by J. M. Smyth
‘Maybe.’
‘I shall make inquiries.’
‘I thought you had.’
‘Mr Lyle has not been at home of late.’
A mobile phone rang upstairs.
‘Would you excuse me?’
With any luck, he was being called out. I could get back to my ‘motivation’. Which clearly did extend to my freedom.
RED DOCK
You should’ve seen Picasso’s face when he saw what was on that laptop.
Here he was: ‘Aagh. Aagh.’ I thought he was gonna have a heart attack. He was watching himself killing Gemma. Thought I’d treat him to a spot of home entertainment. I don’t think Picasso should watch himself killing people on laptops. It’s bad for his nerves. He should go and see a doctor about it.
Did you ever see those old films based on Greek mythology? Where one of the goddesses fights her corner and Zeus fights his, and somebody who has offended the gods has to be snuffed out. ‘Release the Kraken,’ Zeus commands, and everybody goes ‘Aagh!’ as this big dinosaur-type crocodile comes up out of the sea and licks its lips at the sight of this poor virgin who’s been bound to a cliff to be gobbled up. Must have been handy having your own Kraken to get shot of people.
Well Picasso was gonna be mine. Release Picasso! In Clonkeelin.
Now for the plan I had in mind to work, I had to see to it that the laptop I was using, not the one I’d left in Picasso’s, would eventually land in Chilly Winters’ lap. And I had to make Winters believe that it wasn’t me but his daughter who had been communicating with Picasso. And she had to appear to be in control, not intimidated by him, relaxed, casual. Why? Because relaxed casual threats from the right quarters are far more intimidating than giving your opponent the impression that you fear him. That weakens threats. In this instance, forget all that crap about women being frightened by killers. I had to make Winters believe that Lucille had the power to frighten Picasso more than the other way round, through the information she held on him, and her use of what she would believe to be her anonymity being preserved via modern technology. This is the information-technology age.
‘Good evening, Cornelius,’ I typed. ‘And how are you?’ Spot of informality there for me old mate Picasso. I like that. It fits in with the ‘casual threats’ approach. Just because you can put a guy away and ruin his life doesn’t mean you can’t be friendly.
He looked around him as if somehow he was going to see where I was.
‘You can speak,’ I typed. ‘I can both hear and see you.’
He peered into the camera I’d connected to the top of the upright lid as if he expected me to peer back at him. In close-up like this it hit me again that I knew him from somewhere, but I just couldn’t place him. Nah. I already had him. I’d seen letters addressed to him on his sideboard during my first visit. Cornelius Hockler. Faces might change a little over the years but names don’t. And who could fail to recognise a name like that? Me and old Corn went way back.
Anyway, ‘Sit down and be comfortable,’ I typed.
He pulled up a chair.
‘That’s better. Nice and comfy?’
Here he was: ‘Yes, yes,’ nodding away at the same time. I’d say he was more surprised by that laptop than his victims had been by him.
‘Who … who are you?’ he asked.
‘A benefactor.’
‘A benefactor?’
‘Yes, Cornelius. I want you to work for me.’
‘Me? Work for you? In what capacity?’
‘In your field of expertise.’
That one threw him. ‘You wish me to paint for you?’
‘Your other field.’
‘My other field?’
‘Now don’t be modest, Cornelius. Think of the Irish word for church.’
‘I’m afraid Irish was not one of my subjects.’
‘It begins with a “K”.’
He considered it long enough to say, ‘K … k … k …?’ then shook his head. I thought he was gonna come out with ‘Ku Klux Klan’ for a minute.
‘I’ll give you a clue. Sick: three letters, then front it with a “K”.’
A big deep-thought face showed up. ‘Sick, three letters … ill … ill … kill … You want me to kill for you?’
‘Don’t look so shocked, Cornelius. Right now you’re doing it for free.’
‘You wish me to become an assassin?’
‘That’s one way of seeing it.’
