Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (96 page)

“Fair enough,” David replied. “I just wanted to be certain you weren’t one of the bodies lying in the morgue.”

Pat laughed, a harsh sound that sent skitters of glass down David’s spine. “Well it wasn’t that yer fine laddies didn’t give it their all, I only missed bein’ one of them by sheer grace of God. Disappointed?”

“I think you know better than that,” David said somewhat stiffly.

“I think I know pretty much fuck all about ye, David. That’s what I think.”

“I thought we were friends.” The hurt in his voice was unmistakable.

“I was wrong—I made a mistake, but I’m clear now. No Englishman, particularly one whose entire existence is riddled with secrets, can be a friend of mine.”

“Well,” David said, voice near to inaudible, “I’m more sorry than I can say to hear that.”

“Not nearly as sorry as I am,” Pat said acidly. “I trusted ye, that makes me a right fool, doesn’t it?”

David shook his head, feeling suddenly very weary. “No, Pat trusting someone doesn’t make you a fool. Thinking that somehow in this mess I could be a friend to you,” he shrugged, “well I’m afraid that I’m the real fool here.”

“Did you know?”

“Know what?” David asked, though it was more of a reflex, for he knew what Pat meant by his question.

“Know that they brought the Paras in to kill us?”

The dark eyes bored into his own, and David was glad that he did not have to lie to the man; he didn’t think he was up for subterfuge today, not here leastwise.

“No, I didn’t. How can you think I would sit on that kind of knowledge?”

“Well someone did, didn’t they? I mean—” Pat suddenly raised his fist and brought it down hard on the counter next to him.
“What the fuck is it David?!
Do we remind you of a part of yourselves that you despise? The part that isn’t orderly or predestined for greatness. Do we remind you of the one place where you’ve failed again and again?”

“Perhaps it’s only that you’ve something in you that we don’t. Maybe we resent you for that.”

“Aye,” Pat snorted, “such as what? Humanity?”

“I hardly think people who bomb their own to pieces have a corner on the humanity market.”

“Get out.” Pat’s voice was flat, but David had seen him so before and knew the man was furious, and likely to strike at the least provocation. David stood, hat in hand both literally and figuratively, wondering if Pat would just finish him off this time altogether. He certainly looked entirely capable of doing so, eyes black with fury and his breath coming in uneven puffs, like a dragon about to shoot fire from his nostrils.

“Is there a reason yer still standin’ there? I told ye to leave. Are ye deaf?”

“It’s not that,” David said, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly. “It’s only that I can’t afford to be seen leaving just yet.”

Pat raised an eyebrow, the corner of his own mouth quivering suspiciously. “I’d ask why, but I’ve a feelin’ I’m safer in my ignorance.” He shook his head and heaved a sigh of capitulation. “Well I’ll not have ye thinkin’ the Irish have no manners. Would ye like some tea?”

David smiled, ever the polite and charming Englishman. “I’d love some, just don’t slip any arsenic in it.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Pat said, filling the kettle from the groaning pipes. “Who is it out there today? The wee redhead or that dark one with the nasty skin?”

“The dark one with the nasty skin. He was off having a fag, so I slipped in when he wasn’t looking, but now,” David flicked the curtain back into place, “he’s on guard and doesn’t look to be leaving any time soon.”

Pat merely gave him a narrow glance, but didn’t comment further.

David continued to clean up as Pat prepared the tea and dug in a cupboard for a packet of biscuits that had escaped the general destruction of the rest of the rooms. A picture of Sylvie, looking positively sprite-like in a yellow cardigan, sat on the desk. The broken glass had been painstakingly removed, though the picture was cut up rather badly anyway. He had to admit they complimented one another, she so small and fair, Pat big and dark, though not as formidable as his brother—a man whom David held in certain regard, mostly composed of fear. Casey’s file had crossed his desk in regards to Patrick, during his time in the jail.

“I suppose I owe ye thanks yet again,” Pat said gruffly, when they sat. He stirred his tea with more force than was strictly necessary.

David looked up in surprise. “For what?”

“I know ye had a hand in gettin’ me released.”

