The Last Crossing

by Brian McGilloway

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘I can’t just uproot her from her school, her friends.’

  ‘She hates school,’ Tony said. ‘And I don’t think leaving behind friends is going to be an issue for her.’

  ‘Balls!’ Hamilton spat.

  ‘Trust me,’ Tony said, trying to keep his voice low and calm, lest she was eavesdropping. ‘Alice won’t miss anyone in that school.’

  ‘She said she was happy,’ Hamilton said, as if pained both by the realisation of his daughter’s experiences in school and the knowledge that she had taken this stranger into her confidences before him.

  ‘She didn’t want to worry you, I’d guess,’ Tony said.

  Hamilton nodded. ‘They’ll know someone talked,’ he said. ‘If I clear out completely. They’ll know.’

  ‘Not if there’s no come back on any of us. That’s why I need you to not tell the police here. If you just go, without incident, they might think it was just a coincidence.’

  ‘People aren’t stupid. They’ll guess.’

  ‘I know,’ Tony said. ‘But I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to your daughter. And that includes her being left orphaned if something happened to you.’

  Hamilton nodded again, as if he’d been privately considering something while Tony spoke and had reached his decision. He looked around, as if trying to decide where he might begin, what were the essentials that he and his daughter might need in the days ahead.

  ‘Alice!’ he called.

  The rapidity of the steps from above suggested the girl knew what was coming. She appeared at the top of the stairs, already wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It was clear that she’d been listening. The ease with which she’d accepting the move made Tony wonder how many times before she’d been forced to leave her home in the middle of the night, how many other schools she’d joined and left.

  ‘We need to leave,’ her father said. ‘Pack anything important. Don’t forget Rosie.’

  Tony assumed this was a toy of some sort, a suspicion confirmed when Hamilton turned and said, ‘It’s a ragdoll. She’s too old for it, but her mother bought it for her before she passed.’

  Tony nodded, did not speak, did not tell him he had seen the man carry the doll days earlier.

  ‘I know you’ve taken a risk. For Alice,’ Hamilton said. He extended his hand, a curt, sharp gesture. ‘Thank you.’

  Tony took it and shook. In so doing, he felt a moment of reconciliation with what had happened to Danny, the first seed of acceptance. He nodded. ‘I’m sorry it came to this.’

  Hamilton shrugged resignedly. ‘I hope nothing happens to you for doing this.’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Tony said, with no hint of conviction. ‘Just keep Alice safe.’

  As her father nodded, Alice herself came running down the stairs and across to Tony. She embraced him around the waist, her face pressed tight against his side.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said.

  Tony did not trust himself to speak, merely hugging her tightly and then letting her go. ‘Maybe I’ll see you again some time, eh?’ he said finally.

  She smiled, then ran back up the stairs to pack her things.

  When he motioned to go towards the front door, Hamilton stopped him.

  ‘Go out the back and across the yards, in case anyone is watching.’

  He lay in his bed that night, waiting for the knock on his own door, expecting that when Duggan reached the house and realised Hamilton had gone, he would immediately suspect that someone had talked, someone had alerted the cop to the threat. And, based on the past few days, Tony was the only logical person that might be. He’d at least expected a knee-jerk reaction of some sort, hushed calls between them telling him what had happened, or more correctly, what had not. Instead, there had been silence. No calls, no messages, no word from anyone else.

  Had Duggan called that night, Tony was ready to confess, defiant almost in the certainty of his righteousness. By 4am he had convinced himself of the nobility of his sacrifice. By 6am, he was shuddering in the bed as he waited for the knock that did not come, his fear a palpable force, twisting his hands in the bedsheets, popping sweat on his skin despite the relative cold of the morning. He would confess, he still believed, but he feared the form Duggan’s retribution would take nevertheless.

  He’d seen the pictures; bodies lying along the back alleys of Derry, stripped naked, their hands bound behind their backs, black plastic bags tied over their heads, the skin livid with bruising, the final shot, from behind the head, designed to destroy the face so that a wake with an open coffin would be impossible.

