The Bloomsday Dead (18 page)

It was just a piece-of-shit wee bolt that gave after one kick from my Stanley boot. I pulled the hatch open.

The smell hit me. Putrefaction. Either someone was dead down below or a freezer full of meat was rotting. I gagged and stood back.

Donald’s dog started to bark.

“What’s going on?” Donald called over.

“Do you have a phone?” I shouted back.

“Aye.”

Just then the boat groaned in the water. Instinctively I called out: “Is there anybody here?”

Of course there was no reply. I looked into the coffee cups. The boys had been up, drinking coffee to keep themselves awake. They’d been expecting someone. And that someone had arrived.

I held the T-shirt to my nose and pulled open the door that presumably led to the lower cabins. A ladder that went into the dark hole.

“Hello?” I tried again.

I stepped onto the ladder and kept the .38 in front of me. It wasn’t Bristol fashion but I was exarmy, not a navy ponce, so I descended the ladder facing forward with the gun out—just in case there were any surprises. A passing barge made the boat rock and the door closed behind me, leaving me in complete darkness. I wasn’t bloody having that. Whatever was down here I wanted to fucking see it. The curtains had been pulled over the rectangular portholes.

I stepped off the final rung, crossed the room, and tugged the curtains back.

Sunlight streamed in.

The cabin looked disturbed, but it hadn’t been ransacked. There had been no fight. The foldaway beds on either side of the central walkway were unmade and there were clothes on the floor. There were books and a clothesline pegged with black-and-white photographs. Crappy photographs of trees, mountains, small children, and bits of rubbish on the sidewalk. Also a galley, a CD player, and a set of CDs hanging on a stand.

The smell was even stronger down here.

Two doors.

One behind the stairs that led to the bilges and the engine; and a door at the end of the cabin that went to the heads and the rest of the boat. My hunch told me it was the forward door and as I approached I saw that there was a sticky residue leaking out underneath.

No, not leaking, it had leaked yesterday morning. Now it was just rotting.

“Aye,” I said sadly.

Carefully I pushed open the door with the .38.

Blood everywhere in a narrow corridor. On the wooden cabin floor, on the walls, even on the ceiling. I bent down and touched it, tasted it. Dry, brownish, and stale. At least a day old. A door to my left that was marked “WC.”

I eased it open.

This, presumably, was the Scottish student.

A good-looking blond-haired boy about twenty-one or twenty-two still wearing his pajamas. His hands were coarsely bound behind his back with a dressing-gown tie. He’d been shot twice in the head. The first bullet in the back of the neck had killed him. After he’d fallen dead into the shower unit, they’d shot him again right down on the top of his skull just to be sure. They’d done it with a nasty big-caliber weapon. If I hadn’t known for a fact that they’d used a silencer, I would have guessed a pump-action shotgun because the kid’s face was hanging off his head and his brains, blood, and bits of skull were everywhere over the tiny bathroom.

I nodded, walked back into the hall, put away the .38. No one was alive in here. They’d seen to that. Execution style.

The forward cabin.

A body wedged against the door. Carefully I nudged it ajar.

A broken mirror, bloody bedsheets, and a redheaded girl sprawled facedown on the floor with her throat cut.

“Oh, my God, Siobhan,” I said.

My legs weakened.

I bent down, gently turned her over.

It wasn’t her.

It was a boy. A slender youth with hippie-length red hair. His fore-head had been smashed in with a heavy object, a baseball bat or a hammer. They’d done this several times and then they’d cut his throat.

This was Barry, without a doubt.

I stood.

“Poor wee fuck, should have stuck to your photos and your small-time Mary Jane,” I said to myself.

I searched the rest of the forward cabin but there were no more bodies. And the guys who had done this wouldn’t have left any evidence.

I stepped over Barry’s corpse, avoided looking at the dead Scot, and did a scout of the central cabin. Finally I went to that back door and checked the bilges and the engine room.

She wasn’t here. No Siobhan.

Not even a trace of her.

I climbed the ladder and closed the cabin door. I opened the window and sat down at the boys’ table.

Barry’s job had been to win her confidence and get her out of the center of town. But he hadn’t been the one that had lifted her. I doubted that she’d ever even been here. He’d charmed her, won her over, walked her away from the bright lights and the cops and Bridget’s goons. Down some alley and then the real kidnappers had bundled her into a van.

They let Barry go home with his dough and then they’d come after him to make sure he kept his fucking mouth shut.

“Well, that’s that.”

I almost took a sip of two-day-old coffee to get the taste of blood out of my mouth.

I had to be a hundred-percent positive before I left. . . .

I braved the stench and went back downstairs, doing a final and complete search just to be sure, but there were no smugglers’ bulk-heads or secret compartments or hidey-holes filled with kidnapped girls.

But she wasn’t here. She’d never been here. That wasn’t the plan.

Two bodies, buckets of blood, flies.

A complete dead end. No goddamn pun intended.

I sighed, climbed out onto the deck, took a deep breath.

“Fantastic,” I said, and to add to my joy, now the cops were coming. Four of them. Waddling along the Lagan path without a care in the world, chatting away.

