Living Death (4 page)

Eoin was less than fifty metres away from them when the light must have glanced off the barrels of Eoin’s shotgun. The man who had assaulted Cleona croaked out, ‘Jesus Christ, Jimmy, he’s got a fecking gun! Sketch up!’ He started to make a run for it, with an odd, hobbling gait, as if he were practising a three-legged race without a partner.

The other man, though, took hold of the hurley in both hands and stood his ground.

‘Come on, then, boy! What are you going to do? Shoot me? You haven’t got the stones!’

Eoin stopped. The man kept jiggling the hurley and shifting his weight from one foot to the other, as if he could hardly wait to run up to Eoin and give him another hard crack on the head.

The other man had disappeared around the corner of the kennels, but Eoin thought:
all of his fellow dognappers are there, waiting, and the odds are that at least one of them will be carrying a gun. Whatever I decide to do, it’s now or never.

‘Come on, then, don’t waste the rest of your life!’ the man with the hurley challenged him.

Eoin raised his shotgun and aimed it. He waited a few seconds, but only to slow down his breathing and steady himself, so that he wouldn’t miss.

The man took two steps towards him, and he fired, jolting his shoulder. Between the two rows of kennels the shot was deafening, so that it sounded like three shots, instead of one. He hit the man directly in the face, just where his scarf covered his nose, and blasted the top of his head off. His entire brain was blown out of his head and landed on the tarmac ten metres behind him.

The man dropped the hurley and half-turned around, as if he had heard somebody calling his name. Then his knees sagged and he collapsed on to the ground, face downward, and lay there with his feet still frantically jerking. Eoin could have imagined that his legs were trying to obey the brain’s final instructions to run away.

He reloaded the barrel that he had fired, but then he stayed where he was, in the softly falling drizzle. He was ready for the rest of them, if they came for him.

He heard a dog yapping. It was Gaybo, a small prize-winning Munsterlander. He heard a van door slam, and he cocked his shotgun. But then he heard the distinctive whine of its transmission as the Range Rover drove away, followed by the van, which had a rattling exhaust. Within a few seconds, they had driven down to the main road and gone. He saw their red tail-lights disappear behind the trees, north towards Barrell’s Crossroads.

Eoin walked slowly back to the house, past the empty kennels with their doors wide open.

Holy Mother of God,
I’ve killed a man
, he thought, as he reached the front door.
I’ve actually killed a man. He’s dead. But in a way, that’s my life over, too. How can anything ever be the same?

It was nearly five o’clock now, but it was still dark, and he wondered if it would ever get light again.

Katie looked up at the clock on her kitchen wall and said, ‘Maybe I should ring them again. Maybe they can’t find us.’

Barney her Irish setter cocked his head on one side as if to show her that he understood her anxiety completely, but couldn’t think of anything useful to suggest.

She put down her mug of coffee and picked up her iPhone, but before she had even had the chance to switch it on, the doorbell chimed. Barney immediately wuffled and trotted out into the hallway.

When she opened the door, there he was, at the bottom of the porch steps, sitting in a wheelchair. Because it was raining so hard, the paramedics had covered him with a yellow waterproof cape with a pointed hood, so that he looked like some kind of giant gnome. Katie couldn’t even see his face.

‘Good morning to you, ma’am,’ said the female paramedic. ‘Here he is – we’ve fetched your friend for you.’

The male paramedic lifted up a dark grey overnight case and said, ‘His things are all in here, such as they are, and all his medication. There’s written instructions from Doctor Kashani on the dosage.’

John pushed back his hood. Katie had seen him regularly in hospital, of course, since both of his lower legs had been amputated, but under the naked porch light she was shocked at how much weight he had lost, and how much he seemed to have aged. He was smiling at her, and his eyes were bright with pleasure and relief, but his hair was grey and scraggly and cropped short, when it used to be long and black and curly, and his cheeks were sunken in, so that she could see the contours of his skull. When they had first become lovers, he had looked so handsome and muscular and saintly. Now he looked as if the paramedics had wheeled him here on a visit from Glyntown Care Centre.

