Safe House (2 page)

His head throbbed. And his ribs. And his foot. He tried not to think of his mum and his da lying dead, tried not to think of the blood, but sank down as far as he could in the hot water and closed his eyes.

…safe with God…

“Now let me take a look at that foot,” said Delia Cassidy once he was dressed in Rory's gray sweat suit and was back downstairs in the living room with a fresh cup of tea on the table beside him. The Cassidys were like everyone else in the neighborhood—they made tea fifty times a day.

He lay back and propped his leg up on the arm of the couch, dangling his foot for examination. His headache had almost gone; the aspirin and warm bath were doing their work. Rory inspected Liam's foot with great interest while his mother was removing tweezers from the boiling water on the stove. “Reminds me of the Androcles story,” said Rory. “Androcles was the Greek slave feller who removed a thorn from a lion's paw, remember? The lion was very grateful. Soon after that, poor old Androcles ended up in the Roman arena, forced to fight for his life against a lion. Lion turned out to be the same one he had doctored. Lion was pleased to see his old friend. Instead of eating Androcles, he licked his face.”

Delia Cassidy said, “Enough of that nonsense.” She put on her glasses and peered at the wound, pressing around the swollen area gently with her thumbs. “There's a long sliver of glass. I can see it. Just you sit still, and I'll have it out in a jiff.” She probed gently with the sterilized tweezers. It hurt like crazy. He wanted to pull his foot away but he didn't move or cry out, just sat with his jaw clenched, absorbing the pain, knowing that the pain in his heart was much worse.

Jack Cassidy brought a rush of cold air with him as he came in the front door. He propped his Hurley stick against the wall, behind the door. “Ah, Liam! Your poor mum and da.” He shook his head. “They're gone from us. If it had to be, then it's a blessing it was quick. They're safe with God.”

“May they rest in peace,” murmured Delia Cassidy.

Jack Cassidy came closer, watching his wife working the tweezers. “Your da was a strong leader here in Ballymurphy. Isn't that why they murdered him, for sure? It's them on the other side that want no peace, who are doing their utmost to drive us out of the North of Ireland altogether, or kill us all in our beds! May the black butchers who did this to your lovely family burn in hell!”

Delia Cassidy probed Liam's wound gently. “Your da had death threats. A gang of Protestant thugs had it in for him. Your mum didn't tell you, I know, but your da ignored the threats. ‘They are out to kill you,' your mother told him. ‘I'm in God's hands,' was all he said.”

Jack Cassidy said, “Dan Fogarty is the fourth killed in as many weeks. Wasn't Con Begley shot down like a dog outside his own home in September? And the two Connolly brothers destroyed with a pipe-bomb through their letter box the week after?”

“Aye,” said Delia Cassidy, “and it was only in March when that young mother in Lurgan, Rosemary Nelson, a solicitor, was killed by a bomb put under her car by the same murdering thugs.”

Liam closed his eyes and thought about his mum and his da and their violent senseless deaths. He felt a terrible rage against their killers. He wanted to cry, but his heart and throat swelled and the tears would not come. Even the unbearable pain from Mrs. Cassidy's tweezers failed to help bring tears. What he really wanted was a gun in his hands and the killers at his mercy. He would…“Yeck!” That hurt!

Delia Cassidy winced. “Sorry, lovey.”

Jack Cassidy said, “Did you get a good look at them, boy?”

The pain.

Without opening his eyes he said, “One of them. I saw his face.”

“Who was he? Did you know him?”

He shook his head.

“There. I think I got it.” Delia Cassidy held up a glass splinter. “I don't see anything else in there.” She washed off the blood and painted iodine on the cut, then pressed a Band-Aid over it. “There. Now drink your cup of tea before it goes cold.”

“Would you know the man again if you saw him?” asked Jack Cassidy.

Liam sat up and reached for his cup of tea. He nodded. He would never forget that face for as long as he lived, the mole on his cheek, the dead eyes, the mole-like face, the big hulking body.

“You can tell the police when they come. Describe the man to them.”

Delia Cassidy rolled her eyes. “A fat lot of good that'll do,” she muttered.

Jack Cassidy said, “If the police don't get them then the IRA will, you can be sure of that.”

