In These Dark Places Read online

  The world came rushing back at me. Smoke filled my lungs and my eyes as I struggled to make sense of where I was. I had awoken from a dreamless sleep to find myself in hell. My vision was blurred, the orange light of the fire was only a flickering glow as I looked about. I gasped for air but what filled my lungs was a poison and I lay on the ground wracked by a fit of coughing. When I gathered my wits and became fully aware of the situation, when the reality of what had happened, what was happening still, rushed in on me I saw Ellie. She was standing at my feet, her face contorted by fear and horror. She was still holding the slab of basalt with which she had hit Maguire. He was slumped in a pile to my right, his body folded at the waist, the back of his head a tangle of blood and hair and splintered bone. Ellie threw the rock to the ground and screamed. I got to my feet and took her in my arms.

  ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ I said.

  ‘I killed him didn’t I? Oh my God, I killed him!’ she shrieked.

  ‘Yeah, yeah you did.’ I whispered to her as I pulled her closer to me. ‘But you saved me, you saved my life. I was almost gone, Ellie. If you hadn’t done that…’

  ‘Are you alright? Are you okay? Oh my God, I’m so sorry, this is all my fault…’ I pushed her away from me and held her at arm’s length.

  ‘Ellie, look at me! This is not your fault. It’s mine! I threw the rock at his car. He was leaving us alone until I did that. Anyway, he had that coming, from what Abby told us, he’s had that coming for a long time. He was trying to, no, he was killing me and you stopped him, you saved me!’

  ‘But I killed a man!’

  ‘Yeah you did, to save another one.’

  ‘I’m going to hell, I’m going to burn for this…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘’The Fifth Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Kill’. It’s a mortal sin. I’m going to hell…’

  ‘Really? Are you serious? You believe in all that? Cop onto yourself and don’t be so ridiculous!’ I said as I shook her. ‘You need to pull yourself together here... We have to get back to town, but first we need to…’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ she said, disregarding my chide entirely. ‘We need to get to town, let the police know what happened…’

  ‘What?’ I snapped as I pulled her back closer to me. ‘The cops? Are you mad? We can’t tell the cops. We can’t tell anybody about this! What we need to do is get rid of him and then get the hell out of Dodge before we’re lynched!’

  ‘We can’t do that! We have to, we need to go to the police. They’ll understand, they’ll know what he was like and…’

  ‘Ellie, we’re strangers in town, outsiders. We’ve just killed the town King Pin. Do you think it’s the cops we need to be worried about? What about his brother? Another head case if Abby’s to be believed… What about his gang?’

  ‘He has a gang?’

  ‘I don’t know… sure, yeah he has a gang. Everyone like him has a gang! And what do you think they’ll do to us if they get hold of us? It wouldn’t be due process and a fair trial I can tell you that for certain.’

  ‘But he was trying to kill you, he was strangling you. There’s marks on your neck to prove it. The police will see that, they’ll say it was self-defence.’

  ‘Jesus Christ! You’re not listening to me, are you? It’s not the cops I’m worried about. Let’s say we tell them, we tell them exactly what happened here. More than likely they’ll remand us until an investigation proves that you acted in my defence. That means we’re stuck here until it’s all cleared up. That means jail, Ellie. You and me, in jail! Could you handle that?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah I could, if it means we’re cleared of murder and…’

  ‘And then what? You think Con Maguire’s going to let you walk out of town after you caved his brother’s head in with a rock? You think he’ll just sit back and say, ‘Fair is fair?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe…’

  ‘Maybe nothing, Ellie. He’ll come after us. I’d bet my house on it. I can’t have that, we can’t have that happen.’

  She looked at me for a moment, a blank stare seeing past me. Her eyes filled with tears and this time they spilled, rolling down her cheeks, carving white tracks in the soot engrained in her skin.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay. You’re right. What do we do now?’

  ‘Well, first of all, we need to get rid of him,’ I said as I nodded at Maguire’s lifeless body.

