Dead And Buried

You can bury a body, but you can’t bury the past.

Sometimes, doing the right thing can change your life forever. When vet Conor Maguire agreed to dispose of a corpse for his wife’s desperate brother, Patrick, he prayed that would be the end of the matter. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Now Conor is returning to Belfast after five years self-imposed exile. He wants to rebuild his shattered life with the family he left behind, but the past won’t leave him alone. Patrick has risen through the ranks of gangland criminality, and wants Conor’s help once more. This time he isn’t asking nicely.

Dead and Buried

John Brennan

Copyright

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2015

Copyright © John Brennan 2015

John Brennan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9781474030762

Version date: 2018-09-20

JOHN BRENNAN

was born in Edinburgh in 1974, and relocated to London to work in advertising in 2001. He is married with three children.

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Title Page

Copyright

Author Bio

1992

Present Day

1993

Present Day

1994

Present Day

1995

Present Day

1996

Present Day

1997

Present Day

1998

Present Day

1999

Present Day

2002

Present Day

2002

Present Day

2004

Present Day

One Year Later

Extract

Endpages

About the Publisher

1992

WHAT had woken him? A voice?

No – there was no voice – only the strident double-tone of the phone, and then, from under the covers, Christine sleepily asking, ‘What time is it?’

The bedside clock told 3.12.

As Conor reached for the receiver, the cold air of the bedroom raised goose flesh on his arms and chest.

A thoroughbred with a torsioned colon up at the McGill stables. A sheep hit by a lorry out on one of the high roads. A cow that can’t calve in some godforsaken byre down Ballycullen way. That’d be it. Conor turned over the possibilities in his head: breech birth, prolapsed uterus, dead calf…

‘Conor – fucking hell.’

This wasn’t any Ballycullen farmer. He half-recognised the voice through the layers of panic. ‘Patrick?’

‘Fuckin’ hell, Conor, man – you have to help me.’

Patrick Cameron – Christine’s little brother. Conor swallowed; kept his voice level.

‘What’s up?’

‘I’ve done something…something stupid.’ On ‘stupid’ Patrick’s voice broke into a strangled sob. Pissed again, Conor supposed. Patrick liked a drink, no question. Hadn’t he done for the best part of a bottle of Bushmill’s at Conor and Christine’s wedding in the summer and made a twat of himself on the dance floor?

How many have you had? Conor wanted to ask. But with Christine listening he couldn’t ask that. So instead: ‘What’s the problem?’

‘I think I’ve killed somebody.’

Jesus. Conor thought his heart had stopped. He cleared his throat.

‘Say again?’ he managed. Calm, professional, just another late-night call-out…

But Patrick only sobbed into the phone. Then he said, ‘Come out, Con. I’m outside. Come outside.’

It was a freezing night, black and cold and hard as iron.

Conor, closing the front door quietly behind him, made out Patrick jogging back from the callbox at the end of the road. Right down the middle of the empty street, between parked cars, his feet a soft crunch and skidding in the frost. As he passed under the streetlamps, he saw the bloodstains. On his tracksuit bottoms, on his face and hands. He was only a rag of a lad, Paddy Cameron. Twenty-two years of age but could’ve passed for eighteen. A scallywag, to hear Christine tell it – a sharp-edged little scanger, to hear anyone else.

He approached slowly, hands shoved deep in his pockets like he was searching for a lost bit of change. ‘What’d you tell Chris?’ he whispered.

‘Had to go out to Nesbit’s place to foal his mare. The poor girl’s six months pregnant, what am I going to tell her?’ Conor glanced anxiously over his shoulder, but all down the street the upstairs windows were unlit. No one awake on Rembrandt Close – no one watching.

He fixed Patrick with a stare. ‘So?’

Patrick rolled a plug of chewing gum over in his mouth and then, with a half-shrug, said, ‘In the car.’

‘What’s in the car?’

‘He is.’

Conor wanted to turn, run back indoors and lock the door. But something stopped him. He followed Patrick to the car. Already his brain was working to the inevitable conclusion: phone the police. There’s no harm seeing what you’re dealing with, but then walk back to the house and phone the fuzz. No, better, use the phonebox. Keep Christine out of this for as long as you can.

