by Chris Petit
‘Tell me,’ he repeated.
‘Do you really want to know?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘When you were a little boy—’
She felt the gun dug hard into her pubic bone. ‘Tell only me,’ he said.
She leaned forward until his head was inside the open tent of her shirt and grazed her breast. The gun stayed where it was, but the rest of him relaxed.
‘What happened,’ she whispered, ‘is when your mummy was bleeding’ – she sensed his body stiffen – ‘your daddy’ – a strange clicking noise came from the back of his throat – ‘your daddy used to come to you, didn’t he? When Mummy was bleeding.’
She heard the start of a choking sound and felt what she thought were tears on her skin. Still the gun did not budge. She took a deep breath and said, ‘And Mummy let him, didn’t she? When you were seven.’
He was nodding and shaking his head at the same time, sniffing at her, moving down until his head was burrowing between her legs. She had to suppress a quiver of revulsion. Then he suddenly broke away and stared up at her, puzzled.
‘You’re not bleeding,’ he said.
The gun dropped for just long enough. She shoved with all her strength, toppling him and the chair over, then threw herself to her left.
Two shots sounded in quick succession. As Westerby fell she glimpsed the panicked child running around in circles, screaming, his arms stuck out in front of him. She couldn’t tell where the shots had gone. Candlestick was scuttling on all fours trying to dodge Cross’s aim. But Cross could not get a clear shot because of the boy.
‘Matthew, no!’ she heard him shout.
The warning was too late. The screaming boy ran straight into the arms of Candlestick, who snatched the knife from the ground.
Candlestick sank back on to his knees, swaying as though in the grip of possession. He held the boy in front of him like he was a talisman. His stare was glassy, but Cross couldn’t tell if he’d been hit.
‘Ecce Agnus Dei!’ he shouted hoarsely.
The serrated edge of the knife was at Matthew’s throat ready, yet the hand that held it stayed, Cross saw. Had Westerby’s guess been right?
Candlestick’s face contorted with pain and with a despairing cry he shoved the boy aside, revealing for the first time his bloody front. He pitched forward like an animal and, baring his teeth, stared evilly at Cross. His face was greased with sweat, his breathing laboured. His eyes started to dart in all directions, like he was watching an invisible swarm.
Westerby crawled to where Matthew lay whimpering and took hold of him. She removed the hood and cradled the tremulous child in her arms.
‘Let go of him!’ Cross shouted.
She saw from his look of disgust that he regarded her as contaminated by Candlestick. But she held on, burying Matthew’s head against her to prevent him from seeing, telling him over and over that he was safe.
Cross aimed his gun at the point between Candlestick’s eyes, and, like Candlestick, found himself hesitating. Candlestick gave a harsh bark and blood flowed from his mouth. Pain clouded his features and he made a strange hepping sound. Cross took aim again, telling himself that it was no worse than putting an animal out of its misery.
Candlestick sneered. ‘Do it, cunt. Go on, you yellow cunt. Pull the fucking trigger.’
Cross couldn’t. Couldn’t in spite of the black anger he felt. He had been shaken to the core and the humiliation of impotent watching had nearly overridden his concern for Matthew’s safety.
Candlestick made the strange hep-hep sound again and his body twisted sideways in another spasm of pain. A thread of bloody saliva drooled from his mouth.
Cross decided. Candlestick should live to suffer, even if he hadn’t got much longer. Killing was what Candlestick did to others. Not killing him now was his punishment.
Candlestick tried to push himself up. He worked himself on to his knees, lost his balance and sat back heavily, his legs bent awkwardly. He stared down at himself in blank astonishment, and prodded the entry to his wound with his little finger, slipping it into the hole until he winced. His hand was still holding the knife and he seemed surprised to be reminded of it.
With a screech that summoned the last of his strength he lurched to his feet, moving with a force and speed that startled Cross. The hand that held the knife moved equally fast, reaching up and slashing once across, then back.
