In the Forest (24 page)

‘But where are the people?’

‘I don’t want to talk about them people . . .’

‘You don’t have to talk about them. You just have to say, they’re in Meelic . . . they’re in Mohara, they’re in Derrygoolin or in Derrycon . . . Clonoila, Clonrush, Coose, Allendara.. . .’

‘They would be places where they might be.’

‘Are they alive, son?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because a gang have them and they’ve put a price on their heads.’

‘What gang?’

‘A hardened gang . . . Dublin, England . . .’

‘Tell me more ... if you can’t talk to me . . . you can’t talk to anyone . . .’

‘I’ve no one in the world.’

‘You have me, son, and your sister and your poor mother looking down from heaven on her little boy.’ ‘My mind is gone, Gran.’

‘In what way? Like, can you see me? Can you tell the colour of my eyes? Can you tell the day of the week?’ ‘Why didn’t you come sooner?’

‘I did come sooner ... I came the moment I heard . . . I wanted to be near you ... I asked them to put a bed in here beside you in the night but they wouldn’t ... I was awake all night with the bells ringing . . . did you hear them?’

‘I did.’

‘They’re from the Abbey . . . the poor nuns get up two and three times a night to pray . . . three hundred years of prayers and penance . . . they’re praying for you now, love and I’m asking you as your truest friend. Where are the three people?’

‘I can’t tell you what I don’t know.’

‘You can tell me, you can. Get it off your chest ... I know you’re in pain ... I see it in your eyes, in the way you’re smoking, in the way you’re fiddling, in the way you eat the cigarettes . . .’

‘They think they’ll break me . . . they’ll never break me.’

‘We’re all broken, son . . . we’re all of us broken by this and we won’t mend ... we won’t ever mend.’ ‘Fuck you . . . they’ve twisted you against me,’ and jumping up he pulls open the door that is already ajar and flings her out, telling her to fuck off home, traitor that she is. She shakes her head at the two guards that have been standing outside. She doesn’t have to tell them what they already overheard.

The town was dark and dormant, the drawn blinds smack up against the tiny window panes above the shops and public houses. The limestone fortress of the convent solid as a mountain range. Dogs slept and snarled under the gates of the side yards and little streams came rushing down out of nowhere.

A long cylindrical globe of cold blue light shone above the barracks door and inside a team of guards and detectives from across the country paced and mulled and argued, waiting for O’Kane to break. Thirty of the thirty-six hours have passed and nerves are beginning to feel rattled. They took turns to go in pairs, even twice going into the cell to waken him with just that one question - ‘Where are the missing people . . . just tell us where they are.’ At times he has roared back at them, other times threatened them and still others laughed, those bouts that sent shivers through them and made them fear for their wives and children at home alone. Their hopes now are pinned on O’Mara, one of the guards that tried to help him in his young days.

‘You must excuse my attire,’ Guard O’Mara says, shaking hands with several of them who welcome him like a prophet. His pyjamas dip down under his trousers and he is wearing no collar or tie. He is excited. He’d been retired for a few years, his days spent looking at television, looking into the fire, eating too much, especially cream buns and now he is wanted again
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intermediary and hero. Superintendent McBride briefs him on the events so far, the priest’s visit, the grandmother’s visit, admissions, countered a minute later with no admission, with ‘yer all bullshit’ threats.

‘I can handle him, sure I know him since he was a child, a gorsoun.’

‘One of the lads will go in with you.’

‘Christ no.’

‘Christ yes . . .he could knock you out in a split second.’

‘Let me do it my way . . . me and him go way back,’ and he drinks a mug of coffee before he goes in.

