Oh God, I can’t do it. Yes, you can. Oh God, please, I can’t do it. Yes, you can. You have to.
He rested for a few seconds, blood pounding in his ears, and then raised his leg again, more slowly. He still couldn’t lift it as high as the sill and he had to let it sink back down.
You can. You have to. You have to get out of here.
He tried a third time, whinnying through his nostrils with pain and effort, and at last succeeded in pulling himself up on to the sill, first with his right knee and then, immediately afterwards, with his left.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, please let me survive this. If this was my punishment for abandoning Katie when she needed me, I accept it. But please, Holy Mother, enough is enough.
He clung on to the window frame with both hands, leaning out as far as he could. He had done almost the same thing when he was a young boy, kneeling on his bedroom windowsill at his parents’ farmhouse, staring up at the sky at night, trying to see angels – though he had never seen angels. He couldn’t see any tonight, either.
This window was too small and he was in too much pain to be able to turn himself around and climb down backwards on to the slates. He would have to climb out head-first and then try to slide and scrabble down the lean-to roof like a body-surfer and hope that when he reached the gutter there wasn’t too much of a drop down into the yard below.
Right, he thought, although he was in so much agony that he could hardly think at all. Count down from five, and then dive, and hope the Lord spares you.
He bent forward as far as he could, until his fingertips touched the wet lead flashing where the lean-to’s slates joined the wall of the house. He was just about to launch himself off the sill when he heard the bedroom door open and almost at once Sorcia’s voice screeching out, ‘Chisel! For feck’s sake, Chisel, your man’s only climbing right out the feckin’ windie! Chisel!’
John see-sawed himself out of the window and on to the slates. He might have imagined he was going to surf down the roof on his stomach, but he pitched head over heels on to his back, cracking and splintering the slates as he fell, and then slid down the rest of the way at a forty-five degree angle, still on his back, frantically scrabbling for any kind of a hand-hold. Before he knew it he had reached the gutter. He made a grab for it, but it was rusty and sharp-edged and all he managed to do was rip the skin of his hand and tear the gutter away from its soffit. Together, both he and the length of rusty metal dropped down into the yard.
It wasn’t a long drop, no more than two and a half metres, but there was a rabbit hutch directly underneath and a stack of old sash-window frames, with the glass still in them. John fell face-down, smashing one of the windows with his forehead and almost flattening the rabbit hutch, so that the rabbit had to scrabble to the other end. He lay on top of the hutch and the window frames, still conscious but unable to move. He was far too badly bruised and, besides, the wire netting from the hutch had snagged in his sweater. His nostrils were filled with the rancid smell of damp straw and rabbit droppings.
He tried to lift up his head, but when he did so blood dripped down into his eyes and he had to blink furiously before he could see. He felt shattered, smashed to pieces. Every bone in his body felt dislocated from every other bone, and every tendon had been ripped. He didn’t care whether he stayed there or not, even though the rain was gradually soaking through his clothes and mucus was dripping from his nose and he was beginning to shiver.
*
He heard a door unlocking, and footsteps. He managed to raise his head far enough to see Bobby Quilty and Chisel standing in the yard, the tips of their cigarettes glowing.
‘This is pure wick, this is,’ said Bobby Quilty. He crouched down close to John and shook his head in exasperation. ‘Are you wired to the moon with a faulty plug or something? Look at the fecking state of you.’
John said nothing, but closed his eyes.
‘You’re not dead, are you?’ Bobby Quilty asked him. ‘Jesus, you’re some quare gaunch, you are. I’m supposed to keep you in one fecking piece. Like that was the fecking agreement. If your old doll could see the condition of you now, she’d scoop me without a second thought. I mean, what in the name of feck did you think you were doing, climbing out the fecking windie?’
‘I just hope he hasn’t squished De Valera,’ said Chisel, shading his eyes so that he could peer into the broken remains of the rabbit hutch.
‘As if you give a tinker’s shite for that fecking rabbit,’ Bobby Quilty retorted. ‘When do you ever clean him out? The last time I looked there was so much bobbly shite in that hutch the poor creature was almost crushed to death against the ceiling.’
