Well, well, well, whaddayaknow. That’s my big word for the day. So Corn was coming to work for me.
Corn wasn’t a bad old boy, as it happens. Come to think of it, he was a bad old boy. Me and him used to share the same dormitory. The size of him should’ve given him away sooner. He was always a lanky bastard. Mind you, like myself, he’d put on a bit of weight since then.
Hope he isn’t afraid of wasps.
LUCILLE
‘I must confess, Lucille, the powers of connivance at work here have surprised even me.’
‘What powers of connivance?’
‘Your mother’s or your grandfather’s perhaps.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You were correct, it seems. You told no one you were staying in Clonkeelin—’
‘No one.’
‘But you did. Your family. You are related to Amy and Edna Donavan?’
‘They’re my mother’s aunts. Why?’
‘Your grandfather’s sisters?’
‘Yes.’
‘He would benefit from their passing?’
‘Benefit from their passing?’
‘Since no one in Dublin knew of the Donavans, then no one from Dublin would have known where to locate your laptop. Logical?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Then it follows that someone in Clonkeelin took it. And since my own liberty now depends on the demise of your mother’s two aunts, I can only surmise that the communication I have just received can only have come from Clonkeelin. Such is my reading. Time is pressing. Anon.’
It was madness. I couldn’t take it in. Picasso was telling me that he was being forced to kill my two great-aunts and that my grandfather was the only one with motive.
I couldn’t even begin to understand it. And he was gone. I could do nothing to stop him. Even if I could have smashed my way through to the upstairs room, I would have been too late.
RED DOCK
OK, I’d always intended to pull this next part off by myself. The only problem I had with it was it involved lifting. And, as I say, I avoid anything that involves lifting, if I can. Then Corn came along.
When it was over, it had to look like three deaths had occurred through sheer bad luck. Crime couldn’t come into it. The fourth death, Anne Donavan’s, would be put down to Picasso. That’s how Chilly Winters would initially see it. He’d have already linked right into the unlikely coincidence of Picasso just happening to strike the same night three others had died on the same farm. Who could miss it? Then Winters’d discover what else I was gonna leave for him. He’d know the truth, or what he thought was the truth: that Lucille was behind it, but that she had connived to cover it up so she could get her hands on what the Donavans had.
As I say, because I’d had over twenty years to study the Donavans’ habits, I knew what all four did from week to week. Amy’s love of dancing; Edna, who sat stuffing herself every night in front of the TV and rarely went to bed before one; their nights at bingo; Conor’s weekly card game, his involvement with the Irish Horse Board, a divorcee he kept company on Saturday nights; Anne, who ran a horse riding business, and attended shows, showing her mare …
They say actors should never work with animals or kids. Well, it’s a load of crap as far as scams are concerned. The plan I’d perfected had not only begun with a kid, it was to continue with Anne’s mare and a bull.
And since I’d already kicked it off by feeding Anne’s mare a couple of times, when all the Donavans were safely tucked up in their scratchers, I was now lining up for the net with my old mate Corn. Appropriate name for what goes on down on the farm.
Thirty-five minutes after I’d emailed him, I watched his Transit drive past the entrance to the riding stables. He parked farther along the road and walked back. From behind a hedge at the other end of the field, with a pair of night-vision goggles, I saw him enter the field and go over to the mare. She was nudging a foal. It was lying flat out on the grass. He picked it up, carried it over to a drainage ditch, the mare tailing after him, put it down, got into the ditch and lifted it in. Then he went across to the cottage, leaving her standing peering into the ditch, snorting and prodding the way horses do when some fucker’s just dumped their kid in a dark and dingy ditch.
So far he’d carried out my instructions perfectly.
Now in preparation for this over the years, which included finding out a lot about horses, my problem was how the fuck do you make a mare foal when you want her to? Well, the answer is you can’t. Nature’s nature and that’s all there is to it. Then again, maternity wards bring women on all the time. They bypass nature. The truth of this was that if the mare didn’t cooperate, then it was simply back to plan B, then C, D, E and all the rest of them. I’d an alphabetful. But the way I’d worked this particular one out was based on something that happened to me when I was a kid.
Horses carry for eleven months and one week, and foals born five or six weeks premature rarely survive – something to do with their lungs forming during the last weeks of gestation according to my vet book. In other words, they’re born with hardly any lungs. Which got me thinking.
When I left that home, I’d nowhere to go. I slept in containers in the docks, used the wash-and-brush-up facilities public toilets had in those days and got a job in a rag-and-bone yard, cash in hand, four quid a week, on the north side of the city centre, the working-class area.
Men used to rent a handcart for ten bob a day (that’s fifty pence to you younger ones). They were the two-wheel type you had to push. Stick yourself between the shafts and sweat your
