Bleed for Me (30 page)

Eddie is on his feet. ‘My client was defending himself and his property after an intruder entered his house il egal y.’

‘The victim was unarmed.’

‘He was trespassing.’

‘The injuries are horrific.’

‘I haven’t seen a medical report.’

Judge Spencer interrupts. ‘You’l get your chance to speak, Mr Barrett.’

Eddie holds up his hands in surrender, his short blunt fingers pointing to the ceiling.

‘Carry on, Mr Mel or.’

‘Thank you, Your Honour. The prosecution wil also be seeking a protection order. The defendant has threatened and harassed Gordon El is and his wife. We ask the court to order that Mr O’Loughlin not approach either of them at their home or their places of work . . .’

Unshaven and exhausted, I can barely keep up with the arguments and feel no emotion other than abject humiliation. Eddie Barrett is waxing lyrical, describing me as a fine, upstanding member of the community, a university professor, married with two daughters . . . an unblemished record . . . close ties to the community . . . a history of public service . . .

blah, blah, blah.

No mention of the separation.

‘This is a case of a home invasion. The defendant found an intruder hiding in his house. It was dark. He was frightened. He acted to protect himself and his property.’

Eddie pul s out a handkerchief and waves it like a white flag. It’s a nice touch.

‘This is an outrage. A travesty. To incarcerate a man whose privacy has been violated. A man who has selflessly served the community . . .’

Judge Spencer raises his hand. ‘Al right, Mr Barrett, you’ve made your point. Save the speeches for the trial.’

At that moment I sense I’m being watched and glance over my shoulder. The public gal ery is deserted but there is a blind spot to the right of the main doors, an area of shadow big enough to hide a person.

Someone pushes through the door, throwing light into the dark corner. Julianne is watching me. Her hair is brushed back from her face, the fringe fal ing diagonal y across her forehead. She’s wearing a dark trouser suit she bought when she worked in London.

I raise my hand, but she turns away and pul s open the door.

Judge Spencer has finished. Eddie Barrett signals me to the edge of the dock.

‘Can you raise twenty thousand?’

‘That’s a lot.’

‘It could have been worse.’

‘Cal Ruiz. He’l know what to do.’

This time I’m placed in a different holding cel . Three men sit on separate wooden benches against the wal s. Al of them are wearing suits, but only one of them leans forward to stop the jacket from creasing.

I recognise them from photographs. The nearest is Gary Dobson. Next to him is Tony Scott and sitting slightly apart from them is Novak Brennan. I know what I’ve read about them.

Scott is six foot tal , shaven headed, a veteran footbal hooligan who has served time for assault and robbery. Dobson is shorter, stockier and ten years younger with convictions for car theft, drug possession and assaulting a police officer. Both men drank at the same pub and were activists for the BNP.

Brennan was a party candidate at the recent council elections. He narrowly missed winning a seat on Bristol City Council because the Labour Party withdrew its candidate and urged its supporters to vote for the Liberal Democrat, ensuring the BNP couldn’t win the contest.

Brennan looks younger in the flesh, with barely a line on his face. His trademark thick dark hair is brushed back from his forehead and he has laughter lines around his eyes. Unlike his fel ow accused, his suit doesn’t look like a straitjacket.

Scott and Dobson acknowledge my arrival by making eye contact. Brennan is picking at his manicured nails, elbows on his knees. I take the bench opposite. The wal s have been recently painted. Without the graffiti I have less to read and more time to think.

I find myself staring at Brennan. His eyes lift and meet mine, locking on to a place inside my head. I glance away, staring at the floor.

I’m holding my breath. When I realise, I exhale too quickly.

‘How’s the trial going?’ I ask.

The three of them are staring at me now.

‘I just got bail,’ I explain. ‘I’m waiting for someone to post it.’

‘Big fucking deal,’ says Scott, shaking his head.

Brennan continues to stare at me as if he’s trying to examine my conscience.

‘Congratulations,’ says Dobson, who seems happier to talk to someone. ‘What
didn’t
you do?’

He laughs.

Brennan takes a moist paper cloth from a smal travel pack in his pocket and begins careful y wiping his fingers one by one, almost polishing his fingernails.

