Falling Glass

by Adrian McKinty

  Both of Dick’s parents were still alive and of course they and all his siblings believed everything they heard and read about their youngest son and brother. One of the reasons he often had to go on those ghastly morning shows in person was to defend his good name. He’d even promised his ninety-two-year-old ma that he, a Free Presbyterian, would beat Michael O’Leary, a Roman Catholic, to become the first Irishman in space.

  ND TO TALK, Tom texted.

  “In a minute!” Richard muttered to the phone.

  The lane next to his estate wall was muddy and the tractor divots were filled with rain water and it was some job not to get his slippers drenched. However after five minutes of careful manoeuvring he reached the main road and the village of Knocknagulla itself which was precisely six houses and a shop.

  The shop wasn’t yet open and the newspapers were piled up outside in bundles. He slipped a copy of the Daily Mirror from its pile. There was nothing about him in it, or the airline. Nothing in the Express or the Star and it wasn’t until he got to the Daily Mail that he found his own name mentioned in an editorial from Peter Hitchens, something about how travel narrowed the mind rather than broadening it and how Coulter Air was responsible for British people seeing how rotten Europe was and how lucky they actually were to live in glorious Albion. Coulter read it twice and really it was almost a kind of compliment.

  He put the Mail back on its pile.

  His phone was vibrating yet again. He called Tom back. “Okay, okay, can you come and get me? I’m at the newsagents just down the road,” he said.

  The soles of his slippers were soaked in mud so he scraped them clean while he waited. He sat on the pile of newspapers, putting his slippers up on the Scouser- and Coulter-Air-bashing Sun.

  Tom pulled in. He was driving the VW Touareg.

  Richard got in the passenger’s side. “What were you doing out here?” Tom asked.

  “Reading the papers,” Richard said. “Let’s go for a drive. I don’t want to go home just yet.”

  “Okay,” Tom replied and turned left on the A2 which would take them north along the coast.

  “So what’s up?” Richard asked.

  “Got a call from Sean this morning. His bloodhound has found your girl.”

  “Has he now?” Richard said, excited.

  “Aye. I suppose yon boy knew what he was about after all.”

  “Of course he did. I liked him.”

  “Aye, well, I didn’t. Fucking tinker.”

  “Would you listen to you. You’re worse than Mrs Lavery,” Richard said.

  “It’s not racism, it’s fucking experience, mate. I’ve been crossed once too often.”

  “Okay, so where is she?”

  “In a lake.”

  “Drowned?”

  “No, no. Sean won’t say exactly, which is sleekit of him, but our boy’s got her trapped on one of those islands in Lough Erne. He’s getting the ferry over at eight and whenever he makes a positive ID, he’s gonna call Sean to inquire about further instructions.”

  Richard stroked his chin thoughtfully and looked furtively at Tom as they drove along the Larne Road through the village of Magheramorne.

  “‘Further instructions’,” Richard muttered and looked at Tom, whose eyes were firmly on the road. Was Tom speaking in euphemisms?

  “The instructions are easy. Get the laptop and the girls. One less problem to worry about. Two less problems. Tell him that. Get the computer, get the girls, give her something to remember us by so she keeps her big fucking mouth shut,” Richard said.

  Tom said nothing.

  “Alex says you’re doing the Radio 4 Today show tomorrow?” Tom said conversationally.

  “Oh, I didn’t know,” Richard said. Alex was always scheduling things like that. He didn’t mind as long as he could do them over the phone, he hated flying to London for these things. It was just more bullshit.

  They drove south and began to hit the Belfast traffic.

  “You know, we should discuss how this is all going to go down,” Tom said.

  “With Rachel?” Richard said, surprised that they were back to this again.

  “At the very least we’ll have to pay her a vast sum of money,” Tom said.

  “Pay her? Pay her what? She’s lost. We found her. Her play’s over. We’re already paying the tinker half a million. Half a million. Jesus. Thank God for insurance.”

  Tom looked at Richard and shook his head. “For one thing, I’m almost certainly not going to claim this from the insurance company. The last thing we need is an investigation.”

  Richard looked at Tom incredulously for a moment before he conceded the point.

  “Okay, so half a million of my money for my own kids. And you want us to pay more?”

  They drove through Knocknagulla and Kilroot before Tom continued with his point.

  “Richard, we both know that we can’t let things end here. We’re going to have to discuss how we keep Rachel quiet.”

  “What are you talking about? She’ll be quiet. She keeps quiet about the laptop or we release the fact that she used heroin when pregnant with Sue.”

  Tom shook his head.

  “She told me she’d thought about killing herself. She’s erratic. Unbalanced. She’s probably using drugs again. You really think we should bet our entire future on Rachel’s continuing good will? It’s luck and luck alone that she hasn’t gone to the press already. The Sunday World is clearly gunning for you, mate. Did you read last Sunday’s?”

  “Of course I fucking did,” Richard said, irritated.

  “So there’s that. And it’s also lucky that she didn’t, in fact, top herself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when you shoot yourself in the head someone generally calls the peelers and the peelers would have come and found the laptop and you my friend would be in a white-celled interrogation room right about now.”