The knackered old Escort was parked by the kerb beneath a broken streetlight. Patrick opened the rear door. The car light came on like a flashbulb.

‘Turn that fucking thing off,’ Conor hissed. Patrick reached in and killed the light – but Conor had seen enough. The body sprawled face-down on the back seat. Unmoving – the right arm crooked awkwardly – the left hanging limp. Patch of blood on his back.

With the smell of blood in the air, Patrick started muttering. ‘Christ almighty, Con. Christ.’

‘Quiet.’ Conor closed the car door and leaned on it. ‘It’s all right,’ he lied. ‘It’ll be fine. Just – just tell me what happened.’

Patrick was trying to light up a cigarette but his hands were shaking too hard.

‘Forget the fucking cigarette,’ said Conor. ‘Just tell me what you did.’

Patrick shrugged and shoved his cigarettes back into his jacket pocket. His eyes were wide and white in the darkness.

‘It was self-defence, Con,’ he said.

‘How did I know you were going to say that?’

‘I swear to God, man, it’s the truth. What d’you take me for?’

‘You promise me now?’ He felt like a schoolteacher – or anyway Patrick looked like a schoolkid, skinny and pale and finally finding himself in a jam he couldn’t talk his way out of.

‘I promise. I never meant, I never wanted—’

‘Okay.’ Conor cut him off before his voice could break again. More bloody tears were the last thing they needed. Besides, he’d had enough of this. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to go back to Christine. ‘So we call the police,’ he said, digging into his jeans pocket for change for the callbox. ‘We explain. There’s no law against—’

He’d never have thought Patrick had it in him. The kid’s shoulder hammered into his chest; his forehead jolted Conor’s chin – Conor, thrown off balance by the suddenness of the attack, was stunned for a half-second. Patrick’s bony left hand took a tight hold on his right wrist.

‘No police,’ Patrick hissed. His face was wild and close.

‘Get to fuck,’ Conor said.

With an easy half-turn of his arm he broke Patrick’s grip on his wrist. Patrick had caught him off-guard but Conor still had four inches and forty pounds on the kid. Besides, he kept himself in shape – Patrick always looked like he’d been weaned on smack and potato crisps.

He pushed Patrick back with one hand. ‘You can forget about that stuff,’ he said firmly.

But Patrick was still scared. Mad scared.

‘No police.’

‘All we’ll say is—’

‘No police.’

Then there was a gun in Patrick’s hand. The move, dragging the weapon sharply out and up from the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms, was fast, efficient – practised. Conor froze.

‘No,’ Patrick said again, ‘police.’

The kid was aiming the gun right between his eyes. Only six inches away but jumping around so much he might still have missed.

Still, though – the odds were all in the kid’s favour. This was Patrick’s game now.

‘Patrick…’

‘Shut your fucking face and do as you’re fucking told.’

Conor tried to swallow and couldn’t. Mouth dry as dust. He tried to think. It wasn’t easy with the gun barrel quivering in front of his face. They didn’t teach you that at veterinary school.

Patrick was a kid who’d been around. Not a killer, no – but hardly an innocent. So why was he crying like a baby and waving a gun around in the middle of the street at 3am in the fucking morning?

‘Who is he?’ Conor managed to say.

Patrick shrugged with one shoulder.

‘It’s nobody now,’ he said.

Connor wanted to take him by the scruff of his scraggy neck, shake some sense into him. He mastered his anger with difficulty.

‘So who was he?’

Patrick wouldn’t meet his eye.

‘Just a – just a feller.’ Patrick looked up, turned his plug of gum over in his mouth. With what seemed like a childish sort of boldness or bravado, he added, ‘One of your lot.’

‘My lot?’ Conor’s mind raced. ‘A Catholic?’

A nod.

‘Someone – Patrick, is this someone I know?’

Patrick bit his lip and didn’t answer. It came to Conor so suddenly, so horribly, that he forgot about the gun in Patrick’s hand – forgot about calling the police, forgot about getting back home, back to Christine.