‘You must be getting sick of being in that courtroom,’ I say.

He raises a forefinger, signal ing me to stop. ‘Do you know the first lesson you learn in a place like this?’ he asks.

‘No.’

‘You learn to keep your mouth shut just in case the person they put in the cel with you is a snitch who’s going to claim later that he heard you say something you didn’t say.’

His accent is slightly Irish. The North. Belfast maybe.

‘I’m not a snitch.’

‘Oh, so you brought references did you?’

‘No, I mean . . .’

‘Best you not say anything.’

I nod and he goes back to cleaning his hands.

Julianne told me that he didn’t look like a monster. I wanted to tel her that they rarely ever do, bad people. They don’t have a rogue gene or a tattoo on their foreheads and, despite what people seem to think, you can’t ‘see it in their eyes’.

A few minutes later Brennan, Scott and Dobson are led upstairs and their trial resumes. Julianne wil be there. Her witness gives evidence today. The survivor.

32

Two hours later I step outside the crown court registry office alongside Ruiz, who posted my bail.

‘Where did you get twenty grand?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘You put up your house.’

‘More fool them - it’s fal ing down.’

‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

‘Just make sure you turn up for the hearing or I’l track you down myself and kil you.’

We’ve spent the last hour waiting for the paperwork to be approved while I recounted what happened yesterday - first with Sienna, and then Gordon El is. As I told him the story, I could see every turn in the road, every dip and curve, every fuck-up. When I reached the point where El is claimed to have slept with Charlie, I could feel the temperature rise in Ruiz.

‘It’s not true,’ he told me. ‘Charlie’s too bright for that.’

‘I know. I wish I could have been thinking more clearly at the time. Instead I wanted to kil him.’

‘Yeah, wel , don’t go publicising the fact.’

We’re standing on the steps. The street outside is empty except for police and a handful of protesters who have stayed behind. Ruiz unscrews the lid from his sweet tin and pops a boiled lol y on his tongue.

‘You medicated?’

‘I’m al right.’

‘You should get some sleep.’

‘I have to talk to Julianne. She’s working today. Translating.’

I glance towards the courthouse and try to push away the memory of her watching me standing in the dock. The look she gave me. Blank. Empty.

‘Which court is she in?’

‘The Novak Brennan trial.’

Ruiz seems to taste something in his mouth that turns sour and unpleasant. He spits the sweet into the gutter where it shatters against the concrete.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You know Brennan?’

‘Yeah, I know him. We go way back.’

‘I just spent an hour in a holding cel with him.’

‘Then you might want to shower.’

Planting his hands in his coat pockets, Ruiz stares indolently into the pearl-grey sky, but his gaze has turned inward, replaying past events in his head. Clearing his throat, he begins talking about his years in Northern Ireland when he was seconded to work with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, monitoring intel igence on IRA terror cel s operating on the British mainland but control ed from Belfast.

‘A prostitute cal ed Mae Grace Brennan died of a drug overdose in a bedsit on the Antrim Road in 1972. It was just after Bloody Friday. She was dead two days before the neighbours broke into her flat. They found Novak and his sister living in filth. Novak was three, Rita only nine months. The baby was so undernourished she had bleeding sores on her buttocks and back. Novak could barely walk.

‘Brother and sister were made wards of the court and fostered. A Methodist minister and his wife adopted them, but the die was cast early when it came to Novak. He had behavioural problems which saw him expel ed from school and given counsel ing from the age of seven. When he was ten he kil ed the family cat by throwing it against a wal after it scratched him.

Four years later, he beat up the minister’s wife so badly that she had to be hospitalised.

‘The family gave up and Novak and Rita were taken back into care. Four months later they ran away and finished up on the streets of Belfast. It was 1983, just before I started my secondment.

‘That December the IRA set off a car bomb outside Harrods and kil ed six people - three of them coppers. I knew one of them. Inspector Stephen Dodd. He died on Christmas Eve.

We were trying to trace the men responsible and the trail led to Belfast.’

Ruiz registers the passing of a police car. The windscreen catches the light like a camera flash and two men in uniform watch us as though we’re middle-aged suicide bombers.

‘What happened to Novak and Rita?’ I ask.

