by David Jester
The alarm hadn’t been raised until morning. No one went out at night anymore. There was a time, just a few weeks ago, when the community still buzzed in the early hours of the morning. No one really worked and everyone liked to drink and socialise, so the closely knit houses were like college dorm rooms. Now no one paid any late night visits to their friends and neighbours for a drink, and not just because they didn’t want to step into the unsafe night, but because they didn’t know if their neighbours’ houses, or the neighbours themselves, were safe.
“I know it is,” Patrick said, trying to catch the boys’ eyes, to give them a pleading and sympathetic look. “But, I need their help, we all do.” He stared at them a moment longer, they didn’t look at him didn’t seem to blink.
He sighed and sat back in his chair.
He had gone to the Anderson house alone. He had been disposing the Byrnes’ bodies when they called him and told him. The Byrne’s didn’t have a funeral, didn’t have anyone willing to help or to offer their condolences to the dirt, so the work had been harder and had taken longer. Aidan helped, but the pair hadn’t exchanged a single word.
“Did they say anything?” Patrick wondered hopefully. “Anything at all?”
“They said he wasn’t a big man,” the father piped up, surprising Patrick. He had been sitting, stewing and grinding his teeth until that point. Patrick had expected him to explode or storm out on a mission of vengeance.
“Excuse me?”
The father nodded. “They told us last night, we thought they were playing games, maybe were a little scared--”
“We didn’t let them outside,” the mother chipped in, to absolve herself of blame. “We told them to stay indoors, we’d have never let them out at night, not after...well, you know--”
“They snuck out,” the father said. “We told ‘em off, figured they were just acting out when they started telling us what they’d seen. We figured it out last night, didn’t know what to do.”
“I wanted to call the police,” the mother said, raising an alarm in Patrick.
“I told her not to,” the father said, batting Patrick's attention back the other way. “I don’t think what you did was right, we should have told them from the start, but now it’s too late, isn’t it? After we buried the bodies, got rid of the evidence. They’d lock us all up.”
Patrick nodded.
“So, anyway,” he continued. “We told ‘em that the big man wouldn’t get them--” he paused, one of the youngsters shivered at his words. “They said it wasn’t a big man.”
“He was skinny,” the shivering kid piped up. “Smaller than daddy.”
His father was less than five foot ten, just an inch or so shorter than Patrick.
“You’re sure of this?” Patrick asked the child, but he didn’t respond.
“They seemed pretty sure,” the father chimed in. “After all, I don’t think they’ve been able to forget a single thing about last night. Do you?”
Patrick shook his head, offered his sympathy by looking towards his feet, a sullen expression on his face.
“I reckon this guy has to be strong to do what he did,” the father continued, leaning forward and lowering his voice. “I mean yeah, he used weapons, but still...it takes guts and strength.”
Patrick looked up, nodded in agreement.
“He’s skinny, fairly short. He must be pretty compact. Muscular.”
Again Patrick nodded. The father leaned closer still, his eyes flaring, the vengeance in them burning.
“I don’t know about you, but I can only think of one guy that fits the bill. Short. Slim. Strong. Devious. Someone who has something against Evergreen.” He paused, and then asked, “Do you follow me?”
Patrick nodded, he had been thinking the same thing. “Eddie,” he said, receiving a knowing look from the father. “Eddie Ahern.”
***
There were no shortages of volunteers to see the Aherns. All the men, and some of the women, were desperate to go with Patrick; give Eddie and his feckless family a piece of their minds. They decided to go in Aidan’s van. Five of them, Aidan and Patrick included, packed inside.
Willow Park was a thirty minute drive away, a derelict site that the Aherns had trouble maintaining. The land was owned by a local landlord. He was constantly in a battle with the Aherns and, as the police wanted little to do with the violent and unstable travellers, he often lost.
They stocked up on booze before they left, drinking a few pints in the pub whilst they planned their attack and taking a few cans with them for the journey. Aidan drove, but that didn’t stop him from drinking, and because he was drinking he was the loudest and angriest one in the car as they approached the site.
Two teenage boys were loitering outside, sharing a cigarette and a dark purple liquid that sloshed around in an old Coke bottle. They watched the van approach, bouncing over the cobbled road that led a tight and winding path down to the park perimeter -- a path littered with shards of glass and sprouting weeds, blown from the surrounding fields. They were just curious at first, but they quickly perked up when they saw Aidan’s face behind the wheel.
They hopped from the wall, shouted something behind them, towards the park, and then scattered, racing ahead of the van which picked up its pace as it followed them through the gate and into the field that the Aherns, their friends and their extended family, called home.
