cheeks burn – she must be colouring like a strawberry.

Shortly after midday, she closes her volume, restores it to a shelf and makes to go. She turns her back and has an instinct he’s watching her. She doesn’t look round to check. She half hopes he is. Avoiding, as always, the library canteen, she heads outside, up Dawson Street to her regular sandwich bar in a lane just off to the right. Arriving there, she tells herself to catch on.

Routine is restored. She orders her usual toasted cheese-andtomato sandwich with a pack of crisps, which she sits on a stool beside a long Formica shelf to eat. She will then get a coffee and head out for a quick breath of air and her one piece of shopping before returning to the library. She is unusually hungry as she licks stray strands of melted cheese from her chubby fingers and off her light-red, varnished nails.

He’s coming through the door.

‘Hey!’ he exclaims.

She tells herself not to jump or shriek, but the sound of her heart beating drowns the words they exchange. ‘Oh, hi.’

‘I didn’t know you used this place,’ he says.

She must stay cool. ‘I was gonna say the same to you.’

‘Ah well.’ He turns back, orders his own sandwich, then looks round at her again. ‘Fancy a coffee?’

‘I gotta go to the chemist. Then head back.’

‘Can it wait?’ She frowns. ‘Tell you what,’ he continues, ‘I’ll cancel my sandwich. Let me get the coffees and I’ll walk with you.’

‘OK.’ The word seems to have auto-popped out – he’s already ordering the coffees and she’s suddenly walking down the street beside him.

‘You’re a Brit!’ It’s almost a shriek – she can’t help herself.

‘Does it matter?’ he asks innocently.

‘Does it matter? Christ!’ She pauses. He shrugs his shoulders, as if to convey that it’s nothing to do with him.

‘Course it doesn’t fucking matter,’ she says. ‘Why would anyone think that?’

He feels an idiot. ‘Sorry, I—’

‘But you’re a bit of a posh Brit,’ she interrupts. ‘Whaddya gonna do ’bout that, then?’ She’s putting on the full accent and idiom of the working-class girl from the North. She doesn’t know why. But transcending both is the restored timbre of her voice. Pure and unfiltered, the clarity of mountain water.