Delia Cassidy said, “The IRA is as bad as the police and the soldiers. I wouldn't trust any of them. They're all a bunch of murderers, whichever side you're on. Wasn't it the IRA or the Real IRA, or whatever they call themselves, who planted a bomb that killed twenty-nine innocent folk in Omagh, not counting a pair of unborn twins? And crippling three hundred others? And they call themselves good Catholics! Don't be telling me about the IRA!”

Liam nursed his throbbing foot and sipped his tea.

Jack Cassidy cleared his throat. “About your mum and da,” he said to Liam. “Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Coyne from down the street will stay with them until we can arrange to have them taken away. It would be better if we did it before any of your kinfolk see them. They'd be spared that at least.”

Liam said nothing to Jack Cassidy, but he had no kinfolk, none he had ever met anyway. He knew his da had a much older brother who went to England when he was a teenager and never came back. He might even be dead.

Delia Cassidy sent her husband and Rory off to bed. “There's nothing to be done until the police come—if they come,” she said to them. To Liam she said, “I'll make up a bed for you on the couch.” She kneeled beside the couch and reached her arms around him. “Try to get some sleep,”

He disliked being hugged. His mum and his da were not touchy-feely people, and he wasn't used to it. But he let Delia Cassidy hug him, feeling nothing, feeling empty.

…the graveyard…

The Cassidy home was dark and hushed and filled with grief.

Over on the other side of the street Liam's house was now a tomb. He pictured the two old women, Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Coyne, sitting with his mum and his da, “keeping vigil” Delia Cassidy had called it, in the bullet-wrecked, blood-soaked room. Across the hall, his own bedroom would be empty, its bedsheets and covers snarled, twisted and cold, and his circus posters—Charles Blondin crossing the Niagara Falls Gorge on a high-wire; Cirque du Soleil's trapeze artists, aerialists and clowns; the Great Wallendas' high-wire pyramid act; Bozo the Clown—left staring blindly into dark empty space.

The Cassidy household had gone back upstairs to bed except for Prissy the cat, curled up in a chair.

Liam lay restlessly on the couch. Every small noise in the house or on the street made him twitch nervously. His head still echoed with the sounds of death in his own home two hours earlier: the splintering blast of the front door as the killers launched their attack, the thump of boots on the stairs, the exploding guns, the smoke and reek of gunpowder. And the blood.

He tried to sleep, but his nerves and sinews were wide-awake. The mournful sound of wind and rain in the street outside fell on his ears like a dirge, as though Nature were lamenting the deaths of his beloved parents. Again, the thought of his mum and his da made him want to cry, but there was a dam in his throat that resisted tears. Fists and eyes clenched shut in desperation, he thrashed about on the narrow couch, twisting and turning, throwing off the covers. Sleep was impossible.

Sleep, like death.

A car went by outside with a splash of tires on the wet street. The wind moaned in the eaves. Rain pelted the window. The muted scream of a faraway ambulance siren joined with the melancholy sound of the wind

The roar of a motorcycle assaulted the silence. It stopped, down at the end of the street it sounded like. Nobody in the street owned a motorcycle, did they? He listened for the noise to start up again but there was only the wind and the rain.

He reached down to the floor and retrieved the covers, but when they were back in place, he twisted and turned once more until they ended up back on the floor. He felt hot and clammy. He should take off the sweat suit, the bottoms anyway.

He could hear a sound, the faintest scrape of—what? A shoe or boot? There was someone outside. Ears straining, eyes staring at the shadows and patterns caused by the streetlight through the drawn curtains, he held his breath. There it was again! The night growl of a tomcat? Or the wind blowing a sodden cardboard box down the street?

Or maybe it was the mole man, coming for him. He waited, listening.

Silence. Then a faint scratching sound.

Fear skewered him. He started to tremble. Should he run upstairs and wake Jack Cassidy?

No, he decided. Instead he rose from the couch, painfully aware of his sore foot and his aching ribs, and moved as quietly as he could to the hallway where he found a pair of trainers with the laces tied. They belonged to Rory. A boy knows his best friend's shoes as well as he knows his own. He slipped them on, his injured foot more tender with the shoes. But he was ready to run if need be. He returned to the couch and sat on the edge, alert, listening and watching, trying to control the trembling of his shoulders.

