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

by Cindy Brandner

  “Corporal Ainsley, please don’t play the naïve soldier with me. The woman has a history, let’s exploit it.” He drank the last of his whisky and put the empty glass on the desk in front of him. “I think while we’re at it, Ainsley, we ought to see if our compatriots in MI5 will put a fire to James Kirkpatrick’s feet.”

  “Why would we want to do that, sir?”

  The captain smiled, cool as damn.

  “Because if we’re going to get to Noah Murray through the woman, we need His Lordship distracted.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Me, Without You

  THE FIRST KILLINGS IN her own area took place only five miles, as the crow flies, from Pamela’s house. She was well used to hearing of violent acts; the whisper of them always rode the wind in this area, like a narrow slipstream of blood, scenting the air with copper. This one was different. An entire family had been killed in their home, for no reason that anyone could fathom. They were an ordinary family—a mother, a father, a son and a visiting friend all sitting around after the week’s work, anticipating the weekend ahead. None of them was affiliated with any paramilitary group or even any social movement that might have drawn the attention of the less savory elements of their warring society. They had lived on a small farm only ten minutes distance from her. It had jarred her badly. She hadn’t felt secure since Casey’s disappearance anyway, but this heightened the anxiety that was her closest companion of late.

  She had other concerns, however, more immediate at present. She had lost another contract today; that left her with two, one of which would be completed by week’s end. There was no other work in the offing, nothing on which to bid, nothing with which to continue to meet her bills and pay the men who worked for her. Or, if she was being brutally honest with herself, worked for the memory of Casey.

  The clients liked her and they were kind to her, but on some level they didn’t take her seriously and so the contracts were starting to go elsewhere. She couldn’t blame them, she was in over her head and well she knew it and clearly they did too. She thought the work she did still have was in large part due to people feeling guilty about leaving for another contractor when her husband was missing.

  It was the end of a particularly trying day in which Murphy’s Law had prevailed with a vengeance: one of the men had broken a hand when a load of schist came off the truck sideways, the company truck had broken down part way to the building site, and her best carpenter had regretfully told her he was going to be working elsewhere starting the following Monday. Just now, though, the house was quiet around her, other than the burble of the radio she had left on downstairs and the sound of Finbar moving around the kitchen, looking for a stray crumb left from dinner. The children were asleep, Isabelle exhausted from a day of cutting a tooth, which had blessedly popped through in the late afternoon, leaving her and her mother exhausted. She had gone to sleep easily though, and Conor had followed shortly after, tumbling down into his accustomed heavy slumber halfway through his bedtime story.

  Pamela was tired, but needed a bath and to give her hair a thorough wash. She leaned over the tub in the bathroom, and turned the taps on halfway. If she turned them on full, the pipes would rumble and shake the floor, and she wasn’t willing to risk waking Isabelle.

  She sat down on the edge of the tub, feeling a surge of anger towards her absent husband. She was so tired that every cell ached, both with sheer physical exhaustion and with need of him. She was tired of pushing the thoughts away that came every day, all the darkness that was simply part of her life now, all because Casey had walked through their woods one day and never returned.

  Water poured into the tub, the scent of lavender bath salts rising with the steam. She took off her clothes, shucking them to the floor. She turned the water off, the rush of it fading to the mere plinking of drops within seconds. She got into the tub, the heat of the water prickling all along her skin. She sank in up to her neck, and closed her eyes with the sheer bliss of being warm for the first time all day. The anger was still there, a red pulse in her chest, an ache in all her joints. It shocked her a little to realize just how furious she was.

  Having a family meant everything to her; it had made her world whole and given her a security she had never known before. She was angry at Casey for taking that away from her, as nonsensical as it might be to blame the man for something over which he’d had no control. But choice—well that was another matter, because if he had actually killed that man, as Noah had suggested, then he had known such an act would pull out the supports, as shaky as such things were in Northern Ireland, from under their lives. And for that, though she understood why he might have done it, she was furious with him.

  She sometimes felt like there was no longer ground under her feet and that she was forever walking on a crumbling precipice. She had foolishly thought she was used to the violence, used to living on her nerves, used to worry and strife being a constant. But the truth was a person could never be so accustomed to those things that it didn’t affect them each minute of every day. Her incipient panic was proof enough of that. Every act of blood, every death, every time she looked over her shoulder certain that she felt the bead of a rifle sighting along her back—all these things reminded her that she did not live in an ordinary country, she did not live an ordinary life. Particularly not for an American girl who had grown up with money and safety, for she’d had those things until her father died. She had changed a great deal from the naïve girl who had come to Ireland all those years ago in search of Jamie Kirkpatrick. That naïve girl who had, in ways she had never expected, found her home here in this violent land.

