Oak and Stone

by Dave Duggan

  ‘A fella – a neighbour actually – asked me on a date,’ she said.

  ‘A neighbour? Has he a farm?’

  Karen is from farming stock, in the land just beyond the sky mountains. She grew up amidst sheep and learned the intimacies of life and death early on, helping her father on the snow-covered hills as the lambs fell bloody and bawling from their mothers’ rears.

  ‘Yes. His own, as well as he’s tied in with his brothers on the old family farm.’

  ‘A man of property. Is he a good man too?’

  ‘He is. He’s reckoned a bit of a catch.’

  ‘Well then, a man of property meets a woman with a government job. I’d say the first thing to do is to say ‘yes’ to a date with him.’

  I managed to stop myself from saying ‘He could pick you up in his tractor.’

  She stared hard at me and said,

  ‘I reckon the very first thing for me to do is to stop coming round here for workouts. I should buy myself a pair of running shoes.’

  I smiled at that and heaved myself out of the bed. I found my underpants on the neat pile of clothes on the chair under the window. I stepped into them balancing on one foot, then the other. I glanced out of the window once more. A lone straggler from a running group went by, panting hard, the flesh on his thighs glistening red, sweat blackening his yellow hi-vis singlet, but I could make out the text.

  Run on. Run fast. Run Now.

  Reading it made me tense my stomach muscles, slap them briskly, then stretch to touch my toes three times. As a charm.

  ‘Coffee, then. You hit the shower first.’

  It was clear we weren’t going to shower together that morning. Perhaps never again. I put on a dressing gown and slippers and went to the kitchen, the dressing gown open and waving about me like a sail.

  A sultry coffee aroma filled the kitchen by the time Karen came in, fully dressed. She briskly buffed her short fair hair with a bath towel. There was orange juice and floury baps on the table, beside an open dish of butter and a jar of raspberry jam. A beam of light caught it so that it shone like a squat ruby.

  ‘You went out and got baps?’

  ‘Naw. They’re from a packet, but they’re still in date.’

  Karen dipped a knife in the raspberry jam and took a taste, holding the towel to her head with one hand.

  ‘Home made jam, eh?’

  ‘Not mine. Auntie Maisie’s.’

  ‘I told you. You’re a good man. And there’s no need to lay it on this morning. You had me in bed already.’

  That must have brought a hurt look to my face, because she continued swiftly.

  ‘Sorry. I was unkind. Bed was good. Breakfast is good too.’

  ‘Bate it into you woman. I’ll hit the shower.’

  I took a hot demitasse of the coffee with me and went to the shower. I slugged down the bitter revival as I stepped into the scorching flow of water. I had no idea where things stood between me and Karen. I stayed under the hot shower until the water almost scoured me. Cleansed and buzzing, I returned to Karen, now sitting on the balcony over-looking the river, a second pot of coffee beside her, as she leafed through her crime scene report on Todd Anderson. Her short, fair hair nestled in a lively bob round her delicate features. Lightly-framed glasses rested on her fine nose and perfectly formed ears. In her dark blue linen suit, she looked more like a model from a French photo shoot, set to play la gamine, rather than a sheep-farmer’s daughter.

  ‘You’re gorgeous, Karen. Gorgeous.’

  She raised her eyes to me, took off her glasses and beckoned me closer. I leaned forward and she kissed my lips. I tasted woman and raspberries and morning and life rushing through me in a torrent, so that when I eased myself into a chair on the small balcony, I was a man fully awakened and ready for the day.

  ‘Get that coffee into you, Slevin. I made a fresh pot. The day’s upon us. Half the town’s out running and cycling the bridges, the park and the riverside walk. What are they running from?’

  ‘Death, I told you.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. Not in that way.’

  She waved her sheaf of papers at me.

  ‘Here’s death enough for you. Let me tell you what bugs me about it.’

  Karen put her reading glasses back on. They formed a golden filigree about her face, like the dress-mask on a denizen of a harem.

