In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4)

by Cindy Brandner

  “All right. I suspect ye have more reason than that to say this one is different. Even in the executions hate is always involved, which is, as ye pointed out, only the darker side of love’s coin.”

  “It’s only that her body didn’t fall that way. You know most of the scenes when someone is dumped in a spot, it means just that—dumped—like their body was refuse. But she’s been placed carefully, like she’s sleeping.”

  “Aye, an’ so?” He was always one to get to the point, was Gerard.

  “Who would do that, who would place a body just so? Only someone filled with remorse, so that someone cared for her a great deal. My guess is a lover.”

  “She’s naught but a baby!” Gerard said indignantly.

  Pamela shook her head. “You say that because you’re a decent man who looks at her and sees a child, but there are men who don’t view a young girl that way.”

  Gerard gave her a shrewd glance. “Aye, I know that well enough, an’ I suppose ye attracted a few men like that yourself at the same age.”

  “More than a few,” she said. “A young girl can easily be dazzled by the attentions of an older man. Then again it could be a boy who did this, but somehow it doesn’t quite feel that way.”

  Gerard gave her on odd look. “Ye’re gettin’ all that from how she’s lyin’?”

  “Yes, aren’t you?”

  He looked back at the girl and tilted his head, taking in the scene with narrowed eyes.

  “Aye, I see what ye’re sayin’. Hopefully we actually find out one day if ye’re right.”

  She sighed, understanding exactly what he meant. In their line of work they rarely knew the end of the cases they worked on, in the main because the police didn’t know either and the cases didn’t end up at a trial or they ended without any sort of closure or knowledge of events at all.

  She looked around. Everyone was busy at their appointed tasks. Even here, though everyone was polite and professional for the most part, there was a divide. She and Gerard were often the only two Catholics working these scenes. There was a formal restraint even now, after a few years of working with these men. She knew they were good people for the most part, trying to do a difficult job in a more than difficult country. But there were also the ones like Constable Blackwood who took out his hatred on the closest Catholic standing. Now and again, she would catch one of them looking at her and then looking just as swiftly away. Rarely did they smile though, as if even so small a thing could be seen as a betrayal. Which, she knew, it could in either community.

  She packed up her equipment and stood, her shoulders tight from holding the camera so carefully for the last half hour. She sighed and closed her eyes for a moment. Oddly, there was no smell of decomposition. It couldn’t have been very long since the body was placed here in its bower of bluebells.

  Gerard was right, it was the young ones that were the hardest. It was the thought of a light so new, eclipsed before it could even begin to truly shine. It was all the lost promise and blighted hopes of the parents, and the ripples of pain and loss that spread out from there, moving out to the edges of the lives of those left behind.

  She looked back. There were rain clouds rolling in, the color of old silver, and the breeze had sharpened just the slightest bit, carrying the scent of water with it. The fields spread green and verdant out around her, bounded by blackthorn hedges and the sweet scent of newly sprouted hay. And in a ditch lay a young girl, surrounded by falls of sky-color.

  Chapter Twelve

  Tomas Egan, Esquire

  TOMAS EGAN, ESQ. had not been terribly keen to take on a young untried solicitor so that he might complete his training under supervision. Tomas Egan, Esq. in point of fact, had told Patrick Riordan sans Esquire to ‘Feck off yerself an’ the horse ye rode in on, boy.’ Patrick Riordan, a man of no small stubbornness himself, merely waited out the old buzzard, which was how he thought of this fearsome man of law. This man who had once had three separate test cases against the British Government pending in front of the European Commission on Human Rights. This man who, it was said, told the British Prime Minister that he could go shag himself seven ways from Sunday when he proposed sending yet more troops into Tomas’ embattled hometown. He was possessed of a roaring intellect, a gift of oratory and a fierce sense of justice. He might have been, some said, anything he had chosen to be—council to kings and prime ministers, a judge for the Privy Council, or even the leader of the country entire. He had one love beyond that of justice, though, and that was whiskey. Ultimately whiskey won, and the once fiery young lawyer found himself in a seedy office with flies on the windowsills, taking on cases that no one else would touch.

