by Zoe Sharp
It didn’t take long to find out.
Before we’d had time to polish off our current round of drinks, the biggest of the group got to his feet and came swaggering across like he had a six-shooter and spurs. The others followed a few paces behind and what worried me was the fact that, although they’d finished their drinks, they hadn’t put down their bottles and glasses. As unobtrusively as I could, I eased my chair back.
“So, which one of you fuckers is the fucking queer?” The big man spoke with an aggressive local accent.
For a moment there was utter silence. It lasted for maybe no longer than a year – or it felt that way, at least. During that time a whole string of interconnected thoughts whipped through my brain. Everything from the way the group moved, both individually and as a whole, to who else had noticed what was going on. The barman had frozen like a terrier that scents a fox, instincts honed by years of dealing with belligerent drunks.
Then there came the hollow scrape of a chair going back. I flicked my eyes sideways and found, to my surprise, it was Paxo who’d got to his feet, hands clenched and chin thrust forwards.
“Who wants to know?” he demanded.
The big Irishman grinned nastily. If he’d been able to pick which of us he’d wanted to take on, Paxo would probably have been his first or second choice.
Before the man had the chance to express his glee, another chair went back. This time it was William who got to his feet. I saw the Irishman take a mental step back as William rose to his full height. William’s dark face was the same ominous mask he’d worn when I first encountered him at the hospital.
William didn’t speak, just stood with his arms folded, rocked back on his heels slightly, head a little on one side. A second later Jamie was on his feet next to him.
“Whoa, hold up guys.”
Daz put down his drink and stood, looking shaken. Nothing to do with the challenge, I realised. Everything to do with the response.
He faced the Irishman, defiant. “You got a problem with me?” he asked, his voice quiet.
“So you’re the fucking queer, then?” the man said, glancing back to make sure his mates were right behind him before he took the final step.
“That’s right,” Daz said.
“Me too!” Jamie threw in, his voice a little high and wild. He sounded breathless, but that would be the adrenaline shot. The fight was almost inevitable now and his system was cranking up for it, the tension racking his nerves tight as rigging.
“No, no,” William murmured, “I think you’ll find that I’m Spartacus.”
The Irishman laughed without understanding the joke. His mates joined in, the sound loud and primitive, pumping them up, driving them on. Then Sean stood up and they stopped laughing.
You couldn’t deny there was something inherently violent about Sean. It wasn’t just the size of him or even the way he moved, it was the way his thought processes were wired. There were times when, in some subtle way, he could make them show on the outside. It was what made people step into the gutter to avoid a confrontation with him when he was walking down a narrow pavement.
But now I noticed his stance was different. He was keeping it open, hands up a little, fingers outstretched. Hardly anyone in that room would have noticed that he could have turned passive appeasement into aggression in an instant. Walk away now and I’ll do the same, he was saying, but take me on and I will flatten you.
The Irishman was either too drunk, or too inexperienced, to respond to this escape route when it was offered to him. He took another step forwards.
“OK now lads, let’s have this outside,” the barman called across. “Go on, in the street with you – I’ll not have you brawling in my place! The po-lice are on their way.”
It was the perfect opportunity for a climb-down and, just when I thought the Irishman might still be just sober enough to take it, Daz took a step forwards.
“You heard the man,” he said softly to the Irishman. “You up for this, or what?”
The fight kicked off almost before we were all out of the door. The pub had no car park, so the entrance spilled us all straight onto the heavy slope of the street, across a metre of pavement, then into the road.
Daz went for a pre-emptive strike, launching a fast but amateur blow to the Irishman’s head. After that, it was a messy free-for-all. I grabbed Tess and got her out of the firing line, then stayed on the outskirts. Sean saw what I was doing and gave me the slightest fraction of a nod in response.
Group fights are hard and fast and dirty and you’re as likely to get thumped by one of your own team as you are by the opposition. You need a sniper who can stay on the periphery and only join in when things are going badly for your side.
So, when the guy who Daz had hit waded in using his empty beer bottle as a club, I edged in behind them and kicked the back of the guy’s knees out from underneath him, then ducked away again.
Paxo had clearly done martial arts of some description. He fought with more balance and style than I would have expected, but made the mistake of getting too fancy and took a nasty couple of hits to the ribs as a result. As soon as his opponent had his back to me, I slammed a couple of short hard shots into the guy’s kidneys. He grunted but by the time he had the breath to look round, I was gone.
William was relying on brute force and sheer weight, swinging his fists wildly and missing his target more than he was hitting it, but at least his swatting fists kept the blows away from him.
Jamie had seemed to be holding his own, but I saw him go down out of the corner of my eye. Next thing he was curled on the ground with two of them getting stuck in. One was laying in with his boots, but the other had picked up a piece of smashed glass.
