Turbulent Priests (Dan Starkey 3) (14 page)

I nodded.

There was a knock on the door.

Moira hissed a frustrated ‘
Fuck!
’ and then put a finger to her lips. We stood at the top of the stairs while the door was knocked on again. ‘They’ll go away,’ Moira whispered.

Then the bedroom door opened and Christine shouted: ‘Mummy! There’s someone at the door!’

‘
Fuck
!’ Moira hissed, followed by, ‘Hussssssh darlin’ . . .’

‘Mummy! There’s someone at the door!’

And then we both dissolved into giggles. Moira peered around the corner of the stairs in time to see the letter box flap inwards. She tugged Christine back from the top step, but it was too late. A slightly hoarse but still familiar voice called up towards us: ‘Christine! Where’s your mummy?!’

Moira kicked her heel against the wall, cursed again, then stepped out onto the landing. ‘Down in a minute!’ she called. She glanced back at me. ‘It’s Father White. Shadow me down the stairs so he doesn’t see you, then get into the kitchen and tidy up those cans. Stick the empties out the back door or something. Spray some of that Haze. I’ll stall him.’

We began to move down the stairs, Christine first, then Moira, then me hiding behind. ‘I thought you said they couldn’t stop you drinking . . .’

‘They can’t. I just don’t want to flaunt it.’

‘Chicken,’ I said.

There was another knock on the door. ‘Hold on!’ Moira shouted, then added, ‘Impatient son of a bitch,’ under her breath. At the foot of the stairs I slipped past her into the kitchen and rapidly emptied the dregs into the sink and washed them away, then put the empty cans, and there were
lots
of them, into a plastic bag and placed them outside the back door. I sprayed some Haze, then sat at the table just in time for the kitchen door to open. Moira entered, followed by Father White, with Christine in his arms. ‘I’m very sorry,’ Moira was saying, ‘I was having a shite.’

Father White cleared his throat, then stopped and his brow furrowed as he saw me smiling up at him, quite at home.

He stayed long enough to drink three cups of tea and scoff two fifths of a Battenburg cake. While Moira moved about the kitchen his eyes followed her, except when Christine was moving about at the same time. White was concerned about her ill health, and somewhat more concerned that he hadn’t been told. The Messiah only stayed long enough to say hello and then Moira packed her back off to bed.

While Moira took Christine upstairs Father White shook my hand and thanked me effusively for saving her life, although such effusive thanks somehow seemed less than truly effusive. It was a new word for me and I was determined to wring the life out of it. I asked him what was going to happen to Mary Reilly and he stirred his tea for several long moments before looking up and saying that it was up
to the Council. ‘Not the police?’ I queried and he mumbled a less than convincing ‘Of course.’

Moira hurried back in, gave me a half-embarrassed smile, and sat at the table. She cut herself a slice of cake, took a bite, then asked, ‘So, to what do we owe the pleasure?’ spitting crumbs at the elderly priest in the process.

He seemed awkward in my presence, and I was unsettled by him. I was hardly listening to what he was saying because it seemed to me that there were secretive glances passing between them, that I was being excluded. It even crossed my mind, though only fleetingly, that if Moira was such a hornball, I mightn’t be the only person she’d asked to bed in the recent past. What if Father White had called on the off-chance . . .

Shit. I’d known her five minutes and I was already thinking jealous thoughts.

I cut myself a slice of cake. There were only glances between them because they knew things about the McCooeys, about Christine, about the island, that I didn’t, that they didn’t want to share with me yet. That was understandable. I was only a journalist, I wasn’t a mover and shaker. Nor, for long, would White be. Moira had told me that much. I smiled at her. She was an actress, then, and quite good at it.

After a while I got the impression that he was waiting for me to leave, but I stayed where I was, sure that Moira would make it clear one way or the other whether she wanted me to go. She said nothing, just flashed me a nice smile once in a while, so eventually it was the priest who stood and sighed after Moira said, ‘We have to finish our interview.’

He looked at me, nodded and turned for the door. He paused with his thick white hand on the handle and looked at me. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘it’s Father Flynn who’s in favour of this record being kept, not me.’

I shrugged. He left. Moira came back in. She opened the fridge and took out two cans of beer. There weren’t very many left. She gave me one and popped open one for herself. ‘So,’ she said, ‘where were we?’

