by Menon, David
Barry’s office was above the first dealership he’d opened which was just off the main Chester road in Sale. It was the smallest of his three sites with the other two being in Stockport and Middleton and located next to out of town shopping areas. His ‘BM Cars’ brand was one of the biggest in the Greater Manchester area and he was soon going to expand to Warrington and also Bury. Plans for both were in their final stages and were done deals bar the shouting. Barry loved negotiating. It gave him such an exhilarating feeling to get one over on the bankers and the council authorities who tried to screw him before they’d signed on the dotted line and realised that they were the ones who’d been screwed. Barry was a fair minded guy but he was running a business not a charity.
His wife Tabitha was born and bred in Alderley Edge. She was beautiful and any man would be happy to have her on his arm. Barry considered himself blessed that she’d even looked at the likes of him twice but deep down he suspected that his wallet had more than a little to do with it. But Tabitha was pure upper middle class English and her whole family, nice as they were, had no regard for the wider world or the struggles that some in the world have to go through just to survive and have a place to live. They had no comprehension of what it felt like for their community to be crushed by what was seen as an occupying power. He’d once tried to tell Tabitha that when he was younger he hadn’t been able to get a decent job back home in Northern Ireland simply because he was a Catholic and even worse, one from a working class area. He’d tried to explain to her that working class Catholics had been the lowest of the pecking order. She really hadn’t understood what he was talking about. She’d looked at him with a glazed look as if he was speaking a foreign language she had no way of comprehending. Then when he told her of the two week holiday he’d booked for them in Mauritius she’d come back to life. He’d smiled. Tabitha was beautiful. But it really was only skin deep.
Tabitha’s family were the typical upper middle class English types who’d never had to sail through stormy seas that weren’t of their own making. Daddy had his own business. Mum had been a stay at home Mum. Tabitha had married a wealthy man who she hoped would never need her to go out to work. Barry was going to try and see to it that his daughter Georgina would steer a different path from the one her mother was mapping out for her. He didn’t want her future to remain around the same narrow world of her mother and grandmother who only seemed interested in makeup, nails, clothes and getting into the pages of Cheshire Life. No, he wanted his daughter to think about much more than that. He was going to make sure she did well at school and went on to university and a proper career that was a million miles away from what any of the kids he’d grown up with had ever been able to imagine. A world which her mother and grandmother had rejected out of sheer intellectual laziness.
Today had been his Mammy’s birthday. He would never forget her beautiful, angelic face. Barry was only eight years old when his father was killed in a car accident. He was the oldest of five kids and it was in the middle of ‘the troubles’. The streets had erupted in violence that was only termed terrorism if it wasn’t committed by the British Army. They of course were only there to uphold the law and fight the upstart Irish nationalists who’d dared to demand their equality and human rights in a province ruled by so-called loyalists to a British state that acted both inside and outside the so-called law. It was funny how throughout all the years of nationalist people struggling to survive against a system that was stacked against them from the outset the British state never did anything to help them. But as soon as the loyalists began to sense that the lowlife Catholics were savvy and using the education system to pull themselves ahead they demanded assistance to keep them in the falsely superior position they were used to. As soon as they began to see that some Catholics were now as well off as the poorest loyalists they didn’t like it. That’s when the British state stepped in.
At first Barry wasn’t taken in by the whole romanticism of Irish republicanism. Oh sure he believed his community had been horribly wronged against for decades, since partition and way before that, but he detested the violence. He knew it was their only weapon against the might of the British state but he still didn’t like it. His own Mammy was a member of the IRA, so were many of her friends, including her best friend Patricia O’Connell or ‘Aunty Patricia’ as Barry and his siblings called her. Mammy and Patricia would go off together for wee chats and Patricia’s brother Padraig would often join them. Sometimes there were men in the house who neither Barry nor any of his siblings recognised. Sometimes he’d get up in the middle of the night to use the toilet and see his Mammy giving first aid to wounded men and women. Sometimes she’d tell him to be quiet and forget what he’d seen. It had been a difficult time but one which they all, including Barry, were secretly proud of being part of.
Then one night everything changed.
Mammy had cooked chips for tea. She made great chips. They were better even than O’Malley’s chip shop down the street. They were all there consuming their chips along with the slice of ham that had been on each plate when the back door burst open. Barry’s younger siblings screamed and he held them close as a mob of about ten men, including Aunty Patricia’s brother Padraig, stormed in and seized their Mammy. Barry let go of his siblings and tried to fight them but they pushed him away forcibly and told him to mind his own business. Their Mammy was screaming and shouting, kicking and pushing, and her blows were met with counter blows in front of her utterly distressed and terrified children. Barry would never forget the horror of it. He’d never forget the looks on the faces of his brothers and sisters. Their Mammy had been taken away. They never finished their chips and ham. They were taken into care and fostered out. Later they were told that their Mammy had been found guilty of passing on IRA secrets to the British secret services and would never be coming home. Barry knew that was untrue. The IRA had lied to them just like the British had.