As the van bobbled over the bumpy, torn grass and screeched to a muddied stop, Eddie Ahern jumped out of a rundown, rusted caravan a few metres ahead. He wore nothing but a tattered pair of denim jeans, his slim and muscular torso, clad in layers of tattoos and adorned with various scars.
Some of his friends and family joined him, rushing to gather around as the calls went up that Evergreen were on their turf.
“What the fuck’re you doing here?” Eddie screamed at them, his shoulders lifted up, his arms beefed out like he was cradling two invisible boxes.
Aidan was the first to hit the turf, the first to rush forward. “You fucking know what,” he snarled like a rapid pit bull.
Eddie’s dad Mickey pushed his way past him, using his bulky frame as a warning against Aidan advancing any further. “You got a problem McCleary?” he asked, a civil tone in his threatening words.
“This is between us and Eddie,” Aidan said.
Mickey shook his head. He was joined either side by Eddie and his older brother Shaun. “Any problem with one of us is a problem with all of us,” Mickey told him.
“Your son is a devious little murdering bastard,” Patrick said, stepping forward.
Mickey laughed, looked at his sons to allow them to join in. “This about your little problem?” he wondered.
“Little problem?”
“We heard you boys were having some trouble. And what, now you wanna come here and drag us into it? We had nothing to do with whatever--”
“Don’t you fucking lie to us,” Patrick warned.
“What’re you going to do Ryan?” Eddie snarled, turning his head to spit. “Get the fuck off our turf before I teach you and your pathetic little cronies a lesson.”
That was enough incitement to fuel the alcohol and the aggression in Aidan’s blood. He launched into Eddie, throwing his hefty frame at the strongly built younger man. Patrick watched as Aidan tackled him to the floor and immediately began to throw a flurry of punches which Eddie didn’t have the foresight to stop. His brother, his father and the crowd of onlookers threw themselves into the melee, joined by the rush of the Evergreen boys behind Patrick.
Patrick had hoped for more communication, he wanted to know if Eddie really was involved and what he had to say for himself, but he was happy to take his anger out on the Aherns regardless of their guilt and, as he picked his target and prepared to launch, at that moment he felt certain that one of them, or all of them, were guilty.
14
They were a happy, beaten bag of flesh and bones when they returned to Evergreen. They drank away their cuts and bruises,
celebrated what they felt was a victory -- even though both parties had been scattered by the threat of police sirens.
They all went their separate ways on their return, each to their own homes, content that justice had been served and that the Aherns wouldn’t bother them again.
Ian Patterson, a twenty year old boxer with a collection of new war wounds and some fighting experience under his belt, returned to a blackened caravan where he lived with his seventeen year old wife Janet. He assumed she had gone to bed, it was only eight o’clock, but the dismal day was greying to black and she had been tired earlier in the day.
The remnants of adrenaline and alcohol in his blood made him horny and excited. He needed to regale the tales of his bravado. He needed to have sex. He didn’t bother to creep inside the caravan, he fully intended to wake her up anyway. He washed some of his wounds in the bathroom, keeping his appearance sufficiently bloodied and beaten, she would like that, she liked the aggression, she liked the fighter in him. The wounds would turn her on.
He sprayed himself with an abundance of deodorant, checked his breath against his palm, undressed and then burst into the bedroom. The smile, the crooked, lustful, needy grin, dropped from his face when he saw that his wife of three months was lying dead and butchered on their bed.
***
“Well, it wasn’t the Aherns.”
“What do you mean, ‘it wasn’t the Aherns’. How the fuck do you know that?”
“Because we were there last night, during her murder.”
“Pff. They’re devious fuckers. They could have found a way.”
The next morning the community had piled into the pub to discuss the latest murder. Janet Patterson’s body still lay mutilated on her bed, there were more pressing issues on the community's mind.
“We need to do something about this,” Aidan said. “We lost two more families this morning, Evergreen is in tatters. Is this not our home, our land?” he yelled, asking for a raucous response.
A grumbled noise greeted him.
“Is this the community that we fought tooth and nail for?” he said, even louder.
Another wave roared back, a louder, more agreeable one.
“We need to get the police involved,” someone piped up from the back, ushering a hushed silence.
Patrick, sullenly staring into his drink until that point, lifted his eyes.
“This has gone too far,” the objector pushed, saying what the others wanted but didn’t have the guts to say. “We clearly can’t deal with this on our own. I mean, are you even doing anything?” he asked, looking directly at Patrick.
“You’re right,” Patrick said, standing and directing his attention to the whole gathering, every last member of the community, their total now less than twenty. “This has gone too far. There have been too many murders, and we haven’t done anything about them.”
