CHAPTER FOUR
"Derek Reilly has just threatened to batter me."
Marianne sat bolt upright in bed.
I didn't really want to tell her, but things always turned out better if I did.
"Something about more assaults on the estate and he seems to be blaming me."
She didn't say a word. She didn't have to. 'I told you so' was written all over her silhouette in the silver half light of the moon.
"I have to go and see what's going on."
"No you don't. This has nothing to do with you. Not yet."
How can two conflicting feelings be so right at the same time. I still wasn't awake. I couldn't think. Marianne was always right. But I still had to go. I had organized the neighborhood watch, even if Derek Reilly had been its most enthusiastic supporter, the ultimate responsibility lay with me and I hated to shirk responsibility.
"I won't be long." I felt guilty saying the words. "Don't wait up though. No need for both of us to lose sleep."
Marianne rolled over away from me.
"Do whatever you want, but don't say I didn't warn you."
So I left my house and family behind at 4.30am to go and investigate a potential serial killer on our estate. Ireland, even small town Ireland has its problems, but this was surreal for a place like Darklow.
The police lights made the spot easy to find. Sgt. Mike Biggs was still on duty.
"Happy now Dennis?" he said.
Peadar and Michael, as Derek Reilly had pointed out, were well and truly battered. Mangled would have been a better word. I wanted to speak to them but the ambulance crew were working hard to stabilize them and they looked in no condition to speak anyway.
Derek Reilly was still at the scene, still angry, but also looking a bit frightened which was highly unusual for him. I gave him a nod. I figured if he was really going to batter me he wouldn't do it with a Garda Sergeant standing next to me.
"What are we going to do?" I asked Sergeant Biggs.
"We are going to do nothing Dennis. You are going to go home and put your alarm on. All of you are going home and we will be out to question the lot of you once we have this mess cleaned up. You've done enough harm for one night. You know you could be prosecuted over this."
"Me? What for?"
"Ah Jesus." He shook his head and walked away from me to attend to his crime scene. I craned my neck to see into the ambulance and my stomach turned as I realized what I was looking at. Michael's right forearm, the one I could see, looked like a piece or raw meat or an anatomical specimen with the skin removed. I gagged and then landed my eyes on something worse as I turned to Peadar. If I hadn't been told it was him I wouldn't have recognized him. He looked like someone had wanted to flay him and had gotten most of the way through before being interrupted. A chill went through me. Whoever did this couldn't be that far away. Something must have interrupted them. Was this the condition that the first body had been in? Or worse? No wonder Mike Biggs hadn't wanted to discuss the details.
Suddenly Derek was in my face, almost nose to nose. A throwback from his bouncer days I suppose. Everybody else was quietly afraid of him, maybe even Mike Biggs as well but he didn't intimidate me. If he laid a finger on me I would make sure the law dealt with him and he knew me well. Well enough to know that I would stand on principal and never back down.
"Why don't you fuck off home Dennis?"
I held his gaze for exactly two long seconds while he blew air out through his nostrils like a bull.
"Derek, we have to do something. What are you threatening to batter me for? I've known you for years. This is Sunnyvale, we're on the residents association together for God's sake."
He listened hard and underneath his anger I could see fear. Maybe he wasn't so different from the rest of us after all.
He leaned in even closer and looked me in the eye.
"I've seen some fuckin' nasty stuff in my time man. And I know when to back off. Leave this one to the cops Dennis. Fuck sake."
"Dennis," Mike shouted at me, "out of here. Now!" Mike was an even less intimidating man than ex-thug Derek Reilly, but I decided it was time to go home anyway. This whole mess could wait until the morning.
At the house the whole family was awake.
"What's going on sweetheart? " Marianne wanted to know. " What’s all the noise? The whole street is up and talking about it."
"You and you, bed. Now." I told the kids. My son Will scowled at me. He was getting harder to manage. At 15 years old he was beginning to behave a bit like me at that age. I didn't want that. He was born when I was only 20 for God's sake. The biggest mistake I'll never regret in my whole life and the most beautiful, painful experience I will do anything for my own kids to never have. Don't look for the logic in there please. Unless you've done it, it can't make sense to you. Thank God Suzy wasn't showing signs of anything other than maturity at the same age. That's right. Twins. We were blessed with twins. Although sometimes it felt like the Gods were laughing at us.
"Dennis, what's going on?" Marianne called me back to myself.
"There's been another incident. Down in the woods again. Peadar and Michael both beaten to a pulp and it looked to me as if pieces of skin had been cut off them." I shuddered as I told her the details. The shock of it all was slowly sinking in. This was happening on our doorstep.
Marianne was speechless.
I reset the house alarm.
"Pieces of skin? What do you mean? What's this got to do with us? Why did you have to be down there?"
"It was my idea. The neighborhood patrol. That's why Derek Reilly was so angry."
And now Marianne was angry too.
"Why do you always have to be the one to take responsibility? You always have to be the one to stand up for things and then we, this family, end up taking the consequences."
"Somebody has to stand up sweetheart. That's how things happen. Otherwise …."
"Not this time."
She gave me the 'divorce' look, so I backed down. As always. Marianne was a beautiful woman, inside and out. I never really deserved her. Smart, sexy, strong, intelligent; an all around beautiful person. The kids adored and respected her and she was devoted to them and to me.
Me.
Who was I? Who am I?