Have to deal with those bastards and that will eat up a lot of precious time. That eejit called the peelers even after I told him.

“Damn.”

No, there was no way out.

Not unless I jumped into the Lagan and swam for it and then they’d think I was involved and probably plug me.

Reluctantly, I climbed back out onto the deck and I waved at the cops to pedal their slow arses over here and get things bloody moving.

Four cops, one a woman. The lead with a big graying Zapata mustache. All of them in shirtsleeves, but only the lass wearing her bullet-proof vest. Nice-looking bit of stuff too, from this distance. Pert nose, cute figure, and blond hair almost hidden under her hat.

“Who are you?” the lead copper yells at me as if I’m a football hooligan messing about on the terraces.

I pick up a forget-me-not that has floated onto the deck. I sniff it.

“Get off that boat,” he shouts.

I do not reply. I don’t respond well to hectoring. Especially not from a bloody cop. Let the bastard come over and talk to me like a civilized person.

“Hey, did you fucking hear me there, pal?” Zapata tries again.

I hope he sees my ironic grin. I mean, I know two people have been murdered and it’s a pretty serious situation. But even so there’s no need for coarseness or incivility.

In my day the police had been called the Royal Ulster Constabulary and were a largely white male Protestant force. After the Patten Report their name had been changed first to the Northern Ireland Police Service, which had an unfortunate acronym, and then to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Supposedly, now they are less white, less male, less Prod, and more responsive to the public.

Old habits, however, clearly die hard.

I sit down on the deck and dangle my legs over the side.

I’d be smoking if I had a cigarette.

The lead cop decides to pretend I’m not there. That’s how his authority will survive my disobedience of his direct order. I see it as a small victory for the general public. Bloody cops. I lean my head back against the cabin behind me.

Blink.

And then there’s something I miss.

The stiffening of the air. A sudden tension. Violent thoughts leaking into the atmosphere.

For the last ten years I’ve been a wanted man. Hyperaware. Able to take in everything within my field of vision. Able to siphon out the chatter from the real data. Able to see what is relevant and what is not. Whether people are potential threats or harmless individuals going about their lives. Unlike Bridget, I haven’t had bodyguards, armored cars, lackeys. It has kept me cautious, suspicious, paranoid. It has kept me alive. I’m always looking for the assassin carrying the handgun under the bunch of flowers.

Bridget, however, has changed things.

She has given me an escape from that kind of thinking. Away from that life: if you find Siobhan the slate is wiped. You’re clean. Safe.

The killers will be withdrawn. You don’t have to sit next to the wall at the back of the bar. You don’t have to count the exits and memorize them. You don’t have to move house every single year. You can live like a normal man again.

An attractive proposition.

It would be nice to sit outside in a café, it would be nice to day-dream, to let people come and go.

And with these thoughts ebbing into my consciousness, it could be that my guard has fallen a little. The promise of that. That little chink of hope.

And perhaps that’s why I don’t see the van drive up an alley between the apartment complexes. Maybe that’s why I don’t notice the two men in ski masks getting slowly out.

The chugging of a river barge, birds, clouds, footsteps. Feedback through the police radios.

A midge lands on me and begins sucking my blood.

Aye, that’ll do.

As they come closer, the air is so inert I can hear their entire tedious cop conversation. Zapata is talking about the decline of modern music.

“All just a beat and a backing track. No bloody talent needed for that. I remember when you could actually hear tunes and there were decent lyrics.”

“What are you going on about, there are A1 bands about these days, so there are. Fact is, you never listen to anything but the bloody Beatles. Love me bloody do, for Chrissake,” one of the other cops replies.

“Load of shite; tell ya, boy, I know more about it than you and your Downtown Radio country special. Garth Brooks and all that oul shite.”

The midge continues sucking my arm. Only the female of the biting species of midge eat blood. They need fats and protein to make eggs. Sperm is cheap. I let her get on with it. The cops are nearly over.

I stand.

“You were talking about rap a minute ago. Now what are you whittering on about? You should listen to modern stuff sometime, PJ Harvey or the White Stripes.”

“Same oul balls.”

“Gentlemen, please,” the woman says, mocking them.

“I used to be in a band, drummer in a three-piece,” the peeler who hasn’t spoken yet begins, but before anyone can say anything more, the rocket-propelled grenade aimed at me explodes ten feet short of the boat, right in front of the four cops.

Disastrous noise.

A clenched light-cone warning a second before the hail.

I literally hit the deck.

Talk, invective, all sucked away and burned in the air, like a record scraping off.

A civilian would perhaps have been killed by the explosion. The cops, even lulled as they are, still have a fast reaction-response time. The white flash of the blast gives them an instant to get down. An instant, it is hardly quantifiable. The time it takes for me in free fall to clatter to the wood. Three of the cops even get hands up to their faces before the shock wave rains debris and fire over their bodies and blows out four pairs of eardrums. The monstrous sound is metal twisting and advanced chemical morphology. An ammonia flare of Soviet-made fire, a smell like chaff igniting.