He’d given Ella a driving lesson the day before. No Galloway then either. Three weeks in, Ella was starting to get the hang of it; at least, she no longer seemed like quite so much of a risk to life and property. She’d asked him, halfway through making a bollix of a three-point-turn, if he could spare a bit of cash.
‘Kieran and me, we’d like to, to have a weekend away.’
‘Would you now? First a flash new car, and now fancy holidays. Ah, when I was your age—’
‘I’m just asking, Dad.’
Conor had sighed. He’d had to say no. The job in Kenya hadn’t paid much, and right now any spare money he had had to go into the practice. Ella had been disappointed, but she’d seemed to understand.
‘I knew Mum’d say no,’ she’d said with a mock-pout, ‘but you used to be such a soft touch.’
Still am, Conor thought. Soft but skint.
The Land Rover roared and gurgled unpromisingly as he manoeuvred through the directionless grey drizzle and traffic to the practice. He missed Kenya on days like this. Hell, who wouldn’t? It wasn’t just the sunshine; he missed the colour. Here, it seemed like there was nothing but grey: grey sky, grey buildings, grey asphalt, the slow grey river.
He thought of Kip. He wondered where she was now. And he realised, with a guilty pang, that it was the first time he’d thought of her in weeks.
Outside the city, as he approached the practice, the feeling of colourlessness started to lift. The trees lining the road seemed refreshed by the rain. A bright cock pheasant was startled out of the thick roadside foliage by the roar of the Land Rover. Ah, let’s be fair, Conor thought: old green Ireland has its moments, too, after all.
He pulled up in the practice courtyard, killed the engine, climbed down – and paused.
Tyre tracks, in the muddied yard.
Not fresh, but not too old, either. Made last night, if he was any judge. He’d done a little tracking out in Kenya. Never thought he’d be putting it to use in a Castlereagh car park.
He didn’t have to move far from the car to see that the main door to the practice was ajar. Dermot? No – his car would have been here. Conor checked his phone. No signal as always. The place was a blackspot – but there was a landline in the practice building.
What the hell would a burglar want to nick from a vet’s surgery? he wondered. Not much money kicking around. An old computer, a few bits of kit, but specialist stuff, nothing you could sell on the streets, surely.
He remembered Dermot had said something about drugs – about kids getting off their heads on bloody horse tranquillisers, nowadays – the old vet had shaken his head in sorry bewilderment. Well, yeah, Conor thought, there was plenty of stuff in there that’d put you on another planet – if you were so desperate for a hit you didn’t mind taking your life in your hands, and didn’t mind delivering the stuff into your bloodstream with a nine-inch cattle syringe…
He started to cautiously towards the door, cutting across the yard at an oblique angle. At the corner of the building there was a clutter of unused fencing material: a half-sack of cement, set hard – a reel of wire – a rusted boltcutter. Conor stopped. He picked up an offcut of two-by-four as long as his arm, and hefted it in his right hand.
With his left, he pushed gently at the half-open door. ‘Who’s there?’ he called. ‘I’m armed!’
No answer.
Whoever it was in there might have a knife, a gun – God knew what. And they’d most likely be desperate. The length of plank felt suddenly puny.
He crept inside. The light was off – but there was a dim glow from the far end of the adjoining corridor. Just the familiar smells: lingering odours of wet fur in the waiting area, a cloying whiff of asepsis from the clinical rooms beyond.
And something else.
Perfume?
He strained his ears but the place was silent bar the imperturbable ticking of the waiting-room clock.
There was no one in the consulting room and no one in the cage-lined corridor where the practice’s few in-patients served their time. At the far end, a bandaged Westie whiffled in its sleep. Conor relaxed a little, but kept the length of two-by-four ready in his hand as he eased open the door to the operating theatre.
The racks of instruments were undisturbed, the drug cabinets closed and locked. No sign of a burglary. No sign of anything untoward.
Then he saw the bundle on the operating table, wrapped in black polythene. He knew straight away it wasn’t an animal carcass.
Not again. It couldn’t be happening again. Marsh was dead.
Conor stepped into the room. There was a note fastened to the wrapping with a scrap of gaffer tape. Not Dermot’s handwriting, and besides, the old boy was over in Donegal visiting his sister for the next couple of days. Conor tore it free of the tape – could hardly read it, his hand was trembling so hard. He squeezed his fingers against his thumb to stop the shaking. Messy handwriting.
For old times’ sake?
Conor’s stomach lurched, and he crumpled the note in his fist. He looked again at the bundle. A part of him still hoping. From a farmer maybe? But it was too big for a dog. Wrong shape for a pig or a sheep.
There’s a phone in the other room, he thought. You don’t even have to look, do you?
But he needed to.
He took a scalpel from the drawer. His pulse pounded in his temple, his throat, his thumb tight against the scalpel’s shaft. It wasn’t fear he was feeling, not any more. He already knew what he was going to find. This was a feeling of oppressiveness: dull, cold, nausea. He incised the plastic sheeting and gently drew it back.
‘God almighty,’ he mumbled.
She couldn’t have been any older than Ella. Naked. Skinny – frail, even. Her hair was dyed a blazing peroxide white and she’d a model’s high cheekbones. Her head was tilted back and her long pale throat looked exposed and vulnerable. Conor drew the sheeting further away. Ribs jutting. A tattoo above her right breast. Track marks on the inside of her arm.
‘God almighty, Patrick,’ he said again.
He stepped back from the table, from the girl’s body. He dropped the scalpel onto the steel worktop.
It was as if the last five and a half years hadn’t happened, as if Jack Marsh had risen up from his grave. But he knew this couldn’t be Marsh. Not a woman. Before it’d been men: men who’d crossed Jack Marsh, or got in his way.
Conor steadied himself with a hand on the worktop. What the hell was Patrick involved in? Conor swallowed hard. Fuck Patrick, he thought – what am I involved in, now?
Conor dragged his gaze away from the sallow face of the girl on the table. He looked up, and caught his own reflection in the polished steel panels of the wall cabinets. He flinched at the sight. From nowhere a phrase came into his head. From a poem, a poem he’d read at school, or at college – a war poem.
His face, Conor remembered, like a devil’s sick of sin.
He re-wrapped the slender body in the polythene as best he could and walked back out into the corridor, closing the door quietly behind him. There was a basin in the consulting room. Conor soaped and rinsed his hands and splashed his face with cold water.
The