The Lost and the Blind

by Declan Burke

  I was stepping back when the shrill ringing of my phone sawed into the silence.

  It took a second or two to locate the phone in the front pocket of the shoulder bag, but once I had it I stepped to the edge of the cliff again, answering as I did so. The man was scrambling to his feet, the broken shotgun already in his hands.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘Mr Govern?’

  ‘Where are you, Tom?’

  Now the man was looking up, shading his eyes with one hand. I raised my own hand, palm outward, a greeting and a sign of peace.

  ‘I’m somewhere in the bird sanctuary on Delphi. Where are you?’

  Now the guy was snapping the shotgun closed, thumbing back the hammers. I waved to distract him, to get his attention.

  ‘I guess I’m not too far away,’ he said. ‘I’m at Carol’s place right now. Can you come here?’

  ‘Sounds good. Let me just – hey, whoa!’

  This last to the guy below, who had jammed the butt of the shotgun against his shoulder and was aiming up the cliff face.

  I turned and dived and heard the dull boom. A split second later came the tings and chips of ricochets as the load spattered against the rock overhead and the kick in the back that booted me into the dark cleft. The near wall reared up and cuffed the side of my head and then there was nothing much of anything at all.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I came awake slowly and not all at once. Rising and sinking, adrift in warm green depths.

  ‘Ah, you’re awake. Good.’

  She might have been waiting there a minute or an hour or a week. Probably not a week, though. Or even an hour. No woman stands around looking at a sleeping man more than is strictly necessary and I don’t know many women who’d think it necessary at all. Besides, the bowl on the tray was still steaming.

  There was a jug of water on there too, a drinking glass and a straw.

  It was a high-ceilinged room, thick with carpet and curtain in pale yellow or worn gold, an old-fashioned open fireplace taking up most of the far wall. The bed was a four-poster that lacked a canopy but the cotton sheets were white and crisp and warm.

  She set down the tray on a bureau.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she said. She produced a thermometer from the breast pocket of her shirt and shook it out. ‘I’m Erin, by the way.’

  I stared. She tapped the tip of the thermometer against my lips and waited for me to open up. When I didn’t she said, ‘If you want I can have someone come in and hold you down while I tuck this in somewhere else. So what’s it to be?’

  I opened up and she slipped the thermometer under my tongue. Then she took my wrist in a gentle but firm grip. All the while she kept her eyes on mine. She was close enough to count the cluster of freckles across the bridge of her nose. A pert nose and a jutting chin and a fleshy lower lip that seemed poised on the cusp of a pout or a smile.

  She removed the thermometer and glanced at it, shook it again and laid it on the tray. ‘So,’ she said, ‘one more time. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Dizzy and nauseous,’ I croaked, ‘and parched for a drink.’ The back of my head was throbbing and my back felt raw and prickling, like I’d been battered with a giant cheese grater.

  She poured some water into the glass and warned me to sip at it through the straw, then sat on the edge of the bed and probed the lump on the back of my skull with her fingertips.

  ‘You might have a mild concussion,’ she said as I sipped. ‘We’ll keep an eye on that. Probably happened when you banged your head.’

  ‘I was fucking shot.’

  She nodded as she took the glass away. ‘Sure, but the force of it slammed you into the rock. You were lucky.’

  ‘Lucky?’

  ‘Rock salt.’ She’d been putting on a pair of surgical gloves while she spoke, and now she took a package from the tray and tore it open with her teeth, squeezed it until a pair of tweezers popped up. ‘Turn over on to your front. I think we got it all, but I want to be sure there’s nothing impacted under the skin.’

  I was bare-chested, wearing only boxer shorts and a bandage that had been wound around my abdomen and halfway up my ribs. I tried to remember if they were the shorts I’d put on that morning.

  ‘I understand you have questions,’ she said, ‘but let’s just get the job done first.’ She laid the purple-stained bandage to one side. ‘Turn over on your front. Or do you want me to bring someone in to turn you over?’

