The Sleepers of Erin (25 page)

A hand on my shoulder. I’d nodded off and Joe was shaking me awake.

‘Okay, Joe.’ By now the air must be fetid, horrible, and I couldn’t tell it from fresh. I had to feel again to locate the groove in the metal bar. No good cutting at a new place when the bar was partway through in the centre.

‘You were saying about the thumbprints, Lovejoy.’

‘Aye.’
Wheem, wheem
my E string went. I seemed to have been doing this all my life, bent as far as the tunnel would allow and hauling on alternate ends of the string. Pack the groove with more muddy mess, fix the string carefully in the groove and
wheem, wheem
. ‘Aye, Joe. After that Elizabeth Barrett Browning manuscript “Prometheus Bound” was sold for over eleven thousand quid – it had her thumbprints, remember? – every bloody crummy book on sale anywhere had bloody thumbprints . . .’

I’d no idea how long it was, but Joe was suddenly shaking me and urging me to have a go and kick at the bar. I took a hell of a time explaining that the E string kept passing through the bar and I couldn’t find the groove before it dawned on me that I’d cut through.

‘You’ve been doing the top for donkey’s years, Lovejoy. It might break with a kick. You did the bottom hours ago.’

That was news to me. We counted ‘One, two, three’ and I kicked. Something scraped all up my calf, right through the skin. I wept deliriously real awakening pain, but realized then that there was space where the bar should have been, and I was blubbering and slithering and dragging Joe after me and him saying, ‘Great, Lovejoy, great, eh?’

And I felt air.

Rain and cold, mud, chill wind. The lot. But beautiful air, rasping like lung ice in the chest. Fingers bleeding, leg stinging and shoeful of blood, but that air.

I’d dragged Joe out on his face. With my last erg, turned his face sideways so he now projected from the peat barrier as if he’d been fired from a cannon and come through the wall. And the peats that had seemed so light now weighed a ton. He looked unconscious.

A figure moved on the rim of the diggings, and looked down.

‘Jaysus! Is there no killin’ you two?’

 My luck, to find the castle rider. I’d hoped for enough solitude to somehow drag Joe over the hillside to Shinny’s car and escape him, to hospital maybe. Surely there’d be a hospital in the town called Hospital? I glanced at Joe for help, but he’d clearly switched off, the selfish sod. If only he weren’t so big I’d have got him away by now. You’d think giants like him would naturally go on a diet as a matter of course, thoughtless berk.

‘Give me a minute, mate.’ I wanted it to sound terse but it came out a bleat of terror.

‘Back in there, the both of yuz.’

‘Please, mate. Do a deal? Them golds—’

He grinned down at me from the bleak skyline. ‘Mr Heindrick’s the boss. Kurak’s too much muscle. Back into that tunnel.’

Where he’d give me both barrels this time, to make sure. I felt like it was the end of the world.

‘Look, mate,’ I wheedled. ‘It’s Joe they want dead. Not me.’

‘Both of yuz.’

‘Let me go,’ I blubbered. ‘Do Joe, but let me go. Lena said me and her were partners—’

He chuckled. ‘You and Kitchener’s army. Every boyo in the West’s ridden that lane. We call them Lena’s cowboy pictures on the estate.’

Get up and kick him, Joe, I prayed, but he slept on. Sleeper man in more ways than one. The castle rider shrugged, raised his shotgun with that ugly practised speed, hardly seeking aim.

‘Have it here, then, me boy.’

I screeched, ‘No!’ and flung myself sideways hoping to shield myself with Joe, though there was nowhere to run. My arms folded themselves about my head as something thunked up above. Silencer? But nothing hit me. And no bang. I was only in the same old agony, no pain added for once.

Wincing, I peered out between my arms. He was up there looking puzzled, stockstill and legs apart, plucking at a stick near his collar. He turned to his left, moving the shotgun with him. Another thunk sounded. Another stick, black against the grey underclouded sky, joined the first. The shotgun fell, and the castle rider lay sideways into the air. I watched, stunned, as he flopped into the turf pit a yard away. Peat spattered my face. He was still. The two arrows projecting from his neck had broken in the fall. Their fractured ends were ever so clean, varnished a bright translucent acid-oaken yellow. They proved there was a bright safe world still in existence somewhere out of this drab wet brown-greenery.

‘Glory be to God!’ Gerald was up on the rim. ‘Where did you come from?’ He cast a look around, then climbed down with all those jointed limbs. He examined the castle rider’s body.

‘That’s wasn’t me screaming,’ I explained. ‘It was Joe just before he passed out.’

