You must have noticed it. Tom Fred stuck it in your face, for fuck’s sake. The Medusa painting. The boy in it. Who do you think that boy is? Corn painted himself.
Once Winters twigs to that he’ll trace the orphanage inspectors who went round those industrial schools, the brothers and sisters who ran them … He might even go see the bishop. ‘Have a look at this painting, Bish. I need to find the setting. Which industrial school was that statue in?’
Somebody’s bound to recognise it as the one me and Corn were in.
At one point the majority of prostitutes and prisoners here were ex-industrial school. Tens of thousands of kids went through those places. All he needed was one to put a name to the face in the painting.
Then there were those punters of Gemma’s. Corn’d hit on them. And knowing him, he’d go back for a second helping. He might even try for a third. He thought that plan of his was foolproof. But a blackmailing scam only works once. Keep milking it and the guys you’re hitting on start to think up get-outs. Successful businessmen aren’t successful because they’re stupid.
Even if they didn’t pay someone to lay in wait for him, his ruse worked only if they didn’t go to the law. Because he was playing them two at a time, if one went to the law, the other would be seen as the blackmailer and vice versa. But if both went, the law would see through it. They’d tell the pair of them to go to the waste bin as instructed then leave. Corn would think it safe to collect and they’d grab him. Lucille would ID him as Picasso – and, as I say, he’d take me down with him.
Or would he? If I got caught I’d go down for the rest of my natural whether I squealed on Corn or not. Same goes for him.
Here’d be Winters. ‘Tell us about Dock’s part in this, Corn.’
‘In return for?’
‘Well, we can ask the judge to drop the charges for those twenty-odd women you scalpeled, but, ah … he’s a bit of a funny cunt that judge.’
Corn hates the law and the system as much as I do. We’re too much alike. All Winters’s likely to get out of him about me is an ‘Apropos?’
There was one other threat to me of course, but you already know about it. No point going over it again.
Fuck it. Time to do what I’d spent my life planning since the age of nine.
My brief had arranged for a funeral company to have Sean reburied and I had to show the undertaker to Sean’s grave.
After he’d gone, I stayed a while. Nothing worth describing. Just a dump of a cemetery in the grounds of a burnt-down industrial school. St Pat’s they called it. Sean’s was a well-tended grave. I always visited him regularly and kept it tidy. Five names were on the headstone. A small stone with no space to carve anything but names and dates of death.
A couple of hours and he’d have a nice new casket with brass handles and be laid to rest on the brow of a hill overlooking the cottage we should have been brought up in. Proper headstone with his name, date of birth, date of death, and ‘Loving Brother of Robert’ carved on it. Just the way he’d like it.
Winters came over. No doubt Conor’s solicitor had told him this’d be taking place. I’d caught a glimpse of him inside the chapel ruins, looking up at an old beaded arch. The same one above the statue in Corn’s painting. He’d found the setting. Or I’d led him to it. What was left of it anyway. For all the good it’d do him. .
‘I’ve told Lucille who she really is. It’s only a matter of time before you and that animal Picasso are taking her place.’
Yeah, well, a matter of time might be a long time getting here, Chill. We all might be in the ground by then.
‘Know what gets me, Dock? The methods you used. I always knew you were twisted but getting an animal to kick someone to death, using a slurry pit, poisonous gas …’
‘Know what gets me, Winters? I always knew you were twisted, but getting an animal to kick someone to death, using a slurry pit, poisonous gas… Don’t tell me you don’t recognise your own part in this. It was you who set the whole thing in motion. Now fuck off out of my way – I’ve got my brother’s funeral to attend to.’
LUCILLE
When Sean Dock was reburied on the Donavan land, an old man came up to my father and said that he’d heard about the funeral and wanted to speak to Robert Donavan. He was told that he hadn’t yet arrived.
As the afternoon drew on, the old man explained that he was a friend of Robert Donavan’s mother and had been in the cottage the night the twins were born.
In 1949 Mr Donavan senior and his wife Teresa and their three children – Conor, fourteen, Edna, eleven, and Amy, ten – lived in poverty. When Mr Donavan was killed in a farming accident, the priest arrived and took their children away. With no land of her own and her husband gone it wasn’t unusual then for the Church to regard women as unable to care for their children. The police took Conor, Edna and Amy to an industrial school.
Some weeks later, Teresa learned that she was pregnant by her husband. She travelled to England to get a job and make a home for herself and her children and returned after seven months to collect them. But the Church wouldn’t let them go. The trauma brought her into labour, a Doctor Skeffington