  Richard’s eyes narrowed.

  “So you want to pay her off?”

  Tom didn’t answer.

  Richard looked at him. Tom felt the look but kept his eyes on the road.

  Richard shuddered. They’d been dirty over the years.

  Very dirty.

  But pay-offs were one thing. Doling out cash to paramilitaries, bullying unions, dealing with protection rackets and the worst political class in western Europe.

  This though…

  They sat in silence while Tom took them up the M5, across Belfast and onto the Bangor road.

  They still hadn’t said a word when they reached the Bangor marina, the biggest one in the north of Ireland.

  There was a shirt and shoes rule but the security guard knew Richard of old and let him down onto the pontoon.

  They went onboard and down below to the chart room.

  His yacht, White Elephant, was modest. A fifty-five-foot twin masted ketch without a lot of prettying. Below decks was spacious enough and it was fully automated so that in theory you could sail her across the Atlantic solo. Not that Richard had. He’d gotten it for Rachel and they’d only ever been as far as Belfast Lough on calm days.

  The last time he’d been out in it had been with her. Were the kids with him?

  No, no kids. Just him and her.

  It was late winter or maybe early spring, it was cold anyway.

  Two, maybe three years ago.

  They’d sailed over to the Copeland Islands. A big Russian tanker was anchored at the mouth of the Lough. “Lena– St Petersberg” it said on the stern. He remembered that. That and the trace of a hammer and sickle still painted on the ship’s funnel. They’d put up the jib and the main and sailed past the massive anchor chain and sad men in wool caps had waved to them and she’d waved back and they’d given her some kind of intercourse symbol with their hands.

  She’d laughed but when he’d launched the dingy, she’d been nervous. It’s going to be okay, he told her and it was. The water dark and moody and the sky as blue as it ever gets out here. They’d rowed to one of the forbidde
n Copeland islands, off limits to people, and the fat seals had howled at them from the shore. The whole island was a nature reserve. You had to have express permission before landing, but there was no one there to enforce the rule. They’d pulled the dingy up onto the shingle beach and everywhere there were birds and grass and wildness.

  This is wonderful, she’d said and kissed him. And he had held her and thought that moments like these would be happening his whole life.

  His whole life.

  Richard fished in the White Elephant’s chart locker and produced a bottle of Glenfiddich. He looked around the interior of the forecabin until he found a couple of coffee mugs.

  He poured two stiff measures and slid a mug across the chart table to Tom.

  Richard drank and then Tom drank.

  The boat rocked gently on the pontoon and the smell was sail cloth, paraffin and beeswax. Not unpleasant.

  Tom looked at the time on his phone. It was nearly eight now. The ferry on Lough Erne would be up and running. They’d be hearing from Sean very soon. They had to make a decision.

  Tom knew what that decision was going to have to be because he was on the laptop too.

  If Richard was unable to get this done, then Richard was going to have to be bypassed…

  There was no choice.

  “That’s why we brought Michael’s man in, Richard, the Starshyna. You know why he’s here,” Tom insisted.

  Richard poured them another measure and drank his at a gulp, but his friend and advisor left his drink alone.

  “Well?” Tom asked after a minute.

  “The girls are my number one priority. I love them, more than life itself.”

  I do not, Tom thought, but merely said: “He understands that.”

  Richard sighed and nodded. “Aye, okay, then,” he said. “Do whatever you have to do.”

  chapter 13

  the lady in the lake

  IN THE BLUE LIGHT OF MACHINES, IN HOUSING ESTATES, IN GRIM flats and new apartments, in cottages, caravans, cars, faerie rings and sacred groves, Ulster was waking up.

  Killian stood on the ferry, waiting. He had paid his pound and the ferryman was hoping for another customer to make this journey at least a little more economical.

  The two of them stood there together.

  Not talking.

  Killian lit a cigarette.

  The man lit a pipe.

  Swans lifted into the air, disturbed by a noise to the south.

  Joog, joog, joog, joog, joog, joog. A helicopter thudding over the bogland and the lake. The twin rotors of a Chinook, carving up the landscape and sending shivers through the sheep as it flew low along the border at a demented pace. A claw of blades and points, roaring under the thin saliva-coloured clouds. It was a throwback. It was rare to see an army chopper these days and the men instinctively ducked as it passed overhead showing its wide bottom that curved up in a slug of antennae and projectile flares. Well that’s Rachel and everyone else on the island awake, you eejits, Killian said to himself.

  But it was clipping so quickly that before the thought had barely jumped across his neurons, the chopper was gone, the double rotors singing and revolving in a lazy edit of diminishing noise and fuss and leaving behind a flap of birds and an embryonic stillness.

  “Hey, you wanna get cracking?” Killian asked the man.

  There were no other distractions and clearly no other passengers so the ferryman muttered: “Well, I suppose we’ll give this a wee go.”

  He was a balding ginger bap in his late fifties. Pale with big orange freckles all over his face. He was dressed in heavy tweeds and a wool hat and he was sweating like a bastard.

