by Finn Óg
The professor replied, “the Keeper said he seemed to know a lot.”
“And how does the Keeper know this?”
“The Keeper is well-connected,” said the professor.
“Well, what does the Keeper intend to do about it?” said the Brit, as if he were herding snakes.
“He’ll move the Heir,” the Professor paused, “in case any of us are compromised.”
The Brit grunted. “I’ll get this stranger looked into. We may be best to nip it in the bud.”
“Agreed,” said the Professor.
“And he’s Irish, this chap?”
“Apparently,” said the Professor.
“I may need you to go over there,” said the Brit.
“Whatever you need,” was the reply, and the recording ended.
I had a horrible feeling that I might be the stranger. I also had questions. “So who is the Keeper?”
“Who are any of them?” asked the sister.
“I know the one in the tweed,” I said. “He’s an American university professor who was involved in an abuse ring. I don’t know the posh Brit.”
“We don’t know who the Keeper is,” said the twin. “But you need to keep watching.” Charity tapped another file.
There were three squares this time. The Brit, the professor, and a younger man. He was skinny, in a t-shirt, and in his forties. The Brit was running the show.
“This is our investigator,” he introduced the new man to the professor. “He’s been looking into the stranger. I believe the news is not good.”
“Oh?” said the professor.
It was the new man’s turn to talk. He sounded French. “The stranger is a dangerous man. He is kind of a bounty hunter, and was Special Forces officer for some years.”
It was uncomfortable to hear the background I’d tried so hard to conceal discussed openly in front of others. The Brit broke in with incredulity. “Irish Special Forces?”
“He is SBS, Special Boat Service, and Royal Marine Commando.”
“Oh dear,” said the Brit, in a rather understated fashion.
“Like a U.S. Navy SEAL?” said the professor. “I’m not following the accent.”
“He’s Belgian,” said the Brit. “And SBS is rather worse than the SEALs, if such a thing were possible,” mumbled the Brit. His eyes were closed, but his face still managed to convey resignation.
“He is resigned. Not long ago, actually,” offered the Belgian.
I wondered where this twerp was getting his information.
“So how much does he know and where can we find him?” asked the Brit.
The Professor took the first part of the question. “The keeper’s information is that he knows enough, but, uh, perhaps that’s for a discussion off-line.” He appeared coy in front of the investigator. That suggested to me that the investigator was hired in, rather than a member of the abuse ring.
“He lives on a boat,” said the new man.
My heart sank.
“Of course he does,” said the Brit, exasperated. “Where does he keep the boat?”
“Nowhere. He moves around. He sails from place to place. Mostly he’s in Northern Ireland. Sometimes he just – vanishes,” said the Belgian, with a flourish.
“What does he want anyway? Who is he working for?”
The Professor broke in, keen to show that he had information. “He’s working for a group that helps trafficked women. Some sort of charity.”
Charity paused the recording and looked at me. “I can’t understand this bit. This has nothing to do with us, does it? I never asked you to look at an abuse ring. What have these people got to do with my organisation?”
I looked back at her. “I genuinely haven’t a clue,” I said, “keep it running, maybe it’ll become clear.” She tapped the arrow.
“The keeper described him as a kind of mercenary, a freelancer if you will, rescuing women from pimps,” said the professor. “But the keeper didn’t know anything about his background.”
“I still don’t follow how that fits our picture,” said the Brit. “But we can’t have him vanishing.” He appeared to address the investigator. “We will need to know where he is. At all times.”
“Is possible. Lemme see what we can do.”
“That’s all for you, for now.”
The investigator’s image left the screen. The Brit and the professor kept talking. The Brit looked deeply concerned. “Could the heir have contacted a charity?”
“I don’t know,” said the Professor, “I doubt it.”
The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. This seemed to confirm the counsellor’s story, that the heir had come to him for help. I looked at the Brit, and imagined that I was staring at the leader of the abuse ring.
The professor turned even more sheepish. “The keeper suspects we have a breach.”
“There has never, ever, been a breach,” said the Brit.
“I know,” said the Professor. “A breach would be unthinkable.”
It was bizarre, listening to these people piecing together a picture which I had been trying to build for weeks. I wanted to watch the other videos, but Charity needed clarity.
“So they think I engaged you, to help this “heir” person?”
“Who is the heir?” screamed the twin, from the back.
I exhaled, then reeled back in the hope that the three stories would somehow become one. “About a month ago, I got a request for work, through the website you set up for me.”
“Yeah,” said the twin. “I know, I checked.”
I let that pass without comment. “So, I went to see the bloke who had this job. He told me this cock-and-bull story about a woman who was being abused. It was grim stuff, and involved the seasons and all sorts of crazy stuff. He called her “the heir.”
I looked to Charity for a reaction, but got none. “I assumed you had referred this bloke to me.”
She shook her head. “Other than Fran, I only ever sent one fella to you, a psychologist from Dublin.”
“A counsellor?”
“Maybe. He told me he was a psychologist. He was sort of – elusive or something.”
