by Neal Bircher
It was a similar story at his next stop: the “Curry Pot”, an Indian takeaway just a couple of doors up from Savealot. He ordered his food, a chicken tikka masala – he always felt a little uneasy ordering the all-too-obvious “CTM”, but then he liked it, so what the fuck – with a portion of onion bhaji and boiled rice. While he waited for his food he kept himself occupied by browsing through a well-thumbed copy of a local free paper (no mention of him, Gail, or anything about the death of Barry Timson), glancing at the Bollywood movie being shown on what seemed to be a very poorly tuned – and very old – TV, and observing the passing traffic – pedestrian and vehicular. During that time none of the various members of staff flitting around behind the counter, or the few – mostly chavvy – customers who came in, took a blind bit of notice of him. Maybe the story in which he was a leading character wasn’t such big news around here after all, at least, not anymore.
He trotted back to his house, boosted his curry’s temperature with a ninety second spin in the microwave, and then once again slumped onto his favourite sofa, to eat, washing his food down with the first of his new cans of Stella. The curry was good, and once he’d finished it Nick skipped again through the many TV channels that were on offer through whatever deal it was that Alyson had set up. But again, as usual, didn’t find anything of interest. Having replenished his Stella supply he then turned to his and Alyson’s small collection of DVDs. He already knew what he was going to watch. Back in Scotland he had promised himselfThe Wicker Manwhen the opportunity arose, but now that it had arisen he was in the mood for something grittier. SoThe Wicker Manwas beaten into a close second place byTrainspotting. He wondered what it was about Scotland that fascinated him so. But he didn’t think for long as the night was one for relaxation, not deep thought.
Trainspotting had started and Ewan McGregor was stealing a battery from a Volkswagen Golf. Nick had seen the film at least four times before. That was a rare honour: he rarely watched any film more than once, and most didn’t get more than about twenty minutes’ attention. He cracked open another can. From where he was sitting he could see into the open-plan kitchen where that pile of post still waited for him. He thought briefly about going through it, but then –fuck it;like everything else, it could wait until the morning.
Confession
Michael Kelly knew that he was about to confess to murdering Barry Timson … once more. He didn’t want to break the promise not to do it again that he’d made himself after his last drunken mouthing off in a pub, back there in England, but he couldn’t help himself. He’d known all along of course that a combination of drink and bravado would at some time prove too much for his limited capacity to resist letting his tongue run loose, and that time had now arrived. In the course of the evening he’d consumed a large amount of alcohol – through a mixture of strong lager, Guinness, and whiskey chasers, even by his own high standards. And he had done so in the company of two supposed ex-IRA men whose equally drunken states had led them to brag of their own murderous exploits during The Troubles. Well that was a red rag to Michael Kelly. The tales of his drinking buddies, Eamon and Fergus, were probably bullshit, but whether they were or not, his ego had no option but to compete. And in any case if these guys really were ex-IRA then they wouldn’t pass on anything that he told them, and if they weren’t … well they were probably much too drunk to remember anything by the morning anyway.
And so he told them, told them “everything”. He told them how it had started with a game of pool, and how “this big fella” had tried to cheat him. He told them how he had challenged the big fella and that that had led to an argument in which the man had called him a “stupid Paddy”. Eamon and Fergus supped at their beers and listened semi-attentively as they heard how the big fella had then set about Michael Kelly with a pool cue, and how he in turn had disarmed the man and knocked him out cold with a single punch. They carried on listening to how Michael Kelly had then walked nonchalantly out of the pub and along a canal towpath to another pub, only for the “stupid big bald English fucker” to follow him in there and then ask him outside for a fight. They heard how the two of them had then returned to the tow path, only for the “fat feckin’ eejit” to pull out a “fucking huge” knife. That had been too much for Michael Kelly.
“I pulled out the ald Smith and Wesson and gave it to him there and then: bang- bang! Fecker was dead before he hit the ground, he was. Then I lifted him up and dropped him in the water. Stupid cunt!”
