March:
On the Wednesday that Neil Hopkirk was finally posted missing, big John Fallon had been round to have a chat with Phil Corcoran who answered in slow monosyllables. Danny and Tom had been sitting with Corky under the aluminium shelf that served as a porch when the policeman had come round. He'd stood on the step, nodding to them all in his sage and watchful way, letting them know that he saw everything they did and was all right about it so long as they didn't overstep his mark. They all nodded back, even Corky, which came as a surprise to the other two. They'd thought he'd hate the police after what happened to his old man, but Corky made a silent acknowledgement, as if determined not to show any weakness. It was almost man to man.
When the policeman had gone inside, Corky had shrugged off their inquiring glances and Danny sensed there was more to that simple nod than any of them realised.
"Sit up straight," Mamie Corcoran chided her son with a swift knuckle to his shoulder. He grunted a guttural response and through the open window - the three of them sat still so they could catch every word - they heard the policeman patiently try to ascertain Mole Hopkirk's last whereabouts. Phil Corcoran swore blind he hadn't seen Neil since Friday when they were down at Biagi's snooker hall on Kirk Street. In fact, he'd been with Mole Hopkirk on Saturday morning testing the locks on the old warehouses at the far end of the rough drain just in case one of them hadn't been snapped shut. Neil had had to go off on some errand and that's the last he'd seen of him. But Phil knew that the busy-boys could be sneaky and while it was true he hadn't seen Neil for a couple of days, he couldn't be sure that this was all a pretence on John Fallon's part and that he was just trying to draw Phil out so he could pin something in him like they had done to his old man.
The three boys listened to Phil's verbal swerving, grinning each time he sounded nervous and began to stammer but the policeman didn't hang around long enough to make him really sweat. The next day it was all round the school. Neil Hopkirk had left the previous autumn, having reached the age of fifteen. He was well known to most of the younger boys. The last anybody had seen of him was when Donal Crawford had passed him in the alley after somebody had tried to jemmy the hardware store's window. Now that Donal thought about it, that very person could very well have been Hopkirk, but now it was too late to do anything about it. As far as anybody knew, Mole had gone up the alley and disappeared along crowded River Street.
During the week, a different policeman had come round the classes, introduced by Sister Julia who would have been better at wringing a confession than a squad of police with truncheons. Had anybody seen Neil Hopkirk? Everybody had.
"...And he's a swine," Doug said when they were out behind the boys toilets, sheltering from the cold and blustery rain. "As crabbit as a stoat. He tried to kick me in the balls just because he thought I was staring at that birthmark of his. Chased me all down the Aitkenbar Hill when we were sledging. I thought the creep was going to kill me. Probably would have and all."
"Aw, there's nothing to him," Billy said. "He just talks big and flashes that bunch of keys about, but he couldn't punch his way out of a wet paper bag. He's as strong as a dry fart."
"I suppose you've fought him then?" Danny asked. He'd taken the odd sharp-knuckled punch on the arm, or the occasional dead-leg from a well placed knee. Mole Hopkirk could be mean whenever he wanted and with the younger kids, that was most of the time.
"No, I never fought him, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't if he claimed me," Billy asserted. "He's all mouth."
"So why did you give him a smoke down on Rope Vennel last week?" Tom demanded to know. He turned to the rest of them. "It was the same day Paulie went into the river. Mole came down the alley near the ironmongers, swinging those keys of his that don't fit anything and he saw me and Billy smoking. Right away he's in at us for one."
"I had plenty," Billy protested, his face reddening. "It wasn't a big thing. I just gave him one out of the goodness of my heart."
"Either that or he'd have swiped your face with his keys and taken the whole packet."
"Yeah, he can be a mean swine," Danny agreed, taking the heat out of it before Billy got any angrier and felt he had to prove something. "Maybe he's just left. Moved on."
"With any luck he's fallen in the river along with Paulie. Couldn't happen to a nicer person." Doug laughed. "I wouldn't miss him, I can tell you."
"Maybe he took on somebody bigger than himself and got a severe tanking," Billy said. "Maybe somebody beat the shite out of him and threw him in."
"Too much to hope for," Corky said. "He'll turn up sooner or later. Anyway, who cares about him? He's as thick as shit in the neck of a bottle."
The bell rang out, muffled only slightly by the drizzly rain. They hitched up their collars and filed across the yard from the old toilet block. The rain was still spring-cold and blustered in up the firth on the west wind. Summer hadn't yet arrived, but it was coming.
In the back room of Cairn House, in the old abandoned surgery, Neil Hopkirk was dying.
It was dark in the shadows, but a slanted beam of light piercing between some boards over the window, white and solid in the dust-laden air at the far end of the hallway told him it was daytime. The occasional rumbling vibration of a truck passing on River Street confirmed it.
The hurt had faded for now, faded to a burning glow from the intense flame of the last time he had come round and that had been really bad. Bad enough to make him scream but no sound had come out and all the screaming had been inside his head.
