The Rising (2 page)

‘That’ll be a yes,’ he said. ‘It’ll hurt for a day or two. But you should survive.’

‘That’s reassuring.’

‘All part of the service. The price of being a hero.’

I did not respond to him. Nor did I feel heroic. I thought again of the man in the barn, his legs visible behind the partition. Over and over I replayed the scene, trying to discern whether his legs had twitched, or I had imagined it. I could not shake the feeling that by pulling the old man out, I had allowed the other to die. And while, rationally, I understood that I had done the right thing – it didn’t feel that way.

I must have been drifting in and out of consciousness, for the next thing I knew I was in a hospital bed. I could no longer feel the pain in my back though and, strangely, a wave of elation flushed through me. Gripping the side-bars of the bed I tried to heave myself into a sitting position.

A woman’s voice, as light as the touch of her hand on my arm, stopped me.

‘It’s morphine,’ she said. ‘You feel better than you are. Stay in bed.’

Her face appeared at the edge of my vision. Thin, pale blonde hair tied back severely into a ponytail, her eyes brown and wide.

‘Rest,’ she said.

The morphine had worn off by the time I woke again and my back ached like hell beneath the coldness of the cream in the compress they had applied.

Debbie stood at the end of the bed now, with my superintendent, Harry Patterson, beside her. Both looked at me with expressions of long suffering, as if I were a recalcitrant child confirming once again my waywardness.

Debbie came and sat by me, taking my hand in hers. Patterson stood awkwardly beside her.

‘You’re up,’ he said.

I nodded unnecessarily. ‘How’re the kids?’ I asked Debbie.

She looked at me quizzically. ‘They’re fine. We wondered where you were. You didn’t tell me you were going out.’

I tried to speak but my lips felt cracked and dry.

‘He was too busy being a hero,’ Patterson said, aiming for humour but missing.

‘I’m sorry,’ I managed.

Debbie squeezed my hand lightly, her eyes glistening, but she did not speak.

‘How’s the old man?’ I asked.

Patterson coughed lightly into his hand.

‘Not so good,’ he said. ‘He took in a lot of smoke. He’s in ICU.’

His comment hung there for a moment.

‘What about the dead man?’ I asked finally.

Patterson shook his head. ‘We’re waiting for the fire brigade to clear the scene. They haven’t let us in yet. Won’t even let us near the cottage until they have the fire in the barn out.’

‘Any names?’

‘Possibly. A Martin Kielty owned the cottage. His motorbike is parked outside it.’

‘Does the name mean anything?’

Patterson shook his head. ‘Not to us. I’ve contacted your friend in the North, Hendry, to see what they have up there. I’ll speak to the old couple, the Quigleys, in a while, and see what they have to say – assuming the old fella pulls through.’

‘I’d like to see them myself, too,’ I said.

Patterson nodded agreement, though was unable to hide the grimness in the set of his mouth.

That meeting did not occur. The old man, Sam Quigley, died at 4 p.m. that afternoon.

When I learned of his death, I disconnected the monitors to which I’d been attached and shuffled my way down to the elevator. On the ICU floor, I found Nora Quigley standing, dazed, at the end of the corridor, her shoulders stooped, her hands hanging limply by her sides. To her left, in the room where he had been since his admission, her husband lay unmoving on the bed. His face was drawn and waxy already, his jaw hanging slack, his mouth open. A white hospital sheet had been pulled up to his chest.

‘I’m terribly sorry, Mrs Quigley,’ I said, approaching the woman, my hand outstretched.

She looked at me, her eyes glassy with tears, the loose skin of her jaw shaking visibly. Ignoring my proffered hand, she came towards me, moving into the circle of my gathering arms.

Her embrace was light, the bones of her back brittle and sharp beneath the fabric of her cardigan. The smell of talc and rosewater drifted between us when she moved back from me again, still gripping my hand awkwardly in her own, the skin blotched with liver spots.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said again.

The old woman looked up into my face, her features drawn with loss.

