Casey quirked a brow at him but took the proffered flask. The whiskey was strong, the fumes making his eyes water, but the long trail of fire it left on the path to his stomach went some ways toward thawing his bones.
He cast his eyes around the ring of trees. “My gran always called these witch trees, because the berry has a wee pentagram where they join to the stems. She was a great one for the old ways, planted rowans on her parent’s grave, said ‘twould keep the haunts away.” He shuddered under his cloak of blankets. “Hope it holds true in this realm as well.” He looked in the direction of the collapsed mound, though it wasn’t visible through the undergrowth of young holly.
“There was no way to save them,” Jamie said bluntly, taking a sip off the flask himself. “I shouldn’t think you’d have any grief over their death, they just about succeeded in killing you.”
Casey shifted, looking suddenly uncomfortable. “They weren’t the only ones there at first.” His eyes shifted toward Thrawny, and he cleared his throat.
Thrawny never slow on the uptake, heaved himself to his feet, “Finish the flask off lad, ye need the heat of it.”
He stretched his shoulders, the fire kindling his beard and hair to flaming copper. In the night he looked like a Viking berserker.
“I’m goin’ for a walk, need to piss somethin’ fierce, an’ then I’m goin’ back to the van where there’s a heater. I’ll be there when the two of yez decide it’s time to move along.”
Jamie nodded, watching as the massive bulk switched off through the trees.
“I imagine that’s meant to give us a chance to talk privately,” Casey said, glancing in the direction Thrawny had taken, his eyes hooded.
“Did you know the third man?” Jamie asked.
“No. Maybe,” Casey shook his head, “that’s the odd thing, they had me blindfolded from the time they took me off the truck. Wasn’t much of a battle for them, bein’ that I was handcuffed an’ all. The third one was waitin’ in the mound for me. It had all been pre-planned like, or so it seemed. He had a voice that was different than the other two. More posh, like yer own. Though maybe not quite so cultured as yerself.”
“Jade instead of pearls?” Jamie quipped lightly, though Casey’s statement had set off an alarm bell deep within his subconscious.
“Aye, so to speak, an’ I thought perhaps I’d heard the voice before, but what with them kickin’ me an’ plungin’ my head in the water every other minute, it was a bit hard to get a fix on things.” Casey looked directly at Jamie across the fire. “But I’m certain of one thing, the man wanted me dead.”
Jamie added more pieces of wood to the fire. The two of them watched it blaze up into the night, smoke blending with the mist, like ghosts moving through fog.
“Someone in league with Joe Doherty?”
“That was my first thought, an’ I know Joe sees a bulls-eye on my chest every time he chances to meet me—but no, I don’t believe ‘twas him, this time.”
“This time?” Jamie echoed.
Casey nodded, drawing the blanket tighter. “Aye, there’s been a couple of things that have happened out of the way since I’ve been home. I kept it to myself, because I didn’t want to scare Pamela.”
“She’s nobody’s fool, man, she’s been worried sick since you came home.”
“Aye, I know, the woman is my wife after all.”
“I’m aware,” Jamie said dryly.
“Well,” Casey went on, “I had a near miss on the construction site one day, thought my line was secured when I was up on the beams. But the link was next to breakin’, sawed through. Another night I was closin’ up the center an’ a car came by slow. Ye know that’s always a worry in Belfast. They came round again, but I’d ducked into a doorway across an’ up the street. Man got out of the car, had a rifle tucked under his arm. Took a look around for me, an’ thank the Lord didn’t see me.”
“Christ man, why didn’t you tell me sooner? It’s not just yourself you have to worry about these days.”
“I’m aware,” Casey replied, with no little sarcasm. “I didn’t come home plannin’ on gettin’ myself killed. An’ frankly yer not the first name on my list when I need assistance.”
“But you’re asking now?”