It was dark when I left Moira’s cottage. I hated myself deeply. I walked along the weakly lit Main Street and shuddered against the freezing wind blowing in off the sea. It was only when I reached the end of the street and was heading back out into the country that I realised I’d left my gloves behind. I tutted and walked on. Too awkward. We had hardly exchanged more than half a dozen words since we’d left her bedroom.

At the door she’d said, ‘Was it that bad?’

And I’d hugged her and said, ‘Moira, it was
fantastic
.’

‘Then . . .’

‘Don’t ask.’

I kissed her and called goodbye to Christine, but there was no response. We’d kept things quiet, although I’d never been one for shouting. Whispering sweet nothings had always seemed a bit effusive to me.

Patricia, I
. . .

Was drunk.

Was horny.

Will never know.

There was an anchor in my stomach and cement in my shoes. There was a persistent throb at the back of my head that was a sure-fire indication of a mean hangover to come. All-day drinking had once been my forte, but age and lack of practice had laid waste a once great talent. I had a can of Tennent’s in each pocket, possibly the last two on the island. I had swiped them from the fridge when she wasn’t looking. I felt mean about it, but not as mean as I felt about betraying Patricia.

I opened a can and kept walking. I’d forgotten how dark the countryside could be. I was a streetlights-and-shopwindows kind of a guy, not a pitted, muddy, splashy-lane bloke. As I walked, the can grew so cold that I was reduced to holding it between the two sleeves of my coat, supping at it like a leper, or so I supposed. I didn’t have a lot of experience with lepers, although I soon would if Patricia ever found out I’d made love to Moira McCooey.

I’d been walking about twenty minutes when I heard a splash behind me. There had been other splashes, of course, rabbits or hares frolicking, raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, but this was different,
heavier
I turned and stared into the darkness, but it was pointless. I could see nothing beyond the vague outline of the track leading back to town. I walked on. I dismissed it. A few minutes later there was another. I strained my eyes, but still nothing. A nothing I didn’t like much. I was thinking of ghosts. Headless horsemen and wailing banshees. My heart was speeding up. I finished my can. I knelt down and placed it sideways in the road
between two wide puddles. If there was someone following he would have a choice to make, either vault the low stone walls on either side of the road and continue after me over some very rough ground or wade through the puddles and really give himself away; much more sensible to walk the thin strip of dry track between the puddles. I hunched my shoulders and hurried on. I’d barely gone fifty yards when I heard the rattle of the can being accidentally kicked.

It could just as easily be someone else on the way home.

But I’d been in trouble before, many times in many places, and I knew better than to think bright, positive thoughts.

I started to run.

Whoever it was must have realised. There was a flash and a roar and for a split second the lane was illuminated, not that I had any intention of looking back. I knew what a shotgun sounded like. I had the sensation of something hot and dangerous shooting past my head, but I couldn’t judge how close. On the same island was close enough. I let out a little shout of surprise then vaulted over the wall to my right.

There was only a short drop, three or four feet at most. My landing was soft. I put my head down and started to run. The grass was thick but the ground pitted from rabbit tunnelling. I stumbled and fell three or four times before I dared to look behind me. When I did, my blood froze. The night sky was lit by the beams of several high-powered torches. They were coming after me at speed.

18

Obviously they didn’t know who they were up against. I had been a crack member of the Boys Brigade before being thrown out for drunkenness. And I had read
Bravo Two Zero
. If they wanted to get involved in a firefight, well, they’d better have matches.

I giggled and ran, then fell, giggled, ran, fell, giggled . . . it assumed a rhythmic but never monotonous pattern. There were advantages and disadvantages to the chase. I had the advantage of darkness, they had the advantage of torches to stop them falling down every hole they came across. I had the advantage of alcohol in my blood and the proof from past experience that a drunk can cover vast stretches of terrain without even being aware of it. He can leave the pub and one minute later wake up in bed, albeit with his trousers on fire. They had the advantage of knowing the land,
knowing the island, knowing that it
was
an island and that eventually, if I didn’t outwit them, they would drive me into the sea.

