Kyna took the elderly man’s money and then poured Liam a pint of Murphy’s. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ she asked him.
‘No, I can’t like. I don’t want Davy stabbing my other hand.’
‘Oh, so it’s business.’
‘You could call it that. I thought Davy was real sound like, do you know what I mean? But I’m beginning to think that he’s some kind of headbanger. Like, Bobby always frightened the shite out of me but at least with Bobby you knew where you were. With Bobby it was flogging fags and only making out that we were IRA to scare off the other gangs like. With Davy, though, I don’t know. He’s deadly serious about all that political stuff... he’s always banging on about the border and the cause and Christ knows what.’
He suddenly stopped and said, ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this. If Davy heard me he’d cut my mickey off.’
‘Oh, stop.’
‘No, Roisin, I mean it. He threatened to do it before. He followed me into the jacks and took out his knife and said that if I wasn’t one hundred and ten per cent behind him he’d slice it clean off and flush it down the bog. Oh, and he meant it all right. I still have the mark where he cut me.’
Kyna glanced up at the mahogany clock above the bar. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’ll be knocking off at eleven. We don’t have to go clubbing. Why don’t we go down to the town but just have a quiet drink together, somewhere like the Woodford?’
‘Sure like, that’d be grand,’ said Liam. ‘I’d like that.’
He stayed at the bar to drink his pint and Kyna gave him a packet of chilli peanuts on the house. It was almost eleven when she heard a smattering of applause from the pool room and a few seconds later Sorcha appeared. This evening she was wearing a tight grey T-shirt and black skinny jeans and a pair of sparkly sandals with bells on.
‘What would you like?’ asked Kyna, as she came and sat on a bar stool next to Liam, with her sandals jingling.
Sorcha looked at her with those large onyx eyes and said, ‘Guess.’
‘To drink, I mean.’
‘All right. I’ll have a rum and Coke.’
‘How did it go?’ asked Kyna, pouring Bacardi into a tall glass and spooning ice into it.
‘Oh... fair to Midleton. I don’t think this crowd are much into Wolfe Tone songs. I think they’d probably prefer it if I sang “The Black Velvet Band” or some other old Dubliners shite.’
Kyna passed Sorcha her drink and as she did so Sorcha reached out and took hold of the bangles around her wrist, so that she couldn’t take her hand away. ‘What time do you finish?’ she asked her.
‘Eleven,’ said Kyna.
‘But she’s coming out for a scoop with me like,’ Liam chipped in.
Sorcha didn’t look at him but continued to hold Kyna’s bangles and stare unblinking into her eyes. ‘You’re not serious? With him?’
Kyna would have done anything to turn to Liam and tell him to forget about this evening and maybe they would go out some other time. It wasn’t only Sorcha’s face and full-breasted figure that attracted her, there was something in her look that told her they could be amazing together, both as friends and as lovers. It was a look she saw only rarely. She had seen it in Katie’s eyes, too, but Katie was her commanding officer and so the problems of starting a relationship were almost insurmountable. She wouldn’t have that particular problem with Sorcha, although there might be others, considering that her name wasn’t really Roisin MacColgan, and that she wasn’t really a barmaid but a detective sergeant in the Garda, and that she was here to find out who might have shot Niall Gleeson, and why.
‘Maybe tomorrow?’ she suggested.
‘I won’t be here tomorrow,’ said Sorcha. ‘I’m playing at Sin é till late. And the day after at the White Horse in Ballincollig. And who knows who I might meet there?’
‘I’m sorry, Sorcha, no. I can’t tonight,’ Kyna told her. ‘I simply can’t.’
Sorcha shrugged and let go of Kyna’s hand. ‘Your loss,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the drink anyway.’
With that, she took her Bacardi and Coke and slid off her bar stool and made her way back to the pool room. After a few minutes Kyna could see her talking to a pretty young red-haired woman and they were both smiling and laughing. She felt like coming out from behind the bar and stalking over to her and saying, Stop it, will you! It’s you and me, we were the ones who were supposed to be together!
Liam raised his glass and said, ‘She’s some lasher and no mistake, her. Kind of scary, though.’
