The Mac Curtain family were a rough lot. One of her brothers, Colm, was a Fianna Fáil member of the Dáil Éirann, which is the principal chamber of the Irish parliament; of course there’s nothing wrong with that, but at his sister’s wedding in St Maarten, Colm and I had almost come to blows when someone — most likely it was Orla herself — told him that before working for the London advertising agency where I’d met John, I’d been a junior officer in the British army. Colm had received this news with something less than the good humour that ought to have been required at his sister’s wedding. As I recalled it now, sprawled on the sofa with eyes half closed against the undulating room, the conversation had gone something like this:
‘So you’re Donald Irvine.’
‘That’s right,’ I said, extending my hand to shake his. ‘And you must be Orla’s brother, Colm. I’m pleased to meet you.’
Colm had stared at my hand as if it had been covered in the blood of Bobby Sands; but I still left it out in front of me, if only for the sake of Anglo-Irish relations. Not that I’m English, but you know what I mean.
‘I can’t shake your hand, Don,’ he said. ‘Not until I’ve found out if it’s true.’
‘If what’s true, Colm?’
‘If it’s true that you were a British soldier in Northern Ireland?’
I smiled a conciliatory smile and dropped my hand.
‘It was twenty-five years ago, Colm. It would be a real shame if the British Prime Minister and Gerry Adams can manage a handshake in Downing Street and we can’t do the same at your own sister’s wedding.’
‘Tony Blair didn’t murder any of my friends,’ said Colm. ‘And you still didn’t answer my question.’
‘It’s not a proper question for a day like this. We’re supposed to be celebrating, not opening old wounds. But for the record, I’ve never murdered anyone.’
‘If you say so. But it certainly doesn’t sound like you’re denying that you were a Brit soldier in Ireland.’
‘I’m not denying anything.’
‘Then it is true. That you were part of an occupying force in my country.’
‘Please, Colm,’ I said. ‘Let’s not fall out over this. If you want to pick a fight with me then do it later, preferably outside, and I’ll gladly accommodate you, all right? But not now, old son.’
‘No one is falling out over anything. I asked you a civil question, Mr Irvine. The least you can do is to give me a civil answer.’
‘You were hardly being civil when you refused to shake my hand, Colm.’ I held it out once more. ‘Look. There it is again. So, what do you say? Shall we let bygones be bygones, for John and Orla’s sake? After all this day is not about the past, it’s about the future.’
‘Bullshit.’
Colm looked at my hand for a moment and then smacked it away, which transformed my hand into a fist; the next second he had caught me neatly by the wrist and held the fist in front of his face, as if it had been a crucial and damning piece of evidence in a court of law.
‘Go ahead,’ he said, coolly. ‘Punch me. It’s what you want to do, isn’t it, soldier?’
‘I think it’s what you’d like me to do,’ I said pulling my wrist from his wiry fingers. ‘To prove a point to yourself, or perhaps to some of these other people. But you’re not going to do that, Colm. I won’t let you.’
By now several other guests had seen something of this incident and moved to separate us; but for some reason — I’m not sure how — Tadhg McGahern got it into his head that I had threatened his cousin, and it wasn’t long before I was being painted by the wedding’s Irish contingent as the old colonial villain of the piece. Later on, I tried to explain what had happened to Orla, but she wasn’t having any of it; naturally she sided with her chimp of a brother. Blood is thicker than water, although in Northern Ireland it’s more often just thick.
Now, as I watched the television footage of Orla’s body being lifted into a panelled forensic van I heard the reporter’s voice utter some nonsense about how following her tragic murder ‘tributes’ had been paid to ‘the beautiful actress’ by some of the people who worked with her. Then the doors of the van closed on Orla and she was driven swiftly away to her autopsy, which hardly bore thinking of with a woman as stunningly beautiful as she had been. That much was true at any rate. You could hardly blame John for marrying a woman like Orla — especially at his age; at the wedding John had been sixty-two and Orla just thirty-one. There were trophy wives and then there was Orla Mac Curtain, who had been nothing less than the FA Cup.
Chapter 2
The next morning I awoke feeling better than perhaps I deserved. I showered, put on a tracksuit, went for a run along the towpath, ate breakfast and tried to work up some enthusiasm for working on my novel. The day was cool and overcast, perfect conditions for standing at my desk; like Erasmus, Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill I prefer to stand while I’m writing; the human body is not best served by sitting on your arse all day. But whatever feelings of optimism I possessed about the day ahead lasted only until the moment when Peter Stakenborg telephoned.
‘The bastard’s only gone and written an article about John and us in today’s Daily Mail,’ he said.
‘Who has?’ I asked dimly.
‘Mike fucking Munns, that’s who. Two whole pages of crap that includes several less than choice remarks I made over lunch yesterday that I assumed were made in confidence. About Orla. About John. About his books.’
‘I should have realized he’d do something like this,’ I said. ‘Once a reptile always a reptile. You know, I wondered why he went to the lavatory so often. He must have been taking notes.’
‘Cunt. What amazes me is that he was sober enough to write a piece like that when he got home. Me, I was wasted. I spent the whole evening in front of the telly sleeping it off. Where does he get his stamina?’
‘That’s part of the old Fleet Street training. Even the worst of them can knock out three hundred words on almost any subject when they’re pissed. Some of those hacks write better drunk than when they’re sober.’
‘This is considerably more than three hundred words,’ said Peter. ‘More like nine hundred.’
‘Look, I’ll call you back when I’ve read it.’
‘Do it on my mobile, will you? I’ve got a caller display on that; there are several people I’m going to try to avoid for the rest of the day. Hereward for one. My describing a list of people who might have a reason to murder John himself isn’t likely to make me popular with him or John’s publisher. I was rather hoping VVL might read my own book with some favour. But there’s fat chance of that now, I should say.’
‘Maybe it’s not as bad as you think it is, Peter.’
‘Oh, it bloody is, Don. They’ve even printed pictures of us all at the atelier. I’ll kill that bastard the next time I see him. Read it and weep. All right. Catch you later.’
I put on some clothes and walked around the corner to a newsagent just off the High Street. Putney was a bottleneck of traffic, as always; and yet the river — wider than a ten-lane freeway and running from one end of the city to the other — was almost empty. To that extent London was like a body in which the veins and arteries were hopelessly clogged except for the aorta. I bought all of the newspapers and some cigarettes, which made nonsense of the run earlier on but there we are, I need the occasional ciggie when I’m working on a book. Orla’s murder and John’s disappearance was on the front pages of nearly all of them except the Financial Times and the Guardian. The Sun’s headline brought a half-smile to my lips: HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM. It’s not the half-naked girl on Page Three that sells that paper — not for many years; it’s the anonymous guys who write the headlines. As an anonymous writer myself I always had a soft spot for those guys.