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crime and he had gambled away the money he needed to pay for the wedding. He had made several attempts to borrow money from friends and associates without success.
    Although the victim had identified him as a painter who had worked on the house in Newington eight months previously, Taylor maintained that he had not been in the area since.
    The names. Newington. Ponsonby. The aspirant classes. The grid of streets. Neat between-the-wars housing. They had raised themselves above the darkness. The murder seen in the context of political unrest. The city had a history of pogrom, murder and arson, the handed-down rancours of the age. Factions did battle in the streets. Preachers stood on street corners, kin to the ranters of old. There were boilermakers, keel-layers, riveters. They thought in tonnages, vast displacements. There was God in these things. They wanted it known that these were works of the imagination, the wrought matter of the mind.
    The courthouse faced the Crumlin Road jail, its basalt slabs carted from the quarries of the black mountain to the north of the city. An underground passage led from the gaol to the courthouse. In all thirteen prisoners were hanged in Crumlin Road. They were interred in the prison yard. Their names and dates of execution were etched on the wall congruent to their burial place. Taylor was to be represented by Robert Hanna QC, Mr Justice Sheil presiding. The prosecuting counsel was named as Attorney General Lancelot Curran QC.

Four
    Taylor had a ‘box of tricks’ he kept in the shed. It was an old ammunition box, its green paint chipped in places. Taylor had stolen it from the back of a military truck at Magilligan camp. No one else was allowed to touch it. He kept his tools in it. Besides the tools there was a yellowing collection of pornography that he’d found in a service shelter at the waterworks. Girls in marcelled curls wearing bathing suits, striking kittenish poses at the front of the pile, then working back towards what Taylor called the hard stuff. The smudged monochromes, the torn-out magazine pages. Girls who knew what was what, legs akimbo. Starlets with a small-town intentness about them. The way they looked at the camera. Where they’d come from. Knowing the shadows out there, the haunted spaces, what lay in the dark beyond the suburban lawns.
    The men had slicked-back hair and small moustaches. They had a spivvish, across-the-border look to them. Taylor tried to copy the way they looked. He bought a double-breasted suit at Burton and wore it to the dogs at Celtic Park. He liked to get down among the dogs, the wet ash smell of the cinder track, the dogs muzzled, straining. The trainers muscling the dogs, working back from the shoulders, the spavined-looking ribs sticking out to give the greyhounds a slum-dog look, skulking in the noon heat. Taylor would run his hand along their backs feeling the vertebrae through the fine-haired pelt, and the heat. Taylor bet on horses and football, but most of all on the dogs. There was a cruel look to them, remorseless. He liked the moment when the traps opened and the greyhounds left the hutches, changed into something else, the pattered salvo of their paws, kicking up sand pulses, the lithe footfall. Taylor thought about bloodhounds in films given a piece of the victim’s clothing to smell, working their way through the swampland, torches swinging from side to side, a mournful baying.
    Taylor was known as Robert the Painter. Paint was his medium. He was familiar with its qualities of camouflage, of deception. He was always in the shed, mixing paints, trying out colours on the walls. Carmine, turpentine and linseed oil. He painted his parents’ sitting room five or six times a year. He could never leave things alone. He met Lily when he was painting her sister’s kitchen.
    Robert took Lily to the pictures. He said he was a foreman at Barrett’s painting firm. He told her about the things he took from houses he worked in. Ornaments