He was seeing it another way, the crafty bastard. Gone was the musing and the deep thought. Now he was arching an eyebrow, the way people do when a big opportunity has just turned up.
Here he was: ‘A paid assassin?’
Fuck me, the cunt was looking for a backhander. Which threw me. I hadn’t expected it. I’d expected him to be biting his nails. Why was he asking me that? Maybe he was after a job. Whatever it was, he interpreted my silence for what it was – I was weighing up what he’d said.
Then he put a head on it. ‘Would there be … a …’ he said. I could smell that something else was on the way. But not ‘… a possibility of a small advance?’
A small fucking advance? The gall of the bastard. This guy had an odd way of treating blackmailers.
‘You appreciate, Cornelius – “Cornelius”, such a lovely name—’
‘Thank you.’
‘—that I can persuade you to work for me.’
‘So I have observed.’
‘And that a copy of this evidence will find its way to the law if anything should ever happen to me.’
‘Please do not forget to take your vitamins.’
He always had a sense of humour. ‘So we have an understanding?’
‘Male or female?’
‘Who?’
‘Your difficulties?’
Amy and Edna Donavan were first in line. I began with them.
‘Female.’
‘Pretty?’
Pretty? What was he after – girls to paint? ‘Not especially. Why?’
‘Age?’
‘Fifties.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t, I couldn’t. I couldn’t countenance ladies of an advanced age. I just couldn’t.’
‘Fifty’s not advanced.’
‘Quite. But my models are always much younger.’
That’s all I needed – a fussy serial killer. ‘The victims’ gender and ages are neither here nor there. They won’t be modelling for you.’
‘And the riding crop?’ (The one I’d left beside the laptop.)
‘Bring it and the other gear with you.’
‘To where?’
‘Clonkeelin.’
‘Why?’
‘Instructions will arrive in a minute. Study them on your way over. You’ll have thirty minutes. Don’t let me down.’
Well, well, well, whaddayaknow. That’s my big word for the day. So Corn was coming to work for me.
Corn wasn’t a bad old boy, as it happens. Come to think of it, he was a bad old boy. Me and him used to share the same dormitory. The size of him should’ve given him away sooner. He was always a lanky bastard. Mind you, like myself, he’d put on a bit of weight since then.
Hope he isn’t afraid of wasps.
LUCILLE
‘I must confess, Lucille, the powers of connivance at work here have surprised even me.’
‘What powers of connivance?’
‘Your mother’s or your grandfather’s perhaps.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You were correct, it seems. You told no one you were staying in Clonkeelin—’
‘No one.’
‘But you did. Your family. You are related to Amy and Edna Donavan?’
‘They’re my mother’s aunts. Why?’
‘Your grandfather’s sisters?’
‘Yes.’
‘He would benefit from their passing?’
‘Benefit from their passing?’
‘Since no one in Dublin knew of the Donavans, then no one from Dublin would have known where to loca
te your laptop. Logical?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Then it follows that someone in Clonkeelin took it. And since my own liberty now depends on the demise of your mother’s two aunts, I can only surmise that the communication I have just received can only have come from Clonkeelin. Such is my reading. Time is pressing. Anon.’
It was madness. I couldn’t take it in. Picasso was telling me that he was being forced to kill my two great-aunts and that my grandfather was the only one with motive.
I couldn’t even begin to understand it. And he was gone. I could do nothing to stop him. Even if I could have smashed my way through to the upstairs room, I would have been too late.
RED DOCK
OK, I’d always intended to pull this next part off by myself. The only problem I had with it was it involved lifting. And, as I say, I avoid anything that involves lifting, if I can. Then Corn came along.
When it was over, it had to look like three deaths had occurred through sheer bad luck. Crime couldn’t come into it. The fourth death, Anne Donavan’s, would be put down to Picasso. That’s how Chilly Winters would initially see it. He’d have already linked right into the unlikely coincidence of Picasso just happening to strike the same night three others had died on the same farm. Who could miss it? Then Winters’d discover what else I was gonna leave for him. He’d know the truth, or what he thought was the truth: that Lucille was behind it, but that she had connived to cover it up so she could get her hands on what the Donavans had.
