The Horse With My Name (15 page)

‘Sorry . . .’ I began.

‘No . . .
I’m
sorry,’ he said, coming forward, producing from his pocket the head of a tap. He began to screw it into place above the fountain. ‘Should have done this earlier. Been cleaning the limescale.’

‘I thought . . .’

‘Yeah . . . sorry.’ He looked at me. He cleared his throat. ‘The internet’s all very well,’ he said as he turned the tap and water began to cascade, ‘but we can’t download a feckin’ plumber. Or afford him.’ He turned the tap off again. ‘There y’go now, I’ll leave you in peace.’

I nodded gratefully and resolved to stay in the toilets until
the colour had drained from my face. It didn’t take long. I had embarrassment down to a fine art. I could have bottled it and sold it. It would have tasted better than Bass and given half the hangover.

For a while I stared moodily at the paper towel dispenser. Then threw caution to the wind and ripped one off.

I returned to the buzz of the café. Beautiful young things stood chatting in a duller light. Someone had pressed the ambience switch. Three of the terminals now sat neglected. Muzak which had been playing subtly had been replaced with louder mus-
ic
. It was something trippy hippy hoppy. I wasn’t altogether familiar with the new terms. I had grown up with the five chords of punk. That’s three chords for the guitar plus the pair of my hippy brother’s cords I’d thrown out of the window while he was sleeping. I pushed through the throng. A photograph of Ewan McGregor as Obi Wan Kenobi stared out from my screen. It had so excited the
Star Wars
fan that he’d fallen asleep on the keyboard, or perhaps collapsed in ecstasy, or from it.

I nudged the chair, but he didn’t move. I gave him a gentle tap on the shoulder, but there was no response. I tutted and looked about me. Nobody else was appreciating my predicament. Friggin’ kids today. Load up on drugs, plug into cyberspace, then can’t cope with it. I tutted. On screen Ewan was staring at me. He looked kind of pleased with himself, and he’d every right to be. I put a hand on the fan’s shoulder and gave him a shake. ‘Helloooo,’ I said, ‘anyone in?’ then tutted again because he’d managed to spill the remains of my Diet Coke and it was just starting to seep out from under the keyboard.

I put my fingers to it to stem the flow, and realised immediately that what had appeared in the reduced light to be Diet Coke wasn’t. It was warm and thick and sticky. And red.

I froze.

Just for a moment. Just long enough for the devil to get an icy grip on my heart.

Then I slowly sank until I was level with the guy’s face, until I could look into his cold, lifeless, staring eyes.

I’d been gone five minutes and someone had drilled a smart little hole in his throat.

May the farce be with you
.

A scream.

A young girl in a black cocktail dress, pointing.

I stumbled back.

There was no point in a
It wasn’t me!
because it was bleeding friggin‘ obvious that it was.

Blood on his hands, your honour.

I only found the corpse
.

Murder weapon?

Who cares? Doesn’t he have three dead Chinamen in his house and a
You’ve Been Framed
special from a bank in Blanchardstown.

The screaming was spreading.

‘It wasn’t me!’ I yelled anyway, holding up bloody hands.

The lights went up. The hip-hoppy-trippy shit abruptly stopped.

‘Call an ambulance!’ I yelled, looking desperately around me, pleading. ‘For Christ sake, don’t just stand there!’

Nobody moved. They were a weird mix of computer geeks and bright young things ready for a night out. None of them wanted to be heroes, or villains. They wanted to surf and dance and drink and drug. They didn’t want a wild-eyed Northerner with blood on his hands ruining their night out. I looked from cool eye to cool eye and I knew there wasn’t one of them would stop me if I walked out of there. I knew just as well that whoever had killed the
Star Wars
fan, he was no longer amongst us.

I glanced at the ceiling.

Security cameras.

I stormed across to the counter. The sea parted. The owner took several steps back until he couldn’t go any further. ‘I . . . I . . .’ he stammered, ‘I’m . . . s-sure he’d . . . have given your ch-chair back if you’d a-asked . . .’

I put my hands on the counter and tried to look menacing. ‘The cameras,’ I said, ‘do they work?’

He shook his head. ‘Show. We’ve only just o-opened, money’s t-tight.’

