Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

“I want you to sit tight and do nothing for the moment.”

“Do you think there’s been an accident or something? Maybe they left their gas on,” Donald suggested.

“Well, we’ll see.”

“I’ll go with you,” Donald offered.

“No.”

“It’s my neighborly and civic duty, so it is,” Donald said, annoying me now.

“No, you stay here. If you want to become a good citizen, you just go back to your novel and take it easy,” I said.

I walked quickly to the Ginger Bap.

When I got closer I saw that the vessel was listing slightly. Obviously you needed to pump the bilges every couple of days and obviously no one had worked the bilges for at least the last twenty-four hours.

And of course there was the smell. The unmistakable stench of death.

I suppose that’s what Deasey meant when he said the information wouldn’t do me any good. And Donald was probably right about the timing too. The bloody dog had heard something with its dog ears. Something it hadn’t liked. Whatever had occurred had taken place yesterday in the wee hours.

I stepped on the side of the deck. The boat rocked slightly. The plastic fenders squeaked against the quay. I leaned on the safety rail and pulled myself on board. I found the door to the main cabin. I turned the handle. Locked. I examined it closer; no, not locked, jammed. Whoever had done this had exited the boat and jammed the lock shut with a line of wire shoved between the bolt and the side. Either of the two boys would have had the key so it wasn’t them.

It was just a piece-of-shit wee bolt that gave after one kick from my Stanley boot. I pulled the hatch open.

The smell hit me. Putrefaction. Either someone was dead down below or a freezer full of meat was rotting. I gagged and stood back.

Donald’s dog started to bark.

“What’s going on?” Donald called over.

“Do you have a phone?” I shouted back.

“Aye.”

“You better call for an ambulance. Not the cops, not yet,” I said, and stepped inside. I held my T-shirt over my nose and took out the.38. There was plenty of light in the upper cabin and not a trace of disorder. Tidy cupboards, an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s. A table with two half-full coffee cups on either side of it. The Belfast Telegraph from June 13 next to one cup and beside the other a magazine called Panties Panties Panties with a cover photo of a jaded Chinese woman wearing neither panties nor anything else.

Just then the boat groaned in the water. Instinctively I called out: “Is there anybody here?”

Of course there was no reply. I looked into the coffee cups. The boys had been up, drinking coffee to keep themselves awake. They’d been expecting someone. And that someone had arrived.

I held the T-shirt to my nose and pulled open the door that presumably led to the lower cabins. A ladder that went into the dark hole.

“Hello?” I tried again.

I stepped onto the ladder and kept the.38 in front of me. It wasn’t Bristol fashion but I was exarmy, not a navy ponce, so I descended the ladder facing forward with the gun out-just in case there were any surprises. A passing barge made the boat rock and the door closed behind me, leaving me in complete darkness. I wasn’t bloody having that. Whatever was down here I wanted to fucking see it. The curtains had been pulled over the rectangular portholes.

I stepped off the final rung, crossed the room, and tugged the curtains back.

Sunlight streamed in.

The cabin looked disturbed, but it hadn’t been ransacked. There had been no fight. The foldaway beds on either side of the central walkway were unmade and there were clothes on the floor. There were books and a clothesline pegged with black-and-white photographs. Crappy photographs of trees, mountains, small children, and bits of rubbish on the sidewalk. Also a galley, a CD player, and a set of CDs hanging on a stand.

The smell was even stronger down here.

Two doors.

One behind the stairs that led to the bilges and the engine; and a door at the end of the cabin that went to the heads and the rest of the boat. My hunch told me it was the forward door and as I approached I saw that there was a sticky residue leaking out underneath.

No, not leaking, it had leaked yesterday morning. Now it was just rotting.

“Aye,” I said sadly.

Carefully I pushed open the door with the.38.

Blood everywhere in a narrow corridor. On the wooden cabin floor, on the walls, even on the ceiling. I bent down and touched it, tasted it. Dry, brownish, and stale. At least a day old. A door to my left that was marked “WC.”

I eased it open.

This, presumably, was the Scottish student.

A good-looking blond-haired boy about twenty-one or twenty-two still wearing his pajamas. His hands were coarsely bound behind his back with a dressing-gown tie. He’d been shot twice in the head. The first bullet in the back of the neck had killed him. After he’d fallen dead into the shower unit, they’d shot him again right down on the top of his skull just to be sure. They’d done it with a nasty big-caliber weapon. If I hadn’t known for a fact that they’d used a silencer, I would have guessed a pump-action shotgun because the kid’s face was hanging off his head and his brains, blood, and bits of skull were everywhere over the tiny bathroom.

I nodded, walked back into the hall, put away the.38. No one was alive in here. They’d seen to that. Execution style.

The forward cabin.

A body wedged against the door. Carefully I nudged it ajar.

A broken mirror, bloody bedsheets, and a redheaded girl sprawled facedown on the floor with her throat cut.

“Oh, my God, Siobhan,” I said.

My legs weakened.

I bent down, gently turned her over.

It wasn’t her.

It was a boy. A slender youth with hippie-length red hair. His fore-head had been smashed in with a heavy object, a baseball bat or a hammer. They’d done this several times and then they’d cut his throat.

This was Barry, without a doubt.

I stood.

“Poor wee fuck, should have stuck to your photos and your small-time Mary Jane,” I said to myself.

I searched the rest of the forward cabin but there were no more bodies. And the guys who had done this wouldn’t have left any evidence.

I stepped over Barry’s corpse, avoided looking at the dead Scot, and did a scout of the central cabin. Finally I went to that back door and checked the bilges and the engine room.

She wasn’t here. No Siobhan.

Not even a trace of her.

I climbed the ladder and closed the cabin door. I opened the window and sat down at the boys’ table.

Barry’s job had been to win her confidence and get her out of the center of town. But he hadn’t been the one that had lifted her. I doubted that she’d ever even been here. He’d charmed her, won her over, walked her away from the bright lights and the cops and Bridget’s goons. Down some alley and then the real kidnappers had bundled her into a van.

They let Barry go home with his dough and then they’d come after him to make sure he kept his fucking mouth shut.

“Well, that’s that.”

I almost took a sip of two-day-old coffee to get the taste of blood out of my mouth.

I had to be a hundred-percent positive before I left…

I braved the stench and went back downstairs, doing a final and complete search just to be sure, but there were no smugglers’ bulk-heads or secret compartments or hidey-holes filled with kidnapped girls.

But she wasn’t here. She’d never been here. That wasn’t the plan.

Two bodies, buckets of blood, flies.

A complete dead end. No goddamn pun intended.

I sighed, climbed out onto the deck, took a deep breath.

“Fantastic,” I said, and to add to my joy, now the cops were coming. Four of them. Waddling along the Lagan path without a care in the world, chatting away.