  Or failing that, a body never returned, family members never really sure what had happened to their loved one, denied the final chapter of a burial, their story abandoned, unfinished.

  Tony wondered whether he should call Karen, tell her what had happened, what he had done, but his anger both at what he had witnessed at the party and the paucity of her excuse for it was still raw. More importantly, he knew that in so doing, he would be putting her at risk, making her an accessory to his actions. Regardless of what had happened at the party, she did not deserve to suffer because of something he had done.

  Then he began to panic. Maybe Duggan had gone ahead with setting the device and the police had been waiting for him. Maybe he’d been shot, lying in a puddle of blood in the driveway. Or worse, Tony thought, with some shame at his blatant self-interest, maybe he’d been captured, alive. Maybe he was being questioned, right now, giving up all their names and addresses, implicating them all. He sat up at the edge of the bed, scrolling through the channels on his radio alarm until he found a news report, waiting to hear of someone being arrested. But there was no such report.

  All day, he listened to news reports, bought the local papers, watched seven different TV news programmes, all the time waiting to hear something about events in Foxbar.

  But nothing was reported.

  By late evening, when there was still no news, no one had called, and apparently Duggan had not been arrested, Tony began to convince himself that perhaps Duggan had assumed the cop had got lucky, had gone somewhere coincidentally the night before the planned attack. It couldn’t be the first time that such a thing had happened. In fact, perhaps Duggan was waiting for his return, not yet realising that the man, and (more importantly for Tony) his daughter, had managed to avoid their fate.

  That being the case, he decided, his only option was to brazen it out. No one could prove that he’d had anything to do with the cop’s disappearance. He would deny everything. Yes, he’d had qualms in the days before the planned attack, but surely some of the others must have had, too.

  He couldn’t believe that Karen hadn’t once considered the morality of what they were doing, hadn’t once had second thoughts, expressed doubts. Even on the drive from Paisley, that night they’d brought the car back with the gun in the boot, she’d wondered whether they were wrong in what they were doing. Surely her scruples could only have deepened when they targeted a real person. And Kelly knew the man, had a shared history with him. Perhaps he’d harboured some secret doubts himself. Only Duggan, Tony was convinced, would not have thought twice about the ethical consequences of what they were doing.

  By the following day, he’d convinced himself that his best approach was to say nothing, admit nothing. To act as if nothing had happened. Feign both ignorance and innocence.

  That confidence was shaken a little when, the day after, he got a phone call to school, supposedly from a parent. A voice he did not recognise, though with an accent he could place as close to home, informed him that he was required to present himself at Betty’s at 10.30am to discuss recent events. That was all. The caller hung up.

  Tony felt his legs weaken, felt his bowels loosen as he replaced the receiver. It wasn’t Duggan, of that he was sure. Did that mean they’d brought someone in to investigate? Did that mean they suspected Duggan himself as well? If that was the case, there was no doubt Duggan would impli
cate him, tell them all about his change of heart when he learned about the cop’s child.

  That day he’d contemplated pretending he was sick. He’d phone the bar, leave a message for whomever, say that he’d food poisoning, say he’d come the next day. But he realised it would make no difference. They’d suspect him straight away, would come to his flat and forcibly remove him. If he was going to claim innocence, he had to look innocent.

  Shauna Laird briefly came to his mind, and with her, Macbeth: ‘to beguile the time, look like the time…’ He’d not heard about her funeral arrangements yet, and he realized, with a sudden stab of fear, that his funeral might well come before hers. Unless he denied everything. What could they do to him then?

  In fact, if the bar was busy with people about who would see him coming in, meeting this man who had called, there would be witnesses. What, indeed, could they do to him?

  But he knew what they could do, which is why, by the time he reached Betty’s that morning, having had to phone in sick to school, he’d already had to stop twice to vomit through sheer terror, his pulse drumming in his ears and his limbs humming with the constant drip feed of adrenaline running through his system.