‘I tried my best,’ I found myself saying. ‘I tried to . . .’

Nora Quigley shushed me, patting my arm lightly as if it were I, and not she, who was the grieving relative.

‘I tried my best,’ I repeated.

Against the wishes of the doctor, I discharged myself that night. Debbie and the kids called to collect me. Shane was effusive when he saw me, jumping up for me to lift him, despite Debbie’s protestations that it would hurt my back. He clasped my hand in his as we shuffled out to the car, interlinking our fingers and smiling up at me.

My daughter, Penny, was a little quieter. Indeed, on the drive home, I glanced in the vanity mirror and realized she was watching me, her eyes searching the reflection of my face, as she bit at the skin at the side of her thumb. She had stretched over the past year or two, her face thinning, her hair growing longer. She smiled when she realized I had seen her, but the expression did not make it as far as her eyes, which retained a hint of melancholy.

In that moment, I recognized that my daughter was growing older, and with a pang I sensed that she had realized the same about me. Neither of us seemed happy with this knowledge.

‘What’s up?’ Debbie asked, patting my knee with her free hand as she drove, stealing a glance across at me.

‘I’m getting grey,’ I said.

She looked at me again, quickly, her eyebrows raised.

‘Maybe you should take things a bit easier then,’ she said. ‘Starting today. Get to your bed when you get home.’

I glanced again at Penny, but she had turned her attention to the window, her reflection spectral against the darkness beyond her.

The following morning, I could not easily dismiss the thought of the two deaths I had witnessed. I spent the morning with Debbie and the kids, but she could sense that there was something bothering me and we skirted around increasingly fraught conversations as I tried to reason my way through the guilt I felt at having failed to save either of the dead men.

I was sitting at the window in the back room with a mug of tea, looking at the cherry tree at the top of our garden, its bare branches springing in the light wind. Debbie came in and stood beside me.

‘Are you OK?’

I nodded.

‘Penny has something to ask you.’ She waited a beat for me to speak, then continued. ‘She wants to go to a disco on Wednesday night.’

‘She’s eleven,’ I said.

‘The school is running it. She wants to go with all her friends.’

‘I think she’s too young.’

‘There’ll be
a
boy at it. Someone she likes.’ Debbie smiled as she told me this.

I thought I felt something crack inside me. My stomach twisted so forcefully I had difficulty in swallowing my mouthful of tea.

‘She’s too young for boys,’ I stated.

‘Wise up, Ben,’ Debbie said, laughing lightly. ‘She’s eleven. I’d be more worried if she
didn’t
like boys.’ It was a mother’s logic. ‘I told her she’d need to ask you.’

‘We’ll see,’ I said, aware of the fact that, having enlisted her mother’s support, Penny had ensured that the decision had already been made. ‘I’m going out for a drive,’ I added, ignoring Debbie’s look of concern.

I pulled up to the laneway that led to Martin Kielty’s house. A number of squad cars were parked haphazardly along the roadside and a single fire tender still stood at the end of the lane, though the fire was now extinguished.

An ancient oak demarcated the line between Kielty’s property and Quigley’s and it was here that I laid the two bunches of flowers I had bought. I stood in the silence, conscious of the sharp scent of burnt wood carried downwind from the barn, and whispered a prayer for the two men, and asked their forgiveness for my having failed to save them.

‘You should be home.’

I looked up and saw Harry Patterson at the entrance to the old barn, his bulk exaggerated by the blue paper Forensics suit he wore.

‘I couldn’t settle,’ I explained as I approached. Patterson and I had got off to a bad start when he took over as Super. Over the course of the year since, we had established an uneasy sort of truce, led in part by his decision to move to Letterkenny and leave me in Lifford with responsibility for an almost defunct station.

‘We’ve only got in this morning. There were traces of accelerant all over the barn. The bloody thing kept re-igniting.’

He glanced past me to where the flowers I’d laid rested at the foot of the oak.

