Black Widow (38 page)

‘Want a lift?’

It was Pieter Kissin. For all that he’d spent two days in hospital – one more than de Groot – he’d made an almost complete recovery, and seemed very handsome in his overcoat, if a little gaunter than she remembered. The patch that covered his left eye made her smile. He was an unlikely pirate. Besides, it would come off in a week’s time.

He was leaning on the bonnet of a new car. An Audi, something like that. Tanja didn’t bother to delve any deeper into its specification, on principle. She’d lived long enough to know that the very worst thing a woman could do was ask a man about his car. Show anything other than a superficial interest, and before she knew it he would be telling her how the turbocharger worked.

‘How did you find me?’ she asked.

‘I followed you.’

‘Oh.’ She thought about his offer for a moment, then shrugged. ‘All right. Want me to drive? I know a shortcut.’

He shook his head. ‘If it’s all the same with you, Tanja, I’ll decline your offer. I have the rear-view mirror just where I like it.’

Tanja smiled, but made a mental note. He would pay for that, when she finally returned to work.

If she returned, of course. It was far from a given.

She nodded thanks, as Pieter opened the door for her. ‘I like the colour,’ she said absently.

‘Thanks. So – how are you bearing up?’

‘I’m all right.’

‘Good. And your cat?’

‘Well, I don’t think he much enjoyed his stay at Scholten’s,’ Tanja answered. ‘But he’s fine now. Animals live in the moment, don’t they. They don’t dwell.’

Pieter sighed, squared his shoulders, then turned to look at her directly. ‘They buried Scholten this morning. Hester Goldberg paid for the headstone.’

Tanja nodded. ‘I heard. Guilt at not doing things right the first time around, I suppose.’

Pieter sighed, but didn’t dwell on that statement. Tanja appreciated his restraint.

Turn the page for an exclusive extract from thrilling debut novel by John Brennan

Dead and Buried

Out now!

1992

W
HAT
had woken him? A voice?

No – there was no voice – only the strident double-tone of the phone, and then, from under the covers, Christine sleepily asking, ‘What time is it?’

The bedside clock told 3.12.

As Conor reached for the receiver, the cold air of the bedroom raised goose flesh on his arms and chest.

A thoroughbred with a torsioned colon up at the McGill stables. A sheep hit by a lorry out on one of the high roads. A cow that can’t calve in some godforsaken byre down Ballycullen way. That’d be it. Conor turned over the possibilities in his head: breech birth, prolapsed uterus, dead calf…

‘Conor – fucking hell.’

This wasn’t any Ballycullen farmer. He half-recognised the voice through the layers of panic. ‘Patrick?’

‘Fuckin’ hell, Conor, man – you have to help me.’

Patrick Cameron – Christine’s little brother. Conor swallowed; kept his voice level.

‘What’s up?’

‘I’ve done something…something stupid.’ On ‘stupid’ Patrick’s voice broke into a strangled sob. Pissed again, Conor supposed. Patrick liked a drink, no question. Hadn’t he done for the best part of a bottle of Bushmill’s at Conor and Christine’s wedding in the summer and made a twat of himself on the dance floor?

How many have you had? Conor wanted to ask. But with Christine listening he couldn’t ask that. So instead: ‘What’s the problem?’

‘I think I’ve killed somebody.’

Jesus. Conor thought his heart had stopped. He cleared his throat.

‘Say again?’ he managed. Calm, professional, just another late-night call-out…

But Patrick only sobbed into the phone. Then he said, ‘Come out, Con. I’m outside. Come outside.’

It was a freezing night, black and cold and hard as iron.

Conor, closing the front door quietly behind him, made out Patrick jogging back from the callbox at the end of the road. Right down the middle of the empty street, between parked cars, his feet a soft crunch and skidding in the frost. As he passed under the streetlamps, he saw the bloodstains. On his tracksuit bottoms, on his face and hands. He was only a rag of a lad, Paddy Cameron. Twenty-two years of age but could’ve passed for eighteen. A scallywag, to hear Christine tell it – a sharp-edged little scanger, to hear anyone else.

He approached slowly, hands shoved deep in his pockets like he was searching for a lost bit of change. ‘What’d you tell Chris?’ he whispered.

‘Had to go out to Nesbit’s place to foal his mare. The poor girl’s six months pregnant, what am I going to tell her?’ Conor glanced anxiously over his shoulder, but all down the street the upstairs windows were unlit. No one awake on Rembrandt Close – no one watching.

He fixed Patrick with a stare. ‘So?’

Patrick rolled a plug of chewing gum over in his mouth and then, with a half-shrug, said, ‘In the car.’