Mole was dying and he couldn't move. He had come swimming up from the black depths, floating towards the surface of wakefulness, unable to prevent the return of conscious thought. His dreams had been filled with a deeper dark where shadows came lunging from beyond his sight and grabbed at him and twisted and bent and broke him until he slipped away again.
He had broken through into a dopey wakefulness and after a while he had been able to open one eye. The other one was clamped shut and there was a numb sensation under his eyelid that felt like a pulse but his skin was wet and Mole was no longer sure whether or not his left eye was still in his socket. A slow breath escaped him and a jagged shard of pain dug into his back, making him wince involuntarily, again setting up a ripple, a vibration of hurt. With a great effort, he closed his eye and made the motion stop. After a while he struggled to lift the lid again. It slowly cracked open with an almost audible squeal of protest as if it needed oiled. The room was twisted somehow, with no vertical lines at all and even in his state - and at the best of times Mole Hopkirk was never the most eloquent or observant - he realised it was not the room, but himself that was twisted to the side. The light from the far window was a silver bar slanting down to a floor where it sparkled on scattered diamonds of shattered glass.
If thine eye offends thee, pluck it…
The memory came unbidden and the horror came on its heels and all of it came swimming back. His breath came ragged, through his nose and occasionally past the obstruction in his mouth. He had tried to get his tongue around whatever it was and force it out but there was something wrong with his jaw. It wouldn't work properly and when he did move it, splinters of pain ground inside him so fierce and hot that he had to stop. Every now and again, his nostril blocked and whether it was blood or snot he couldn't fathom, but when it happened he was convinced he was going to suffocate and a part of him didn't really mind that at all. His body, on the other hand, refused to go along with it quite as readily and his frantic breathing reflex took over and convulsed him so violently that he would pass out under the pressure of the pain.
If thine eye offends thee...
He had said that. The man in the shadows.
Oh Jesus where is he....? Is he coming back Oh mammy don't let him...
In through the window Neil had come creeping like a mouse while outside the seagulls were screaming as they wheeled around the chimney-tops and the masts of the old fishing boats and a woman was screaming and some men were yelling and it was all right because nobody was looking and he was ... in.
And then it had all happened so fast. The white face, just a blur, a ghost high up in the shadows and then the massive blow on the face and he'd been running and hiding and the man had filled the doorway. He'd coughed. Coughed. That was all, and that had finished it. The man had grabbed him and thrown him and dragged him, flopping and helpless down to the room and there had been a blurt of hot blood. He had hit something hard and the lights had gone out for a dreadful second when the pain had screeched inside his thigh and then a grip of metal - it had to be metal - on the back of his neck hauling him upwards, lifting him like a doll.
He was in.
The pain had been there, waiting patiently for him to waken. The axons and dendrites inside his head were re-connecting themselves after the fragmentation of the shock of hurt and for a while he was cocooned in warmth, numbly aware of low sounds far off and for a sweet moment he imagined he was in his bed on a Saturday morning, dozing in the mid-morning light of the sun coming through a crack in the curtain. Even as he slowly uncoiled from unconsciousness he was aware of the heat in his nose, a burning throbbing just under his eyes, and another augur screwing into his thigh.
He breasted the tape and came through to the real world and the fear came exploding up from within as memory came back. He had twisted round, blurrily aware of the light in the hallway and a scraping sound, the noise of heavy shoes on broken glass had come in from the right.
Who comes like a thief in the night? A man's voice, low and somehow hot, almost wheedling.
Neil was not an academic and he had left Quarryhill School having achieved a proficiency certificate in horticulture (he weeded the shrubbery) and a failure in metalwork and technical drawing. But he was not completely devoid of intelligence and at that very moment he knew he was in desperate danger.
The feet had crunched on the broken glass again, now louder, now closer and he had shrunk away from the shadow that came looming to cut off the dim light.
"The first woe is past, and the other woes are yet to come," The voice had been closer, hoarse and cracking as if the speaker had been breathing the dust.
"Wha...?" Neil had started to say, but a hand had come swinging up and clamped over his mouth.
The shadow came closer, right up to his face. Through the clog of blood in his nose he could smell bad breath and smoke and the flat scent of unwashed clothes.
"Nice and quiet now lad, eh? Nice and easy," the voice rumbled. The hand still clamped his mouth, fingers and thumb squeezing so hard on his cheeks that it forced his jaws apart. The other hand started pulling at the narrow leather belt around his waist.
"What's he doing?" the jolted inside his head. The belt buckle jangled, fell free. The hand groped again and yanked at the popper stud. His zipper rasped and cold air puckered the skin on his belly. The hand dived straight in, horny and tough and everything Neil had shrank upwards reflexively.
"No!" he blurted, though the pressure on his face made the sound come out in a single grunt. He had squirmed away from the probing, groping hand.
"Lie still," the man had hissed, hot and shivery. He'd leaned forward....
Time had changed. Everything had changed.
