Blood for Blood Page 15

  Good actor, my brother. ‘Our’ sister? was popping out of him like he was genuinely puzzled by it. But I was definitely getting through to him. There’s nothing like a good murder picture when it comes to shocking an audience. And of course he was glaring at me like I was the bad guy. No doubt he was casting himself as the aggrieved hero. ‘You killed Edna, you dirty rat’ was written all over his face. No, it wasn’t. He wasn’t that quick, but it was on the way. The law’d spent a couple of days taping off the scene, getting the coroner to do his Picasso impersonation. They’d dig two of those holes I was telling you about earlier and fuck the pair of them in. Conor didn’t even know they’d been the victims of a boxing horse and a load of old bull. Mixing my metaphors here. Is ‘boxing horse’ a metaphor? Don’t know. Who cares about crap like that? Conor was looking like he wished one would prance in and lay one on me. I don’t think he wanted me for a brother. Homecomings can be so disappointing.

  He was a good actor all right. He nearly had me convinced he didn’t know what I was talking about. And there was me intending to tell him all about what I’d been up to: Doctor Skeffington, for instance, but I knew I’d be wasting my breath. He should’ve gone to RADA. By my calculations, he’d’ve been fourteen when me and Sean were born. Old enough to know what the bump in our mother’s stomach meant. He’d’ve hit me with ‘I thought she’d miscarried’ or some shit like that. I’d had it in mind to tell him about Lucille and who she thought she was and about her old man, who was part of a police force who’d been trained to notice their own kids being taken away but not thousands of other kids – kids like me and Sean. I’d definitely intended to tell him about Sean; how he’d died. But it sickened me to see him standing there with a pile of ‘I didn’t knows’ on his tongue. A woman has kids who disappear and it’s a topic of whispers in the family. He knew all right. I wasn’t going to let him demean Sean’s memory by denying he knew. Fuck it, I could go on like this forever. Whatever he’d said, I wasn’t believing it. If he’d wanted to find us, he could have. He didn’t, so fuck him. The Donavans walked away from us. We didn’t even exist to them. Not that Sean ever believed that.

  Sean used to say that it would all turn out to be some big mistake; maybe we’d got lost and Mammy hadn’t been able to find us, and she was crying for us. Well, I made Sean a promise, and I was just keeping that promise, and I’d learnt from those who brought me up that you could get away with a whole manner of things simply by making the law view you in a certain light. And that’s what I was doing.

  If I’d said to Conor stuff like: the law’d do me for putting Lucille through an abusive orphanage system, but that same law had no notion of doing the hundreds of so-called innocent clergy who stood by and watched thousands of kids being handed in, knowing their peers would abuse them, he’d have looked at me as if I was talking a foreign language. The sort of stuff people who hadn’t been through it tell you should be forgotten.

  I’m rambling here. Didn’t mean to do that. Facing him after all this time had sort of got the old nerves jumping.

  ‘Bye, bro.’

  I locked the door on my way out.

  Now this tack room of my brother’s had no windows in it, but it did have a small ventilation hole in the door. And the method I’d come up with for him had to do with a virus called strangles. It can live on tack. You can pick it up on your hand and pass it on to a horse, and that’ll be the end of it. A growth swells in its windpipe and it dies gasping for breath – no cheese wire or ropes required – unless it gets a dose of modern antibiotics, though that doesn’t work in all cases.

  While Conor had been out checking his stock, I’d found an ice-cream container in the tack room and nailed it to the inside of the door. And now it was time to pour the formaldehyde in through the hole into the container. Then came the potassium permanganate. I’d brought my own in case he was out. But I’d seen his supply on the shelf and used it. Better for the law to think his had been used. It wouldn’t point to an outsider. It would point to Lucille.

  Potassium permanganate looks like coal particles. Mixed with formaldehyde, it forms what’s called formalin. It’s a gas. Though Conor didn’t think so. He wasn’t laughing anyway. Mind you, he was the one breathing it in. Formalin gas kills strangles. And anything else. That’s why it’s best to do it from the outside. Go in there and you won’t come out. It acts in seconds. White smoke everywhere and bonk! down you go.

