by Shaun Herron
Time ticked by in the kitchen. The man Kevin watched it on his wrist in the stirring silence and seemed to judge the quarter-hours with uncanny precision. When an hour had passed he stood up. “He’s sleeping by now,” he said. “Away on. Quiet now.”
“We can go?” the doctor asked with relieved astonishment.
“Quiet if you don’t want shot,” O’Connell said to McManus. “I know all about it, son, your sister and that. Powers murdered my brother Danny. All I want is Powers dead. As long as he thinks you’re here, you don’t need to be. I’ll handle Cleery. Away on.”
“Mrs. Burke too?” McManus said.
“Thons your desperate woman. I’d be glad to see the last of her.”
McManus went back to the bedroom. “The man says we can go if we do it very quietly. Get dressed, Kate, and come away on,” he said.
“Come here, child.” Her face was even older, even more severe; there was no trace of a smile round the wide mouth or of humor in the eyes. The eyes were lifeless. “Sit here,” she said, patting the bed beside her. He sat down and she took his hand. “Tell me honest, child, were you happy in this bed with me—in the dark?”
“Yes, Kate.”
“In the light?”
“Yes, Kate. Get up and come on.”
“You did my heart good, child.”
“You mine, Kate.”
“You’re for England now.”
“If I’m lucky.”
“We have a brother there. He’s rich.”
“Come away with the doctor, Kate.”
“He lives in East Grinstead.”
“Never mind that, Kate. Get dressed and come on.”
“Get me a folder from the bottom drawer over there.”
O’Connell stood impatiently in the doorway, “Will you for God’s sake cut it and get outa here?”
“Five minutes, sir,” Mrs. Burke said, with surprising charm, and McManus brought her the folder. “My brother has no children,” she said. “He and his wife go to Spain every summer. He’s a stockbroker.” She said it with naïve pride. “We can use his house anytime in the summer.”
“Use it now, then.”
She wrote on the pad from the folder and gave him what she had written. “There’s a key at an estate agent’s in the square in East Grimstead. Give him that. He’ll give you the key. You’ll be safe there.”
He took the letter. “Thank you, Kate. Now come on.”
“You’re a gentle child. Stay gentle. Kiss me again.”
He bent and kissed her.
“I’m always left, child. I’m always left.”
O’Connell was back in the doorway. “For fuck sake, if that’s what you want, get into bed and get it. Make up your bloody mind!”
McManus leapt from the bed. God, everything went sour, everything was ridiculous in the end. He was ridiculous. “Goodbye, Kate,” he said in confusion and grabbed his money and his gun from the drawer and rushed from the room. “She won’t come,” he said to the doctor.
“Then let her stay.”
O’Connell took the gun from McManus. “You won’t need that. You should never have touched one. You’re the great bloody pair,” he said, “and by God, doctor, no polis or we’ll come for you.”
They went through the front fuchsia hedge to avoid the creaking gate, and down between the slate ridges and through the grassy hollows to the crossroads. The doctor’s wife was asleep in the back seat.
“I’ll drive,” McManus said, and took the wheel. He thrashed the car through the narrow twisting roads and wakened the doctor’s wife.
“Where’s Kate?” she screeched.
“She wouldn’t come,” her husband said curtly.
“You should have made her come. Let her rot. I did all I could for the crazy woman. Why’s he driving?” the woman whinnied.
“Shut up,” the doctor said as if for the first time in his married life.
“Seamus!”
“Shut your bloody mouth!”
The Mercedes roared through Schull. “Schull! Schull! Stop!” the doctor shouted. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“Cork Airport.” McManus didn’t speak again. He was away. Again. Well away. He’d be in England in hours with a place to hide. Well away. Again. Thank you, Kate.
“I’m dying with sleep,” Mrs. Sullivan complained, and joined in the exhausted silence.
The light came up. The brakes ground in the fourcourt of the airport. McManus got out without speaking and walked into the lobby. There was a Cambrian Air flight to Cardiff at a quarter to nine. Yes, there was space on it. Yes, he would take it. He would take anything to get away quickly.
