The weapon was loaded and ready for use.
He pushed it down in the narrow gap between his thigh and the rough cloth of the chair where it could be easily and quickly located.
He rested his hand there.
Let it go limp.
The furnishings in the house were a mish-mash of 80s tat and Ikea self-assembly.
It made for an incongruous mix which could not rise above the overriding impression of the squalid and the seedy.
The whole property stank of cigarette smoke and dampness.
The wooden hearth surrounding the barren fireplace had been burned and scarred black by a number of cigarette butts that had been carelessly left there by some earlier occupant.
A crushed Coke can and some biscuit wrappers lay abandoned in its mouth.
Its edges were sooty and blackened.
On the dining table sat a vase with some plastic lilies.
A beer mat had been peeled back so that someone might use it to write on.
High above him, the water tank in the loft groaned.
He had left the tap running in the bathroom following several unsuccessful attempts to throw up in there.
The fluorescent strip lighting in the kitchen hummed loudly. A moth trapped inside the translucent cover beat in vain against the plastic.
Little or no natural light seemed to permeate the living areas of Number 172 Stranmillis Parade, Belfast 9.
*
He had asked both Helen Totton and Cecil Herringshaw to meet with him here at 3.30pm.
He told them that he had a proposal that would take care of any continued meddling from Eban Barnard, whilst protecting the identities of both Herringshaw and Alex Barnard from any reopening of the Joseph Breslin case.
Watson was particularly keen to emphasis the results of his deliberations, which placed Councillor Herringshaw at the scene of that assault all those years ago.
It wasn’t just pride in his own police work – he needed to be sure Herringshaw would attend.
Needed to hook him and bring him to a place like this, for reasons Herringshaw could not reveal to others.
As for her, well… it was nothing more than revenge.
He could live – and die – with that.
The bitch had strung him along and played him for the fool he undoubtedly was.
How could he have let it all slide away so quickly?
He was weak.
A weak, wretched man and Helen Totton had seen that somehow and used it against him.
No resolution of this debacle would be complete without her inclusion.
And he told himself that it was for Elaine.
Long-suffering, compliant Elaine.
Her natural generosity of spirit and capacity for forgiveness would not have extended to Helen Totton selling her story to the Sundays.
He felt sick again at the thought of the mess he was dumping in her lap.
And the children’s of course.
But he could in conscience find no better solution to the impasse facing him.
Blackmail, professional ruin, lonely, solitary, humiliation, an old age waiting, wishing for it all to end.
It was better – much better – this way.
Watson’s eyes stung with the tears now welling up in them.
He shook them free to clear his head and wiping his nose with his sleeve, steeled himself again for what he must do.
He was aware that almost as many people had died from suicide in Northern Ireland since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement as were killed during the entire Troubles.
A significant number of these were police officers who had used their own legally held firearms.
He knew this because he had recently attended the biannual seminar arranged by Human Resources for officers of sergeant’s rank and above.
They had subcontracted the mental health of the force out to a high profile psychotherapy practice.
Earnest, well-meaning, touch-feely members of the caring professions, who nodded soberly whilst taking notes on paper emblazoned with their distinctive logo.
“Please don’t allow the stresses of the job to imperil your mental well-being.”
Please don’t blow your own brains out more like!
Add to that the recent high profile cases of love triangles resulting in murder-suicides and it all fell into place.
The press would have a field day of course.
But that hardly seemed to matter now.
What was important was that there had to be enough uncertainty around whether Watson had taken his own life or was in fact a victim of one of the other two.
In this way, Elaine’s police pension could be protected and his own character perhaps redeemed, if only partially.
Suddenly Watson stiffened.
His mind had been wandering.
To the day of his passing-out parade.
To Elaine’s laugh… or the way it used to be.
To a model aircraft he’d made when he was a boy.
To a song his father used to sing when coming home from the pub.
There was the noise of voices outside.
A key in the lock.
They had arrived together.
So much the better.
Probably cleaner that way.
Do them both at once.
One shot.
Him in the temple, up close.
Her in the heart.
Then…
He tensed, sat up straight and allowed his right hand to drop and rest again in the narrow space between his leg and the chair.
A colleague who had survived a terrorist shooting had once confided in him his fear that an abrupt, violent act resulting in his murder would leave his spirit suddenly dispossessed and exiled forever, in the very place that the attack had happened and at the moment of his death.
He had gathered up a stack of junk mail and bills when he’d first arrived and left them on the kitchen table in front of him.
He glanced at the transparent windows of the brown envelopes, spilled across the Formica surface like a beaten hand of cards.
59
He often stayed in his room for long periods of time with the door locked.
Mother and daughter had always felt it important that he should have his own space.
His privacy.
