Rider (4 page)

The hospital morgue was cold, the walls sweating damp. Kane closed his eyes. Ryan looked like a teenager, like a sick kid, his skin a dappled grey, his cheeks slightly sunken. Kane looked away and ran a hand over his face.

‘I’ll wait outside,’ the doctor said.

Kane sat in the chair and clasped his fingers together, inhaling deeply and breathed out through puffed-up cheeks. He looked at Ryan. He seemed restful and at peace.

Kane bit his lip.

The wound on Ryan’s chest, under the sheet, had been sown up, Kane was told. He wanted to see it but his hand wouldn’t pull the sheet back. His eyes filled with tears.

The door behind him opened. ‘Kane?’

He turned, brushing at his tears with his sleeve.

‘Oh, Kane, no…’

Margaret Bernhard rushed to him, falling into his arms as he stood. They sobbed together, their tears fusing on their cheeks, her arms about his shoulders. Then she turned away, steadying her breathing.

‘I can’t look,’ she admitted.

Kane touched her shoulder.

‘I can’t believe it, Kane. Is this real?’

‘I wish it wasn’t.’

They were silent. Margaret took his hand and turned. Her lips trembled, eyes puffy and red. She stepped forward, bracing her strength against the chair.

She looked at Ryan.

‘Oh, my baby,’ she exhaled and she sobbed again, her hand on his face.

And right then, seeing the grief on Margaret’s face, feeling the pain like Death himself had jabbed him with his scythe, Kane couldn’t help thinking, Did Ryan bring this on himself? Was it his own fault that he lay now, as he did, naked in life’s own mortality?

Kane put a hand to the pain at his breastbone. He could feel his heart beating.

‘Baby,’ Margaret said again. She kissed Ryan’s forehead, both his cheeks, and finally his lips. And she took his hands and joined them together as if in prayer. She whispered something in his ear, a blessing maybe, and she turned away from him.

* * *

They sat together opposite Detective Thorpe in his office. ‘I won’t believe it,’ Margaret had said. She was wringing a tissue in her hands while Kane sat passively beside her, staring at the floor.

Thorpe had invited them here to go over the case history with Margaret.

‘I understand how you feel,’ Thorpe said.

Margaret shook her head adamantly. ‘No, it isn’t possible. Not Ryan.’ She turned to Kane. ‘Tell him, Kane.’

‘They have evidence,’ Kane said, his voice weak. It felt like a betrayal.

‘I don’t care what they have,’ she said. ‘I know he wouldn’t do drugs.’

Thorpe stood and cleared his throat. ‘It’s a lot to take in. I understand. Believe me I do. Mrs Bernhard, I—’

She shook her head again, looked at Kane. ‘Do you believe him?’

‘I…’

‘You believe he was doing drugs?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’

She took his hands in her own, held them tight. ‘In all the time you’ve known him, have you ever seen him do drugs?’

‘No. But…’

She let go of his hands, folded her arms. To Thorpe, she said, ‘As soon as you find out who murdered my son, you’ll call me. And you tell them—tell them I’ll visit them in jail every day for the rest of my life so that they’ll never forget the face of the mother they made childless. You tell them that.’

She stood up, faced Thorpe over the mountain of paperwork on his desk, and then she turned and left.

Kane caught up with her as she was heading towards the front door of the building and they exited together, walking down the steps and towards his car. Margaret’s resolve was ebbing, her shoulders slumped, head lowered, her movements slow and deliberate.

Kane pulled his car keys out of his jacket pocket, triggered the central locking and opened the passenger door for her. She stopped, her hand on the edge of the door, and looked back at the police station. She looked at him, her face saddened, and then she eased herself into the car. He had never seen her look so old.

When he closed the door and walked around the front of the car, he noticed a slip of paper tucked under one of the windscreen wipers. He hesitated before picking it up and unfolding it, looking around as he did so.

It was a hand-scrawled note:
I said no police
.

There was nobody around, nobody that looked to be following him or watching him. He took a deep breath, scrunched the paper into a ball and stuffed it in his pocket.

In his car, when he got behind the wheel, Margaret said, ‘What was that?’ There was no real interest in her voice.

Kane started the ignition, checked his mirrors. ‘
Just one of those stupid flyers,’ he lied. ‘Ten percent off something or other.’ When he pulled away from the roadside, the skin on his hands stretched tight over his knuckles as he gripped the steering wheel. His chest was still aching.

* * *

A light rain spat at the funeral party as they gathered around a newly dug grave, indolently watching the young Father Mitchell as he led them in prayer. Margaret, in her black trouser suit, strengthened perhaps by the arrival of David late last night, sympathetically squeezed Kane’s arm before she placed a white carnation on top of the coffin. White for purity, Kane thought.

‘Eternal rest,’ Father Mitchell prayed, ‘grant unto Ryan, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.’

Reading
from the Order of Service, the gathered people replied, ‘May his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace. Amen.’

