Border Angels Read online

She leaned her face close to his and, widening her eyes with mock aggression, hissed in his ear. “Tonight my country will take its revenge on you.”

  “What?”

  She paused for a moment, drinking in Daly’s uncertainty.

  “I’m talking about football.” She grinned and pointed to the television screen. The pumping music had drowned the commentary, but Daly was able to make out that Poland was playing Northern Ireland. An international friendly match, but there was nothing friendly about the atmosphere on the terraces. Poland had scored a goal and a flurry of missiles rained down on the pitch.

  Behind the Polish girl, Daly saw a familiar face enter the pub, shun the bar, and disappear into the crowd. He blinked. It was a woman with short spiky hair, pale olive skin, and a gleam of disdain in her eyes. He felt an intimate heat rise in his chest. He caught another glimpse of her shoulder, her narrow black dress, the curve of her back and waist, as she weaved through the crowd heaving on the dance floor.

  Daly made off after her. He pushed past the absorbed faces of young men and women bobbing together. The black lace of the woman’s dress hem slipped out of view. He forced his way down a long passageway leading to the toilets and outside smoking area. He was sure the woman had not seen him. He waited against an emergency exit and stared at the groups of smokers silhouetted against the brink of a starry night.

  When she did not reappear, he pushed past the smokers. The increased tempo of their voices drowned out the beats of the disco. A young couple brushed against him and sneered, as though he were just another middle-aged man in pursuit of a woman, which, in a way, he was. What had brought him to this place, he wondered. Equal parts loneliness and work, he conceded. Perhaps he was just another pathetic drunk after all.

  In the darkness, he heard the rapid sound of footsteps, a door opening, and then the heavy footfall of several bodies landing from a height. A voice cried out in pain, followed by muffled laughter. His eyes grew accustomed to the dim light. At the other end of the yard, he saw a figure drop from the wall. The woman he had been following was steadying a set of empty beer crates as a makeshift ladder, and a group of young Eastern European men were clambering down it into the grounds of the pub. They filed hurriedly past Daly. He recognized them as the youths barred entrance at the door.

  He watched as the woman with short hair swept by him. She was sinewy, with a lean back and slender neck. Daly tapped her on the shoulder. She whipped round, her pale face expecting an interrogation. He saw that she was thinner faced than Lena, her features harshly shadowed, her eyes more hollow. Disappointment thickened in his throat.

  “I’m not with them,” she said. “I don’t know where they came from.”

  “It’s OK. I’m not a bouncer.”

  “What do you want then?” Her eyes glinted.

  Suddenly, it was he who was searching for an explanation.

  “Nothing. I thought you were someone else.”

  It was probably his age, he told himself. The faces of women were beginning to repeat themselves, that and the destructive effects of alcohol on his mental apparatus.

  She leaned back against the wall and looked up at him, her dark eyes equipped with mascara, glittery eye shadow, and a smoldering expression. Her shoulders pressed against the wall, emphasizing the tight nexus of her waist. She smiled at Daly’s downward glance. A smile that said I can twist you around my little finger.

  “Lena Novak. Ever heard of her?” he asked.

  “Are you seeing her?”

  “No.”

  “Then who are you seeing?”

  “I’m not seeing anyone.” The words came out with a force that surprised him. “This is important. Do you know a girl called Lena Novak? She’s Croatian, your height and build.”

  Her eyes rolled. “The more you run after a girl like Lena, the faster she’ll run away.”

  He wanted to tell her he was a policeman, and that policemen don’t get caught up in romance. It was bad enough being caught up in crime, but he did not want to frighten her into silence.

  “This is purely business. I need to know where she is.”

  She was losing interest in him. Her eyes drifted to the side. “I haven’t seen Lena in over a month. What’s wrong? Is she in trouble?”

  “Worse than she knows. But I’m her friend. If you see her, tell her Celcius Daly is looking for her. I have everything ready.”

  “What’s everything?”

