In the Forest (22 page)

‘Get the fuck down.’

‘I won’t get the fuck down’ and he pushes her down with a violence and strikes her across the cheek and they lie in the wet hammocky ground, O’Kane slouches over her, believing his green jacket to be a camouflage, their hearts, their warring hearts like the hearts of lovers, beating violently. It dances above them coming down, closer, closer so that the crew are within calling distance and she is thinking
They’ll pick us up
...
they’ll pick up our heat
and it hovers and dips, undulates and all of a sudden it roars away happy with itself. In the wake of its passing the most awful silence, only the shivery vibrations of the telegraph wires.

‘Thank fuck,’ he shouts.

She closes her eyes not wanting him to see that she is in tears. Finally he eases his chest away from hers and she staggers up, disconsolate.

They go on down, limping, no longer arguing, the sun beating down, the odd house in the distance, ponies in a field sparring over sops of hay, life as it should be. He needs a car. Fast.

‘You’ll have the drive of your life,’ he tells her.

Coming to a two storey house he warns about not doing or saying anything stupid. She sees his finger in the trigger, sees the roof of a hay shed, him kicking open the double wooden doors and dogs barking from inside. The dogs are chained. In the courtyard next to a tub of flowers is a big new Jeep with a sheen to it, a readiness, a yen to go. He shouts for the keys to be handed out. Above the baying dogs comes the voice of a man whom they cannot see, ordering them to get off his property. His accent is foreign.

‘Throw out the keys,’ O’Kane shouts up.

‘I do not have the keys.’

‘Throw out your fucking keys’ and now they swear obscenities at one another, the self same words sounding different in either tongue and then the barrel of a gun juts through the upstairs window and as shots are fired, two orange cartridge shells land on the gravel near her and the dogs go berserk. O’Kane grasps her, his anger unabatable now and holds her as a shield as they back away towards the gate which is swinging open and shut.

‘Tell him we will be back for him and his wife and his kids.’

‘We will be back for you and your wife and your kids,’ she says, her voice high pitched. She is like a puppet, no, a robot, she is witnessing everything as if it is not happening, as if it is outside of her, their going down the drive, him making her jump over barbed wire, his eyes now bulged and rolling.

The birds are busy, flocks of them darting in and out of the hedges, foraging, one with a very yellow beak carrying a worm back into a nest, to its young, birdsong so gay, so spry, soon to be silenced in the ensuing pandemonium, a fleet of patrol cars coming up the road, an older man emerging from a small cottage, refixing his cap as if it is just another morning and he going a few miles to fodder his cattle and she thinks
Oh, you poor man, you are for it in a matter of a minute and you don’t even know.
They crawl under more wire, down a steep slope onto a cattle grid. Everything is eerily clear, the older man getting into his car and reversing, blue string with an assortment of white carrier bags to keep animals out and underneath the grid a pool of rainwater with cress growing in it, a fleet of cars coming up the road and guards jumping out, more than thirty armed guards on the road, on the wall, calling in loud, brisk, but still reasonable voices, ‘Let the girl go, let the little girl go’ and O’Kane answering that if they come an inch closer he will blow her fucking head off. ‘I’ve seen your face on television . . . you’re wanted,’ the older man says from his car, dazed, disbelieving.

She is pushed into the back of the car, O’Kane lurched over her as the guards yell, ‘Throw out your keys, Pat.’

‘I can’t . . . you see, I can’t,’ Pat answers, helpless.

They drive over the grid and away from the convoy of cars and men, O’Kane, Kitty and the driver all shouting, mad tossing shapes beyond the window and then a crunch as the car veers towards a drain, comes to a halt and Pat exclaiming, ‘We’ve been shot at ... we’ve been shot at.’