Cross saw the lateral tear appear in Candlestick’s throat – a jagged grin. Candlestick lifted the knife again, this time using the serrated edge to saw at his throat. The rasp of steel cutting through gristle was drowned by a harsh gurgling, like some terrible final emptying. Then the blood came. Gouts, bright splashes, spilling down his front, then jets of it as the overworked heart beat harder in response to the adrenalin flooding his system.
The knife fell from his twitching hand. Soon the whole body began to convulse like it was in electric shock. As it shuddered and jerked, the power of his gaze grew more concentrated. Cross found himself unable to tear his eyes away. The look was beady and unknowable. Cross felt himself the inheritor of that last, dark stare – he would be the bearer of its terrible secrets. Candlestick reached out to touch him and Cross, appalled at being cheated by death, threw himself at the man.
They toppled to the ground. Cross was distantly aware of hammering Candlestick with the butt of his pistol and hearing the satisfaction of bone break. He was aware too – only just – of someone grabbing him and being astonished by his own strength in shaking himself free. He returned his attention to the thrashing limbs. The collarbone close to the slit throat, he smashed that, and the wrists too, hammering like he was driving nails in. Then the nose, with its sharp sound of hard bone splintering. He could hear his own rasping breathing, mixed with the other man’s screams and then what sounded like the start of his last rattle. Cross raised the gun again to bring it down on the teeth and checked. The mouth was grinning up at him, a sardonic smile of triumph. He saw the eyes glittering and undefeated.
In his hesitation Cross saw himself for what he was – no better than the man beneath him when he had slaughtered the animals on the same killing ground.
Candlestick raised his head and spat at Cross’s face. As Cross recoiled Candlestick grabbed his ears and he found himself dragged down by a vicelike grip. The strength of the man was terrifying. Cross felt like he was being pulled over the edge of a precipice. Again he saw the shiny, concentrated air of victory, and closed his eyes tight in a useless effort to avoid his own sense of defeat.
The grip subsided. The body gave a final convulsion and when Cross next looked the eyes had gone milky. He was about to extricate himself when they came briefly alive again. He saw a distant calm in them, then Candlestick gave a long-drawn-out sigh that sounded like faraway sea.
Cross stood, like a man climbing out of the grave. He could not see Westerby or the boy. Was it she who had attacked him, trying to prevent his frenzied assault?
He looked down at Candlestick, shrunk in death. He bent down and picked up the gun and, putting it behind Candlestick’s ear, pulled the trigger. The body jumped from the impact and Cross felt the satisfying jolt of the recoil as it travelled up his arm, and savoured the sharp smell of cordite that cut through the visceral stenches of Candlestick’s last struggle.
Westerby and the boy were outside. He decided to send them to the house while he buried the body in one of the soft peat ditches. If anyone wanted to claim it later they could.
Cross looked around. It was a beautiful dawn, a good omen for the future, though in his heart he knew that the blackness of that night would always be part of him.
The boy wouldn’t let him touch him.
61
November 15 1985
CROSS watched events as though through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything looked sharp but remote. It was suddenly winter – a clear late autumn had given way to raw, overcast days. The cold he had caught on the night of Candlestick’s death ref
used to go away.
Most of the time he felt curiously untouched. He told himself that he was all right. Then with no warning, sitting at traffic lights or in a meeting, his eyes would begin to prick. When with others he had to hurriedly excuse himself before he started to weep uncontrollably.
The loose ends of his life retied themselves, not to his satisfaction. He was too distant to take much of an active part in their resolution. A half-forgotten term from his boyhood religion – sins of omission – came back to haunt him.
It was a day of damp asphalt. Watery sunlight tried to penetrate the morning fog. Cross shivered inside his coat. Doody and the rest of the scene-of-crime squad moved about their business. There was none of the usual wise-cracking within his hearing. Hargreaves pointed to the body dumped on the steep grass verge under a hedge.
‘Head job,’ he said.
Business as usual, thought Cross.