“Aye, I’m askin’ now. Because I know ye’ll watch out for her as well as I would myself. She’s stubborn as a goat an’ doesn’t take kindly to bein’ told where to go an’ what to do. But she’s still a wee bit naïve about Ulster. I know ye understand her nature.” Casey swallowed as if he’d a bone in his throat. “An’ if I don’t make it home any time soon, will ye tell her I’m sorry?”
“I will.”
PAMELA CAME UPON JAMIE pulling his head out of the rain barrel that sat outside the stable doors. His hair was streaked translucent and streaming, skin flinching from the icy water.
She handed him a towel wordlessly, earning her a weary quirk of his eyebrow before he took the towel and buried his head in it, vigorously scrubbing at his numbed scalp.
“Get any sleep?” he asked, noting that the house was still quiet in the faint morning light.
“A little more than you, I imagine,” she said, voice sharp with strain.
He emerged blinking from the towel, in the midst of an extravagant yawn, to find her looking at him in chin-up resignation. “He’s dead then?” she said and he saw that she’d no more slept than he had, but rather had used her hours to prepare for what uncertainties her life with Casey had always held.
“No, not dead,” he said, bracing his hands on each side of the barrel in an effort to stay upright.
“Not dead,” she echoed, voice a mere whisper in the vast silence of dawn. “There’s a ‘but’ at the end of those words, Jamie.”
He admired her strength in the midst of terror. She always wanted her truth undiluted. Some would think such bravery foolhardy, but he knew well enough to respect it. He also knew that she wasn’t going to be happy with what he had to tell her.
Behind her, where the hill dropped away and gave onto the city, the sun rose through a haze of smoke and the dull glow of dying fires. An occasional pop signalled the fact that bullets were still being exchanged. Exhaustion had put a delineating edge around everything he saw, so that it appeared magnified.
The city seemed no more than a toy set up for imminent destruction. The roads annexing off the wedges of neighborhood, small tribal enclaves wrapped tight around themselves and their pain, breathing the stilted air of violence. Today people would emerge from their hidey holes, exhausted, injured, confused, and for a moment—perhaps a mere second—would pause to wonder what any of it meant. And then they would stoop to pick up the stone that would continue the war.
He sighed, one last moment of strength, and then even he was due a rest. “Casey’s fine, a little banged, a little bruised, but I managed to find him before any serious damage was done.”
He saw the swift intake of breath, the light that sprang to her face as she began to look about wildly.
“He’s not here, Pamela.”
“Then where is he? Somewhere safe? Can I go to him?”
“Safe as can be at present,” Jamie said grimly.
“Jamie?” The fear returned swiftly to her face.
“There’s only one place that’s beyond the reach of the men who paid to have him taken off that truck. It’s ironic really.”
“What is?”
“Last I knew he was headed for a ship anchored in the Lough called the Maidstone.”
“Jamie what have you done?” she asked, voice sharp with fear.
Jamie, gone beyond the bounds of exhaustion and sense, laughed without humor.
“I’ve handed him over to the British Army.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
The Maidstone
AS PRISON SHIPS WENT, the Maidstone, anchored in Belfast Lough, was totally unsuitable. Built in 1937, she had been used as an emergency billet for troops in 1969. For the latest round of troubles she’d been hastily converted
into a prison ship to lodge close to 150 men.
Moored twenty feet from solid land, the ship was berthed at the only wharf in Belfast equipped for unloading pitch and tar. Pipes for tankers to unload ran through the ship’s sides. Entry to the jetty was guarded by a sandbagged army emplacement. Short Brother’s airfield overlooked the ship on the pier side, and on the starboard lay a 300 foot stretch of water leading to a huge coal yard.
The ship was cramped, stuffy, and overcrowded. The prison itself was at the stern and consisted of two bunkhouses, one up and one down, and two mess rooms. Above these were the quarters of the governor and his staff, and above them was the deck, used twice a day for exercise and surrounded by ten-foot high barbed-wire. Forward were the army quarters, separated from the prisoners by a high mesh fence and a solid gate.
It was here that Casey had landed. The irony that he was locked up in the only Belfast prison that sat upon water was not lost on him, nor was it greatly appreciated.