Chisel had managed to open the hutch door. The rabbit was crouched on its sodden straw, its ears folded back, its pink eyes wide with terror, but it was still alive and it appeared to be unhurt.
‘Joseph and Mary, are you going to you help me lift up this looper and get him back upstairs?’ Bobby Quilty protested. Chisel reluctantly closed the hutch door again and came round to help.
It wasn’t easy, picking John up off the hutch and the window frames, because he had now lost consciousness. Apart from that, the wire netting was hopelessly snarled in his sweater. After two or three minutes of struggling to get it free, Bobby Quilty wrenched all of it away from the front of the hutch and said, ‘I can’t believe this. This is totally fecking hectic. And what are you doing, Chisel, for feck’s sake, wandering around like a fart in a trance? Get ahold of him under the oxters and let’s hoick him up.’
‘Look at the state of this fecking hutch now,’ said Chisel. ‘What if De Valera gets out?’
‘If he has any luck at all, wee lad, he’ll run straight out into the road and get himself flattened by a bus. Better than being flattened by his own shite. Now start lifting, will you?’
‘Jesus, he weighs a fecking ton,’ Chisel complained as they hoisted John up and shuffled with him over to the open back door.
‘Oh, so what do you want to do, leave him out here all night? It’s lashing. He’ll catch cold, won’t he, if we do that, and he’ll die of the fecking pneumonics, and then where’s our trump card, eh?’
With Chisel holding John under the armpits, and Bobby Quilty holding his legs on either side of him as if he were pushing a wheelbarrow, they carried John into the house and struggled up the stairs with him. Sorcia stood on the landing smoking as they puffed and grunted and swore and eventually managed to wrestle him back into his bedroom and drop him with a crunch of springs on to the mattress. John opened his eyes for a moment but then closed them again. He had regained consciousness but he was in such pain that he could hardly think.
‘Don’t you say a word,’ Bobby Quilty told Sorcia.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ she said. ‘I was only going to ask how you’re going to stop him from getting away again. Like, what’s going to happen when we all go to sleep? If you think that I’m going to stay awake all night watching him, like, you’ve got yourself another think coming.’
‘And if you don’t shut your bake, you’ve got yourself another slap in the kite coming, so you have.’
Sorcia shrugged and blew out smoke, and said, ‘Just asking, like. You don’t have to go schizo.’
Bobby Quilty turned back to look at John lying on the bed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘maybe you’re not totally away in the head.’ He thought for a moment, slowly rubbing his belly as if had eaten something that disagreed with him, and then he said, ‘Chisel? Do you still have them nuts and bolts, the ones you used for fixing the trailer?’
‘What do you want them for?’ asked Chisel.
‘I said, do you still have them?’
‘Yeah, I’d say so. Somewhere in the bottom of my toolbox, most likely. Why?’
‘And you still have your drill here, right?’
‘Chalk it down, right. What do you have in mind?’
‘Do you know something, Chisel, my life would run a whole lot smoother if you didn’t ask so many fecking stupid qu
estions. Go downstairs, will you, and bring up them nuts and bolts, and your drill, too, with a drill bit.’
‘What size of a drill bit?’
‘A drill bit big enough to make holes for the bolts, you clampit. What else?’
John heard Chisel clomping downstairs. A few more minutes went past during which he could hear Bobby Quilty and Sorcia murmuring to each other. They didn’t sound like affectionate murmurs – more like a bitter under-the-breath argument that they didn’t want him or Chisel to hear. As Chisel came clomping back upstairs again, Bobby Quilty distinctly said, ‘You do that again, you dirty clart, I’ll fecking kill you, so I will.’
As Chisel came back into the bedroom John lay still and kept his eyes closed. It was the only way that he could bear the pain and at the same time hide from Bobby Quilty how frightened he was. He had never been frightened like this before, ever, in the whole of his life, even when he had first met Katie and he and his mother had been attacked on their own farm and almost killed. When that had happened he had been surging with adrenaline, but lying here at the mercy of Bobby Quilty he felt helpless. All he could feel was the sickening conviction that Bobby Quilty and Chisel were going to hurt him badly.
