The Psalm Killer

by Chris Petit

  He made her presents whittled from wood, and tamed one of the farm’s wild cats for her. Under her guidance he started to read, and devoured republican texts. He wondered occasionally if she were not his gaoler, Becky with her dark hair pulled tight from her brow and her pale skin, graver now that the shadow of death had brushed her and was never far from her thoughts. He learned to smile because she said she liked it.

  She slept late and rested in the afternoon while he tidied up around the smallholding with its couple of outbuildings. The house itself was small and damp, and ingrained with decades of poverty. He did his best to make it habitable.

  Her slow recovery kept them from the outside world. In three months he had not been to the nearest town, even learned its name. The farm’s isolation was complete. There were no other buildings or road in sight. That they never saw anyone did not seem strange.

  Only the occasional army helicopter flying low overhead broke the silence. Once in the distance he saw an army patrol making its careless way across fields, lulled into false security by the bewitched, uninhabited remoteness of the landscape. Sometimes as he moved around he had the feeling he was being watched. Once or twice he walked down the narrow lanes as it grew dark, taking in the lie of the land and noting where there was a telephone box. He thought of calling one of Davenport’s numbers but never did.

  From time to time he found her weeping uncontrollably and asked what the matter was but she only shook her head and buried her face in her hands. These episodes puzzled him and he wondered how this sombre woman connected with the young student he had first met in laughing, crowded bars. Only in sex did she lose her self-consciousness, and then not often. Sometimes when he looked at her and saw the slashed belly or slit throat of those he had killed he wondered if his time of slaughter was over. These zero days, in which he did no wrong, were what he supposed adult life was about.

  One day a man came to see Becky and afterwards she said she was taking a job in the local library.

  ‘Is this what you want?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s what I want,’ she replied simply.

  He was surprised by his question. He had never thought of the future before and he was uncertain how to take her decision. Until then she had given no sign of feeling imprisoned by his fierce protection.

  During the long days Becky was away he experienced a gnawing ache he could not identify until he realized it was to do with missing her. She had been going to the library for several weeks when the next-door farmer, a man with a round, guileless face and shock of white hair, approached him saying that he needed a labourer. Candlestick nodded slowly at the offer, wanting to believe that the rest of their life would be like this, with her at the library while he worked in the fields.

  She told him she loved him and he said he did too, not sure if he was saying it because she wanted him to. He saw himself as a young boy standing before a wood at dusk, pines blackening in the gathering darkness, knowing that if he went in he would be lost. Words left him feeling like that. Gestures he could imitate, simple acts, doing something and giving it to Becky, even holding her. Words he mistrusted. He still muddled the letters, and remembered the sharp edge of a ruler on the back of his hand.

  Becky phoned her father and asked him to come over. He was a bluff and congenial man and when Becky – for she did the talking – solemnly said that she wished to marry he looked bemused.

  ‘You don’t look very happy about it,’ he said.

  ‘It’s what we want,’ she replied simply.

  ‘There’s many’ll disapprove, marrying a Brit. And you, son, what have you to offer?’

  She interrupted. ‘We’re happy here, doing what we’re doing.’

  ‘I said you don’t look it.’

  ‘I’m happy just to be alive,’ she said earnestly.

  They had a sad wedding to which no one came because there was no one to invite except her parents and a few relatives. It took place in a small town church and afterwards there was an awkward meal in a room over a bar. Becky’s father made the best man’s speech to which Candlestick replied briefly, formally thanking everyone and saying that he was a very lucky man. He could see their disappointment. He and Becky danced the first dance, accompanied by a fiddler, moving awkwardly at first, then with growing ease, until the room was spinning and he saw only the two of them and no one else.

  Their honeymoon was several days in Killeen on Lough Erne. It was the first time he had left the farm, except for going to the town for his religious instruction before the wedding and for the ceremony itself. They ate formal meals in the dining room of the guest house where they were the only ones staying, and during the days they walked. He wondered what her silences hid. He pointed out birds, which he could name, and once she froze when an army patrol passed, the only intrusion from the outside world in their time there.

  On their last day they bought supplies from a grocer and walked to a pine wood. By a black lake he built a fire from twigs, and cooked sausages and afterwards they lay back and looked at the tops of the pines swaying in the wind and he wondered if this was what other people thought of as happiness.

  On their return to the farm they continued to live simply in a house of silence and small conversations that seemed to satisfy their needs. At night she sometimes held him fiercely and let out a thin cry at the end that left him wondering if he was not hurting her. When she was asleep he held her tight, wanting to leave his impression on her, like a stamp.

  ‘Are you happy here?’ he’d once asked, curious because he sought her guidance in this area.

  ‘Yes, I’m happy.’

  When she announced she was going away for a bit he did not know what to think. He thought he had offended her.

  ‘It’s Mother. She’s not well.’

  While she was gone they came, early one evening. He heard the car grinding its way up the track to the farm and slipped from the house into the barn.

  After the flatness of the last months he was slow and out of practice, his mouth dry with anxiety. When the car drew up he heard doors slamming and men moving into the house, calling his name.

