by Jacqui Rose
‘It’s #BSD*99,’ he shouted. ‘! Please! Stop!’
Bidoner keyed the password into his phone and pressed send.
‘I hope you’re not lying,’ said Xena. ‘I want all this to have a happy ending.’
She squeezed his thigh with her hand, then stroked it.
Tears streamed from under his blindfold. His cheeks were red. It was good he couldn’t see the weals on his body, because he would know immediately that he wouldn’t be able to explain any of them to his wife.
‘Please, let me go. I promise not to tell anyone. I swear, on my children’s lives.’.
Lord Bidoner’s mobile beeped as an incoming message came in. He nodded at Xena. The code had worked.
‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘But there is one more thing I must do for you.’
She put the Turboflame down, went to the fridge. She took out a six inch long serrated knife, honed with care to a perfect blade, from the freezer section.
She held it in the air, admired its cold edge.
‘Now you will find release,’ she said.
The man’s body went still. His toes, which had scrunched up, half straightened. The only sound was his pain-filled whimpering.
The panic room in the apartment on 5th Avenue, overlooking the skyscrapers of Manhattan, was soundproof. It was why they used the room.
Xena flicked the blade tacross the man’s pale skin, once, then twice, fascinated by how quickly blood gushed, how fast it flowed from a few simple cuts.
‘Those were for my brothers,’ she said.
‘Don’t,’ he whimpered. Fear trembled in his voice. ‘I have two children, a wife.’
She growled, psyching herself up.
‘Prima quattuor invocare unum,’ she said, as she grabbed him, jerked him upwards, castrated him with one swinging motion.
She held the bloody remains up in the air.
His screams of terror and pain vibrated through the room as blood spurted two feet high. A foul smell followed and the man’s words became a babbling.
Lord Bidoner held his nose. He’d seen enough. He went out to the main room of the apartment, with its view towards the glittering Jazz-era spire of the Empire State building. ‘You did good, my dear. The first offering has been done correctly,’ he said, when she joined him.
She was panting.
‘Come here.’
They did it then up against the inch thick glass of the window as Manhattan glittered behind them.
Afterwards, he handed her a balloon glass containing a large shot of Asbach Twenty One. She sipped the brandy, then downed it in one gulp.
Then she lay down on the sleek oak coffee table that dominated the room. The canyon of lights stretching into the velvet Manhattan night reflected all the way along the length of the table and on her ebony skin.
‘’
He reached down, held her shoulder.
It was trembling.
‘Three more before the moon rises again. That is what the book says. That is what we will do.’
She smiled up at him.
And her white teeth shone as she leaned her head back and stretched.
2
A creak rang out against the muffled noise of night-time London.
‘Sean?’ Isabel’s voice echoed. Her head was off the pillow. Was that a shadow moving? The moment of deep pleasure at sensing his return was replaced in a second by fear, as no response came.
She slid out of bed. Alek, who was now four, was in the next room. If that was Sean out there, playing some game, she was going to make him pay. Big time. She’d just finished one of the most demanding projects in her time as an IT security consultant, and her brain had been fried to mush. She needed sleep.
She stood in the doorway.
There was no one on the landing.
She peered downstairs. The house felt deserted. The heating had been off for hours. She went into Alek’s room, checked his breathing, tucked him in
Was this going to be a replay of that night a few weeks ago when he didn’t come home? The thought made her shudder. In all the time she’d known him he’d never done what he’d done that night.
She remembered the creak that had woken her. What had that been about?
Had she imagined it? Her dreams had been strange again recently. Images from Istanbul and Jerusalem came too often now, as if those journeys haunted her. Maybe that was what had woke her.
She went downstairs, turned on all the lights. Nothing was out of place, though there was an odd smell. A lemony tang, as if a cleaner has passed through. She stood near the front door. This was all Sean’s fault. She picked up the telephone, pressed redial. The call went to voicemail, again.
She slammed the phone down.
Bastard.
Stop it. He’ll be home soon.
She turned out the lights. Headed back to bedtried to sleep. The icy wind buffeting the window didn’t help. Neither did the cold space where Sean’s freckled body should have been.
The matchbook-thin Bang & Olufsen docking system said it was five past three. How many years do you get these days if you murder your husband?
She lay there, seething, angry not only with Sean, but with the idiots at BXH too.and whoever had decided to hold their stupid celebration the night before.
It was bad enough that they demanded he work long hours, couldn’t they at least let him sleep at home?
When she finally woke after a disturbed sleep London rumbled even louder. was ten to eight. Her first thought was that he’d come back, had already gotten up. He usually woke before she did. He could be down in the kitchen making toast with that new poppy seed bread.
He’d stick his jaw out when she asked him what time he’d come in, then run a hand through his thick brown hair and give her that blue eyed innocent look, his secret weapon ever since she’d met him in Istanbul.
She turned.
His side of the bed was unruffled. An ominous prickling sensation ran over her skin.
She took her phone from where she’d put it beside the letter from the clinic she wanted to talk to him about, pressed his number. He’d better have a good explanation. A very good explanation.