‘You heard about the old man, then,’ he said.

‘I spoke to his wife. I couldn’t ask about Kielty though.’

Patterson waved aside my comment. ‘I spoke to her myself after I saw you. She was the one who called the fire in; said they were woken by loud bangs just before three. She confirmed seeing Kielty here earlier that night. She also saw an old blue car outside the cottage around 8.45. Old-style Volkswagen Beetle with an orange door, apparently.’

I nodded. ‘That should be easily traced.’

Patterson nodded. ‘We also got reports of a white builder’s van here around 2 a.m. Milkman saw it – tinted foil on the windows of the rear doors, peeled off on one side. We have bulletins out on both.’

I nodded absent-mindedly and turned towards the barn.

‘Is he still in there?’

The charcoaled remains of the roof rafters crunched under our feet, and the dry air, coupled with the unmistakable stench of burnt flesh, made remaining inside the barn difficult.

The body lay to the rear of the building, in the corner. The medical examiner, John Mulronney, was squatting beside it as we approached. The upper torso and face were severely damaged by the fire, the features impossible to distinguish. The lower part of the body, though scorched, had not been burned quite as deeply. The clothes had been burnt away and the charred shreds scattered beneath the body. It was evident that, regardless of identity, the victim was male.

Mulronney used a long thin piece of wood, more commonly used for throat examinations, to angle the head. He did not acknowledge our presence until he had finished.

‘He’s dead, obviously,’ he said, standing up. ‘It appears he was stabbed in the chest. There’s a deep wound near the sternum. Might have killed him before the fire – might not. Hard to tell.’

‘Any gunshot wounds?’ Patterson asked.

Mulronney shook his head.

‘Are you sure?’

‘As much as I can be,’ he said, a little irritably. ‘Why?’

‘The old couple heard shots,’ I explained. ‘That’s what brought me here in the first place.’

‘No gunshot wounds that I can see,’ he repeated. ‘Unless the state pathologist finds them.’

‘Anything else?’ I asked, as we started to move back out into the freshening air.

‘Nothing obvious; the state pathologist will check his lungs to see whether or not he was alive when the fire started.’

We stepped away from the ruins and I took out my cigarettes and passed one to Mulronney. One of the fire crew, still sifting through the debris, shouted to us.

‘Put those bloody things away. We’ve just got this out.’

I raised my hand in apology and pocketed the packet. It had been an impulsive act anyway, for I certainly didn’t feel like smoking.

‘You’ll need dental records to confirm ID,’ Mulronney said, placing his unlit cigarette in his breast pocket and making his way back to his car.

To our right, outside the door of Kielty’s cottage, sat a Kawasaki motorcycle, the helmet hanging from the handlebar. As we approached, Patterson gestured once more to the flowers I had brought.

‘You’d have saved your money if you’d seen inside,’ he said.

The hallway of the cottage was lit by an arc light, and trapped smoke from the barn still swirled through the lamp’s illumination.

I followed Patterson through a doorway to our left, into a room I took to be the living room. Against the right-hand wall sat an old threadbare sofa. A stained hearthrug took up most of the middle of the floor, and on it stood a small coffee table. On its surface lay scattered a mixture of syringes and spoons and the stub of a candle, squatting amidst thick veins of hardened wax. A number of empty beer cans, bent double, lay on the floor. One had been cut open; the metal of its base scorched into a rainbow pattern through frequent heating. Also on the floor lay a mobile phone, its screen and casing cracked. A group of Forensics officers had marked each of these objects and a photographer was moving around taking shots.

I went into the next room, a bedroom. The wall was papered in a pattern of large pink roses, the boarded-up window framed by tattered pink satin curtains. The only furniture in the room consisted of a stained mattress against one wall and a single shelf running across the centre of the opposite wall. On the shelf lay an empty cigarette packet and several broken filters. Beside that was the empty foil wrapping of a condom. As I moved around the room, I could feel the resistance as my feet pulled against the stickiness of the carpet.