OxCrimes Page 14

  While Rab watches, more coins miss their mark. A ballboy, his partisan presence taunting the away support, begins pocketing the missiles. This incenses the crowd, who throw ever more and faster projectiles. The faster they are, however, the less accurate, and with a little luck and a lot of unharried wits, neither of the slow-moving targets is hit.

  At half-time, a smoke bomb is let off in the crowd and a small fire starts. Rab gives the nod, and eight of them move in a line through the gate and into the crowd. They focus on what’s ahead of them, ignoring the taunts. Rab knows better than to look back and confront the hate, but he can feel the flurry of spit as it begins to land on his back.

  The fire is out when they get there. Two obviously inebriated skinheads are pointed out by their neighbours. The line of dark shapes forms itself around the trouble-makers and they are arrested. Rab knows that now only his team’s ‘bottle’, their absolute determination, is going to stop elements of the support turning on them. If one of the younger constables should crack and lose composure, they will be swamped. The skinheads are led back towards the gate. Rab allows himself a glance up at the pitch as they work their way forwards. It is a lush green plain, its divots being stamped down by the ground-staff in preparation for the second half. The skinheads raise their arms and begin to sing, others joining in. A hissing and whistling from the opposite end of the stadium tells them that the home support has noticed. The singing grows louder as a result, filling Rab’s ears, making him dizzy with its intensity. The pitch blurs for a second, then clears. There is sweat on his back, inside his white cotton shirt.

  By the end of the match, he has been twice more into the crowd at the away end. He stays behind the net after the final whistle – a draw being the thankful, prayed-for conclusion – until the terracing has cleared. A few hoarse chants issue from the street outside the ground. Cans clatter along the gutter. Rab peers at the three stripes on his right arm, the tight threads which signify his rank. Thirty years. Seagulls swooping down to pick at discarded food. Floodlights caught against the pale red of the encroaching evening. Thirty years. The ballboy is standing in front of him, holding a pile of coins which he offers up.

  ‘Half for you.’

  Rab looks at the kid, his hair cut in a shoddy fringe across his brow. Maybe they get younger every year, but at least some still hold you in respect.

  ‘I’ll see they go to a good cause.’

  The money, as it does every week that Rab is on duty at this ground and with this boy, changes hands. The boy turns and marches off the field towards the tunnel. Rab wonders if the coins really do amount to a half-share. Next time he’s in his local, he will slot them one at a time into the charity tin. One of these days, maybe a coin will find its target and he will have to make an appointment, will have to stare defeat squarely in the face. One day, but not today. He pockets the handful of missiles and they become money again.

  Heading for the locker-room, he notices a coin that has gone unnoticed on the churned turf. He stoops to claim it and it is as though the afternoon is rushing back into his ears: the crowd’s hateful chanting. Easy, easy, easy; the noise crashing down over the gulls and the pitch. One floodlight is turned off and then another. Easy, easy ringing in his ears and the coin between his outstretched fingers, his vision blurring once more. He staggers a little but manages to right himself. The roaring subsides and the breath comes cold from his lips as the penultimate floodlight goes dark. In shadow and discomfort, he makes for the relative safety of bench, and washhand-basin, and mirror.

  Author’s note

  ‘An Afternoon’ was published in the second annual volume of ‘New Writing Scotland’. The year was 1984, which means it was probably written in ’82 or ’83. I had submitted – unsuccessfully – to volume 1. Other contributors to Volume 2 included Kathleen Jamie, Edwin Morgan, and Robert Crawford. I wonder if any were as thrilled as I was. This was the first acceptance of my work by an actual BOOK. Not a magazine, but a 166-page tome retailing at £3.95. The cover announces me as Ian J Rankin, and my bio at the back states that I was a postgraduate student at Edinburgh University, with three published short stories under my belt and a first novel ‘seeking a publisher’. (Alas, it never found one, and resides in my bottom drawer.) Re-reading this story now, I’m curious about the young man who wrote it – a young man who hardly ever attended football games, and knew no police officers. The writing could be improved upon (and I have taken the liberty of tweaking this current version a little), and it remains a vignette more than a fully-fledged story. But what interests me most is that I should have chosen to write about a jobbing police officer. Were the seeds of Rebus being sown here? Although I did not at the time read detective fiction, did I harbour an interest in policing itself? I don’t have any answers, I’m afraid. But I do sympathise – and empathise – with Rab, and I like the fleeting glimpse we are given of his relationship with the ballboy. Who is the boss and who the sidekick? Maybe the kid grew up to be a cop himself – a detective even. Or a criminal …

