Uchenna's Apples (18 page)

After five minutes or so, the Headmaster came in and started the assembly. It was the normal recitation of games schedules, complaints about discipline problems, reminders about permissions for upcoming school trips, and other boring crap. “Wish he’d get on with it,” Emer whispered to Uchenna: “he’s putting me to sleep here. Who’s today’s special guest speaker?” For there was normally some kind of guest at assemblies, someone educational or occasionally even marginally famous.

Uchenna shook her head. She hadn’t heard anything. But then the Headmaster stopped speaking and looked off toward the wings of the stage: and out onto the stage walked a tall, broad-shouldered shape in a dark blue uniform, with a hat under his arm. It was a Guard.

Uchenna felt herself go cold.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Mr. Mallon, “this is Garda Sergeant Moran from the Garda Regional Investigation Section in Naas. He’s here to speak to us about some of the odd things that have been going on in the Adamstown area over the past week, and to ask for our help.”

An uneasy silence fell over the seated students. “Good afternoon, everybody,” Sergeant Moran said. “We’re hoping you can assist us in our inquiries into a theft or thefts in this area. The thefts involve a group of horses which have been introduced into various private properties in this neighborhood without the owners’ permission, and have then been removed again. The people involved in this business are at the very least guilty of trespassing, possibly criminal trespass, and may have plans for something more ambitious in the near future, involving other properties in the Adamstown area. Now as many of you know, we’ve had a spate of burglaries and an attempted ram-raid recently, so I’m sure you’ll all understand that—”

Uchenna was finding it difficult to concentrate on what the Sergeant was saying: she was too busy looking at him and being nervous, for she was already imagining him standing in her living room and denouncing her to her horrified parents as some kind of accomplice horse thief. He didn’t have the kind of face that suggested he would be particularly understanding of a kid’s explanation about feeling sorry for pregnant horses, either. His hair was iron-grey and cropped very short, and he had a grim, narrow-eyed, frowning look to him, even when his face was relaxed.

“—business with the horses may be some kind of attempted cover-up for something else that’s going on. At any rate, someone has been bringing these horses food in their temporary quarters, but we’ve found no traces of car transport for this food, which suggests that someone local is helping them—”

Uchenna held absolutely still. “So I’d appreciate it if you’d all think about whether you’ve seen anything strange in the area, any people you don’t know, and especially anyone out in the fields behind Adamstown who might not normally have any business being there. The comings and going of lorries or cars and trailers would be of great interest to us, but so would details about anyone seen walking through the fields, especially on the west side of the development, over the last few days—”

Uchenna breathed, but only because she couldn’t see anyone immediately turning around and staring at her.
Oh, God, I hate being so tall! If anybody saw me there’s no way they wouldn’t know who I was—

But no one turned around and identified her as the one the police were looking for, and very slowly Uchenna began to relax. The Sergeant was still talking, but the other kids were beginning to get less concerned about him now as well: the normal rustle and whisper of a normal assembly started to reassert itself. “So please call the anonymous Garda information number that your Headmaster will be posting on the school bulletin boards and the school website,” Sergeant Moran was saying. “We guarantee that you will not be identified as the enquiry proceeds. We just want to find out who stole these horses, and who they belong to, so we can take appropriate action. And we appreciate your assistance. Thank you.”

There was some uneasy applause as Sergeant Moran walked off. As he did, Uchenna noticed something about him that she hadn’t picked up on before: he was limping.

Emer saw it too. She leaned over to Uchenna and whispered, very softly, but with a helpless snicker, “What do you want to bet he’s the one the Mammy stepped on?”

Terrified as she was, Uchenna couldn’t help but laugh. But most people were too busy whispering to each other to notice, and Uchenna managed to shut herself up.

Mr. Mallon stepped up and spoke for a few minutes more about some final details, including congratulations to the girls’ hockey team for their win of the weekend, and some kids clapped and looked back at Uchenna when that happened. But then it was all over and everybody was dismissed to the last couple of class sessions of the day.