Scary? thought Kyna. If you knew who I really am, then you could talk about scary.
*
They took a Hailo taxi down to the city centre. The Woodford was a stone-fronted Georgian building on Paul Street, with flower baskets hanging outside. Kyna had chosen to go there because there was less likelihood of them being seen by Davy or one of his cronies from Gurranabraher.
It was a big old-fashioned pub, with green-painted wooden panelling and brick walls and long red velvet curtains. By the time they arrived it was crowded and noisy, but they managed to find a small table for two next to the bar, with a lighted candle on it. Liam ordered another pint of Murphy’s while Kyna asked for a Prosecco. She didn’t usually drink on duty, but she wanted to make Liam feel that he was impressing her. They had to lean their heads close to each other to make themselves heard over the shouting and the laughter and the background music.
‘Don’t you have a girlfriend, Liam?’ Kyna asked him.
‘I did, up until a month ago, Moira, but we broke up. We was sort of living together, on and off, but I was out so much that she wanted a cat to keep her company. The trouble is cats make me sneeze and anyway who wants to be treading barefoot in a litter tray when you go to the kitchen in the middle of the night to fetch yourself a glass of water?’
‘Well, not me, and that’s for sure,’ said Kyna.
‘Besides that, Roisin, you’re about a million times prettier than Moira. You are, girl, I don’t mind telling you. You’re a stunner.’
‘You’re not bad-looking yourself, Liam. And you’re not stupid, either. I don’t know what you’re doing mixing with that Davy and those other fellows.’
‘What? It’s the grade, that’s all. Well, mostly. And it means I get no bother from none of the scummers down my street, nor nobody else for that matter, because they know who I’m in with.’
‘But what’s this trouble you’ve been having with Davy? Why did he stab you in the hand like that?’
Liam took a swallow of his drink, wiped his mouth with the back of his bandaged hand, and looked around the pub as if he were making sure that nobody could overhear him.
‘Like I told you, I thought he was sound. Between you and me, he was even going to get me a gun. Yeah, really. But it’s like he’s not so much interested in the fag trade any more. He’s forever saying that we’re at war with the Brits. For some reason he got it into his head that I’d been telling you about some of our private business and that’s why he had forty thousand fecking canaries and stabbed me.’
‘So what’s this private business that he didn’t want you to tell me about?’
Liam stuck out his lower lip and shook his head. ‘He’d fecking kill me if he knew that I’d told you.’
‘So why do you stay with him?’
‘Because he’d fecking kill me if I didn’t.’
‘Do you think he might have shot Niall?’
‘No – no, I don’t think so. I mean, he was depending on Niall for selling the fags after Bobby went. And he always said that he liked him.’
‘You said you had a get-together this afternoon. What was that all about?’
Liam didn’t answer at first, but then he finished his pint and looked at his empty glass and said, ‘I can’t tell you, Roisin. But I will tell you one thing. What Davy’s planning to do, it fecking scares me. I don’t want to be spending the rest of my life in Portlaoise prison.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want to tell me? Maybe yo
u’ll feel better if you do.’
‘No. I can’t. It’s like some kind of fecking nightmare. He always says it every time we meet like that: Zippo. Keep your bake tight shut and don’t tell nobody nothing.’
‘All right,’ said Kyna. ‘Let’s talk about something else. Are you hungry at all?’
‘I’m starving, actually. I’ve had nothing at all to eat since an apple I had for breakfast. I could eat the hind leg off the Lamb of God, to be honest with you.’
‘What do you feel like? We could have something here. They do a fantastic burger, or we could share a plate of their tapas.’
Liam looked around and then he said, ‘I don’t know, Roisin. It’s getting fierce crowded. Why don’t we take a Burger King back to my place? I’ve a couple of bottles of white wine in the fridge that Moira bought before she walked out on me.’
‘All right, then, why not?’ said Kyna. She smiled at him and reached across the table to squeeze his hand as if she couldn’t think of anything she would rather do. They stood up and shrugged on their jackets and elbowed their way out of the Woodford, walking hand in hand to Patrick’s Street. Liam kept throwing surreptitious looks at Kyna and she could tell how proud he was to be out with her, and that he was growing increasingly excited. A passing gaggle of teenage boys gave her a connie burdle, a wolf-whistle, and that clearly pleased him even more.