  “A safe place. Legal help.”

  “I know what you are, Celcius Daly.”

  Daly said nothing.

  “You’re in love.”

  Daly flushed.

  “See,” she said, her smile widening.

  She made to leave but then turned back.

  “If you want to find Lena Novak, speak to Martha Havel. She’s the boss of a cleaning company called Home Sweet Home. You’ll find it on Rutherford Street. She’s as hard as nails, but all the girls go to her if they’re in trouble.”

  Daly made his way back to the bar. He glanced at his watch and wondered where Susie Brooke had gotten to. It was 11:00 p.m. and still there was no sign of her. With a sigh, he decided that sobriety was not an option with so many drunken people pressing around him. He ordered another pint of Guinness and a whiskey, which he downed in two gulps. For an Irishman, getting drunk in a packed bar was a physical imperative, like putting up an umbrella against the rain.

  He was enjoying being one intoxicated single man among many when he saw a curtain fall back from the stage behind the dance floor. A shiny pole hung from the ceiling against a silver banner, advertising a pole-dancing competition. The dance music changed in pitch and grew deeper, as though the disco was slowing down. In reality, the pace was about to get a lot racier. A voice beside him shouted: “Showtime!”

  Just as he was thinking it was too late for Brooke to appear, he caught sight of her. Onto the stage walked a tall woman with silver-studded hot pants and a glittering bikini top. Even in a crowded bar, Susie Brooke would not have been a difficult woman to spot, but as she sauntered scantily clad across the stage, her presence was like a searchlight filling the room. Daly sank back into the dark. Brooke’s hair had gone a little wild since the last time he saw her, and her skin was covered in false tan. She looked possessed. She lifted her chin toward the audience and wrapped one strong thigh around the shiny pole.

  Daly could feel the excitement billow through the crowd like wind in an eager sail. Drunken men pressed closer to the stage. The floor trembled. Susie seemed oblivious to the leering audience. She leaned back, her body straining as if she were about to somersault backward.

  The DJ shouted over the thumping music. “Our first contestant tonight is Susie. In her day job she’s Armagh’s antiracism officer, but tonight, I think you’ll all agree, she’s political correctness gone mad!”

  Daly’s head began to spin. The dance floor tipped like the deck of a ship riding a high wave.

  The pole trembled as Brooke slid up and down to the grinding rhythm of a Latin dance tune. After each flip and acrobatic move, the crowd cheered lustily. Her eyes remained half closed, her face a blank. Her body had taken over from her senses.

  An overweight man bumped into Daly.

  “You’ve the best seat in the pub!” he shouted. “Full view of the stage and within shouting distance of the bar.”

  Daly nodded uncomfortably.

  The man leaned closer. “What do you think of her?”

  Daly avoided the glare of his bulging eyes and moved away. In the meantime, Brooke had finished her routine and stepped off the stage. She spotted him through the crowd and waved. When he raised his hand in awkward acknowledgment, she strode toward him, still on fire with the energy of her dance, her hair damp with exertion.

  “That was a revelation,” said Daly.

  “I’m not much of a dancer,” she replied. “I�
��ve only taken this up recently.”

  “You seem to have it backward. Compared to you, I’m an invalid.”

  She was so close he could see the soft boundary of skin above her bikini where the false tan stopped.

  “This is my second adventure this year. Getting up there and dancing is just another source of adrenaline.”

  “What was your first?”

  “Getting a job with the police.”

  “That’s a lot of excitement for one year.”

  He tried to recall his last adventure. He had to think hard. Falling in love with Anna, he supposed, had been an adventure of sorts, but that had been a decade ago, and he’d jettisoned all his memories of that time and sent them spinning into the void. He gulped from his pint. He was overcome suddenly with the feeling that it was he who was spinning emptily into the void, cast off from the one great romance of his life.

  The elastic figure of another dancer swung round the pole. Susie stared at him. He felt her tease around his silence, searching for a point of connection as though it were an ungraspable pole.