He kept a kettle, a radio, a portable TV in there.
Sometimes the only way you could be sure of his presence at all was when he crossed the landing to use the bathroom.
“Sure he’s no trouble to nobody,” was how Mrs Breslin described him.
Anne knew he would go to ground following the visit by Herringshaw and the crushing disappointment regarding Molly McArdle.
It was only natural.
She didn’t want to worry their mother when she’d asked after him. Asked why he hadn’t gone into work. Anne reassured Mrs Breslin that he was just a little bit down in himself.
But she had been to Joe’s door three times now and he had refused to answer her.
That was unlike him.
She couldn’t sleep.
She was rendered distraught beyond belief at the thought of the animal who had destroyed her brother’s life, only yesterday sitting below in the parlour of their own home.
She prayed to God and the Virgin that Joe did not comprehend who his callers had been.
It was bitter wound inflicted upon bitter wound.
She had heard the noise of the radio carry on all through the night.
But Joe had made no visits to the bathroom.
Anne was desperate to speak with him.
To learn what they had said to him.
If they had threatened him.
And to tell him that there was someone for everyone in this world and he was not to fret over Molly McArdle.
But if that were true, then where was her shoulder to cry on?
Anne did what she always did when confronted with the prospect of a solitary, loveless existence and buried her own disappoi
ntments deep down beneath selfless anxieties for her brother and mother.
Now, as she stood outside Joe’s bedroom door knocking and calling once again, she wondered why the volume and the station playing had not varied for close to eighteen hours or so.
She felt icy dread rise from the well of her guts, but pushed it back down again.
Crouching, she peered through the keyhole but her view was blocked by the key in the lock on the other side.
Taking a pair of scissors, she pushed through the aperture until it fell to the floor.
What she then saw caused her to cry out in a plaintive wail that she stifled as quickly as it had escaped her.
Joe’s lower body was visible. Inanimate.
He lay on the floor in an unnatural position, one arm trapped beneath his leg.
Anne’s first instinct was to scream for help.
To hammer on the door and to screech his name.
But there was no-one there to help her.
Her mother’s voice came from downstairs. “Anne… did you call me?”
She closed her eyes and gathered herself.
“No Mammy… I just took a fit of sneezing.”
“Oh. Will you ask Joe if he wants tea?”
“I will.”
“Do you want a drop yourself?”
“No Mammy… thanks…”
Her mind was racing.
A fall? A stroke?
Her brother might be dead or dying.
It took all of her composure to collect herself and enter the kitchen where Mrs Breslin was pulling on the lid of the biscuit tin as the kettle boiled.
Anne took a deep breath. “Mammy, Joe says he’ll take a drop of tea but he’s dying for one of them snowball buns he loves.”
“Sure I’ve nothing in… you know I don’t do my grocery shopping ‘til tomorrow.”
“Sure put your coat on and nip down to the wee home bakery.”
“Their stuff is very dear. He’s a bandit, that one,” she complained.
Anne was opening her purse and pressing a ten-pound note into her mother’s hand.
She tried hard to stop her own hands from shaking.
Tried hard to push away the image of her brother upstairs, slowly choking to death on his own vomit.
“That’s far too much!” scolded the old woman.
“Get a few fresh creams and a bap… I’d go myself but I’m waiting for an important phone call from work.”
Mrs Breslin pulled on her coat and searched for her shopping bag. “You say Joe wants snowballs?”
“Aye.”
“See if you can get him to come down for his tea… I’ll not be long.” She paused at the door. “They’re slave drivers in thon place of yours!”
“I know Mammy, I know. I’ll get a pot of tea made.”
*
Anne waited for the garden gate to close, the metallic clang and click.
It seemed like forever.
She stood fighting tears, pushing her nails into the palms of her hands in an act of sheer willpower.
When she was sure her mother was gone, Anne flung open the front door and flew as fast as her feet would carry her to Sweeney’s house next door.
Tommy answered her urgent knocking.
“It’s Anne Breslin,” she heard him say to his wife Rita as he turned the deadbolt.
“Tommy, it’s our Joe… can you come?”
Seeing Anne’s face, the man followed her in next door and bounded the stairs two at a time, apprising himself of the situation instantly.
“I can get my tools and take the hinges off, but…”
Anne’s expression answered his question.
“Stand back then.”
He aimed a kick at the base of the handle and it splintered but held.
A second broke the door handle off completely.
A third and the door opened a small way, pushing against Joe’s prone body.
Tommy placed his shoulder in the gap and levered it wide enough to slip though.
He immediately dropped to his knees and placing his ear close to Joe’s mouth, looked for a pulse.
Anne peered in through the opening.
On top of Joe’s bed were a number of paper chemist bags and a small pile of brown pill bottles.
