Shadow Box

by Peter Cocks

  Four men were playing doubles and several others were watching on barstools in the shadows. It was busier than Donnie would have liked, but he took his drink and walked slowly towards the group as if watching, or waiting for a game. He shuffled into position behind two men sitting at the bar. From behind, he was sure he recognized one as Dolan. He hadn’t seen him for nearly two years; Dolan had been inside and Donnie had been in Spain.

  “Paul?” he asked. “Paul Dolan?” The man turned and Donnie did a double take. The man could have been Paul Dolan by his physique, the length of his wavy black hair and his typically Irish face, but he was not quite Paul Dolan. Maybe it was the heavy beard? Donnie was confused.

  “Who wants to know?” the man asked, his accent thick and dark as Guinness.

  “Me,” Donnie said. “Donovan Mulvaney. I’m here on behalf of Tommy Kelly. I thought you were Paul Dolan – you look like him.”

  The other men playing pool stopped their game and watched the exchange.

  “Well, I’m not,” the man said.

  “You know who Tommy Kelly is?”

  “Sure I’ve heard of him,” the man said. “Everyone has. He’s inside; he’s over. Now I’m a little tired, so if you don’t mind…”

  “That doesn’t stop him operating,” Donnie said. “Do you know Paul Dolan?”

  The man shrugged. The group of pool players gathered around as the conversation continued.

  “What if I do?”

  Donnie leant in closer and went to grasp the Irishman’s collar to increase the pressure of the interview, but the man snatched Donnie’s thumb and held it with surprising strength. Seated on his stool, he had the leverage to bend Donnie’s thumb, holding him.

  “Don’t you touch me, you ugly fucker. No one touches me, especially not Tommy Kelly’s gimp. My name is Martin Connolly. Remember it.”

  That was when the first pool cue crashed down on Donnie’s head.

  The men that came for me wore full-face balaclavas.

  They were like black spectres as they silently blindfolded and wrestled me into the back of a car on Martin Connolly’s orders.

  “These gents will find out exactly what your game is, Kieran Kelly,” he said. Hannah showed no compassion as I was taken away.

  I felt more afraid than I ever had before. I was cold. What clothes I’d had were on the floor of Hannah’s flat, along with my shoes. That meant no phone, nothing to locate me, no way of contacting Sharp – and neither he nor anyone else would think anything odd about my not being in contact for a few days. After all, I’d done a pretty good job of becoming a loner.

  After driving round a few anonymous streets and out onto a main road, the man next to me pushed my head down, out of view.

  “D’you bring a decent knife?” I heard one voice say.

  “Aye,” replied another. “It’s a bit blunt but it should do the job.”

  Horrifying images began to run through my mind. My imagination ran riot as Irish voices bantered menacingly in the car. Tony had told me enough about IRA brutality to make me terrified.

  I tried to keep my mind straight as the car sped up for a couple of miles then slowed down onto a slip road. In a way, I was hoping it might be over quickly, that they’d take me out and shoot me.

  The car slowed down a few minutes later and I could feel it turning left and right over wet tarmac.

  Then it stopped.

  The passenger door was opened and I could just make out grey sky as my blindfold rode down, when I was pulled out of the car and on to my feet. I glimpsed the outline of an industrial building. I could smell diesel. I was shoved across the ground towards the building, heard the rattle as metal shutters rolled up.

  “Put him in the box,” I heard an Irish-accented voice say.

  I was taken inside and thrown into a small, cold room where a thick metal door was slammed behind me. It smelled strongly of shit and disinfectant. There was no light, and when I pulled off my blindfold, I could see nothing. I felt along the walls, concrete and damp. I reached out and could feel girders on the low ceiling above and the cold, hard floor below. I was inside a blacked-out concrete cell about three metres square and, as far as I could tell, there was not a stick of furniture in it. I felt along the walls again until I came to a corner, then wedged myself in it and slid to the floor. I pulled my knees up and rested my head on them. My legs were still trembling with fear and cold. Sitting on the hard floor, I began to cry. If the aim was to terrorize and disorient me, they had done well. I couldn’t tell which way I was facing; I almost had a feeling that I was spinning. My mind was racing out of control. I sat and shivered in the blackness, trying to go elsewhere in my mind, begging for sleep.

