by J. M. Smyth
But let me run this one by you. If you have a brother, look at him now. What would you do for him? Or, putting it another way, what would you not do for him?
Now place yourself, think yourself, if you can, into the basest level of humanity where all that exists is misery and deprivation. Then go lower. Seek out those depths. There you might find where I come from.
Now look again at your brother. Imagine him gone. Imagine him still down there. He’s nine years old and he’s terrified. Would you want to bring him back up, away from it all? Away to a place that is sweet and natural? A place where he wants to be? Yes? Then you love him as much as I loved Sean. We’re no different. I just have the mentality of those depths, that’s all. There was a time when I didn’t. And I didn’t instil that mentality in myself.
LUCILLE
‘Lucille?’
When Picasso came back, the fear of him made me pass out. He’d carried me back to my cell.
‘Yes?’
‘In your pocket I found a birth certificate accompanied by a note from a Sister Joseph.’
‘Lucille Kells is not my real name.’
‘You are connected to the Donavan riding stables?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your mother is Anne Donavan?’
‘That’s what it says.’
‘Then why were you living in a holiday home and not—’
‘They don’t know who I am. I didn’t tell them. I didn’t tell anyone about Clonkeelin.’
‘Kells carries with it a religious connotation, as in The Book of Kells.’
‘So?’
‘I myself have had some experience similar to that of your own. An old acquaintance of mine had formed the theory that abandoned children, those without known backgrounds, as opposed to you, with one, were named by the religious of the religious?’
‘I only know they named me Kells.’
‘Hmm, interesting, though perhaps not relevant.’
I didn’t understand what he was getting at.
‘Now: the laptop computer. Yours?’
‘No.’
‘Then whose?’
‘What will you give me?’
He laughed. ‘You are indeed a product of your upbringing. You have played this game before.’
‘Not voluntarily.’
‘Quite. Voluntarily connotes choice, a right denied you.’
‘Where did you learn it?’
‘Excellent: engage with your persecutor, humour him and it might go easier on you. Respond only, and remain solely in the position of the subjected. You are very clever. The same environment as yourself.’
He’d said he’d had a similar upbringing.
‘You’ve taken it to extremes.’
‘The goal is the same, Lucille: pressure applied to extract that which is not volunteered. Psychological persuasion, one might say. A technique which I have also studied. In your case for sexual favours?’
‘Given against my will.’
‘Of course. Which some blatantly demanded, while others used cunning – those of the “don’t tell” fraternity. Puzzling. Since no one would believe you, and since they saw to it that you never could tell, the dictum was thus rendered academic.’
‘And in yours?’
He didn’t answer. Since he’d brought it up, I took it that he’d undergone ‘psychological persuasion’. Mental torture, I would call it. We’d both been abused as children, a topic I’d rather not go into. You do your best to live through it, that’s all. I do not blame the Church. God did not abuse me – those who abused the position He had given them did.
‘Your instinct for survival has not deserted you, Lucille.’
‘Sometimes instinct is all you have to go on.’
‘And yours is telling you to …?’
‘I’ll answer your questions for another length of timber.’ The rats were scaring the life out of me. ‘In case you should go out and be delayed.’
‘I shall try not to be. Go on.’
‘I think the laptop belongs to a man called Ted Lyle. Gemma worked for him.’
‘Her pimp?’
‘Yes.’
‘He was blackmailing her clients?’
‘I don’t know that for sure.’
‘Yet if, as you say, you told no one of Clonkeelin, then how did Lyle know where to go to retrieve his computer? It’s gone from your car.’
‘I didn’t tell him. I don’t even know Ted Lyle – only by sight.’
‘Nor I. Yet. I shall pay him a call.’ The door opened. ‘Your payment.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Anon.’
I now had two pieces of timber.
I waited for an hour or so until I was sure I couldn’t hear him walking around on the floor above me then took the only chance I could see of getting out of there.