‘They lived on the streets, in squats, deserted factories and freight cars. Then Novak came up with a honey-trap scam. Rita used to dress up in a short leather skirt and boob tube, wandering up Adelaide Street, drawing attention from the johns. She lured them into a dark al ey, unzipped them and got on her knees. That’s when Novak crept forward and tapped Rita on the shoulder, aiming a knife at their soft bits and demanding money.

‘He stole wal ets, credit cards, sometimes clothes. Later he graduated to blackmail by taking Polaroids and threatening to post them home if the john didn’t stump up more cash.

Nothing shakes money from a tree like a photograph of an underage girl giving a married man a blowjob.

‘Soon they had plenty of cash and rented a place. Set up house. Stayed clear of the social. It seemed like a perfect set-up.’

‘What happened?’

‘Rita attracted the wrong customer one night. A biker by the name of Nigel Geddes plucked her off the street before Novak could intervene. Geddes took Rita to a gang party where she was raped every which way by at least a dozen bikers. When they discovered she was a virgin they laughed. What were the chances, eh?

‘They dumped Rita back on the street, bleeding internal y, with cigarette burns that turned to weeping sores. Novak lost it completely. The only constant in the shit-storm he cal ed a life had been his little sister and he had made a promise to himself that he’d protect her.

‘So while Rita was stil in hospital, being looked after by social workers, Novak bought himself a .25 calibre automatic handgun for eighty quid from an IRA gunrunner cal ed Jimmy Ferris. The Ferret.

‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking a kid like Novak, with his history of violence and his hair-trigger temper, would go al Dirty Harry and shoot a place up, but it didn’t go down like that. Novak didn’t walk into that clubhouse guns blazing. He watched and he waited. He fol owed the bikers, making a note of their faces, their routines, where they lived . . .

‘The first mark made it easy. He left a bar in Short Strand with a young girl in tow. The pair walked into a dimly lit parking garage. By the time Novak turned the corner, the biker had the girl on her knees.

‘It was a familiar scene. Novak tapped her on the shoulder and she pul ed back in fright. The biker opened his eyes and the pistol slipped between his lips.

‘Novak told the girl to get lost. He waited until she disappeared before he looked back at the biker whose shrinking wet penis was stil hanging outside his pants.

‘The girl heard him begging for his life. Apologising. Novak counted down from three and pul ed the trigger. Because it was a low-calibre weapon the bul et didn’t make a clean entry and exit. Instead it ricocheted around the inside of his skul , turning his brain to pulp.

‘Novak used the guy’s shirt to wipe the saliva and blood from the barrel of the gun. Two hours later, he kil ed a second biker. This time the guy ran into a school and hid in a toilet block.

Novak found him in one of the stal s and shot him four times, but only after he’d kicked him unconscious. Novak slipped on the muck and left a neat handprint on the floor. That’s how the police eventual y caught him, but not before he’d kil ed eight more times.

‘One by one he tracked down the men who’d raped Rita. Nigel Geddes was the last. By then Geddes knew he was being hunted so he fled to Liverpool and changed his name, but Novak caught the ferry to Holyhead and slept rough in the streets of Anfield for two months until he found his man. Geddes was shooting up in a squat in Everton and Novak helped him find a vein and then an artery. Bled him dry.

‘The police caught up with Novak when he stepped off the ferry in Belfast. He didn’t say a word during the interviews. He wouldn’t speak to the social workers or child psychologists.

The bloody handprint saw him charged with one of the murders, but investigators didn’t have enough evidence to pin the others on him.

‘When Novak’s barrister stood up at the bar table, he told the jury that Novak had been sexual y assaulted by the biker, who mistook him for a rent boy. The jury believed the story and the prosecution accepted a manslaughter plea. Novak was stil a minor so he was sent to a youth prison and served barely four years.’

Ruiz doesn’t look at me for a reaction. Nor does he editorialise with his own body language. This is history now. Indisputable.

The clang of metal on metal makes him turn. Across the road an overloaded skip sits beneath a forest of scaffolding pipes. Workmen are dismantling the framework around the Guildhal . Another pipe drops from a height, bouncing on to the cobblestones.