Neil was slumped against something hard that could have been the waste pipe of the wash-hand basin. His right eye creaked open and every movement set fire to some part of him. How long had it been? He couldn't say. He'd climbed in the window on the Saturday, sometime in the afternoon and while it seemed like a lifetime ago, it might only have been a day, maybe two days ago. Some things were hazy in his memory and other things might have been crystal clear, sharp as glass, but for the moment he kept them battened down. The numb sensation under his left eyelid was pulsing again, throbbing in time to the beat of his heart the way a finger will begin to throb if you coil a rubber band around it and let it go from red to purple. Another slow breath let itself out and the sliver of pain came arcing into his back. The puzzling slant to what should have been the vertical lines of the window shutters and the corner of the wall made all the perspectives incomprehensible. The light spangled blurringly on the scatter of broken glass and he remembered the other footsteps crunching them into the floorboards.
The pain had been intense, unbelievable. It had come burning up into the root of him and he had felt as if he would split apart.
The hand had kneaded between his legs and his panic had taken wing. He couldn't speak and the force on his jaw had made his eyes water so that the room swam in liquid ripples.
Oh mammy daddy it's a homoqueer..it's a BAD MAN
He'd been turned over, roughly, as if he weighed next to nothing and the calloused hand had slid across the skin of his buttocks. He felt the skin pucker and he felt his sphincter pucker and the fear had simply erupted.
Two days ago? Three days? It was far away, a lifetime away but the pain was here and now. Every movement scattered the anaesthetic affect of dehydration and blood loss. Every motion woke some broken and torn part of him. Down there, where his skin was pressed against the flat of the floor, he could feel the trickle begin again and he couldn't tell whether he'd pissed himself or shit himself or whether his insides were slowly leaking out onto the boards.
If thine eye offends me, pluck it....
A memory was trying to work its way back and Neil tried to dodge away from it because it came scrabbling up inside his head like a scary spider, dripping pain and poison and he didn't want to see that again....oh no!
"Don't look at me," the shadow had said and by now Neil Hopkirk knew it was the devil talking to him. This was sometime on the second day, maybe the second day, so it must be more than two, more than three days now and Neil knew he would never get out of here. His head slumped towards the floor making the slanted angles list even further. His arm twisted up his back but that was only a minor pain, adding little to the rest. He needed a drink and inside his mouth, where his tongue rasped against some rough fabric that might have been a piece of sackcloth but felt like sandpaper and the memory came crawling and scuttering back.
"Don't you look at me or I'll..." Neil had closed his eyes quickly. He had seen nothing except the looming shadow. All his senses were focused on touch and smell. The scent of old tobacco and the metallic cloy of his own blood and the burn of piss down there on the floor.
Then the voice had changed. There had been a silence for a moment, no more than two seconds and when the devil spoke again, it was in the different voice.
"Eye for eye, tooth for tooth and do not resist an evil person. If thine eye offends me pluck it OUT."
Sour breath blew in at him. The hand on the back of his neck squeezed tight, so tight Neil thought the thumb would come through the skin and into the muscle, popping through his windpipe. His eyes opened involuntarily and something fast flicked up, quicker than he could blink. It hit him in the eye, pecking like a blunt-beaked bird. His head jolted back and for an instant there was no pain at all inside him. It all flew away, leaving him floating in warmth. His right eye wheeled, panning in a short arc, taking in the shadow and the sliver of light and the other hand pulling away from him. There was a small sucking noise and a wetness trickling down his cheek and it might have been a tear.
"Love your enemy and pray for he who persecutes you that you may be sons of the father."
Neil Hopkirk had floated away on clouds of shock.
Now the shadows were lengthening and the angle of the beam of light was changing as the sun swung, weak and still wintry in the early spring and Neil knew it would be night soon. The memory had come crashing through, forcing past his defences and the realisation of all that had happened came back to him but he was too tired now to fight it, to exhausted to react. There was something wrong with his left eye and he didn't know exactly what it was because he couldn't move it and the eyelid wouldn't open but there was a strange feeling there as if something had caved in and he couldn't really tell whether he still had an eye in there.
The fabric in his mouth absorbed all of his saliva and made his throat dry and bleached. Neil felt himself slide to the floor and the motion blocked off the airway at the back of his throat. He breathed through his nose, or tried to and found it blocked. For a second the exhaustion claimed him, then he snorted hard, clearing the clotted blood, found another breathing hole and drooped further. One of the hands tied behind his back hit against a metal upright, just a touch but it felt as if a ton weight had slammed down on it. Another memory tried to come back, one in which a foot stamped down on his fingers again and again, but this time the lethargy was creeping into his brain and it was hard to think.
The hunger was gone and the thirst was so bad it felt as if all the moisture in him had been wrung out, but the tiredness was overwhelming and after a while the slanted light began to fuzz out. From his slumped position, jammed against the old wash basin he could just make out the gleam from the bunch of keys and the little polished metal disc as they reflected the light. The sun moved and the glimmer faded away and Neil Hopkirk went with it.
Over in the corner, a still shadow remained motionless. It stayed there for a long time, just waiting. After a while, a black fly came buzzing through the door and settled on Neil Hopkirk's cheek.