In Belfast, I merge onto the Westlink, looking at the backs of the houses crowded along the motorway. The satellite dishes, sheds, downpipes. Some of the houses have small sun decks. I can almost see into the rooms before they slide past. Then the motorway lifts onto a ramp, and the city stretches away for miles. I feel despair, looking out over the rows and rows of brick terraces. Their safe houses aren’t always remote. Marian could be inside any of them.
The motorway curves through the city’s fringes, past industrial estates and bonded warehouses. After another few miles, a blackthorn hedgerow runs along the motorway, then it falls away to a view of open countryside.
Wind turbines rotate in a field. Marian might have seen them, too. They had arrived at the service station from this direction, the northbound carriageway.
A sign appears for Templepatrick, and I steer toward the exit. At the end of the slip road, the service station comes into view. A few people are standing at the pumps. The drivers fueling their cars look relaxed and casual, like this was never a crime scene. They shouldn’t be here, the pumps shouldn’t even be working.
I step out of the car into the wind and the rain, the wet air smelling of petrol and exhaust fumes. It was hot yesterday when Marian was here. A yellow rapeseed field stretches behind the station. Marian might have noticed it as the three of them crossed the car park. I move slowly, like I’m following them, three figures in black ski masks, holding guns down at their sides.
Marian had on her own clothes. A hooded rain jacket, jeans, the hiking boots she’d worn while walking along the cliff path. As they drew nearer to the doors, Marian might have been watching for a police car, bracing herself for shouts or gunshots. She could have died here yesterday, in someone else’s ski mask, with mud from the cliff path still on her boots.
The automatic doors slide shut behind me, sealing out the wind. The inside of the station seems uncanny, like the replica of a service station on a weekday morning. It’s a good facsimile. The smell of coffee and pastries, the shining floors, the soft pile of tabloids by the till.
I find a table by the window, and watch people come in to buy bottles of water, use the toilets, pay for their fuel. My stomach feels hollow. I could buy coffee and a danish, but the idea of eating something from this place seems grotesque.
During the lulls between customers, the staff drift over to talk to one another. A girl in heavy eyeshadow chats with a boy whose uniform hangs from his thin shoulders. When he comes by to clear the tables, I lean forward. “Sorry, can I ask you something? Were you working yesterday?”
He holds up his hands. “I’m not saying anything.”
“No, I’m not a reporter. I just want to know what happened.” He moves away to wipe the next table, avoiding my eyes. “My sister was here.”
His hands stop for a second. “So ask her yourself.”
“She won’t talk to me about it,” I say, and his face changes. I can imagine someone—his mother, his girlfriend—asking him questions about yesterday, and him brushing them off, trying to change the subject.
“Is your sister all right?” he asks.
“Not really.”
He sighs, then points at the ceiling, where a piece of cardboard is held in place with gaffer tape. It looks so ordinary, like something put up to cover a leak. “They shot into the ceiling,” he says. “And shouted at us to get the fuck down.”
“What were their accents?”
He shrugs. “They were all shouting at once. One of them told our manager to open the tills.”
“Did they say anything else? Did they use each other’s names?”
“No.”
I don’t know what I’d expected, of course they wouldn’t give themselves away. I look up at the cardboard taped over the gunshot holes. “Is it strange for you to be here?”
He shrugs, and I know what he’s about to say. “I’d rather be here than anywhere else. They’ve already hit this once, haven’t they?”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
For a moment we look at each other openly. Neither of us believes a word of it, of course. No one knows where the next attack will be.
Marian and I were talking over breakfast last summer when the café shook. Closer to the explosion, windows had blown out, showering glass over the road. Belfast confetti, a poet called it. I thought we’d seen the worst of it, but then we turned the corner onto Elgin Street and saw that a block of flats had collapsed, sliding forward into the road, like a slumped cake.