by Chris Petit
‘Things are very delicate in that direction, skip. I can’t risk anything.’
Given Blair’s lack of help, Cross made no mention of what Vinnie had told him, though he had half intended to when he’d picked up the phone.
Cross’s exasperation increased during the drive. If it wasn’t a lorry blocking the way it was a bus. He should have been able to do the journey in half the time.
He’d finally told Blair that he would be outside York Road station that night at eight and if Vinnie couldn’t make it then he would be there the same time tomorrow. Blair had grunted and hung up, leaving Cross with no indication of whether he would pass on the message.
In Newtownstewart he stopped and bought cigarettes. The dreariness of the place emphasized how uncomfortable he was outside Belfast. He had never learned to interpret the local towns and villages, all of them as hostile as a bandit town in a wild west film, with their empty streets and hidden eyes.
He sat in the parked car and smoked with the window down, feeling like a guilty schoolboy. Deidre had a crusading zeal against smoking. He wondered what his life would have been like if he had not met her. He flicked the butt away unfinished to show himself he didn’t need it.
Donnelly turned out not to be the stout, ruddy fellow of farmer’s stock Cross had imagined but a lean, angular man of metropolitan looks in neat suit and jazzy tie. His hair flopped over his brow and his most frequent gesture was a flick of the head to stop it from getting in his eyes.
‘You’re younger than I imagined,’ said Cross. He meant it as a compliment.
‘And you’re older. Welcome to Ballybofey.’
It was said pleasantly. Donnelly was clearly direct, which was a relief.
Ballybofey police station was a dirty pebble-dash building in the main street. After the massively fortified barracks of the North, it looked naked. Wire mesh over the windows was the extent of its defences. Most of their work according to Donnelly involved co-operating with customs on border smuggling.
‘I’ve not come up with much on Berrigan, a dark horse altogether. Seems like it turned out nice after all,’ said Donnelly as they got into his dilapidated Opel Kadett.
During the drive, Cross dozed and awoke to find himself facing a desolate landscape like something from a nightmare. As far as the eye could see, the hillside had been stripped of vegetation, leaving clumps of splintered pines sticking out of the ground like broken bones. There were craters of muddy water where whole trees had been upended and enormous clods of earth thrown up by the upheaval. Cross asked if it was some sort of firing range.
‘Christ, no. That’s just the forestry people.’
They turned off into a forest maze of unsignposted lanes so complex that Cross could not believe they weren’t lost.
‘I know the way,’ said Donnelly with a smile, though soon after he announced he had made a wrong turn, by an abandoned burnt-out car, and reversed back.
‘Berrigan makes his living from a few animals and a bit of upholstery,’ he said, ‘though, you can imagine, there’s not much call for that sort of thing around here. He was a newcomer too, which is unusual in these parts.’
‘When did he come here?’
‘A couple of years ago.’
‘Married?’
‘Not as far as anyone knows, but he could keep a harem up here and none would be the wiser.’
The lane narrowed and the tall firs closed in until they brushed the sides of the car, and there was no view beyond the tunnel ahead and the thinnest strip of sky above. Cross had seen only one other vehicle since the town, a tractor they had followed for a mile or so until it had turned off.
The Kadett ground up a track so rutted that Donnelly had to use bottom gear. As they came over the crest of a hill into bright sunlight the trees disappeared and below lay a tiny valley and Berrigan’s farmhouse surrounded by steep hills. Its walls sparkled white in the sun, the fields around bright green. Cross got out to open a gate across the track. The air was fresh, though for a moment he thought he smelled something tainted on the breeze.
The farm became distinctly less alluring the nearer they got. Rusting machinery and discarded sacks littered the land.
‘Do we know for sure he’s not there?’ Cross asked.
‘If he is I’d be surprised, let’s put it like that. At least the van’s still where it was,’ said Donnelly as they parked in the yard.
Cross inspected the van’s tyres. Their tread looked similar to the sample.
