The Last Crossing

by Brian McGilloway

  Duggan had told him that this man’s death was a response to Danny’s in some way, to justify his involvement. But it wasn’t, and he knew that now. Danny had died. That was separate from this. There was no reciprocity of violence that would change any aspect of what had happened to him.

  He stayed in the car and waited. He knew that the changeover in watches was at 8pm. Sure enough, at 8.03pm, he saw Martin Kelly drive out from the parking area at the shops and make his way home.

  He waited for another twenty minutes, just in case someone else arrived to replace Kelly, but he suspected no one would. If the attack was happening tonight as he had implied, Duggan would probably wait until it was late, until people had gone to bed, before arriving to attach whatever device he had built. They had agreed that, in the hours before, they would stay away from the area. Even so, Tony got out of the car and pulling up his hood, and zipping up his coat to cover the lower part of his chin, he cut across the road through a break in traffic and up along the backs of the rows of houses facing the shops.

  Some of the kids he’d seen from the previous night were gathered under the shelter of the front canopy of the small supermarket. He could hear their raised voices, their laughter, could see the glowing tips of their cigarettes, swirling through the darkness like fireflies in flight.

  He wanted it to be over, but it was still dusky, the streets still busy with people heading out for the evening. He went back to the car, avoiding crossing where the kids might see him, and drove out to the promontory where Black Cart and White Cart Waters met as the River Cart.

  There he stood, the smell of the mudflats along the banking sharp in the evening air, and considered, just for a moment, what would happened if he walked down into the river, allowing the water to carry him, to weigh down his clothes and bear him away, as Ophelia had done.

  His parents would be broken, he knew that. His father would never recover. What of Karen? Would she care? Would she blame herself? A self-centred part of him took some imaginary joy in her suffering. And it would free him from the searing pain boring through him, the guilt of what was to come and the impossible situation he faced.

  He drove back towards Paisley, stopping at a phone box below a fish and chip place on Storie Street.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Hi, son,’ his father sounded groggy, as if he’d been asleep. Tony imagined him drowsing in front of the telly, the house so quiet now there was little to disturb his slumbering. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Good,’ Tony managed, his voice cracking a little.

  ‘Do you want your mother?’

  It was the normal rhythm of their calls.

  ‘No. I’m good talking with you. How’s things?’

  ‘Good, good. I was up at Danny’s grave today, cleaning it up a bit, weeding and that.’

  ‘Did you say one for me?’ Tony asked.

  ‘Every day,’ his dad said. ‘You know that. How’s things there? How’s school?’

  ‘Ok. We’d an Open Day today.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘For the kids for next year.’ He felt sick at the comment, the thought of a future. The presumption of it.

  ‘Very good. How’s you and Karen?’

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ Tony said, not wanting to have to explain. What could he say? Strangely, he still didn’t want his parents thinking badly of her. ‘Listen, I just wanted to say thanks.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Sending me away over here. I know why you did it.’

  ‘Given the choice, I’d rather have you here. You know that.’

  ‘I do,’ Tony said. ‘And I’d be there, too. I miss you.’

  ‘I miss you too, son.’ His father hesitated a moment. ‘Is everything OK?’

  Tony nodded, aware the gesture was futile. He wanted to tell his father that he had been right, the night of the funeral, when he’d spoken to Tony about the futility of revenge. And he wanted to tell him that he loved him, wanted Alice to say the same to her father. But the words struggled in his throat; he’d not done it before and knew his father would think it strange now. Would worry. So instead he contented himself with his usual. ‘I’ll head on so. Talk to you later.’

  ‘All right, son. You’re sure you’re OK?’

  ‘I’m all right, Da.’

  ‘All right, then. Speak soon. I love you.’

  The comment threw him. By the time he’d responded, the line was already dead, his words lost.

  He drove back to Foxbar one final time and parked at the shops, now closed up for the evening, the kids all gone. He watched across at Alice’s house, saw the bedroom light go dark.

  ‘Just get it over with,’ he muttered.

  He got out of the car and sprinted across the road, pulling up his hood again as he did so. He climbed over the low fence of one of the houses along whose backs he was moving and cut through their garden and out onto the street. He was on the opposite side of the street from Alice’s house, about a dozen houses up from it.

  He walked down towards the house, scanning the cars parked along the street, lest Duggan was already there. But each vehicle was empty.

  He paused, once at the bottom of Alice’s driveway, building up the courage to take the final steps. He shoved his hands in his pockets, took a few slow breaths, trying to steady his nerve.

  Just then a pool of light spilled onto the drive as the front door opened and Alice’s father stepped out, two empty milk bottles in hand. He wore a pyjama top over brown cords. He stopped when he saw Tony, frozen mid stoop. One bottle slipped from his fingers and clattered hollowly onto the step, rolling onto the one below where it shattered.

  The noise forced Tony to act. He moved up the driveway, even as the man stood and rushed back inside, his face drawn in terror, misunderstanding Tony’s presence on his doorstep this late at night.