Just a plain old ordinary sales guy, mid-thirties and heading for the big 40. Struggling to keep a roof over my family's head, wondering where it all went right, wondering where it all went wrong. I knew she was right. She always was. I always had to be the one. Problem neighbors? I complained and then took the heat. Other people benefited. Poor service? I had to see the manager. Queue jumper? Not with me around. I'm a pacifist, non-violent and non-aggressive, which is a real problem when you are trying to put good manners on the whole stupid ill-mannered world we live in. I won't hurt a fly. I'll chase the damn thing around the house for an hour to get it out of the window first. Even the kids laughed at me. But I didn't care. In my head I was the good manners hero. I still am. But to the rest of the ill mannered tracksuit wearing bad-tattoo sporting, ever trashier world we live in, I guess I was just a short, skinny, ordinary uptight guy and most of the time people would just tell me to go to hell. One kid recently told me my vagina was too tight. A girl. The little....
But it never did stop me. Not even when they got aggressive. I was Joe ordinary and it's guys like us Jane and Joe ordinaries who make this world go round. We pay the taxes, respect the law and other people, keep a bit of damn civility and manners alive in an otherwise rude and obnoxious world.
The only thing more important to me than cleaning up this trashy planet one sloppy tracksuit at a time, is looking after my wife and family. They always came first.
The always will.
"Did you speak to him?"
"Damn!" I had forgotten about him. Will. The walk around had taken an hour in all with the ten minutes of delay from the rain and the bit of exchange as we changed shifts and I just damn well forgot. I was tired.
But that was no excuse.
Marianne glared. "Go to bed Dennis. You have work tomorrow and I have to get up early too."
"I'll speak to him first thing tomorrow. I swear. I won’t forget."
She stopped on the stairs.
"Don't tell me. Just do it. And in case you forgot, Suzy and I are having our girls’ break tomorrow. Mother and daughter together. Get it? We won't be back until Thursday."
"Of course sweetheart. It’s just this stupid rubbish happening on the estate and all ...." I sounded so lame.
"Speak to your son and then get your mind off this crazy stuff. Let the police handle it. You've done all any concerned citizen should do already."
"I'll be up soon."
She dismissed me with a withering, disbelieving sigh before disappearing up the stairs.
As soon as she was out of sight I clicked the computer on. God help me. I wouldn't be long, but I knew if I didn't follow this train of thought I wouldn't get to sleep anyway.
'Tattoo’s cut off' was my first Google search.
Results:
'Joyous Life – how to remove a tattoo!' No.
'I need help to cut out my tattoo. One drunken night … .' No.
'How to delete a tattoo – 6 easy steps!' No.
'The Five Punishments of ancient China' Interesting. I read that one before continuing.
'Woman tries to cut off boyfriend's tattoo.' Hmm, a little more relevant.
'Man cuts out tattoo after split with girlfriend' Maybe.
'Gang Member with Tattoo of crime scene' Just stupid.
It's a sick world and all the more reason for hard working people like me to organize ourselves and stand up for our families and for what we believe in. Even if we end up being a small minority on a generally screwed up planet, we will be the hard working ones, the focused ones, the clever ones. No wonder we had chosen to live in a gated compound. Keep the damn tracksuits outside. Just a pity they had started renting inside the gates is all. Nothing I could do about that. When the recession hit and landlords started to drop their prices in desperation suddenly exclusive wasn’t so exclusive any more. Now we were locked inside with them.
But I digress.
It was time to go a little deeper with the searches.
'Magical Power of Tattoos' I entered on a whim.
Results:
Sak Yant: Magic Tattoos of Thailand
Cambodian Yantra Tattoo
Magical Tattoos of Thailand's Mahouts
Mahouts? Interesting.
Now I didn't have any tattoos, I'd never been interested. In fact, as I have mentioned... Did I mention that? I downright hated the damn things and had forbidden my two children from ever having them. I'm only 36 years old but that's enough to remember when they were universally considered to be anti-social, trashy, criminal looking stains on the skin. I preferred it that way. Now every bank manager and school mistress has to show off their flash sheet designer tattoo at the beach or the company picnic. My dad was a sailor back in the 1940s and he made his own tattoo. He dug it into his forearm with a sewing needle and some printers’ ink. He did it on board ship which probably explains why it was so lopsided. He earned that tattoo and it represented his profession and his experience and his time. It was still horrible though and he wasn’t proud of it. I grew up in an era when you would cover them up so people wouldn't think you had been in jail. But today everybody has them. It no longer means anything. It's just fashion. Boys, girls, old ladies, intellectuals, rich and poor.
Meaningless. Vain. Pathetic.
If I see one more set of Robbie William’s shoulder flames, or swirls or whatever they are, so help me …. Does anyone really think this makes look rebellious or cool anymore? I was an insurance salesman before all this happened. It's a good solid, honest profession. If I was going to get a tattoo it would say that and nothing else. 'Insurance' printed across my upper back. Possibly with the company website and logo underneath. If a bank manager gets a tattoo then that is exactly what it should say and it should be somewhere conspicuous so it can't be hidden away when he's at work. Once a thieving banker, always a thieving banker and recognized as such.
I digress yet again. Please don't get me started.
My Internet search needed to become a bit more graphic.
Thus:
'the serial killer cut off his tattoos'
Call it a hunch.
This time, the results weren't nice at all. Two cases, separated by a lot of time. The infamous Black Dahlia case of the 1940s and a much more contemporary case from the 90s. Two killers removing tattoos from their victims. Both, coincidentally, from the inner thigh.
Not an exact match. These victims were women. The victims here are men.
"What are you doing?"
My wife's voice came down the stairs.
"Nothing. Just shutting off and going to bed."
As the computer powered down I heard the muffled tone of a text message coming through on my phone. It sounded like it was under something so I got up to look for it and sure enough there it was underneath a sofa cushion. I picked it up and swiped the screen to take a look. It was my wife's phone, not mine, and the text was on screen. Our phones were brand new, an offer from the provider, the latest smart technology. We had been meaning to get protective cases to distinguish them from each other but hadn't quite got around to it yet.
The text was short and but not sweet.
"Where's my fucking money?"
Huh?