Sacrifice of Fools

by Ian McDonald

  ‘That wee girl, she’d turn your head, she would. Probably away off for the night with some waster with a company car.’

  As opposed to wasters without company cars. Or any kind of car. Mean thought, Gillespie; Karen’s ma always had a soft spot for you. You got on well with her. Just the daughter you couldn’t stick. However, no man from the Woodstock Road can admit to his mother-in-law that he’s busted.

  ‘OK kids, here’s the plan.’ He’s coming on like a UTV link-man. Moderate. Modulate. ‘I have decided that because it’s a special occasion, there is going to be no school today.’ Genuine, heart-melting glee. Big chocolate-banana smiles. ‘In fact, we’re going to have a wee treat. A wee day out.’ It’s no sooner said than regretted. What kind of day out can you have on three pounds fifty? ‘We’ll go to the museum. They’ve got dinosaurs.’ It’s cheap. It’s free. Problem: they’ll want Coke. They’ll want crisps and stickies. They’ll want dinosaur erasers and pencil sharpeners from the shop. ‘In fact, we’ll make a real expedition out of it. We’ll pack a lunch, and we’ll go to the Tropical Ravine and eat it there and it’ll be like we were back in the age of the dinosaurs, right?’ He feels like a pound and a half of eel shit at their excitement for his cheapskate day out. Might as well spend your last three pounds fifty on dinosaur erasers and stickers as anything else.

  Improvising sandwiches from the odds and sods living in Andy Gillespie’s fridge proves to be a great game. While they try and match up slices of bread from different bags, he fetches the free sheet from the hall. All over the front page. HORROR SLAYING AT OUTSIDER GHETTO. Sexual tension at the Outsider commune at the former Annadale Flats last night erupted into violence which left one Outsider dead and another critically injured … Jesus wept. Fucking Newsletter. It’s not even accurate, but when did that ever matter? Any chance to have a dig at the Shian, all the dirty-dealing-by-Dublin-to-minoritize-Unionists bullshit. Anyone who isn’t for us is against us. Worse than the Taigs, you know. Detective Chief Inspector Robert Willich refused to speculate on possible connections with the recent horrific multiple murder of Pastor McIvor Kyle and his family, but firmly denied rumours of a crazed alien sex killer.

  Gillespie bins the shit.

  ‘OK, girls, what have you made me?’

  ‘Peanut butter and raisin, ham and apple, and banana and jam,’ Stacey says.

  ‘Daddy; what’s this?’ Talya comes out of the coat alcove with the genro staff.

  ‘It’s a very special magic stick that was given to me by a very, very good friend. She can’t use it any more, so she gave it to me.’

  ‘An Outsider?’ Stacey asks.

  ‘Yeah, an Outsider. It’s for people who have a very special thing to do.’

  ‘Do you have a very special thing to do?’ Talya asks.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Gillespie says. ‘A very special thing, but the trouble is that I don’t know what I can do to do it right.’

  He shows them how the genro staff collapses and extends, and it delights them so much he does it a dozen times. As they put on their coats to go out, he slips the collapsed staff into his pocket. A reminder of special things to do.

  They’re first into the museum. The attendants unbolt the doors, and in they go. Straight to the shop. Then the displays. As well as the dinosaurs and the stuffed animals in the natural history gallery and the geological map of Ireland with pressbutton coloured lights for the different rock types that, with three pairs of hands, you can make all light up at the same time, there’s a good new exhibition about genetics and inheritance. Even Gillespie can understand it, though the kids wander ahead to the mummy in her glass case. Let me show you why you look like your parents, says Mr DNA, who’s sort of springy and spirally. Gillespie stands in front of the family tree with the photographs of the generations all the way back to Victorians who look disgusted to have been hijacked into something as vulgar as a display on reproduction, and the lines of inheritance and dominants and recessives and the nose which passes all the way down from the start, and the joining-up eyebrows that come in the nineteen thirties with Uncle John, from Swansea. All in the blood. All passed down and passed sideways.

  And looking at Uncle John from Swansea’s joining-up eyebrows, Andy Gillespie realizes what it is about the HORROR SLAYING AT OUTSIDER GHETTO that doesn’t feel right.

