Stone Heart

by Des Ekin

  Careful not to snag the weight or the feathered hooks, Tara found the right depth and began moving the line in a regular up-and-down motion. Within seconds she felt a succession of rapid, violent tugs which she instantly recognised as mackerel. She drew up her line. Three fish had taken the hooks at once. As she hauled them in, she took a glance at her father. Had he noticed her catch? Was he aware of anything at all? The unfocused stare and the sightless eyes gave her the answer she didn’t want.

  The line went down again and returned with a fine-sized pollack.

  At the stern of the boat, Fergal had already landed half a dozen mackerel, a pollack and a cod. Tara caught a few more mackerel and then left him to it. She sat beside her father and began stroking his hand, urging him gently to open his senses to the sights and sounds and smells around him.

  Meanwhile, Fergal’s rod kept pulling in cod and mackerel. In less than half an hour, the big fish-box in the centre of the deck was filled.

  ‘Okay, I suppose that’s enough,’ called Tara. ‘No point catching more than the freezer will hold. We’re drifting off the mark, anyway.’

  Fergal stowed away the rods. He wandered over to the wheelhouse where Tara was sitting, her father’s hand clasped gently in her own.

  ‘Anything?’ Fergal asked quietly.

  She shook her head. She had spent the past twenty minutes talking to her father and checking his eyes for signs of awareness or consciousness. There were none. His pulse was strong, his breathing was relaxed and regular, but he still inhabited another world.

  Eventually, she had to admit to herself that the experiment had been a total failure. Well, at least they’d tried. Grateful that the salt spray disguised the tears that sprang up in her eyes, Tara took the wheel and fired the engine. ‘I’ll take her back in while you gut the fish,’ she called to Fergal.

  He made a grimace. ‘I’ll do it when we get home.’

  She looked at him with surprise. ‘Come on, Fergal, it’s always best to gut them at sea. It saves time and mess, because you can throw the waste to the gulls.’

  ‘I don’t feel like it.’

  ‘Okay. You take her into port and I’ll gut them.’ She was annoyed at his intransigence. She dived into the cabin and emerged with her father’s toolbox.

  Fergal’s male pride was wounded. ‘All right, all right,’ he said testily. ‘I’ll do it. You stay at the wheel.’

  Tara smiled. ‘Thanks. It’s just that you do it so well. You can gut a dozen fish while I’m still struggling over the first one.’

  Fergal grunted. ‘You just watch where we’re going,’ he said.

  He took the first fish, the large pollack, out of the box and set to work.

  The helicopter was waiting on the tarmac at Aldergrove, just as the Belfast businessman had promised.

  Andres had to admit the man had done a good job. As part of the same package deal, he’d arranged with the cabin crew for Andres and his companion to get priority exit from the jumbo; he’d arranged for their swift passage through immigration at Belfast’s international airport; and he’d arranged to have their luggage collected and forwarded to them at Shannon Airport.

  Within ten minutes of touchdown, the couple were being ferried across the airport in a baggage truck and dropped off at the helicopter pad.

  Andres recognised the chopper, a dependable Bell 206B Jetranger III, capable of a top speed of 132 mph. It had a range of over 360 miles, more than enough to cover the distance to Clare without stopping.

  The pilot had already powered the engine, and the rotors were slowly spinning ready for takeoff. Buffeted by noise and downdraught, they ran crouching to the doors, hoisted themselves into the passenger seats and fastened their seatbelts.

  Clearance came through almost immediately from Air Traffic Control. The rotors chewed hungrily into the heavy, fuel-stinking air. With contemptuous ease, the big machine battered gravity into submission. It rose high above the sparse hillside terrain of County Antrim, and began shadowing the M1 motorway southwards and westwards on the first stage of its long journey to Claremoon Harbour.

  As the neat, pretty villages of Antrim, Down and Armagh passed underneath, Andres Talimann did a rapid calculation of speed and distance and crossed his fingers, hoping against hope that they would not be too late.

  Back in Store Street Garda Station, Geaney’s lawyer no longer feigned an air of busy impatience, and his client no longer looked bored.

  ‘My client has agreed to co-operate,’ the solicitor announced as soon as Phil O’Rourke ambled through the door, refreshed and relaxed after a sound night’s sleep in a nearby hotel.

