Born Bad Page 28

  Here were street after street of red-brick semis, all extended in improbable and often unsightly ways. Housing that harked back to a bygone era. The people carriers and Volvo estates that were double parked on the scruffy streets a testament to each household boasting many, many children. This was the place, Conky knew, where God’s chosen people dwelled in near-total separatism that would have some of the folk back in the Northern Ireland of his youth crippled with jealousy.

  A row of shops punctuated the scene. The kosher butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. Incongruously opposite the Polski Sklep that sold Tyskie beer and kielbasa. Outside, women wearing ugly wigs and black clothing pushed double buggies along the pavement. Men dressed in black suits and big hats like the Fish Man, hastening to the synagogue or Talmudic college with prayer books and bags containing their prayer shawls tucked under their arms.

  Conky scanned the locale, remembering the address that had come up on Google. Sure enough, there, at the end of the row, was what he sought. ‘Smolensky’s Fresh Fish’ in scrolling black Perspex on a white sign above the picture window. Nothing in the window apart from an empty display counter and some green AstroTurf. This was a utilitarian place for serious fish connoisseurs. No sign of the Fish Man from outside. Conky parked up, checked his gun was loaded and approached the busy shop.

  Inside, it was bustling with locals, bellowing their orders enthusiastically at the serving girl. The fridges were stacked with wholesale polystyrene trays of fish from the market. The smell of the sea stung the back of Conky’s nostrils as he walked in, almost forcing him to retreat. A smell from his childhood, conjuring the memory of oysters, tipped from their pearlescent shells down his daddy’s throat, washed down with Guinness. His father had allowed his wee man to sample those delights on birthdays, as long as he didn’t tell his mammy about the Guinness. Now, he held his nose. Tried to push to the front, understanding that his was surely a commanding presence among these people who were largely short of stature.

  ‘Hey, there’s a queue you know!’ one of the customers shouted in a shrill voice. A tiny speck of an elderly woman, pulling a tartan shopping trolley. She wore a scarf on her head, tied tightly under her olive-skinned chin. ‘You wait your turn.’

  Conky spoke over her head to the assistant. ‘I want to speak to Asaf Smolensky,’ he said.

  Studiously ignoring him, or perhaps she simply couldn’t hear him over the din, the assistant continued to weigh and package the wares for the clientele.

  His hand itched. Almost tempted to reach into his pocket and draw the gun. It made everything so easy. But then, these women didn’t deserve that kind of treatment. They were ordinary folk, blissfully unaware that the proprietor of their favourite fishmonger’s was an ex-Mossad hit man.

  ‘Asaf Smolensky!’ He raised his voice so that the women turned to him, askance. The shop was suddenly silent. ‘Where is Asaf Smolensky? I demand to speak to him.’

  Finally the assistant looked up at him with an exasperated expression on her face. Wiped her hands on her apron and picked up a boning knife – the kind he had seen the Fish Man wield on the odd occasion they had clashed on the battlefield.

  ‘He’s in Israel,’ she answered, simply.

  ‘You’re lying,’ he said.

  She pointed to the door with the blade of the knife. ‘Listen,’ she said, fixing him with the dead eyes of a cod. ‘You want fish mix? Get to the back of the queue. You wanna insult me in the workplace? There’s the door! I told you. Smolensky’s in Israel. He went three days ago. He’s not due back for a fortnight. And if you don’t believe me, ask Bracha here, because he’s gone to her nephew’s best friend’s Barmitzvah in Tel Aviv.’

  Bracha, an attractive middle-aged woman in an expensive-looking black wig, nodded. ‘It’s true. The Barmitzvah boy said his piece perfectly, Baruch Hashem,’ she told her companions, smiling skywards. ‘I saw the photos on Facebook. Mr Smolensky was there.’ She gave a diffident shrug.

  ‘Are you sure? When was this?’ Conky asked.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure. It was this morning.’ She took out her mobile phone. Scrolled through some notifications. Showed him a photo of the Fish Man, surrounded by other Hassidic men – all smiling at a beaming boy in an oversized prayer shawl. The photo was indisputably tagged and dated around the time when Paddy O’Brien had been filleted by his swimming pool.

