‘But she didn’t lie,’ he stammered. ‘I was with her. I never left her side except to buy her a package of smokes. Two minutes, that’s all it was.’
‘Exactly,’ she said, smoothing the skin of his face. ‘No time to do any of what they made you say you did.’
‘Of course not. So what happened?’
‘Nothing. I’m not stupid: I know what they were trying to do, a bit of emotional blackmail from a girl who can’t hold her drink.’ She smiled then. ‘It didn’t stand up in the Four Courts, and it doesn’t stand up with me now.’
Tuesday 2nd September 2.45 pm
Frank Maguire went outside to get a breath of air; one hand in his trouser pocket, he fingered the rosary beads he carried, wandering around the back of the main building to get away from the press.
His head was full of memories: recollections of a past he’d managed to brush under the carpet. But like the odour of something that’s festered, the memories were seeping back.
He could remember his brother’s dad, though he couldn’t recall his own. He showed up one day after a Russian ship docked in Dublin, only for the entire crew to defect. That had been back in the days of the iron curtain: lots of men jumped ship. Good-looking enough to charm a single mother who drank too much, he was looking for a place to hide out, and he found it. He stayed for nine months: just about long enough to know his son was born, and then he was off. From the day she left hospital, his mother blamed the boy.
*
It was a day like any other: when Frank came home from school, his mother was asleep in the chair. Climbing concrete steps to the grim little flat, he found Patrick sitting on the floor beside the chair, where she was slumped, as usual, in alcoholic oblivion.
‘Hey, Paddy lad, how are you?’ With the smile he reserved just for his brother, Frank picked him up in his arms and hugged him.
‘Frankie, our ma’s asleep; she’s still asleep. She’s been that way for ages.’
‘She’s always asleep. But what about you, are you all right, wee feller? Have you had anything to eat?’
Paddy shook his head.
Frank looked at him, then, with a stab of pain in his chest, he looked at his mother with an intense hatred, he wondered if it wasn’t time he told someone. He’d hidden this for as long as he could remember, because for as long as he could remember he’d lived in fear of being taken into care and being separated from his brother.
Sitting Patrick down at the tiny table, he took the empty glass from between his mother’s fingers: he tipped out the ashtray and cleaned it, and still she didn’t stir. Her head lolled to one side, her hair thick with grease.
He hated her: he’d not known what hatred was until his brother was born. Before then, there had only been the two of them, and Frank could deal with that. She didn’t drink so much then, or perhaps she did, only he was younger and didn’t understand.
‘Are you hungry, Paddy?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, I am.’ His brother patted his stomach and Frank could hear it gurgling. He knew he would’ve had nothing since the cereal he’d given him at breakfast. Sometimes, if there was bread, he’d make him a jam sandwich and leave it hidden so he could munch on it until Frank got home.
But there was no bread today and very little else, and when Frank looked in the fridge he thought they’d have to go hungry. Then he spied his mother’s handbag on the worktop. She had a couple of quid in her purse: enough maybe to get a saveloy and chips from down the street. It would have to do: if she found out, she found out. They couldn’t just starve: with all she drank, she never seemed to need any food, but the boys had to eat.
An hour later, having shared a couple of battered sausages and a portion of chips, Frank took his brother home. Quietly he unlocked the door, then, finger to his lips, he led Patrick to the bedroom they shared.
Before they knew it, the door swung open and their mother stood there like some kind of witch, with her hair hanging over one shoulder. She peered at them in turn, her eyes wide, head bobbing, then, with incredible dexterity, she flicked out a hand and caught Frank across the face.
‘You little shit,’ she hissed. ‘You sneaky little shit. Thieving from your mammy, Frank; thieving from your mammy.’
‘Mam!’ Patrick yelled at her. There was such venom in his five-year-old eyes that his mother took a step back.
But she recovered herself. ‘What do you think you’re doing, boy, screaming at me like that?’
‘Let Frankie be!’ he shouted.
