Oak and Stone

by Dave Duggan

  ‘Yeh, but you could have gone, you know, political. Done the community thing, suited and booted, and then up the road in the big government car. I reckon you might do it yet. You have the book-learning from jail.’

  ‘My stuff’s a bit specialist, Mervyn. Not very “street”. More of a head-fuck, really. I know you could say it’s all myths and legends here still, but I’m better off on the ground. The small things suit me. I’m a man for the grubs, the beetles, the silverfish and the woodlice.’

  ‘Plenty of them round here.’

  ‘Like I said, the cops is not that far from what I was always at. I’m better doing it than talking about it. I like the books too. I pick at things, Mervyn. I want answers and when I don’t like the answer I get, I ask more questions, take another case, see where that leads me.’

  ‘What about this poor bastard then?’

  ‘I see a family wedding.’

  ‘In Donegal.’

  ‘In Donegal. A hotel near the shore. His sisters are there, all solicitous. They are admiring his suit, his outfit. There are others, men, in the background, not so keen on him.’

  ‘Are you making this up?’

  ‘Yes. No.’

  ‘You’re speculating. Right. And you have to speculate if you want to accumulate.’

  My cigarette burned down to my fingers. I dropped it on the ground and squirmed my foot to put it out.

  ‘He’s not a street drinker. Not in the day-to-day sense. Yes, he is a drinker and his sisters are glad he’s home. So the wedding “do” takes off. There’s fine food. Whiskey flying. He’s dancing and schlepping about. Getting noisy. Bothersome. He falls over a chair, then stumbles onto a table, scattering glasses and drinks. Frightens a flower-girl.’

  ‘You should be writing books, not solving crimes. That’s all romance, Slevin. Only a story.’

  I would not be put off.

  ‘It’s not his wedding. A niece, perhaps. Later, there’s a row. With a brother or a brother-in-law, maybe.’

  ‘And they dump the body here? When they could have dumped him anywhere? In a bog? Up the side of a mountain?’

  ‘So, we have someone coming back into the city anyway. Someone with a notion of a way out of a crisis. This is not the perfect crime, Mervyn. There’s no such thing. Unless you’re in banking. This? This is folly, fuck-up, tragedy, disaster and mess.’

  I turned back towards the electricity substation. 100,000 volts. Indecipherable graffiti. A low wall on the other side of which the dead man lay in repose on a bed of empty cans and bottles. Further back, a building wore a mask of scaffolding, as it was prepared for re-plastering. No one clambered about the rickety rigging.

  ‘Where’s the evidence, Eddie, eh? As Karen would always say.’

  At the base of the scaffolding was a part-filled builder’s skip, rusty as a decommissioned U-boat, the lower lip pouting towards us.

  ‘Has anyone checked that skip?’

  ‘For what, Eddie?’

  ‘Evidence, Mervyn. Evidence.’

  Mervyn walked round the sub-station, using the duck-boards he’d put down earlier. Soon after that I saw him and the photographer cross the edge of the carpark and make for the skip. Mervyn found an old wooden crate to stand on and leaned in. The photographer got up then and started to take photographs. I watched the photographer angle and pose, lean and balance, all the time scanning and photographing. I saw him put the cap back on the lens, climb off the crate, swing the camera awkwardly behind his back, then descend. They came back to me and the photographer showed me the pictures he’d taken.

  ‘There’s a bloody towel. I didn’t touch it. Just took the shots. Could be from one of the builders. Cut himself with a scarifier, like. Nasty bastard, the plasterer’s scarifier.’

  I looked at the images he showed us. A dirty white towel, innocent as belly-button fluff, splashed with crimson. Except for the embossed logo, badly scrunched and twisted. It was the ensign of a grounded vessel, the banner for a dead soul.

  I didn’t need to tell Mervyn we might be able to determine the hotel the towel came from.

  ‘Get that into a bag, Mervyn. Anything else you can get. I’ll tell Goss to put a hold on that skip.’

  ‘We’ll need a bigger team here, looks like.’