  He edged round the corner of the barn and walked stealthily, heel to toe, until he could see through the kitchen window. There was Breen and another man waiting at the table, looking relaxed.

  Neither of them noticed him enter the room until he was standing there like an apparition.

  ‘Where the fuck did you come from?’ said Breen.

  ‘Call first, otherwise you won’t know what welcome to expect.’

  Breen had lost weight in the intervening months and his hair was greyer.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he finally said. ‘I hear you got married.’

  It had never crossed his mind that he would see Breen again, just as it had never really occurred to him to telephone any of Davenport’s numbers. Since the mock execution he had been in limbo. Only Breen’s arrival showed him for what he was: a man in hiding.

  ‘There’s a job to do. You’ll be back before daybreak,’ said Breen, standing up.

  They drove to the city and he was taken to a safe house for briefing. There on a child’s blackboard the interior of a bar had been drawn in yellow chalk. Candlestick was careful to show no surprise. He recognized the bar from his own meetings with Captain Bunty.

  Breen told him the plan. He would be dropped outside the bar and the escape route was through a back exit to where a car would be waiting.

  Candlestick looked again at the blackboard. The bar area was in the centre of the room, with seats all around and the back exit to the right.

  ‘What if he’s sitting on the left? I’ll have to go all the way round the bar to get out.’

  ‘He won’t be,’ said Breen. ‘He’ll be at the back on the right, by the door you’re leaving by.’

  ‘How long is the run-back?’

  ‘Five minutes to the wash house.’

  The wash house was where his clothes would be taken and burned and he would hand over his gun a
nd remove any forensic traces.

  The photograph of the man he was to shoot came as no surprise. He had already guessed as much and was careful to keep his face a mask, aware of Breen studying his reaction.

  He was given a pair of workman’s brown overalls and a Browning automatic. He said he would have preferred a revolver.

  ‘Next time I’ll get you a six shooter.’

  They dropped him off at the corner just before closing time. He watched the car disappear. The streets were damp with the finest of drizzles and the night was sharp after a mild day, with a wind blowing off the sea. He found himself hanging around instead of going in, wondering if he had lost his nerve. It was the lack of rehearsal he didn’t like. What if the back door was locked? It felt too much like a set-up. He told himself to walk in and have done with it.

  Bunty was half rising out of his seat, with a silly look of recognition on his face, when the first bullet hit him in the chest, punching him backwards. A neat crimson stain blotted his shirtfront as he slid sideways on the banquette, his unfinished lager still in his hand. He looked like he was trying not to spill it as he fell, a touch that struck Candlestick as absurd as the once-bitten sandwich lying on the table. Bunty crumpled on to the swirled carpet, beer spilling down him, mixing with blood. His head bent awkwardly against the banquette and he made little hep-hep noises as the blood bubbled from his mouth. Candlestick leaned forward and stuck the gun behind Bunty’s ear, twisted it sideways and fired. The plump body jerked as if tugged by wires. He fired again, straight into the ear: that’d put him to sleep even if the others hadn’t.

  He smelled the panic rising as people realized what was happening, not all at once because the jukebox was too loud. It was an old Brenda Lee record. ‘I’m Sorry.’ Wrong song, he thought. The shocked silence worked its way out from the killing point to the edge of the room until there was only the noise of the music, but by then he was gone. So lonely baby.

  His heart was thumping, not because of the shooting. It was Bunty’s companion who’d almost stopped him in his tracks, getting up to go, as cool as you like, the moment she saw him, brushing past, leaving a trace of her perfume in the air. He caught a glimpse of the same red skirt she had worn last time. For a fraction of a second their eyes met, hers dead cool. Did she smile?

  Maggie was gone by the time he had finished with Bunty, gone the way he came in, he presumed. He thought of running after her until he saw there was no way through the crowd, gun or no gun.

  Within twenty minutes he was washed and changed and on his way back home.

  That night he spent a long time sitting in the field overlooking the farm, growing gradually colder, thinking about the wrong woman.

  In the New Year Breen used him more. There was a haphazard feel to the shootings that he learned to accept. They were done with little preparation and involved himself and Breen roaming the city by car, stopping off at various bars where Breen would pause long enough to drink a glass of Guinness and enquire after the man he wanted, while Candlestick waited in the car.

  He shot a drunken man pointed out to him outside a pub in the Markets, sending him staggering back into a doorway down which he slowly collapsed, arms aloft, caught between surrender and surprise.

  He shot others in the following weeks, on the same hasty basis. Candlestick undertook these assassinations without the slightest curiosity. He felt immune. He was the trigger, nothing more. The deaths were of no consequence to him. But as the killings mounted – sometimes as many as three a month – he grew puzzled. The Markets, Ardoyne, the Falls, Whiterock and Ballymurphy. Always Catholic areas. Which made no sense as Breen was IRA. Why was Breen using him to shoot Catholics? He didn’t like being kept in the dark. The dark room of his childhood, the varying screams of his mother next door – pain and pleasure. He wanted control.