Without warning, he felt his left ankle being seized and his shoe tugged off. His sock was pulled off next. Immediately afterwards, his right shoe and sock were taken off, too. While this was happening neither Bobby Quilty nor Chisel said a word, although Sorcia said, ‘I can’t fecking watch this,’ and he heard her clattering erratically downstairs.
Now both legs of John’s jeans were dragged halfway up his calves. His ankles were gripped tight and the sole of his bare left foot pressed flat against the bed’s footboard. He knew that it was Bobby Quilty who was holding him because he could feel his heavy patterned signet rings pressing into his skin.
There was a chukk noise, like a plug being pushed into a wall socket, and then the sudden high-pitched whine of an electric drill. The next thing he knew, John felt a pain in his left foot so intense that he jolted up and down on the mattress and shrieked out loud.
‘Jesus!’ said Bobby Quilty. ‘Shut the feck up, will you, you sound like a woman giving birth to a full-grown pig!’
Almost hysterical, John tried to twist his leg away, but Bobby Quilty’s grip was far too strong for him. When he looked down to the end of the bed he saw that Chisel was drilling a bloody hole into the top of his foot. He could feel the bit separating his bones and then biting through the skin of his sole and into the pine footboard.
‘Aaaaahhhhhh!’ he screamed. ‘No! Stop it! No! Don’t – don’t! No-no-no-no-no-gaaaaahhhh!’
Bobby Quilty and Chisel looked at each other and both of them shrugged. Chisel drilled right through the footboard and then took the drill out. The tip of the bit was still hot from cutting into the wood and John jumped as it touched his flesh.
In a matter of fact way, as if he had been doing this every day of his working life, Chisel took a fifteen-centimetre stainless-steel bolt out of the pocket of his dirty denim waistcoat. He slid a wide penny washer on to the bolt so that John wouldn’t be able to tear his foot free from it. Then he inserted it into the hole he had drilled in John’s foot and right through the hole in the footboard. John lay back on the mattress, his eyes closed again, shaking, as Chisel took out a nut, spat on it, and twisted it on to the end of the bolt. He tightened the nut by hand, then picked up a spanner from the floor and gave it three or four extra turns so that nobody could loosen it unless they had a spanner, too.
John was rising and falling in and out of consciousness, as if he were struggling to stop himself drowning in the sea at night. The shock of Chisel drilling through his foot was so overwhelming that his brain wanted to drag him down into darkness where he wouldn’t feel anything, but the pain kept bringing him up to the surface again. He kept seeing his mother’s face again and hearing her voice. There, there, it’s only a scrape, like! Nothing that a poke with sprinkles won’t heal!
But then Bobby Quilty held his right ankle even harder and Chisel started to drill through his right foot, too. There was a brief ripping sound as the drill bit tore through skin and muscle, and then an odd sqyerkk! as it glanced off one of his bones. He wanted to pray as the drill bit went through his sole and into the footboard, but his mind couldn’t assemble any sensible words. All he could smell was burning wood and flesh, and he was in far too much agony even to scream, let alone pray.
When Chisel had finished drilling through his right foot, he fastened a second bolt through it and tightened that up, too. Now both of John’s feet were bolted to the bed.
‘There, that’s grand altogether,’ said Bobby Quilty. ‘Now you won’t be able to go climbing out the windie again, not unless you take the whole fecking bed along with you.’
‘What if he needs a shite?’ asked Chisel.
‘You’ve a wee want, Chisel, what do you think? We unscrew the bolts and then he can walk to the jacks on his own. When he’s finished dropping the kids off, all we have to do is bolt him back up again.’ He mimed the act of twisting the spanner.
‘Oh, I have you now, I have you!’ said Chisel in admiration. ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Bobby, that’s fierce crabbit, that is. It’s exactly like what the Romans did to Jesus when they nailed Him on the cross, except it’s more crabbiter than that because the Romans used nails, like, didn’t they? So Jesus couldn’t come down from the cross to take a shite and then climb back up again. Not that the Romans probably would have let Him, do you know what I mean, like?’