The walls of the cell were modern concrete block, but on the other side of the door the masonry was much older. No daylight came from any direction into the corridor. I had to be in a cellar. The house had to have two. If the ceiling above me was plaster, joist and floorboards, maybe I could just find a way out.
I put the claw of the hammer onto the edge of the first piece of replacement timber and hit it with the second one until it split then broke the split length into pieces. Using three of the four nails, I nailed them to the second one and made treads to make a kind of ladder.
The crate was to the left of the door, which meant that when Picasso opened the door, the crate was behind it. I took the risk that he wouldn’t see that piece of ceiling to the side almost above his head. If he looked up, my plan wouldn’t work.
I put my home-made ladder at an angle on the top of the crate, climbed up to the ceiling and began scoring a square in its plaster. It would take time.
The problem was the rats. If they ate their way through, I’d have only one nail to shore off the crate. It wouldn’t be enough.
RED DOCK
The following morning I was back watching Picasso’s place, though it was well into the evening by the time he drove away in his Transit. Time to go up and have a look.
His front door had a lock on it like something you’d see in a dungeon. I couldn’t pick it. Cylinders and modern mortises are about my limit. His back one had a cylinder. And it wasn’t his only line of defence. A monster was roaming the downstairs, a cross between a big dog and an even bigger big dog. Huge slobbery mouth on it too. Didn’t fancy it. It had jaws that’d bite clean through your wrist.
Now as you well know, the best way to deal with a dog is to put your boot up its arse. But not when its arse is as high off the ground as your own. I’ve used a device the makers call ‘Scare Away’, though I don’t carry it with me. It’s about the size of a car battery and gives out a sonic pitch only dogs can hear. Makes them act like they’re hearing terrible news and back off. It works only on nine out of ten dogs though. This one might’ve been the tenth.
I used it on an old woman once. She lived next door to a bank job I was setting up. We needed her kitchen wall for the purposes of gaining entry. And, in keeping with my no-fuss methods, she had to be out of the house. Fortunately her husband had just dropped dead and she was all alone with their faithful Kerry Blue Terrier. So I installed the ‘Scare Away’ treatment in their bedroom. The dog wouldn’t enter it. She thought it was her hubby’s spirit. Dogs being able to see spirits that we can’t. Because only the dog could hear it, it kept her awake night and day howling. She had to go and stay with her daughter for rest and recuperation. And came back and found a big hole in her wall. Of course, you’re probably saying to yourself: why didn’t he just hit her over the head with something? I would have, but I wanted to try out my experiment.
Another way to fend off dogs of course is to use a warden’s loop or maybe a dart gun or a shield – one that looks like a big upside-down cheese grater. They lunge at you and cut their paws to bits on it. Handy if you like grated paws. The best method I’ve seen is an electric screen. Poultry farmers use them to keep fo
xes away. Basically it’s a panel about the size of a sprung single-bed base. The old type, electrified by way of a built-in battery. You need to wear protective rubber gloves when you’re handling it so you don’t get a wallop. But I shot the fucker instead. Nah, I rarely carry a gun. Guns are against the law. The tongue in that cellophane bag Picasso carried in his tool bag and Winters taking Greg Swags’s German shepherd had got me thinking I’d come up against a dog. I tossed in a piece of meat laced with dope I’d bought from a vet.
‘There, girl, eat that.’ Five minutes and it was dreaming it’d found the biggest bone in the world.
I went in, stepped over it and had a look upstairs. Other than a darkroom, which contained no photographs, it was just bedrooms. Nothing worth telling you about, except that in the downstairs living room there was a framed photo of him on a horse. Which clinched what I had in mind for him. The last thing I needed was a killer who was afraid of horses.
A door to a flight of stone stairs that led down to a basement was open. If Lucille was still in one piece, she had to be in it. Which meant I couldn’t let her see me. She’d know someone was about though: as soon as I hit the halfway mark, more dogs started snarling. They sensed I wasn’t their owner, and she must have too, because she started calling out: ‘Hello, hello, help me,’ all that. I think I got her hopes up.
