Stolen Souls (23 page)

Mackenzie raised himself to a sitting position, keeping his knees apart so as to avoid aggravating his already tender groin.

“So I turned round to see if I could find the cheeky bastard,” he said. “I saw him cutting up an entryway to the next street over, one of them as faces onto the waste ground, and I caught up to him outside this house just as he was about to go inside. The way he looked at me when I called after him, I thought he was going to go for me. I swear to God, I thought, this fella’s a nut job.”

Herkus stood upright and hauled Mackenzie to his feet.

“Where is this house?” he asked.

51

I
TOLD YOU LOT
before, I don’t know where he is.”

Sissy Reid peered through a six-inch gap at Lennon, “ keeping the door between them. A Pomeranian barked at him from behind her legs. She kicked it back with her heel.

“I didn’t know two years ago, and I don’t know now,” she said, and went to close the door.

Lennon blocked it with his hand. “Even so, I’d like to have a quick chat with you about Edwin. Inside might be better.”

She scowled. “On Christmas Eve? Have you nothing better to be doing?”

“Yes, I do,” Lennon said. “But I’m doing this instead. The sooner you let me in, the sooner I’ll leave you in peace.”

She sighed and stepped back.

He followed her through her hallway and into the living room. She sat down on an armchair facing the television, on which an old Doris Day film played. Colored lights blinked on a small Christmas tree that sat on the hearth, an open tin of Quality Street chocolates beside it. Half a dozen Christmas cards stood on the mantelpiece.

When none was offered, Lennon took a seat anyway, facing her from the couch. A puff of stale urine odor escaped from the cushion, displaced by his weight. The dog yipped at him all the while, dashing in circles.

“Shut up, Dixie,” she snapped.

The dog whined and settled by her slippered feet. It continued to glare at him, low growls coming from its throat.

Sissy reached for the remote control, muted the sound, but continued to stare at Doris’s flirtations with Rock Hudson.

“Go on, then,” she said.

“When was the last time you saw him?” Lennon asked.

“I couldn’t tell you exactly, but it was more than two years ago.”

“What was the weather like?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Was it warm and sunny? Cold and wet?”

She shrugged. “There was a wee nip in the air.”

“Was it dark or light outside?”

“Just getting dark,” she said. “I was still working at the time, and I’d just got home when he was setting off.”

“You’d just got home. So around six o’clock, then?”

“No, more like seven that night, I think.”

“What did you do?” he asked.

“I was a home help,” she said. “You know, getting tea for them that can’t do it for themselves, lighting their fires, putting out their rubbish, that kind of thing.”

“And it was getting dark, so maybe October time?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Did he have any friends?”

“No, not Edwin,” she said. “Not really. He knew people, like, but no one he really socialized with. He kept himself to himself. Quiet, but chatty when he wanted to be. He could be awful nice at times, then other times he could be crooked as anything.

“He got that from his mother. My sister. She always had a wee bit of a lacking in her. I knew she’d wind up in the state she did.”

“What state was that?” Lennon asked.

“In a mental home, screaming at the walls. I sometimes think Edwin couldn’t help turning out the way he did, being raised by the likes of that.”

“Was he born here?” Lennon asked.

“No, over the water. Cora was a wild wee girl. Always chasing after the boys. Always thinking they’d like her better if she let them have their way with her. No sense in her at all. She got worse when the soldiers came. Throwing herself at them, she was. And she was a pretty enough wee thing, so she had plenty of soldiers wanted to take her out. Course, she didn’t have the wit to keep her legs closed, so they got what they wanted and that was that until she chased after another one. She had our poor Ma’s heart broke. There was more than one time she had to get herself sorted, and not by a doctor, if you know what I mean.”

The corners of her mouth turned down in distaste at the idea.

“Then there was this one soldier, he was near for coming out of the army when he took up with her. He mustn’t have been wise himself, ’cause next thing you know, they’re going together. Like boyfriend and girlfriend, I mean. So when he finishes his tour, they get married.”

Sissy’s eyes grew distant as she spoke, memories playing out behind them, the flickering light of the television reflected in their sheen.

