I was discharged the next morning with mild bruising and no more than a few scrapes down my back. They burned when I pulled on a shirt. I didn’t mind. I was getting used to the pain. We were old friends, now.
I took the bus to the city centre, gingerly spreading my weight across the seat, aware of every ache and tingle. The drugs don’t work? Aye, imagine how I’d be feeling without them.
Back at the flat, I checked the second mobile, the one hidden behind the couch with the laptop. Six messages from Susan. I answered with one: ‘I’m OK.’
Griggs had sent only one message.
‘Call me.’
Aye, the very measure of concern.
I didn’t call him. Instead, I ran the shower hot as I could and stood in the steam until I couldn’t stand it any longer. I’m a sucker for a strong shower. The pounding of the water. The white noise that becomes a haven. For a few minutes, I can be cut off from the world. I can exist as myself. Alone.
I came out and towelled down gingerly. My body ached. My muscles strained. The cuts and grazes in my back were raw, pulsating. Reminded me of their presence with the insistence of an ignored toddler.
I got dressed in a fresh shirt and jeans. Was half done buttoning up when the buzzer went. I answered, already knowing whose finger was on the button.
Malone didn’t waste time on false concern. Just took one look at me and said, ‘You get a simple task and it winds up being a bloodbath. This is getting to be a habit with you.’
‘How’s the old man taking it?’
‘Why don’t you come and find out for yourself?’
Now there was an offer you couldn’t refuse.
‘Animals!’
The old man raging. Face scarlet. Veins pulsing in the right side of his head. Ready to throttle someone. Anyone. He had always suppressed this kind of anger in my presence. But I’d known it was there.
I understood how he had got his reputation. I could see the thug – maybe even the killer – he had once been.
It reached to the primal part of my brain, made me want to run.
But I didn’t.
‘Animals!’ He paced. Kicked up dust from the floor of the disused office space. Stomped over to an old pine desk and gripped it underneath. ‘Animals!’ He threw the desk over. Making the kind of sound you could have heard over the noise of a Spinal Tap gig.
These days, he looked his age, but there was still something of the old strength inside David Burns. He had been fuelled by anger in his youth. Still had it in him, despite his claims to the contrary.
Malone and I stood in silence by the door. Let him scream and rage. Talk to himself. Rant. Roar. When he finally acknowledged our presence, he spoke to me directly. Maybe because he had already told Malone what he had to say or maybe because he trusted me. As he always said, we had a kinship.
‘He was nobody. He was innocent.’
Hardly. But in the things that mattered, Robert Burns had really been a nobody. Taking him out like that was senseless. Served no purpose. But then, maybe that was the point.
‘There are rules.’
Rules that even Burns had broken over and over again. But I didn’t tell him that. He believed completely in the rules when they suited him. Like a religious zealot who covets his neighbour’s wife, worships false idols and still does not see his own hypocrisy.
‘Unwritten?’
He laughed. ‘They don’t need to be written. It’s what separates us from the psychopaths. You don’t hurt a man’s family. Not unless they’re involved. Not unless they’re soldiers.’
‘Then we’re at war?’ Using ‘we’ without even thinking. I was beginning to empathize with the old man. See things from his point of view. Losing my sense of perspective.
‘Always.’
He turned away. Hunched over and shivered. Crying? I couldn’t be sure. When he turned back to face me, his eyes were red. But from anger or sadness I couldn’t really say.
Family is a funny thing. We can hate them. We can despise them, and yet still love them.
They had killed his nephew. Without warning. Crossed the line.
God only knew what the old man would do, now.
‘They’ve forgotten,’ Burns said. ‘Forgotten who I am. They see a frail old fucker. They’ve forgotten the lessons their fathers fucking learned.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘They know who you are. That’s why—’
‘You don’t understand, McNee. Don’t know you ever will. In your way, you’re like them. Only aware of an old man with a reputation.’
A reputation for cruelty and hatred. A man who once nailed a priest to a cross over an unpaid debt. Whose idea of mercy had been leaving behind a hammer to pry loose the nails.
‘Then tell me.’
‘When I was young, my guts burned with ambition. There was nothing I wouldn’t do to get what I wanted. I lost some of that when I got older. That’s what success does. Dulls fire. Dulls the edge of your soul. Makes you forget the very things you were fighting for in the first place.’
‘And now?’
‘Now I’m an old man. Cautious. To these lads, I’m little more than a stepping stone. One more corpse they have to step over to get wherever it is they’re going.’
‘They are what you were.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘They think they’re worse.’
‘And are they?’
‘Son, these little shitebags don’t know what kind of hell they’re about to face. They killed my brother’s boy. They broke the rules. They’ll learn … there’s always a price.’
The old man could be decent, in his own way, to those he felt deserved it. Callous when it came to those he didn’t care about one way or another. But when you crossed him, his wrath was righteous, terrifying and indiscriminate.
His anger had not faded with youth. It had merely retreated. Gone into hibernation. But the death of his nephew had reawakened the old terror. A monster was roaring, raising its head.
It was a warning. A dark sign of things to come.