Dead And Buried

‘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?’

He did. He nodded stiffly. Kept his eyes on the empty road.

‘And then you got that phone call. From that farmer over at Coldholme.’

Another nod. ‘Jimmy Price.’ Of all the damn things to talk about.

‘And you didn’t want us to come, did you? You said it was “vet stuff”. But Chris wanted to see what you did at work and hell I did too. Anyway you’d promised us a day out. So you turned the car round and you drove all the way out there at Coldholme. And what did we find?’ Patrick let out a low whistle. ‘What – did – we – find?’ he repeated.

They’d found old Jimmy Price, first thing, white as a sheet, cap in his hands, waiting at the farm gate. He’d said the lad and the lass’d best stay in the car, Conor, son, it’s not pretty; no it’s not – but there was no stopping them now and besides, Conor had thought, how bad could it be? Jim had led the three of them out to the third barn. Hell, it was barely even a barn – just an exposed tumbledown, with three walls and a dirt floor and four bare beams jutting from the ruined roof.

There was a smell in the air of blood and faeces and fear. In the middle of the barn a lean-looking black mare staggered in mad circles. A yard and a half of coiled intestine drooped from the gash in her belly.

‘Jesus Christ, Conor,’ Jimmy said.

Conor felt Christine’s hand grip his arm and he heard Patrick behind him gag and then heard the spatter of the kid’s breakfast on the ground.

He’d read about this sort of thing. He dropped to one knee and squinted at the wound: a reckless two-foot slash – Stanley knife? Screwdriver? – all the way from her vulva to her middle.

‘Why’d anyone do it?’ Jimmy demanded shakily. Conor could only shrug. You heard reports of this stuff. Who knew why the people who did it had to do it? Something to do with sex, something to do with religion, something to do with madness.

He straightened up and warily moved closer to the circling mare. With every step she trod her own wet guts into the shit and dirt of the barn floor.

‘Cush, now, cush,’ he said, knowing how much good it’d do.

The sick bastard had taken her tail, and hadn’t been too neat about it. Her eyes as well. Conor dropped to his knees again and unfastened the clasp of his medical bag.

‘Everybody out,’ he said.

Patrick laughed. It was a hell of a noise, there in the quiet car, out there on the dark road. Conor was aware of the cold sweat on his arms and back.

‘So you did the deed,’ Patrick said. ‘You did what had to be done. And then – d’you remember?’ His voice now became softer, intent. ‘We had to take her away, didn’t we? Jimmy was going to call the knacker’s yard but you said no, something to do with regulations, proper procedures – you’d deal with her.’ Another laugh. ‘So there we were. You, me, Jimmy and his boys heaving this mess of an animal into the trailer. Guts all over. Blood everywhere.’ A pause. ‘And d’you remember,’ Patrick asked, ‘what you said?’

Conor shook his head. He didn’t remember. He only remembered the mare – and the look on Jimmy Price’s face when they closed up the tailgate of the trailer.

‘I was snivelling about all the blood,’ Patrick said. ‘And you said, “grow up”. It’s only blood, you said. It can’t hurt you, Patrick. And I thought, what a man!’ And then that laugh again – God, Conor wished he’d shut his bloody hole. ‘You were my fuckin’ hero that day, man.’

Conor drove on, watching the road. Grey hedgerows glided past, and the gold sovereigns of a fox’s eyes twisted out of sight. They still hadn’t passed another car, and Conor was guessing they wouldn’t. Patrick tapped the barrel of his gun on the dashboard, reflectively, as though he was deep in thought.

‘You said you didn’t give a damn about blood,’ he said. ‘You said, “blood means nothing to me”.’

Conor swung the car off the road, veering sharply through an iron gate and into a narrow cobbled car park past the sign: D. Kirk and D. Riordan, Veterinary Surgeons. He braked. The car rocked back on its heels.

Patrick turned in the passenger seat and hooked an elbow casually around the headrest. ‘There’ll be no one around, right?’

Conor shook his head. ‘Kirk’s away in Antrim till tomorrow night. Riordan’s on his holidays. There’s no one here.’

Patrick nodded briskly. ‘OK. It’s time we did to this old feller what you did to Jimmy Price’s poor black mare.’

That’s not Colm Murphy, Conor told himself. In the dead cold dark of the practice car park they’d hauled the body out of the car and slung it awkwardly in a tarpaulin. Heavy, like you’d imagine. Murphy always seemed like he was made out of iron, or he’d been quarried from Fermanagh limestone.