  Another dizzying rush as I turned on to my stomach, the room yawing off beam. That left me vulnerable, virtually naked and weak and ready to puke, my field of vision reduced to the blank white of the pillow. If anyone wanted to run in right now and put a shotgun to the back of my head …

  But it made no sense. If they’d wanted me gone, disappeared, they’d had all the opportunity they needed. And they’d hardly tuck me up in bed, bring hot soup on a tray and go to all the trouble of removing salt shrapnel from my back, if they were planning anything lethal.

  I shivered as she brushed the cold tweezers against my skin, then gently prodded. A pinch, a squeeze, and then a tinny pik as she dropped a fragment of rock salt on to the tray.

  ‘Where am I?’ I said.

  ‘Bellapaix,’ she said. ‘Which is where, I assume, you were headed.’

  ‘I’ve never even heard that name before.’

  ‘Maybe not, but this is where you were aiming for.’ The tweezers were cold where she brushed the skin, grazing it. ‘Mr Govern was here when they brought you in. He was very upset when he saw you.’ She paused then. ‘It was a pity you didn’t simply announce yourself, Tom. Take the boat around. Carol is absolutely distraught.’

  ‘So it’s my fault I was shot.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.’ A pinch, a tik. ‘Carol tells me you’re here to write a book about Sebastian.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘She’s hoping you won’t be put off by your, um, experience.’

  ‘By this? Not at all. Being honest, I have problems with committing to a project until I’ve been shot at least once.’

  ‘I’m glad to see it hasn’t affected your sense of humour,’ she said. Pinch, tik. ‘You’ll need it when you interview Sebastian. I presume you are planning an interview?’

  ‘Sebastian Devereaux?’

  She pinched some skin, gave it a playful twist. ‘It’s not like we get many Sebastians to the pound here in Donegal, Tom. So yes, Sebastian Devereaux. Unless you came all this way looking for some other Sebastian?’

  ‘He’s here?’

  ‘Sebastian is here,’ she said, ‘and as it happens, very keen to interview you too.’ She put the tweezers down on the tray. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘that looks fine to me. I’m going to put some iodine on now, so stay still.’

  ‘What does he want to interview me about?’

  ‘One step at a time, Tom.’ She dabbed in silence, then told me to sit up and face her. She wrapped a fresh bandage around my abdomen, focusing on the job, leaving me to stare down at the top of her head. When she was finished she sat back to examine her work, then nodded at the bowl on the tray. ‘Chicken broth,’ she said. ‘You think you could feed yourself?’

  She topped up my glass of water, put two painkillers on the bedside table. ‘You’ve already had a couple,’ she warned as she stripped off the gloves, ‘so don’t use them unless you really need to. Will I send in your wife?’

  TWENTY-THREE

  My clothes were folded on the bottom of the bed. I was stiff and aching and still woozy, so it took me about fifteen minutes to get dressed. They’d given me a new t-shirt, or at least a fresh one, but the waistband of the jeans was ragged from the rock salt.

  Erin was right about my being lucky. There was no sign of my shoulder bag, presumably because it, and the laptop inside, had taken the main blast. Both were probably mangled. The skin on my lower back tingled at what might have been.

  Bellapaix. Good peace.

  Ironic
, perhaps, but the place was well named. It felt like the room was muffled in wads of cotton wool. Or maybe that was just the concussion and the painkillers.

  I took a turn around the room to stretch out and get my gyroscope back on its axis. Fresh air was a priority too. The sash window slid down easily enough, but then I made the mistake of looking out and down three floors of ivy-tangled stone to a crazy-paved courtyard. Dizzy again, I withdrew, and heard Kee drawl, ‘Don’t jump, you’ll make me look bad.’

  She looked fresh and pink-faced, recently showered, the hair still damp and looking a lot like a water-logged bird’s nest. She wore the jeans and boots she’d been wearing yesterday, and a form-fitting peach t-shirt.

  I sat on the bed and she perched on the bottom, asked how I was feeling.

  ‘Ropey. How long was I out?’

  ‘Since it happened, more or less. It’s now,’ she checked her watch, ‘nearly nine in the morning.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘They’re saying you shouldn’t have run.’

