The Lost and the Blind

by Declan Burke

  Kee stood behind me, huddled into her coat despite the warming sun. On edge as she scanned the waterfront, eyes cold above a fixed grin.

  ‘Why don’t you just get out a flag?’ I said. ‘Or a bullhorn, let them know we’re coming.’

  ‘You think they’re not watching for you?’

  ‘Who, the spooks? Here?’

  ‘You were supposed to take a hint, Tom. Walk away. Except you’ve walked away and somehow wound up on Delphi.’

  She made a good point. Still, I found it hard to believe that the break-in crew, however smooth they might be, were sufficiently resourced and prepared that they’d be able to track me all the way to north Donegal, and have people already in place when I got there. I said as much.

  ‘And anyway,’ I went on, ‘if they’d wanted to hit me, they could have done it last night, or this morning. Unless you think they held off because of Emily.’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘probably not. So if they are here, then they’ll be waiting to see what happens next.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I sit down with Shay Govern and get his story on record. Then I bang it off into the ether in an email, CC-ing a couple of people I can trust, including Father Iggy Patton. Anything happens to me, it all tumbles out.’

  ‘That’s your plan.’

  ‘So far. And lose that smile, you look deranged.’

  ‘I’m on honeymoon, remember?’

  ‘With me, though.’

  She switched off the smile, looked me up and down. ‘I’ve been on honeymoon with worse,’ she said.

  ‘Atta girl.’

  We hadn’t had the most auspicious start to our shotgun coupling. Kee was sturdier than she looked, could throw a proper punch, and there was a swelling below my left eye that was throbbing now and would be a juicy dark plum later on. Still, she’d been entitled, and besides it was the kind of detail that would confirm that we’d recently been in the vicinity of an Irish wedding.

  The ferry tied up and Kee rolled the car down on to terra firma, up on to the pier. There she paused. On our left, tucked in under the sheer headland, was a large car park sparsely populated by cars, some of them under tied-down canvas coverings, along with a couple of small trucks and a handful of camper vans. At its entrance we found a topographical map informing us that Delphi boasted no more than a single road that was navigable by car, which encircled the island and hugged the coast all the way round. Otherwise the interior was essentially a steep-sloped pine-covered mountain accessible only by footpaths and hiking trails, with a single donkey path leading straight up from the rear of the village to a viewing point high on the cliffs above.

  The village itself, we discovered as we strolled back from the car park, was a jumble of houses and B&Bs, one hotel and a few pubs, with some cafés and restaurants lining the seafront. The narrow streets had been laid down when the ass and cart was the height of vehicular sophistication, and while there were signs announcing that delivery vehicles were allowed access during business hours, the streets were pedestrianized from six in the evening until nine in the morning. The house fronts were all whitewashed, with doors and window frames picked out in reds, greens and yellows. The street was so quiet that we could hear our footsteps above the murmurs of conversation inside as we passed.

  The young receptionist at the only hotel – Nuala, from the name tag on her bottle-green waistcoat – greeted us as Gaeilge and made an appropriate fuss when Kee flashed her ring and announced we were taking an ad-hoc honeymoon, wandering wherever the wind and the mood took us. We paid for two nights, cash advance.

  I put a bit of a dent in her brisk bonhomie when I asked if she’d put me through to Shay Govern’s room.

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t have a Mr Govern staying with us at this time,’ she said after checking the computer, although I was pretty sure, this early in the season, she’d know the few guests by sight. ‘Might he have checked in under another name?’

  ‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘He’s an elderly gentleman, American, very dapper.’

  She was shaking her head as I spoke. ‘We have no one with us like that at the moment.’

  ‘Is there another hotel? He might have gone to the wrong place.’

  ‘We’re the only hotel,’ she said, ‘but there are B&Bs. Would you like me to ring around and see if I can track him down?’

  ‘No, that’s fine. I have his number. I’ll ring him myself.’

