Red Dock , livre ebook

JM Smyth - JM Smyth

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114 pages

English

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Historical background: In the Republic of Ireland, for most of the 20th century, orphanages, known as "industrial schools", were run by the Catholic Church. Children were forced to work in child slave labour camps. Physical and sexual abuse were commonplace. Children grew up believing their families were responsible for all that had befallen them. Some were driven insane; many went on to a life of crime. For decades, the majority of prison inmates in Ireland were ex-industrial school. Only in the mid-1990s were these institutions exposed as "the gulags of Ireland".In 1949, on the night of their birth, Robert "Red" Donovan and his twin Sean are placed in such an institution and given the surname Dock. Aged nine, Red witnesses the kicking to death of Sean by a Christian Brother. At his twin's deathbed, Red vows to one day return his body to their birthplace for reburial. Red's life is consumed by this vow. It is his driving force to the exclusion of all else.His family, and a garda constable Winters who put the twins into "care", will be made to pay.Red Dock kidnaps Winters' new-born daughter and leaves her on the steps of an orphanage to be raised by nuns who name her Lucille Kells. 22 years later, he blackmails a notorious psychopath and ex-industrial school inmate, who's evaded the law's best efforts to capture him for nine years, into killing the Donovan family and framing Lucille, whose father then brings her to justice unaware she's his daughter.The poignancy of the story is all the more pronounced when delivered in Red Dock's aggressive style.A powerful novel about monstrous by-products of a brutal system.

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Publié par	JM Smyth
Date de parution	29 septembre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781909270534
Langue	English

