‘Is that your daughter running on?’ he said.
‘She is.’
‘Mind her.’
‘I will.’
‘Make her street-smart. That’s what happened to my Jo … she was too naïve, too trusting … she thought, you know, that no bad thing would ever happen to her. She was like her mother, God rest her … she prayed for the angels to keep her safe. Huh, goes to show you, doesn’t it? Prayer is a waste of fucking time.’
‘Dad!’ his daughter said.
‘It’s true.’
I wished Amy would hurry up. I picked up a bunch of fliers and said, ‘While I’m waiting …’. I handed them to people passing by in both directions. No one refused to take them, but I saw that a few, after taking a glance at Jo, pitched them into a bin before going through the double doors. People don’t give a fuck. They might for a while, but the passage of time washes meaning away.
I was never as delighted to see her. Bob patted her head, said she was beautiful, and asked if she liked school.
‘No,’ Amy said, adding, ‘are you Jo’s daddy?’
‘I am.’
Amy seemed to ponder this. Louise figured on my radar, weighed down with bags.
‘We have to be going, Amy … Bob … the best of luck,’ I said.
‘I hope your Jo comes home to you,’ Amy said to Bob.
My back was to them, so they couldn’t have seen my expression. The expression of a man fully realising that his daughter had cursed him in a most peculiar way.
Eight suspects. A routine call in by the cops to see if there were chinks beginning to grow in my story, my conscience. Things that they could scrutinise; at which they could pick and poke. I’d made the shortlist. They’d told me this months ago, after I’d supplied them with a blood sample; back then they’d asked me if I’d volunteer to do that for elimination purposes. Clever. If I’d declined …. But I knew the sample wasn’t worth a flying fuck to them unless they had a body to match it against. And they hadn’t, wouldn’t, so giving them my blood was no problem.
‘Is that it?’ I said.
‘We’ll let you know when it’s time for you to go,’ Detective Roche said.
He was clean-cut, young. A guy on the up, with not much for a chin.
‘Am I under arrest?’ I said.
‘No,’ Roche said.
Fitz, his older companion, was sitting across the desk, toying with a grey Biro he kept his eyes fixed upon. A ginger-haired man with deep lines across his forehead, like cracks in a ceiling.
‘So I’m free to leave any time I like?’ I said.
For the first time during this interview, Fitz spoke. He looked at me with clear blue eyes, and said, ‘I’ll break your fucking leg if you move … I’ll say you assaulted me and that you slipped in the ensuing struggle …’.
I said, ‘Maybe I should call my solicitor.’
He said, ‘Sure, give us his name and phone number and I’ll have Frank here give him a call.’
‘I did nothing to deserve this shite,’ I said, then I gave him a contact name and number for Denis Wallace, the solicitor who’d pushed through the purchase of my house.
‘You sold a car in the immediate aftermath of Jo’s disappearance,’ Roche said.
‘It was falling apart.’
He continued, ‘You bought yourself an identical model. A different colour.’
‘So?’ I shrugged, pretending to be lost as to the relevance. ‘We’ve been here before, guys.’
Roche said, ‘The car you flogged … it matches the colour that a witness gave us. He saw a young woman get into a car like yours.’
Greatcoat man, I thought, but he was too pissed to take notice of anything.
‘Like mine,’ I said, ‘but not. So …’.
‘So,’ Roche said, ‘we found hair fibres from Jo on the front seat.’
‘So,’ Fitz said, with sarcasm and contempt, ‘can you explain how come we found those in your vehicle?’
‘Jo was in my car, that’s easy to explain.’
They looked at each other. I formed the impression that Fitz had something else on me, that he had been told things. He had the look of someone who had a trump card that he wasn’t going to play just yet.
I went on. ‘I gave her a lift home after babysitting two or three times. She used to babysit for us … do you not read those questionnaires you have people fill out? Because I said about taking her home in the one I filled out, and my missus said so in hers too. We both said that I gave Jo a lift home a couple of times.’