It was too quiet. He held his breath, listening. The wind moaned in the eaves of the house. He rose and tiptoed to the kitchen and looked out the window. Because the house was small and narrow, the light from the streetlamp shone through the curtains at the front of the house and reflected off the upper part of the kitchen window at the back, preventing him from seeing out. He ducked his head and peered through the lower part of the window where it was dark. It was this sudden move that saved his life. The kitchen window shattered as the bullet meant for his head missed by the width of a hair, drilled through the wall behind him, sped through the living room, shattered the glass in the front window, ricocheted off a lamppost and flew impotently into the street.

Crackling with adrenaline, he turned and made a mad dash for the front door, fumbled the bolt open and sprinted out the door and down the street, away from the Cassidy house as fast as his grief-destroyed heart, lungs and legs would let him.

That had been close. He could now be lying dead on the kitchen floor, killed in an instant. You don't see it coming. It's sudden. Without warning. You're alive—then you're dead. The end.

Like his mum and his da.

The Mole for sure.

He hadn't even felt the pain in his foot when he was running, but now it was like he was being stabbed with a knife.

The rain had eased off. The glistening street was all puddles and gurgling drains.

He heard the roar of a motorcycle starting up and glanced over his shoulder. The Mole on a motorcycle not far behind. He couldn't see the man's face, but there was no doubt in his mind that it was the Mole. Slipping and sliding in the puddles, he dodged into an alley, away from the streetlights, and kept going, sucking air. He ran out of the alley and into the next street over, heading toward Milltown Cemetery. He didn't need to look behind; the motorcycle was still roaringly there, dangerously close. He kept going, chest hammering. He turned into the next dark alley and stopped, pressing himself into invisibility in the nearest backyard doorway. He sucked air into his aching lungs and then tried to be quiet. Bike and rider approached his hiding place slowly and puttered past. He couldn't see the rider's face, but it had to be the Mole. Who else would be chasing him? Who else would be trying to kill him?

He counted to ten, took a deep breath, and ran back the way he had come, out onto the street again. Think! Think! Use your brains! Fool the killer somehow. But how? He crossed the Falls Road, plunged into another alley, and changed direction so that he was heading once again toward the cemetery. He had an idea! If he could get to the cemetery, he could hide in the Ludlow tomb, a sepulcher really, because there was no underground part. The gate on the front of the sepulcher was rusted and the padlock was broken. Inside the burying place rested several generations of the once wealthy Ludlow family who had made a fortune with their linen factory. But the sepulcher had been neglected for many years. Liam and Rory Cassidy and another boy, Sean Farrell, from St. Anthony's, had discovered last year that there was room enough inside—it was like a tiny stone house—for them to sit and smoke. If they were careful to close the gate and hang the broken padlock on the latch then no one would ever guess they were there, sitting and smoking on the stone coffins of the Ludlow dead.

Not that any of them were regular smokers. It was merely a bit of rebellion to buy a packet of smokes and one or two bottles of Smithwick's once a month maybe, if they had the money, and sit around for an hour someplace, drinking and smoking and making believe they were cool and brilliant. His mum would kill him if she ever found out.

Not anymore she wouldn't. His mum was gone. Now he could do whatever he wanted. But who would be there to care?

He reached the high arch of the cemetery's main entrance, the sound of the motorcycle as it coursed up and down the alleys still behind him. Sometimes it roared. Sometimes it slowed and puttered.

To ease the pain in his foot he tried walking on his heel.

The rain started again, thinly.

He turned up the collar of Rory's sweat suit and stood for a few seconds inside the gate to get his bearings. Everything looked different in the dark. The streetlights at the edge of the cemetery painted the nearest gravestones a grim yellow. He stumbled through the graveyard as quickly as he could in the rain and darkness, avoiding collision with tombs and gravestones, trying to remember the location of the Ludlow sepulcher. There was no light in this part. He had never been here at night in the dark. Fear of death from the Mole overcame his fear of ghosts. He could still hear the gun exploding in his ear. The cemetery was scary. Stone angels and Celtic crosses loomed darkly over him like monsters, many of them as tall as fifteen feet.