The group sound an agreeable but cautious reply.
“So yeah, you’re right, we should get the police involved. We should tell them that a maniac has been killing our friends and family and we’ve been removing the evidence and burying their bodies. Whilst we’re at it, we can also tell them how we killed poor Paul Murphy. How about it, you all up for that?”
The sea of faces looked ashamed, some looked away; some mumbled half-arsed replies.
“That’s what I thought,” Patrick said. “We have to see this through, we’ve come this far; we have to see it to the end.”
No one mentioned Janet Patterson, no one offered to help out Ian. The widowed husband sat by his dead wife’s body for most of the afternoon then, when he couldn’t take the grief anymore, when he shed his last tear and drank his last drop of whiskey, he slit his wrists and lay by her side. Wherever she had gone, he didn’t want her to be alone.
***
Elliot Thompson’s fists were balled tight, so tight that the skin around his knuckles turned white. He ground his teeth as he walked with long and purposeful strides.
He had gone to see Ian Patterson, to offer him a shoulder to cry on, to help him take his mind off his wife’s murder. He didn’t know that his wife’s body hadn’t been moved, didn’t know that no one had offered to help. He was disgusted that he was the first to ponder visiting the poor man.
He burst through the doors of the Dog and Bull, greeting a wall of noise. The man he sought stood in a defensive posture against the bar, surrounded by two younger members of the community. He stood back, held his anger to see what they would do to him first.
“You have just as much motive as any of us,” one of the men was saying. He was drunk, heavily slurring his words and throwing his accusing hand around with a nauseating unsteadiness.
“Yeah,” the second chimed. “You’re alone in that caravan of yours. No family; no woman.”
“Is that why you did it?” the first asked. “Is that why you killed those little girls, because you wanted to feel them up first?”
“You sick bastard.”
Patrick listened to them without saying a word. He moved back against every advance, lowered his head with every offending insult thrown his way.
“You make me sick,” the first man said.
Patrick was pressed up against the bar, he had nowhere else to retreat to.
“You act like you’re our friend; our leader. You’re just a sick, perverted freak.”
At that moment Aidan McCleary burst through the doors of the pub, nearly knocking Elliot off his feet. He wore an expression of pure aggression on his face and carried one of his swords in his hands, a similar weapon to the one that killed his son. He waved it in front of them -- saw the terror in their eyes as they studied it and back away.
“Leave him!” he ordered, pointing the blade at each of their throats.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” one of them argued.
“He’s our man,” the other added.
“Really?” Aidan asked, with exaggerated sarcasm. “You mean the same man who tried to help us all, the same man who’s always tried to help us?”
“It was him, trust me--”
“Trust you?” Aidan laughed. “You mean I should trust you over the guy who has stood by my side through the years, the guy who comforted me when my son was murdered--”
“He killed your son.”
“Bollocks,” Aidan spat. “He was with me at the time. He was here.”
The accusers looked confused, they turned to Seamus who had shied away from their advances. Seamus gave them a gentle nod.
“You weren’t here though,” Aidan said, advancing on them. “Neither of you were.”
“Don’t you fucking blame us!”
“Why? I can’t point the finger at you, but you can point it at whoever you like?”
“We didn’t fucking kill anyone,” one of them sat with a serious snarl on his young face. “I adored those kids. I was good friends with your son, and with the Byrne boy and his grandmother. I practically grew up with the Brady twins, with Susie and with Siobhan. I knew them all.”
“What about Janet?” Elliot said from the back of the room, his anger had subsided into a melancholic sadness.
“Janet?” the youngster asked.
Elliot sneered at him. “Janet Patterson. She just died, and none of you give a shit.”
“No, don’t say that. We care.”
Elliot shook his head, fired an accusing stare at everyone in the room, everyone in the community. “None of you went to pay your respects. None of you offered to help to move the body. Ian returned home last night to see his wife slaughtered like an animal. He spent the rest of the day surrounded by her blood, smelling her rotting flesh. None of you went around there.”
They hung their heads in shame.
“Ian killed himself,” Elliot said. “Slit his wrists right there next to her. He wouldn’t have done it if any of you were there.”
“And where were you?” Patrick asked, stepping forward. “Why didn’t you stop him, why didn’t you help him?”
“T
his is not my fucking fault!” Elliot snapped, felling his anger return.
Patrick held his angry stare, studied him in the silence. He turned away, shook his head gently. “This is all of faults,” he conceded. None of us were there.”
15
They cleaned the bodies and buried them with their former friends and family. They said a few words and then departed as before -- only this time their numbers were halved.
Patrick and Aidan waited by the graveside.
