Love Sex Work Murder

by Neal Bircher

  “Call me a feckin’ pikey, would ya?” he called after it, and then laughed out loud. Behind him, with its back to the structure of the ship, was a seat – like a park bench, but bolted down more securely. He sat down on it, making sure that his long coat got between the wet wooden slats of the bench and his jeans. Then he took his new-gotten wealth from the coat pocket. There were two bundles: thirteen twenty pound notes, and a total of three hundred and forty-five euros.

  “Ha! Ha! We’re rich!” he cackled to himself, and then folded the cash into his own wallet with the money he already had in there. Now he had more than a grand in spending money; the most he’d had in years. He rubbed his hands gleefully together and then took the cigarette from his pocket and, using his coat as a shield from the wind, rain, and spray – they were all as bad as ever, but he was getting used to them as well as being warmed by his thieving triumph – and managed to get it alight. Then he sat back to enjoy a relaxing, smug smoke. He would stay on the bench until car drivers were called to their deck, when he would go and join them. It was very unlikely that the fat lorry driver would both notice that his wallet was missing and put two and two together with the people around him to know who to look for, but if he did then he’d be looking on the lorry deck for somebody who had a pass to the lorry drivers’ canteen, not the car deck. In other circumstances Michael Kelly wouldn’t have bothered to take such a precaution, after all, the risk of a – potentially violent – confrontation didn’t worry him, and he was completely confident that there was no physical evidence left to link him to the theft of the fat bloke’s wallet, but again he was after all on the run from a murder charge, and keeping his head low with regard to police matters remained a very good idea.

  The landing went without incident, Michael Kelly managing to avoid contact with any of the three fat lorry drivers or with Derek, and he was not challenged at either customs or passport control. He then took a bus to the centre of the city. Only six other people got on the bus with him. He was first to get on and made a beeline for the back seat, where he lay down, and, using his holdall as a pillow, almost instantaneously fell asleep. It seemed to be straightaway that he woke up again, with a big burly bus driver shaking his shoulder and barking something at him. Michael Kelly sat up and rubbed his eyes. The bus driver was walking away from him, back to the front of an otherwise empty bus. He looked out of the window and was surprised to see that he was already in Dublin’s central bus station. The sight made him spring up, grab his bag and trot to the front of the bus to get off. Once outside in the cold morning air he stopped to look around. It was only a bus station and it looked, smelled, sounded, and felt just like a bus station, but it was Dublin bus station, and to Michael Kelly it looked, smelled, sounded, and felt like only Dublin station looked, smelled, sounded, and felt. Its utilitarian sixties buildings, and its buses that were much like any other buses, were shrouded in a gentle morning mist that could only have wafted in from the Irish sea en route to the mountains of Mourne. The smell was of diesel fumes and tyre rubber, but, he was sure, with a hint of peat smoke unique to his home country. The sound was of engines and footsteps, but infused with gabbled snippets of human voice. No words were discernible, but the accent was clear as a bell. And the feel – it was physically cold as the dark sea that he’d stared into from the ferry, but at the same time it wrapped him in a warm comforting blanket of familiarity. Yes, Michael Kelly felt comfortable. Draw a circle around where he was with a radius of five miles and you would cover the site of his birth, of the home where he was raised, of each of his schools, of his first pint of Guinness, his first job, his first shag … and also the current homes of two of his brothers, either of whom he would be able to stay with, should he need to. But he wouldn’t be stopping with either of his brothers, nor with anybody else in this stinking great city: the place of his first arrest, his first fight, his first beating from his father, his first realisation that he had to get away to somewhere – anywhere – else if his life was to be anything other than one of perpetual misery. No, he wouldn’t be spending any more time than he had to in the shit-hole that was his home town. And even if he had loved the place he wouldn’t have been stopping, no, not in the first place the Garda would expect to find him, once their friends from the UK had got in touch. He had a different plan, one of which he was rather proud. He knew that Mr Wilson and his chums, stupid though he thought they were, once they knew that he was missing, would guess that he would have gone home: home to a different country, with all the legislative inconvenience that that entailed for them. Yes, they would guess at that, and they would be right, and they would soon discover that too, once they’d wasted lots of time sifting through the bookings of every airline and ferry company that operated a service between the UK and Ireland. How helpful Mr Wilson’s Irish counterparts would be to him and his buddies Michael Kelly had no idea. What he did know was that it didn’t matter how much they put themselves out to aid the London police in their quest for an Irish murder suspect whom they had let slip through their hands, as it wouldn’t be of any use. Because he would be back in the UK, in Northern Ireland, back within Mr Wilson’s jurisdiction, if he ever thought to look … which of course he wouldn’t. Michael Kelly chuckled at the audacity of his own plan, and then gave a hard stare to the cleaning woman who was looking at him quizzically. Then, seeing the cleaner’s alarm, he changed the stare to a (false) warm smile, and pointedly turned his attention to a long brick wall, attached to which was a set of huge bus timetables, which would help him chose his next destination – his next home.

