Corn doesn’t take any chances. He got those two punters of Gemma’s to pay him by playing one off against the other in case the law turned up. Crafty bastard. I might use that trick myself sometime. I’d tailed him to see how he’d do it. He was in the vicinity, they made the drops then he disappeared into a field before heading off. Alternative uses for waste bins. Anyway, his fee had been well paid – that was the main thing. Time to make him work for it.
I got on to his laptop and told him to get his scalpels sharpened.
Then I went to visit my family – what was left of it. I was gonna get Corn to deal with Conor as well as Anne, but I was wise to the bastard: he’d only do one then demand a couple more of Gemma’s punters before doing the other. I wanted it over with, so I decided to do Conor myself.
The same method of thinking applied. This would later seem like Lucille’s handiwork.
I parked along the road and cut up through the fields to Conor’s place. I didn’t tell him his brother was coming home to see him or anything; wanted it to be a surprise. Family members are always surprising one another, or so I’m told. I only know about families from what I’m told, and from what I’m told, I’m glad I only know what I’m told.
Not that Conor would see it like that. After I’d finished with him, he wouldn’t be seeing anything. I’d brought him a little goodbye present: formaldehyde and potassium permanganate.
He goes around checking his stock, y’see, before calling it a night. He was turning the key in the tack room when I commenced my homecoming.
‘Well, brother,’ I said, ‘how’s it going?’ The ‘brother’ bit didn’t register. He thought I was using it in the colloquial sense. Startled the shit out of him though, me stepping out from behind his horsebox, but he didn’t say as much; just a quick check of the old composure, then a ‘Who are you?’ Marvellous, isn’t it – all these years and not even as much as a hug.
‘Inside.’ This startler worked better: it was made of iron and fired bullets. Though, as with Skeffington, I’d no intentions of shooting him either. But again, he didn’t know that. Information technology, y’see – you can’t beat it. He hesitated though, looked me up and down. I doubt he was considering having a go – there was twenty feet between us. He’d never’ve made it. Besides, maybe I’d just called to warn him about something not shoot him. Bullshit of course. But people’s minds start calculating all sorts of possibilities in a situation like this, all to persuade themselves that the trigger won’t get pulled if they cooperate. I’d say Conor was doing much the same. He’d probably no wads of cash lying around, no one was after him for anything illegal, he’d nothing to be blackmailed with. A nice clean life. He probably thought I’d got the wrong guy. If he’d known what I had in my head, that tack room was the last place he’d have gone into.
‘So how’s life treating you, Conor?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Red Dock. I introduced myself to you twenty years ago. Don’t tell me you forgot. And surely the word “brother” must’ve given you a clue.’
‘What brother? I have no brother.’
‘Ah, I see, so you indulged yourself in a bit of selective memory. Common enough in this game. It’s amazing what people’s consciences’ll let them forget.’
‘Look, I don’t know who you are or what this is about, but I have no brother and I don’t know you.’
‘You didn’t know me the last time I was up here. Oddly enough, watching you that day gave me the idea of how to pull this off. I wasn’t relative to you then either, so you wouldn’t remember. You were lunging a horse. I was impressed by the way you had it rearing and boxing. A foot closer and it would’ve hit you a dig in the mouth. One punch’d’ve done it. It would’ve trotted off – no hoofprints taken, no charges brought. Most people wouldn’t look at it like that of course. I seem to be always on the lookout for ways to make the law see things the way I want them to, though it took me years to figure out how to get a horse to hit someone a dig in the mouth. My sister, as it happens. Sorry, mustn’t forget you in this – “our” sister.’
Good actor, my brother. ‘Our’ sister? was popping out of him like he was genuinely puzzled by it. But I was definitely getting through to him. There’s nothing like a good murder picture when it comes to shocking an audience. And of course he was glaring at me like I was the bad guy. No doubt he was casting himself as the aggrieved hero. ‘You killed Edna, you dirty rat’ was written all over his face. No, it wasn’t. He wasn’t that quick, but it was on the way. The law’d spent a couple of days taping off the scene, getting the coroner to do his Picasso impersonation. They’d dig two of those holes I was telling you about earlier and fuck the pair of them in. Conor didn’t even know they’d been the victims of a boxing horse and a load of old bull. Mixing my metaphors here. Is ‘boxing horse’ a metaphor? Don’t know. Who cares about crap like that? Conor was looking like he wished one would prance in and lay one on me. I don’t think he wanted me for a brother. Homecomings can be so disappointing.
