All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney Page B

button.
    ‘Are you all right?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Jesus Christ.’ He glanced round the cabin as if hoping to spot whatever had riled the crowd. ‘Right. Let’s get you out of this. Stick close to us. All right? We’ll take you the Uddingston road.’
    The window scrolled up.
    I put the car in gear and eased round. The squad car pulled off. The crowd closed behind me, raising its noise.
    On the motorway, once the cops had taken the exit and I merged back into the city-bound flow, I still felt shaken. The backs of my arms prickled with shame. The rocking of the car hadn’t bothered me. It was the slow drive down Crosskirk High Street, the hard laughter of the crowd. The street had seemed to go on for ever. At one point, when the cop car braked without warning, I stalled. The crowd hooted and cheered. I saw the camera phones, the hands cupped around shouting mouths. For a second I was lost, I no longer knew how to drive a car. Then I closed my eyes and opened them, talked myself through it: turn the key; find first gear. I followed the Land Rover’s bumper down that hostile mile, beneath loops of coloured bunting. It felt like an expulsion, the town purging my unclean presence. I wasn’t the victim but the culprit , the scapegoat, the treacherous Lundy.
    The faces stayed with me, on the drive back to Glasgow, and the smirking grins on Crosskirk High Street meshed with those in the photo of Lyons. These were Lyons’s people, this was his hinterland. This is where he preened and swaggered, tossing his stupid stick. Suddenly I was rooting in my pocket, yanking out my phone. I stopped in a lay-by and punched the number.
    ‘Norman Rix.’
    ‘I’ll need a week,’ I told him. ‘I’m going to Belfast.’ 

Book Two
     
     

Chapter Six
     
     
    What Gordon Orchardton had told me in his gleaming conservatory, when he leaned to switch the Dictaphone off and turned his back on the blue Garnock hills, was this. There was a time in the early eighties, Orchardton said, when Lyons was in Belfast every month. Things were happening then, and Lyons was close to the action. He had contacts. Names were never mentioned, but you got the idea that these were the high-ups. The top boys. Lyons never let on. This was the whole UVF thing, said Orchardton. You never spilled. The UDA were different, they sat in pubs and flapped their lips, talking large about things they’d never done. But the Blacknecks were tight, Blacknecks never talked. You never knew for certain who was in it and who wasn’t.
    But then something happened. There was a rift, a falling out, between Lyons and the guys on the other side. Lyons came back in a hurry. It was Guy Fawkes Night, 1983. Bangers and firecrackers snapping in the street, rockets whistling up in the dark and crackling in green-and-purple bursts. That’s how he remembers the date: Lyons was upset, agitated – he jumped at every bang and muffled crump, perched there on Orchardton’s sofa, his big hands clamped round a mug of toddy.
    ‘I’d never seen him like that,’ Orchardton told me. ‘Peter Lyons is a big strong man. But that night he was beat; he was a whipped dug. The guy was scared. He came straight to mine’s off the ferry. Still had his holdall. He was shaking like stink, really chittering. Like he couldnae get warm. “That’s me,” he kept saying. “I’m finished. I’m bye with it.” Shaking his head and staring into his mug: “Bye with it.” Blackneck to the last but.’ Orchardton smiled. ‘Wouldnae tell me what was wrong. But something had happened. Somebody’d put the frighteners on him. Somebody daunted him. There were no marks on him that I could see but I think they fucked him over.’ He looked at me and nodded. ‘Yeah. I think they gave him a seeing-to. And maybe something worse. Or else the threat of it. And that was him. He never crossed the water again.’
    I told all this to Rix, in his big corner office, the day after the Walk. ‘And that’s his theory?’ Rix