Dead And Buried

Dermot Kirk and Donald Riordan had run the practice for years. They were good vets, both of them – knew every farm and farmer in Northern Ireland, hell, pretty much every damn animal – and they knew one another, too: partners in the practice since the sixties, they might’ve passed for brothers, or twins, even.

But Riordan had died a few years back. Heart failure. Dermot had written to Conor in Kenya to tell him; the handwriting had been spidery, frail, wayward. Dermot had the steady hands of an expert surgeon, even now he was, what, sixty-five, seventy? – but they’d trembled when he wrote that letter.

Chris had always got on with Dermot. He was a prickly old lad with a face like a bag of spanners but there was something in him that Christine responded to – gentleness, maybe. Mercy. Strength. On his better days Conor sometimes thought that maybe she saw the same things in him.

‘I’ll end up having to run the old bugger out of the place at the point of a gelding knife,’ Conor said, and Christine laughed.

For a second it felt like it used to between the two of them. But, Conor told himself, it’s not – and you’ve no right to sit here acting the man of the house and pretending that it is.

‘Simon all right?’ he forced himself to ask.

Christine gave him a look that pinned him to his seat. ‘Why do you say that?’

He shrugged. ‘Just asking. I mean, you two are—’

‘Us two are none of your bloody business,’ Christine snapped. Then she paused, and closed her eyes, and touched her fingertips to her brow. ‘Sorry, Con,’ she said. She managed a smile. ‘Knackered.’

‘It’s fine,’ he said.

‘And me and Simon – well, it’s nothing serious. He’s a good guy. It’s just – well, let’s just say it’s not serious.’

Conor took another mouthful of coffee and swilled the dregs in the bottom of his cup. He could feel her eyes on him. Man, those eyes. What the bloody hell was he doing here?

‘How about you?’ she said. It seemed to Conor she didn’t even try to hide the tension in her voice. ‘Anyone special in your life?’

Conor’s stomach knotted up. He thought of Kipenzi, and that night on the savannah, and all the things they’d told one another – and he thought of the day he’d met Christine, and the breaking Belfast dawn when he’d kissed her for the first time, and their wedding day at St Dunstan’s.

‘Me? No. No one special.’

I’m sorry, Kip, he added, in his head.

Then the telephone rang in the hallway. ‘I should get that,’ Christine said.

Left alone, Conor sat back in his chair and let his gaze drift around the familiar kitchen. He’d sawed and fitted the worktops himself, liking the feeling of building something for his family with his own two hands – he and Christine had turned up the handsome Belfast sink in a reclamation yard out Antrim way – the old-fashioned wine glasses arranged on a shelf by the window had been a wedding present from Christine’s grandmother. ‘They’re no use to me,’ she’d said, ‘since the doctor said I’ve not to drink so much wine any more’ – and Christine had told him later that the old girl had taken the doctor at his word, and switched to gin.

But the last time Conor had been here the chimneybreast had been crowded with framed family pictures. They were gone now, except for a pinned-up snapshot of a teenaged Ella, blonde and tousled and smiling in a sunlit meadow – Fermanagh, near Christine’s parents’ place, Conor guessed.

Something on the windowsill caught his eye. A shell, a cockleshell. Deep-ridged and the palest sea-blue. It wasn’t anything special, you could’ve found one pretty much the same on any Atlantic shore from Inishowen to Mizen Head. Only Conor knew where this one came from. He’d picked it up on Carrickfinn beach in Donegal. He’d rinsed the sand off it in the rolling white surf, and he’d given it to Christine. Christine had admired it, and stroked her thumb across its sea-blue surface, and slipped it into her skirt pocket. Then she’d kissed him.

Their honeymoon. Twenty years since.

Conor shook his head sharply and drained the bitter grounds in the bottom of his coffee cup. He couldn’t let himself think like that. There was too much at stake.

Christine came back into the room and with an irritable sigh dropped wearily into her chair.

‘Something up?’

‘Just college stuff,’ she said, a little abruptly.

‘Just asking.’

‘I know. It just makes me tired talking about it.’ She pushed a hand through her uncombed blonde hair. ‘Makes me tired thinking about it.’

‘Students bothering you?’

She nodded. ‘I wouldn’t mind if they were asking for extra tuition or asking me to check the spelling on their job applications or whatever – but this is something different.’ Another sigh. ‘Two girls have dropped out of class.’