I crouched in the long grass for several moments, catching my breath and taking stock. There were six of
them
, spread fairly evenly apart. The ones on the outside were moving quicker or had easier terrain to cover and so had forged slightly ahead of those in the middle, creating a loose semi-circle. The speed of the chase, inevitably, meant that they couldn’t cover every square yard with their torches; it wasn’t inconceivable that I could lie down in the rough grass and hope that they passed over me. But in the end that would be down to good luck, two words which didn’t figure large in my vocabulary, unlike effusively.

I started running again. There was a shout as one of them spotted me, and the torch beams began to converge. With a little zigzagging I managed to lose them again. I giggled. This was so
fucking stupid
. I wanted to stop and shout,
Are we playing hide and seek
? I wanted to shake my finger at them and tell them to catch themselves on, grown men chasing a wee fella like me. But I didn’t even know if they were men at all. For all I knew it could be the women of Wrathlin on my tail. God knows, they’re big enough and hairy enough. The thoughts piled in on top of each other as I charged breathlessly across the fields: had they been after me all along, or had they found out about Moira and me? Had Father White sent them? Or Christine?

The ground had been rising for several hundred yards.
Even though I was running into the teeth of the wind the incline allowed me to put a little extra space between me and my pursuers. I’d been a runner at school and still played five-a-side, the hardest sport on earth, twice a week, so my legs were reasonably fit, even if the rest of me was a bag of bones. With the thin light from the stars I could see that I had reached the top of the island’s central saddle, the highest point on Wrathlin. A mile ahead of me there was the chop of the waves, further still the lights of the mainland, civil isation. Snow Cottage was about a mile in the opposite direction. By accident rather than design I had led my pursuers away from it, which was good news for Patricia and Little Stevie but somehow made my own safety seem even more remote.

There was a whirring sound ahead of me. I slowed up, suspicious. As I drew closer I could just make out the most bizarre outlines: like three helicopters had crash-landed and buried themselves in the soil, leaving only their rotorblades revolving. Still, they seemed less threatening than what came behind. When I was right up close it was suddenly obvious that they were wind turbines, and, once identified, that I knew something about them. Father Flynn had spoken glowingly about them. He’d helped engineer a European grant for them. They provided two thirds of the island’s electricity. He’d even told me their names. Conn, Aedh and Fiachra. I had the info on tape, and had reviewed it the previous day while trying to make some sense out of Flynn’s visions. If I’d had the inclination I could have waited for my pursuers and explained that the turbines had been named after the
three sons of the mythical chieftain Lir, who’d been turned into swans by their wicked stepmother and spent hundreds of years floating on the Seas of Moyle around Wrathlin. Like most natives, the chances were that they didn’t know much and cared less about their own history; they were too busy catching fish and killing rabbits and generally surviving to give a toss about myths and legends. If there was even a slight inclination to stop for a chat, my mind was made up by the sudden shotgun blast that whooshed past my ear and snapped an arm off one of the turbines. We live in an information age, but it’s not much use to you if your head is splattered all over your computer. I ducked and ran.

As my fatigue grew, the icy wind began to catch me, cutting into my chest. I had run myself sober. In a different environment I could probably have stayed ahead of them indefinitely, as long as I didn’t do anything stupid, like twist my ankle, because I was sure they weren’t super-fit athletes either. But I had to face up to one indisputable fact. Sooner or later I was going to run out of land.

As I ran I tried desperately to remember the map of the island I had pored over before leaving Belfast or the route of the walk I had taken with Father Flynn. I tried conjuring up the points of the compass in my head: the old schoolboy method of remembering the order in which they came –
Never Eat Shredded Wheat
. North, east, south, then west. I’d walked west on leaving town, heading home, then been shot at and started running north; after a while this had taken
me onto the higher ground where the turbines were, and now I was heading down towards . . . what was it, Artichoke or Altachuile Bay and the freezing . . . Straits of Moyle? It was coming back to me. I giggled again. It was like the moment of clarity which precedes death. I cursed. My teeth were starting to chatter. I needed to find another way, and fast. The sea was no use to me. To the east I could see the beam of the East Light, one of the three unmanned lighthouses on the island. Close by it, I knew, was Robert the Bruce’s cave. It was probably the first place they’d look, figuring me as a mainlander and a tourist. Even if I went for it, it was also only accessible by boat, and the last thing I intended to do was venture anywhere near a boat.