‘Fuck,’ I said.

‘I’m s-sorry.’

‘I . . .’ I looked down at the counter. Bloody handprints. ‘I didn’t do . . . Fuck!’ I kicked the bottom of the counter in frustration. Why me? What did I ever do to deserve . . . I sighed. ‘How much do I owe you?’

‘What?’

‘For the use of the computer.’

‘I . . . no. It’s okay. Just go.’

‘No. I don’t think so. I didn’t do this. Just tell me how much and I’ll be off.’

He looked warily at the rest of his customers, then stepped cautiously towards his computer and called up my terminal. I glanced behind. Still nobody moved. They just looked. Blood was now seeping across the floor.

‘Five eighty,’ said the owner.

‘Okay.’ I dug into my pockets. I produced coins and held them out. They were sticky red already.

‘Plus three for the Cokes.’

‘Diet Cokes,’ I said. I turned my hand and the coins fell on to the counter. They didn’t roll away. They stuck. ‘Keep the change,’ I said and walked quickly out of cyberspace.

15

I was certain that I was not followed. Nevertheless I spent the entire night by the fly-smeared window of my tiny bed-and-breakfast refuge, watching every car, studying every drunk, turning only to listen to every creak from the landing outside. Death was my shadow. A young man had been killed by mistake, in mistake for me. I was alive because I’d been accommodating, and needed to use the gents. It was Coke proving that it really did add life.

My stomach rumbled incessantly. There was nothing to eat. Kebab smells filtered through from a carry-out down the road, but I was too frightened to go out. Someone had stabbed the guy in the throat in the middle of a crowded café and nobody had noticed. I was not walking down a cracked-pavemented barely lit street to satisfy mere hunger. I would suck the hairs out of the manky sink for sustenance before I crossed the threshold of this matchstick fortress in the hours of darkness.

They, he, she, couldn’t have followed.

I had crossed and crissed so much on the way back that even I got lost for a while.

I also tried to convince myself that I would not have
been followed because there was no need for it. Whoever had killed the
Star Wars
fan had presumed it was me, and must thus have been satisfied that he had carried out his task. The only way he could have tracked me down was by somehow hacking into the messages I’d left with Hilda and backtracking them to the specific computer console I was operating in the internet café. A fortuitous slash and I was still alive.
Star Wars
fan’s last view was of Ewan McGregor, his last thought of distant, equally violent galaxies.

Fuck
.

I slipped out of the bed and breakfast shortly after eight the next morning. Not that there was any breakfast on offer, and the bed only just qualifed.

Traffic was already gridlocked. It was quicker, although scarier, to walk. He, she, they would probably be aware by now that the man they believed to be the Horse Whisperer was still alive. He, she, they would be looking for me. I was fairly certain that whoever had tried to kill me wasn’t connected to either Oil Paintings, Chicken or the dry-cleaning man. Neither was he, she, they avenging the late Chinese bookies.
Their
interest was in keeping me alive. Their motive was money, and they were all still looking for me as well.

Popular guy.

There was a newsagent’s on the corner with papers hanging up outside. The
Irish Times
led with it.
Internet Murder
, the headline screamed, and I felt like screaming back. There was a description of me, the killer. It was fairly accurate, but it could just the same have fitted ten thousand men in the city. Police had closed down the café and impounded the computers. I knew that they would track my e-mails back to Hilda, and perhaps beyond that to the Horse Whisperer, but there was nothing in either of them to specifically identify me. Hilda would claim ignorance or innocence or both.

On the other hand, I hardly knew her. She might sell me down the river. That was the way my luck was running.

Running.

Jogging.

Shit. I looked at my watch.

Jogging
.

It was the last thing I needed.

She was pretty and lovely and prone to bad temper, but I was up to my eyes in trouble and the last thing I needed was to go busting a gut on a country road.

But then.

Why not?

