A Song for the Dying

39

There was a moment’s silence, then the screaming started. Mrs Kerrigan’s eyes bugged, mouth twisted around bared teeth, sitting on the wet tarmac rocking back and forth, both hands wrapped around her right ankle. Blood dripped from the hole in her shoe.

‘AAAAGGGHHH!’

‘Told you I’d done my research.’ Wee Free tossed the gun away into the darkness. ‘“Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” You had someone shoot Mr Henderson in the foot, and now you’re reaping what you’ve sown.’

‘CHRIST AND FECKING… AAGGHH!’

Rain pounded against the tarmac, sparking in the 4×4’s headlights, battering me down with it.

He bent and picked up the lump hammer again. Twitched it towards me, then the stolen Jaguar. ‘I think it’d be best if you got back to work, don’t you?’

‘JESUS! AAAGGHH BASTARD!’

I grabbed my walking stick and levered myself to my feet. Stared down at the wailing figure curled up at his feet. ‘We have to kill her.’

‘Eye for an eye.’ Wee Free nudged Mrs Kerrigan with his boot. ‘That’s next.’

‘She’ll come after you, and she’ll come after me. She’ll go for our families…’ Oh God — Alice.

I turned, hobbling as fast as I could, straight through puddles, past the Jag. Making for the passageway between the warehouse and the shipping containers.

If she’d done what she was meant to — ran for it — we were all screwed. Soon as she crossed the hundred-yard mark, the alarm would go up and Jacobson’s firearms team would hot-foot it over here. Where all the blood and bodies were.

Shite.

I yanked out my phone and powered up Sabir’s app. The thing took a moment to load, then pinged, slow and steady, the screen amber. Wherever she’d got to, it was no more than sixty-six yards away.

I stopped. Cupped my hands into a loudhailer. ‘ALICE!’ Took another couple of steps towards the containers. Towards the hole we’d made in the fence. ‘ALICE!’

The screen went from orange to yellow, the pinging slowed.

Further, into the darkness. ‘ALICE!’

Green.

A shape lay in the gap between two of the containers.

Joseph.

He was on his back, one arm up above his head, legs bent. The pickaxe handle lay beside him, the thick end smeared with thumb-sized blots of red, just visible in the gloom.

I checked my phone. The screen was green. She was near.

‘Alice?’

Two steps further into the darkness between the containers, the rusting metal walls not much more than shoulder-width apart. The smell of burnt plastic and mould. Another two steps. Then two more.

‘Oh no…’

She was on her side, curled, knees up to her chest, little red shoes sticking out at twenty to nine. One arm draped across herself. A line of blood ran sideways across her forehead. Her satchel lay open beside her, the lump hammer notable by its absence.

Bastard.

I knelt beside her, brushed the damp hair from her face. ‘Alice? Can you hear me?’

Two fingers in the dip behind her jawline… There — a pulse.

Breath hissed out of me. My head curled forwards until it rested on her shoulder. Thank God.

Then something dark burrowed into my chest.

I stood, marched back to where Joseph lay and slammed my good foot into his stomach a couple of times. Nothing. Grabbed the pickaxe handle. ‘You rancid little shite.’

Pick a leg, any leg.

The impact shuddered up the wood and into my hands. Once. Twice. Three times. He didn’t even grunt, just lay there as I shattered the bones.

One more kick for luck, then I dumped the pickaxe handle, scooped Alice up in my arms and hobbled back to the car park, right heel thumping against the ground with every step, knives of dirty ice shredding through the bone and tissue.

By the time I’d made it to the car, there was no sign of Shifty, or Mrs Kerrigan. But Paul Manson was still stretched out on the ground, face up, the bullet holes in his chest and forehead glistening like mini black holes.

Wee Free stood where I’d left him, holding the lump hammer in one hand and my gun in the other. He jerked his chin up. ‘She all right?’

I lowered Alice into the Jaguar, laying her along the back seat. ‘She’s alive.’

‘Good.’ He walked over and nudged Manson with the toe of his shoe. ‘Take this with you. I’ve got enough bodies.’

The door clunked shut. I pulled my shoulders back. ‘Where’s Shifty?’

‘The fat naked guy? I’m keeping him. You get to keep the dead accountant, and the girl. And then you get out there and you find my daughter.’

My mouth was full of sandpaper. ‘I’m not leaving without him.’

‘Jessica’s fifth birthday. We had the party in the hospital so her mother could be there. Smiling away with tubes in her arms and nose, barely able to lift her head off the pillow. And Jessica kisses her on the cheek and tells her she’s going to be an angel soon.’

‘He needs help.’

‘Asks if she’ll come back and be her guardian angel and turn pumpkins into carriages and mice into horses.’

‘Wee… William, he needs a doctor.’

Wee Free raised the gun. ‘When she was six she asked for another slice of wedding cake at the reception, and when her stepmother asked why, she said her mum always loved cake, and that next time we visited her grave we could give it to her.’

I turned my back on him, searched the ground around the car. Where the hell was Mrs Kerrigan’s gun?

Everything was darkness and clumps of weeds and rain-filled potholes.

‘When she was seven, Jessica’s rabbit died. She cried for a week, because rabbits can’t get into heaven, because they haven’t got souls. Took me that long to convince her they don’t go to hell either.’

Where was the sodding gun?

‘She grew up. Got rebellious. Turned her back on the Lord. But she’s still my little girl.’

It wasn’t as if I had another three hundred quid to buy a new one.

‘So this is what’s going to happen. I’m going to keep your friend until you find her. And every day she stays missing, I’m going to send you a bit of him. And if…’ Wee Free’s voice crackled for a moment. He cleared his throat. ‘If she dies-’

‘Let me guess: “Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe”?’

