John Brennan - Dead And Buried

Conor sat silent. He gripped one hand with the other to keep them from shaking.

Marsh resumed his recital. ‘Earlier today,’ he said, ‘three members of the Ulster Volunteers were murdered on the Shankill Road. Now, I’ve been made aware of who was responsible. I have their names, addresses, descriptions, registration numbers.’ He ticked the items off on his fingers. ‘And I have made plans for…reparation.’

‘Revenge.’

‘No, no, no.’ Marsh waved a dismissive hand. ‘Not revenge, Conor. Nothing so impractical. Favours, Conor, favours for friends. I do a brisk trade in favours. Revenge is messy, hot-headed, liable – as you good folk of Ulster know so well – to get out of hand. Favours are simply good business.’

‘I won’t. I couldn’t. I…this is…you’re—’

‘What this is and what I may be,’ Marsh interrupted him smoothly, ‘are none of your concern. The fact is, Conor, that you’re implicated. And, therefore, you can. You will.’

Conor thought of Colm Murphy. Implicated – yeah, that was one word for it. Guilty was another one. Guilty was the word they’d use on the Falls Road – hell, the word they’d use on Coleraine Road – if they had any idea what he’d done. Betrayal was another one. Fucking Judas. Stinking Rat.

Marsh wouldn’t have to kill him. There’d be Irishmen queueing up to do the job for him if word got out – if even a whisper got out.

‘Old Colm,’ Marsh said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘He was very close to the Maguire family, wasn’t he?’ A low whistle. A gesture with palms spread. ‘It takes a considerable man – a man of substance, Conor – to take sides against his own family. His own blood.’

Conor could feel the tense muscles of his jaw quivering. Hold it, Con, he urged himself. Stay cool. Don’t rise to it.

‘I’ve never taken sides,’ he said, slowly, deliberately. He didn’t look at Marsh – he looked out of the window, out into the darkness. ‘I’m my own man. I’ve my own family—’

‘Oh, yes, the family…’

Marsh left the word hanging, and Conor felt his bowels threaten to turn liquid. A mixture of anger and panic. ‘You listen!’ he hissed, his finger jabbing the air between them. ‘You fucking listen! You even go near my family, and I’ll—’

‘Steady, Conor,’ said Marsh. ‘You’ve got the wrong impression.’

Conor’s whole face seemed to be trembling. He felt like a child, playing a grown up game he could never win. ‘I don’t take sides. I won’t work to an agenda.’

Marsh laughed softly.

‘“I don’t take sides”,’ he quoted Conor back at him. ‘That’s quite a thing. That takes some balls. “I don’t take sides” – in this Godforsaken country. That’s quite a thing to hear, from the man who threw the sainted Colm Murphy on the fire.”

‘I’m not a fucking Republican,’ Conor said desperately. ‘I’m not a Loyalist. I’m not – I’m not bloody anything.’

He felt Marsh’s hand grip his knee hard, and turned his head to see Marsh leaning towards him, eyes bright with a fierce amusement.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ the old soldier said. ‘All that matters, Conor, son, is that you’re mine.’

Present Day

CONOR tussled with the key in the stiff lock and slammed closed the door to the studio apartment. He looked up and down the street. No sign of Galloway, thank God. Maybe she’d realised he really didn’t want to be part of whatever plan she was cooking up.

He crossed the road from the flat to the parked Land Rover, wondering if it was even worthwhile keeping the place on. Be easy enough to doss down in the practice, he thought. The rent wasn’t too much – although, to a man who’d been out of the country for a while, it seemed a damn sight over the odds for a damp attic flat in Knock. It wasn’t like he had money to burn. The cash in his pocket had gone a lot further, back in Kenya. It’d bought him a clean-swept apartment with running water and its own generator – and he’d got used to the mosquitos, didn’t mind being woken in the night by the saw-toothed roars of leopards and lions (especially after Kip had told him that a lion that roared was a well-fed lion. When they were hungry, she’d said, you never heard them coming).

He’d given Ella a driving lesson the day before. No Galloway then either. Three weeks in, Ella was starting to get the hang of it; at least, she no longer seemed like quite so much of a risk to life and property. She’d asked him, halfway through making a bollix of a three-point-turn, if he could spare a bit of cash.

‘Kieran and me, we’d like to, to have a weekend away.’

‘Would you now? First a flash new car, and now fancy holidays. Ah, when I was your age—’

‘I’m just asking, Dad.’

Conor had sighed. He’d had to say no. The job in Kenya hadn’t paid much, and right now any spare money he had had to go into the practice. Ella had been disappointed, but she’d seemed to understand.

‘I knew Mum’d say no,’ she’d said with a mock-pout, ‘but you used to be such a soft touch.’

Still am, Conor thought. Soft but skint.

The Land Rover roared and gurgled unpromisingly as he manoeuvred through the directionless grey drizzle and traffic to the practice. He missed Kenya on days like this. Hell, who wouldn’t? It wasn’t just the sunshine; he missed the colour. Here, it seemed like there was nothing but grey: grey sky, grey buildings, grey asphalt, the slow grey river.

He thought of Kip. He wondered where she was now. And he realised, with a guilty pang, that it was the first time he’d thought of her in weeks.

Outside the city, as he approached the practice, the feeling of colourlessness started to lift. The trees lining the road seemed refreshed by the rain. A bright cock pheasant was startled out of the thick roadside foliage by the roar of the Land Rover. Ah, let’s be fair, Conor thought: old green Ireland has its moments, too, after all.

He pulled up in the practice courtyard, killed the engine, climbed down – and paused.

Tyre tracks, in the muddied yard.

Not fresh, but not too old, either. Made last night, if he was any judge. He’d done a little tracking out in Kenya. Never thought he’d be putting it to use in a Castlereagh car park.

He didn’t have to move far from the car to see that the main door to the practice was ajar. Dermot? No – his car would have been here. Conor checked his phone. No signal as always. The place was a blackspot – but there was a landline in the practice building.

What the hell would a burglar want to nick from a vet’s surgery? he wondered. Not much money kicking around. An old computer, a few bits of kit, but specialist stuff, nothing you could sell on the streets, surely.

He remembered Dermot had said something about drugs – about kids getting off their heads on bloody horse tranquillisers, nowadays – the old vet had shaken his head in sorry bewilderment. Well, yeah, Conor thought, there was plenty of stuff in there that’d put you on another planet – if you were so desperate for a hit you didn’t mind taking your life in your hands, and didn’t mind delivering the stuff into your bloodstream with a nine-inch cattle syringe…

He started to cautiously towards the door, cutting across the yard at an oblique angle. At the corner of the building there was a clutter of unused fencing material: a half-sack of cement, set hard – a reel of wire – a rusted boltcutter. Conor stopped. He picked up an offcut of two-by-four as long as his arm, and hefted it in his right hand.

With his left, he pushed gently at the half-open door. ‘Who’s there?’ he called. ‘I’m armed!’

No answer.

Whoever it was in there might have a knife, a gun – God knew what. And they’d most likely be desperate. The length of plank felt suddenly puny.