  He scoops Stacey and Talya away from the three-thousand-year-dead Egyptian princess with her cracked black skin and eye-sockets filled with mortician’s wax.

  ‘I’ve had this great idea,’ he lies. ‘Wouldn’t you like to see what it’s like inside a police station?’

  What do you do the day after a killing?

  If you are Roisin Dunbar you find you are lying in your bed far far past your getting-up, even past your work time, because he’s downstairs and you don’t want to have to meet him, even see him.

  Willich is going to kill her.

  Let him. It can’t be any worse.

  She lies in bed, listens for Michael down there. Usually it’s his noise that drives her to distraction. Today it’s his silence. It’s as political as his noise; creeping around, being good, being quiet, not disturbing poor wee Rosh, giving her peace, understanding that, yes, he’s done a bad thing, a bad bad thing, but he’s not going to compound it by selfishly making a racket.

  It’s got to be better in the office than this.

  ‘I’m getting up,’ she yells. ‘I’m going to the bathroom.’ In the shower she examines her body: these tits, slight sag? This belly, slight bulge? This face, slight wrinkles? This fanny, slight withering? They’re all right. They’re pretty damn good for a working, child-bearing, woman of her age. She’d fancy her. But not enough for him. She dries, dusts, dresses, then shouts, ‘I’m coming downstairs now. I’m going to have something in the kitchen.’

  She hears doors creak and close, but doesn’t catch even a glimpse of him. But halfway through her muesli with dried apples and apricots she finds the fury stoking up inside her until she throws the bowl against the dishwasher and it shatters and spills its load like vomit.

  ‘Fuck you wherever you are, just get out of here, just go away, I want this house empty, right? I want it just me and Louise; I don’t want you hovering around like some invisible presence. Just leave us alone.’

  The doorbell rings.

  ‘What?’ Roisin Dunbar says.

  It rings again.

  While she thinks about not answering it, it rings a third time.

  ‘Yes? What is it?’

  It’s Andy Gillespie with two little girls, peeping out from behind his legs.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ he says. ‘I need you to help me. You see, I just worked out something.’

  ‘How the hell did you get my address?’ Not so much an ex-con calling on you first thing in the morning — albeit with kids in tow — as God’s way of telling you to change the locks.

  ‘Littlejohn.’

  ‘Bastard.’

  ‘Hey. Kids here. You weren’t at the station.’

  ‘We saw inside the pleece station,’ says the older girl, finding boldness. ‘It wasn’t very nice. There was water falling out of the roof.’

  Maybe if she goes back inside and comes out again, it’ll be the Jehovah’s Witnesses this time. They’d be easier to get rid of.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I need you to come with me to Queen’s Island. I’ve got questions need answering, and I want the police with me to make sure they get answered. By the way, um, you couldn’t lend us a tenner to pay the taxi?’

  Another thing about the great detectives, Andy Gillespie realizes, is that as well as never running out of money they never have to worry about child care. It takes the best part of an hour for Roisin Dunbar to persuade her sister to take not only Louise but a perfect stranger’s two daughters.

  ‘Mikey busy today?’ the sister asks.

  ‘He’s seeing a client,’ Dunbar says hastily. Don’t even think of phoning my house.

  Gillespie stands i
n the middle of the sculpted tuft among the Early Learning Centre non-endangered wood toys and feels like a refugee from an African civil war. The cook on the Good Morning! show is making Moroccan lamb tajine with apricots and cinnamon.

  ‘When will you be back?’ the sister asks, a little apprehensively, as the detectives say their goodbyes. Dunbar looks at Gillespie. He shrugs.

  ‘If anything happens, call this.’ He writes Karen’s number on the message pad. ‘Ask for Karen. My home address is this.’ He puts it below the girls’ mother’s. ‘OK, I have to go now, girls. I’m sorry about this, but we’ll have that picnic some time, I promise. Be good.’

  ‘This had better be worth it, Gillespie,’ Roisin Dunbar says as she steers the car around the loops and curves of the development. ‘That was perhaps the most diabolical liberty I have seen in my entire life.’

  ‘I think so,’ Gillespie says. ‘You see, I think whoever did the killings at South Side of the Stone and University Street and Kyle, and whoever killed Ananturievo at Annadale last night, are two different people.’

