The Dark Divide

by Jennifer Fallon

  Darragh knew what henna was, but he had no idea about the other method Pete was talking about. ‘It must have been the ceremony at Lughnasadh. When the power was transferred, the brand went with it.’

  Pete sighed. ‘I see. We’re back to that again, are we?’

  ‘I wish there were some way to prove I’m not lying,’ Darragh said.

  ‘Let’s start with why you were demanding to speak to O’Righin.’

  Darragh smiled. That was easily explained. ‘I want to talk to Jack, because he might know where Sorcha is.’

  ‘Ah … the mysterious Sorcha,’ Pete said, his tone giving away nothing. ‘I thought you said she went back through the rift to another reality with Hayley Boyle?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t believe me about the rift?’

  ‘I don’t,’ the detective said. ‘But the first rule of being a good liar is having a good memory, kid. Yours sucks, apparently.’

  ‘I lied about her still being in this realm because I didn’t want Sorcha getting into trouble,’ he admitted.

  ‘And all this time she’s been at Jack’s?’

  ‘I assume so,’ he said, figuring the only way he was going to get a message to her was to level with this man who had the power, he knew, to pass the message on. He vaguely remembered a guard in the room the last time he’d regained consciousness. Darragh realised being relocated to a hospital in no way altered the fact he was incarcerated, and that he was likely to remain that way until somebody from his own realm came for him, or the authorities in this reality accepted that he really hadn’t done anything seriously criminal and let him go. But it was important to let Sorcha know he lived. She was too dangerous to leave in this realm without any sort of guidance or restraint, and who knew what she would do if she thought she was stuck here now, alone and friendless, in a realm she didn’t know and didn’t understand?

  ‘Must be hard for her.’

  ‘More than I can say,’ Darragh agreed, genuinely concerned for the woman.

  ‘What about Warren?’ Pete asked.

  Darragh’s brow furrowed. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Did Sorcha take care of him, too?’

  ‘She was planning to take care of the matter the last time I saw her,’ Darragh told the detective, encouraged by how sympathetic the detective seemed to be to Sorcha’s plight.

  ‘Do you know what she was planning?’

  Darragh nodded. ‘She felt it necessary to protect Rónán. I realise in this realm, such things are not nearly so cut and dried, but in our world — Sorcha’s world — things are much more black and white.’

  Pete nodded, looking pensive. ‘Black and white, huh? Is that what you’re calling it?’

  There was a slight change in Pete’s tone — an undertone of menace that made Darragh wonder if he might have inadvertently said something foolish. That memory of Rónán’s rattled around inside his head again, along the lines of ‘never talk to the cops without a lawyer’, but it was only now that the alarm bells rang in his mind.

  ‘Rónán was quite insistent that we not kill him,’ Darragh assured the Gardaí officer.

  ‘But you and Sorcha disagreed?’

  Darragh nodded. ‘My brother has not seen what we have seen, sir. He did not really understand.’

  ‘But you and Jack understood he needed to be eliminated?’

  Darragh nodded.

  ‘Did Jack help?’

  Darragh didn’t worry for himself. He was confident someone would come for him, and he would not be held responsible for anything he had done in this realm. He knew Rónán would have preferred to keep Jack out of this, but Darragh wanted to protect his brother. To do that, he needed to make sure this detective understood Rónán had been innocent and any trouble they had caused was not Rónán’s doing.

  ‘He kept Warren silent until Sorcha could arrange a more permanent solution to the problem,’ he admitted.

  ‘So Jack O’Righin, you and the lovely Sorcha conspired to murder Warren Maher?’

  ‘Detective, you make it sound like —’ Darragh cried out as a sharp pain attacked the lower half of his left arm. He struggled against the restraints as the pain grew worse, but there was nothing he could do to relieve or stop the intense agony.

  Pete jumped to his feet to see what was wrong. He gasped when he spied blood welling on Darragh’s forearm. ‘What the fuck is going on? What are you doing?’

