The Four Streets (34 page)

Sean hadn’t liked what Brigie had told him about Alice’s visit earlier in the day. It had perturbed him greatly.

Sean liked to take his wash-down upstairs at the press. The first thing he did every night, when he came home, was to carry his jug upstairs and strip off.

Every one of his daughters had been conceived during the end-of-day wash-down. Brigie looked at the other men on the streets and, with the exception of Jerry who was known for his good looks, she knew how lucky she was in Sean.

She didn’t like the number of young girls who hung around the boxing club, and she was no fool. As exhausted as she frequently was, she kept her man happy and paid for it with a lifetime of pregnancy and breastfeeding.

Tonight, whilst Sean was washing down, Brigie had stopped downstairs. He thought over what she had told him and remembered times that Father James had visited his own house. Images flashed into his mind of the Father holding his daughters in his arms. He had often fleetingly questioned why Father James called round to the house so often.

Sean had no idea what had happened on that night or why Jerry was being questioned. He only knew what Alice was asking him to do. There were plenty on the four streets who revered Father James.

Sean told Brigie it was very important to keep her mouth shut. Some would find what they were doing difficult to understand.

‘If I do what Alice has asked, Brigie, we need to keep safe.’

Brigie didn’t need to be told. The people she lived amongst were as good as her family, but she knew that many were devastated by Father James’s death. The Dohertys and the Deanes were good people. She would tell no one.

When Sean stepped into the kitchen, Paddy was already there. The women had left and the men sat down.

The women had talked Tommy round and, the more they had talked, the more he realized their plot made good sense. They were in greater danger without an alibi for Jerry. They needed to source one quickly, get him out of the police station and safely home as soon as possible. They needed help from their friends.

The kettle began to whistle on the range and, as Tommy stood to take it off and mash some tea, Paddy roared, ‘Feckin’ hell, imagine that, lads, no women and just us men living in one house now, how grand would that be, eh?’

Despite the seriousness of the situation, all three burst out laughing.

‘Yeah, but I’m not going to bed with you, Paddy,’ said Tommy, carrying a pot of tea over to the table. ‘Ye snore.’

They laughed again and the atmosphere lightened momentarily.

‘Now, lads, you don’t need details, trust me, but Jer needs our help and we all need to be singing out of the same bloody hymn book to do that. Are ye with me?’

Sean and Paddy picked up their tea and looked at each other. They had both moved onto the four streets at around the same time and between the two families they had attended too many baptisms to count. They had both clasped their arms together and held Jerry upright underneath Bernadette’s dead body as she lay in her coffin on the day they buried her. One of Sean’s daughters was running around the street right now in Angela’s old shoes, and the two girls were best friends.

Sean took both sets of Tommy’s twins down to the boxing club with him on a regular basis and they had all pooled their resources together on many an occasion to make sure the kids were fed. When Paddy had run out of money before the end of the week, Jerry had often slipped him half a crown.

It didn’t matter what Jerry had done. They were his mates and they would do whatever was needed, regardless of the danger to themselves.

‘I’m in,’ said Sean.

Paddy felt guilty as he looked at his two friends and drank his tea. Peggy had told him what little Paddy had done and big Paddy had taken his slipper to him. He wouldn’t open his mouth again, the stupid little fecker. Too much like his mother at times. Spoke rubbish before putting his brain in gear.

He had been home for a full half-hour before Peggy told him what had happened, and the stupid woman had told the lad to hide in the outhouse, out of his da’s way.

It took Paddy a full minute for what Peggy was telling him to sink in.

‘He did what?’ Paddy roared. ‘He did what? Are ye telling me Jer is sat in a police cell, being questioned about the priest’s murder, because that gobshite of a kid wanted to look clever?’

Shame and anger convulsed Paddy in equal measure. The men had talked about nothing else on the docks other than how ridiculous the police were. They had laughed at the ridiculous notion that Jerry could have anything to do with it.

‘Stupid feckers, the bizzies are. Jer didn’t even go to fuckin’ mass since the day he buried Bernadette,’ Brian, his gang mate, had said. ‘He’s even married a Protestant. God knows when the last time was that Jer even spoke to the priest. What a fuckin’ laugh it is.’

Paddy ran up the stairs as quickly as a man could run who smoked forty a day and had worked nine hours straight. There was no sign of his son.

He ran back through the kitchen, picked up his slipper from in front of the fire and went out into the yard. Now he could hear little Paddy whimpering in the outhouse.

Maura could hear the shouts in her own yard as she took down the washing. She stopped unpegging and held onto the line with her eyes closed. Neither Maura nor Tommy ever hit their kids and it made her feel sick to hear poor little Paddy’s pathetic pleas for Paddy to leave him alone.

‘No, Da, don’t hit me with the slipper,’ he screeched, as the outhouse door flung open.

It was too late; his pleas were followed up by loud thwacks, screams and even louder crying. Paddy must have slapped his son at least a dozen times. Maura heard him swear as the slipper flew out of his hand, but that didn’t stop him; he then resorted to his fists. The guilt she felt at hearing little Paddy take a beating made her stomach turn sour. Maura loved little Paddy. She often fed him at her own table and had deloused his hair as often as she had the twins. He was one of life’s innocents and he never failed to make them all laugh with his antics. ‘What has little Paddy done today then,’ she would ask her boys at some stage of the evening. She often pulled him to her for a quick hug each time he said ‘I wish I lived with ye, Maura.’ She wished he did too. Never more than today.

Maura wanted to lean over the wall and plead with Paddy to stop, but she didn’t dare. The four streets survived in harmony on the basis of unwritten rules and one of them was: you never interfered or stuck your nose in when it hadn’t been asked for.

‘I’m in,’ said Paddy, relieved to have the opportunity to compensate for the perceived stupidity of little Paddy.