  10

  It was no windswept romance, no whirlwind. Nothing so Hollywood. Our relationship grew from an at first, tenuous friendship, bound as we were by our terrible secret. Exiled from Carneydonnagh, myself and Ellie found ourselves in each other’s company more often than not. If I’m honest, the instigation for that was more on Ellie’s part than mine. Although I liked her, liked her very much, my shyness would have kept me away from her had she not been so insistent that we spend time together.

  I was a crutch for her, something to lean on as she endured a seemingly endless period of grief, crushed as she was by a debilitating guilt over what had happened that night in the woods. There were long walks up in the hills, silent vigils by the sea. Conversations, at times heated, where I had to point out the cold hard facts to her. If she were to allow her guilt to get the better of her, we were done for. No one would understand. She had killed a man and I had gotten rid of his body. We were each as culpable as the other, both guilty of different, but equally serious crimes. In time I was able to sway her to my thinking. It was no mean feat given that she had been raised as a staunch Catholic by her mother, a woman whose faith in God would have put my Grandfather’s piety to shame.

  As that glorious summer wore on, stretching out the distance between us and that terrible night, the memory of it began to fade a little and Ellie appeared to have made her peace with it. A great weight was lifted from her shoulders and from beneath that weight emerged the most beautiful, vivacious and happy woman. A thing so beautiful to behold that it defies any of the awkward and trifling words a fool such as I might utter in attempting to convey its radiance. Whatever it was that had changed her mind, whatever switch had been tripped to alter her outlook on our situation, I didn’t care. I was all the happier to be there for her when she came out the other side. As September drew to a close, as much to my surprise as to anyone else’s, we were dating. I had never been so happy in my life. The light of that love blinded me to everything. Caught up as I was in the feverish excitement of a new and beautiful relationship I couldn’t have seen what was thundering down the tracks towards us. My guilt too, at having been such a willing and scheming participant in the events of that night, dissipated with Ellie’s. Well, in my waking hours at least. My dreams were still haunted by Maguire and the sickening odour of his charring flesh.

  The fire had chased us all the way back to the main road, a cool breeze coming in from the sea fanned the blaze and there were several times as we beat our retreat that I really believed it would encircle us and that we too would meet the same fate as Maguire. Dawn was breaking, smoky and ash ridden, when we reached the road, the fire not a quarter mile behind us by then. We emerged from the woods just three hundred yards from where we had entered the night before. Maguire’s car was still by the ditch, the driver’s door hung wide open. A dead man’s car. The hole I had smashed in the rear windscreen bore an incriminating testament to the night’s events.

  ‘We need to get rid of that too,’ I said as I pulled Ellie up from the ditch and onto the hard-top.

  ‘Get rid of it? Why?’

  ‘Because it has to go, that’s why. Okay? It can’t be found sitting there like that. You may as well put a sign on it pointing to where we… pointing to Maguire. Let’s just hope, pray, that no one from the party has come by this way and seen it.’

  The car was at the crest of the long hill which lead into town. I put it into neutral, dropped the handbrake and we pushed it hard for at least a hundred yards until it gathered enough momentum to pull away from us, gravity did the rest. For a heart stopping
moment it looked as if it was going to stay true to the road and roll right into town, the ghost car of a dead man. As it gathered speed however, the wheels turned slightly and brought it out across the centre line. From there it edged ever closer to the ditch on the offside of the road. It ploughed up the small embankment, flipped and landed on its roof in a tangle of brambles and fern a good twenty feet in from the road.

  ‘What are you smiling for?’ Ellie asked me as we took to the fields on the left side of the road to make our way to Abigail’s house.

  ‘That couldn’t have gone better, Ellie. Don’t you see? We’re in the clear. We left the party before him. We didn’t even speak to him. He left alone after we were long gone and he was drunk. Anyone who was at the party will confirm that if they’re questioned. So long as nobody passed along here and saw his car on the road, this is how they’ll think it played out. He’s that drunk he crashes his car. He’s dazed, out of it. He wanders into the woods. He starts a fire with a discarded cigarette. He falls asleep… We’re clear.’

