Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (60 page)

“No, I don’t think so. One of my ribs is maybe cracked, but that’s it. They seemed much more intent on drownin’ me than doin’ me bodily harm.”

“Any notion of why they plucked you off that lorry?” Jamie asked, as he set out building a fire. He’d matches in his pocket and had found enough pieces of dead wood to build the flames to a cheery blaze that Casey was only too grateful to huddle near.

Thrawny returned then with two heavy blankets in hand. They reeked copiously of fried potato, but Casey wasn’t in a position to complain.

“Thank ye,” he said, grasping the edges of the blanket as though it were a life preserver. “And I’m not talkin’ about the blanket. The two of ye saved my life, another minute or two an’ I’d have been dead. How the hell did ye know to find me?”

Jamie smiled. “I bent a few ears, twisted a few arms.”

Thrawny grunted in affirmation, pulling a flask of whiskey from his pocket. “Here, swig this back laddie, yer still lookin’ like a fish belly, day after it’s been gutted.”

Casey quirked a brow at him but took the proffered flask. The whiskey was strong, the fumes making his eyes water, but the long trail of fire it left on the path to his stomach went some ways toward thawing his bones.

He cast his eyes around the ring of trees. “My gran always called these witch trees, because the berry has a wee pentagram where they join to the stems. She was a great one for the old ways, planted rowans on her parent’s grave, said ‘twould keep the haunts away.” He shuddered under his cloak of blankets. “Hope it holds true in this realm as well.” He looked in the direction of the collapsed mound, though it wasn’t visible through the undergrowth of young holly.

“There was no way to save them,” Jamie said bluntly, taking a sip off the flask himself. “I shouldn’t think you’d have any grief over their death, they just about succeeded in killing you.”

Casey shifted, looking suddenly uncomfortable. “They weren’t the only ones there at first.” His eyes shifted toward Thrawny, and he cleared his throat.

Thrawny never slow on the uptake, heaved himself to his feet, “Finish the flask off lad, ye need the heat of it.”

He stretched his shoulders, the fire kindling his beard and hair to flaming copper. In the night he looked like a Viking berserker.

“I’m goin’ for a walk, need to piss somethin’ fierce, an’ then I’m goin’ back to the van where there’s a heater. I’ll be there when the two of yez decide it’s time to move along.”

Jamie nodded, watching as the massive bulk switched off through the trees.

“I imagine that’s meant to give us a chance to talk privately,” Casey said, glancing in the direction Thrawny had taken, his eyes hooded.

“Did you know the third man?” Jamie asked.

“No. Maybe,” Casey shook his head, “that’s the odd thing, they had me blindfolded from the time they took me off the truck. Wasn’t much of a battle for them, bein’ that I was handcuffed an’ all. The third one was waitin’ in the mound for me. It had all been pre-planned like, or so it seemed. He had a voice that was different than the other two. More posh, like yer own. Though maybe not quite so cultured as yerself.”

“Jade instead of pearls?” Jamie quipped lightly, though Casey’s statement had set off an alarm bell deep within his subconscious.

“Aye, so to speak, an’ I thought perhaps I’d heard the voice before, but what with them kickin’ me an’ plungin’ my head in the water every other minute, it was a bit hard to get a fix on things.” Casey looked directly at Jamie across the fire. “But I’m certain of one thing, the man wanted me dead.”

Jamie added more pieces of wood to the fire. The two of them watched it blaze up into the night, smoke blending with the mist, like ghosts moving through fog.

“Someone in league with Joe Doherty?”

“That was my first thought, an’ I know Joe sees a bulls-eye on my chest every time he chances to meet me—but no, I don’t believe ‘twas him, this time.”

“This time?” Jamie echoed.

Casey nodded, drawing the blanket tighter. “Aye, there’s been a couple of things that have happened out of the way since I’ve been home. I kept it to myself, because I didn’t want to scare Pamela.”

“She’s nobody’s fool, man, she’s been worried sick since you came home.”

“Aye, I know, the woman is
my
wife after all.”

“I’m aware,” Jamie said dryly.