Fitz kept staring, trying to dig at the truth lurking behind the walls of my skull.
‘Louise … that’s my missus’s name, if you want to cross-reference. We share the same surname.’
Silence.
‘Does an innocent man still need his solicitor?’
I couldn’t hide the truth of my visit to the cop station from Louise. They’d called to the house twice to see me, knowing I wouldn’t be there. Sussing her out was all, looking for anything she might say that could be used against me. Which set me to thinking.
‘What’s up with you?’ I said, stabbing into the silence.
She didn’t answer.
‘I’m talking to you,’ I said. ‘I said, what’s up with you?’
She’d the worried and haggard appearance of a deeply troubled woman.
‘I heard you,’ she said. ‘They obviously think that you have something to do with her disappearance. Why, Tommy?’
‘No idea.’
‘I do,’ she said.
‘You do …?’
She nodded, reaching for her pack of cigarettes on the table. She was trying to quit, but she hadn’t got the willpower. She was afraid, and spoke with a tremor on her lips, but at the same time she
was flashing steel. I wanted a fag too, but not one of her brand.
‘Be honest with me, Tommy, for Christ’s sake. You owe me that much at least.’
‘I …’.
‘How come you’re a suspect?’ she said in a knowing way.
I sensed that she was digging for a deeper answer. Teasing for a truth, a smidgen of it, trawling for a confession. Whatever. Worse than the fucking cops.
‘Because of the car sale,’ I said, ‘of what happened to Jack’s oul’ lad and the picture-house woman. We found something belonging to her on the plains … a locket of hers … so really, tell me: why are you fucking asking me this? You already know it.’
An item of jewellery Jack had stupidly given to his then girlfriend, now wife, who’d worn it to a charity dance, where the picture-house woman’s mother recognised it and demanded a closer inspection. There were no giveaway initials, just a scratch mark that the old woman insisted was graven on her memory. Jack and I sung the same hymn to the coppers, so we smoothed over the ripples of suspicion – but suspicion never dies. Our names, for sure, were logged in the picture-woman’s case file.
And I looked across at Louise and thought that she was a noose beginning to tighten around my neck. Under my glare, her shoulders climbed. Nervously, she scratched at her thigh. We were both thinking of differing and the best means to end things.
A Sort of Jesus Disappearance
Barney, who had been on desk duty the night before, was intent on sleeping through the journey from the Lebanese border to Jerusalem. Carty was getting increasingly annoyed at Barney’s lacklustre responses to the landmarks he’d been occasionally and excitedly pointing out.
‘Akko!’
‘Yeah …’.
‘The Holocaust museum.’
Yawn.
‘Look at that, Barney, a Roman aqueduct.’
In a jaded voice, Barney said, ‘I couldn’t give a bollix … I just want an hour’s kip, okay?’
‘You’re in the Holy Land, you should …’.
‘If the place you’re talking about isn’t a disco or a pub, fuck off … please.’
Eventually, Carty gave up and Barney fell asleep on the back seat of the UN minibus Louis had pre-booked for a week. A straw hat with a back-band covered his face, bony legs drawn up.
There were five of us. Tommy drove. He hardly ever smiled, and took himself seriously. He had a brown fleck in the white of his eye. Barney had called it a shit spot. Tommy didn’t think it funny, and reminded Barney of his corporal status. Tommy was the best looking one among us, film-star handsome, and we intended to use him to lure women into our company. Alongside him sat Louis, who was the senior rank among us, but he would keep that fact quiet while we were on leave, hoping we wouldn’t mention the times he’d shafted us on the duty roster for slights we had done to him, real or imagined. According to rumour, the Norwegians had him in their pocket. They supplied him with snus and Gammel Dansk – Norwegian snuff, and a concoction made from a variety of fruits – and insisted he had to have Viking blood in his veins. ‘Viking genes,’ Louis had said, unsteady on his feet in Thor Mess, feeling his chin, not amused when I pointed out that they’d said, ‘Wiking, not Viking.’
‘They can’t pronounce the V,’ he’d snapped.
