Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

I walk past the police station, the ice-cream shops, and the theater showing Cats.

The Firehouse, Water Street, State Street. I stop outside All Things Brit.

The Closed sign is in the window but it’s only seven o’clock. It usually stays open till eight or nine. I try the handle.It doesn’t turn. Maybe she went down to Boston to get my pardons and the forms for my money. Come on, Samantha, I could do with a cup of hot tea.

I open the letter box and shout through it:

“Hello, is there anyone home? Hello?”

No answer.

Aye, she’s gone. Probably bloody bird-watching in Maine. That’s exactly the kind of support you need when you’re an undercover on a dangerous assignment.

Another silly woman.

“Hello, is there anyone home?” I try for the final time.

I’m about to go when I see a shadow appear at the bottom of the stairs.

“Hello? Who is that?” I shout again.

The shadow walks towards me.

It’s Touched.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

He opens the door.

“No, the more pertinent and important question is what are you doing here?” he asks, pointing a silenced 9mm at me.

“I came to get some chocolate for Kit,” I tell him.

“Is that so?” he says suspiciously, closing the door behind me.

“Uh-huh. We had a bit of a fight.”

“You often shout into the letter box of closed stores? Eh?”

“The wee lady who runs the place told me she’s open till nine every day,” I say.

His face is cold. His eyes are the color of granite slabs cut for tombstones.

“How well do you know this wee lady?” he asks in a voice with no emotion.

“Seamus, Jackie, and I were in here yesterday and Kit took me in here once to get clotted cream,” I say as calmly as I can, for I realize now that he’s killed her. That somehow he’s found her out. But she didn’t tell him anything. I know that because I’d be dead too by now, or if not dead, shot in both kneecaps and being dragged screaming to the back room to be tortured lovingly and long.

“Aye, I remember that. Well, you better come see this,”Touched says.

“What’s the gun for?” I ask him.

“Excuse me, Sean, but I’m going to have to watch you very closely for the next couple of days. Too many wee things happening at once. Suspicious, so it is, very fucking suspicious.Last night going wrong like that and now this.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Something has come up, Sean,” he says soberly.

“Like what?”

“Upstairs with me and you’ll see. You first, mate,” he says.

I walk up the stairs.

I can smell the blood from the second step.

On the landing, at the top, I turn right and walk into her bedroom. She has been gagged and tied naked to the bed. Her eyes have been cut out of their sockets and she has been slit open from her vagina to her throat.

But not deeply, not enough to kill her straightaway.

Blood is everywhere. On the sheets, on the walls, even on the skylight. There is still a scalpel blade embedded in her thigh and Touched’s little green toolbox is open between her legs. It’s not a toolbox at all, but is in fact a dissection kit. His instruments: knives, scalpels, retractors, covered with skin and gore-well used.

My knees buckle and I throw up in my mouth.

“Oh God,” I say.

“She was smart,” Touched says. “She had no paperwork of any kind. And she denied everything, right to the end.”

“What the fuck have you done? Who is she?” I manage.

“She’s been spying on us. I’d seen her twice. I’m always watching for new people. I wasn’t sure, though. Even tonight.

I just wasn’t sure and for a while I thought I’d made a mistake.”

He laughs.

“Jesus, yeah, thought I’d really fucked up and she was just a dumb tourist, nosing around the biggest house on the island. I really thought that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was on my way to Portsmouth and I saw that big Jag parked outside the shop here, and when I came in to see who owned it I saw her. First thing that bothered me was that I was smoking a cigarette and she didn’t ask me to put it out.

No Smoking signs everywhere and she didn’t ask me to put out me fag. Why?”

He looked at me. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. He wanted me to think about it.

“I don’t know, Touched.”

“Why? I’ll tell you fucking why. Because I’d put the wind up her, thrown her, she was afraid of me. Why would she be afraid of me when she doesn’t even know me? Aye, Sean, I can smell it, you know. Fear. I can fucking taste it.”

“I’m sure.”

“Aye. So that was the first thing. And so then I asked her about herself. And it turns out she’s only been here a week or two and she’s British. Ask her all these questions and she doesn’t say ‘Stop wasting my time’ or ‘Are you going to buy something?’ Ever see a shopkeeper who just wants to chat? She gave herself away, mate. She was too friendly.Overcompensating. And I realized I’d have to probe this further.”

“Christ. You killed her because she was polite to you?”

Touched smiles sadly and pats me on the back, all the while keeping the gun pointing at my belly. He runs a gloved hand through his hair and grins, licks the blood from his lips.

“Aye, Sean, for a while there this evening I thought I’d made a mistake. Tied her up, gagged her, had my way with her, searched the place. Nothing, fucking nothing. And really that was another mistake. I mean, everybody has to have some personal stuff. Driver’s license, passport, library card, letters, anything. And she had nothing.”

I shake my head.

“But fortunately, Sean, my instincts were right. At the very end, at the very fucking end, I take the gag off her, and she’s hurting, oh yeah, she’s hurting and she begs me to finish it, begs me. She says, and this is the kicker, Sean, ‘Please, Touched, kill me, just kill me,’” Touched repeats, his eyebrows raising in a look of triumph.

“I don’t get it,” I tell him.

“No one calls me Touched. Except Gerry and the Sons of Cuchulainn and the lads back home. She was FBI, Sean, or a British agent working for the FBI.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. And that’s why I don’t like to see you shouting through the letter box as if you and her are best pals. And that’s why we’re all going to have to split town for a while. Get rid of this bitch. Switch to plan B like Gerry says. This is when they’ll be least expecting it. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I say, reeling.

“Yeah, well, whatever we do I’m going to have to keep an eye on you, mate. Very close eye,” he says with a grim face.

“I met this woman twice in my whole fucking life,” I protest.

Touched nods sympathetically.

“Sean, put yourself in my shoes. You just can’t be too careful.”

“I know her about as well as Kit and Jackie know her,” I say.

“Aye, but they have several years of trust in the bank with me. You have less than a week. And a bad week at that.”

I catch his eye and nod.

“You’re right. I’d do the same thing myself.”

He grins.

“You’re a good lad. At least I hope for your sake you are.”

And we stand for a moment and stare at the bed. And suddenly I notice her chest moving up and down.

“She’s still alive,” I gasp in horror.

“Aye, but not for long now,” Touched says clinically.

He’s right.

She has bled all over the floor.

Her cheeks dead white, her teeth smashed in, the breath exhaling from her body in frothy bubbles of crimson blood.

There’s nothing I can do and anyway he has the gun.

But if you can hear me, Samantha, if you can hear me, hear me.