  It wouldn’t come, so I tried standing up and walking around in an attempt to keep warm, but the cell was too small to gather any pace and as soon as I tried, I hit a wall. I tried stamping my feet on the unforgiving concrete floor, then slapping my arms against my body, but the damp atmosphere had got to my bones and the smell had seeped into my nostrils.

  I sat down again and curled into a ball, trying to keep in as much body heat as I could. In the total darkness I had no idea how much time went by, but after some hours I heard noises at the door. It swung open, and a shaft of light almost blinded me.

  “Warm enough?” the figure said. Irish again, bulky and dark, silhouetted in the doorway. He threw a small object into the corner where I was still curled up. “I’ll be back in a while for a wee chat.” The door slammed shut again. I felt around for whatever he had thrown and found a lighter, which I used to warm my hands until my fingers burned. It also revealed the inside of my cell. I could see that the walls had been smeared with what looked like blood and shit. If the intention was to horrify and intimidate, it worked. I began to wonder who else had sat in this cell before me, and what had become of them.

  After an hour or so, the door clunked open again and a smaller man in a balaclava and lumberjack shirt pulled me out. My legs had gone dead, and I shivered as I was led into what seemed to be the main room, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the daylight. The building was like a garage, with stacks of tyres and boxes around the edges. Hooks and chains hung from steel joists across the ceiling.

  Another man wearing a balaclava sat on a plastic chair behind a rough wooden table. He was wearing a yellow hoodie with a mixed martial arts emblem and smoking a cigarette through the mouth hole of his balaclava. Black eyes looked at me from the eyeholes.

  “Siddown,” he said. He gestured to another chair opposite him. “Cuppa tea?”

  He pushed a stained, chipped mug across the table. His voice was warm and unthreatening, and for a millisecond I felt ridiculously grateful for the tea and for not being shouted at. I took the mug between shaking hands and put it to my lips, scalding my mouth with hot, sweet tea. As the liquid went down my throat I could feel it restoring sensation to my empty stomach, which gurgled audibly.

  “You hungry?” he asked. “Or just nervous?”

  “Both,” I said.

  “You’ve good cause,” he said. “But you’ll get nothing to eat until you’ve answered a few questions.”

  “We wouldn’t want him chucking up all over our nice clean floor,” Lumberjack Shirt joined in from behind me. The threat in his rougher voice made me want to vomit immediately.

  “First things first,” my interrogator said. “Let’s start from the beginning. A few easy questions. Think carefully before you answer, because I’ll be asking again until I know you’re telling the truth, got it?”

  I nodded.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Kieran Kelly.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “London.”

  “Where in London?”

  “All over. Originally Deptford, New Cross area.”

  “So what do you know about us?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I don’t know who you are, or why I’m here.”

  “So what do you know about the IRA?”

 
; “Nothing really, stuff to do with Irish politics. Wanting to be separate from the British government?”

  “So you do know. How do you know? What do you know?”

  “News and stuff, you know … but I hooked up with Hannah Connolly at college, she told me a bit. We were friends, I thought.”

  “What went on in her flat, apart from you shaggin’ her and stealing drugs?”

  “I didn’t,” I protested.

  “Shag her or nick drugs?”

  “Either,” I said.

  “I’m beginning to detect a wee lie,” he said. “I think we need a more in-depth chat. Now make sure you’re telling the truth, Kieran.”

  He nodded at the man in the lumberjack shirt, who grabbed my arms and pulled them behind me, binding them tightly together with gaffer tape. “You didn’t finish your tea,” he said, picking up the mug and throwing the rest over me. “Now … let’s talk properly.”

  Donnie had no memory of being wheeled into the Homerton Hospital. He’d been here years before, when it was an old Victorian red brick, something between a loony bin and the Somme dressing station on a Saturday night.