  ‘I’m messaging Goss now, if he’ll listen to me. He’s probably pulling drunks out of their beds as we speak. And that won’t do him or them any good. No drunk ever struck a blow like that. It’s too replete.’

  ‘Replete?’

  ‘Replete with passion. Full of it.’

  ‘Could still be one of his drinking buddies.’

  ‘Anything’s possible, but answer me this: why didn’t even one of them stay? Say we have a group of street drinkers, a row, things getting out of hand and they scatter. But not all. There is always one, too beaten to get away, too drunk to move. Too scared or horrified to run, too lost in a boozy fog to save himself, too curious to know what’ll happen next and if there might be a drink in it for him. One of them would have stayed, if the victim really was a street drinker.’

  ‘Enough fantasy. Let me get on with the facts.’

  Mervyn wanted to get a move on. He’d bought into the first scenario I’d laid out and I knew that his report to Goss would reflect that. Right on cue an ambulance arrived with two police Land Rovers. Uniformed officers and ambulance personnel began the process of pick-up and dispatch.

  ‘I’ll get the crime scene report to Goss by the afternoon,’ Mervyn said. ‘I’ll copy it to you.’

  We were finished. I could come back to being myself. The stories that I spun were part of the story of myself. I could hear Mervyn and his colleagues on a tea-break, at their base in Maydown.

  ‘He just said to check the skip and we found the towel. A hotel towel, branded and all, totally confirming his story.’

  ‘He’s a bit pally with the gypsies, isn’t he? They must have given him a crystal ball.’

  Slurps of tea, edgy laughter, then Mervyn again.

  ‘He’s got something. Like a sixth sense.’

  ‘He’s got something alright. A criminal record and a long stretch behind him. No wonder he’s seeing visions.’

  More edgy laughter. Maybe even a sneer. Then a steely voice.

  ‘He doesn’t belong.’

  And we were back to Mervyn’s question.

  ‘What the fuck is he doing in the cops?’

  But Mervyn and I were well past that question, at the murder scene behind the electricity sub-station. We were immersed in the crime, doing the job by answering questions, one by meagre one, finding more answers, one by tawdry one, revealing yet more questions to answer.

  My phone sounded an incoming message. I expected it to be Goss, fulminating in response to mine, but it was on my personal channel.

  ‘wen you comin over have sometin fer yu’

  I recognised my Auntie Maisie’s personal script straight away. She messaged as she spoke, in a voice I associated with ease and effort in equal measure, with hurt and joy combined, all grounded in the pain I caused her and the forbearance she offered me. As a token of my gratitude, I gave her my doctoral scroll when I graduated. I asked her to look after it for me. She called me every now and then to give it back to me, now that I had my own place. Here she was again, calling me to her home, calling me to my past and holding out a prize she valued more than I did. I hoped she might also have a jar of jam and some fresh scones. They would banish the taste and smell of the beer-cellar death-scene, behind the electricity sub-station.

  ELEVEN

  I ignored three messages from Goss. I messaged Auntie Maisie to say I’d call by soon and I walked away from the death scene behind the electricity sub-station. The traffic slowed me, but I weaved and ducked directly across the roundabout, then semi-vaulted over the railings to reach the river-side walk, just downstream f
rom the Peace Bridge. I got some strange, almost admonishing, looks from people on the walkway. They may have known me as a policeman. What with the turbulence caused by working with Goss and the grief I imbibed from the dead man in his drunken sprawl, the last thing I felt like just then was a policeman. When I settled by the riverside railing, I immediately lit a cigarette, drawing on it in a way that marked me as an empty balloon, a vacuum in need of filling.

  The river churned carelessly before me, jostling itself into tide turning. It was a good moment to view it and to take stock. I missed Karen. I missed Hetherington. I was confounded by Anderson, still outside my grasp. I was swimming against a weir full of dead ends. Skeletons, ocelots, football boots, shoes in chillers – dead ends. I began to walk, keeping the river on my left, its low corrugations bumping along as if it could go either way. I kept walking. I lit another cigarette. I made it to the double-decker bridge and walked underneath it, using the pedestrian lights to make the crossing.