David looked down at his teacup, running a finger along the chipped rim. “Not officially I didn’t. You’re rather lucky to have a friend such as James Kirkpatrick. He’s a little daunting when it comes to getting what he wants.”

“Aye, he’s that.” Pat’s glance flicked away for a moment and he seemed quite absorbed by the green swirls that decorated the cheap table where they sat. “It seems a great risk for ye to take. I don’t imagine yer bosses would be too pleased to know ye helped to free such a dangerous criminal as myself.” This last was said with a certain amount of acid.

“It was worth the risk.”

“Why?” Pat was looking at him directly now, and David felt the strange slippage in his stomach that he always did when the man looked him in the eye. He swallowed hard; it felt as though something large and sharp was lodged in his throat.

Pat was right about the risk, though even he did not fully appreciate the hazards David had chanced in pulling strings to get him released. Secrecy was a normal, if not natural, part of his life. But there were times, like now, that David wished he could confide it all in someone else. Perhaps though, he thought, squaring his shoulders, there
were
things one could be honest about.

“Because what I feel for you doesn’t have a border, nor a flag. It doesn’t seem to much care what the conditions or politics of this country or any other are. No,” he put a hand up to halt the protest he saw forming on Pat’s lips. “I’m not asking you for anything, I don’t have expectations. I just needed to tell you—when I thought it might be you dead I regretted that I’d never had a chance to tell you how I feel. Even if all you felt was disgust in return, still I needed to have it said.”

“David, ye know that I can never return yer feelins’.”

“I know. It doesn’t matter though. Or rather it does, but somehow whatever the form of it, love seems a rare commodity in this country of late. So I thought perhaps,” his fair skin was flushed, though his eyes still met the stark honesty of Pat’s, “it only mattered that it existed at all, and not that it wasn’t proper.”

“Yer very brave to just say it out like that, my mood bein’ what it is today,” Pat said, expression unreadable.

David shrugged. “I did it more for myself than you, truth be told.”

“Well ye’ll forgive me if I don’t quite know how to respond to such an admission.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

Pat obviously took his words at face value, because he drank his tea without further comment. David supposed it was preferable to the punch on the nose he’d half expected.

“I would hope that,” David laughed, though it came out with a fractured note, “despite the travesty in Derry and uncomfortable admissions on my own part, we could still be friends. Unless of course I remind you of a part of yourself
you
despise.”

Pat looked at him for a long time, dark eyes giving away nothing of what went on behind them. Finally, he smiled wearily. “Can ye just give me a little time to figure out what that means? Right now, I’m not sure of much in my life an’ I’m so angry that I’m afraid of myself. Suddenly it seems I may be capable of things I wouldn’t have countenanced a month ago.”

It was a huge admission, David knew, for a man who was so intensely private. And who, admittedly, had no reason under the sun, at present, to trust him.

Except that he loved him, and thought perhaps Pat understood there was no force on earth that would cause David to betray that emotion.

STANDING IN THE RAIN on the Mullabrack Road, some miles beyond Portadown, Pamela was severely questioning the state of her sanity. She was on her way to a meeting with the most infamous Loyalist that had ever come out of the heartland of Protestant extremity. A man who was famous for his ‘shoot now, ask questions later’ policy.

The phone call that had drawn her here had come in three days earlier at the Tennant Street Station, where she’d been filing her pictures and conferring with one of the constables over a few details in the photos.

She’d answered with her mind still on the dumped body in the photo. The voice on the other end jolted her.

“I hear yer lookin’ into an old murder.” The tone was direct, and the phrase was not in the form of a question.

“Who is this?”

“William Bright. Is the name familiar to ye?

“Yes,” she’d replied, while a small snake of fear uncoiled in her belly. William Bright was a man one heard of, occasionally saw pictures of, and devoutly hoped to never meet in person.

“Scared yet, lass?”

“A little,” she admitted.

The chuckle on the other end of the line was dry.

“If ye want to know what really happened to Brian Riordan, ye’ll be on the Mullabrack Road just beyond the walls of Gosford House, Tuesday mornin’ round eight o’clock. A couple of my lads will pick ye up.”