‘Not so unusual, is it? Maybe they went home, to, to…’

‘Maybe,’ said Christine. ‘They’re wanderers, these kids – they go wherever they can get work, and money, but I thought they might have said goodbye.’

‘Do they owe you money?’

‘The opposite, which makes it weirder. Both had paid up till the end of the month.’

‘Teenage girls can be difficult to predict.’

Christine smiled. ‘You’re telling me.’

When he left, there was no kiss goodbye. Christine just smiled half-heartedly and said she’d see him around – he said he hoped so, and left her to her paperwork and her cold cup of coffee.

Turning the corner out of the estate, he spotted Lisa Galloway’s black car parked up on the opposite side of the junction.

She’d pushed the Marsh connection hard, but that didn’t mean she knew anything.

Whoever killed Jack Marsh…

Conor switched on the radio to block out his thoughts.

1994

‘RIGHT – all of you together. Say “cheese”.’ Click, whirr. ‘And another one for luck – ah, wait – the sun’s gone in – let’s wait for the light to be right…’

‘Gets a posh digital camera and he thinks he’s David Bailey,’ Christine heckled from the back of the posed group of graduates.

‘Just want to do you justice,’ Conor grinned.

The college had laid on a few bottles of white wine after the ceremony, and Christine’s class had made short work of them. Conor helped himself to a couple of glasses, too – ‘Photographer’s fee,’ he winked at the steward with the tray. It was good to see Christine letting rip: three years of college was hard enough work without taking eighteen months out to have a baby. She’d earned this.

It was getting on for evening by the time the rest of the new teachers had finally drifted tipsily away. Conor linked his arm with Christine’s and produced a bottle of Prosecco from his rucksack. ‘Reinforcements,’ he said.

Christine whooped. ‘My hero,’ she said, and, aiming for his mouth, kissed him on the nose.

They shared the bottle of tepid, slightly fizzy wine under a sycamore tree in Ormeau Park.

‘We’re proper grown-ups now,’ Christine said, resting her head in Conor’s lap and looking up into the branches of the tree. ‘A teacher and a vet.’

‘More than that,’ Conor said. He turned a curl of her blonde hair round his forefinger. ‘We’re a family.’

‘Yeah,’ Christine sighed.

Little Ella was with her uncle Martin and her auntie Hazel. Auntie-to-be, anyway. Martin and Hazel were set to be married in the spring. They sipped the wine and watched the slow sun set and talked about the future – the things they could do, now they were grown-ups.

‘We could go abroad. How about that? You could teach English.’

‘South America would be nice. Or Africa. Think you’d be good with elephants?’

‘Sure. They’re nothing but oversized cows.’

‘Or the Galápagos Islands. You could look after the tortoises and I could teach English.’

‘To the tortoises?’

‘No. To the Galápagese. If there are any. Are there any?’

Conor shrugged. ‘Dunno. Never met any.’

‘I’d find it hard without my family, though.’

A scowling image of Mags Maguire crossed Conor’s mind.

‘I think I could live without mine,’ he said thoughtfully.

‘Well, I couldn’t. I’d miss our Patrick too much.’

Patrick. A name he’d been trying to avoid. Patrick the petty crook, Patrick, with his little jobs for Jack Marsh, Patrick the killer, Patrick the butcher.

Patrick, the little bastard who’d made Conor into a liar and – and worse.

‘You’d get used to it,’ he managed to say.

‘I wouldn’t like to have only tortoises for company,’ Christine insisted.

Better a tortoise than a snake, Conor thought. But God, don’t let that little swine spoil today. He ruffled his wife’s hair affectionately.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘time I was off. You’re meant to be meeting your fellow beaks at the Havana in ten minutes, remember?’

They walked hand-in-hand to Ravenhill Road and Conor helped Christine into a cross-town cab. He flagged down a second cab for himself. He was surprised when he tripped over his own feet climbing into the back seat – more pissed than he’d thought.

‘Home, James,’ he told the driver. ‘Rembrandt Close, Sydenham. And don’t spare the horses.’

On the way, Conor found himself explaining to the driver in detail exactly why it was the right time for Billy Bingham to step down and by hell if a team can’t beat Lithuania on its own damn turf it has no business going to the World Cup.

And then he found himself standing in the dusk on the pavement outside his house.

He was surprised, on opening the front door, to hear the sound of male voices laughing in the living room. Had Martin got the boys round for an evening’s baby-sitting?

In the living room he found Hazel, rocking Ella in her arms, and Martin, on the settee, and, standing arms folded with his back to the fireplace, Patrick Maguire. Like a summoned spirit.