‘Is this the van the body was carried in?’ asked Donnelly.
‘Pretty definitely.’
‘I can get it gone over if you like. It might take a while but they’re not bad.’
Cross looked round. Most windows in the outbuildings were broken and left unrepaired. Several belonging to the house had been patched up with plywood that had become warped by rain.
‘Mr Berrigan was not exactly one for the jobs around the house,’ said Donnelly.
‘He could have been gone for years,’ said Cross.
‘Oh aye. If it wasn’t for the farmer who has the fields above the house seeing him from time to time, I’d say the same. The door’s open – no great call for security up here.’
The interior was dark and musty, the boarded windows making the rooms unnaturally dark. A sitting room and dining room were clearly not used, their furniture covered in dust sheets. The detritus of Berrigan’s life centred on a flag-stoned kitchen, with a parlour off that contained little apart from an armchair and stove, empty gin bottles and a few cans of cheap food. There were not any of the usual things that defined people’s existence – newspapers or books, television or radio.
‘There’s no post,’ he said to Donnelly. ‘Do you think he doesn’t get any or he comes back for it?’
‘They might hold it for him in town. I’ll check.’
A telephone was the only connection to the outside world. Cross picked up the receiver. It still worked.
Upstairs they found a few old clothes and some basic toiletries. The bath was full of dust. The bedrooms were empty, apart from one room which had been camped in, with a mattress on the floor and a couple of blankets. A sheet was tacked over the window. A cupboard held two old suits and some shoes. Downstairs Cross had noticed some waterproofs and gumboots.
‘This fellow has things pretty stripped down,’ said Donnelly.
‘The bare essentials. No Mrs Berrigan.’
‘No sign of a woman’s touch, I’ll grant you.’
They were on their way downstairs when the telephone rang, startling them. They looked at each other in surprise, then Donnelly ran to answer. It was for Cross.
‘Me?’ Cross asked in astonishment.
It was Westerby, who had traced the number through the directory. She sounded breathless. The line was very bad.
‘I thought you ought to know, sir, I think I’ve found two more advertisements. They feel like they belong with the other one.’
She had decided to check back-issues of the classifieds on the hunch that there might be more than the one advertisement. Cross marvelled at her dedication but wondered at her keenness. Phoning him felt like a way of seeking his approval. He decided he was being unfair – it was the unpleasant atmosphere of the farm making him sour.
‘What makes you think they belong?’
‘They both have false names and addresses.’
Cross’s chest felt tight and he reached for his cigarettes and fished around for a light. Donnelly produced a book of matches from his top pocket – advertising a cocktail bar, Cross noticed.
‘And there’s a reference to piercing hands,’ said Westerby.
Cross exhaled. The tightness in his chest persisted. He had the sudden feeling someone knew he was at the farm and was even watching.
‘Are you there, sir?’
‘Yes,’ said Cross. ‘What do these new ones say?’
‘The first appeared on the last Friday in February. Yea, for thy sake are we killed all the day long;
we are counted as sheep for the slaughter.’
He wondered if Westerby ever read in church.
‘What’s the procedure for placing an advert?’
‘Write your copy on the coupon in the paper and send the right money.’
‘And no one need know the address is false?’
‘As long as it gets past the scanners. The supervisor told me they turn down some they consider contentious. Otherwise there’s no check.’
‘What about the other one?’
‘This was only a couple of days ago. It goes, For dogs have compassed me; the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.’
They pierced my hands, he thought. He wondered if Westerby wasn’t being over imaginative. She seemed to sense his reluctance.
‘I just thought you ought to know, sir. I’m not so sure now I’ve told you.’
‘Why not?’
He was irritated by her sudden backtracking.
‘Well, they feel like they belong together, but I could be wrong because I’m pretty sure these are from the Psalms and the first one isn’t.’
‘You did the right thing telling me,’ Cross said, hanging up, though he did not see why it could not have waited. For the moment he didn’t want to consider the implications of what she had told him, and he resented her intrusion.