We all wore new clothes bought in Ali’s on the shack street outside headquarters, except for Carty, who had on his issue green T-shirt and khaki shorts. He had a red scapular around his neck and his dog tags. Now and then he took out the scapular and kissed its image. We thought it might be of Jesus, but it could well have been of himself. After three months in Lebanon, we were sort of mad for skirt, but we had to temper that with a visit to the holy places too, to take photographs of where we had been to show our families back home, to say we’d lit candles and said prayers for the people we’d been asked to pray for. A backdrop for our planned and hoped-for acts of depravity. So it wasn’t a holiday, we’d lied to families, but a pilgrimage, making it sound like it would be an ordeal.
Soon, as we veered a left off the road to Tel Aviv, Barney threw his legs to the floor and said he was bursting for a piss. At 30 he was the youngest, Louis, at 38 the oldest, the rest of us fitted age wise somewhere in-between. We were all victims of something or other. Veterans of trips to Lebanon and Cyprus. A couple, Carty and Louis, had been to Iraq.
Tommy said, ‘I can’t over pull over here. The traffic’s … and besides, I’m sure there’s a law against urinating in public.’
Carty said, ‘Hold it, can’t you … you’re not a child.’
‘I said I was bursting,’ Barney said, ‘how can you fucking hold anything that’s bursting? You stupid fucking Kerryman, you.’
Louis said, ‘Use a bottle.’
‘He’s not pissing in the bus,’ I said, thinking of the smell.
‘Look at the tits on your one!’ Barney said, tapping hard on the window to take her attention. She gave a small wave. Broad smile.
Louis slugged the last from a cola bottle and passed it back.
Carty said, ‘You shouldn’t be looking at women in that way … it’s not healthy.’
‘And she’s carrying a pair of balls, too … but you missed that,’ I said.
Pissing into the bottle to Tommy’s, ‘Don’t get any on the floor,’ Barney said, ‘This is Israel, huh? Full of the fuckers who throw the shells into the Leb at us, bastards … ahhhhhhh, great to have the tank emptied.’
Carty said, ‘The cap, Louis.’
Louis handed Carty the blue top, and he told Barney to catch. Because of cry-offs we had ample space on the minibus: a double seat each with Barney’s a triple.
Barney capped his piss, sighed long and hard, lit up a cigarette, then thought to ask if anyone minded. He was heading for premature baldness. He looked like a slimmer version of Bob Hope, and things that fell into place for him usually happened through accident, not by careful planning on his part.
A song came over the radio that Tommy liked, and he raised the volume. Sinatra’s ‘Let me try again.’
Barney said, ‘Is that what you said to your Missus, Tommy?’
Louis glanced sidelong at Tommy, not smiling until he saw it was okay to by Tommy’s expression.
Carty was the only single man present. He was tall, built, as Barney put it, ‘as though he’d been reared on a dinosaur’s tit.’ He had short, wavy black hair, Slavic high cheekbones and green eyes that were close-set and deep under his brow. He was Born Again; the list of things he had got up to until about four years ago was the stuff of legend.
Carty said, ‘That song is a hymn … it’s what we should all do every time we slip … look to try again.’
Under the weight of this platitude, I think even the minibus groaned. Tommy looked in the rear-view mirror and asked if anyone had a cassette. Barney reached in his tracksuit top lying across the back of the seat and said, ‘Here … Boney M … for the holy soul there.’
‘Rivers of Babylon,’ Carty said.
Boney M and Belfast played as we climbed the hills leading in to Jerusalem (as though two troubled cities were acknowledging each other), passing red-oxide-painted war vehicles parked as ornaments on grassy strips, and new apartment blocks on disputed territory.
As the honey-coloured curtain walls of the old city came into view, Carty blessed himself three times in exaggerated sweeps, three fingers joined to indicate Father, Son and Holy Spirit. His eyes swallowed every new sight, his mouth open too, to help out.
