OK, I’d always intended to pull this next part off by myself. The only problem I had with it was it involved lifting. And, as I say, I avoid anything that involves lifting, if I can. Then Corn came along.
When it was over, it had to look like three deaths had occurred through sheer bad luck. Crime couldn’t come into it. The fourth death, Anne Donavan’s, would be put down to Picasso. That’s how Chilly Winters would initially see it. He’d have already linked right into the unlikely coincidence of Picasso just happening to strike the same night three others had died on the same farm. Who could miss it? Then Winters’d discover what else I was gonna leave for him. He’d know the truth, or what he thought was the truth: that Lucille was behind it, but that she had connived to cover it up so she could get her hands on what the Donavans had.
As I say, because I’d had over twenty years to study the Donavans’ habits, I knew what all four did from week to week. Amy’s love of dancing; Edna, who sat stuffing herself every night in front of the TV and rarely went to bed before one; their nights at bingo; Conor’s weekly card game, his involvement with the Irish Horse Board, a divorcee he kept company on Saturday nights; Anne, who ran a horse riding business, and attended shows, showing her mare …
They say actors should never work with animals or kids. Well, it’s a load of crap as far as scams are concerned. The plan I’d perfected had not only begun with a kid, it was to continue with Anne’s mare and a bull.
And since I’d already kicked it off by feeding Anne’s mare a couple of times, when all the Donavans were safely tucked up in their scratchers, I was now lining up for the net with my old mate Corn. Appropriate name for what goes on down on the farm.
Thirty-five minutes after I’d emailed him, I watched his Transit drive past the entrance to the riding stables. He parked farther along the road and walked back. From behind a hedge at the other end of the field, with a pair of night-vision goggles, I saw him enter the field and go over to the mare. She was nudging a foal. It was lying flat out on the grass. He picked it up, carried it over to a drainage ditch, the mare tailing after him, put it down, got into the ditch and lifted it in. Then he went across to the cottage, leaving her standing peering into the ditch, snorting and prodding the way horses do when some fucker’s just dumped their kid in a dark and dingy ditch.
So far he’d carried out my instructions perfectly.
Now in preparation for this over the years, which included finding out a lot about horses, my problem was how the fuck do you make a mare foal when you want her to? Well, the answer is you can’t. Nature’s nature and that’s all there is to it. Then again, maternity wards bring women on all the time. They bypass nature. The truth of this was that if the mare didn’t cooperate, then it was simply back to plan B, then C, D, E and all the rest of them. I’d an alphabetful. But the way I’d worked this particular one out was based on something that happened to me when I was a kid.
Horses carry for eleven months and one week, and foals born five or six weeks premature rarely survive – something to do with their lungs forming during the last weeks of gestation according to my vet book. In other words, they’re born with hardly any lungs. Which got me thinking.
When I left that home, I’d nowhere to go. I slept in containers in the docks, used the wash-and-brush-up facilities public toilets had in those days and got a job in a rag-and-bone yard, cash in hand, four quid a week, on the north side of the city centre, the working-class area.
Men used to rent a handcart for ten bob a day (that’s fifty pence to you younger ones). They were the two-wheel type you had to push. Stick yourself between the shafts and sweat your bollocks off. You could rent a pony to pull it for a quid a day. Most men pushed. They’d buy a basket of delft, go round the houses – ‘Any rags? Scrap iron?’ – and give maybe a cup in exchange for a few woollens or an old fire grate – anything they could weigh in. Some men rented carts and went down the docks and bought a load of herrings and flogged them round the streets at a shilling a dozen; fruit and veg was another one – and bags of coal. I’m talking about men who were signing on the dole and doing the double.
Because there was no grass in this area – there wasn’t a garden within a mile, let alone a field, just streets of terraced houses with no bathrooms – horses were given a nosebag: oats mainly, hay rarely.
But the thing I remember most were the horses’ stomachs. It used to amaze me that such big strong animals could be so weak in the stomach. Horses can’t throw up the way you and I can. The kind of gut-ache they get can often lead to colic. It makes them sweat and they keep looking back at their flanks where the pain is – their intestines have twisted and they’re wondering what the fuck’s going on. A fine healthy specimen can go down and not get up again and be dead within two hours.
