“I really did just want to help Tomas and Pat with their case. It was only a conversation.”
“Which could have gone horribly wrong. He might have dragged you off, done anything to you. This kind of stuff, as simple as it seems, can get you killed here. You know that better than most.”
He was right; the risks here were higher and played out for far greater stakes than they might in another land.
“I really am sorry, Jamie,” she said and meant it.
“Oh, I believe you’re sorry for making me worry, but I don’t believe you’re sorry for doing it in the first place.”
He gave her a long, level glare, which she quietly took in because she really didn’t want to aggravate the man any further tonight. Suddenly he laughed.
“You’re never dull, Pamela, I will say that for you. I’m surprised Casey didn’t tie you to the bed posts before he left for work in the mornings, just to give himself peace of mind for the day.”
“He did mention it a time or two,” she said, relieved that the worst of his anger seemed to have passed.
“I’m acquiring a much deeper appreciation of the man’s forbearance.”
“I’m not quite that much of a handful, James Kirkpatrick,” she said indignantly.
He merely laughed, and she felt annoyance replace some of her relief.
“Well, did you get any valuable information out of the man?”
“Some,” she said, feeling badly for the poor wreck she had left back there on a stool that was far too familiar with his backside. “His mind isn’t all it could be, and he rambled a bit, but I think all together, yes, it’s useful. None of it can be used in court, directly, but it gives Tomas and Pat some leverage with him. Maybe enough to convince the courts that an appeal is necessary.”
He didn’t respond to that, and her general impression was that he was less than impressed by the rewards reaped versus the risks taken. His index finger was tapping out a vigorous rhythm on the steering wheel, and she thought she was quite happy she couldn’t read his mind. Then again, it’s likely he still had a piece or two of said mind to give her, so it was probably best to get it over with.
“Say it, Jamie. To paraphrase Pat, spit it out and save your spleen.”
He took a sharp breath in through his nose and she braced herself, lest he was about to let fly with one of his rare lectures. They tended to be pointed and razor-sharp in their assessments, and entirely unpleasant.
“When men have nothing to lose, Pamela, they do desperate things. That man in there tonight, has nothing left to lose, and he might have done something awful and taken you with him. You would have been nothing more than collateral damage in his view.”
“I wouldn’t have left the bar with him. I’m not that crazy.”
He was looking out the windscreen of the car, his jaw still tight with tension, face drawn in troubled thought. He managed a derisive, “Hmmphmm,” which she thought was meant to disagree with her statement as to the degree of her craziness.
“Is that how you felt in Russia, like you had nothing to lose?” she asked. He didn’t speak of Russia, not about the serious things, not about the woman who was his wife or the man who had been his friend and died for it.
“Sometimes, yes.”
“Do you feel that way now?” She worried about him, his life was so splintered among a variety of personas, both public and private, and because of his bipolar disorder, she knew he often lived near the edge of a very particular sort of disaster.
“No, because I have Kolya to raise, and apparently,” he smiled, “you to look after as well.”
“I am sorry, Jamie,” she said for the second time that night.
“I know you are, Pamela, I just don’t think that will stop you the next time.”
They sat quiet for a few moments. Silence with Jamie, unless he was upset, was always a comfortable thing. As he seemed to have moved past the worst of his anger, she leaned back into the seat and felt some of the tension leak slowly from her body. She was exhausted. She could easily fall asleep here, with the security of Jamie beside her, and the sound of the night breeze roaming through the leaves on the oaks around them.
“Do you ever feel that way, Pamela? Like you have nothing to lose?”
She thought about telling him a half-truth, something to relieve the worry she could still feel emanating from him. But he had asked an honest question, and so she owed him an honest answer.
“Sometimes,” she said, “at three o’clock in the morning, when I haven’t slept for yet another night and I think there may never be an answer to the one question that burns me from the inside out—then yes.”
