by Finn Óg
“Take a right,” Sam said, closing his eyes as he recalled what he’d been told.
They moved deeper into the estate, Sam ticking the directions off on his left hand. Four orange fingers became three as they turned, then two, then one.
“Stop,” he said. “Face the van out. Use the horn if Fran sees the cops coming in.”
“Understood,” Min said. “Are you sure I canny—”
“I’m sure,” Sam said. “Thanks again. Really, Min, thank you,” he said as he affixed his face mask, pulled down his hat and slipped out with an empty box, moving towards the target house.
39
The oddity of a parcel delivery at four o’clock in the morning was not lost on Sam, but he had no option – just as he had no intention of knocking and waiting for a response.
Do it with conviction and nobody will know you’re bluffing.
Instead of approaching the front door he moved with the urgency of a parcel delivery man and made straight for the gable wall where he hoped a recycling bin might lurk. That’s where parcels were often left, after all. Once shielded from the street light he set the box down and in two seconds clambered, then rolled over the side gate into a small, smelly rectangular yard. Facing him were three big steps up to a door with large glass panels. Five-point lock, he reckoned. It would take several shoulder slams impeded by the steps and too much noise. He possessed neither the time nor patience. Sam knew he could have already been spotted by a neighbour and there was, even more incriminating, a van with a man parked down the street. The best thing to do was achieve his aim without anyone else in the estate knowing he was there, so he took the unconventional option. He knocked the back door quickly and urgently.
A dog a few doors down growled but didn’t bark. A light came on and shone down from an upstairs window, went off again, and then a hall light on the ground floor came on. Sam watched shadows appear through the frosted glass of the back door. A figure in white ambled to the door, but moved aside to what two taps at just above Sam’s head height betrayed as a kitchen window. The sill was at shoulder level to Sam as he stood in the sunken yard. He decided his next actions in the seconds it took for the window to crack open a fraction. He could try to talk his way in – and had a story loosely prepared – but he’d never been one for conversation.
“Who’s that?” a woman’s voice rasped with all the guttural phlegm of a heavy smoker.
Sam rocked back, gathering momentum and shoved hard off his left calf, the tread of his right shoe gripping the roughness of the bricks and allowing him to push upwards to grip the windowsill with his right hand and the lip of the open frame with his left, hauling it wide. He scrabbled his feet as hard as he could to get propulsion as the woman yelled and stepped back. Sam flicked his anchor hand onto the other side of the frame and gained enough leverage to haul himself aloft and head first into the sink.
He felt blow after blow of a heavy but dull instrument as he grabbed and pulled, sliding over the sink and head first onto the floor. The woman dropped a large chopping board and he caught sight of her grabbing a knife, but he was easily able to fell her from ground level by using his legs to twist one of hers behind the other and crashing her down. Still she flailed and screamed and Sam stood, pinning her knife hand to the floor while he reached over to close the window. Then he knelt on her chest and tried the name he’d been given.
“Hello, Clodagh.”
The woman kicked and spat and tried to slap Sam as she moved desperately to get her shoulder or back to a wall to assist her upright again. Sam did his best not to, but eventually he was forced to subdue her by grabbing an ankle and twisting it back against itself, precipitating another scream – which he answered with more pain. Her night dress rode to reveal an amateur tattoo.
“Keep quiet or I’ll snap this and start on the other one,” he hissed, but she was unpersuadable and kept at it to such an extent that it wasn’t strictly Sam’s punishment that broke her ankle, but her own twisting and writhing. The pain must have been excruciating and Sam was forced to move quickly and stuff her heaving throat full of a balled-up apron he tore from a wall hook. He used its ties to lace it round her head, then tore the neck strap off to secure her wrists. There was little progress she could make on one leg, so he was about to leave it at that and move off when another voice stopped him dead.
“She’s not Clodagh,” another voice said calmly. “I am.”
Something in her self-assured tone made Sam turn slowly, and sure enough, he was treated to the dark circular tubes of what must once have been a fine modern shotgun – had half its barrels not been ground off.
Sam kept his back to the woman with the busted ankle, thinking about the spatter arc a shotgun like that would create when discharged. He’d used enough shotguns in enough dark places to know that the only person or thing in the room that would not be hit in some way by its shot was the woman holding it. He instinctively kept the woman on the floor in the line of fire.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass if she dies,” the real Clodagh said. “She’s a tramp and a criminal and I’d be glad to see the back of her.”
Sam’s heart rate plummeted as he told his body to breathe, to assess, to calculate a way out of this unexpected scenario. He’d expected there to be men in support of this Clodagh – there had been so many at the lock-up. Now he knew there were only women in the house, any man present would have intervened by now.
He looked at Clodagh’s face as best he could, the light from the landing shining round her. He reckoned she was a bit older than him, frayed at the edges, of middle weight, average height and unkempt hair, even by the standards of someone just out of bed.
A gunshot would finish everything – not just for Sam, but probably Sinead. Min would run into the building – there was no question, and even if he found her, he’d get caught with a van full of a dead man’s DNA and probably blood spatter, and Fran would get drawn in too.