‘Daddy’s home,’ Hazel cooed to the baby.

‘Half-cut, by the look of it,’ Martin laughed.

‘Hiya, Conor,’ Patrick smiled.

Conor sobered up in the time it took him to say, ‘Hello, Patrick.’

‘Christine’s not here,’ said Conor, feeling stupid.

‘I came to talk with you actually,’ Patrick said. ‘Business. You mind if we take a drive?’

Another night, another car racing through the Belfast suburbs. But this time it was Patrick driving, and Conor all nerves and nausea in the passenger seat. And, thank God, no body on the back seat.

Hazel and Martin had just shrugged and smiled and said yeah, that was fine, they didn’t mind keeping their baby niece company for a little while longer.

‘Going to tell me where we’re headed?’ Conor asked.

‘Just wait and see.’ Patrick chuckled, not taking his eyes off the road. ‘Calm head, Con.’

Easy for you to say, you smart little bastard.

The kid seemed to be playing games with him: feinting to stop the car outside some run-down bar or club, then moving off – signalling, to Conor’s alarm, to turn onto the Falls Road, just at the junction with Coleraine Road, but then wheeling the other way, into the city – even pulling into the staff car park at Grosvenor Road police station, for Christ’s sake, before quickly, laughingly, three-point-turning the car back onto the road.

‘Are we taking the scenic route?’

‘Just enjoy the sights, Con.’ Patrick was lounging low in the driver’s seat, one arm hanging out of the window. ‘God, this is a fuckin’ beautiful city.’

At first Conor thought Patrick was just trying to wind him up – he didn’t know why, but then who knew why a nutcase like Patrick Cameron did anything?

Then he realised. This wasn’t for his benefit. It was for Patrick: Patrick needed to feel in control, strong, smart – needed to psych himself up.

For what though?

At last the kid pulled the car onto a sliproad, took the road down by the Opera House, and then dropped into a dark entryway under an out-of-order traffic barrier. A car park beneath Bankmore Street. The rooflights were all broken or on the blink. Someone’s been watching too many B-movies, Conor thought.

Patrick spun the wheel. The car’s headlights scoured the concrete columns, the deserted bays, the forbidding signs – ‘no smoking’, ‘no pedestrians’, ‘no exit’ – as he steered the car to a lower storey and eased into an out-of-the way space. He killed the engine and the lights died.

‘So are you going to tell me why we’re here?’ Conor said into the silence.

Patrick gave him a look that told Conor what he already knew.

Jack Marsh was half a head shorter than Conor but his waist was slender and his tailored grey shirt was tight around his shoulders and biceps. His face was marked with scars – could’ve been from scrapping and shrapnel, could’ve been from teenage acne. His pale eyes bulged slightly. His pupils were restless and he blinked frequently, sharply, always re-sighting, refocusing. He carried his jaw high. His hair had been trimmed to a military crop.

‘Dr Maguire,’ he said, with a smile. Ten years in Belfast had done nothing to wash the sound of the Mersey out of his accent.

‘Mister Maguire,’ Conor corrected him. Reluctantly he took the hand Marsh held out. Marsh’s handshake was quick, firm, unconsidered – the shake of a man who didn’t have to impress anyone – a man who knew full well what you thought of him, and didn’t give a damn.

They stood facing each other in the gloom of the car park. Conor couldn’t see anyone else but he was sure Marsh wouldn’t have come alone, even to meet a pair of no-marks like him and Patrick. How many guys did he have waiting in the shadows?

I could die here, Conor found himself thinking. At first he felt weirdly dispassionate about the idea. This guy, he thought, could fucking kill me, right now, just for the fun of it, and no one would ever know – it’d be like I’d just vanished into thin air.

Then he thought of Ella and Christine – of them waiting for him to come home, of Chris never understanding what had happened to him, of Ella growing up without him. He felt tepid sweat leach from the skin of his palms.

‘I’ve been wanting to thank you, Conor – I can call you Conor, can’t I? – for helping young Patrick here out with that bit of difficulty he ran into,’ Marsh said. ‘You’re a resourceful feller.’

Conor didn’t see the point in saying anything.

Patrick, anxious, leaned in between the pair of them. ‘I told him, Con, what you done for me,’ he said. Then to Marsh, ‘He’s a good lad, boss, is Conor.’