  ‘The lividity. That’s what bugs me.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘My own account here. ‘The victim shows advanced livor mortis, indicating an estimated period of up to twelve hours from time of death.’ I can’t argue with the pathology there. But that means he was lying in an open field all night and half the evening before and no one saw him.’

  ‘The club was on a World Cup break.’

  ‘See Bechtimme’s leading the goal-scorers’ list? And that’s him only playing half the games. My money’s on the Germans, Slevin.’

  ‘Anderson’s body could have been held off-site for a time. Then brought in fairly quickly.’

  ‘There’s no evidence of a vehicle being driven onto the pitch.’

  ‘He was carried.’

  ‘Carried?’

  ‘I reckon. At least two people. Strong people. Men, most likely.’

  ‘We did find boot marks but nothing you could do anything with. The site is a quagmire of boot marks.’

  ‘Two people, maybe three, to move him. He was a big, hefty lad.’

  ‘And solidly muscled. An athlete obviously. You have any idea of a motive? Any leads?’

  ‘Fairly thin. We know the source of the special marks. The Dreamtimes.’

  I lifted a page from her report and read.

  ‘A pattern of indentations on the neck consistent with the mouldings on the sole of a football boot, the Dreamtime.

  ‘It belongs to a girl, a twelve year old. Hetherington and me interviewed her. One of the ground-staff saw her on the day.’

  ‘Did she see anyone?’

  ‘She was there, yes. After Anderson’s body was dumped. She has a routine. A thing she does. She’s football crazy. Before school, she goes to the pitch and plays a bit. Takes a penalty or two.’

  ‘And they let her in?’

  ‘She’s in and out early, usually before the ground staff arrive. She climbs over the wall, no matter what they do with barbed wire and barriers.’

  ‘She told you all this?’

  ‘Some of it. She knows nothing. The rest we got from Goss and Doherty’s interviews with the ground-staff. Seems they spooked her that morning and she ran off. Then one of them walked onto the pitch after her, saw her scale the wall at the town end. And then he saw something on the penalty spot on the country end goal, called his muckers and they went over to Anderson’s body.’

  ‘With livor mortis. So he’d been there up to twelve hours, but you say “no”. You reckon the body was stored elsewhere.’

  ‘What about a chill room?’

  ‘A freezer? There was no evidence of freezing.’

  ‘No, not frozen. Chilled. You know, like you get in a supermarket. Where the milk and the yoghurt goes.’

  ‘Jesus, you have the uniforms out searching supermarkets now?’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  ‘That’s fairly put a flavour in the breakfast. I need another shot of orange juice.’

  She got up and went into the kitchen. I heard the fridge open, then hum quietly until the satisfying rubber-dampened clunk of the door closing. Two shags skimmed the waves right in front of me, as Karen sat down and poured orange juice from a carton labelled Sunburst.

  ‘I’m going to say “yes”,’ she said.

  ‘It’s none of my …’

  ‘It is some of your business. Some of our business. I’m going to say “yes” to the neighbour and see where it goes.’

 
Then we both looked over the river, where the water flows by as dreams do and gulls, singly and in small groups, come and go from the railings, squawking at each other like lost souls.

  It was lunch-time when I heard my sister’s voice carry down to me, as I climbed the stairs in the dark. I stood in the doorway of the lounge. Bewitched. Bothered. Bewildered. A dust-mottled shaft of light from somewhere off to the left picked out the singer, sitting upright on a three-legged bar stool, a mini music system propped on the bar beside her. Ruby has the straight nose, broad brow and solemn jaw that I have, in a more gentle form, but she also has a gleam in her eye that I don’t.

  I mimed applause, as she finished the great song and flicked the ‘off’ switch on the player beside her.

  ‘Cracker,’ I said. ‘Have you a gig?’

  ‘Naw.’ Emphatic and warm. ‘Jackie let’s me use the lounge to rehearse on my break.’

  ‘There’s a good acoustic. Bluesy.’

  ‘Aye. Great for Ella’s stuff. Ma’s stuff. Her Ma’s stuff, probably.’

