Blood Will Be Born

by Donnelly, Gary

  That will do us son. We have enough to work with. I can speak you through it.

  ‘OK Daddy,’ he said.

  He looked at the explosives, the canisters of petrol, the timer, and detonator in front of him. He needed to work quickly. Christopher tapped the handle of the screwdriver against the wooden work top: Bump, bump, bump. He stopped. It sounded like Daddy’s drumming heels.

  Let’s dance son, what do you say?

  Chapter 7.

  After leaving Dempsey’s neighbour Phelan Brown, Aoife told Sheen she wanted to wash up and change, which meant returning to Randalstown. He said he would meet her at the Royal where Jamie Anderson was waiting. She also wanted to call Marie again, to check in on Ava. She had tried her before leaving Lincoln View, but got no reply.

  Aoife tossed her own and Cecil’s mobile on her bed, and when she emerged from the bathroom fifteen minutes later, Cecil’s phone illuminated in the darkened room, then blinked off. The message was more abrupt, less toying than those previous.

  Find me Jackie Coyle’s location, NOW.

  Coyle was the man who had killed Scotty Woods and was now co-operating with police. He had named Cecil Moore, and Cecil had got a sniff of it, somehow.

  Another text message: Aoife, I need you help me.

  He might be arrogant, but Aoife could read behind this message; Moore was scared, his back against the wall.

  ‘Finally, you bastard, you have bitten off more than you can chew,’ she said, cold water dripping from a loose strand of hair on her naked shoulder. Moore had been on the radio this morning lamenting the plight of the Protestant people of Ulster, under siege and under threat. What would happen to him when those people found out that it was Moore who had planned the attack on their homes, killed their leader in the street?

  Answer me, remember our video.

  She locked the phone and threw it on the bed. No more messages, and no more blackmail. She had worked honest days and nights to get to Serious Crimes, what in Hell’s name had she been thinking even letting him in? She reached for the hair dryer and plugged it in beside the mirror. Another message pinged on the phone. Delete it, don’t even read it. Of course, she picked up the phone and looked.

  ANSWER me you BITCH!

  She threw the phone down again in disgust and turned on her hair dryer full blast, blotting out the world. Moore was going to get his response, but from Irwin. Now it was he who was going to have to give some answers.

  By the time Aoife was standing in her kitchen, pouring a fresh coffee, there was a further six message on the phone. She did not open them; instead she lifted her own smartphone and pressed Marie’s number. It was just past nine o clock, the girls should be ready to begin their summer school classes. Marie answered on the third ring and Aoife could tell immediately she was outside. She could hear the sound of the girl’s voices in the background, chattering away at the same time, talking ten to the dozen. Aoife smiled, despite everything this bloody Sunday morning, that sound, made her smile. It felt good.

  ‘Hi Marie, just me. Wanted to check in. Everything ok?’ she asked.

  Marie said everything was dead on. She told Aoife they were heading up the Falls Road now, coming up the Culturlann, with the girls, as Aoife suspected. Marie, also able to talk the back leg off a donkey, told her all about the previous evening’s events: Makeshift campfire on the living room floor, telling ghost stories, eating sweets, followed by bedtime which degenerated into some kind of game of musical beds by the sound of it. Finally Marie took a breath and asked Aoife if all was well with her?

  ‘You dealing with that trouble over the Peace Line near Clonard last night? People on the road are full of the talk of it, you can still smell the burning in the air,’ said Marie.

  ‘I’m alright, Marie. I heard about the trouble, but no, not working it,’ she said. Talk of the trouble ticker taped Jackie Coyle’s name across her mind, followed by the last message she had read from Cecil Moore: ANSWER me you BITCH! She blinked the thoughts away. She could do this, she would prevail.

  ‘You still there Aoife? So what are you doing?’ she asked.

  Aoife gave the stock reply that she always used when someone outside the force asked about police business, she did not even hesitate it was so well used.

  ‘They are keeping me busy, but nothing too exciting going on,’ she said.

  ‘Well, just watch yourself, this place always goes buck mad over the 12th,’ said Marie.