  ‘It wasn’t him,’ Conky said under his breath.

  Chapter 46

  Sheila

  ‘It’s been days now. Will he make it?’ Sheila asked, clutching Paddy’s hand. She looked up at the staff nurse who was wrapping a blood pressure cuff around her husband’s deathly pale arm. Flinching at the grinding noise of the inflating cuff. No response from the unconscious Paddy whose face was obscured by the tubing and mask of a ventilator. The incessant, not quite syncopated bleep-bleeping of the oxygen and heart monitor set her teeth on edge. She had a perverse desire to unplug everything. ‘He looks …’ Wiping at her eyes, she swallowed painfully. ‘He still looks on death’s door.’

  ‘Sorry, love,’ the nurse said, frowning as she wrote the blood pressure reading onto the clipboard at the end of the bed. She reached over and patted Sheila’s arm gingerly. ‘He is very poorly. They put him into this induced coma to give him a chance to recover, so they must hold out some hope.’ The nurse adjusted the flow of the drips that hung from a stand by the bed. ‘His colour’s improved a bit now he’s had the blood transfusion, but the collapsed lung …’ She grimaced, contemplating her prone patient who had been reduced to a mass of tubes and wires. Turned back to Sheila with a sympathetic smile. ‘Nab the consultant when he does his rounds later. He can tell you more than me. In the meantime, why don’t you grab yourself a coffee, lovey?’ She gesticulated towards the bed with her pen. ‘Your hubby won’t know if you slip out for half an hour. You look like you could use it.’

  Clutching her cardigan around her, Sheila slipped out of Intensive Care, away from the hiss and bleep of the machinery. In a daze, she hastened down the corridor to the café, considering all that had gone on. Days, now, and her life had already become a dull carousel of questioning by that little arsehole Ellis James, regular reports from Conky, who was getting precisely nowhere with his own investigation, and maintaining this arse-numbing bedside vigil, waiting for Paddy to die. Punctuated only by once-daily visits from the girls, who seemed more intent on catching up with their old friends while they were home than spending time with their father in what could be his final hours.

  You reap what you sow, Gloria had told her. Paddy had sown a lifetime of avoidant dismissive attachment and dysfunction into the hearts of his family. Her therapy sessions had told her that much.

  ‘Sheila! Sheila!’ A woman’s voice called out after her. Sheila turned around to find Katrina padding along the corridor towards her, plod-plodding in those ugly orthopaedic shoes that nuns wore.

  ‘Oh, God give me strength,’ Sheila muttered under her breath. ‘Here we go.’

  ‘Wait for me! I wanted to speak to you.’

  Her nun’s veil flapping as she walked, Katrina approached, linking Sheila by the arm. Sheila’s viscera knotted into a tight ball, feeling as though she had been annexed by one of God’s emissaries who spoke not only with the conviction of the holy but also with the bombast of an O’Brien.

  ‘I’ve just spoken to the consultant,’ Katrina said, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial pitch that had a whiff of the confessional about it. Rubbing her fingers together as if there were beads between them. Maybe she was saying a rosary in her head.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Sheila said, shaking her arm loose. ‘How come you got to speak to the consultant and I didn’t?’ The lack of sleep was making barbed wire out of her silken tongue. Try harder, Sheila. Make an enemy of Sister big bollocks Benedicta at this stage, and you’re just swapping one thorn in your side for a whole crown of them. ‘Sorry. I mean, what did he say?’

  Her sister-in-law scrutinised her face, presumably seeking a shre
d of sincerity that had long since vanished. She toyed with her crucifix and dropped her inquisitive gaze to her highly polished shoes. ‘Well, he said that it’s likely Paddy’s going to be in a coma for a long while. He possibly might never wake up. The collapsed lung and internal damage don’t bode well for a man who already has heart problems.’

  Sheila breathed in deeply through her nose and closed her eyes. Processed the news, though she would have preferred to hear it for herself from the consultant’s own lips. ‘He’s not going to make it, is he?’ She felt certain that some platitude about the Lord working in mysterious ways was just about to trip off Katrina’s tongue. But it wasn’t.

