Heart Stopper (19 page)

Priya looked around the pub. She couldn’t see the far wall through the crush of people. There was a sign for the beer garden over the heads of the crowd and it pointed to a way out. She looked back at the front door to the hotel. The two men had not followed her in. She wondered how long they would wait. She needed to get out through the back door before they realized there was one. She didn’t know if they were locals, whether they would know about the beer garden, nothing at the front of the hotel gave a hint. She started pushing her way through the mill of bodies. She felt as vulnerable in the crowd, the thought of a knife thrust into her, her body kept upright by the others around her. The panic was tightening her throat, making it difficult to breath and she gasped in the warm air when she broke through on the other side of the room.

The cold air outside was even more welcome. The beer garden was deserted, its garden furniture tables with their attached benches lonely in the early evening breeze. Not completely deserted, she realized with a fright. There was one occupant. He sat by himself at the table closest to the exit from the beer garden to the side street. He was wearing a peaked cap and his navy t-shirt stretched tight over a large belly. His nose was bulbous and red, but his eyes were clear and he looked up from his sandwich to peer at her with curiosity as she stumbled through the door.

She tried to get her bearings. She was at the back of the hotel she thought and a side alley led in the direction of the front of the hotel, back to the main street. There was no way out without placing herself in the sights of the men in the car. She walked towards the exit, a break in the waist-high wall that ran around the stone beer garden, meaning to check down the side street and see if there was a slim chance that she could sneak out undetected.

“Evening.” His voice was deep, his accent so strong that she struggled even with the simple word.

She could see the small holes in his baggy trousers and the patch of grey hair on his belly that showed where the T-shirt had given up its effort to cover the expanse. He smiled and every line in his face stood to attention pushing back the folds of stubble-roughened skin. He took off his cap and wiped at the bald red patch that appeared covered lightly with wisps of grey.

“Hi. Good evening.”
Wow, she was able to be polite, now
. Her eyes were searching the surroundings, a trapped animal seeking escape.

“Sit, sit…” He gestured to the bench attached to the other side of the table.

She sat in a daze.

Michael was dead, she was being chased by two…killers, and she was sitting with the stereotype of a Connemara man shooting the breeze
. This could only happen to her.

The man was looking at her in the way that she was used to from most old Irish men, a mixture of appreciation and curiosity.

“You are not from around here. Where are you from?”

She was used to this too. She wanted to say Galway, but decided on the shorter route.

“India, originally.”

“Ah… I hear that’s a nice place, that. You must find it very cold here.”

“I’ve been here a long time. A very long time, you get used to it.”

She looked at the cars parked in the small gravel area behind where they were sitting. There was a high wall surrounding the area, she tried to judge if she could clamber over the wall. She turned back to him.

 
She said, “Where are you from?”
Stupid question, Priya, it was obvious
.

“Down Connemara. I’ve a farm there. In the middle of cutting the bog.” He pointed to a lime green van parked at the side of the gravel area. It had a trailer attached covered with a blue tarpaulin that was lumpy and she assumed packed with a load of cut turf. She looked back at him and saw that he wasn’t as old as she’d originally thought maybe late sixties.

 
“A bit of sandwich?” He was holding it out to her.

She shook her head.

He took a swallow of his Guinness and held up the pint to her. “Do you want a drink? Do you drink Guinness?”

She shook her head again and smiled with difficulty.

He said, “I come and have one or two of these on an evening. Gets me away from the wife and kids, all six of them still at home. I keep Connemara ponies you know. Can’t get the same price now, it’s all the Swedish buying them now.”

She couldn’t do this. He was nice, but this was crazy. She needed to find a way out. She got up and he held out his hand.

He said, “Powli. My name.”

That didn’t sound like any name she knew and she didn’t even know if she’d heard it right, or anything he’d said that didn’t involve gestures. She didn’t want to tell him hers. She shook his hand and smiled at him, and heard him say as she walked off the stone of the beer garden, “Lovely girl.”

The side street was rough and darker than the back of the hotel. She saw the cars passing on the main street. The street opened onto the road a few yards up from the entrance of the hotel. She risked a look out sliding just the side of her face out from behind the bulk of the building.

The car was there. But there was only one man in it. And he would see her if she left the side street.

