by Declan Burke
‘What?’ I said.
‘Tom Noone?’
‘Who’s this?’
‘I could give you a name, Tom, but why would you think it was genuine?’
A Boston accent, this one harsher than Shay Govern’s, even though he sounded amused at my naivety.
‘What do you want?’ I said.
‘Like the man told you, I’d like to meet. For a chat.’
‘About what?’
‘Shay Govern.’
‘What about him?’
‘This gold mine he’s planning.’
‘I know nothing about it that I didn’t read in the papers.’
‘I find that hard to believe.’
‘There’s not much I can do about that.’
Silence. Then: ‘I take it you’re heading for Delphi, meeting up with our friend Shay.’
‘That’s the plan, yeah. He’s expecting me first thing tomorrow.’
‘Is he now?’
‘He is.’
Another silence. Then: ‘Seanie tells me you’ve a kid with you.’
‘What about it?’
‘A little girl.’
‘So?’
‘I’m only asking, Tom. I have two girls of my own. It’s always nice to see a father spending time with his daughter.’ A sigh (a sigh?) and then he said, ‘You always think there’ll be more time, don’t you? And then you turn around and it’s twenty years later and you realize that more time is the biggest con of the lot.’
I couldn’t work out if he was turning maudlin or building towards an explicit threat. I said, ‘Look, it’s late and I need to get my girl to—’
‘Sure, sure. But Tom? Listen, this chat – I’m talking about an exchange of information. OK? By which I mean, an exchange of information about Shay Govern.’
‘That sounds fine by me. But there’s no way I’m doing it now.’
‘No, I understand, it’s way past the girl’s bedtime. How about we meet tomorrow, have some breakfast. I’m guessing you’re taking the early ferry?’
‘I haven’t decided yet.’
‘Well, there’s a café not too far from where you are now, Belle’s Kitchen, Seanie’ll show you where it is. Say eight thirty? They do a fine Irish breakfast.’
‘All right.’
‘See you then. Put me back on to Sean.’
I handed the phone back, checked on the rear-view. Emily was wide awake and staring at Seanie, her eyes huge and round, wondering what was going on.
I said, ‘Hon? Daddy’s friend is going to show us where we can have breakfast in the morning. Isn’t that nice of him?’
She nodded, but she didn’t take her eyes off Seanie. She’d always been wary of clowns.
You couldn’t accuse the Swilly View Guesthouse of false advertising. It was a house that took in guests, and when I looked out the window of our upstairs room the view was nothing but Swilly. I’d passed it almost as soon as I’d arrived in Rathmullan, one of a row of terraced houses facing across the road to the lough, which was now calm under a fat moon. Over on the other side Delphi was hunched in somewhere against the darkness of the far shore.
Mr Elliott, bald and stocky, had a broad Yorkshire accent as he welcomed us in, waving off my apology for arriving late – I’d got lost, I said, on the road from Letterkenny – and ushering me up the stairs. He’d put a camp bed in the room for Emily, but after he’d left, a little nonplussed and possibly even offended at the idea that we wouldn’t be staying for breakfast in the morning, she asked if she could sleep in the double bed with me.
Not a problem. I got her teeth brushed and her Pet’s Parade pyjamas on, then tucked her in under the heavy quilt.
‘Is there time for a story?’ she said.
‘It’ll have to be very quick.’
‘That’s fine.’
So we raced through a tale of princesses and dragons and zombies and laser swords – quite the postmodernist, our Emily, as most six-year-olds tend to be – and ten minutes later she was breathing deeply, lost in the pillows with the back of her hand thrown across her eyes.
Once I was sure she was asleep I locked the door and wedged a chair under the handle. Nothing that would keep out anyone who really wanted to get in, but at least it would work as an early-warning system. Then I took the laptop from the duffel and turned it on, sat on the bed. Checked Gmail first, and found I had seventeen emails, very few of which needed to be replied to immediately – a couple of movie screening invites, some PR stuff from book publicists, an upgrade offering from an Internet security firm, a short line from McFetridge in Toronto wondering if I was thinking of getting along to Bouchercon this year. In among them was a message from Martin.