  But when I rang, strolling over to the display case on the other side of the lobby that stocked leaflets and flyers advertising the island’s points of interest, the call went straight to his answering service.

  I left a message telling him I was on the island and looking forward to seeing him again and gave him our room number.

  It all seemed a little odd. Sure, there could have been innocent reasons for his not taking my call. He might have been taking a nap, or switched off his phone for a meeting. But why would he avoid the hotel? Shay Govern didn’t strike me as a man who’d eschew the relative luxury of Delphi’s only hotel for the homely comforts of a B&B.

  Had he been intercepted or abducted before he made it this far? Possibly, but why? The man was on his way to Delphi to announce funding for the biggest investment the island had ever seen. Who’d want to screw around with that? The only likely candidate I knew of was Franco Govern, who’d already told me that he knew his brother was on Delphi. Except that would mean Franco had taken breakfast with me as some kind of elaborate and entirely unnecessary double-bluff, which didn’t seem to be Franco’s style.

  So, yes, it was all a little odd.

  We’d asked for a room overlooking the harbour. It was on the second floor, which was also the top floor, and came with a tiny balcony with wrought-iron railings. The balcony only really worked as a balcony if you opened back the double windows and sat inside looking out, but the view – sight lines, according to Kee – was across the seafront to the harbour, the pier and the dog-leg breakwater built from those massive stones. To our left, when I leaned out over the railing and craned my neck, the village ran out along the shore like awkward pearls nowhere joined but invisibly strung.

  The room was small and warm, low-lit, the bed too big for the space but soft and piled with duvets and plump cushions. Which was the first problem, because it meant Kee and I would have to share or someone would have to kip on the hard-backed chair.

  The second problem was that Kee seemed to think she was running the show, laying down ground rules about how we’d behave when out and about.

  When she’d finished I said, ‘Kee, you need to get your head around the fact that they already know we’re on the island. Or if they don’t now, they’ll know it five seconds after I touch base with Shay Govern.’

  ‘Humour me,’ she said. ‘You’ll live longer.’

  There was a mocking edge to her tone, but it was an edge all the same. When she went to the bathroom to freshen up, I lay out on the bed with my arms behind my head and offered up a silent prayer of thanks to the noble knight Martin Banks as he escorted my secret princess very far away from the island of Delphi.

  I must have dozed off. A harsh click brought me back fast. The kind of dry grating you associate with a gun. A hammer cocked, a slide racked.

  Kee was sitting at the desk, the laptop pushed to one side to make room for one of the bathroom towels. A small plastic bag with the logo Toher’s Chemist to one side. She was slipping the magazine out of a gun, checking there was nothing in the chamber. Then she eased off the slide and placed it on the towel, went rummaging in the plastic bag. She gave the slide and the barrel a clean with a baby wipe, coming up with a faint oily residue, and went after the corners very gently with a Q-Tip. Then she produced a small can of three-in-one oil, squeezed in four separate drops, slid the barrel back into place and clipped home the spring. She gave it all a minute or so to dry. Once the gun was reassembled she racked the slide three or four times and stuck it into the belt at the small of her
back, squirming a little until she got it comfortable.

  ‘Not ideal,’ she said, cleaning her hands on another baby wipe, ‘but it’ll hold for now.’

  ‘You really know how to kill a honeymoon buzz, don’t you?’

  ‘Try a gun jamming when some bastard’s trying to blow your head off. That’ll kill your buzz all right.’

  Sounding bitter, like she’d been through it. I eased myself off the bed, padded across the room to the kettle. ‘Coffee?’ I said.

  ‘I’ll take a tea if there’s one going.’

  I filled the kettle in the bathroom and knocked it on, got the coffee sachets and teabags organized.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Ask.’

  ‘Ask what?’

  ‘To hold it.’

  ‘The Glock?’

  An amused shimmering in the grey eyes. ‘You know it’s a Glock?’

  ‘Standard issue, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll give you that one. But the answer is no.’