As I say, because I’d had over twenty years to study the Donavans’ habits, I knew what all four did from week to week. Amy’s love of dancing; Edna, who sat stuffing herself every night in front of the TV and rarely went to bed before one; their nights at bingo; Conor’s weekly card game, his involvement with the Irish Horse Board, a divorcee he kept company on Saturday nights; Anne, who ran a horse riding business, and attended shows, showing her mare …
They say actors should never work with animals or kids. Well, it’s a load of crap as far as scams are concerned. The plan I’d perfected had not only begun with a kid, it was to continue with Anne’s mare and a bull.
And since I’d already kicked it off by feeding Anne’s mare a couple of times, when all the Donavans were safely tucked up in their scratchers, I was now lining up for the net with my old mate Corn. Appropriate name for what goes on down on the farm.
Thirty-five minutes after I’d emailed him, I watched his Transit drive past the entrance to the riding stables. He parked farther along the road and walked back. From behind a hedge at the other end of the field, with a pair of night-vision goggles, I saw him enter the field and go over to the mare. She was nudging a foal. It was lying flat out on the grass. He picked it up, carried it over to a drainage ditch, the mare tailing after him, put it down, got into the ditch and lifted it in. Then he went across to the cottage, leaving her standing peering into the ditch, snorting and prodding the way horses do when some fucker’s just dumped their kid in a dark and dingy ditch.
So far he’d carried out my instructions perfectly.
Now in preparation for this over the years, which included finding out a lot about horses, my problem was how the fuck do you make a mare foal when you want her to? Well, the answer is you can’t. Nature’s nature and that’s all there is to it. Then again, maternity wards bring women on all the time. They bypass nature. The truth of this was that if the mare didn’t cooperate, then it was simply back to plan B, then C, D, E and all the rest of them. I’d an alphabetful. But the way I’d worked this particular one out was based on something that happened to me when I was a kid.
Horses carry for eleven months and one week, and foals born five or six weeks premature rarely survive – something to do with their lungs forming during the last weeks of gestation according to my vet book. In other words, they’re born with hardly any lungs. Which got me thinking.
When I left that home, I’d nowhere to go. I slept in containers in the docks, used the wash-and-brush-up facilities public toilets had in those days and got a job in a rag-and-bone yard, cash in hand, four quid a week, on the north side of the city centre, the working-class area.
Men used to rent a handcart for ten bob a day (that’s fifty pence to you younger ones). They were the two-wheel type you had to push. Stick yourself between the shafts and sweat your bollocks off. You could rent a pony to pull it for a quid a day. Most men pushed. They’d buy a basket of delft, go round the houses – ‘Any rags? Scrap iron?’ – and give maybe a cup in exchange for a few woollens or an old fire grate – anything they could weigh in. Some men rented carts and went down the docks and bought a load of herrings and flogged them round the streets at a shilling a dozen; fruit and veg was another one – and bags of coal. I’m talking about men who were signing on the dole and doing the double.
Because there was no grass in this area – there wasn’t a garden within a mile, let alone a field, just streets of terraced houses with no bathrooms – horses were given a nosebag: oats mainly, hay rarely.
But the thing I remember most were the horses’ stomachs. It used to amaze me that such big strong animals could be so weak in the stomach. Horses can’t throw up the way you and I can. The kind of gut-ache they get can often lead to colic. It makes them sweat and they keep looking back at their flanks where the pain is – their intestines have twisted and they’re wondering what the fuck’s going on. A fine healthy specimen can go down and not get up again and be dead within two hours.