Barry opened the drawer in his desk and took out the bottle of Irish whiskey he kept in there. He took two glasses and poured a measure into each. He was expecting a visitor. He gulped down his own measure and then gave himself a refill. It was half past seven in the evening and all the staff in the dealership had gone home. That’s why he knew exactly who it was when the handle on the door to his office turned.
DSI Jeff Barton came into the squad room where the rest of the team, including those who’d been drafted in from other sections, were all sitting round the conference table. He’d been looking for any signs of potential trouble between the newly promoted DS Adrian Bradshaw and his mate DC Joe Alexander who he’d beaten to the DS spot. But so far he could detect no trace of anything going on. The boys seemed to be playing nicely. And it had better stay that way.
‘Okay’ said Jeff as he stood at one end of the table where three white boards had been fixed together to give them more space with which to write down their theories. ‘Padraig O’Connell’ said Jeff, pointing at the picture of their victim. ‘Sixty-two years old. A total of thirty-seven stab wounds to his face, neck, and chest. No sign of a forced entry suggesting he either knew his killer or the killer was able to push their way through the wooden and fairly insubstantial door. You might say that he was no ordinary victim given his IRA past and his incarceration in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland for thirty-three years’.
‘So are we looking for a sectarian angle to this, sir?’ suggested DS Adrian Bradshaw. ‘Maybe the settling of an old score perhaps? It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened on the mainland’.
‘That’s true, Adrian’ said Jeff. ‘But let’s not forget that he’d been out of prison and living over here in Manchester for nearly five years since his release. He’s built up something of a life and that could be where the answers lie but I agree that the sectarian angle to this is the most obvious. So let’s go through what we know’. Jeff then pointed to the picture of Carol Anderson. ‘This is O’Connell’s girlfriend. When DI Wright and myself spoke to her she was certainly in distress abou
t her lover’s death but I have my doubts about Miss Anderson. There was just something about her attitude when DI Wright and I spoke to her that makes me think there might be more that she should tell us and something about what she said as we left has stayed with me. She said that she was too forgiving of people’s lack of respect for her. She said it had always been her trouble’.
‘What do you think she meant by that, sir?’ asked DS Joe Alexander.
‘I don’t know’ said Jeff. ‘But I do think she meant something by it. Now added to that she told us about a man called Chris O’Neill who drank at the same pub as her and O’Connell but who was from the other side of the sectarian divide from him. Now it could be that she and O’Neill are more friendly that she’s admitted so far. So, I want the initial lights of this investigation to shine on Carol Anderson and Chris O’ Neill. I want to know everything about them. I want their lives to be picked apart in the search for something that might be useful to us. The other direction I want to look at this from is from the organization called the families of the disappeared which is based here in Manchester and headed by a man called Kieran Murphy. He watched his mother being dragged away by the IRA back in the seventies on suspicion that she was an informant for the British. She was never seen again but Padraig O’Connell was part of that IRA abduction gang. On the day that O’Connell was murdered Murphy and his siblings had been with him on a beach in County Antrim looking for where Murphy’s mother’s body had been buried but O’Connell couldn’t remember. That’s when he was flown back to Manchester. He was murdered in his flat a couple of hours later and Murphy and his siblings caught later flights back to Manchester making it impossible for any of them to have committed the murder. Except for one member of the Murphy family, Barry Murphy, Kieran’s brother. He didn’t go with the rest of them to County Antrim’.
‘Does Barry Murphy have a record, sir?’
‘No’ said Jeff.
‘But it might be that he killed O’Connell for having led the family all the way to Ireland and still not getting the result they’d so needed for years’ said DS Bradshaw.
Whilst the team were discussing the implications of whether or not Kieran Murphy could be the killer they were looking for, the phone started ringing in Jeff’s office and he asked DI Ollie Wright to go and answer it for him. When he came back he had information that shifted the investigation even further.
‘That was the neighbourhood police team in Sale, sir’ said Ollie. ‘Barry Murphy has been found dead in his office above his second hand car dealership. He’d been shot in the head. No sign of a forced entry’.
THROWN DOWN FOUR
‘So will you be going back to Ireland for the funeral?’ asked Dennis for want of a better question. He really couldn’t get his head round all of this.
‘Didn’t you hear the police constable?’ said Patricia, flatly. She was sitting at the kitchen table with her elbows perched on it and her hands crossed just below her chin. ‘The funeral is going to be in Manchester’.
‘Oh yes’ snapped Denis, irritably. ‘Sorry but I was just coming to terms with the fact that my wife has a brother who’s just died and that the funeral will be attended by her five other brothers and sisters, none of whom I knew anything about because my wife told me she was alone in the world. Forgive me for getting a little confused but I’m in shock’.
‘Well it’s nothing compared to what I’m feeling’ said Patricia, firmly. How had the police found her? She hadn’t been in contact with any of her family since she left Ireland and she didn’t even know that they’d moved to Manchester or that Padraig had been released from prison. Who told them? Just how had they traced her and what did that mean? If they knew where she was then what was to stop them coming after her? And if they’d known for a while then what had been stopping them?