There could be no gunshot – no matter what way it was aimed.
The barrels were angled down towards him, allowing him to see the top of the gun. The safety slide looked to be engaged, but the woman’s thumb was dangerously close to it. Her index finger was on the trigger. Sam leaned back a tiny amount, staring into the up-and-over barrels, hoping the sawn-down length might help him work out whether there were cartridges inside. But the light was so low, and even with a torch it would be nigh on impossible to tell if there was definitely nothing in the tubes. He searched the woman’s face for a tell. Was she nervous? If she was nervous, could that be because she knew it was unloaded?
All he could detect was anger. She had a snarl and stare that suggested she was willing him to make a move, to give her a reason to rattle off the shot into both of them; a dynamic that in the heat of the moment he struggled to make sense of.
He had only one option.
“I’m really not here to harm anyone,” he said, his own anger refusing to allow him to plead. “I’ve come for someone, and if I get her – I’m gone. That’s it. I have no interest beyond that.”
“Awh,” the woman tilted her head, cooing but mocking. “Here for Sinead, are you?”
Sam’s heart stopped for a split second, weighing his next move with extreme care. He decided to say nothing and wait to see why she hadn’t shot him already. His silence unnerved her.
“Who are you, anyway?”
He stayed quiet, staring at her.
“You can’t be a guard – you’re here on your own and, besides, Guards knock the door. And she’s not married, and I know she has no boyfriend – I asked around.”
Sam placed his hands on the floor as the woman behind began to shout through the cloth in her mouth.
“Shut her the fuck up,” Clodagh ordered Sam, and thereby came his opening – a command to move. “Easy, tiger!” Clodagh warned and he placed a palm down and twisted his body over to rest onto his knees. He drew back his right arm in an arc as if to punch the woman on the ground in the back of the head but
lifted his heels as he did so to let the toes of his shoes grip the lino.
“You sure?” he asked over his shoulder, measuring her distance and position.
“Do it,” she spat. “Hit her hard as ye can, knock the bitch out.”
Which explained the dynamic between the women, and also placed Clodagh’s thoughts into vitriol and off her focus, so when he pushed back further he didn’t wheel his arm downwards but back further to arch his back and grab the barrels, praying that he’d been correct about the safety slide and that his crotch wouldn’t take the edge of the buckshot. In the split second he hauled on the gun he saw her finger pump furiously at the trigger as she lurched forward and fell half on top of him and half on the other woman. Sam twisted the gun free and thumbed the action release to open it and spit out two cartridges.
He’d been beyond lucky.
Clodagh twisted round and scrambled to her feet, making for the doorway into the hall. Sam got himself upright and followed her – expecting her to make for the front door and escape. Instead she tore left, slamming a door shut before he heard a lock twist home. A toilet, he assumed. People always head for the toilet because of the lock.
“Clodagh, I just want to get Sinead and get out,” he called, struggling for breath.
He was worried that even though the house was an end terrace, the far side bordered another home. If its residents hadn’t heard a commotion, they were either in a deep sleep or dead, so he gave up thinking too much and put his shoulder to the door and popped the bathroom lock open with ease.
And there he was exposed to a sight completely unexpected.
Clodagh was standing by the sink – to his left. She was bent at the hip, slightly twisted with her hand to her mouth, sobbing uncontrollably as she stared not at Sam, but into the bath. In it was the body of a man, partly decomposed but with the stench of some chemical that was causing the flesh to part from the skeleton. Half of the chin had dropped into the gloop, leaving jawbone and teeth exposed. Sam had seen plenty of manky bodies but he fleetingly wondered if this one took the biscuit.
He looked again at Clodagh, his brows creased in query. “What the fu—”
“He’d have killed me! He’d have killed me!” She was gulping air between repeating the excuse. “What did they do to him? What’s happening to his face?”
Sam tried hard to set aside the confusion of the situation and get the answer he needed. “Where is she? Where is Sinead?”
“Are they, are they—?”
“Sinead – where is Sinead?” he hissed at her, grabbing her wrist and wheeling her towards him.
“Are they… melting him?”
Sam glanced back at the man. “Looks like it. Now, where is she?”
The woman turned her head in trepidation again, unable not to look at whatever reaction was taking place in the bath. “They only said they’d get rid of him for me,” she yelped.
Sam reckoned they’d fulfilled their commitment, whoever they were, but that wasn’t helping him.
“I thought they’d just scare him away.”
“Last chance, Clodagh. Where’s Sinead?”
But Clodagh was for the birds, rather like her husband. Sam had to hold her up just to keep some sense to the situation. She placed her fingers into her lower lip and almost ripped at her own gums.
Sam had to move. He dragged her over to the bath and hissed in her ear. “This is acid, smell it – smell it!”
She choked in the vapour and turned her face away as Sam lowered it towards the surface. “Tell me where she is. Tell me or you will burn – just like him.”
She began to gag and he worried that she might vomit, thus splashing droplets of the dreadful mixture upwards, but he had to have his answer.
“She’s under the steps,” Clodagh wailed, and Sam threw her backwards, trepidation rising in him. If they were prepared to kill and melt a man in a bath, what had they done to Sinead?
