Falling Glass (20 page)

He called Sean. “It’s gonna be a piece of piss,” he said.

“That’s right, just jinx it why don’t you,” Sean said.

“Any blowback yet?”

“None.”

“When do you think they’re going to find them?”

“I don’t know. We could call it in. But why would we.”

“Aye, we’re not doing that.”

“So you’re going to give this scheme a go?”

“Aye.”

“I don’t need to say it, do I?”

“No, once bitten and all that.”

“You should have put something in his drink.”

“Amateur hour. Patience is all you need.”

“Call me if there’s trouble.”

“I won’t.”

He hung up.

He got out of the car. His heart was racing. Adrenalin pumping. He wasn’t going to do anything for at least thirty minutes, but Ivan had clearly gotten under his skin, spooked him.

He lit a match. The phosphorous ignited with a white flare, fire kicking staccato backwards along the wood pulp and turning yellow as it cooled. He watched it, oddly fascinated. The damp air caught the smell of burning and smothered it in the stagnant earthy smells of the wet evening. With only a few seconds left in the match he pressed the hand-rolled joint reluctantly into the flame. It was his last one and it was too late now even to get a packet of ciggies. In a few seconds the cannabis was already dissolving in his blood. His hand stopped shaking, his head cleared, his eyes learned how to focus again. The match dropped out of his hands taking a long second to fall and die in the black leaves that had collected in the gutter. He crushed what was left under the heel of his shoe and took another drag on the Virginia tobacco, mixed with a touch of Moroccan hash.

Ivan’s hotel room was still dark.

A breeze was blowing off Lough Erne.

Nice place Enniskillen.

All traces of the big IRA bombing in ’89 were long since gone.

Nice place. But cold.

There was a pub on the other side of the car park which had a lot of empty seats. Some in the window.

And he felt cold inside too.

He wished just once he could have a real conversation with Sean,
instead of business or blather. He wished again there was someone he could talk to, who would listen to the thoughts he overheard himself thinking.

But there was no one.

“It’s the path you’ve chosen, ya eejit,” he said and spat.

Keeping his eye on the window he walked to the lake shore.

His stomach was rumbling.

He hadn’t eaten in a day and his head still hurt from the beating.

Oil and beer cans were jigging in and out between the tied-up boats. It was quiet, the yachts making the only music, clanging those familiar halyards and shaking their booms into discordant notes which resonated uncomfortably off the water. He grimaced, even with the dope mellowing him it was irritating – like a hundred school kids playing some warped modernist triangle symphony. Sort of thing you’d see on BBC4.

A kid came by. A short sleekit looking boy with freckles. Mouth open and closing. Clearly itching for a convo. Either that or a poofter. Nah, there weren’t any poofters in Fermanagh or if there were they kept bloody quiet about it, poor sods.

The kid sidled.

Stood there.

“Evening,” he said finally, in a cautious country voice.

Killian said nothing.

“Is that grass you’ve got in your fag?” the kid asked.

“What are you, a peeler?” Killian asked.

The kid laughed. “No, but you are, or something,” he said.

Killian liked that. “How long have you been watching me?”

“Since the hotel bar,” the kid said. “Who are you after? I couldn’t tell which one. Was it the Chink? Are you gonna lift him?”

“I’m not a cop. It’s a divorce case. Most tedious fucking thing in the world,” Killian said.

The wean’s face fell.

Killian was freezing and hungry. “Hey, you want to earn twenty quid?” he asked.

“Aye.”

Killian pointed at the hotel. “Keep an eye on that second floor for me, if a light comes on, come in the pub and get me. Okay? Think you can handle it?”

“What about the joint?”

Killian threw it in Lough Erne. “Stunts your growth, doesn’t it?” Killian said.

The pub was called The Boatsman’s Arms. Enniskillen saw a lot of pleasure traffic between lower and upper Lough Erne and all the way over to the Ulster canal and the Irish internal waterways. Narrowboating was a popular holiday for some people. Other people even lived on their barges, travelling from place to place. Of course
they
never got called tinkers or gyppos or pikeys.

“What are you having?” the barman asked.

They had two taps. Guinness and Harp.