“Well,” Casey went on, “I had a near miss on the construction site one day, thought my line was secured when I was up on the beams. But the link was next to breakin’, sawed through. Another night I was closin’ up the center an’ a car came by slow. Ye know that’s always a worry in Belfast. They came round again, but I’d ducked into a doorway across an’ up the street. Man got out of the car, had a rifle tucked under his arm. Took a look around for me, an’ thank the Lord didn’t see me.”

“Christ man, why didn’t you tell me sooner? It’s not just yourself you have to worry about these days.”

“I’m aware,” Casey replied, with no little sarcasm. “I didn’t come home plannin’ on gettin’ myself killed. An’ frankly yer not the first name on my list when I need assistance.”

“But you’re asking now?”

“Aye, I’m askin’ now. Because I know ye’ll watch out for her as well as I would myself. She’s stubborn as a goat an’ doesn’t take kindly to bein’ told where to go an’ what to do. But she’s still a wee bit naïve about Ulster. I know ye understand her nature.” Casey swallowed as if he’d a bone in his throat. “An’ if I don’t make it home any time soon, will ye tell her I’m sorry?”

“I will.”

PAMELA CAME UPON JAMIE pulling his head out of the rain barrel that sat outside the stable doors. His hair was streaked translucent and streaming, skin flinching from the icy water.

She handed him a towel wordlessly, earning her a weary quirk of his eyebrow before he took the towel and buried his head in it, vigorously scrubbing at his numbed scalp.

“Get any sleep?” he asked, noting that the house was still quiet in the faint morning light.

“A little more than you, I imagine,” she said, voice sharp with strain.

He emerged blinking from the towel, in the midst of an extravagant yawn, to find her looking at him in chin-up resignation. “He’s dead then?” she said and he saw that she’d no more slept than he had, but rather had used her hours to prepare for what uncertainties her life with Casey had always held.

“No, not dead,” he said, bracing his hands on each side of the barrel in an effort to stay upright.

“Not dead,” she echoed, voice a mere whisper in the vast silence of dawn. “There’s a ‘
but’
at the end of those words, Jamie.”

He admired her strength in the midst of terror. She always wanted her truth undiluted. Some would think such bravery foolhardy, but he knew well enough to respect it. He also knew that she wasn’t going to be happy with what he had to tell her.

Behind her, where the hill dropped away and gave onto the city, the sun rose through a haze of smoke and the dull glow of dying fires. An occasional pop signalled the fact that bullets were still being exchanged. Exhaustion had put a delineating edge around everything he saw, so that it appeared magnified.

The city seemed no more than a toy set up for imminent destruction. The roads annexing off the wedges of neighborhood, small tribal enclaves wrapped tight around themselves and their pain, breathing the stilted air of violence. Today people would emerge from their hidey holes, exhausted, injured, confused, and for a moment—perhaps a mere second—would pause to wonder what any of it meant. And then they would stoop to pick up the stone that would continue the war.

He sighed, one last moment of strength, and then even he was due a rest. “Casey’s fine, a little banged, a little bruised, but I managed to find him before any serious damage was done.”

He saw the swift intake of breath, the light that sprang to her face as she began to look about wildly.

“He’s not here, Pamela.”

“Then where is he? Somewhere safe? Can I go to him?”

“Safe as can be at present,” Jamie said grimly.

“Jamie?” The fear returned swiftly to her face.

“There’s only one place that’s beyond the reach of the men who paid to have him taken off that truck. It’s ironic really.”

“What is?”

“Last I knew he was headed for a ship anchored in the Lough called the Maidstone.”

“Jamie what have you done?” she asked, voice sharp with fear.

Jamie, gone beyond the bounds of exhaustion and sense, laughed without humor.

“I’ve handed him over to the British Army.”

AS PRISON SHIPS WENT, the Maidstone, anchored in Belfast Lough, was totally unsuitable. Built in 1937, she had been used as an emergency billet for troops in 1969. For the latest round of troubles she’d been hastily converted into a prison ship to lodge close to 150 men.