‘Barns, how are you, boy!’ he called out, in a wheezy voice, but Barney stayed in the hallway, behind Katie, as if he wasn’t at all sure about this strange wizened man in a wheelchair.

‘Do you want a hand lifting him in?’ asked Katie. ‘I’ll have to have a ramp installed, won’t I?’

‘No, you’re all right,’ said the male paramedic. He turned the wheelchair around and bumped it up the steps backwards. Barney retreated even further into the hallway, making a low suspicious sound in the back of his throat.

‘I don’t have to sign anything, do I?’ asked Katie.

‘No, no, you’re grand,’ grinned the male paramedic. ‘He’s not a parcel. All the same, like, we don’t accept returns. If you change your mind about him within twenty-eight days, you still have to keep him.’

They all laughed, and Barney barked. The paramedic pushed John into the living-room and then said, ‘G’luck, so, John. I expect we’ll be seeing you again before too long.’

Once she had shown the paramedics out, Katie went back into the living-room. She lifted off John’s rain-cape and then sat on the end of the couch next to him. He reached out his hand and she took hold of it, and squeezed it tight, although she couldn’t help thinking how cold and bony it felt.

‘Would you like a coffee?’ she asked him. ‘I just had one but I could make some fresh.’

‘No, no thanks,’ he said. ‘I’m okay for the moment.’ He looked around the living-room and then back at Katie. ‘It feels so weird to be here. But
good
, too. You don’t know how good. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about our days together, and how great they were.’

‘Well, yes, we did have some good times all right,’ said Katie. She squeezed his hand again and then let it go. This was no time to bring up all of their blazing arguments, and how much John had resented her strength and her ability to organise his life for him, especially when he had been out of work. Neither was she going to mention the morning he had walked out on her because he had discovered that her impetuous once-only fling with her previous neighbour had left her pregnant.

‘Katie, darling, believe me, we can have those good times all over again,’ said John. He grimaced as he shifted himself up straighter in his wheelchair. ‘Once my stumps are healed they’ll be able to take all the measurements for my sockets, and it won’t take more than a couple of weeks before my prosthetic legs will be ready. Then I can start proper gait training, that’s what my therapist told me. That’s what they call teaching you to walk. They should call it “gatch training”, shouldn’t they, in Cork?’

He paused, and reached out for her hand again. ‘Even so, being able to walk, that’s not an essential when you’re in bed, is it? Look at Oscar Pistorius.’

‘Yes, my God,’ said Katie. ‘And look how
he
turned out!’

‘Well, I know, sure, but all I meant was, he was able to make love to his girlfriends even though he didn’t have any legs, like me. It won’t change me, this, Katie. It won’t change who I am, and it won’t change the fact that I love you. I know I haven’t always treated you too well, but it was only because I was so possessive about you. What’s that song? “I’m Just a Jealous Guy”.’

He paused again, and then he said, much more softly, ‘You’ve shown me that you love me, too, Katie, so much. You saved my life and ever since then you’ve stuck by me. I know how deeply you’re devoted to your job. I understand that now. But now I’ve found out that your devotion to me runs just as deep. I guess you couldn’t always find the words to tell me, that’s all.’

There was a very long silence between them. Katie gave him small occasional smiles but she couldn’t think how to answer him.
‘Yes, I do love you, but looking at you now, I’m not sure that I find you so physically attractive any more’
?
‘No, I don’t love you, and perhaps I never did love you – not really, not as deeply as you seem to believe’
?
‘I care about you, John. I feel responsible and guilty for you losing your legs, but responsibility and guilt – they’re not the same as love’
?

‘Bridie will be here soon,’ she told him. ‘She’s a grand girl, very experienced, and very good-humoured. I got her through Seamus O’Shea at Caremark. She’ll be looking after you while I’m at work. Jenny Tierney will be coming in from next door to take Barney for his walk, so you don’t have to worry about that.’

‘I think Barney’s taken against me for some reason. Look at him staring at me. If looks could kill.’

‘He doesn’t reck you, that’s all, and he’s very protective. He’ll get used to you again, the longer you stay here.’

John said, ‘Bless you, Katie. Without you, my life wouldn’t be worth the living, I can tell you that.’