‘What’s in the car?’

‘He is.’

Conor wanted to turn, run back indoors and lock the door. But something stopped him. He followed Patrick to the car. Already his brain was working to the inevitable conclusion: phone the police. There’s no harm seeing what you’re dealing with, but then walk back to the house and phone the fuzz. No, better, use the phonebox. Keep Christine out of this for as long as you can.

The knackered old Escort was parked by the kerb beneath a broken streetlight. Patrick opened the rear door. The car light came on like a flashbulb.

‘Turn that fucking thing off,’ Conor hissed. Patrick reached in and killed the light – but Conor had seen enough. The body sprawled face-down on the back seat. Unmoving – the right arm crooked awkwardly – the left hanging limp. Patch of blood on his back.

With the smell of blood in the air, Patrick started muttering. ‘Christ almighty, Con. Christ.’

‘Quiet.’ Conor closed the car door and leaned on it. ‘It’s all right,’ he lied. ‘It’ll be fine. Just – just tell me what happened.’

Patrick was trying to light up a cigarette but his hands were shaking too hard.

‘Forget the fucking cigarette,’ said Conor. ‘Just tell me what you did.’

Patrick shrugged and shoved his cigarettes back into his jacket pocket. His eyes were wide and white in the darkness.

‘It was self-defence, Con,’ he said.

‘How did I know you were going to say that?’

‘I swear to God, man, it’s the truth. What d’you take me for?’

‘You promise me now?’ He felt like a schoolteacher – or anyway Patrick looked like a schoolkid, skinny and pale and finally finding himself in a jam he couldn’t talk his way out of.

‘I promise. I never meant, I never wanted—’

‘Okay.’ Conor cut him off before his voice could break again. More bloody tears were the last thing they needed. Besides, he’d had enough of this. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to go back to Christine. ‘So we call the police,’ he said, digging into his jeans pocket for change for the callbox. ‘We explain. There’s no law against—’

He’d never have thought Patrick had it in him. The kid’s shoulder hammered into his chest; his forehead jolted Conor’s chin – Conor, thrown off balance by the suddenness of the attack, was stunned for a half-second. Patrick’s bony left hand took a tight hold on his right wrist.

‘No police,’ Patrick hissed. His face was wild and close.

‘Get to fuck,’ Conor said.

With an easy half-turn of his arm he broke Patrick’s grip on his wrist. Patrick had caught him off-guard but Conor still had four inches and forty pounds on the kid. Besides, he kept himself in shape – Patrick always looked like he’d been weaned on smack and potato crisps.

He pushed Patrick back with one hand. ‘You can forget about that stuff,’ he said firmly.

But Patrick was still scared. Mad scared.

‘No police.’

‘All we’ll say is—’

‘No police.’

Then there was a gun in Patrick’s hand. The move, dragging the weapon sharply out and up from the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms, was fast, efficient – practised. Conor froze.

‘No,’ Patrick said again, ‘police.’

The kid was aiming the gun right between his eyes. Only six inches away but jumping around so much he might still have missed.

Still, though – the odds were all in the kid’s favour. This was Patrick’s game now.

‘Patrick…’

‘Shut your fucking face and do as you’re fucking told.’

Conor tried to swallow and couldn’t. Mouth dry as dust. He tried to think. It wasn’t easy with the gun barrel quivering in front of his face. They didn’t teach you that at veterinary school.

Patrick was a kid who’d been around. Not a killer, no – but hardly an innocent. So why was he crying like a baby and waving a gun around in the middle of the street at 3am in the fucking morning?

‘Who is he?’ Conor managed to say.

Patrick shrugged with one shoulder.

‘It’s nobody now,’ he said.

Connor wanted to take him by the scruff of his scraggy neck, shake some sense into him. He mastered his anger with difficulty.

‘So who was he?’

Patrick wouldn’t meet his eye.

‘Just a – just a feller.’ Patrick looked up, turned his plug of gum over in his mouth. With what seemed like a childish sort of boldness or bravado, he added, ‘One of your lot.’

‘My lot?’ Conor’s mind raced. ‘A Catholic?’

A nod.

‘Someone – Patrick, is this someone I know?’

Patrick bit his lip and didn’t answer. It came to Conor so suddenly, so horribly, that he forgot about the gun in Patrick’s hand – forgot about calling the police, forgot about getting back home, back to Christine.

He turned and wrenched open the car door. The outline of the still body was clear in the dim light. Reaching in, Conor took hold of a coat sleeve and hauled. The leather of the car seats creaked; a wheeze of air hissed horribly from the dead man’s lungs. The heavy body rolled reluctantly onto its side. Behind him Conor heard Patrick’s voice: it sounded like he was pleading now, ‘Oh, Con.’