He turned and wrenched open the car door. The outline of the still body was clear in the dim light. Reaching in, Conor took hold of a coat sleeve and hauled. The leather of the car seats creaked; a wheeze of air hissed horribly from the dead man’s lungs. The heavy body rolled reluctantly onto its side. Behind him Conor heard Patrick’s voice: it sounded like he was pleading now, ‘Oh, Con.’

With his hand still clutching the canvas coat sleeve Conor looked down at the half-shadowed, half-turned face of the dead man. Cold bile rose sharply in the back of his throat.

‘It wasn’t supposed to happen,’ he heard Patrick say.

Conor stared at the dead man’s face and the dead man’s empty blue eyes looked back at him.

Coleraine Road, spring of ’74

‘Quiet now. They’re coming. They’re—’

‘Quiet, he says. Be quiet yourself. And duck down. He’ll see you.’

There was rain in the air and you wouldn’t have wanted to go out without a jacket. Winter wasn’t forgotten. But still – it felt like summer, it felt like a holiday, that day.

‘They’re coming in!’

‘Shut your bloody hole, will you, Con.’

Lefty was first – Lefty McLeod, the Lieutenant. What would he have been then? Twenty-six, twenty-seven? George Best sideburns and a face as long and pale as a ballet shoe. Hadn’t got any better-looking in the two years he’d been away. He came in, grinned, winked.

‘No one here, yet, Colm,’ Lefty said in a loud voice. ‘Must all be – must all be busy or something, I s’pose.’

As if he hadn’t seen Con and Robert and Martin giggling and nudging each other behind the settee.

And then in he came – Him, the big feller, Colm Murphy, fresh from a three-year stretch in Long Kesh, bold and bearish as ever, curly blond hair overlong and pushed behind his ears, blue eyes bright, all six-foot-four of him filling the doorway.

‘Well!’ he said. ‘It seems like the Maguire boys don’t give a tinker’s cuss for the homecoming hero! It seems like the Maguire boys—’

And he probably had more of the same to say but the Maguire boys couldn’t wait long enough to hear it. Robert got there first – first to throw his arms round Murphy’s waist, first to feel Murphy’s heavy hand ruffle his hair. Martin, the youngest, was gratefully gathered in under the big man’s arm.

Conor hung back. He was thirteen – too cool for that stuff.

‘It’s good,’ Colm Murphy said, ‘to be home.’ He held Conor’s eye while he said it – and Conor held Murphy’s eye right back. He knew how it was for the boy. He stepped forward – Robert and Martin still clinging to the hem of his coat – and put out a hand.

‘Conor,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to see you again. A young man,’ he added.

Conor shook his hand. ‘Welcome home, Uncle Colm,’ he said.

Murphy kept hold of his hand for a moment longer, and smiled. God, Conor thought his heart was going to burst.

His ma and da came in then, with kisses, handshakes, how-are-yous, how-was-its. His da drew out a bottle he’d been saving. He was forever drawing out bottles he’d been saving and they were always piss. But no one cared, least of all Colm Murphy. He might’ve been the king of Long Kesh but a prison’s a prison, and Murphy knew better than anyone that off-licence whiskey tastes better to a man that’s free than the best champagne to a man that’s not.

‘Here’s to you, Colm,’ said Conor’s ma.

‘Sláinte. Thank you, God bless you,’ Murphy said, lifting his half-full glass.

And now Colm Murphy was lying dead in the back seat of Patrick Cameron’s clapped-out car. No more Uncle Colm and goodbye to Coleraine Road, Conor thought. All that was gone, now – those days were dead. Patrick had killed more than a man.

The dimmed headlights led the way over the dark roads to Dundonald. Patrick sat in the passenger seat with the gun in his lap. Conor just drove. His hands were cold on the wheel: they’d rolled down the windows to try to let in fresh air, though it’d done no good. He tried not to think but thoughts kept coming to him, things he could do, things he’d seen in films.

Patrick hadn’t got his seatbelt on, Conor noticed. So why not slam on the anchors, send him into the windscreen – he’d have his gun off him in a second, turn around, back to the town, to the police.