Eamon and Fergus both just kind of nodded, and then started talking about something else. Unimpressed by their being unimpressed Michael Kelly sat back in his chair, mumbled “Feckers!” into his Guinness and then began to indulge himself in a spot of daydreaming. He thought back again over the last couple of months, of his journey – in both senses of the word – since the night of Barry Timson’s murder: his arrest; his notoriety in Norling; his travelling “home”; and then on up here to Enniskillen, where he found himself in the Flag, an ornate old fashioned pub, in the middle of the town. Those thoughts and his transition from Michael Kelly, trouble-making murder suspect, to Shaun Ryan, contented construction worker, always brought a smile to his face.
The need to go to the toilet soon snapped Michael Kelly out of the late night daydream. The night was one of his get-drunk-in-town nights. It was a Friday night too, which meant no work the next day, which was the excuse, if one was needed, to drink that little bit more even than normal. He went to the toilet, an exercise that in the Flag involved a treacherous journey down, and then of course back up, a very steep and very hard set of stone steps with a hairpin bend in the middle. The whole exercise took a number of minutes, and by the time Michael Kelly got back to re-join Eamon and Fergus, the two of them had their heads down in alcohol-induced dribbling sleep. He viewed them from the top of the steps, whilst holding onto a banister. He wasn’t always good at judging when it was time to go, but this was one of those occasions when even he didn’t feel that one more drink would round off the evening perfectly. He stumbled his way past his drinking companions, leaning his hand briefly on Fergus’s – or was it Eamon’s? – shoulder for support. He paused and looked disdainfully at the two of them. He was even more confident than before that neither would remember anything at all of the evening, let alone his “confession” that they hadn’t even seemed to take in at the time anyway.
Michael Kelly left the comfort and warmth of the Flag to be hit by the familiar cold air of the winter’s night. He buttoned up his coat, but he didn’t grimace or curse at the realisation that winter at one o’clock in the morning in Northern Ireland in December wasn’t warm. No, he smiled at the prospect of his invigorating walk home, at the thought of his cosy caravan at the end of it, and through the sheer pleasure of his current existence.
Michael Kelly felt good to be alive.
In the usual three or four minutes he was out of the town and into the dark refreshing countryside. The road – it was too wide and, during the day, too busy, to be called a lane – meandered gently uphill away from the town, and Michael Kelly had become familiar with its every twist and turn. In his mind he broke up the route into six stages, and he enjoyed mentally ticking each one off upon its completion. Stage one ended with crossing a mini-roundabout that took him from a lit street to that hedgerow-flanked country road. Stage six was the drive up to Willow Farm. Each other stage ended on a sharp bend and/or the passing of a big tree. The stages weren’t strictly equidistant, but they were close enough, and observing their passing helped to while away the stagger home.
Michael Kelly always walked on the right-hand side of the road, for no particular reason. What that meant was that any traffic that he met on his side of the road approached him from in front, where he could see it. Usually, during the course of his walk, there were two or three vehicles in each direction, but this night there weren’t any at all until he got to stage three. On stage three the fields on his side of the road were six feet higher than the road surface. Michael Kelly wal
ked along the edge of the road, with a small drainage ditch to his right. On the other side of that ditch was a steep embankment on the top of which an ancient and wild hedge bordered out-of-sight fields of grass and shrub.