  Close Encounter

  Nick came back from the bar with two drinks, a Diet Coke for Gail, and a full fat Coke for himself. He’d only got small glasses as they would need to be getting back to work soon. He pulled up his chair. Gail was opposite him looking lost in thought. “Thanks,” she said, and then returned to her silence. Nick chose not to interrupt her.

  They went out to lunch together every three weeks or so, and they had two pubs that they tended to alternate between. This time they’d chosen somewhere different for a change, and it was called the King’s Arms. It was on the far side of Norling, rather than out in the country like their other choices. It looked a bit run-down, but the food had been OK, and the lone barperson – a middle-aged blonde woman, who had a name badge saying “Sandra” – had been efficient and friendly. Nick thought that they would probably be back there again.

  There weren’t many other customers, but Nick, who was facing the pub’s one entrance, observed another one coming in. He was a large bald man, and his gaze went first to the bar, behind Nick, but then he seemed to stop in his tracks, his attention apparently on Gail and Nick’s table. He looked Nick in the eye for a good few seconds, making Nick question whether it was somebody that he knew, but he was sure that it wasn’t. The man then pulled a phone from his pocket, briefly fiddled with it, and then turned and departed.

  Gail snapped back into the present. “What’s up?”

  “Me? Nothing. Why?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, nearly the weekend. I was thinking about going to the football.”

  And so the conversation picked up, both of them blissfully unaware that for the first time Nick had set his eyes on Gail’s husband, Barry Timson.

  Sorry - see that woman at the middle table with the long dark hair - thats my wife. X

  Shit! Did she see you? xxx

  No. I’ll come back in a bit. Let me know when shes gone. X

  Why don’t u go and wait at my place. Im off at 3. xxxx

  Sounds good 2 me! I’ll keep it warm for you. X

  Mmmmmmmmmmmmm! cant wait. xxxx

  Nor me, love. C U l8rXXXX

  The North

  The border to the North was not really so far from Dublin, and ordinarily Michael Kelly would have hitch-hiked. But given his desire to keep a low profile – not to mention his newly-gained wealth – he decided he would pay for his ride this time. He would find a bus route t
hat went generally in the right direction, and at its destination, do the same thing again, until he was across the border, and then he would stop in the first northern town the bus took him to, sort himself out a B&B for the night, and then settle down to a good day’s drinking somewhere. Plans didn’t get much better than that!

  Michael Kelly’s geography of Ireland, or anywhere, for that matter, wasn’t particularly good. But he did know that Cavan was vaguely in the direction of the North, and as there was a bus going there in twenty minutes, he chose that route to be the first leg of his journey. He was the first on the bus again, and he again settled into the back seat and lay down for a sleep. As a man who was not unfamiliar with sleeping in the great outdoors, sometimes through choice, sometimes through having nowhere else to go, and quite often through being too drunk to be able to go anywhere else, nodding off in the relative warmth and comfort of the bench seat of a moving vehicle, after more than twenty-four hours with close to no sleep, was not difficult. And so it came to pass that a couple of hours later, Michael Kelly was awoken from his slumbers by a bus driver for the second time in the one morning. This time though he was not in the familiar surroundings of Dublin Central Bus Station, but in a rather smaller-scale version in the little town of Cavan. He sat up to find himself again to be the sole remaining passenger. He had no idea of how many others had joined him on the journey, or indeed how many of them had shaken their heads or made loud comments at his inconsideration at taking up five seats to himself. Nor, of course, did he give a shit. He ambled blearily out onto the open air, made his way once more to a timetable, and selected the next bus going north of the border. It was leaving in ten minutes, and it was going to Enniskillen, in County Fermanagh. And that is how Enniskillen came to be the town in which Michael Kelly would, by his standards, settle down.

  Enniskillen’s therefore became his third bus station of the day. It was small and functional, and didn’t in itself give many clues as to the character of the town that it served. Michael Kelly had slept once again for the entire journey, and so had not seen anything of the town or the approach to it. But as he stepped blinking across the station’s concourse that was dappled in pleasantly-warm, pale midday autumn sunshine he could smell the freshness of country air between the wafts of tyre rubber and diesel fumes, and he already had a smile on his face as he sensed that this would be the place that he was looking for. A five minute walk later, and that feeling was confirmed: It was a bustling little market town, big enough that there would probably be work going, and that he would be able to melt into the background, and yet small enough to feel like a million miles from London, or indeed Dublin. Just as importantly, he had already passed four inviting pubs. He decided to stop at the fifth, and to begin to get acquainted with his new home town.

