by Peadar Ó Guilín
Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1987
FOR THREE DAYS, BADB, Goddess of War, sat in her own excrement. Bent double in a rusted cement mixer, with nothing to eat or drink but the blood and bodies of summoned crows, she hid and bided her time.
Everything hurt. She was near the end of her cycle, so her joints felt like molten rock and her skin consisted entirely of scabs. Flies and vermin swarmed over her and not even passing beggars could bear to look inside the old machine.
And still, divinely patient, she waited.
But the goddess was not idle. When she closed her eyes, the city of Belfast stretched out below her. From the ground it appeared chaotic. Taigs hated Prods. Prods murdered jokers. Brits fought the IRA and the INLA and the Twisted Fists. But from the air, it was a chess set like any other, except that this game would never end. She would see to that.
As a crow, Badb flew over a column of Saracen armoured cars, thundering down the street to quell a riot on the Falls Road. She watched masked men bundle a weeping mother into a van, never to be seen again. In Lincoln Place a boy with too many arms was being beaten by three others wielding baseball bats. Nobody played baseball in Northern Ireland, but sales of the equipment were booming.
Night fell. At last, she saw the first signs that her weeks of planning had not been in vain.
First came the SAS, all in black, their steps soft as butterflies on the roofs of the derelict two-storey buildings on either side of the road leading into Belfast’s jokertown, the Island. Badb herself had supplied the intelligence that brought them here.
Seventeen years earlier, twenty-one thousand soldiers had poured onto the streets of Northern Ireland. Some of the squaddies going home in coffins today were buried next to fathers who’d met the same fate before them. Badb had done her work well. The blood of heroes – and there had been hundreds by now – fed the land so that it grew lush and green for as far as the eyes of a crow could see.
Finally, at ground level this time, three more men and one woman, all wearing balaclavas and armed with AK-47s, set themselves up on either side of the street. She had lured them here. They too thought they were about to spring an ambush, but their lives could now be measured in minutes.
Badb’s heart began to beat faster. She could see, as no mortal could, that a glow surrounded one of these figures. A true believer. A hero …
And then, before all the escape routes could be closed off by the arrival of more soldiers creeping in from both ends of the street, one of the so-called elite up on the roofs knocked against a stone and sent it tumbling down two storeys.
The hero reacted before anybody else. ‘Run!’ he cried. ‘Through the factory!’ He was no giant as her uncle had been long ago. But he sprang to his feet. He picked up his closest comrade, shoving her in the direction of the nearby buildings before the first bullets from above kicked up the spot where he’d just been crouching.
He was going to get away! Or be hunted down and killed too far off for Badb to benefit from it. She had to get out of here and follow him, although every muscle in her body had shut itself down from days of immobility.
Bullets struck the cement mixer, rattling it like the loudest drum in the world. A man cried out for mercy. It was a value all sides in the conflict claimed to honour, but nobody was watching tonight and his pleas ended in a gurgle.
Badb felt the hero pause and then … Glory! Glory! A bullet took him through the brain. She sensed his blood jetting onto the parched earth, the legions of those who had passed before him stretching out bony fingers to welcome him.
Oh, the pain of his death! The murdered future, where this noble soul might have loved a wife; ploughed fields; made peace. Gone now, all gone, and Badb, the goddess, screamed for its loss. Her voice shattered windows; streetlights guttered; Saracens rolled to a stop, every battery flat, while up on the surrounding roofs, soldiers voided themselves and covered their ears as a vortex made entirely of crows spun in the pitch darkness overheard.
Like a cannonball, Badb shot out of the cement mixer.
Then she ran.
She failed to mark the passing of time, but deep in the night, laughing and crying, she stepped into an empty courtyard in the ruined shipyards. Here, as it started to rain, she completed her transformation. Always strong at the start of her cycle, she ripped away clothing and rotted bandages with her own hands. Old skin sloughed off in the downpour, giving way to youth and beauty. Her back straightened and she laughed, mouth open to taste the rain – the most delicious thing in the universe! She wept. She shivered. She danced, swirling, swirling, and then—
‘You!’ she cried, spinning to a halt. ‘Who are you?’
