Hidden River (Five Star Paperback)

by Adrian McKinty

  “Ok, look, Douglas, here it is. It’s the oldest bloody story in the book. I was an undercover cop. I had to pretend to be a junkie. I started taking heroin. It got ahold of me, took over, I really was a junkie, I was taking heroin from the police evidence room to support my habit. One time they caught me. The RUC found out and they made me resign. They were nice to me, they didn’t prosecute me for theft, they just made me resign. No conspiracy, no corruption. I just fucked up. I know it’s the bloody cliché of the narcs squad. But it’s true.”

  He stared at me for a moment. He wasn’t sure. He sat back down in the chair and lit another fag. He smoked nearly the whole thing. Thinking. I tried not to show that my fingers were crossed. He coughed, weighed his words.

  “Mr. Lawson, I’m disappointed in you, I’d guessed that that was the story you would tell me, but I thought you’d be more creative.”

  “But it’s fucking true.”

  “Part of it may be true, Mr. Lawson. Pathetic, I’m sure. But I don’t want part of the truth, I want all of it.”

  He sighed melodramatically, got up again, walked over, suddenly grabbed both my wrists with one hand, and then pinned my arms with his knee and body weight. He smiled at me and brought the hand holding the cigarette up to my face. I started to yell but he shoved his free hand over my mouth. His knee and entire body forcing me into the chair. I struggled. He brought the cigarette to my eyebrow and let the ash singe it. I tried to wriggle away from him, but he was too strong. Strong and obviously a real psycho. He let the cigarette burn me for five agonizing seconds, then he let me go.

  I gasped for air.

  He stood. He picked up his briefcase, his clipboard.

  “I’m flying back to London tonight. It’s not just fucks like you we have to deal with. Other cases, too. That’s why I have no time for your shit. But I’ll be back two weeks from today. Yours is the most interesting. Monday the twenty-second. Keep your appointment book free. It’s a good thing. Give you time to think. You will cooperate or I will shit upon you from a great height. I will destroy your fucking life. I will see you do ten years in Wormwood fucking Scrubs. And they will know that you were a copper. Oh yeah. I will see you fucking broke, you pathetic little shit. I’ll see myself out.”

  He walked across the living room, turned, grinned at me, spat, and left.

  I leaned back in the chair, got my breath back, tried not to puke. I heard the front door bang. Dad came in.

  “What was that all about? Did he touch you? Are you ok?”

  “Dad, how much money do you have?” I gasped.

  “Nothing. I told you. I used it all for my deposit in the election but I do get it back if I win. Are you ok? What happened?”

  “So, in other words, you’ve nothing.”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “No, but I might have to go somewhere for a while till the heat cools down.”

  “Who was that man, what did he want?”

  “A policeman. He wants me to rat on my brother officers.”

  “Is he part of that Samson thing? But you’ve done nothing wrong,” Dad said.

  “I know, but he’s going to persecute me, I’ve got to go somewhere.”

  “Your brother would put you up in London.”

  “England’s no good. Besides, he wouldn’t put me up anyway.”

  “He would, Alexander. Look, what’s going on?”

  I got up and went into the hall. I climbed up into the attic, I felt I was nearly going to cry. I was pathetic. Douglas was right. I stopped myself, found my coat, came back down the ladder.

  “Where are you going?” Dad asked.

  “Out.”

  I knew what I had to do, I had to get to the water. I had to get to my place. Raining again. But I had to get down there. That’s where everything would become clear.

  “Where are you going?” Dad insisted.

  “Nowhere.”

  “Do you want some tea? You have to eat, Alex, you never eat,” Dad said, shaking his head, worried.

  “I’ll get something.”

  I put on my coat and hat and ran out the door.

  Pissing down. Hard. Bouncing off the stones and making lakes on the tar macadam. My wool hat was drenched in a minute. My place. Not going to panic. My place. Close, soon. Yes. Think. Think, man. Maybe John could lend me some money. Maybe Dad would come through. In any case, I had to lie low. Where? My brother and sister, in England. Hardly talked to them since the funeral. We weren’t that close and Mum had been the glue holding the family together. And wasn’t I right? They’d find me.