“Hullo,” the voice at his shoulder said.
He turned and said, “Brendine Healy of Boston.”
“I tried to find you,” she said. “You look all right now. I don’t mean it that way. I mean you’re looking well . . . not sick . . . you know?”
“Oh?” he said. “I see,” he said, surprised at first and then surprised at the sudden relief that ran through him. Laughing, suddenly, for the nightmare, the unreality was shattered in his head, and the normal, the real was with him. He reached out his hand to touch it.
THIRTEEN
POWERS drove.
“This car,” Kiernan said bitterly, “will do the main road from Schull to Mizen Head and everything we can see from it. Half a dozen take the coast road. The rest do back beyond the main road.” He sat behind Powers.
Sorahan sat up beside Powers with little Barney behind him. Sorahan’s head was full of smiles at the cause of Kiernan’s bitterness. But he kept his smile inside his head.
“I don’t know,” Kiernan said broodingly for the fourth or fifth time. “I don’t bloody know. Nobody from Skibereen? That’s a bloody mystery.”
It wasn’t to Sorahan, and his smiles were harder to hold. He was doing well as a conspirator. But then, intrigue’s second nature to us, he told himself happily. We do it better than anybody.
“Thon Sheehy of Skibereen,” Kiernan said, “thons a sleekid man.” (Sleekid, Sorahan explained to little Barney, was a northern word meaning slippery, deceitful, devious, untrustworthy.)
“Very busy he is,” Barney said ambiguously.
Sheehy had been very busy. Sorahan phoned him at the end of the Bantry men’s meeting at the house of the priest and they met early that night in the back of O’Keeffe’s Bar in Schull. “I’ll tell you what it is, Tim, and I’ll ask you what you’ll do and I hope you’ll do nothing.”
Sheehy listened. “That’s the way of it?” he said at the end. “That’s the way of it.”
“Rape?”
“Rape.”
“Holy God.” Sheehy folded his hands defensively over his crotch. “That’s the fearful thing.”
“The worst.”
“There was no call for that.”
“No call at all.”
“There’ll be two killins here?”
“Two.”
“Jasus. I thought they’d take the boy back and do it up North.”
“No.”
“Here?”
“Here.”
“Jasus. Tis the wrong time o’year, Daniel. There’s the Ballydehob Annual Show, the Skibereen Gymkana, the Skibereen Festival, and the Drinagh Harvest-Time Festival. All at the same time. Two killins here would bugger the lot.”
“That’s the God’s truth. T’would leave a bad taste.”
“Very bad taste, Jasus, aye. Have you the time to follow me into Skibereen and we’ll knock doors and get the boys together?”
“I have all night, Tim.” They looked quickly into one another’s eyes and the look conveyed all the things they had left unspoken, and they smiled little glancing half-smiles as if them that weren’t meant to would hear whole ones and drove to Skibereen and knocked doors and went into conference with the men of Skibereen.
It was a long meeting. The light was brushing the sky before they went home for their breakfasts, having heard Sorahan reco
unt in detail what Kiernan told him about McManus and Powers and Maureen McManus and Powers, and the dread word rape fell with cunning from his schoolmasterly lips onto their early-morning nerves. The word was not spoken again when he was done.
“Then there’s two killins at the time of the Ballydehob and the Festival and the Gymkana and the Harvest-Time ...” Sheehy said wisely and looked from face to face “... tis ruinous timin,” he said, and in their sidelong way they skirted their revulsion and renewed their loyalty to the Cause, containing each in separate compartments in the single and collective mind.
“Tis a busy old time,” a circular man said from the floor, “and the least we can do for being so busy is send the boys in the North an extra collection this week.” They went home to fried bacon or mackerel and sweet tea with their consciences as fresh as the new day’s air.
