John Brennan - Dead And Buried

‘Had to go out to Nesbit’s place to foal his mare. The poor girl’s six months pregnant, what am I going to tell her?’ Conor glanced anxiously over his shoulder, but all down the street the upstairs windows were unlit. No one awake on Rembrandt Close – no one watching.

He fixed Patrick with a stare. ‘So?’

Patrick rolled a plug of chewing gum over in his mouth and then, with a half-shrug, said, ‘In the car.’

‘What’s in the car?’

‘He is.’

Conor wanted to turn, run back indoors and lock the door. But something stopped him. He followed Patrick to the car. Already his brain was working to the inevitable conclusion: phone the police. There’s no harm seeing what you’re dealing with, but then walk back to the house and phone the fuzz. No, better, use the phonebox. Keep Christine out of this for as long as you can.

The knackered old Escort was parked by the kerb beneath a broken streetlight. Patrick opened the rear door. The car light came on like a flashbulb.

‘Turn that fucking thing off,’ Conor hissed. Patrick reached in and killed the light – but Conor had seen enough. The body sprawled face-down on the back seat. Unmoving – the right arm crooked awkwardly – the left hanging limp. Patch of blood on his back.

With the smell of blood in the air, Patrick started muttering. ‘Christ almighty, Con. Christ.’

‘Quiet.’ Conor closed the car door and leaned on it. ‘It’s all right,’ he lied. ‘It’ll be fine. Just – just tell me what happened.’

Patrick was trying to light up a cigarette but his hands were shaking too hard.

‘Forget the fucking cigarette,’ said Conor. ‘Just tell me what you did.’

Patrick shrugged and shoved his cigarettes back into his jacket pocket. His eyes were wide and white in the darkness.

‘It was self-defence, Con,’ he said.

‘How did I know you were going to say that?’

‘I swear to God, man, it’s the truth. What d’you take me for?’

‘You promise me now?’ He felt like a schoolteacher – or anyway Patrick looked like a schoolkid, skinny and pale and finally finding himself in a jam he couldn’t talk his way out of.

‘I promise. I never meant, I never wanted—’

‘Okay.’ Conor cut him off before his voice could break again. More bloody tears were the last thing they needed. Besides, he’d had enough of this. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to go back to Christine. ‘So we call the police,’ he said, digging into his jeans pocket for change for the callbox. ‘We explain. There’s no law against—’

He’d never have thought Patrick had it in him. The kid’s shoulder hammered into his chest; his forehead jolted Conor’s chin – Conor, thrown off balance by the suddenness of the attack, was stunned for a half-second. Patrick’s bony left hand took a tight hold on his right wrist.

‘No police,’ Patrick hissed. His face was wild and close.

‘Get to fuck,’ Conor said.

With an easy half-turn of his arm he broke Patrick’s grip on his wrist. Patrick had caught him off-guard but Conor still had four inches and forty pounds on the kid. Besides, he kept himself in shape – Patrick always looked like he’d been weaned on smack and potato crisps.

He pushed Patrick back with one hand. ‘You can forget about that stuff,’ he said firmly.

But Patrick was still scared. Mad scared.

‘No police.’

‘All we’ll say is—’

‘No police.’

Then there was a gun in Patrick’s hand. The move, dragging the weapon sharply out and up from the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms, was fast, efficient – practised. Conor froze.

‘No,’ Patrick said again, ‘police.’

The kid was aiming the gun right between his eyes. Only six inches away but jumping around so much he might still have missed.

Still, though – the odds were all in the kid’s favour. This was Patrick’s game now.

‘Patrick…’

‘Shut your fucking face and do as you’re fucking told.’

Conor tried to swallow and couldn’t. Mouth dry as dust. He tried to think. It wasn’t easy with the gun barrel quivering in front of his face. They didn’t teach you that at veterinary school.

Patrick was a kid who’d been around. Not a killer, no – but hardly an innocent. So why was he crying like a baby and waving a gun around in the middle of the street at 3am in the fucking morning?

‘Who is he?’ Conor managed to say.

Patrick shrugged with one shoulder.

‘It’s nobody now,’ he said.

Connor wanted to take him by the scruff of his scraggy neck, shake some sense into him. He mastered his anger with difficulty.

‘So who was he?’

Patrick wouldn’t meet his eye.

‘Just a – just a feller.’ Patrick looked up, turned his plug of gum over in his mouth. With what seemed like a childish sort of boldness or bravado, he added, ‘One of your lot.’

‘My lot?’ Conor’s mind raced. ‘A Catholic?’

A nod.

‘Someone – Patrick, is this someone I know?’

Patrick bit his lip and didn’t answer. It came to Conor so suddenly, so horribly, that he forgot about the gun in Patrick’s hand – forgot about calling the police, forgot about getting back home, back to Christine.

He turned and wrenched open the car door. The outline of the still body was clear in the dim light. Reaching in, Conor took hold of a coat sleeve and hauled. The leather of the car seats creaked; a wheeze of air hissed horribly from the dead man’s lungs. The heavy body rolled reluctantly onto its side. Behind him Conor heard Patrick’s voice: it sounded like he was pleading now, ‘Oh, Con.’

With his hand still clutching the canvas coat sleeve Conor looked down at the half-shadowed, half-turned face of the dead man. Cold bile rose sharply in the back of his throat.

‘It wasn’t supposed to happen,’ he heard Patrick say.

Conor stared at the dead man’s face and the dead man’s empty blue eyes looked back at him.

Coleraine Road, spring of ’74

‘Quiet now. They’re coming. They’re—’

‘Quiet, he says. Be quiet yourself. And duck down. He’ll see you.’

There was rain in the air and you wouldn’t have wanted to go out without a jacket. Winter wasn’t forgotten. But still – it felt like summer, it felt like a holiday, that day.

‘They’re coming in!’

‘Shut your bloody hole, will you, Con.’

Lefty was first – Lefty McLeod, the Lieutenant. What would he have been then? Twenty-six, twenty-seven? George Best sideburns and a face as long and pale as a ballet shoe. Hadn’t got any better-looking in the two years he’d been away. He came in, grinned, winked.

‘No one here, yet, Colm,’ Lefty said in a loud voice. ‘Must all be – must all be busy or something, I s’pose.’

As if he hadn’t seen Con and Robert and Martin giggling and nudging each other behind the settee.

And then in he came – Him, the big feller, Colm Murphy, fresh from a three-year stretch in Long Kesh, bold and bearish as ever, curly blond hair overlong and pushed behind his ears, blue eyes bright, all six-foot-four of him filling the doorway.

‘Well!’ he said. ‘It seems like the Maguire boys don’t give a tinker’s cuss for the homecoming hero! It seems like the Maguire boys—’

And he probably had more of the same to say but the Maguire boys couldn’t wait long enough to hear it. Robert got there first – first to throw his arms round Murphy’s waist, first to feel Murphy’s heavy hand ruffle his hair. Martin, the youngest, was gratefully gathered in under the big man’s arm.

Conor hung back. He was thirteen – too cool for that stuff.

‘It’s good,’ Colm Murphy said, ‘to be home.’ He held Conor’s eye while he said it – and Conor held Murphy’s eye right back. He knew how it was for the boy. He stepped forward – Robert and Martin still clinging to the hem of his coat – and put out a hand.