  ‘Mr Hamilton,’ Tony said. ‘I’m a teacher in Alice’s school. I need to talk to you.’

  ‘I’m calling the police,’ the man said, already closing the door, but Tony managed to to wedge his foot in the gap and prevent him shutting it completely.

  ‘Please. You need to let me in.’

  The door opened a crack further, the man still holding his weight behind it.

  ‘You need to let me in,’ Tony said. ‘Please. You have to trust me.’

  ‘Mr Canning?’

  He heard Alice’s voice, as if from somewhere deeper in the house. She’d recognised his accent. He felt the weight behind the door shift and her father’s face appeared at the widening gap.

  ‘Let me see your hands.’

  Tony held up both in surrender. ‘I’m not going to harm you. Or Alice. But we need to be quick.’

  Slowly, the door opened and Tony stepped inside. He heard it slam behind him, with a finality he could not easily dismiss, as if the life he had lived was over and a new reality lay ahead.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The entrance to the woods lay ahead of them as they trundled down an increasingly uneven roadway that led to a small empty parking area.

  ‘No sign of Uncle Sean,’ Duggan said, pulling one of the cans free from the plastic rings that held the four together. He tapped on the top twice, a trick Tony remembered him doing years back to stop the contents from spraying when the can was opened. Tony didn’t know if it worked, or it was a tic Duggan had not shed.

  The can opened with a wet hiss and he gulped down three or four mouthfuls before belching softly. ‘We’re staying put so, until he comes.’

  ‘I’m going to stretch my legs,’ Tony said, feeling he had to explain his exiting from the car to Duggan.

  ‘I’ll join you,’ Karen said.

  They stood together, in front of the car, their backs to the occupants, and scanned the woodland. A five-bar gate blocked the pathway leading up into the trees, a dull metal chain and padlock wrapped around one side.

  ‘Do you remember this?’ Karen asked.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Tony admitted. ‘I don’t remember climbing
over a gate. How could we have?’

  ‘Did we even come in through here? Maybe the gate wasn’t here back then.’

  Tony looked around, trying to find some distinguishable landmark that might trigger a memory from that night, but recognised nothing in particular. It could have been the entrance to any woodland, anywhere.

  ‘It has been thirty years,’ he said, finally.

  ‘We’re never going to find him,’ Karen said.

  Just then, the air filled with a low rumbling which grew in intensity and pitch. They both glanced up instinctively as the sound sharpened, rising above them. They could just make out the underbelly of the jet as it emerged through low lying cloud and continued it ascent, breaking through the higher layers and disappearing from sight, its roar gradually dying with its passing.

  Karen looked at Tony. ‘This is the place. I remember that.’

  ‘We don’t need to be exact about the spot,’ Tony said. ‘They have all this technology now where they can scan the ground to see if soil was disturbed. We just need a general part of the woods. I remember there was a big oak near to where we buried him. And spruce trees. And there was a fallen tree trunk over a stream along the way.’

  ‘I don’t remember that,’ Karen frowned. ‘Are you sure?’

  Tony nodded. ‘I took your hand to help you across. We’d barely spoken since the row, the party.’

  ‘It wasn’t quite a row,’ Karen said. ‘That diminishes it a little.’

  Tony mumbled an apology, keen to drop the subject.

  ‘We’ve all kept our secrets,’ she said, clearly still annoyed by his comment.

  Before he had a chance to tease out the implications of her comment, a black car swept down the road, skittering loose gravel as it did so. It ground to a halt next to Barr’s car and Sean Mullan stepped out.

  ‘Folks,’ he said, by way of greeting, then moved across to his nephew’s side of the car and waited for the boy to get out, business-like. Impatient.

  Tony studied him. The man had aged more than any of them, he reckoned. The weight of power, perhaps: uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. His moustache was narrower now, more grey-blond than the brown of his youth. His hair had thinned and, though still brushed to one side, revealed more of the scalp below. His weight had settled at his gut, his belly hanging over the top of his belt. Only his clothes were better quality, his trousers a heavy canvas, his brown walking boots supple and well-polished. Either he’d been planning on a walking holiday when he was in Scotland, or he’d had to buy them new on the way here. Or, of course, he’d half expected that Duggan would demand his presence at the wood and had come across prepared for that eventuality.

  ‘Let’s get a move on,’ Mullan said, tersely. ‘Hugh,’ he added, acknowledging the man who had now made his way out of the car and was draining the can. ‘You’ve started early.’

  ‘I started on the boat,’ Duggan laughed.

  ‘So I heard,’ Mullan said, deliberately not looking at his nephew who had clearly been reporting back to his uncle.

  ‘Good to see you, Seanie,’ Hugh said, raising the tin.

  The informality of the nickname seemed a little forced, a little desperate, as if he were letting everyone know that his relationship with Mullan was different from theirs. But the fact that he felt he needed to do so at all suggested it was not as close as perhaps he believed.