He must have been stockpiling his medications, she thought, and mentally ran through what he might have taken.
Rita Sweeney now arrived on the landing.
“Antidepressants,” said Anne, aloud but to herself.
“Will one of the two of youse phone an ambulance… he’s still breathing!” shouted Tommy from inside the room.
“I’ll do it,” said Anne. “Rita, will you keep an eye out for my mammy when she comes back and take her into your house?”
The operator asked her for the nature of the emergency.
Anne heard herself say, “My brother took an overdose.”
It came out of her sounding almost matter-of-fact.
“Just bear with me while I take a few details.”
She remembered Joe building her a doll’s house, carrying her on his shoulders down Royal Avenue, sitting up nights, caring for a sick dog he’d brought home.
“Do you know what he might have taken?”
She felt anger swell up inside her.
Resented these ‘by the numbers’ protocols.
Felt that her brother was being judged somehow.
How could they know what he’d been through?
What he’d had to endure?
The daily prolongation of a body and soul in torment, representing some kind of pitiful existence.
And they couldn’t even leave him that.
“He’s taken just about all that he could take,” she said and began to cry quietly.
60
When the smiling anaesthetist leaned over Eban’s scrubbed and prepped body, he asked him to count backwards from ten.
Despite the adrenaline and dread rising up in him, such was the potency of the general anaesthetic being administered that it was unlikely that he would make it to seven before oblivion overtook him.
Not such a bad thing perhaps.
The anaesthetist looked at Eban like he was some kind of simpleton when – being pushed on a gurney into theatre – Eban had asked him, rather matter-of-factly, if he was familiar with the phenomenon of anaesthesia awareness; of being awake during surgery.
Of the awful prospect of being compos mentis whilst undergoing a major operation?
If he knew the percentage figures for this… and if he was taking steps to avoid it?
The prospect of this locked-in syndrome – of some Edgar Allan Poe-like premature burial vibe – had been fucking with his sensibilities from more or less the time when the orderly had been around to shave off all superfluous body hair so that tape and tubes might affix more easily.
This was exacerbated when he learned that Mr Khan would be performing the procedure.
And that his heart muscle had sustained considerable trauma during the incident.
It was explained to him solemnly that irrespective of the success of his operation, this damage could not be reversed.
Only hours earlier, before they’d arrived to take him down to pre-op, Eban had looked around the ward as a man might look upon death row.
The black second hand on the functional Roman numeral clock seemed to judder noisily around the face, thudding out every second.
Every tick. Every tock.
6.17am and 32 seconds and counting.
The pre-op ward, despite attempts to remodel it as a modern, cutting-edge facility, could not seem to completely shake off the aura of some 19th century institutional workhouse.
Or so it seemed to him.
It was quiet and dark.
Few words were spoken and only then in whispers.
Three elderly men in the ward stirred occasionally.
His fellows on the scaffold in striped pyjamas; they had all arrived just that day. Mercifully, no time for pleasantries or
discussions on the things to come.
Sighs and coughs and farts and the pulling up of blankets to throats, as if to ward off the coming of the blade and the chest-splitter.
That inevitable first incision.
Their families had been in of course.
Quiet prayers whispered up in entreaty.
Soft crying and the repeated exhortation of the need to be strong.
Seeing him alone and cowed, one elderly woman took pity on Eban. “You’re so young for something like this,” she said.
He thought that strange.
How he hadn’t felt young for the longest time.
Had he ever?
If so, he couldn’t recall it now.
All he felt was alone.
Utterly alone.
I have no-one to blame but myself, he thought.
He had consciously rejected belonging.
Fought against it.
Ran from it.
And it had led him here.
To the sovereignty of self.
The sovereignty of one.
They had asked him to sign the form acknowledging the possibility of a fatality should there be ‘complications’, and asked him again about his next of kin.
Eban misunderstood and told them about the family grave, where his father and mother were buried.
But now Alex was buried there as well, and with his ex-wife and kids having gone to live in Australia after their divorce.
He thought again about his brother, the policeman.
Thought now, in this moment, of the reasons that had so driven him in his quest to expose and discredit Alex.
Blood will have blood.
Abel had risen from the dead and killed Cain.
It was an unacceptable sacrifice unto the Lord.
And it was without honour.
Alex had always loved his garden; loved to tend his roses.
They were the last thing he saw as his blood soaked the ground and mixed with the soil that they grew in.
The soil he had fought for.
The soil he now lay in.
Eban had always thought that he would be interred alongside them.
But the council had passed an edict some years ago reducing the number of corpses in any one family plot from four to three.
Whatever happened.
Now or in the future.
He would be interred alone.
White Church, Black Mountain Page 30