by Finn Óg
“You see, I’ve been told about a terrible thing, and I need to know if it’s true, or if it’s just a horrible fantasy. It involves a child, well, an adult now, a person described as “the Heir.”
“Oh, dear God, forgive us,” the woman spoke for the first time as she crossed herself.
I didn’t take my eyes off her as I bent my legs to sit on her sofa. I just waited as she stared at the wall. Eventually her head rotated back towards me. “Who told you of this? Why would they tell you of this? What did they want?”
I didn’t realise it until much later, but that question betrayed an awful assumption. “Is it true?” I ignored her query, but I already had my answer.
She made an unusual gesture, contorting her fingers a bit like the scout salute, but backwards, and placed the tips against her forehead, masking much of her face. The slack skin on her bony fingers was a little unnerving, and stirred some distant fear from a childhood nursery rhyme. I swiped it aside and sat silently.
“It’s true,” she said eventually. “And my advice to you, is that you drop this.”
I didn’t feel foolish. Sure, my instinct had been to dis-regard the crazy counsellor and his hallucinogenic horror story, but in a way, that put me at ease with myself. There was a certain relief that my view of human life had not darkened to the point of blindly accepting what he’d described. I was trying to reinvent myself as a father and a civilian, and my default position gave me hope that I might see the transition through. Still, I’d sought to disprove the story through an independent source, and it hadn’t gone as planned. It was a reminder that in order to get us out of the mess, I would need to be able to think the worst, and to believe it.
Once I prized open the crack in her conscience, the old woman treated our encounter like a confession. The surroundings seemed appropriate; cold, claustrophobic, no eye contact. Enormous tears leaked down her cheeks; the deep crevices like tributaries, irrigating the disturbed earth of a freshly ploughed field. The truth eventually flooded her face with peace, as if those years spent suppressing the horrors had wizened her, and left her incapable of laughter, of life. I left her in her exhaustion, but my mind was racing. There were gaps in her knowledge, but her story did keep driving at one thing.
“You are not safe.”
She said it three times, and each time it sent a static-like crawl through me. I didn’t care if I wasn’t safe, I hadn’t been safe since I was twenty-two. Isla however, was another matter.
“You have no possible idea what you’ve got yourself into.” The way she began describing what had happened made me wish I was a decade fresher, and fitter for the inevitable fight.
The old girl had grown up in an orphanage, but from what she described, it was nothing short of a workhouse. The children appeared to have been treated as free labour. From her use of language, I could tell that her view of the world was limited; her references were almost child-like and her experience had been curtailed by dreadful hardship and the constant threat of punishment. She described having come of age in the dormitories, and how she realised that she had no ability to live outside the convent walls. Her skills were washing, cleaning, and reading. She explained that she hadn’t even wanted to leave; her life in the echoes of that cold, hard environment, was all she knew.
At some stage, when she was old enough, she’d been given the task of looking after babies. They’d come in quite often, but she didn’t specify any regularity. Her job was to feed and wash them, and she was scolded for amusing them in their cots. The first time she encountered a child that had been skinned, she looked with alarm at the nun who had carried the child in. “Bathe the feet, and mind your business,” was all she was told.
That’s what she did, fighting the infection that set in, asking repeatedly for a doctor who was never summoned. Over the years the process was repeated, as the little unmarked graveyard at the back of the building filled up with tiny corpses.
“You become numb to it.” She turned to me, the first time she’d held my gaze in an hour. “You, God forgive me, you just learn to accept that little children are going to die, and you try to take away that pain for them, you try to stroke away their cries and their screams. But your mind is filled with them, and your sleep, and you never recover. All those babies…” she trailed off, and drifted back into her torment.
“Who brought them to the convent?” I asked.
“A man from America,” she said. Her pronunciation of the continent made it sound like some exotic, untouchable land.
“How do you know?”
“I heard him speak once, to the Sister. He was giving her money. ‘God bless your good work,’ he told her. He was a small man. He had hair at the sides and he tried to make it cover the top. He’ll be dead now I expect.”
“He was old?”
“Much older than you, and that was a long time ago. In the 1970s.”
“How did you know he brought the babies?”
She turned to me with a furious look, as if I had doubted her. “Because he had one with him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m just struggling to understand how anyone could do this to babies.”
“You understand nothing,” she spat, before softening. “You do not realise what you are dealing with here. These people will stop at nothing to keep their secret. They even killed a nun.”
“What?” was all I could manage.
“She challenged the Sister, told her that she would go to the Guards. It was after a child was brought in and the infection took it. The Sister said nothing and showed her back to the nun, and the next day she was dead.”
“Dead how?”
“Dead in her bed! She wouldn’t even have been thirty years old. A woman that age, dying in the bed. Sure, who would ever hear the like of that? She was buried in the graveyard, the marked one. Her family came, a brother and a cousin, but there was n’er a doctor allowed near her. No police. Nothing. She was just dead and that was that.”
“How do you know she was killed?”
“Because her face was purple, and her bed was….” she paused, “soiled, terribly soiled. And the smell from her poor throat when we lifted her up.” She simply shook her head.