  ‘What about the back of his head? They’ll see that. They’ll know that didn’t happen in “the crash”. When they do the autopsy they’ll see that.’

  ‘I don’t think they will, Ellie. You felt the heat in there. I don’t want to get into the nitty-gritty of it but, well, in those kinds of temperatures things have a habit of well, popping..’

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said as she turned and walked away from me.

  ‘Hey, hey,’ I said as I caught up with her, ‘You’d better hope he goes, ‘Pop’, or we’re in real trouble.’

  ‘And what if he doesn’t?’ she snapped.

  ‘He will. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘And what if someone left the party after us and saw his car sitting there most definitely not crashed?’

  ‘That’s the only chink in the armour. If someone came by, which I’m sure they didn’t, that party looked set to go on all night, it’s most likely still going as we speak, they’d have been either too drunk, stoned or both to remember it when they wake up later on. All we can do is hope, there’s nothing else for it. We just have to believe that no one saw it.’

  ‘What? And “believing” will make it so, will it?’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Ellie, I don’t know. You’re the religious one, say a prayer no one saw it, if that helps you.’

  She turned from me again and stormed off across the field as a pale sun rose pink through the smoke from Maguire’s funeral pyre.

  Abigail was sitting on the steps of her front porch. She raced to us as we walked up her drive. It was clear from her appearance that she had endured as long a night as we had, although I was certain it had been nothing close to having being so dramatic.

  ‘Jesus, lads,’ she shrieked, ‘Where the hell have you been? Where’s Maguire? What happened?’

  Ellie hugged her.

  ‘How about a cup of tea and a smoke. We’ll tell you everything then, how’s that?’

  She listened, incredulous, as we recounted the nights events. I wasn’t entirely happy to be telling such a dark and murderous secret to a woman I had met only the previous night, but she and Ellie were friends. They had been for a long time, if that was good enough for Ellie, what place had I to object? When every detail had been recounted, Abigail got up from the kitchen table and went to the sideboard. She took a bottle of vodka and a glass from it and put them on the table before me.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I don’t want a drink.’

  ‘No, you don’t want one, but you need it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You need to drink at least half of that, and drink it as fast as you can?’

  ‘What? Why?’ I asked. Abigail fixed me with a stare and I realised what needed to be done. I took the bottle, pushed the glass aside and drank almost three quarters of it in no more than twenty minutes.

  With a meticulous attention to every detail, Abigail carefully constructed our alibi. Nothing was overlooked, every contingency was considered and planned for. Every possible loose thread was picked up and incorporated into the weave of a watertight story. I was very well on jarred when the girls dropped me back to my digs later that morning. Through my landlady’s scowl I believed I caught a flicker of pity as the girls told her that I had fallen down the stairs at Abigail’s house and broken my nose. She helped them get me to bed, where I remained for a solid twenty-four hours.

  We left Carneydonnagh two weeks later, about a week after Maguire’s car was found, just three days after his charred remains were discovered in the woods. Once Maguire was found everything had played out as I had predicted. It was nothing more than a tragic accident as far as the police investigation was concerned. He had been drunk. He crashed his car and stumbled out into the woods in a daze, there to carelessly toss a cigarette butt into the tinder dry brush. The fire had burned so hot and for so long that what remained of Maguire was nothing more than a husk of carbon far beyond the reach of the forensic science of the early nineteen-seventies. In the heat of the fire his teeth had popped like popcorn and he was identifiable only by the gold signet ring on his right hand which had fused with the charred calcium in his fingers. We never showed up on the radar. Nothing connected us to Maguire’s murder whatsoever. Nothing but our own guilt. That in itself was the real life sentence, a sentence which would hurl us headfirst into further calamity.

  11

  As September drew to a close, the money I had earned in the meat plant finally ran out. No amount of frugality could prevent it haemorrhaging from my wallet, especially as I was a newly spoken for man and there were cinema tickets and drinks to be paid for. I was reluctant to surrender my independence, it was something I had come to enjoy immensely, but if going back to work for my father meant that I could spend more time, and money, with Ellie, it was a sacrifice all too easy to endure.