  ‘I think we should bring him to my nursing home to die,’ Katrina said. It felt more of an order than a suggestion. She fixed Sheila with hard, clear eyes, devoid of emotion that spoke to a familiarity with death. ‘He shouldn’t be in this highly medicalised environment. It’s no place for a man at the end. He needs his family around him and his creature comforts.’

  Numbed by everything that had come to pass, Sheila arranged her face into an approximation of sorrowful surprise. ‘So, he is dying. Is that what they told you?’

  Katrina started to walk towards the café. Sheila grabbed her by the sleeve and pulled her backwards. The nun looked disdainfully down at Sheila’s manicured hand, clutching at the rough fabric of her ecclesiastically appropriate cardigan.

  Peeling her hand away, Katrina said, ‘I manage a clean, homely nursing home with a large staff of experienced nurses and care workers. We specialise in palliative care, as well as meeting the spiritual needs of the terminally ill. I can’t think of a more suitable place for my own brother. Can you? Or would you rather leave him with strangers in here?’

  ‘I’ll give it some thought,’ Sheila said, rubbing her eyes as though tears were brewing. Using the gesture as a foil for rapidly calculating the pros and cons of Katrina’s suggestion. In hospital, they would try their damnedest to save Paddy. With Frank and Katrina breathing down her neck, she had had no choice but to refuse the Do Not Resuscitate option. ‘What’s your security like?’

  ‘As good as we make it,’ Katrina said. ‘Sometimes the protection of the Lord Jesus is not enough, and our Patrick has led a somewhat unusual life that has made him enemies.’

  Sheila chuckled. ‘You’re telling me!’

  Katrina leaned into her and whispered in her ear. ‘Shame you didn’t look after him better, then, isn’t it, you selfish, narcissistic woman? A good wife would have talked him out of leading a life of crime. And Patrick wouldn’t be hooked up to that life-support machine.’

  Leaving Sheila open-mouthed, Katrina padded off into the café, smiling benignly at the harried-looking clientele, who sat staring mournfully at their gnat’s piss tea or shrink-wrapped ham subs.

  Cheeky bitch, Sheila thought, unsure whether to run after her and take her to task over the criticism or whether to let it go. There was too much of Paddy in Katrina. She hadn’t reckoned on swapping one O’Brien despot for another.

  Chapter 47

  Frank, then Katrina

  ‘You need to be aware, Sister Benedicta, that there’s a strong possibility that your brother won’t make the journey to your nursing home, even if he’s transported in a specialist ambulance,’ the consultant said, glancing at Sheila for signs of approval. He started to roll up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing the sort of muscled forearms that had been developed in the gym. ‘Mrs O’Brien, is this what you want? He doesn’t have to go. I recommend that he stays under our care in the ICU.’

  Frank deliberately turned away from the consultant’s forearms that reminded him so painfully of his son. Observed Sheila instead as she sat by Paddy’s bedside with a faraway look in her eyes. She was pale. Appeared fragile. Beaten down by the experience. They all were. Apart from Katrina, who seemed visibly invigorated and a good ten years younger than she had before she’d had the opportunity to feast on everyone’s misery like a locust, Frank mused. No different when she’d been a kid.

  Sheila’s gaze flicked absently towards the consultant. ‘Yes. Let him go.’

  ‘That’s decided then,’ Katrina said, smiling. ‘Paddy’s coming with me.’ She held her unconscious brother’s hand territorially and said a prayer under her breath.

  Frank watched her taking charge. The words of protest welled up inside him. He willed them to come out loud, clear and authoritative instead of his usual garbled mutterings.

  ‘You’re fucking loving this, aren’t you?’ he said to his sister.

  ‘Whatever do you mean, Francis?’ Katrina appraised him through hooded eyes, running her little finger over her crucifix.

  The consultant blinked repeatedly and flushed red. ‘Er. Listen, I’ll erm, prepare the discharge documentation and leave you to it. In fact, really, only Mrs O’Brien should be here, so if you can take your discussions outside …’

  Katrina stood and smiled sweetly at the doctor. ‘Of course. How selfish of us. Please excuse my younger brother’s language.’ She gathered the fabric of Frank’s hoody in her fist and dragged him out of his seat. ‘Get up, Francis,’ she said in a soft voice that was marbled with a streak of pure titanium.

