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“Yeah but listen, right -” Sinéad began, but Lilith simply stepped in between us and raised her hand up to my sister’s face. Amazingly, she shut her mouth with an audible click.
“No. You listen.” Lilith narrowed her ice-blue eyes and lowered her voice to a particularly menacing quiet growl. I’d seen grown men cry when she’d used it on them, and it appeared that it was now having a similar effect on Sinéad. “This is neither the time nor the place for yet another of your attention-seeking little episodes. You’ve already caused more than sufficient damage to those I love in these past weeks, and I steadfastly refuse to provide the vermin currently staking out this shithole with yet another front page.”
“You can’t fuckin’ speak to me like that!”Sinéad countered, outraged. “My counsellor says my anger issues aren’t my fault and -”
“Really?” Lilith cut her off. “Well right now I’m guessing my fucking anger issues trump yours by a significant margin. So just shush.”
Sinéad tried one more “Yeah, but…”, but I could see she’d lost any early advantage.
“I am not finished,” Lilith stated. “I think we both know how they found Finn and me the other day, and now you’ve been on the sharp end of their cameras I bloody well hope you still feel whatever pittance they gave you was worth it.”
I saw Sinéad open her mouth as if to try and deny that it had been her who’d tipped off the press, then think better of it. It was the first sensible thing I’d seen her do since we’d arrived in Dublin.
“I need you to listen very carefully to me right now,” Lilith continued. “I’m prepared to give you one - and only one - chance to discuss the entire fiasco and explain yourself, but it will not be in the pissing rain at your own mother’s funeral with an audience enjoying the free cabaret.”
With each perfectly-enunciated word from Lilith a little more of the fight drained away from Sinéad, until she looked like the hurt and lost child that she still was. Despite everything she’d done my heart ached and I went to hold out my hand to her, but Lilith gently pushed it back down.
“Not yet,” she mouthed to me with the briefest flicker of a reassuring smile before turning back to Sinéad. “Now I think we all need to dry off. So go back inside, and if you can sit quietly and behave for exactly half an hour I’ll consider buying you a proper drink instead of whatever vile mixture of meths and paintstripper you’ve been swigging all day from that flask in your coat lining, and we can discuss terms. Does that sound reasonable?”
Sinéad lifted her chin and made one last decent attempt at defiance. “An’ what if I say no?”
Lilith gave her a quick, hard smile. “Oh, then you won’t be anywhere near as intelligent as I currently infer you to be.”
Sinéad fell silent for a moment then asked, “Are we talking about a proper drink, and not some shite rat’s piss lager? Like a double whisky and coke?”
Lilith made my sister wait whilst she pretended to consider the request. “I could probably stretch to that,” she replied.
Sinéad held her steely gaze for a few long seconds more before giving the most ungracious teenage shrug of concession that I’d ever seen, accompanied by a surly, “Whatever.”
But it was enough. As awful as the whole confrontation had been, it looked like the conflict had come to a temporary halt and might even have some sort of resolution in the near future.
Sinéad had been put back in her box for the time being, and it also appeared as if the floorshow had escaped the attention of the remains of the gathering inside the club. We could all sort things out another time and no blood had been shed, either metaphorical or real.
Then the gate to the yard swung open on its rotten and rusted hinges and remarkably, the day managed to get exponentially worse.
Lilith
Two figures stood in the gateway. The first to step into the yard was a woman, and to my shock I realised that I knew her. During the trial her photograph had been in the papers countless times, her pinched and pallid face framed by platinum blonde straw and her chain-smoker’s mouth pursed like a cat’s arse, staring out at readers as she’d bemoaned the fate of her unfortunate, victimised and totally innocent sociopathic rapist thug of a son.
In those photos she’d posed as Ireland’s favourite mammy, complete with hand-knitted cardigan and oversized crucifix, but today Kathleen O’Halloran had come dressed for war in a royal purple velour tracksuit and more gold sovereign rings and belcher chains than one might normally find in a pawn shop window.
Kathleen was the first to speak. “Ah would youse look at this, son? Looks like a lovely little family reunion, doesn’t it eh?”
I took my first proper look at the towering man clad in faded blue jeans and white vest top who now loomed out of the shadows behind her, and my breath froze in my throat when he turned to leer at me.
Every ounce of logic told me that Coyle O’Halloran was far away in England, locked safely behind a door in HMP Frankland, a Cat A prison in Durham, with an eye-patch covering the gaping hole in his skull where Finn had stabbed his eye out with a shard of glass.
And yet it seemed that at this moment he’d managed to manifest like a demon in the backyard of an Irish shithole pub. From the man’s black, tightly-curled hair and steroid-enhanced bulk to his malevolent swagger, this could only be Blaine’s hired muscle; the man who had terrorised both me and Finn during our time on Albermarle.
Kathleen appraised me with undisguised loathing. “Ah, and here’s the posh wee mare that ruined yer poor brother’s life,” she drawled, and her words gave me the jolt back to reality that I needed. When we were still both trapped at Albermarle Finn had told me about Coyle’s twin, Ciaran; when Coyle had ‘accompanied’ Finn to Albermarle Hall, it was Ciaran who had remained in Dublin as Blaine’s enforcer, making sure that she had a constant eye on Sinéad and Niamh. He makes Coyle look like the Dalai Lama, Finn had warned back then, and one look at the man’s hard-faced sneer told me that still held true. Ciaran certainly appeared to be preparing to fight as dirty as his brother; I noticed that he already had his right hand curled around a short length of metal pipe, and could only hope that Finn had spotted it too.
Before I could find a suitably indifferent reply, Feargal stuck his head out of the fire door. “Niamh wants to know if you guys are okay out…” he began, then paled as he took in the scene. He clearly recognized both of the new arrivals because all he could manage was an “Ooh bugger!”
“Feargal, get the fuck back inside and take Sinéad with you. Now!” I snapped.
He shook his head. “Ah come on Lilith, I can’t leave the pair of you out here! Not with this pair of bastards!”
“No offence Fearg, but I sense you’re more of a lover than a fighter.” I managed what I hoped was an encouraging smile but was probably more of a rictus grimace; because I had a feeling that the current uneasy standoff wasn’t going to last much longer. “Please, just make sure that Sinéad, Niamh and the baby are safe inside and you call the police,” I pleaded. “That’s the most useful thing anyone could do right now.”
