by Chris Ryan
Siobhan hung up immediately and felt her heart racing, her skin flushing. She tucked the phone back into her jacket, turned the key and pulled away.
Kieran’s directions were good. She took the A7 south of Belfast and it was a little before 5 p.m. when she pulled off a country lane on to a track marked ‘Not Suitable for Vehicles’ and stopped about 100 metres from a cluster of disused farm outbuildings. She switched off the engine.
Silence.
Through the windscreen she could see an old tractor missing one of its wheels, and she had a sudden flashback to the rusted vehicle she and Jack had used for cover in Somalia. Apart from that, just beyond it, there was only one other car – a silver Alfa Romeo that positively gleamed in comparison with the mud-caked outbuildings as the setting sun glowed against its paintwork.
Siobhan stepped out of the car with the firearm in her right hand and scanned the area. No sign of anyone. If that was Kieran’s car – and she had to assume that it was – he must be inside one of the buildings, and she recognised the ramshackle barn from his description. She started to walk towards it.
Siobhan stopped by the old tractor and looked around again. Still no one.
A rook called somewhere nearby, shattering the silence.
Siobhan stepped out from behind the tractor and approached the entrance to the barn.
The big door was open – not fully, but enough for her to peer into the gloom inside, and it took a moment for her eyes to adapt. The first thing she saw was Kieran. He was alone, standing in the centre of the large open space, wearing his strangely unfashionable clothes – a patterned jumper and ill-fitting jeans. He hadn’t noticed her yet, but he looked anxious as he stepped from one foot to the other and blew into his hands even though it wasn’t all that cold. The barn itself was full of junk – old tyres, tractor attachments, rusting bits of farmyard machinery and hand tools, even a few bales of hay – and it was immediately obvious that nobody had paid this place any attention for a very long time.
Siobhan raised her gun.
‘This had better be good, Kieran,’ she called, and the tout appeared to jump. He looked in her direction; the moment he saw the gun he put his hands in the air.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Sure. I think it’ll be good. For everyone, you know.’ He licked his lips and looked at the gun. ‘There’s no need for that, now is there?’
Siobhan hesitated. There was something about him. Something different. It wasn’t just that he was on edge – that was to be expected. It was something else. Siobhan’s senses screamed at her to abort.
‘I’m leaving,’ she said.
‘I don’t think you are, now.’
The voice didn’t come from Kieran. It came from behind, and it caused all the warmth to drain from Siobhan’s blood just as she felt something hard at the back of her head.
‘Drop the weapon and kick it away.’
She had no choice but to obey.
‘I know who you are,’ the voice continued. ‘If you do a single thing to make me nervous, I’ll kill you without a second thought. Take five steps forward and turn around slowly.’
Siobhan did as she was told. A figure was standing there, no more than three metres away. He wore a heavy coat, but his body was as thin as the lines on his face; his hair was bushy and so were his eyebrows. There was a cruel scar running from one corner of his mouth up into his cheek, but it wasn’t half so cruel as the chilling look in his eyes as he aimed a sawn-off shotgun directly at Siobhan’s stomach.
She recognised Cormac O’Callaghan, of course. How could she not? And how, she wondered in a moment of clarity, could she not have realised what she was walking into?
‘Step backwards,’ he told her.
Kieran had moved closer; he bent down to pick up her M66. For a moment she considered going for him, but she knew Cormac O’Callaghan meant what he said.
‘Keep going,’ Cormac instructed in just a whisper. He bore down on her as she continued to step backwards into the barn. ‘Stop,’ he said when she was in the middle.
They were both in her view now, standing next to each other about ten metres away, guns raised in her direction.
‘You’ll do exactly what I say,’ Cormac hissed. ‘You fuck me around, lady, and you’ll get one in the head before you know it. Empty your pockets slowly and drop everything you’re carrying on the ground.’
Siobhan’s limbs would barely obey the instructions her brain was giving them. She removed her car keys from her pocket, dropped them in the dirt, and then took her mobile phone from her jacket.