‘You remember me?’ he says to O’Kane who is on the floor hunched, talking to himself. Getting no reply, Guard O’Mara sits, rocks his body back and forth and commences on the reverie that he has told to himself in the twenty-five mile drive along the dark roads, past houses with frightened people, their lights left on. He talks in a soft fatherly drawl. ‘You remember you took a bicycle from the doctor’s shed, a lady’s bicycle, you didn’t do it for gain, you never did anything for gain, I’ll say that for you; it was more like a game, a prank. Next thing you broke into a holiday home of a Dutch woman and you found tins of paint and poured them onto the floor and onto the chairs and the sofa. That’s how I got your first fingerprint. It was on the bottom of a tin and I lifted it off with a bit of sellotape and sent it up to Dublin to headquarters. You broke into houses and took cushions and pillows that you hid up in the woods. You were going to live there, that’s what you said. Your father asked me to talk to you, to caution you and I did but you went on with your blackguarding.

‘There was no holding you. I could have arrested you the time you broke windows but I didn’t, I let you off, I said there would be no summons if you agreed to stop running wild and to go back home, back to your father. I drove you down there and I watched you go up the path and you were a grand little lad with your curls, a bit afraid but a grand little lad. I drove on back home and it was pouring rain and a fierce gale. There were trees down. ’Twas one of them stormy nights. I can see it now, every second of it, the wipers getting stuck on the windscreen of the car.

‘I declare to God I’m at home in my own kitchen in front of the stove drying myself when my wife Mary goes to let the dog out and there you are under our ash tree like a drowned cat, not saying anything, not asking anything, just looking into our lit house. She comes back in and says, “That youngster is out there and he’ll catch pneumonia” and I give her the nod and she brings you in. She sends you into the bathroom and hands you a bath towel. Later she dries your hair and stands you in front of the stove next to me, the two of us with towels around us like Roman senators, like Nero, my wife Mary not able to do enough for you, making you cocoa, heating scones and imploring you to speak. You wouldn’t speak. You wouldn’t tell us why you came to us. Maybe you thought you could stay with us, my wife and I. Is that it Michen, is that it, is that what you thought then?’

‘They’re bastards, they’re pigs, they’re jumping on me.’

‘They’re not bastards . . . they’re just doing their job . . . they’re very anxious to find these people.’

‘Their time is up ... I won’t be long more here . . . they can’t keep me . . .’

‘You know me . . . and if you trust me, I’ll make a deal with you. You and I will go back out into the woods and we’ll fnd the three people and we'll restore them to their poor heartbroken families. It’s days now and these people are gasping with hunger and thirst . . . hostages as I presume . . . the young priest trying to give them whatever comfort he can, the child yelling . . . you’ve proved you can scare us now it’s time to unscare us, Mich.’

‘They’ll never be found . . . never . . . none of them.’

‘Why not, son?’

‘I can’t tell you. I’m not going down for what I didn’t do.’

‘But if you didn’t do it, you won’t be going down at all. Your only crime will be the unlawful possession of firearms and abducting that Boland girl . . . they’re not heinous crimes . . . you’ll be out on bail . . . local people will go bail for you.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘You’ve built up a lot of rage since you were a youngster but just think - that woman, that child and that priest never did you any wrong . . .’

‘I know that.’

‘I’m glad to hear you say so. How ’bout me arranging for you to get boots and clothes and the two of us go out?’

‘I’ll go if it’s only us.’

‘Jesus, Mich, it can’t be only us ... there’s forty men on this case.’

‘You fucker . . . it’s only a stunt.’

‘It’s not a stunt . . . I’ll see to it that you’re sitting in my car next to me and you’re not cuffed.’

‘I’ll come tomorrow not tonight.’

‘Tomorrow could be too late.’

‘The priest is dead . . . he’s buried three feet down . . . I took a leather jacket out of his car . . .’

‘Oh God Almighty, where is he buried?’

‘I can’t tell you . . . they’ll link me to the killing . . . will the ballistics show that the bullet came from the same gun as I had?’

‘Where is he buried?’

‘Awful thing to see blood flowing from a man’s neck . . . spouting.’

‘Are the woman and the child alive?’

‘They should be.’

‘I’ll put it to you hypothetically.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Say you’re not you, you’re an observer, if a person was going to dump a body in that wood, give me a clue where would be the best place . . .’