  Darragh cried out again and saw the wound taking shape. Then he knew. At least, he thought he did. He grinned delightedly through the pain. He recognised the timbre of the stinging agony, realised what it must mean. Although tears stung his eyes from the torment of the injury that was manifesting on his arm, he was filled with relief.

  ‘I am not … doing … anything,’ he said, gritting his teeth, as he watched the blood bead amid the hairs on his forearm and then drip onto the pale blue cotton blanket.

  Pete grabbed the emergency call button on the chest beside the bed. He pressed it a number of times and then ran to the door to call for help. Darragh bit back his pain and glanced down at his arm.

  Slowly, painstakingly and with infinite care that only served to prolong the pain, a bloody word was taking form on the flesh of his forearm, carved — he was quite certain — in another realm with airgead sídhe by his brother.

  Darragh was elated. Rónán was alive and had found a way to contact him.

  ‘Jesus, what is that?’ Pete demanded, as he returned to pressing the emergency bell. The reaction time here in this ward was vastly different to the immediate response of the ICU staff. ‘What is that? Some sort of stigmata? How are you doing it?’

  ‘I am not … doing anything,’ Darragh told him, gritting his teeth against the pain. ‘Rónán is.’

  ‘No fucking way,’ Pete insisted, refusing to believe what he was seeing.

  Darragh leaned forward, trying to make out the words, but the angle his arm was tied to the railing with the Velcro and the blood dripping from the wounds made it hard to read. Then a nurse opened the door, stepped into the room, her put-upon expression changing to horror when she saw the blood. She shouted for help and shoved Pete out of the way.

  A moment later there were more nurses filling the room, all of them shouting and ordering each other about and generally panicking about what was causing Darragh’s sudden bleeding. With them blocking his view, Darragh could barely see the wound, although he could feel every agonising inch of the bloody characters as they were carved into his flesh. Unfortunately, the nurses were only interested in staunching the bleeding, not reading the message. Before long his arm was bound with a pressure bandage to stop the bleeding — obscuring Rónán’s communication — and Pete was being shooed from the room.

  They gave him something for the pain, and someone sent for a doctor, but Darragh wasn’t paying attention to the medical staff. He dropped his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes, conscious of the words still cutting into his flesh, bringing him hope and maybe even a way home.

  Darragh tried to recall the small part of the message he’d seen before it was obscured by blood, gauze and a clutch of very rattled nurses.

  All he could remember seeing was one word, and it made no sense at all. Carved into his arm was the word ‘bike’.

  CHAPTER 54

  It took several blows with a short police battering ram to break the lock in the solid oak front door of Jack O’Righin’s house. Once they were inside, the armed ERU team spread out with practised efficiency, checking each room and yelling ‘clear’ as they verified there was nobody in the house brandishing a weapon, ready to die rather than be taken alive.

  Pete followed them in, carrying a handgun and wearing a bulletproof vest, but he let the team do its job, knowing he would only be in the way while they cleared the building. He listened to the radio in his ear as they moved, room by room through the house, expecting the call at any moment telling him they had found Jack or Sorcha. Part of him worried he wouldn’t hear it over the comms, but rather shot
s ringing out somewhere in the depths of this large, echoing mansion.

  Cold-blooded and merciless as she must be, Sorcha, he figured, wasn’t going down without a fight. But with her arrest, finally, they might catch a break in the Hayley Boyle case. Darragh was delusional, but Sorcha, his accomplice, was much more focussed. So was Jack O’Righin. One way or another, Pete was determined he was going to find Hayley Boyle and make someone pay for Warren Maher’s murder.

  It took the team less than ten minutes to get through the house.

  It took them less than ten minutes to discover nobody was home. Not even the old lady who’d been here the last time Pete paid Jack O’Righin a visit.

  Pete cursed as he entered the kitchen on the heels of the assault team, wondering who had tipped O’Righin off about the raid. It was the middle of the night, his car was parked in the drive, but there was nobody to be found inside. It didn’t make sense that he wasn’t here. The house had been under surveillance for hours. Other than the housekeeper leaving about four in the afternoon, there had been no other movement in or out of the house.