The back door is opened and a body thrusts itself over them, a multiple scream as the gun explodes inside the car and she opens her eyes to see Pat grasping the raised barrel, clinging to it, the cloth roof dropping down in shreds and a smell of gunsmoke. ‘We have him ... we have him.’ The guards’ shouts go up as though from one throat, passing through their ranks, in glory and disbelief and he is pulled out of the car, his wild scoriated face, his wild unspent voice, shouting in a brief and fading burst - ‘I know nothing about the woman and the child.’

He moves with a staggering and undefeated bravado, this, for him, just an interim until he is loose again, a free man, them hunting him down, this never ending chase of them and him, hunted and hunters, the victory he had dreamed and re-enacted down the butchered years.

As he is put to the ground and his pockets searched, other guards rush on him exultant; anger and frustration wiped out now in this melee of jubilation, vindication; in triumph, in pride, in honour, his cursing, kicking frame there on the ground, being reined in, his rampaging at an end. But where are the missing people. Where are the missing people. Where . . . are . . . the . . . missing . . . people. They ask from different heights, different vantage points, different degrees of desperation, each thinking he will be the one to worm it out of the bastard. Guard Garvey is already a hero, being punched and congratulated for having had the presence of mind to jump forward from behind that wall and immobilise the back wheel of the car and bring the chase to a close.

‘Good work, Michael.’

‘Pure luck,’ Garvey says, his face scalding with pride.

‘Where are the missing people?’

She comes, the mercy woman, from some hidden dwelling, loose grey hair, in night gown and wellingtons, cuts her way through the swathe of men and kneels by him, placing her hand along his forehead, motherkind.

‘Where are they, son?’

‘I can’t tell you . . . with these fuckers around.’

‘That child is in nappies ... his bottom will be sore ... his poor mother at her wits’ end . . . you can tell me . . . I’m your friend ... I knew your people.’

‘They’ll be left outside the shop tomorrow night.’

‘Are they safe?’

‘They have food for two more days.’

‘Are they alive?’

‘They’re in a house . . . they have television.’

‘They’re safe . . . they’re safe,’ she says, her hands clasped in gratitude.

‘Listen, my dear woman ... I have to ask you to move out of here,’ a detective tells her.

‘Don’t take him . . . give me a few more minutes . . . he wants to tell me ... he needs to tell me,’ she says and as they move him forward her voice goes on begging, like the long sighing sound of the banshee, up there on a road where nothing had ever happened, just the seasons, branches choking each other in summer and reaching out wanly in the wet winters.

He is cuffed to two detectives and in a lather of curses is led away, the bunched arm muscles with the crazed and supple fury of a python and even as they hold him they fear that he will in some way elude them still, some phenomenal ingredient will transport him back to the empty woods and his murdering haunts.

He jerked fiercely on the cuffs and stood above Kitty who was sitting on a wall with a blanket around her.

‘The fox is finished,’ he said, his last utterance to the landscape he had violated.

Superintendent McBride stirs the white stomach medicine in the beaker, keeps stirring it in order to delay drinking it because the taste disgusts him. He is a big man with a bit of flab, his hair grey before its time, but his eyebrows thick and sleek and black where he puts a lick of boot polish on them, something his favourite daughter Sile jeers at. He can scarcely believe what has hit him. Five days of searching, five days of pillory and criticism from press and public and finally O’Kane captured in the early hours on a mountain roadway, with not a drop of blood shed. The heroism and euphoria of the capture are short-lived because now all eyes are on him and his team to find the three missing people, before they die of exposure or starvation. Rumours abound. Tip-offs abound. They are near the lake, they are in the woods, they are in the midlands, they have been seen driving around together, the woman, the child and the priest. He has thirty-six hours to find them, thirty-six hours with the eyes of the world beamed in on him, thirty-six hours of scalding pain in his gut and probably no sleep. He is lucky to have got O’Grady and Wilson, whiz-kids at their job, the two most experienced interrogators in the land, famous for their strategy, their softly softly and then wham-bam.

