was curled on the ground with two of them getting stuck in. One was laying in with his boots, but the other had picked up a piece of smashed glass.
“Sean!” I shouted and, despite the chaos, he turned instantly, unaffected by the usual tunnelling of sight and sound. The guy he’d been fighting was on the floor at his feet. He saw Jamie down and jumped for one of his attackers. I abandoned my detached stance and went for the other.
My opponent was bigger than I was but hampered by his instinctive reluctance to hit a woman. He’d also already been giving it his all for more than thirty seconds and, in a brawl, that’s a long time. Boxers spend their whole life preparing for the ring, yet are exhausted after bursts of action lasting only a couple of minutes. And this guy wasn’t a professional fighter.
I ignored the wicked piece of jagged glass in his hand and took his nose out sideways with my first sweeping blow, aiming to water down his vision and distract him with the pain. After that I could choose my target. I hit him, just once, at the vulnerable point on the side of his jaw where his moustache would have come down to meet his chin, had he been wearing either. I put my bodyweight behind it. He overbalanced backwards and went crashing.
The lad who’d been facing Sean lost his nerve at that point and ran. Sean checked to see I was coping, then took off after him. When I’d made sure the guy I’d hit wasn’t going to get up again in a hurry, I went after them both.
Not that I didn’t have confidence that Sean could tackle the man he was chasing. That wasn’t what worried me.
I was scared that he could tackle him only too well.
Twenty-two
The guy Sean was chasing had plenty of incentive to escape but he was just about spent from the fight and he didn’t have Sean’s predatory instinct. He’d headed downhill as his best chance of survival, arms windmilling for balance as he ran, then skidded round a corner and disappeared from view.
Sean shot after him, gaining with every stride. By the time I’d rounded the corner myself, Sean had the guy on the ground down by the wall of a building and had hit him just to the outside of his left eye, hard enough to quell his struggles, to frighten and hurt him rather than put him out. Sean glanced up as I approached. I caught something in his face and gave him a single nod to show I was prepared to follow his lead.
The guy on the floor was in his early twenties, dark-haired and solidly built. He might have been brave when he was hunting as part of a pack, but now he was singled out and down and on his own his courage seemed to have deserted him. He was gasping for breath and sweating hard enough to stain through his shirt, his hands spread in front of him as though to ward off another blow.
“Don’t hurt me,” he begged, his accent local. “Sweet Jesus, don’t hurt me.”
“Now why would I want to do that, you wee fucker?” Sean said, perfectly slipping the slant and rhythm of East Belfast into his voice.
I thought the guy on the ground was going to have a heart attack, or wet himself, or both. His face buckled completely as he recognised the tones and made all kinds of wild and unsubstantiated connections.
“Sean,” I murmured, deliberately allowing a trace of unease to slide through. “You can’t kill him – not here.”
“And why not?” Sean said. “Didn’t your man here and his pals have it in for us?”
“We didn’t!” the guy yelped. “Honest to God, we didn’t! No one else was supposed to get hurt.”
“What about the young lad you had on the ground between you?” Sean demanded roughly. “You looked to have it in for him, right enough.”
“OK, OK,” the guy said, squirming backwards until his shoulders were hard up against the brickwork. Not a good idea if Sean decided to hit him again, but clearly he was too scared to think straight. “Look, we were told to do him over, right? To break something – stop him getting on a bike, or something. I don’t know any more than that. Honest to God!”
Sean and I exchanged glances.
“Now who would tell you to do a thing like that?” Sean said softly.
The guy’s eyes swivelled as though searching for an excuse he thought we might swallow. He failed to come up with one before Sean had straightened and made a big show of drawing back his fist.
“OK, OK!” the guy shouted, flinching his head away, hands still up. “I don’t know who it was, all right? Davey got this phone call earlier tonight, telling him this group of Brit bikers’d be in Portaferry and to look out for them. Said one of them was gay. We didn’t know someone like you’d be with them or we’d have stayed well clear.”
“Davey’s the big feller who came over?” Sean surmised. “So who would be calling him about that?”
“I don’t know!” the guy squawked, tension making the tears squeeze out and roll down his cheeks. “Davey works as a bailiff. He knows all kinds of folk. Sweet Jesus, that’s all I know!”
I believed him. He was too frightened to be inventive.
After a moment’s consideration Sean stepped back and jerked his head. “All right, you be on your way now,” he said, his voice still quiet, laced with contempt. “But I don’t want to see your face again, you understand me? Not ever. Or I’ll do more than tell your pals you cried like a girl.”
The guy scrambled to his feet, never taking his eyes off Sean just in case of a double-cross. As soon as he was upright again, he bolted. We watched him dive into the gap between two buildings and disappear from view.
“Well now,” Sean said then with a lazy grin, shouldering back into his own skin. “
“You’re very convincing.”