When they met Kiernan and Powers later in the morning, the two frustrated and impatient men from the North listened to a careful recital of the responsibilities, this week of all weeks in the year, borne by men who were in charge of the Irish dancing and horse-jumping and the fish-and-chip and fried-sausage van, and the flower shop and the country craft work . . . and how would they explain runnin round the country with the Ballydehob and Drinagh and Skibereen annual festivals fallin apart from want of them? They had to live here, it is.
Defeated and with nothing to get a grip on, Kiernan said bitterly, “By Jasus, youse boys carry a heavy load. All our boys in the North have to do is die.”
He could not hear Sheehy say in his head, “Well, God rest their souls but let them do it in the North.”
And who has heard a smile? Sorahan’s was behind his eyes. “Hunt two by two,” he told his young Bantry men, “and them that finds the boy, say nothin—just get him to hell out of West Cork. Let them find him somewhere else, but not here.” Death is less ghoulish out of sight and hearing and executioners are less of a bother in the North, or somewhere else far away from West Cork.... “And you, Barney,” he said, “if we find him, maybe you’d slip off and phone the Garda ... we’ll think about that.” That was the sour one. Sweet Christ, that was informing. That one would have to be thought about. But not yet; not now; “later” is the sweet refuge from bloody decision, thanks be to God.
Sorahan was pleased with his conspiracy and for all he knew when they reached the crossroads shop at seven in the evening, two of the Bantry boys could already have McManus on a bus, running him to Cork and comfort.
It was a simple country shop, smelling of potatoes and bacon and bread and Mr. Deasy was behind his counter, tall, scholarly, and bent like a question mark, ready to close for the day.
“What can I do for you gentlemen?” he said, and speculated on their source of life.
“Half a pound of bacon,” Kiernan said. The others stood back among the lemonade cases on the floor, ordered to keep their mouths shut and leave the talk to an angry and impatient little man.
“Sliced or wrapped?”
“What?”
“Do you want it cut off the side or out of the fridge in a packet?”
“Oh. Wrapped.”
Mr. Deasy went to the fridge by the door into his living quarters. “Nice old day.”
“Fine.”
“You’re not from these parts.”
“No. Do you happen t’know,” Kiernan said indifferently, “a young fellow by the name of McManus who could be stayin round here?”
Mr. Deasy looked thoughtful. “No. I don’t happen to know anybody by that name. Friend of yours?”
“I’m his uncle. Tryin to find him.”
“Is he a tall one?”
“That’s right. You’ve seen him?”
“No. Would he have a beard?”
“He has. Y’ve seen him.”
“No. A lot of young fellows have beards. Is he from the North?”
“He is. How would you happen to know that?”
“I don’t. You’re from the North. I suppose your nephew is too.”
“Jasus! Kiernan paid for his bacon and tried again. “He was walkin. W’a pack, you know.”
“They all are.”
“He might have had a girl with him.”
“Likes the flesh, aye?”
“Well, he’s young.”
“McManus?”
“Aye.”
“Haven’t set eyes on him.”
Kiernan turned and opened the door and rang the bell hanging from it.
“But I know where he is,” Mr. Deasy said, enjoying himself. There wasn’t much to entertain you here, and Mr. Deasy liked a little joke. What do you do here in the winter, Cleery had asked him. Well, there’s table tennis, Mr. Deasy said, and watched Cleery’s eyes with private pleasure. Now he watched the unfolding four-figure tableau fold back into position in front of the counter and among the lemonade bottles. He had said something magical, like pushing a button on television.
“Is that right now?” Very disciplined. Not eager. Kiernan told himself he was getting to know these West Cork foreigners.
“Likes the women?” Mr. Deasy said.
“That’s right. Has he picked himself one round here?”
“Picked a hot one.” Mr. Deasy wiped his counter with a cloth and then wiped the scale of his bacon-slicing machine with the same cloth. “She’s not all there. But she likes young ones. He’s her second.”
They’re talking about a man’s life, Sorahan thought, and waited, his hand on Barney’s arm.
“I was afearda that,” Kiernan said. “Near here?”
“Down behind.”