In the dark they’d carried it across the yard to an outhouse a little way behind the main practice building. Conor fumbled with the keys to the padlock. Patrick stood and shivered. The cold, Conor noticed, had shaken the bravado out of him – or maybe it was the dark, or the smell of the body and the blood – or just the thought of what he’d done, and what would happen next.

And then, once they’d dragged the body in its bloodstained tarp inside, and the door was deadbolted behind them and the bitter white striplight in the rafters had flickered into life, Conor leaned on the broad stone bench that stood in the centre of the floor and looked down – forced himself to look down – at Colm’s still, pale face. His rounded, bullish features were composed, his eyes shut (had Patrick done that, Connor wondered – had Patrick, unable to bear the scrutiny of the dead man’s empty gaze, closed Colm’s eyelids for him?). They’d laid him flat on his back, arms at his sides. The tarp was draped across the gunshot wound in his chest. Conor took note of Colm’s clothes: a shabby grey jumper, no shirt underneath; unbelted jeans; shoes with no socks.

He looked up. ‘Now. Before we do anything else, Patrick, you tell me how it happened.’

Patrick was again white-faced, fidgeting, trembling – a kid again.

‘Listen, Con, just—’

‘You tell me now,’ Conor said.

So Patrick told him. He was just doing a bit of work, he said – he never meant for anything like this to happen.

‘What work?’ Conor pressed. ‘Work for who?’

‘For Jack Marsh.’

That figured. Marsh. A name he knew. A name everyone knew. He’d used to be a redcap, British military police, Conor had heard, but he wasn’t police any more. You couldn’t exactly say he’d gone off the rails – by all accounts he’d been bent from day one – but now he didn’t even bother to hide it. Didn’t have to hide it. No one could touch Jack Marsh in Belfast. He held the city in the palm of his hand.

So why wouldn’t a chancer like Patrick wind up on Marsh’s payroll? A bit of work. Conor didn’t want to know what that meant.

‘And?’

Patrick shrugged. It looked like the kid didn’t want to talk about it – didn’t even want to think about it. Tough.

‘What happened?’

‘He went for me. Lost his rag. Didn’t know I was – didn’t know I was packing,’ Patrick said, his hand straying to the butt of the gun tucked in the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms.

You fucking liar, Conor thought. Colm Murphy, fifteen years a Provo commander – a soldier, a man of discipline, and, more than that, a man with a calling – a man with more on his mind than the crooked property deals and blackmail shakedowns that the likes of Jack Marsh made their money from – and he lets himself get called out by a snot-nosed little bastard like Patrick Cameron?

But Conor let the kid go on talking.

‘I didn’t mean it to happen,’ Patrick said again.

‘When you carry a gun,’ Conor said, ‘these things tend to happen whether you mean them or not.’ He paused, squeezed the bridge of his nose between his finger and thumb. What time was it? Maybe five, or quarter to. But he’d learned to live with sleeplessness. You just had to decide not to be tired. It was just a choice you made. ‘So. You shot him,’ he prompted.

Patrick’s wide-eyed gaze drifted to the corpse on the floor. Thinking, Conor guessed, of who Colm was, and who he, Patrick, was – wondering, maybe, how the hell all this happened. Maybe David felt the same way as he stood over the body of Goliath, Conor thought. Only that was the end of that story, and this was just the beginning of this one. ‘I guess I did.’ Conor noticed that Patrick had to bite down hard on his lower lip to keep it from quivering. He knew the kid was thinking the same thing he was: what happens now?

Because you couldn’t kill a man like Colm Murphy and just walk away. It wasn’t like a gangland hit, a kingpin knocked off in a turf war – it wasn’t just business. Murphy didn’t live in a world where everything had a price and a ten grand kickback to the right person bought you absolution. Murphy’s world was tough, sure – but the people who moved in it mattered to him, and he mattered to them – hell, Murphy was a god on the Falls Road, on Conway Street, on Workman Avenue. Every Republican in Belfast loved the man, and even the people who hated him at least hated him good and hard.

Murphy would be missed. Conor thought of the Lieutenant, Lefty McLeod. If he knew what Patrick Cameron had done – if any of Murphy’s boys knew…

When Conor was a kid, he’d heard that Neil Burke, a lad a couple of years above him at school, seventeen or eighteen he would’ve been, had been picked up by Murphy’s boys one afternoon and driven out to an industrial estate beyond Ballynafoy. They killed him, shot him dead – but before they did that they ran roofing nails through the palms of his hands.

Burke had nicked the wrong guy’s car and gone joyriding with it in the wrong part of town. That was all it took, sometimes. They called it justice. Maybe they even thought it was justice.