Priya panicked. She looked back down the side of the hotel. How long before the other man discovered the beer garden? She looked at the van and trailer. She checked whether Powli could see from his perch and decided he couldn’t. She didn’t have time to find a better way out of here. She ran over to the trailer as quietly as she could, worked up one end of the tarpaulin and slipped into the dark crevice. She knew he would be driving back into Connemara, she just hoped he was at least going in the general direction of Catherine’s house.

The tarpaulin weighed heavy on her, damp and hot in the cave of sharp edges. She could not see or hear now. But she would not think. Just strained to listen. Then she heard the rise and fall of music as the door to the garden opened and shut. She heard and understood despite his thick accent.

“Sure, the little Indian girl. Are you her boyfriend then?”

The questioner must have nodded assent and Powli continued,

“Lovely girl, lovely. We had a nice little chat. Then she headed back into the bar, didn’t you see her? Must be very busy in there. Good band, isn’t it? One of my cousins is on the bodhran. What do you think of them?”

There was silence, the music, and silence again. Then Priya heard him again,

“If that’s her boyfriend I’ll eat my cap.”

She estimated that she had been lying there for two hours. It felt longer because of the space for thoughts. On a few occasions, she heard people come out and she smelt the cigarette smoke. Powli started up conversations with all the smokers and a waiter brought him out another Guinness. So he had drunk two pints that she knew of, and was going to be driving her and a trailer-load of turf down the narrow bog roads in the coming dark. She didn’t care. Her usual concern for the letter of the law seemed useless right now.

She took stock. The men were probably sitting out front in the car. She was finding it hard to figure out what a killer would do. Would they have given up when they didn’t find her in the bar? She had no phone. If she could get to Catherine’s house. She concentrated on that thought.
Would they have found Michael
? She pushed all thoughts of his body out of her mind, lying there, broken.

She felt the movement of the van as the door slammed. The engine was loud even filtered through the tarpaulin. The edges of the cut turf jabbed into her as the trailer went over the curb and bumped onto the main road. She needed to see whether the men were still there, but she was lying with her head near the van. She didn’t know whether it was dark enough outside her cocoon to risk moving. She stayed as still as possible, trying to move with the swaying of the trailer. She needed to work out the distance, the time it would take the van to reach the turn she remembered Reyna taking. If Powli kept driving straight, she would have to jump.
And then what? Walk to Catherine’s?
She felt she could find the house, they hadn’t made many turns, the road had just wound its way and though she had been lost in thought and talk for a part of the trip, her eyes had taken in the beauty, and the route.

She maneuvered her way around to face out the back of the trailer, inch by inch, holding in her breath as though the smallest dimension would make a difference. When she was positioned right, she nudged the edge of the tarpaulin and saw that the dusk that she needed was moving in. There were no car headlights in view.

They were reaching the area where Reyna had turned right onto a narrower road through the bog. Priya moved closer to the edge of the trailer praying that Powli would turn right as well, but he passed the turn and she hesitated for a second and then launched herself off the back of the low trailer aiming for the grass verge and ditch beside it. She landed with the upper half of her body on the grass and her legs scraping the tarmac. She felt the pain and heat through her trousers, but stopped the cry that tried to escape. She rolled into the ditch and lay quiet, listening through her gasps. The sound of the van’s engine lessened as it continued on its way, without a pause.

Her legs hurt, but she needed to get off this road and onto the one through the bog, the road that led to Catherine’s house. She staggered up the gravel track that led up a hill. At the top, she could see the stretch of the way ahead. The curve around the hill hid the road on which she had come. The track was edged by fields of bog, part dug up, part intact. She stumbled on the stones, the clicking of her shoes loud in the boggy silence.

She was halfway down the track when she heard the noise. She looked back, but saw nothing. Then she saw two diffuse shafts of light winking between the hills. She ran.

She knew would be an easy target in the open and she searched the fields on either side for somewhere to hide. She made her decision and scrambled off the track and into the darkness of the bog.

The earth was torn like a dog’s chewed up plaything. She was lying in the earth cut of bog, bricks of turf lying chunky and black beside her.

She quietened her breathing and listened. Her head lay against the base of the tunnel, the days’ sun-baked heat still retained to seep out into her skin. The dense earthy smell crept into her nostrils. She felt the quiver of her pulse in her cheek and then the tremble of weight on the stone-chipped track. The clicking of wheels on gravel cut through the night air.

Priya felt tears trickle down from her eyes and drop to the black earth silent as pebbles in a raging current. The car had stopped, the thunk of its door shutting preceded the light footfall, shifting weight on an uneven stony ground.

