Resurrection Man Read Free

of a crime, in particular the ornate details of route and destination. He studied the type of weapon used, barrel rifling and trajectory. The pathologist’s report with photographs of entry and exit wounds was handed round the court and he followed its intimate passage from hand to hand.
    Lastly there was the testimony of witnesses: I just seen these blue flashes in his hand and the deceased just kind of sat down, I can’t explain it. The testimony of detectives from Delta or Charlie division. The kind of look they put on for the judge made Victor laugh. Like, I’m haunted by dates of civil unrest, your honour.
    *
    Victor could have any woman he wanted. Click his fingers. But the women only lasted one or two nights. They’d look into his face when they were alone with him and get frightened. Looking into Victor’s blue eyes when you were fucking was like watching a televised account of your own death, a disconsolate epic.
    He reckoned that Heather was the only woman who ever understood the depth of his ambition. He would always go back to her during the good years. Besides, Victor liked a woman with meat, pockets of flesh you could put your hand into. Towards the end she’d drink Bacardi and cry like hell itself. But at the start it was all Jesus, Victor, I could eat you with salt. Her big slow voice. Come on, you big fucker. I’m dying for a fuck. Take you home and fuck you bendy.
    *
    Dorcas said that Victor’s favourite programme was Harry Worth. He’d split his sides laughing, she thought he’d burst a vessel. He was always crackers about cars also. His first was a Mk II Escort with wide wheels and this hand you stuck in the back window that waved hello. Big Ivan thought that was the cat’s pyjamas. Him and Big Ivan would go down to the car park on the Annadale Embankment, do handbrakes in the gravel.
    *
    Before he formed his own unit Victor sat in on several killings. In one they picked up a Catholic on the Springfield Road in a hijacked black taxi. He got a bit of a digging in the back and was moaning by the time they got him to a lock-up garage off the Shankill. They carried him inside. There was an acetylene torch in the corner of the garage. A battery leaked acid on to the floor. Victor wore a blue boiler suit and carried a shortblade knife that he’d got in the Army and Navy stores. There was a smell of butane in the air, a sense of limits reached.
    The body was found in a shop doorway on Berlin Street. There were 124 careful knife wounds on the body. Death was due to slow strangulation. The victim appeared to have been suspended from a beam while he was being stabbed. The taxi was found abandoned on waste ground. There were traces of blood on the windows and a woman’s lipstick under the passenger seat.

two
    There was a cellophane-wrapped ordnance map of the city above Ryan’s desk in the newspaper office. He spent hours in front of it. Locations of sectarian assassinations were indicated by red circles. Many of these represented call-outs, the phone ringing late at night and a drive across the city through checkpoints. He would reach the place in driving rain. There would be a scene-of-crime officer, fingerprint and forensic men. The forensic men had fine hair and glasses. They wore white boilersuits and rarely spoke. They approached a corpse with gravity, removing it to another context.
    There were lines on the map too, indicating rivers, areas which had been demolished, suggested escape routes following a bomb, zones of conflict, boundaries, divisions within the heart. Ryan drew a new one on the map almost every day. An evolution had been going on in there over the past three years, a withdrawing behind the lines. He thought he could learn something by keeping a record of encroachments and retreats. He was trying to develop the knowledge that the inhabitants of the city had. The sense of territory that guided them through hundreds of streets. That feeling for the anxious shift in population. He