But he knew he wouldn’t do anything. Apart from anything else, this was Patrick, for God’s sake. His wife’s little brother. Family. So Conor just drove.

The faint nightlights of the Kelvin farm were visible on the hill and the dashboard clock showed ten to four when Patrick broke the silence.

‘D’you remember something?’ he said out of nowhere. ‘I remember something.’ There was a note in Patrick’s voice that told Conor that, whatever it was that Patrick remembered, Conor wasn’t going to like it. Patrick went on. ‘It was four or five years back,’ he said, ‘and you and Chris had just started going out. We were in the car. You were taking us somewhere – trying to show Chris what a great feller you were, palling up with her little brother, like. You were driving us out to Bangor. D’you remember?’

He did. He nodded stiffly. Kept his eyes on the empty road.

‘And then you got that phone call. From that farmer over at Coldholme.’

Another nod. ‘Jimmy Price.’ Of all the damn things to talk about.

‘And you didn’t want us to come, did you? You said it was “vet stuff”. But Chris wanted to see what you did at work and hell I did too. Anyway you’d promised us a day out. So you turned the car round and you drove all the way out there at Coldholme. And what did we find?’ Patrick let out a low whistle. ‘What – did – we – find?’ he repeated.

They’d found old Jimmy Price, first thing, white as a sheet, cap in his hands, waiting at the farm gate. He’d said the lad and the lass’d best stay in the car, Conor, son, it’s not pretty; no it’s not – but there was no stopping them now and besides, Conor had thought, how bad could it be? Jim had led the three of them out to the third barn. Hell, it was barely even a barn – just an exposed tumbledown, with three walls and a dirt floor and four bare beams jutting from the ruined roof.

There was a smell in the air of blood and faeces and fear. In the middle of the barn a lean-looking black mare staggered in mad circles. A yard and a half of coiled intestine drooped from the gash in her belly.

‘Jesus Christ, Conor,’ Jimmy said.

Conor felt Christine’s hand grip his arm and he heard Patrick behind him gag and then heard the spatter of the kid’s breakfast on the ground.

He’d read about this sort of thing. He dropped to one knee and squinted at the wound: a reckless two-foot slash – Stanley knife? Screwdriver? – all the way from her vulva to her middle.

‘Why’d anyone do it?’ Jimmy demanded shakily. Conor could only shrug. You heard reports of this stuff. Who knew why the people who did it had to do it? Something to do with sex, something to do with religion, something to do with madness.

He straightened up and warily moved closer to the circling mare. With every step she trod her own wet guts into the shit and dirt of the barn floor.

‘Cush, now, cush,’ he said, knowing how much good it’d do.

The sick bastard had taken her tail, and hadn’t been too neat about it. Her eyes as well. Conor dropped to his knees again and unfastened the clasp of his medical bag.

‘Everybody out,’ he said.

Patrick laughed. It was a hell of a noise, there in the quiet car, out there on the dark road. Conor was aware of the cold sweat on his arms and back.

‘So you did the deed,’ Patrick said. ‘You did what had to be done. And then – d’you remember?’ His voice now became softer, intent. ‘We had to take her away, didn’t we? Jimmy was going to call the knacker’s yard but you said no, something to do with regulations, proper procedures – you’d deal with her.’ Another laugh. ‘So there we were. You, me, Jimmy and his boys heaving this mess of an animal into the trailer. Guts all over. Blood everywhere.’ A pause. ‘And d’you remember,’ Patrick asked, ‘what you said?’

Conor shook his head. He didn’t remember. He only remembered the mare – and the look on Jimmy Price’s face when they closed up the tailgate of the trailer.

‘I was snivelling about all the blood,’ Patrick said. ‘And you said, “grow up”. It’s only blood, you said. It can’t hurt you, Patrick. And I thought, what a man!’ And then that laugh again – God, Conor wished he’d shut his bloody hole. ‘You were my fuckin’ hero that day, man.’

Conor drove on, watching the road. Grey hedgerows glided past, and the gold sovereigns of a fox’s eyes twisted out of sight. They still hadn’t passed another car, and Conor was guessing they wouldn’t. Patrick tapped the barrel of his gun on the dashboard, reflectively, as though he was deep in thought.