Jerry had been in the police station for eight hours and the police were getting nowhere.

Howard and Simon should have gone home three hours since, but they didn’t want to leave this to anyone else. Neither could say why, they had no evidence other than a witness statement from a ten-year-old, but both knew they were on to something.

Their trained noses could smell it. They could taste it. The aroma of guilt filled the station. It was at its strongest in the cell in which they held Jerry and yet they didn’t have a single fact to go on.

‘Maybe we should let him go, put a watch on him and call it a night,’ said Howard, who was imagining his tea, which was always on the table at six-thirty sharp, sitting there congealing.

‘Are you joking?’ said Simon. ‘Look, mate, we both know we are on to something here. That man is playing us like a fiddle. He hasn’t said one flaming word since we handcuffed him. We have to keep going until he cracks first.’

‘We are running out of time,’ said Howard. ‘We will have to let him…’

His words trailed off as, from the window, they saw Tommy, Sean and Paddy march in through the station doors.

Brigie had just got the youngest off to sleep when Howard knocked on her front door. She looked surprised to see him and with a warm and welcoming smile, invited him straight in. He made no small talk and looked as though he was in a foul temper.

He opened his notebook and took out his pencil. ‘Would ye like some tea?’ said Brigie sweetly. Howard appeared not to hear and got straight to the point. ‘Did you, on the sixteenth of this month, receive a bottle of whiskey as a gift from the wedding family?’

‘Aye, we did,’ replied Brigie. ‘And so did everyone else.’

‘Can I see your whiskey, madam?’ said Howard, feeling more officious than usual.

Neither he nor Simon believed the card-school story. Now they needed to check whether or not the whiskey bottle had been opened. If it hadn’t, it would be their only lead. And a big one too. They would be able to prove that Jerry’s neighbours had been lying and that was a serious offence indeed.

Brigie looked at Howard questioningly and slowly moved to the sideboard in the front room. Howard followed her.

Brigie bent down to open the cupboard door, looking sideways at Howard and, as she lifted the bottle of whiskey out, she let out a high-pitched squeal and gasped, ‘Oh Jaysus, someone has drunk the bleedin’ whiskey, there’s nothing here.’ She turned and faced Howard with the empty bottle in her hand. A look of pure amazement sat on her face and took a bow.

Howard snapped his book shut and stormed out of the kitchen.

At exactly the same time in Kathleen’s kitchen, Simon was asking the same question.

‘Sure,’ said Kathleen as she went to the kitchen cupboard, ‘we are saving it for Christmas mind, here ye are,’ and she took out a full and unopened bottle of whiskey.

Within an hour, Jerry walked in through his own back door. Everyone had gathered in his kitchen, even Brigie, as once again Kathleen poured out whiskey for all. ‘Bugger Christmas,’ she laughed as she cracked open the seal. ‘Easy come, easy go,’ said Sean.

He and Paddy had both told the police that there was a card school, playing for money, in Sean’s house that night, well after the women had gone to bed.

They had embellished the story with the admission that they had drunk almost the whole bottle of whiskey between them. They were both prepared to sign a witness statement to that effect. When Paddy said firmly, ‘Aye, and my lad wants to withdraw his, so he does. Now he thinks it was me he saw leaving the entry, not Jerry,’ Howard’s heart sank.

Gone was his promotion.

Simon and Howard knew they were back to square one. With no evidence they had to let Jerry go. He had an alibi with two witnesses. He was safe.

Nellie and Kitty were back together on the comfy chair. Nellie had refused to move from Jerry’s arms until Kitty came back in through the door.

Everyone lifted their glass to drink in relief, when Kathleen tapped her glass with a spoon and spoke.

‘Before we drink,’ she said, ‘we need to say thank you to someone. To Alice.’ Everyone turned and smiled at Alice.

Alice beamed, feeling swamped by a sense of pride. Her face flushed red and tears pricked at her eyes when everyone lifted their glass and said loudly, ‘To Alice.’

It was the happiest moment of her life.

Nellie and Kitty hugged each other, grinning. They had no idea what they were grinning at, or what had just occurred, but everyone was happy and so were they.

Suddenly, without warning, Kitty leapt from the chair and raced through the back door to the outhouse.

As Kitty leant over the pan to throw up the first time, she felt someone holding back her hair from the vomit and stroking the back of her neck. She could hear the voices wafting down the yard from the kitchen, laughing and chattering away. Celebrating. Everyone joyous and happy.

Another shot of whiskey, she thought, and they will be singing next and pushing the chairs back to dance around the kitchen. They wouldn’t miss her. She was shaking with cold and felt clammy as she knelt on the floor and clung onto the wooden seat, a long, polished plank that stretched across the top of the toilet. Next to the seat stood a large pile of cut-up pages of the
Echo,
to use as toilet paper. The smell from the printer’s ink made her heave again.

The soothing, ethereal whispers calmed her panic. She knew everyone was in the kitchen, and there could be no one with her in the outhouse, but the nausea made her feel so deathly that she was beyond thinking or caring.

Just as she leant over to vomit for the second time and felt her own hair being lifted clear, she saw a long strand of red hair sweep past the side of her face.

Kathleen looked at Maura to see if she had noticed Kitty dashing out of the back door to the outhouse. She had.

Maura went white. She put her hand to her mouth and held onto the back of the chair to steady herself as the realization hit her with the force of a truck.

Kathleen moved over to her side and put an arm round her waist.

‘Oh my God, Kathleen, ’twas before me very eyes and I never knew. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what next? What will we do?’

‘Sh,’ Kathleen replied. ‘Let’s enjoy tonight, Maura. That problem is ours to share, tomorrow.’

We hope you enjoyed this book.

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