Turbulent Priests (Dan Starkey 3) (25 page)

‘Up the church tower, telescope in hand. You can see just about everything from up there.’

‘And what did he see?’

I shrugged. ‘I left him to it. He was hogging it.’

‘Do you think the pressure’s getting to him?’

‘I don’t know. It’s getting to me.’

And it was. At home, no matter how much of a bind you were in, there was always the off-chance of being rescued by the police or army; there was always the reticence of the terrorist when it came to public appearances. Here there was no recognisable law. Here there were too many guns. Here there was no way off the island unless they wanted you to leave.

‘They will be caught, won’t they? Before the day’s in.’

‘I suppose. I mean, Mary and Murtagh are both island people, so it’s conceivable that they know every last inch of the place and how to use it to best advantage. But they’re hardly unique in that respect. Flynn seems to think they’ll be captured in a very short while. He says there’s a sort of historical precedent for it.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that about a hundred and fifty years ago there
was another blow-up here. A Protestant minister and his family tried to set up a church, raised everyone’s hackles in the process, and there was a trial.’

‘For what?’

‘I don’t know. God. The meaning of life. The usual thing an island community likes to busy itself with. It seems – surprise, surprise – that the trial wasn’t going in the Prods’ favour, and they did a bit of a runner as well. So just about the whole of the island turned out to hunt them down.’

‘And?’

‘And they found them. And they hacked them to death.’

‘Oh. Dear.’

‘Of course that was then, and this is now. We live in altogether more enlightened times now.’

‘Right.’

They came to Snow Cottage around six. Three of them. Two came up and knocked on the door, the other I saw pass the side window to take up a position in the back jungle. They were perfectly polite, even a little embarrassed, said they were checking every house, asked if we minded them checking ours.

‘Sure, fire ahead. Any sign of them yet?’

‘Nah. Jamie McBrinn found a shoe that might have been Mary Reilly’s out by the lighthouse, but it could just as well have belonged to any big-footed woman.’

We stood respectfully back, let them get on with it. Patricia whispered to me about making them a cup of tea. I told her
to catch herself on and reminded her about the cups of tea people had made for the British Army when they were first sent to Belfast; they’d enjoyed them so much they’d stayed for thirty years.

The searchers said hello to Little Stevie, the miracle baby. Little Stevie bubbled something thick and transparent out of his nose in response. They took a little longer in the garden because there was a little more of it. They found a wheel-barrow in the dark undergrowth, but no killer whale. Then they thanked us for our patience and moved on. We watched them go through the kitchen window, noting the thin line of hunters spread out beyond the garden wall as far as the eye could see.

Patricia looked at her watch. ‘It’ll be getting dark soon.’

‘Yeah.’

‘They’ll call the search off then, won’t they, for the night?’

‘I expect so. If Mary and Murtagh are out there together, I expect that’s what they’re waiting for. Do whatever they’re going to do under the cover of darkness.’

‘What do you think they’ll do?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘What would you do, Dan?’

I shrugged. ‘Cry. Call for momma. Incite insurrection amongst the rabbits. I hate to think.’

It was still pretty bright, but Patricia reached up then and pulled the curtains. She shivered.

‘That doesn’t make it go away, love,’ I said.

‘I know.’

I gave her a hug. And a kiss.

‘What’ll we do if they come here in the middle of the night, looking for help?’

‘We tell them to fuck off.’

‘We’d have to help, wouldn’t we?’

‘We’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it.’

‘So what now?’

I hemmed and hawed. Eventually I said, ‘How about that pelvic floor?’

31

There were gunshots during the night. Isolated shouts. Cars roaring along the lane outside.

I was dreaming, of course, and soaked with it. The third time I shouted out Christine’s name was enough for Patricia and she kicked me out of the bed with orders to take a shower and rid the demons, except there was no shower so a rub down with a cold flannel had to suffice. After that it was difficult to get back over so we lay in the semi-dark around dawn and bickered over who was taking up too much territory in the bed, all of it carried out in hissing whispers for fear of waking Little Stevie. At some point I asked her if she ever said her prayers, and she told me it was none of my business, which I took for an embarrassed yes.

