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

by Cindy Brandner

  Noah, his sleeves rolled up and slippers on his feet, was just putting tea on the table when she emerged from the bathroom. He appeared entirely unruffled, and was in good clothes. He had been to town from the looks of him. He couldn’t have been one of the men in the roadway in balaclava and camouflage, there was no way he could have run off and come back looking like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth a few minutes later. That didn’t mean he hadn’t ordered the massacre. She couldn’t ask, though he knew well enough that she was likely to think it.

  She realized, to her consternation, he was looking back and taking in her scrutiny of him. He knew exactly what she was thinking, she could see it in his face, though his expression never changed.

  “Drink yer tea,” he said.

  She sat and took a sip of the tea, it was good and hot, but not scalding and it was sweet with sugar. Did every bloody Irishman know to treat shock with tea and sugar? Noah, she suspected, was more used to dealing out the blows that caused shock than trying to repair the after-effects.

  He sat down across from her and drank his own tea, quiet, watching her steadily. It only felt like casual observation though, not as if he was searching her for signs of imminent hysteria.

  “I see horrible things all the time. I don’t know why this got to me so badly.”

  “I would imagine,” Noah said quietly, “it’s because ye’re seein’ yer husband every time ye go to a scene now. An’ while I know ye’ve seen some dreadful things with yer work, I don’t imagine ye’ve had men shot right in front of yer face before.”

  “I had a realization when I was out there,” she said, looking up to find his eyes on her with a calm curiousness in them. “I want to live, even though most days I feel like I will never draw a deep breath again and I still dread waking up each morning.”

  “It’s how life is,” he said, “life asserts itself even when we think it can’t possibly want to, it does. Life is ruthless that way, an’ it doesn’t take our feelings of how things should be into consideration.”

  “You would tell me, wouldn’t you—you would tell me if you ever found out he was dead?”

  He regarded her for a long moment. “It’s why ye came to me in the first place, no? Because ye know I’m not goin’ to be tender about yer feelins’. So yer answer is yes, if I knew, ye would know too.”

  “It’s comforting somehow, that you would tell me, that you wouldn’t spare my feelings.”

  “Ye’re a strange one, Pamela.”

  “I’d rather know, even if it kills me. It would be better than this. I feel like I’m in purgatory much of the time.”

  He didn’t say anything to that, just accepted the words as she said them.

  He made a rough dinner for the two of them, and she was shocked to find that she was famished. He fried up potatoes and a rasher of bacon, did up eggs in the bacon fat and put a well heaped plate in front of her when it was cooked. She ate it all and even accepted a slice of bread and two more cups of tea. She pushed her plate away, feeling guilty, but comfortingly full at the same time.

  “How can I be hungry after seeing all those men dead and dying? How can I want to eat?”

  Noah considered her over his last forkful of potatoes. “It’s not uncommon for death, even a violent one, to give a person an appetite. It’s like the body needs to reassert that it’s alive, an’ so ye might find ye’re hungry, or thirsty or needin’ to bed someone. It’s just how it is.”

  “Is it?” she asked, slightly shocked at how candid he was.

  “Aye, it is. Ye’ve seen more than yer fair share of the horror this country can inflict, did ye never go home an’ take yer man straight to bed right after takin’ pictures of one of yer dead bodies?”

  She felt herself flushing, a flare of heat starting at her neckline and washing up over her face and ears. She considered what he said, about life asserting its appetites to reassure itself.

  “Yes, I suppose I did do that more than the once. Is that what you do?” she asked and immediately regretted the question.

  He laughed. “Ye’re not shy, are ye? Aye, I’ve a woman for such times an’ others. I know they call me the Monk, but it’s not for the obvious reason.”

  “I see,” she said, aware that she sounded rather prim.

  “Do ye?” he asked, the amusement clear in his voice. Yet there was no sense he was mocking her.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Aye, I thought ye might.”

  She felt slightly surreal having this conversation with him, and yet she felt strangely comfortable in his presence. As if things were simple, were black and white and she didn’t have to worry about finding herself in a grey area with him.

  “You’re maybe not so terrible, Mr. Murray.”

  He paused part way through putting his mug down on the table. He looked at her, expression utterly serious. “No, I am. I’m every bit as awful an’ monstrous as yer friend on the hill will have warned ye. Ye’d be advised to remember it, Pamela. I tell ye this as a kindness, don’t ever underestimate how ruthless I am. Don’t ever cross me because I’d rather not prove my words to ye.”

  There seemed little point in answering to that, so she merely finished her tea and then stood.

  “Thank you for everything, but I need to go get my children now. Do you think my car will make it home?”

  “No. Ye can take one of mine.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  He stood up, took their dishes to the sink and turned. “I don’t see that ye have a choice.”

  They walked out to the byre closest to the house. That it didn’t contain animals was at once apparent, for though it was freshly painted and kept in good repair there was no animal smell wafting out of it.

  Noah pulled back the doors, and the scent of hay filled the air around her.

  The truck was covered in a canvas tarp. He pulled it back, wisps of hay floating out on the air. It was a deep blue and maybe a year or two younger than she was. She gave him a dubious look.

