In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4)

by Cindy Brandner

  Poetry had long been their shared language, and was often the way they understood the world, made sense of both its pains and its pleasures. It was a common root for the two of them, going back to the summer when they had first met.

  “I’m going to England for a few days,” he said, and she was relieved at the turn in the conversation.

  “Will you go see Julian?”

  “Most likely, yes. I can’t say it’s an interview about which I’m excited.”

  “Well, if anyone can manage him, it’s you.”

  “Thank you for the vote of confidence, but I have to say I don’t quite feel equal to this task. I had no idea of his existence. He isn’t likely to believe that though, is he?”

  She shook her head, rueful. “No, probably not. He’s somewhat disposed to take against you, for lack of a better way of putting it. I wish I could be more encouraging, I just don’t want to see you get hurt or caught in the crossfire between him and his mother. My sense is, she has twisted him with ideas about you that bear no resemblance to reality.”

  Jamie looked down at the glass in his hand. His hair and eyes and cheekbones were underlit by the fire and the lamp that glowed on the small table next to the couch, so that he appeared softly gilded. But his fingers were tight around the glass, knuckles sharp against the skin. He saw her glance and unclenched his hand, setting the glass gently aside. “Her reality has clearly been very different than mine. I wish she had told me about him at some point. I think I understand why she didn’t, but damn it, I wish she had.”

  She saw for the first time since her arrival home how badly the news about Julian had upset him. With his history, she could only imagine what it had done to him to discover he had a son who was nineteen years old and completely unknown to him until days ago. She leaned over and put her hand on his.

  “Jamie, he’s old enough that she can’t control everything he thinks and feels. He’s not a child anymore.”

  He looked up, the green eyes dark, his expression bleak.

  “That’s my worry, Pamela. What if it is too late?”

  She did not speak for she knew there was no answer she could give, nor did he expect one.

  Chapter Seven

  Black Taxi

  THE STREETS WERE his hunting ground. In this city people disappeared all the time, mostly for the grave sin of wandering off into the wrong bit of geography, down the wrong street, into the wrong pub, or merely associating with someone who was a known criminal of the political sort. Either way it was to a hunter’s advantage. Prey went missing, people assumed it was political in origin and that The Troubles had taken yet another victim into its ravenous maw, all in the name of cause or creed.

  A city was a living organism, its streets the arteries through which humans moved in predictable patterns. In this city there were cross-points, places through which people must move into a strange no man’s land, but one could always tell whence they had come. He had the patience of the natural born hunter—he watched, he waited, he saw.

  An unofficial, messy little war served many purposes, it covered over many sins, hid things that would otherwise find the light of day, allowed atrocities to masquerade as tribal warfare and as the collateral damage of conflict. This war was perfect for him for it gave relief to the hunger that ruled his life. He could not remember a day in his life in which the hunger hadn’t ruled, though he knew there must have been a time when it had not. For so long now it had controlled him with an iron hand, and he had long been its willing slave.

  He drew hard on his cigarette, considering his options. The smoke floated and curled out on the damp air, blue tendrils sliding amongst the molecules of oxygen, infiltrating and dissipating, just as he himself did through people and streets. He was, he thought, as good as invisible, for he killed any witness to his actions.

  It was time to move on, better hunting perhaps tomorrow. He touched the keys, and turned over the ignition when something flickered in the corner of his eye, a bit of blue cloth, not much to the average person’s senses, but to his own a prickle of fire along his skin, and that strangely pleasant shudder that told him the prey had come out into the open field where he might play with it at his leisure, until he no longer wished to continue the game.

  It was a young man, alone, and just a bit worse for drink. Precisely how he liked them. He eased in the clutch, let the car roll forward, and turned on the light on the top of his car.

  “Will ye want a ride, lad? ‘Tisn’t the best neighborhood to be caught out in, ye know.”

  Gerard’s voice on the telephone had been grim. “Be sure to bring a strong stomach with ye, I think it’s only fair to warn ye that it’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen.”

  Pamela could not begin to imagine how bad it was for Gerard to say such a thing. They had worked together after the bombs of Bloody Friday had left body parts scattered in the streets. She still had nightmares occasionally to do with what they had witnessed that day.

  She knew she ought to have said no, ought to have told him her husband was missing and that he needed to find someone else. She never considered saying any of it though, because she had to know, she had to see the body, to see if it was Casey. She hadn’t done this sort of work in a while, not since before Isabelle was born. Running Jamie’s companies had taken up a great deal of her time, and so she had only worked sporadically when the police couldn’t find another photographer on short notice. Having children had changed something inside her and she found the scenes much harder to deal with in the aftermath.

  When she arrived there were policemen milling everywhere. Some nodded at her, some did not and she was used to it. Gerard had been right, she couldn’t have begun to imagine how bad it was. The body had been dropped over a railing and lay in a filthy stairwell, a bloody heap that was barely recognizable as having once been a human being. She could see the hair color and it was not black, it was a fair, dirty blond. It was not Casey, and there was some small part of her that felt the relief of that confirmation, even while recoiling in horror at the state of the body. Still, a thrum of panic, never far from her these days, began to beat in her blood, sending out its cold tendrils of fear and nausea.