Never known to fail. A moment of respite as he imagines reading over the confession when his attention is alerted to the commotion in the street outside. Beyond the grimed window pane he sees a guard pushing back spectators as they try to surge forward over the metal barrier. He has given instructions that there be no ugly scenes, no booing, no weeping women with rosary beads, beseeching O’Kane to confess. Journalists jump on windows and roof tops to catch a glimpse of the infamous figure and in the corridor he hears doors banging and footsteps flying. The ‘Fox’ has arrived. He does not go out to have a look. He waits until Francis, a young, conscientious guard puts his head through the door and then indulges his curiosity - ‘What does he look like, Flann?’

He smiles at the pragmatism of the answer - ‘He looks like any other young lout in an anorak and five days of dirty growth on his chin.’

The superintendent broods, winds his watch, listens to the lisp of the little tick, examines the sleek black hands, like sewing thread, as they meet over the digit eleven. In three days himself and his team should be congratulating one another on having a confession and he will celebrate with yet another glass of his milky medicine.

They are on first names, Gerry and Frank and Michen. Easy does it, as Gerry says, he being the smooth-talking one. He is younger, informal, pulling his shirt sleeves up to show that they are all mates together.

‘Bit of a rough ride over, had you?’ he asks and knowing there will be no answer he says to understand that the boys get a bit hyper once there’s press and cameras around. They sit across a varnished brown table, their three sets of elbows leaning on it, the castors wobbling this way and that. As Gerry explains in a soft reasonable voice, all they want is to make things as painless as possible for everybody.

‘How long will I be kept here?’ O’Kane snarls.

‘That’s up to you,’ Frank snarls back.

‘We’ll help you if you help us,’ Gerry adds.

‘I’m entitled to a solicitor,’ O’Kane says, then holds up his wrists, pink and ridged from the way they had handcuffed him on the drive over. He licks them.

‘Of course you’re entitled to a solicitor ... no one’s stopping you . . . but if you take my advice we’ll work it out here between the three of us . . . a solicitor will complicate matters at this juncture. Look, we have no papers, no pens, no note taking . . . it’s a nice easy friendly atmosphere . . . you and Frank and me,’ Gerry says.

‘Where’s Father John?’ Frank asks.

‘Precisely, we start with Father John . . . the whole diocese has gone hysterical . . . masses offered for him every morning . . . very popular man,' Gerry says.

‘What the fuck are you talking about.’

‘We’re talking about three missing people, a woman and a child and a priest.’

‘They must be joyriding,’ O’Kane says and sneers.

‘Don’t give us that shit,’ Frank says.

‘Easy now, Frank . . . Michen here has had a tough life . . . packed off to a home at ten or eleven . . . your poor mother dying. Do you want to talk about your poor mother? It’ll help. They say a grief like that, bottled up, is a bad thing for a child . . . what age were you?’

‘She was smothered in her coffin and I know who did it.’

‘Where’s the priest?’ Frank asks, leaning in close to him.

‘You have the wrong man,’ O’Kane tells him.

‘But you know they’re missing.’

‘You fuckers set me up . . . I’ve never heard of these people.’

‘A gun was taken off you at approximately nine thirty-five this morning ... it had been fired a few times . . . what were you shooting?’

‘A hit from a bullet doesn’t always mean that people die ... it can be a shot in the air.’

‘Mich . . . what’s the story? The sooner you get it off your chest, the sooner you will be out of here . . . the superintendent in this unit is as decent a man as you could find ... a family man ... if you co-operate so will he . . . he’s no sadist,’ Gerry says.

‘I was shooting vermin.’

‘What kind of vermin?’ Frank, at his most sarcastic.

‘So you were in the woods . . . maybe you came across people in the woods ... or you might have heard them . .. crying out for help,’ Gerry, still solicitous.

‘I want cigarettes.’

‘You’ll get your fucking cigarettes when you answer these questions . . . where are the missing people?’

‘You won’t get my dabs on them and you can’t keep me here much longer. I know the law . . . I’m here under Section Thirty.’