Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

“What are the Four Kingdoms?” I asked the barkeep.

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re called the Four Kingdom Restaurant,” I said quickly.

“Oh, that. Supposedly that’s the view from the top of the Knockagh. Kingdom of Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and, of course, the Kingdom of Heaven.”

“That’s fascinating. Fascinating stuff. I bet you know a lot of local geography and stuff like that,” I said.

“Not really,” he replied.

“Well, uh, listen, uh, I was wondering, I was looking for this old lodge that was supposed to be around here, did you ever hear of anything like that?”

“No.”

“No old Orange Lodge, around here, nothing like that?”

“No.”

“No ruins of any kind?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Perfectly sure.”

A man came out of the toilet and sat back down at the bar. He grabbed a pint of Guinness as if it were a life belt, nodded to me. He was a younger man, thirties, wearing a tweed suit but with a yellow silk waistcoat. His slightly wild blond hair was unadorned by a flat cap. It was a stroke of luck; this level of unconformity might also stretch to the possibility of being open for questions.

“How do?” I asked.

“Not too bad,” he said.

“Well, a bad pixie must be following me around because I am completely banjaxed,” I said, coming straight to the point.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

I summoned over the barkeep.

“Another pint of Guinness for my friend here,” I said, and offered him my hand. He shook it.

“Brian O’Nolan,” I said.

“Nice to meet you, Brian, my name’s Phil, thanks for the pint,” he said.

“My pleasure, Phil.”

Phil looked at me, eager to hear the nature of my difficulties.

“Ach, I’m in a wee spot, Phil,” I said, trying not to appear too anxious.

“What do you need?” Phil asked, finishing his own pint and starting on mine.

“Well, I’m a bit disappointed, to tell you the truth.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Uh, it’s not important,” I said with a sigh.

But the man’s interest was piqued. I had him on the hook now.

“No, tell me,” he said.

I laughed.

“It’s probably a stupid thing. But me dad, we live in America now, he moved us out there in the seventies when I was just a wee boy. And, well, he used to be in the Orange Order. You’ll think it’s stupid.”

“No, go on.”

“Well, he used to go to an Orange Lodge round here, and I was coming over to Belfast for business and so he asked me if I could find his old lodge and take a picture of it for him. Well, wouldn’t you know it, business took me a little longer than I thought it would in Belfast and now it’s dark out and I’ve been driving around for a couple of hours and I haven’t been able to find it and, ach, I’m just a bit upset for me da.”

The man nodded solemnly. I had hit all the right buttons. The Orange Order, family, tradition, a son’s duty, if only I could have worked a dog in there it would have been a home run. Phil looked upset for me and gulped down his pint. I put a fiver on the counter and nodded at the barman. He started pouring another.

Phil cleared his throat.

“Well, Brian, you shouldn’t be giving up yet. I don’t know too much about that sort of thing; I’m not really from around here, but Sam Beggs over there, he knows this area like the back of his hand.”

“That guy in the corner?” I asked, looking at a haggard, blue-nosed yokel chain-smoking his way through a packet of loose tobacco.

“Yeah, that’s our Sam.”

“Thanks very much, I’ll go ask him,” I said.

Phil shook his head.

“You better not, he’s not exactly a big fan of strangers; you know how it is with some of those culchie types, wee bit sleekit, you know. I’ll just go over and ask him for ya,” Phil said.

“I would be much obliged.”

“Sure, ’tis no problem at all. What’s the details?”

“All my dad said was that he used to go to an Orange Lodge within a stone’s throw of the Knockagh; he said it might be a ruin now, could be an arch over the gate or something,” I explained.

Phil walked to the character in the corner of the room while I sipped my lemonade and tried desperately not to look at my watch. Five agonizing minutes went by as the two men chatted.

Phil came back with a smile on his face.

“See, never say die, he knows the very place. The arch you’re talking about must be what’s left of the old narrow-gauge viaduct, the lodge is the next field over. About two miles up the road from here, a wee lane you turn off and go down. The lane has a big sign on it that says “Trespassers Prosecuted, No Shooting.” You can’t see the old lodge from the road, you have to go down the lane a good bit. He says that he thinks it is a ruin, mind, but if you’ve a flash on your camera it might come out.”

I thanked Phil profusely, ran out to the car.

I reversed the taxi out of the pub car park, sped along the Knockagh Road, hammering down the foggy track at ninety miles an hour. A Jeep passed me doing fifty in the other direction and it distracted me enough so that I almost drove straight past the lane.

Almost.

I slammed on the bloody brakes, skidded, nearly rolled, recovered, stopped, reversed, read the “Trespassers Prosecuted, No Shooting” sign, pulled in, parked the car, and grabbed the gun.

A smell of burned gorse over by the tarn. That or a bonfire. Or perhaps someone lighting turf in an old Orange Lodge in an attempt to keep warm. The path led down to a field. But there was a haze in the glacial mouth of the valley-a gluey sea mist snaking its way up from the ocean at the head of a cold front and storm from the north. That, coupled with the fog on the mountain and the coming night, had closed the visibility to almost zero.

I felt my way forward gingerly and arrived at a second barbed-wire fence and a gate with another sign, which said “Keep Out. Trespassers Strictly Prosecuted.” This sign was new and there were tire tracks in the mud.

A big vehicle and a couple of smaller cars. I bent down to examine them. Definitely fresh, in the last day or so, I would have guessed.

The path seemed to diverge now, left along the contour of the hill, but straight on took you farther down the slope. A bite of wind came from the high bog, a cold blade moving over the shadowy hills. While I zipped my jacket, the gust opened a gap in the mist. Fences hugging the hills, separating one desolate little sheep field from another. But what was that at the bottom of the slope? A house, a ruined lodge? Definitely worth investigating. I’d have to get closer. My hands tensed on the cold fence.

I opened the gate and walked onto a metal cattle grid, got one pace, immediately skidded, slipped, and fell. One of my Stanley work boots came off and my plastic foot got caught between the gaps in the metal rollers.

“Bloody hell.”

A cattle grid is a series of metal tubes usually placed over a trench in front of a gate. People can walk on the rollers and cars can drive over them, but cows cannot cross them. The cows don’t even have to fall one time to get it, instinct keeps them away. It’s a handy device that allows you to keep your gate open without worrying about your cows, pigs, or horses bolting.

A clever contraption, and it’s the rare fucking eejit that gets his foot caught in a cattle grid. But he was here tonight. I tugged at it, but my artificial foot was completely wedged. I unhooked the straps and pulled as hard as I bloody could. It didn’t move an inch.

I removed the sock and heaved on the bastard, but there was still no way it was coming up. A better option would be to push it through the rollers. I could get the whole weight of my body behind it, but the problem there was that I couldn’t see how deep the pit went under the rollers. I didn’t want to lose my foot in a bottomless hole, not when I might need to run on it in a second. And anytime now the car with the kidnappers and Siobhan inside was about to drive up from the house.