Katie was about to ask him if he was hungry when her iPhone played the first two bars of ‘Tá Mo Chleamhnas a Dhéanamh, The Matchmaking Song’.

Oh I walked east and I walked west

I walked Cork and Dublin’s streets

An equal to my love I didn’t meet

She’s the wee lass that’s left my heart broken.

It was Detective Sergeant Begley. By the sound of it, he was standing outside somewhere, in the wind and the rain. Katie could hear somebody shouting in the background, and the sudden whooping of an ambulance siren, which abruptly stopped.

‘Sorry to be disturbing you today, ma’am. I know you have the day booked off. But there’s been a fatal shooting early this morning out at Ballinroe East, and under the circumstances I thought you need to be informed as soon as possible. You’ll have the media wanting to talk to you, if they haven’t been chasing you already.’

Katie held up one finger to John to show him this was a serious conversation and that she needed to give it all her attention.

‘What’s the story, Sean?’ she asked Detective Sergeant Begley.

‘The victim’s a male in his late thirties, no identification on him of any kind at all. He was shot at a boarding kennels just off the R604, a little short of a kilometre south of Barrell’s Crossroads. The owner of the kennels is a fellow called Eoin Cassidy. He and his wife were disturbed around four o’clock this morning by a gang of fellers stealing their dogs. Almost all of them are pedigree, spaniels and suchlike, so they’re worth thousands, some of them.’

‘Go on,’ said Katie.

‘Well, this Eoin Cassidy took his shotgun and went outside to challenge them, like. They started to come for him, so he fired a warning shot in the air. But that didn’t stop them, and he says he was afeard of his life, so he fired another shot at them directly, and blew the head off of one of them. After that the rest of them scattered quick.’

‘I assume that Superintendent Horgan knows all about this.’

‘He does of course. There’s five officers from Bandon up here now, including Inspector O’Brien. They’re just waiting around for the Technical Bureau to go over the scene before they have the body moved. But the thing of it is, this gang who was robbing the kennels, they sound like the same bunch of dognappers that we’ve been having such trouble with around the city. They was driving a Range Rover and a white van and there was about six of them altogether.’

‘You’re right,’ said Katie. ‘It does sound like them. What does Dooley call them? The Labrador Lifters.’

‘Those are the fellows. And if it’s the same gang, like, Superintendent Horgan didn’t want to be talking to the media until he’d had the chance to discuss it with you. Didn’t want to be treading on your toes, like, do you know what I mean?’

‘Well, yes, fair play to him and I appreciate that. But this dognapper getting shot, that puts a whole different complexion on this. They’ve been nothing much more than a nuisance so far, this gang, but if dog owners are going to start using lethal force to protect their animals—’

‘Lethal force? He only blew his whole entire brain ten metres out of his head.’

‘Where is this Cassidy fellow now?’ asked Katie.

‘They’ve taken him in to Bandon for questioning. As far as I know, he has his solicitor on the way. I’ll be heading across there myself in a minute.’

‘All right. I have to wait for my home carer to show up, but then I’ll go directly to the station. I’ll call Superintendent Horgan from there.’

When she had finished talking to Detective Sergeant Begley, John said, ‘I suppose that means that duty calls.’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so. I had hoped to have the whole day off, but of course I’ll wait until Bridie gets here.’

‘You’re all right. If you want to go now, I can look after myself. I’m pretty nifty in this wheelchair now.’

‘John, I’m not leaving you here on your own. Bridie won’t be long.’

She stood up and touched his hand and smiled at him. The rain pattered against the living-room window like a soft, regretful reminder of days gone past. They were both acutely aware that they hadn’t kissed.

‘Are you hungry at all?’ she asked him. ‘I could make you a sandwich, if you like; or I have some beef hand pies that my father’s cleaner Blaithin gave me. She cooks for the Roaring Donkey in Cobh and she always brings me the leftovers.’

‘Maybe later,’ said John.

She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. His skin felt dry and unfamiliar. He raised his head and kissed her on the lips, but again she felt as if she were kissing a stranger.

John was just about to say something to her when the doorbell chimed. Barney immediately sprang to his feet and ran into the hallway, wuffling, and Katie said, ‘That’ll be Bridie now.’