  33

  MOLLY Connors turned out to be a tall, handsome woman who lived on a small farm whose neatness was in pointed contrast to the desolation of Breen’s. The farm had a paddock where a couple of horses strolled, and a tranquil view made more peaceful by the late-afternoon sun that bathed everything in a golden light.

  ‘I baked some soda bread in your honour,’ she said on coming out to meet them.

  Molly listened to Cross’s explanation for their delay. Her mocking manner suggested she was enjoying some private joke, probably at his expense. She looked in her mid-thirties, which would make her some fifteen years younger than Breen. She was far more striking than her sister, to judge by the photograph of Bernadette, less anaemic and darker, with a hint of recklessness.

  It was clear from her air of sturdy independence that she lived alone and supported herself. Her hands were rough from work. She looked altogether strong and without vanity.

  ‘Do you manage all this by yourself?’ asked Cross.

  ‘Pretty much. Do you know anything about farming?’ she asked, again with the hint of mockery.

  ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘This is small enough to manage, just. I have a man come in. But it’s the stud that is my real passion.’

  She took them into a kitchen with a range and a table large enough to seat a dozen and only four chairs to go with it. Like Breen, Molly obviously got by with a minimum, except with her it looked more like choice than neglect.

  ‘Well,’ she said, after pouring tea. ‘What is it you want to know? Is it Bernadette? They’ve not found the men who did it?’

  There was no expectation in her voice or disappointment when Cross said they had not.

  ‘I’ve never expected a solution. From the moment I heard I knew there would never be an answer.’

  ‘It’s Francis Breen we want to talk about.’

  Molly stared at the table. ‘Is Francis dead too?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Just a feeling.’

  There was no curiosity about his fate, which struck Cross as odd. ‘Breen was murdered,’ he said.

  Molly considered this, again showing no surprise.

  ‘By the same people that killed Bernadette,’ she said.

  It was a statement not a question. Cross asked what had happened to Breen after her sister’s death.

  ‘I never saw him or spoke to him again. He didn’t even come to the funeral. His own wife and children.’

  ‘Because he was scared?’

  ‘I’d say.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who killed Bernadette?’

  Molly shrugged. Cross looked at Westerby, a sign for her to take over.

  ‘You were with Francis Breen the morning your sister died,’ she said.

  Molly looked up with what seemed like relief.

  ‘I was with Francis the morning Bernadette died, yes. In bed with him, is the answer to your next question.’

  ‘Do you know what happened to him after that?’

  ‘No. Nor did I try to find out. Whatever feelings I might have had for Francis – and they were mixed at best – died with Bernadette.’

  Molly showed no reluctance to answer their questions. She had waited a long time to make her statement. Cross admired her self-possession and control. She had formidable powers of concentration and would not speak until she had each word arranged.

  She told them how she was the sister that had got the education and gone to Queen’s and become politicized, unlike Bernadette, who did nursing. The sisters had often argued about Molly’s politics. Bernadette dismissed her going on marches and making noises about civil rights as an affectation of higher education.

  ‘Bernadette was right in a way. But it all changed, for me, on the fourteenth of August 1969. I was in Catholic West Belfast when the Shankill gangs moved in and burned out more than two hundred Catholic families from their homes. I’ve never seen such chaos or carnage. The RUC took Browning machine guns into the Falls Road. Browning machine guns in an area like that! They shot at anything that moved. Those things fired ten high-velocity bullets a second and had a range of over two miles. They killed a sleeping nine-year-old b
oy, and a British soldier home on leave was shot dead on a balcony in the Divis Flats while he watched the rioting. And then they sent the army in, kids in camouflage who couldn’t tell the two sides apart. Well, I met Francis Breen on the afternoon of the fifteenth. He was in the thick of it. I know they said that IRA stood for I Ran Away, but not Francis. We became lovers that night.’

  She paused, far away, lost in her memories, before dismissing them with a sardonic smile.

  ‘I was very young and it was all very wild and romantic, I dare say, running around with revolutionaries and manning the barricades. Anyway, it all seemed a lot more real than studying. You know, it was our turn, after Paris ’68. Mao, Che, Cuba. All the slogans, you probably remember.’

  ‘From what we’ve been able to discover, Francis Breen was a man with several sides to him,’ said Westerby.

  ‘And several women. I take it you’re talking about the rackets?’

  Cross nodded.

  ‘Business enterprises, he called them. Raising funds was always a problem for the organization and in the beginning I think it was a real concern for Francis. I even helped him organize a student subscription and university discos. All for the cause, I thought. Francis was a hero to me. Don’t forget my first sight of him was at the barricades helping the wounded. And Francis was silver tongued and larger than life, unlike most of the Provos. He dismissed the lot of them as small-minded reactionaries, and it was difficult not to agree. The Officials were far more progressive, enough for the Provos to accuse them of being riddled with Communist agents. Francis laughed at that too and said that as good Catholics the Provvies had been brainwashed into thinking of Lenin as the devil incarnate.’

  ‘What made you change your mind about him?’

  ‘A woman’s intuition,’ she said sardonically. ‘Francis’ wallet got fatter, his clothes better and his passion for political debate got less. Once when he was in the bath I went through his pockets and found a huge wad of money and that’s when I realized.’