  The bright, colourful interior that greeted him as he opened his eyes was a surprise. But what had given him more of a start was the uniformed, armed copper at his bedside.

  “Fuck off, plod,” had been his first words on regaining consciousness. The words had strained to come out, but were clear in their intention, like a toddler mouthing its first “mama”.

  Dave visited on day three, by which time Donnie’s battered frame was propped up on pillows arranged by a little Indonesian nurse, who was taking none of his mess.

  “Lianti, get my mate a chair, will you?” Donnie wheezed.

  “He’s a big boy,” his nurse replied. “He can get his own bladdy chair, Mr Donald Duck.”

  All six-foot plus of Dave Slaughter had bowed to the superior authority of five-foot-nothing Nurse Lianti. He pulled over a wing-backed chair upholstered in dusty pink plush and dumped himself in it, knees and arms overflowing the frame.

  “Brought you grapes,” he said, passing over a brown bag he had bought from a stall half a mile down the road. The policeman glanced over, checking out the bag.

  “’Choo looking at, plod?” Dave asked. “Hungry? Missus forget to pack your truncheon meat sandwiches?”

  Donnie laughed a low gurgle. The young policeman remained impassive, staring ahead, a slight red flush betraying his embarrassment and apparent powerlessness in the face of two old-school villains. He coughed, got up and left the room, closing the door behind him. Donnie watched him through the glass, talking to the second armed policeman stationed outside.

  “Leave it, Dave, it hurts when I laugh,” Donnie coughed.

  “Don’t laugh, then. How you feeling?”

  “All right, apart from the lumps on me head.”

  Dave looked at the turban of bandages still wrapped around Donnie’s skull. Apparently it had taken four of them with pool cues and a cue ball in a sock to bring him down, but Donnie had made the mistake of stabbing one of them while they were about it. The man was somewhere else in the same hospital, hanging on to his life with a punctured lung.

  “You’ll be all right in a minute. You’re made of stern stuff.”

  Donnie snorted dismissively through a swollen nose. “What’s new, Dave?”

  “All going on, Don. The guvnor’s appeal’s coming through. He’s got the top firm on it this time, Mishcon de Doo-Dah, the ones what done Princess Di’s divorce, God rest. He’s pretty confident. Lawyers reckon if Dolan got out, they can call a mistrial.”

  Donnie nodded his bandaged head sagely. He didn’t have a clue what Dave was talking about, save the word “appeal”.

  “Nice one, Dave.”

  “He’s unhappy about the Micks having a go at you, Don. Very unhappy. And he’s unhappy about the Micks muscling in on business while they think he’s not on the ball. I’ve been on the blower 24/7 having a word with all relevant parties, Don. Heads will roll.”

  “What about me, Dave?”

  “Bit more complicated, Don. It could have been a simple GBH on you, if you hadn’t shivved the other geezer. Puts you in the same boat for attempted. Can’t do much for the minute with plod all over you like a nasty rash.”

  “I ain’t doing porridge, Dave. I’ll top myself before I do.”

  Dave Slaughter patted Donnie’s leg through the cover.

  “Tommy won’t let you go down, Don. You’re too valuable. He’ll sort something. Just sit doggo here, play it up a bit so they keep you in. If you feel better, don’t let on. It’ll be sorted, TK’s on it.”

  “You’ll tell him I done good, won’t you?”

  “I have, Don. He knows … and,” Dave leant in, whispered, “he got another card from Sophie.”

  “Yeah?” Don said. Donnie worshipped Sophie Kelly.

  “Yeah,” Dave whispered back. “America.”

  The first blow of the cable hurt like hell as it whipped across my legs.

  The second of my captors had a length of heavy-duty electric cable wrapped around his fist.

  I cried out but couldn’t escape the next blow: my ankles were bound to the chair legs, my wrists taped behind me and I was fixed to the seat by layers of gaffer tape around my chest.

  I yelled again as a third blow thrashed across my thighs.