  Outside in the corridor, the three stood together in a triangle that was far from equilateral. Frank put his arm around Sheila, feeling that, even combined, their strength was no match for the mighty Sister Benedicta who positively shone with religious conviction and an ego the size of a good Glastonbury turnout.

  ‘We don’t see you for years,’ he said, cleaving his sister-in-law to his shoulder. Pointing at Katrina with an index finger so rigid with resentment and frustration that his whole arm ached. ‘And the minute it all starts to go tits up, you’re all over Paddy’s downfall like flies on dog-shit.’

  The beatified smile on Katrina’s ageing face slid abruptly, like a loose-fitting mask. Clearly bristling with indignation. Her bosom heaved beneath its humble outer wrappings.

  ‘Think about what you say before you speak, Francis. You’re embarrassing poor Sheila. She’s suffering enough.’

  ‘Sod that, Kat.’ He knew she hated any abbreviation of names. ‘I’m speaking out for She as well as me. You’re shoving your neb in where it’s not wanted. It’s not down to you where Paddy gets treated. Whether he lives or dies. That’s all down to Sheila. His wife!’

  ‘I’m the eldest!’ Katrina shouted, making several passers-by look askance at her. ‘I get a say. Sheila’s in shock! And we can’t expect her to make these big decisions.’ She treated Sheila to a harsh stare. ‘Can we Sheila?’

  But Sheila remained silent. Frank found it impossible to intuit what was going on behind those bright blue eyes, now bloodshot and unadorned with makeup after sleepless nights. He turned back to his sister.

  ‘You’re tapped. It’s like you’re getting a kick out of all what’s gone on with me and Pad. Know what I think?’ He swallowed hard, knowing this constituted a sucker punch that he couldn’t come back from. ‘I think you’re glad Paddy had his heart attack and you’ve loved every minute of my Jack dying.’ He took a step closer. Tempted to poke her in the shoulder but resisting … just. ‘And Pad’s plans to escape to Thailand were ruined. Bet you loved that too, especially now he’s on his deathbed. I think you’re lapping it up because us tainted sinners are all getting our comeuppance, and that makes you right, at last.’

  Katrina shook her head. Tutted loudly, clasping her hands behind her back. ‘I thought there was hope for you, Francis, but I can see how the years have ground away at your spirit, leaching the goodness and leaving only a bitter and twisted runt of the litter. I’m sorry for you. I really am.’

  Frank stared at her open-mouthed. Felt tears stab at the backs of his eyes, realising that blood may be thicker than water, but he’d take water any day of the week.

  *

  Sister Benedicta stood on the steps of the nursing home the following morning, awaiting the arrival of her brother in the special ICU ambulance. Having rained over
night, it was a damp, cool morning. The kind she liked, where the aroma of recently mown grass in the adjacent fields suffused everything with a blissful freshness. Like the world was washed clean of sin, if only superficially.

  The odd visiting relative came and went, during that wait. She spoke kindly to them and cracked the odd joke. Providing comforting words to those whose relatives were near to the end. But she did not leave the steps.

  After forty-two minutes, the white and fluorescent green bulk of the ambulance appeared at the end of the drive. He was here. Now it could all begin. She had planned everything. She was ready.

  Chapter 48

  Conky

  Conky sipped thoughtfully from his whisky glass, occasionally writing words in his pad that meant something to him. Names, mainly.

  Frank

  Boddlingtons double-cross

  Smolensky – he had since drawn a line through the Fish Man’s name

  Maureen

  What was in the bag?

  He cast his mind back to those moments where Paddy had been sprawled on the poolside floor, bleeding out and dressed like a salmon with cucumber. Someone had been at pains to make it look like one of the Fish Man’s distinctive hits. Someone was trying to deflect attention from their own subterfuge by implicating Jonny Margulies and Tariq Khan.

  Conky pressed the ball of his biro into the line, ‘Maureen’. Had she sabotaged her client because of some long-standing grudge? Perhaps Maureen wanted out of the business and considered bringing Paddy down the only way out. God knows, the boss tied people in for life, whether they wanted that level of commitment or not.