‘You said you didn’t give a damn about blood,’ he said. ‘You said, “blood means nothing to me”.’

Conor swung the car off the road, veering sharply through an iron gate and into a narrow cobbled car park past the sign: D. Kirk and D. Riordan, Veterinary Surgeons. He braked. The car rocked back on its heels.

Patrick turned in the passenger seat and hooked an elbow casually around the headrest. ‘There’ll be no one around, right?’

Conor shook his head. ‘Kirk’s away in Antrim till tomorrow night. Riordan’s on his holidays. There’s no one here.’

Patrick nodded briskly. ‘OK. It’s time we did to this old feller what you did to Jimmy Price’s poor black mare.’

That’s not Colm Murphy, Conor told himself. In the dead cold dark of the practice car park they’d hauled the body out of the car and slung it awkwardly in a tarpaulin. Heavy, like you’d imagine. Murphy always seemed like he was made out of iron, or he’d been quarried from Fermanagh limestone.

In the dark they’d carried it across the yard to an outhouse a little way behind the main practice building. Conor fumbled with the keys to the padlock. Patrick stood and shivered. The cold, Conor noticed, had shaken the bravado out of him – or maybe it was the dark, or the smell of the body and the blood – or just the thought of what he’d done, and what would happen next.

And then, once they’d dragged the body in its bloodstained tarp inside, and the door was deadbolted behind them and the bitter white striplight in the rafters had flickered into life, Conor leaned on the broad stone bench that stood in the centre of the floor and looked down – forced himself to look down – at Colm’s still, pale face. His rounded, bullish features were composed, his eyes shut (had Patrick done that, Connor wondered – had Patrick, unable to bear the scrutiny of the dead man’s empty gaze, closed Colm’s eyelids for him?). They’d laid him flat on his back, arms at his sides. The tarp was draped across the gunshot wound in his chest. Conor took note of Colm’s clothes: a shabby grey jumper, no shirt underneath; unbelted jeans; shoes with no socks.

He looked up. ‘Now. Before we do anything else, Patrick, you tell me how it happened.’

Patrick was again white-faced, fidgeting, trembling – a kid again.

‘Listen, Con, just—’

‘You tell me now,’ Conor said.

So Patrick told him. He was just doing a bit of work, he said – he never meant for anything like this to happen.

‘What work?’ Conor pressed. ‘Work for who?’

‘For Jack Marsh.’

That figured. Marsh. A name he knew. A name everyone knew. He’d used to be a redcap, British military police, Conor had heard, but he wasn’t police any more. You couldn’t exactly say he’d gone off the rails – by all accounts he’d been bent from day one – but now he didn’t even bother to hide it. Didn’t have to hide it. No one could touch Jack Marsh in Belfast. He held the city in the palm of his hand.

So why wouldn’t a chancer like Patrick wind up on Marsh’s payroll? A bit of work. Conor didn’t want to know what that meant.

‘And?’

Patrick shrugged. It looked like the kid didn’t want to talk about it – didn’t even want to think about it. Tough.

‘What happened?’

‘He went for me. Lost his rag. Didn’t know I was – didn’t know I was packing,’ Patrick said, his hand straying to the butt of the gun tucked in the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms.

You fucking liar, Conor thought. Colm Murphy, fifteen years a Provo commander – a soldier, a man of discipline, and, more than that, a man with a calling – a man with more on his mind than the crooked property deals and blackmail shakedowns that the likes of Jack Marsh made their money from – and he lets himself get called out by a snot-nosed little bastard like Patrick Cameron?

But Conor let the kid go on talking.

‘I didn’t mean it to happen,’ Patrick said again.

‘When you carry a gun,’ Conor said, ‘these things tend to happen whether you mean them or not.’ He paused, squeezed the bridge of his nose between his finger and thumb. What time was it? Maybe five, or quarter to. But he’d learned to live with sleeplessness. You just had to decide not to be tired. It was just a choice you made. ‘So. You shot him,’ he prompted.