Sitting in the front seat of the car, Cullen reached into his pocket and pulled out the .45. The clip was full and he still had the other eleven rounds. He reached over to the passenger seat where he had left the shotgun. He broke it open. Two full shells were ready in the breech. He searched under the seat and in the glove department for more. There were none. He got out and tried the boot. He found five loose ones. That was it. He put the shells in the left pocket of his jacket, the .45 and the rounds for it in the right side. That was as well as he could prepare himself. He knew Bill France would be here soon. He wanted to be finished with Maguire by then. He wasn’t too bothered about the other two. Only Boylan would present a real problem. Willie Maguire just needed a good fright and he would sprint for the nearest escape route — if he wasn’t already on it. He checked Doyle once more, opening the door and giving him a final word. It could mean a lot, Cullen knew, when things were bleak.
“OK, Sean, I’m off. We’ll get my sister back for you. You take it easy. Just stay there.”
Clutching the shotgun, he closed the car door. The rain swung in silvery drifts in the brightening dawn. His only concern was for the life of his sister. He knew Doyle would be all right and the children were fine. Now all he needed was to see his sister alive. He would get her out from where she was, get her back. That was all that mattered. He knew death, had seen it many times before. He had met it and evaded it. Death didn’t worry him too much anymore. He would see to Eileen, then he would worry about his own life. His time was up a good while ago anyway.
He knew it. He had faced it in the trawler the night he had waited for Doyle to deliver him to the French boat. He had seen it then, but only recognised it now, that he had stopped living a long time ago. He saw it clearly now. He had been merely existing in the cocoon of his own flight and fear, alienating himself from what could really be called life.
His feet flicked through the grass. The rain washed over him. He reached the first hill, then stooped and ran in the familiar kind of military rush, shotgun held in both hands, head down, using the cover, diving into a small hillock of sand and reed.
He knew they were near. There are times when the experience and sense of a soldier in any kind of fighting tells him when he is in a combat situation. Cullen could feel it now. He had hidden too often in combat, engaged too many times in covert ambush, had taken part too frequently in the atmosphere of life or death. It is a sensation only those experienced in it know. It is unmistakeable. Cullen knew in his heart that the others were close. He was into the job beyond the point of reason. All conscious logic had left and he was stripped to the bare essentials for combat. His total being was in the action.
He had accepted his fate. He had recovered from the stall, the fractional holdup in the mind that can jar the flow of thought, throw a smoothly flowing process into aimless chaos. At first it had checked him, tripped his mind so that he had stumbled in his efforts to see it. And then it was as clear as it could simply be.
It was just the way it came. He didn’t care now. He was indifferent, that was all. Death, if it came, was not his punishment. No, the real pain, sharp and unfathomably deep, was that the sense of loss would be denied him. His punishment was for him to leave this life without regret. Life wasn’t worth staying for.
He lay flat, not wishing to be discovered now, and watched all around. He was poised, tensed, breathing, alert on instinct.
He pressed himself closer to the ground, chin digging on a mound of grassy sand. The rain came down heavier, spurting sand into his mouth and face. He screwed his eyes up in protection. There was no shelter, no respite from the torrent. The rain, like his life, was closing in on him.
The movement, when he saw it, was the living reality of his thoughts. He saw it clearly through the wind, the blasted reeds and the shuddering shrubs. It appeared in slow motion, out of tempo with the storm. It lacked the rhythm and ferocity of the wind and, though it was quick in human terms, was too slow to match the insanity of the elements.
The two human forms, as they crouched and ran, then crouched again to disappear in the lee of a windy fern hill, beckoned him into the vortex of his own existence. This was the moment for which he felt he had been born.
He clutched the shotgun, gripped the .45 in his pocket for reassurance, then was up and moving out in the same instant.
It wasn’t far to the fern hill. He took the space at a full run. His flying feet squelched through the sodden moss. A bullet zinged on the ground behind him. Some more hummed as they passed his head. A close one tore his jacket.
He was over the top, still running, a roar bellowing from his throat, when the first bullet hit him. But by then he had opened up with the shotgun, let it drop, and was blazing the .45 into the two screaming figures in front of him, as they cut him to pieces with their firepower.
Epilogue
On the morning after the rainstorm, the men came down to the pier before first light. They needed an early start for a long day. As soon as they got the engines going and the ropes cast off, the fishermen moved out from the harbour. The older men who gathered along the top of the harbour said little. They sucked on their unlit pipes, spoke in sporadic mutterings and watched the departure of the fleet.
Everyone wondered about the Stella Maris. She lay at her berth, tied and silent, unmanned. But there were no opinions, no judgments.
The wind had eased. The remnants of storm-tattered clouds wisped over the sky in ragged and changing patterns. A sharp chop studded the surface of the sea near the land. Further out the remains of the storm rolled through the sea in a rumbling swell. In the distance, the boats tossed and ploughed to their offshore fishing grounds.
The fleet was hard at work, but the Stella Maris had not moved. Still no mention was made. The old men fell quiet as the rest of the fleet disappeared into the horizon and the day opened fine and windy. The large blue patches became more constant. The clouds heightened and lightened, eventually becoming high, white, delicate streaks in a blue and windless sky.
The morning moved on. Along the vacant pier berths, the men strolled, discussing the brief storm and the fortunate return of good weather. When they arrived at the end of the pier, where the Stella rode in solemn silence on the ebbing tide, they looked in discreet glances and strolled back up the pier. They still said nothing about her presence. They would know soon enough. None of them wanted to be the first to start a rumour. That would have been easy. The Stella deserved better than that, as did her skipper.
