Slaughter's hound

20

Most Irish cops, freshly minted, are sent to Dublin once they leave Templemore. The idea being, if you can handle the Dublin streets anywhere else will be a doddle. If you grew up in Dublin, they’ll probably send you to Limerick. Same idea, more knives.

The last place they’ll send you is home, the theory being that you’re far less likely to be bribed, corrupted, threatened or inclined to turn a blind eye if you’re parachuted into a place where you know no one and no one knows you, or your family.

This also applies to the judiciary.

Why it doesn’t apply to the politicians is anyone’s guess. Maybe they’re born of nobler stuff than cops and judges.

Anyway, the theory is sound, but in practice it has its drawbacks. For one, it promotes a them-and-us mentality, which means most young cops pick up their local knowledge from other cops, which in turn means that one cop’s personal experience can filter down through the years into a prejudice against a particular individual or family, and become a self-perpetuating myth.

The fact that such prejudice is generally hard-earned and well-deserved is neither here nor there.

The cop stationed outside the door of my room, Pamela reckoned, was nervous. Not because he knew me, but because the only things he did know about me were that I’d done time for killing my brother and was liable to embark on a homicidal frenzy when I woke to discover that the hospital corners on my sheets weren’t sharp enough to shave with.

So Pamela said. I didn’t have the strength to check the colour of the sheets, let alone the quality of the corners.

I’d woken drenched in sweat to a world that was shorter and narrower than when I went away. The ceiling lower, pressing down. For a second I’d thought I was back in my cell, that it’d all been another dream. But the sheets felt crisp.

Then came a muted beep.

I sensed rather than smelled the cloying blanket of antiseptic warmth. A tube in my arm, the bag of clear fluid suspended high above my head. Beneath that a bedside locker, and on top of that a jug of water, a plastic beaker standing sentry, half-full.

My throat felt like it was growing cacti for fun. I reached for the beaker and-

Bad mistake.

I’d been booby-trapped, some sadistic fiend laying in tiny coils of molten razor-wire just below the skin. Ripped free, they sent an agonising jolt whiplashing out from under my left eye, all the way down through my shoulder and into my left elbow.

I lay there panting hot and raw. Sweat or tears or something acid burning my right eye.

I must have grunted.

‘You’re awake.’ She swam into view with a swish of starch, her shoes all a-squeak on a floor carpeted with orgasmic mice. She tried for severe but she was too surprised to make it work. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Shit.’ A croak. ‘How’s Ben?’

‘He’s fine. Do you want a drink?’

I nodded. Another bad mistake. My head felt like a balloon going over an underwater falls. The wooziness spiralled away down my spine, became a whirlpool. She held the beaker to my lips. ‘Sip at it,’ she said.

It took a combination of Napoleonic ambition and Puritan masochism, but I managed three sips. It was warm and tasted faintly of dust and something antiseptic but as it trickled down my throat the cacti blossomed into a field of damp buttercups, gleaming. She took the beaker away. ‘Are you in pain?’ she said.

‘Ben.’

‘You need to rest.’ It was an order rather than advice. ‘You’ve suffered a trauma to the-’

‘Ben.’

She was smaller than I remembered, stretching on tip-toe to reach around and plump the pillows. A faint whiff of the cinnamon gum she favoured. Up close her eyes were no less hypnotic than they’d been the last time we’d been that close, although I’d have remembered them more fondly if they’d met mine when she spoke about Ben.

‘He’s fine, Harry. Stable, in no danger.’

An entirely practical woman, Pamela Burns. Efficient and cynical and not given to overtly feminine ploys. At least, that’s how she looked from a distance, petite and largely unremarkable and unconcerned with convincing strangers otherwise. But if you were to jog her elbow at a crowded bar — Fiddlers, say — and spill some of the three G amp;Ts she was carrying away onto her wrist, and she was to glare up at you with those round brown eyes flecked with a kind of green mica, the crown of her head just about level with your chin, and she was to say something harsh that you didn’t hear because the music was too loud and you’d had two pints too many, and were already perning in the gyre of those eyes, round as moons and exerting roughly the same gravity — well, you get the gist.

It had ended badly between us, but then such things end badly or they don’t end at all. Sligo being the size it is, we’d bumped into one another a couple of times afterwards, and a detente had been established, one that had thawed a little when Ben arrived — I’d met her the night he was born, staggering out into a shiny new world as she came on for the early shift — and later became a fully fledged truce, and we the battle-scarred veterans not quite capable yet of sharing our war stories, when she got married herself and had two kids, boys or girls I could never remember.

I hadn’t seen her since I’d gone away, and now here she was, a thumb on my pulse. Her fingers felt cool and dry and somehow essential.

Slowly, very slowly, I raised my right hand to my face and touched fingertips to my left eye. It felt swollen and gauzy. Above the swelling where my eye should have been I came upon a soft wadding. An eye-patch of sorts.

‘Where is he?’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘Ben.’