‘I know that.’ Marsh nodded approvingly. ‘Brave. Loyal.’ He lifted his chin to meet Conor’s gaze. ‘We can use men like you.’

Conor breathed in through his nose. It felt like his guts were in knots – like they’d twisted into a tight ball that now sat heavy as lead in his empty belly. He needed to piss. He clenched his fists. He knew what he needed to say – and he knew he’d have to be nuts to say it, here, now. His voice sounded like someone else’s. ‘You used me once,’ he said. ‘It won’t be happening again.’

Marsh smiled. Again Conor knew: this man could kill me – he could make me just disappear.

‘Is that a fact?’

Conor shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet. ‘It is, aye,’ he said, and braced himself to take a blow, or to fight, or to run. If he lashed out and made for the exit, how far would he get? Christ, Marsh probably had guys on every door.

Marsh only smiled wider. ‘Can we talk privately?’ he asked, with theatrical politeness. He extended a hand to the open door of Patrick’s car. ‘In the vehicle?’

Conor nodded without certainty. He felt so fucking stupid. That night, he should have just gone to the police. All that crap about loyalty, about Colm, it was the darkness crowding him. He should have punched Patrick’s lights out, called the police, and been back in bed by dawn. Why hadn’t he? Had he really thought Christine would be angry for handing over her little brother? Look at him now – standing there like a bloody Jack Russell beside his master. If the smooth fuck wasn’t grinning too!

Conor didn’t have anything more to say. But then he’d known he was living on borrowed time. Marsh wasn’t going to let him off the hook so easily. There was every chance he wasn’t going to let him off the hook at all. Get in that car, Con, he told himself, and you might not get out again. Again, he felt disembodied. Scared too, yeah, and…so damn disappointed with himself. You made this bed for yourself. You could’ve made it differently.

He slid again into the passenger seat while Marsh settled himself at the wheel, smartened his rolled shirtsleeves, smoothed an eyebrow in the rearview, adjusted the sit of his black trousers.

Through the side window Conor saw Patrick reach for the rear door handle. And he saw Marsh, with a negligent gesture, flick the central-locking switch in the driver’s door. Patrick tugged twice at the handle, then wised up. Shrugged. Stepped away.

Just the two of them.

‘Now look—’ Conor began, but Marsh held up a hand.

‘No,’ he said. A quick shake of his head. ‘I talk first. I’m going to need you again, Conor. I’m going to need you to do a few more jobs.’

He didn’t look at Conor as he spoke. He looked at the wheel and the dash, as if he were reading from notes, from a script – or from a contract.

‘I—’

‘You’ll let me fucking speak or you’ll be talking through a mouthful of broken teeth. Interrupt me again and I’ll have your fucking tongue sliced down the middle.’ Now he looked at Conor. ‘Simple rules, simple courtesies,’ he said.

Conor sat silent. He gripped one hand with the other to keep them from shaking.

Marsh resumed his recital. ‘Earlier today,’ he said, ‘three members of the Ulster Volunteers were murdered on the Shankill Road. Now, I’ve been made aware of who was responsible. I have their names, addresses, descriptions, registration numbers.’ He ticked the items off on his fingers. ‘And I have made plans for…reparation.’

‘Revenge.’

‘No, no, no.’ Marsh waved a dismissive hand. ‘Not revenge, Conor. Nothing so impractical. Favours, Conor, favours for friends. I do a brisk trade in favours. Revenge is messy, hot-headed, liable – as you good folk of Ulster know so well – to get out of hand. Favours are simply good business.’

‘I won’t. I couldn’t. I…this is…you’re—’

‘What this is and what I may be,’ Marsh interrupted him smoothly, ‘are none of your concern. The fact is, Conor, that you’re implicated. And, therefore, you can. You will.’

Conor thought of Colm Murphy. Implicated – yeah, that was one word for it. Guilty was another one. Guilty was the word they’d use on the Falls Road – hell, the word they’d use on Coleraine Road – if they had any idea what he’d done. Betrayal was another one. Fucking Judas. Stinking Rat.

Marsh wouldn’t have to kill him. There’d be Irishmen queueing up to do the job for him if word got out – if even a whisper got out.

‘Old Colm,’ Marsh said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘He was very close to the Maguire family, wasn’t he?’ A low whistle. A gesture with palms spread. ‘It takes a considerable man – a man of substance, Conor – to take sides against his own family. His own blood.’

Conor could feel the tense muscles of his jaw quivering. Hold it, Con, he urged himself. Stay cool. Don’t rise to it.

