Stuart Neville - The Ghosts of Belfast Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  TWELVE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  ELEVEN

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  NINE

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  SIX

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  FIVE

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  THREE

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  ONE

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright © 2009 by Stuart Neville

  All rights reserved.

  Published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  Harvill Secker Random House as The Twelve.

  Published in the United States in 2009 by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Neville, Stuart, 1972-

  The ghosts of Belfast / Stuart Neville.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56947-600-0

  eISBN : 97-8-156-94770-6

  1. Assassins—Fiction. 2. Northern Ireland—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6114.E943G47 2009

  823’.92—dc22

  2009011312

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Ellen Emerald Neville

  “The place that lacks its ghosts is a barren place.”

  —John Hewitt

  TWELVE

  1

  Maybe if he had one more drink they’d leave him alone. Gerry Fegan told himself that lie before every swallow. He chased the whiskey’s burn with a cool black mouthful of Guinness and placed the glass back on the table. Look up and they’ll be gone, he thought.

  No. They were still there, still staring. Twelve of them if he counted the baby in its mother’s arms.

  He was good and drunk now. When his stomach couldn’t hold any more he would let Tom the barman show him to the door, and the twelve would follow Fegan through the streets of Belfast, into his house, up his stairs, and into his bedroom. If he was lucky, and drunk enough, he might pass out before their screaming got too loud to bear. That was the only time they made a sound, when he was alone and on the edge of sleep. When the baby started crying, that was the worst of it.

  Fegan raised the empty glass to get Tom’s attention.

  “Haven’t you had enough, Gerry?” Tom asked. “Is it not home time yet? Everyone’s gone.”

  “One more,” Fegan said, trying not to slur. He knew Tom would not refuse. Fegan was still a respected man in West Belfast, despite the drink.

  Sure enough, Tom sighed and raised a glass to the optic. He brought the whiskey over and counted change from the stained tabletop. The gummy film of old beer and grime sucked at his shoes as he walked away.

  Fegan held the glass up and made a toast to his twelve companions. One of the five soldiers among them smiled and nodded in return. The rest just stared.

  “Fuck you,” Fegan said. “Fuck the lot of you.”

  None of the twelve reacted, but Tom looked back over his shoulder. He shook his head and continued walking to the bar.

  Fegan looked at each of his companions in turn. Of the five soldiers three were Brits and two were Ulster Defence Regiment. Another of the followers was a cop, his Royal Ulster Constabulary uniform neat and stiff, and two more were Loyalists, both Ulster Freedom Fighters. The remaining four were civilians who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He remembered doing all of them, but it was the civilians whose memories screamed the loudest.

  There was the butcher with his round face and bloody apron. Fegan had dropped the package in his shop and held the door for the woman and her baby as she wheeled the pram in. They’d smiled at each other. He’d felt the heat of the blast as he jumped into the already moving car, the blast that should have come five minutes after they’d cleared the place.

  The other was the boy. Fegan still remembered the look in his eyes when he saw the pistol. Now the boy sat across the table, those same eyes boring into him.

  Fegan couldn’t hold his gaze, so he turned his eyes downward. Tears pooled on the tabletop. He brought his fingers to the hollows of his face and realised he’d been weeping.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  He wiped the table with his sleeve and sniffed back the tears. The pub’s stale air clung to the back of his throat, as thick as the dun-colored paint on the walls. He scolded himself. He neither needed nor deserved pity, least of all his own. Weaker men than him could live with what they’d done. He could do the same.

  A hand on his shoulder startled him.

  “Time you were going, Gerry,” Michael McKenna said.

  Tom slipped into the storeroom behind the bar. McKenna paid him to be discreet, to see and hear nothing.

  Fegan knew the politician would come looking for him. He was smartly dressed in a jacket and trousers, and his fine-framed designer glasses gave him the appearance of an educated man. A far cry from the teenager Fegan had run the streets with thirty years ago. Wealth looked good on him.

  “I’m just finishing,” Fegan said.

  “Well, drink up and I’ll run you home.” McKenna smiled down at him, his teeth white and even. He’d had them fixed so he could look presentable for the cameras. The party leadership had insisted on it before they gave him the nomination for his seat in the Assembly. At one time, not so long past, it had been against party policy to take a seat at Stormont. But times change, even if people don’t.