With his hand still clutching the canvas coat sleeve Conor looked down at the half-shadowed, half-turned face of the dead man. Cold bile rose sharply in the back of his throat.

‘It wasn’t supposed to happen,’ he heard Patrick say.

Conor stared at the dead man’s face and the dead man’s empty blue eyes looked back at him.

Coleraine Road, spring of ’74

‘Quiet now. They’re coming. They’re—’

‘Quiet, he says. Be quiet yourself. And duck down. He’ll see you.’

There was rain in the air and you wouldn’t have wanted to go out without a jacket. Winter wasn’t forgotten. But still – it felt like summer, it felt like a holiday, that day.

‘They’re coming in!’

‘Shut your bloody hole, will you, Con.’

Lefty was first – Lefty McLeod, the Lieutenant. What would he have been then? Twenty-six, twenty-seven? George Best sideburns and a face as long and pale as a ballet shoe. Hadn’t got any better-looking in the two years he’d been away. He came in, grinned, winked.

‘No one here, yet, Colm,’ Lefty said in a loud voice. ‘Must all be – must all be busy or something, I s’pose.’

As if he hadn’t seen Con and Robert and Martin giggling and nudging each other behind the settee.

And then in he came – Him, the big feller, Colm Murphy, fresh from a three-year stretch in Long Kesh, bold and bearish as ever, curly blond hair overlong and pushed behind his ears, blue eyes bright, all six-foot-four of him filling the doorway.

‘Well!’ he said. ‘It seems like the Maguire boys don’t give a tinker’s cuss for the homecoming hero! It seems like the Maguire boys—’

And he probably had more of the same to say but the Maguire boys couldn’t wait long enough to hear it. Robert got there first – first to throw his arms round Murphy’s waist, first to feel Murphy’s heavy hand ruffle his hair. Martin, the youngest, was gratefully gathered in under the big man’s arm.

Conor hung back. He was thirteen – too cool for that stuff.

‘It’s good,’ Colm Murphy said, ‘to be home.’ He held Conor’s eye while he said it – and Conor held Murphy’s eye right back. He knew how it was for the boy. He stepped forward – Robert and Martin still clinging to the hem of his coat – and put out a hand.

‘Conor,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to see you again. A young man,’ he added.

Conor shook his hand. ‘Welcome home, Uncle Colm,’ he said.

Murphy kept hold of his hand for a moment longer, and smiled. God, Conor thought his heart was going to burst.

His ma and da came in then, with kisses, handshakes, how-are-yous, how-was-its. His da drew out a bottle he’d been saving. He was forever drawing out bottles he’d been saving and they were always piss. But no one cared, least of all Colm Murphy. He might’ve been the king of Long Kesh but a prison’s a prison, and Murphy knew better than anyone that off-licence whiskey tastes better to a man that’s free than the best champagne to a man that’s not.

‘Here’s to you, Colm,’ said Conor’s ma.

‘
Sláinte
. Thank you, God bless you,’ Murphy said, lifting his half-full glass.

And now Colm Murphy was lying dead in the back seat of Patrick Cameron’s clapped-out car. No more Uncle Colm and goodbye to Coleraine Road, Conor thought. All that was gone, now – those days were dead. Patrick had killed more than a man.

The dimmed headlights led the way over the dark roads to Dundonald. Patrick sat in the passenger seat with the gun in his lap. Conor just drove. His hands were cold on the wheel: they’d rolled down the windows to try to let in fresh air, though it’d done no good. He tried not to think but thoughts kept coming to him, things he could do, things he’d seen in films.

Patrick hadn’t got his seatbelt on, Conor noticed. So why not slam on the anchors, send him into the windscreen – he’d have his gun off him in a second, turn around, back to the town, to the police.

But he knew he wouldn’t do anything. Apart from anything else, this was Patrick, for God’s sake. His wife’s little brother. Family. So Conor just drove.

The faint nightlights of the Kelvin farm were visible on the hill and the dashboard clock showed ten to four when Patrick broke the silence.

‘D’you remember something?’ he said out of nowhere. ‘I remember something.’ There was a note in Patrick’s voice that told Conor that, whatever it was that Patrick remembered, Conor wasn’t going to like it. Patrick went on. ‘It was four or five years back,’ he said, ‘and you and Chris had just started going out. We were in the car. You were taking us somewhere – trying to show Chris what a great feller you were, palling up with her little brother, like. You were driving us out to Bangor. D’you remember?’