  Ed and May

  Apart from a leisurely pub lunch stop, Nick kept driving until darkness began to fall, when he and Gail agreed to stop at the next town, whatever it might be, and take a room at the first B&B that they came across that had vacancies. Hence another “Helen” (this time with a strong Scottish accent) was soon welcoming them across her doorstep, and another small town’s hostelries were benefiting from their custom.

  That town, as it happened, was Forres, in whisky country, on the north coast of Morayshire. There wasn’t too much happening there that interested them, and so they only stayed the one night. But it did set the trend for the weeks ahead: it was the first of many a random brief stop at a small town somewhere in Scotland. It was one of only a few completely random destinations though, as more often than not the two of them sat down with their road atlas on the morning of their leaving a place – after either one or two nights, depending on how much they liked it and how hung-over they were after the first night – and selected their next stop. And that next stop was selected only on the criterion that it was not an obvious next destination from their starting point.

  Hence they zigzagged their way, up, down, and across the country, driven on by their desire to get away. They both knew what they were running from, but had little need for the time being to give a great deal of thought to where they were running to. They stopped at places they’d heard of before largely at 4.45 every football season Saturday – Aberdeen, Dundee, Ayr, Montrose, Stranraer, and so on – or because a racecourse was located there in the case of Perth, or a ski resort in the case of Aviemore. There were other places that they had heard of before – Dumfries; Fort William – and others that they hadn’t really, such as Oban, and Newtonmore. They did the tourists things too – Loch Ness, Culloden, and John o’Groats. Each newly-visited town became to Gail and Nick no longer just a name, but a real place with people with strong accents, a local pub or two, and in most cases with homely welcoming accommodation too. The places were all enjoyed for whatever they had to offer: the pubs, picturesque lakeside walks, views to gaze into out over the North or Irish seas, and of course no end of opportunities for having sex in new locations, many of them outdoors. Of those many outdoor experiences, Nick’s personal favourite was at Perth racecourse, just under the final jump, at midnight, on the occasion of the second anniversary of their first date. He would enjoy watching racing from that course on the TV in future. Most places became memorable for something. In Aviemore, ironically, a heavy snow fall had kept them “trapped” for four days, spent almost entirely between their room and the pub. In Oban it didn’t ever seem to stop raining, and also, Nick observed, practically every taxi, and many other cars beside had personalised number plates ending in0 BAN.Newton Stewart was another interesting one. Upon visiting the tourists’ information office, Nick realised that he was on location for the shooting of one of his all-time favourite films,The Wicker Man. The sites Culzean Castle (Lord Summerisle’s house in the film), a sweet shop in Kirkcudbright (Rowan Morrison’s mother’s general store), a quaint little cottage in Anwoth (the school house), St. Ninian’s cave, near Whithorn (the cave in the film), and a graveyard in, again, Anwoth, were crammed into a day’s visiting. Then followed a long drive back north to one more majorWicker Man location: the village of Plockton, which turned out to be Scotland’s most picturesque and tranquil inhabited place.

  This wholeWicker Man experience reminded Nick of how good the film was, and he made a note to dust off his DVDcopy when the next opportunity arose – whenever that might be. Thinking of the film it occurred to him too that his favourite two films were both set in Scotland (the other one beingTrainspotting), and that he was living through a film-like Scottish adventure of his own. Carrying the theme further, he and Gail were still using false names to help deflect anyone who might think that they recognised them. For the next few days they were Ed and May, in homage toThe Wicker Man’s lead actor, Edward Woodward, and a character from the film, the sweetshop owner, May Morrison. Not that anybody did seem to recognise them. No, Ed and May (or whichever names they were using at the time) blended in wherever they went. They clearly didn’t act like anything other than normal tourists, as far as the locals were concerned. And their adventure didn’t feel like anything out of the ordinary to Gail or Nick either. In fact, Nick mused, it felt to be just what they should have been doing with their lives at that moment in time, maybe even something they should have been doing a long time before.

  Search for Granny Gail

  Police have stepped up the search for missing grandmother Gail Timson, who disappeared almost a month ago, after being questioned about the death of her husband.

  Mrs Timson (40) was arrested along with her friend Nicholas Hale (34) after the body of Barry Timson, was found in a canal at Norling, Middlesex, on September 18th. Mr Timson (41), a local football manager, had been shot in the chest.