Living Death (2 page)

‘Stop the car!’ shrilled Siobhán. ‘Stop right now and let me out of here!’

She tugged desperately at the door-handle, but Garret had switched on the central locking. She turned around and started to pummel Milo with her fists, panting with frustration, her bracelets jingling and her earrings swinging. Milo laughed – a short, abrupt bark – and seized both of her wrists, gripping them so tight that she couldn’t move her arms at all.

They stared at each other for a few seconds – Siobhán’s eyes were wide with fear and bewilderment, while Milo’s eyes were completely dispassionate – grey-green, almost colourless, but there was so little expression behind them that they could have been made of glass.

‘Please let me go, Milo,’ Siobhán begged him, trying to pronounce her words as clearly as possible, and not to sound too drunk. ‘I can call a taxi to take me home, or I can
walk
even, if you don’t want anybody to know where I’ve been.’

‘
Walk
, girl? You can hardly fecking stand up. Besides, we’re almost there now.’

Siobhán frowned out of the window. All she could see were the grey stone walls that lined Middle Glanmire Road, and hedges. They passed the cream-painted Montenotte Hotel, with its flags and its floodlights, but then they were driving between narrow walls again.

After a further five hundred metres, Garret slowed, and turned up a steeply sloping driveway. Ahead of them, Sibohán could see a large grey house, its walls blotched green and black from decades of damp. A single light was shining in the porch, and one of the upstairs windows was lit, without curtains, but apart from that the house was in darkness. Its gardens were in darkness, too. Apart from the driveway, they were surrounded on all four sides by yew hedges, over six metres high, so that Siobhán could see only the rooftops and chimneys of the houses on either side.

Outside the front of the house stood a painted signboard,
St Giles’ Clinic.
Garret drove around to the side of the house and then stopped.

‘Are you going to let me out now?’ said Siobhán.

‘I thought you wanted a lift home,’ Milo told her.

‘I did, but now I don’t. I just want you to let me out.’

‘Well, all right, then, if you insist. Gar had to stop here to pick up one or two things, but if you really don’t want us to take you back to Knocka—’

‘I don’t. Let me out.’

Both Garret and Milo climbed out of the car. Milo walked around to open the door for Siobhán, and stood patiently waiting for her while she picked up her bag and shuffled herself off the seat.

She had started to sober up now, and when she got to her feet she said, ‘Jesus, I swear to God, I don’t know what kind of a stupid game you two think you’re playing at!’

Milo shrugged and smiled apologetically, but he didn’t tell her that Garret was standing close behind her with a two-pound ball-pein hammer lifted high above her head. He was still smiling when Garret hit her on the left-hand side of her skull, with a hard, hollow crack. She pitched forward, so that Milo had to step neatly back to avoid her, like a dance manoeuvre, and she collapsed face-first on to the tarmac driveway.

‘Good man yourself, Gar,’ said Milo. The two of them crouched down and rolled Siobhán over on to her back. She was unconscious, but her eyes were still half-open, and the lids were fluttering. All the contents of her handbag were scattered across the ground.

‘That was some fierce old wallop you gave here there, boy. Wouldn’t surprise me if she was brain-damaged, and the Doc won’t have to bother with all the rest of his malarkey.’

‘This is a good heavy hammer, this one,’ said Garret. ‘I bought it at Hickey’s day before yesterday. The other one was too fecking light by far, wasn’t it? I always had to clonk them about a half-a-dozen times before I knocked them out cold.’

Milo took hold of Siobhán underneath her armpits and started to drag her around in a circle. He positioned her very carefully so that she was lying across the driveway with her knees directly behind the Opel’s rear offside wheel.

When he looked up from doing that, he saw that a man was standing in the upstairs window, silhouetted against the light. He didn’t wave or acknowledge that he had seen him because he knew that the man wouldn’t respond. As far as Milo was concerned, he wasn’t there, and he would never say that he had seen what Milo and Garret were going to do next.

Garret lit a cigarette and then climbed back behind the wheel of the car. Milo stepped clear, but not too far away, in case Siobhán suddenly regained consciousness and rolled herself out of position.