“Guinness, I suppose,” Killian said. “And do you have any food?”

The barman nodded. He was about fifty with a moustache that curled at the edges. Killian was a wee bit worried that he might be a “character” and a talker. He still needed to concentrate on the window.

“Nuke ya a shepherds pie, aye?” the barman asked.

“That would hit the spot,” Killian agreed.

He sat in the window seat where he could see Ivan’s hotel room. The barman disappeared into a back room. It would be okay. Between him and the kid Ivan would have to be sharp. And that wean might come in useful for part two of the plan if he was what Killian thought he was.

The Guinness and the pie came together. The black stuff was well poured: black to the brim, the head above the glass, no fucking trace of a shamrock.

He sipped the pint, drowning everything out in the hoppy taste of the black liquid.

“Five even,” the barman said.

Killian gave him a fiver.

The pub was empty now. Killian wondered when closing time was.

“How long have I got to eat this?” he asked.

“Ach, you’re okay,” the barman said and went back to the counter to clean glasses. Killian started on the pie. Pretty good. Meaty, warm.

“It’s all right is it?” the barman wondered.

“Aye, it hits the spot,” Killian said.

“The wee woman makes it, so she does. So where are you off to, if you don’t mind me asking?” the barman asked.

“Sligo,” Killian said off the top of his head.

“Oh aye? Lovely there. Go there a lot?”

“No.”

Killian finished the pie and the pint.

No light had come on in the hotel room. No light was going to come on. Ivan had spent all day driving and then all evening drinking.

He had about six or seven hours…

“Toilet?” he asked and was pointed to the left. He walked through the public bar to the bathroom at the back. It was really only a wall with a metal trough at the bottom, angling into a ditch that ran outside. There were big holes in the whitewashed walls that he could see out of, and a hole in the felt ceiling through which he could see the sky. Clouds were moving silently across the constellations like vast alien ships. He pulled down his fly and pissed into the soap ball stuck in the bottom of the drain. It fizzed and bubbled and he shook the last of the yellow urine onto the soap and pulled up his fly again. There was no water for the washbasin so he wiped his hands on the back of his black jeans.

The graffiti here was a time warp back to the nineties: Up the IRA, Fuck the IRA, Fuck The Pope, Fuck The Queen, UVF, UDA, INLA, PIRA, CIRA, No Pope Here, with the occasional Man United, Liverpool and there in a corner: Tinkers Out!

They’d never grow out of that would they?

He looked at his watch.

11.20.

Ivan had been down for nearly an hour.

Suddenly his legs gave way. Heart hammering, breath shallow. He
leaned up against the wall and pinched the top of his nose. It was a panic attack, not a heart attack. “Fuck,” he said and slammed his fist hard in the whitewash. Plaster crumbling under the blow. “What’s all this about, Killian? Tinkers out? The dead woman? Tangling with a big boy like Ivan?”

Through a hole in the outer wall he could see the car park and the lough beyond. It was pitch black beyond the arc light. Like a friggin’ coal mine. Like the friggin’ grave. He focused on the dark until his breathing was normal.

“Okay now, is that it?” he asked himself.

Apparently it was. He took his car key and scratched a line through the graffiti about the tinkers, digging it until it was illegible.

He bent down to look in the piece of glass that was almost a mirror but with the tain scraped to a few flakes. He was like a ghost in the glass.

He walked back out into the lounge and said goodnight to the barman.

He found the kid in the car park and gave him twenty quid.

“Thanks, mister,” the kid said.

“You want to earn a hundred more?” Killian asked.

“Aye!”

“I need a car.”

The kid didn’t baulk but merely asked, “What’s the matter with yours? Or is that nicked too?”

“No, it’s not nicked. It’s mine, but it’s been fitted with a tracking device by the guy upstairs. He’s a rival investigator and we’re both on the same divorce case. It sounds exciting but it’s not. It’s a fairly common practice.”

The kid looked at him. Killian had pegged him as a sleekit wee so-and-so, probably joyriding since he was about thirteen. Of course he could get the car himself, but it had been a while and it would take
time.

“Aye, I can get you a car, easy,” the kid said, “but it’ll cost ya more than a hundred quid.”

“How much?”