“I remember it well. A registry office do, not even a church. She was starting to show then. Our Ma took us both into town to get new dresses for it, and she near died when she saw the belly on Cora in the fitting rooms. She slapped the head off her right there in the shop. Jesus, I can still hear the screams of her.

“It was a disgrace in them days to get pregnant out of wedlock, not like today. These days the wee girls pop out babies left, right and center, doesn’t matter if there’s a daddy for them or not.

“Anyway, thank God yous’re getting married, my Ma says, and that was that. There was no reception to speak of, just five of us in the pub with a plate of sandwiches. Cora and her fella, some mate of his, me and our Ma. Cora and the two boys got pissed as farts. Girls didn’t worry about drinking when they were pregnant in them days. Me and our Ma drank a half a Guinness each and left them to it.”

She paused, eyed Lennon. “You have any youngsters?”

“A little girl,” Lennon said.

Sissy clucked and shook her head. “Wee girls are the worst. They’ll break your heart.”

Lennon did not answer, so she sighed and continued.

“So off they went to England. Salford, to be exact, that’s part of Manchester.”

“I know,” Lennon said.

“Well, I didn’t. Not until I went over to see them one Easter. Awful auld hole they lived in. Top floor of a house, one bedroom, a sink in the corner of the living room, and a toilet they had to share with some darkies that lived downstairs. Three days I was there, and I never saw the husband once. He was out drinking all the time, chasing other women, any sort of badness he could get himself in to.

“And Cora was going downhill by then. She did her best to let on nothing was wrong, but you could tell she was coming apart. You know when someone drops in on you unexpected, and you tidy the place in a panic? You know, shoving magazines behind the couch, throwing dirty dishes in the sink, that kind of thing? That’s what she was like. Not the house, I mean, but in herself. Like she’d scraped up all the madness and tidied it away. But you could see it there, behind her eyes.

“And wee Edwin. He was maybe five or six at the time. Hardly the clothes to stand up in. I brought him an Easter egg and you’d have thought it was the last bit of chocolate on earth the way he took into it. But I didn’t see much of him that weekend either. Cora used to lock him in the bedroom with a Bible. Hours and hours in there.

“Aye, she got religion while she was away. Of a sort, anyway. All weekend, she kept trying to convert me. I told her, I says, I go to the Church of Ireland every Sunday morning with our Ma, and that’s enough God and Jesus to see me through to the next Sunday. I didn’t need no preaching off the likes of her. But still she kept at it, nonstop.

“In the end up I lost my patience with her and said a few things that needed saying. She didn’t take too kindly to that, so she put me out. I remember waiting for a taxi out in the rain, wee Edwin watching me from the bedroom window, that round face of his up against the glass. I waved at him the once but he didn’t wave back. Just kept staring.

“We didn’t hear a peep from her for another year till our Ma got a letter saying the husband had died. Fell piss drunk into the canal and drowned. Our Ma wrote back, said Cora could come home to us if she wanted, but we never heard anything more. Not until she finally lost the head altogether and got put away.

“Edwin was twelve or thirteen by then. When they found him, he’d been locked in the bedroom for more than a week, nothing but the Bible to keep him from going mad himself. He was lucky there was a washbasin in the bedroom, or he’d have died in there.

“We wanted him to come to Belfast to stay with me and our Ma—he was her only grandchild, and she’d never set eyes on him—but the granny on the father’s side objected. She said she didn’t want him coming to this place, with all the killings going on. Can’t say I blamed her. You look old enough to remember what this place was like in the eighties.” “I remember,” Lennon said.

“Aye, well, not many of us had it easy. As far as I know, when he turned eighteen, he took Cora into his care. I didn’t hear anything more from them until she died. I never went to the funeral. It was over there somewhere.

“But not long after that, I got a phone call from him asking if he could come and stay with me. I was a bit wary, I’ll be honest with you, seeing as I didn’t really know him from Adam. But our Ma had passed on a year before, and I was finding it lonely here by myself, so I thought, what harm could it do?”

