The Killing Season (11 page)

Even at that age I agreed with him on that one. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up, though. They talked about it often enough but I couldn’t fix myself on anything. Plenty of time for that. Fireman one week. A soldier a few years back before the Troubles flared up in earnest again. Secretly I sometimes dreamed of being a priest. I could see myself standing up there in the pulpit, holding everybody in awe as I railed and castigated. I was not so hot at the academicals, however, as I called them back then and I minded how the black crows and the penguins knew everything about everything, and that must take a powerful lot of book studying.

I bent down to pick up a pebble form the path. Feck it, I thought, I’m only nine years old – I have my whole life ahead of me. I threw the stone, arcing it high in the air to clatter down on the salt-crusted rocks on the beach below, when I heard the cry. And I recognised the voice.

I rushed down the path and around the corner. And there, sure enough, was Liam Corrigan, my cousin. Liam was a couple of years younger than me, a few inches shorter, and was surrounded by four older boys with mischief on their faces and sticks in their hands. I could see that Liam had tears in his eyes, that he was trying to hold back, and a small trickle of blood was running down from his nose.

I knew the other boys, sure enough. All Linehans. All trouble. Like the family had always been.

‘Brave of you to be taking on the one boy,’ I said to the eldest of them.

Gerry Linehan looked at me and grinned, strolling over. ‘You want to join in, do you? Do you want some of—’

But he never finished the sentence as I smashed my fist furiously and suddenly into his nose. The boy dropped, squealing, to his knees. I snatched up the stick from his hand and turned to the three remaining Linehans.

‘Come on, then, ya gobshites.’

I waved the stick in front of me and pushed Liam towards the road. ‘Get out of here.’

And as Liam ran off up the road for help, I turned and faced the others, a fury in me as they circled me as warily as a pack of dogs would approach a wounded wolf.

Had help not arrived when it did, things might have gone a lot worse for me. But, as it was, that was the first time I ended up in hospital for Liam. On that occasion it was for a fractured wrist. On the second occasion it was for something far more serious.

‘He’s coming round.’

I heard the voice and tried to open my eyes. Christ, I felt awful. As if I had been run over by a herd of cattle. Every muscle in my body ached. But most of all there was a stabbing pain in my side, and I remembered where I was and why.

‘God bless you, Jack. You’ve done a marvellous thing.’

I blinked my eyes and could just about make out my aunt looking down, smiling gratefully, and my mother, beautiful as she always was, with hair like Maureen O’Sullivan’s and every bit as pretty, as my da always said.

‘Is he going to be all right?’ I asked.

‘Yes, Jack,’ ma said, taking my hand and patting it. He’s going to be just grand. You both are.’

The fact that she crossed herself immediately after saying it might have given others cause for concern, but I was sixteen years old now and invincible.

‘You’ve saved his life, Jack. You’ve saved his life,’ cried his aunt effusively, bursting into tears.

I shrugged. ‘Sure, it was only a kidney.’

I smiled at the memory. And then the smile faded as I remembered how my cousin had repaid me. Many years later in the lock-up of a murdering gangster called Mickey Ryan in London.

There was a metallic clang. I looked across to see the gorilla of a henchman putting a toolbox on the workbench that ran along the whole left-hand side of the garage.

‘You might wonder why you are still alive, Delaney.’

‘Must be my guardian angel.’

Ryan laughed. His blue eyes sparkling with amusement. ‘I wonder if you’ll still be laughing when my man here goes to work on you with a pair of needle-tooth pliers.’

Liam stepped forward. ‘Nobody said anything about that.’

‘Nobody points a gun at me and gets away with it. You’re going to learn that, Delaney. And that grassing tub of lard Norrell is going to be next.’ He turned to Liam. ‘Put one in his gut, give him something to think about.’

Liam raised the pistol he had been holding in his right hand: a semi-automatic with a silencer. I could see no mercy, no compassion in his eyes as he pulled the trigger.

The minder made a sound like a dog swallowing a fly and dropped to the floor, a hand fluttering towards his heart but not making it. Liam pointed the gun at Mickey Ryan.

