Dead And Buried

‘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.