  ‘I thought he might,’ said the detective.

  The solicitor looked anything but relaxed and refreshed. The top button of his shirt was undone and his tie was slightly askew. He looked as though he’d come to regret taking on Christy Geaney as a client.

  ‘The quid-pro-quo, of course, strictly off the record and without prejudice, is as follows. My client will give you all the information at his disposal about Mr’ – he had to consult his notes – ‘Manus Kennedy, and in return you will guarantee that he will face no charges of any nature in relation to the incident involving Ms Tara Ross in Ballymahon Flats.’

  O’Rourke peeled open a new pack of cigarettes, opened the flaptop, and passed the entire packet over to Geaney. It was a gesture of good faith. ‘Agreed,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Christy spoke for the first time. He was more relieved than resentful. ‘Okay, bogman. What do you want to know?’

  ‘When did you first meet Manus Kennedy?’

  ‘Couple of years ago. He was in and out of the loony bin at Inismaul. The guy was sick in the head.’

  O’Rourke leaned over with a lighter and put a flame to Geaney’s first cigarette. ‘We know that. Go on.’

  ‘They kept giving him medication and letting him back into the community. But Manus didn’t have a bleedin’ community. He kept getting into trouble and had to be taken back inside. He would come to Dublin and began wandering around places like Bernietown with a head full of prescribed uppers and downers, looking for somewhere cheap to stay. He was like a bleedin’ lamb to the slaughter.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Well, he got a private flat and the health board paid for it. We got to know him, chatted him up, gave him the all-mates-together crap, and screwed the bastard.’

  ‘You mean, you took his money?’

  Geaney shook his head in frustration at O’Rourke’s lack of cop-on. ‘More than that, bogman. We moved in with him, Paul Lawless, myself and a few other heads. We told him we were poolin’ money for food and rent. But what we did was, we took his disability money and used it to buy dope. We brought the junkies in and let them shoot up in his flat. We stored the gear there, too – at one stage there was enough bleedin’ heroin stashed there to supply halfa’ Dublin, and Mano didn’t even cop on. His head was so screwed up on medication that he’d totally lost the plot. He thought we were just all mates together, just watching videos all day and hanging out and having a bit of a laugh.’

  He sniggered unpleasantly. O’Rourke’s poker face concealed the deep disgust he felt. ‘And then?’ he prompted.

  ‘Lost touch. I went to jail for a bit, Mano went back into hospital. Paul Lawless was in there for a while, too. We all met up again earlier this year and organised a great stroke.’

  ‘This was the scam that ended up with Manus owing you three grand?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m coming go that. Don’t be so impatient, bogman. What’s the matter, your cows need milking or something?’

  O’Rourke sighed. ‘You don’t know much about farming if you think cows can wait to be milked until this hour of the morning, Christy. Keep talking.’

  ‘Lawlo had noticed that the pharmacy in Inismaul Mental Hospital was wide-open. They didn’t close it until late at night, with only one woman in charge, an oul’ wan of nearly sixty. Mano was friendly with her. He used to keep her company, p
laying chess with her in the evenings when things were quiet. Lawlo’s scam was deadly. Real simple. When they got back into Inismaul, Mano would get together with the oul’ wan, play chess with her as usual, and then keel over as if he wasn’t well. The oul’ dear would lean over him to see what was wrong, Lawlo would sneak up from behind and whang her over the head with a metal golf club from the recreation cabinet. Then Mano and Lawless would take her key, get into the pharmacy, and fill a couple of kitbags.’

  O’Rourke looked over at the lawyer, who couldn’t hide his expression of nausea. He glanced back at Christy, who looked as cool as though he’d just outlined the tactics for a five-a-side soccer match.

  ‘What with?’ asked O’Rourke.

  ‘What with, what?’

  ‘What were you going to fill the sports bags with? Which drugs?’

  Christy stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Morphine. Phy. Napps. Gee-gees. Roches. Uppers. Anything you can sell easily on the streets.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’ asked O’Rourke. ‘Did Manus do the job himself and cut you fellas out?’

  Geaney laughed rudely. ‘Nah. Jesus, you have got it all arsewise, haven’t you?’ He helped himself to another cigarette and waited silently for O’Rourke to produce the lighter.