Wasn’t I trying to tie Geordie McClean into the death of Mark Corkery? Mandy was my only valid reason for remaining in his company. If he now believed he had killed Corkery in error, and was back on the trail of the real Horse Whisperer, right down to murder in an internet café, surely it was better to stick close to him; he wouldn’t think the real Horse Whisperer would be foolish enough to hide out in his own back yard. If he was behind the internet café murder, then he had ordered the death of whoever was using that computer, not
me
specifically. If he did suspect me at all, then the likelihood was he wouldn’t touch me with his daughter around, and wouldn’t risk anything near his own property. Hiding in plain sight. Dangerous but . . . well, just dangerous.

I kept my head down, and walked.

Close to Connolly station I found a sports shop. I went in and bought a Liverpool top, a Liverpool tracksuit and a pair of Nike trainers. The clothes felt coarse yet frail and I could feel the linoleum floor of the shop through the trainers. They were clearly pirated. The Celtic Tiger wasn’t really a tiger at all, just a big pussy cat purring as the cash registers rang. I left the shop wearing my sports gear. My ordinary
clothes were in the small sports bag they threw in for a fiver. As I hurried into the railway station one of its straps broke, but there wasn’t time to go back and complain. It was probably the only piece of my new ensemble that was authentic. I bought a ticket to Blanchardstown. From there, making sure to keep my head down as I passed the bank, I took a cab about half a mile out past McClean’s stables and it dropped me by the hump of a small bridge which she’d picked out as the spot for us to meet. We’d agreed ten thirty for our jog. I was five minutes early. I checked the road, saw that it was clear, then climbed down beneath the bridge. There was a stream running beneath it, only about a foot deep, but there was plenty of dry undergrowth in which to hide my sports bag. I was back out just in time to see her jog around a bend in the road. As she approached I was running on the spot, looking eager, and feeling like death.

‘Top of the morning to you,’ I said.

She was wearing a blue and white tracksuit with grey slashes. She was devoid of make-up. She looked stunning, even while frowning. She didn’t say good morning. She just kind of grunted in response, then added a terse ‘Let’s do it.’

Perhaps she wasn’t a morning person. She took off again at speed and I used up what pitiful reserves of energy I had in catching up. From there on in it was a case of hanging on for dear life.

‘How many . . . miles . . . do you . . . normally . . . do?’ I managed. We were, of course, going uphill.

‘Thirty-four.’

‘Thirty-four!’

‘Three
to
four!’

‘Christ . . . that many?’

‘I thought you ran?’

‘I . . . do . . .’

‘Uhuh.’

She upped the speed, I fell back, with a major effort I caught up, or maybe she slowed again. I gasped: ‘You . . . seem . . . distant . . .’

‘I will be if you keep up that snail’s pace.’

‘No . . . I . . . mean . . .’

‘I know what you mean.’

She sped away again.
Fuck it
.

Within a couple of minutes she’d become not much bigger than a dot on the horizon. I was bent double, trying to get my breath. When I managed to look up the dot was getting bigger again. I steadied myself against a fence post as she continued to grow. As she closed in I pushed a smile on to my face and said, ‘I must have pulled a––’

But she flashed past. ‘It’s all downhill now,’ carried back to me on the wind.

Christ.

I started after her again. I could feel every friggin’ ounce of gravel through my trainers, plus they were cutting the heels off me. I had sweated through my Liverpool top and was gratified to see that the colour was running; my hands were already dyed red.

Up ahead, distantly, she finally stopped.

She was on the bridge. When I finally got there she was sitting on the wall, hardly out of breath at all. I was gasping for dear life. I sat down beside her. She smiled at me. I smiled back. She put a hand on my shoulder. She smiled again. I smiled back. Her face moved towards mine. Mine moved towards hers.

I had a sensation of floating through the air.

No.

I
was
floating through the air.

She’d given me an almighty shove.

I shot backwards. It was only a drop of fifteen feet or so,
but it seemed more. I plunged into the stream with a yell, when I should have kept my mouth closed. As I thrashed about I swallowed a lungful. The stream bed was relatively soft, small pebbles as opposed to sharp rocks, but it
hurt
. I was bruised and scratched and soaked and suffering from mild shock.

I stood up and yelled ‘What the fuck was that for?’

She was above me on the bridge. She was no longer smiling. ‘For telling me lies, you bastard.’

I finished coughing up stream life then ran a sopping hand across my face before responding with a suitably Wildean ‘What’re you talking about, you fucking stupid bitch?’