‘Ben’s fine,’ she said again. Her gaze flickered away as she tugged a sheet corner straight. ‘And you need to relax and get some rest. You really shouldn’t be awake yet.’

‘Sure. Okay.’

She plucked a pen from her breast pocket and moved away to the bottom of the bed, unhooked the chart. The sip of water sloshed around greasily as I threw back the sheet, slid out. She glanced up in time to see me pluck the tube from my arm. A three-inch needle came away too. Spots of blood spattered the sheet, Pollock-style, but Pamela had never been a fan of abstract expressionism.

‘Harry! What the fuck are you-’

‘Where is he?’

She backed away to the door. ‘You can’t leave,’ she said. She was firm on the principle although her voice was a bit shaky. I was still holding the tube, the needle pointing at her. I put it down on the bed.

‘Where’s my clothes?’

‘It’s not me who’ll be stopping you,’ she said. She put a hand behind her and twisted the handle, and I realised she wasn’t checking her escape route but ensuring it was still locked. This was when she told me about the cop stationed outside. There were more downstairs, waiting for me to wake up so they could take a blood-level reading.

‘For what, booze?’ She nodded. ‘They won’t find anything,’ I said. ‘I haven’t had a drink since God was a boy.’ Then it occurred to me. ‘What time is it?’

‘Nearly midnight. But look, they want to talk to you about the accident too. Best if you just take it easy for now, get as strong as you can.’

‘I’m grand, really. And I’m not going anywhere they won’t find me. All I want is to see Ben.’

‘I told you, Ben is doing-’

‘Pam,’ I said. ‘I’m not a good person. We both know this. But I’m not dangerous to you or anyone else in the hospital, and I’m definitely not dangerous to Ben. What matters now is I was the one driving when we got rammed, when Ben was my responsibility, so I need to-’

‘Rammed?’

‘Rammed, yeah. The guy ran us off the road.’

‘The Guards say it was a one-car accident. That you lost control.’

‘They didn’t see the dents in the side of the car?’

‘They’re saying the car’s a write-off.’ A doubtful note. ‘It rolled over three or four times. They say it’s a miracle you both got out alive.’

‘What else are they saying?’

She was wavering. ‘I really shouldn’t be telling you anything. I’ve been ordered to ring downstairs as soon as you’re awake, let the Guards-’

‘Ordered?’

‘That’s right.’ Her lips thinned. ‘It’s an order. Just like we were ordered to sign you in under Gerry Smith, and Ben as Francis Browne.’

‘Listen, Pam.’ I gripped the sheet as a wave of nausea rippled up my throat, the adrenaline buzz already starting to seep away. ‘Someone tried to kill me and didn’t care Ben was in the car. My only kid, and when it mattered most I couldn’t fucking protect him.’ I closed my eyes, squeezing tightly, then opened them again. The world was still fuzzy around its seams. ‘When the cops ask what happened, I’ll tell them I threatened you with the needle, you had no choice. And I’m begging you.’

I swallowed against some rising bile and maybe she thought I was choking back a sob. Anyway, she took a deep breath and let it out slow, shook her head, then went to the wardrobe to retrieve my jeans and T-shirt, laying them on the bed along with my socks and jocks.

She had to help me dress, filling me in on the events of the past four hours as she eased my limbs into various openings.

Dee had heard the accident happening, the crunching and glass smashing, rang 999 straight away. Christ alone knows how long we’d have been in the gully if she hadn’t. I’d taken a blow to the face, from the steering wheel they guessed, which had fractured my cheekbone and left my eye so swollen it was completely closed. On the plus side, and apart from the concussion that was causing thirst, blurred vision, nausea and disorientation, I’d had a solid four hours of sleep for the first time in a week. I’ve walked away from stag parties in worse shape.

Ben didn’t walk anywhere. The Audi had hit passenger-side first. They’d had to cut him out and he had yet to regain consciousness. His left arm was broken in two places and he had a compound fracture in his left femur. A tangerine-sized lump on his right temple was bleeding into the brain pan.

The cops were downstairs in the canteen, scarfing free coffee and complaining about the stale muffins. Pamela was supposed to tell the doctor the minute I woke up.

‘Do it,’ I said, trying to tie my trainers in through a blur of fingers and laces. ‘I don’t want to cause you any problems.’

‘A dollar short and a decade late.’ The hint of a sad smile. ‘Wait here.’

She unlocked the door, went outside. I snuck up to the door, heard her tell the cop I was coming round, I’d be fit for interview in another ten minutes or so. No, he couldn’t use his mobile phone, and she didn’t care if his two-way was on the blink, the use of mobile phones was banned on this floor in case they interfered with hospital equipment. Twenty seconds later she slipped inside again.

‘I’d say you’ve about fifteen minutes,’ she said.

She stuck a Band-Aid on the needle’s oozing wound and told me the ICU was three floors up. Then she gave me two Dilaudid and a ten-minute start. Which is as fair as you can ask of any woman.