  STUART NEVILLE was born in 1972 in Armagh, Northern Ireland. His debut novel, The Twelve (published in the USA as The Ghosts of Belfast), won the Mystery/Thriller category of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and subsequent titles have been shortlisted for various awards, including the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year, and the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. His latest novel, The Final Silence, is published in summer 2014.

  Juror 8

  Stuart Neville

  My name is Emmet McArdle. I am seventy-six years old, and I feel every day of it. I don’t sleep well. I don’t pass water well. I don’t eat much. Which leaves me a lot of time to think. And I’ve been doing far too much of that lately.

  I wish I could say all this started after the trial, but that wouldn’t be true. I’m just an old man with old man complaints, and my discomforts go back long before I did jury duty nine months ago in August of ’57. But now, when I can’t sleep at night, it’s the trial that plays on my mind. The boy we saved from the chair.

  That boy went free because of us twelve men.

  You’d think that would be easier to live with than if we’d sent him to burn. Probably should be. But ever since I left that courthouse, he’s nagged at me. Kept whispering in my ear, saying maybe you were wrong, maybe I did kill my father after all. And maybe I’m fixing to kill again.

  Well, a week and a half ago, that’s exactly what he did.

  I heard the news on the radio. I didn’t make the connection straight away, mind you, but there it was. I was in the back room of the store, what used to be my store, and I guess on paper it still is. But my boy Eugene runs it now.

  McArdle Musical Instruments of 48th Street.

  When my father survived the boat trip from Ireland, escaping the poverty that devoured his own parents, he and his brother brought with them four piano accordions, two melodeons, three mandolins, and a suitcase full of D-whistles. His brother, my uncle, also made it across, but he died within a week of landing. He coughed his lungs up from pneumonia. I don’t know what they did with his body.

  My father, Emmet Senior, found a room somewhere in the Bowery, probably sharing a floor with a gang of other Irishmen, all of them wondering where those streets paved with gold were located. He used the little money he’d brought with him, and what he’d taken from his brother’s pockets, to rent a stall on Canal Street. As he told it to me, he wound up selling those fancy accordions for less than they cost him, but he made a killing on the whistles, snapped up by immigrants who wanted to hear a little Londonderry Air to remind them of home. He made enough to buy more stock and establish a paying business.

  A year later, he was making a profit on accordions, and mandolins, and banjos, as well as playing in a ceilidh band in the evenings. That was how he met my mother, a brown-haired girl from Clonmel, at a neighbourhood dance. I never knew her. She died giving birth to me, and my father never married again. Not unless you consider whiskey a wife.

  I took over the running
of the store at age sixteen. I never got much schooling, at least not the proper kind, learning everything I needed to know on the shop floor. How to tell what a customer wanted, how much he had to spend, whether he was good for credit. My father remained the boss, of course. We walked to the store together every morning from our apartment on the next block. While I opened up, Emmet Senior went to the back office, with its big old mahogany desk and the portrait of that brown-haired girl from Clonmel, and sat down. He’d leave it a decent time, maybe until noon, and then he’d open the right hand drawer, remove the bottle of liquor, and start drinking.

  I carried him home most evenings, his arm slung around my shoulder, his feet dragging on the ground. And the store takings in my pocket, ready to stow in the safe in his bedroom. I never saw the money again. I don’t know what he did with it, whether he banked it or drank it. All I know was the rent got paid, and I got my salary. Weekends he’d go out and play at the local ceilidhs.

