“Pamela was right about yer Da’s death.”
“What?” Casey felt something cold and heavy settle in the very marrow of his bones.
“I said she was right. In fact, she got so close to the truth she’s lucky to still be breathin’. ‘Twas fortunate ye made her stop when ye did. She was close to stumblin’ across that bastard Morris Jones while tracin’ the Brotherhood.”
“Ye know about the Brotherhood?”
“Aye, though maybe not so much as yer friend up on the hill.”
“What are ye sayin’?”
“That the organization still exists, though it’s more secretive than ever. An’ that yer man on the hill runs the show nowadays. Now there’s a ruthless bastard if ever I’ve met one. Man thought I was sneakin’ about watchin’ yer house while ye were locked up on that ship. He questioned me for hours. Didn’t hold so much as a gun or knife on me, but I tell ye, I’ve rarely sweated out a time as I did that one.”
“Do ye know how my Da’ died, then?”
“Aye I do, didn’t have anything to do with the Brotherhood in the end, though he did belong—though ye’ll know that, for ye’ve the ring.”
Casey tried to breathe and found he could not. “Do ye know who killed him?”
“Aye, I know. Yer Da’ spent a deal of time tryin’ to find out what happened to my sister. Durin’ the course of his searchin’ he found out about the things goin’ on at Kincora. He was goin’ to go to that wee friend of his that worked for the newspaper. The names he’d come across played like a Who’s Who of British aristocracy, government ministers an’ celebrities. Men have been killed for far less. They had him shot out in a field. They say he asked no quarter an’ gave them no satisfaction.” Robin swallowed as though he had a rusty nail lodged in his throat, “Twas my father who had the shooting of him.”
“What?” Casey felt horribly sick, as though the world had tipped out from under his feet without warning.
Robin met his eyes, and Casey saw something old beyond counting in the man’s face and knew there were things that time did not have the power to heal.
“And I killed my father, gave him the same treatment as he gave yer Daddy. Took him out in a field in the dark an’ made him beg for his life, an’ he did beg. An’ then I shot him. Don’t know why he bothered with beggin’, he saw his death in my face from the minute I found him.”
Casey shook his head slowly, the knowledge of things coming at him too quickly. His daddy on his knees—what had he felt knowing his death was imminent? Christ, he couldn’t think of it now, he had to stay clearheaded, had to stay level, stay standing just a little longer.
“But ye said that yer father died on the street, choked on his own vomit.”
Robin shrugged. “I lied, seemed best then, rather than tellin’ ye what had truly happened. Then yer wife kept diggin’ about for the truth an’ I knew it would have to come out. Yer Da’ was kind to me, an’ he was maybe the only adult that gave a damn when Jo disappeared. I owed him vengeance for his death.”
“How did ye know all this?”
“Casey, ye know what it is, I’m surprised ye never worked it out before. Maybe it’s only that ye didn’t want to see it.”
“Yer workin’ for the Brits,” Casey said, disbelief still strong in his mind. He could hardly connect this with the man he thought he knew, and yet it all fit, every piece that hadn’t seemed to form a picture before, now snapped tightly into place. The scenario it presented made him queasy.
“The MRF was runnin’ me. I got cozy with Joe an’ fed back to them. Now an’ again I took somethin’ back to Joe, just to keep his trust. It made certain other information easy to come across. They never knew I’d come upon the pedophile ring, that I knew about their filthy parties over the water with all those young boys. I’d have been dead months ago if they knew that. But now I’ve outworn my usefulness an’ they’ve made it apparent that my services are no longer required.”
Casey swallowed back a sick surge. The MRF was the Military Reconnaissance Force—the agency that gathered intelligence and ran agents in Northern Ireland. To work for them, as a Republican, meant you had a pretty big death wish.
“What the hell were ye thinkin’, man? Ye can’t play those games in this neighborhood, ye know that as well as anyone who grew up on these streets.”
“I didn’t know the Brits would cut me loose when it was over, I thought I could play both sides for all they were worth an’ walk away the winner. Forgot you were the lucky bastard, not me.”
