Kevin reached his hand out towards the living-room door. He was about to push it open when he thought he heard a squeak, and a faint shuffling sound, and he hesitated.
‘Do-you-think-Mummy’s-in-there?’ whispered Sibeal.
Kevin pressed his fingertip to his lips to shush her. It was his house: he didn’t know why he didn’t just push the door open and march straight in to see if Órla really was playing hide-and-seek. For some reason that he couldn’t fully understand, however, he sensed that something was badly wrong. Either Órla was in there, acting completely out of character, or else there was nobody in there at all – in which case, why did he feel so apprehensive?
Not just apprehensive – actually frightened. But why? Órla was probably standing at the counter in Sheehan’s even now, buying sausages, and she’d be back in five minutes. Yet why was the door almost closed like that? And what was that smell?
He touched the door cautiously, but as soon as he did so a man’s voice called out in a strong Antrim accent, ‘Kevin! Why’n’t you come on in here, big lad? What are you footering for outside of the door there for? You’re not jibbing it, are you?’
Sibeal looked up at Kevin in alarm.
‘It’s all right, sweetheart,’ said Kevin, although he felt as if his heart had stopped. He pushed the door so that it swung wide open, but he didn’t immediately step inside.
Órla was standing on the oval rug in the middle of the living room. She was wearing her long brown apron and her hands were still white with flour. Her fine reddish hair looked frayed where she had tied it back in a scarf and her face was even whiter than usual, ivory white, which showed up the tawny freckles across the bridge of her nose, and her pale pink lips.
Two men were standing close to her, on one either side. The man on her right was bald-headed, with the lumpy face of a former boxer, and an S-shaped nose. He was barrel-chested, but his legs were short and his droopy black jacket made him look even shorter, almost like an amputee.
The man on her left was skinnier and taller, with a messy mop of grey hair and a long, indented face. His eyes were glittery and near-together and he had a downward-pointing nose as sharp as a stalactite. He was wearing a cheap bronze nylon windcheater and tight black spindly jeans. He could have been taken for a giant bird of prey rather than a man.
Both men were holding automatic pistols, the short man in his left hand, the tall man in his right. Kevin reached down and gently pushed Sibeal so that she was standing behind him.
‘Come along in, Kevin,’ said the short man, beckoning him with his gun. ‘There’s nothing for you to be nervous about. We’re only paying you a social call that’s long overdue, that’s all.’
‘Who are you?’ asked Kevin. ‘Órla, have they hurt you at all? No – Sibeal – stay behind me, sweetheart.’
Órla looked at Kevin with a desperate expression on her face, her floury fists gripped tightly, but said nothing.
‘If you’ve hurt her—’ said Kevin, turning to the short man.
‘Ach, away on,’ the short man replied. ‘We’ve hardly come here to hurt you. This is all going to be painless, I can assure you.’
‘Who are you?’ Kevin repeated. ‘What do you want? I’ve some cash upstairs if that’s what you’re looking for, but otherwise there’s not much of any value.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t agree with that at all, big lad. What you have here is the most valuable commodity that Ireland ever has to offer. Settling old scores.’
‘What in the name of Jesus are you talking about? What do you want?’
The tall man spoke in a slow, mournful voice, almost as if he were giving a sermon. He, too, had a distinct Antrim accent, but it sounded more precise and more educated than his companion’s. ‘I thought you Catholics were very conscientious when it came to admitting your transgressions. For the Lord loveth judgement, and forsaketh not His saints, but the seed of the wicked shall be cut off.’
‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘Exactly what I said Kevin – cutting off the seed of the wicked. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children, and rightly so. If there’s one thing we never do in Ireland, it’s forget those who trespass against us. No sinners should ever go unpunished, but if by some rare chance they do, then their descendants should be punished for what they did, no matter how many generations it takes.’
‘I still don’t follow you. What sinners?’