She lashed out again, with her fist this time, and knocked Patrick right across the bed. He came up with blood on his lip and the same murderous expression in his eyes.
Again his mother stepped back. ‘Mother of God, would you look! I swear you’ve the devil in you.’
Tuesday 2nd September 4.05pm
How long had she been gone?
How long had she been lying here under the eye of the clock? She could see now, having finally worked the blindfold from her eyes. She was out of the grave. Thirst had driven her; the water in her hole all gone, she’d summoned every ounce of strength to break the weight of the floorboards and inch her way – a painstaking wriggle – across the floor to where a puddle had formed from the rain. Lying on her side, she managed to tilt her head and bury her taped mouth in the water, then suck what she could through the hole. It was not enough; it would never be enough; but even a little moisture might keep her from slipping deeper into delirium.
She could hear the clock but she couldn’t see it: tick-tock, tick-tock from somewhere high above her.
She knew the clock mattered: she knew all about time. She knew what had happened to Mary Harrington and she knew she was dying of thirst. Her senses, her stomach; her lips were dying of thirst; her tongue, her throat; her limbs; her guts were shriveling, intestines loose like rubber bands that had been stretched once too often.
Face pressed to the floor, she tried to listen for the voices she thought she had heard before, and she felt sure Danny had been calling. He was beckoning, calling out for her to join him; he was so close now she could almost touch him.
It was tempting: her little boy, who’d got on his bike and cycled so far away. All she had to do was close her eyes and drift off to sleep, and then she would be with him.
Jess and Laura: their faces were etched suddenly in her mind. Opening her eyes once more, she could see the roof above her head; she could see gaps in the tiles and clouds; clouds massed in the sky.
Life.
A single word, distinct and separate in her head.
I am alive: my name is Eva. I’m Eva-Marie Quinn and I have two little girls. I know I have two little girls.
My husband is Moss and he is looking for me. My husband’s name is Moss; he is a policeman and he is looking for me.
Then she heard the footsteps. Slow, they seemed, like a distant kind of echo: footsteps coming from outside.
And she lay there helpless, an escapee from the grave.
Closer they came, and closer; an even, deliberate step; she knew he was coming back. After a moment’s silence, the door began to open. He stood with gloved hands hanging loose at his sides. His image was blurred, his features swimming in the haze of her confusion. But she saw his fingers flex and then that same gravelled rasp carried to her.
‘Eva, darling, what’re you doing out of bed?’
Desperately she tried to call out, but all she had was the tiny hole in the tape and she could not show him that. Crossing the floor, he took the blindfold and worked it back into place. Then he lifted her, and in a few paces she was carried the short distance it had taken an eternity to crawl.
Tuesday 2nd September 4.15 pm
O’Connell Bridge was alive with traffic, the first of the evening’s commuters scurrying for the tranquillity of the seaside or the country, maybe. In the taxi heading for the flat, Maggs tapped a fingernail against his teeth, thinking about the prayer meeting he’d called tonight in Harold’s Cross.
For two days, D
ublin had been a sea of police officers – the usual clamour with the scream of sirens and the blur of flashing lights. A couple of Fords went rattling by now, blue lights flashing. They roared around the cab on the wrong side of the road, and for the second time since he’d flagged him down, Maggs could feel the taxi driver scrutinising him.
‘Don’t I know you from the telly or something?’ the man asked him.
Maggs studied the back of his head: white-haired, a man in his sixties, a rattle in his voice from too many cigarettes.
‘You might,’ he replied matter-of-factly.
‘So who are you, then?’
Maggs chuckled softly. ‘I suppose that depends on who you talk to. If you ask my girlfriend, she’ll tell you I’m a man of God; if you ask the police, on the other hand, they’ll tell you I’m a murderer.’
The cabbie squinted at him. Then recognition flared. ‘Jesus, now I know you: you’re the feller they beat seven kinds of shite out of, aren’t you? That trial back in the spring.’
Maggs didn’t reply.
‘The Four Courts; the lass whose body they found in Mayo?’
‘Kerry.’
