A Day in the Life of Louis Bloom

by Paul Charles

  ‘That’s how you did it, Mr Woyda, but why did you do it?’ McCusker asked.

  ‘Plain and simple,’ Noah Woyda offered, ‘he stole something of mine and it was something I could never get back.’

  ‘What, you mean your wife?’ McCusker asks.

  ‘No, no, not at all,’ Noah spat, shaking his head furiously, ‘nor even her love, for he surely stole that as well. No, the unforgivable thing he stole was my respect. I couldn’t let him get away with that.’

  ‘But you’ll go to prison,’ McCusker said, not prepared to just let it go.

  ‘Prison? No biggie! Easy peasy,’ Noah said, laughing. ‘I’ll plead guilty, I’ll be an ideal prisoner and I’ll be out in six years max. My business will run itself, so I’ll enjoy putting my feet up and having a bit of break from the rat race. It’ll do me the world of good.’

  Right there, just right there, McCusker thought – that’s the big problem.

  Woyda genuinely believed Louis Bloom’s end justified the means. Bloom’s murderer clearly lacked a conscience. Nor did he seem to have battled with the big issue that had troubled McCusker since he first became a member of the RUC: how does one human take another’s life?

  McCusker also recognised that Noah Woyda wanted to come across as a bit of a “bloke” and if you didn’t know what he had done, you might even think he was a “decent bloke”, in a salt of the Earth kind of way. In a different world he might have tried to network himself into a friendship with the detective. McCusker had always felt that in order to take someone’s life, you needed to have a dark side. But Noah Woyda didn’t have a dark side, an inner conflict that the successful businessman side needed to fight with. So now McCusker wasn’t quite so sure. In fact, in this case a distinct lack of any conscience at all made so much more sense.

  This thought, this realisation, of the modern criminal was the scariest concern the detective had ever hosted. The brutal ordinariness of the modern murderer was frightening in a way McCusker never thought possible. The lack of intelligence, coupled with this whole sense of entitlement – the “I can do what I want, when I want” attitude and ultimately the idea that modern life was cheap – was truly unbelievable.

  McCusker had always thought that a murderer would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, haunted by ghosts of the dead or by their own conscience. They would surely re-trace all their steps, all their movements. In the resultant examinations, their victims would come alive again and stand as their judges.

  But Noah Woyda most definitely wasn’t worried about burning in Hell. In the first place, he probably didn’t even believe that Hell existed. Woyda would most likely have claimed that Hell was a place invented by parents to scare their children – when the children were at an age that they would believe them – just so they would be good.

  McCusker said as much to O’Carroll after they’d finished their work in the interview room and Woyda had been led away to be processed.

  ‘That’s your problem, McCusker,’ she said, ‘you and he both think you know that he’s not going to burn in Hell. In your case, so much so in fact that you’ve made it your vocation in life to make sure that he’s going somewhere, even if it’s only to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, and for no matter how little a period of time it turns out to be. Yes, your priority will be to try to ensure that for as long as humanly possible, his lack of conscience doesn’t cause anyone else to lose their life.’

  Chapter Fourty-Seven

  About six weeks later, DI Lily O’Carroll received a call from Mariana Fitzgerald. She told O’Carroll that her hip and leg had mended quite well and there were no after-effects. Mariana had remembered her promise to O’Carroll to introduce her to a few decent men. With that in mind she invited the detective to a social event at Queens. Independent of this, McCusker received an invite to the same event from the Vice-Chancellor. His invite included a “plus one”. Angela Larkin also received an invite for her and her husband, from her sister Elizabeth Bloom. This was how, on the first Friday of December, DI Lily O’Carroll, Superintendent Niall Larkin and his wife Angela, and McCusker and Grace O’Carroll all joined the good and the great of Belfast in the spectacular wood, brick and glass Canada Room in the eaves of the Lanyon Building, QUB.

  The event had been organised to celebrate the life and times of Louis Bloom. Louis, in his Will, had ensured that both his wife, Elizabeth, and his lover, Murcia Woyda, would be comfortable for the remainder of their days. However, he had left the bulk of his estate to Queens, some of it to be used to build a new building (in the style of the Lanyon), beside the McClay Library. The new building would house three new lecture theatres. The majority of the endowment would go to seeking out deserving students and financing their academic lives at Queens. Both the building and the endowment would be in the name of The Bloom Family Trust, citing Sidney, Miles Bloom and Louis Bloom. Each of the three new lecture theatres would, in perpetuity, take one of the Bloom names.