“How did you know—” she began, then fell silent at the unmistakable click of the receiver going down.

“Problem?” the constable asked, not looking up from the negatives he was going over with a magnifying glass.

“No.”

Now standing here on this empty stretch of road, it took all her willpower not to jump back in the car and flee for the relative safety of home. She turned her keys over in her pocket, noting with part of her mind that the leaves on the beeches were beginning to unfurl, lending a soft green mist to the heavily wooded road. Then she wondered if this was the last time she’d see leaves open, or anything else for that matter.

“Get a grip, girl,” she told herself sternly under her breath. Just then, she heard the chuggy thrum of a car cresting the small rise. She braced herself, the teeth of her keys cutting deep enough to draw blood from her palm.

There were two men in the car, both hooded and both well armed. The one on the passenger side got out, pistol cocked casually in her direction.

“Get in the back, we’re blindfoldin’ ye first though.”

She’d anticipated this. They wouldn’t want her to know where they were taking her. She nodded and walked over to where the man waited for her. The blindfold was a grubby football scarf in the red, royal blue, and white of the Glasgow Rangers. It reeked of stale cigarette smoke and spilled ale.

After the man had fastened the scarf tightly across her eyes, he put a hand to the back of her head and shoved her roughly into the back seat of the small car, getting in behind her and pulling her head down to his knee.

“Don’t fuckin’ move,” he said, “an’ don’t try anything stupid or I’ll shoot ye as ye lie. Understood?”

She nodded, wishing fervently she’d given in to her desire to flee minutes earlier. The car made a lurching u-turn and then took off in the direction it had come from. They were heading back to the carriageway. The man kept a firm hand on the back of her neck, his denim leg hard and smelling strongly of car oil.

The car settled to a steady pace. They were traveling toward Markethill far as she could determine. An odd choice considering the IRA was extremely strong in that area. Though there were several desperately lonely country roads between here and there, the knowledge of which did little to calm her.

“Nice tits for a Fenian bitch,” the man above her said in a conversational tone to the driver. She swallowed hard over the lump of fear in her throat. She didn’t dare even wriggle under the hand, though the fear of rape was almost stronger in her than that of death.

“None of that, man. Billy said she’s not to be touched for now.”

The
for now
chilled her, but she was relieved to know that at least for the present she was kept safe by a hard man’s word. Inside her head she began her fifth round of prayer to ‘Our Lady’ as a way to calm herself and hopefully draw some divine intervention in her direction.

The hand on her neck pulled her back, until her face was only inches from the man’s groin. She stiffened her neck and gritted her teeth, knowing it was a game of intimidation, to show fear would be suicidal.

“Squeamish are ye?” he said, with a low throaty chuckle that would have stood the hairs up on her entire body were they not already stiff with fear.

The rest of the ride was accomplished in this fashion, until they turned down a considerably bumpy lane where she could hear the scrape of tree branches along the sides of the car.

“End of the line,” the man said as the car lurched to a rough halt.

Her first impression was a heavy smell of sap, which told her they were in a wooded area, with not another human soul around for miles. Not comforting, but what she’d expected.

The man pulled her out of the car by her collar, shoving her blind ahead of him. She stumbled and he caught her roughly by the elbow, shoving her forward again. She could feel the menace in his touch, and knew that only a word or two stood between her and the unpleasant thoughts in his mind becoming real acts.

He pushed her through a doorway. The driver seemed to be staying outside, for the door shut behind them. The scarf was then untied, but left looped around her throat. He put his hands in the waistband of her jeans, then slid them around.

“Have to check ye, boss’s orders.”

It was too dark to see his face but she could feel his smile as he opened the front of her blouse and put blunt fingers under the bottom edge of her brassiere cups in order to determine if she was wired.

“That’ll do Rob,” said a man who’d emerged from a shadowed doorway. “She’s clean, bring her in.”

She was pulled through the open doorway into a room with windows three-quarters of the way up the dank walls. She blinked in an effort to adjust her vision to the light, pallid as it was. It took a few seconds for the spots to clear and then she surveyed the man in front of her.