And because he was Jamie, he did not remonstrate with her or tell her she had children to raise and friends that loved her because he knew she understood all that. He knew that it was possible to have all those things to live for and still feel, in the midst of a white night, like you had nothing to lose. He simply took her hand and said, “I’m here.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Carpe Diem
THINGS MOVED RATHER SWIFTLY after Pamela’s slightly sordid evening. Tomas and Patrick had listened through the tape several times and then had approached the former policeman at his home, which was a rundown bedsit over a tobacco shop in Atlantic Avenue. He’d been furious at first, but then had admitted he thought something was ‘mucky’ about a woman like Pamela being so friendly with him. Still, he’d spilled his guts and being that it was on tape, didn’t seem to see a reason not to do it again with Pat and Tomas. Pat recounted all this to Pamela across her kitchen table one night, after having dinner with her and the children.
“To be fair, he was half-cut at the time. I think he’s sort of given up all together, an’ feels he might as well shrive his soul to lawyers as to anyone else before they kill him. That’s about how he put it leastwise.”
“Will they really kill him?” she asked, even though it sounded naïve to her own ears, and she knew the answer.
Pat nodded. “Aye, if they can find him. He might feel he’s nothin’ left to lose, but they have plenty. One of his former colleagues is high up in the RUC now, an’ not a man to be taken lightly. Tomas has Andy stowed in a safe house now, even I don’t know where it is. Tomas says it’s best if I don’t, so the bastards can’t torture it out of me if they take a mind to.” Pat laughed, but it was, as was often the case in this city, a bit of a gallows laugh.
“Tomas is tryin’ to keep him relatively sober, though that’s a bit like puttin’ the fox in charge of the hen coop. I suspect that means they drink together more than anythin’, an’ then Tomas takes the remains of the bottle home. We have to move quickly, because as ye know Andy’s just the wee bit unstable, an’ I don’t know how much longer the man’s liver is goin’ to hold out, he was the color of a banana last time I saw him. So we’ve put together his statement an’ pieced together a timeline, also we’re lookin’ at the other three suspects. Once we looked at the girl’s history it wasn’t hard to figure out just who was who—one man is dead, but the one we think most likely to be guilty is still alive. Mind, we don’t need to prove he did it, just prove that there were at least one or two points of law that were fudged over or not attended to properly.”
Pat hadn’t expected to be in court with Tomas, as thus far much of his work had consisted of conveyancing, succession work and accident compensation, with the very rare divorce thrown in for variety. However, he did have his certificate in advocacy which gave him the right of audience in the higher courts. It was the same path Tomas had taken, which had allowed him to advance to the rank of Queen’s Counsel. Tomas had insisted that Pat having brought this ‘feckin’ quagmire of a case’ to him, could suffer through all the legal proceedings that resulted from said quagmire.
The hearing was this morning, and as a result she had a case of butterflies on their behalf that neither tea nor toast had drowned. The house was quiet around her, as she stood wiping up the breakfast dishes. She had dropped off Conor a
nd Isabelle with Gert earlier, to give herself a chance to catch up on her book keeping.
Later, she thought she might run a box of baby clothes up to a young mom in Newry to whom she’d promised them. She’d packed the clothes up the previous evening and had sighed over every wee dress and pair of socks that had gone into the box. It was as if she was closing the door on ever having more children by giving them away. Casey and she had discussed the possibility of more, she feeling three would make a nice number and he more inclined to four. Still, if he did not return, it wasn’t likely that she would ever have any more children and the thought of that made her sad. She picked up the box, resolved. She would put it in the car now, so she didn’t spend her morning gazing at it and feeling melancholy.
She put on her shoes and opened the door, jumping back in startlement and dropping the box, which spilled tiny sweaters, booties, frilly dresses and tights all over. Pat was standing on the doorstep, his hand raised to knock. Rain was dripping down his face and darkening the shoulders of his suit.
“What on earth are you doing here? I thought you were in court this morning,” she said. He hunkered down with her to pick up the clothes.
“I’m meant to be there in two hours,” he said grimly, “but Tomas is drunk as the proverbial lord an’ I’ve done everything I can to sober him up. All to no fockin’ avail I might add. Pamela, ye’ve got to help me. He’s in the car, passed out.”
The man’s desperation was clear, Patrick wasn’t one to swear.
