The city still loved him and was soft on him. It prized even the husk of his charisma, and tolerated his explosive, sentimental qualities as similar to its own. It craned its ear in bars to hear his hoarse stories and stood him drinks, waiting for the day when it would wrap him up in legend and carry his coffin through the streets on a horse-drawn carriage. There’s a painted mural of him now in Sandy Row, wielding a cue in his flashy heyday. He died alone in his flat.

Higgins came home to Belfast when he was wrung out, looking for a last bit of comfort, but not everyone finds it there. Now that things are quieter, we tiptoe back to the old places where pain is tangled up with the past and unpick the threads and try to comb them into some kind of order. And there are certain people who can’t seem to get anything in order, because their threads are lost or too densely matted, because they still don’t know what happened to the people they loved, or who was to blame.

27

A month ago, in July, I was back in the shop, going over some of the stock orders with Marty. The pair of us were down in the cellar, surrounded by cardboard boxes of Tayto crisps, instant coffee and basmati rice. We had branched out into a small selection of groceries. Marty had a notion to bring in a line of Thai and Indian curry paste. He was grumbling that they weren’t anywhere near as good as doing the real thing yourself entirely from scratch, but that most people were too lazy. This was rich, I thought, coming from someone who once subsisted almost solely on nicotine, chips and diesel fumes. Still, he’s good that way, keeping an eye out for new stock.

As he was lugging the boxes, he suddenly paused and said:

‘Och, did I not tell you—’

‘Tell me what?’ I said.

He looked at me hesitantly for a second, as though not sure whether to proceed, wondering perhaps if he was breaking some unspoken pact about territory that wasn’t to be ventured into again.

‘They arrested McMullen.’

For a moment I thought ‘who?’ and then I remembered: the sleekit looking heavy that used to hang about with McGee’s dad. I’d always avoided him, with his half-smile and the creased T-shirt clinging to his belly like the rumpled skin on boiled milk. There was a look in his eyes that intimated that any form of closeness would end badly.

‘McMullen? Why’d they do that?’ I said.

He looked at me again.

‘Och get on with it, Marty,’ I said, exasperated.

‘They found a woman’s body in a disused quarry down near Kilkeel and it was McGee’s ma.’

I couldn’t take it all in at first.