By seven I was up and tracksuited. It was an old Liverpool Carlsberg tracksuit, and it had never seen a track. But it had
seen action on several football pitches, most of them lovingly laid out by groundsmen who must have worked on the Somme. There were several cigarette burns on the sleeves, testament to close encounters with footballers with the same regimented approach to training as my own, and also to the dangers of passive smoking.

Before thinking about food I took a turn round the garden, at least those sections accessible to earthbound creatures. It was a bright autumnal morning, with a slight but not unpleasant chill in the air. Around the back, the hedgehog had returned to its box, the floor of which was now packed with leaves. I lifted the grimed saucer out and returned with it to the kitchen and placed some of the remnants of the ham from the previous evening on it. Then I left it back in the box. There was no reaction on the part of the hedgehog. He didn’t wave a paw, or wink an eye; he didn’t even bristle. Perhaps he found it difficult to express his emotions; possibly he was of English extraction. For a moment I pondered on how I’d come to acquire a pet hedgehog on an island of ten million rabbits, or hares. But not for a very long moment.

I made breakfast – toast, raspberry jam, coffee for Patricia; Diet Pepsi, a Twix for myself, and carried it through on a tray. Little Stevie would be catered for later, wife-willing. Patricia pushed her knuckles into her eyes and gave me a big open-mouthed yawn.

‘Och, thanks,’ she said. ‘What’s come over you?’

‘Making up for the sweats and screams,’ I said. ‘Husbandly duties.’

‘Love, honour and raspberry jam.’

‘Something like that.’

We ate in silence, thinking our own thoughts.

It had come to me during the night where Murtagh and Mary might be, but I thought it better not to share the information, on the basis that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, unless you’re at a Christian Brothers school.

The bird observatory.

Murtagh had not been able to hide his surprise when I told him about the radio shack up there. He was a prisoner on the island with no means of communicating with the mainland, but if he made it to the birdman’s radio then he could summon help. They could be whisked off the island by helicopter. If I was right, then our troubles could soon be over. Once they realised what was going on, they’d have all sorts of police and social workers over. They’d probably take Christine into care.

They wouldn’t have attempted a night landing on stormy Wrathlin, so it was all a matter of whether Murtagh and Mary had managed to evade capture until daylight. But it was past breakfast time, and there had been no sound of helicopters. Of course they could just as easily come on a boat. Or the radio could have been broken. Or that might not have been their intention at all.

‘Will you stop fidgeting?’ Patricia said.

‘Sorry.’

‘If you can’t sit still, why don’t you go and find out what’s going on?’

I stood up.

‘But first you have to help me with the baby.’

I tutted. She looked at me sternly. I withdrew the tut.

An hour and a half later we climbed into the car and drove into town. I was going for fresh bread and gossip. Patricia was going to a women’s meeting. I primed her to prise all the information she possibly could out of them, so that later we could combine our findings into a rich rumour stew which, when boiled together, would leave a residue of truth.

Of course, she was used to me talking nonsense.

‘It’s not that sort of a meeting,’ she said.

‘You’ll chat. Youse ’uns always do. It’s in your genes.’

‘We won’t. We’ll be too puffed. It’s keep fit. Exercise.’

I shook my head. Snorted. ‘Jesus. Youse are desperate. Keeping fit while the world goes to pot. It’s like Stepford aerobics.’

‘Maybe we’re just keeping things in perspective, Dan. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with keeping fit.’

‘Fit to fight the good fight.’

‘Whatever you say, Dan.’ She tutted. She pulled her T-shirt half up. ‘You know I’ve this stomach to lose.’

‘What stomach?’

‘Dan, please.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘You’re fine. Honest. I love you just the way you are.’

‘Aye. Bollocks.’

‘Besides, what does Little Stevie do during all this? I’ll have you up for neglect.’

‘Steven is in the crèche.’

‘A
crèche
is it? Sor-rey.’

Where I came from a crèche was a polite collision between two cars, but I let it lie. She said quite a few kids went to the crèche, Christine amongst them.

I dropped her and the baby off in the churchyard. There were a few other women standing about. They waved over as she got out of the car. She didn’t kiss me goodbye. She presumed I’d pick her up in an hour. She presumed a lot. Usually she presumed right. Then I drove back down the hill and parked on the seafront.