An army jeep had been waiting at the head of the road leading away from Dun Siog. It seemed unlikely that the soldiers had been driving by coincidentally. It seemed more like insurance against his possible survival.
For Casey and most of the men who also found themselves at the mercy of God, England and the RUC, this was not the first time they’d been incarcerated, and so they settled quickly.
Routines were established swiftly, leaders rising to the head of small motley groups through a natural and instinctive pecking order. The ship had a committee that was comprised of four Provos and two Officials under the chairmanship of an old Derry Republican, Matty Loughlin, a man Casey knew from his boyhood as he’d been a compatriot of his father Brian.
The committee set up rotas of men to take care of the food serving and latrine duty. There was a great deal of grumbling over this, as many of the men saw no purpose in doing what they termed ‘lackey’ work. They felt their captors should do the work that came of illegally imprisoning 142 men.
While Casey understood their attitude, he knew the real reason for the rotas was to prevent the apathy and depression that inevitably befell imprisoned men. Particularly ones who had no clear idea when or if they might hope for release. Cooped up for twenty hours a day, or more if the weather was foul, with only two thousand square feet of deck, and that liberally coated with gull excrement, it was imperative that the men have some sense of order if they weren’t all to sink into complete anarchy.
Casey’s own small crew consisted of some six men. Matty, who never slept in a bunk, but curled up on an old couch every night. Declan Roy, who’d a sarcastic tongue, a mane of black hair that he kept tied back, and who stayed up from dark to dawn playing rounds of chess, solitaire and bridge. Roland Dempsey, who was fanatically religious, had a wife and four sons on the outside, and possessed an enormous talent for getting directly on the one nerve Declan had left.
And then there was young Shane McCann. It was the first time he’d been incarcerated and therefore he was the hardest hit of the lot of them. He was frightened and jumpy, a bad combination what with the frequent ‘raids’ and ‘reprisals’ the troops subjected the internees to. Detainees were locked up for three hours while troops plundered their quarters, destroying many of their scant belongings as well as the small crafts many men did to pass the time; matchstick crosses, hand-painted handkerchiefs and the like. They also stole their cigarettes, not the wisest move on a ship where morale was lower than a snake’s belly and the tension as high as a kite in a gale.
Arrangements for visitors were next to non-existent. Permits, without which no one could visit, were arriving after the date fixed for the visit. Frustration both within and without the ship was mounting.
Thus far, two weeks into his time aboard the ship, Casey had received two messages. The first a tersely worded and heavily coded message from Jamie letting him know that Pat was being held at Girdwood Barracks. The other was from Pamela, telling him that she was doing everything in her power to get a visitors pass; that she and the boy had returned home; and that all was as well as could be hoped for in his absence. The first message he had burned to ash and flushed down the latrine. The second he kept in his shirt pocket, unable to bear parting with the small bit of familiarity and home her few words provided him. Other than a briefly worded missive saying that he wasn’t being maltreated, he’d sent no other message back. He knew full well that every word in and out of the ship was being scrutinized for any bit of information that could serve in the end to incriminate the lot of them. Pamela knew enough of Ulster to understand that he could not reveal anything of either the true conditions of the ship, nor the true condition of his heart. Both of which were less than golden.
His heart she knew, the ship he didn’t want her to know in any way.
Ostensibly the governor, a hard-faced Ulsterman named Norman McDonough, was supposed to be in charge. But it was the volatile Sergeant commanding the British troops that was really in charge, and every manjack of them knew it.
Sergeant Boyce was a regular bastard with a penchant for screaming until his eyes bugged from his head, and a hatred of Irishmen that Casey had experienced once or twice in his lifetime, but never with the fervency that Sergeant Boyce evidently felt. He wasn’t averse to inflicting pain on anyone who looked sideways at him, either. During the first week there’d been a scuffle between troops and a man named Alan Kelly, who had felt it was his right—as well as that of all the prisoners—to bombard the governor and the Ministry for Home Affairs daily with protests about their arrest, treatment, and conditions aboard ship. For his pains, Kelly had been tricked into believing his lawyer was waiting for him in an interview room. Who was really waiting was Sergeant Boyce.