  ‘Mano didn’t know anything about the plan until the last minute,’ he said through puffs of smoke. ‘Then when we told him, he didn’t want to play ball. We did everything to persuade him – even roughed him up a bit – but he just kept comin’ off with this oul’ hippie shite that he couldn’t bring himself to harm anybody, couldn’t hurt another living creature.’ Geaney frowned as though trying to remember something. ‘Kept ramblin’ on about cows’ eyes burning, some crap like that. I already told you, he was sick in the head.’

  The solicitor’s head turned sharply, but Geaney didn’t appear to notice the irony. ‘So,’ continued Geaney, ‘what our good mate Mano did – what he did, was shit all over our great scam. He warned the oul’ wan in the pharmacy. She was moved to safer duties. The hospital put up a grille and extra locks and a security man. So we never got a chance to pull it off.’

  ‘When did all this happen?’

  ‘Early April this year.’

  ‘And Mano?’

  ‘He’d planned to go back into the hospital, but he didn’t. He disappeared, which was a bleedin’ wise thing to do since both Lawlo and myself wanted his testicles on toast.’

  ‘Come on, Christy!’ O’Rourke was incredulous. ‘You’re overreacting by a mile. It was just a plan that went wrong. Nobody was hurt. Nobody was busted. You didn’t lose any money because there wasn’t any money in the first place.’

  Geaney hissed in frustration and leaned forward until his face was only inches from O’Rourke’s.

  ‘What went wrong, bogman, was that this wasn’t just one scam. It was part of a series of operations that would set me and Lawlo up for life. And it all hinged on the Inismaul pharmacy job. As far as we were concerned, that was money in the bank. It was our cash-cow.’

  He smiled with temporary pleasure at having landed another bogman insult. ‘Once we got the stuff, we would have had no trouble shifting it on the streets. It sells fast ’cos everyone knows it’s the real thing, straight-up, uncut. We reckoned it would get us three-K each, so we promised that amount of money to take a share in a big shipment of heroin from Amsterdam. Somebody in Holland was in trouble and needed to shift it cheap. It was the sort of chance you get once in a lifetime. When the time came to collect and we’d no money to pay for our share, the whole deal fell through and we were in deep shit with a lot of heavy people.’

  ‘It’s a tough world out there, Christy.’

  ‘As I said earlier, you’ve no idea how tough, bogman.’ He smiled wryly. ‘For me there was only one way out of the problem, unless I planned walking on crutches for the rest of my life. That was to volunteer as a mule for the big fellas who’d organised the shipment. And that’s why, one nice April morning, I ended up being busted at Dublin Airport with a shit-load of cocaine.’ He pulled viciously at his cigarette. ‘And that’s why I’m facing ten years in the Joy instead of lyin’ on the beach in Tenerife.’

  O’Rourke nodded. ‘And what about all the gear you were cutting and packaging at the flat at Ballymahon a few days ago? The time Tara Ross came round?’

  ‘A different deal. Other people’s stuff. More favours, more bleedin’ risk. It all went down the tubes thanks to your bogwoman friend. And that’s only because she was looking for Mano.’ He grimaced. ‘One way or the other, that little bastard has set me back the guts of ten grand.’

  O’Rourke sat in silence for a moment, taking notes. Then: ‘You know a fella called Godfrey Villiers?’ he asked at last. ‘Runs the Michael de Blaca Gallery in Claremoon Harbour?’

  ‘Yeah. Only I knew him before he was Godfrey Villiers. I knew him when he was plain Paddy McGurk. We did a bit of time in Spike Island Prison together, before he went into the art business.’

  ‘The laundry business, you mean.’

  Christy shook his head. ‘Dunno what you’re talkin’ about, bogman.’

  ‘Course you do, Christy. He launders drug money for your old mates the Vineys in Limerick. Only problem was, the art shop turned out to be more successful than anyone bargained for. And before long, Godfrey was skimming off the cash to fund his seven-card stud.’ O’Rourke began counting out imaginary piles of money. ‘“Ninety-five quid for the Vineys, five for me. Ninety for the Vineys, ten for me.” Then it was eighty, then seventy-five.’