Moored twenty feet from solid land, the ship was berthed at the only wharf in Belfast equipped for unloading pitch and tar. Pipes for tankers to unload ran through the ship’s sides. Entry to the jetty was guarded by a sandbagged army emplacement. Short Brother’s airfield overlooked the ship on the pier side, and on the starboard lay a 300 foot stretch of water leading to a huge coal yard.

The ship was cramped, stuffy, and overcrowded. The prison itself was at the stern and consisted of two bunkhouses, one up and one down, and two mess rooms. Above these were the quarters of the governor and his staff, and above them was the deck, used twice a day for exercise and surrounded by ten-foot high barbed-wire. Forward were the army quarters, separated from the prisoners by a high mesh fence and a solid gate.

It was here that Casey had landed. The irony that he was locked up in the only Belfast prison that sat upon water was not lost on him, nor was it greatly appreciated.

An army jeep had been waiting at the head of the road leading away from Dun Siog. It seemed unlikely that the soldiers had been driving by coincidentally. It seemed more like insurance against his possible survival.

For Casey and most of the men who also found themselves at the mercy of God, England and the RUC, this was not the first time they’d been incarcerated, and so they settled quickly.

Routines were established swiftly, leaders rising to the head of small motley groups through a natural and instinctive pecking order. The ship had a committee that was comprised of four Provos and two Officials under the chairmanship of an old Derry Republican, Matty Loughlin, a man Casey knew from his boyhood as he’d been a compatriot of his father Brian.

The committee set up rotas of men to take care of the food serving and latrine duty. There was a great deal of grumbling over this, as many of the men saw no purpose in doing what they termed ‘lackey’ work. They felt their captors should do the work that came of illegally imprisoning 142 men.

While Casey understood their attitude, he knew the real reason for the rotas was to prevent the apathy and depression that inevitably befell imprisoned men. Particularly ones who had no clear idea when or if they might hope for release. Cooped up for twenty hours a day, or more if the weather was foul, with only two thousand square feet of deck, and that liberally coated with gull excrement, it was imperative that the men have some sense of order if they weren’t all to sink into complete anarchy.

Casey’s own small crew consisted of some six men. Matty, who never slept in a bunk, but curled up on an old couch every night. Declan Roy, who’d a sarcastic tongue, a mane of black hair that he kept tied back, and who stayed up from dark to dawn playing rounds of chess, solitaire and bridge. Roland Dempsey, who was fanatically religious, had a wife and four sons on the outside, and possessed an enormous talent for getting directly on the one nerve Declan had left.

And then there was young Shane McCann. It was the first time he’d been incarcerated and therefore he was the hardest hit of the lot of them. He was frightened and jumpy, a bad combination what with the frequent ‘raids’ and ‘reprisals’ the troops subjected the internees to. Detainees were locked up for three hours while troops plundered their quarters, destroying many of their scant belongings as well as the small crafts many men did to pass the time; matchstick crosses, hand-painted handkerchiefs and the like. They also stole their cigarettes, not the wisest move on a ship where morale was lower than a snake’s belly and the tension as high as a kite in a gale.

Arrangements for visitors were next to non-existent. Permits, without which no one could visit, were arriving after the date fixed for the visit. Frustration both within and without the ship was mounting.

Thus far, two weeks into his time aboard the ship, Casey had received two messages. The first a tersely worded and heavily coded message from Jamie letting him know that Pat was being held at Girdwood Barracks. The other was from Pamela, telling him that she was doing everything in her power to get a visitors pass; that she and the boy had returned home; and that all was as well as could be hoped for in his absence. The first message he had burned to ash and flushed down the latrine. The second he kept in his shirt pocket, unable to bear parting with the small bit of familiarity and home her few words provided him. Other than a briefly worded missive saying that he wasn’t being maltreated, he’d sent no other message back. He knew full well that every word in and out of the ship was being scrutinized for any bit of information that could serve in the end to incriminate the lot of them. Pamela knew enough of Ulster to understand that he could not reveal anything of either the true conditions of the ship, nor the true condition of his heart. Both of which were less than golden.