“Down behind what?”
“The hill behind the shop.”
“But you’ve never seen him?”
“Not yet.”
“Then how d’you know?”
“Three fellas that’s been round here told me. They spoke to him. They’ve been in the woman’s house. There’s only one bed in the house.” His sparkling eyes said, how’s that? and isn’t gossip the countryman’s live theater in the head and no excise tax on it?
“These fellas? Where’re they?”
“Left. They took off this mornin, early.”
“Who’s the woman?”
“Thomas Burke’s widow.”
“Who’s he?”
“He was from here. You never heard of him?” Mr. Deasy had a rack of paperbook books behind the lemonade. Tim Pat Coogan’s The IRA, J. Bowyer Bell’s The Secret Army, Donald S. Connery’s The Irish, Dan Breen’s My Fight for Irish Freedom, Bernadette Devlin’s The Price of My Soul, and a lot of old rubbish it is, he told his customers. But there was no Thomas Burke.
“Am I supposed t’have heard of him?”
“Ah, no. You’re more for business than readin up North. Why don’t you just shoot them old bombers and get on w’business?”
“How do you get to the woman’s house?” There are enemies wherever you turn. This stupid oul duff was one of them. The country’s full of them. Kiernan was no longer all that sure about Sorahan.
“She has a sister in Schull—that’s the doctor’s wife, that one. The one down here keeps them on the run, I’d say.” Don’t answer terminal questions till you have to. They end the play.
“The doctor’s wife?”
“Sullivan. Down the coast road.”
Everything Kiernan feared was being confirmed. He was in a nest of vipers. The Skibereen men were busy, for the love of God. Busy! And this doctor. Sullivan told them he hadn’t seen a soul. Nobody came near him for medicine, or treatment! Bloody liars. Worse, by God. “This doctor. Does he come to the sister’s ... the Burke woman’s house at a1l?”
“For a while, all the time. Every day for a while lately. The wife too. With him every day down here. Well,” he winked and nodded, “a doctor has to watch it, aye? With a horny sister-in-law like the Burke woman. . . . There’s always people that like a nice old gossip.”
“How do we get there?”
“He was here last night. Woke me up in the middle of the night. I got up
and looked and his car was parked out front there. He woke me again in the small hours, roarin away like a motor racer....”
“Thanks.” Kiernan bustled them out of the shop. “Drive up the road,” he told Powers.
“Wait a minute. I need fags,” Sorahan shouted, and ran back into the shop, panic growing in his head. “Have you a phone here?” he asked Mr. Deasy, and then it was blind clear to him too late that all he needed to do was look for a lead-in wire from the telegraph poles. No need to create a situation. Christ! The things you had to remember.
“No. The only one round here’s in the post office a quarter-mile down the road. You wanted to phone?”
“Which way down the road?”
“I’ll show you.”
“No! No need. Just tell me.”
“No bother.” Mr. Deasy was coming round the counter.
“No need! Left or right?”
“No bother at all.” Mr. Deasy shoved Sorahan out through the door into Kiernan’s hearing. “Down there. There’s a dip in the road on a bend and the post office is in a private house on the right. You can’t see it for the trees and the hedge....”
“Thank you, thank you....” Sarah an stumbled into the car.
Mr. Deasy rested his hands on the door. “There’s one thing, though.”
“Thank you, thank you....”
“The postmaster’s over eighty. Very crusty. Won’t let anybody use the public phone after three, the poor old cripple. You’re over four hours late, mister.”
“Thank you, thank you....”
“Away on,” Kiernan said. “Along the road.” He leaned towards Sorahan. “What was all that about?”
Sorahan’s native talent for conspiracy was scrambling to save its face. “I was askin him about a phone. I have to call my wife when I get a chance,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else. His mind was spinning like a fly wheel and Kiernan looked very quiet. This necessity to lie in a hurry was the bad part.
“You went in for fags. You came out lookin for a phone,” Kiernan said gently.
“Yes. I just forgot the fags when I remembered my wife.”