  He paused outside Betty’s, taking a breath, wondering whether he should turn and walk away, but the door opened and Duggan stood inside, holding it ajar for him, Hades at the entrance to his kingdom.

  ‘Come in, Tony,’ he said grimly. ‘We’re through here.’

  The bar was empty, the shutters pulled.

  ‘Betty’s not well,’ Duggan explained. ‘She’s closed up for the day. A family thing.’

  Tony nodded, tried to control his shivering, tightened his jaw a little. The empty bar wasn’t a good sign.

  Duggan led him through the bar into a back room, a lounge he’d not seen before, smaller than the main area; the type of place to be used by families looking to offer soup and sandwiches after a funeral, perhaps. That thought brought him no comfort.

  Three seats sat behind a table at one end of the room, a single chair sat in the middle of the room in front of the table. The room was dimly lit, so Tony had to squint a little to see the two men sitting behind the table: he recognised one as Sean Mullan, didn’t know the second. Duggan moved forward and took the third seat.

  ‘Sit down, Tony,’ Mullan said.

  Tony shuffled slowly forward towards the seat that Mullan had indicated. Only in doing so did he hear the dull crinkle of the plastic sheeting as he stood on it. He looked down, dumbly, to see that a square of builder’s plastic, twelve feet or side each side, had been set on the floor, the chair at its centre.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he muttered, backing away, the bile rising raw in his throat once more.

  ‘Sit down!’ the unknown man said. ‘It’s OK.’

  Tony stood a moment, as if in a paralysis of fear, before Mullan spoke more gently.

  ‘It’s OK, Tony. We just want to talk. That’s all. Sit down, please.’

  His voice was so reasonable, so calm. He smiled at Tony, might have winked at him, were it not that the lights were so dim, his face so shadowed, Tony could not be certain.

  Still, he moved forward and sat as instructed, swallowed dryly, waited.

  ‘Good man,’ Mullan said. ‘Let’s get started. We’ve some questions for you, Tony. You’re not in trouble. We just want to talk. You know me and Hugh. We’re joined by a comrade who will act as an impartial adviser. Is that OK?’

  Absurdly, the situation felt more like a job interview than an interrogation, as if he were applying to work in the bar. Until the unknown man spoke.

  ‘You know why we’re here,’ he said. ‘All we need from you is the truth, son. Let’s not make this any harder than it needs to be for anyone. We already know what’s happened: you just need to tell us the truth.’

  Chapter Forty

  ‘I just want to know the truth,’ Duggan said. ‘I want to know who set Martin Kelly up.’

  The locked gate meant they’d had to walk the incline up towards the tree line, a path along which, Tony thought he remembered, they had been able to drive the last time they had been here.

  ‘No one set him up,’ Mullan said. ‘You were there; we investigated it and he was the one we identified. We identified,’ he repeated, indicating both himself and Duggan.

  ‘Here’s the thing, Sean. I don’t believe you. The more I’ve thought about it, the more convinced I am that Martin was killed so someone else could cover for what they did.’

  ‘No one else thinks that, Hugh,’ Mullan said. ‘Just you. We were all happy just letting him be forgotten.’

  ‘No, you weren’t,’ Duggan smiled. ‘You need his grave. Looking to bolster your leadership chances with an act of reconciliation, like a fucking vulture picking over his bones for your own self-interest.’

  ‘And for the good of the country,’ Mullan said curtly. ‘What’s your interest then, Hugh? What are you looking for? You’re the one shot him and now here you are, looking to dig him up again?’

  ‘I know what I did,’ Duggan spat. ‘I think about it often. He’s the only one won’t give me peace.’

  ‘You’re looking for peace?’ Mullan laughed. ‘Says the man with the gun.’

  ‘Kettles and pots, Sean,’ Duggan said. ‘The great peacemaker with his armalite behind his back.’