  ‘You have evidence?’

  ‘Can’t prove a thing. But it’s Graceland gives it away.’

  ‘Graceland?’

  ‘Ounserrat Soulereya’s kid. She calls it Graceland because she likes the sound of the word. You saw it last night, the wee thing clinging on to the stretcher for dear life.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It should have been dead. What’s the factor in all the other killings? The family is wiped out down to the last child. You know about the Sacrifice of Fools thing?’

  ‘Littlejohn explained something about legends and ancient epic poems and why the Outsiders haven’t had a war, ever. Can’t say it made an awful lot of sense to me.’

  ‘It’s how they fight wars. Wars to avoid fighting wars. Stamp out the fools before they get dangerous. Weed them out. Eradicate them. And make sure they don’t breed their foolishness to any other generations. That’s the reason they cut the sex organs out. Symbolize that it’s been sterilized. And the children, so they won’t pass it on. Tell me: Ananturievo, Ounserrat’s partner: were there any cuts or mutilations?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And Ounserrat. The killer missed the first shot; why didn’t he finish the job? And the kid was a sitting duck, why didn’t he blow it away? It’s a different person. Someone who’d never done it before, and bottled when it came to making a clean job of it.’

  ‘Copycat?’

  ‘Clean up. The Harridis want to keep the thing secret, take out the killer, and anyone else who knows too much.’

  ‘Gillespie,’ Roisin Dunbar says, effortlessly merging into the inbound motorway traffic, ‘this puts you in the firing line.’

  ‘And Stacey and Talya. And Karen — my ex — too. And that’s why we’re going to Queen’s Island, to let them know that it’s out, that they can’t hope to keep it secret any more.’

  ‘Gillespie,’ Dunbar says, ‘my kid is with your kids.’

  ‘I know,’ Andy Gillespie says.

  ‘Gillespie,’ Dunbar says again after a time, ‘just to make your day absolutely perfect: we know why no one ever saw the killer. Killers. We know what a Cloak of Shadows is.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It sounds like something out of a sci-fi film, but it’s a kind of, ah, invisibility device. As far as we can tell, it bends light around the target.’

  ‘No wonder none of them ever put up a fight.’

  ‘They probably let him into their homes. He switched this thing on and sat there until someone opened the door, then just walked in. No one saw him come, no one saw him go. Perfect camouflage.’

  ‘Jesus. So you can’t even warn me to watch my back. How are you going to catch a killer you can’t see?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

  Neither has Andy Gillespie.

  ‘One wee favour,’ he asks, after a time. ‘It’s probably well out of your way, but could we make a detour via an off-licence?’

  Queen’s Island feels morning-aftery. Hung-over. Not the residents — there are no residents, the big wide streets are deserted — but the district. The buildings are tired of holding themselves up against gravity; the big wide deserted streets are lying down on the nice cold solid earth; the vehicles are hunched over gutters, just in case. The flags can’t be bothered flying; the colours are too bright for themselves and the lamp posts are leaning on each other. The day is clear and headache blue and whatever way you turn you can’t get away from the light.

  There’s music somewhere deep in the Shian town, a little feeble, a touch fragile. Roisin Dunbar’s car rolls through a moraine of wind-blown trash: paper cups, styrene chip boxes, kebab bags, wooden chip forks. The fast-food vans make big money out of on-heat Shian needing to eat every twenty minutes. Among the disposables are articles of clothing: lost, discarded, ripped off; body ornaments and pieces of jewellery; streamers, aspirin packets, empty mineral water bottles, musical instruments, flags, banners, emblems.

  ‘It must have been some party,’ Roisin Dunbar comments.

  ‘It is.’

  The Volks folks have taken themselves off their stand outside the sacred space. Too close to the kesh winds. Dunbar stops the car. Gillespie uncaps the quarter bottle of vodka he bought at the offie, offers it to Dunbar. She downs a slug, winces, downs another.

  ‘I’ll be OK as long as traffic branch don’t stop me,’ she says. ‘They are complete bastards.’