The night’s first vehicle was a large one. Michael Kelly could hear its big engine and labouring gear changes from a long way off, and as it neared he concluded that, unusually for the time of night, it was a full 38-tonne articulated eighteen-wheeler. He thought to himself with a chuckle that it was probably carrying something dodgy – quite likely from “The South”. He drew on his cigarette as the artic thundered around the bend just ahead of him. Its multitude of headlights blinded him and he slowed his walking pace. The cab’s three sets of axels whooshed by. And then came the trailer, close enough that he could reach out and touch it. He didn’t do that, but in the pitch dark he stood on a large stone, and he yelped in pain as it turned over his left ankle. The pain only lasted a second before first his head, and then the rest of him fell under the first set of the trailer’s double wheels. Then it fell under the second set. Between them they broke almost every bone in his body, and crushed his skull beyond recognition. His remains landed in the drainage ditch, where they would be discovered by two of his work colleagues, sent out by a concerned Pat McBride the following Monday afternoon.
The chain of events would see four people die.
Alan
AfterTrainspotting had finished, Nick still had two cans of Stella left. A hard day of driving after hardly any sleep and a heavy session the night before – not to mention the eight cans sunk so far, left him ready for nothing more than a good and very long sleep. He decided to finish off just one more can. He switched off the TV, opened the can that he had just retrieved from the fridge, and took a long swig. Then he placed the can on the floor by his feet, closed his eyes to rest them for a moment, and instantly fell asleep.
He had been asleep for about an hour before he was stirred by a loud banging on his front door. Quite drunk, and at least half asleep, he stumbled through to the porch on auto-pilot, to see a large, and rather menacing-looking bald man, in a black leather jacket, beckoning him to open his front door. He was not surprised. He had, of course, been expecting a visit from the CID all evening. He unlocked, and slid open, the double-glazed door.
“You took your time,” Nick said. Then he turned and went back into the living room. Once there he turned to his guest, intending to ask what he could do for him. But before he got to ask the question, the man punched him hard in the stomach, causing Nick to double up in both surprise and pain. Then he landed another punch, to the side of Nick’s head, and another, square on his chin. Nick could feel teeth loose on his tongue as he crashed flat on his back to the floor. A bone-crunching Doctor Martin-clad kick crashed into his rib cage, followed by another, and another, then a furious stamp on his nose, sending blood all over his face, and a hard, numbing, kick to the ear. Nick could tell that he might well be about to die, but he couldn’t do anything to help himself. His eyes were blurring, full of blood. He could make out a big knife, and he felt its point on his throat. He heard a voice: “Alan, it’s me, Steve!” In his last two seconds of consciousness, Nick realised that he had just met Gail’s son and her brother-in-law, both for the first time.
“Stop it! Stop it!” screamed Gail, held back from physically attacking Alan by her own son, Stephen. “He didn’t do it – it was someone else! Ask the police, you fucking moron!”
A sweating, blood-spattered Alan turned to face Gail, large knife still in hand. Stephen kept his arms around Gail.
“Is that true?” Alan’s question was addressed to Stephen, not Gail.
“Yes, some Irish fucker.”
Alan looked first at Stephen, then at Gail, and then at Stephen once more. He paused in tense silence whilst considering his options, before grudgingly dropping his knife to the floor, and stepping away from Nick, allowing Gail to see Nick’s bloodied unconscious face for the first time. Gail wriggled free from Stephen and threw herself at Nick, but Alan, his eyes still full of fury, stopped her by grabbing her in his muscular tattooed right arm. Hating Alan more than ever, Gail punched him on the nose with one hand, whilst gauging his neck with her long fingernails with the other. But she was no match for the pumped-up psychotic ex-boxer. With barely a flick of his arm he threw her lightweight frame across the room, crashing her into its fireplace, and breaking her arm the process. “That’s for my brother, you fucking whore,” he explained, then he lunged at her again. But before he got to her, he fell to the ground unconscious, his jaw broken in three places by Stephen’s immense right-hander.
Stephen stood, towering over Alan’s prone form, and nodded to himself, satisfied with his handiwork. Then he turned to Gail. “I suppose I’d better get you an ambulance.”
The Mermaid
Margaret McVie was not best pleased when two police officers came into the Mermaid during Sunday lunchtime. She wasn’t pleased for one thing because she was alone behind the bar, and for another because not all of her clientele enjoyed having police in their vicinity. All the small number of customers that were present barely looked up from their newspapers or conversations.