“Sean!” I shouted and, despite the chaos, he turned instantly, unaffected by the usual tunnelling of sight and sound. The guy he’d been fighting was on the floor at his feet. He saw Jamie down and jumped for one of his attackers. I abandoned my detached stance and went for the other.
My opponent was bigger than I was but hampered by his instinctive reluctance to hit a woman. He’d also already been giving it his all for more than thirty seconds and, in a brawl, that’s a long time. Boxers spend their whole life preparing for the ring, yet are exhausted after bursts of action lasting only a couple of minutes. And this guy wasn’t a professional fighter.
I ignored the wicked piece of jagged glass in his hand and took his nose out sideways with my first sweeping blow, aiming to water down his vision and distract him with the pain. After that I could choose my target. I hit him, just once, at the vulnerable point on the side of his jaw where his moustache would have come down to meet his chin, had he been wearing either. I put my bodyweight behind it. He overbalanced backwards and went crashing.
The lad who’d been facing Sean lost his nerve at that point and ran. Sean checked to see I was coping, then took off after him. When I’d made sure the guy I’d hit wasn’t going to get up again in a hurry, I went after them both.
Not that I didn’t have confidence that Sean could tackle the man he was chasing. That wasn’t what worried me.
I was scared that he could tackle him only too well.
Twenty-two
The guy Sean was chasing had plenty of incentive to escape but he was just about spent from the fight and he didn’t have Sean’s predatory instinct. He’d headed downhill as his best chance of survival, arms windmilling for balance as he ran, then skidded round a corner and disappeared from view.
Sean shot after him, gaining with every stride. By the time I’d rounded the corner myself, Sean had the guy on the ground down by the wall of a building and had hit him just to the outside of his left eye, hard enough to quell his struggles, to frighten and hurt him rather than put him out. Sean glanced up as I approached. I caught something in his face and gave him a single nod to show I was prepared to follow his lead.
The guy on the floor was in his early twenties, dark-haired and solidly built. He might have been brave when he was hun
ting as part of a pack, but now he was singled out and down and on his own his courage seemed to have deserted him. He was gasping for breath and sweating hard enough to stain through his shirt, his hands spread in front of him as though to ward off another blow.
“Don’t hurt me,” he begged, his accent local. “Sweet Jesus, don’t hurt me.”
“Now why would I want to do that, you wee fucker?” Sean said, perfectly slipping the slant and rhythm of East Belfast into his voice.
I thought the guy on the ground was going to have a heart attack, or wet himself, or both. His face buckled completely as he recognised the tones and made all kinds of wild and unsubstantiated connections.
“Sean,” I murmured, deliberately allowing a trace of unease to slide through. “You can’t kill him – not here.”
“And why not?” Sean said. “Didn’t your man here and his pals have it in for us?”
“We didn’t!” the guy yelped. “Honest to God, we didn’t! No one else was supposed to get hurt.”
“What about the young lad you had on the ground between you?” Sean demanded roughly. “You looked to have it in for him, right enough.”
“OK, OK,” the guy said, squirming backwards until his shoulders were hard up against the brickwork. Not a good idea if Sean decided to hit him again, but clearly he was too scared to think straight. “Look, we were told to do him over, right? To break something – stop him getting on a bike, or something. I don’t know any more than that. Honest to God!”
Sean and I exchanged glances.
“Now who would tell you to do a thing like that?” Sean said softly.
The guy’s eyes swivelled as though searching for an excuse he thought we might swallow. He failed to come up with one before Sean had straightened and made a big show of drawing back his fist.
“OK, OK!” the guy shouted, flinching his head away, hands still up. “I don’t know who it was, all right? Davey got this phone call earlier tonight, telling him this group of Brit bikers’d be in Portaferry and to look out for them. Said one of them was gay. We didn’t know someone like you’d be with them or we’d have stayed well clear.”
“Davey’s the big feller who came over?” Sean surmised. “So who would be calling him about that?”
“I don’t know!” the guy squawked, tension making the tears squeeze out and roll down his cheeks. “Davey works as a bailiff. He knows all kinds of folk. Sweet Jesus, that’s all I know!”
I believed him. He was too frightened to be inventive.
After a moment’s consideration Sean stepped back and jerked his head. “All right, you be on your way now,” he said, his voice still quiet, laced with contempt. “But I don’t want to see your face again, you understand me? Not ever. Or I’ll do more than tell your pals you cried like a girl.”
The guy scrambled to his feet, never taking his eyes off Sean just in case of a double-cross. As soon as he was upright again, he bolted. We watched him dive into the gap between two buildings and disappear from view.
“Well now,” Sean said then with a lazy grin, shouldering back into his own skin. “There’s a part I haven’t had to play in a while.”