  Gillespie finishes the rest of the bottle. He waits until he can feel it tickle the base of his brain. He goes to the north entrance. Dunbar is at his back. Gillespie can feel the powers contained in the sacred space moving over his skin like shadows.

  — Thetherrin Harridi, he shouts in Hot Narha. Birds explode upwards from their roosts on the rusting cranes. — Andy Gillespie calls. Must speak. A calling out. High noon in Shian town. For the time it takes a ship to move up the channel to the sea, nothing happens. Then the north door opens. Gillespie shakes out the genro staff.

  ‘What is that?’ Dunbar asks. The rising wind flaps her coat tails like wings.

  ‘Tool of the trade,’ Gillespie says.

  ‘Mr Gillespie,’ the warden of the sacred space says. She is dressed in long greys but her face bears the dusty white marks oikesh decorations. ‘And Detective Sergeant Dunbar.’

  ‘I’m representing my client, Ounserrat Soulereya,’ Gillespie says. ‘I’ve got some questions I need answered, and under your law a genro may be refused no reasonable request. Can we come in?’

  ‘You want to talk with me in the sacred space?’

  Yeah. Because even though you keep the thing and run it, even you aren’t immune to its effects and you’re going to find it harder to lie to me in there than out here. Me, I’ve nothing to hide, and nothing to lie about. The hahndahvi can blow right through me.

  It’s nothing like it was like last time. It probably never is; always something different to everyone at every occasion. The presiding spirit today is a slightly edgy expectancy. Tense, bass line of something-awful-is-going-to-happen, high notes of thrill. Knot in the stomach. Hitchcock hahndahvi. He looks at Dunbar; by the expression on her face he can see it’s something altogether other for her. All things to all people. Like a good god should be. Or maybe it’s really done with mirrors. Reflects back on you your own dominant mood. Like most gods are. Tricks of the lighting.

  ‘I know about the Fool Slayer,’ Gillespie says. The acoustics lend his voice a sonorous ring. Authoritative. ‘We worked it out. Me and Littlejohn. It was the genro Saipanang gave it away. We know about Sounsurresh Soulereya and her family, what you did with the bodies at South Side of the Stone, how you thought you could hush it up. And we know who did the job at Annadale Flats. We know you’ve someone out there, hunting for the real killer, taking out anyone who knows too much.’

  ‘You know a lot,’ Thetherrin Harridi says. The perspectives shift behind her, making her at once far away and immensely tall. She seems to lean over And
y Gillespie with his stolen staff like a redwood tree. ‘You are to be congratulated. I advised the Council of the Nation that they could not possibly hope to keep this an internal Shian affair, especially after the killing of the religious. But some of us are less trusting of humans; they have good reason.’

  Gillespie fights down the dread rising like bile in his belly. It’s all inside your skull. It’s just stuff. Head-games.

  ‘You were for us?’

  ‘Mr Gillespie, none of us are “for” you. We are for ourselves. Some of us think that our interests are best served by rapprochement with humanity. Some of us disagree. Some of us resent having to share this world with other sentients. The Shian are a hunting species. We are a proud species. We have great achievements behind us. We do not like to be second-class citizens, refugees who have sold their inheritance for land that we could have taken. And we could, Mr Gillespie. When the fleet picked up your radio broadcasts in flight and it was discovered that World Ten had given rise to a technological civilization, there was a motion to reduce human civilization to a level at which we could achieve technological dominance. It could have been simply achieved: moving the fleet into earth orbit and focusing the Mach drive fields on the tectonic plate boundaries would have generated seismic activity sufficient to destroy ninety-five-per cent of your industrial capacity. Likewise, cometary heads could have been manoeuvred out of the Oort cloud into impact orbits; after fifty years the ecosphere would have stabilized sufficiently for colonization. The colonial council of Nations was brought out of stasis to debate and vote upon these motions. They were rejected. The margins were exceedingly narrow.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Andy Gillespie says. ‘But you didn’t and we’re here and you’re here and we’re stuck with each other.’ He’s shifted weight on his feet, but that’s enough to move into a new emotional focus. Concentrated ballsiness. He’s not taking this from anyone. ‘Who is it, Thetherrin Harridi?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  Gillespie takes another step forward, moving through moods, pushing Thetherrin into the deep mysteries around the south door.