  Casey had the talent of that—home, family. She thought perhaps it was something both he and Pat carried naturally with them into the world, something their father had provided for them and so they had a simple expectation of it. Her own father, though he had loved her well, had not had that talent and so while their homes had been beautiful she had often been lonely in them despite their aesthetic appeal. With Casey, regardless of the surroundings—the two-up two-down they had shared in the Ardoyne, the top floor of the triple-decker in Boston, the tiny cottage on the coast of Kerry, this house here—it was always home, because his love and strength had surrounded her from morning until night. He was home, and now with him gone she wasn’t sure how to keep that feeling, how to provide it every day for their children. She wasn’t certain about any of the dozens of decisions she had to make each day.

  She tried to shut her mind off; she could never make cogent decisions when she was this tired and if she made plans or thought her way through any of the difficulties that presented each day at work, she would forget her solutions, flimsy as they might be, by the time she got a pen and paper to jot them down.

  She needed to toughen up and find a way to understand the business better, to run it better, so that clients felt that they could trust her to get the job done properly.

  Her thoughts drifted back to Casey, not that they ever truly left him. Thoughts of him were a constant, like a piece of music that played relentlessly in the background, distracting her at all times. She felt porous, as if everything flowed through her, good and bad. Like the Echo of myth, she felt like she might eventually disappear through the sheer strain of longing for something she could no longer have. If she let the longing take over it would swamp her and she wouldn’t be able to function, and she could not allow that to happen. She had to take control of what she could, and leave the rest. Conor and Isabelle were her number one priority, and in order to look after them properly she had to establish some sort of steady income. It was more likely to come from keeping the company solvent than her occasional jobs photographing crime scenes.

  She sat up in the tub and began the arduous job of washing her hair. It was a big task as it fell in a curly mass to the middle of her back. Casey loved her hair, which was why she hadn’t cut it in such a long time. She mostly wore it tied back in a ponytail these days, having neither the time nor the patience
to tend to it. She desperately needed a trim, but she didn’t see where she was going to find the time for an appointment. She put a large dollop of conditioner in her hair, working it through, the scent of rosemary and honey surrounding her. Once that was done she washed her body quickly; the water was starting to cool and she wanted to keep as much of the warmth in her skin as she could. She rinsed her hair under the tap and then wrung the water from it before getting out of the tub and toweling off. She was already making a list in her head of all the things that needed to be done tomorrow. There was a list two weeks long just for the company alone. The list for the household was daily, weekly and seasonal. Casey had looked after so much of it, and it was a big task taking over all of that, even with Jamie and Patrick’s help.

  Determined to winnow her list by one item, she padded downstairs in her towel to retrieve her scissors. They were good and sharp and more than adequate to the task. Upstairs again, she cleared one side of the mirror and before she could change her mind made the first cut. Snip by snip her hair fell to the floor, forming a blue-black cloud on the tile. She was taking something away, shedding something. It felt like a powerful act, stripping away this one harbinger of femininity. As though she were an inversion of the biblical Samson, and shearing the hair away would give her strength and make her less vulnerable. Before she really understood what she was doing, she had cut all her hair off, leaving only about two inches on her head. She looked into the mirror, resolute, lifting her chin and giving herself an honest assessment.

  Her eyes looked enormous in her too thin and too white face. She felt a moment of regret so pure and sharp that it made her sick to her stomach. What had she been thinking? The back of her neck felt horribly exposed, and the length of it seemed suddenly ludicrous, like she was Alice and had swallowed the contents of the Drink Me bottle and grown grotesque in parts. She knew it was only a matter of what she was used to and that given a few days she would adjust to this woman in the mirror with her strange eyes and overly-long neck. She had hoped somehow that the severe hair cut would make her appear no-nonsense, all business and capable. Instead she looked like an alien child, not quite of this world, but uncertain in which world she did belong. It could stand as a metaphor for her life, as she truly didn’t know where she belonged since Casey had disappeared.

  She trimmed off a few last unruly pieces and then stood back. The hair was so short that she no longer had any curls. She sighed, at least she wouldn’t have to fuss with it anymore. It was definitely a wash and go sort of hairdo. She ran a hand over her shorn head, and grimaced at herself in the mirror. The first thing on her list of to-dos and she had made a frightful mess of it.

  She looked at her reflection. She didn’t look fierce or unafraid. She looked tired, lonely and indefinite, as if even her edges were insecure and wavering and that she might dissipate along with the steam. She had told Casey long ago that when she was a little girl she had believed that if she touched the surface of a mirror her fingertips would one day melt through and she would be able to follow, stepping into another time. She touched the mirror now—if she could go through, would she? Would she seek out that girl and warn her or would she choose to start over again, maybe never meet him and spare herself the heartache that was her every day companion? She felt a shaft of pain at the very thought—no, never that, she would never choose that, despite the terrible void in the universe which was his absence.

  She could, with effort, conjure him leaning in the doorway behind her, his arms crossed over his chest, relating his day, or just watching her with that look in his dark eyes that said she was soon to find herself in bed, entirely and happily at his mercy. Big, strong, capable and yet gentle with her and the children, he had been the axis on which her world turned.

  “Tell me what to do, Casey,” she whispered, as if anything louder would scatter the carefully-constructed apparition in the mirror. “Tell me what I am supposed to do—with the company, with the house, with our babies, with the rest of my life.”

