by Menon, David
‘So what’s been happening here then, June?’ Jeff asked.
‘A stabbing?’ she questioned with an all innocent voice.
‘You don’t say?’ Jeff replied, smiling.
‘There are thirty-seven stab wounds on him’ June declared. ‘Whoever attacked this poor bugger really wanted to make sure he was dead. It’s almost as if it was driven by some kind of madness’.
‘Any sign of a forced entry into the flat?’ Jeff asked.
‘No, sir’ said Ollie. ‘It looks like he opened the door willingly. Maybe he knew the person?’
‘I guess it’s too early for you to tell us anything else, June?’ said Jeff. ‘Like if there’s any trace of anyone else being in this room?’
‘Not until I get everything back, mate’ said June. ‘Then I’ll be able to look for any traces of someone else’s blood or DNA’.
‘Something else, sir?’ said Ollie. ‘O’Connell had just got back from a trip to Belfast this afternoon, barely three hours ago in fact. It was no secret why he was over there. About a year before he murdered the RUC officer James Carson, O’Connell was identified as one of an IRA gang who abducted a woman called Deirdre Murphy from her home in front of her children. She’d been accused by the local IRA masters of feeding information to the British about local IRA operations. She apparently screamed her denials at the time of her abduction and her family have protested her innocence to this day. She became one of the so-called disappeared, sir’.
‘People who were taken off by the IRA for interrogation and never seen again’ said Jeff.
‘That’s right, sir’ Ollie confirmed. ‘Now her family had been pressing O’Connell into telling them where their mother was buried and eventually a few weeks ago he agreed, hence the trip to Northern Ireland. However, he took them to a beach in county Antrim where he said she was buried but couldn’t pinpoint exactly where. Apparently her family were pretty angry about it as you can imagine and O’Connell was rushed back here because they were ready to lynch him’.
‘Do we know where her family live, Ollie?’
‘According to the PSNI they all moved over to the Greater Manchester area, sir, and live at several locations across the city and into Cheshire’.
‘And did they all make the trip back to Northern Ireland this week?’
‘That’s what I’m going to investigate next, sir’.
‘Good work, Ollie, thanks’
‘He certainly doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet’ said June Hawkins as she stood with Jeff watching Ollie Wright run down the stairs. ‘He was on the phone constantly before you arrived’.
‘He’s a good lad, alright’ said Jeff. ‘But then I’d always known that which is why I’d wanted him promoted’.
‘How’s it going without Rebecca?’
‘Well as far as the team is concerned we’ll be fine’ said Jeff, optimistically. ‘Although Adrian Bradshaw being promoted to DS has put Joe Alexander’s nose out of joint after it came down to a choice between the two of them. We won’t be having a new DC starting for a while yet if at all because of all the financial cutbacks they’re throwing at us’.
‘I can’t help but feel a bit sorry for poor old Joe’ said June.
‘I feel sorry for him too, June. He’s had a lot of bad luck in the last few years. But like we all do he’s got to pick up and carry on however hard it is’.
‘And what about you and the woman that was Rebecca and not the police colleague?’
‘I hesitated and I lost’ Jeff admitted. ‘We might’ve been good together but I didn’t give it a chance. Then I lost. So put it this way I won’t be making that same mistake again if someone else comes along’.
Jeff decided to have a quick look round the flat before going downstairs. He’d seen so many flats like this that looked like they’d been put together to satisfy the needs of life’s accidents. From the garishly patterned carpet to the curtains so thin you could probably see through them at night. These kind of flats were intended for people who no longer had any pride in their surroundings and didn’t care much beyond making it through each day. Jeff thought it must’ve been perfect for Padraig O’Connell who could sit here of an evening and be anonymous in a neighbourhood of anonymous people living in put together flats. There wasn’t much to distinguish this one from any of the others. A stack of newspapers showed that he liked to take the Independent as well as the Irish times. There were no books or pictures. He clearly hadn’t been sentimental in that way.
‘Jeff!’ June called out. ‘DI Wright wants you downstairs!’
‘Okay, I’m coming!’ Jeff called back. Why wait? Jeff wondered as he took a last look around. Why wait five years before you try and put the Murphy family out of their misery? Why did you wait until you were no doubt pushed and coerced into doing it? And who would kill you with such ferocity that you probably wouldn’t have known anything after the second stab. So why does the killer carry on many more times digging their knife into you? Why did they want to make sure you were well and truly dead over and over again? What was driving all that fury and hatred? There were scores of former IRA terrorists and murderers now living freely in the community. They didn’t end up dead in the way Padraig O’Connell had done.
‘Of course it might not have anything to do with his past’ said June as if she’d been reading Jeff’s thoughts. ‘It might’ve been something to do with his more recent life after he came out of prison?’
Jeff paused. ‘You could be right, June’ he said. ‘We shall have to wait and see’.
‘DI Wright is calling for you again’.
Jeff went downstairs and joined DI Wright who was talking to a visibly shocked and shaken looking woman of clearly advancing years in a bright red skirt, white t-shirt and leather jacket. Her hair was a mass of long peroxide blond curls, her make-up was thick and unyielding and her finger nails were painted in a deep, dark red.