Outside he was glad of the bright daylight. Donnelly was sitting on a mounting block. He looked content, making the most of the early warm weather.
‘Is there anything else you’d like to see?’
‘Give me five minutes. Stay there if you want. I’ll just be poking around.’
‘A rat the size of a tank just ran across the yard.’
Donnelly smiled his easy-going smile and said he’d sit in the sun if it was all the same.
The farmyard was surrounded by a rectangle of outbuildings. Most were empty or contained rusted machinery. In a smaller shed Cross found the freezer, easily deep and wide enough to hold a man. It had been switched off and the ice had turned to water.
Next door seatless chairs hung from the ceiling. An armchair stood on the floor, its stuffing spilling out, and another lay pushed on its side. Swathes of calico lay on the floor covered in dirt. A bench was littered with tools and old lozenge tins full of upholstery tacks. Berrigan’s workshop seemed indecently cluttered after the spareness of the farmhouse. Cross’s eye was drawn to what looked like a screwdriver with a snapped-off point. He picked it up, careful not to get his fingerprints on it, and held it to the light. The handle was wooden, like a screwdriver’s, but the stem thinner and sharply pointed. He tried to remember what the thing was called as he slipped it into his pocket, wondering if it had been used on the dead man’s wrists.
The workshop had a back door that took him out into the fields on the far side of the farm. He stopped, puzzled by a bizarre sight in the distance, between him and the barn – cemetery-straight rows of what looked like tiny garish body bags. Line upon line of dead children, it seemed, ready for burial. Cross couldn’t wait to leave.
The barn was much further than it looked. Several times he almost gave up. Ditches not visible from the farm needed negotiating and they shortened his temper. The dead children turned out to be plastic bags full of peat.
He heard Donnelly call and turned: the farm seemed tiny. Cross shouted back and Donnelly waved.
He pressed on. His nostrils caught a whiff of something: manure, or perhaps the sickly smell of silage. Then he recognized the stench of decay. It came from the barn and was so overpowering that he had to cover his nose.
He cautiously pulled open the barn door and stood blinking in the entrance, his eyes adjusting to the dark. He was aware only of the total silence. Then something rose up at him, and he threw his hands in front of his face as the air became furious with a black buzzing. They swarmed around his head, thousands of flies, and Cross understood then what had been nagging him since his arrival. Donnelly had said that Berrigan kept animals. But the farm had none.
He realized he was staring at the remains of the man’s livestock – several chickens, a couple of cows, a piglet, some kind of other animal whose head had been removed, and a donkey. He had to force himself to look.
Each animal had been systematically slaughtered, throats hacked from ear to ear, the chickens with their heads snapped off. The belly of each animal was slit up the middle then across. Grey sacks of intestines lolled out of the carcasses on to straw treacle-sticky with blood. Blood was on the walls, sprays of the stuff, looking like it had been hosed on. Cross could imagine only too clearly the jets of it pumping out of the bellowing, thrashing animals in their death throes. Christ, what slaughter. He’d never seen anything like it.
Had it not been for the hammer on the floor he would have left it at that and fled. It was a small mallet. He wondered what it was doing there until he saw the state of one of the cow’s legs. The front knees were smashed, bone shards exposed. All four of the donkey’s legs had been broken, the other animals’ as well.
Out of the corner of his eye Cross sensed movement and spun round, heart thumping. What had disturbed him – a wild cat crouched on top of the stalls – was not what held his eye. The severed head of a goat had been jammed on to the post of the stall and deliberately arranged as a sightless observer of the carnage below.
The cat started gnawing at the goat and Cross yelled in delayed fright, causing it to scurry off. He saw too that the other animals were in the process of being eaten away. He felt rats watching.