None of us had been to Jerusalem before. But it was an old name among us. Book and spoken word from childhood became a reality: something we could touch and smell and taste.
Carty said in his lilting Kerry accent, ‘He was here. Imagine that, lads … we’re in the place where Jesus actually walked … this is his city. He breathed the air, he …’.
‘Sure, Jesus is Jesus … he’s been all over the fucking world, like,’ Barney said.
‘But here … here, he came and lived among us, became human.’
‘Us? Sure you weren’t even fucking born then,’ Barney said.
‘Among the human race, you clown.’
Barney said, ‘And youse Kerrymen haven’t evolved to the level of humans yet … yere always getting above yereselves.’
‘Are you looking for a slap?’ Carty said.
We couldn’t determine if he was serious.
Tommy bypassed several parking places for some nitpicking reason he didn’t share with us; we circled the hotel maybe six times before he settled for a space Louis had indicated to him the first time around. Louis wore spectacles, and he kept pushing the bridge with the tip of his forefinger, as if pushing back thoughts he wanted to scream out to Tommy about his passing yet another perfect fucking spot. Mild-mannered Louis never called a spade for what it was to a person’s face; he preferred to serve up his opinion behind a person’s back; not solely out of badness; he simply disliked confrontation and engaging with the risk of having his words pushed down his throat.
Octagonal black-and-white tiles covered the reception floor of the Palace Pilgrim Hotel. Rubber plants stared at us from the corners, and crystal chandeliers looked down on an arrangement in squares of green couches and opaque glass-topped coffee tables. After leaving our bags in rooms on the third storey, we took up residence in the green area, and discussed what to do for the evening over Macabbi beers, or in Carty’s case, a tomato juice with ice.
Carty said, ‘We should go into the old city, before it gets too dark.’
Barney said, slouched, feet crossed, arms folded, unlit cigarette between his fingers, ‘Tomorrow would be better … we’d have more time, yeah?’
Louis said, ‘It’s been a long day.’
Tommy said, ‘How about something to eat? I don’t know about ye, but I’m famished.’
I said, �
�I’m easy.’
The Tavern Inn – we volunteered non-drinker Carty to drive our minibus – was dressed seedier than a shebeen in bogland at home. Dimly lit, low-ceilinged, dark crossbeams, photographs of Jerusalem on the walls and paintings of nineteenth-century Palestine. Also, a few national flags: even the Irish tricolour had a space, something Carty told us, because it was something we’d missed. Disinfectant wafted from the loos, and creaking ceiling fans rotated with maddening sluggishness. We sat outside, watching a beautiful red sun begin its descent while Carty was inside asking the barman whose idea had it been to put the British flag above the Irish tricolour, over the mock ochre brick fireplace. I’d gone in to say his eggs and chips had been brought to our table.
‘I don’t know, mate,’ the young man said in a cockney twang, towelling a beer glass, ‘I never noticed it to be honest. You can put them level if you want. Maybe it slipped, yeah?’
‘Where’s the owner?’
‘In the States. Why? Do you want the manager. He’s here.’
‘Carty,’ I said.
His hand spread like a map across my chest. I stepped back from it.
‘Have you a lighter?’ he said to Barney, who was passing by on his way to the loo.
‘Sure,’ he said, handing over his silver Zippo.
Carty pulled the Union Flag from the wall. He threw it into the hearth, and put a Zippo flame to a corner.
I said, ‘Are you mad?! You’ll trigger the smoke alarms and …’.
He shoved me away, and glared at the barman who’d come running from behind the counter with a fire extinguisher. Others present looked on and away, long enough to see what was happening, and longer to balance the price of action and inaction. Luckily for us, it wasn’t their national flag.
‘That yoke,’ he said, ‘won’t ever fly above the tricolour again.’ Glancing around, he continued, ‘If any of youse want to do make anything of it, we’re here …’.
We’re?
By now Barney had emerged, piss spots around his fly, his eyes widening – Barney was born in England, moved to Ireland when aged 6, and was married to a Welsh woman.
Deadly Confederacies Page 14