  ‘Those days are gone, Hugh,’ Mullan said.

  ‘But not forgotten. I want the truth of what happened.’

  ‘The truth?’ Karen snapped. ‘Whose truth? You’ve heard us these past few hours; we can’t even agree on our memories of back then, we all remember what happened so differently.’

  ‘There’s some things none of us will have forgotten,’ Duggan said, stealing a glance at Mullan. ‘No matter how many versions of the past we’ve heard since.’

  ‘Whatever you think is going to happen in here, Hugh,’ Mullan said, ‘you’re wrong.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  They moved their way into the edge of the woodland. Tony had wondered on the way across whether he might recognise anything in particular, but the truth was, it could have been any woodland anywhere in the country. Sycamore, beech and alder predominated. The air beneath the canopy was chilled and damp, rich with the tannic scent of last autumn’s leaf fall mushed from winter snows. It hadn’t rained for a week or so, yet the ground was still soft beneath their feet, the clay clinging to the grips of Tony’s boots as he made his way deeper into the speckled shadows the late spring sunshine scattered over the woodland floor.

  ‘It’s the wrong season,’ Tony said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We came here in winter,’ he explained. ‘The trees were stripped. It’s going to look different.’

  ‘We’ll be alright,’ Hugh said. ‘We headed due north for about half an hour. That’s enough to get us started.’

  They fell into natural groups: Karen and Mullan walked ahead, deep in discussion. Tony guessed she was quizzing him about how much he’d known about Duggan’s planned mission and, perhaps more importantly, what they could do about it. Tony wondered at how stoically Mullan had taken Duggan’s revelation of the gun. Perhaps a lifetime spent using them or in the company of those that did had inured him to them. Or else, he had suspected all along that this was Duggan’s plan – that the events which began, for Tony at least, with an army Land Rover blindly careening down a street just as his brother walked around the corner, could only reach their natural conclusion in this woodland, in this way.

  Rather than asking the man himself, Tony slowed his step a little, to walk alongside Barr, Duggan trailing them by some seven or eight feet.

  ‘How are you holding up?’ Tony asked, assuming the youth to be frightened by the turn of events.

  ‘All good,’ Barr said. ‘Good to have Uncle Sean here.’

  ‘This wasn’t your fault,’ Tony offered.

  Barr looked at his quizzically. ‘What wasn’t?’

  ‘All this. No one could have guessed what Duggan was planning. It�
�s got a bit out of hand.’

  ‘Hugh’s had his problems,’ Barr said. ‘Uncle Sean will take care of all this. Don’t be worrying.’

  Tony was struck by how the dynamic had shifted, with the youth now attempting to console him. And yet, strangely, he realized that he was not worried. Not because of Mullan or anything he might do to salvage the situation but because of himself.

  He thought of his empty house, the church, cavernous and echoing as he cleaned it, Ann’s grave, narrow and silent, his rituals, designed to inure him to his own loneliness. He realized, with only the faintest note of pain, that if Duggan killed the lot of them, no one would really notice he was gone. He’d just be a footnote to the story of Mullan’s death in the papers; no one would mourn his passing.

  ‘Everyone’s gone,’ he said, and surprised himself to hear the words had been spoken aloud.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Tony said, unwilling to share something so personal.

  ‘I trust my uncle,’ Barr said, continuing with his own train of thought. ‘He’s come out of worse than this unscathed.’

  ‘How long have you been working with him?’

  ‘About three years,’ Barr said. ‘He took me under his wing; an apprenticeship, I suppose.’

  ‘Do you enjoy it?’

  Barr nodded. ‘It’s important work.’

  Tony wondered at the nature of the work that he considered so important. Driving old killers around the country, listening to their war stories, or multiple versions of them? Was that important? Perhaps, it was all part of the healing process that people said the country needed to undertake before it could be whole again. But none of this felt like healing, none of it cathartic.