  ‘I only half remember. Or think I do. We were only young when she …’

  ‘Etta James too. The odd Billy Holiday. Great songs, right enough.’

  ‘You’re next in the line. You have the voice.’

  ‘And what did you get? The thran’ ways?’

  ‘Give us another one then, sis.’

  ‘A lucky dip.’

  She hit the ‘on’ button and an intro began. High strings, bluesy half notes, then my sister’s voice, singing about a love that comes, at last. She sang on, then stopped to turn up the volume on the backing track and climb off the stool. She stepped towards me and took my arms to lead me in a slow revolve that became a gentle down-beat waltz that broke my heart. I rested my head on her shoulder and snuffled tears into her neck.

  I broke from my sister and I handed her my handkerchief. She dabbed her neck and returned it to me.

  ‘You okay?’ she asked.

  ‘Grand, yeh, grand. Why did she do it, Ruby?’

  ‘Don’t go back over it, Eddie. Leave her be.’

  ‘I can’t, Ruby. She … it’s the job. She’s Open Unsolved. A big thick file sitting on my desk and when I put my hands to it … I don’t know, it flutters away like a plague of moths.’

  ‘Is that a dream?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have other ones? You should go about it. See somebody.’

  ‘I see you.’

  ‘Me? I’m an estate agent’s secretary, not a psychologist.’

  Her laugh chimed lightly from the bottles on the shelves behind the bar.

  ‘You’re my sister. And a singer. Like her.’

  ‘We should put up a stone. Something permanent, just for her. I know her name is on her mother’s stone, but it’s not hers.’

  ‘Jesus, I don’t know …’

  ‘Listen Eddie, she’s not one of your files. One of your cases. She’s our mother. She reared us on her own. She threw herself into the river, years ago. We got up anyway and here we are. You know she’s dead. Drowned and pulled from the river, waked in front of her friends and neighbours, who were so stunned they cried a deluge; in front of her kids, so thunderstruck they took to self-harming, street wandering and gun toting. It’s a major miracle we survived.’

  ‘That’s all in the past.’

  ‘It is. Put the last vestiges of it there and you’ll be grand.’

  ‘That’s the second time that word’s come up recently. Vestige. A trace, a scrap, a shred. A fading footprint.’

  ‘Faded, Eddie, faded,’ Ruby said, pulling a large handbag across the bar top. She turned the volume down on the backing tracks.

  ‘You want to share my lunch?’

  I pulled up another barstool. Ruby poured sweet coffee from a flask and popped open a plastic container from which she retrieved a homemade tuna and mayonnaise sandwich she ripped in two, passing half to me. We ate in silence, the upturned cap of the flask, filled and refilled with black coffee tantalising as sherbet, cooling between us.

  The light moved across the bar floor and soon we sat in darkness. The tuna brought me a briny smell, as I touched it to my lips, a sense of the sea lulling up against the side of the bar, the wooden spars of our fragile family vessel that day. Eventually Ruby screwed the cap back on her flask. I brushed crumbs from the front of my jacket and sucked a lace of peppery rocket from between my teeth.

  ‘You working?’ she asked.

  ‘Lunch. Like you. A couple of domestics to do. You going back?’

  ‘I’ll sing a couple more numbers. I’m only round the corner in Castle Street. What brought you here anyway?’

  ‘To see you.’

  ‘You alright for money?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  We both laughed and I leaned forward and patted her arm. We’re not a hugging family. But we dance.

  I turned and walked through a shaft of light, illuminated for an instant, as in a polaroid flash. Behind me, I heard the strings again, this time lush and swirling. Then Ruby’s voice, singing an eternal goodbye. I faced her and we sang together, until I stopped and asked,

  ‘Why do you always sing the sad ones?’

  Ruby turned off the music.

  ‘They’re the only ones I can stand, this time of day. Anything lighter than tragedy and I start to bawl.’

  I smiled at her, but how could she see in the brewery-smelling dark?

  I needed a piss and went into the Gents on the first landing, as I descended. A man stood at one of the urinals.