‘All of the sinners. Every one of those bloody-handed IRA murderers, and you can go back as far as you like. How many anti-Treaty men were never captured during the civil war and held to account? Hundreds! You could argue that they’re long dead now, but that’s no reason why their heirs and descendants shouldn’t be justly punished for all their atrocities.’
‘Am I hearing you right? You think people should be locked up for what their fathers and their grandfathers did a hundred years ago – even if they never knew about it?’
‘I wasn’t talking about prison, Kevin. I was talking about justice. An eye for an eye and a bullet for a bullet. Listen, today’s weak-kneed politicians may have gone soft on murderers, granting them amnesty and letting them out of the Maze and sending comfort letters to those on the run. But the fact remains that they are murderers still – bloody-handed murderers! They will never be forgiven by the Lord our God – and no matter how many years go by they will never be forgiven by those grieving families whose parents they killed, or whose grandparents, or whose great-grandparents, ad infinitum, and so on and so forth. Why should a murderer’s children be allowed to live a happy life when the people they murdered were robbed of all the years that were left to them and never had the chance to see their own children grow up?’
Kevin laid his hand on Sibeal’s shoulder and said, ‘Wait there, sweetheart. Just stay where you are. No, please, magic word, darling, stay where you are.’
He walked into the living room and approached Órla until he was standing directly in front of her, so close that he could have reached out and touched her. He heard a cough and a sniff behind him and he turned round to see a third man sitting in the window seat overlooking the garden – a young man with a khaki woolly hat pulled down right to his eyebrows, wearing a denim jacket and jeans. He looked only about eighteen years old and he had angry red spots on his cheeks and a wispy black moustache. He, too, was holding a gun – an AK-47 semi-automatic rifle which he was holding at a slope across his knees.
Kevin had to try hard to keep his voice steady. Without taking his eyes off Órla, he said, ‘Maybe I’m very stupid, but if you haven’t come here to rob us, I’d very much like you to explain to me exactly what you’re doing here and why you’re threatening my wife and my family like this. What’s all this talk about settling scores and punishing people? All I want you to do is get out of our house and leave us in peace and I swear on my children’s lives that I won’t breathe a word of this to anyone.’
‘Could you believe it – that never entered my mind, do you know that? – your breathing a word to anyone!’ said the short man in mock surprise. ‘Like, if you’re not breathing, like, you can’t breathe a word, can you, big lad?’
Kevin stared at him, hardly able to believe what he had said, but the short man didn’t even look up. He was too concerned with ejecting the magazine from his automatic, frowning at it, and then clicking it back into place.
‘You’ve come here to kill me?’ said Kevin. ‘What have I ever done to anybody? What? You’re just going to shoot me, in front of my wife and my children? I don’t even know who you are!’
‘No, you’re right there, you don’t know who we are,’ said the tall man. ‘But the whole point of this is, we know who you are. Have you not been listening to the news and reading your paper in the past few days?’
Kevin was beginning to hyperventilate. Almost silently, Órla had begun to cry now and tears were running freely down her cheeks. She kept opening and closing her mouth as if she wanted to tell him something important but was too
distressed to get the words out. In the hallway, Sibeal had started to whimper, too, clutching her rag doll as tightly as she could.
‘If you’ve been paying attention to the news, Kevin, you’ll be aware that the guards discovered some bodies under the floorboards of a cottage in Blarney. A whole family – father, mother, two children and even the family dogs.’
‘I heard about that of course,’ said Kevin. ‘But they’d been dead for nearly ninety years, hadn’t they? I think that’s what they said on the news. So what does that have to do with me?’
‘It has everything to do with you, Kevin. The Langtrys, that family was called, and it was members of your family who shot them.’
‘You’re cracked!’ Kevin protested. ‘My family never had anything to do with anything like that!’
‘Maybe they never told you about it, but they did. The Langtrys came from Dripsey originally, to work at the woollen mills in Blarney. Everybody was told that they had simply done a moonlight flit. But now we know for sure that they were shot by your great-grandfather, Martin Doherty, and your great-uncle, Killian Doherty, amongst several others.’