  Mullan came across to Karen and Tony and shook hands, a little stiffly, with both of them. ‘Thanks for doing this,’ he said.

  ‘Happy to,’ Karen commented. ‘It’s the right thing to do.’

  Mullan nodded, though seemed a little distracted, always keeping Duggan in his peripheral vision.

  ‘Those days are long past,’ he said. ‘The new future demands that we make up for some of the cruelty of previous generations.’

  It was an absurd soundbite, clearly prepared for the conference he was speaking at and cribbed to use now. They were the generation who had carried out this act and for all his attempts to dissociate himself, Mullan’s hands were as bloody as anyone’s. Bloodier, in fact.

  ‘I don’t think Hugh’s too happy about it,’ Tony said, nodding towards the man who had moved around to the boot of the car and was recovering a bag from the boot.

  ‘Hugh?’ Mullan said, sceptically. ‘Sure, it was him suggested doing this in the first place. We’d never have asked you if he hadn’t already agreed.’

  ‘Hugh suggested it?’

  Mullan nodded. ‘He suggested it and he suggested this date for coming across.’

  ‘What’s that I did?’ Duggan asked, having approached them, his small bag in one hand.

  ‘I’m saying you suggested this trip, to find Kelly.’

  Duggan nodded in agreement. ‘That’s right.’

  Tony frowned. ‘I thought you said you thought he should stay in the ground where he was.’

  ‘This isn’t about finding Martin,’ Duggan said. ‘Not for me. I told you that on the boat.’

  ‘What is it about then, Hugh?’ Mullan said, making no effort to disguise the exasperation in his voice.

  ‘We put the wrong person in the ground thirty years ago. I want to know the truth.’

  ‘Not this again, Hugh,’ Mullan began, moving towards him, making for his car. ‘I’ve no time for your bullshit.’ He stopped suddenly, half raising his hands. ‘What the fuck, Hugh?’

  The woodland seemed to quieten, the bird song silenced as they all turned to where Hugh stood.

  In his hand, he held a pistol.

  The image took Tony back thirty years in an instant, to this same place, with Hugh again standing with a gun, moving into the woods to kill someone. It appeared to him to be the same gun that had been used that night.

  ‘We’re all going back into the woods,’ Duggan said. ‘And we’re going to finish what we started thirty years ago.’

  Karen moved a step closer to Tony and, instinctively, he found himself stepping forward a little, partially blocking her from Duggan’s line of sight.

  ‘Anyone who tries to leave will be joining Martin in the ground. Let’s get started.’

  The Woods

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  ‘Let’s get started,’ Mullan said.

  They were sitting in the backroom of Betty’s. Tony had got the call to school, telling him to present himself in the bar at 10.30 that morning to discuss what had happened at the weekend. No further elucidation had been provided

  It was five days since he’d visited Alice Hamilton’s house and spoken with her father. The man’s initial reaction had been to call the police, but Tony had begged him not to, for so doing would surely result in Tony being killed.

  ‘How’s that my problem?’ the man had said, receiver in hand.

  ‘I’m risking my own life being here,’ Tony said. ‘If they know I warned you, I’m dead.’

  ‘Who is they?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  Hamilton dialled the first number on the phone, allowed the dial to circle back, a rapid unspooling.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ Tony said again. ‘I don’t want anyone’s blood on my hands. Yours or theirs.’

  ‘They know what they’re getting into when they target policemen.’

  A second number dialled.

  ‘They said the same about you when you targeted a child,’ Tony said, glancing past Hamilton to where Alice sat on the step at the turn of the stairs, listening.

  He saw something shift, almost imperceptibly, in Hamilton’s expression: a wounding, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed.

  ‘I know Alice,’ Tony said. ‘I don’t want anything to happen to her.’

  ‘So you’re the teacher from the North who bought her lunch and that?’

  Tony nodded.

  Hamilton considered for a moment, not taking his eyes off Tony, then replaced the receiver on the handset. ‘You’ve two minutes. Get up the stairs, Alice.’

  They waited until the heard the child’s footfalls pad
across the floor above them and the creak of her bedsprings. Hamilton nodded for Tony to speak. When he did so, he still spoke in hushed tones in case the girl was listening from her room.

  ‘Someone will plant a device under your car this evening. It might already be there. They know who you are, what you did, what your routines are. Church on Sunday, your runs to the supermarket on a Friday, when you go out, when you come back.’ He could see the man’s expression grow a little wilder as he recognised the details of his own weekly routine.

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  Tony held his gaze, but fear prevented him from speaking. Irrespective, the man clearly guessed at the truth for he straightened a little, his mouth curled in disdain.

  ‘It doesn’t matter how I know,’ Tony said, almost pleading now. ‘You need to leave here. Go and don’t come back. You find the device today, there’ll be another one sometime down the line. For Alice’s sake, you need to leave, go somewhere else, away from Glasgow altogether.’

  ‘We can’t just leave,’ he scoffed. ‘What about Alice herself?’