That’s the trouble with crime these days: no fucker’s reliable.
‘OK, Corn, this is the way it is. I tried to be reasonable, and you won’t let me. So your mother will get a copy of your activities.’
‘Done.’
‘Ah, that’s better.’
I told him what I wanted him to do then waited to make sure he did it.
PICASSO
Pressure had been exerted on me which I had not anticipated. I was compelled to visit the riding stables and liaise with Anne Donavan.
I was surprised to see that while she was pretty, in her own country-girl way, ideal for a bringing-in-the-hay portrait, she bore no resemblance whatsoever to her daughter. Still, she did have rather fine skin …
I began with a conventional expression of ‘Good evening’, which elicited a guarded ‘Hello’. The late hour, a stranger at the door, the remote location, the aura of recent events, her aunts’ demise, for whom her slightly puffed eyes suggested that she had been crying, their funeral, due the following day, and so forth were no doubt unsettling to her.
‘May I come in?’
‘Who are you?’
‘An associate of your daughter’s.’
‘My daughter’s? I have no daughter.’
‘Quite. However, I am privy to information to the contrary: Frances Anne Donavan, also known as Lucille Kells.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I too feel the matter requires elucidation.’
My chloroform spray rendered her incapacitated. I bound her hands behind her back and laid her out in the first double-bedded room that presented itself – her father’s, as I was later to discover – and waited while she regained consciousness.
‘You have a relative who walks with a limp?’
‘No. Look, please tell me what this is all about. Who are you? Why are you doing this to me? Why?’
Fear inspires many questions.
‘In the event of your father’s death, who, save yourself, stands to inherit?’
‘What?’
‘Please answer.’
‘No one. Cousins … I don’t know.’
‘No one specifically?’
‘No. It would be shared out, I suppose. Why? Why are you asking me this?’
‘Lucille’s Kells’ father – he walks with a limp?’
‘I don’t even know who Lucille’s father is.’
‘You had several lovers?’
‘“Several lovers”?’
I produced Lucille’s birth certificate. ‘You still deny this?’
‘I’ve never seen it before. Or Lucille, up until recently.’
The conundrum at hand had now been rendered fathomable by further reflection. And although Anne Donavan was refusing to put construction to the truth, it was the case that mothers had been known to deny having given their children into care, even when official documents proved the contrary. Perhaps she was lying to protect the father. Perhaps he was behind this, manipulating events which would allow his daughter to claim the family fortune. He could then re-enter Lucille’s life and share in her inheritance. Whatever Anne Donavan’s reasoning, she would reveal to me the truth surrounding the affair. I would then know exactly why I had been blackmailed into killing Lucille’s family.
RED DOCK
I have to report that me old mate Picasso went to see Anne and left her in need of a few stitches.
I waited for an hour or so after he’d gone then took a drive up to the main house and went inside. Anne was in Conor’s bedroom, relaxing against the pillows. Not the sort of thing you should look at on a full stomach. You’d throw up. I’d seen corpses before but, fuck me, never the way Picasso left them.
Her hair was draping down around the edges of what his gallery suggested was a carved flower. Her legs were spread wide. Oddly enough they were still attached to her. Maybe he forgot his saw. She was a bad colour too, pale as the sheets – pale and red as the sheets. Her arms were detached though, spread out from her crotch to make her look like she’d four legs. She wouldn’t be showing any more mares, that was for sure.
I wasn’t interested in trying to figure out why he’d cut her the way he had. I had what I wanted and that was that.
I’d had enough of fucking around with the Donavans. It was over. Besides, this wasn’t even my home. It held fuck all for me. It hadn’t even been built when Sean and I were born. The cottage was. That’s where I’d watched Picasso coming and going from. We’d been born there. Skeffington had more or less confirmed it.
Nice little cottage. Modernised now, but it still held its charm. I began in the kitchen, checking, as I’d checked before for something to do with my past. I didn’t expect to find anything this time either. And I wasn’t disappointed.
But then something hit me. It was the eyes that did it. Y’know how the eyes in some pictures follow you around the room? Well, that’s what the Sacred Heart was doing. I thought of something a nun had said to me when I was a kid. She was one of the good ones.
‘Robert,’ she said. ‘Folk’ll take down every picture in the house except a Sacred Heart.’ Which didn’t make any sense to me at first, until she went on. ‘They admire family photos and take them down, pass them around at gatherings and so on.’ She’d been referring to the twenties and thirties when photos were a big thing; when people paid a lot of attention, wanted to know what had become of such and such who’d fucked off to America and years later had sent home a picture of what he looked like now, which his folks then showed to people who’d known him when he was young. But a Sacred Heart’s a Sacred Heart, so nobody had any reason to take one down for a closer look.
I took down Edna’s and there taped to the back was a letter, dated the night I was born, from the old girl herself, Teresa Donavan. My darling fucking mother.
Dear Conor, Edna and Amy,
My darling children, I never wanted to go away and leave you, but I