  ‘I will, thanks Marie. I’ll see you tomorrow evening, might be a bit later than planned but I’ll be there. My girl doing ok?’ she asked.

  ‘She’s absolutely fine, sure listen to the noise of them,’ said Marie.

  ‘OK, speak to you later,’ said Aoife, but Marie had already hung up. Aoife raised her coffee and took a sip, wincing at the bitterness. She visualised Ava trotting in through the gates of the Culturlann, Marie's daughter by her side. Marie was a good friend and a great mother, she would have eyes on them, all the way in, she trusted in that.

  Aoife shivered, goose bumps prickling her arms all the way to her shoulders. Cecil’s phone pinged from the kitchen. She pocketed it. She felt her jaw tighten and pulse treble as she moved quickly from one disgusting message to the next, deleting each with a jab of her thumb, her anger and her resolution to destroy Cecil Moore deepening with each deleted message. She was a bitch, a cunt, a whore bag, and a Fenian cocksucker. She reached the final message.

  YOU have made a mistake blanking me Aoife. You will learn about loyalty.

  Delete, for the final time. Aoife turned off the coffee machine and she walked out the front door, all panic and frustration gone. Now she was just angry. Angry that Ava was involved; but mostly, she was angry at Moore’s final text message. A snake telling her that she needed a lesson on loyalty? He had used the death of his own mother to make personal gains against his own community.

  Aoife got into her car and slammed the door, pulled Cecil’s cheap phone apart and removed the SIM card. She accelerated quickly until she joined the M2. She rolled down her window, first discarded the sim and then thirty sends later, the shell of the phone, after all it was a throwaway. In a matter of minutes, both would be broken and gone under the wheels of weekend traffic.

  ‘Fuck you Moore and fuck you too Charlie Donaldson,’ she shouted, letting the cool air blast in round her face. The car rattled like a space shuttle on re-entry.

  She needed to get her hands on that video. Even if Moore was not to be trusted, if there were other copies, his phone was a starting point, the video was definitely there. What other choice did she have, let Cecil put a collar round her neck and lead her about on a leash for the rest of her life? She was back, and despite everything, she was glad to be alive.

  Chapter 8.

  Christopher pulled the sheet off his bed and treaded carefully past John’s bedroom and down the stairs. He lifted the taxi keys as he did so, headed for the garage where he unlocked the door that led to the street, threw the bedsheet on the bench and went outside.

  The steel trolley was still on the floor of the back of the black taxi, well concealed, the white cotton coat and hat over it. Christopher heaved the trolley out and walked it quickly to the open garage door and inside where the device Daddy had helped him make was waiting. The petrol canisters made the incendiary bomb heavy, but he managed to coax it on to the foot of the trolley, covered it with the sheet and wheeled as fast as he could to the taxi. Daddy had told him to set the timer and prime it only when ready; safety first. Christopher manoeuvred the bomb into the back of the taxi, took all his strength. He wedged it snugly between the sofa seat and the folded singles, sweating lightly with the effort. He remembered to close the garage door over, before he drove away. He felt the trolley shift a bit, pushing against the folded seats at his back as he descended the hill outside the house, but otherwise, it felt secure. Christopher glanced in the rear view, saw it looming in the back, propped up like a draped casket in his black carriage.

  As he p
arked the taxi on the street next to the Culturlann, Christopher could hear the muted rise and fall of small voices within. He glanced down the street, lots of parked cars but no traffic and no people. Ahead a steady current of vehicles passed the mouth of the street leading to the Falls Road, but for now few pedestrians, just an old couple who made slow work of the crossing. Christopher waited for them to pass, then got out and switched from the front seat to the back of the taxi where he put on the white cotton coat and hat, removed the sheet to prime the bomb. The air was tainted with faint fumes from the petrol canisters, and sickly sweet marzipan from the sweating 808 plastic. He ever so gently draped the sheet over the trolley and it’s now softly ticking cargo. Christopher opened the door, nudged the bomb from its standing position, and lowered the load so it was all but flat to the floor. He pushed it, inch by inch, out the open back door of the taxi, lowered it through the turn of its wheels until it reached the ground below.