A handsome little man, somewhere in his early twenties, goggled at her naked body. Four empty beer cans lay at his feet, while another dangled from his fingers.
‘I …’ he said. ‘Um … Billy, uh … O’Donnell. Billy O’Donnell. Are you … are you one o’ them aces?’
Billy O’Donnell. He had the sweetest lips imaginable. The largest eyes.
‘How much did you see, Billy O’Donnell?’ She moved next to him, her heart beating. She loved him, she LOVED him and kissed his lips, delighting in the taste of beer, breathing deep of his scent, rubbing the stubble on his cheeks.
He wanted her too, of course. His breath matched hers as she pressed against him, but when she took two handfuls of his Stiff Little Fingers T-shirt, he jerked away from her with a cry.
‘No! No! I need to keep that on.’
That was not how one spoke to a goddess. She would lose her great strength in a day or two, but now she tore away his clothing like tissue paper. A sweet little chest waited underneath, except that bandages covered each nipple.
‘What have we here?’ she asked
‘Please … please … I have to go … I have to—’
Under the bandages, instead of a right nipple, he had a mouth. It began babbling the moment she uncovered it: ‘Dirty Papist whore! Left-footed Fenian Catholic cow! Lie down, Croppy! Lie—’ She laughed and laughed while Billy wept. There was a mouth on the other side too.
‘Proddy bitch!’ it hissed. ‘You Orange snout Jaffa black Protestant, dirty—’
Both voices stilled the moment she covered the lips. ‘Are you from a mixed marriage, Billy O’Donnell?’
He nodded with a sob. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I … Please …’
‘I love it!’ she cried, startling him. ‘I love you!’ She ripped off the bandages completely. She kissed the mouth on the left of his chest, licking the lips with her tongue, while feeding her fingers to the one on the right. ‘And what about this?’ she asked, grabbing him between the legs. What religion does this belong to?’
‘Any …’ he groaned. ‘Any … one you want.’
Later, back in her hidden, booby-trapped home, Badb read poetry. Nobody wrote about sex like Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. The joy. The sliding of limbs. The perfume of a man’s body that she called ‘cumhracht’.
Poor Billy O’Donnell. He had seen too much and would have to die. Not yet! Badb still loved him too much. But in a day or two, when rationality returned, she would track him down. A joker like that wouldn’t be hard to find. A joker like that, however sweet, would die and never be missed.
Two weeks after it happened, Billy Little, as he usually called himself, was still grinning. His stepfather would box his ears for making calls at work, but he picked up the phone anyway, dialling Armi’s number. He waited … and waited … nothing. He was desperate to talk about her again. The nameless woman. But nobody less than a best friend could be trusted with such a secret.
When Billy thought about it – and he thought of nothing else! – his cheeks grew hot and his hands itched as though they remembered the feel of curves; of smooth skin.
These were hardly fitting thoughts for a funeral parlour, of course.
He sat beneath a portrait of Her Majesty, Queen Margaret. What would her highness have thought if she could read his mind? Or Granda, uniformed, staring out of a framed photograph on the desk in front of him?
Billy had only kissed two girls before and the second time, when Rosie McMichael had slipped her hand under his jumper at the school social, he had run terrified from the hall and had spent the last two weeks of term pretending to be sick.
He could never risk a kiss again. Or so he’d thought.
But then, she had happened. The ace. The gorgeous woman who didn’t care who he was, what he was. Who seemed – by God! – to enjoy it. To enjoy him. She knew all his secrets: that his card had turned; that his real da had been a Catholic named O’Donnell. It wasn’t the sort of thing Ma had wanted to boast about when they’d moved home from England and she’d remarried. But Billy still remembered and when the black-haired woman had asked him his name, that ancient truth had come spilling out.
He trembled. If only he could find her again.
The clock ticked. Armi still wasn’t answering the phone. Billy tried to fill in paperwork, but couldn’t concentrate. Finally – and his stepfather would kill him for this! – he pulled the newspaper out from under the desk. It was two days old and the worst kind of tabloid, the kind with a topless model on page three.