As the footsteps grew closer Priya realized with horror that the moonlight was bouncing off her white shirt, glowing like a firefly in the deep blue night. She was possibly more visible to the occupants of the car than if it had been broad daylight. She tried to shrink further into the ground. Then the anger that had been building in her from the moment she saw Michael lying on the floor struck her hard. She felt around, her hands grasping and releasing crumbling turf, until her fingers gripped something that didn’t disintegrate. She felt the edges of a solid object, it was shaped like an axe head, it was blunt, but it was something, something solid.

The footsteps had stopped at her hole in the ground and she raised her head and then her torso. She gripped the axe head feeling the blunt edges dig into her palm.

The tall shadow figure was silhouetted by the lights of the car behind. Priya used her arms to launch herself off the ground and towards the legs. Her shoulder connected with a sharp knee and she heard the exclamation of pain, a surprisingly high-pitched sound that at first she thought might have come from her own crazed mouth. The axe head had fallen loose into the dark soil so she scrabbled for the throat of her pursuer and closed her hands around soft skin and a slim neck.

“Priya?” The accented voice was a woman’s struggling to break free, to breathe. A voice Priya recognized. Her hands loosened and she felt strong hands grasp her own and hold them away. Priya rolled off from on top of Reyna and huddled against the sharp edged stacks of turf lining the pit.

Reyna sat up rubbing her throat. Her face was in shadow still cast into a sharp silhouette. The engine of the car whined and then sputtered out, the lights dimming in a faint flicker of movement. The breeze was quiet and couldn’t conceal the sound of their breathing. Priya could see in a haze Reyna moving towards her like a zookeeper approaching a wounded lion. She felt the edges of shock nudging her towards nothingness and she battled to keep her mind present, adrenaline leaving its bitter taste in her blood as it ebbed.

She felt Reyna beside her, and then arms around her shoulders gentle, but firm, guiding her into a circle that cut off the cold of the evening air. Her trembling lengthened into a shaking, jerking, gasping string of words that made no sense to her.

When her words ran out, she felt the grip around her tighten and she sank further, emptied and silent. She didn’t know how long they sat there; it felt like hours huddled against the rough edges of hardened earth.

∞

Priya felt Reyna whisper in her ear as the circle of warmth loosened. She felt the cold leak back into her arms and chest as Reyna got up. She acquiesced as Reyna stood her up, as fingers wiped away some of the tears, as she was led to the car that sat quiet its light cutting a weak path through the lightening night.

Reyna helped her into the front seat and Priya felt lost in the seconds it took for Reyna to walk around to the driver’s side. The cold feeling of loss continued to numb her; she paid no attention to the route, staring silent out of the window unseeing. The occasional grinding of the automatic transmission punctuated the long drive, the road twisting and rising before settling into a level path darkened by trees bunched at its side.

One solitary light cut through the darkness, brighter than the lights of the car, bright in the darkness of forest that cleared to surround the house on three sides, the fourth side, at the back of the building was pale, no trees blocking the dawning sky. The car bumped up from a pothole and her head tapped off the side glass window. She sat up as Reyna brought the car to a stop at the back of the farmhouse, its white walls glowing pale the windowsills chipped dark where they appeared through the flowerboxes that rested in sleeping colors of red and blue and deep almost black violet.

 
Reyna got out and walked around the car to open Priya’s door. Priya took the outstretched hand and the help to get out of the car. The back door of the house was unlocked and the warmth of the empty kitchen felt like a blanket on her face. The light went on, she was seated at a worn solid pine kitchen table and she heard Reyna opening a few cupboards. Reyna placed two tablets in her palm and helped Priya with the glass of water before finding a bottle of brandy from which she poured out a glass and the smell hit Priya with a memory of Michael and his neatly placed dishtowel. She rushed to the sink and retched, but the old thick Belfast sink remained white and clean and mocking her efforts.

Priya leant against the solid ceramic, eyes shut tight against the tears. She felt Reyna hug her gently from behind and then lead her out of the kitchen and through a draughty hallway. They passed an open door that held the remnant smell and heat of a turf fire and then entered the small room with the bed covered in its knobbly white bedspread. Reyna pulled back the covers and Priya crawled into the space beneath closing her eyes and letting the cloth swaddle her as the covers were laid back over her.

Priya heard the scraping of a chair being pulled up and the creak as Reyna settled into it. She felt the light weight of a hand resting on the fabric covering her shoulder and then the blackness swept in and she felt nothing.