  ‘Fine by me. I wasn’t asking.’

  ‘Sure you weren’t.’

  ‘Guns aren’t really my thing.’

  She got a bang out of that. ‘So if I was to take us up into the hills, set up a few tin cans and tell you to take three shots, you’re saying you wouldn’t do it?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Strike one for Kee,’ she said. ‘I had you down for the homo-erotic type.’

  ‘Those hunches ever work out for you?’

  ‘I’m usually right, yeah.’ A wry grin. ‘Which means they rarely work out. Anyway,’ she said, ‘Shay Govern.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Just a couple of things for when you sit down with him. You’ve used the Record function on your phone before, right?’

  ‘You want me to tape the conversation?’

  ‘Of course.’ Kee took another sip of tea, wrinkled her nose and set it down on the desk. ‘Look, Tom, don’t start with the ethical bullshit, or whatever it was kind of bullshit you were about to get cracking on with. OK? You are where you are, and we need you to do this. And besides, all we’re asking is that you have the exact same conversation you were going to have with him anyway, except you’ll be recording it.’ She shrugged. ‘I mean, you could probably get his permission to record the conversation if you wanted, tell him it’s all for the book. Except then, he knows the tape’s running, he’ll be a little more cautious about what he’s saying. You don’t tell him, then he feels free to say whatever he wants. He’s thinking, worst-case scenario, if he says something he shouldn’t, incriminatory, it’s all deniable, your word against his.’

  ‘We already have Gerard Smyth’s word,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Sure thing. Except Gerard Smyth isn’t in any position to testify in court, is he? Also, and unless you’ve been playing silly buggers, Smyth never mentioned any gold.’

  ‘Exactly. I mean, that’s what I’m asking. How come you’re chasing this gold when the only eye-witness account doesn’t say anything about it?’

  ‘Alleged eye-witness account.’

  ‘Split hairs all you want, there’s still no one talking about any gold.’

  She got up from the chair and went to the window, opened it and stepped out onto the balcony. Leaned forward, gripping the rail, inhaling deeply. Then she turned and folded her arms, talking back into the room, so that she was dark against the sky, her face in shadow. ‘You heard Smyth’s story first, right? And then Franco Govern wades in with this story about missing bullion.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘It came to us the other way round.’

  She named no names, partly for my own safety, partly because they’d mean nothing to me. Sloggers from the Long War, who’d done their time, still had the whiff of cordite in their nostrils. ‘Let’s just say they watched the pie being carved and got fed up waiting for their slice. Or with a few crumbs, when other people were buying holiday homes in Donegal or the Algarve, and setting themselves up in business with start-up capital delivered in sacks of cash.’ An edge to her tone now, although shadowed as her face was, I couldn’t make out her eyes, her expression. ‘Or getting themselves boosted on to the gravy train in Brussels, say.’

  Whispers and rumours and anonymous calls. The Revenue passing along allegations of a corner cut here, a shell company there. ‘Nothing anyone might be jailed for, yeah? But enough, once in a while, for CAB to clean out a bank account or freeze some assets, maybe force a repossession. Not putting anyone in the poorhouse or starting a war, but, y’know, keeping people on their toes. Letting them know the rug could be pulled out any time.’

  The word about the Delphi gold had wafted down the line one fine day, and flagged as a maybe. When it popped up again a couple of months later, it was upgraded to possible.

  ‘Next thing we know, Shay Govern is sniffing around Delphi talking gold mines. So Govern gets a background check and we discover that he’s donated his fair share to Noraid and whatnot back in the day. It might be a coincidence, they happen all the time, but we have to take a look, don’t we?’

  ‘And then Gerard Smyth pops up.’

  ‘Seems a little off, doesn’t it? This massacre no one has ever heard of on an island about ten people knew existed. And yeah, it just pops up out of nowhere.’

  ‘You don’t believe it.’