  ‘You know all this already, bogman, why you asking me?’ Christy began picking his teeth. ‘I never get involved with the Vineys’ business. As long as they stay in mucker-land and we stay in the city, everything’s cool. They learned that the hard way. A few years ago, they tried to move in on us and we pissed all over them.’

  ‘Nice way of putting it, Christy. You left three people dead.’

  ‘Get to the point, bogman.’

  ‘That is the point, Christy. The current deal is, you stay in Dublin and the Vineys stay in Limerick and Clare. So what were you doing in Claremoon Harbour last month? And why were you spotted with Godfrey Villiers?’

  Christy looked at his lawyer. Clement Zeicker gave a shrug. He was past caring.

  ‘I was on the run on the coke smuggling charge when I got a message from Villiers. He’d heard that I’d put a contract out on Manus Kennedy. He wanted me to drop the contract and spread the word that it was safe for Mano to come out into the open again. In return, he would personally give me my three-K back, plus another three for my trouble.’

  ‘Maybe he was just in a generous mood,’ said O’Rourke.

  ‘Yeah, and my arse is parsley. I wanted to know what was behind all this shit, so I arranged a secret meeting. We got together in Claremoon, he got pissed drunk and told me everything.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Christy hesitated. ‘The Vineys weren’t as stupid as he’d reckoned. They’d figured out that he was skimming off their hard-earned cash. So they took him for a walk along the mudflats on the Shannon estuary and asked him very nicely if they could have their money back again.’

  ‘Only he didn’t have the money any more. He’d gambled it all away.’

  ‘That’s right. Now Villiers likes lazin’ around on the beach as much as the rest of us, but it kind of spoils your day out if you’re buried up to your neck waiting for the tide to come in. Which is what’s going to happen to him if he doesn’t get the readies.’

  ‘Nothing surer,’ said O’Rourke.

  Clement Zeicker, who was out of his league in this sedate discussion of savagery, glanced from one face to the other in horror. His mouth opened, and then closed again. He said nothing.

  ‘The poor fecker can feel the water lapping up round his chin already,’ continued Christy. ‘Then, out of the blue, he gets a call from some big art house in New York.’

  ‘Cedric Maxwell Associates.’

  ‘Yeah. Something like that. Seems th
e Yanks are going daft for Michael de Blaca – he’s some Irish artist who used to live in Claremoon Harbour – and they want Villiers to buy up whatever he can get. Big money, big commission for a small-time loser like him. So he promises them the sun, moon and stars and starts asking around.’

  Christy flicked his cigarette ash on the floor. ‘Trouble is,’ he continued, ‘he can’t find nothin’. Not a bleedin’ thing. Until somebody tells him that de Blaca used to work up at Barnabo, the Kennedy family house. So up goes our Godfrey to Barnabo, and he talks to Ann Kennedy. And she gives him good news and bad news. The good news is, she’s got the very first sculpture de Blaca ever done, some naked woman or something. The bad news is, it’s not hers to sell.’

  ‘Whose was it?’ O’Rourke leaned forward.

  ‘She didn’t say. But Villiers looks up his books, does his sums and works out that it has to be Manus. So he phones up New York and asks the guy what he’ll pay for the first sculpture de Blaca ever done, and the guy practically creams his pants and says, get it to us by yesterday and we’ll send you a bank draft for three hundred thousand dollars. At least’ – Christy’s brows lowered in suspicion – ‘that’s the figure he told me, so I reckon the true offer was nearer four.’

  O’Rourke did a few rapid calculations. ‘Godfrey must have thought he’d died and gone to heaven,’ he said. ‘With that kind of money, he could get the Vineys off his back and also set himself up for a nice peaceful retirement.’

  ‘Yeah. Remember, Mano was broke and living rough. Even if he was offered a tenner for the statue, he’d take it. It was a shit-hot deal. It was perfect. It couldn’t go wrong.’

  ‘Except that it could,’ said O’Rourke. ‘Because nobody could find Manus anywhere.’

  Christy nodded. ‘The Vineys pulled out all the stops to find him, because the way they saw it, it was the only chance they had of getting their missing money back. They knew Mano was living rough around Claremoon, but they couldn’t pin him down. Because Mano wasn’t like their usual target. He didn’t have a house. He didn’t drive a car. He didn’t drink in pubs or play in pool halls. He was their worst nightmare.’