The body lay on its front, dressed in thin jeans and a denim jacket. The black hood covering the head took Cross back to the barn, and he made fists of his hands in his pockets until he blanched the memory.
The body was barefoot, a sign, along with the hood, that the killing was sectarian, the victim an informer. He supervised the removal of the hood. The entry wound was behind the right ear. After the photographer and medical examiner were done, the body was turned over. Cross stared at the lad’s face for a long time, then turned to Hargreaves and said, ‘You’d better tell Blair.’
He walked back to his car. The last time he had seen the boy was when he’d called round and given him the money to go to Dublin. Why had he come back? He remembered their strange drive together when he had talked about the state of his marriage and Vinnie had said that he was feeding false information to Special Branch. Cross examined his conscience, wondering if there wasn’t more he should have done.
It would have been the homesickness that had brought him back. Cross had seen it before with lads who had got themselves into trouble and gone away, only to discover their new lives insufficient, and had returned home dazed. With the boy’s death Cross learned a hard lesson about himself. He probably didn’t have the strength to leave either, and if he did it would only be to return.
That night on television Vinnie’s death rated a small item on the local news. He had been shot by the Provisionals, the newsreader said in her carefully neutral tones, for being a police informer. Most of the news was taken up with that day’s signing of the Anglo–Irish Agreement at Hillsborough Castle. Cross wondered briefly about all the invisible cogs, and how they ultimately fitted together, and at what point the strange submerged careers of Breen and Candlestick overlapped with the political machinations that had brought about this treaty, and how much the woman signing it knew of all that. He put the thought aside, telling himself that it was just another television news story. He had seen over the edge of the chasm and he had no wish to do so again. His responsibility was to his work and his family, clear duties that would allow the days to take care of themselves.
There had been a strange postscript to Vinnie’s death. As Cross was leaving a car had drawn up. It was Stevens the journalist looking scrubbed and fresher than when Cross had last seen him. They had spoken briefly about the shooting and as they had parted Cross suggested that they met. Stevens had shaken his head.
‘I’m still interested in what we were talking about,’ said Cross.
Stevens feigned ignorance. Cross noted the expensive suit and new brogues and wondered if he was safely in Moffat’s pocket now, passing on whatever he was told.
During the night a helicopter flew low over the house, waking Cross and Deidre. Deidre mumbled sleepily and settled again. Cross worried that it had woken the children. He got up to check. They were both asleep. Matthew stirred when Cross smoothed away the frown from his brow, and mumbled, ‘Sush-sush.’
For a long time after the barn Matthew had said nothing apart from that same strange noise: ‘Sush-sush-sush.’
Cross realized what it was later. ‘Helicopter,’ he had said to Matthew in the hospital, where he was being kept under observation. Matthew had blinked in acknowledgement. It was the beating of the helicopters that had come to take them away. Matthew hadn’t responded when Cross had kissed him goodbye except to give another ghostly ‘sush-sush’.
Westerby had telephoned from the farm and two helicopters had come. Cross had watched the disposal team hurriedly bag up Candlestick’s corpse and swing it into the second helicopter. He had meant to bury the body. But an overwhelming lassitude had prevented him and he had sat alone for a long time before walking back to the farm where the three of them had waited in huddled silence. Matthew sucked his thumb, in a state of shock. Cross and Westerby were drained of all communication. Then Moffat arrived and urged everyone on. They were there illegally and he wanted them out in five minutes. Moffat, in spite of his air of disapproval, was clearly gleeful at Candlestick’s untidy end, which was the tidiest ending for him. Cross was aware of Moffat looking at him strangely, with a mixture of fear and respect.
‘What went on in there? The body was in a hell of a state.’
‘All your dirty little secrets are safe,’ Cross had said as they got into the helicopter.
He hadn’t seen Westerby since. She’d taken immediate leave and then been away on a nine-week course. He wondered if their relationship had been permanently damaged by what had happened in the barn, or even before. With the satisfactory resolution of the Candlestick case, the matter of her charge of sexual harassment was quietly forgotten. ‘It was a conversation that did not take place,’ said Nesbitt, who overlooked the fact their affair was a disciplinary offence. On the contrary, he even hinted that he should make the most of it until Westerby’s promotion came through.
