The Last Crossing

by Brian McGilloway

  ‘Our questions,’ Duggan said.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  ‘We’ve a few more questions,’ the unnamed man said.

  Tony had asked if he could use the bathroom, to which the three men opposite him had laughed.

  ‘What’s the situation with you and Karen?’ Mullan asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Are you an item?’

  Tony glanced again at Duggan, once again clearly the course of this information. He wondered just how much the man had been feeding back to Mullan in Derry.

  ‘No,’ Tony said, simply.

  ‘Were you one?’

  Tony scowled lightly. ‘For a while.’

  ‘How serious was it?’

  ‘That’s none of your business,’ Tony said, the turn in questioning angering him.

  The unnamed man stood up and walked in front of the desk. He leant against it, no more than four feet from where Tony sat.

  ‘How serious was it?’

  ‘That’s not relevant,’ Tony said, the man’s size tempering his earlier bravery in challenging them.

  Despite this, the man moved forward quickly, hitting Tony on the side of the head with his cupped hand, just over the ear. The blow knocked him off his chair, onto the floor.

  He looked up at the man, more stunned by the blow than anything. His ear sang, a high-pitched whistling that he tried to shake away. He reached out for the chair to steady himself, in an attempt to get to his feet. The man held out a hand which he refused, scrabbling for the seat.

  As he rose, the man cut in sharply near him and punched him this time, a quick, curt blow to his cheek bone, not hard enough to break it, but enough to leave his teeth hurting, his eye stinging as he hit the floor again. His head spun and it took him a moment to orientate himself enough to sit up.

  He looked up at the man, reluctant to rise again lest it elicited a third blow.

  ‘You can get up,’ the man said, moving away from him. ‘Don’t tell us again what’s our business and what isn’t.’

  ‘I don’t have to take this,’ he said, spitting onto the ground, the saliva thick and bloody. He prodded with his tongue, found a tooth in his upper jaw loosened a little, shifting under pressure.

  ‘That was just to put some manners into you, son,’ the man said, standing to the side of the room now. He reached down into the seats of one of the booths there and produced a length of wood tapered at one end. A baseball bat. Even in the dim light, Tony could see the glints where nails had been hammered right through the wood, their points piercing through the opposite side.

  ‘So, you and Karen,’ Mullan began. ‘What’s the situation?’

  ‘We were dating.’

  ‘Dating?

  Tony nodded, tried to stand, righted the chair on which he had been sitting and sat once more.

  ‘Dating, going for dinner? Dating, fucking? Which?’

  ‘I don’t–’ Tony began, but the man stood, the bat in his hand.

  ‘Answer the question.’

  ‘Both,’ Tony said.

  ‘Dinner and fucking?’

  He nodded, trying to suppress his blush.

  ‘So why not anymore?’

  ‘We had a fight,’ Tony said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Private stuff.’

  ‘Nothing’s private. What stuff?’

  ‘What has this got to do with the cop?’ Tony said, his voice more pleading than he’d intended.

  The air filled with the swish as the man swung at him. Tony tried to shift, jumping to his feet and moving back, tripping over the seat. In so doing, the bat connected with his calf, at first a dull thud which then gave way, as the numbness passed, to the piercing pain of the puncture wounds from the nails.

  ‘Jesus,’ he yelped, putting his hand to his leg, feeling the frayed edges of the holes in his jeans, already dampening with blood.

  ‘Tony, we’re trying to be civil here,’ Mullan said. ‘We need to find out what happened at the weekend and that means knowing what happened before that, too, with everyone involved. No one wants to hurt you, if you’ll just tell us the truth.’

  Tony tried not to cry, tried to stymie the tears that were burning in his eyes. ‘I don’t… we broke up. We’re not talking.’

  Mullan nodded in a manner that made Tony think that he’d already known this, that Tony was simply confirming something rather than offering them anything new.

  ‘I was meant to meet her at a party last Friday. It was the night I spoke to Hugh about the kid. By the time I got there, she was in the bedroom with some other fella.’

  ‘And you’ve not spoken since?’

  ‘She tried to explain but I’d no interest in listening. We’re not speaking anymore.’

  ‘Do you trust her?’ the man with the bat said, his tone changed slightly, less antagonistic.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you trust her?’ he repeated, more slowly, his voice raised, perhaps suspecting Tony’s hearing had been damaging by the blow he’d dealt him.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘In any way? Trust is trust. Do – you – trust – her?’

  ‘She didn’t tell the cop about us, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘She’s not that type.’

  ‘She’s the type to fuck someone when her boyfriend’s late to a party,’ he said, simply.

  ‘That’s not what happened,’ Tony said, beginning to get confused, unsure what the point of the discussion had been, suddenly wary that now might be just the time when he’d say something he shouldn’t, inadvertently reveal her knew more than he should about the cop, about Alice.

  ‘So what then?’