‘Easy,’ Kieran said, as she started to bring it out; when he saw it wasn’t a weapon, relief was clear on his face.
‘Drop it,’ Cormac said.
Siobhan stared directly at him. Anything to stop his attention wandering to the phone itself. While it was still between her fingertips, she squeezed the ‘1’ button. She heard the sound of the phone dialling Jack’s number, but it was too faint for the others to hear at a distance. Lowering her arm, she dropped the mobile next to her keys, making sure that it landed mouthpiece side upwards.
‘You don’t want to go down the path of shooting a cop, do you now, Cormac?’ she said, in a voice that she hoped was both confident and loud enough to be heard over the phone.
‘To be honest,’ O’Callaghan replied, ‘I think you’d be surprised at what I’d be prepared to do to you.’ He turned to Kieran and nodded. ‘Go ahead,’ he said.
Siobhan Byrne could feel her jugular pulsating as the tout started walking towards her.
Jack had been on the ground in Belfast for thirty minutes, but he was still inside the terminal building queuing up to hire a vehicle, and the queue was moving impossibly slowly. It was all he could do to stop himself from barging through the lot of them to get to the front. It was more to distract himself than for any other reason that he took his phone from his pocket and switched it on. He waited a moment to get a signal, then saw that a voice-mail was waiting for him. It had been left just under an hour ago.
Siobhan’s voice, and it made his stomach go heavy. Jack, it’s me. It’s Siobhan. I know you told me to stay at home, but . . .
He listened to the message and when it was finished he cursed under his breath. What was it with her? Why the fuck couldn’t she just do what she was told? He counted the people in front of him. Six of them. He walked up to the front of the queue. ‘Look, mate,’ he said to the guy up front, ‘I’m in a real hurry. Could I just –’
‘We’re all in a hurry, pal . . .’ and the fucker turned his back on him.
Jack saw red. But just as he was about to escalate the argument, he felt his phone vibrate in his hand. Siobhan’s number. He pressed a button to answer.
‘Siobhan, where the fuck –’
But Siobhan didn’t answer. Not at first. There was just a crackling sound, confused and incomprehensible. When he did hear her voice it was distant. Faint. Above the noise of the airport terminal he could barely hear what she was saying. You don’t want to . . . shooting a cop . . . Cormac.
He suddenly felt nauseous. What was going on? What the hell was going on? ‘Siobhan!’ he barked down the phone. ‘Siobhan!’
No answer. He looked around in frustration: he’d be here for hours if he carried on queuing, so he ran out of the terminal building, his phone still pressed against his ear.
The drop-off area was busy, but for now Jack ignored the cars parked with their engines running and their doors open. Instead he looked up and spotted a line of white security cameras attached five metres up on the terminal wall at intervals of ten metres. The three nearest cameras were angled towards him; after that the angle changed as they pointed in the opposite direction – which meant there was a blind spot. Jack positioned himself there, all the while listening to the ominous silence on his phone.
It took two minutes for a suitable opportunity to present itself. A black Renault Mégane pulled up by the kerb and a young man with a goatee climbed out, leaving the driver’s door open
. From the other side a red-headed woman emerged and shut the passenger door behind her. There was no one in the back seat. The woman went off to get a trolley while the man opened up the boot and removed one suitcase and a laptop bag. Thirty seconds later the woman returned with her trolley.
Jack stepped forwards as the man hauled the suitcase on to the trolley; neither the man nor his partner noticed him walk behind them as they embraced. And because the woman had her eyes shut, she didn’t see him slip behind the wheel.
Jack quietly shut the door and pulled out. He accelerated to 15 m.p.h. – fast enough that the car’s owner wouldn’t be able to catch him up; not so fast that he’d draw attention to himself. He kept his eyes on the rear-view mirror: the man only noticed what had happened once Jack had travelled the thirty-odd metres to the end of the drop-off area. He swung the car round to the right and only then did he take the phone out of his pocket, switch it on to speakerphone and prop it up on the dashboard before navigating towards the exit.