The gossip was fresher than the bread. The trial and sub sequent hunt had disrupted the baking schedules, so the women stood about the grocery store rattling away about the night’s events, or their version of them, waiting for the bread to be delivered. I loitered amongst the frozen fish and listened in. Five or six of them – the women, not the fish – stood about the cash register talking ninety to the dozen. They were all fat and fiftyish and could have done with accompanying Patricia to the church hall to exercise their bodies instead of their mouths. The woman behind the counter, who’d been so welcoming on my first visit to the shop, scowled over from time to time. One had heard something in her garden and had gone out to investigate and nearly got shot for her trouble by one of the hunters. Another was convinced she heard a woman crying in her garden, but
she hadn’t dared look out. One said three or four cars had raced past her cottage in the middle of the night out towards the Magennis farm. Another slept like a brick and hadn’t given the search for Mary Reilly a second thought.

There’s a limited amount of time you can stand admiring fish before people start to become suspicious. I decided to give up on waiting for the bread and was just moving towards the door when the bell jangled and Duncan came in. He wore a big black donkey jacket and stained black jeans. The woman stopped their jabbering when they saw who it was.

‘What’s the news then, Duncan?’ the shopkeeper asked.

Duncan nodded hello to me then turned a serious face towards the women. ‘Bad,’ he said solemnly. ‘It looks like they might have got away.’

‘Aw, y’don’t say?’

‘Aye. I was just talking to Father Flynn. He says Carl Christie’s wee motorboat is missing. He saw it tied up secure before he went to bed, then it was gone by seven this morning.’

‘And he thinks . . .?’

‘Aye.’

‘Oh dear,’ said one of the women.

‘We don’t need that,’ said another.

‘There’s nothing but trouble will come from it.’

‘Nothing but trouble, no.’

‘They’ll be there by now.’

‘Telling the world.’

‘Aye. Telling all about us. She’s a bad egg, that Mary Reilly. I always knew that.’

‘So what does the Father say about it, Duncan?’

‘He says life goes on as normal. We’ve nothing to be ashamed of. We’ve done nothing wrong. Besides, and I think he has a point, who’s going to believe someone like Mary Reilly?’

‘But what about Mickey Murtagh? They’ll believe him, won’t they now?’

Duncan shrugged. ‘What can he say? That he deserted his post and ran away with a madwoman?’

‘Aye. Right enough, Duncan,’ said the shopkeeper.

I attempted to slip out the door, but the bell jangled again and they all stopped and looked at me.

‘I’ll come back for the bread, then,’ I said. ‘D’ye think it’ll be long?’

‘It all depends,’ said the shopkeeper.

I smiled at their fat faces and went on out.

‘He’s an odd one too,’ one of the women said just as I closed the door.

‘Odd as begot,’ said another.

I sat on the car bonnet for a couple of minutes until Duncan emerged with a bag of potatoes under his arm. He came straight over.

‘Your think they’ve really made it?’ I asked.

He set the bag down on the car and ran a hand through his shaggy hair. ‘Probably.’ He looked out across the harbour. It was a smoked-out hive of activity. ‘Father White and a hatful of his boys lit out in one of the trawlers first thing this morning to see if they could catch them. Pretty much depends what time Mary and Murtagh set out. There’s not
that much power in those wee boats. If there was a bit of a swell they might have found it slow going. But I’m thinking they probably had too much of a head start. Are you pleased, Dan?’

I shrugged. ‘I’m pleased she’s not been crucified. She needs locking up, not nailing up. What about you?’

‘I’m in two minds.’

‘Like Mary.’

‘I mean, she didn’t deserve a trail like that, or to be hunted down like an animal. At the same time, I dread to think what might happen once Murtagh starts blabbering.’

‘You think he will?’

‘What else can he do? He’s not just going to turn up at the local police station with Mary, turn her in, then get the boat back over here, is he?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘He’ll have to tell them everything about us. They probably won’t be the slightest bit bothered about Christine, but taking the law into our own hands, well, that’s a different thing entirely. There’ll be helicopters coming over that horizon by teatime, I’ll tell you. Then your lot will follow, the TV, the radio . . . then everyone else. Half the world’ll be laughing at us and the other half will be breaking their necks trying to pay homage to Christine.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘The place’ll never be the same again.’