  Now I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a man being gassed. But it’s a noisy business. I suppose you’d have to imagine some cunt locking you in a room then tossing in a canister. Going mad to get out pretty much describes how people react to it. You’ve never heard the like of it in your life. Grabbing and tearing at that ice-cream container he was, trying to get it off. Which he did. Well, ice-cream containers aren’t that hard to remove. I think he was exploring the possibility of bunging his mouth in the hole for a breath of nice country air. Then again, they say the night air’s not good for you. I felt fine though. Of course, while tearing the container off, he had to come into closer contact with it, which rather defeats the object. He was breathing it in all the more. Once the formaldehyde and that other stuff make contact, as the saying goes: ‘What I have mixed together let no man put asunder.’ Didn’t do much for his nails, I can tell you that. Some of the gas escaped through the hole, as gas will, but there was plenty left for him.

  Interesting what good screamers men make at times like this. I’d never heard no woman scream like that. Still, it didn’t last. It turned into a croak before very long. The old ‘aaghhhh … aaghhh … aagh’ becoming an ‘aa … a …’ until he hadn’t an ‘a’ to his name. With no window, it had nowhere to go but him. It’s a question of physics, y’see. You have to be up on that stuff to be able to pull a stroke like this.

  I didn’t wait much after Conor’d stopped. No point. I’d other things to do. I wiped my prints off the door handle and bolt and withdrew the bolt, so it was almost open but not quite. Part of that method thinking I mentioned.

  I didn’t go out and celebrate. This wasn’t about victory. Just clearing up some outstanding business.

  All I had to do now was go back to my car, get my laptop out and contact Cornelius.

  ‘Anne Donavan is awaiting your immediate attention,’ I typed. ‘She’ll make a good model for you.’

  PICASSO

  It had occurred to me that my position, still tenuous, would fortify were I to withdraw my services in their entirety. Amy and Edna Donavan’s deaths were not attributable to me. Were their niece, Anne, however, discovered bearing my signature that perception would alter. I therefore ignored instructions to proceed to the riding stables post haste. In short, with reference to earlier conjecture, I was now convinced that my visiting Anne Donavan would be the knell of my usefulness, not my arrest, resulting in my experiencing some prearranged fatal mishap, courtesy of my blackmailer, whereupon the police would deduce that I, and I alone, had been responsible for all three deaths chez Donavan, leaving him to benefit unhindered and beyond apprehension. I confess that I could not elucidate upon this hypothesis, except to propound that it was abundantly clear that my welfare would be low on his agenda. Such was my reading.

  I ignored the communication, hoping to prolong our association further, until I had taken ameliorative steps to safeguard my personal safety. Alas …

  RED DOCK

  Well, well, well. So Picasso was double-crossing me again. I dunno, y’give a man two names to blackmail and what appreciation do you get? I mean if a man can’t rely on his own personal killer, who can he rely on? Sure now. Life’s full of little disappointments.

  ‘“Apropos”, what the fuck’s the crack?’ I typed him.

  Nothing. He never answered. The cunt was probably still in his scratcher. Anybody’d think he was working late. Not for me he wasn’t. ‘This is not satisfactory,’ I hit him with. ‘Apro-fucking-pos our gentleman’s agreement.’

  That’s the trouble with crime these days: no f
ucker’s reliable.

  ‘OK, Corn, this is the way it is. I tried to be reasonable, and you won’t let me. So your mother will get a copy of your activities.’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘Ah, that’s better.’

  I told him what I wanted him to do then waited to make sure he did it.

  PICASSO

  Pressure had been exerted on me which I had not anticipated. I was compelled to visit the riding stables and liaise with Anne Donavan.

