by Declan Burke
Carol closed her eyes, then exhaled long and slow. When she opened them again she was staring at me with a hatred so cold I half-believed she was about to smash her champagne glass on the table and set about me with the jagged shards.
Instead she lowered it to the table with a shaking hand and sat down. ‘Christ, Tom,’ she whispered.
Except it was clear from his expression that I wasn’t telling Shay Govern anything he didn’t already know. I’d expected him to dispute what I’d said, that he would need to be cajoled into accepting that he hadn’t had to live with a terrible burden of guilt his entire life. And then, belatedly perhaps, tears of relief, of joy, as the realization of what it truly meant began to seep in.
Instead he simply put down his glass and reached for the Montblanc, sat down and pulled the contract to him.
‘Shay?’ Franco said. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
‘Is that it, Tom?’ Shay said.
‘There’s more, yeah. But you might want to hear it in private.’
He took a firmer grip on the fountain pen, signed the contract with a flourish and laid the pen down. Then he slid the leather-bound folder across in front of Franco.
‘You don’t think,’ Shay said, ‘that my brother deserves to know?’
So Shay knew. Had known all along.
‘Know what?’ Franco demanded.
‘I shouldn’t be the one to say it,’ I said.
Shay acknowledged that with a brief nod. ‘Sit down,’ he told Franco, ‘and sign the contract.’
‘Not until someone tells me what’s going on.’
So Shay told him. The words coming easy, a brook babbling over smooth pebbles. As if he had been rehearsing the speech in his mind for many years. How he’d always known the children hadn’t died that night. How it had seemed simpler in the beginning to exaggerate the effects of his concussion and allow people to leach off his ignorance. That he was happy to pay a blood debt that didn’t exist if it meant the truth stayed buried.
Or the lie, rather.
He’d told the islanders the truth when he’d said the man known as Richter wasn’t long returned from Berlin before that night, and that he’d lived there for two years, an IRA man plotting with his enemy’s enemy.
Where Shay had lied was in saying that he knew very little about Richter, a Belfast man he’d only met for the first time three days before.
Richter, also known as Peter McGovern, IRA commander and Shay’s father.
‘I didn’t mean to kill him,’ he said. ‘The church was burning and he was running towards it with his gun drawn. It was madness, and all I wanted to do was make him realize that.’
He’d planned to loose a burst over his father’s head. But he had never fired a Schmeisser before. A heavy weapon, far heavier than he was familiar with from shooting rabbits in the hills. It bucked in his hands and damn near broke his wrists.
He had no memory of being struck. The next thing he remembered was coming to and seeing his father sprawled on the cobbles and the full horror dawning.
The rest we knew.
‘You have my blessing, Tom,’ Shay said. ‘To put it all in there.’ He picked up the Montblanc and handed it to Franco. ‘Sign it,’ he said.
‘You knew all along?’ Franco said. His voice was a rasp. The eyes were ghastly, bright and dry.
Shay nodded.
‘And you never told me?’
‘It was my burden, Franco. How could I ask you to carry it?’
Franco seemed to have trouble swallowing. He picked up the pen, then stretched out an arm and clasped Shay around the neck and drew his brother into a hug that was almost brutal in its intensity.
‘Jesus, Shay. Jesus fucking Christ.’
A sob broke from Shay Govern, a cry that had been buried for seventy years and came out bellowing, a wordless wail.
Franco closed his eyes. ‘I know,’ he shushed. ‘I know.’
It was all over in a heartbeat. Franco clenched his arm around Shay’s neck and drove the Montblanc so far into his brother’s eye that the titanium barrel buckled and snapped in two.
Eoin gaped and began to swing the shotgun around but he was slow and he was clumsy and my hand was already in the small of my back, the automatic there with the safety off.
Franco was no more than a yard away across the table, his eyes closed, chin resting on the top of his brother’s head.
I put two in Franco’s face.
One for Martin, one for hate.
TWENTY-NINE
I heard the boat before it appeared, a dull throb beyond the western headland. Shaded my eyes and watched it turn in a slow wide arc into the bay. Skeletal and black coming out of the sun.
‘Emily? Rikki-tik, love. Let’s go.’
Rikki-tik was our new code word – do it now, upstairs, no questions asked.
She’d grown taller, or at least leggier, in the past five months, tanned by the breeze that swirled up the Swilly and scoured the little bay huddled beneath the cliffs. Now she sprang to her feet, tossing away the shells she’d been gathering, and ran lightly up the wind-warped steps on to the wooden gallery, past me and into the cottage. Exactly as rehearsed, every day for the past five months or so.
I put down the plane and blew some sawdust from the slab of driftwood that would, I was hoping, reveal itself as something useful one of these days. The plane went into the toolbox at my feet and out came the stubby automatic. I stood and went down the steps on to the beach, watching the boat come, standing sideways on with my left shoulder to the breeze, as Kee had instructed, this to present a thinner target and to hide the gun in my right hand and flush against my thigh.
‘He’d need to be a hell of a shot and Lotto-lucky to hit you from a moving boat,’ she’d said. ‘So don’t panic. Let him come. By the time he’s close enough to do any damage you’ll have a fair idea that that’s his plan. And you’ll be the one standing on solid ground.’
Good advice, provided he arrived in daylight, by boat, and came alone.
‘Anyone tries to come down there in the dark,’ she’d said, craning her neck to stare up at the craggy black cliffs, ‘you’ll probably find that a spade will be more useful than a gun.’