He’d peered at her already, couldn’t help himself. But the blonde’s passionless smile and unnatural pose did nothing for him now. What he wanted was jet-black hair. He longed for laughter and fury and breathlessness. So he turned the page, flicking past gossip about that American Wild Cards tour. Stuff about Peregrine’s pregnancy. About Fantasy – oh, God, Fantasy! – at the Royal Ballet. He turned the page one more time … And there, right in front of him, was an article about how the army were offering a reward for the capture of what they called the Screeching Ace.
Billy’s heart beat faster. £100,000. A huge, huge sum of money.
Not that he would betray her for something like that! Life-changing though it was. He loved her, whatever her name was. He loved her. And yet, he lingered on the page.
For £100,000, he could go to New York and visit Dr Tachyon’s clinic there. Jokers had been cured before, hadn’t they? What if he were cured? What would his life be like then?
The phone rang and he jumped, as though guilty.
‘Billy Boy!’ came the drunken voice at the other end.
‘Billy Boy, yerself.’ Armi had the same first name, which had led to endless confusion in school.
‘Come out for a drink. Bring yer snooker cue. Nobody’s gonna die in the ten minutes you have left to work.’
Billy threw the paper with its poisonous temptation in the bin and ran to fetch his cue.
The day after the emotions wore off, Badb sat in her office in Thiepval Barracks. She had long since learned that cutting into parts of her body that were covered by clothing meant that lesions were far less likely to break out on her face and hands. But over the next few months, she would appear to age rapidly and she’d be forced to hide it with make-up and feigned illness.
For now, she closed her eyes and flitted to the crow that sat just outside.
She watched the back of her own head. She heard the clock on the desk muffled by the glass. Then, she took off, sailing around the building to another windowsill.
‘Bloody RUC Special Branch!’ Tom, her boss, railed against the police. ‘Bloody amateurs! They’ll get us all killed—’
It was nothing Badb hadn’t heard before. Besides, it wasn’t Special Branch that had got his agents killed, but her. For every piece of intelligence she fed her British employers about the IRA, she passed another back in the opposite direction. She couldn’t allow anybody to win the war after all, or who would feed the land?
She chose another crow, one she’d ordered earlier to circle high over the city. The wind whistled past, rippled her feathers, held her aloft.
This is how it was to be a goddess – to feel nothing. To see everything. She soared for a while, watching for patterns, cracks in the city she might exploit to make each community feel threatened so that heroes must arise to defend it. Foreigners always thought the Ulster conflict a simple struggle between British Protestants and Irish Catholics, but it was so much richer than that! Layer upon layer: communists; agitators; aces; jokers. There were British regiments that hated each other more than they hated the IRA, and every year terrorist organizations killed more of ‘their own’ than they ever did of the opposition.
The bird she occupied was tired and would fall from the sky soon. She moved on. She listened to a conversation in an IRA safe house. She scratched a warning to one of her agents on a gate. She checked a drop in the Island, but no, not one of her joker contacts knew anything of a boy with mouths for nipples. She would keep looking. She flitted from crow to crow and—
Badb tumbled back into her own body as a hand grabbed her by the wrist.
‘Anya! McNulty! By Christ, woman, get it together!’
She opened her eyes to find Tom Grayson’s face less than an inch from her own, displaying all the attributes of the mood known as ‘panic’. She smelled perspiration from him along with the usual Old Holborn rollies and the rotting tooth he had at the back of his mouth. She saw that he had locked the door behind him for some reason.
‘I didn’t know about this,’ he blurted. ‘I swear to you. They didn’t even tell the boss they were coming. But I hope by Christ you weren’t lying when you said you weren’t a joker because—’
A fist punched right through the pine of the door, then fiddled unsuccessfully with the key, before ripping the whole thing off its hinges.
The brute responsible wore an eighteenth-century army uniform, complete with a red jacket and shiny buttons. Was this the famous Redcoat? Wasn’t he supposed to be dead? He flung the crumpled wood aside before puffing out his chest and standing to quivering attention.