Where the hell was the bloody gun?

Wee Free bent down and picked something up from the ground at his feet. ‘This what you’re looking for?’ Mrs Kerrigan’s semiautomatic. He ejected the clip, dropped it, then tossed the gun over. It clattered against the wet tarmac, two feet from me.

‘Did you kill her?’

‘An eye for an eye. Now find my daughter.’

He climbed behind the wheel of the big 4×4. The engine roared into life. Then the BMW backed away, turned, and headed out through the open gates.

Rain seeped through my jacket, stuck my trousers to my legs, dripped from my face as the car’s tail-light glow faded into the night.

Bastard.

Now there was nothing left but the lights from the closed cash-and-carry next door.

Don’t just stand there. Get the scene tidied and get the hell out of it before someone calls 999 to report the gunshots.

I snapped on a pair of gloves from my investigation kit. Picked up the gun. Then limped over to where Wee Free had been standing and collected the magazine. Four bullets left.

It clacked back into the handgrip, then the whole thing went in an evidence bag. Just in case. No way in hell I was getting my fingerprints on the murder weapon.

I popped the Jag’s boot, pulled out a couple of the rubble sacks and worked them over Paul Manson’s head and shoulders, covering the mess where the back of his head used to be. Dragged and shoved him into the boot. Stood, staring down at his body, still bound with duct tape.

Killed because he’d boasted about his family at a charity dinner.

‘I know it doesn’t help, but I’m sorry.’

I clunked the lid shut.

The firelighters stank of paraffin as I clicked them into chunks and scattered them across the driest bits of wood I could find — sticks and twigs and newspaper at the bottom, bigger branches on top. All arranged in a ditch beside a drystane dyke in the depths of Moncuir Wood. It’d probably been a farm at some point in the distant past, slowly smothered beneath the boughs of beech and pine. Now it was just a few lines of stone drawn through the dead nettles and mourning brambles. Secluded and forgotten.

Only the darkness and the rain for company.

Paul Manson seemed to have got a lot heavier since death. Who would have thought four little bullets would weigh so much? I dragged him over and tipped him in on top of the sticks.

His top half was still covered with the rubble sack, what was left of his head pressing against the black plastic, making it bulge.

At least I couldn’t see his face.

I stood. Rubbed at the small of my back.

Picked up the five litre container of methylated spirits.

‘Like I said, I’m sorry…’ I poured half of it over him, let it seep around his body and into the wood beneath him. Then tossed in a couple of lit matches. Stepped back and watched it take hold.

Branches popped and crackled, tendrils of smoke joining the blue flicker of burning spirit. Then the kindling caught and gold joined the blue.

OK, so there wasn’t nearly enough wood to cremate the body, but that wasn’t the point. It just needed to burn long enough and hot enough to get rid of any DNA and trace evidence Alice and I had left.

Half an hour later, I shovelled dirt over what was left, and limped back to the lay-by.

The Jaguar sat on one side, Alice’s Suzuki on the other.

The methylated spirit nipped my eyes, catching my throat as I drenched the Jag’s upholstery with the last two-and-a-bit litres. I chucked the shovel into the back, along with the tarpaulin, then wound down the windows and closed the doors.

There was one chunk of firelighter left in the bottom of the box. I dropped a lit match on it and waited for it to catch…

A voice behind me: ‘Ash?’

I turned.

Alice wobbled on unsteady legs, one arm out, holding onto the Suzuki’s roof.

‘You’re awake.’

She blinked at the Jaguar. Pointed. ‘What…?’

‘It’s OK, get back in the car. I’ll only be a minute.’ Smoke oozed out from the cardboard box in my hand. I tossed it in through the driver’s window and the methylated spirit went up with a whump. Gouts of flame belched from the open windows, curling up into the rainy night as the first wash of volatiles burned themselves out.

The lay-by was thrown into sharp relief for a moment, then the light faded, leaving everything wrapped in gloom again.

I snapped off my SOC gloves and lobbed them in after the box. ‘I’ve lost count of the times we’ve turned up to one of these only to find the silly sod who stole it lying on the other side of the road with second-degree burns and a face full of safety glass. They don’t wind the windows down, so the whole thing’s just one big bomb.’

It was a fiddle, but I dug the sim card I’d used to call Manson out of my unofficial phone and chucked it into the burning Jag. Replaced it with the original one.

Leaving nothing to connect us.

Alice’s face rippled and swam in the light of the blazing car. A massive lump sat on her left temple, it’s crown cracked and oozing blood. ‘Where’s Paul Manson?’

OK.

It took a bit, but I managed a smile for her. ‘I got Witness Protection to pick him up. He’s going to turn Queen’s Evidence.’

Her mouth twisted. ‘Don’t lie to me!’

‘I’m not. He’s-’

‘Ash, I saw you carrying his body off into the woods. You said you were going to get him to testify!’

Brilliant. Exactly what I needed to round the day off. As if things weren’t bad enough…

‘It was Mrs Kerrigan, she-’

‘You said no one had to die, I trusted you.’

‘I did my best, OK?’ I waved a hand at the burning car. ‘He was lying there on the ground and she shot him. Four times. Grinning while she did it.’ Sentenced to death because he was boring at dinner. ‘There wasn’t anything I could do.’ My shoulders dipped. ‘I’m sorry. I really, really am.’

Alice leaned back against the tree, covered her eyes with her hands. ‘Oh God…’

I cleared my throat. Looked away so she couldn’t see my face. ‘Rule number four: he was a mob accountant. Soon as he started stealing from Andy Inglis he was dead. It’s nobody’s fault but his. His and the people he worked for.’

Liar. It was all mine. Just like everything else. Just like it always was.