The Abstainer

by Ian McGuire

  “Who is the traitor?” Doyle says again.

  “It’s Rice,” he says. “Peter Rice is the traitor.”

  Doyle’s lips tighten and his face twitches sideways, but he doesn’t speak or lower his arm. I had that one chance to save myself, O’Connor thinks, but now the chance has passed.

  “Peter Rice.”

  It is not a question but an echo, as if he wants to hear the name again from his own mouth, taste it, just to be sure.

  O’Connor nods.

  “Yes,” he says. “He told me all about the plan to kill the mayor. He told me everything.”

  There is the long blast of a police whistle from the direction of Market Street and then another. Doyle looks away quickly, then turns back again.

  “See those handcuffs there on the ground,” he says, pointing downward. “You put one link around your wrist and one around your friend’s. You do it now.”

  Malone’s left hand is black and wet with blood. He’s only half-conscious and his eyes are rolling up into his skull. When the cuffs are locked in place, Doyle gestures for the key and O’Connor gives it to him.

  “I’ll see you hanged for this, I swear,” O’Connor says.

  Doyle shakes his head.

  “No, you won’t,” he says. “They only hang the stupid ones, and I’m not that.”

  He drops the Tranter back into his overcoat pocket; then, moving without haste or guile, as if this place and time are no different from any other, neither better nor worse, turns and walks away. The wet fog, rough-grained and maculate as old timber, breaks open to receive him, then shuts behind like a door.

  CHAPTER 15

  When the banging starts, Dixon is asleep in bed with Victor the ratter splayed out beside him. He shouts that he is coming, then pulls on his boots and goes up to see who is there. He remembers Neary’s face from before but not his name.

  “It’s Doyle’s chap,” he says. “And what time of night do you call this?”

  Over Neary’s right shoulder, on the far side of the narrow street, he can see Skelly’s ragged-looking hansom stopped beneath the gas lamp and Stephen Doyle standing in front of it, holding a pistol against his thigh and looking palely furious. Neary tells him they need to use the railway arch tonight and they will give him a sovereign if he will take them there. Dixon asks him what the gun is for, and Neary sniffs, then tells him there are some things it is better if he doesn’t know about. Dixon thinks a moment longer, then asks to see the sovereign, and Neary shows it to him. “I’ll get the keys,” he says. He goes back down to the cellar, dresses himself quickly, and takes a ring of keys from the brass-headed nail on the wall. Victor sighs in his sleep and fidgets, and Dixon lays a hand on his ribs and whispers an endearment into his felty ear.

  They get into the cab together and drive past the end of Stanley Street and across the broken and waterlogged ground to where the viaduct crosses the Bolton Canal. The fog is wrapped so thick about them that Skelly has to slow the horse more than once and peer about to be sure they are still on the road. When they reach the place, they all get out. Neary lights a match and Dixon undoes the padlock and opens the door. The archway is cold and black inside like a cavern set deep in the earth. Near the entrance, there is a workbench scattered with rusted tools, a cast-iron stove, a cabinet, a table, and some archaic armchairs with horsehair poking through the rent fabric. Farther back, in the shadows, there’s a head-high pile of dust and bones, and another, similar-sized, of planks and broken furniture. The floor is cement, and rainwater drips, now and then, from cracks in the brickwork overhead. Dixon finds a paraffin lamp, wipes away the dust, then trims and lights it.

  “You’ll need to hide the hansom in the next archway over,” he says. “If you leave it outside, they’ll see it from the coal wharves yonder as soon as it gets light. There’s no fodder for the horse in there, but I can walk to the livery stables to get you some.”

  “You stay here with us,” Doyle says. “Skelly will tend to the nag.”

  Dixon nods.

  “It’s quiet here,” he says. “No one’ll find you, if you don’t want to be found.”

  Doyle is still holding the pistol in his right hand. He examines it for a while, turning it over and back as if wondering what it might be worth at market, then puts it into his jacket pocket.