  Tony felt his eyes burn, his face blaze with shame at what they had done to him, clasping his calf in one hand, the other wiping his face. ‘I thought she was… she’s a decent person,’ he said, and realized that despite what he’d seen at the party, he believed it. ‘Whatever happened that night, she’s not the type that would have sold us out.’

  ‘Now’s the chance to get your own back on her,’ the man said. ‘You can fuck her over the same way she did you.’

  Tony thought of Karen’s face the morning after the party. She had seemed genuinely distressed at what had happened, genuine in her denial of her own complicity in the events of the evening. He thought of her, lying next to him, the touch of her, the vulnerability of her in the story of her father’s death. None of that was fake. She was, he believed, a decent person. And she didn’t deserve to suffer for what he had done.

  ‘I know she didn’t tell on us,’ Tony said. ‘I know it for a fact.’

  He waited for a moment, to see if they would push him on how he knew it, ready to confess what he had done, to protect her.

  ‘You know for a fact?’

  The man stood, the length of wood in his hand.

  Tony felt his confidence falter a little. ‘Yes,’ he managed, his tongue thick and dry in his mouth.

  ‘Funny, she said the same thing about you,’ Mullan said.

  The atmosphere in the room seemed to almost imperceptibly shift, like a held breath released.

  ‘Get yourself a drink,’ Mullan said. There’s a bottle of Jamesons on the bar over there. Take a breather. We need to talk.’

  Chapter Forty-Four

  ‘We need to talk,’ Tony said.

  Duggan had stopped, seemingly getting his bearings in the woodland, affording Tony a chance to catch up with Karen and Mullan.

  ‘What about?’ Mullan said, smiling ruefully.

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘We’re going to find Martin Kelly’s grave, as we’d agreed.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Tony snapped.

  Mullan shook his head. ‘Hugh’s hurting. That’s all.’

  ‘He’s threatening to kill one of us,’ Karen said.

  ‘Only if he discovers that the wrong person died thirty years ago. He was part of the process that identifi
ed Kelly in the first place, so he should know that that conviction was secure then and remains so now.’

  Tony waited a beat before he spoke. ‘And what if he discovers that Kelly shouldn’t have died?’

  ‘Then we have a problem,’ Mullan said. ‘Hugh’s an attack dog. That’s how he thinks. It’s like you said; he’s threatening. That’s what dogs do, they growl. It’s how they’re trained.’

  ‘I can hear you,’ Duggan said.

  ‘I assumed you could, Hugh,’ Mullan said. ‘You know it’s true. That’s what you were good at.’

  ‘While you sat back giving orders, not wanted to get your hands dirty.’

  Mullan accepted the criticism with a nod. ‘Why keep a dog and bark yourself?’

  Tony wondered at his calmness. Mullan continued moving through the woodland, stepping over tangles of brambles and weeds which covered the ground in areas where the sun was able to break the canopy, as if he already knew the location to which they were going, the end to which they were being drawn. Tony, for his part, knew different. They had killed the wrong person. That truth had yet to be revealed.

  ‘I’m no dog,’ Hugh snapped.

  ‘You’re a good man, Hugh,’ Mullan said. ‘But you’re wrong in this.’

  ‘Someone lied to us,’ Duggan said. ‘In Betty’s that morning. Someone lied.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About Martin. Everyone confesses, Doherty said. But Martin didn’t. No matter what was done to him.’

  ‘Martin was a special case,’ Mullan said. ‘He’d been lifted on and off for years by the cops for dealing. Hell, even the first time we spoke to him in Derry, after we caught him red-handed, selling, he denied it to my face. He had a skill in lying. It was useful in its way, but you couldn’t trust him. Not in the slightest.’

  ‘I trusted him,’ Duggan said. ‘He was always straight with me.’

  ‘Lie with dogs and you’ll catch fleas,’ Mullan muttered.

  ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ Duggan snapped, but Mullan walked on and did not respond.

  Karen stopped and surveyed around her, turning her head slowly from side to side, searching for something that might trigger recognition. ‘Are you sure this is the right way?’

  ‘Yes,’ Duggan said, though without his earlier confidence.

  ‘I don’t remember any of this,’ Tony said.

  ‘I wouldn’t remember it anyway,’ Karen said. ‘It was dark. We were almost delirious.’

  ‘There was a tree trunk, a stream,’ Tony said. ‘We crossed it about half way through.’

  ‘Maybe it’s rotted,’ Mullan said. ‘The stream dried up.’

  ‘The track of it will be there,’ Duggan said. ‘The memory of it.’

  ‘I think we’re off a little,’ Tony said. ‘I remember when we came in, the sun was setting already, but you could still see it burning on the horizon. My memory was that it was up to the left more, so, if we’re meant to head north, that should be across to our right a little.’

  Mullan looked at Duggan. ‘You’re the man in charge. You wanted to come here. Is he right?’

  Duggan looked around him, staring straight ahead as far as he could see, then across to the right, where a path of sorts seemed to insinuate its way through the trees.

  ‘We’ll move right a bit,’ he concluded. ‘If the path doesn’t take us anywhere, we can always come back here.’