  He laughed, interpreting the look correctly. “I don’t want ye drivin’ in something that’s recognizable as mine. This truck is old, but she runs well an’ no one is goin’ to associate it with me, which is the most important factor.”

  “I can’t take your truck,” she said.

  “Ye bloody have to, or ye’ll not have any way to get to work in the mornin’, nor pick yer wee ones up tonight. Don’t be silly, I don’t drive it anymore an’ it’s good for the engine to run every now and again. I’ll have one of the boys look yer car over an’ see if it can be fixed. Ye can’t take it into a garage, or there will be questions about the bullet holes.”

  She got into the truck and put the key in the ignition. It turned over without hesitation and had the rough volume of a cannon.

  “I’ll get it back to you as soon as I can,” she said, wanting to be clear that she wasn’t taking favors from him that she could not hope to repay. She suspected she had passed that point already.

  He shrugged. “Keep it as long as ye need, it will just go back in the byre when it returns.”

  She eased the truck out of the building, the scent of hay sweet in her nose. The inside of the truck was immaculate, and she wondered how much work he had put into this vehicle. Heaven help her if she scraped it or banged it up against something. It felt a tiny bit like driving a tank. She stopped outside, the light of the day starting to fade a bit at its edges. She was suddenly impatient to pick up Conor and Isabelle and just hold them, feed them dinner, give them their baths, read them a chapter from Winnie the Pooh and lie down beside them to watch them fall to sleep. It sounded like the most blissfully normal thing imaginable.

  Noah walked out with the truck and stopped by the open driver’s window.

  “It wasn’t me who ordered that hit,” he said quietly. He looked her in the eyes. “I know ye were wonderin’, but those were not my men out there today. I’m not messy like that, an’ I don’t do things for sectarian reasons. I have never killed a man because
of his religion.”

  “Okay,” she said. He didn’t owe her explanations, and she knew he was not a man normally to give them. She wondered why he had made an exception today. Then thought, perhaps, that was another question she didn’t truly want answered.

  “That’s all,” he said and waved her off.

  He was a puzzle, was Noah Murray. She looked in the rearview mirror and was slightly perturbed to find him still standing in the lane watching her drive away.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Count the Stars in the Sky, Noah

  THE WORLD THAT NOAH MURRAY lived in was a shadow land, and of this dark place he was the master. This world had its own hierarchy, its own rules and someone had broken those rules and broken them badly. Someone had forgotten that to commit crime in Noah Murray’s territory without his advance knowledge and permission, was to speak a death wish to the wind that wove through the lanes and over the walls and high dark hedges of South Armagh.

  Noah had never been afraid of wet work; he had started out as an enforcer for Mickey Devine, many years ago now. He had become rather infamous for his ability to make men talk before they died. He rarely did this anymore, rarely held another man’s pain in his own two hands, pushing the man to the fine edge of madness, knowing when to stop and when to begin again because breaking a man was an art. A messy art, but an art nonetheless.

  Some transgressions required direct contact; the shooting of ten Protestant men two miles from his home was one. Today he had received word that his men had taken one of the shooters. He had forewarned them that he alone would deal with the punishment. They knew where to take the man.

  Thus he stood outside an old stone byre, long abandoned, deep in a forgotten corner of his realm, deep enough in the hills and hedges and byways that no one could hear a man scream, no one could save a man from his fate. He looked up. The sky was clear tonight; it had been a fine day with only sporadic showers, clearing to a world of tender blue near evening.

  “Count the stars in the sky, Noah.” His mother used to say that to him to calm him, to get him out of the house, to get him away from his father. It was an old habit this, counting the stars in the sky, actually attempting to do so in earnest when he was a wee boy, before he understood that such a thing was impossible even for astronomers. Later, it had become a way to quell the terrible anger that rode him like a scorpion on a frog’s back. Some nights it had been the only thing that had kept him from killing his own father. Counting those tiny pinpricks of cold fire, one by one by one. And then counting them again, lying on the hill beyond the house, half-frozen and counting the fucking stars so that he would not slit his father’s throat, gut the bastard like the pig he was. No matter the blood, the pain, the rage, no matter the agony, no matter the loss of a boy’s soul, no matter the lack of poetry and love and music and tenderness and art. No matter the bruises and the blood and the words that rained like stones upon his head. There were still and always stars in the sky. Still and always his mother’s voice, pleading with him to forgive, to understand, to survive into another day. It was what she said to turn him from the realization that life wasn’t going to change, things were not going to get better and he wasn’t going to suddenly awaken in a household that understood him. The stars were a place to put his mind, while nasty things happened on the ground below. It was a place to hide and to believe that there was, despite all evidence to the contrary, beauty and goodness in the world.

  Count the stars in the sky, Noah.

  He took a breath, the evening was chilly, and when he exhaled clouds of silver streamed out around him.