  “I’ll walk,” Fegan said. “It’s only a couple of minutes.”

  “It’s no trouble,” McKenna said. “Besides, I wanted a word.”

  Fegan nodded and took another mouthful of stout. He held it on his tongue when he noticed the boy had risen from his place on the other side of the table. It took a moment to find him, shirtless and skinny as the day he died, creeping up behind McKenna.

  The boy pointed at the politician’s head. He mimed firing, his hand thrown upwards by the recoil. His mouth made a plosive movement, but no sound came.

  Fegan swallowed the Guinness and stared at the boy. Something stirred in his mind, one memory trying to find another. The chill at h
is center pulsed with his heartbeat.

  “Do you remember that kid?” he asked.

  “Don’t, Gerry.” McKenna’s voice carried a warning.

  “I met his mother today. I was in the graveyard and she came up to me.”

  “I know you did,” McKenna said, taking the glass from Fegan’s fingers.

  “She said she knew who I was. What I’d done. She said—”

  “Gerry, I don’t want to know what she said. I’m more curious about what you said to her. That’s what we need to talk about. But not here.” McKenna squeezed Fegan’s shoulder. “Come on, now.”

  “He hadn’t done anything. Not really. He didn’t tell the cops anything they didn’t know already. He didn’t deserve that. Jesus, he was seventeen. We didn’t have to—”

  One hard hand gripped Fegan’s face, the other his thinning hair, and the animal inside McKenna showed itself. “Shut your fucking mouth,” he hissed. “Remember who you’re talking to.”

  Fegan remembered only too well. As he looked into those fierce blue eyes he remembered every detail. This was the face he knew, not the one on television, but the face that burned with white-hot pleasure as McKenna set about the boy with a claw hammer, the face that was dotted with red when he handed Fegan the .22 pistol to finish it.

  Fegan gripped McKenna’s wrists and prised his hands away. He stamped on his own anger, quashed it.

  The smile returned to McKenna’s lips as he pulled his hands away from Fegan’s, but went no further. “Come on,” he said. “My car’s outside. I’ll run you home.”

  The twelve followed them out to the street, the boy sticking close to McKenna. McKenna had climbed high in the party hierarchy, but not so high he needed an escort to guard him. Even so, Fegan knew the Mercedes gleaming in the orange street lights was armored, both bullet- and bomb-proof. McKenna probably felt safe as he lowered himself into the driver’s seat.

  “Big day today,” McKenna said as he pulled the car away from the curb, leaving the followers staring after them. “Sorting the offices up at Stormont, my own desk and everything. Who’d have thought it, eh? The likes of us up on the hill. I wangled a secretary’s job for the wife. The Brits are throwing so much money at this I almost feel bad taking it off them. Almost.”

  McKenna flashed Fegan a smile. He didn’t return it.

  Fegan tried to avoid seeing or reading the news as much as he could, but the last two months had been a hurricane of change. Just five months ago, as one year turned to the next, they’d said it was hopeless; the political process was beyond repair. Then mountains moved, deals were struck, another election came and went, while the shadows gathered closer to Fegan. And more often than before, those shadows turned to faces and bodies and arms and legs. Now they were a constant, and he couldn’t remember when he last slept without first drowning them in whiskey.

  They’d been with him since his last weeks in the Maze prison, a little over seven years ago. He’d just been given his release date, printed on a sheet of paper in a sealed envelope, and his mouth was dry when he opened it. The politicians on the outside had bartered for his freedom, along with hundreds more men and women. They called people like him political prisoners. Not murderers or thieves, not extortionists or blackmailers. Not criminals of any kind, just victims of circumstance. The followers were there when Fegan looked up from the letter, watching.

  He told one of the prison psychologists about it. Dr. Brady said it was guilt. A manifestation, he called it. Fegan wondered why people seldom called things by their real names.

  McKenna pulled the Mercedes into the curb outside Fegan’s small terraced house on Calcutta Street. It stood shoulder to shoulder with two dozen identical red-brick boxes, drab and neat. The followers waited on the pavement.