  I was surprised to see that while she was pretty, in her own country-girl way, ideal for a bringing-in-the-hay portrait, she bore no resemblance whatsoever to her daughter. Still, she did have rather fine skin …

  I began with a conventional expression of ‘Good evening’, which elicited a guarded ‘Hello’. The late hour, a stranger at the door, the remote location, the aura of recent events, her aunts’ demise, for whom her slightly puffed eyes suggested that she had been crying, their funeral, due the following day, and so forth were no doubt unsettling to her.

  ‘May I come in?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘An associate of your daughter’s.’

  ‘My daughter’s? I have no daughter.’

  ‘Quite. However, I am privy to information to the contrary: Frances Anne Donavan, also known as Lucille Kells.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I too feel the matter requires elucidation.’

  My chloroform spray rendered her incapacitated. I bound her hands behind her back and laid her out in the first double-bedded room that presented itself – her father’s, as I was later to discover – and waited while she regained consciousness.

  ‘You have a relative who walks with a limp?’

  ‘No. Look, please tell me what this is all about. Who are you? Why are you doing this to me? Why?’

  Fear inspires many questions.

  ‘In the event of your father’s death, who, save yourself, stands to inherit?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Please answer.’

  ‘No one. Cousins … I don’t know.’

  ‘No one specifically?’

  ‘No. It would be shared out, I suppose. Why? Why are you asking me this?’

  ‘Lucille’s Kells’ father – he walks with a limp?’

  ‘I don’t even know who Lucille’s father is.’

  ‘You had several lovers?’

  ‘“Several lovers”?’

  I produced Lucille’s birth certificate. ‘You still deny this?’

  ‘I’ve never seen it before. Or Lucille, up until recently.’

  The conundrum at hand had now been rendered fathomable by further reflection. And although Anne Donavan was refusing to put construction to the truth, it was the case that mothers had been known to deny having given their children into care, even when official documents proved the contrary. Perhaps she was lying to protect the father. Perhaps he was behind this, manipulating events which would allow his daughter to claim the family fortune. He could then re-enter Lucille’s life and share in her inheritance. Whatever Anne Donavan’s reasoning, she would reveal to me the truth surrounding the affair. I would then know exactly why I had been blackmailed into killing Lucille’s family.

  RED DOCK

  I have to report that me old mate Picasso went to see Anne and left her in need of a few stitches.

  I waited for an hour or so after he’d gone then took a drive up to the main house and went inside. Anne was in Conor’s bedroom, relaxing against the pillows. Not the sort of thing you should look at on a full stomach. You’d throw up. I’d seen corpses before but, fuck me, never the way Picasso left them.

  Her hair was draping down around the edges of what his gallery suggested was a carved flower. Her legs were spread wide. Oddly enough they were still attached to her. Maybe he forgot his saw. She was a bad colour too, pale as the sheets – pale and red as the sheets. Her arms were detached though, spread out from her crotch to make her look like she’d four legs. She wouldn’t be showing any more mares, that was for sure.

  I wasn’t interested in trying to figure out why he’d cut her the way he had. I had what I wanted and that was that.

  I’d had enough of fucking around with the Donavans. It was over. Besides, this wasn’t even my home. It held fuck all for me. It hadn’t even been built when Sean and I were born. The cottage was. That’s where I’d watched Picasso coming and going from. We’d been born there. Skeffington had more or less confirmed it.

  Nice little cottage. Modernised now, but it still held its charm. I began in the kitchen, checking, as I’d checked before for something to do with my past. I didn’t expect to find anything this time either. And I wasn’t disappointed.

  But then something hit me. It was the eyes that did it. Y’know how the eyes in some pictures follow you around the room? Well, that’s what the Sacred Heart was doing. I thought of something a nun had said to me when I was a kid. She was one of the good ones.

  ‘Robert,’ she said. ‘Folk’ll take down every picture in the house except a Sacred Heart.’ Which didn’t make any sense to me at first, until she went on. ‘They admire family photos and take them down, pass them around at gatherings and so on.’ She’d been referring to the twenties and thirties when photos were a big thing; when people paid a lot of attention, wanted to know what had become of such and such who’d fucked off to America and years later had sent home a picture of what he looked like now, which his folks then showed to people who’d known him when he was young. But a Sacred Heart’s a Sacred Heart, so nobody had any reason to take one down for a closer look.

