Blood Will Be Born

by Donnelly, Gary

  ‘I need to make a quick call, check that Ava is still OK to stay over at her friend’s house in this blackout. Then, maybe you and I should go for a drink?’ she said. Sheen checked his watch, continued his study of passing streets before he replied.

  ‘Can’t say I’m not tempted, but as I understand it, this guy Fryer once ran with a very small crew, Jim Dempsey being one of them. Why not take a trip up west, knock on his door, and see what he knows?’ he said. She knew the name, but had never met the man.

  ‘Dempsey? Irwin would skin us alive if we went sniffing round the door of republican aristocracy like him,’ she said. That was an understatement; he would have her off the case, after what had happened today. Maybe tomorrow they’d try their luck, but Irwin had been explicit this afternoon; steer away from republicans. Sheen nodded, looked resigned.

  ‘Drink it is,’ he said.

  She found a parking spot on Linen Hall Street, adjacent to Belfast City Hall, its blue copper dome and white baroque arches visible above the brown sandstone faces of the surrounding buildings. This pocket of streets always reminded her of New York, more Brooklyn than Belfast. She phoned Marie, who said they had plenty of candles and that the girls were happy campers, preparing to tell each other ghost stories. A local take away had its own generator so they were going to get Chinese.

  ‘Ava alright?’ he asked.

  ‘Dinner by candle light, ghost stories before bed,’ she said.

  ‘Blitz spirit by the sounds of it,’ he said.

  ‘Germans bombed Belfast too,’ she said.

  ‘Drink?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh yes, drink,’ she said.

  ’I’ll take you to The Kitchen,’ she said.

  The Kitchen Bar was five minutes’ walk from where she parked near City Hall; an old pub re-built into the periphery of the recently completed Victoria Square shopping complex. On the big screen she could see but not hear highlights of the Celtic v Rangers match from earlier. Looked like Celtic had won, and she allowed herself a grim smile of satisfaction. The sectarian politics of Scottish football meant nothing to her, but Cecil Moore supported Rangers and that was enough.

  She walked Sheen through the galley of the public bar to a softly lit lounge. Music played, not too loud, something vaguely jazzy. For the first time since leaving the Bat Bet in Tiger’s Bay earlier, she felt her shoulders drop and her adrenaline level drop too, in its place a heavy fatigue, but also a pang of hunger. She found a space at the high wooden bar, and leaned against the buffed brass rail that ran under it. Sheen got the drinks, and they ordered Irish stew, the only thing still on the menu.

  They sat down in a table nestled by the end of the bar. It gave them a full view of the room, and the bar’s second entrance directly across from their seats. Drinks arrived first, then food, shortly after. Half of her gin was already down by the time she started the stew. They both ate hungrily, and without conversation, until her spoon reached the bottom of the deep bowl and she was using the side order of buttered wheaten bread to mop up the last of the thick broth.

  ‘Nice?’ she asked. Sheen gave her thumbs up from behind his raised pint, most of which was also gone. She felt the tingle of the gin in her temples, down her arms. She should drink some water, she was probably dehydrated. And definitely leave it at just the one.

  ‘Another?’ she asked. Sheen shook his head, swallowing. ‘Doctor’s orders,’ she said. Their drinks arrived and they lingered on their second. She settled deeper into her chair, then felt the weight of her personal protection weapon, heavy against the wooden arm of the seat. She sat up again, leaned forward a little. Sheen pointed at her gun.

  ‘You not worried you’ll shoot yourself in the foot with that thing. Know I would be,’ he said.

  ‘Better get ready Sheen, because you will be issued with one. But you’ll also get trained. Glock 17 has what they call a Safe Action trigger, two-stage. Basically, if you accidently flick the side of the trigger, nothing happens. The firing pin is captured at half-cock at the end of a firing cycle, you got to fully grip and pull to make it go off,’ she said. Sheen yawned melodramatically.

  ‘Fascinating,’ he said and they shared a laugh. She stopped, looked at him more seriously.