“Jesus Christ, Robin, eight hundred years of them throwin’ us to the wolves wasn’t enough for ye to know how it’d end?”
“Doesn’t much matter anymore, man, I know too much to be comfortable for either side. We both know what happens next.”
Casey nodded, there was no answer needed, they both did know, and a little too intimately, just what happened next. Robin had always known where this path led, and yet had chosen to keep walking it.
Robin shifted, a grunt of pain escaping his lips along with a slipstream of darker blood that made Casey’s stomach lurch. Blood that shade was never the result of a surface injury. “There’s another thing I’d tell ye before we’re done. Do ye remember how yer Da’ used to say sometimes a man is most blind to what’s goin’ on right beneath his own nose?”
Something in Robin’s tone stopped Casey cold. “Robin, it’s too late for games, if ye’ve somethin’ to say, say it.”
Robin drew a half-breath and gasped as it caught hard upon the shoals of his smashed ribs. “Yer wife an’ Love Hagerty.”
Five simple words, but enough in their content to fell a man, to put him on his knees and make him wish he were deaf rather than hear them.
“No,” he said, throat stripped raw, heart pounding so hard that it filled his ears with the sound of a roaring vortex. Aware that it did not come as the shock that Robin had intended it to be.
“Every time ye shipped out she was in his bed. He’d an apartment for her, I think the damn fool was actually in love. Then there were the things ye’d seen that he’d rather ye hadn’t. An’ given that set of circumstances you were lookin’ like a mighty large inconvenience.”
“How—” he swallowed hard against the bitterness surging at the back of his throat, “how’d ye know?”
Robin shook his head, wiping a crusted hand across his mouth. “Hagerty was no man’s fool, though in the end he surely was a woman’s.” He held up a hand as Casey started forward. “Save it man, I can see by the look on yer face this comes as no great shock. What I mean to say is the man did his homework, he knew all about yer background an’ that’s where he found me.”
“What did he want with ye?”
Robin laughed, a bitter sound that raised the hairs on Casey’s neck. “Hired me to follow ye, if ye can believe it. Sad bastard didn’t know I was playin’ both sides of the coin, followed him too. That’s how I found out about him an’ Pamela. Watched her come an’ go from the flat in Brookline. Sometimes I’d follow him to public events and I’d see how he watched her across the room, or make reasons to be near her. He was obsessed. An’ I knew that would be his downfall, she’d only need to feed him a little rope an’ he’d hang himself. She can be mighty cold, yer wife, when the need is on her.”
“Ye’ll keep yer opinions of my wife to yerself,” Casey said in a flat tone that brooked no argument. “I’ve no proof of what ye say, but if she were to do such a thing, she’d have to have a mighty good reason.”
“She did—your life.”
“What?”
“Did ye not ever wonder why, if Hagerty wanted ye dead, he never managed to accomplish it? The man had connections up an’ down the entire eastern seaboard.”
“You mean—” Casey paused, unable to finish the sentence, a clear picture of Pamela in Love Hagerty’s bed, her body at his bidding, allowing him to touch her in the most intimate of ways. With a great force of will he pushed the picture away, heart turned to lead in his chest.
“How was he killed?” Casey asked, voice dark and hollow.
“Ye know how he was killed, the Bassarelli boys took him out. Wasn’t pretty either.”
“That’s not what I mean an’ ye know it. If ye were following her then ye must know if—if she had somethin’ to do with it.”
Robin nodded slowly. “She visited old man Bassarelli the once. Love Hagerty died later that same evening.”
The nausea Casey had suppressed earlier overwhelmed him now, his body understanding truth, though his mind refused it. Beneath his knees, the floor was thick and sticky with years of scales and blood.
“Why tell me now? It can’t serve any purpose.”
“Long time ago ye told me that if someone were to betray ye, ye’d not want to be the last to know. Both she and I have betrayed ye, an’ beyond the two of us, there’s no one else left alive who knows.”
Casey tilted his head, feeling like a cur that’s been smacked with an iron pipe. “What do ye mean none left alive? Who else knew?”