As he drove he heard voices. They were muffled and indistinct, but he could tell aggression when he heard it. The sound made his skin prickle and he increased his speed without even thinking about it. He wanted to burn the road, but he couldn’t risk being stopped; it was all he could do to keep his speed down. He went through Siobhan’s directions in his head. Crossgar was thirty minutes away; twenty if he could floor it once he hit the A7.
He tried not to panic. To keep his head clear. His eyes on the road and his ears on the phone.
He had just left the airport perimeter when he heard the shot. It was almost as if the bullet had entered his own body.
And when he heard the scream, it felt as if he himself had just been ripped apart . . .
The first thing they did was force her to remove her clothes. ‘I’ve always loved a striptease,’ Kieran said. ‘But couldn’t you just do it with a bit more feeling, now?’
As she stood naked and trembling, he sidled up to her – close enough for her to smell the cigarettes on his breath and see the tiny little hairs sprouting on the bridge of his nose. ‘You know,’ he said in that reedy voice of his, ‘I just can’t decide what to do first. Fuck you, or kill you.’
Siobhan just closed her eyes. She wished it could be over. Now.
‘Maybe I could do both,’ he whispered. ‘You know, fuck you first, then kill you. I’m a bit worried that I might not be able to get wood, but maybe if you’d just talk dirty to me for a while . . .’ He walked round behind her and she felt the steel of his gun pressed against one of her buttocks. ‘But then, like I told you first time we met, you’re not really my type.’ He pressed the gun a bit harder, and she staggered forward involuntarily. There was the sound of laughter – Kieran’s laughter – but when she opened her eyes, it was Cormac she saw, his gun still pointing directly at her, and there was no smile in his expression. He had the eyes of a snake.
‘Tie her,’ he said.
There were three posts in the middle of the barn, thick, solid structures that supported the rafters. Kieran approached a couple of the hay bales and, with a pocket knife, cut one of the plastic strips that bound them together. He pushed Siobhan up to one of the posts and started to tie her using the strip. The plastic cut sharply into her skin where it made contact around her neck, her breasts, her belly and her ankles. She did what she could not to make the pain show, but it was impossible and a whimper of discomfort escaped her throat. Once Kieran had tied the strip tightly behind the post, he moved round to her front, squeezed her cheeks between the fingers of his right hand, then cupped his left between her legs. She felt a finger, and struggled to get away, but of course she was going nowhere, and her attempts simply encouraged Kieran to grip harder – with both hands.
‘Stand away, lad.’ Cormac’s voice was still deathly quiet.
Kieran gave her a nasty leer, then a final, rough grope; but he clearly knew to obey his uncle. He stepped back, then took his place a few metres to his uncle’s right where he removed a pouch of baccy from his coat and expertly rolled and lit himself a cigarette. Cormac raised his sawn-off and aimed it casually at Siobhan. Her body started to tremble violently – a terrified, humiliated mess.
Silence in the barn. The two men stared balefully at her.
‘Please . . .’ she whispered.
A smile twitched on Cormac’s face. ‘Please what?’
‘I have a daughter who needs me. Please don’t . . .’
‘Well, you see, lass – we have a lot to talk about, don’t we now?’
Siobhan stared at him in horror.
‘But I can’t help thinking some conversations are best had just between the two of us.’
As he spoke, Cormac O’Callaghan turned ninety degrees to his right, so that the sawn-off was pointing at his nephew, who was just taking a drag on his roll-up. It took a moment for Kieran to work out what was happening; a moment for the unpleasant, gloating look on his face to switch first to an expression of confusion, and then to one of alarm as he staggered backwards, away from his uncle.
‘Jesus, Cormac,’ he whispered, his voice suddenly hoarse. ‘I did what you asked, didn’t I?’
‘That you did, Kieran.’ He didn’t move the barrel of the gun away from his nephew.
‘I’m family,’ he rasped.
‘Indeed you are, Kieran. And you know, that’s what makes it all the worse.’
He fired.