There are different types of colic, and without going into it in detail the horses round what I soon began to call ‘our way’ – mainly because the people were friendly and made me feel like one of them – sometimes got colic, because they’d eaten their straw bed or had been fed too quickly after building up a sweat between the shafts. To regulate their diet, the old guy I worked for used to send me up to the graveyard to get a sackful of grass. I’d no shears or anything. I had to pull it out by the roots. Sometimes, if you were lucky, they’d just mown between the graves and you could grab that. Though if old Francie McArdle had known, he’d have given me a boot in the arse. Diesel from the mower on the grass wasn’t any good for horses either, y’see. Sensitive bastards.
Francie was a thieving old goat, by the way. He was loaded, though to look at him you’d think he hadn’t tuppence. He used to wear an old fawn overcoat tied round his waist with a length of rope. If you stole lead off a roof and threw it on his scales – the old low flatbed type I’m talking about – he’d stick his shin against the bed to stop it going down as far as it should so it would register less weight and you’d get less money than you were entitled to. He’d strike up some interesting conversation or crack a joke, thinking you weren’t wise.
‘Get away t’fuck, ya aul’ bollocks ye,’ I’d’ve hit him with. My accent was a bit thicker in those days and not that of the suave sophisticate before you today.
He ended up having to let me go. Some fucker set fire to his yard one night when he was well stocked with rags and the whole lot went up.
The reason I’m telling you all this is because when I went and saw the state of McArdle’s yard – carts burned and all that – I wondered where the horses were. And I asked Francie. I was really only interested in one of them: a white pony mare called Peggy. She was in foal and I’d wanted to see it being born.
‘She lost it, Red,’ he said.
‘Whaddaya mean?’
‘She took fright and it brought her on early.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Sure I’d nowhere t’keep her, Red.’
He’d sold her to the knacker man for dog meat. She was getting on. That’s why he had her in foal. He wanted a replacement out of her before she copped it. The rest went to tinkers.
And this experience got me thinking. If fear could bring a mare on, was there any other way to make her foal before her time? So I looked into it. A vet book told me that by mixing follicle-inducing stimulants in with a mare’s feed, you could bring her into season quicker, for covering, but that you had to be sure you didn’t let a mare who was already in foal eat the same feed, otherwise she’d give birth prematurely – within forty-eight hours usually – but the foal would die. Because of that lung thing, y’know, it wouldn’t have a breath. Horses need breath. Bit of technical info for you there.
So I’m saying to myself: Conor’s a stallion man. He’d have a supply of stimulants. Lucille had gone to Clonkeelin. It doesn’t take a genius – after the event – to see that she could have got access to them. What if I stuff Anne’s mare with stimulants? All you have to do is shake a bucket and she’ll come over, tip them out and away you go, leaving her to it. And since mares invariably wait for the cover of darkness before foaling – gut-instinct survival crap that’s in them going back to the days when predators were knocking about and would’ve eaten the foal – the chances are she’ll do the same.
So I went back out to see how my bucket had worked, night three, Saturday, and found her lying on her side. And because the Donavans had no reason to be keeping a strict eye on her, because she wasn’t due for nearly six weeks, I more or less had a free hand.
Anyway, she got to her feet when she saw me coming, and I shone a torch on her rear end and saw that her croup had dropped – the croup is the part between the top of the rump and the tail. When it loses its roundness and slackens into a slightly concaved state, it’s a sign that the muscles around her birth canal are relaxing to enable the passage of the foal. She started nudging her flanks with her nose. The pain of coming into labour makes a mare do that and stand with her legs stretched out, like a rocking horse. Her waters had burst and the membrane covering the foal’s hoof was showing.
I left her to it and went back to the driveway: horses can get nervous with strangers around and hold off until they’ve gone. Half an hour later she went down, and I saw her continually looking back at her rear end and heaving. I went along behind the hedge of the adjoining field and had a closer look. The foal was on its way. Two tiny hooves had emerged, and I saw the membrane covering its snout being sucked in and out over its nostrils as it fought for air. Then its little head came forward, and the mare got to her feet. On average, foaling from this point usually lasts about fifteen minutes, with the mare getting up and down, until the widest part – the shoulders – emerge, then the rest comes much more easily.
When the mare was down, and with junior halfway out, I climbed through the fence and clipped a lunge lead to her halter. We were in business. All I had to do was arrange for the foal to fall into a six-foot-deep drainage ditch. A drainage ditch, for you city folk, is a trench that runs round the edge of a field. In winter when the ground is constantly wet, the rain drains into it through perforated pipes just below the topsoil. Drier land means better grass and fewer rushes. As far as my use of it was concerned, well it’s like this: because I’d studied this for so long, and because the law had first to see this not as a deliberate killing – make that killings – I’d been teaching myself all about life down on the farm.