  In addition, Mrs Elizabeth Bloom – minus her normal croaky plus-one for functions – announced that she was donating the advance and all future royalties on Louis’ book to the university, insisting all funds were to be used to directly benefit students. She claimed, barely able to contain her tears, it was what Louis would have wanted.

  As the O’Carroll sisters and McCusker arrived at the Lanyon Building and made their way through the entrance hall in the direction of the staircase, Lily was distracted once again by the statue, still deep in thought.

  ‘I used to think that Galileo was just a character Brian Kennedy sang a song about,’ she admitted.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Grace, in turn, said to McCusker, ‘of course my sister is not that dumb and she knows full well who Galileo is – she’s just trying out a new chat-up line for later.’

  When they entered the classic old world styled Canada Room, they were hit with a wave of sights, sounds and scents of the buzzing masses. All those in attendance were rushing around with their wine glasses and dainty canapés. As a voice and volume of one, they sounded like they were speaking in foreign tongues, but to McCusker, they were all merely seeking the same nirvana, the look of love from someone, from anyone.

  ‘All these wonderful boys and girls just trying to find the right boys and girls,’ was how Lily O’Carroll succinctly put it. ‘We’re all people just out looking for someone to come home to.’

  ‘It’s been a while since any of us could be termed as boys and girls,’ Grace quipped back.

  Pretty soon they came upon Mariana Fitzgerald at the centre of a group of people, which included her husband. She happily broke away to join McCusker and the O’Carroll sisters.

  ‘Murcia is getting on okay. Elizabeth Bloom was enlightened enough to invite her to tonight’s event, but Murcia was too shy to attend, I think she’s only come to realise just how much she loved Louis,’ Mariana offered in her quiet voice, which was difficult to hear due to the volume of the chatter in the room. They all instinctively drew in closer. ‘The jury is still out on my husband,’ she explained, when Lily asked how they were getting on, now that she had discovered his and Woyda’s plans for the manse. ‘I can’t work out if he’s a good man who had a temporary lapse of playing the fool, or if playing the fool is a terminal issue. Either way, I’ve decided to delay a decision until after our hearing. I’m contesting Noah Woyda’s right to the freehold of the manse, on the grounds that I was the joint owner and I wasn’t consulted. In light of what just happened, my solicitor…’ she stopped dead in her tracks, ‘Oh look, Lily, it’s Oisin … or maybe Darragh… Toal! I can never tell them apart! Either of them would be a perfect catch, let me introduce you!’ And just like that, she whisked Lily away.

  Grace and McCusker walked a few circumferences of the room and in the course of doing so, they met and chatted briefly to Leab David, the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Vincent Best, Angela and Niall Larkin, Gary and Eilish Mills, and Harry and Sophie Rubens (who apologised once again for not being able to recall the
layout of the MAC). Grace was convinced that every time McCusker bumped into her from then on, Sophie would always apologise.

  They even bumped into Thomas Chada and his date, Siobhan. Thomas took great pains to introduce McCusker to Siobhan and then, as he stared at Grace, unconsciously nodding his approval, he offered ‘I can see now why you knew exactly what I was talking about.’

  Later again they sought out Lily to say goodnight, before heading off for a quiet supper at their favourite eatery, the popular Café Conor, so that they could continue their discussion about their search for a new home – together.

  Before they left they eventually found Lily, still with Mariana, and they were deep in what sounded to McCusker dangerously like a golf conversation with three men. As he and Grace drew closer to the quintet, McCusker could very clearly hear Lily O’Carroll say:

  ‘When Rory talks about his game of golf before and during a match, you know, when he tries to justify his play, well then eight times out of ten he will lose the game. When he keeps himself to himself before and during the game and doesn’t get drawn into anything deep, during his contracted interviews, well, that’s when he wins. That’s because he’s playing pure golf and not preoccupied with fulfilling his own sound-bites.’

  This is not the end of the story; it is just where we leave it.