Garret started the Opel’s engine, although he kept his door open so that he could look over his shoulder and see where he was reversing.

‘All right, boy, you’re fine,’ said Milo, beckoning him backwards.

Garret slowly edged the rear wheel over Siobhán’s legs. Her bones snapped like muffled pistol-shots, and this was followed by a soft crunching sound as two thousand kilos of car crushed her knees.

Cleona suddenly sat up in bed and said, ‘Eoin! Just listen to the dogs, will you? Something’s bothering them! Eoin!’

‘What?’ said Eoin, blurrily. ‘What is it?’

‘The dogs, Eoin! Listen!’

Eoin lifted his head from the pillow. The dogs’ barking was indistinct, because it was raining hard outside and their bedroom window was closed, with the curtains drawn. All the same, he could hear that they were frantic. This wasn’t the monotonous barking of dogs who were impatient to be taken out for a walk, or who were hungry, or thirsty. This was the sound of dogs who were panicking – almost screaming, some of them, like terrified children.

Eoin switched on his bedside lamp, threw back the patchwork quilt, and swung himself out of bed. He went over to the window, opened the curtains, and peered out into the darkness. The window was speckled with raindrops, and all he could see was the wall lights on the end of the two rows of kennels, and their reflection in the wet tarmac yard. His first thought had been that there was a fire, but he couldn’t see any smoke, or smell any, either.

He opened the window so that he could hear the dogs more clearly and there was no doubt that they were hysterical. He recognised at least two of them: Bullet, the young Welsh terrier, whose high-pitched yapping was always distinctive, and the throaty barking of Trippet, the Labrador.

‘What time are we?’ he asked Cleona, crossing over to the chair where his jeans and his brown cable-knit sweater were hanging.

‘Twenty past four,’ said Cleona. ‘What do you think’s wrong with them?’

‘That’s what I’m going down to find out.’

‘Well, for the love of God be careful. You can never be sure who’s prowling around these days. Hold on a moment and I’ll come down with you.’

‘No, pet, you stay here. I’ll call out for you if I need you.’

Eoin struggled into his jeans, grabbing the side of the wardrobe to keep his balance, and then pulled on his sweater, so that his black curly hair stuck up. His eyes were puffy from lack of sleep and his head was thumping. It had been his thirty-eighth birthday yesterday, and since his birthday was on 31 October, he had celebrated as usual with a monster Hallowe’en party at Hurley’s.

He switched on the landing light so that he could see his way down the steep, narrow stairs, but he didn’t switch on the light downstairs in the hallway. He doubted if the dogs had been disturbed by anybody more threatening than a petty pilferer – some Knacker looking to see if there were any tools or bicycles lying around. At this time of the morning it was even more likely to be a red fox, rummaging through their dustbins. If it was a prowler, though, he wanted to catch him by surprise, and he didn’t want to open the front door and appear as a backlit target. Sceolan Boarding Kennels was very isolated, with the next house nearly a kilometre away, and the village of Ballinspittle more than four, and Eoin was always cautious about security.

Before he opened the front door, he looked out through the semi-circular window in it, but he could still see nothing but darkness, and rain, and the two lights at the end of the kennels. He pushed his bare feet into his wellington boots, picked up the ashwood hurley stick that he kept in the umbrella stand, and stepped outside. The wind was cold and blustery, and even though the gutters were gurgling, the rain seemed to be easing off a little. The dogs were still barking, though, and as he crossed the yard, he thought that they sounded even more frantic. Marcus, a pedigree Labrador, was giving out a long convoluted howl like the Hound of the Baskervilles.

When he reached the two parallel lines of kennels, he began to see why the dogs were so distressed. At least six or seven of the doors at the far end of the left-hand line were wide open. He broke into a run, gripping his hurley even tighter. The kennel doors were all fitted with alarms, which he religiously switched on at night, but clearly somebody had found a way to short-circuit them.

As he reached the first of the open doors, he saw who the intruders were. Just out of sight of the house, a silver Range Rover and a large black Transit van were parked in the driveway that led down to the road. Two men were pulling a reluctant German Shepherd called Caesar into the side door of the van, while three more were walking back towards the kennels.