The policemen introduced themselves. One was local, and the other was from London. She recognised the man in the photograph that they showed her straight away, although not the name that they gave him. It was Shaun – she knew that face well enough. But she’d never heard of “Michael Kelly.”
She took her time studying the photo, as if she was trying to recall the face. What she was actually doing was working out what story she was going to tell the policemen. Clearly Shaun was in some sort of trouble, and probably quite serious if the police were prepared to come all the way from England to speak to him. He’d not mentioned any trouble, nor had he said anything about having been in London; the only English city that he’d talked of had been Liverpool.
Margaret McVie was no longer inviting the piss-head waster into her bed. She’d given that up before it had got too far. And, quite likely for that reason, he wasn’t coming into the pub as often as he had been. But she still saw him around often enough, and had chatted to him in the street only two days before.
Her first instinct was to say that she didn’t recognise him. But then she thought that the police might already know that not to be true, and if not already, then they might find it out soon enough, and would quickly know that she was lying.
“Yes, yes, I know him. He was a customer from time to time. But I haven’t seen him lately at all.”
The two policemen each eyed Margaret McVie with enough suspicion to make her uncomfortably avert their combined gaze.
After that pause in conversation, Detective Sergeant Craig Nolan spoke. He and Dave Ferriby had agreed that he would lead the questioning as Margaret McVie would in all likelihood be less forthcoming with a stranger from “over the water”.
“Margaret,” he said softly, “we were given to understand that he has been staying here with you.”
Margaret McVie looked nervously back at the policemen, her eyes darting back and forth between the two of them. They wouldn’t be able to tell whether she was feeling embarrassed / concerned that they knew of her guilty secret, or whether she was just playing for time to further concoct her story. The latter was of course the case.
“Sure. Yes, he was, but he’s not anymore.”
With a nod of his head Nolan prompted her to continue. She obliged.
“He went a couple of weeks ago … said he was going back to England – to London – because he was running out of money. He said he was going to stay with his brother for a while, on the way – in Belfast.”
The policemen’s eyebrows were raised.
“His brother, you say?” asked Nolan. “Did he say what his brother’s name was?”
Margaret McVie paused for a moment, feigning more thought. Then she shook her head. “No, he didn’t say, just that he lives in Belfast somewhere. I think Shaun said that he works in a bookies.”<
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Detective Sergeant Nolan carried on his questioning for another few minutes, but he could soon tell that Margaret either knew nothing else of use to him and Ferriby or that she did but she wasn’t going to tell them. She claimed that Michael Kelly was neither working nor signing on, and that she didn’t know of any friends that he had in the town, other than casual drinking acquaintances in the Mermaid.
The two policemen thanked Margaret McVie, and left, both doing well to conceal their disappointment.
They retired to a café a few doors along the road. It was after one o’clock in the afternoon but Ferriby still hadn’t had any breakfast.
“Let me get you a proper full Irish,” offered Craig Nolan. “That’ll set you up nicely for the rest of the day.”
“What’s in a full Irish, exactly?” asked Ferriby, whose only previous experience of either Ireland had been an alcohol-fogged stag weekend in Dublin, many years before.
“It’s basically a full English with soda bread,” his host informed him.
Ferriby nodded approvingly, choosing not to further expose his ignorance by asking what soda bread was.
Nolan ordered and they got back to the main matter in hand.
The key question was whether Margaret McVie had been telling them the truth. They were both unsure about that. She was clearly wary, but that didn’t necessarily mean that she was lying.
“So, what about the running out of money thing?” said Nolan, “That would back up her saying that he wasn’t working or signing on. Did he have any money to start with?”
“Not much, but we think he might have been involved in a burglary before he left, and it’s all but certain that he robbed a lorry driver’s wallet on the ferry. So it could stack up.”