‘Sir, this is Carol Anderson’ said DI Wright. ‘She says she was O’Connell’s girlfriend’.
THROWN DOWN TWO
Melbourne, Australia.
It was the morning after the night before and Patricia Knight managed to drag herself out towards the end of the afternoon and drive to the shopping mall at Ferntree Gully to pick up a couple of last minute supplies. Last night she’d celebrated her sixtieth birthday with a party thrown by her darling husband Dennis down at their local pub at which all their friends were there plus their three kids, two grandkids, and various members of Dennis’s family. It had been an absolutely wonderful night but rather a lot of champagne and wine had been drunk that had given Patricia the pounding headache she’d woken up with and was only just starting to go away. She kept her sunglasses on all the way and hoped she didn’t bump into anybody she knew because she must look bloody awful. She was looking forward to tonight though. . It was just going to be her and Dennis and he was going to cook her favourite meal which is a nicely tender piece of sirloin steak followed by a pavlova with strawberries and fresh cream. She’d never had a pavlova until she went to Australia but now she adored them. She was starting to feel hungry now. She hadn’t been able to manage more than half a slice of toast all day.
It had been sort of food related when she and Dennis had first got together just a couple of months after she’d arrived in Australia nearly forty years ago. She’d flown across to the other side of the world like a bird that was wondering where to go for the summer. She had no qualifications for anything that could be put onto a job application but she’d placed her faith in making a new start that would take her away from everything. She felt so alone and out on a limb in those first few weeks but despite that she knew it was right to have broken herself off from the rest of her family back home. How on earth would she ever explain to her Mammy how complicated life had become for her and those around her? There would be nothing gained from stepping backwards and in any case the reason for her migration to the other side of the world was to wipe herself clean. She flushed her past down the t
oilet and literally started her life all over.
Before too long she managed to get herself a job in a snack bar used by truck drivers, some of whom were local guys and some were from interstate, but all had large appetites and many of them thought they were God’s bloody gift to women. Dennis had been a local Melbourne boy who did some interstate stuff as far as Canberra and Sydney. She knew that Dennis had noticed her in that way that men do because of all the looks and the way his eyes went up and down her. He called her ‘freckles’ because the sun that she was so unused to had brought them out all over her face. Her strawberry blond hair had also become a little lighter since she’d arrived ‘down under’. She had a good thing going with some of the other boys who teased her rotten but she could give as good as she got and all the time they were playing their games Dennis would hover in the background without saying anything, just observing and sending her a nod and a wink from time to time. Dennis was a couple of years older than Patricia although they were both still in their early twenties. She loved the way he strutted around in his jeans and his seemingly endless collection of checked patterned shirts. He had a sexual allure about him that she’d never come across before with his dark hair and dark eyes and what was, to her, such a funny accent.
Dennis finally got around to asking her out one Thursday afternoon back in 1977 when the rest of the snack bar team were attending a party to celebrate the Queen’s silver jubilee. Patricia hadn’t wanted to attend. Her Irish Republican instincts were still too strong to get any pleasure out of celebrating the British crown but instead of giving her real reasons she just told her work mates that she should work so that the rest of them could go because she was the last one in. She thought it was only fair. Dennis came in and put some coins in the juke box. Seconds later the sound of Dusty Springfield singing ‘The Look of Love’ filled the place and Dennis took her in his arms and they started dancing. She did genuinely fall in love with him and went out with him for all the right reasons. But more than that, by getting together with Dennis she’d be laying down the kind of roots that would remove her from her past forever. When Dennis asked about her family back in Ireland she told him they were ‘all gone’ and that she’d been an only child. She didn’t like lying to him but she couldn’t tell him the truth. And yet he trusted her. He never questioned anything of the brief story she told him.
The pregnancy test six months later was positive so Dennis said he’d ‘do the right thing’ and marry Patricia as soon as they could organise it. Not that he hadn’t wanted to. As soon as he met her he knew that she was the only girl for him so it wasn’t exactly difficult to say his vows in church and his family embraced Patricia almost as one of their own. Then when their son Shane came along they were well on their way. Shane was joined a couple of years later by his sister Phoebe and then two years after that Michael came along. They’d all done well for themselves and Dennis and Patricia often joked about how they could possibly have bred three such clever kids. Shane now worked as a lawyer for a local firm based in Melbourne. He was married and had given them their two gorgeous little grandkids, Peter and Lauren. Phoebe was married but was devoted to her career in teaching for the time being and didn’t want children yet. Michael was training to be a nurse and lived in the city with his girlfriend Summer. She didn’t have to worry about any of them. But she did because she was their Mum.
She remembered how strong her own Mammy had been. Night after night she and her sisters had listened as one of her brothers got the living daylights lashed out of him by their father and his belt. There’d been so much violence in their household growing up. But her Mammy had stayed upright throughout it all even when their father turned his fists on her. She was a hero in Patricia’s eyes. Her halo would never slip. The only fault she would lay at her mother’s door was the covering up of everything that went on in the house. All the rows, all the fights, all the violence given out by their father, none of it would ever be spoken about. It was all swept under the carpet and she thought her Mammy would never be comfortable in today’s world where everybody seems to think its right to confess all. Not that Patricia would ever do that herself. There were some things you should never confess to.