‘Sah!’ he shouted. ‘Door opened, sah!’
What came next was even stranger.
A man made entirely of stone ducked under the lintel and stepped into the small room. ‘My apologies, Miss McNulty.’ When it – he looked up, Badb saw two eyes of flame looking into her own. And there was another light too, one that only she could sense. Glory. Belief. She was in the presence of a hero. Every part of her skin turned hot at once, while new lesions opened on her back and chest.
‘You have no right!’ babbled Tom. ‘She’s our best handler. She’s worked with the Force Research Unit for—’
‘You know who I am?’ asked Captain Flint. He wasn’t talking to Tom.
Lying would have aroused his suspicions, so Badb nodded once and received a nod in return.
‘We’re in the province on other business, Miss McNulty. We finally have a lead on the Screeching Ace. But since we are here, well, if you’re a joker …’ he paused to gauge her reaction. ‘Your considerable talents should be employed with us instead.’
‘She’s not a joker,’ said Tom. ‘I have assurances from the regimental doctor that—’
The arrival of another woman interrupted him. She was middle-aged and black with a strong Birmingham accent. She squeezed her ample frame through the broken door, out of breath and sweating slightly. ‘You trying to kill me, Flinty?’
‘Madam,’ said Tom.
‘Esmerelda,’ she told him. ‘Charmed.’
‘Madam. Esmerelda … your services are not needed. Like all FRU handlers, Anya McNulty is evaluated by a telepath once a year.’
The woman smiled, still wheezing a little from climbing the stairs. ‘Oh, I don’t mind doing it again. I’ve come all this way. And what harm could it do, anyway?’
What harm indeed? With a perfect memory and an ability to spy on anyone anywhere, Badb had gathered great power to herself. She controlled the local FRU telepath as surely as any of her agents in the IRA or the Twisted Fists. The doctor, too, turned a blind eye when she wrote her own fitness reports. But these strangers from Britain were beyond her influence.
‘It’s insulting,’ Tom said. ‘Anya couldn’t be more loyal. Her father was killed by the IRA.’
Badb had arranged that murder herself. But now she was only two moves from checkmate.
She put on her professional voice. ‘I’ve heard of this ace,’ she said. ‘The Screamer. Or the Screecher. How can you expect to find him when we cannot?’
‘They have a new source,’ said Tom. ‘We should be handling him, not the Silver Helix!’
‘Enough. And no, Mr Grayson, we won’t be sharing the identity of our source with the FRU. Too many of your agents have met an unhappy end. Now, my dear,’ Captain Flint turned to Esmerelda. ‘We’ll get this over with. Miss McNulty, will you sign a consent form? Miss McNulty? Are you all right? Is she asleep?’
Badb opened her eyes. ‘Thank you, Captain Flint. I am fine. I give my full consent. There is no need for a form.’ She held her hand out towards Esmerelda. On the chessboard, her king tottered, but she had one move left.
‘Good for you, love,’ Esmeralda was saying. ‘Unlike some, you won’t even notice me goin’ in there. Won’t feel a thing. Now, let’s just see …’
Down by the fence, a crow pulled at a particular wire that for some reason was always missed during routine sweeps.
The entire base shook. Then came sound, like a great fist, as the gatehouse turned into a fireball and shards of glass flew through the room. Several embedded themselves in Badb’s back and neck just as Esmeralda caught her wrist. But the mind of the goddess was already in another crow, pulling yet another wire at the top of this very building. Now the ceiling came caving in. Tom and Captain Flint disappeared in a rain of rubble and Badb, bleeding all over her back, found herself alone and face to face with the telepath in a ‘fortunate’ pocket of air.
A series of moods passed over Esmeralda’s face. Her mouth opened as though intending to plead for mercy, but she was still touching the goddess’s skin and must have guessed the outcome. When Badb removed a shard of glass from her own back and shoved it into the telepath’s neck, ‘fear’ and ‘panic’ showed on her features. But not ‘surprise’. Not even a bit. Fascinating.