  He was sweating, only partly through the effort, his hands slick on the handles. He got out and tipped the bomb backwards, edged it out of the way and closed the taxi door with his foot. From behind him he heard the distinctive metallic rattle of a front gate being closed, footsteps approached the clack of heels, it got louder. He stayed still, like a spider disturbed.

  ‘Nice morning,’ said a voice. Christopher nodded to his right, from where the woman spoke, in time to catch her swish past in a cloud of floral perfume and fresh cigarette smoke. Christopher did not reply. He watched as she marched on up the pavement and disappeared into the Falls Road. From the near distance, the tinny chime of a church bell, calling the faithful like this woman, to their knees. Where she was headed, others would follow. He needed to get moving.

  He breathed deeply, forced himself to push the trolley on another few steps, then stopped again. What if he was challenged? It was Sunday morning, not a typical time for a food delivery as his outfit implied. Also, there had been trouble last night over the Peace Line, the news of Dempsey’s death. People would be edgy, especially the sort of people who staffed an Irish cultural centre in west Belfast. The doubts circled his mind like besieging Indians. He wished Daddy would speak to him, give him a word of assurance. He should had never come out this morning, he wished –

  Christopher turned his head in the direction of the Culturlann. Moments before there’d been laughing voices of children, but no longer. Something was happening. A different sort of commotion was afoot; several adult voices in the mix, then the piercing wail of a single child’s cry. This was it, the distraction he needed. He hurried along, turned the corner and on to the Falls Road and straight through the open gates of the Cutlurlann. As he approached the glass annex entrance the door was opened from within by an acne cheeked teenage girl who stood aside to let him pass.

  She said something, not in English. Christopher kept his head down, quietly thanked her and pushed the trolley inside.

  It was dim, despite three or four LED camping lanterns positioned on round tables across the central space. Two more stood on the ends of the coffee bar that ran along the back wall, white porcelain coffee cups reflecting their glow. A banner, green and white, written in Gaelic, displayed over the bar. There was a door, no handle or lock, left of the bar. It was probably a swing door into the kitchen, too much traffic. He disregarded it, turned his attention to the wall to his left where long gothic windows were shrouded with floor to ceiling blackout curtains, the kind used in venues that hosted theatre productions. Better. Christopher headed towards the far wall where the curtains were bunched exactly as he needed. The old church building echoed with the shrill cries of a child who was surrounded by attending adults. Nobody looked at him.

  He set the trolley on its foot, put his ear close to the swing door and listened for signs of life. He heard none. He nudged the door and it swung fluidly open. The kitchen was pitch dark inside, empty. Christopher carefully tipped the trolley forwards, and slid the bomb off the flat foot. He pulled open the surplus of the blackout curtain and inched the bomb along the smooth wooden floor using his foot and lower leg to steady it, and his body weight to shift its bulk. It disappeared behind the curtain, shrouded in its funeral sheet and still softly ticking. Even if the curtains were drawn, there was more than enough surplus to keep it concealed.

  Christopher steered the empty trolley back through the main room, casual. The glass door was still standing open and he emerged into the sharp light. When that bomb exploded tomorrow afternoon there would be no escape. The curtains would fuel the inferno. Christopher started to whistle as he loaded the trolley back into the rear of the taxi, then paused, and smiled. The song, it was an old rock tune that had been on the radio when he and John Fryer sat with their tea the day before. Light My Fire, The Doors. He puckered his lips to resume but the laughter, broke free like a freshly broken oil head, the best he could manage was to clamber into the driver’s seat of the taxi and let it out.

  Time to return the trolley we borrowed son. The coat and hat too. We can’t have people say we are common thieves.

  Daddy’s words cut through his paroxysm and he turned the key in the ignition, face wet but sombre.

  ‘No Daddy,’ he said quietly, eyes downcast. The taxi’s engine rattled under him, and Christopher pulled away, bound for the Kennedy Centre mall which by now would be open for business. Little did he know it, but this brief exchange would be the end of his many conversations with Daddy. Good Daddy at least.