While they were waiting in the queue in Burger King, behind a very drunk man with urine-soaked jeans who kept swaying from side to side, Kyna rang for a taxi. By the time their order was ready, the taxi had drawn up outside. As they climbed in, Kyna was going to apologize to the driver for the smell of their takeaway food, but he smelled so strongly himself of stale cigarettes and fenugreek that she decided he probably wouldn’t notice.
‘Sixty-nine St Anne’s Road, Gurra,’ said Liam. As they pulled away from the kerb he shifted himself nearer to Kyna and put his arm around her, with his thickly bandaged right hand resting on her shoulder. In response, she rested her hand on his thigh so that she could feel his bony leg through his jeans.
She had realized when she was only twelve years old that she was attracted to girls rather than boys, and she had never kissed a boy, not romantically. In the back of this taxi with Liam, she suddenly began to feel breathless and panicky. He leaned across and kissed her on the cheek, and when she turned towards him he kissed her hard on the mouth. His lips were dry and when he pushed the tip of his tongue into her mouth she could taste stout and cigarettes and cheese and onion crisps.
She kissed him back. She knew she had to. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine that she was kissing Katie, but Katie’s skin was soft and her lips were always inviting and moist and glossy with lipstick. She didn’t have prickly stubble and pimples and jumbled-up teeth like Liam, nor wiry hair that was thick with dandruff.
She opened her eyes and saw that the taxi driver was staring at them in his rear-view mirror. Liam leaned over again, but this time she quickly turned her face away so that his nose bumped against her right ear. It was bad enough kissing him, let alone having somebody watching her do it. She had no doubt at all, though, that he was only going to grow more passionate. Why else had he invited her back to his flat?
The house where he lived was halfway up St Anne’s Road, in the middle of a grey pebble-dashed terrace. Liam paid off the driver with a handful of loose change, leaving Kyna to climb out of the taxi with the Burger King bag. Then he led her up a steep flight of concrete steps to the front door.
‘The landlady’s in,’ he said, nodding towards the living-room window. The dark brown curtains were drawn, but they could see that a television was flickering inside. ‘Mrs Devlin, fecking old wagon. She stays up till all hours, so we’ll have to keep the noise down. No screaming.’
Holy Mary, Mother of God, you’ll be lucky, thought Kyna. The only screaming I’ll be doing is screaming to get away from you.
Inside the narrow hallway it smelled of boiled cabbage and overheated electric plugs. Liam pressed the light switch and climbed ahead of Kyna up the red-carpeted stairs.
He showed her first into his pale blue-painted kitchen, which was so small that she had to shuffle out on to the landing again while he opened the fridge door. He lifted out a bottle of Tesco white wine and then reached up to the cupboard to bring down two plates and two cloudy-looking wine glasses. Kyna handed him the Burger King bag so that he could take their food out: a double bacon cheeseburger for him and a veggie wrap for her.
‘By the way,’ he said, as they carried their plates and glasses into his bed-sitting room at the front of the house, ‘that door there, that’s the bathroom. Just in case you need to drain the spuds like, you know.’
His bed-sitting room was dominated by a sagging green couch which could fold down into a double bed, as well as a large flat-screen television and two mismatched armchairs: one orange, and one oatmeal with a scattering of grey stains on the seat cushion. Behind the television there was a built-in plywood wardrobe and under the window a shelf heaped with dog-eared Men’s Health magazines and CDs and crumpled Mars bar wrappers and half-squeezed tubes of spot cream and a hairbrush clogged with hair.
On the wall over the couch Liam had pinned a large tattered poster from Bruce Springsteen’s concert in Cork in July 2013.