  I shook my head. No. No money for a bus ticket to the airport, never mind an airfare. My left eyebrow hurt, everything hurt. What to do? Keep out of the shit. I could lie low. I had enough ketch for a couple of weeks. I could avoid Spider until then. Yeah, everything be fine. Yeah, all work out somehow. Douglas, looking at my personal file. Bastard. What does he know? Used me. Buck McConnell used me. Transferred me to narcotics because they knew I’d been arrogant. Curious. Knew I’d pursue the leads wherever they went. So stupid. Messed up. They were smarter than me. Thank God for ketch, ketch saved my life….

  The railway lines. The beach. The heroin. Thank God.

  Everything in my coat pocket. Lunch box. Dry. I find my spot under the tiny cliff. Out of the wind, out of the rain. Open the lunch box. Ketch in a cellophane bag. Needles and syringe. New needles as important as supply. Can’t share needle, ever. AIDS, hepatitis B and C. Death. Distilled water. Cotton balls. Some people use citric acid to make it dissolve better. Basic safety. New needle, alcohol swab, cotton filter. Spoon. Heroin so pure now some smoke it. Smoke it off aluminum foil. Eejits. Get brain damage, lung cancer. Injection safe. Safe as houses. Spoon, water, heroin, lighter under spoon. It boils. Ketch, beautiful. Check it’s a vein. Draw it in. Draw it in….

  The beach.

  The beach is not a beach. The sea is not a sea. The clouds are not clouds.

  The beach is a slick of seaweed, jetsam, garbage, and shopping carts embedded in the sand like abstract sculpture. The sea, a tongue of lough. The clouds, oil burn-off from the smokestacks at the power station, two chimneys that fuck any residual hope of loveliness in the Irish landscape.

  Belfast just across the water, its yellow cranes, its ferry terminus, its back-to-backs, its poison of estates. Everything dissolves. The rain stops. The sky clears. The world ceases to spin. Time slows. The power station vanishes into the sludge of history. The sky quiet. Birds. Gray seals. Sun. It’s Ireland before people came. Before that Viking bark, that pine coffin of this morning, before the coracle. An Eden. A meditation of hill and forest. I stand there—an anachronism. A dead girl walks past me, in bare feet along the golden shore.

  “Hey, you’re a Christian really. What was all that Hindu stuff you were always going on about?”

  “My heritage.”

  “You’re really beautiful.”

  “Death doth improve my face.”

  “No, it never needed improving. But it is true, you are dead.”

  “I am and you’re what, now, a junkie?”

  “Why does no one understand? I’m not a junkie, you have to really try to become a junkie. I’m not a functioning heroin addict, because I’m not an addict.”

  “Sounds like you have that all rehearsed.”

  “Did you come here to give me a hard time?”

  “I didn’t come here at all.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “It’s just you and me on the boat.”

  “I remember.”

  “I know.”

  Your lips, your hair, oh, Victoria. I was terrified. My first time ever. Your breasts and those dark eyes. Jesus. And it was something you wanted too. You pushed away the silk spinnaker sail and made room. You kissed me and the saliva caught the light as you sat up and climbed on top of me. And you said, “This is position twenty-one from the Kama Sutra” in an Indian princess accent. A joke against yourself, the exotic Oriental. And I thought it was the funniest
thing ever and laughed and relaxed and we screwed for an hour and a half. I remember. Truth, is that what heroin brings?

  “No,” she says.

  But that was truth. Her words fade. Gone into the smoke in the air above the river. And in every gasp I can’t help but breathe in ash, little particles of sandalwood and cherrywood and her. The wind changes its direction and the rain comes down and I open my mouth and it’s cold, like the coldness in my heart.

  * * *

  Things happen to fuck you up. Little things. You get chased from a boat and you accidentally forget your heroin. It forces you to go to the pub quiz but you get the crucial question wrong and have to steal more heroin from your dealer—Spider. Spider realizes it could only be you that stole from him and wants to get you. And how to get me? Tell the peelers that an English copper has been seen going into my house. That’s all it would take. Everyone would know what that meant.