And if you’re gonna arrange deaths that don’t have foul play stamped on them, use what the person does on a daily basis. That’s the conclusion I’d come to. In this case, farming books will tell you how to avoid fatalities. By reversing the process, they tell you how to bring them about.
This, for instance, was based on a farmer whose mare was due to foal. He went down in the middle of the night to see how she was getting on and found her flat out with her rear end hanging over a ditch, foaling. Being a dumb animal, she wasn’t able to tell what she was doing. The foal literally passed out of her and went ‘bonk’ into the ditch. The farmer went in to rescue it, and dumbo, all worried because she couldn’t see her baby, in a rush to get to her feet, back-kicked him, tried to go in and save junior and squashed her owner to death. It didn’t say whether Chilly Winters took her hoofprints and got her twenty years. Tragic, I know. But that’s the way it goes.
And Picasso was rapping Edna’s door. As per the instructions I’d emailed his laptop. He knew where to go and what to do. No detail was overlooked. I’d even included a few suggestions on how to get her to cooperate, plus info about her and their vet. The dialogue was his own. I was standing behind a hedge at the front of the cottage in my capacity as official observer.
She was in front of the TV with a fag in her mouth and her rollers in. She opened the window.
‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘So sorry to bother you. Might your name be Edna Donavan?’
‘It is, yes.’
‘Well, in that case, Amy sent me for you.’
‘Amy?’
‘Amy is the name I was given. I was fishing the river then making my way across the field when a lady of that name, tending a mare, called me, and here I am. I’ll be more than pleased to take you to her. I have to go back for my rod in any event.’
‘This is all very strange.’
‘Apropos?’
‘Eh?’
Yeah, it was definitely his own dialogue. I don’t remember including any apropos.
‘What’s she doing with the mare this time o’ night and her away to the dance?’
‘There’s a man called Cormac with her. He appears to have hurt his leg. Amy mentioned that you had nursing experience and may be of assistance.’
Homework. It’s the only way to get away with anything. Edna used to work in the General.
‘I’ll get my coat,’ she said. She also put on her wellingtons and Picasso shone a torch and led the way. I traipsed along behind a hedge for scene three.
The mare was still peering into the ditch and snorting when they reached her, and Edna took it by its halter and went to soothe it. ‘There, girl, there,’ she said, trying to calm her, and at the same reminding Picasso what he’d said about Amy and Cormac. ‘Where are they?’
‘In there, madam.’
‘Where?’
‘There.’
I couldn’t see the bottom of the ditch, but when he pushed her she had to have landed straight on top of the foal. And she must’ve been eighteen stone. No newborn could’ve survived that, lungs or no lungs.
The mare started getting into an even bigger state over her foal and Picasso tried to lead her away. But she wouldn’t follow. She kept straining at the neck into the ditch.
So he clipped away under her girth with the crop to get her going and led her down into the ditch, jumping back up onto the grass as he trotted her along it towards where Edna was lying.
But the mare stopped. I heard Edna wailing, ‘Oh my God. In the name of God,’ and generally making it known that she wasn’t too keen on Picasso’s equestrian activities. He had to shut her up. They were behind a hedge and couldn’t be seen from the road, but with the mare going mad and Edna going mad and her rollers coming undone, a farmer out tending stock might’ve heard. As might Anne Donavan, who was up at the house watching TV. Conor himself was with his fancy piece and wouldn’t be back till later. But there was still too much noise.
Picasso slipped a hood over the mare’s head so she couldn’t see, then, with the riding crop, laid into her rear end, which was sensitive from having just given birth. What could she do but bolt forward on top of Edna?
That Picasso’s a fucking eejit. He kept apologising to the dumb bastard every time he hit it. ‘Oh I’m so sorry, my darling, I’m so sorry.’ Fuck’s sake.
She backed up then reared on her hind legs, and he apologised again with the crop, and it sent her hinds forward enough to ensure that when she brought her forelegs down, they hit the spot. Which shut Ed up. But was she dead? He couldn’t tell without getting in himself and checking. Dodgy. The mare might have done the same to him. A mother, head away, protecting her young – not recommended. I always advise people to stay away from mad mares who’re protecting their young.
Though he did need to give Edna a couple more goes to make sure.
He got on the mare’s back. Risky. That trench was up to her withers and only a few feet wide. She could cripple him. Still, the photograph on his living-room wall said his arse had been on a horse before; he obviously knew what he was doing. He fed the lunge lead through her mouth and, using it like a bit and reins, backed her up then kicked her onto Ed and junior. Hard going with all that bucking and screeching. Difficult to be accurate.