  ‘I already got the message, yeah. It’s my fault some fuckwit blasted me.’

  A terrible misunderstanding, reported Lady Carol McConnell after consulting in private with Shotgun Sam. Possibly because Sam, aka Eoin, was a little jumpy. After all, they’d had a security breach at the southern end of the valley earlier that day.

  ‘A security breach?’

  ‘Her very words. An interesting turn of phrase, no? Anyway, Lady Carol is accepting all responsibility, even if you were, as she pointed out a number of times, trespassing at the time.’

  Hence the best medical care the island could provide, along with a private room in which to recuperate.

  Kee, who’d realized I was hurt but not fatally, or even punctured to any noticeable degree by a blast of rock salt from twenty yards, had decided to play along with the hospitality routine, see where it might go. Gave it the whole hands-wringing honeymooning wife bit. Which was how she’d scored herself a room across the hall and one of the finest dinners she’d had in years.

  ‘Pheasant, Tom. Marvellous stuff. Make you wonder about this bird sanctuary they’re running, wouldn’t it?’

  Kee, Shay Govern and Lady Carol McConnell, aka Carol Devereaux, Sebastian’s daughter, the three of them hunched around one corner of a table they could have used for indoor tennis. ‘That’s actual tennis, mind. None of your ping-pong nonsense.’

  Kee playing her part, the newly married Mrs Tom Noone (‘I hope you don’t mind, but I told them I was keeping my own name’) while Shay and Carol picked her brain with a little more verve than they brought to the pheasant. ‘I mean, this was seriously good bird. But they didn’t seem to have much of an appetite. Maybe they shouldn’t have had the melon starter.’

  They started easy, asking if she’d known of my books before she met me. ‘We met at a book launch, by the way. Hodges Figgis, I couldn’t remember the writer. Probably because I was so dazzled by you.’

  ‘Probably.’

  It wasn’t long before they were asking, keeping it casual, whether I’d mentioned anything about the latest book, the biography of Sebastian Devereaux. If I’d talked about any research I’d managed to do, or sources I might have turned up in the last couple of days.

  ‘So I say, sorry, no, Tom’s a bit mental when he’s working on something. Hates anyone to see his work until it’s finished. And was there any source in particular they were thinking of?’

  None that sprang to mind immediately, according to Kee. Although Lady Carol did happen to drop the name Gerard Smyth during the banoffee pie.

  ‘It wasn’t Govern who mentioned him?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Because I already told him about Gerard Smyth. That Jack Byrne tracked him down.’

  ‘Well, he’s obviously told the good Lady Carol that, because he wasn’t remotely surprised that she knew the name.’

  ‘So maybe they think I’m hooked up with Jack, trying to pull a scam.’ I shrugged, which was a bad idea, because it sent shudders of burning pain through my lower back. ‘Except I was the one who told Govern about Jack wanting to do a number on him.’

  ‘OK, but maybe this isn’t the first time Lady Carol is hearing about Gerard Smyth. It’s possible, right? I mean, if the guy’s firing off missives to Foreign Affairs and half the embassies in Dublin, it’s likely he didn’t stop there. For all we know Smyth came back here, tried to get them onside for his campaign.’

  ‘He never said anything to me about travelling to Delphi.’

  ‘OK, so maybe he wasn’t here. Maybe he wrote to them instead. The point being, Carol seems a little sensitive about Gerard Smyth and what he might have told you. When you’d imagine, wouldn’t you, that she’d be pleased to learn there was someone out there who could confirm the story.’

  ‘Do they know he’s dead?’

  ‘Not from the way they were talking, no.’

  ‘So maybe they’re worried that Smyth won’t just confirm the story, but add a little bit more that doesn’t exactly sit straight with the idea of Sebastian as this hero. You get a chance to read it?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Sebastian’s the Englishman, right? The Tommy.’

  ‘Has to be.’

  ‘Doesn’t exactly come out of it covered in glory, does he?’