‘Are you out of your mind? My great-grandfather was a grocer! Doherty’s Grocer’s, in Coachford. He was never anything to do with shooting anybody. I don’t know what my great-uncle did for a living, but I think it was something to do with shipping.’
The tall man shrugged, ‘There were plenty of men in those days who were shopkeepers by day and soldiers by night. Your great-grandfather was one of them. Didn’t you know that after the Dripsey ambush in 1921 he was hauled in by the British army and interrogated for nearly a month before they had to let him go?’
Kevin said, ‘No, I didn’t. All I know about him was that he was a grocer and my grandfather was a grocer, too. In the end, my grandfather sold the shop and ran a pub for a while, the Mills Inn at Ballyvourney.’
The tall man came around and stood closer to Kevin. He had a large brown wart on his chin instead of a dimple. Now that he was standing so near to him, Kevin could tell that he was the one who made the living room smell like a charity shop.
‘You can say what you like,’ the tall man told him. ‘My family had it on the best possible intelligence that Martin Doherty and Killian Doherty had been sent to do for the Langtrys. We never once believed for a moment that it was the Brits who did it. It was Captain Frank Busteed of the IRA at Kilcullen who ordered it.’
Kevin didn’t know what to say. He felt as if he had opened the living-room door and stepped into a world of total madness. He was terrified and he was sure that these men were intent on killing him, but he couldn’t even begin to understand why.
The tall man said, ‘The only reason that the Brits let your great-grandfather go was because a letter arrived from the Langtry family in America to say that they had taken it upon themselves to emigrate and that they were all alive and well. Under the circumstances, the Brits could hardly charge him with murder, could they? Our family, though, we were never totally convinced that they had actually emigrated – but what else could we do? The Langtrys sent more letters from America, and there was no sign of them anywhere around Blarney, and no graves found – no bodies burned or buried in bogs. We had to assume that they really were in New York. No emails in those days. No phones, even.’
He paused and then he said, ‘You can understand why we’ve been so devastated that their bodies had been found, can’t you? After all this time, we’ve found out at last that our suspicions had been right all along and that they had been murdered by the IRA.’
‘I still don’t see how you can blame me for what happened,’ said Kevin. ‘Not in a million years.’ He lifted his chin and flared his nostrils, trying to look defiant.
‘Are you having a laugh? Of course we can blame you! Your family murdered one of our families – all of them, even the bairns. Even the fecking dogs, man! It’s time you lot paid for it.’
‘You’re not a Langtry, though, are you?’
‘No, of course not. The Crothers, we are. Our family used to keep Leemount House for Mrs Mary Lindsay, back in those days. My great-great-grandfather Payton kept the gardens. My great-great-great-grandmother Aideen did the cooking and their youngest daughter, Radha, helped her and did the house-cleaning.
‘I still don’t—’ Kevin began, but the tall man interrupted him and now his voice was shaking with indignation.
‘It was Radha who married Stephen Langtry and ended up buried under those floorboards. She was the flower of the family, that’s what they used to call her. I should have brought you a photograph of her so that you could see for yourself what kind of a beauty she was. The loveliest young woman that you could ever imagine. But your great-grandfather – your great-grandfather, whose blood is flowing in your veins even now – he forced his way into Radha’s house, that beautiful young woman, and he shot her with no hesitation whatsoever.’
To emphasize his outrage, the tall man lifted his own automatic and pressed the muzzle against his forehead. ‘Shot her,’ he repeated. ‘Killed her.’
Kevin raised both hands, as if to show the tall man that he was sorry for Radha and her family being murdered, but he could think of no way of making up for it, even if his great-grandfather had been responsible for it. If Radha hadn’t been shot she would have been dead by now, anyway, no matter how beautiful she was.
None of them spoke for almost half a minute. The rain spattered against the living-room windows and Órla continued her painful, muted sobbing, although Sibeal had stopped whimpering now and stood silent, swallowing and swallowing as if she were close to being sick.
