Resurrection Man (20 page)

It was only when she walked up the path though that she saw all was amiss. The front door was veered sideways on its hinges with the lock broken. The wits were put out of her and she ran forward with a worried cry before mastering her emotion. Taking her courage in both hands she pushed the door aside and entered the premises without further ado. Inside was a state of dissolution with everything tossed and holes dug in the floor. It was with an agony of apprehension that she explored every room thinking perhaps to find Victor dead and cold. She did not draw breath until she had made sure that this was not so.

It was only then that she sat up and took full heed of the situation. She could see it as a place left behind in a hurry like a tale of utmost desertion but it took the woman’s eye to see the things vital to feminine behaviour removed. Even a woman mad for haste would not disdain what was necessary in the cosmetics line. Especially a woman like this whose face was a living and who would have all the trappings of a Jezebel. Sure enough in the bathroom there was a fortune in money of
make-up
which showed that the girl had her hand in Victor’s pocket.
But Dorcas was able to see that essentials such as cleanser were gone which meant that she had left freely, perhaps with Victor.

She left the bathroom and went into the bedroom which was an offence with articles of clothing scattered and
bedsheets
that had not seen the inside of a washing-machine for months. It made her cry to see this and recall her hopes of Victor. She would see him in her mind, him smiling beside a pretty girl, perhaps holding a child of his own to break his heart. Instead he was a desperate character on the run. Here was one mother who would not benefit from the entitlements of age. She sat on the bed and gave in to grief.

She could not say what time it was when she came to herself. The first thing she noticed was the cheap smell of the room like a degrading perfume. Her first act was to seek a mirror and straighten her hair. When she looked at the clock she saw that she had spent close to two hours in the house. The risk of discovery put the heart sideways in her. That woman surveying her with brazen eyes. The house was like a place in a time of desolation and it crossed her mind that the blame for destruction might be put on her shoulders like so much else. Panic seized her and she ran down the stairs and fled by way of the front door, going down the path like a woman with devils in pursuit.

She did not slow her pace until she got home. People looked strangely at her but she was blind in her senses. She reached the house and slammed the door behind her and stood in the hallway with the perspiration rolling off her. At that moment James came out of the living room and gave her a look of concern. He came towards her but she would not suffer him to touch her and lifted her hands to ward him and took herself upstairs and would not be consoled.

Ryan had never known of the existence of Tomb Street baths but now that he was beside it in the car it seemed the ominous heart of the city. A red-brick Victorian structure with fleshy sandstone abutments, the windows boarded and holes in the slate roof visible in the charnel glow of a street-light. A bathhouse for the industrial poor, gaslit, looming eerily out of a gaseous fog. A moody, imperfect place with fitful winds blowing debris against its bleak walls.

McClure had called him in the office just as he was about to leave. It was the hour of the shift change when there were few people in the building. There was a low hum of machinery, lights going out in offices across the street. Ryan tried to avoid the office during the change-over. It was a time to fall prey to a perilous nostalgia.

‘Well, Mr Journalist,’ McClure said, ‘you ready for a bit of action?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You want the story on our friend Victor? He’s gone spare so he has, finally lost the rag. There’s a few people in a high state of concern about his activities. Reckon he’s got bad for business in the town. Word is he’s going to be took out.’

‘What are they going to do? Who’s involved in this?’

‘Hold your horses there, son. That’s a bit down the road yet. First things first. By the way, I hear Coppinger’s took bad. From what I hear the man’s fucked.’ Ryan said nothing. ‘Suit yourself. Anyhow since you’re the big journalist there’s
something
I want you to take a look at. Say I’m giving you the exclusive. Tomb Street baths. If I was you I’d get my arse down there quick as I could. You wouldn’t want to miss the scoop. Take a torch with you. There’s a back door lying open. Nobody there to give you any problem if that’s what you’re worrying about. Safe as houses so it is.’

‘What’s the story?’

‘Never you mind. Just get yourself down there.’

‘What about Kelly?’

‘I’ll be in touch never you fear, Mr Journalist. Get on down to Tomb Street, there’s a good lad.’

McClure hung up. Ryan felt light-headed, his hand
trembling
. A reckoning lay ahead and he was unsure as to its nature.

The previous day he had gone to the remand hearing for the other members of the Resurrection Men. The foyer of the courthouse was packed, clamorous with pressmen and
relatives
of the accused. Dry-eyed younger women and others who looked like they could be mothers – frail and noisome elders. There was a group of young men standing at the doorway, smoking and scanning the faces of lawyers and journalists with violent promise.