  “There’s been some trouble tonight,” he says. “A man’s been shot.”

  “One of yours, is it?” Dixon says. “A brother?”

  Doyle shakes his head.

  “A policeman. It’s not likely he’ll live.”

  Dixon stares at him a moment, wide-eyed.

  “No,” he says. “You can’t stay here if you just killed a copper. They’ll hang us all.”

  Doyle’s face doesn’t change. In the light from the paraffin lamp, the whites of his eyes gleam like polished ivory. His swollen shadow jitters against the high curve of the wall.

  “Two days only,” he says. “I’ll pay you well for this place and the more help you give us, the quicker we’ll be away again.”

  Dixon rubs his neck and scowls.

  “It’s not my fight,” he says. “I’m not one of you.”

  “If you keep calm and do all I ask, we’ll be gone before you know it. You can forget this ever happened.”

  “I’m not a killer.”

  “And I’m not asking you to become one. That’s not what I have in mind.”

  Dixon looks across at Neary, but Neary’s expression doesn’t alter.

  “You’re fucking mad, the lot of you,” Dixon says.

  Doyle waits a moment, then takes a step forward and puts his hand on Dixon’s shoulder.

  “Listen to me now,” he says. “I have a job for you. There’s a man called Peter Rice. He owns a tannery near the Scotland Bridge. Tomorrow morning, I need you to go out and find him for me. I’ll tell you where to look and who to talk to. As soon as you find him, you come back here and tell us, and we’ll do the rest ourselves.”

  “That’s all of it?”

  Doyle nods.

  “There’s one more thing I should tell you, though, just in case you’re thinking that instead of going out looking for Peter Rice you could run to the police.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that at all.”

  “Just in case you were. The man we robbed before was a detective, name of James O’Connor. The moment O’Connor sees your face, you’ll be charged with conspiracy to murder. You may not believe you’re one of us, but that’s not how the judges will see it.”

  Dixon looks at Doyle’s right hand still pressing down on his shoulder.

  “We robbed a peeler?” he says.

  “I would have told you before, but it wasn’t to the purpose.”

  Neary goes outside to help Skelly with moving the horse and cab, and Doyle finds kindling and lights a fire in the stove. When they come back inside, Skelly is carrying blankets and a bottle of whiskey. They sit down on the broken armchairs and pass the bottle back and forth until it’s finished. Skelly sings them a song. Sometime after midnight, Dixon falls asleep. When he wakes up again it is still dark, the paraffin lamp is alight, Neary is snoring, and Doyle is standing at the workbench, sorting through a box of old rusted nails, dividing the ones that can still be used from the ones that can’t.

  “You’re a strange bastard, you are,” Dixon tells him. “The police must be tearing down the city looking for you. Any normal man would be long gone by now if they had the chance, but here you are.”

  Doyle turns around to look at him.

  “I’m a soldier. If I have a job to do, I like to keep on until it’s finished.”

  “I’d never be a soldier. Marching about like that, following other men’s orders. You couldn’t ever pay me enough.”

  “You think the thieving makes you free?”

  Dixon sighs and scratches h
imself.

  “I don’t think on such things,” he says. “I just do what I want.”

  A train passes overhead. There is a distant muffled roar, and the darkness shakes around them. Skelly grumbles out a curse and shifts about in his broken chair.

  “So you follow your own pleasures, is that it?” Doyle says. “Go wherever they point you and don’t worry too much about the consequences?”

  “Something like that.”

  Doyle nods.

  “I remember how that feels. I used to think like that myself, but then I changed. I went off to the war and learned a thing or two.”

  “What did you learn?”

  “That a man’s life on its own is nothing much to talk about. That it disappears just like that, in the blink of an eye.”

  He turns back to the workbench and picks up a bent nail from the wooden box. Dixon watches him silently as he hits it twice with the hammer, then checks it again and puts it in the good pile.