  I cut behind the old railway station, skipped over the rusty tracks and looked across to see the truncated bridge called ‘Aspiration’, pointing directly at me. When I reached the partner section on the side where I walked, I hesitated to acknowledge that I was very near the actual place where my mother went into the river.

  A heavy-lidded milkman saw her that morning. He never got over it. He repeats the same telling any time we meet.

  ‘Her hair was flying off her, the morning was that breezy. A good Spring breeze and a good Spring tide on the river. Her arms flung out. Like an eagle she was, yeh, flying. Gone, before it even dawned on me what was going on. Shur, what could I do? Again I got parked up and ran across the grass and climbed the wall meself – all in a rush, I nearly went in after her – she was gone. God be good to her.’

  I crossed the same grass and held a palm up to traffic leaving the city, giving a thumbs-up when it stopped, as I jogged across to the other side of Foyle Road. Auntie Maisie lives in a mid-terrace house on Moat Street, a short, steep street bordered by the old Star Factory, famous for shirt-making, now refurbished into apartments. The football club lodges players there. Todd Anderson shared a three-bed apartment with another player and, when that player’s contract wasn’t renewed, Anderson negotiated with the club for a sole lease agreement, with an option to buy.

  I climbed the rising terrace and knocked on my Auntie’s door. She opened it immediately, then walked away. I followed her shape down the gloomy hallway, my feet scraping across the threadbare carpet. My Auntie lives in a late-twentieth century time-warp, the immaculately clean house last decorated when my grandparents were still alive. Auntie Maisie is my mother’s only sister. She is my only living relative, apart from my sister, Ruby.

  ‘I have a thing for you,’ Aunt Maisie said, when we reached the single-storey kitchen-dining extension. Light came softly in from the yard, giving the floral patterned wallpaper and the formica-covered worktops a vinyl matt finish.

  ‘Ah, shur, that’s grand, heh. I’m in no rush for it. Any chance of a mugga tay?’

  My language followed hers, in a domestic sing-song from my adolescence that threw the years off me and found me seated at the very same table I pulled up to now, then a rascally youth, just shy of becoming an active street fighter.

  Of course, there was tea: a full, steaming Belleek pot, a parian china jug of milk, sugar in a matching bowl, delicate basket-weave decorated cups and saucers of the same material, beaming their liquid-cream glaze. And there were scones and a small saucer of blackberry jam, beside a butter dish, shapely as a woodworker’s box-plane.

  I lifted my cup and enjoyed the close-up of the subtly embossed shamrock decorations, weaving across the delicate body of the cup. I held it up and away from me and recognised the distinctive Belleek stamp, with the words ‘Déanta in Éirinn’ printed beside it. Auntie Maisie is a collector and has Belleek china from different periods in the history of the Fermanagh pottery.

  ‘‘Tis yeer legacy,’ she told Ruby once. ‘Though what you and that run-about brother a’ yours’ll do with it, I have no notion.’

  Ruby reckons it’s worth a fortune. I tell her not to hold her breath. Auntie Maisie will outlive us all and her pottery collection will be buried with her, as a votive offering to the gods.

  ‘Did you see tha’ Ruby one at all?’

  ‘Saw her, wha’, onny a wee while ago. She’s still singing.’

  ‘Has she a man?’

  ‘Come on, Maisie. That’s none of my business.’

  ‘None of mine neither. So she says. Cheek of her.’

  ‘She doesn’t need a man. Shur, look at you.’

  ‘Aye, look at me.’

  I did. Seated across from me, she is a gangly sprite, erect as a pine and florid as a pink hydrangea in full bloom, her pert curls countably infinite atop her skull and about her lean face. She is as tall as me, so our eyes met and dared me to look hard.

  ‘You keeping well?’ I asked.

  ‘The finest. Only the aul’ blood pressure tablet rattling round inside. The sight’s still good. I hear grass grow and I can smell a fella needs a good shakin’ a mile off. You dodgin’ something? Bit of a ‘flu is it?’

  ‘Ach, nothing like that. I onny had a run in with a fella at work.’

  ‘Give me his name and I’ll hex him for you.’