“I thought he was off the booze this week, or at least until the appeal was over.”
“Aye,” Pat said, “he was meant to be. I’d confiscated everything I could find at his house, but he must have had some stored away because he appears to have gone on a real bender last night.”
She stood from re-packing the last of the baby clothes and brushed down her pant legs. “What is it you think I can do?”
“For some reason, heaven help us, he sees ye as his good luck charm. If ye could just help me sober him up a wee bit an’ then give him a talkin’ to, I’d owe ye somethin’ terrific. Not that I can repay it, but ye’d have my eternal gratitude.”
“You can’t go to court soaked as a wet rat, let me run upstairs and get you a dry suit. You can change into it when we get Tomas sorted.”
“Pamela, I—”
“Patrick, I don’t mind you wearing his clothes. You’re his brother. Not to mention,” she said briskly, “you’re the only person who would fit them. Now, go bring Tomas in.”
He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek and said no more. Patrick had always been wise in that way. A moment later, the two of them were bent over Tomas, whom Pat had laid out on the sofa by the hearth. Pamela feared he was unconscious until she had leaned over him and one puffy and excessively red eye looked back up at her. He lifted a hand and patted her face, smiling beatifically, “Ye have the eyes of a mermaid, lass, has anyone ever told ye that? Ye’re like somethin’ borne in upon a wave, Venus on the half shell.” He hiccoughed, and a wave of whiskey scent wafted toward her. Pamela sighed and then grabbed him, rather ungently, by his dirty collar.
“Listen you old sot, if you ruin this for Patrick, I’ll drown you in a vat of whiskey and do it happily. He needs your help, he can’t present the damn arguments by himself. If you make him go out there alone, it will be a fiasco for him and I will never forgive you. What’s far worse is that you will never forgive yourself once you sober the hell up. Patrick, help me get him up and into the bathroom.”
Between the two of them they got him into the bathroom, where he slumped on the toilet lid, and began to sing Tiny Bubbles. She turned the cold tap on full in the tub. “Stick his head under and show no mercy.”
Twenty minutes later, Tomas was presentable and nearing sober. He was still damp from his forced ablutions, but he no longer smelled like the inside of a whiskey barrel and his eyes had gone from red to pink, rather like those of a querulous and somewhat pissed rabbit. He was seated at her kitchen table, while Pat was upstairs changing his clothes.
Pamela handed Tomas a cup of coffee strong enough to take the silver off a spoon. She adjusted his collar, which she had cleaned with a damp cloth and a bit of soda while he was in the bath, and then took a brush to his hair. “Drink that bloody coffee, we don’t have much time here.”
“Ye might look like a mermaid, but ye act like a bloody fishwife,” he grumbled, though he drank the coffee meekly enough. Patrick came down the stairs a few minutes later, in a clean suit, which Casey had last worn to their grandmother’s funeral, his hair tidied as best as he could manage and a look of nervous anticipation on his face that set Pamela’s butterflies to fluttering in her stomach once again on his behalf.
Ten minutes later they had Tomas in the car, relatively sober and presentable. Pamela had decided her bookkeeping could wait and she could easily deliver the baby clothes another day. There were a couple of things she could do in Belfast while Pat was in court, and for now she could offer him moral support.
“Yer brother must have had his hands full with that one,” Tomas grumbled from the back seat, as Patrick took off at a fast clip, looking dark things best not uttered. At Tomas’ words though he looked over at Pamela and smiled.
“Aye, he did, an’ ye never saw a man happier for it.”
When they pulled up to the courts, Pamela felt like all of Patrick’s nerves must have transferred over to her stomach. It was one of those rainy dark Belfast days and the Crumlin Jail, situated directly across the street from the courts, didn’t look the better for it. It had an imposing façade as it was. The prisoner would be led from there through a tunnel that ran under the road to the court which sat, just as imposing on the opposite side of the street.
“Give us a kiss for luck, dear Pamela,” Tomas said, and presented her with his freshly shaved cheek. She kissed him, and was happy to find he no longer reeked of alcohol, instead he smelled pleasantly of the Bay Rum cologne she’d splashed liberally upon his person. It was Casey’s cologne and the scent lingered pleasantly in her nose, even if it did make her feel a pang of longing for the man who had once worn it.