  ‘I’m not not believing it. For now everything’s on the table until it’s not. But it feels wrong, yeah. Like someone’s trying to force it.’

  ‘Force what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Draw attention to Delphi, get people talking about it. Get a couple of journalists up here,’ she nodded at me, ‘poking around. Maybe even a TV crew. All of which would make it a lot harder for anyone to pull up the gold.’

  ‘Except Smyth doesn’t mention any gold.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘If you were Smyth, I mean. Or whoever’s behind Smyth. Like, say you were inventing a story about some German sailor and a submarine on a secret mission. It’d be a bit much if he knew all the ins and outs of the operation. Right? And once he starts waffling on about all the bullion stashed in the hold, you’d be thinking, Really? They told the sailors about it?’

  ‘So the fact that he doesn’t reference it makes it more probable that it was there.’

  ‘I’m saying that it makes the story more plausible than if he does mention it. That’s all.’

  ‘Except he’s dead. And if it was a con, why would anyone want to tip him into a canal?’

  ‘That we don’t know. We also don’t know that it wasn’t a tragic accident.’

  ‘It’d be a bit of a coincidence, though. A very convenient coincidence.’

  She shrugged, and came forward off the balcony rail, stepping into the room. Her face, her expression visible now. ‘It’s like I said, Tom,’ she said with that bittersweet smile she’d very probably be wearing when the priest arrived to give her the last rites, ‘coincidences happen all the time.’

  EIGHTEEN

  It was just after two thirty when we strolled out of the hotel and turned up a side alley, away from the seafront. A pleasant afternoon, still warm and sunny, with a hint of briny tang on the breeze whisking in off the lough. The whitewashed houses and shop fronts reminded me of Greek villages I’d been to over the years, the narrow streets winding back on themselves and intersected by alleyways, the apparently chaotic planning designed to confound pirates and sundry other seaborne attackers. There had been Greeks on Delphi back in the day, according to the tourist literature available in the hotel lobby, traders who had sailed around from Cornwall via the Cork coast, drawn by rumours of the copper mines on the north coast. They’d had plenty of foreign visitors since – Celts and Vikings, the English, and even some Spanish, swimming ashore from the sinking remnants of their ill-fated armada, wrecked in the storms off the unforgiving Donegal coast.

  And then, if Gerard Smyth was to be believed, there was the handful of Germans who’d turned up on the night of 4 April 1940
.

  There were enough tourists around for us to blend in. The pubs and restaurants were quiet at that hour of the day, but there were three or four cafés, two art galleries that seemed to specialize in seascapes by island artists, an antiques shop that also offered sculptures hand-carved from sea-bleached wood, a visitors’ centre, a couple of ice-cream shops, and an outlet that sold tapestries hand-woven on the working loom in the back room. It was a tourist trap, certainly, but the atmosphere was congenial, and the smiles and welcomes were either genuine or brilliantly faked.

  The mood lent itself to aimless sauntering, and the layout made it very easy – as per Kee’s instructions – to pause and glance into a shop window and check the street behind in its reflection, or abruptly about-turn for no good reason other than to peer again at a galleon tossed on a stormy sea, or double back down a cobbled alleyway in the spirit of exploration. All of which we did without seeing the same face behind us twice, or anyone ducking out of sight into a doorway. Which meant we wasn’t being followed, or whoever was following was much better at their job than we were at catching them out.

  We took a table outside one of the cafés on what they called the village square, even though it was a balloon-shaped cobble-stoned plaza that narrowed in a gentle incline to the steep steps of the tiny whitewashed church, one of the few buildings in the village not shouldered about by its neighbours, the gravel-chip paths on either side allowing it some breathing space. To its left was a small bakery, on the right a hostel with an Alpine-style balcony running the full width of the second storey. The bell tower that rose over the front door was small enough to seem humble, or even apologetic, in its domination of the square, perhaps because the church appeared to have been built into the base of a sheer wall of striated rock that loomed high over the church, the tower and the village itself.