  I was twenty-five when he died. He touched up some young woman at a dance, neither realising that her fiancé was only a few feet away, nor that said fiancé was in the habit of carrying a pistol.

  I cried when I buried him, not that he deserved it.

  Ten years later, I had a wife and five children of my own, and I’d made enough money that I could move the store from the Bowery up to 48th Street.

  My two girls grew up to be schoolteachers, same as their mother. I met Mary at a dance, just like my father had met my mother, but I took better care of her. I paid for proper care when she gave birth to our children, rather than giving some backstreet witchdoctor a dollar for the job.

  My eldest, Jarlath, became a police officer. Don’t ask me where he got that from. All right, we’re Irish, but that doesn’t mean we’re all born with badges.

  Eugene had the music in him since he was a baby. I knew before his first birthday that he would take over the store for me. And he did, not long after he came back from fighting the Nazis in Europe.

  His younger brother Columba was not so fortunate. He never made it off the beach, cut down by machine-gun fire along with hundreds of other good men. I miss him too much to be proud of him, hold too much resentment in my heart to be glad of what he sacrificed. He was my son and it isn’t fair that he died, no matter what for. I am angry about it, and that’s that.

  I still show up to work every day. I live with Eugene and his wife – Mary was taken by a stroke five years ago – and we both travel to the store every morning, just like me and my father did. We don’t walk all the way, of course; some of the journey is by train, but we go together all the same.

  And just like my father, I go to the back office. I took his desk with me when I moved the store, and it’s still there now, along with that portrait of the girl from Clonmel, and another of my absent son. Sometimes I talk to my mother, as if we had known each other. I hope she’d be proud of me, proud of the life I’d made for me and my children. I talk to her more now than I used to. Perhaps the growing awareness that I’ll see her before too long makes me want to know her better.

  I only get called out of the office when someone’s interested in an accordion, or they want one repaired. The store’s ground floor used to be a gallery of pearloid, rows of Hohners, Paolo Sopranis, Victorias, big 120-bass monsters right down to little 12-bass tiddlers.

  Not any more. Nowadays, everybody wants a guitar.

  And not even real instruments, proper acoustic instruments with air in them to make a decent sound. Now the ground floor is full of these planks with strings on them, Fender, Gibson, Gretsch, and I don’t know what. I swear it’s a race to see how much paint they can put on a stick of wood and still get money for it. The Gibson rep came by last week, and he had a guitar with him that looked like an arrowhead. He called it a flying something or other. I asked him how someone was supposed to sit down and play the darned thing without it sliding off his knee.

  Eugene took one even though I told him it was a damn fool thing to do. Mark my words, it’ll still be hanging there five years from now.

  Anyway, I spend my days in the back room, looking at that photograph of my mother, wondering how I’m going to get through the day. If I’m honest, I was relieved to get the letter calling me for jury duty. I grumbled about it to Eugene, but inside, I relished the idea of getting out and doing something that mattered.

  And when I realised what the trial was, I felt good, I felt the importance of this burden I’d been given.

  All twelve of us had the boy strapped down and wired up the minute the prosecutor opened his mouth. Not a chance in the world this young thug was innocent. They talked till I was dizzy, and not a word told me anything but this young man had stabbed his father in the heart in a fit of anger. They had two witnesses, a man about my age, and a woman in her forties. One saw the boy do it, the other heard him.

  And yet, and yet, and yet.

  The foreman held a ballot, and we all raised our hands to say guilty. All but one.

  The man next to me, Juror 8.

  Let’s talk, he said.

  And we talked.

  We talked until God cracked the sky. We talked until every other man in that room had been reduced to a sweating pulp. That man, Juror 8, didn’t stop until he’d broken every one of us.

  I was the first to fall.

  When he stood against the rest of them, saying let’s talk, I’m not sure, let’s go over it again – when he said that, when he made his stand, I listened.

  Why?

  Because I’m a contrary old bastard, that’s why. Pardon my language. And I’m Irish. Show an Irishman a lost cause, and he’ll fight to the death for it, just out of pure wickedness.