Pat had explained to her that it was the details that would make the difference in whether or not this case stood a chance of being retried. Those details had to be gone through at length, but also made compelling enough so that the judge would stay awake throughout and be swayed to see their side of things. Most appeals failed at the first gate, so the odds were stacked against them going in, and unless there were valid points of law that had been ignored or subverted, the case wouldn’t stand a chance. Tomas, despite his alcoholism still had a great deal of respect within the legal community, and his summations in the courtroom were legendary. She only hoped he could pull his wits together because, while she suspected that Patrick would one day be capable of greatly moving oratory, she didn’t think he was prepared for it today. She knew, however, that he had crossed all his ‘t’s’ and dotted every last ‘i’.
She left them to their legal battle and went to run her errands, one of which was to drop off a set of proofs to a couple whose wedding she had photographed the week before, and then she needed to stop by the Tennent Street station and pick up a check that was waiting for her.
Once in the station, she waited, skin prickling, for she wasn’t comfortable in a police station. She always had the sense that her Catholic baptism, as long ago as it was, ringed her in a green halo here; as if the men in this building, Protestant almost to a man, knew her entire history and geography merely by looking at her. Tribal lines ran so deep and long here that it was likely they did know. Belfast was one sticky web of communication, and if you trod one strand of that web, the vibrations of it rippled out to every other line, so that people knew what you’d done and who you were before you understood those things yourself. Her last name alone was enough to condemn her.
She heard his voice first, clipped and harsh and yet with something sibilant in it, for he drew his consonants out i
n a manner that she thought he had decided was threatening. She didn’t want to turn around; she didn’t want him to notice her at all if she could manage it. She wondered briefly what he was doing here in this station, rather than his base in Newry. She chanced a glance up. It was Constable Blackwood, out of uniform and chatting with another officer. She shuddered, the internal shudder of prey that wishes it had a handy hedge to hide in. There was no way to avoid his notice.
Pamela put her head down and pretended to be studying the counter with great interest. The man raised the fine hairs on the back of her neck and she hated even being in his proximity. The policeman from behind the counter returned just then, and handed her the envelope. She muttered a ‘thank you’ and turned for the door, hoping to make a quick exit. But she felt the constable’s antennae prick up just then, like she was a rabbit and he a hound that could smell the fear that bubbled through her blood. She heard him excuse himself to the man he’d been speaking with, and turn toward the door. She bolted out of it, uncaring about who noticed now, just wanting to get away as swiftly as she could. She turned up toward Crumlin Road, walking as fast as she could manage without actually breaking into a full run, her adrenaline shooting off in small geysers, adding a manic little hop to her walk every few feet. He was behind her now, and she looked back, to find him looking right back at her, a nasty grin on his face.
She kept her head up and kept walking, even though she felt like every vertebra in her spine had been suddenly exposed to a cold wind. He kept pace behind her, staying just a few steps back, so that she could smell the sour scent of him. She picked up speed, weaving in and out of the people on the sidewalk with her. He walked faster too. The area had long made her nervous, and she wished now that she hadn’t been seized by the notion of walking. It was a very Loyalist area, replete with Loyalist murals and Union Jacks flapping wetly in the wind and drizzle.
There were three cars coming out of Crimea Street, turning onto Crumlin Road and so she had no choice but to stop or be run down by one of them. Her whole body was prickling like it had been brushed with nettles, and she was as aware of the man at her back as she would have been a gun muzzle pressed to her neck. It seemed as if the traffic flow would never change, as if she was going to be standing here for the next hour or day or week, with this man standing behind her, breathing his hot, sour breath. A sudden gust of wind blew her hair into her face so that she was temporarily blinded. It was then that he put a hand to the small of her back and shoved her lightly, jarring her enough so that she stumbled into the street, to the tune of brakes shrieking and the claxon wail of horns. She closed her eyes and tried to step back, and then a hand yanked her hard, and she fell, out of the danger of the road way.
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 26