There was another ace in the room, or part of one, anyway. The brutish Redcoat must have had unnatural speed to go with his strength, because he’d almost outrun the explosion. His head and arms poked from the rubble. His eyes were closed and he hissed like a leaky balloon until the goddess blocked the airways with her hands. He was definitely dead now.
All that remained was for Badb to remove herself from suspicion in the murders. She lay down as far from the two corpses as she could get. Then, she pulled a piece of rubble onto her legs. Bones snapped, followed by a stab of pain so intense it sent her flying above the city for a whole minute. Good. Most satisfactory.
Captain Flint still lived too. She could feel his heroism through the wreckage.
He had come to Northern Ireland in search of an enemy ace – Badb herself, of course, although he couldn’t know that yet. Still, this new information implied that somebody somewhere had talked, probably to the RUC confidential line. She had contacts there.
Billy O’Donnell was about to leave the board.
Two days later, crutches dug into Badb’s armpits, opening wounds that soaked the bandages under her clothing. It was still early in her cycle, but broken legs, and the extra bleeding that happened whenever she encountered a hero like Captain Flint, had weakened her. There were other kinds of power, however. When she swung into the laundrette on Mieville Street, the women working there paled and left at once.
She rested against a machine. Then, closing her eyes, she flew around the building, looking for anybody watching her.
Mieville Street lay at the intersection of three communities – Protestant, Catholic, and joker. Graffiti splattered every building in sight: crowns, fists, harps. Slogans of every kind: No Surrender! Tiocfaidh Ár Lá! Five for one! There were painted flags and provocations and threats. If Badb knew how to love, she would love this place. It was the very landscape where heroes were born and fattened and killed.
A furtive movement in an alleyway sent her flitting to a crow with a better view. Yes, it was the man she expected and he approached alone. The joker came into the shop. His neck was a foot long and wound like a spring, so obviously, people called him ‘Bobby’. They’d be more careful if they knew what she knew about him.
‘How’s about ye?’ he asked. And of course, he nodded. Bobby couldn’t help it.
Badb didn’t look up. She had covered her face with a veil and, as was traditional in all the stories, the Goddess of War appeared to her worshippers as a woman washing blood from clothing. A great deal of blood. Bobby’s nodding grew more nervous the longer he watched.
Eventually, he asked, ‘What ya got for me?’
‘Two members of the DUP,’ she said. ‘You want them?’
His face twisted into hatred. ‘They’re tryin’ to send us all back to Rathlin where they won’t have to look at us. Well, we’re not goin’! Bastards!’
‘Aye, I want them. But … but what’re you lookin’ for in return? Yer always after somethin’.’
‘Nipples,’ she said.
‘Wh-what? What?’
She handed him a piece of blood-sticky paper with a name and address. ‘Kill him,’ she said. ‘Your men must bring me his nipples.’
He was used to her strange requests. ‘He’s the one you had us lookin’ for before? I’ll do this wee job myself.’
‘You will not. Nobody who knows me can be involved. Do it tonight.’
Bobby nodded. Of course he did. And then, he was gone.
The CCTV cameras caught them: a trio of men, wearing masks of that American preacher fellow – what was his name? Captain Flint had no idea. But they were certainly jokers. One of them had three legs, and another tore down the door of the house in Lurgan Park by charging it with his head. Then, all three drew guns and ducked inside.
‘Why?’ Captain Flint asked a pair of terrified police officers. ‘Why am I only seeing this footage now?’
‘Um …’ said the first, a skinny man with an enthusiastic Adam’s apple, ‘s-security? We don’t want it falling into the hands of … of the enemy.’
‘By George, the only enemy you lot seem to care about are your colleagues in Army Intelligence.’
‘They got themselves bombed the other day, didn’t they? Had to be an inside job. They can’t be trusted.’