  ‘Can I ask you a personal question?’ she said. Sheen’s smile faded, but he nodded, his eyes still warm. ‘What would you do if you found him? I mean whoever was responsible for the bomb that killed your brother?’ she asked. It was a bold question and a bit unfair. She was already pretty sure what John Fryer was to Sheen. But what did Sheen intend to do? Finding him was one thing. But if Sheen wanted to do more than build a case against John Fryer, she needed to know. It was not simply the success of their investigation which now hung in the balance. Fryer was paired up with a murdering psychopath. If Sheen could not control himself, it was her safety, and therefore Ava’s which was at stake. She wanted his unguarded response. Sheen’s face clouded.

  ‘I am going to ask him, and he is going to tell me. And then I am going to have justice,’ he said.

  ‘Justice? That is a fairly flexible term, depending on who is using it, you know? Are we talking Belfast justice, or Met Police justice here?’ she asked.

  ‘He’ll have his day in court,’ he said quietly. If there was such a thing as seeing murder in the eyes of man, then this was not that moment. If he wanted to kill John Fryer, then he had not admitted it, perhaps not even to himself. She asked him how he could ever know, after all the time that had passed.

  ‘Ridiculous, but I’ve always thought that face to face the truth would be in his eyes,’ he said.

  Aoife nodded, not because she understood, but because it sounded like the truth, for Sheen at least. But was it enough for her to trust him? Her mother had trusted her useless excuse of a father, then God and the Blessed Virgin, and look where it got her. She had trusted Charlie Donaldson, and now she was harnessed to Cecil Moore. Sheen’s answer told her she could probably trust him not to explode like a suspect device, but there would be no more men on horseback in her life, riding in to save the day and trampling you underfoot in the process.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘You’re doing it, that thing with your eyebrows. When you are thinking, or getting ready to argue your point, you get a little crease, right here,’ he said, pointing to the space between his own eyebrows. She raised a finger to the same spot on her own face, as though she could feel what he meant, vigorously rubbed between her brows.

  ‘Is it gone? Thanks for that Sheen, love it when a man points out something as charming as a crease in my face. Am I insanitary too; is that your follow up line?’ Her finger moved from theatrically rubbing between her eyebrows, to examining more carefully the hurt on her forehead, still tender but less so under a layer of gin. Her other hand crept on its own accord to Cecil’s phone in her pocket, and she forced herself to stop. Sheen was off his seat.

  ‘Where you going?’ she asked.

  ‘We are having one more drink,’ he said. Which made it at least two too many for her to drive home. And a taxi to Randalstown would cost a fortune.

  ‘You trying to get me blocked, Sheen? Hope I can trust you to behave like a gentleman,’ she said.

  ‘Of course you can. I’m the only gentle man in Belfast,’ he said.

  ‘I am not sure I believe you, Sheen,’ she said. At least part of her hoped that she was right.

  Chapter 26.

  Christopher and John Fryer had not waited in the queue for long, Saturday evening and traffic was light. The PSNI fool at the police checkpoint on the intersection between Broadway and the Falls Road waved them through. He barely looked at the black taxi, Christopher sitting in the back, John Fryer driving. Christopher saw John raise a finger from the wheel in thanks as they accelerated past. Their taxi was a perfect disguise. Like the Celtic FC top Christopher was wearing. The only thing more common than a black taxi on the Falls Road was someone wearing a Celtic top.

  A closer inspection would have turned up that John did no
t have a valid driver’s license, let alone a cab permit. The fact that John was wearing the bottle green uniform of the disbanded RUC under his loose fitting tracksuit would have been trickier to explain away, and the weapons stowed under the spare tire in the boot would have been a different conversation entirely. But they had been waved through and John grinded the taxi up a gear. The blacked out side streets of the Falls flicked past his window.

  Christopher’s Doc Martin boots creaked like virgin snow under foot each time he clenched and unclenched his toes in the back of the cab. Granny’s blood had stained the yellow stitching. That would be the clincher, the one that would be simply impossible to explain away. Christopher smiled, it’s just so hard to keep that yellow stitching box clean, officer, I’m sure you can understand.

  The DM boots were a bit naughty of him. He knew he’d left footprints but he couldn’t destroy them. It would be wrong. Anyway, he had turned up at Granny’s dressed for the part and not a soul had seen him. He probably could have stepped out into the street, red in tooth and claw, and still walked away. The thought, though stirring in him some excitement and pride, did not strike Christopher as particularly amusing, and yet there it was, the sudden bubble of laughter in his throat, formed in an instant and impossible to contain.