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RED DOCK by J M Smyth
© 2012 J M Smyth J M Smyth has asserted his rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by J M Smyth First published in eBook format in 2012 eISBN: 978-1-909270-53-4
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
All names, characters, places, organisations, businesses and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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RED DOCK - REVIEWS
"Interesting and compulsive read with a thoroughly unpleasant main character whom you actually end up liking. Told in the first person, it is an extraordinary insight into the mind of a totally amoral individual. Good one." Bookseller
"Shiveringly superb!" Image Magazine
"… A welcome break from the stereotypical crime novel told from the Good Guy's prospective." Dublin Herald
"A cracking good read, impossible to put down." The Irish Times
"Cross me bedraggled heart, Red Dock just blew me to smithereens. Unbelivable book. Ferocious. Terryfying. Beautifully compassionate. And oh so wonderfully written…" Ken Bruen
"It’s no mean feat for an Irish crime novelist to stand out from the (ever-growing) Celt crime-writing crowd. Yet Smyth’s Red Dock succeeds in being something fresh and far darker than the rest. Red Dock, Smyth’s primary narrator in this haunting mosaic of first-person voices, is a thug, shakedown artist, kidnapper, misogynist and full-on sociopath. Yet Smyth keeps us on board to ride’s end, pulled along by Red Dock’s boisterous, self-centered, view-askew take on the world and his up-from-the-heels Irish voice. In putting us in the heads of this nasty but fascinating man as well as that of a serial killer with a twisted artistic bent Smyth deftly follows in the footsteps of James Ellroy’s Killer on the Road, while simultaneously recalling some of the fever-dream tug of the best of Jim Thompson and Grand Guignol of Thomas B. Harris." Craig McDonald
CONTENTS
RED DOCK - REVIEWS
RED DOCK
LUCILLE
RED DOCK
LUCILLE
RED DOCK
PICASSO
LUCILLE
RED DOCK
PICASSO
LUCILLE
RED DOCK
LUCILLE
RED DOCK
LUCILLE
RED DOCK
LUCILLE
RED DOCK
LUCILLE
RED DOCK
PICASSO
RED DOCK
PICASSO
RED DOCK
PICASSO
RED DOCK
PICASSO
RED DOCK
PICASSO
RED DOCK
Eleven Months Later
RED DOCK
LUCILLE
RED DOCK
Dublin, 1969
Wanna be a millionaire? Then don't work for a living. Fifty years of that crack and before you know it some cunt's digging a hole and fucking you into it. ‘Oh, he was such a nice man. He'll be sorely missed.’ A load of bollocks. Take my advice: he who works last lasts longer.
‘Aye, well, it’s all right for you, you miserable bastard,’ I hear you say. ‘But how do we make a million?’ Fair question. You could try kidnapping, but I wouldn't advise it. I've never seen one yet that hadn't got something wrong with it. Grabbing the victim's easy enough; collecting your wages is the hard part. Either the victim calls attention to himself by being unreasonable and trying to escape or there's a lot of extra coming and going where you're hiding the bastard, and the next thing you know the TV's running it and some nosy neighbour's saying to herself, ‘Here, hang on a minute,’ lifting the phone and it's ‘Fuck me, the cunts are surrounding the place.’
Nah, the only way to kidnap somebody is to get rid of them as soon as you grab them. No nosy neighbours, no hideout, no coming and going, nothing to worry about. These days it pays to be streamline.
So I told Charlie Swags that as soon as the baby was snatched, it was to be left on the steps of some orphanage. (The last thing you want is some squealy kid knocking about the place.)
Then I sent its mother a note, the usual stuff, NO COPS, BRING CASH (in this case a hundred grand), and the following morning gave her a call. She had to be sitting with her hand on the phone if the speed of her was anything to go by.
Here she was: ‘Yes? Yes? Hello? Hello?’
She must've thought I was deaf. I could just imagine the lads there with her whispering ‘For fuck's sake, missus, will you give us a chance to get the trace going?’
‘Mrs Winters?’
‘Yes, this is Mrs Winters.’
‘You want your baby back, you bring the money to Kilreed today at two o’clock. Wait in the phone box outside the post office. And come alone.’
It's hard to tell from a few words, but I got the distinct impression she was suffering with her nerves. Maybe she wasn't sleeping well.
Of course you're saying to yourself by now: how's he gonna collect the money if he's no baby to hand over? Simple: only kidnap when you want to drive the victim's loved ones round the twist. As a diversionary tactic. Never for money. .
Not that she had any. Not on her husband's wages. She was probably driving him nuts with the ‘I want my baby’ routine. Y'know what women are like. He was probably wishing they were like tape-recorders and came with a pause button.
She wasn't a bad-looking woman though: late twenties, popcorn hairstyle. Brave pair of tits on her too – I've seen smaller arses. Not that I fancied her. In women, I wear a size ten; she had to be a fourteen at least. My only interest in her was that her husband had got in Charlie Swags’s way, and I needed him to get in somebody else's.
So at two that afternoon I was in the attic office of a hotel, binoculars in hand, looking down at Mary Winters as she went into the phone box in the village of Kilreed to take my call. She was looking very red round the eyes – probably something to do with the wallpaper paste Swags’s men had squirted into them when she’d stepped out of the lift of an underground car-park and had junior snatched out of its carrycot. They’d mixed citric acid with the paste, by the way. They tell me Optrex is good for getting rid of it, but you need gallons of the stuff. A hospital's better.
‘Turn left at the corner,’ I told her, ‘ then left again at a sign that says "Whites". Follow the lane till you come to a farmhouse.’ Typical woman – looked at her wedding finger to tell which way left was. Fuck knows how single women manage. Half of them only get married to find out where they’re going.
I watched her arrive. Whites’ farmhouse was less than half a mile from where I was. She’d be bugged of course, and the law wouldn't be far away, waiting to pounce when I handed over the baby. That's how they'd be seeing it. They have training for this sort of carry-on, so they can get their man.
She got out of her car, y’know, looking around the farmyard to see what the story was – no doubt expecting me to pop out from behind the barn, or whatever – heard what I wanted her to hear – the sound of her baby roaring and crying in the farmhouse, then the phone ringing just inside the open front door. I was giving her another little call to see how she was getting on.
‘Put down the attaché case and go up and get your child,’ I told her.
After that I couldn't tell you what happened exactly. I couldn't see inside. But I’d say she went on in through the hall and looked up and saw an infant in a body harness dangling from the hatch into the attic, where I'd left it.
She was very controlled, to be fair to her. No ‘Oh my God’s, or ‘Look at my poor baby’ crap. All I heard coming down the phone was a distracted wail of relief, then the sound of the case hitting the ground, and her running up the stairs, and the stepladder creaking as she climbed up to save her baby, only to find a doll dressed in the clothes it was last seen wearing, and her going into hysterics – which was nothing to the screams that came out of her when she climbed up into the attic and saw a recorder playing the tape
I’d made of her baby crying and realised that she was going home alone – aaagghh! – and wailing ‘Where's my baby? Where's my baby? Where's my bay...be...’ and breaking down in tears.
Whether or not the case contained the cash, I couldn't say. The law had no doubt come up with it for the occasion. They have contingency funds, y'know, for unforeseen eventualities.
Anyway, I heard the clatter of her flying back downstairs to the phone, then coming at me again with her ‘Where’s my baby, where’s my baby? Please tell me where my baby is’ routine.
‘You were told not to involve the cops.’
‘But my husband's a Guard. How could I not tell him?’
He was a detective sergeant. Chilly Winters. One of the Garda Siochana's finest. Trained to notice if his kid’d been kidnapped. He could notice whatever he liked as long as it wasn't me.
‘I can't show my face with him in on it.’
‘What was I supposed to do? She's his daughter. What was I supposed to do-oo?’
‘Find some way to keep him out of it.’
‘How could I? Tell me. Plea-ease. I'll do anything you say.’
‘I'll have a think and get back to you. I can't say fairer than that. Bye now.’
‘No, wait. Tell me where my baby is, please tell me where my baby is. Please. Please...’
A monk's fancy woman could have been breast-feeding it for all I knew.
Oh, I meant to say, as far as their investigation was concerned, the gardai would carry out their inquiries, you know the way they do – locate my vantage-point as the only place the farmhouse could be seen from across the village rooftops by tracing the phone I was using, which had only one set of prints on it, belonging to a man called Ken Varden, who was connected to the hotel.