It was then that they heard Tom bounding down the stairs, calling out, ‘Dad! I can’t find my blue top! Do you know where my blue top is? I didn’t put it in the wash!’
Kevin froze for a second. Then he strode to the living-room door and just as Tom came jumping to the bottom of the stairs he shouted, ‘Tom! Get out of the house now, quick as you can! Run to Mrs Doody’s next door and tell her call for the guards! Go!’
Tom hesitated, blinking in bewilderment. He was wearing only his black tracksuit bottoms and a white vest, and he was carrying his grey school uniform bunched up close to his chest.
‘Go!’ Kevin told him, and this time he was almost shrieking.
The short man came out of the living-room door behind Kevin and roughly pulled at his sleeve. ‘What the feck you playing at, big lad?’
‘Tom! Go and call the guards!’
Tom dropped his school uniform on to the doormat and reached for the front door latch. As he tugged it down, however, the short man levelled his pistol at him, left-handed, still gripping Kevin’s shirt sleeve with his right. The distance between the muzzle of the gun and the back of Tom’s head was less than three metres.
In films, guns are fired in slow motion, so Kevin would have had time to twist his sleeve free from the short man’s grip, dive towards Tom and rugby-tackle him to the floor, while the bullet would have slammed harmlessly through the door panel.
Instead, Kevin heard a sharp crack and at the same time a splash of bright red blood appeared on the door panel in front of Tom’s face. Tom hesitated for a split second, still holding the door latch, but then he dropped sideways on to the staircase. He slid lifelessly down to the bottom, his arms and legs jumbled, his face turning towards Kevin as he did so. His eyes were open, but above his eyebrows his forehead been blown away and the top of his head was filled with bright red lumps like roughly mashed tomatoes.
Sibeal may have screamed. Kevin didn’t seem able to hear anything. Even though the pistol was fitted with a silencer the shot had still been loud. He couldn’t even hear himself let out a rising groan of grief. He dropped heavily on to his knees beside Tom, and collected him up in his arms, and held him close. He was warm, he was still warm, and when Kevin hugged him tight he let out a breath.
The tall man came out of the doorway to see Kevin hunched over Tom’s body, his head nodding up and down in anguish like a religious p
enitent. He looked with obvious distaste at the blood that was already smothering Kevin’s hands and drenching the front of his shirt, and at the fan-shaped spray of blood on the front-door panel.
‘Man, dear, would you believe the fecking state of this place? It’s going to be a right pain in the arse cleaning all this up.’ There was no more emotion in his voice than an interior designer who disapproved of his client’s choice of colour.
‘The kid was going for the peelers,’ the short man explained. ‘What else could I do?’
‘I don’t care where the feck he was going, you didn’t have to make such a fecking pig’s dinner out of it. Oh well, it’s not like we’ll be trying to keep this family hidden for the next ninety years.’
Kevin raised his head. His eyes were almost blinded with tears and his mouth was dragged down in anguish.
‘Come on, then, you can kill me, if that’s what you came here to do. But don’t hurt my wife, don’t hurt my daughter. You’ve taken my son, you evil bastards, isn’t that enough?’
The tall man looked back down at him, heavy-lidded. ‘I think you’ve missed the point, big lad. An eye for an eye, that’s what I said. A bullet for a bullet. A father and a mother, a boy and a girl. And I saw you have a couple of cats in the kitchen. You have to pay in full.
‘Ker-ching,’ he added, making the noise of a cash register.
Kevin looked down at Tom’s staring eyes and the bloody chaos where the top of his head had been. ‘This is not real,’ he whispered to himself. ‘This is a nightmare. None of this is real.’
‘I expect our Radha said that, too, or something very like it,’ said the tall man, while the short man gripped Kevin’s arm and started to pull him up on to his feet.
Twenty-five
Katie drove home before she interviewed Bobby Quilty. She needed a shower and a change of clothes and something to eat, even if she didn’t manage to get any sleep.
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