‘I’ve never taken sides,’ he said, slowly, deliberately. He didn’t look at Marsh – he looked out of the window, out into the darkness. ‘I’m my own man. I’ve my own family—’

‘Oh, yes, the family…’

Marsh left the word hanging, and Conor felt his bowels threaten to turn liquid. A mixture of anger and panic. ‘You listen!’ he hissed, his finger jabbing the air between them. ‘You fucking listen! You even go near my family, and I’ll—’

‘Steady, Conor,’ said Marsh. ‘You’ve got the wrong impression.’

Conor’s whole face seemed to be trembling. He felt like a child, playing a grown up game he could never win. ‘I don’t take sides. I won’t work to an agenda.’

Marsh laughed softly.

‘“I don’t take sides”,’ he quoted Conor back at him. ‘That’s quite a thing. That takes some balls. “I don’t take sides” – in this Godforsaken country. That’s quite a thing to hear, from the man who threw the sainted Colm Murphy on the fire.”

‘I’m not a fucking Republican,’ Conor said desperately. ‘I’m not a Loyalist. I’m not – I’m not bloody anything.’

He felt Marsh’s hand grip his knee hard, and turned his head to see Marsh leaning towards him, eyes bright with a fierce amusement.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ the old soldier said. ‘All that matters, Conor, son, is that you’re mine.’

Present Day

CONOR tussled with the key in the stiff lock and slammed closed the door to the studio apartment. He looked up and down the street. No sign of Galloway, thank God. Maybe she’d realised he really didn’t want to be part of whatever plan she was cooking up.

He crossed the road from the flat to the parked Land Rover, wondering if it was even worthwhile keeping the place on. Be easy enough to doss down in the practice, he thought. The rent wasn’t too much – although, to a man who’d been out of the country for a while, it seemed a damn sight over the odds for a damp attic flat in Knock. It wasn’t like he had money to burn. The cash in his pocket had gone a lot further, back in Kenya. It’d bought him a clean-swept apartment with running water and its own generator – and he’d got used to the mosquitos, didn’t mind being woken in the night by the saw-toothed roars of leopards and lions (especially after Kip had told him that a lion that roared was a well-fed lion. When they were hungry, she’d said, you never heard them coming).

He’d given Ella a driving lesson the day before. No Galloway then either. Three weeks in, Ella was starting to get the hang of it; at least, she no longer seemed like quite so much of a risk to life and property. She’d asked him, halfway through making a bollix of a three-point-turn, if he could spare a bit of cash.

‘Kieran and me, we’d like to, to have a weekend away.’

‘Would you now? First a flash new car, and now fancy holidays. Ah, when I was your age—’

‘I’m just asking, Dad.’

Conor had sighed. He’d had to say no. The job in Kenya hadn’t paid much, and right now any spare money he had had to go into the practice. Ella had been disappointed, but she’d seemed to understand.

‘I knew Mum’d say no,’ she’d said with a mock-pout, ‘but you used to be such a soft touch.’

Still am, Conor thought. Soft but skint.

The Land Rover roared and gurgled unpromisingly as he manoeuvred through the directionless grey drizzle and traffic to the practice. He missed Kenya on days like this. Hell, who wouldn’t? It wasn’t just the sunshine; he missed the colour. Here, it seemed like there was nothing but grey: grey sky, grey buildings, grey asphalt, the slow grey river.

He thought of Kip. He wondered where she was now. And he realised, with a guilty pang, that it was the first time he’d thought of her in weeks.

Outside the city, as he approached the practice, the feeling of colourlessness started to lift. The trees lining the road seemed refreshed by the rain. A bright cock pheasant was startled out of the thick roadside foliage by the roar of the Land Rover. Ah, let’s be fair, Conor thought: old green Ireland has its moments, too, after all.

He pulled up in the practice courtyard, killed the engine, climbed down – and paused.

Tyre tracks, in the muddied yard.

Not fresh, but not too old, either. Made last night, if he was any judge. He’d done a little tracking out in Kenya. Never thought he’d be putting it to use in a Castlereagh car park.

He didn’t have to move far from the car to see that the main door to the practice was ajar. Dermot? No – his car would have been here. Conor checked his phone. No signal as always. The place was a blackspot – but there was a landline in the practice building.

What the hell would a burglar want to nick from a vet’s surgery? he wondered. Not much money kicking around. An old computer, a few bits of kit, but specialist stuff, nothing you could sell on the streets, surely.