Bobby Quilty said nothing for a moment, but stood over John, breathing in and out through nostrils clogged with catarrh. John opened his eyes and looked up at him, but then closed them again as unconsciousness dragged him down. He couldn’t be sure if he was dreaming or not, and that round-faced man with his Kim Jong-un haircut wasn’t simply some nursery-rhyme character from his childhood. The Man in the Moon came down too soon.
At last Bobby Quilty said, ‘Do you know something, Chisel? If I’d been given ten euros for every time you’d ever said anything that made any sense, I’d be flat fecking broke by now.’
Fourteen
The next morning was warm and summery, with huge white clouds that billowed over Cobh like the Spanish Armada under full sail. Katie had slept badly again, so she got out of bed early and took Barney for a walk all the way up to the Rushbrooke Tennis and Croquet Club.
Barney knew this walk well and normally he would trot fifty or sixty metres ahead of her, only waiting at the street corners with his tongue hanging out for her to catch up. Today, he must have sensed that she was anxious, because he stayed very close to her and every now and then turned his head around and looked up at her as if to reassure her that he wasn’t going to leave her far behind.
As she reached Grove Garden, her iPhone played ‘Buile Mo Chroi’ – ‘The Beat of My Heart’ – which her mother had loved and which had always set her off dancing around the kitchen.
‘Good morning, ma’am. It’s Detective O’Mara here.’
‘Good morning to you, Bryan. How’s it going?’
‘We’ve located one of Quilty’s fag-peddlers for you. He’s sitting in the doorway of that linen shop in the Savoy Centre, the one that closed down, so that you can’t see him on the CCTV. I don’t know how long he’s going to be there, but he has three or four bags of fags with him. He’s even got himself a folding chair like he’s on his holliers or something.’
‘Thank you, Bryan. Just make a note of that, would you, and put it in the case log.’
‘You don’t want him lifted?’
‘No. You know how we’re dealing with this now.’
‘You don’t want me to tip off Revenue or nothing?’
‘No. Just leave him be. How old would you say he was?’
‘He has a bit of a scobe tash but it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s hopped off school.’
‘Well, there you are. If he’s underage that’s one good reason not to pick him up. Thanks,
Bryan. I’ll be into the station by eleven so I’ll talk to you after.’
Immediately, she called Kyna. Barney stood patiently beside her while she waited for an answer. She was beginning to think that Kyna wasn’t going to pick up when she heard her say, ‘Katie – yes, what? Sorry, I’ve just woken up. What time are we on?’
‘Half past eight. Sorry. Did you have a late night?’
‘Didn’t sleep very well, that’s all. I keep having this nightmare.’
‘What’s it about? Getting shot?’
‘I suppose it must be something to do with that. I keep hearing people talking about me in other rooms but when I go to find out what they’re saying about me all these doors start slamming – upstairs, downstairs, everywhere.’
‘Detective O’Mara just rang me,’ said Katie. Although she was concerned about Kyna, because she knew that she was still suffering from post-traumatic stress, she didn’t want to start trying to interpret her dreams, not this early in the day. Most of all, she didn’t want to hear anything that would put her off sending Kyna to find John for her. Stress could be treated by therapy. Blindness or amputation or death was irreversible.
‘One of Quilty’s dealers has set up shop in the Savoy Centre. He’s probably catering for the early crowd, people on their way into work. O’Mara couldn’t say how long he’s going to be there, but he says he has a heap of cigarettes.’
‘All right. It’ll take me a while to squeeze into my leggings and stick up my hair and put my face paint on, but I’ll get down there as quick as I can. I’ll ring you if he’s gone by the time I get there. I’ll ring you anyway.’
‘Thanks, Kyna. But for the love of God be careful.’
‘You know me.’
‘Exactly. That’s what I’m worried about.’
*
Katie had just poured boiling water into her coffee mug when she received a text from Dr Kelley. The four mummified bodies had now been lifted from underneath the floor at Millstream Row and they were being transported to the mortuary at Cork University Hospital. The remains of the two dogs had been sent to VLSI, a specialist veterinary pathologist in Vicar’s Road.
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