I looked back at the road. “Well, that’s when it all started. I didn’t believe the counsellor bloke at all. But then someone came to the boat one night. I don’t know how he got aboard, but anyway he came to kill me…”
“Sweet and gentle…” the sister began in the back, but I cut across her.
“And after that I came to you looking for someone who might explain what was going on. And you put me in touch with the old woman from the convent.”
“Who’s now dead,” said Charity.
“What?” I said.
“Yeah. She got killed during a burglary. What had she got to do with anything?”
“It’s complicated,” I said, my mind racing. “She knew about a cover-up of an abuse ring. It seems to me now that it’s the same ring that the professor and the Brit seem to run.”
“Right,” said the twin from the back seat. “So they’re killers. They think my sister tipped you off about some “heir” person, and now they’ve got a failsafe way to get to you.”
“What?” I turned to face her. “What way to get to me?”
“Well Sam,” said Charity, “apparently, you have a daughter.”
Alarm is mental, yes, but it can also be physical. Fear had never made me sick before, never. But I threw open the car door and vomited hard, my darkest terror realised. Yet there are times when deep tiredness and panic can mix to help you focus concentration on one thing, and block out all else.
The third recording drew my mind in so tight, that I managed to finally zone out the fractious twin on the back seat, and work through what was happening. I listened intently. Every word spoken took on a fresh importance.
The investigator recounted my recent movements. He told them that I’d flown from Dublin to New York. He said that I appeared to be following some undefined lead, and that he’d been cracking my phone
s from time to time but I was discarding them. He said I was headed northeast, and then the professor chipped in. “I know where he’s going,” he said, “he’s going to Boston.”
The professor obviously didn’t want to elaborate on how he’d been compromised by one of his students, in a Long Island library. “I can get our people to deal with him there,” he said with confidence.
“We thought that when we sent someone to his boat didn’t we?” said the Brit.
“Well,” said the professor, “we still don’t know for sure what happened there. The man we sent didn’t actually…”
“I know!” yelled the Brit. “He bloody vanished, like this bloody commando keeps disappearing.”
Charity looked at me. I shook my head. It wasn’t the time to get into more explanations.
“Well,” offered the investigator, “you could wait for him to collect his daughter.”
I tried not to pant, but my chest heaved at the mention of Isla.
The Brit placed his face in his hands, and exhaled loudly. “His daughter? Why am I only hearing about a daughter now?”
“His wife, she is dead. He has a young girl,” said the investigator.
The Brit huffed and puffed in exasperation. “And where is she?”
“I don’t know,” said the Belgian, and I breathed in, with relief. “But I can find out.”
“Then do it.” The Brit was over-elaborately calm, containing himself. “If this bloody commando disappears again, things will get very uncomfortable you.”
“I will deal with it,” said the investigator.
“Get off the line,” barked the Brit, and the investigator vanished.
“If he gets away in Boston,” the Brit addressed the professor, “I need you to get the rest of the circle, travel to Ireland and tidy things up. Immediately.”
“But what about the Keeper?” said the Professor, “he’s not authorised to allow anyone near the heir between Beltane and Samhain.”
I looked at Charity, who paused the recording, and lifted her shoulders to indicate she had no idea.
“It’s pagan shit,” the twin broke in, reading from her iPhone. “The first one’s about fertility, the second one’s about… death and stuff.” Charity cut her off by pressing play.
“Leave the keeper to me,” the Brit said. “I have a job for him. I’ll make sure he’s not around.”
The professor wasn’t happy. “The Irish police – how do we navigate that?”
“We have people where we need them. You know that. You just get done what needs to be done.” The professor nodded, and the recording finished.
My heart hammered like a mortar drop.
Charity looked at me. “Is your daughter safe?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“When did your wife die?”
“A while before I met you,” I told her.
“You never said,” her delivery was gentle now, his sister’s less so.
“Umm, sorry to butt in like, but, we have an issue here. There was a new recording cracked, remember? So maybe we should, like, watch it?”
Charity came-to. She fumbled around, bringing up the fresh film. It had a real sense of urgency. The Brit was shouting. “So where is he now?”
“He’s leaving my office building,” the professor replied. He was deferential. Little wonder, given the eruption his response had conjured from the Brit.
“To go where?” the Brit screamed, the sound distorting.
We appeared to be watching the video call the professor had made immediately after I had confronted him in New York.
“I don’t know,” the professor began to shake his head in panic.
“Well, hadn’t you better find out?” boomed the Brit, top right.
“Is OK,” interjected the investigator. “We can pick him up, is no problem.”
“But I thought you said he was dumping his phones?” the Brit blurted out in frustration.
“Oh, I can get him again. Soon probably,” shrugged the Belgian. “Phones are good, but not reliable, really. They are sometimes discarded, or, broken, and many people know they are compromised.” There was flippancy to his delivery, which suggested complete confidence in his ability to find me.
“So how can you be sure you can track him?” asked the professor.