‘Oh, I know all about the bombing and you are the ones who can’t be trusted.’ He glared at them, well aware of the effect his burning eyes were having. ‘That boy died because you lot leak like a sieve. The jokers were even going to mutilate him before they were surprised. Now,’ another glare, ‘is there anything else you’re not telling me?‘
They resented him, he could see that much. But the chief constable had ordered full cooperation with the Silver Helix in this particular matter and the elder of the two sighed and nodded. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘We now know the Screeching Ace is a beautiful young woman with black hair. She was seen on the edges of the Island the day of the ambush. We’ll get you a tape of the call the boy made to us, but that’s all he was willin’ to say until we got approval to award him the money.’
‘Better,’ said Captain Flint, ‘much better.’ He felt a sudden itch between his shoulder blades, as though somebody were staring straight at him through the sight of a sniper rifle. But when he spun around, there was nothing on the windowsill but a ragged-looking crow. He sighed.
‘Yes. Be so good as to get me that tape.’
He left them at once, taking an armoured car to a house on Lurgan Street to meet with the boy’s distraught mother. As the public face of the Silver Helix, he was often the one to talk to the families of the fallen. He hated it. But it was part of his duty to Queen and country, and while both were much diminished these days – one through a lifetime of smoking, the other because of pernicious foreigners and a cowardly leadership – he, at least, would always be faithful. Even in the face of a mother’s tears. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs—’
‘Call me May, sir,’ she told him. ‘I know why you’re here. But I don’t know nothin’ else. ’Cept they had knives and they were gonna cut into my wee boy’s chest. Them twisty monsters! They should all be sent back to Rathlin Island, so they should. The real island, not them streets they took for themselves in the city.’ She glared at him, as if she only now realized he was a bit of a joker too. ‘My boy was never involved in nothin’. Certainly not with the Twisties. Unlike some people I might name.’
‘Name them.’
She gulped. People here on all sides killed what they called ‘touts’ – informers. But this was different, wasn’t it? ‘Billy Little,’ she said, at last. ‘So-called best friend, but a bad, bad influence. He’s been seen sneakin’ into the Island to get drunk and the Lord knows what else …’
The Island kept coming up. That was where the SAS men had been incapacitated by the screaming that had followed their ambush. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘if the boys were best friends, is it possible your son might have shared information with this other … Billy?’
‘Oh, aye. Thick as thieves, those two. Though the Little boy hasn’t even shown his face over here since … since …’
The brigadier noted that a crow at the window suddenly shook itself and flew off, as though freed from a stupor. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I need to hurry. It might be rather urgent.’
What surprised Badb as she listened to Captain Flint’s conversation were the photos on the mantelpiece of the sitting room. The wrong boy had died, she realized. She had seen Billy Little in this very house – an obvious check to make before ordering his death. But he was a frequent visitor here, after all. And now, he was about to fall into the clutches of a dangerous enemy.
Unless she could get to him first.
She did not like to use her crows to kill, because sooner or later it would get her caught. But this was an emergency. Police records indicated a Billy Little of the appropriate age, living no more than three streets away. She concentrated, hopping from crow to crow, leaving each with a simple instruction to follow one of their fellows. Soon, an entire flock of them descended on what looked like a funeral parlour, one bird landing on each windowsill, with more on the chimney pots. Then, she flicked from one body to the next, staying no more time than it took to glance inside the building, until, at last, she found him, curled up on a bed, with all the signs of ‘sadness’ on his handsome features. Weeping for his friend, no doubt.
Another flick showed her that Captain Flint was already on his way.
Badb was left with no choice but to take another risk. She tapped a beak against Billy’s window. He looked up, wondering what was going on. Tap, tap, tap.
He stood up, wiping his eye – the same one she would attack as soon as he let her in. She could bring the entire flock to bear if necessary, but since his room faced the public street, it would be better to keep it to one bird. She might even be able to bring it out alive afterwards. She made preparations for other scenarios too. She set one crow to circling high over the whole area. Others were tasked with gathering a stack of thumb-sized pebbles on a nearby roof.
Billy came forward, but slowly, slowly. Even in his room, she saw, he kept his chest well covered, which might mean his family were as ignorant of his secret as the rest of the world.
Tap, tap, tap.
He was right there now. Bewildered. Curious.