Inside the courtroom there was silence as the defendants were brought in. Ian Samuel Barnes with his head down. Ivan Robert Crommie smiling and waving to the public gallery with a lax foolish hand. William John Lambe also looking towards the public gallery, but fearfully, as if something there might quell him where he stood.

Charges of murder against the three were read by the clerk against which they entered pleas of not guilty. A police inspector gave evidence of their arrests and the confession of Crommie. He confirmed the murders, which had taken place over the previous four years, read the names of the victims and described the nature and extent of their injuries. When an application of bail was put forward he opposed it, stating that the leader and most dangerous member of the gang was
believed to be still at liberty in the city although none of the defendants had named him, being in fear of their lives. Bail was refused.

Ryan studied them. He expected to see their crimes outlined there, some terrible detail of mouth or eyes. He expected faces of perceptible evil but they were ordinary. Glancing into the public gallery he saw Heather. She had lost more weight and the skin around her eyes was dark. He thought of the face of a condemned murderess, pale features glimpsed in a dramatic penal gloom.

As the three men were being led down to the cells Big Ivan raised a clenched fist in salute towards the public gallery. There was no response. They knew that he had broken and implicated the others. Big Ivan’s eyes moved from face to face and each was averted in its turn. His lips moved as though naming the people and the streets they came from, as if their denial of him was geographic, pertaining to the parts of the city.

Outside relatives of the victims had gathered opposite the main gateway. Their faces were uncertain and strained, scarcely believing that nothing was required of them save this vigil. Ryan saw Heather coming towards him. She took his arm and he felt a reluctance to be touched by her.

‘Victor found me,’ she said urgently. ‘He just turns up at the door the other night with the blood dripping off him. I think he must have killed someone again. He just sits there talking like he’s not right in the head, how he’s going to take over the town and all. My own head’s away with it. Somebody’s got to do something.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ The woman looked away from him towards the small group of relatives opposite the courthouse and her face softened as though she found
consolation
in their beleaguered stance.

‘I don’t know. I thought maybe with you in the papers and all.’ She spoke vaguely now, her thought requisitioned.

‘I don’t know,’ she repeated, ‘the head lets you down
sometimes.’ She turned abruptly and walked away from him with jerky steps. Ryan watched her cross the street, a halting and afflicted withdrawal.

On the way to Tomb Street he had bought a naggin of Powers whiskey. He had half-emptied it while driving and finished it now in two long swallows, feeling that the place he was now about to visit required some drift, the mind passive and inclined towards tolerance. He got out of the car and stood looking in the direction of the docks. A gull flew across the end of the street and wheeled urgently and then was gone as if driven by the wind to ratify the darkness beyond. Ryan switched on the torch and walked through the broken fence at the side of the building, moving the beam until he saw a steel-shuttered door propped open. He stepped inside and immediately the noise of the wind was reduced to a minor register, the complaint of a weird and ancient mania. He shone the torch down a long corridor. Its white walls seemed to phosphoresce and shimmer slightly as though something had remained unresolved in their construction. There was a familiarity about the place. Although he did not know what it was he felt a part of him lay claim to it. The torch beam found a door marked Office. He tried the handle but it was locked and it seemed to him that the place had fallen under a darker administration. Halfway along the corridor he discovered a smear of blood on the wall. He went on until the corridor turned sharply to the left where there were signs for the changing rooms and the baths. It was there that the smell first reached him, an aqueous bathhouse odour of Jeyes fluid, carbolic soap and a residue of the bare, chilled flesh of men filed through here in their thousands. Walking on he came to the changing rooms. There was horror here. Men cubicled naked or padding silently towards the baths. He remembered his father stripping wet swimming trunks and discarding them with a wet slap on the floor then towelling his head and neck vigorously. He was
gaunt from the waist up, but his belly and fallen buttocks shook dreamily like filled panniers. He would turn and walk towards his folded clothes, his body seeming vast, abstract, burdened.

Ryan stepped through the shallow footbaths which would have contained warm, pink disinfectant. The light caught something lying there and he bent and saw that it was human skin, a bloodless medallion with the imprint of a shoe on it. He straightened and went on towards the bathhouse. He felt a crunch under his foot. The torch showed a piece of tooth enamel, its edge bevelled and stained with tobacco. Further on he found the whole tooth with the pink root attached like some strange anemone. He shone the torch upwards then and saw the vaulted brickwork roof of the bathhouse itself. The walls were made of white tiles with green tiles inset. The baths were porcelain with brass fittings and there was a stagnant briny odour which reminded him again of the seawater baths where his father had worked for four months one year and how he had clung to the man’s neck while he swam the length of the pool, a tiny figure perched there, mute and fearful, as his father’s body lurched over terrible depths. He lowered the torch and moved forward again, finding more blood and fragments of skin. Water dripped in the distance. Lying on top of old rags he found a severed finger gone white around the knuckle as though the man who owned it still held all his doings in the world in a wild grip. He felt that he could go no further but there was a second severed finger a foot away from the first and this one was crooked with the appearance of beckoning.