I’m no pathologist, but I bought the old woman’s diagnosis.
“It was to be a closed coffin,” she continued, “the brother made an almighty fuss, but the nuns would not have it. Then a priest got involved and quietened the brother, and she was laid to rest without any more to-do.”
The old woman stared at me.
“That’s what they’ll do to you, if you don’t get a bit of sense for yourself.”
“Who? Who are they? What is this group?”
“Well I couldn’t tell you that,” the woman said, indignant again. “Sure, how would I know? Perhaps you should have asked whoever sent you here to my door to open up all this horrible stuff. I don’t know what you were thinking at all.”
“It wasn’t intentional,” I told her. “But I’m in it now.”
“Well if you’re in it, I suggest you get out of it as soon as you can, for these are dangerous and powerful people and they will do anything to keep their dreadful secrets.”
There is something about the elderly, when they issue a warning, which is chilling. Perhaps it's their frailty, the slack skin showing their skeletal future, their proximity to the grave, like a head start towards decomposition. Perhaps it's their experience, the corners they’ve turned long before you. Either way, that old woman unnerved me in a way that I had never before experienced, and in stark contrast to my reaction to the much younger counsellor, I believed every word she uttered.
Of course, I knew that there were other possibilities. The man who had been sent to kill me could have been anyone. A dissident Irish republican, trying to kindle the dying flame of the IRA perhaps. I had served in the U.K.’s armed forces after all, and any military personnel would be considered a target to them. That didn’t seem plausible to me though. Car bombs and opportunistic ur
ban gun tactics were more their bag.
I considered whether it might be a revenge attack for poisoning my wife’s killer, but I doubted whether anybody would care enough about that scumbag.
The factory owner was a possibility. He was incapacitated, dreadfully so, but he might still be able to communicate somehow. His problem was that nobody on the planet liked him enough to help him out, and I had heard that his power of attorney had passed to a niece. Therefore, his ability to source and pay for a hit had been removed. He was a loose end I should have dealt with, but still, my gut told me that the intruder hadn’t been sent by him.
As soon as that brute of a man stepped onto the deck of our boat, I knew there was something desperate afoot. Nobody chooses to kill at sea, unless they have to. There are too many variables – how to get aboard, or ashore, how to dispose of a body, where to leave a dinghy or how to approach without being spotted. Admittedly, that part of the whole assassination attempt still baffled me, but the facts seemed pretty clear. Someone had a serious issue with me. Someone wanted me dead, and they didn’t care that I had a child on board when they came to do it.
It seemed the reason I’d been lined up for disposal was deep and dark. It wasn’t about prostitutes, politics, or seafarers; it wasn’t about revenge either. It was about that bloody counsellor.
It didn’t take long to work through a likely scenario. As the victim’s counsellor, he was probably under surveillance from her abusers. They’d probably pinged me when I met him in Dublin. They may have followed me, in which case they were pretty good - I hadn’t seen them. The night I met him I’d had the smartphone with me, an oversight on my part. My eagerness to get the meeting over with may have proved fatal. It seemed more plausible that they had traced the cell phone, or its GPS. That pointed again to reasonable sophistication, and if they had that sort of tech, then they might have been able to discover Charlie. My business had probably told them all they needed to know about my skill-set. If they knew the right people, they’d have been able to hack into databases and find my service records. If they knew where I’d served, and in what unit, they would likely have become concerned. Uneasy enough perhaps, to decide that I was best removed.
I’d been to countless briefings, and during the surveillance training it was hammered home – the target rarely predicts the lengths to which we go. That was the strength of the U.K. intelligence services, its cunning and guile. It appealed to me, frankly, that those who work hardest and think more than anyone else, get results. If any target were to try to expose the type of intrusion and eavesdropping they’d endured, nobody would believe it. It was too devious for civilians to accept. That’s part of the reason I knew that the people who were on to me were professional, well-connected, and dangerous.
I may not have had the evidence, but I knew in my bones that that’s how I’d landed in this mess. They’d got to me through the Counsellor, they’d assumed I was working for him. It seemed to follow that such a dreadful group would never leave Isla and I in peace.
Anybody else would have gone to the police, but I knew that they would simply listen to the tale of feet skinning and seasonal abuse rings, and dismiss me as a Nut Case. That’s exactly what I had done when I first heard the Counsellor describe the same thing. I could send the plods to the Counsellor, but the police would just take his weirdness as confirmation of their scepticism. He might not agree to see them at all. The old woman would be dismissed as damaged, or institutionalised. In any event, if this ring was as he’d described, it would have the capacity to close down any fledgling investigation. The police had handled my wife’s murder appallingly, so I reckoned there was just no point. Even if they did act, it would take too long, and would not keep Isla safe.
It all seemed depressingly clear to me. So long as the members of the ring remained alive, we were in serious danger – me from them, Isla from being orphaned. And so, we had a looming confrontation, rather like many situations I had been in before – take them out, or be taken out. After what I’d learned from the old woman, truth be told, I’d have gone after them even if my life hadn’t depended on it.