  And they got me. A week after Victoria Patawasti’s funeral. Walking along the sea front. They were so smooth that I didn’t even notice the Land Rover pull in beside me.

  “Lawson,” a voice said.

  I turned, saw the open door at the back of the Land Rover, legged it, got about twenty feet. A burly man tap-tackling me to the ground. I didn’t recognize him. In his forties, alcoholic face. Leather jacket. Old stager. Reliable. He had two fingers missing from his left hand. Bombing, shooting, accident?

  “You’re under arrest, Lawson,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  The man slapped cuffs on me, hauled me up, dragged me to the Land Rover. Three more men inside. One was Facey, looking guilty. The second, a copper in a flat cap, green sweater, tanned face, and finally a bald man with glasses and a raincoat, trying to cover a police uniform. High one, too, chief super or above. The Land Rover drove off. It came back—that familiar stench of diesel and lead paint and ammunition. Same claustrophobia.

  “Alex, I’m sorry, they needed someone to ID you,” Facey said.

  Flat Cap turned to Facey: “You shut up and don’t speak again,” he said.

  The bald man nodded at the big guy, he held my arms, Baldy leaned over and punched me in the stomach. I retched. I looked at Facey but he was looking away. Flat Cap grabbed me by the hair. Shook me. Shit, they weren’t going to kill me, were they?

  “What do you want?” I managed.

  “We heard you were talking to the Old Bill, the Metropolitan fucking Police,” the bald man screamed in my face.

  “Think we don’t know about everything that happens in this town, in this country? Your mate Spider told us. Wipe your fucking arse and we know,” Flat Cap continued.

  “You know what we’ll fucking do to you. You’ll go down. You’ll go down, Lawson. I don’t care what they promise you,” Baldy said.

  “Aye, whatever they threaten you with, Lawson, it’ll be a thousand times worse if you ever fuck us over. Remember that. You’d be dead if you weren’t such a fuckup. You owe us. You owe us. We’ve been lenient. We could kill you now. We could do anything we like, Lawson. Do you understand? Do you understand?” Flat Cap said.

  “I understand,” I gasped, shaking.

  “Says on your file you’re Jewish, not even Protestant at all. Is your loyalty a question we should be worrying about?” Baldy said.

  “No,” I spat, somehow managing to answer this humiliating question.

  “Hope fucking not. You’re a fucking sorry excuse for a human being,” Baldy said.

  “Aye, he is, but he gets it. Good. Stop the vehicle,” Flat Cap commanded.

  “Stop the vehicle,” the big guy yelled to the driver.

  The Land Rover stopped. Through the armored windows I could see that we were in the middle of nowhere. They uncuffed me, pushed me out the back of the vehicle. I stumbled and fell.

  “Think about it. We know where you live, we know everything you do, we know everyone you fucking see,” Baldy said, closing the door.

  The Land Rover drove off in a slew of mud. I got up and brushed myself down. Smiled. The icing on the cake. If I didn’t cooperate with Douglas, he’d have me arrested. If I did cooperate, the RUC would at the very least release my confession. Worse. Get me, get Da. Or that age-old drama. A car, a gun, a struggle, a field far from anywhere, a bullet in the neck…

  I got my bearings. They had dumped me way up Empire Lane. I calmed myself. Walked down the hill. My wrists hurt. I went past the big, asymmetrical Patawasti house. Farther down. The rich neighborhood giving way to the poor. Council houses, bungalows. A bonfire being built for the twelfth of July holiday.

  My house. Kitchen. Da gone campaigning. I tried to find something to drink but there was nothing. What to do? Escape? Go to Douglas? Borrow some dough? I racked my brain but couldn’t come up with anything.

  I picked the bills from off the hall floor. Final demands on electricity, oil heat, ground rent. Place was a mess. Ma would have cleaned it. Made Da clean it when she was sick. Ma. Jesus … What the hell was I going to do? I needed to think but I couldn’t do ketch again today. Twice in one day. Never. Back to the kitchen, opened the fridge.