As people left school that afternoon, the usual gossiping crowd was hanging around the gate, waiting for their rides home and talking excitedly about the horse thefts and the possible identities of the mysterious thieves who were involved. “Hey, bet I know who it is,” said one of the kids standing outside the gate, giving Uchenna a sidelong look as she came up.

She paused there, not sure she was the one being talked to, and glanced around to see if she could see Emer anywhere nearby. She couldn’t. But another of the kids standing there said, “I know! It’s her little friend the creamer.”

Uchenna flushed hot again, ready to say
He’s not my friend!
But something stopped her. And the others noticed that. “O ho,” said another of the kids, and there was nudging and nasty laughter.

Uchenna just rolled her eyes and shook her head at them. “You guys are so fecking clueless,” she said, and walked off. But as she did, someone in the crowd behind her said, more quietly but no less nastily, “Better tell the Guards about the knacker and save everybody some time. I mean, who else here would be screwing around with street horses? Those people all stick together, he must know something about it even if it’s not him. Hey, text me that hotline number—”

Uchenna kept walking, sure that this particular group was just pulling her leg for casual cruelty’s sake. But others might be having this same idea—kids who didn’t like Jimmy or just felt like getting him in trouble because they could.
Oh, please don’t let it happen…
she thought as she headed for home. But she doubted somehow that GTS was going to get involved in this any further. The Mammy Horse was safe now with people who would take care of her, which was pretty much what she’d been praying for. Now, Uchenna thought, everybody else involved in this—meaning her and Emer and Jimmy—would probably be on their own.
And we’ll be okay. I really, really hope…

The next day, she started to suspect that this was might be true. The school day went by without incident or interest for Uchenna, partly because she was mostly avoiding her schoolmates when she didn’t have to be in a class with them: she felt strongly that it would be smart for her to keep her head down at the moment. Afterwards she walked home in company with Emer as usual, then sat down to do her homework on the kitchen table as she normally did on weeknight evenings. She’d discovered that this kept her parents calm about whether she was actually getting the work done, and right now Uchenna definitely wanted them calm. But a little after six, while her Dad was standing in the kitchen making some tea, her Mam came through the back door and before even taking her coat off, said to her Dad, “Did you see the
Kildare People
today?”

Her Mam’s expression was peculiar, and there was something a little odd about her tone of voice, too, as she looked at Uchenna’s Dad. He shook his head. “Didn’t stop by the newsagent on the way home,” he said. “Why, did you pick one up?”

Uchenna’s Mam nodded and dropped the
People
on the table in front of him. It was the local newspaper that covered both County Kildare and the part of County Dublin just north of it, which included Adamstown. The front featured a headline,
Adamstown Mystery Horses Re-Horsenapped!
—and a picture of the field near the school, now full of Garda cars surrounding the five horses.

Uchenna stared at it for a moment and then turned away, intent on not looking like this was any kind of big deal. Her Dad was leaning on the table, his head down, reading the article. “A group of five unlicensed and unidentified horses which were impounded in the Adamstown area by the Gardai on Monday morning after a number of complaints from local landowners have disappeared,” Uchenna’s Dad read out loud.

“I didn’t know horses had to have licenses,” Uchenna’s Mam said as she slipped out of her coat.

“Only since a few years ago,” Uchenna’s Dad said, glancing up. “A lot of the city kids were buying horses from Travellers’ markets and then keeping them on waste ground, by motorways and so forth… Some of them weren’t being well treated. The licenses were the only way the government could make sure that people actually had somewhere decent to keep a horse, could afford to feed and water it…” He was scanning down the article again. “Hmm. ‘Police believe that the horses may be part of a larger group of illegally held horses impounded in Dublin City early last week. These horses were removed without leave from the City Animal Pound by persons unknown during the night last Wednesday. At that time the horse thieves did several thousand Euros’ worth of damage when they broke into the pound complex. Five of these horses were recovered by Adamstown Gardai from a local field two days ago, only to be lost again late last night.’”

“Somebody stole them
twice
,” Uchenna’s Mam said, getting herself some coffee. “Pretty persistent.” She was frowning.