He was a good actor all right. He nearly had me convinced he didn’t know what I was talking about. And there was me intending to tell him all about what I’d been up to: Doctor Skeffington, for instance, but I knew I’d be wasting my breath. He should’ve gone to RADA. By my calculations, he’d’ve been fourteen when me and Sean were born. Old enough to know what the bump in our mother’s stomach meant. He’d’ve hit me with ‘I thought she’d miscarried’ or some shit like that. I’d had it in mind to tell him about Lucille and who she thought she was and about her old man, who was part of a police force who’d been trained to notice their own kids being taken away but not thousands of other kids – kids like me and Sean. I’d definitely intended to tell him about Sean; how he’d died. But it sickened me to see him standing there with a pile of ‘I didn’t knows’ on his tongue. A woman has kids who disappear and it’s a topic of whispers in the family. He knew all right. I wasn’t going to let him demean Sean’s memory by denying he knew. Fuck it, I could go on like this forever. Whatever he’d said, I wasn’t believing it. If he’d wanted to find us, he could have. He didn’t, so fuck him. The Donavans walked away from us. We didn’t even exist to them. Not that Sean ever believed that.
Sean used to say that it would all turn out to be some big mistake; maybe we’d got lost and Mammy hadn’t been able to find us, and she was crying for us. Well, I made Sean a promise, and I was just keeping that promise, and I’d learnt from those who brought me up that you could get away with a whole manner of things simply by making the law view you in a certain light. And that’s what I was doing.
If I’d said to Conor stuff like: the law’d do me for putting Lucille through an abusive orphanage system, but that same law had no notion of doing the hundreds of so-called innocent clergy who stood by and watched thousands of kids being handed in, knowing their peers would abuse them, he’d have looked at me as if I was talking a foreign language. The sort of stuff people who hadn’t been through it tell you should be forgotten.
I’m rambling here. Didn’t mean to do that. Facing him after all this time had sort of got the old nerves jumping.
‘Bye, bro.’
I locked the door on my way out.
Now this tack room of my brother’s had no windows in it, but it did have a small ventilation hole in the door. And the method I’d come up with for him had to do with a virus called strangles. It can live on tack. You can pick it up on your hand and pass it on to a horse, and that’ll be the end of it. A growth swells in its windpipe and it dies gasping for breath – no cheese wire or ropes required – unless it gets a dose of modern antibiotics, though that doesn’t work in all cases.
While Conor had been out checking his stock, I’d found an ice-cream container in the tack room and nailed it to the inside of the door. And now it was time to pour the formaldehyde in through the hole into the container. Then came the potassium permanganate. I’d brought my own in case he was out. But I’d seen his supply on the shelf and used it. Better for the law to think his had been used. It wouldn’t point to an outsider. It would point to Lucille.
Potassium permanganate looks like coal particles. Mixed with formaldehyde, it forms what’s called formalin. It’s a gas. Though Conor didn’t think so. He wasn’t laughing anyway. Mind you, he was the one breathing it in. Formalin gas kills strangles. And anything else. That’s why it’s best to do it from the outside. Go in there and you won’t come out. It acts in seconds. White smoke everywhere and bonk! down you go.
Now I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a man being gassed. But it’s a noisy business. I suppose you’d have to imagine some cunt locking you in a room then tossing in a canister. Going mad to get out pretty much describes how people react to it. You’ve never heard the like of it in your life. Grabbing and tearing at that ice-cream container he was, trying to get it off. Which he did. Well, ice-cream containers aren’t that hard to remove. I think he was exploring the possibility of bunging his mouth in the hole for a breath of nice country air. Then again, they say the night air’s not good for you. I felt fine though. Of course, while tearing the container off, he had to come into closer contact with it, which rather defeats the object. He was breathing it in all the more. Once the formaldehyde and that other stuff make contact, as the saying goes: ‘What I have mixed together let no man put asunder.’ Didn’t do much for his nails, I can tell you that. Some of the gas escaped through the hole, as gas will, but there was plenty left for him.
Interesting what good screamers men make at times like this. I’d never heard no woman scream like that. Still, it didn’t last. It turned into a croak before very long. The old ‘aaghhhh … aaghhh … aagh’ becoming an ‘aa … a …’ until he hadn’t an ‘a’ to his name. With no window, it had nowhere to go but him. It’s a question of physics, y’see. You have to be up on that stuff to be able to pull a stroke like this.
I didn’t wait much after Conor’d stopped. No point. I’d other things to do. I wiped my prints off the door handle and bolt and withdrew the bolt, so it was almost open but not quite. Part of that method thinking I mentioned.
I didn’t go out and celebrate. This wasn’t about victory. Just clearing up some outstanding business.
All I had to do now was go back to my car, get my laptop out and contact Cornelius.
‘Anne Donavan is awaiting your immediate attention,’ I typed. ‘She’ll make a good model for you.’