Tom –
Quick one … I’m rereading Rendezvous at Thira and just got to the massacre part. There’s four kids murdered in the book, not six. Not sure if this matters, and it probably doesn’t, but thought you’d like to know.
Cheers,
M
The words popped into my mind before I had time to process them: At least it’s going down.
I glanced across at Emily, fascinated as always by the moth-wing delicacy of her violet eyelids. At how fragile she was. I wondered how many, or how few, children needed to be murdered for an act to qualify as a massacre. One, certainly, was too few, but would two be enough? Would it need a minimum of three dead children before we could start calling it an atrocity?
I was being flippant, sure. Call it a defence mechanism, a way of putting distance between the sordid tale of murdered children and the sleeping beauty faintly snoring by my side.
I’d seen a photograph once, not long before Emily was born, a black-and-white taken somewhere in Russia in 1941, just after the Germans invaded. A perverse family portrait, in part because they were all women – two older women and three or four girls, from teenagers down to a little kid who couldn’t have been more than four years old, who was staring back over her shoulder at the camera even as she clung to her mother’s thigh. They were all undressed to their underwear, the older women and the teenagers visibly embarrassed, the expressions of the younger girls more curious than anything else. Behind them the rough ground was strewn with corpses, a handful of German soldiers standing around holding their weapons. A pitiful, horrifying sight. But what stayed with me long after I’d clicked the photograph closed was the one thing that wasn’t in the picture: the man who’d taken the photograph, who’d ordered the women to strip, and then posed them just so, against the backdrop of their murdered fellow villagers or townspeople, knowing they only had moments to live.
What kind of man behaves that way?
The easy answer, I knew, was that he was insane, a sociopath or perhaps an ordinary soldier temporarily frenzied by blood-lust. Or an exceptionally motivated disciple of the Nazi doctrine, doing what any good Aryan son would do when confronted by the untermensch from the east.
The trouble with easy answers, of course, is they’re too easy. The way they allow us to go easy on ourselves. There’d been no frenzy involved in creating that tableau. Cruelty, yes, on a scale you might describe as inhuman if you were keen to allow yourself the easy option of believing that the man who took that photograph was not of the same species as yourself. That he had, simply by virtue of being a German adult male abroad in Russia in 1941, sidestepped his way out of the human race and was now peering back through a camera lens at all he had left behind.
No, it was too easy. Whoever took that photograph was as human as I was, had very probably lain down on a bed beside his own children and told them rushed bedtime stories because they were going to bed a little later than usual that night, and had marvelled after at the sight of violet-tinged eyelids and tiny eye lashes on pudgy little rose-red cheeks. And had then gone out and posed a family of women in their underwear for a photograph in a field of corpses, and very likely afterwards put his camera to one side and picked up his gun and ripped those children apart.
Easy answers?
Fact is there m
ay be no answers at all.
THIRTEEN
I must have dozed off because I woke up choking a little before six, when Emily, thrashing around in her sleep as she tried to free herself from the folds of the heavy quilt, caught me with a straight-arm smash across the throat.
I got her settled again, making sure her arms were outside the quilt this time, then lay there staring up at the damp stain on the ceiling that resembled, if you squinted, a skinny Africa. No matter how hard I stared and squinted, though, I couldn’t persuade my mind to shut down – it kept jumping to images of a clown-looking goon pulling up beside my car, planting his huge paw against the glass, the stubby black automatic in his palm.
In the end, I got up, careful not to disturb Emily, and unplugged the phone, turned it on. It was a little on the early side, but I reckoned it wasn’t a bad idea to ring a couple of contacts back home, see if anyone knew of a solid cop or two in the Letterkenny area who might be useful to touch base with, so I could make myself and my whereabouts known before I sat down to breakfast with Seanie the Clown’s handler.