  Chapter 9.

  Sheen texted Aoife a little past nine AM to say that he and Irwin were waiting for her at the Royal’s High Dependency Unit.

  Jamie Anderson had been found unconscious with multiple injuries on waste ground between the lower Shankill and the Clonard area of the lower Falls. Not far in fact from where Jackie Coyle, the bloke who shot Scotty Woods in the street, had been picked up a few hours earlier. Jamie’s mother held her polystyrene cup of coffee as though her life depended on it, told Sheen and Irwin that she had no idea how her son could have ended up in no man’s land between Protestant and Catholic. Jamie had no friends outside the Tiger’s Bay area that she knew of, and those he was in touch with were more likely to be communicating online rather than in person. Nor did he have any enemies. The kid had never been in any trouble before, and the genuine shock she displayed told Sheen she was telling the truth.

  The nurse on duty gave them a grizzly inventory of Jamie Anderson’s injuries: Both legs had been broken, one arm too, the other badly bruised, ribs cracked, two vertebrae in his lower back cracked, fractured jaw, broken nose, some swelling on the brain.

  ‘All of the above were probably caused by the same blunt instrument, a ball hammer would be my best guess,’ she said. ‘The young man is fortunate to be alive,’ said the nurse, speaking to them outside the staff tea room. She was smaller by at least a foot than both Sheen and Irwin, wearing a plain smock, her complexion free from makeup. She had her hair pulled into a tight, styles bunch on the top of her head. Sheen had spent enough time in hospitals in and out of his time in uniform to know that these people worked hard, twelve hour shifts, something her red ringed eyes confirmed. She spoke with a terse efficiency which told of weariness but there was no irritation. She had the professionalism, Sheen noted, not to go over the line, even though he and Irwin were eating into what must have been a precious break. Sheen looked up from the small black note book in which he had been writing her summary, ready to question how she could be so sure about the weapon. She cut him off before he had time to speak.

  ‘Oh aye, I can tell. I’ve seen enough injuries in this place over the years to know the difference between a Hurley stick, a baseball bat and a hammer,’ she said.

  Sheen nodded, fair enough.

  ‘Looks like this young man was most likely set upon while taking part in the riots over the Peace Line last night, it explains where we found him, left for dead,’ said Irwin. Irwin sounded unconvinced by his own synopsis and Sheen did not blame him. The nurse shared Sheen’s silent scepticism.<
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  ‘I said he was lucky to be alive, but in my experience when people try to murder each other in Belfast, they usually manage it. At the very least I’d expect more severe head injuries, symptomatic of being jumped or stamped upon. That’s how this usually plays out, get them on the ground, then they jump all over their head,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps Jamie Anderson was fortunate, perhaps the attackers were disturbed before they could finish him off, we just don’t know. It was chaos there last night, trust me I was trying to restore order,’ said Irwin.

  ‘No, no, no, I doubt that very much,’ she replied. ‘Not unless this young man was tied to a chair, beaten up, and then carried to the place where he was found behind the Peace Line,’ she said.

  ‘Explain,’ said Irwin.

  ‘He has clear ligature marks on his wrists and ankles, deep enough to have caused lasting bruising and to have broken the skin on his ankles,’ she said passing an index finger over both her inner wrists to illustrate. Sheen thought of that scumbag Nelson, and what he was going to do to him when he found him. The nurse locked eyes with Sheen. He saw her recognition, and her judgement. She broke her stare and produced a packet of Silk Cut from the front pocket of her smock.

  ‘I’m gonna leave the rest of the detective work to you gentlemen,’ she said.

  ‘I need a smoke and in this place that means a walk. The consultant has agreed you can speak with Jamie, but five minutes, no more. He has only regained consciousness, I don’t want him distressed,’ she said. She was looking pointedly at Sheen.

  ‘We need a bit longer than that,’ said Irwin.

  ‘I get back in five minutes,’ she said. ‘You’ll not get sense from the poor creature, he’s doped up to the eyes,’ she said.