My priority was to make sure that Isla was safe, and that meant I had a massive job to do. I didn’t really know where to begin. I sat and tried to calm the sickening fear that had clotted inside me. Sequencing was important. I wouldn’t be able to do anything while worrying about my daughter. With her at my side I’d constantly be operating at half power, always conscious of the risk to her. She was doing so well, and I refused to let my mistakes mess her up.
I took an enormous amount of cash from the bilge of the boat, handed it to my dad, and pleaded with him not to ask any questions. They’d seen a lot of life themselves, my folks, and my occupation had taken its silent toll on them; the worry, the fear that every time a military death was reported, it might be mine. They knew where I served, and what unit I was in, and asked fewer and fewer questions as I grew older. Their attention and care turned to Isla, into whom they decanted their love. I’d often wondered at the shift in their devotion. It was beautiful to watch, the mutual pleasure of simply being in the company of the third generation of their existence, while Isla reciprocated with simple contentment. She would reach for them without thinking, placing her tiny hand in theirs, and in so doing, she gave them purpose, and a sense that their lives had rounded, in some sort of natural order.
Dad knew by the way I asked him that this simply had to be done. He frowned when I talked him through the need to pay for the convoluted journey in cash, but he accepted it. The only thing he argued over was whose cash it would be. He wanted to pay, but I refused. Eventually he took the money and booked the ferry, and I knew that when he got to England, he would secure flights and the three of them would spend a few months in the sunshine. I thanked God for Mum and Dad's early retirement and their health, and then I hunted for a thread to pull, in the hope that I might be able to preserve their safety.
I cast back over the old woman’s story again, searching for an "in" point. No matter how much I thrashed around, I kept returning to the same conclusion, unappealing as it was.
19
“So, now you do understand what evil is,” the counsellor said gently. He’d woken calmly, despite the fact that I had entered his bedroom un-invited, placed my hand over his mouth, and used it to shake his head. I swiped away a flashback to Jerusalem.
Not here, I motioned to him, staring at the nefarious smart speaker sitting beside his bed. I had quickly learned not to trust any bloody device that could pick up voice commands. If the companies which made them weren’t recording, someone else probably was. What a gift to those involved in surveillance; nobody need ever place a bug in a home again. We were doing it for them by selling our souls to convenience.
There followed an odd arrangement whereby he sat on the lid of his own toilet and I perched on the edge of his bath. He was wearing ridiculous boxer shorts with a gaping convenience. The shower was running as an extra audio precaution, and we talked as the steam built up.
“I understood evil before we last met,” I said. “This is not evil alone, this is perversion.”
He smiled at me, I don’t know if he was smug or seedy, but he seemed to be enjoying it. I certainly didn’t frighten him, which I rather regretted, so I needed to find a foothold.
“How did you confirm what I told you?” he asked.
“I second sourced it.”
“With who?”
I knew I had him on the hook then. He didn’t like the notion of others knowing his secret story. I ignored the question, but hoped he’d ask again.
“I’m prepared to take the job,” I told him. “How do you want to pay?” I needed him to believe that my interest was primarily commercial, but he still hadn’t got past the previous thing.
“Did she tell you about the others?”
The crafty bugger was fishing, but I had the line. I knew that if I ignored that query too, he would start to spill. He had to show that he knew more than my
source. Otherwise he stood the chance of becoming irrelevant. He’d opted to guess it was a woman, which seemed interesting, and I made a mental note to reason out why.
“Cash only.”
“You’ll get your money,” he sighed, as his trunks yawned and I stared instead at the steam condensing on his enormous mirror. Something caught my attention then, but I didn’t compute that properly at the time. Something visual, unusual.
“When?” I tried to keep returning to the cash. It would conceal my fear for the future and safety of my daughter, and it seemed like a useful distraction.
“When you deliver,” he smiled. There was a leeriness to his grin that somehow coupled to the observation made by my subconscious. I began to reassess him.
“What is delivery, to you?” I used a phrase I’d heard some plummy officer once deliver to his poorly-trained troops.
“Well,” his hands opened like his jocks, “that’s up to you, but we can’t have these people abusing anyone else, can we?”
It was then that I saw the condescension in him, the desire to be respected. Such people are often incapable of commanding such regard, so they cling to the tufts of power, as if grabbing at roots when sliding down a cliff. The desperation of a job’s-worth. He sat on his bog lid and treated me like a pupil. I loathed him.
“I need to meet the woman, the victim,” I said.
“Oh, I can’t let you do that.”
He wanted control.
“Why?”
“Trauma. She’s deeply unwell. She needs protection. If she even knew I had spoken to someone else about it, a huge amount of the work I’ve done to help her would be undone.”
The vanity in the man became apparent. This was all about him. I flashed back to his designer ripped jeans. Something I had seen since entering his house was niggling at me, but it was time to leave. I needed a lead, so I poked him enough to provoke one. “You don’t even know where the abusers are, do you? You claim to protect her, but you can’t. You don’t know who they are, the people she’s afraid of.”