Later in the morning, after the Angelus had rung and the pier had emptied, when the eyes of the village were meant to be occupied with the doings of their own homes, the cars arrived. That could have given cause for rumour. But the fact that they had arrived at that time, when the pier was quiet, was message enough in itself. The people understood. They were not being told because it was as well they did not know.
So when the cars drove slowly down the pier during the hot June noon, there were no apparent onlookers. Uninvited curiosity was confined to silent watching from behind the distant curtains.
Sergeant Bill France, Father Tom McMicheal, Wally Malone, and the two crewmembers of the Stella, Wills and McCann, worked quickly in silence and in unison.
They laid a heavy tarpaulin over the three wrapped corpses on the deck of the Stella Maris. The bodies were put on the boat very quickly, but then someone would have to understand what they were in order to recognise the three wrapped and tied bundles as covered bodies.
From the window of her house overlooking the harbour, Eileen Doyle knew, and saw, and understood.
Doctor Ray O’Donnell stood beside her.
“That’s about it,” he said quietly. “A couple of hours will see them out far enough to bury the bodies.”
He paused, then added softly,
“It’s over.”
“Why only Steven and the other two?” asked Eileen. “Why didn’t they take Larry Maguire as well? Put him in the sea with my brother and the others?”
“That’s the way Father Tom decided it,” answered the doctor. “Some people knew something had gone on last night. It couldn’t have been hushed forever. So Maguire will be offered to the press as having died in mysterious circumstances. There are no other bodies. It’ll be put down as either a political or criminal assassination, satisfying the public, and keeping us at the edge of the limelight. We’ll all be living normal lives in three weeks’ time. Wait and see.”
Eileen was glad of the doctor’s company, grateful for his attention to herself and her husband.
“Do you really think so, Ray? Do you really think it’ll ever be normal again?”
The doctor moved closer and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Please, just think of what you have to do now. Let the future take care of itself. It was a close thing you had with Larry Maguire.”
He stopped as he felt her stiffen.
“It’s over now, Eileen. I’m not going to tell you to forget it, but it can’t do you any more harm, so don’t be afraid of it.”
“God,” she said, shoulders convulsing suddenly in a sob. “I thought I was dead. I really did.”
For the first time since that morning, she could feel her muscles and her limbs letting go. A flash went through her system as her lungs sucked and the tears spilled, the shock let loose into the quiet of the room and the doctor’s presence.
Doctor Ray said nothing. He was quietly content that her breakthrough had come so soon and at this time. It would help her cope, calm her, put her on the far side from the horrors of her experience.
After a short while, the weeping subsided and she continued.
“After I fell and heard the shot and felt him fall on top of me, I lay waiting for the pain to come. But none did. All I can remember is the warm wet stickiness as his eyes looked at me. Oh God, he was so helpless! You’d never believe it, Ray, but I felt waves of pity for him. He was just a hurt little boy.”
She stopped as she remembered the shot man lying on top of her.
“Then a terrible feeling of sickness came on me and I remember trying to scream, but no noise came. As I tried to push him off and get away, his hand grasped around my wrist.”
She stopped again, eased her breathing, then went on in a quiet tone.
“That must have been when I fainted.”
The doctor gave her shoulder a brief, light squeeze.
“That’s it Eileen. There, you have it now. It’s all out and you can see it. No harm will come to you from it. Not now.”
“And Sean?” asked Eileen. “What of him? How will he come out of this? What about his wound? His own mind? Where will he turn?”
The doctor gave a short laugh.
“It’s a flesh wound. He won’t have far to go for the right kind of help. He’s got all the help he needs right here, Eileen, with you and the two lads, John and David. You and they are his life, and you and they are all intact.”
He paused and tapped her shoulder lightly.
“You’ll see. You lot are the least of the worries. Please just trust me now. Believe in what I’m saying. Have faith in it. You’ll see.”
Eileen watched the harbour below her in silence. The Stella Maris was reversing out from the pier, edging out in a long semi-circle beyond the mouth of the harbour. Slowly the boat began to move forward, turning her stern to Eileen and making her journey seawards, carrying her brother’s body and the others. Eileen could make out Sergeant Bill France standing beside the wheel-house and Father Tom McMicheal amidships. The priest was making signs of the cross, wandering back and forth at the feet of the riddled bodies. Soon they would be gone. Committed to the deep and gone forever. Eileen thought of Steven, and of poor Willie Maguire, and even of Boylan. They didn’t seem so sinister anymore. Just dead forever, their lives over and finished with the world.
Soon she would be back to her own life. Her own normal life of rising and working, mending, cooking, cleaning, listening to the boys and to her husband, getting the clothes ready, buying more, giving out about the costs and the carelessness with which the men in her life treated their things and their home.
She knew it would be well. She knew it within herself. She was alive, Steven dead. Life was what mattered. That was the first thing. When she heard the footsteps on the gravel, the voices talking in eager boyish shouts because they could go home from their Auntie’s if they were quiet for their mother, she felt the sap of life begin to rise within her again. The last thing was the man upstairs.
Maybe Doctor Ray was right. Time would do its own job, and soon. Soon they would be leading normal lives again.
She turned to go to the door.
“They need to be told to be quiet,” she said to the doctor.
As she walked across the room, she decided that would be the first thing. Tell the boys to be quiet and not wake their father. Then, when they were in and sitting, she would check on Sean. She would worry about the rest later. But that would do for now.
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