Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

“I’m glad you’re with us, Sean, Touched says you were great,” he said, squeezing the life out of me in what, for a moment, I thought was the subtlest murder attempt I’d ever experienced in my life.

He released his grip and embraced Kit, too. He lifted her up in the air. Kit so small and frail, Gerry a man mountain. For a moment it was like the footage of the little kid who falls into the gorilla cage.

“I heard you were great too, Kit,” Gerry said.

“I was ok. Sean was the star,” Kit said.

Touched slapped me on the back.

“Damn right he was. You know me, Gerry, I’m a bit liable to fly off the handle. Fucking Sean, cool as a cucumber. He was a bloody natural.”

“Is that right, Sean?” Gerry asked happily.

“Nah, wee bit of exaggeration. Touched ran the show. I was just helping out.”

Gerry patted me on the head with his meaty paw.

“He’s modest, too, unlike some people I could mention,”

he said, looking inside the house. Hinting, perhaps, that Jackie was not flavor of the month. Touched put his arm round me and led me to one side.

“Ok, mate, do you trust me to divvy up?” he asked, his cold, greedy eyes waiting for an answer.

What choice did I have?

“Of course, Touched.”

“Good lad. One thing about me, I’m honest, never cheated a mate in me life. Pal of mine will buy the stash for eighty percent of cost. He’ll wash it in one of the casinos in New Hampshire. We’ll lose a fifth but still, it’s going to be a good score,” Touched said.

I knew what that meant. After the “washing” and the divvying up, Touched was going to steal about half the money for himself.

Gerry dragged me away from Touched’s claws.

“Come on inside. We’re sitting down to dinner and then we’re all going to go to the beach. We’ve had the maid make up your room in the guesthouse, you’ll be living here now, not in that shithole,” Gerry said.

“Thank you very much, but my stuff is over at-”

“It’s already been brought over. You’re one of us now, Sean. Part of the family. Now come on in, Natalia has made the most amazing dinner for us and Kit has been working on a pie.”

I walked inside the house.

“Kit, you give him a quick tour, but it has to be quick, we’re sitting down to dinner in five minutes.”

Kit breezed me through the house. All eleven bedrooms, six bathrooms, observation deck, TV room, lounge, and finally dining room. It was actually worse than I was expecting, the McCaghans combining their talents to create a bad-taste masterpiece. Sonia, who seemed to have an old-money sophistication about her, was either colorblind or had decided that decor was not a place to fight her battles.

The paint scheme was gold, green, and silver. The carpets three-inch-thick white shag on which zebra-patterned throw rugs had been placed for contrast. No window was free of lace curtains, taffeta bows, ivy, and other elaborate treatments. Entire rooms were filled with white leather furniture, pictures of dirty gamins, kittens, and puppies. They had delicate and unfunctional chairs that you wouldn’t dare touch, never mind use, and the beds were huge puffy affairs on which stuffed animals slept in cozy proximity. It also wasn’t unusual to find antique porcelain dolls sitting on chairs, gazing out to sea with creepy eyes. No books anywhere but the coffee tables displayed copies of Architectural Digest, New England Home, and France Sud. Gerry had also invested in a great store of contemporary Irish art. The usual tat: the stony fields of the Burren, rain in the Mourne Mountains, sheep in the Antrim Plateau, deserted beaches in Donegal, gap-toothed children sitting in rowboats. Dozens of these artworks, in lovely antique gilt frames and placed seemingly at random all over the house.

The whole thing would have turned the stomach of a weaker man, but fortunately I was made of sterner stuff.

Kit’s room was the only sane one in the house and even that was a bit overboard. She had painted the walls black, hung a massive Indian shawl from her ceiling, and put up several askew posters proclaiming her loyalty to The Cure, Nick Cave, and, alas, Poison. There were statues of the Buddha, Ganesh, and that scary deity with swords and lots of legs.

“Nice,” I said.

She brought me downstairs to the dining room, which was relatively subdued and dominated anyway by a spectacular view of the Atlantic coast: the curve of Plum Island and Cape Ann stretching to the south, New Hampshire and Maine to the north.

“Amazing view,” I said to Gerry.

“Can you believe they only had a tiny window in this room before we bought it? I knocked out the wall and stuck in support columns. Best view in PI.”

Sonia showed me to my place next to Kit and facing the ocean. The sun had set, so the sea had become a bewitching shade of lavender and it would have been perfect had I not been sitting opposite Jackie, who looked as if he’d fallen off a bus. Something that gave me a tremendous and childish feeling of satisfaction. Two black eyes, a cut chin, a cut lip, bruises on his cheeks.

“Goodness, Jackie, are you ok? Kit told me you’re thinking of suing the End of the State, because something fell on you? Is that right?”

“Aye,” he said sourly and sipped from a Waterford crystal glass that was filled with fizzy beer.

Touched sat next to Jackie. Gerry sat at one end of the table, Sonia at the other. Seamus, Touched explained, was not feeling well and had gone next door to the guesthouse for a wee lie down.

There were two Mexican servants who brought in several bottles of expensive white wine and a formal dinner of soup, lobster, another fish course, and finally lamb. Although it seemed that their command of English was not particularly impressive, I could see that we were not to allude to this afternoon’s events except in the most oblique of terms.

Gerry, though, was in rare form and pontificated on international politics, domestic politics, and baseball. Touched contradicted him here and there and Sonia was the voice of reason. Or if not reason exactly, at least of more informed comment than either of the other two. Jackie remained sullen for most of the meal and before the dessert came, asked permission to excuse himself from the table.

“Gerry, do you mind if I leave? The tide marker is giving me the heave-ho,” he said.

“No, of course not, we’ll all be joining you later. Off you go, Jackie,” Gerry said.

Jackie stood and it was then that I noticed he was wearing board shorts and wet-suit booties. He ran to the guesthouse next door and appeared on the dunes in front of the house wearing an ankle strap and black rash guard, and carrying a surfboard.

“What was he talking about? The tide marker?” I asked Kit.

“That thing on the wall,” she said, pointing at a clock with LOW and HIGH where the twelve and six should be.

“So what does that mean?” I asked.

“Well, if you look, the arrow is almost into the low, so that means for the next few hours surfing conditions will be pretty close to perfect on the Plum Island beach break.”

“Jackie surfs?”

“Yeah, he’s very good. He had an amateur tryout at Mon-tauk a few weeks ago. He was seventh out of about forty or fifty. We all surf, well, me and Jackie do. Jamie as well, before he ran away. But Daddy and Sonia both bodyboard.”

“I love the ocean,” Gerry said. “I love the feeling of being in the ocean.”

Sonia nodded in agreement.

“It’s really the best feature of living on Plum Island,” Sonia said. “It can be such a hassle, sometimes the bridge is closed and I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Sean, but there can be a lot of insects…”

“No.”

“Well, that’s the downside but the upside is a beautiful unspoiled beach, and you should see what it’s like in the wildlife refuge, it’s America before the white man came and wrecked the place,” Sonia continued.