Alex Barclay - Darkhouse

But something did lie in Riggs’ upturned palm — a maroon and gold pin: a hawk, wings aloft, beak pointing earthwards. He had been gripping it so tightly, it had pierced his palm.

Ely State Prison, Nevada, two days later

‘Shut up, you fuckin’ freak. Shut your fuckin’ ass. I got National Geographic in my fuckin’ ears twenty-four/seven, you sick son of a bitch. Who gives a shit about your fuckin’ birds, Pukey Dukey? Who gives a fuckin’ shit?’

Duke Rawlins lay face down on the bottom bunk of his eight by ten cell. Every muscle in his long, wiry body tensed.

‘Don’t call me that.’ His face was set into a frown, his lips pale and full. He rubbed his head, disturbing the dirty blond hair that grew long at the back, but was cut short above his chill blue eyes.

‘Call you what?’ said Kane. ‘Pukey Dukey?’

Duke hated group. They made him say shit that was nobody’s business. He couldn’t believe this asshole, Kane, knew what the kids used to call him in school.

‘This hawk has that wing span, this hawk ripped a jack rabbit a new asshole, this hawk is alpha, this hawk is beta, and this little hawk goes wee, wee, wee, all the way home to you, you sick son of a bitch.’

Duke leapt from his bunk, sliding his arm from under the pillow, pulling out a pared-down, sharpened spike of Plexiglas. He jabbed it towards Kane, who jerked his head back hard against the wall. He jabbed again and again, slicing the air close enough to Kane’s face to let him know he meant it.

The warden’s voice stopped him.

‘Lookin’ to book yourself a one-way ticket to Carson City, Rawlins?’ Carson City was where Ely’s death row inmates took their last breath.

Duke spun around as he unlocked the door and pushed into the cell. The warden smoothed on a surgical glove and calmly took the weapon from a man he knew was too smart to screw up this close to his release.

‘Thought you might like to read this, Rawlins,’ he said, holding up a printout from the New York Times website.

Duke walked slowly towards the warden and stopped. The pockmarked face of Donald Riggs jumped right at him. KIDNAP ENDS IN FATAL EXPLOSION. Mother and daughter dead. Kidnapper fatally wounded. Duke went white. He reached out for the paper, pulling it from the warden’s hand as his legs slid from under him and he slumped on to the floor. ‘Not Donnie, not Donnie, not Donnie,’ he screamed over and over in his head. Before he passed out, his body suddenly heaved and he threw up all over the floor, spraying the warden’s shoes and pants.

Kane jumped down from his bed, kicking Duke in the gut because he could. His laugh was deep and satisfied. ‘Pukey fuckin’ Dukey. Man, this is quality viewing.’

‘Get back to your business, Kane,’ said the warden as he turned his back on the stinking cell.

Waterford, Ireland, one year later

Danaher’s is the oldest bar in the south east; stonefloored, wooden and dim. Salvaged timber from unlucky ships stretches in beams under the low ceiling, making shelves for rusty tankards and tangled green fishing nets. Fires live and die in the wide stone hearth. The mensroom is called the jacks and the jacks is outside: two stalls, one with no door. ‘And we haven’t had a shite stolen yet,’ Ed Danaher liked to say when anyone complained.

Joe Lucchesi was undergoing an interrogation at the bar.

‘Have you ever said ‘Freeze, motherfucker?’ asked Hugh, pushing his glasses up his nose. Hugh was tall and gangly, bowing his head as he talked, always ready to walk through a low doorway. His black hair was pulled into a frizzy ponytail and his long fingers tucked back the stray strands.

His friend, Ray, rolled his eyes.

‘Or anything you say or do can be held against you in a court of law?’ said Hugh.

Joe laughed.

‘Or found peanut shells in someone’s trousers?’

‘That’s CSI , you fuckwit,’ said Ray. ‘Don’t mind him. Seriously, though, have you ever planted evidence?’

They all laughed. Joe couldn’t remember a night when he had gone for a drink without being asked about his old job. Even his friends still pumped him for information.

‘You guys need to get out more,’ he said.

‘Come on, nothing happens in this kip,’ said Hugh.

A kip in Ireland was a dive in America, but to Joe, Mountcannon was far from a dive. It was a charming fishing village that had been his home for the past six months, thanks to his wife, Anna. Concerned for their marriage, their son, Shaun, and the family sanity, she had brought them here to save what she loved. Anna wanted him to quit after his last case, but he didn’t, so they agreed he would vest out for a year — temporary retirement that gave him nine months to decide whether or not he’d go back.

He didn’t know then where that year would take him. Anna was a freelance interior designer and pitched an idea to Vogue Living to renovate an old building, bought by the magazine and shot in stages. The building she chose was Shore’s Rock, a deserted weather-beaten lighthouse on the edge of a cliff outside Mountcannon, the village she had fallen in love with when she was seventeen.

When they got there, Joe understood how she felt. But he needed his New York fix. He would go to the local store and pick up USA Today or USA Two Days Ago. He’d say to Danny Markey, ‘If anything big happens back home, call me a couple days later, so I’ll know what you’re talking about.’ In New York, Ireland was Sunday afternoons and WFUV 90.7, Forty Shades of Green and Galway Shawls . But in an isolated lighthouse near a small village, the real Ireland was not all sentimental ballads... and it was far from simple practicalities. He could score a great pint and find a friend in any of Mountcannon’s three bars, but try renting a movie, ordering in or finding an ATM. For most people, Ed Danaher played banker and barman, always happy to refill his till with the cash he had just handed out.

Joe stood up, slid some notes across the bar and said goodbye to the two men. He made his way home in fifteen minutes, enjoying the turn of the last bend when the stark, freshly painted white of the lighthouse would rise up from the dark. He pushed open the gate and walked the hundred metres along the lane to the front door.

The site was sloping, carved into the cliff side, and made up of an almost jumbled collection of buildings, dating back to the eighteen-hundreds and added to over the years until it was finally deserted in the late sixties. There were three separate two-storey buildings, two of which could be used as living spaces. The first held the hallway, the kitchen, the living room and the den on the ground floor, and the main bedroom, guest bedroom and bathroom on the first floor. The second building was like a huge basement to the first, set lower into the cliff — a darker small-windowed space. The first storey was Shaun’s bedroom and the lower storey, a wine cellar. The third building was the round tower of the lighthouse, a separate structure to the rear of the main house. From the outside, it looked complete, but it was what lay inside that was the biggest challenge. Higher up on the site, above the house, a large shed had been transformed into a fully kitted-out workshop that Joe was still learning to use. He had made some of what Anna called the cruder furniture in the house, but she said it like a compliment, so that was good enough for him.

By the end of the year, she wanted the house to be modern and comfortable, with as many of the original features as she could keep. She was in the right part of the country for that, with carpenters, ironmongers and builders easy to find, but she learned quickly not to be as exacting in her timings as she would have been in New York. And the usual enticement of a mention in Vogue was hardly likely to stir these guys. But even in six months, they had helped to transform the unfulfilled potential of the dank, crumbling rooms and battered exteriors. When the family had first walked into Shore’s Rock, it was as if everything had been deserted in a hurry, like some great tragedy had swept old keepers away. It stank of the sea, of damp, of rotting timber. It looked hopeless to Joe and Shaun, but Anna called it perfect dereliction.