O’Kane thought about the question and for the first time seemed to show some interest, then asked for the door to be closed.

He whispers it - ‘You go up from the crossroads, towards Derrygoolin, you pass the first two barriers and you come to a third one and in a bit there’s an old hut that had a dead goat in it ... there’s drains there . . . that would be a good place to dump a body.’

They have set out early, to pre-empt the crowds, five men squeezed into a small unmarked police car, the air stifling because the windows have to be kept shut, the two detectives on either side of O’Kane recoiling from him.

‘Feeling better . . . feeling a bit more relaxed,’ Detective Morgan says, turning from time to time but O’Kane does not answer. Solon, the young driver, keeps looking in his mirror at the weirdo, slumped, his paws on his lap, like someone in a daze. Morgan has agreed not to cuff him. At unexpected moments he comes awake and taking note of a shop front, or a tin sign flapping over a filling station, or a field with gorse bushes he says, ‘I bought sardines there ... I bought buns there ... I had a good shit there’ and then reverts to his torpor.

‘You were a great hurley player . . . won the O’Dono-hoe shield for your school . . . scored the two goals . . . great stuff,’ Morgan says and again O’Kane is listless.

Passing a glass shrine with a statue of the virgin and a crown of artificial red roses, Detective Lahiffe, attempting to diffuse the tension says, ‘Who puts them up I wonder ... is it the state?’

‘Not the state . . . the locals . . . that spot is where there was a terrible accident . . . five people killed . . .
tragic altogether,’ Brophy says, proud of his knowledge of the area and familiar with every house, every hay shed, every car or tractor.

‘Is it the Blessed Virgin that’s always in the glass case?’ Lahiffe asks.

‘Oh no ... if you go towards Mayo you’ll find they have St Patrick,’ Solon says.

‘Is that a fact Joe?’

‘Beautiful . . . especially at night . . . lights around him like a halo.’

‘Of all the vandalism that’s around, these shrines are never harmed . . . isn’t that a marvellous thing?’ Detective Morgan says.

‘Marvellous.’

‘I want to go to my mother’s grave,’ O’Kane says sharply.

‘You can go later ... we have our bit of business first,’ Morgan says, over friendly.

‘I want to go now ... I have to talk to her up in heaven . . . she whispered to me, she has a message for me.’

‘Listen . . . we go to the wood first and then we go to the grave.’

They drive on, in a taut silence until they come to the crossroads with a sign that leads to Cloosh Wood and Morgan lets loose a stream of heated curses at the sight of so many cars, cameras, droves of people and a helicopter landing in a nearby field.

‘Ye bastards . . .ye fucking bastards . . .ye said no press no cameras,’ O’Kane shouts.

‘They won’t see you . . . I’ll go up and talk to the Super on duty and have the area closed off. You lie low here with the men,’ Morgan tells him.

‘Cunts . . . I’ll bring ye down . . . I’ll bring the whole fucking lot of ye down with me,’ and he whirls and punches Lahiffe, knocking him sideways, then kicks on the door to make his escape. Brophy pulls him back by the coat, then by the torso and while O’Kane is headbutting him with quick rolling thrusts, the shrill pips preceding the morning news, then a woman’s voice, strangled, emotional, says, ‘Word has just come in that a body of a female has been found in a shallow grave in . . .’ Then the reception is gone because they have entered the wooded region and Solon searches frantically, twiddling the knobs, the others craning, hearing only static and their own shocked exhalations. O’Kane begins to cry, quiet at first, then less quiet, sobbing, a seepage of tears, as if now he is only his tears; his flesh, his fury, his bellowing, all gone, only tears as he puts his hand out for one of them to hold it. No one does.

‘We’d better go back, lads,’ Morgan says and as Solon starts to turn the car, a guard on a motorbike comes rushing down, flashing them to wait.

‘What is it, Pakie?’ Morgan says, winding the window down.