‘Right, right, Kerry. You’re him, aren’t you?’ He grinned then, a little awkwardly. ‘So what really happened, eh? Did you do it, did you?’
‘Of course I did,’ Maggs told him.
The driver peered at him in the mirror. Then his whiskered lips parted in a grin. ‘Suppose I asked for that, didn’t I?’
‘I suppose you did, yes.’ They were at the southern end of Lower Camden Street now, and Maggs handed him a ten-euro note. ‘Here’s just fine,’ he said.
He didn’t go straight back to the flat; instead, he took a stroll past the Portobello and along the canal towards the bronze of Patrick Kavanagh, as he’d done the other night. This was where Patrick Maguire lived. Maggs knew his flat: the last of the older homes before the squared sixties-built blocks that overlooked the lock. Patrick Maguire, whom he’d met in Kerry all those years ago; Patrick Maguire, who came to Mountjoy as a visitor; Patrick Maguire, who had testified against him.
Maggs was feeling liberated after his meeting with Quinn, although the old resentments still lingered, as far as Doyle was concerned. It made him angry, but bad blood was bad blood, and he supposed that was just how it was. He had had another moment on the TV, though, and he’d enjoyed that: his first interview since back in April. Lost in thought, it was only when he looked up as a car came by too close that he saw the water rat sitting on a towpath bench.
He recognised him immediately: Jug Uttley, the man with the big mouth he’d first come across in prison. He looked like he was taking a breather on his way to the next watering hole, and of course the canal was where drunks like him hung out in the daytime. Then it dawned on him: now he knew how Doyle had found his way to Jane’s door.
Unaware of his approach, Uttley got up from his bench. Above him, Maggs leant over the wall.
‘Jug,’ he called, ‘you ulcerated boil. Been lipping off to the guards again, have you?’
For a moment, Uttley gawped at him. He looked left and right, but the towpath was empty save for a couple of tramps further on, squatting with bottles of cider.
In one athletic spring, Maggs was over the wall and sliding down the bank. Then he was face to face with the informant and pressing him down on the bench.
‘Tell me, Jug, what were you doing bringing Sergeant Doyle to my door?’
Uttley shook his head, fear in his eyes behind the black-rimmed glasses. ‘I wasn’t bringing him. Jesus, I didn’t even know you were here.’
Maggs had him by the lapels, grime-laden and stinking. So disgusted was he that he almost let go. He could smell the old man’s rancid tongue, his breath reeking of whiskey.
‘I swear: the last I heard, you were in London,’ Uttley spluttered. ‘Saved, they said: saved by the blood of Jesus, and doing his good works.’
‘I’ll give you the blood of Jesus, you misshapen gargoyle. Spill your guts, or I swear I’ll spill them for you.’
‘I said nothing,’ Uttley wailed. ‘I told no one anything. I never knew you were here.’
Maggs gripped him tighter. ‘I’m a man of God, Jug, not a man of violence, but so help me – with you I could make an exception.
‘Jesus, will you please …’
‘Tell me.’
‘All right, all right: I heard a whisper, and so I spoke to Mr Doyle. Mother of God, I needed a couple a quid, and what harm could it do? After what he did, and everyone knowing it - I knew he’d not touch you again.’
‘How much did he pay you?’
‘Thirty euro.’
‘I said, how much?’ Maggs shook him then, viciously. ‘How much, Jug? How many pieces of silver?’
‘All right, fifty.’
‘Give it up.’
‘That was yesterday. I spent it.’
‘Give it up, or you’re going in the canal.’
‘OK, OK, but you’re a whore’s melt, so you are.’ Shaking free, Uttley fumbled in his pocket and brought out a bundle of notes. Before he could peel off a fifty, Maggs had taken the lot.
‘Jesus, man, will you give a feller a break? That’s all I got, Conor: you’ve taken all my money.’
‘So phone your pal Doyle and tell him you were mugged.’ Maggs stuffed the cash in his pocket. ‘This is payment for betraying me. Now go on and get yerself lost. You’re lucky I’m in a good mood, otherwise you’d be picking up bits of yourself all along the towpath.’