‘Sure it was. I recognized the voice,’ Gerald said diplomatically. ‘He looks done for.’

‘Maybe a broken back. Anybody else about?’

‘Just this blackguard, God rest his poor soul.’

‘We’ll have to hurry, eh?’

‘Not so’s you’d notice.’ He winked and began to slot his bow and quiver of arrows into that long thin canvas case. ‘Somebody lodged an appeal against the Heindricks.’

‘Another cousin?’ I guessed.

‘Aren’t you the amazin’ one, Lovejoy! How’d you guess that? It’s me cousin Sean’s boy Liam. A terrible Wexford man, to be sure, God forgive him, but goin’ for a lawyer and wantin’ to take on every judge in Munster—’

‘Got any tools, Gerald? Hammer, chisel.’ His surprise didn’t stop me asking. ‘I’ve a little job to do before we get the torcs.’

‘Long job? We haven’t many hours.’

I saw again those small ledges of rock supporting the last wall slab of the burial chamber. ‘No, not long.’

‘I’ll see what I can find.’

‘You take Joe to hospital. I’ve Shinny’s car over the hill.’

‘I saw it.’

I wasn’t surprised. He seemed to have seen everything since we started. I hadn’t.

‘You know,’ I said. ‘I thought that bag was for fishing stuff.’

And hurt them little innocent watery souls?’ He paused to look at the castle rider. ‘We’ll put him in the tunnel before we go. Two good arrows wasted. D’you know the price of them things? ’Tis a scandal, a scandal. You’ll wait here?’

‘Promise,’ I said, and meant it.

 I’d misjudged Gerald.

That last hour changed me for life.

Gerald was indefatigable. His multi-hinged limbs all angles and his prattling tongue never silent two seconds together, he did countless journeys across the hillside, and made a stretcher from those horribly familiar steel marker-poles tied with twine so we could hump Joe’s recumbent mass over the hill. The arrangement was for Gerald to drive Joe to hospital while I finished a small task that was on my mind.

I was near dropping and had to ask for a rest when finally we tottered within sight of Shinny’s crate. Gerald was all for sprinting on, but I had the heavy end and insisted.

‘Here,’ I puffed. ‘What the hell’s that glass thing?’

 A shining bubble was on the track next to the car.

‘My bubble car.’ He sounded really proud.

So he had spoken the truth when I’d asked about the glass bubble on the van roof at Caitlin and Donald’s house in Drogheda. I remembered the shrill whine of an engine.

‘I kept hearing scooters,’ I said.

He was enraged. ‘Scooters? You evil black-hearted Englishman! Don’t you know that bubble cars are the engineering wonder of the age and scooters are nothing but cardboard cut-out Heath-Robinson toys that shame the purest principles of engineering poetry—’

I sighed. Resourceful he might be, but he was still a nut in my book.

‘Lift,’ I said.

He kept up his tirade all the way to the car.

I watched the car go and returned reluctantly to the turf digging. Leaving the dead castle rider there like a dead guard at a tomb made me feel ill, but there was nothing for it. Everything was out of my hands now. Once I decided that, it went like clockwork, maybe twenty minutes or even less. I went the length of the tunnel. Gerald had somehow purloined all the equipment everybody else seemed to lack. He’d found a hammer from somewhere for me, and a chisel that weighed a ton, and one of those tiny disposable torches that last for ever.

Though I say it myself I did a marvellous job underneath the burial chamber. I chiselled away the underlip from one side of the last slab completely, packing the chippings into the space created to give it some slender support. Then I did the other side but going cautiously, inch by inch. The great cross-slab formed the last paving of the burial chamber, and in turn it supported the place where the two converging walls met to form that characteristic wedge shape.

Heindrick’s original tunnellers had cut away a great deal to make enough tunnel space, so in a sense they’d done me a favour. There wasn’t much to do to make the whole structure unsafe. I scrabbled out in a panic only when there came a slight grating sound above me as the great slabs shifted and settled, their first movement for millennia. Gerald talked a soft welcome in my earhole before I even knew the swine had returned. He fell about when I nearly infarcted in fright, a great joke of the kind only imbeciles like him appreciate. When I came down through the superstrata I explained we’d have to go canny breaking in to lift the gold torcs out.

‘I’ve made it a bit unsafe,’ I told him apologetically.

‘Ah, it’s terrible careless y’are,’ he gave back without batting an eyelid. ‘How’ve you done that?’

‘Anybody standing on the apex slab’ll go through.’