I came straight back out. I’d only brought enough meat for one dog. She was alive. Knowing that would do for now. As I say, there’s always an extra angle if you go looking for it. And like all angles, some people don’t see them. But I’m not some people. I’d found one, and, with any luck, it would allow me to deal with my family and get this whole thing with Chilly Winters arresting his daughter for it over and done with. And the upshot of that would be that Greg would be released. Everybody happy. Except Lucille and the Donavans of course. Still, you can’t please everyone.
I was going to make good use of Picasso at the riding stables is what I’m saying.
So I went out there. It was a Thursday night, and I knew that on Saturday night my sister Amy would be out dancing, usually in the village hall, though that shindig she’d been talking to Cormac about would do just as nicely. It sounded as if it was further away, a bigger outing than usual – in Dublin maybe. She’d be home even later then. I’d already picked up what I needed so I went for it.
That prize-winning mare of Anne’s was in a field behind Amy and Edna’s cottage. I parked along the road and walked up Conor’s drive with a bucket of feed nuts. I’d mixed follicle-inducing stimulants with them. The mare came over when I shook the bucket. I leaned in through the fence, tipped it out on the grass and stood back. She got tucked in.
I did exactly the same the following night. Then the next morning I was back at Picasso’s. Again he stayed home all day, until about eight o’clock, when he drove off in his Transit.
I went in, same story with his bitch (doped her) – only this time I’d brought a little something for him. A surveillance laptop with a built-in phone – though not the one he’d appeared on – a riding crop, a horse’s hood and a bee-keeper’s outfit.
Then I went downstairs.
The dogs weren’t the only ones making noise: such a clamour. A kind of frantic rustling. It had to be coming from Lucille’s cell. There were four cells running along a corridor at the bottom of the steps. The first two were open; the others were bolted shut.
This time there could be no mistake. She would definitely know that someone other than Picasso was down there with her.
She’d hear me as I crept past her cell, under the hatch so she wouldn’t see me, to the fourth, where the dogs were. It had an internal door.
This time she really called out. Never stopped. ‘Hello, please help me,’ crying and begging. Sorry, Lucille, I haven’t come this far to be put off now. I’d ignored her crying when she was a baby, and I could ignore it again.
So Picasso had his own private little jail. Wonder what kind of warden he was. There were a few more bone crunchers to contend with. I fed them what Sleeping Beauty upstairs was dreaming on, and checked the first two cells while they dozed off.
Each of the cells contained a big wooden crate the size of a coffin. The timber on the inside of the one I lifted had been gnawed. The bottom was caked in shit, matted with black hairs. I heard squealing and scratching below my feet, coming from under the flagstones. Rats they sounded like. So that’s what I’d been hearing rustling in Lucille’s cell. Wouldn’t fancy doing time in there.
I went into the dogs’ cell, stepped over them and opened the door that led down a flight of wooden steps into an artist’s studio. Recreational activities for the inmates – I didn’t think so. What a carry-on. I’d never seen anything like it. Human hands in the freezer in case he felt peckish, a dog’s tongue in frozen saliva. So I was right about that. It was the one he took with him when he didn’t feel like walking the rest of it.
The second room was a gallery. I’m no connoisseur, but I’d’ve given odds no art expert had ever seen paintings like his before.
The bones in the dogs’ cell more or less confirmed how his victims were paid in return for sitting for him. I’ll leave that to your imagination. If you haven’t worked it out, you haven’t got any. Let’s just say the inmates who had literally given him a hand were no longer in residence, and I doubt they’d been paroled. Every enterprise has its little waste-disposal problems. Saved him digging graves and buying dog food.
Not that I’d ask him to confirm that. Though I did have questions for him.