Then she reared and when her fores landed I heard a crack.
I doubt there was a roller in place. My guess was he’d give her one more go for luck, and that did it. Difficult one to call – how many times you need to trample an eighteen-stone woman with a one-ton mare to do the trick. Having administered a final trot or two, that was him for the night, as far as riding without a safety helmet was concerned. He went across to the cowshed.
I went and shone my trusty torch and had a look at how Edna was managing. When the light hit her face, I thought I was looking at a Halloween mask. Bye, sis.
But was the damage consistent with this type of … ‘misadventure’? How the fuck should I know? Who’s to say how much trampling a mare would be capable of when trying to save its foal? That’s how this would look – should, anyway – to the law. For a while. Until they realised Lucille had orchestrated it, as I’ve said.
As for the foal itself, I could now see that he hadn’t thrown Edna on top of it. I think that Picasso’s a bit of an animal lover. It still looked dead though. The mare was nudging it but it wasn’t moving.
Now, as you know, one of the most important ingredients in farming comes from cows. Then farmers spread it to make the grass grow. Years ago a man might’ve had an old byre in which to shelter his livestock over the winter months; today it’s intensive state-of-the-art slatted sheds – barns with slatted flooring, each with a centre aisle between two holding bays. Cattle are taken off the land at the back end of the year when the grass has stopped growing and kept in a shed where they eat silage, which is grass cut in spring or summer, rolled into a four-foot bale and wrapped in black bin-liner-type plastic. You must’ve seen them in fields; they look like giant snooker balls from a distance. The grass gradually breaks down, ferments you might say, in the plastic, which gives it a high acid content. It’s not only good for fattening cattle; it also makes it easier for the farmer to look after them. Once eaten, the silage passes through their systems and comes out the other end as slurry then falls down through the slats they’re standing on into a man-made pit the size of a swimming pool – effectively we’re talking about a swimming pool of liquid cow shit. Then comes spring, the cattle are let back onto the land and some of the slats are removed to allow a pipe from a slurry spreader to be lowered down into it so it can be sucked up and sprayed over the land as fertiliser. All very recyclable, and all very boring.
Unless you have an alternative use for it.
Poisonous gas builds up in this slurry. Methane. And that’s when it becomes interesting. Which is why I chose it. They’d removed the slats for the slurry man to come and empty the pit. Every year they did this. And they’d brought their bull in.
He’d been out all winter. But his ladies were out grazing. And he didn’t like that. He was keen to earn his pay, wanted to be out playing with them. Which meant he was in a bad mood – and that made him dangerous. Horny bulls kill ten men in Ireland every year. More in a good year.
This one was in the left-hand-side holding bay. Picasso was shaking a bucket of beef nuts beside him to let him smell them. He put the bucket in the opposite holding bay, opened the bull’s gate, got the fuck out of the way, watched the bull cross over to the holding bay opposite and get tucked into the nuts then went back up and closed the gate, locking the bull in the bay where the slats had been removed.
Oh, just in case you’re wondering why I’d chosen Amy for this, instead of Edna, well Edna was too fat, y’see. Amy was only a skinny little thing – about seven stone. Whoever removed those slats removed only enough for Amy to fall through. For Edna, a few more would have to have been taken out – a job for two men. Also, if need be, Picasso could carry Amy over to the slats and drop her down through them into the pit, whereas he would never have managed Ed. He’d have had to drag her and that would leave marks. I had to credit Lucille, in the law’s eyes, with the cop on to think of these things.
I saw headlights pulling in at the front of the cottage. Amy had come home from the dance to put her feet up. But there was one waltz yet to go. Or shall I call it a tango? With the bull.
Picasso put on his bee-keeper’s gear, overalls, gloves and a veil – he didn’t look like a blushing bride in it – and came up to the top of the centre aisle where someone had brought in jumping poles to paint. They stood upright against the wall. To their left was a wasps’ nest.
For this to work, y’see, the law’d have to at first conclude that Amy came home, saw the TV on, wondered where her sister was, saw the light on in the shed, went in to check, found that the bull was loose and in the wrong bay, tried to shoo it back to where it should have been – out of harm’s way from the open slats – and found that it, coming into the mating season and pissed off, ran at her, hit the pole and broke open the nest. The wasps went mad and started stinging all round them, which sent the bull nuts and he chased Amy, who couldn’t see too well with all the wasps stinging her eyes, fell into the pit and was poisoned by the gas – it acts in seconds.