  There had been other firms to choose from, but Patrick had decided himself weeks before, it was Tomas Egan or bust. And so he merely stood his ground (partly because there was no chair on which to sit) in the rundown office, where piles of papers covered every conceivable surface, and dust lay thick as velvet over most of them. And there he stayed, all six foot two of him, stubborn to his final inch. He was a Riordan, and Riordans stood their ground, particularly with crusty old solicitors, even if said old buzzard had once been lauded as a judicial genius.

  “Ye need the help, I’d say,” Pat said, in response to a needling query on what the feck he thought he was doing barging into a man’s office, unannounced. Pat knew that this was not a man who needed flattery or finessing, he would recognize it for what it was. Blunt honesty seemed his only course. “Ye don’t even have a secretary.”

  “Don’t need one,” the man said, “not enough for her to do here, not many calls to field an’ no dictation to take. An’ I’ve certainly no need for some wet-nosed pup who imagines himself a lawyer.”

  “Well, that’s the point, I’m not a lawyer yet. I need yer help with that.”

  “And why is it you think I should be interested in helping you?”

  “Because I asked ye to. I’ve not got anything else in my favor, only that I need to do my training under someone an’ ye’re my first choice.”

  The man leaned across his desk, blue eyes suddenly sharp. “How desperate are you, son, that an old shambling alcoholic is yer first choice?”

  “Ye’re the best at what ye do, an’ I would learn from the best. It’s that simple. I could have gone elsewhere, but I came here first. I’ve passed my rights of audience an’ I’m bringin’ a case with me that I think ye might find interestin’.”

  There was a spark of curiosity in the old man’s face, though it was swiftly veiled.

  “Ye’ve got a case? Well, why the feck would ye need me then?”

  Pat took a breath, appealed to his own particular saint and answered the man politely.

  “Because clearly I can’t try it, but you can.”

  The old man laughed, and laughed, until Pat, clearing a space on a stool he’d spotted under a pile of files three feet deep, sat down to wait him out. Patrick, unlike most of the men in his ancestry, had the patience of a saint, or as his father used to say, the stubborn will of an obdurate bulldog.

  “Let me guess, it’s one of those do-gooder, entirely suicidal cases that suck a man down into a tribal quagmire from which he’s not likely to ever emerge.”

  Pat merely maintained a dignified silence, having nothing with which to refute the man’s last statement. It was, in many ways, just as Tomas had described it. It was also one of the worst miscarriages of justice he had ever seen.

  “Ah, I see I’m right. Such a case will get ye killed, an’ bein’ that ye’re young an’ hale I don’t see why ye’re intent on stickin’ yer neck into that particular noose.”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do, someone has to defend those who cannot defend themselves.”

  “I know who ye are, boy, or leastwise I know who yer family is. I don’t meddle in republican affairs.”

  “Ye used to,” Pat said mildly.

  “I used to wear short pants too an’ eat more candy than was good for me, but as ye grow older ye leave the bad
habits behind.”

  “Really?” Pat looked pointedly at the whiskey bottle that was none too well hidden behind the toppling stack of papers at the man’s left elbow.

  Tomas Egan merely leaned back at this provocation and eyed Pat more shrewdly than he had before.

  “So why me then, boy? Of all the solicitor’s offices ye might have strayed into, why this one? Tell me the truth, no buttering me up the right side an’ down the left, just the cold hard truth.”

  Pat took a deep breath and then told the truth, which he sensed was the only tactic to take with this man.

  “Because I think ye might be the only lawyer mad enough to take this case on. Also, I was tellin’ ye the truth when I said ye’re my first choice.”

  Tomas Egan, Esquire, gave him a ruminative look, narrowing his eyes until they were mere rheumy blue slits.

  “Flattery will get ye a cup of tea, boy an’ maybe five minutes of my time. That’s how long ye have to convince me that I shouldn’t just kick ye out the door.”