“The boy knew I was playin’ both sides. He knew I was workin’ for the Brits. Saw me one weekend, when he was slurkin’ about his old hangouts. ‘Twas just happenstance, an unfortunate coincidence.”
The world tilted again but he held to his feet, the red haze tinging the corners of his vision once again. “Is that why ye killed him? Because he saw ye playin’ out a double-cross?”
“’Twasn’t how ye thought, the boy was never in anyone’s cards. He just got in the way of things. Knew too much, Morris was afraid of him, only the more so once the boy had joined up with you.”
A low moan of pain escaped Casey’s lips, Lawrence’s ginger hair and pale, clear eyes rearing up stark in his mind. Killed for the inconvenience of his existence. What love or joy had his brief life ever known? “Was it Morris Jones he went to meet?” Casey ground the words out, the sickness surging hard through his system again.
“Aye. The lad was right to be afraid of him. I’ve known some sick bastards in my life but he was altogether in a league of his own. He’s some ugly appetites an’ he’d a special spite for the lad. He lured the boy there with some sort of threat, then raped him amongst other things. By the time,” Robin swallowed, the scene apparently still vivid in his own mind, “I found him he was in a bad way, a very bad way if ye understand my meanin’.”
“Ye forget maybe,” Casey said harshly, “that ‘twas me that found the boy, an’ myself an’ my wife that buried him.”
“An’ yerself that loved him,” Robin said quietly, “no I’ve not forgot. Not likely to, am I? For it’s what brought you here tonight, the belief that ye’d avenge his death.”
“And I will,” Casey said, in the tone of an oath.
Robin coughed again, a sound like a sputtering engine, and blood bubbled from the corner of his mouth.
“Robin—”
“Nay,” Robin said shortly, “I’ll do. Now ye’ll have seen enough of fightin’ to know there are some men excited by the sight of blood?”
“Aye,” Casey replied tersely, the wealed crosshatch of fine silver scars scattered about Lawrence’s body all too plain in his memory.
“Well, Morris was that way, but it had to be a boy’s blood. I think maybe it started out with a few simple cuts, nothin’ that the child couldn’t heal physically from, but then like most appetites it built until it was out of control. Lawrence wasn’t the first to be hurt at the man’s hand.”
“He wasn’t dead when ye found him?”
“No, but ‘twould have been better for him had he been.”
“So it was you, then,” Casey said, voice flat, a tone that made Robin brace for the expected blow. None came, though. “Why, Robin? He was nothin’ to ye, he’d not harmed anyone. He’d kept yer secrets that long, there was no reason he’d have told then.”
Robin shook his head. “It wasn’t my secrets that I was worried for, don’t ye understand?”
“No.”
“It was a mercy, do ye see? Ye can’t live proper with such scars on yer soul. The boy wasn’t going to heal this time, I knew that an’ so I did what I had to for him.”
“It wasn’t for you to decide.”
“But it was, who better to know what the boy felt?”
“He wasn’t you Robin, ye can’t know—”
“Yes, I can know,” Robin said wearily, “an’ that is why the boy didn’t like me. He saw himself, another decade down the road, when he looked in my face.”
Casey didn’t think he could stand much more revelation tonight. “I didn’t know, Robin, why did ye never say? Maybe I couldn’t have helped but my Da’ would have gotten ye out.”
Robin shook his head, tongue tentatively flicking at the corner of his mouth, causing a fresh stream of blood to trickle down his chin. “Do ye think I could have ever looked ye in the face had ye known? I couldn’t bear the thought of ye not treatin’ me like an equal anymore, I’d have become somethin’ to pity, not to love.”
“I knew about Lawrence, all of it, an’ it didn’t change my love for him.”
“Aye, but that’s as a man loves a child, we were boys together an’ that’s a different view. I was hollow before I met ye, but when ye gave me yer friendship, when ye cared for me as though I wasn’t—” Robin paused to take a ragged breath, “wasn’t broken an’ filthy, well there wasn’t any secret worth tellin’ to sacrifice that.”