  ‘Check again,’ he ordered into his radio, as he glanced around, wondering where the old man and the young woman were hiding. This was a big house, with lots of nooks and crannies. It was not inconceivable that they had gone to ground somewhere inside the house …

  Another thought occurred to Pete. He reached for his radio but then decided to check out his hunch alone. Jack had a glasshouse out in the garden. Pete considered it a front to buy nitrates in case the old man decided to go back into the bomb-making business, but there was no evidence of that, just his own gut feeling, and the general dislike Pete had of anybody who cashed-in on killing people. He keyed the mike and then let it go again. It was only a glasshouse, which made it the worst place imaginable to hide. But Pete wanted to check it out. This was too important to leave any stone — or pot plant — unturned. Maybe he’d get lucky and discover Jack had been cultivating more than pineapples. A few drug charges might help if the accessory to murder charge didn’t stick, after Darragh’s confession yesterday.

  He let himself out into the back garden. A gentle misty rain was falling, obscuring the glasshouse. He pulled out the uncomfortable radio earpiece and trotted across the lawn. As he neared the glasshouse, he realised there was a dim light coming from inside.

  Pete should have called for backup at that point, he knew, but something held him back. As he neared the glasshouse, its walls misted with rivulets of rainwater, the nature of the light became clearer. It was candlelight.

  Inside the glasshouse, someone had lit scores of tea-light candles and placed them all over the stepped shelves inside.

  Pete raised his weapon and opened the door carefully — although given it was glass, anybody inside with a gun could have killed him long before he got the door open. He stepped inside; the warm loamy smell of the vegetation, mixed with the smell of urea and blood and bone fertiliser, was almost overpowering.

  Jack was standing opposite the door, but he wasn’t paying any attention to Pete, who stopped at the entrance and took in the scene, not sure he believed his own eyes.

  Laid out on the centre bench of the glasshouse was a dead body. Jack was standing there, looking down on it with tears silently rolling down his cheeks.

  It was the old woman Pete had spoken to a few days ago, when he’d come here to ask about Warren.

  She was not dressed like an old woman, though. She was naked, painted with blue woad, the symbols covering her limbs, her torso and her face, a mix of familiar Celtic designs and others he’d never seen before. Her arms were crossed over her chest. In one hand she held a carving knife, in the other, a small garden hatchet. Her thin, arthritic fingers clung to them like she was a knight laid out in state with his weapons.

  The artwork on the old woman’s body was amateurish but meticulous. Someone had spent a lot of time and expended a great deal of effort preparing this body.

  Beside the old woman lay a variety of items. There were more kitchen knives, a block of cheese, several jars of what looked like homemade fruit preserves, and various other food items arranged around the body. On the centre of her forehead, Pete noticed, taking a step further into the glasshouse, someone had painted the same triskalion symbol that had — until so recently — graced the hands of Darragh and his twin brother, Ren.

  Jack glanced up. It seemed he had only just noticed he had company.

  ‘She must have known for days,’ Jack said, wiping his eyes, as if embarrassed to be caught with such an obvious display of emotion.

  ‘Known what, you sick old bastard?’ Pete asked, pointing his weapon directly at Jack’s head. ‘That you were going to kill her?’

  Jack smiled briefly. He didn’t seem bothered by the gun. ‘I didn’t kill her, lad. She died of old age.’

  Given the state of the old woman’s body and the lack of any obvious wounds, Pete wasn’t going to argue about that now. ‘Whatever she died of, O’Righin, the old woman didn’t deserve to be defiled like this.’

  ‘Defiled?’ Jack seemed surprised. ‘Jaysus, she did this herself, lad,’ he said. ‘She was going downhill fast. Had been for days. Once the equinox passed with no sign of help from her own people, she gave up, I think. But she wanted a warrior’s burial. I tried to tell her they’d not let me leave her body lying about for days, or let me bake her in an underground oven in the back garden once she was ripe enough, but she was adamant.’ He gently moved a stray lock of grey hair from the old lady’s face, adding, ‘I found her like this about an hour ago.’ Jack glanced up then at a shattering sound coming from the house, as if he’d only just realised his house was being torn apart by the ERU. ‘They’ll be paying for anything they break in there.’