The call went to voice mail. She wasn’t going to leave another message.
Her stomach tightened. She felt sick. Where was he?
Her life was not supposed to be like this. She was too young for all this crap. They’d gone through a lot when they’d first met, that watery tunnel in Istanbul, that hell hole in Israel, but all that was long behind them. Their life was peaceful now, family oriented.
So what about that last time he hadn’t come home?
It hadn’t been that long ago. Three weeks, to be precise. That had been a Thursday night too. He’d come home for breakfast, pleading for forgiveness, with that elaborate excuse on his lips. What had it been? Oh yes, a planning meeting that had gone on too long.
Did he think the bank’s mega-merger finally being completed would be enough to placate her? How could a celebration dinner, drinks, explain this? He wasn’t even a full time employee there, he was a consultant, working there for the Institute of Applied Research on a project that had already eaten up a year of his life.
She breathed in, told herself to calm down.
Someone would have called her if something had happened.
He was late. That was it. That was all.
The same as last time. And she would make him pay properly this time. She listened for the soft click of the front door opening. He wasn’t going to let her down. Sean didn’t do things like that.They were going to Paris later that day. They were going to be soaping each other in a pink marble bath at the Roosevelt Hotel on the Champs-Élysées before midnight.
That was his plan.
Everything was ready.
Since his uncle had invited them to stay in the hotel with them while they were visiting Paris, she’d been counting the days. And Sean knew it.
The trip was just what they needed. And such a great gestur
e from his uncle. He and his wife were the only people from Sean’s family she really got on with. They’d insisted Sean find someone to look after Alek. The Louvre and the Opera House weren’t ideal places for a three year old, never mind one with a hyper-active streak. They deserved this weekend.
And they were booked into the hotel’s honeymoon suite. Tonight they’d be sleeping in a Louis X1Vth four-poster under a canopy of mauve silk. It was going to happen. No one was going to take it away from her.
Not even Sean Ryan.
3
The girl’s head rolled from side to side. There was no turning back now. The effects of Rohypnol wear off after a few hours.
He had work to do.
He ran his hands over her naked body. She winced as he pushed her legs apart, but didn’t wake. Looking at her splayed out made him want her properly this time. But he stopped himself.
He couldn’t afford for his DNA to be found.
He knelt.
The blade made a sighing noise as it cut through the air. There was a spasm of wet jerking as skin, muscle and artery were cut.
And even then she didn’t wake. And the blood began to flow like paint cans tipped over. And as it did the shaking in his body slowed, then stopped, as if the flames of a fever were easing.
He was glad he’d done it quickly. The next job he had to do would be messy.
Find out what happens next and be warned, this is a conspiracy that could change the course of history …
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A note from Michael Russell
Writing ‘The City of Strangers’
‘The City of Strangers’ is the second of a series of historical thrillers set in the 1930s and 1940s, featuring Irish detective Stefan Gillespie. His bloody-minded investigations into murder, crime and corruption in his country’s darkest corners have already brought him close to the dangerous margins of looming Second World War intrigue in the first of the books, ‘The City of Shadows’, and have seen havoc wreaked in his personal life. In 1935, in ‘The City of Shadows’, Detective Sergeant Gillespie found himself investigating two murders that took him to the Nazi controlled city of Danzig, on the Baltic, where the Second World War would start four years later. In ‘The City of Strangers’ he is caught up in another Irish murder, which this time takes him to New York in 1939, then the most exciting and extraordinary city in the world. It takes him to a divided America, struggling to keep out of the inevitable conflict in Europe. Both Irish and American neutrality are being tested by German and pro-Nazi politicians, by British pressure, and by IRA actions in the US and Britain. When Stefan helps two Irish women who are being pursued by the NYPD, he is pulled into a conspiracy that involves the IRA, the German-American Bund, the Mob, and bitter personal enmities. Not only are his life and the lives of the two women in danger, it is a danger that will follow them back to Ireland. Future stories will see Stefan Gillespie’s investigations into murder and espionage in Ireland take him to other cities caught up in the war that begins just as ‘The City of Strangers’ ends: to Lisbon, Madrid, Berlin, London, Rome. It’s a war no one can entirely escape from, not even in precariously neutral Ireland.
The Stefan Gillespie stories are first of all stories of crime and detection in Ireland before and during the Second World War, but they also take a quirky, sideways-on look at the war itself from a little known perspective. I grew up in an English-Irish family where the first tales I heard at my grandmother’s knee were about murder, mayhem, Thompson Machine Guns and civil war in Ireland in the 1920s and later. By the time I decided to write my first novel I was living in Ireland and it seemed inevitable that I would combine a passion for crime fiction with the stories about Ireland between the First and Second World Wars that I once heard from my grandmother. It is a world of long memories and dark secrets, where many people still regard the police, even their own police now, as an enemy. The result is the series of novels about Detective Sergeant Stefan Gillespie’s Ireland that began with ‘The City of Shadows’ and is now continued by ‘The City of Strangers’.