  I laughed. It mightn’t have been such a bad idea to put a spell on Goss, a simple charm like fleas in his underpants or lice in his hair. I knew Auntie Maisie had the gift, or claimed she did and had everyone believing her, which was practically as good.

  ‘No need for that. I have him in hand.’

  I thought of Goss cursing me savagely when Mervyn’s report came in and the focus of the investigation shifted from street-drinkers to revellers at a wedding across the border, thus complicating his life. All speculated by my story.

  ‘You have the gift too, I know. You could hex him right enough.’

  ‘Now, Maisie. I’m a cop, not a wizard.’

  ‘No. That’s right. And I’m an aul’ spinster and not a witch.’

  We both laughed and she continued.

  ‘Your mother gave yeez the most aul’ fashionist names. Ruby and Edmund. Like she didn’t want ye to be growing into modern times. She wanted ye old before yeer time. Or she wanted ye never to grow up. Ruby got the chanting. And you got the storying. You’re wasted with the police. I suppose the money’s good. And a bit of a pension. If you’re not shot.’

  The laughing petered out.

  ‘No one’s going to shoot me, Auntie Maisie. Them days is over. All I have to worry about is bosses and long hours.’

  At that moment a wasp buzzed into the space between us and aimed for Auntie Maisie’s mouth. She splattered and waved at it, clinking her teacup loudly on her saucer.

  ‘Bloody wasps. Could they not invent something to do away with them?’

  ‘Here, take a minute. You didn’t spill any tea, anyway. Catch your breath.’

  A heightened flush coloured her cheeks. Tendons in her neck strained and stood out like fleshy hawsers. Her eyes bulged and watered. Her chest heaved in great bouts, slowly returning to normal.

  ‘I’m grand. Grand. I didn’t swallow the bastard anyway. There, look at him, behind the nets.’

  We both looked at the wasp, a quivering ink blob walking purposely up the window pane, coyly covered by the net curtains Auntie Maisie washed by hand twice a year before re-stringing them on a new length of curtain cord.

  ‘Are them nets new?’ I asked, teasing and distracting her.

  ‘No,’ she laughed. ‘They’re as aul’ as Methuselah’s granny. As aul’ as meself. Your mother bought them when the extension got done.’

  The wasp buzzed and tapped, safe between my mother’s nets and the pane of glass. Did the glass chill its feet, padded and sticky as toffee apples? Did the gauze above lend it an ephemeral sky, the la
ce-patterned clouds repeating a celestial order, regulating its world?

  Auntie Maisie rose from her chair and, with a set of well-practised moves and soundings, held back the nets, opened a side window and shooed the wasp out to the yard.

  ‘I mind the day your mother swallowed the wasp.’

  ‘She did not.’

  ‘Oh, she did. She said she did.’

  ‘A wasp?’

  ‘Aye, a wasp. Buzzy as a band saw and near as deadly.’

  ‘Would that not poison her?’

  ‘Poison her? Your mother? Nothing would poison that one. She was a walking medicine chest. She looked at you and you were cured.’

  ‘She never cured herself.’

  ‘She went into that river below, aye. Many like her went in. Some in joy. Most in sorrow.’

  I took a long, final swig of my tea and clinked the cup onto its saucer.

  ‘Where’s that thing then, Auntie Maisie? They’ll be looking for me back at work.’

  ‘Isn’t that the cops’ job anyway? Finding people and bothering them? Ach, look, I upset you, talking about your mother like that. Go easy on me. She was my sister, you know.’

  I imagined the wasp butting onto the outside of the window-pane, thumping his head, trying to get back in.

  ‘You told me a story once,’ she continued, ‘‘Bout a woman swallowed a wasp. A fly, was it? A may fly, you said it was.’

  ‘Dechtire.’

  ‘She was the mother of the hero.’

  ‘Setanta.’

  ‘That was his baby name. What’s his other name?’

  ‘Cú Chulainn.’

  ‘Aye, tha’s him. He was on a wall above on Bishop Street one time. You can still see the outline no matter how much magnolia they put on that gable. You said she swallowed the fly.’

  ‘… and fell into a deep sleep.’