So Picasso took hold of a pole and cracked open the nest. Then he bolted for the door and left the wasps to blame the bull. I wasn’t sure about this bit. I didn’t know how wasps blamed bulls. Could they sting through hide for instance? Leather’s tough. Then again, hide gets a good deal of its toughness only in the tanning process. Besides, it had two eyes, two nostrils, a mouth, open ears and balls the size of milk bottles to sting. How the latter’s performance might later be affected, I wasn’t sure of either. I’ve never performed with my nuts covered in wasp stings, so I can’t say.
By the time I’d crept round from my ringside seat – a hole high up in the cowshed wall where a block had been left out for ventilation – (I’d covered it with a little mesh to keep the stingers at bay) – Picasso had removed his veil, gone over to the cottage, rapped on the door and was talking to Amy through the open living-room window.
‘Excuse me,’ he was saying. ‘Might your name be Amy?’
‘Yes. And you are?’
‘I am with the vet: Mr Feeney.’
‘What’s Feeney doing here?’
‘Administering to the bull. It has slipped its moorings, so to speak, and has injured itself as a result. Your sister Edna is asking for you.’
‘Edna’s asking for me? I thought she was in bed.’
‘She may well have been. Now she is in the slatted cowshed with the vet.’
‘What does she want me for?’
‘She is of the opinion that you are the one who normally deals with the bull.’
‘Why didn’t she come herself? Why did she send you?’
‘I volunteered. Would you like me to fetch her?’
‘No, it’s all right. I’d better come.’
She opened the door and followed him round behind the cottage and halfway across the yard then stopped at the noise coming from inside the shed. The bull was wrecking the place.
‘Is he loose?’
‘He is. Though he presents no immediate danger.’
‘What’s all that buzzing?’
‘Perhaps the vet has his electric shaver on. To shave around the wound before stitching.’
‘What – with him going buck mad?’
‘He’s waiting until the anaesthetic takes effect.’
‘Where’s his van?’
‘We drove it straight in and locked the doors in case the bull got out.’
‘Oh.’ Talkative bitch – I thought she was never gonna shut up. ‘I’d be afraid to go any further with all that commotion. I’ve never heard him this bad. Edna?’
‘I doubt she will hear you.’
She saw Picasso’s bee-keeper’s veil lying near the wicker door. ‘What’s that?’
He got it and put it on. She didn’t fancy him in it. And no way was she going anywhere near that door.
‘This?’
‘Yes. What’s it for?’
Fuck knows what she thought with him standing there in that get-up. He looked like something out of a sci-fi movie. She made to back away and Picasso scooped her into his arms.
I didn’t like it. A bull charging her down would not leave paw marks on her. A small point, I know. But if forensic found bruises consistent with being grabbed, it might ruin everything. Still, what was I worrying about? Lucille would get the blame when the time came.
Picasso opened the wicker and turfed her in then went in after her.
And I returned to my air vent. Amy was standing screaming and grabbing her hair as the wasps got to work. Picasso lifted her over the metal feeder into the bay where the bull was going mad. Then he stepped back.
To be fair to her, she didn’t faint. She just stood in the corner wailing. She didn’t try to climb back out either. Whether she was in too much of a state or she knew Picasso would prevent her, I couldn’t say. The wasps were keeping her mind on other things.
The strange thing was the bull never charged. I thought he’d be so out of his head that he would’ve gone straight for her. Maybe she’d been good to him. You can never plan for how an animal will react.
Picasso climbed over, lifted her into the aisle then carried her up and turfed her back over the feeder rail to where the bull was.
The bull was bucking so much he couldn’t help but ram her. He bucked all round him, caught her with a rear hind in the small of her back and bolted for the opposite end of the bay as she slid down the wall. The methane in the silage’d finish her off.
Picasso went in and dropped her through the opening in the slats. Then he opened the gate to let the animal have the run of the place. There was no need for him to stay behind and check that the fumes’d finish her off. Everybody needs oxygen and there wasn’t any down there.
She didn’t try to climb back out. I couldn’t hear her spluttering as the slurry covered her face. The bull was making too much noise for that.
I went to my car, emailed Picasso’s laptop in his Transit (I’d told him to bring it with him), telling him what to do next: see to Conor then Anne. Job done.
All the Donavans would be gone.
And I would have what I had wanted since I was nine years old.