  The camera was her only defense in such situations, to do what she had been brought here to do and do it well, to give the dead person their due from the living. So that is what she did—laying out the instruments of her trade, the shaking in her hands slowly subsiding as the camera fitted itself to her fingers. She could quell the panic long enough to get this done, she had to, so she bit down on her lip and pulled in her focus. All she needed to do was get through the next half hour. She got out the ruler, the grey card, the lens and filters she thought most suited to the scene. There was a weak sun flickering through the clouds and a whiff of rain in the air. As long as the rain held off for a bit it was perfect weather for this job. Nighttime shooting required much more fussing with lighting and lenses so that depth perception was as accurate as a daytime shoot and a bright, sunny day would have presented difficulties of its own. She took her preliminary notes quickly, knowing Gerard’s would be more in depth, but needing her own record to submit with the pictures. Then came the overview photos, the basic sketch of the scene, and the photographic record of each item of evidence.

  It was how she had to view these scenes—as evidence, as something that was owed to the victim and to those who had loved him or her. Even a scene outside had to be approached as though it were a building, like she stepped into a room with four walls and a door—a room of blood and death, but a room nevertheless with exact boundaries. All angles and approaches had to be covered, the way the body was lying, its alignment to the buildings and cobblestones beneath it. Any other items within the vicinity of the scene had to be photographed twice—once with the measuring device and once without. The pictures were meant to be a precise record, scientific in their exactness, without emotion coloring any part of them. She catalogued each aspect as it came into her camera’s view, and hoped that it di
d not come back to haunt her later.

  The boy’s throat had been cut, a jagged open wound that made it clear that the neck had been slashed with such force and brutality that it was sheared down to the backbone. He had been, for all intents and purposes, decapitated. There were thick shards of glass in the victim’s forehead. It appeared that a beer glass had been forcefully shoved into his face at some point. There were bruises and abrasions on every inch of skin she could see. There were two depressions in his skull, obvious to her eye, even though parts of the hair were matted black with blood and other matter that she knew, from previous scenes, was brain. His arms had been flung up above his head when he was thrown here, for it was clear this was not the primary scene, and she could see deep abrasions on his wrists that indicated he had been bound with something sharp—wire maybe. Each wound had to be photographed separately and close up; this part never felt as difficult as the overview shots, perhaps because she could parse the victim up into his or her various injuries, rather than seeing the whole human being.

  Time took on an odd feel at crime scenes, sometimes it was short and tight, confined to each whirr of the camera’s shutter and other times it was drawn out fine until it felt like a wire in the blood, thrumming with primal fear, with the full knowledge of the human body’s ultimate fragility—how a living, breathing, laughing creature could be reduced to this—this bloody pulp—in a mere matter of moments. In real time the photography took two full hours, because it was a complicated scene in some ways. It wasn’t the original location for one thing and the narrowness of the street, the overhanging buildings and the depth of the stairwell made both light and positioning difficult.

  She stood when she was done and walked over to Gerard who was still making notes, face impassive, his tape recorder tucked into his shirt pocket. The rain had started to spatter in fitful drops, the crime scene would soon be compromised; she had finished just in time.

  “I’m done,” she said, feeling as if she had run for miles without air or water, without sustenance or reprieve. She felt faint, her vision was slightly fuzzy, the grey telescoping warning her that the anxiety which was her constant companion was about to become something far worse. He nodded, still scribbling in his notebook and so she busied herself with organizing her equipment. A shadow fell across her and she glanced up briefly, black spots dancing across her vision. It was only Gerard though, his sharp eyes damnably observant.

  “Are ye all right?” he asked, as she repacked her camera, putting the lens in its coddling velvet lined bed.

  “No, I don’t think I’ve ever…” she stopped, pressing a hand to her middle. She tried to take a breath and then tried again only to feel it catch hard on the shoals of panic, like a dam bursting and pouring its flotsam, jagged and sharp through the spillway of her nervous system. She could not, must not have a panic attack here. If she did, she would fall apart, would not be able to get in the car, would not ever get another job photographing dead, battered, bloody bodies.

  “Pamela?” Gerard hunkered down beside her, concern written large over his weathered face. He patted her back, and slowly her breathing resumed something near its normal pace.

  “I…my husband is missing. He’s been missing for over two months,” she said flatly, her hands clenched so hard that the bones sang with pain.

  “Missing?”

  “Missing, disappeared without a trace, gone into the wind, and everyone except me and his brother thinks he’s dead.”

  Gerard didn’t comment, merely rubbed her back for a moment longer and then said, “Pamela, ye ought to have told me about yer husband. Ye shouldn’t be here, an’ ye know it.”

  She took a deep breath in, trying to ignore the heavy scent of blood that lined her nasal passages. “I’m all right, I just need to get past the initial shock.” It occurred to her that life in this city was always about getting past the initial shocks. And then one day, what if she wasn’t shocked anymore? She dreaded such a day ever arriving.

