In These Dark Places

by Stephen Duffy

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Stephen Duffy lives in Dublin with his wife, Siobhán and their daughter, Leah. When away from his writing desk he enjoys astronomy, filmmaking, hiking and playing the banjo. In These Dark Places is his fourth novel, following his hilarious trilogy charting the life and times of Dublin Butcher, Tommy Costelloe, with which he enjoyed immense success on Kindle.

  www.stephenduffyauthor.com

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Tommy Costelloe Trilogy:

  Steaks and Stout

  Boned and Rolled

  Done and Dusted

  Holy Ground – An Anthology

  in these dark places

  STEPHEN DUFFY

  ISBN-13: 978-1979175630

  ISBN-10: 1979175632

  In These Dark Places

  Copyright © Stephen Duffy 2017

  The right of Stephen Duffy to be identified as the author has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For my mother, Maura.

  For life, love, lessons and laughter.

  1

  May 1974. The country was still reeling from the horror of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. ABBA were at the top of the charts with ‘Waterloo’, fresh from their success at the Eurovision. Bellbottom jeans were all the rage, as were steamer coats and raglan sleeved t-shirts, platform shoes and mullet haircuts. I was twenty years old and happy with my lot in life. I was in love. I had a great job with great pay and the future had never looked better for me. I’d had the hubris to make plans for that future, fate on the other hand, had different things in mind.

  1974. “Annus Horribilis”, as herself across the water would so eloquently put it some years later. In the summer of what had promised to be a glorious year, long before the scourge which riddles me now had taken a hold, it happened.

  Her name was Ellie. I loved her as much as any man could ever love a woman. She was my all, she was my only. Our love was born out of violence, it was stained by it, marred by it. Eventually, it would die in violence. We were doomed from the start.

  They say I did a terrible thing. Even now, all these long years later, there’s some in that town who say it still. I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.

  2

  The Fola burst her banks just before midnight on the second of January 1976. It washed away everything before it. Homes, cars, people. Her destruction was indiscriminate. The old timers, smoking their stinking hand-rolled cigarettes as they sat at the bar in Ryan’s years later, said that it was the worst flood in living memory. The likes of it had not been seen before, not by their fathers or even their grandfathers.

  Eleven people died the night the river broke. Eleven. It should have been twelve, very easily it could have been twelve. The Conways down on the Burragh Road, they were the first. A young family. Thomas Conway. I had known him at school. He was a few years ahead of me, but I had known him just the same. He was a nice fella, for the most part. His wife, Susan. She was originally from the north side and had ideas above her station, well, that’s what some would say. Apart from that, she wasn’t the worst in the world.

  The river took their three children too. Babies really, not one of them older than five. Their names? I’m ashamed to say that I can’t remember them, or that I never cared to learn. Either way, their names elude me now. Yeah, the poor Conways were the first to be taken that night.

  The Burragh Road runs through the old quarry, which has been gone since time forgot. It sits below the level of the river. That poor family never stood a chance, not after so much rain. The Burragh Road was the first to be hit by the water, and the worst too. The Fola showed no mercy as she poured over her banks and spilled down onto them without warning. Despite the near ceaseless rain which had fallen for over a week, that the river might flood was never a concern. There were defences in place, you know, levies and such. They had never failed before, not catastrophically anyway. Sure, over the years there had been a few gardens down on the banks which got a good soaking but it was no more than seep-water through the levy and not overspill. What was there to worry about in a few saturated flowerbeds and a soggy carpet or two? So life went on as normal that week, with the inconvenience of the rain and not the threat of flooding foremost in people’s minds. But January had an ace up its sleeve and it tossed it on the table that night.

  The storm blew in from the west at about five o’clock that evening and by seven o’clock there were reports coming in over the radio of rivers bursting, walls collapsing, trees down and livestock in peril the length and breadth of the country. By nine o’clock it had blown out to sea, hitting Britain an hour later before moving on to The Netherlands and the Baltic States. Forty-seven people were killed across Europe that night. Look it up for yourself if you don’t believe me. That storm was nothing but murder dressed up as Nature. If an inanimate thing can have intent, it was hell bent on death that night.

  They found the youngest of the Conways a week after the waters went down. A little girl, if my memory serves me well, no more than two years old. Her broken body was wedged beneath an upturned car, the poor little thing. Her father was found a couple of days later, tangled in the branches of a sycamore, twelve feet above the ground and some five miles from his home. Susan and the two boys were never found. They were taken to sea by the torrent.

  Yeah, the night the Fola burst her banks, that storm, it changed a lot in our town. For me, it was the night that it finally ended. For better or worse it ended. For almost two years I had stood trial, the night of the storm was when the verdict and sentence were finally decreed down on the Barrow Pier in the salty spume of the storm’s fury. For better or worse, it would end.