She wagged a finger at Lennon.

“I’ll tell you something, though. If I’d known about the other, the prison and the sex offender business, I wouldn’t have let him come near me. But by the time I found out about all that, sure it was too late.”

When Sissy finished speaking she appeared deflated, as if the words had taken all the air out of her. Lennon considered ending the questioning, but knew she was the only connection to the man he sought.

“What about women?” he asked. “Did he have any girlfriends here? Anyone he brought back? Anyone he visited?”

“God, no,” she said. “Not unless you count wee Mrs. Crawford.”

“Mrs. Crawford?”

“Och, God love her, she lived in this big house off the Cavehill Road. An awful auld tumbledown place, stood on the corner, nothing but weeds all around it. I did her home help, and then Edwin did the odd bit of work around the house for her. He got to be pretty friendly with her. Wee
cratur
had a stroke.”

“Was there anyone else he did regular work for?”

“No, just that auld git who pissed off to Spain.”

“Is Mrs. Crawford still alive?” Lennon asked.

“I couldn’t tell you,” she said. “She had another turn just before Edwin went off, and she went in to hospital. I never got a call to go back to her, so I assumed she went to a home or something.”

“So where’s this house?” Lennon asked.

PART THREE
EDWIN

52

G
ALYA FELT SHE
was held in a hard embrace, arms like stone wrapped around her, as she lingered in the dim place between waking and dreaming. She journeyed to waking through a heavy fog, a light ahead that at first seemed friendly and welcoming, but became more harsh and painful the closer she drew to it.

The first firm slap to her cheek brought only confusion. The second brought anger, and she tried to raise her arms to defend herself, but found her wrists were pinned behind her.

She dragged her eyelids open, struggling to think through the rush of sensations that threatened to overpower her mind. The light sent a spike of pain straight to the center of her head. She blinked against it, again wanting to raise a hand to defend herself from it, again unable to do so.

A voice said something, somewhere.

“What? Where am I?” she asked in Russian.

The voice came again, but she couldn’t understand the words. Then she recognized them as English, and played them back, slowly grasping their meaning.

“You’re all right,” the voice had said. “Sit still, now.”

The owner of the voice moved into her vision, his moon face looming over her, lit from above by a single lightbulb. She remembered breaking a lightbulb, the tiny fragments raining down on her like brittle snow. Then she had been in the dark, alone and waiting. Waiting for the owner of the voice to come.

Come and do what?

Come and hurt her, she thought.

A little of the dark fog lifted and she smelled something warm and damp: steam from hot water. She turned her head as far as she could and saw him lift a large plastic bowl from a workbench. He brought it in front of her and placed it on the floor, at her feet.

She remembered him now—the sour milk smell, the calming words, the knowing in his eyes—and fear broke through the fog. Her body jerked with the realization, but she couldn’t move her limbs. She twisted around, tried to see what bound her wrists to the chair, could barely make out a tail of plastic: a cable tie. It cut into her flesh as she tried to pull her hand away.

“Don’t,” he said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

She began to speak in Russian, but corrected herself. “What are you doing?” she asked.

He smiled at her. “You’ll see. Don’t worry, it’s something nice.” As he walked behind her, she followed him with her eyes until the muscles of her neck protested. He took a small bottle and a sponge from the workbench.

“Please,” she said. “What are those?”

He smiled once more and lowered himself to his knees in front of her. The linoleum covering had been rolled back to reveal the concrete beneath. Galya saw rectangular shapes in its surface where it had been dug up and filled in again. And she knew what for.

“Back home, did you ever read the Bible?” he asked.

She understood the words, but could make no sense of the question. “Bible?”

“The Bible,” he said. “About Jesus.”

“Yes,” she said. “I go to church.”

“Then you know about Mary Magdelene?”

“Yes,” she said.

He took a pair of wire cutters from his pocket and she tried to recoil.

“It’s all right,” he said, his voice low and soft.

She felt a pressure at her ankle, heard a hard snipping noise, and her foot was free for a moment before his hard hand gripped it. Her leg tensed.