An Act of Contrition
A short story by Michael Russell
West Wicklow, 1925
The day Donal Kerrigan was murdered, he went to confession.
‘I’m telling you what I heard. Are you saying that’s not how it was?’
It was dark. The priest spoke through the grille of the confessional.
‘Sure, you don’t want to believe everything you hear, Father’
‘Don’t play the bollocks with me, Donal.’
‘Isn’t it my fecking confession?’
‘It is if you’re confessing. I’ve told you that before.’
‘I should let you tell it for me, is that the way of it now?’
‘The way of it is that you don’t sit through that grille telling me how many times you missed Mass, or the day you cursed twice when the heifer you bought at the market turned out to be barren, or maybe how you put your faith at risk by going to a palm-reader at Tullow Fair, or got drunk one night in Sheridan’s and pissed behind the church gates. It’s what you’ve done that’s harmed or hurt someone else you need to talk about, because I already know you have. And when you’ve talked about that and about what you’re going to do to stop it happening again, that’s the time I’ll worry over how many Hail Marys and how many spins round the rosary to give you.’
‘So you’re refusing me my penance, is that it?’
‘You’ll tell me what happened.’
‘If you’re talking about Sarah breaking–’
‘What else would I be talking about?’
‘She fell on the steps out of the cowshed. She’ll tell you herself.’
‘I’m sure she will.’
‘That’s all there is to it.’
‘So why’s she at her mother’s?’ The priest wouldn’t let it go.
‘A woman’s better at looking after a woman.’
‘I doubt she’ll be in a hurry to come back.’
‘She’ll be back today. I’ll be going to fetch her.’
‘It’s not the first time she’s hurt herself, since you were married.’
‘It’s a farm. Do you think I never hurt myself?’
‘How many times did Josie fall down the stairs or slip in the yard?’
‘You’ve no right to say that to me, Father.’
‘I’ll say what I want in my own confessional, Donal Kerrigan.’
‘You’re after saying it enough times so. If you’ve accusations–’
‘It’s not about accusations. It’s about decent fucking behaviour!’
‘I know how to behave to my wife. I won’t have you tell me–’
‘Sure to God, can’t you get hold of your temper? She’s barely a girl.’
‘You never did want her to marry me. What fecking business of yours it was, I’ve no idea. But you put your oar in enough. I know that, Father.’
‘No, I didn’t want you to marry Sarah Phelan. Why would I? I didn’t think you were fit to marry anyone after Josie died. There’s not a woman in the parish who doesn’t know the life you gave her. You beat her black and blue more times than you gave her a good word. She’d lost count of the bones she’d broken over the years. There wasn’t enough strength in her–’
‘You think you’d have something better to do than listen to the gossip of a gaggle of old hens, Father, and maybe show a bit more of the charity you tell us all about. I lost my wife. Is it my fault the TB took her? Jesus–’
‘There wasn’t enough strength in her to fight it, to fight anything.’
‘A doctor too? You’ve some talents on you, even for a priest.’
‘You know what I think.’
‘You’ve told me.’
‘Well, I’m telling you again.’
‘That’s your business. When you put a collar on it’s Someone Else’s.’
‘It’s starting all over, Donal. Can’t you
see that for yourself?’
‘A man might have good reasons to take a hand to his wife.’
‘So you did?’
‘She fell down the steps–’
‘Don’t lie in here. Can you not hear yourself?’
‘Maybe you should talk to Sarah. If you’re so interested in how a man and his wife get on, you might remind her what she promised in this church.’
‘And what was that?’
‘A bit of obedience at my own table would be a start. For a woman whose mother’s a fecking tenant of mine, she’s got a strange idea of who she is, I tell you that. She’s never been used to doing what she’s told, that’s for sure. And then there’s the mutual love. Isn’t that what it says? I don’t see any of that, with her lying there in the bed like a fish on a slab. I married her for a bit more than a place to put it. A man’s bed can be cold even when there’s a woman in it. Any normal man wants more than that. Even a priest ought to know. You may tell her what a wife owes her husband. There’s no sign of a child, no sign at all. You may tell her she should be praying for that as well. A woman has to want that to get that. Shouldn’t she show it in the way she is with her husband? Shouldn’t she show him she wants him so?’
The priest said nothing for a moment. It wasn’t so many years ago that there had been a child. There was no reason why Donal Kerrigan’s first wife had miscarried. Women did miscarry, of course, and sometimes there weren’t any reasons anyone could find. But she had never spoken about it. People had their own opinions about the accidents that had happened to Josie Kerrigan. For a farmer’s daughter she had had an unfortunate habit of getting in the way of cows that crushed her up against walls, horses that kicked out at her that had never kicked anyone else, not to mention slipping off hayricks and down ladders, or the times she’d fallen down the stairs in the house that Donal Kerrigan never managed to fall down in a lifetime, even when he was blind drunk. And of course those were only the accidents that something had to be done about. No one doubted a woman as clumsy as Josie was forever in the way of accidents that weren’t worth the mentioning. But Josie was dead two years. Whatever had needed saying it was too late.