  ‘Not unless dead kids are your idea of glorious, no. But here’s the thing,’ she said. ‘What we’re looking at here is an open door. You want to push back against Shay Govern, tell him you think Gerard Smyth’s testimony isn’t rock solid. Meanwhile, they’re edgy right now because you’re the connection to Gerard Smyth, who’s saying more than they might want about Sebastian, and they’ve only gone and pumped a round of rock salt into you. Maybe soured your perception a little.’

  Now, she said, they needed to pamper me and get me well, feed me up on roast pheasant and make sure I was properly disillusioned and cynical about the dark fairytales told by old men craving one last moment in the spotlight before eternity folds in forever.

  ‘I say let them do it,’ she urged. ‘Nod and smile and agree with their concerns. Then we walk away. Once you’re back in Dublin, you drop Shay Govern a line letting him know that Gerard Smyth has drowned in a canal, the book is going to take a little longer than you thought. What?’

  ‘Have you seen my laptop?’

  ‘Not since the café yesterday afternoon. You think they took it?’

  ‘It was in the bag that was blasted with the rock salt. It’s probably in bits.’

  ‘Probably, yeah. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the hard drive is irretrievable.’

  ‘What about your copy? The one on the memory stick.’

  ‘Gone. They rang around, tracked me down at the hotel and told me you’d been shot. So I flushed the stick.’

  ‘Nice priorities.’

  ‘I like to think so. Besides, it was only rock salt.’ She got up, clapped her hands. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’m going to head down to the village, make some calls, get the wheels turning. Soon as you’ve had your chat with Shay, let me know and we’re off this godforsaken rock.’

  ‘It could take a while.’

  ‘Just do it, Tom. You can work on your dying swan routine back in Dublin.’

  ‘I mean, there’s a queue.’

  ‘A queue?’

  ‘According to Erin, Sebastian Devereaux is quite keen to interview me.’

  ‘Sebastian Devereaux?’

  ‘Apparently so.’

  ‘I thought he was dead.’

  ‘So did I.’

  ‘Shit,’ she said, sitting down again.

  ‘Kind of complicates things,’ I said, ‘doesn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, you think?’

  It was bad enough, she said, when some old German guy was making allegations of Nazi atrocity. Now we had a bona fide living and breathing British spook who’d been operating in neutral Ireland and the reason six kids had been burned up in a church.

  ‘It wasn’t him who killed them,�
� I said.

  ‘Maybe not by pulling a trigger, no. But he’s why they were rounded up. Because he wouldn’t tell Richter what he wanted to know.’ She put her face in her palms, dry-washed her face. ‘Christ, Tom. This could blow the lot sky high.’

  But while she was talking all I could think about was the church in flames and children shovelled into the Moloch’s maw.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Kee departed in a hurry shortly afterwards, forgetting in her haste to bestow any additional luscious kisses. The soup had begun to congeal – besides, who eats soup for breakfast? – so I swallowed the painkillers and lay on the bed, wishing the water was coffee.

  About half an hour later there came a cautious tappity-tap on the door, and Erin popped her head around the door.

  ‘Are you feeling up to a wee chat yet?’ she said. I said I was, the dull stabbing pains in my lower back notwithstanding. She led the way along a stone-flagged corridor, then down a broad and curving flight of stairs. It was the kind of place that generally boasted oil portraits of venerable ancestors on the walls, a modest chandelier or two, but Sebastian Devereaux – or Lady Carol McConnell, or whoever the hell was running the place – favoured the minimalist look. The hall was a vaulted affair soaring three storeys to oak rafters, the floor a chequerboard of black and white tiles, but other than a wooden chest against the wall to the right of the front door there was nothing to take the bare look off it.

  She crossed the hall and opened a heavy door, ushered me in ahead. A fine room, high-ceilinged again, the walls lined with bookshelves and leather-bound volumes, a writing desk to my left. She directed me to the semicircle of leather couch and armchairs at the other end of the room, where a low fire glowed in a huge fireplace. The smell of turf hung heavy on the air.

  The table in the middle of the room was littered with the remnants of breakfast.

  ‘I thought she’d be here,’ Erin said. ‘She must have gone through to the kitchen. Back in a sec.’