  She touched the image, knowing it was as illusory as a reflection in a funhouse mirror. The mirror was warm on her hand, quicksilver and mist, letting her believe for just a moment. She wondered what he would think if he could see her now, what he would say to this woman with the haunted face and butchered hair. This uncertain, stumbling woman who jumped at her own shadow some days.

  She needed to move, to feed the dog and bank the fire, to lie down in a bed that was not her own and go to sleep. But first she spoke to the mirage in the mirror and to the woman beside him.

  “This is me, without you.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  The Anatomy of Desire

  August 1976

  IT HAD TAKEN FOUR months of painstaking repairs before her car was in good enough nick to drive again. She was happy to return Noah’s truck to him, as it had felt a wee bit like driving a Shorland tank down their tiny country lanes and she was certain everyone in a five mile radius could hear her approach each time she took it out.

  It was one of those summer days when the clouds scudded light as thistledown across the face of the sun and the occasional spatter of rain dusted the land and then just as swiftly turned to a bright sun that gilded the fields and dusted the hedgerows with diamonds.

  Pamela paused as she got out of the truck, casting an eye over the land around her. The fields were a rich luxuriant green with plants that would soon need harvesting. Casey had loved this time of year and had spent many hours after work each day in the garden, pulling up the vegetables and readying the soil for the following spring. She had always loved when he came in from the garden, smelling of earth and plants, and excited by the fruition of the new things he had chosen to grow that year. It was a love they had in common and they had often spent winter evenings with their heads bent over seed catalogues, dreaming green dreams. She took a breath and pushed the thought away. She had been able to get her panic under control in the last few weeks, but thinking about Casey could bring it on again.

  Noah was in from the fields, working in the small kitchen garden he kept at the back of the house. He was digging up potatoes, swiftly, rhythmically, as it seemed he did all things. He looked up at her approach and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. It was one of the fine parts of the day and the sun, standing near its zenith, was hot.

  “I came to return your truck,” she said, “thank you for the loan of it, it’s been a great help.”

  He shrugged, uncomfortable, she sensed, with her gratitude. He really looked at her then, his eyebrows rising as he took in her hair, or rather, the lack of it. In typical Noah fashion he went straight to the point.

  “Did ye have a reason for scalpin’ yerself?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, feeling suddenly self-conscious about her shorn head. “I just wanted to be less visible somehow.”

  Noah gave her an odd look. “Well, let me be the first to tell ye, if that was yer intention, ye’ve failed miserably.”

  She flushed hotly. “I’m well aware I look like a scarecrow, thank you very much.”

  Noah propped his arm on the top of the spade and looked at her in a very direct manner. “If that’s what ye think ye resemble then ye need to take a longer look in the mirror. Ye don’t exactly blend in, an’ it’s not because of yer bald head.”

  “I’m not bald,” she said indignantly.

  “Near enough to it,” he said and turned back to his digging, the warm scent of soil and sun floating on the air. She bent and started collecting the potatoes he’d dug up, their skins cool with rich, fragrant black soil.

  “You aren’t one to soft soap a girl, are you?”

  “Ye know well enough that I’m not one to flatter, if ye need that ye’ll have to go elsewhere. Nor am I blind, Pamela. Ye’re very pleasing to the eye, an’ somehow takin’ off all yer hair has only made it that much more obvious.”

  “Well, that wasn’t my intention.”

  “No, I don’t imagine it was, but there it is.”


  “I thought somehow,” she said, feeling unaccountably irritated, “I’d become less visible, I’d fade into the background.”

  Noah gave her a look of incredulity. “What—like some farmer’s wife with a weather-beaten soul showin’ in her face an’ limbs? Surely ye must look in a mirror now an’ again, Pamela? An’ even if ye don’t, I would imagine men’s faces are mirror enough.”

  “I don’t really look at men,” she said, realizing it was true. She barely saw people sometimes, which was dangerous in this country. So much in life seemed like a blur since Casey had disappeared.

  “I can see why ye would feel that way now. But ye must realize that men desire ye. I tell every man I ask ye to put up that if they so much as look at ye sideways, I’ll have their kneecaps shot out.”

  “You do?” she asked, slightly shocked and yet aware he rarely said anything he didn’t mean, even in jest.

  “Aye, I’m no fool. Men will feel what they do and desire is no bad thing, it’s not as if they can control the feeling of it, they’ve just been warned to control their actions. Has one of them made ye uncomfortable?” His tone had changed with the last sentence, and she felt a chill slide through her, despite the warmth of the day.

  “No,” she said, for though one young man had made his interest clear, she didn’t want him to end up in a ditch somewhere merely for making a pass at her. Noah gave her a dubious look, as if he could see straight through what she said.

  “Well, if any one of them does, ye be certain to tell me.”

  “I can look after myself,” she said, aware her tone was sharp and that her pique had little to do with the words he was saying.

  “Are ye sayin’ ye have no need of men’s desire?”

  “There’s only one man’s desire that I want, and he is gone,” she said, “so I would just as soon not have to contend with the rest.”