“Let’s say five.”

“Let’s say two.”

“Two-fifty.”

“Two.”

“Aye, okay. What sort do you want? It’s Enniskillen so you’re not going to get a Porsche.”

“No, nothing like that. Nothing flashy.”

“I’ll go to the side street, better chance of an unlocked wee job,” the kid said.

“How long will it take?” Killian asked.

“No time at all.”

“Meet me back here in ten minutes?”

“Aye, nay probs.”

“One more thing,” Killian said.

“Aye?”

“I am not a man to be fucked with.”

“I can tell,” the kid said a bit cheekily and sloped off into the shadows.

The car park had one CCTV camera on a pole near the emergency exit of the hotel. Killian walked back to the water’s edge, fished out a shopping bag, dandered to the hotel wall and made his way behind the pole. He shinnied up without difficulty and put the shopping bag over the camera.

He dropped to the ground and ran to Ivan’s white Range Rover and took out his skeleton key. He was lucky this was an old model. The new ones sometimes confounded him. Stealing cars was a young man’s game. He put the key in, toggled it, pressed on the tines and heard a click.

It was all about the alarm now. He opened the hood and disabled the battery.

He tugged on the door handle and flinched but no alarm sounded.

He looked inside the Range Rover just to give it a once-over but there was no guard dog or fucking booby trap, just a dense, expensive aftershave smell.

He sat on the driver’s seat and tried a couple of the skeleton keys on his key ring until he found one that turned the ignition. He reconnected the
battery, flinched, turned the key and the Range Rover roared into life. No alarm sounded this time either.

The put the car in neutral and turned on the satnav.

He thumbed through the menu until he found the last programmed address:

3 The Holiday Cottages

Dervish Island

Fermanagh

He wrote it down in his notebook and then cleared the satnav’s memory just on the off chance that Ivan hadn’t written it down somewhere else. He rummaged in the glove compartment for money or IDs but Ivan had been scrupulous about taking everything to his room. That was okay. This was already a good night’s work. He shut down the satnav, turned off the engine and pressed the bonnet release button.

The hood popped up.

He got out of the car, closed the passenger door and locked it again. He took out a penknife and mini flashlight he’d bought on the road.

He held the flashlight between his teeth.

He lifted the hood and propped it on its stand and then leaning carefully over the engine cut the spark-plug wires with his penknife where they went into the cylinder heads.

He stood back and examined his work with the flashlight. If you took a casual look you wouldn’t see anything wrong. Even an experienced mechanic might not twig it for an hour or so.

He closed the hood just as the kid was pulling into the car park with a black Mercedes W112, which wasn’t exactly the most discreet vehicle in the world with all that chrome, tail jets and lacquered bodywork.

“What do you think?” the kid asked.

Joyriders and professional car thieves had completely different sensibilities, Killian reflected.

“Well, it’s a bit fucking shiny and there’s no satnav,” he said.

The kid’s face fell. “You want me to get something else?”

“Nah, it’ll do. Where’s there a garage I can get a map of Fermanagh?”

“Twenty-four-hour garage just down the road,” the kid said.

“Aye well, a deal’s a deal,” Killian said and gave him two hundred quid. He was secretly pleased. His uncle Garbhan had had a W112 for years, stolen of course. He was much less of a drunk than his da and Garbhan had taught him to drive in that car, which was nerve-racking because it was an attention getter – not only nicked and a bloody classic but Garbhan regularly painted it with green gloss house paint so that it stood out a mile.

Finally Uncle G traded it for a couple of horses who were supposed to be goers on the flat but both of them failed miserably at Down Royal. And Garbhan himself had died in an infirmary in Glasgow at the ripe old age of forty-four. Poor bastard.

“Here’s another fifty for doing it quick,” Killian said and counted out two twenties and a ten.

“Thanks!” the kid said, beaming, the sleekit gone from his face. He wouldn’t make a serious player. Too big a heart that wee mucker, Killian reckoned, but thought of another task the wee mucker might be able to handle.

“You want to double your money?” he asked.

“Maybe,” the kid said.

“You’ll need to get a few hours sleep and come back here early. Can you do that?”

“Aye, I think so.”