  3

  Granddad Byrne was my maternal grandfather. He had helped to raise us. My father was too wrapped up with the business to tend to his paternal duties, always. When my mother passed away, it was Granddad or, ‘Sir’, as we were told to address him, who took on the task of rearing us, my brother, sister and I. There was not much love in him. He was stern and distant, but despite that, he raised us well. As well as he could have done I suppose, given that there is no real, no proper substitute for maternal love and nurturing.

  Manners were instilled the old fashioned way, through long revered and sacred ritual, hard discipline and a rap to the side of the head with a half closed hand. Something as small as a slip in dinner table etiquette could earn you anything from a steely glare to a rap on the knuckles with the base of his pipe. A more serious indiscretion could earn you a leathering with his Botta, a strap of hardened cow hide two inches thick. That would see you not sit for a while with nothing to do but scold yourself for getting caught.

  Granddad, Patrick was his given name, had fought with the rebels during The Rising. He was only a lad of seventeen back then, when he stood side by side with the likes of Pearse, McDonagh and Connolly in the GPO. He took a bullet in the hip, a ricochet from the frenzied firing of a British soldier, as he clambered through the shelled ruins of Sackville Street trying to make good his escape as the efforts to drive the Brits fr
om the country descended into chaos around him. He was arrested and carted off to Fron Goch, there to spend a year in the company of such notables as Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith.

  His most prized possession, taken out at every possible opportunity, was a torn and cracked photograph of himself and The Long Fella, DeValera, taken in the bright March sunshine of 1916 outside a meeting house on Aston Quay. It was something to be passed around, handled with the reverence of a holy relic, and gazed upon with awe. My father would call him a hypocrite on occasion, usually with drink taken. He could never get past the fact that my Grandfather, having fought the British on the streets of Dublin in 1916, sailed beneath a Union Jack to fight the Germans at the Advance of Flanders just two short years later.

  They never saw eye to eye, those two men who shaped my childhood. How could I have expected them to, when the common denominator, my mother, was long since out of the picture having succumbed to pneumonia the winter after I was born. Their relationship would degrade further, when, in desperate times my father found solace at the bottom of a bottle, and Granddad forced his hand into signing a deal with the devil. When we were still young however, my father needed him. To watch over us and to run the household, at least until Saoirse was old enough to take the reins. Granddad knew this, a trump card to be played with a predictable regularity.

  Love was not a notion that was mentioned very often, let alone displayed in our house in the 1960’s. Yet still, I had a pleasant childhood, as good as a young lad can hope for, given that his mother was six feet under the cold earth up there in The Belford Grange Cemetery. With his quick temper and Gradgrindian approach to child rearing aside, Granddad was not the worst in the world. There were worse things, worse people out there. School would teach me that. After a time, as childish follies faded and as I grew towards manhood, my relationship with him warmed. It grew somehow, however awkward in its nature. There were stilted conversations, peppered with the odd awkward silence or two. But still, it was far more cordial, far more real than it ever had been. By the time I had reached the milestone of eighteen, we had come far enough in our relations to be comfortable with those silences. Time spent in each other’s company became something I looked forward to with a sadistic relish. We would joust with our ideals. Politics, history, religion, we clashed on all of them. Sometimes a common ground could be found, more often than not the conversation ended with a slammed door and Granddad bemoaning my heresy for having the gall to question the church. Contentious debates aside, I came to enjoy my time with him. I enjoyed listening to his stories, the tales of my mother in particular. We had some underlying issues, who doesn’t? You show me a man who claims to have a perfect relationship with everyone he knows, and I’ll show you a liar. Despite the recent upheaval in our family, putting aside the fact that Granddad had donned his Shylock mask so readily, and had played the part so well and with such gusto, it was to Granddad to whom I turned when my world fell apart in May 1974.

  You might then easily imagine my shock, that it was him, of all people, my own grandfather, who was to lead the charge against me. It was him who threw the first punch. It was Granddad who was the first to curse me, the first to disown me. It is a certain thing that I will take to my grave the look on his face that May morning. How quickly the expression of concern evaporated to be replaced with one of utter and unchecked anger. The eternal hypocrite. The man who had fought against and then for The British Empire. The man, who in one breath, went from a word of solace to one of damnation.

  I couldn’t have known it back then, but there had been whispers in his ear. From the very minute her disappearance became the talk of the town, the whispers pointed the blame at me. They pointed to the motive, and to the means. The whisperer told of the spat we’d had in The Stoop on the night she vanished, of the fist banged on the bar in anger, of the pint she’d tossed over me. For forty-eight hours the whispers rang out in my Granddad’s ears, convincing him of their veracity. The whisperer predicted the inevitable outcome, using it as an irrefutable proof of my guilt. And when the inevitable did happen, the whisperer’s job was done. The seed of doubt had been planted. It was planted firmly in the pious and God fearing mind of my Grandfather.