  “Can I come in for a second?” McKenna’s smile sparkled in the car’s interior lighting, and kind lines arced out from around his eyes. “Better to talk inside, eh?”

  Fegan shrugged and climbed out.

  The twelve parted to let him approach his door. He unlocked it and went inside, McKenna following, the twelve slipping in between. Fegan headed straight for the sideboard where a bottle of Jameson’s and a jug of water awaited him. He showed McKenna the bottle.

  “No, thanks,” McKenna said. “Maybe you shouldn’t, either.” Fegan ignored him, pouring two fingers of whiskey into a glass and the same of water. He took a deep swallow and extended his hand towards a chair.

  “No, I’m all right,” McKenna said. His hair was well barbered, his skin tanned and smooth, a scar beneath his left eye the only remainder of his old self.

  The twelve milled around the sparsely furnished room, merging with and diverging from the shadows, studying each man intently. The boy lingered by McKenna’s side as the politician went to the unstrung guitar propped in the corner. He picked it up and turned it in the light.

  “Since when did you play guitar?” McKenna asked.

  “I don’t,” Fegan said. “Put it down.”

  McKenna read the label inside the sound hole. “Martin. Looks old. What’s it doing here?”

  “It belonged to a friend of mine. I’m restoring it,” Fegan said. “Put it down.”

  “What friend?”

  “Just someone I knew inside. Please. Put it down.”

  McKenna set it back in the corner. “It’s good to have friends, Gerry. You should value them. Listen to them.”

  “What’d you want to talk about?” Fegan lowered himself into a chair.

  McKenna nodded at the drink in Fegan’s hand. “About that, for one thing. It’s got to stop, Gerry.”

  Fegan held the politician’s eyes as he drained the glass.

  “People round here look up to you. You’re a Republican hero. The young fellas need a role model, someone they can respect.”

  “Respect? What are you talking about?” Fegan put the glass on the coffee table. The chill of condensation clung to his palm and he let his hands slide together, working the moisture over his knuckles and between his fingers. “There’s no respecting what I’ve done.”

  McKenna’s face flushed with anger. “You did your time. You were a political prisoner for twelve years. A dozen years of your life given up for the cause. Any Republican should respect that.” His expression softened. “But you’re pissing it away, Gerry. People are starting to notice. Every night you’re at the bar, drunk off your face, talking to yourself.”

  “I’m not talking to myself.” Fegan went to point at the followers, but thought better of it.

  “Then who are you talking to?” McKenna’s voice wavered with an exasperated laugh.

  “The people I killed. The people we killed.”

  “Watch your mouth, Gerry. I never killed anybody.”

  Fegan met McKenna’s blue eyes. “No, the likes of you and McGinty were always too smart to do it yourselves. You used mugs like me instead.”

  McKenna folded his arms across his barrel chest. “Nobody’s hands are clean.”

  “What else?” Fegan asked. “You said ‘for one thing’. What else do you want?”

  McKenna circled the room, the boy following, and Fegan had to twist in his chair to keep him in sight. “I need to know what you told that woman,” McKenna said.

  “Nothing,” Fegan said. “I’m not much of a talker. You know that.”

  “No, you’re not. But a reliable source tells me the cops are going to start digging up the bogs near Dungannon in the next few days. Round about where we buried that boy. His mother told them where to look.” McKenna moved to the center of the room and loomed over Fegan. “Now, how did she know that, Gerry?”

  “Does it matter?” Fegan asked. “Jesus, there’ll be nothing left of him. It’s been more than twenty years.”

  “It matters,” McKenna said. “If you open your mouth, you’re a tout. And you know what happens to touts.”

  Fegan tightened his fingers on the chair’s armrests.

  McKenna leaned down, his hands on his thighs. “Why, Gerry? W
hy’d you tell her? What good did you think it’d do?”

  Fegan searched for a lie, anything, but found nothing. “I thought maybe he’d leave me alone,” he said.

  “What?” McKenna straightened.

  “I thought he’d go,” Fegan said. He looked at the boy aiming his fingers at McKenna’s head. “I thought he’d leave me alone. Give me some peace.”

  McKenna took a step back. “Who? The boy?”

  “But that wasn’t what he wanted.”