  “Really, you should leave now,” Dixon tells him again. “If you stay, they’ll find you and hang you for sure.”

  Doyle doesn’t trouble to turn around this time. He picks up another nail from the box and examines it in the dim light of the paraffin lamp. His white breath forms ghoulish shapes in the black and frigid air.

  “If they hang me, there’ll be someone else coming after,” he says. “Someone who remembers my name, and who I was, and why I was here. That’s what this all means. There’s always another.”

  CHAPTER 16

  By morning, there are thirty Fenians in the Swan Street lockup, and another fifteen down at Livesey Street. O’Connor checks the list of names. Neary is missing, he notices, and so is Skelly. His hand trembles as he turns the pages of the ledger. Someone offers him brandy to steady his nerves, but he asks for tea instead. The broken handcuff is still in his pocket and there are patches of blood on his shirt front and up one arm of his overcoat. He wishes now he had stayed in the infirmary with Malone. The thought of him suffering alone, unwatched and uncomforted, is like an ache in O’Connor’s chest. He looks at the clock on the wall and promises himself he’ll be back there within the hour.

  Fazackerley explains that they have made a start on questioning the suspects, but they’ve uncovered nothing useful so far.

  “Peter Rice is the one who will know,” O’Connor says. “If anyone knows.”

  “That’s what we figured too.”

  “Where’s Michael Sullivan?”

  “Cell three. He was effing and blinding when they brought him in, but I gave him the look and he quieted some.”

  “We should leave him in there for a while. See what he can pick up from the others.”

  Fazackerley nods.

  O’Connor takes a swallow of the tea and glances about. The charge office is crowded with policemen. They stare at him, then look away again. He senses their anger and their fear, the questions they want to ask him but won’t.

  He turns to Fazackerley.

  “Do they think it’s my fault?” he asks. “Is that it?”

  “Don’t be foolish,” Fazackerley says. “Why would they think that?”

  “Is Maybury waiting somewhere?”

  “He’s upstairs in the surgeon’s room. I’ll take you to him.”

  The room is small and bare: three chairs, a narrow desk, a sink in one corner with a mirror above it, and a cupboard for the medical supplies. When O’Connor and Fazackerley walk in, Maybury is behind the desk writing. He glances up, then nods for them to sit.

  “We’ll bring Peter Rice in here presently,” he says. “We’ll stand him over there, and you’ll tell him what you told Doyle. If he’s going to talk to us, we need to put the fear of God into him. Do you think you can manage that?”

  O’Connor nods.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he says. “I’m guessing Rice and Doyle don’t like or trust each other much, but whether that means Rice believes Doyle would actually kill him is another thing. Even if he does, Rice may not know where Doyle is hiding, or Doyle may have fled already. He could be halfway to France by now.”

  “You told me that he’ll stay here in Manchester until he’s found the man who betrayed him. That’s what you said to me before.”

  “I think it’s likely, but I don’t know that for sure. I may be wrong. Since they killed Tommy Flanagan and the others, I’ve had nothing solid to go on.”

  Maybury’s eyes widen. He shakes his head impatiently, then turns to Fazackerley.

  “Likely,” he says. “Good god, we’re chasing our own fucking tails here, Sergeant, I swear.”

  O’Connor looks out the window. The morning sky is the color of dust and ashes.

  Frank Malone is dying, he thinks, and Tommy Flanagan is already dead; I have enough guilt on my back to last me a long lifetime, so what does it matter what else Maybury cares to throw on the pile?

  “If you don’t need me here, I have better things to do,” he says.

  Maybury’s face darkens.

  “You’ll sit there until I tell you to go,” he says.

  “Everyone is distressed about the shooting,” Fazackerley explains. “It’s only natural. O’Connor’s not thinking right, is all.”

  “I’m thinking fine,” O’Connor says.