“Tell me how.” Casey said, barely able to force the words past his throat, but needing to know all the same.
“I just held his nose. It was quick an’ peaceful, he barely struggled, ‘twas more like he slipped off to sleep. He’d not have survived the night anyway. He was damaged real bad. He said yer name just before he went beyond words, just sort of breathed it out. Ye need not worry yerself about Morris neither, I took care of him that night as well. ‘Twas him ran the ring that killed all them young boys. He spent a deal of nights at that house where Pamela found my sister’s bones.”
“Oh Jesus,” was all Casey managed to gasp out before the sickness took him firmly in its maw and shook him without mercy. He wished with the force of everything in him that he could erase the sight of Lawrence’s ruined body from his mind, that he would never again know that smell, the scent of utter depravity and cruelty. To not know that the boy had died calling his name, wondering why he didn’t come to his rescue. But no, he thought as another spasm of nausea clawed his insides, Lawrence had not believed in fairytales. He had known the cavalry didn’t rush in at the last minute on white horses, holding salvation in their hands. The child had not had any illusions and somehow that seemed much, much worse than the alternative.
As the retching subsided, he felt Robin’s hand on his back and tensed immediately for the blow that would end the night and all things with it. He no longer had the energy to resist it. The dark would be welcome. He realized with a shock that Robin’s hand was fast in his hair, the singing tension in his scalp only now registering itself on his ravaged senses. And then there was a knife at his throat, scoring the skin just below his adam’s apple.
Robin’s mouth was by his ear, breath as intimate as a lover. Casey could move neither forward nor back and was completely at the man’s mercy. The anger that had sustained him for so long was ebbing, swamped in the beginning of a grief that threatened to become a deluge he would surely perish in.
“Do ye have less courage than a wee lassie, then?” Robin hissed in his ear. “She killed without a backward glance to keep ye safe, will ye sell her so short as to let me take ye here an’ now?” He yanked back on the handful of hair and Casey grunted, teeth gritted, not daring to swallow with the knife so tight against his throat. “Come on, ye black Irish bastard, ye said ye’d avenge the boy’s murder so
fight me, fight me!”
Robin let him go so quickly that Casey half fell into the sticky muck on the floor. He was quickly losing feeling in his right arm, which seemed a mercy at this point. He took a shallow breath, aware of the coppery taste of blood on his tongue.
He rose onto his knees to find Robin had circled round to the front of him and was propped against the dusty sacking and empty wire spools. One arm was wrapped protectively around his shattered ribs, the other pointed straight at Casey, with a pistol snugged tight in its grip.
His wife’s voice was suddenly clear in his head, the words she’d spoken only days ago. Though it seemed a lifetime. She had found him sitting on their bed, pistol in his lap.
“Some night you’re going to find it.”
“Find what?”
“The bullet with your name on it.” And his reply, which in the cold, hard light of what he now faced, seemed naïve and foolhardy.
‘Better that than to live afraid for a hundred years.” And untrue. He did not want to die, not here and not now, not by the hand of a man who’d been trying to lure him into a fatal death dance from the moment they’d seen one another across that smoky card table. He slowly put down his left hand, not trusting the right to support him, and pushed himself up into a standing position, preternaturally aware the entire time that the gun continued to point at his head. His legs were shaky, but they held him upright and it seemed—if he gave them a minute or two—they might be willing to carry him out of this place.
Robin was speaking again, voice gone soft with fatigue. “Do ye remember the time we were goin’ to run off to Liverpool together?”
Casey drew a ragged breath and nodded. “Aye, we’d not the sense of a goose between the two of us, had what—thirty pounds total to call our own in this world? I remember we were goin’ to meet down by the Donegal Quay.”
“Aye, well I was there, but you never came.”
“What?”
The gun dropped between Robin’s knees, his eyes shimmering with tears. “Do ye know how long I waited there for ye?”
Casey shook his head, the tension still thrumming hard through his shoulders, down his arms and into his hands.
Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series Book 2) Page 90