Now Kee raised a hand from the stern, throttled back on the outboard and allowed the boat to drift into shore. She threw me a line, watched me weigh it down with a flat rock, then stepped out into the water barefoot with her jeans rolled up to her knees, and trudged up on to the sand.
‘Still here,’ she said.
‘Still here.’
‘Girl Friday?’
‘Inside.’
‘Good.’
We scuffed up the beach through the soft sand, up on to the wooden gallery. Kee took a seat at the table and I went inside to put the kettle on, called Emily out from the bedroom. When I got back outside with a couple of mugs of piping black coffee and a cold apple juice, they were staring at one another across the table like a lion tamer facing down a new lion, although which was which was hard to say.
‘Do you want to stay and chat with Alison, love?’
‘No thanks.’
‘All right. Off you go.’
She went, taking her juice-box with her, sucking on the straw as she headed back down the beach to her precious collection of shells. Kee reached into her shoulder bag and took out a newspaper, the Irish Times. She laid it on the table already folded back to page nine.
A coroner’s report into the death of Mr Francis Govern, an Irish-American businessman from Boston, Massachusetts, has returned a verdict of death by misadventure.
The body of Mr Govern washed ashore on a beach south of Buncrana on Lough Swilly on 19 August last.
Mr Govern, an experienced sailor, went missing with his older brother Shay Govern, the CEO of Govern Industries, last April, during a short holiday in which they were tracing their family tree in Donegal. The pair rented a boat on Delphi Island and went fishing, and the alarm was raised when they failed to return that evening.
/> Letterkenny’s Coroner’s Court was informed that decomposition was so advanced that Mr Francis Govern’s skeletal remains were identified from dental records.
Mr Shay Govern is also presumed drowned.
Mr Francis Govern is survived by his wife and …
‘Drowning again?’ I said. ‘You’d want to be careful; you’ll wear out the motif.’
‘It’s a coincidence, Tom.’
‘Right. I hear they happen all the time.’ I wondered who’d been given the job of battering in Franco Govern’s skull so badly that the bullet holes didn’t show. ‘So what now?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t have to tell you there’ll be no book on Sebastian Devereaux. Or do I?’
‘You just did.’
‘Of course, if you were to write it as a novel, change a few names, a few dates …’
‘I’ll bear that in mind, thanks.’
We sipped our coffee. Kee watched Emily play. ‘She’s grown,’ she said.
‘All that fresh air and healthy living.’
‘Shouldn’t she be back at school by now?’
‘That’s next week. First Monday in September. Rachel’s coming up for a long weekend, taking her home.’
‘What’ll you do then?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If you’re going to be at a loose end …’
‘Go on.’
She hummed and hawed and hedged it around with so many ifs and buts that by the time she was finished I reckoned I needed a machete to get at the truth of it. But what it sounded like was a proposal for some kind of keyboard-warrior agent provocateur, an electronic coat-trailer prowling the wilder fringes of the Web to see if I couldn’t raise a banner or two, and draw out some like-minded lunatics and fellow despoilers of the Constitution. Black ops, although in this case the shades would be rather more lurid than grey.
I let it lie for a while and drank my coffee, then said, ‘Why me?’
‘You write spy thrillers, Tom. Think of it as a never-ending novel.’
‘No, that part I get. What I’m asking is why you think I might give a shit.’
‘Well, we thought, y’know …’
‘What? That I’m blooded now?’
‘I wouldn’t put it as crudely as all that, no.’
‘Think again. I did what I did because Franco put Emily’s life on the line. Because if he got away with it once, he might feel like he could try it again.’
‘There’s plenty more Francos, Tom.’
‘I’m sure there are.’
‘Not your problem, right?’
‘Not unless they come after my daughter.’
‘Which is highly unlikely.’
‘I’d imagine so. And the less time I spend flushing crazies out of the electronic undergrowth the less likely it’ll get.’
‘Can’t say I blame you,’ she said. ‘But it was worth a try.’ She gestured at the copy of the Irish Times on the table. ‘You want to hold on to that?’
‘Sure. I need to catch up on the football results.’
I walked her down the beach to the boat, hauled it in and held it steady while she climbed aboard. She got herself settled in the stern, and only then, when it was clear she was leaving, did Emily come trotting down the beach.
‘Bye, Alison,’ she said, giving a shy half-wave.
‘See you later, Emily. Take care of your dad.’
‘I will.’
‘Tell him he needs a holiday, he looks exhausted.’
‘All right.’
‘If he needs any ideas of where to go, tell him Cyprus is lovely in September. Especially Turtle Bay, it’s not too far from Kyrenia on the northern coast.’
‘Are there really turtles?’
‘Loads of them. I’ll send you a postcard when I get there in a couple of weeks, OK?’
‘OK.’
Kee brushed her fringe from her eyes, gave Emily a big smile and waved goodbye. Emily waved goodbye too, perhaps a little too enthusiastically to qualify as polite.
‘See you, Tom.’
‘You take care, Kee.’
I tossed her the painter and shoved her off, and when she’d drifted far enough she tugged on the outboard’s rip-cord. The motor roared to life, the boat arced around, and two minutes later she was turning out of the bay and around the western headland again.
‘Daddy?’ Emily said as we trudged back up towards the house.
‘Yes?’
‘What does exhausted mean?’
‘Tired, love. Very, very tired.’
‘Are you exhausted?’
‘I am, yeah.’
She found my hand, gave it a squeeze. ‘Maybe you should go to Cyprus. To see all the turtles.’
‘Maybe I will, love. Maybe I will.’