  Pat smiled, feeling an uprush of hope. If he had the measure of this man, he was certain he wouldn’t even need the full five minutes.

  Tomas poured them each a whiskey rather than the aforementioned tea. Pat, normally not one to imbibe before evening, was grateful for the fortification.

  “Outline the case for me, an’ then tell me yer own particulars.”

  The case wasn’t a simple one, but Tomas Egan had never specialized in simple. A young woman had been raped, beaten and strangled to death in a cemetery. It was a cemetery she cut through on her way to work each day, and she was known to spend her lunch hours there from time to time. The young man who tended the grounds of the cemetery was charged and convicted in the case, having been found with blood all over his shirt, cowering in a tool shed. He had a mental age of roughly twelve, and the reading comprehension of a child of eight.

  After ten hours of non-stop questions, during which it was alleged the police had pulled his hair, slapped his face and shouted at him for many of those hours, he had signed a confession which he could not comprehend, merely to make the interrogation stop. The confession had been written in pencil, allowing, it was also alleged, changes to be made afterward. A blood expert had testified saying the only way the young man could have gotten the blood on his shirt in the pattern it was in was if he had committed the crime. There were at least three other very viable suspects though. A cuckolded husband, a married lover, and a strange man who had been known to follow women into the cemetery and expose himself to them. None of these men had ever been so much as questioned. All this Pat outlined in broad strokes, giving just the facts and not coloring it with emotion.

  “An’ why is it that ye think they didn’t bother to look at the other men?” Tomas asked, though Pat suspected he already knew the answer.

  “Because Oggie’s—that’s the convicted lad—last name is Carrigan, an’ so I suspect they charged an’ convicted him to get their own back on his older brother.”

  Tomas would be more than familiar with Oggie’s older brother, a social justice campaigner and it was rumored a former IRA member who had been involved in the killing of two RUC officers many years back.

  Tomas sat forward, tenting his hands under his chin and narrowing his eyes at Pat. “All right, I’m imaginin’ the family wants to appeal the conviction, though they’ve been turned down already.”

  “Aye.”

  “An’ they approached you?”

  “They didn’t know I wasn’t a fully trained lawyer yet. They know they can’t look to the police to open an inquiry, so they are trying to force their hand with an appeal.”

  Tomas nodded. “All right, tell me about yerself.”

  Pat refrained from grinning, but he felt a rush of jubilation at the question. He had a foot in the door, even if only just.

  Two weeks later, his joy over convincing the old man to take him on was somewhat tamped, though he in no way regretted it. It was going to be a hard twelve months, but he would know what he was about when it was over. Tomas wasn’t going to spare him in the least, that was clear. It was, he believed, what was referred to as learning on an extremely steep curve.

  It became clear to him almost immediately that if he wanted to actually get the full worth of his pupillage, he was going to have to convince Tomas to take on a secretary. They desperately needed one so that Bob, Tomas’ clerk, could get on with the job of clerking properly. The man was good at his job, he was just spread far too thin. He brought to mind Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s much put-upon clerk in A Christmas Carol. He was a small, thin man with a smattering of red-gold hair in a fringe round his face, and a flyaway cap of it on the dome of his head. In the little bit of time he’d had to get to know him, Pat had decided he quite liked the man.

  When he suggested the notion of a secretary to Tomas, he got a grumble of what he decided to take for agreement, despite the fact that the man was knee-deep in papers and couldn’t find his wig for court at the time. Pat decided he would act in haste and repent, no doubt somewhat copiously, at leisure. He told Tomas three days later when the taste of a victory in court was still sweetening the man’s mood.

  “I’ve hired a secretary,” he said, quailing a little on the inside but holding fast on the outside, which it seemed to him was what much of working in the law required. Regardless of what hard-nosed judge he came up against in the future, he didn’t think he was likely to find any of them as intimidating as his own boss…unless it was the aforementioned secretary he had just hired. The simple truth was they needed someone to organize them and see to clients. It would take away a good bit of the burden Bob Gibney was currently staggering under, and allow the man to do what he was meant to do, which was to bring in clients, sort out court times and perform the Herculean task of trying to keep their budget out of the red.