  ‘You’re the cop, aren’t you?’

  When I didn’t answer, he continued,

  ‘You’re the cop put Sean Quigley away. For killing my cousin.’

  He released the heavy stream of a lager drinker, zipped himself up, heaved his hips back into his trousers, then tucked his shirt around his tub-shaped belly. He turned to face me. I stayed near the door, eyeing the keyboard on a stand, beside the partitioned toilet cubicle, with its door open, so I could see its cracked and soiled porcelain. I’d worked out that, if necessary, I could pick up and throw the Yamaha PSR-S1150 and make it out the door before the man recovered.

  ‘He’ll get out some day, you know that, Sean Quigley,’ the man said.

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘And see when he does, make sure you put the bastard back in again. Fast. For his own good.’

  Then he walked past me and out the door.

  When I made it to the urinal, it took me a while to produce anything and when I did get going, it was more trickle than rush. I tidied myself up, washed and dried my hands, ran my fingers down the soundless keys of the Yamaha and left, wondering about the musician who discarded the instrument.

  There was no sign of the man from the toilet when I made it downstairs to the bar. Jackie, the bar manager, was bent over, clunking bottles of mixers into the recessed shelves. He got up, as I reached the bottom step.

  ‘Sounding good, she is.’

  ‘Great,’ I agreed.

  ‘Best thing me and Ruby ever did, getting divorced. She sings here at me work. She gets to be grateful to me for doing her a favour. And we don’t have to worry that we’re missing something. That there’s something more than what we’ve got.’

  I nodded. Jackie knows that Ruby divorced him because she grew up. She does think there could be something more in her life, that there is something she could aspire to, aim for, reach even. Some grander, bigger, version of herself, beyond her current life. A dream, always just in reach, she sings to charm closer.

  And how do I pursue my dreams? I look for clues in my past, test theories in my present and expect little of my future.

  ‘Your man that just went out. Big fella in a blue jacket. You know him?’

  ‘Big fella in a blue jacket. Never seen him.’

 
That’s how it’s going be then, Jackie. Fair enough.

  ‘See you, Jackie. Good luck.’

  ‘Right, aye.’

  I left the midday gloom of the bar and stepped into a breezy skiff of rain, flicked up my collar and walked through Castle Gate, thinking about tragedy and how Ruby assuaged it with songs and how in Thebes, another city of many gates, the songs of the Nile birds called over the bodies of the dead.

  I entered my own walled city, stone built upon stone, in good time for my dentist’s appointment.

  I was trying to avoid sucking on a new filling when I heard Tony White’s voice, as I walked through Butcher Gate later. He was behind the police barricade, in the middle of a parking lot of vehicles. Tony was leaning against the WART wagon.

  ‘You on duty too, Slevin? I don’t see you in ages and here we are falling over each other in a matter of months,’ he said.

  ‘The brass are expecting wild animals today?’

  ‘In this town, anything’s possible. Routine follow-up to a bit of intelligence. Keep an eye behind you. We’re expecting a few giraffes.’

  ‘And you’ll shoot them when they appear?’

  ‘Don’t think so. Bit of corralling maybe. Handy overtime, Slevin. You know the score.’

  Then Amy Miller climbed out of the cab of the vehicle. She was taller than I remembered, with the same lithe movements and the eyes that held mine fiercely, yet warmly.

  ‘No shooting today. They wouldn’t let me bring my gun.’

  ‘Ah, Amy, right on cue. Meet DS Slevin, my – er – college mate. That’s right, we went to school together. Different classes. He studied Irish history. I studied British. Then we both went on to third level at PS (North). Figure it out yourself. Eddie, this is Amy Miller.’

  She took my hand and shook it firmly. I felt like she had given me a gift.

  ‘Amy, you listen to this fella’s shite for a while. I’ll take the weight off me feet. I reckon another ten minutes, maybe sooner, and we’ll be clear.’

  Tony moved to the front of the vehicle, squeezing a boyish grin at me, as he hauled himself up, saying,