  My life changed on that bright Saturday morning in May, 1974. I remember it as though it were yesterday. The scent of rhododendrons hung heavy on the air, blown in on a gentle breeze. My sister, Saoirse, was out in the garden tending to the little plot she had planted with herbs. I could see her through the open window, stooping, pottering, sighing as she worked. My father was at work down in the yard. Despite the calamity of the previous two days, he thought it best to keep working. The business always came first. And now that he was essentially working for Granddad, he did his utmost to deny his father in-law the opportunity to harp on at him. And how Granddad relished in doing that, twisting the screw and rubbing the salty issue of the debt into already sore and painful wounds. My older brother, Rob, had gone with him for the day. There was a large delivery coming in and Dad needed all available hands on deck. I had offered to help, even though I had left the business a few months previous, I knew that my father needed a dig out to make sure the delivery was unloaded as soon as possible, so that the lorries didn’t cause a backlog of traffic right the way through town. Given the tumult I had gone through since two nights previous, my father had the good sense, or the compassion, I don’t know which, to leave me be.

  I stood at the foot of the stairs, my heart a warm and thumping hammer in my throat. I was going to Granddad, to talk to him, to tell him… the telephone rang. That hammer in my throat intensified. I could hear Granddad’s hoarse voice through the parlour door, thick with phlegm, its pitch rising and falling as he went through the formal pleasantries of the call. Someone official I thought, the police no doubt.

  ‘Rightio,’ I heard him say. Not so formal then. Not the police. Not yet. He replaced the receiver in the cradle, the bell on every phone in the house chiming as he did so. I pushed the door open sometime later. How long I had stood there in the hall I can’t recall. Granddad was in his chair over by the window. His pipe hung slack from the corner of his mouth, blue ribbons of smoke curling upwards into his tawny hair. His paper trussed, his eyes pinched down to squints.

  ‘Hi, Granddad,’ I said from the doorway. A short grunt was his only reply. I was in a daze. I wanted to speak to him, to lay bare my thoughts. To tell him how I was feeling… to tell him…

  ‘Have you got something to say?’ he asked. His paper was set down on the window sill, neatly folded. I hadn’t seen that. When had he done that? How long had I been standing there? I didn’t know.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Are you coming in or not? You’re barring the door with bad luck, standing there like an eejit.’ I looked past him, out the window. There was a police car pulling up outside our front gate. They had found her. Granddad followed my gaze and when he saw the two policemen striding up our path he didn’t seem phased at all, it were as though he had been expecting them. I couldn’t help but wonder, had that phone call been a warning?

  ‘Well, what’s this now?’ he asked and then turning to me. ‘I think you’d better steel yourself for this.’ He followed me down the hallway and as I opened the front door, he placed his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘It’ll be alright, lad. Whatever they have come to tell you, you need to be strong now, okay? And remember, we reap what we sow…’

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  He didn’t reply. I opened the door and the world cracked wide open.

  4

  It was the twenty-fourth of May, 1974. The sky was a bolt bright powder blue, the scent of the rhododendrons coming to me again, and my grandfather’s punches falling hard down on my head. His hoarse cursing was the soundtrack to that otherwise silent movie, and the policemen, blurred flashes of navy blue as they tried to pull me free from his assault. I stumbled away and fell to my knees on the grass after just a few steps. He came at me once more, punch after punch. I cowered on the lawn,
my hands raised to my head. For an old man there was still a sting in the tail, so I cowered. What else was there to do, hit him back? He was seventy-five. No, I couldn’t fight back. With or without intent I would have probably killed him, making a bad situation even worse. So I lay there, curled up on the ground as my grandfather pummelled my head with his fists, and the cops danced in a blurry haze around us.

  Saoirse stopped him. She pulled him away and dragged him to the porch but she wasn’t strong enough to hold him. He tore away from her and set on me again as lithe and as strong as a featherweight in his prime, ready and willing to inflict as much damage as he could.

  ‘Shame on the family! Shame on this house!’ he screamed. ‘Though shalt not kill!’ he roared as he beat me. He was kicking me now, too. I tried to crawl away. He stamped a heavy hobnailed boot down onto the back of my right hand and a furious pain exploded there, sending flashes of white through my brain. The whisperer had done his job well.

  Saoirse pulled him away once more and held him fast as I got to my feet. There was blood streaming from my nose and from the cut beneath my eye, gouged open by his signet ring. Drips of crimson on our garden path and my grandfather’s screams ripping the air asunder. One of the policemen, Tom Curran, shepherded him into the house while the other took me out onto the street. He gave my wounds a cursory appraisal.

  ‘Nothing more than a couple of scratches, sunshine,’ he said when he was done. I was sitting sideways in the back of the patrol car, my feet planted firmly on the street, my head between my knees to help fight the dizziness.