Dennis sat down at the table opposite her and lowered his voice to sound more compassionate. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about your family, Patty? What happened back there that made you run away to the other side of the world? You know I’d have understood if you’d told me. I wouldn’t have judged you or anybody else for that matter’.
‘Oh Dennis would you stop being so bloody reasonable!’
‘Why? I want to know what you’ve been keeping from me all these years and more importantly I want to know why?’
‘You have no idea! You have no idea what happened to compromise my very soul in those days’.
‘Well then tell me! Tell me and perhaps we can move on from this’.
‘Perhaps?’ It was the first time she’d felt frightened since the police constables had appeared and she’d thought at first then that it must be one of their kids who’d been in an accident or something. Her heart had been in her mouth and she certainly hadn’t expected what they had come to tell her.
‘I didn’t mean it that way’ he entreated. ‘Just tell me the truth, Patty’.
‘The truth? The truth hasn’t always been very welcome in my life’.
‘Well isn’t it time that changed? I mean, you’ve got a whole family over there who could’ve been part of our family down here and I’m at a loss to know what could’ve been so bad that you prevented that from happening’.
For Patricia this was like the dead calling. Her brother Padraig was calling out to her from beyond the grave and she could almost hear him urging her to come clean finally and tell the truth. But why did she have to? Why couldn’t it all have just been left where it was? Maybe her luck had simply run out. Maybe it didn’t matter anymore what the consequences would be. She’d lived the charmed life of the suburban lower middle class Australian housewife for all these years and perhaps the natural laws of justice meant that one day it would all have to be reckoned with.
‘You really think it’ll be that easy?’ she asked. She was still struggling to work out how they could’ve known where she was.
‘I know it won’t be easy but you have to tell me, Patty’ said Dennis. ‘Apart from anything else I’m your husband and I’ve never kept anything from you. I think I’ve got a right to know’.
‘Alright’ said Patricia. ‘But not here. Let’s drive down to Geelong and that little hotel we stayed at before. We’ll go out to the winery that’s near there and I promise I’ll tell you everything’.
The journey down to one of the most southerly parts of the state of Victoria took longer than usual on account that neither Dennis nor Patricia spoke very much to each other. It felt like the whole of the world was between them and neither of them could find the words to break out of the impasse. Then they got to Geelong and headed west along the Princes Highway to the winery at Mt. Duneed where they’d had a couple of very special times over the years. They could check into the hotel at Waurn Ponds later. Once they were there Patricia wanted to just stand at the beginnings of the estate as it rolled across the countryside in front of them and hope that the beauty of the landscape would help to soften the blows she was about to inflict on her poor, sweet Dennis. What the hell was she doing? The man who’d been beside her, loved her, adored her, given her three beautiful children, a home, a life, a family, the man who’d never given her even a moment’s doubt, the man who’d trusted her in return and been there for her every step of the way was about to learn that the woman he’d done all of that for wasn’t the woman he thought she was. How the hell was she going to do this? How the hell was she going to turn the world of this wonderful man right on its head?
She was leaning back against the bonnet of the car taking in the view when Dennis came up beside her. He’d stayed sitting in the car for a few minutes after Patricia had got out. He’d just wanted to give her a bit of space. He thought that might be the right thing to do. But he was scared. He got the feeling that everything about their life together was about to come crashing down around them. He’d never seen Patricia look so haunted. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t the Patricia he knew and he loved.
‘Patty? Come on now. Talk to me’.
‘When I was growing up there were
some pretty ugly scenes in our house’ Patricia began, staring out into the distance at nothing in particular. ‘My father was a very violent man. He used to take it out on my brothers with his belt. My sisters and I caught the back of his hand no end of times. We all had to do what we could to survive. It got easier as my brothers got older and were able to stand up to my Dad and prevent him lashing out at them or at my mother’.
‘He used to hit your mother?’
‘Oh yes’ said Patricia. ‘My mother could never go out to work and have a life. He saw to that. He saw to that by giving her enough bruises she had to hide herself away a lot of the time. We had to do the shopping for Mammy whilst the signs of his handy work healed. I hated him, Dennis. I absolutely hated him’.
‘I’m not surprised’.
‘I hated him with such a passion that I arranged one night to have him killed’.
Dennis recoiled. He hadn’t quite been expecting that. ‘What did you say?’
‘I took advantage of all the men around me who dealt in a different kind of violence and I got them to kill my father’ Patricia revealed. ‘I’m not sorry for it, Dennis. My father deserved it. He broke my mother’s heart on so many occasions that in the end it just couldn’t heal any more. My father came out of the pub one night and the group of guys who I’d got together were waiting for him. They gave him the beating he’d never recover from and because it was Northern Ireland nobody said a word. As far as the police were concerned it was just one less Catholic to worry about. They didn’t care a damn about us. They thought we were scum. And if we’d turned on one of our own then so bloody be it. They weren’t going to concern themselves. My father had no real friends to speak of. Nobody was there to defend him or stand up for him’.