  Those first days that we dated were some of the happiest of my life. Long walks, longer talks, tender moments passed in silence. Her smile captivated me, her kiss enthralled me. I was besotted. The thought of her consumed my every waking moment. I don’t think I had ever been so happy, before or since. Notwithstanding the pall of guilt which clung to us like the smoke of Maguire’s funeral pyre, only one cloud sullied the horizon. My only reservation was my anxiety as to how her family, her brother in particular, might react to the news that she was going out with a fella from the wrong side of town.

  One Sunday afternoon in early October, with the encroaching autumn tinging the fringes of the leaves a pale yellow, and against my protestations, she marched me right up their driveway and then into the family room, there to announce her undying love for me. It was crass, more than a little embarrassing and completely over the top. But that was her way, always. They took to me readily enough, albeit there was a sense of capitulation to their acceptance. It were as though I was a tolerable, if somewhat unfortunate consequence of the latest fad to capture Ellie’s attention. Her mother, Chrissy, she took a shine to me from the get-go. She was a petite woman who would blow over in the gentlest of summer breezes were it not for her faith in the Almighty, whom she professed with a predictable regularity, was her rock and succour. Echoes of Granddad I had thought at first.

  To her, God was a loving and forgiving entity. No fire and brimstone here, not the rattle of a rosary bead. There were no framed needlepoint pieces quoting psalms in the Brandon household. Chrissy Brandon didn’t see religion as a stick with which to beat others into conformity. She saw the true meaning, its true purpose, which was to spread nothing more than peace and love and happiness. If religion didn’t enhance one’s life and that of others, as far as Chrissy was concerned, there was no point in participating. I remember thinking how much I would have loved to get herself and Granddad together. I was sure the sparks would truly fly.

  Perhaps it was because I was motherless, or maybe it was just that she was a down to earth darling of a woman, but Chrissy took to me right away. She always went out of her way to make me feel welcome in her home. As I
had thought, it was Ellie’s brother who had the biggest problem with our relationship. More than once I had to suffer through a bout of his machismo laden big brother talk. Threats were issued, as were warnings of the penalties I would incur if I were to step out of line with his younger sister. Ellie would deflect these tirades with a roll of her eyes, telling me to pay him no mind, that it was nothing but big talk. There was something in her demeanour however, a slight nervous tick, which told me that nothing could be further from the truth. As I had done for many years, I did my absolute best to avoid him whenever I could, but given that I was now a family member by proxy, it became increasingly difficult to do so.

  The months passed and Joe’s attitude toward me thawed slightly, although it never entirely dissipated. It was always there, the permafrost beneath a melting surface, cold, hard, resolute. The malice he bore me was nothing if not a sleeping giant. Brooding, waiting, biding time. Ready to erupt with a fury unknown, waiting for the catalyst which would trigger the explosion. Time would present him with the opportunity soon enough.

  That winter times got particularly hard for my father’s business, and coming as it did on the back of a difficult few years, his back was to the wall. After he had let go almost all of his men he pleaded with myself and Rob to stay on with him on a reduced wage with the promise of better pay once things picked up. That was a difficult winter for him. With the building trade in decline, commercial customers became a rare thing, and with sales of lumber and such evaporating overnight, we found ourselves increasingly relying on fuel sales. But even that end of the business was beginning to deteriorate. For years my father had been the go-to in Crannstonbarrow for fuel. Coal, logs, turf, bottled gas, slack and what he called, ‘those new briquette yokes’, he sold it all and did well from it. As more and more households availed of cheap installation prices on gas fired central heating, the once reliable bedrock of the business seemed more like sand than granite and our economic situation teetered precariously close to oblivion. By October, with all his avenues to credit dried up, and with the books eating up more and more red ink every month, he found that he was only left with one option, he would have to re-mortgage the yard.