  As it broke, and he struggled for breath, Christopher decided, it felt like from some distance away, that the laughing – no these spasms - were getting much worse, almost impossible to predict and control. And that was not all. Not a whisper from Daddy since leaving the mall this afternoon. But in his dreams, that was another matter. Daddy, a Bad Daddy, had appeared once again as he dozed fitfully this afternoon, just as he had appeared the night before. Christopher could recall mere snippets, but what he could remember, he wanted to forget.

  And when, exactly, had this turning, this decomposition of his Daddy’s communication started? Not while he was planning his mission, no, Bad Daddy and his rope-strangled words was a more recent arrival. It coincided, almost to the hour, with the appearance of the man who was driving the taxi tonight; ill-fitting Daddy’s uniform and heavy with bad juju. And here was a final thought, just as it seemed like the spasm might never stop and he, too, might asphyxiate, like father like son. The stronger Bad Daddy became, the weaker his True, Good Daddy would be. Daddy would go quieter and quieter until he was gone forever. The spasm dropped him, a man carried on a tsunami, deposited on high land.

  John stabbed a glance at him from the rear view mirror.

  ‘What’s got you tickled, kid?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, which was, in fairness, the truth.

  John muttered something under his breath, reached over the windscreen and turned the white sign round. NOT IN SERVICE now faced out, and P/Glass Glen Road faced him. Christopher eased himself back into the seat, calmer now, ready. The shadows of the evening had thickened, west Belfast in blackout. A tingle of excitement coursed from his loins down his legs, bad thoughts about a Bad Daddy all gone. This was his doing. Tonight he was God of this city. John Fryer’s voice punctured his reverie, thick with fear, his eyes glaring from the rear view.

  ‘It’s dark,’ he said.

  ‘We talked about this, John,’ said Christopher, but he could feel his panic, like a ball of negativity growing in the taxi.

  ‘Remember what I told you. Fear is for others now, their blood will flow,’ said Christopher. He stretched his legs out along the double seat, a picture of nonchalance, but Fryer losing his bottle, especially at the first round, had not been part of the grand design.

  John grunted, put the headlights on, full beam, the yellow tubes of light opening up the dusky road ahead. Christopher felt his mobile phone vibrate, fished it out, another alert for @TenDead81. @LoyalistTrueBlue wanted to do all sorts of medieval things to Christopher’s online persona. Christopher smiled; the photo of Granny Moore had over fifty thousand reloads, people were starting a good old fashioned ding dong, albeit online, raking up old hurts and wrongs, fighting for the moral high ground, screaming for blood. Christopher killed the feed, put this phone away and took out another.

  He logged on again, to his separate account, using an alternative email, and password, and this time a @God’sPeopleUnderSiege and he typed:

  An Eye For an Eye.

  He followed @TenDead81. @God’sPeopleUnderSiege had no followers yet, but that would change.

  The engine rattled away under his seat as the taxi started up the hill of the Glen Road. A light fog had descended to the foot of the Black Mountain, momentarily in and out of view as the taxi hurtled along. If a patrol car passed them, they would get pulled over, Fryer was speeding, running in a panic while seated behind the wheel. John’s eyes appeared again in the rear-view, frantic this time.

  ‘It’s too dark. I want to go back to your place. Now!’

  ‘Relax John, you are doing OK, we are nearly there.’ But John was not doing OK. The guy was calmer on the pink pills. But then he would have been fit for nothing at all. Christopher leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, fixed his eyes on the illuminated corridor of road the taxi was swallowing up ahead.

  ‘Be cool.’

  ‘You be cool you fucking wee gabshite,’ replied John. At last: In the headlights, just ahead and to the right, a break in the hedgy border of the road.

  ‘Slow her down John, then take this right,’ said Christopher. His voice was steady and instructive, John obeyed.

  They turned into a one lane street which gently rose ahead of them, growing steeper as it followed the contours of the Black Mountain. The right of the road was lined with trees. To the left, new build town houses, high faced and spacious. Lincoln View, in every way it was situated well above the rest of west Belfast. John Fryer had scrubbed off most of their speed, and that was good, but it would be better if he kept a lid on the panic.