  I took down Edna’s and there taped to the back was a letter, dated the night I was born, from the old girl herself, Teresa Donavan. My darling fucking mother.

  Dear Conor, Edna and Amy,

  My darling children, I never wanted to go away and leave you, but I had to go. Some day you’ll understand the reason why. I didn’t want you coming back to an empty house wondering what had become of me, so I’m leaving this note to say that everything will be clear when I see you again.

  Your ever-loving mother

  It was too vague. But it more or less fitted in: she’d got herself into trouble and was going off to dump me and Sean in the orphanage because bringing up a couple of illegitimate kids’d bring shame on the family. As I say, the nature of illegitimacy in Ireland ruled out ever discovering the truth behind it. That’s why people like me exist. Still, that’s the way it goes. No good complaining. You have to make the best of the opportunities life has given you. The Donavans got rid of me and Sean; I got rid of them. ‘An eye for an eye’, as the guy in the picture hiding the note’d once said. I’m very religious when it comes to certain things the Church teaches us.

  Speaking about the Church, I forgot to tell you exactly where I knew Picasso from. Me and him had shared a well once. It was actually a dried-up well. They used to lower you down in a bucket then close the top off. Punishment stuff. I got mine for creeping out of bed one night to see how Sean was doing. Corn got his for asking too many questions – one.

  A government minister visited the place one day and Corn went up to him.

  ‘Might I have a word?’ he asked. ‘Are you in a position to prevent them from treating us like this?’ I’ll never forget it. Only Corn could’ve put it like that. We all started giggling.

  The minister didn’t though. He looked at his chauffeur and said, ‘Get me to fuck out of this place.’ His exact words for all to hear and from a minister too. Tut tut.

  The Brothers weren’t mad about it either. Corn had been there only a few weeks, y’see. He hadn’t been educated to their ways yet.

  You always knew when someone important was coming to see them. Usually it was an orphanage inspector who came. He’d run a check on how we were being treated, and that’d be him for another year. He’d just drive off in his black Austin with running boards on the sides and let on he’d suffered some sort of perception blackout, that he hadn’t seen what he’d seen.


  Anyway, Corn worked on the farm feeding the pigs. If the Brothers liked you, they’d give you a cushy job. And they liked Corn. Which meant he got plenty to eat. The meals there were bread and dripping for breakfast, a kind of porridge at midday, cabbage and the water from the cabbage and spuds for dinner, and an egg every Easter. But if you worked with the pigs, you got what they got. You made yourself Head Pig. The best job of course was going around the canteen unstitching mice from the gunge they used to tape onto skirting boards. You could usually grab a handful of something.

  Now because this diet hardly led to what you’d call healthy teeth and bones, it meant that we were all skinny little bastards, stunted and full of boils. Our necks used to be covered in them.

  So when a big shot was calling, they’d get you up, cover you with a white dust to hide the boils – some of those big shots must’ve let themselves believe they’d walked into a bakery – and give you new sheets, pillowcases, new plates and cups, good silverware and decent clothes. It would all disappear and we’d be back into our sack clothes once he was out the door. But Corn had disappeared before this minister’d showed up.

  He’d been feeding the pigs in his normal gear and when he came back and the minister saw the difference between him and us, he knew that Corn’s gear was the norm, and the Brothers knew he knew it. But Corn took this as a good opportunity to ask his question. It’s hard to believe that someone with enough brains to outwit the law was once so naïve.

  He got slaughtered for it. The door to the whip room opened and they put his head up against a Brother’s crotch and laid into him naked in front of the rest of us. I think the Brothers felt he’d let them down. Corn lost his pig job after that. We had to carry him to the infirmary and lay him out. I knew he was in for what they called the ‘head staggers’ after that.