  “What’s bothering you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Is it the music or the dancing? Something tells me you’re not impressed.”

  “I didn’t realize you were going to invite me along to this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Watching how long a half-naked colleague can hold her body upside down in front of a crowd of baying drunks.”

  She shrugged. “I find it empowering.”

  “Empowering? Now there’s an overused word. You know, I’ve even heard it used to describe charging a mobile phone.” He was drunk and could hear the contemptuous dismissal in his voice. “I thought women’s lib was against using the body as a sex object.”

  “My body’s not an object.”

  “Try telling that to the men who crowded the stage.”

  “If your aim is to humiliate me, then you won’t succeed.”

  “I don’t need to try. I thought you were a policewoman, not some sort of wannabe exotic dancer.”

  She looked disarmed. “I didn’t realize you were sexist.”

  “Me? Sexist? Now you really are political correctness gone mad.”

  He watched as her face cooled and backed away, disappearing into the swirl of drunken strangers. He realized it was time to go home, before he said or did anything else he might regret.

  29

  In spite of the half-dozen pints, Daly believed he was in good enough order when he staggered onto the street. He had decided to leave Irwin­ to his own devices after seeing him take to the center of the dance floor and clear a space like Bambi on ice.

  The cloying reek of oil and meat from the nearby fast-food outlets coated the night air. Farther up the street, a snatch of melody floated from a bar where a folk session was in full swing. Daly made his way toward the center of the town. The mood changed dramatically in the square. Chanting from a group of Poland supporters had attracted a rival group of local youths, who began shouting their own songs, peppered with swearing. Young men with grim, pale faces taunting one another. Meat factory workers with the kind of faces that do not wake up expecting sunshine. Daly had seen the inside of the places where they worked. He knew the sheer scale and awesome vacuum of the factory floors, the endless conveyor belts carrying meat carcasses imported from all over the world. He detected something mechanical and automatic in their violent shouting and the way they lined up in front of one another. A few of them had rolled back their shirtsleeves, revealing muscled biceps covered in tattoos.

  Perhaps they were motivated by pride in their team, or some kind of patriotism, thought Daly, or perhaps they had gathered in the square because it was difficult to stay sober and rational in the hours of darkness. To express something through their bodies and voices, no matter how meaningless and violent, was the crucial thing.

  Daly looked anxiously for a police patrol but saw none. Without warning, a bottle crashed on the pavement in front of him, showering his clothes with glass. He peered at the grim spectacle of youths spoiling for a fight. A few of them turned in his direction. He expected the thrower of the bottle to step forward, but instead another bottle came sailing through the darkness, smashing against the wall above him. This time, the fragments of glass rained down upon his head. It was too close to have been an accident, and the bottle flew too fast to have been thrown with drunken abandon. Daly was convinced it had been aimed straight at him.

  He lurched down a side alleyway, blundering against a couple in a furtive embrace. The chanting of the youths turned to roars and shouts, rising into the night air with sudden violence. The sounds of a window smashing added glee and excitement to the drunken voices. He clambered over a low wall and ran along a series of dark alleys filled with bins. Only the noise of the mob gave him any sense of direction. There were further sounds of windows breaking and running footsteps. He caught a glimpse of a lit street, a car slowly moving sideways and then heaving over, and a column of young men clambering on top.

  Ten minutes later, he emerged from the warren of alleyways onto a quiet street. He tried to flag down a taxi, but none of them stopped. Relief at having escaped the drunken crowd was undercut by anxiety as to how he was going to get home. He was no longer protected by his detective’s ID; in fact, it made him a vulnerable target. He passed walls covered in crude graffiti and racist slogans. He felt stranded in a town dreaming of violence. He was on his own now, too drunk to know where he was going, too disheveled to attract a passing taxi. A car pulled up in front of him and a passenger door opened. It was a private car, not a taxi. Daly thought of clambering in, but hesitated. An arm waved at him urgently.