He tore into the hall and turned around the staircase, looking for a door, but found none. He kicked the plasterboard, punching through holes and tearing at the fabric until the underside of the staircase was exposed, but there was nothing inside beyond waste wood and sawdust. He was about to return to the bathroom when he realised what she’d said.
Steps.
More slowly, he prepared himself for what he was sure must now be an inevitability. The steps were outside. Up to the back door.
He rushed back into the kitchen, walked over the woman with the broken ankle and found the key in the lock. He ripped open the door and made down the steps, turning to peer into the gloom, convinced now that his heart was about to be smashed for a second time, and fully prepared to accept that he deserved it to be so.
Standing at ground level and in slow motion he felt around the steps, following the concrete down to the right, where his hand rested on a different texture – flaking, painted timber. Some sort of coal-hole or space for a dog under the house. He searched for a latch or a bolt, but there was none. He placed his hands against it in frustration only to hear a metallic ping as the door came back towards him when his weight was removed – a spring closing, he realised – like that of a roof-space inspection hatch. The door opened and he fell to his stomach, peering into the black, reaching forward – grappling for her.
He found a foot, then a lower leg and hauled himself inside the hole, feeling his way up the body.
And then a tremble, a tiny shudder, and an almighty kick in the face. Sam recoiled and half rolled.
“Sinead? Sinead!” he shouted.
He got urgent but suppressed grunting in return. He tried to grab the legs and pull but was met with yet more violent moans and a shaking of the feet.
He crawled backwards and ran up the steps looking for anything that would let him see what was going on. By the kitchen sink was an ashtray and on the windowsill was a lighter and cigarettes. He grabbed the lighter and raced back down the steps into the hole again. He flicked the roller twice before it caught fire, exposing a woman tied by the wrists and ankles to two eye hooks. Her eyes were covered and her mouth taped shut.
“Sinead, it’s Sam. It’s me. It’s Sam. It’s Sam,” he said as he struggled, one-handed, to remove the band from her eyes. The lids remained shut for a moment then slowly cracked – her face twisted and untrusting, as if not believing what she could obviously hear. The lighter went out and he struck it a few times as he used his one free hand to feel around the back of her head to release the gag. Eventually he got it loosened enough to tear it down her face and she spoke clearly but confused.
“I’m dead, aren’t I? I’m dead?”
He struck the lighter again, managing to get a flame, and moved to free her hands. The knots were pathetic but plentiful and had been doubled using what looked like a clothes line.
“Are you Sam?”
“Yes, yes, Sam,” he tried to assure her.
“I must be dead,” she said again. “Sam’s in the Caribbean. Bastard.”
“Sam’s here, Sinead. I came to get you. I’m right here.”
He freed her feet then crawled backwards on his belly and grabbed her ankles. “Ready?”
“I’m fucking dead,” was all she said, so he hauled her out.
40
Sam kicked all the boxes through the curtain into the back of the van and turned to pull Sinead into the cab.
Min knew to say nothing but leaned forward to give her a nod as he started the engine and pulled away from the kerb. Sam placed his arm around her and whispered in her ear.
“It’s ok. You’re not dead. We are here. It’s Min, and it’s Sam. Look.” He leaned her forward and she peered again, disbelievingly at Min as he hit the phone to dial, then sat back again.
“How are you here?” she rasped, a million miles distant.
“Long story,” Sam said. “Are you injured?”
She jumped in fear as a ringtone burst through the speakers.
“Yes, brother,” came the answer.
“Success,�
� Min said, “we’re extracting. Anything to worry about?”
“Yep. There’s three patrol vehicles now, all on the prowl around the bridge. You’re going to have to go countryside, brother.”
“What’s happening?” Sinead looked completely dazed as she stared into the hint of light now offered by the sky.
Min hit mute.
“We need to get out of here without the Guards seeing us.”
“Get the Guards,” she croaked.
“No,” Sam said.
She turned to him, baffled, then touched his face as if to make sure he was really beside her.
“No,” he said again. “It’s complicated. Did they feed you?”
“Yes,” he could barely hear her above the din of the van and the noise through the phone.
Min handed a bottle of water over and Sam uncapped it and offered it to her lips, but she took it from him and swigged hard.
“You’re away to nothing,” he said, his arm round her back, hands on her ribcage.
She leaned into him, touching his jacket, his torso, as if still checking.
“I am here, Sinead. We are here, it’s not a trick. It’s not a dream.”
“The guards,” she muttered.
“No,” he said. “I’ll explain later.”
Min had to interrupt. “Which way?”
Sam looked up at where the dawn light was coming from, closed his eyes and tried to orient himself. “We need to cross the river somewhere.”
“Cops are at the bridge.”
“We’ll have to go east. Head towards the sunrise if you can. That should bring us coastal. We’ll work north and cross the motorway somewhere up there, then use small roads to get back to Dublin.”
Min unmuted then shouted to the radio, “Going coastal, cross motorway further north, then work back down on minor roads.”
“Got that. I’ll watch for you turning out then overtake and clear the way.”
“Good man, good man,” Min muttered.