‘The fuck you think you’re doing?’

‘The fuck
you
think I’m doing?’

Ryan shook his head. ‘We had a deal.’

‘I don’t make deals with scum. Gut shot, wasn’t it?’ He pulled the trigger again, and Mickey Ryan dropped to his knees, squealing and holding his stomach. ‘Hurts, doesn’t it?’

Ryan’s face had gone purple and he hissed between his teeth. But if they were words he was trying to speak they were not intelligible to the human ear.

Liam grabbed a Stanley knife from the toolbox and slashed the ropes binding my arms.

He smiled. ‘I made some calls after you left. Figured out what was going on and realised you’d be way out of your depth.’

‘I had it covered.’

‘Sure you did, cousin. But you weren’t going to kill him, were you?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Which means that one way or another he would have ended up killing you.’

‘Maybe.’

‘No “maybe” about it.’

‘What did you have to hit me for, then?’

‘You might be ten kinds of death wish walking on legs, Jack. But I still enjoy my life. I did what I had to do. And you should be grateful, so take a Panadol and shut the fuck up with the whining already.’

Ryan gurgled again, hissing through wet lips, his face contorted with pain. ‘Listen . . .’

Liam turned to me and held the gun out. ‘Do you want to do it?’

I made no move to take the pistol. Liam nodded, then fired two bullets one after the other into the kneeling man’s head. Ryan slumped sideways and the gurgling stopped.

I looked at the dead body. Not sure what to think any more. ‘What now?’

‘Now, cousin, we walk away from here.’

‘We can’t. There’s DNA all over the place. You go. Leave me the gun.’

Liam reached into his overcoat and pulled out a large brown packet. ‘Did you know Mickey Ryan was in big with the old IRA? Back in the 1970s?’

‘No.’

Liam nodded. ‘Back in the day he made a fair few bob out of it. Pissed a fair few people off, too. People who didn’t take the laying down of arms at all happily. Formed new groups.’

‘The Real IRA.’

Liam shrugged. ‘Amongst others. Either way. He’s on a list. And this . . .’ he tossed the packet onto the workbench ‘. . . is the boys’ old friend.’

‘Semtex?’

‘There won’t be enough left of Mickey Ryan, his sidekick, or this garage to fill a teaspoon, let alone any trace of our DNA.’

I nodded. Micky Ryan was the man who had been responsible for my wife’s death when she’d been torn apart by a shotgun blast in a Pinner petrol station. I looked down at his dead body. It didn’t feel like closure.

I just felt empty.

‘I guess that makes us even, Liam.’

I snapped back into the present and took a deep breath as the phone was answered. ‘Liam,’ I said. ‘I need a favour again.’

‘Anytime, Jack. You know that.’

‘Our slate’s clean.’

‘Never going to happen, cousin. We look out for each other. What do you need?’

‘I need someone dealing with.’

I STOOD IN
the doorway and looked at my sleeping wife-to-be.

Her book, Hilary Mantel’s
Wolf Hall
, had fallen from her hand and lay face down beside her on the bed. Kate preferred her violence, crimes and murder in the distant past; preferably Tudor, for some reason. But she had been reading this particular book for a while and hadn’t made much progress into it. She’d probably read about half a page before nodding off. Having a young baby to look after meant that she grabbed her opportunities to sleep whenever she could, it wasn’t a literary criticism on her part.

It had been a long day for both of us, and I knew that going back to forensic pathology on this case today had taken its toll on her. She had given up that particular job for a reason. At the time she had decided to quit she was pregnant, and neither she nor I were aware of it. She had been sick one morning after being called to the scene of a particularly gruesome murder and decided that she couldn’t do it any more. It had been morning sickness but she knew it was more than that in hindsight. I looked across at our baby daughter, Jade, who was named after Kate’s mother. She too was sleeping peacefully, her eyes closed but a smile still playing on her lips. I couldn’t blame Kate for wanting to give up that aspect of her job. Or for giving up on London and bringing both the girls to a safer part of the world. I guessed she had gone into pathology because it meant she didn’t have to get emotionally involved, a way of dealing with the demons of her past that had haunted her, had fractured her in her soul or psyche or spirit or whatever you want to call it. I had attempted to drown my feelings in the comfort of alcohol after my wife’s death, and Kate had to keep those childhood demons at bay by working among the dead. The living needed more from her than she was able to give at that time. Kate had saved me, our daughter had saved her. Maybe I played a part, I don’t know. One thing I did know was that I was going to keep her safe, keep them all safe, whatever it took.