Kelly emerged from the interview room an hour later, staggering, bleeding and closemouthed. He’d maintained his silence from then until now and hadn’t demanded nor complained in any of the intervening days. Nor had any of his visitors received their passes, and his mail had mysteriously dried up. In the outside world Kelly was a solicitor who’d been charged with ‘scandalizing a court, and preventing the course of justice’, for successfully defending a client. Word also came back through Kelly’s bunkmate that Kelly’s younger brother had been badly beaten and Kelly’s home ransacked while his wife stood crying in the front garden. Every man on the ship understood the message. Nothing was safe, not your wife at home in her bed, not your brothers and sisters, nor your mam and da’.
After the incident with Kelly, an uneasy rhythm set itself in motion on the Maidstone. The men retreated into their small enclaves, did their duties, and obeyed the command that came down from the committee of Republicans that were the only authority they recognized. The others they ignored, averted their eyes from, kept their heads down and their mouths shut within the hearing of the soldiers, RUC and governor.
However, an incident occurred during afternoon exercise three weeks into their incarceration that put Casey directly in the sights of the sadistic Sergeant Boyce.
It started simply enough, with Roland and Declan indulging in one of their endless spates of bickering about Roland’s habit of praying wherever and whenever he was seized with the desire to commune with God. The crowded, gull shit laden deck was no exception.
Roland often claimed to see visions of the Holy Mother’s face in windows, in the air and on one memorable occasion on the front of Declan’s Dubliners t-shirt. Today she apparently was peering out of a rather dirty porthole at him, because he dropped mid-stride while Shane was passing a ball to him, directly onto Declan, who was attempting to have a quiet walk and smoke simultaneously.
“Jaysus Christ!” Declan exploded. “Get off my goddamn foot.”
Casey turned toward the men, knowing the tension between them had been at break point for a good three days. For Roland his religion was his safe haven, for Declan it was his innate cynicism that kept his sanity intact. The two were mixing about as well as oil and water.
“Don’t blaspheme,” Roland said calmly, returning to
fingering over the rosary beads that never left the sanctity of his scarecrow thin chest.
Casey winced, knowing that Roland’s very calmness was going to be the thing that drove Declan over the line. It was.
Declan simply went to shove Roland off his foot, but as fate would have it caught the clasp of Roland’s rosary on his finger. The chain, worn from years of usage, snapped, and the beads exploded out from Roland’s neck in a spray of jet.
“What have ye done?” All things considered, Roland’s tone was beautifully calm.
“I’ve broken yer wee necklace,” Declan said, and Casey groaned inwardly, seeing the apologetic route wasn’t about to be taken.
“Tisn’t a wee necklace, ‘tis a rosary,” Roland said stiffly, the red mounting his face in a tidal surge that put Casey on full alert.
“It’s just a bunch of beads an’ superstition,” Declan said, his own temper still well and truly stoked.
“Jaysus, the fool should have apologized,” Matty muttered.
Casey only had the time to get out an, “Aye but since when has Declan done as he should?” before Roland came round off his knees with whip-crack speed, the glint of something silver in his hand. Before Casey could clearly understand what was happening, Roland had Declan’s ponytail firmly in hand and was holding a knife to the base of it.
“Oh shit,” Casey and Matty said in unison.
“Superstition, is it?” Roland said, as Declan twisted ineffectually, batting at Roland with fists cuffed. “I’ll scalp ye and then we’ll see who’s superstitious.”
“Oh Christ,” Matty muttered. Declan was as certain as Samson had been that his luck lay entirely within his refusal to cut his hair. He was convinced that was what had kept him alive and relatively unharmed through years of imprisonment and interrogations.
“Get yer fuckin’ hands off me hair,” Declan howled, scrabbling for purchase on the slick deck beneath his feet.
Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series Book 2) Page 46