Mark Pearson - The Killing Season

‘He’s coming round.’

I heard the voice and tried to open my eyes. Christ, I felt awful. As if I had been run over by a herd of cattle. Every muscle in my body ached. But most of all there was a stabbing pain in my side, and I remembered where I was and why.

‘God bless you, Jack. You’ve done a marvellous thing.’

I blinked my eyes and could just about make out my aunt looking down, smiling gratefully, and my mother, beautiful as she always was, with hair like Maureen O’Sullivan’s and every bit as pretty, as my da always said.

‘Is he going to be all right?’ I asked.

‘Yes, Jack,’ ma said, taking my hand and patting it. He’s going to be just grand. You both are.’

The fact that she crossed herself immediately after saying it might have given others cause for concern, but I was sixteen years old now and invincible.

‘You’ve saved his life, Jack. You’ve saved his life,’ cried his aunt effusively, bursting into tears.

I shrugged. ‘Sure, it was only a kidney.’

I smiled at the memory. And then the smile faded as I remembered how my cousin had repaid me. Many years later in the lock-up of a murdering gangster called Mickey Ryan in London.

There was a metallic clang. I looked across to see the gorilla of a henchman putting a toolbox on the workbench that ran along the whole left-hand side of the garage.

‘You might wonder why you are still alive, Delaney.’

‘Must be my guardian angel.’

Ryan laughed. His blue eyes sparkling with amusement. ‘I wonder if you’ll still be laughing when my man here goes to work on you with a pair of needle-tooth pliers.’

Liam stepped forward. ‘Nobody said anything about that.’

‘Nobody points a gun at me and gets away with it. You’re going to learn that, Delaney. And that grassing tub of lard Norrell is going to be next.’ He turned to Liam. ‘Put one in his gut, give him something to think about.’

Liam raised the pistol he had been holding in his right hand: a semi-automatic with a silencer. I could see no mercy, no compassion in his eyes as he pulled the trigger.

The minder made a sound like a dog swallowing a fly and dropped to the floor, a hand fluttering towards his heart but not making it. Liam pointed the gun at Mickey Ryan.

‘The fuck you think you’re doing?’

‘The fuck you think I’m doing?’

Ryan shook his head. ‘We had a deal.’

‘I don’t make deals with scum. Gut shot, wasn’t it?’ He pulled the trigger again, and Mickey Ryan dropped to his knees, squealing and holding his stomach. ‘Hurts, doesn’t it?’

Ryan’s face had gone purple and he hissed between his teeth. But if they were words he was trying to speak they were not intelligible to the human ear.

Liam grabbed a Stanley knife from the toolbox and slashed the ropes binding my arms.

He smiled. ‘I made some calls after you left. Figured out what was going on and realised you’d be way out of your depth.’

‘I had it covered.’

‘Sure you did, cousin. But you weren’t going to kill him, were you?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Which means that one way or another he would have ended up killing you.’

‘Maybe.’

‘No “maybe” about it.’

‘What did you have to hit me for, then?’

‘You might be ten kinds of death wish walking on legs, Jack. But I still enjoy my life. I did what I had to do. And you should be grateful, so take a Panadol and shut the fuck up with the whining already.’

Ryan gurgled again, hissing through wet lips, his face contorted with pain. ‘Listen. .’

Liam turned to me and held the gun out. ‘Do you want to do it?’

I made no move to take the pistol. Liam nodded, then fired two bullets one after the other into the kneeling man’s head. Ryan slumped sideways and the gurgling stopped.

I looked at the dead body. Not sure what to think any more. ‘What now?’

‘Now, cousin, we walk away from here.’

‘We can’t. There’s DNA all over the place. You go. Leave me the gun.’

Liam reached into his overcoat and pulled out a large brown packet. ‘Did you know Mickey Ryan was in big with the old IRA? Back in the 1970s?’

‘No.’

Liam nodded. ‘Back in the day he made a fair few bob out of it. Pissed a fair few people off, too. People who didn’t take the laying down of arms at all happily. Formed new groups.’

‘The Real IRA.’

Liam shrugged. ‘Amongst others. Either way. He’s on a list. And this. .’ he tossed the packet onto the workbench ‘. . is the boys’ old friend.’

‘Semtex?’

‘There won’t be enough left of Mickey Ryan, his sidekick, or this garage to fill a teaspoon, let alone any trace of our DNA.’

I nodded. Micky Ryan was the man who had been responsible for my wife’s death when she’d been torn apart by a shotgun blast in a Pinner petrol station. I looked down at his dead body. It didn’t feel like closure.

I just felt empty.

‘I guess that makes us even, Liam.’

I snapped back into the present and took a deep breath as the phone was answered. ‘Liam,’ I said. ‘I need a favour again.’

‘Anytime, Jack. You know that.’

‘Our slate’s clean.’

‘Never going to happen, cousin. We look out for each other. What do you need?’

‘I need someone dealing with.’

I stood in the doorway and looked at my sleeping wife-to-be.

Her book, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall , had fallen from her hand and lay face down beside her on the bed. Kate preferred her violence, crimes and murder in the distant past; preferably Tudor, for some reason. But she had been reading this particular book for a while and hadn’t made much progress into it. She’d probably read about half a page before nodding off. Having a young baby to look after meant that she grabbed her opportunities to sleep whenever she could, it wasn’t a literary criticism on her part.

It had been a long day for both of us, and I knew that going back to forensic pathology on this case today had taken its toll on her. She had given up that particular job for a reason. At the time she had decided to quit she was pregnant, and neither she nor I were aware of it. She had been sick one morning after being called to the scene of a particularly gruesome murder and decided that she couldn’t do it any more. It had been morning sickness but she knew it was more than that in hindsight. I looked across at our baby daughter, Jade, who was named after Kate’s mother. She too was sleeping peacefully, her eyes closed but a smile still playing on her lips. I couldn’t blame Kate for wanting to give up that aspect of her job. Or for giving up on London and bringing both the girls to a safer part of the world. I guessed she had gone into pathology because it meant she didn’t have to get emotionally involved, a way of dealing with the demons of her past that had haunted her, had fractured her in her soul or psyche or spirit or whatever you want to call it. I had attempted to drown my feelings in the comfort of alcohol after my wife’s death, and Kate had to keep those childhood demons at bay by working among the dead. The living needed more from her than she was able to give at that time. Kate had saved me, our daughter had saved her. Maybe I played a part, I don’t know. One thing I did know was that I was going to keep her safe, keep them all safe, whatever it took.