Eoin stopped running, and stood where he was, holding up the hurley in both hands. ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘What in the
name
of Jesus do you think you’re doing?’

The three men said nothing at first, but kept on walking towards him until they were only five metres away. Two of them were wearing black windcheaters, and had scarves wrapped around the lower half of their faces, like jihadis, so that Eoin could see only their eyes. The third man was wearing a long grey raincoat, tightly buckled at the waist. He had swept-back grey hair and the ruined good looks of an ageing actor. A cigarette was glowing between his lips, and it waggled up and down when he spoke, as if to accentuate what he was saying. He spoke very softly, with a slurred Sligo accent, so Eoin found it difficult to hear him over the cacophony of barking.

‘Sorry if we’ve disturbed you, sir! As you can see, we’re only after taking a few of your liabilities off of your hands, that’s all.’

‘Oh, you mean you’ve come here to pikey my dogs?’

The man’s forehead furrowed into a distinctive V. ‘Ah stop! That’s not a very friendly thing to say, now is it? If I
was
a pikey, like, I’d be pure offended by that. As it is, I’ll let it pass. How about we say nothing, all right, in case something’s said. But I suggest that you go back indoors and let us get on with our business.’

The other two men had slammed shut the Transit’s door by now, and come over to join them. Apart from the man in the grey raincoat, none of them spoke, but they didn’t have to. With their hands thrust into the pockets of their windcheaters and their legs braced apart and their heads tilted slightly back, they were making it quite clear to Eoin that if he tried to stop them they would beat him senseless and dance on his face.

It sounded as if the dogs could sense the increasing tension in the air. Their barking not only continued relentlessly, but it grew sharper and harder, echoing from one side of the kennels to the other. Eoin felt as helpless as they obviously did. What could one man do against five, even if he was armed with a seven-hundred-gram hurley? For all he knew, they could be carrying knives, or even guns.

In a cabinet in the dining-room he kept an under-and-over shotgun. Why hadn’t he had the sense to bring it out with him? Hadn’t his father told him time and again: ‘Always be ready for the worst that life can throw at you, boy, because it fecking will’? His father had died of lung cancer at the age of fifty-one.

‘All right,’ said Eoin. He was trying to sound calm but he felt as if his insides had turned into cold water. ‘It doesn’t look as if I have much choice, does it? But all I ask is, treat these dogs with respect, and take good care of them.’

The man in the grey raincoat gave him a sideways-sloping smile. ‘You don’t seriously think I’m going to let you go back inside on your own, do you? As if you won’t be ringing the shades as soon as you walk through the door. No – a couple of my pals here will go along with you while the others finish up here, taking what we came for. Oh – and you can drop that
camán
. Don’t want you taking a swing at them, do we?’

Eoin hesitated for a moment and then tossed the hurley so that it clattered on to the ground. One of the men stepped forward and picked it up, sloping it over his shoulder as if it were a rifle.

‘What are you going to do with them – the dogs?’ Eoin asked the man in the grey raincoat. ‘You’re not going to have them fighting, are you?’

‘Oh, will you come round to yourself,’ the man replied. ‘These are fine dogs these are, best quality. They’ll all of them be going to pampered homes, believe me. They’ll probably be eating better munch and sleeping in more comfortable scratchers than you or me ever will.’

Eoin was tempted to say something like, ‘You won’t get away with this,’ but he knew how futile that would sound, and the reality was that they probably
would
get away with it. The Garda were tied up with enough serious crime without chasing after dognappers.

He walked back to the house, with two of the men uncomfortably close beside him, including the man who was carrying his hurley. They followed him inside, and with his voice muffled behind his scarf, one of them said, ‘Just park your arse in the parlour, okay, sham, and don’t be trying anything stupid.’

Eoin went into the living-room and switched on the lights. He could still hear the dogs barking and he prayed that Cleona hadn’t heard him come back into the house; that she wouldn’t decide to come looking for him.

He sat on the end of the white leatherette sofa while one of the men sat in the armchair by the fireplace. The man with the hurley remained standing, directly behind him, as if he were just waiting for him to make a wrong move so that he could give him a cheeser across the back of the head.

‘So what are you going to do with our dogs?’ asked Eoin.