The noise of the gun echoed round the barn, and caused a number of birds roosting in the rafters to flock up and squawk. Siobhan screamed, simply unable to help herself. Kieran himself didn’t fall to the ground. Not at first. He bent over, clutching his stomach as though somebody had winded him with a solid punch. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words came; just a sudden, vicious torrent of blood and foam.
A strangled noise.
Only then did he tumble, twitching, to the floor.
The sound of Siobhan’s scream rang in Jack’s ears. He burned through the outskirts of Belfast on the A55, not caring now whether he was bringing attention to himself as he ran red lights and only narrowly avoided collisions using his skill behind the wheel. And in a horrible kind of way, the silence that followed was even worse than the scream itself. What the hell was going on at the other end of the phone? What the hell was going on? He lifted the handset and put it to his ear. Maybe, maybe, he could make something out. A voice. Male. But even without the sound of the car engine it would have been too muffled to hear.
Jack slung the phone back on the dashboard and increased his speed. He had Siobhan’s directions firmly in his head and he drove with his foot to the floor.
Kieran’s body was twitching. Siobhan couldn’t tell if he was dead yet, but if he wasn’t, he soon would be.
Cormac approached her. If he felt any remorse at killing his nephew, it didn’t show on his face. ‘He was a wrong ’un,’ the old man whispered. ‘It was stupid of him to think I wouldn’t find out. Stupid of you, too.’ He looked her up and down the length of her naked body, then pressed the sawn-off into the flesh of her belly. ‘You’re going to tell me everything you know about me,’ he said. ‘Otherwise the next few minutes are going to be very nasty for you.’
Siobhan closed her eyes. ‘Go to hell,’ she hissed.
‘Yes,’ Cormac replied, with not even a hint of irony, ‘I imagine I probably will. Who knows, maybe I’ll see you there. We can chat about the old times round the fire. But you know what, lass? When you know you’re going to hell, it’s very liberating. Means you don’t have to worry so much about what you do in this life.’
He gave her a bland smile, then lay his gun on the ground and walked to the side of the barn where he had stashed an old leather sports bag. Cormac fished around inside the bag, then returned with a battered metal dog bowl and a one-litre plastic bottle containing a clear liquid. He poured the liquid into the bowl. ‘My dog died ten years ago,’ he said as the liquid glugged out of the bottle. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to throw the bowl away. I’m a sentiment
al old thing . . .’ He placed the full bowl at Siobhan’s feet and pulled a lighter from his pocket.
‘Don’t,’ she whispered. ‘Please. I don’t care about you . . . I don’t care about the drugs . . .’
But O’Callaghan wasn’t listening. He made a flame, then touched the dog bowl.
The fuel, whatever it was, didn’t erupt. It ignited gently – a blue and orange flame that grew no higher than six inches. But that was high enough. It started to singe the skin on the side of Siobhan’s naked left leg. She gasped and gritted her teeth. ‘Put it out,’ she begged, just as the acrid stench of her own burning flesh reached her nose.
O’Callaghan just looked on without expression.
‘Please . . .’
The skin was fizzing and blistering. She could hear it.
‘Please . . .’
‘I don’t think so, lass—’ O’Callaghan started to say, but he didn’t finish his sentence. Siobhan had started screaming. The voice didn’t even sound like hers. More like that of an animal. And once it started, a little part of her mind wondered if it would ever stop.
The second scream Jack heard was worse than the first. A million times worse. He knew what pain sounded like, and that was it. It continued for more than a minute.
He was on the A7 now, only five miles from Crossgar, tipping 100 with his heart in his throat. He told himself that the scream meant that at least she hadn’t been killed outright.
Yet.
That wasn’t much consolation.
It was all he could do to stop himself from shouting out too, in panic and frustration. In fear at the thought of what was happening to Siobhan.
He kept his foot on the accelerator, and his gaze on the road.
Siobhan had never known agony like it. Vaguely, she was aware that O’Callaghan had thrown his heavy overcoat over the flames to extinguish them; that she’d stopped screaming, and that noise had been replaced by short, desperate gasps of hyperventilating pain.