  He pressed a red button, a motor whirred, he turned a small wheel and the large flat-bottomed boat putted into the lough.

  The fickle rain was easing now and compacting everything in front of Killian into a fine residue of comfort-drizzle. He stood there by a guard rail and drank from the ferryman’s thermos filled with coffee, taking a sip from the thin plastic mug to quench his thirst. It tasted foully of the flaked pieces of white dye on the lid.

  “Ta,” he said and passed the cup back.

  Out of the reeds a curlew rose and flapped into the air.

  It was calm, lovely, like being inside a frickin’ Yeats poem.

  The ferryman started fiddling with a radio but he couldn’t get anything and the hissing noise was upsetting the ducks.

  “Could you cut that out, mate, I’m having a wee moment here,” Killian said.

  “No, I’ve got it. It’s a geographic thing. A quirk. There’s an array of cosmic forces that works through the exact way you position the aerial, only I can do it,” the ginger bap said.

  “Array of cosmic forces,” Killian muttered to himself before Radio 3 came in clear as bell. He didn’t know classical music but this was definitely Mozart or one of the biggies and Killian had to admit it actually improved the “moment”.

  The ferryman steered them around the swans, who had landed again, and after only a few minutes brought them to a rickety wooden jetty that could have done with a nail or two and a couple more tyres along its side.

  The boat touched and Killian got off.

  He had been expecting to immediately see the settlement but instead he found himself in a field with a deciduous wood beyond.

  “Where do I go?” Killian asked.

  “Ach, there’s a wee path, follow it for about five minutes and you’ll come to the village if you can call it that. Here, you wouldn’t mind asking if there’s anyone who wants to go back to the mainland would ya? I’ll wait here a quarter of an hour and then I’ll go back.”

  “No problem,” Killian said and set off along a not terribly worn-looking trail through the grass.

  Starlings flitted among the dandelions and bluebells, and red hawks were hovering in the air above the woods. There were butterflies everywhere: purple hairstreaks, dingy skippers, essex skippers, gatekeepers, clouded yellows.

  It took him back to childhood walks with his da and uncle: apple scrumping, blackberrying, mushrooming. Of course they’d had the lore and knew every type of medicinal and edible plant.

  All that knowledge that had gone with that generation – few traveller kids these days were interested and Killian wondered if any of them could even tell a chanterelle from a death’s cap.

  He entered the wood and was surprised to find himself in an old growth forest among ash, oak trees and giants ferns. Moss was growing on fallen trunks and the smell was close and heady. He hadn’t gone a minute before he saw a deer staring at him from a hillock between the trees.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  The deer watched him and when he passed by she bent her head and began nibbling at a wet mound of grass.

  Through the trees he could see houses now, or rather wooden cabins, four of them close to one another with a cement block toilet and washhouse near the shore.

  In one of the cabins a curl of blue smoke was drifting from the chimney stack.

  He could hear children’s voices.

  They were fighting and then one of the children began to cry.

  “You’re bad!” a girl exclaimed. There was fistling ahead and a girl ran into the trees and stopped in front of him, open-mouthed.

  She was about five with reddish curly hair, small pointy ears and greyish otherworldly eyes. She was wearing a grubby yellow dress and no shoes. She could have passed for Pavee easily.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m Killian,” he replied.

  She nodded and then, remembering why she was running in the first place, she started to cry.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, getting down on one knee in front of her.

  “Everyone’s always cross with me,” she said with little sobs gultering out.

  “Who’s everyone?” Killian asked.

  “Mum and Claire. Claire says I’m stupid, that I don’t know anything. Not even the alphabet,” the girl said.

  “What’s
your name honey child?”

  “Sue.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Five.”

  Killian stood. He vaguely remembered something in the notes about “learning difficulties” for this one. Richard had also said that Rachel had taken heroin while pregnant with Sue.

  She seemed fine to him though. Were kids in the straight world supposed to know their letters by five? It hardly seemed possible. Five?

  “Come now, wipe those cheeks and I’ll take you back to your mummy,” Killian said.

  “I don’t want to go back, I want to go with you,” Sue said, “you’re the only one who’s ever nice to me.”

  “I’ll tell you what, I’ll take you back but we’ll go the long way round, is that okay?”

  “Aye, okay,” she said.

  Killian offered her his big oversized paw and she slipped her fingers into it. From the outside this scene must have looked like that bit in Frankenstein when the girl goes walking with the monster. Of course, thought Killian, the monster brained her.

  He led her back through the woods.

  The deer unfortunately had gone but when they got to the meadow the butterflies were all still there.

  “Do you see these butterflies?” Killian asked.

  “Of course, I’m not blind!” the girl said, all eggy with him which he liked.

  “Do you know any of their names?”

  “They’re just butterflies, so they are.”

  “No, no, no, they all have names. Three names. An English name, a Latin name, an Irish name. Would you like to know some of them?”

  For the first time a little smile appeared on the girl’s face. “Maybe,” she said.