Jessie Keane: Ruthless

‘Redmond,’ said his wife.

The old man looked at the two women in bemusement. ‘Who?’ His eyes fastened on his daughter. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

Orla stayed on, living in a dim twilight world of cooking and cleaning, exhausting herself so that she fell into bed at night unable to think, unable to do anything other than sleep. Her mother was sharp as a tack – although clearly ground down and aged from the burden of caring for her husband – but Pa’s dementia had left him with no interest in the daily business of living. He would subsist on bread and water if you let him. Baths were things he had to be reminded to take on a fortnightly basis – Ma had to run his bath for him, then wash his reeking clothes.

Someone had once told Orla that grief had its passage of time. Nothing could hurry it. Two to five years was normal to grieve, going through all the processes of anger, guilt and acceptance.

Five years passed. The Garda, despite her fears that they might, never returned. The farmhouse came slowly back to life under her care. And still she longed for Redmond, for the presence of her twin at her side. And she felt plagued by guilt because she had lived, and he had not.

With so much time to think about it, she’d become convinced that the crash had been orchestrated by Annie Carter and her Mafia pals. She could never forget Fergal tapping that fuel gauge, wondering why it was showing empty when it should have been full. And now the only person she had ever loved in her entire life was gone. The one consolation was that she and Redmond had settled the score with that Carter bitch before they’d fled England. They’d finished her good and proper – there would have been nothing left of her but blood and guts. It pleased Orla so much to think of that. If the police had ever found the remains of her, God alone knew how they would have identified the cow.

The days dragged on, the skies sitting in a grey repressive bowl above her head as she went out to hang the washing. It wouldn’t dry much today, but later she’d bring it in, hang it on the clothes horse in front of the fire.

Her life was dull too, dull like the sky. She was wearing an old cotton dress of her mother’s, pulled in tight with a belt because she was terribly thin these days, as if the grief had eaten her from within. Over that she wore a faded quilted jacket – her father’s – and Wellington boots that belonged to him too. They flopped around her feet, acres too big.

Orla grabbed the peg bag from inside the kitchen door and hurried out clutching the basket of washing. In the living room of the old farmhouse her parents were watching the news on TV. She’d sat with them through the latest reports about the IRA shooting dead a policeman who’d stumbled upon a bomb-making factory in a Hammersmith basement, and the scandal surrounding Indira Gandhi, who’d now been found guilty of electoral corruption. But when the newsreader announced that a Boeing 727 had crashed at the edge of Kennedy airport, killing over a hundred people, Orla had begun shaking uncontrollably. The footage of wreckage in the water had her reliving her own nightmare struggle for life, the icy sea, the plane sinking, the loss – oh God! – of Redmond.

She looked around her at the decaying farm buildings. It was hard to believe that they had been reduced to this. Her father, who’d seen to it that the Delaney name inspired fear and respect in London’s ganglands, now a demented old man. Her mother, once so smart, so elegant, now worn down by the strain of caring for him. Her brothers, dead.

The Delaneys were a spent force.

And so was she.

Moyross, Ireland, 1973

‘Jesus, I’m not sure about this,’ said Pikey.

Alongside him, crouched down behind Pardew’s parked car, Rufus Malone gave Pikey a scathing look.

The guy had no balls.

Things got rough, and he started to squirm like a big girl.

‘Shut yer trap,’ hissed Rufus.

Pikey fell silent.

Tosser, thought Rufus with a sigh. Rather than squatting here, cramping up in the freezing fucking cold with Pikey groaning on about not being sure, Rufus was wishing he was elsewhere. Time was, being a cousin of the Delaneys would have spared him this sort of crap. Maybe he ought to have stuck to the horse trading around St Mary’s in Limerick. Or kept up with the serious betting on the sulky races, travelling all over Ireland having a piss-up and making a packet.

The lure of criminality had pulled him from an early age, even in the school playground where he’d pinched other pupils’ marbles with his old oppo Rory. As one of the Delaney clan, he had a reputation to live up to.

Rufus was built like a rugby player. His size intimidated all but the most determined foe. Added to that, he was fast-moving and had a shock of shoulder-length curly red hair. The hair gave him a primitive, caveman appearance. His facial features were pudgy, not distinctive, but his hard grey eyes promised trouble – and he always delivered.

He’d moved up the ranks since his schooldays. From regular appearances in the juvenile courts, having progressed from stealing marbles to robbing milkmen and grocery stores, he graduated to the district court on charges of breaking and entering. He became a master at blagging old judges with innocent looks and pleas to spare him, he would never do such a thing again, honest.

Of course, he always did.

As a result, he got accustomed to the occupational hazard of brief spells inside. Prison was his finishing school, where he brushed up against real hard cases, learned more about the ways of the world.

While frequenting the races with his old mate, sometime thief and sometime motor mechanic Rory, he encountered smoother, bigger criminals. People with connections to the provisional IRA and dissident republicans. And, of course, Dublin-based gang bosses who liked the cut of him and were impressed by his Delaney connections, thinking he’d be handy in a scrap. Bosses, middle-aged silverbacks, bulky and mean-eyed, like Big Don Callaghan, who owned Rufus’s arse now – and paid handsomely for the privilege.

For the time being, Rufus was enforcer for Don’s Island Field gang and he had a job to do. The job was simple. Dispose of a bit of rubbish called Jonathon Pardew, who had been stepping on Big Don’s toes. Don had wanted Rufus to include Pikey, his nephew, on the outing, so who was Rufus to refuse? He would rather have had Rory, who had grown up with him through various scrapes and was to be trusted implicitly. Rory was his companion of choice on such ventures. But he had no say in the matter.

‘Look after the little tit, he’s my sister’s boy,’ Don had said earlier in the day. ‘See what you think of him, give me your opinion.’

Rufus thought that Don would not like his opinion one bit. Pikey was spineless. But he would look after the boy on this one outing, report back to Don that the kid was useless, and hopefully he would never be burdened again.

From early on in the proceedings, Pikey had been displaying nerves. While Rufus siphoned petrol from the can into a Lucozade bottle, Pikey’s hands had been shaking so hard that he couldn’t hold the bottle still. He’d ended up with petrol splashed all over his hand and arm.

When the bottle was full, Rufus stuffed paper into the nozzle to act as a fuse. Then they waited. Their information was that Pardew would come out of his mistress’s house in the suburbs of Moyross dead on ten o’clock, aiming to get home before his old lady started playing up.

And sure enough, here he was, whistling his way down the path as happy as a lark. His breath was like smoke in the cold night air. Pardew had already survived one of Don’s boys taking a pop at him. Someone had walked up to him in the street and fired a gun in his face. Or that had been the intention. The gun had misfired. The would-be assassin had been a marked man after that, showing up in the local morgue a week later.