– John Webster,
TWENTY-ONE
I drove back to Quarry Fields, Dave Donnelly following. He had a bag in his car and he followed me into the house with it in his hand. In the kitchen, making coffee, I looked at the bag until he said something.
'I was hoping I could stay a few days, Ed. Until things…you know…'
'I'm not sure I do know, Dave. I mean, of course you're welcome to stay, but is it a good idea? What about your kids?'
Dave set his jaw in that brooding, deliberate way he had, as if I were a puny earthling who could never truly understand the colossal scale of his plans.
'They think I'm working. Emergency shift. It's not unusual.'
'And what about Carmel. Did she throw you out?'
'No. No, she…she asked me to stay. Tears, the whole lot. She begged me.'
I couldn't see Carmel begging, but then, I couldn't have pictured her with Myles Geraghty either. How much did Dave know about that?
'Maybe you should go back there,' I said. 'You don't want to be alone on Christmas night. Certainly not if a woman needs you to be with her.'
' Carmel doesn't need me,' Dave said, but he sounded, if not actually hopeful, certainly unconvinced.
'Oh yes she does,' I said. 'She…she told me she did.'
'Last night? And what else did she tell you?'
'Dave, whatever's happened between you…you have a woman who wants you. And like any woman, she needs you to pay her some attention. To behave as if you know she's there, and you're as glad of it today as you were twenty years ago.'
Dave looked skeptically at me.
'You almost sound as if you'd like to be in my shoes,' he said. 'Football practice and sleepovers and Friday- night pizza and mass on Sundays and nodding off in front of the TV and watching each other get old.'
I looked out the back window at my apple trees, close but never touching; the bare limbs looked like bones in the hard wind. I looked out into the hall, where a pine stood bare and unadorned in a coal scuttle; I had forgotten, or hadn't bothered, to decorate it.
'It would have its compensations,' I said.
Dave looked at me in disbelief.
'Anyway, you can't stay. No one with a woman who wants him sleeps here.'
He thought about that for a while.
'You don't know what she did…'
I took a chance.
'Do you? Really? Maybe she needed to get your attention so badly…she tried before and failed…maybe it was your last chance…'
'Is that what she said?'
There was fear in his eyes. I shook my head.
'I don't know. She was upset. She wants you. I know what I'd do.'
Dave was doing his best to look wounded and noble, but I think he was relieved. We talked about the case for a while, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere; on the doorstep, he looked at me as if, in some crucial way, I'd let him down. If I'd told him to leave his family, would that have suited his image of me better? Now I'd let him believe I envied him, he felt happier about himself. Just to make sure, I asked him to keep his mobile on: I told him I might need him, and I could see he liked the idea that I might. After he drove away, I rang Carmel and told her he was coming home. She started to say a lot of stuff about being sorry and ashamed, but I told her nobody wanted to hear any of that, now or ever, wished her a happy Christmas, hung up and left the house.
THE THREE MEN who took me were under orders not to hurt me; that's why each of them carried a gun. None of them wore sportswear either: with their dark leather jackets and jeans and boots, they could have been construction workers on a stag night; they certainly didn't draw the eye the way Burberry hoodies did. They put me in the back of a Mercedes Estate with blacked-out windows, one on either side, one to drive. When we got to Redlands, which is where I assumed we were going-they could have shot me on the doorstep if they'd wished-I was led to a small bungalow George Halligan had built in the grounds, a three-room den with a pool table, a home cinema system, a bar and an en suite bedroom. What more could a man want? A head butt from Leo Halligan would not have been top of my list; nor would the kicks to the head and body that followed; a cowboy boot to the liver wouldn't have made the backup list; it felt like a week before I could breathe again. Leo was breathing heavily when George called a halt; he was almost out of breath when he stopped. The off-duty construction workers got me upright and propped me in a chair; George presented me with a tumbler of whiskey and sat opposite me; Leo hovered to one side, an elaborate dressing with some kind of metal frame over his nose.
'Compliments of the season,' George said in his fifty-a-day rasp. 'Sorry about that, Ed, but it sounds like you were asking for it.'
'I'm sure I was,' I said. 'Still, I didn't think Leo was such a girl he'd have to get his brother to hold me down.'
Leo came at me so fast he forgot to bring his brain along; he was drawing a blade from his jacket, but before he pulled it free, I smashed my tumbler hard against the metal-framed dressing on his nose and jammed the shattered glass against his throat; the metal jarred the bone out of its setting and blood was flowing from his nose and he was screaming and gurgling, and I was on my feet now, a red mist swirling around my head.
'You see what can happen? You see?' I heard myself shouting. I had lost any sense of where or who I was. I dug the broken glass into Leo's throat. I could see George waving at his henchmen to drop the guns they had pulled. George's mouth was moving, but I couldn't hear what he was saying; it took me a while to realize that that was because I was still shouting.
'You see? When we all live like savages? Blood! You see? You see?'
I could see the panic in George's eyes as he pointed at Leo; the sudden sight of Leo's face covered in blood, of the punctures the glass had made in his throat, of the choking quivering mess of him beneath me brought me to my senses. I signaled George to kick the guns across the floor to me; when he hesitated, I jammed the glass back into Leo's throat until I heard the skitter of metal across the floor; then I let him have Leo, whose injuries looked worse than they were; it was only because I had him lying on his back that he was choking; George sat him forward and gave him a bar cloth to stanch the flow, and one of the construction workers got some ice from the bar and wrapped it in another cloth and passed it to him.
My head was throbbing and there was blood on my face where Leo had opened the eye he had blackened on Bayview Hill and the pain on my right side where he'd caught my liver hurt so bad I felt like crying, and possibly did. But I watched Leo with his face in his hands, whimpering, and George, his prematurely white head bowed over his brother, and the three construction workers, their faces registering as much shock as you could discern through their folds of beer and steroid fat, and I thought: They won't forget this in a fucking hurry. And fool that I was, I felt stupid blood pride in my victory, suppressing the ache that, worse than any physical pain, warned me that maybe the only way the Halligans could properly settle this was to kill me.
I gathered up the guns: two Glock 17s and a Sig Sauer compact. I didn't know what was waiting for me down