There are different types of colic, and without going into it in detail the horses round what I soon began to call ‘our way’ – mainly because the people were friendly and made me feel like one of them – sometimes got colic, because they’d eaten their straw bed or had been fed too quickly after building up a sweat between the shafts. To regulate their diet, the old guy I worked for used to send me up to the graveyard to get a sackful of grass. I’d no shears or anything. I had to pull it out by the roots. Sometimes, if you were lucky, they’d just mown between the graves and you could grab that. Though if old Francie McArdle had known, he’d have given me a boot in the arse. Diesel from the mower on the grass wasn’t any good for horses either, y’see. Sensitive bastards.
Francie was a thieving old goat, by the way. He was loaded, though to look at him you’d think he hadn’t tuppence. He used to wear an old fawn overcoat tied round his waist with a length of rope. If you stole lead off a roof and threw it on his scales – the old low flatbed type I’m talking about – he’d stick his shin against the bed to stop it going down as far as it should so it would register less weight and you’d get less money than you were entitled to. He’d strike up some interesting conversation or crack a joke, thinking you weren’t wise.
‘Get away t’fuck, ya aul’ bollocks ye,’ I’d’ve hit him with. My accent was a bit thicker in those days and not that of the suave sophisticate before you today.
He ended up having to let me go. Some fucker set fire to his yard one night when he was well stocked with rags and the whole lot went up.
The reason I’m telling you all this is because when I went and saw the state of McArdle’s yard – carts burned and all that – I wondered where the horses were. And I asked Francie. I was really only interested in one of them: a white pony mare called Peggy. She was in foal and I’d wanted to see it being born.
‘She lost it, Red,’ he said.
‘Whaddaya mean?’
‘She took fright and it brought her on early.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Sure I’d nowhere t’keep her, Red.’
He’d sold her to the knacker man for dog meat. She was getting on. That’s why he had her in foal. He wanted a replacement out of her before she copped it. The rest went to tinkers.
And this experience got me thinking. If fear could bring a mare on, was there any other way to make her foal before her time? So I looked into it. A vet book told me that by mixing follicle-inducing stimulants in with a mare’s feed, you could bring her
into season quicker, for covering, but that you had to be sure you didn’t let a mare who was already in foal eat the same feed, otherwise she’d give birth prematurely – within forty-eight hours usually – but the foal would die. Because of that lung thing, y’know, it wouldn’t have a breath. Horses need breath. Bit of technical info for you there.
So I’m saying to myself: Conor’s a stallion man. He’d have a supply of stimulants. Lucille had gone to Clonkeelin. It doesn’t take a genius – after the event – to see that she could have got access to them. What if I stuff Anne’s mare with stimulants? All you have to do is shake a bucket and she’ll come over, tip them out and away you go, leaving her to it. And since mares invariably wait for the cover of darkness before foaling – gut-instinct survival crap that’s in them going back to the days when predators were knocking about and would’ve eaten the foal – the chances are she’ll do the same.
So I went back out to see how my bucket had worked, night three, Saturday, and found her lying on her side. And because the Donavans had no reason to be keeping a strict eye on her, because she wasn’t due for nearly six weeks, I more or less had a free hand.
Anyway, she got to her feet when she saw me coming, and I shone a torch on her rear end and saw that her croup had dropped – the croup is the part between the top of the rump and the tail. When it loses its roundness and slackens into a slightly concaved state, it’s a sign that the muscles around her birth canal are relaxing to enable the passage of the foal. She started nudging her flanks with her nose. The pain of coming into labour makes a mare do that and stand with her legs stretched out, like a rocking horse. Her waters had burst and the membrane covering the foal’s hoof was showing.
I left her to it and went back to the driveway: horses can get nervous with strangers around and hold off until they’ve gone. Half an hour later she went down, and I saw her continually looking back at her rear end and heaving. I went along behind the hedge of the adjoining field and had a closer look. The foal was on its way. Two tiny hooves had emerged, and I saw the membrane covering its snout being sucked in and out over its nostrils as it fought for air. Then its little head came forward, and the mare got to her feet. On average, foaling from this point usually lasts about fifteen minutes, with the mare getting up and down, until the widest part – the shoulders – emerge, then the rest comes much more easily.