  ‘Dempsey lives here?’ said Fryer.

  ‘Him and those like him,’ said Christopher. The road turned a sharp right, ahead a cul-de-sac.

  ‘We stop here,’ said Christopher. Fryer turned, slowly stopped the taxi, lights still blazing, engine rattling.

  ‘Kill the engine now, John.’ The rattle tattle of the engine died abruptly but not the lights. Christopher waited, every second a chance they would be seen. He spoke. ‘Now the lights,’ said Christopher. His tone was soothing, but his eyes darted left to right for a sign they had been seen. Christopher heard a creak from the steering wheel as John’s fat fists tightened round it, his knuckles white. The lights burned on. John Fryer was breathing in short pants, tailing off to a wheeze. He gripped the wheel like a caught snake. Then his left hand slowly unclenched and he lowered it to the sticks under the dash. He twisted one of them and in the same instant the lights went out, total blackness. Good John, brave John. He knew he would do it. He wanted Dempsey.

  But mostly he had turned them off because John was his. Not his friend, any more than a lion tamer was friends with the big cat. But nor was he Christopher’s toy. He was much more dangerous, more lethal. He was his animal.

  ‘Thank you John,’ he said. ‘Let your eyes adjust, take it easy, fella.’ Soon the darkness softened and Christopher saw John’s hands, still ten and two on the wheel. He was trembling.

  ‘Tell me you can smell that, kid,’ he hissed. Christopher did not reply, and John Fryer repeated his question, voice thick with fear. John turned his head, looked into the back of the cab, still clinging on to the wheel like a trawler man in a storm. His bull’s shoulders were shaking. Christopher’s heart took an involuntary skip. The man was terrified, and whatever haunted him, was in the back of the taxi, with Christopher. Or so Fryer believed.

  ‘John, I can’t smell it. I can’t smell The Moley because it is not here!’ Then he heard something. A voice; rasping, and throaty, it spoke his name.

  Chrissssssstoher….

  It was Bad Daddy, and his voice was coming from beneath the taxi, the noose round his neck, choking him. The same monster he had found hanging from the bannister when he
had returned from school, feet knocking against the wall, urine dripping from the bottom of his trouser leg. Christopher snatched the leather straps on the roof of the taxi and raised himself aloft, feet on the seat. He held his breath, John’s shoulders kept shaking.

  Chrisssssssssstopher…. Christopher did not look down, kept his eyes trained on Fryer.

  ‘It’s close,’ said John. The big man took one hand off the wheel, fist to his mouth.

  Christopher closed his eyes and slowly lowered himself into the back seat. His testicles had shrunk, his manhood retreated. He opened his eyes, took a breath and forced his still raised feet to the floor, first one, then the other. The DM boots creaked. Christopher cleared his throat; blinked away the awful thought of Daddy on the rope, and spoke.

  ‘Tell me you are OK, John. Don’t be going la la on me now.’

  ‘I’m ready, kid,’ said John, stronger now, hands flexing from the wheel.

  ‘Good man,’ he said, but he was not looking at Fryer. Christopher was staring at the dark floor of the taxi. ‘If it is going to take too much out of you, we can abort the mission.’ John turned and squinted at him.

  ‘I’m OK, kid. Are you? You smelled it, didn’t you?’ Blood on John’s thumb, he popped it into his mouth, sucked.

  ‘I can’t smell anything. You’re bleeding, John,’ he said flatly.

  ‘It’s just a wee nick. Good thing too,’ he replied and opened the driver’s door, got out. Christopher watched him shed the tracksuit, Daddy’s bottle green RUC uniform beneath. He opened the boot, retrieved the Ruger and the plastic bag with the light, battery and bag of raw meat. John walked off up Lincoln View, swallowed by the darkness and mist. Christopher settled deeper into his seat, the cold sweat on his back making him shiver. His phone pinged but Christopher did not move to check it, he did not move at all.

  He watched the darkness and listened.

  Chapter 27.

  The homes along Lincoln View were dark and lifeless. Large fronted semi-detached and detached houses, bay windows and deep front gardens. The street lamps, spaced every twenty metres or so, would have kept this row well illuminated, but tonight they were cold and blank, silver swan necks presiding over pools of darkness.