  There are several seconds of clenched silence between them, then a knock on the door and Peter Rice is brought in wearing handcuffs. Maybury tells the constable that he can leave. He asks Rice for his name, address, and occupation and writes the information down slowly, as if it is new and important. He then asks him where he was last night, and whether he has any knowledge of an American named Stephen Doyle. Rice says he was at home asleep with his lady-wife and, no, he has never heard of any Stephen Doyle, but he knows a Willy Doyle from Donegal, if that is any help to them. Maybury pauses awhile for effect, then tells him that they know very well who he is and they know very well he is lying about Doyle, and if he has any sense at all he will listen carefully to what they are going to tell him next, because his life may very well depend on it.

  Rice looks calm and easy, unconcerned. He rubs his head with both hands and yawns loudly. His curled-up tongue has the color and sheen of a kidney, and his blunt fingers are stained brown from the tanning liquor. He points at O’Connor and asks whose blood that is on him, and when O’Connor explains, he nods and smiles as if he knew it already but just wanted to be sure. “It’s a great shame, that,” he says. “A terrible piece of bad luck for the young fellow.” O’Connor says it is not bad luck but plain murder and Rice’s problem is that he will likely be the next one killed. Rice frowns at this information and looks suitably bewildered. O’Connor then tells him what happened on Milk Street, explains that Stephen Doyle put a gun to his head and demanded to know the name of the man who had betrayed him.

  “And do you know whose name I gave him, Peter?” O’Connor says, standing up so their eyes are on the same level, and he can smell Rice’s tobacco-stained breath and the musk of his unwashed flesh. “I gave him yours.”

  There is a moment of silence, and then Rice snorts as if he’s been told a great joke.

  “I don’t know any Stephen Doyle,” he says. “And he don’t know me. I’m an honest tanner, that’s all I am, so why you should be giving some murderous Fenian fellow my name I can’t for the life of me imagine.”

  “Well, that’s a great mystery, then,” O’Connor says. “Because when I gave him it, he seemed awful pleased, awful satisfied, as if I’d cleared up something that had been troubling him for a good long while. He could have shot me dead then and there, but he didn’t because he believed I was telling him the honest truth. Just think on that awhile.”

  O’Connor watches Rice carefully. Beneath the boldness and bravado he thinks he sees the beginnings of something new.

  “Why would he ever believe a copper anyway?” Rice says. />
  “You know why, Peter. Because I’m the one the traitors like to talk to, I’m the one who knows.”

  Rice shakes his head.

  “All that means nothing to me,” he says. “Nothing at all.”

  “Tell us where Doyle’s hiding,” Maybury says. “That’s the only way to save yourself now. If we don’t catch him first, then he’ll be coming for you. You know he will.”

  Rice shifts his jaw sideways, then back again. His face tightens.

  “I’m not a squealer,” he says. “Never have been.”

  “He looked angry when I gave him your name,” O’Connor says. “That was his big plan, wasn’t it, killing the mayor, and now it’s all in shreds and tatters and he wants someone else to blame. Maybe you can talk your way out of it, but I’d be surprised. He’s not a man to show much mercy when it comes to spies. Just tell us where he’s hiding, though, and your difficulty goes away.”

  Rice frowns and rubs his bristled jaw. He gazes up at the ceiling for a while, sniffs, sighs, then looks back at O’Connor.

  “I bet you made the same fine promises to Tommy Flanagan, didn’t you?” he says. “Said you’d keep him safe and warm if he told you what you wanted to know? And look how well that turned out for poor Tommy. Beaten half to death, I heard, then finished off with a shotgun, wasn’t it?”

  O’Connor doesn’t answer. Maybury grinds his teeth and looks down at the tabletop in front of him. Rice’s mouth broadens into something close to a grin.

  “You may be clever enough in your own fashion, Jimmy,” he says, “and you know how to keep your lords and masters happy, I can see that, but you’d better believe you’d be the last man in Manchester I’d ever trust my secrets to, the very last one.”

  O’Connor looks down at the floor between his feet a moment to steady himself, then starts to speak again, but Maybury stops him.