Tuesday 2nd September 4.25 pm
Stoked now by memories, Frank Maguire stepped over the pile of letters inside his brother’s front door. Recalling their last conversation, he left them where they were. And he was reminded again of childhood: the stone steps he’d had to climb above a rubbish-strewn quadrangle in a battered council block. There had been a handful of children’s swings, though they were useless with the seats torn from the chains. The older boys used the dangling links to tie up the smaller kids, and he recalled coming home one day to find three of them tying up his brother. He sent the ringleader home with a fat lip and carried Pat upstairs.
He’d kept it secret, the past: as far as the job was concerned – as far as anyone was concerned, in fact – he and his brother were a couple of local lads whose parents lived abroad. There had been nothing in it other than the desire to cover the embarrassment of a childhood that should’ve been banished to the dark days when the Irish were burning everything British but their coal.
Inside Patrick Pearse’s flat, he climbed the three stairs that led to the living room. All was quiet apart from the traffic on Charlemont Bridge. All was quiet apart from the ticking of the clock. Frank considered the hands against those of his wristwatch: a little fast. He went to adjust them but then changed his mind.
Next to the clock was the photograph, featureless save for the wasted look in her eyes. He studied her plaited hair; he studied the broken line of smoke lifting from her cigarette. He considered her throat and the hint of gold, the Sacred Heart pendant he’d last seen as he and Patrick had looked down on her open coffin.
As a kid, Paddy had been fascinated by it, and in his mind’s eye Frank could see him with their mother passed out from drink and her unrecognised son climbing into her lap. He would sit there and fiddle with that necklace as if she were holding him, as if she were mothering him – when she never did.
A maggot in her head, that’s what they said, but only Mary knows.
The words echoed in Frank’s skull and, sitting down at the table, he looked out over the trees and the parked cars to the canal. He could hear the clock: tick-tock, tick-tock, the mouse and the clock, the clock’s going to stop.
Eyes closed, he could hear his brother crying.
*
Crossing the quadrangle, he heard the shrieking sobs. He’d spent his life listening out for his brother, and he recognised the voice immediately. Almost eighteen, Frank was desperate to join the police, and he’d been trying to think of a w
ay of telling his mother. Paddy was eleven, and Frank going to Templemore would mean him being left alone with her. He’d talked about it with him; tried to explain that Pat was older now and it would be all right; but the boy had fallen to pieces.
Breaking into a run, Frank was across the grass and into the stinking concrete stairwell that climbed to the floors above. On the landing, he ran to the door – which was locked, as usual. With one hand he was thumping, and with the other he was fitting the key.
He burst into the tiny hall and, throwing open the living room door, he saw Paddy squatting on his heels looking up at their mother, who was slumped in the chair with her arms rigid and her head thrown back.
*
A massive stroke, or so the doctor told them: brought on by years of depression and years of the drink. Even if he’d been at home, there was nothing Frank could have done. She was dead, and with her gone there was nothing to stop him joining the guards. God forgive him: six weeks later, Patrick was at Islandbridge and he was training at Templemore.
Tuesday 2nd September 4.45 pm
Quinn phoned the Kerry guards and asked them to take Jimmy the Poker to the station in Terenure in the south of the city. It was an old-fashioned four-storey brick building with a slate roof. The local DI was a friend, and he said he’d make sure that Jimmy was nice and comfortable.
The guards came on up to the square afterwards, and Murphy took charge of the camera. Quinn and Doyle took the box of Polaroids and sat down to flick through them.
They were mostly pictures taken when Jimmy had been out hunting: deer he’d shot, and birds; lots of rabbits. There were others, though: a few of his poor old dad asleep in the chair, and a couple of him shuffling around the ratty kitchen, sprinkling holy water. There was another when he was scampering up the stairs with his pyjamas all but falling off him. ‘Sick fucker, isn’t he?’ Doyle commented.
The Gathering of Souls Page 18