  “Feckin’ smarts, doesn’t it?” my interrogator asked. His voice was as even and unthreatening as it had been before. “Perhaps you’ll answer my questions honestly now?”

  I nodded, my face contorted with the stinging pain from my legs.

  “Now, Martin’s very protective about his daughter. So, I’ll ask you again, did you shag her and nick drugs from her flat?”

  “Nothing happened, I swear! She got into bed to put a knife to my throat.” My explanation sounded mealy mouthed.

  “So you weren’t telling the truth before. I was right, I can always detect a lie.” He sounded pleased with himself. “And you took something as well?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  The cable thrashed across my legs again.

  “NO, I DIDN’T!” I screamed.

  “Who did?”

  “I don’t know. I did see the drugs, but I never touched them.”

  “Who did, then?”

  “I don’t know, she was burgled.”

  “By you?”

  Another stinging blow hit my thigh.

  “No!” I screamed. “I don’t know who broke in, I don’t.” I felt hot tears trickle down my cheeks.

  “Well, who did, then? We take a very dim view of kiddies meddling with our business. Usually we put a bullet through one ankle for a first offence. With that amount of gear, we’d probably do both. You’d never play football again.”

  Despite the burning pain in my legs, I felt a cold chill in my gut at the thought of my ankles being smashed by bullets.

  “I didn’t take them!” I protested.

  “What were all the photos about?”

  “I’m a student, I’m doing a photography course. That’s where I met Hannah.”

  My interrogator went quiet. Either he had hit a dead end, or he was giving me time to think about my story.

  I felt the tape being cut from my wrists and ankles. I panicked that I was going to be taken away.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’ve not finished with you yet. I’m going to give you a little more time to think about what you’re telling us. I have a hunch that there’s more.”

  I was wrenched out of the chair by the second man.

  “We’re going for lunch,” my interrogator said.

  I realized that I desperately needed to relieve myself.

  “I need the toilet,” I said feebly.

  “Well, you’re in the right place,” the second voice laughed. Then he bundled me back into the box and slammed the door behind me.

  I scrabbled to sit upright. My legs were lifeless – tingling and burning at the same
time. I picked at the scraps of tape that were still stuck to me. My bladder was bursting, and as feeling returned to my legs, I struggled to my feet and felt my way to the opposite corner. I loosened my boxers and, supporting myself with a hand against the wall, pissed on the floor, adding another layer to my misery and degradation.

  I sat back down and hugged my knees.

  I turned my story round in my mind. I could not begin to tell them the truth; any hint that I was working for a British intelligence organization would be certain death. I had to focus on my cover, which, if they chose, could mean certain death anyway. I tried to remember names, places, connections that would make my story credible.

  I mulled it over and over in my mind, what I could and couldn’t say, until I had it fixed.

  It had to stack up.

  Donnie was pleased to see Dave.

  He hadn’t had a visit for a couple of days. He was feeling better and bored, but trying to string out his stay by complaining of severe headaches. The nurse was having none of it, and given his status, the ward doctors on their rounds didn’t seem particularly sympathetic, merely prescribing paracetamol.

  They wanted rid of him, and it was making him nervous.

  He wouldn’t speak to his armed escort on principle. He had filled in The Sun crossword without looking at the clues, done the Sudoku without making the numbers add up. No one was going to check. A well-used Martina Cole book from the hospital library lay unread on his bedside cabinet.

  “Dave.”

  “Don.”

  “Good to see you, Dave.”

  “You look better, Don.” The turban of bandages had been removed. Dave gave a cursory glance over the stitches that held Donnie’s head together.

  “Apparently I’m on the mend. They’re talking about moving me.” Donnie signalled his unease with his eyes.

  “We’ve applied for bail, Don.”

  The policeman knew better than to show a reaction to their conversation.

  “Nice one, Dave. ’Preciate it.”

  Ten minutes after Dave’s arrival, two more armed policemen arrived on the ward. One of them, a superior officer, chatted in an undertone to the duty officer, who nodded and left, pleased to be relieved of his duty.