I TAPPED ON
the door across the corridor and my daughter Siobhan called me in.

She too was reading. Sitting up in bed with a copy of Arthur Ransome’s
Coot Club
, which involved two friends of the
Swallows and Amazons
children having more water-based adventures on the Norfolk Broads, apparently. She had been given it to read by her English teacher who was no doubt keen to show her a pleasanter way of life than the gritty reality of the great Metropolis that we had left behind and which had evidently crept into some of Siobhan’s creative endeavours. Personally, I wasn’t worried and Kate agreed with me that there was a certain cathartic healing in writing out the stuff of her nightmares. Kate herself knew only too well the side effects of bottling up childhood trauma. The brain can apply a particularly potent pressure. But there is a yin and a yang to everything and, if Siobhan took comfort from escaping to the middle-class fantasy world of high jinks on the jolly old Broads in 1934, then that was fine by me too.

‘How’s the book?’ I asked.

‘Can we get a sailing boat?’ she replied.

There’s a downside to everything, too.

‘Maybe in the spring, when the weather is better, we can hire a boat from Wroxham and take a trip, see how you like it in real life.’

‘Got to be a sailboat, though. Motorboats are for foreigners and hullabaloos.’

‘I see.’

‘Foreigners are holidaymakers. It’s not racist.’

‘That’s good to know.’

‘Not proper Norfolk people like us.’

I sat on the bed beside her. ‘We’re proper Norfolk people now, are we?’

‘We can be if we want to be.’

I nodded reassuringly. Sometimes things are simpler when you are eight years old. But, then again, maybe she was right. We are all made in God’s image, apparently. But what we make of ourselves, after that, is largely down to us. I hadn’t made such a good job of it lately; maybe I should listen to my daughter more. From the mouths of babes.

‘Tell me a story, then,’ she commanded, settling herself back on the pillow.

‘OK – do you want to hear the tale of Black Shuck?’ I asked, mindful of Kate’s instructions.

‘Black Shuck. What is that?’

‘It’s a local tale.’

‘A Norfolk tale.’

‘Better than that: a North Norfolk tale from this very coast.’

Siobhan made saucers of her eyes, a tad over-dramatically perhaps. But she was a Delaney, after all.

‘Go on, then,’ she said.

‘So now, twelve hundred years or so ago on the North Norfolk coast early in the month of July when the sun was a blazing star in the midday sky and the corn was golden and tall and ready for harvest. All the talk in the village of Sheringham was about the carnival that was coming up in the following month. A committee of the village elders, the local druid and a strange woman who lived in a cave gathered to prepare for it. It was a time of feasting and laughter, of wine and song. There would be displays of strength and racing, and each year a carnival queen was to be appointed. And that year they chose a fair maiden by the name of Eadlin, which actually means princess in the Anglo-Saxon tongue so maybe her parents knew she would be crowned a princess. Even if it was only for the week of the Sheringham carnival. Everybody called her Eadie and everybody loved her.’

‘Was she pretty?’

‘She was fifteen years old and the one man who loved her most was Owen Tregatthen, the druid. And he had pledged her parents the princely sum of three goats if they would give her hand in marriage to him.’

‘Wasn’t she too young to be married?’

‘Not in Norfolk at that time. Now, the town had been raided for many years by the Viking warriors from across the North Sea. And that year the elders had decided that they had had enough. A sacrifice had to be made to the sea gods. The committee elected to take the carnival queen to the top of the Beeston Bump. And as the sun set into the sea at the end of the summer solstice they were to bind her to a stake in the middle of a large bonfire that they had built and then sacrifice her.