Cross fought his way out of the barn, staggered and fell to his knees, then on all fours. He knelt there panting, feeling cold sweat pricking his flesh. He fought the urge to vomit, in the belief that if he won that struggle it would ward off the evil of what he had just seen. But the images of bone and guts swam uncontrolled before his eyes, and his stomach contracted and with a cry of despair he retched in blinding spasms until his eyes burned and the horror of the barn seared itself on to his mind’s eye. The cruel detail of the slaughter became ever clearer, and he saw fresh patterns in the killer’s method, saw how each animal’s belly had been carved up, then across to make a sign of the cross.
With nothing left in his stomach to bring up, he continued to retch until he fell sideways from exhaustion and lay on the grass staring at the sky, a pitiful drooling creature so weak that he doubted if he could stand. He felt blighted by what he had witnessed. The grisly tableau had assaulted his humanity, reduced him to an animal, stripped him of reason. If it were the work of Berrigan, then he was dealing with a monster. As sheep for the slaughter, he remembered from the quotation, except there had been no sheep in the barn.
He heard Donnelly call, sounding so close that Cross could not work out how he had got there so fast. He thought he had only been in the barn a minute or two, though it had felt like an eternity.
‘Christ, what happened?’
Donnelly moved towards the barn, but Cross shouted at him not to.
‘Don’t!’
‘Jesus, what went on in there?’
‘I’ll tell you later, just don’t go in. How did you get here so fast?’
‘I drove. There’s a track. Are you all right?’
Cross rose shakily. Donnelly pointed to the top of the car, visible over the hedge. He resisted Donnelly’s help, ashamed of the vomit he could smell on himself beneath the general stench.
As he made his way unsteadily towards the car he remembered the hammer and told Donnelly to wait. He forced himself back, keeping his eyes averted from the carnage – a hell to which he had already sworn he would never return – to retrieve it.
18
IN the days after the barn Cross felt his grip go. He slept badly, waking at five without fail. Irritable days passed teetering on the edge of exhaustion.
‘For Christ’s sake, Matthew, will you stop banging that spoon!’
The boy ran from the breakfast table in tears. When Deidre told Cross not to swear at Matthew he snapped back that he h
ad not been swearing at the boy.
‘You know what I mean,’ she said in exasperation. ‘At, in front of – just don’t swear.’
‘That’s rich coming from you.’
‘I do not do it in front of the children!’ she shouted, setting Fiona off.
‘We do nothing in front of the children!’ Cross yelled as she went after Matthew, leaving him to mollify Fiona.
‘Daddy’s horrid,’ was her only verdict.
He looked at his toast and decided he was not hungry. What sleep he had got had ended with a dream where he’d watched Ricks’ fastidious white hands perform an autopsy on him, while the barn’s sharp-toothed cat picked at his remains.
Donnelly had taken him back to the farm, where he had cleaned himself up, then driven him to Berrigan’s nearest neighbour, who lived on an adjacent smallholding. The farmer was surprisingly young, and told Cross he had taken over the place at sixteen after his father died. Cross wondered what another thirty years of solitude would do to him, or what chance he would have of picking up a wife in such a remote spot.
In spite of being neighbours, he and Berrigan could have been living on different planets. The farmer’s sightings were restricted to the occasional view of a distant figure in the valley below. Cross understood something that he had not appreciated until then. He saw how isolation could have sent Berrigan crazy enough to slaughter his own livestock.
The drive back to Ballybofey seemed quicker than going, the route less tortuous. Cross was tempted to stay over except he had to be at York Road station at eight.
Cross said, ‘I’ll have the hammer and the screwdriver thing looked at by forensic. Get someone to go over the van and look at the animals before getting rid of them.’
Before he left, they talked to several local shopkeepers. Cross grew impatient with the endless preambles that took in everything from local match scores to the health of relatives. All of them had trouble recalling Berrigan. By the end Cross had no idea whether he was tall, short, fat, thin, forty, fifty or sixty. (‘Well, his hair was white, I’d say, but not an old man’s white, so it might have been a colour like white.’)