‘Here, take a seat,’ he said, and he and Kyna sat side by side on the couch. Immediately he started to wolf down his bacon and cheeseburger, his mouth so full that he could barely speak to her. Kyna nibbled at the edges of her veggie wrap and sipped at her wine and looked around the room. She hadn’t felt so trapped since she had gone undercover to work for Bobby Quilty and he had attempted to rape her. She could have simply stood up and left, but that would jeopardize all the work she had put into this investigation so far, and she would never find out what it was that Davy had told Liam to keep Zippo about.
‘Wow, you hounded that,’ she said, when Liam had finished his burger.
‘I told you I was starving,’ he said. ‘You haven’t eaten much of yours, though.’
‘I wasn’t as hungry as I thought.’
Liam wiped his mouth with his bandaged hand. He set his plate down on the floor and took away Kyna’s plate, too, and set it down on top of it.
‘C’m’ere,’ he said and took her in his arms and pecked her twice, three times, on the lips. Before he tried to kiss her too deeply, though, he sat back for a moment and used the tip of his tongue to worry out the last few crumbs of burger meat stuck between his teeth.
‘Liam—’ she said. She was beginning to think that she may not be able to go through with this, even if it was critical.
But Liam said, ‘Jesus, you don’t know what you do to me, girl,’ and kissed her more and more aggressively, his stubble rasping against her lips. Then he started to feel her breasts through her thin grey woollen dress and slide his good left hand up between her thighs. He was starting to pant as if he had run all the way here from Patrick’s Street.
‘Let’s have this dress off of you,’ he said, taking hold of the hem and trying to pull it upwards. But Kyna snatched at the hem and gripped it tight to stop him lifting it any further, and pressed her knees together.
‘What?’ he said, half-smiling. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s not you,’ she said.
‘Then what?’
‘I’m in my flowers, that’s all.’
‘What? You’re never! Oh, Jesus, you’re codding me!’
‘No, Liam. I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do about the phases of the moon.’
Liam took hold of her hand and pressed it between his thighs so that she could feel how stiff he was. ‘Do you see what you’ve done to me, and now you’re saying that you’re bullfighting? I don’t fecking believe it!’
‘It’s true, Liam. I think you’re a wonderful, wonderful feller, you know? But I can’t show you just how much you turn me on... not tonight, anyway.’
She kissed him, and stroked his hair, and smiled at him as if he were a d
isappointed child that she hadn’t been able to take to the circus.
‘I’m busting here, girl,’ said Liam. ‘If I’d known you couldn’t do nothing – Jesus – couldn’t you give us a blowjob?’
‘Liam—’
But Liam was already unbuckling his belt and tugging open the buttons of his jeans. He levered his erection out of his shorts and held it between finger and thumb and jiggled it up and down. Kyna didn’t even want to look at it, but he said, ‘There – there’s the proof of how I feel about you, Roisin. The solid, hard proof. Stand up in a court of law, that would.’
Kyna glanced down and saw his swollen purple glans with the foreskin rolled back. She felt her gorge rising and prayed that she wouldn’t bring up the mixed bean salad she had eaten for lunch. Liam laid his bandaged hand on her shoulder and pulled her even nearer towards him.
‘You’re something special you are, Roisin,’ he told her. ‘I feel like you and me were meant for each other, do you know what I mean like?’
That decided her. He might make her feel nauseous, but if he believed that fate had brought them together, and trusted her, there was a good chance that he would confide in her about Davy Dorgan and what he was up to.
She bent her head down and closed her eyes and then she took him into her mouth. She felt like gagging, but as she licked him, he let out a whinny, like a tinker’s horse, and ran the fingers of his left hand into her short blonde hair so that he could pull her head down even further.
She tried to imagine that she was dreaming this and that she couldn’t taste him or feel him or smell him. She sucked at him hard, bobbing her head rhythmically up and down, and probing the cleft in his glans with the tip of her tongue. The sooner it was over, she thought, the better. With every suck he groaned and snorted and whinnied some more and said, ‘Holy Saint Peter, Roisin! Holy Saint Peter!’
It took only a few minutes before, without warning, he shuddered. At the same time he gripped the roots of her hair even harder, so that she couldn’t twist her head away. Her mouth was flooded with warm slime, and then almost immediately he began to subside, so that he felt like a fat slippery worm.
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