The violence didn’t end at their front door. They lived a couple of blocks back from the Falls road and the violence was everywhere as soon as they stepped out onto the street. They were a besieged community. They’d had the guts to stand up to the British liars and pigs but they’d paid a bloody high price for it. But still Mammy would never speak a word of badness against the British soldier who would treat her like an animal if she looked at him the wrong way when she was making her way down the street. It had been that outside violence and the causes for it that had inspired Patricia to go down the path that led to her leaving Belfast in the end.
She stopped at some traffic lights and her head was swirling around with memories of that far distant world of her upbringing. It was all so different from the life she had now and sometimes she wondered how on earth she’d managed to get here. Who from those early days would recognise the respectable married woman she’d now been for almost forty years? Her marriage to Dennis had been solid throughout and neither of them had sought company elsewhere. He’d been an absolute godsend. They’d had their ups and downs like most couples but there’d never been a time when they thought they might not get through whatever crisis was happening at the time. Money had been short at times when the economy had been in recession and the demand to have truckers take goods around the country had dipped. But that’s when Patricia had pulled her weight and got herself work doing all sorts of stuff from postal sorting to supermarket checkout just to keep the family’s head above water and avoid the need to dip into their savings. They’d survived. They’d got through. Dennis was good with money and he’d made sure they had a good enough pension to provide the comfortable retirement they were enjoying now. She’d also always been relieved that Dennis had never asked her questions about her past. When they first met he’d just accepted her story that she’d ran away from Northern Ireland because of the troubles and been desperate to start a new life and that she had no family. He’d never questioned what had happened to them and on the rare occasions when the subject did come up he said that if she ever did want to tell him he’d be ready to listen but he’d never push her into telling him. Now they were going to grow old together and sit on the back porch each summer evening with a beer or a glass of wine in hand. Patricia counted her blessings alright. She was as psychologically distant from her early days back home as she was in sheer physical distance from the streets she learned to navigate in ways that would avoid death.
She parked her car and picked up her handbag and her empty shopping bag before proceeding towards the supermarket entrance. Even with her dark sunglasses on she couldn’t help but see Marjorie Reynolds walking up to her with her usual all embracing smile. God, why did it have to be her she bumped into? She couldn’t stand her. She’d only asked her and her husband Reginald to her sixtieth because Marjorie was a friend of a friend and it had been one of those things that had seemed like politeness. It was like looking at someone who’d just stepped through a time slip from the 1950s. Marjorie always wore high collar blouses and skirts that were never above her knee. Her hair was the same kind of old fashioned Doris Day style too and her makeup was always blue eye shadow applied with about as much care as a two-year old could muster. The whole ensemble was finished off with a pair of oh so comfortable court shoes. It wasn’t just that Patricia couldn’t stand her. She actually hated her and wanted to find the nearest shopping trolley to ram her with.
‘Hi Patricia!’ gushed Marjorie. ‘Suffering from the consumption of too much alcohol I see’.
God, the woman had the knack of making everything sound like you should put yourself on the naughty step.
‘Well the champagne was flowing rather freely, Marjorie as you know’.
‘Yes and that’s precisely why I didn’t indulge or let Reginald indulge eit
her. Whenever someone puts cash behind a bar it always ends in casualties like the way you’re feeling now’.
Poor Reginald, thought Patricia. He and Marjorie had been married for years but they’d had no children. Patricia sometimes wondered if they’d ever actually had sex. Marjorie had once told her that she irons Reginald’s pyjamas and all the sheets and pillowcases and when there’s a fresh lot on she won’t let him move around in bed in case he creases them all prematurely. She’s always telling of the things she won’t ‘let’ Reginald do. If Patricia ever talked to Dennis in terms of either letting him or not letting him do something he’d have shown her the door years ago and rightly so. You can’t talk to a grown man like that. Her Mammy came back into her thoughts. God love her she’d never known what it was like to be part of a good marriage with a good man. Patricia wished her Mammy had been able to pull herself away from Patricia’s father and find a good man to be with who would’ve treated her right. She might’ve been able to know some personal happiness if she had.
‘Well that’s where I’ve obviously been going wrong all these years, Marjorie’.
‘And that dress you were wearing, Patricia? I mean, full marks to you for carrying it off as well as you did’.
For the party Patricia had bought a black one piece dress with a strap over each shoulder and a low neckline. It was short too, the hem just about covering the important stuff and showing off her still noticeable legs. When she’d seen it in the shop she’d had second thoughts about buying it. She loved it but she wasn’t sure if it was seemly for someone her age. Her daughter Phoebe had been with her and she told her mother to go ahead and buy it. ‘Not many women of your age have got your figure Mum so go on and live dangerously’ Phoebe had encouraged. So she had and by all accounts it had gone down a storm except with Marjorie the bloody mother superior here.