I’d already reconsidered by the time the phone had powered up and located a signal. If Kee wasn’t playing it solo, there was every chance she’d put out an APB, which meant walking into a garda station wasn’t the smartest move I could make.
The trouble with that kind of thinking was that the longer I mulled it over, the more I realized there were no smart moves.
I texted Martin, asking him to call back whenever he got a chance. He rang while I was in the bathroom.
‘Tom?’
‘Yeah,’ I whispered. ‘Listen, sorry for the early start.’
‘No problem. What’s wrong?’
‘Can you talk?’
‘Sure. Hold on a minute … What’s that, hon?’
I heard a muffled murmur, and then Martin said, ‘Jen says fuck you very much, and she’s buying you a ticket for a one-way flight to Mars.’
‘Tell her I’ll take it.’
I heard the rustle of sheets and realized he was getting out of bed so as not to disturb Jen any further. It seemed like a good idea, so I said, ‘Martin? I’ll call you back in two minutes, OK?’
I was still dressed from the night before, so I moved the chair away and unlocked the bedroom door, then locked it again from the outside. Tiptoed down the stairs, slipped the deadbolt off the front door and went out into the street, across the road to the low wall on the other side. There were small gardens fringing the foreshore, then a wide beach and the Swilly itself. Beyond the orange streetlights it was still dark, although the sky away to the east was turning pearly grey.
I’d expected it to be cold, but it was actually quite mild. Even better news was the fact that there were no clown-looking goons watching the Swilly View Guesthouse.
‘So what’s up?’ Martin said.
‘I could do with someone to bounce a few ideas off.’
I heard the flick-clink of a Zippo, Martin exhaling. It had been nearly three years since I’d had a cigarette, and now I was practically drooling.
‘Bounce away,’ he said.
I gave it a shot, trying to untangle everything that had happened over the last few days, starting with Shay Govern and his desire to confess to the part he’d once played in murdering children. While I spoke I had a flash of what Jack Byrne’s face must have looked like when I told him he’d need to get his skates on if he was planning to blackmail Govern, because the guy was hell-bent on telling the world himself. At the time it had been almost comical, the hardboiled private eye sideswiped by the idea that anyone might want to dish the dirt on themselves. Now it wasn’t even remotely funny. Not with Gerard Smyth drying out on a slab.
‘He’s dead?’ Martin said. ‘The old guy?’
‘The cop, Kee, she wanted me to identify the body. But there was no way I was dragging Emily down to the morgue. So then she started in about how I’m a person of interest, I was the last one to see Smyth alive.’
‘Christ. So where’s Emily now?’
‘Upstairs.’
‘She’s still with you?’
‘What else was I supposed to do?’
‘You could’ve rung us, Tom. We’d have taken her.’
‘There wasn’t time.’ I explained about Kee and the wardrobe.
‘Holy fucking shit,’ he breathed. ‘So where’s this Kee now?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Where are you now?’
‘It’s probably best if I don’t say.’
‘Jesus.’ Another clink-flick, Martin inhaling like it was the last smoke he’d ever have. Then: ‘You think it was deliberate? The old guy, I mean.’
‘I don’t know.’ I wanted to believe it was an accident, that an elderly man had simply lost his footing on a slippery towpath and toppled in. The kind of tiny tragedy that happens every day. Sad, yes, but not sinister. Until you start wondering about what an old man was doing wandering along a towpath late at night. ‘I mean, he was hardly on the prowl for a tart, was he?’
And then there was the file. Gerard Smyth had gone into the canal before or after the file was stolen, and the sequence of events didn’t really matter. What mattered was that unless it was the kind of massive coincidence I tend not to believe in, the two events were connected.
‘But that doesn’t make sense, Tom. If they already had the file, then why go to all the trouble of taking him out, involving the cops?’