  “What happened to your head, Daly? You’re covered in blood,” said a voice from the passenger seat. It was Irwin. The Special Branch detective had managed to cadge a lift with the three Polish women.

  Daly breathed a sigh of relief and clambered into the back. He sank into the warm seat beside one of the women. Irwin was drunkenly entertaining them with stories about the police.

  “What’s it like being a detective?” asked the woman driving.

  “Murder,” replied Irwin and they all laughed

  “Honestly, it is hell though,” said Irwin. “Don’t ever think of joining.”

  “Tell me something I’ve always wondered. Is it a crime to go missing, to disappear?” asked the driver a few minutes later.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just want to know is it a crime? To leave behind everything, all your responsibilities and relationships. Can you be punished for that?”

  “If it is, we haven’t done anyone for it yet. How can you arrest someone who has disappeared? It would be like trying to punish a ghost.”

  “Poor ghosts,” she said, and the others laughed again.

  When they dropped Daly off at his cottage, he made his way to the bathroom and stared into the scrubby mirror. He tore small pieces of tissue paper and stuck them with blood onto the scratches on his forehead. When he was satisfied with the blood stanching, he examined his coat. The material was full of tiny glass shards. It glittered like a fish tail. He picked out the bigger pieces and shook the coat at the threshold of the front door. He felt relieved. Bar the few scratches, he had survived his drunken jaunt with Irwin. He drank a pint of water and crawled carefully into his bed as though he were slipping into a dark pool.

  That night, Lena appeared in a nightmare, only this time their roles were reversed and she was pursuing him. He dreamed he was fishing the river Blackwater in a rowing boat, the currents pulling him deeper into border country, the banks growing wilder, tangled with winter thorns. There was just enough moonlight to make out the shapes of two horsemen searching the undergrowth in opposite directions. One of them, astride a white horse, was Jack Fowler, while the one on the black horse resembled the man who had tried to kidna
p Lena.

  His fishing line snagged and then jolted fiercely, almost capsizing the boat. He had hooked something from the depths of the river. He reeled in the line, and to his surprise the black-haired head of a woman broke through the waters. Then in a splash, her arms and torso appeared.

  It was Lena Novak. She rose, loose limbed as a runner, from the churning water, wrenching herself free from his fishing line. The boat rocked violently, and he struggled to keep it afloat. When he looked back, her face had aged, her cheekbones grown sharper, her skin paler.

  Suddenly it was Anna, rising out of the water, her bare feet tangled in weeds, her legs riding the swell of the river toward him. His impulse was to flee. He rowed to the bank as if his life depended on it. Then he took off into the forest, but no matter how hard he ran, he was unable to shake her off. Everywhere he turned, he saw the elongated shadows of Lena’s running body followed by the galloping horses, but it was Anna’s voice that he heard echoing in the forest, calling his name repeatedly.

  He ran until he reached his cottage. He had just managed to shut the door tightly when it began to crack. It shook and fell apart, and in she stumbled, falling in a tumble across the stone-flag floor, her limbs entangling with upended furniture. The wet shroud of her dress was sodden and twisted, mud and river creatures spilling onto the floor. When he lifted the strands of black hair that had wrapped themselves across her features, he fell back in surprise. The face of a skeletal old woman stared back at him.

  He woke up, breathing hard. For a few moments, he was afraid he had completely lost control of his thoughts. He got up and took comfort from the unchanged position of his furniture, the table and chairs, and the solid presence of the locked door. The cottage’s nooks and corners looked reassuringly familiar in the moonlight streaming through the small windows. He stood for a while in the middle of the room. A bird scrabbled on the roof. He tried to recall the precise details of his nightmare, to clutch at some clues it might offer as to what was going on inside his head. He wanted to know where the images of the dream had come from. Was it his subconscious trying to work through the mystery of Lena’s flight, or a signal of something darker from within? The first dim light of dawn crept through the window. A lough wind swept against the glass pane, and the rooster began to crow.