“Same as before,” said the European, “he has one thing with him almost always.”
“Which is?” yelled the Brit.
The European snorted. “Look, I do not ask who you are or what you do. I provide this service, and track the persons of interest to you. You have no need to know how I do this.”
The Brit was silent for a moment. He had the tremor of an incendiary on the cusp of detonation. Then, his face loomed large in the screen, as he leaned in.
“Listen to me, you little Belgian bastard,” he spat. “Do you think we can’t find people ourselves? The only reason we chose you is because we don’t have anyone in Ireland. We know everything about you. Your little rental home on Achill Island. Where your wife works, where your children go to school. You are not indispensable, you little twat.”
The Belgian’s eyes were wide. He was completely blindsided.
The Brit’s voice gathered volume. “If you cross me, we will fuck-you-up. Do you understand that, or shall I speak more slowly!”
The Belgian sat still for a moment, evidently dumbfounded that he had been rumbled on the tech front.
“Now. What is it? The thing that the commando has with him all of the time?” The Brit paced his delivery, making each word crystal clear.
The Belgian’s eyes fell. “He has the key to his boat,” he replied, softly.
I felt the sister’s head hit the back of my car seat as the charity woman paused the recording, and turned to face me. The twin groaned from the rear. Now I knew why Mini Marine’s boffin hadn’t detected anything. I had walked off the marina pontoon for lunch, with the tracker in my trousers.
“Tell me it’s not in your pocket now, Sam,” said the twin.
It was in my pocket.
“Ok,” said the charity woman. “We need to get out of here.”
“We need to get away from him,” said the twin, incredulous.
“I need to know what else is on those recordings,” I said.
“Eh, yeah,” said the twin sarcastically, “that’s the priority, yeah. Not that a bunch of – who knows what – is looking to kill us.”
I worked through the sequencing, and realised that they’d lost me in New York, because my boat keys had been bundled in my kit and flown home by Federal Express. But I’d picked the keys up again just that morning, and as such I’d handed them my whereabouts again.
I looked up. We were sitting in the part of the car park where articulated lorry drivers hauled in to get some sleep. Nobody was looking at us; they were all trying to appease their tachometers by lying in their curtained bunks. I watched a small dog pad over, a fluffy little yoke. In the distance two children swung a dog lead and played in the grass. There was a refrigerated container to the rear of us. I saw a sleepy looking driver climb down from the cab and head for the shop. Wake-up time. Coffee probably. I took my keys and went to the rear of his load, using the ring to bind them onto its security cable. As I walked back I saw the man returning with a paper cup. The reg was Polish. The Belgian would have fun tracking that.
In the car the twin was obviously working through the logic of the recordings. I could see her shaking her head. “You actually met this bloke?” she said. “This professor?”
“Two days ago. In Manhattan,” I said.
“So, we need to go to the police, in the north maybe, get him picked up?” said the sister.
“Afraid not,” I said. “He’s pretty dead.”
It was now plain how monumental an indulgence killing the professor had been. I’d missed an opportunity to round up his group at that bloody apartment in Belfast. I doubted anyone would go near it now, in the middle of a police investigation.
&nbs
p; “Eh, what?” The sister was struggling with news of his death, and was shouting.
“He killed himself. Long story.”
“Unbelievable.”
“How long until the next recording is cracked?” I asked her.
“Depends on how long it is,” she said.
If the Belgian was looking for Isla, I needed to find the Belgian. I started the car, and began to pull off.
“Oh, so we’re going with you now, are we?” the sister said, her voice thick with Dublin attitude.
“We need to get to Achill Island,” I said.
“We’re safer with him for the moment sis, honestly.” Charity had her head turned to the back seat. “I’ve seen him working, we’re probably better off with him.”
“I’m not going to the West of Ireland with ye,” barked the sister. “You can let me out now.”
I swerved to the hard shoulder; I’d had enough of her.
“No, no, no, sis, we stay together,” said Charity. “They know who we are and probably where we live. The only way to sort it is to deal with them. Sam can deal with them.”
“The Guards can deal with them!” yelled the twin.
“You heard the man, the cops are ‘on board.’ Let’s get away from here. If they’ve tracked him this far, we need to keep moving.”
I looked in the rear-view mirror. “Get out if you’re getting out. Otherwise the next stop is Achill Island,” I said to the twin.
She slumped down petulantly, her arms folded across her chest. I took that as confirmation, pulled into the traffic, and headed West.
Some people love barren, but it’s not for me. Bogland represents one long, turgid reminder of freezing, wet nights yomping across desolate countryside, the mud clinging to my boots, the earth trying to lay premature claim to my sodden, aching, carcass. Those months of training for the Marines, and then the SBS, were far from fun. Nor was the drive to County Mayo. I was tailgating, speeding, and hurtling ahead, despite the swearing and gasps from my passengers, who clearly thought that I was destined to cause their deliverance. We swept through the flat, black gorse brush, Heaney’s turf, where Ireland’s brutal history was embalmed, and concealed.