  Pete lowered his weapon. ‘Tell me where I can find Sorcha, and I’ll stop them breaking things.’

  ‘You’re looking at her.’

  Pete was tempted to raise his weapon again, pull the trigger and rid the world of this fool. ‘Really? This is Sorcha?’

  ‘In the flesh.’

  ‘You know, I bet it seemed like a grand idea, when you and Darragh and Sorcha came up with that ludicrous story.’ He moved a little closer to the bench and examined the body more closely. The woman seemed ancient. ‘But you’re forgetting, Jack, I’ve met Sorcha. And this isn’t her. You’re out by about … eighty years, I’d say.’

  Jack nodded. ‘I met her the first time on September eighth,’ he said. ‘She looked twenty-five … thirty at the best. I know you’re not going to believe me, but I’ve seen her age, lad. Every single day since then.’

  ‘Sorcha helped kidnap an innocent girl and murdered a man for the crime of owning a car one of her accomplices stole, O’Righin. This woman wouldn’t be able to get out of her walking frame long enough to get into a heated argument, let alone slash the throat of a grown man and then escape over the neighbour’s fence.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Jack said with a shrug, ‘this is Sorcha. Aren’t there tests you can do now, that will establish that?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’ll be checking her DNA,’ he assured the old man. ‘And yours, too. If we find so much as a flake of dandruff belonging to you at Warren Maher’s place, you’ll be going down for murder, not just being an accessory.’

  That got a rise out of the old man. ‘Me? An accessory to what, for feck’s sake? Killing the broker? You can’t pin that on me.’

  ‘Can and have,’ Pete told him. ‘Darragh’s confessed to everything. He admitted to ordering the killing. He admitted sending Sorcha to do it. And he admitted to your involvement in keeping Warren Maher quiet until Sorcha could get to him.’

  Before Jack could answer, the glasshouse door shattered as the ERU burst in, weapons cocked, and trained them on Jack in a spray of red dots. The old man raised his hands in a gesture of surrender; however, his expression was anything but submissive. The captain of the ERU team quickly scanned the small building before he turned to Pete. ‘You were out of radio cont
act.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, lifting the earpiece off his vest where it had fallen when he pulled it out. ‘I must have dropped it.’

  The captain gave him a look that said volumes about what he thought of officers who lost radio contact for such a pathetic reason, and then he turned and ordered his men to take Jack into custody. He then fixed his attention on the old woman’s body, intrigued rather than disgusted by what he saw. ‘O’Righin did this?’

  ‘He says not,’ Pete told him, as Jack was cuffed and marched out of the candlelit glasshouse. The old man muttered some comment as he stepped over the broken glass of the door, and then he was out of earshot. For a fleeting moment, Pete felt sorry for the old man.

  He would probably never see his bromeliads again.

  ‘There’s no sign of the woman Sorcha,’ the captain told him. ‘We’ve searched the house from top to bottom.’

  ‘According to Jack, that’s Sorcha right there.’

  The man shook his head. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘My sentiments exactly.’

  ‘Who is she, then?’

  Pete shook his head. ‘I have no idea. Last time I met her, she was introduced as the housekeeper’s demented aunt.’

  ‘She’s laid out like a warrior,’ the captain said. He pointed to the weapons clutched in each hand. ‘See … the weapons, the food … that’s meant for her journey into the otherworld.’

  Pete stared at the man in surprise. ‘Are you telling me you think this woman thought she was some sort of pagan Celtic warrior?’

  ‘The symbols on her body are crude, but they’re unmistakable.’

  ‘I never realised you were such an aficionado of ancient Celtic mythology and symbolism, Mac,’ Pete said, rather impressed.

  ‘We all need a hob — Hang on.’ He put his finger to his ear, to better hear the radio message coming through, and then he turned to Pete. ‘You’re needed out front. Apparently the press has got wind of this.’

  ‘That’s hardly surprising,’ Pete said. ‘The paparazzi have a permanent camp set up next door.’