Only a few of Ryan’s friends turned out. Some of them Kane recognised, but there were others, people he had never seen before. He wondered if they knew about Ryan’s addiction, wondered if they were in on it, if they supplied him. More to the point, he wondered if any of them knew about the phone calls he had been receiving. Or the biblical calling card.

He loosened the tie around his neck, his face feeling flushed in the rain. When the funeral was over and people were leaving, they shook his hand or gave him a gentle hug, accompanied by words of condolences.

John, the only drag queen Kane and Ryan really knew, who called herself Daphne Do-More when it suited, was a completely different person today, the only time Kane had ever seen him in a suit and without the face paint. His stubble must have been a couple of days old. Everyone hides behind a mask. It was Wilde who’d said you only see someone’s true self when you give them a mask.

Kane wasn’t so sure.

Margaret resembled a pillar, brave-faced and strong. Kane imagined she was tearing herself up inside, but outwardly, she gave nothing away.

She approached him and pointed to a group of Ryan’s friends who were clambering into a car. ‘They’re going to a pub. One that they say Ryan used to go to.’

He looked away from her. He was crying. David, grey-haired and upright, stepped away to give them a moment, his hands behind his back like an army general. Kane’s words were gritty when he spoke. ‘They’re going to get drunk in his memory?’

Margaret touched his shoulder. ‘They’re going to toast him. He’d like that.’

‘I think he’d prefer to be alive.’

‘We’d all prefer it if he was alive.’

Kane turned away from her. He clenched his teeth and his eyes, his hands knuckling his temples. ‘It’s not f-fair,’ he said, his voice pathetic, ripped through with sobs. Margaret Bernhard took him in her arms and said the truest thing he’d ever heard.

‘Life isn’t fair.’

* * *

He needed some time alone, some time to collect himself. He told Margaret he wouldn’t be long, that he’d see them back at theirs within the hour. And now, sitting on the damp grass in another part of the cemetery, he stared at the headstone in front of him.
In loving memory of Laura Rider, cherished mother. B. 6-9-1956 – D. 24-3-2008. Taken too soon.

Cancer had consumed her a few years ago and Ryan had been his rock. And now here he was, going through the motions all over again. Without Ryan, he wasn’t sure he could manage it this time. Without Ryan, without the strength that he had given him, Kane wasn’t sure he even
wanted
to manage this time.

In his trouser pocket, his phone vibrated and he closed his eyes. If heaven really existed, like his mother had believed, he hoped she was there to meet Ryan.

And yet—the drugs.

Part of him still couldn’t believe it. If it was true—and it had to be—then he was more stupid than he could have imagined. You can’t live with someone, sleep with someone, and not notice the puncture wounds on his arm—on his groin, for heaven’s sake. Thorpe had told him that the coroner had found a couple of small needle-marks in the area between his leg and his testicles. Not an uncommon thing, Thorpe said, for users to hide their addiction among pubic hair.

The thought made him sick.

His phone continued to vibrate but he refused to answer it. He knew whose voice would be on the other end, knew beyond any doubt.

And he could go screw himself today.

* * *

Everyone had gathered at David and Margaret’s house after the funeral. David, a financial magnate with a keen eye for a good deal, had been clever with his money; he had bought a plot of land on the northern outskirts of
Belfast
and employed a team of builders to construct not just a house, but a mansion. Hidden from the road by a line of trees and an electronic gate, he had been conscious of security and installed CCTV. In their teenage years, before moving in together, Kane and Ryan had spent many summer evenings by the covered pool under the watchful gaze of motion-sensor cameras.

It was there that they had their first kiss, there that they shared their first sexual experience, hurried and immediate as it was, lying naked beside each other under nothing but a blanket and the wan light of the moon. It was there that they had first said, ‘I love you.’

The funeral had been wonderful, people said. Ryan would have loved it, they told him. Good old Irish logic. He stopped himself from stating the obvious.

Kane stood by the glass display cabinet of hunting trophies and photos of David and Margaret with their clay-pigeon friends. It was a sport that never appealed to Ryan or Kane.

His head was hurting. ‘You should have another whiskey,’ Daphne Do-More’s alter ego, John, said. He had come back from the pub that the guys had gone off to in order to extend his condolences. He scratched the stubble at his neck and said, ‘All I can think about doing is getting pissed.’

Kane smiled, obliging, and looked around. It was odd seeing John without the wig and make-up, odder still seeing him without Ryan around.

Margaret, from a place near the front door, caught Kane’s eye and smiled at him. She and David were circling the room, Margaret with a platter of sandwiches cut into little triangles, David with a whiskey decanter.

Kane sighed, turned back to John, and said, ‘Sorry, can you excuse me? I need a bit of air.’

He headed towards the front door, but Father Mitchell had just come in and he couldn’t face another well-intended comment about Ryan. Instead, he ducked through into the kitchen and took the rear stairs up to the next floor.