  Miss Dervla Mundy (he had made the mistake of calling her Ms. Mundy thinking an independent woman such as she appeared to be might prefer the title—he would not make that mistake ever again) was a woman of comfortable proportions, steely grey eyes and a fearsome bun of dark hair that looked as if it had not grown as normal hair grew, but rather had been placed there upon her head at birth, like a crown bestowed for sensibility and valor in the face of a feckless world. Had Miss Mundy been presented to the Queen, she would have dealt with the meeting, Pat had no doubt, in the same manner in which she took him in hand during the interview. She would have disabused the Queen of any notion she might have of her place in society and the larger world as having any importance greater than that of a hobo begging his meals in a ditch. She was, thank God, highly qualified, but even had she not been, Pat didn’t think he would have had the wherewithal to tell her she didn’t have the job. And so Miss Dervla Mundy joined the company of Tomas Egan, Esquire, his law clerk, Bob Gibney and his pupil of law, Pat Riordan.

  Tomas gave him a dressing down about it, calling him a Fenian bastard who was going to need to learn his place if he wanted to stay in his law firm, by God. Pat said nothing until Tomas was done raging. He merely took the dressing down, as it was fully expected and then said, “Can ye deny that we need the help here?”

  Tomas fired him a look out of bloodshot blue eyes that would have shriveled a lesser man. Pat merely looked back at him; after two weeks with the man he was well used to his rages.

  “She can have a trial period of one month. I reserve the right to fire her at the end of that time.”

  Bob was hovering in the corridor, a small stack of briefs in his hand, when Pat came out of Tomas’ office. He gave Pat a nod of encouragement.

  “He’ll rage at ye, but he will allow her to stay. I think even he has the good sense to be afraid of her. Meself, I’m terrified, but I’ll not deny she’s efficient. I’ve had loads more time to actually get clerking done this week. It’s brilliant, really.” He beamed at him, and Pat thought that alone made it worth suffering Tomas’ wrath for a few more days.

  “I know I’m lucky he didn’t show me the d
oor, I didn’t see how we were goin’ to get properly organized around here, though, without some help. I don’t know how ye’ve managed as long as ye have, Bob.”

  Bob shrugged. “He still brings in money, not as much as he once did, mind ye. He’s never missed my wages, even if he’s usually late with them. I worry about him though, he squanders too much money on the dogs an’ the drink.”

  “Ye’ve been with him a long time,” Pat observed, thinking with Bob’s talents he might have worked in any number of solicitor’s offices.

  “I sense there’s a question in that simple statement,” Bob smiled. “I stay because he’s the best there is, when he remembers it leastwise. I’m fond of the old man, truth be told. Who’d look after him if I weren’t here? Well, other than the formidable Miss Mundy.” He cast a wary glance down the hall, as if they were both truant and about to be caught out by the headmistress. Which pretty much summed up how Pat felt. The woman was a wonder, though, even if the office was so clean now that they couldn’t find their tea mugs in the morning.

  Bob handed the briefs to him. “Study up, he’ll expect ye to present the cases to him so that he can take the ball an’ run with it. How are ye findin’ it here?”

  Pat grinned. “I love it.”

  Bob grinned back, his untidy hair lit red as a Roman candle in the afternoon light. “Aye, I thought ye might.”

  “Are you two school girls goin’ to work today, or merely hang about gossipin’ in the corridor?” Tomas bellowed.

  Pat tucked the briefs under his arm and realized the truth of what he had said to Bob. He did love it here. He surveyed the office around him, all surfaces of which had been divested of their burden of dust within twenty-four hours of Miss Mundy’s employment. The sun had been a rare presence this week. It was shining now though, through the well-polished windows, highlighting just how shabby the furniture and carpeting was but also giving the place a glow. There was a hum to the activity that was lovely to hear.