  So I changed my vote. When all the rest of them protested, thought me an old fool, I dug my heels in and said I wanted to hear what Juror 8 had to say. If I hadn’t, he would’ve let it go, and the boy would’ve got fried. And that young couple in the new Pontiac Star Chief would be breathing this morning.

  The young man had called at his sweetheart’s building on West 127th to take her to the movies. They were approached by two Hispanic males, threatened with a knife, ordered to hand over the keys to the shining new car. The young man resisted. He was stabbed in the heart.

  They took the girl with them. Her parents found the young man’s body on the sidewalk and called in the description of the vehicle. Lord alone knows what they went through, knowing their daughter had been taken by the same people who had killed her boyfriend.

  The police caught up with them out in Queens. The two males didn’t show their hands quickly enough, and they were shot dead right there in the car. The cops found the girl’s body in the trunk. She must have put up a fight, made too much noise. They’d killed her before they had a chance to molest her.

  I shook my head when I heard the report on the radio the following morning, wondered at the state of the world. But that was all. It wasn’t until Jarlath called by that night for supper that I learned the truth of it.

  Jarlath had a wife at one time, but she couldn’t hack being married to a cop. At least that’s what he said. God forgive me, my eldest son has a mean streak in him, and he’s hard to like. His brother barely tolerates him, only has him over for supper once a week in order to placate me.

  ‘You hear about that double homicide last night, Pop?’ Jarlath asked between mouthfuls of pork chop with applesauce.

  Eugene and his wife Wendy exchanged a look. Their three girls remained silent as they ate.

  ‘Not at the table, Jarlath, all right?’ Eugene said.

  Jarlath ignored him. ‘You hear about it, Pop?’

  ‘I heard something on the radio,’ I said. ‘Let’s maybe talk about it after supper.’

  I swear Jarlath is as thick in the skull as a gorilla. He kept right on talking.

  ‘You heard the perps got shot over near Flushing Meadows, right?’

  Eugene shook his head and rolled his eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, deciding to humour Jarlath in hopes of
finishing the conversation as quickly as possible.

  He put his fork down, ran his tongue around his teeth, seeking stray morsels of pork.

  ‘Well,’ he said, sitting back in his chair, ‘you’ve come across one of them before.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Hugo Fuente,’ he said.

  My scalp prickled. I felt the hairs on my arms stand up like soldiers. A loose feeling low down in my stomach.

  ‘Pop?’ Eugene said.

  Jarlath’s crooked smile fell off his face.

  They must have seen it on me. The horror. My fork fell from my fingers and rattled on Wendy’s good china plate, taking a chip off it.

  ‘Pop,’ Eugene said once more, reaching for my hand. ‘You’re shaking. What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Please excuse me.’

  I left the table and made for my room at the back of the house. The door hit the frame harder than I meant it to. I sat on the edge of my bed and chewed on my knuckle.

  ‘Pop?’

  Eugene calling from the corridor. I sprang to my feet, or as near as a man my age can manage, and turned the key in the door. The handle rattled, then he knocked hard.

  ‘Pop? What’s wrong? Open the door.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I called. ‘I just want to lie down for a little while.’

  ‘Come on, Pop. You’re scaring me.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘Let me alone. Please.’

  ‘Pop, you got me worried. C’mon, open the door.’

  ‘Let me alone, dammit.’

  I didn’t mean to yell, but it did the trick.

  ‘All right,’ Eugene said. ‘Wendy can warm your supper when you feel like eating.’

  I returned to my bed, sat on the edge, my hands clasped together.

  Hugo Fuente.

  Just a kid, we’d said, all twelve of us. A boy. How could we send an eighteen-year-old to die? Some of us wanted to. Some of us fought hard. But Juror 8 ground them down.

  This boy, he said, had been hit on the head every day of his life. I didn’t doubt it. But he didn’t look like a mean kid. I can still see him there in the courtroom, small, lean like a greyhound, and those frightened eyes.