Her Dad nodded and kept reading. “But listen to this. ‘Security cameras at the parking lot of the station on Adamstown Crescent were disabled and locks on the gates to the secure parking area were cut through when the horses were removed. Adamstown Gardai when contacted said only that they are conducting a local investigation and will be asking for the assistance of local citizens groups to identify the horses’ owners and determine who is responsible for illegally siting the horses on private property—” He trailed off, reading down the article. “So weird,” he said. “Who goes to that kind of trouble for some street horses?”

“Uchenna—”

Her Mam’s voice had that particular tone to it. Uchenna turned around.

“You wouldn’t know anything about this, would you?” her Mam said. “Or not you. Your, uh, friend who was helping you mow the lawn.”

“What, Jimmy?” Uchenna said, and now it was very hard to try to look calm.
I promised not to get him involved, I promised!
“You’re kidding, right? He doesn’t even like horses.”

“A Traveller who doesn’t like horses?” her Dad said, glancing up. “Sounds a little unusual.”

“If it’s true,” her Mam said. She looked at Uchenna for a long moment: Uchenna gazed back, forcing herself not to look away or do anything else that might make her seem guilty—even though guilty was exactly how she felt: and scared.
If the Guards ever came after me for anything, Mam would simply rip the flesh off my bones—and it’s going to happen and there’s nothing I can do —

“I bet you this this is something to do with that new Traveller encampment up on the Naas Road,” her Dad said, straightening up again. “That one you passed the other day. I was by there this afternoon on the way back. They had some horses there.” He turned to the fridge to get out a beer. “You know the kind. Those shaggy ones…”

Uchenna’s Mam sighed, frowning, and turned away. “They’re going to turn that whole area into a dump, like they did with the field at the end of the road in Stillorgan that time,” she said. “It took the County months to get rid of them. I still can’t forget the rats coming down into the street from that field those people were camped in…”

She headed off into the living room. Uchenna sat at the table and turned her attention back to her homework: but she found it almost impossible to finish it. She kept coming back to the thought of what her Mam would say when—not if—she found out Uchenna had been fibbing to her about Jimmy.
Gotta remind Emer what to say about this. We’ve got to present a united front…
. Because her Mam was suspicious of something: there was no doubt of that. But they hadn’t been doing anything wrong, so she didn’t really have anything to worry about.
Well, except for doing something Mam said not to do….

Uchenna finally managed to get her homework done, and she watched some TV with her Dad and finally went up to her room. But the TV wasn’t as much fun as usual, and even in bed Uchenna somehow felt unsafe, expecting her Mam to come in for one of those terrible parental heart-to-heart talks that never really work out. And there was still the problem of the Mammy Horse. Until she’d heard what was in the paper, Uchenna had at least been slightly relieved that the Mammy was being taken care of.
But now who knows where she is?
She rolled over and pushed her face down into the pillow, feeling like crying but too miserable right now to want to add the mess of crying to her troubles.

Once again Uchenna had a troubled night, with dreams full of mist and horses’ frantic neighing waking her up again and again. The last time it was so bad that she sat upright in bed in the dark, absolutely sure that she’d heard a horse neighing right under her window: but there was no actual sound outside at all, not even the wind. Very quietly she got up, went to the window, peered out.

Once again the morning was obscured by that strange, thick mist. The weather guy on RTÉ the previous evening had been going on about a weak high pressure system that was stuck over Ireland, waiting for more enthusiastic windy weather from the Atlantic to blow it away. But Uchenna didn’t find the explanation at all reassuring. The thought of Hallowe’en coming, of the days getting dimmer and shorter, and this fog closing in at night as well as in the morning, gave Uchenna the creeps.

She discovered when she got to school that others were having the same problem. Normally if she didn’t meet Emer in her house’s circle, they met by the school gate: but Uchenna didn’t see Emer in the circle that morning, and the crowd around the gate looked unusually subdued, huddled together as if numbers would defend them against the fog that wasn’t ready to lift even at eight thirty in the morning.