He found Darkie Larche naked in an empty bath. His torso was incised with small cuts meticulously executed and his head was bent to his chest as though there were something written there he could read, words in a severe tongue. Looking closer Ryan could see that the man’s throat was cut and that his blood had run to the bottom of the bath and into the plughole, the whole scene composed like an anatomical plate devised for instruction with parts exposed and parts covered
and rudimentary surgeons standing around looking lost to civilization.

In the week following the remand hearing for the other men Victor began to return to his old haunts, easing the Capri down side-streets, entering bars by the back door. Men greeted him cautiously. About you, Victor son. He never had to put his hand in his pocket for a drink. Barmen accepted that they were dealing with something outside the ordinary range of
commerce
and set drinks before him unasked. Victor sat alone at the bar and the other drinkers spoke in low confidential tones. The skin on his face had shrunk back on the bones and the men stole glances at him, sensing an erudition in the matter of last moments. They knew who he was and each thought of themselves alone with him in a deserted place. Each thought of himself becoming an exponent of the solitude within.

Victor kept newspaper cuttings about the Resurrection Men which he would spread out on the bar in front of him. The emphasis had begun to switch from the arrested men to their leader. They referred to a mystery man which pleased him. He saw himself as a figure in the shadows, someone elusive and dangerous to know. He thought that he could become a celebrity and give interviews to the papers on a regular basis. He imagined himself at parties, subject to admiration. He thought about expensively dressed women with small but immaculate breasts and voices that hinted at mannered
raptures
. He saw himself wearing a dinner jacket in well-lit rooms, prone to a little sorrow sometimes amidst the gaiety.
Continuing
his thought along these lines he realized that he was well rid of the others who lacked class. He congratulated himself on the way he had mentally seen the advantage arising from their loss.

Heather was another who had become a source of stress in his life. She had become a sloven in her personal
appearance
and would sit in the house sometimes crying fit to frighten
the dogs in the street. He had told her about Darkie Larche and how he had screeched like a cut cat in the bathhouse, but then he realized that it was an error in judgement to give operational details to a woman. He had fucked her a few times for something to do but could not concentrate for the noises coming out of her. The spectral groans.

He gave attention to re-establishing himself after the setback of the arrests. The Larche job had served to announce his return as well as settling an old score, but more needed to be done. He realized that he had experienced a problem with clear thinking over some months so he obtained some speed from a man named McCaughey who kept it for greyhounds. He began to spend nights in the back room of the Pot Luck again, his head lost in chemical dazzle until the speed began to wear off with the advent of another glassy, Belfast dawn. At these times he started to think about his mother. He was reluctant to approach the house in case the police or even former members of Darkie’s unit had it watched but it brought tears to his eyes to think of the hardness of her life. The last time he was home she had given him a photograph which showed her holding him as a baby while his father stood beside them looking away. Her eyes contained an earnest sorrow. Victor’s eyes were sombre and watchful.

He would return to the house early in the morning and go to bed without speaking to Heather. She spent her day in the kitchen where she lit the oven and opened its door for warmth. Half-empty cans and milk cartons stood on the table. She sat by the oven smoking and running her tongue over her lips to taste the rancid, salty atmosphere of the warm room. She found a pile of
Reader
’
s
Digest
magazines under the stairs and read them at night when Victor was gone, looking for stories of a woman’s survival against lonely odds. The story of Florence Nightingale. The story of Grace Darling. During those last weeks McClure began to ring her at night. First of all he would ask about Victor. Where was he now? What time did he leave? What was his state of mind? Was he confused? Elated?
Vanquished by memories? She did not know what to answer. He was a taste of old blood in her mouth. He was an entanglement in her heart.

Often McClure would begin to murmur obscenities down the line to her. Accounts of bondage, group sex, bestiality. She would lie against the wall holding the receiver to her ear and feeling afflicted with a sense of melancholy.

Sometimes the phone would ring and there would be no one on the other end but she would keep the instrument to her ear feeling calmed by its glacial hum.

She knew that it was a question of waiting for the end now. A woman could foretell these things when she was in a predicament of love. Though her heart had hardened when Victor had told her about Darkie. It would have been different if Victor had shot him. If he had been gunned down in a siege or an ambush and expired with a snarl on his lips and defiance for ever in his eyes.