After I’d made sure that Anne’s mare had reacted to those follicle-inducing stimulants, I was going to invite Picasso out to meet the family. The wonders of modern technology. I’d a spot of email in mind for him when he came back. That’s why I’d left him the laptop, logged on to the internet and ready to go. A slow way of communicating but effective. I could’ve rung him of course, but this had a better angle to it. Either way, he’d know that if he didn’t do what he was told, Chilly Winters’d be asking him if he had a licence to run his own private prison.
LUCILLE
If I was ever to see my mother again, I had to put the fear of Picasso catching me trying to escape out of my mind. But it wasn’t easy. Others’ lives would be at risk. I would see to that. He would force me to.
I had read in his journal that he’d been told about Gemma and me by Lisa Shine and Jackie Hay. If he could break their will, he could break mine. And the thought of informing on people I knew was more than I could bear. But I could feel myself becoming weaker. And I was afraid to sleep.
The rat in my cell had finished eating the other one. While I was awake, it stayed in its corner watching me. But when exhaustion set in, it seemed to know that it was safe to come out. I had already woken to find it sitting on my chest, staring at me. I’d bounced up and sent it scurrying. Picasso had been standing looking in through the peephole. The ones in the crate may have been his way of letting me know that I would eventually wake to find myself covered with them. The single one though was used in a far cleverer way. It was also there to keep me awake. If I slept, what would hunger force it to do? Without proper food and rest, I would begin to hallucinate. In that state, I would give him the names he wanted. I wouldn’t be able to help myself.
Because I didn’t know when it was morning or when it was night, I couldn’t tell when there was no sound of movement in the floor above, whether he had gone out or to bed. But I could tell when it was time for him to exercise his dogs. He used to take them out several at a time. They seemed to know when he was on his way and would whine. And while they were gone, I worked on as fast as I could.
I’d scored my way through the ceiling and removed a square of plaster and lath, big enough for me to squeeze up through the joists. But first I’d need to remove the same area of floor directly above. By hammering my one and only nail through the boards, then pulling it back out with the claw, I was able to make a hole. I’d straighten the nail and make another one next to it. By p
erforating a square outline of the floorboards I could eventually cut my way through. I could only pray that I was working on a section of flooring that was covered by a piece of furniture, to avoid Picasso discovering what I was up to from above.
And then, after about an hour or so, when I’d managed to penetrate about four inches along a line where the joist met the underside of the floor, I heard someone coming down the stairs. The remaining dogs started snarling. They didn’t do that when Picasso came down. It had to be somebody else. Whoever it was, he wouldn’t help me. I pleaded with him, but he just ignored me. Then the dogs went silent. He went into their cell and down to the rooms below. Then he left. But it was the way he’d come and gone. He’d crept under the serving hatch in my cell door. He didn’t want me to see him. Why? Why didn’t he help me?
When Picasso returned he came running down the stairs shouting my name, ‘Lucille? Lucille?’ as though he’d expected to find me gone. When he saw me through the hatch, he stood back and composed himself. Other than the time I’d told him about the computer, I’d never seen him lose control. It was the most unnerving thing about him. He was always so polite, so unruffled. In some respects he reminded me of a doctor discussing with a group of interns how to dissect a human body for medical reasons, dispassionately and matter-of-factly. He had done horrible, horrible things, yet he seemed removed from the fact that he done them to living people. It was almost as if he was referring to something as trivial as the weather.
‘I see we have had a visitor, Lucille.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yet you are still here. His motivation clearly does not extend to your freedom. You require another replacement timber?’
‘I have nothing to trade with.’
‘He did not speak to you?’
‘A glimpse of the back of a pair of corduroy trousers and men’s shoes are all that suggests he even is a he.’
‘You did not see his face?’
‘He didn’t show it.’
‘Then he has a reason for keeping it hidden. Strange, since identifying him at a later date would depend on your liberty. He is cautious. Ted Lyle?’
