They were inside, she guessed; someone in the café was watching her. She fumbled a cigarette from her packet and lit it, taking a deep, bitter drag. She felt fat tears welling up, uncontrollable, because she was tired and it was late at night and she’d set such hopes on coming here.
She opened the door and stepped out into the rain, pulling the car keys from her pocket, only vaguely aware of the figure following her out. The street was empty of parked cars, but somehow the big van had backed up nearer to the Golf, so that she would have to reverse first to get out. Cursing it, herself, and every spiteful shit who worked at the Daily News, she turned sideways to slip between the van and the bonnet of the little red GTI.
The van door flew open, hitting her in the face, breaking her nose with a dull thunk. A large, rough hand fell over her face, covering it entirely, smearing what was left of her Frosty Pink lipstick over her chin. She heard him behind her, the man from the café. She heard him speak to the grabbing man, heard him object. Thinking him her savior, she tried to turn to him, but the hands in front of her grabbed her neck, lifting her by her throat into the back of the van.
Donkey Jacket hardly spoke above a whisper. “Wrong fucking bird, ya mug ye.”
II
When Heather came to she knew she was in the van and felt it moving fast, along a motorway or a good flat road. She was lying on her side, on a flat surface, with a towel that smelled of sour milk hooked over her head. She was missing a shoe, and her hands were tied together with rope behind her back. Through the waves of shock and nausea she realized that her face was very swollen; the pain seemed to radiate out from the bridge of her nose, engulfing her eyes and cheeks and ears, almost meeting round the back of her head again. Her nose was blocked with blood. She tried to blow it clean, but it hurt too much. She could hear the faint sound of a radio coming from the front of the cab, a sound of voices, and poor, dead John Lennon’s “Imagine” came on.
At first she thought again that it must be some of the morning boys playing a prank that had gone too far, but they were never sober enough to drive, especially not late at night, and they wouldn’t have hurt her physically. She wondered for a moment if Paddy Meehan’s family were exacting their revenge, but that couldn’t be right either. She remembered the hand around her throat and realized, suddenly and clearly, that she didn’t know these men and they didn’t know her. They were going to kill her.
Moving carefully, rubbing a relatively pain-free part of her chin repeatedly against her shoulder, she tried and failed to get the smelly towel off. She began to panic, rubbing frantically, regardless of the pain. When the driver hurried or slowed she drifted a little over to the side.
She was struggling with the rope around her wrists and feet, getting nowhere, when the van pulled off the road, took a couple of sharp turns that slid her around the floor, and then came to a creeping stop in a very dark place. The driver got out and a bright overhead light came on. They were outside, somewhere dark. She could hear a river and feet crunching around to the side of the van.
Heather worked her hands up and down, her skin rubbing hard against the tight rope, trying to loosen the cord but embedding it instead in her raw skin. The van door opened, the hood was unhooked from her head, and the man in the donkey jacket looked in at her. He was holding a short-handled shovel. Heather tried to smile.
When Donkey Jacket saw her brutally swollen face, eyes like oranges, chin and hair smeared with blood and snot, he looked perplexed. “That’s not her.”
From around the side of the van she heard another voice muttering, “Ye said ye’d follow her out and ye did.”
An older face looked in at her, frightened, shaking his head. She couldn’t be sure, seeing him upside down, she couldn’t be altogether sure, but she thought his eyes were wet for her and sorry for what he had done. His sympathy made her think for a moment that they might let her go, and relief swept from her crown to her toes, a cold wash that unclenched her aching jaw and eased her throbbing shoulders.
Donkey Jacket lifted the spade from his side, holding it with both hands near the shovel end. “And ye said she was dead,” he said.
The older man’s cracked voice gave his emotion away. “She’d stopped breathing. I thought she was.”
Donkey Jacket nudged him playfully and raised the shovel to chest height. “See? You teach me about things.” His voice was rich and calm. “And now I can teach you things.”
He swung his arm freely, bringing the metal shovel down fast and crushing Heather’s skull against the van floor.
TWENTY . EVER SO LONELY
I
Paddy’s weekend was as poor and friendless as she could remember. She spent the whole of Saturday skulking around the big library in town, keeping out of the house, reading old newspapers about the Dempsie case that told her nothing she didn’t already know.
She hadn’t realized the degree of local animosity towards her until she passed Ina Harris, a vulgar woman she knew to be a friend of Mimi Ogilvy’s, on her way home from the library. Ina turned quite deliberately and spat at Paddy’s feet. She was hardly an arbiter of good manners herself: she often answered her door without her teeth in and was a famously light-fingered cleaner. She kept having to change her job all the time because the day and hour she started anywhere she’d look for the fiddle, steal what she could, and had to leave before she got found out. She got a job cleaning operating theaters once and came home with a bag full of scalpels and gauze. Everyone in Eastfield knew about her.
When Paddy opened her drowsy eyes on the Sunday and saw the two cups of hot tea on her side table, she thought for a moment it was a normal weekend. Con’s only chore around the house was to make the Sunday-morning cuppas and deliver them to the bedrooms, easing everyone up and getting them ready for ten o’clock mass. Paddy blinked, feeling especially excited about seeing Sean at chapel. It was only when she recalled why seeing him meant so much to her that she remembered it wasn’t a normal time.
She sat up in bed, sipping her tea, thinking about all the disapproving Ina Harrises she would have to face today. Sean would be there and would ignore her. Her family wouldn’t speak to her, and everyone in town was watching her and whispering about her crime. Mary Ann would stand loyally by her, but she’d laugh an eloquent articulation of Paddy’s shame and fright.
She listened as everyone in the house took their turn of the bathroom. Mary Ann was rinsing her teeth when Trish called up the stairs to tell them it was half nine, mind now, they’d need to set off in ten minutes. Mary Ann came back into the bedroom and made an astonished face to see Paddy still in bed. Paddy made the face back and Mary Ann giggled, gave her one last open-mouthed gawp, and left.
Paddy lay in bed, still wearing her pajamas, reading L’Etranger, a book Dub had lent her, because she knew the French title would upset her father. She heard the scuffle and whispers at the bottom of the stairs, followed by Con’s tread. He stopped outside, knocked, and opened the door, looking around the room expectantly. She wanted to sit up and challenge him, say something incendiary that would make him speak to her and have a fight for once in his pathetic life. But she didn’t. She sat in bed with her eyes fixed on the page, slowly slipping under the covers, protecting her father’s dignity at the expense of her own.
Con snorted angrily twice and left, shutting the door to the room tight to show how annoyed he was. He tramped downstairs again, she heard the front door shut, and like bubbles bursting, the family was gone.
A calm fell over the house. Paddy listened just to make sure no one had been left behind. They were really gone. She was alone in the house for perhaps the first time in ten years. Even if no one else was in the house, Trisha was usually in the kitchen or at least near it. Paddy threw back the covers and bolted downstairs to the phone.