  She snapped her camera case shut and got to her feet. She couldn’t feel her legs properly. She thought if she could just get in the car and sit down that she might be able to stop the precipitous slide into the abyss of panic. Gerard picked the case up and walked to where her car sat, battered, but still reliable.

  He put her camera case in the boot and then stood back and looked at her.

  “I can’t have ye here if emotion is cloudin’ yer ability to do the job, ye know that well enough.”

  “It won’t happen again,” she said, her body so tired that it felt like it was aching in every joint and cell.

  “Pamela, I hope ye won’t mind me askin’, but why the hell are ye still doin’ this?”

  “I need the money,” she said bluntly, because soon enough it would be true. She had put aside some of what she had been paid while running Jamie’s companies but she had also sunk most of it into their mortgage. Casey had been against it, feeling that the use of Jamie’s money to purchase their home wasn’t right. But she had finally talked him around to it because she wanted the security of the land, she wanted to know the house was theirs forever, even should some terrible event befall them. He had looked at her long and hard and finally said, “All right then, I can’t argue with ye over that.” He had understood that for her, it was a necessity, because it was her first real home, it was the home in which they were raising their family. Nothing less would have convinced him, she knew, for he had not liked her coin coming from Jamie’s coffers. Right now, the construction company was barely breaking even, and she knew without Casey it was going to be a hard sell to keep contracts, even small ones, coming in. It was important to her to keep her relationship with Gerard intact, and to keep her work as professional as it had always been so that she didn’t lose a source of income.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “Just tell me next time if it takes ye sideways, we can’t afford to have anything off with the photos.”

  She understood that Gerard meant the two of them specifically, as they were both Catholic with affiliations inside the Nationalist community. This meant their work needed to be beyond reproach in every single aspect. She respected that and held herself to that higher standard—always—because she knew too well just what was at stake for herself, for her children and for the Catholic/Nationalist community as a whole. Sometimes it was the only defense a person had, rising to a higher standard, sticking to it through the bloodshed and violence and hatred that had once been unimaginable in her life. Their work was used in court, what she did provided a permanent record for the police and the legal system to refer back to on the pathway to providing some sort of justice for the victims.

  “It won’t happen again, you don’t need to worry over me,” she said, striving to keep the nerves from her voice. He nodded at her, though there was still a look of doubt in his face as he waited for her to get in her car and then shut the door for her. He leaned in the window of the Citroën, brow furrowed.

  “Pamela, I’m sorry for what’s happened.”

  She nodded, because she could not yet say meaningless, polite words like ‘thank you’ for something this profound. Gerard would understand.

  “Are the police—are they helpin’ ye?”

  “As much as they would help any wife of a known rebel,” she said bitterly.

  “If ye need anything, if there’s anything I can do, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  She nodded tersely, just wanting to be away from the stink of blood and fear and pain, just wanting to be gone from the sympathy in Gerard’s face. She drove carefully, because it would be all too easy these days, with her exhaustion and the constant anxiety eating at her nerves, to have an accident. The rain was coming down in earnest now, keeping the wiper blades going at full throttle.

  She was a good distance out of the city, nearer to home than to Belfast when she stopped the car, got out on the roadside and threw up the little she had eaten that day, and then just stayed there on her knees in the cold, wet grass, rain beading through
her hair and sliding down the back of her neck. The road was thankfully deserted. She was quite certain she did not have the strength to get up. The last of her reserves had been depleted by the death scene. She had not slept again, not properly, since the night in Jamie’s study. She knew she was in danger of making herself seriously ill if she didn’t find a different way to cope with the situation, with the lack of Casey in every second, in every breath. For the sake of Conor and Isabelle, if nothing else, she had to find a way to sleep, to eat and to breathe her way through the days to come and not have every second wracked with the thought of what might have happened to her husband.

  There was a pain in her chest, like some black and terrible substance held in a vessel blown fine and thin as a wish; which sat waiting, smoking and acid, to break the vessel and flood her entire being. This was fear she knew—fear of the grief that would swamp her and take her over if she allowed it. If the vessel broke, she feared she might die; she feared that she would no longer be able to keep thoughts of what may have happened to Casey at bay and that wasn’t something she could manage; that was a nightmare from which there would be no waking.

  Get up off yer knees, Jewel. Get up and go home.

  She startled, Casey’s voice so vivid and stern in her head that she was certain she had heard it right there in the air behind her. She turned quickly, wrenching her neck with the strain. The shock of it stunned her. It was like being punched hard without warning—the sound of his voice and the empty road behind her.

  “I’ll listen to you, you bastard,” she said angrily, “if you will listen to me and just fucking come home.”

  She hit the ground, her fist sinking into the wet verge, coming away muddy and cut from a stone she had grazed. She stared at her hand and then drove it into the ground again, blood pounding in her head and face, blurring her vision. It felt good as much as it hurt, it felt like the only real display of emotion she’d had since Casey had gone off to walk their property and not come home. Disappeared like a fairy tale figure, as if he had never been real, so absolute was his vanishing. She hit the ground again and again, mud spraying up into her face and over her clothes. She kept hitting and hitting until her hand was running with blood and her hair was dripping with rain, rivulets of it running down the channel of her back and soaking her clothes.