  The man would be hard-primed now, blood pumping furiously, panic lighting up his nerve endings like match sticks. It thinned the skin, fear did, it heightened the pain, lent it a ragged red edge that broke a man down far faster than a sudden violent attack. Noah would give it another five minutes, which would feel like both five seconds and five days to the man awaiting him. Fear did that, it both compressed time and stretched it out to unbearable limits. It was his friend in these situations, it was the enemy of the man at the end of his hands.

  He knew what it was to be on the receiving end of pain, to be utterly certain that death was coming for you, and to believe it was not going to arrive gently, but in a crimson wave of pain and terror. He thought that only someone who had been subjected to pain could ever really apply it properly. What he had learned as a boy, he had done as a man, and so it went. He had never hurt a child, a woman or an animal—it was a code of sorts, something that set parameters around this shadow world. Parameters kept a man sane.

  Count the stars in the sky, Noah.

  He had planned to go by and visit Pamela Riordan this evening, check to see if she had recovered from her experience the other day, and to make certain the truck was running well. It would have to wait, for he wouldn’t go near her, not with another man’s blood on his hands, not with another man’s fear thick as oil upon his flesh, which it always was after such a night as that which lay before him. Some women had the ability to scent violence on a man, to know what he had done if not in its particulars then in its general darkness. He felt instinctively that she was such a woman. He would need to avoid her for a day or two, until it was washed from his eyes and his skin. Noah wondered at himself that he wanted to see her, that he felt drawn to her, that he worried about her safety, despite the warnings he had put out. She was not for him, and he didn’t entertain such a notion, for he didn’t have relationships with women, other than his sister. He did not have love for any other than Kate; he was not capable of it. Once, perhaps, but no longer.

  Count the stars in the sky, Noah.

  “Ye ready?” a voice asked, quiet, respectful, just a wee bit afraid, for even Noah Murray’s own men held a bit of fear for him, a bit of a clenching in their bellies. A filament of scent reached him. The man had already pissed himself, even though Noah had yet to enter the byre. He knew Noah was coming and Noah’s reputation walked ahead of him into every meeting room, every dark hedgerow, every lonely hut on an abandoned hillside in this country. Because he had made damn certain a long time ago that his reputation was backed up by his actions.

  He pulled his gloves on, and walked into the old byre, the scent of another’s man’s fear thick in his nose.

  Count the stars in the sky, Noah.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Qui Audet Adipiscitur

  TRUE TO NOAH’S prediction the SAS was deployed into South Armagh. It was done in a blaze of dubious publicity by the British Prime Minister in the wake of the bus massacre of the ten Protestant workers. He had told the House of Commons that SAS units were being sent in to stamp out cross border banditry and murder. The plan for the SAS to initially operate only in South Armagh was an indication of just how serious the situation there was considered to be.

  Captain Edwin Forest had been a SAS commander for five years. He had seen action in Malaya and Aden but he had never seen anything quite like the ground in South Armagh. They had been briefed on the situation, though that briefing, as black in tone as it had been, could only partially prepare a man for the reality of life as a soldier in this land. The leash was far shorter in Northern Ireland than it was in any other location in which the British Army was stationed, because nominally this place was part of the United Kingdom. Captain Forest thought most of the natives hadn’t gotten the memo on that particular detail. They had been told they were here to protect the civilians, but the civilians weren’t appreciative in the least. In fact, he had never come up against a more actively hostile population.

  He was awaiting a briefing more narrow in scope at present, though certainly it was connected to the larger scheme of things as well. The young man in front of him had a fresh look to him, but he had survived his time in South Armagh which meant he was tough and smart.

  He set a folder down on the desk and flipped it open to a picture of a charming and well-kept farmhouse in a dell of woods and fern; it was the sort of home that might be featured a
s a slice of old Ireland on a travel poster. He looked up, waiting for the young man to begin.

  “There’s been a bit of activity around this farmhouse, always at night, they come and go through the woods on the property. It’s not constant, but Noah Murray has been seen there on more than one occasion.”

  “Noah Murray?” There was no name in the county, no enemy he had ever encountered, that made his blood boil more.

  “Yes, sir, Noah Murray. We’re not entirely certain what is going on. There’s a widow who lives there with her two small children.”

  “A widow?”

  “Yes and no sir, one Pamela Riordan. She was married to Casey Riordan, who was a longstanding member of the PIRA. Or she still is, I suppose. He’s classified as missing.”

  “And is he missing?”

  “As far as we know, yes.”

  “You think this woman is running a safe house of some sort, or that Noah Murray actually has something other than ice water in his veins and is courting a woman?”

  “Well, sir, if you had seen the woman in question, you’d understand why it might be visits of the romantic sort.”

  Captain Forest raised a brow. “Do you have a picture? I’d like to see the woman who could turn Noah Murray’s head.”

  The soldier smiled. “I thought you might ask, sir. Just flip through the photos.”

  “How long have we been keeping a file on this woman?”

  “Well, she was married to a known IRA leader; he was pegged to run the Belfast wing of the PIRA before they packed up and moved to Boston. They came back here a couple of years later. He still had ties within the Provos when he disappeared. And, sir, it is likely worth noting that she also lived with James Kirkpatrick for some time.”