  The phone rang. I picked it up. It was Mrs. Patawasti. She asked if I had been up Empire Lane this morning near their house. I said I had. She said that Mr. Patawasti had come out after me, but his knees were bad, couldn’t keep up. She said that they would very much like to see me. Would this afternoon be convenient? I said it would.

  I hung up the receiver. It didn’t take a genius to see what they wanted. All the pieces were there now. I would never have gone to America. I knew Victoria and I loved her and I was sorry that she was dead, but I had given up police work forever. I had failed in that aspect of my life and it was only heroin that kept me together at all. I had not, like so many RUC officers, put a bullet in my own brain. Detective work had destroyed me. Why had I resigned from the police? Because I had unearthed the case, because I had broken the case. The truth had imprisoned me, not set me free.

  But everything had come together, leaving me one way out. The British cops were down on my neck, the Irish cops were on my head. I had to run. But it was all of it. The boat. The drugs. The quiz. Spider. And now the murder case. That English peeler was just the stoker, the driver of this great derailing train. And within a week we were in America.

  Aye, within a week we were in America, we had killed a man, fucked up the case, and were on the run there, too.

  4: THE FLOWER OF JOY

  Two days after her murder, Victoria’s brother Colin had flown to Denver to pick up her effects. The murderer was already caught. The case was open and shut. Nearly half of all murders that are solved are done so within the first twenty-four hours. The Denver police had a known criminal in custody. His Mexican driver’s license had been found in Victoria’s room. In the U.S. he had previous convictions for theft and burglary. He wasn’t particularly bright—he had been arrested by the police at his brother’s house. The police had assured Colin that they had their man, that prosecution would be easy, that he could go home with at least the thought that Victoria’s killer would be brought to book. And that since the murder was committed during the commission of another crime, he might even get the death penalty.

  The Denver police had an air of competence that impressed Colin and he was convinced. In violation of the rules, the cops took him to the jail to see the man who had killed his little sister. After that, Colin drove the forty-five minutes to Victoria’s office in Boulder, Colorado. He got a great deal of sympathy. She had been well liked. She worked for a nonprofit called the Campaign for the American Wilderness. A charitable organization that explored new ways of looking at environmental policy. A very successful group, so successful, in fact, that they were moving out of their Boulder headquarters to a shiny new office in downtown Denver. Victoria had been in charge of many aspects of the Denver move and it was difficult without her. Everyone had been sweet and kind, especially the copresidents of CAW, Charles and Robert Mulholland. C
harles and his wife, Amber, took Colin to the Brown Palace Hotel and bought him lunch.

  Colin gathered Victoria’s effects and gave them to a thrift shop. No will had been found, but, of course, Victoria had only been twenty-six. The cops released the body. Colin met with an undertaker and they flew her home.

  Four days after Victoria Patawasti’s funeral, on June 16, Mr. Patawasti received a letter with a Boulder postmark. It was slightly faded, computer printed (rather than typed), and said simply:

  Don’t let him get away with you’r daughter’s murder.

  A lead. Revealing something about the sender, but the family didn’t know that and the local peelers hadn’t seen it either.

  The family called Carrickfergus RUC. A Constable Pollock came to see them. He checked for prints, found nothing, held the note up to the light, found nothing, and on that basis somehow decided it was probably the work of a crank. After all, didn’t the Americans already have the murderer in custody? America was full of cranks. They should throw the letter out, burn it.

  Mr. Patawasti was an Oxford graduate, a professor; Constable Pollock’s analysis did not satisfy him.

  He called up the Denver police and after a great deal of trouble got through to the investigating officer. Detective Anthony Miller. Detective Miller assured Mr. Patawasti that they had their man and that everything was under control. Of course, he could send the letter to them and they would add it to the investigation, but really the Northern Irish police were probably correct, it sounded like a crank.

  Mr. Patawasti had seen me at the funeral, talked to Dad, had a think….