“You’re very convincing.”
“Mm, well,” he said. “At one time, I had to be.”
We started walking. Staying put was foolish, as was going back to the pub. We had to assume that the boys had managed all right on their own so we headed downhill, back towards the hotel. I jammed my hands into my pockets.
The light was starting to go now, dusk softening the edges of the trees on the far side of the Narrows. The tide was running in fiercely, funnelling the water through the restricted gap into the Lough. The regatta of little boats clustered near the shoreline had all swung on their moorings to face into it.
“So who on earth rang this Davey bloke and told him to duff one of us up?” I wondered.
“That is an interesting one, isn’t it?” Sean said. “Our friend Eamonn has a fair amount of rental property and would undoubtedly know a few bailiffs.”
“But he’s living with Isobel. Why would he want to beat up her son?”
“Who says Jamie was the target? They could have been indulging in a bit of queer bashing and got the wrong man. After all, our boys didn’t make it easy for them to spot him.”
For a few moments we walked in silence. Then a sudden thought occurred to me. “If it was Eamonn, how did he – or those lads in the pub – know about Daz coming out? Now, apart from telling you on the ferry, he only made that one public this morning. So is this a new threat, or a continuation of the old one?”
“Good point.” Sean nodded. “Though without knowing what the hell it is they’re up to,” he said, “it’s hard to know who might have it in for them.”
***
When we got back close to the hotel we found the rest of the Devil’s Bridge Club sitting on a bench on the edge of the harbour, licking their wounds.
They looked pretty sorry for themselves, even though the group who’d set about us hadn’t succeeded in their aim to put one of us out of commission.
We might have come to Jamie’s rescue but he’d still taken a pasting. He was sitting with his arms wrapped gingerly around his body as though his ribcage would spring open if he let go of it. Tess was next to him, her arm across his shoulders. Daz sat a little apart from the others with his head tilted back and a wad of tissue pressed against a bleeding eyebrow.
“Well, well, where the fuck did you two piss off to?” Paxo demanded, flicking his cigarette butt over the harbour wall into the water.
“Finding out who that lot were who attacked us, and why,” I said.
“And did you?”
“The kiddie you picked a fight with was a bailiff called Davey,” Sean said to Daz. “It seems he had a phone call telling him all about you and instructing him to make sure somebody wasn’t in a fit state to get on their bike tomorrow.” He let his eyes pan over their shocked faces, then added, “Any ideas why that might be?”
Of all of them, Tess looked the most shaken but perhaps I was just being unkind to her. Even living with Slick she probably hadn’t been witness to too many skirmishes close up.
“Who would call this bloke and tell him to go after us?” she said, swallowing to firm up her voice. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Somebody did,” Sean said, eyeing her. “Someone who knew about Daz. You tell me.”
She threw her hands up in frustration and anger. “We were all there when he admitted what he was!” she snapped. “Grow up, Sean – it wasn’t me.”
“He never said it was,” I said blandly. “Guilty conscience, Tess?”
“So did everybody in this fucking place know about you before you told your mates, then?” Paxo wanted to know. “Laughing behind our backs, were you?”
Daz rolled his uncovered eye in Paxo’s direction but before he could answer I noticed a police car appear at the far end of the harbour and start to cruise slowly in our direction.
“I would suggest we continue this conversation inside,” I murmured. “Seems a waste to pay for a hotel bed and then spend the night in the local nick, doesn’t it?”
Once you had a room key you could enter and leave the hotel by a side door that opened out into a stairwell leading directly to the rooms on the upper floors. At least it meant we didn’t have any explaining to do to whoever was on the reception desk. Paxo was limping slightly on his right leg as we walked in and Daz’s eye was still bleeding.
“You ought to get that sorted out,” Sean said to him.
Daz’s eyes flicked in the direction of his mates for a moment, then back again. “Yeah, well, it’ll be fine.”
“I’ve got my first-aid kit upstairs if you want some help?” I offered.
He hesitated for a second, then nodded, looking grateful.
“OK,” he said then. “Thanks.”
We took Daz to the room Sean and I were sharing. It had been recently renovated by the looks of it, with striped wallpaper and antique p
ine furniture, and there was still a faint smell of new paint. Daz eyed the double bed but sat down on one of the armchairs by the window while I fished my kit out of my tank bag. Sean filled the small kettle on the side table and started putting together coffee from the little packets provided.
Daz threw the sodden tissue into the waste paper basket and folded up a fresh piece. He watched me unpacking disinfectant and Steri-strips and his lips twisted.
“You not going to put gloves on before you deal with me?” he wanted to know, his tone taunting. “The others seem to have developed a sudden strange reluctance to get my blood on them.”