‘Won’t that bring down the sides and the top monolith? Them graves are nothing more than a card house.’

‘Afraid it might. How much do you reckon they weigh?’

‘Them stones? Ton, maybe ton and a half.’

‘Good heavens,’ I said evenly. ‘I do hope there isn’t an accident.’

We broke into the chamber from above as dusk fell. Oddly, I noticed the two saddled horses idling patiently in the distance. The other guard seemed to have gone. Gerald said nothing about them so I was inclined to keep mum too. He seemed boss, full of plans and way ahead of me. Just how full I’d yet to discover. I may be good at antiques, but I’m dud on people.

Gerald had not done too badly this far and me and Joe were alive to prove it. But that evening he did us proud, with a pulley-operated metal claw which fixed on connecting rods fetched from his bow case. We – he, rather – lifted the gold torcs one by one from the chamber. I was really proud of their placing, pointing the krypton beam time after time to show him exactly how perfectly I’d positioned them. The ignorant sod was too stupid to appreciate my skill.

‘Ah, Lovejoy,’ he said sadly, sprawled out across the gap we had made by simply pulling a stone from the entrance roofing. ‘Ah, what’s the matter now? The sleeper game’s the sleeper game. Different, y’see. This is your honest-to-God grave robbery.’

‘Yes, but—’

 ‘It won’t count,’ he insisted sadly, bringing out another torc in the metal claw and holding the pulley’s nylon rope taut as he did so. ‘Not in the annals and records of the great sleeper tricks of criminal history.’

‘But you must admit—’

‘
No
, Lovejoy. We’re undoing all your great work. Nil out of ten, boyo.’

We left one torc on the dangerous slab at the grave chamber’s apex. By then I was worn out. Gerald was still lively as a cricket, and got a thrill out of pretending every five seconds that the other guard was creeping up on us, the goon, just to see me leap and panic. Despite his tomfoolery we did the final gory job pretty well, making quite a good finish.

We – mostly Gerald – put the castle rider into the tunnel, walled it up with debris, closed the tunnel mouth with layers of peat, the whilst singing some old Gaelic thing (‘An auld peat-layer’s song from the Dark Ages, Lovejoy!’)

The final insult was that he hadn’t returned in Shinny’s motor and we had to drive off in his bubble car. The worst ride I’ve ever had. He thought he was giving me a real treat, and praised its speed.

‘We need to get away fast,’ I complained, my teeth rattling in my head from the vibration. I’d never been so near the ground without lying down. ‘For when they find the tunnel. And the castle riders, erm . . .’

‘Sure, Lovejoy, we’re not to blame if wicked people go digging tunnels under the countryside!’

‘They know I was in the Heindricks’ group.’

‘Ah, but you stayed in town all day, Lovejoy.’ He nearly turned the bloody machine over, laughing like a drain. How he managed to crumple all those limbs in that driver’s seat I’ll never know.

‘No, Gerald,’ I explained to the moron. ‘I came back to the lough. In the tunnel. At the turf diggings—’

‘
No
, Lovejoy,’ he corrected. ‘Don’t you remember? You stayed with the rest of us. We all went shopping.’

‘Who’s “us”?’

‘Me cousin Brian. Our Terence’s three. Auntie Mary and her husband’s brother Donald . . .’

‘Right,’ I said lamely. ‘I’ll need a list, okay?’

Funny thing about women. They have this knack of putting you on the defensive, as if you start out guilty when they’re in the right over everything. They’re born with it. Normally it always unsettles me, though I manage by ignoring any guilt I might possess. Sometimes it doesn’t work. That last night with Shinny was one of them, even though it was celebration time.

Gerald and I had driven eastwards in his daft van through Tipperary as far as the Irish Sea and then doglegged up to Dublin. There, on a waste ground in the city’s outskirts, we gazed at the fourteen torcs gleaming on the unfolded leather sheet in his van.

‘Well, boyo,’ he said softly, ‘isn’t that the poetic sight?’

‘What now?’

‘I take the genuine torc to be authenticated. The rest get valued.’

Authenticated? Not by a trained archaeologist?’ Police were in my thoughts.

He grinned. ‘My cousin Sebastian’s one. Wouldn’t it be time he earned his keep, now?’

‘Then we’ll market the rest on the sly?’

‘Sure it’s a terrible criminal mind you have, Lovejoy,’ but he was grinning. ‘Which is the true torc?’

‘That.’ I pointed instantly and waited while he wrapped it with reverence in a separate leather. ‘Wait, Gerald. What’s the split?’