For Matthew’s sake, he and Deidre agreed to bury their differences. They were aware that this was just another holding measure. ‘We should mend the child before mending ourselves,’ she’d said, then added, ‘Though perhaps it’s only by mending ourselves that we’ll mend the child.’
He didn’t know. Perhaps some things never got solved. Or mended.
At work he wrote up the case for Moffat. All the murders had been committed by the same man, in addition to the countless killings he had undertaken as an assassin for the loyalists and the republicans, but none of this was reflected in Cross’s report. It stated that Francis Breen and the wife of Billy Eddoes had been killed by the same man, who was now dead by his own hand. He left it to Moffat to decide whether Willcox would still go down for the murders of Mary Elam and Mary Ryan. As for the others, they were filed among the statistics of unsolved sectarian murders for that year. There was no mention of conspiracy, no mention of secret work for the security forces, no mention of the INLA. He wondered briefly about Eddoes’ story about the INLA moving drugs into respectable Protestant areas. It was difficult now not to see the hidden hand at work in everything. If a British faction wanted a united Ireland and anticipated a Protestant reaction, what better way to undermine them than by peddling drugs to their children? He remembered the note he’d found among the papers of the dead journalist Warren, noting how the Nazis had flooded the Polish market with pornography prior to invasion. Perhaps the same principle was still at work.
What would have happened, Cross wondered, if the scale of Candlestick’s plan had been revealed? Would he have panicked everyone into seeing sense? Would the Brits have owned up? He doubted it. They’d been getting away with not owning up for centuries. As for the Irish, perhaps Deidre was right with her story about the Kilkenny cats. It would take a lot more than a massacre of the innocents to make them bury their differences. Like his marriage, an uneasy truce was the best that could be hoped for, with the certain knowledge that hostilities would be resumed sooner or later.
He finished his report for Moffat with the sentence: ‘WPC Westerby acted with the utmost courage and devotion to duty throughout. Without her efforts this case would not have been brought to a close.’
That part of the report was true at least. But what of their affair? he thought. Had it been turned into just another secret to be buried along with all the others?
His disgust had flared only once and predictably it was in his last meeting with Moffat, a supposed celebration of a successful conclusion. His anger was directed at the smugness of the man’s cover-up, to which he was a party. He thought of poor Mary Ryan, lying eyeless in the wasteland. Didn’t her death deserve explanation? Didn’t her parents at least have the right to know that she was murdered for a reason?
‘What if I don’t keep my mouth shut?’ he asked. His voice was quiet and reasonable.
Moffat saw he was serious and said, ‘Ah, well, yes. I wondered if it would come to this.’ He fiddled with his pen. ‘Honest coppers can come to grief. Stalker wants to get his hands on a surveillance tape that’ll prove the RUC deliberately shot up some Paddy against the rules. If he persists, then—’ Moffat shrugged.
‘Then what?’
‘He’ll find himself on some trumped-up disciplinary charge. Perhaps one of his social contacts will turn out to be not quite seemly. If it’s not in the greater interest to have him dig up the dirt, then he’ll be stopped, just as you will.’
Cross stood up to leave.
Moffat said, ‘Wait a minute.’
He produced a file from a drawer and flicked through the pages, then spoke quietly in matter-of-fact terms for a couple of minutes before telling Cross that he could go. They didn’t shake hands.
Back in his office, Cross laughed in disbelief at the immaculateness of the stitch-work. His connection to McMahon had been noted, and the fact that he had used these meetings to pass on information to the Provisional IRA. Through one of Special Branch’s informers it was known that the RUC had been penetrated at a high level and a senior officer had been turned. It took Cross a while to recognize this story as the one Vinnie had told him in the car: the Provisionals had instructed him to leak to Blair the false story of a senior informant in their ranks.