  ‘We’ll never be back,’ Tony muttered.

  ‘What?’

  Tony shrugged. ‘The Road Not Taken? He keeps one for another day but knows he’ll never be back.’

  He glanced at Mullan, but he seemed disinterested at best.

  ‘I used to teach it,’ Tony explained. ‘How your life choices changed your later life.’ He lifted eyes a little, looked at Karen, reflected that the last time they’d walked through these woods, they’d had a possible future together lying ahead. Now, they had separate pasts behind them. The problem was, Tony couldn’t work out what choice he’d made which had resulted in that outcome, or indeed if the choice had been his at all.

  As if sensing his gaze, or sharing his thought, Karen looked up at him, raising her eyes from the undergrowth which she was scanning to ensure she didn’t trip. She smiled, a little sadly, and he wondered if it was for the graveness of the situation in which they now found themselves, or in shared recognition of the thing they had lost.

  ‘How much longer?’ Barr asked, his voice a mild shock after his long silence. The question held no tiredness, no frustration.

  ‘We’re not done yet,’ Duggan muttered.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  ‘We’re not done yet,’ Mullan said. ‘Sit down again.’

  Tony had drained a glass of Jamesons, swirling the whiskey in his mouth to help rinse away the taste of blood. He knew people used alcohol to clean wounds, so hoped that the whiskey would keep the loosened tooth clean and free from infection. His leg was another matter. The sharpness of the initial injury had passed and now his skin felt inflamed, each small wound angry.

  ‘Can I go now?’

  The question elicited a laugh from the three men.

  Tony took his seat, but the three men remained standing, Mullan and Duggan leaning against the desk, the unnamed man standing to one side, nearer to Tony, the length of wood in his hand once more.

  ‘Where were you on Saturday night?’

  ‘In my flat.’

  ‘Anyone with you?’

  Tony shook his head. ‘No one.’

  ‘You were out during the day,’ Mullan said. ‘Hugh here called with you in the afternoon and you weren’t there. Where were you?’

  ‘I was working.’

  The blow was sudden and sharp, the wooden bat being swung low, striking him across both shins. He almost toppled off the chair, more with the shock than the pain, though both were considerable. He looked at the unnamed man angrily, as if demanding to know what he’d done to deserve being hit.

  ‘You’re a teacher,’ the man explained. ‘Schools don’t open on Saturdays.’

  ‘We had an Open Day,’ Tony spat. ‘The school was open for next year’s pupils, you fucking prick!’

  The man came forward quickly, fist raised, but Tony was expecting it this time and curled himself a little in his seat, his hands up over his head and face, his stomach curved, his knees brought up, defensively. He felt a series of glancing blows on his hands and arms, waiting out the attack until he saw, through the gaps, the feet of the unnamed man retreat back to his position. He straightened himself up tentatively, wary that a second series of blows might follow if the man felt frustrated by the lack of impact of the first.

  ‘I’ll use the nailed side next time, son, you don’t watch your mouth.’

  Tony realized that the blow across his shins had been from the flat side of the baton, for while his shins sang in pain, he did not feel the individual piercings that his calf muscle still carried.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Mullan said. ‘It was Open Day. When did that finish?’

  ‘About four, I think,’ Tony said. ‘I went home afterwards.’

  ‘And what then?’

  Tony feigned ignorance. ‘What? I ate my dinner.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I watched TV, I think.’

  ‘What did you watch?’

  Tony couldn’t remember the TV schedules from the weekend, couldn’t be sure that whatever programme he suggested had either been on, or that some of them wouldn’t ask him what happened during it to test whether he’d actually seen it. He knew enough not to lead himself into a blind alley.

  ‘Actually, I went to the cinema,’ he said.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The Odeon on Renfield Street.’

  ‘What was showing?’

  ‘The Living Daylights.’

  ‘What time?’

  Tony tried desperately to remember what time the showing had been the night he and Karen had gone to see it. He knew the Odeon were still s
howing it in the smallest screen, hoped the times hadn’t changed.

  ‘It was the 8.30 showing.’

  Mullan nodded, then tapped Duggan on the arm. The man rose, wordlessly and walked across to the bar. Tony followed him with his gaze, watched as he lifted a phone and a Yellow Pages from beneath the counter. He flicked through the directory, found the number and dialed, Tony’s panic growing with each click as the dial revolved back into place.

  The room was silent, save for Tony’s breathing and the thudding of his heart which he felt sure the others must be able to hear.

  ‘Hi, I’m looking to see if you’re still showing The Living Daylights?’

  A pause. ‘You’re not,’ Duggan said, turning to glance at Tony.

  Tony felt the room spin, placed his hand on the seat of the chair, to steady himself, swallowed dryly, the taste of whiskey in his mouth now sickening him, burning his throat and chest.

  ‘Tell me, was it running last weekend? Saturday night?’

  Another pause, a held breath.

  ‘What time was the screening?’