It was a good question. No one had taken Gerard Smyth seriously enough to act on his queries and allegations before now. And even if it was the case that the spooks had heard he’d been waving his file around, that he was talking to a journalist and an ex-cop private investigator, surely all they had to do was throw a scare into him, mention the canal and ask if he’d ever learned to swim after that dunk he’d taken off a submarine into the waters of Lough Swilly.
Taking the file and putting Smyth away for keeps – that seemed crude, unnecessary. Not the kind of belt-and-braces approach I’d have expected from a crew that was slick enough to get in and out of an apartment and leave no trace of their coming or going.
‘What are you saying?’ Martin said. ‘That they’re not connected?’
‘The events are, yeah. But if we’re agreed that Smyth going into the canal was no accident, then there’s two very different approaches here.’
Someone had broken into my apartment and lifted Smyth’s file nice and smooth, I told Martin, leaving behind only an invisible warning for me to stay out of it. Then, someone else had gone the more direct route by bringing the hammer down on Gerard Smyth.
I heard him again, although this time it didn’t sound anywhere near as pompous as the first time. A dying man, if he is any kind of man, will live beyond the law. Maybe at the end he’d decided to live beyond fear too, heard them out as they made their threats and then told them, in that wheezy gasp, fixing them with those rheumy eyes, to take a good long fuck at themselves.
I hoped he had. I really did.
Martin was smoking up a storm on the other end of the line. ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘how come whoever broke in knew to come looking for the file in your apartment?’
‘I’m guessing Smyth told them I had it.’
‘Right. But how did they hear about it in the first place?’
And that was when I realized that, in among all the missed calls and text messages, one caller was notable by his absence.
Jack Byrne.
We talked it through. Had Jack Byrne tried to hack in somewhere he shouldn’t and been tracked down? Possibly. Equally likely was a scenario in which Jack the Player tried to play a few more angles, covering his bets, and dropped a nugget of information in someone’s lap that bumped us all up into the big leagues and nudged Gerard Smyth off the towpath into the canal.
‘And you haven’t heard from him since,’ Martin said.
‘Not since yesterday morning, when he sent me Smyth’s address.’
‘Doesn’t look good, does it?�
��
‘No, it doesn’t.’
I could hear the slappity-slap of Martin’s slippers as he shuffled around, the sound of running water as he prepped a coffee. ‘The big question,’ he said, ‘is why it’s all kicked off now.’
There was that. Smyth had put in an official request to the British and German embassies months ago, and got no more attention than a brush-off and a pat on the head. What had changed since then to justify the murder of an old man to keep his account of an ancient war crime under wraps?
‘Shay Govern,’ Martin said.
‘Right. Because he wants to go public with it.’
‘And the guy’s worth a fortune. An American philanthropist. I mean, he’d be missed. So they can’t go dunking him in any canals, can they?’
‘I don’t suppose they can.’
‘And the same goes for you, and Emily, if you’re standing there beside him. Am I right?’
‘That’s the theory, yeah.’
‘I don’t like it,’ he said.
‘I’m not exactly turning cartwheels myself.’
‘I mean,’ he said, ‘I don’t like you dragging Emily into it.’
Martin was a good guy, always keen to avoid causing offence, even accidentally. But he had his principles and I’d crossed a line.
‘I didn’t have much choice at the time,’ I said. It sounded weak even to me.
‘I get that, Tom. Heat of the moment and so forth. But now?’
It was a bad time, I believed, to mention that I’d be having breakfast with Seanie the Clown’s handler, the guy with the inside track on Shay Govern. ‘It is what it is, Martin.’
‘OK, but it doesn’t have to be. Tell me where you are, I’ll come get her.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s a bit of a hike.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Where are you?’
The likelihood that Kee or anyone else was listening in was slim. So I told him.
‘Grand,’ he said. ‘Traffic should be light enough on a Sunday. I’ll be there in about four, five hours.’
‘I owe you big-time, Martin.’
‘Yes you do. Just don’t do anything else stupid until I get there, OK?’