Then, he looked past her and his eyes widened. Confusion and then horror came over his face. The Saracen – Captain Flint’s transport – was already here. In a Catholic neighbourhood, there might have been a warning: women banging the footpath with dustbin lids; young men whistling or shouting out. But the residents of Lurgan Gardens regarded the army as theirs.
Billy turned his back and fled. Why, she wondered, was he running from the British army? Clearly, he hadn’t been the one to call the confidential line in search of the reward. Had he put his friend up to it?
Through one set of eyes after another, Badb followed him down through the house. One room had a chessboard set up with a half-played game and she lost valuable seconds when she couldn’t help working her way through to the inevitable checkmate. But she spied him again as he fled in through a room where an old woman lay on a slab surrounded by bottles of what looked like make-up. A back door led out into an alleyway. Badb was ready for him. She flicked up to the roof, where she grabbed a pebble in one claw. Then she took off, swooping around twice to gather speed before hurtling down towards the alleyway.
Billy was just coming out of the door. She never missed – it was simple mathematics. Once released, the pebble would strike him with exactly enough force to cave in the back of his skull.
But then, a voice called out. ‘Halt! You’re wanted for questioning!’
She veered away as Billy jumped onto the lid of a rubbish bin and scrambled over a fence into the next garden.
The soldier spoke into a radio. Others were approaching from nearby streets. Neighbours looked out of windows, any of whom would report it if they saw a crow killing the boy.
She flitted from one set of eyes to another, taking in the whole board. Soldiers were arriving from all sides. Captain Flint too had begun running – so slowly at first that a child could have overtaken him. But step by step his massively heavy frame gathered enough momentum to dent a tank. The squaddies caught the boy first. Three men knocked him over and kicked him as he lay on the ground.
‘What are you doing?’ said the captain when he arrived. ‘By God, we’re British! We don’t torture!’ They looked at him in astonishment. ‘Our own, I mean. We don’t hurt our own. You’re on our side, aren’t you, boy?’
Even through the senses of a bird’s body Badb could feel the glory radiating from the stone man. The land longed for him; to drink down whatever passed for blood in that strange body of his. She fought against the distraction to keep her concentration.
Billy was weeping, but he nodded and said ‘Aye’. He was about to talk. In mere moments, the British would have a description of her younger self and would know that she transformed after her mourning cry. Even now, it wasn’t too late to strike Billy with a pebble, but she’d never put an end to Captain Flint that way and it would have revealed to him her true power. So instead, she waited to gather as much information about the disastrous situation as she could.
‘I’m sorry,’ Billy said. ‘I’m … I’m so sorry. Armi’s dead ’cause of me.’
‘You told him about the woman?’
‘I … I made it up from somethin’ I saw in the paper. He was always talkin’ about the girls he was with, an’ I just got sick of it, so I … so I … I never thought he’d call the police! The story got bigger an’ bigger an’ it just ran away with me.’ Billy sobbed. Whatever about his story, the grief and the guilt were very real.
‘Then why was he murdered?’
‘Jokers like to kill nats,’ one of the soldiers said. ‘Especially Loyalists. Five for every one of their own that’s killed.’
But Billy didn’t know. He had no idea at all. About anything. And that was when Badb understood. The only reason the boy had fled the soldiers was that he had intended to keep her secret all along. He wanted to protect her. Fascinating, truly fascinating.
Captain Flint’s sigh had a rattly sound to it.
They brought Billy back to the station for more questioning. Lots more. But not once did he tell them the truth.
Some months later, out of curiosity, she walked past Billy in the street, and deliberately allowed him to see her face. He didn’t recognize her. He only remembered the younger version of herself.
He should still die, of course. Like the boy in the story of King Lowry, he knew a secret that sooner or later would have to come out. But there might be value in having her own Renfield. And Billy Little had access to Captain Flint now. All he had to do was claim he wanted to tell the truth and the hero of the Silver Helix would return to Ireland at a time of her choosing.
Imagine the glory then!
She paused at the side of the road as though uncertain.
‘You need help, missus?’ he asked, as she knew he would. It was what good boys did.
‘Perhaps,’ she told him. ‘Perhaps I do.’
