PEPAC novel: excerpt: "Mexican Storm"

Sir Ronald is woken by three, measured knocks on the front door of the Armitage Residence.

He wakes slowly.  His head … oh!  His head!  Tramadol and Speyside whisky vie for supremacy.  The result is a scrum of trauma and ill-feeling; Sir Ronald feels like his skull has been taken over by teams of warring hooligans, some Scottish.

 He consults the clock above the mantelpiece.  It is ten to seven.  Or  twenty-five to ten.  One of the two.  Where the Hell are his damned glasses? 

The house is silent.  Was that somebody at the door?

Three further knocks in solemn succession resound through the house.

If Sir Ronald’s head was hosting a scrum, if certainly feels like pharmaceutical mud now.  He doesn’t even try to wade towards some sort of conclusion as to who’s at the door.  He’s going to struggle to make it there in person.

Why doesn’t that bloody woman answer it?

Because, he thinks bitterly, staggering towards the hall, his wife will either be asleep or, having heard the knocking, be hiding in the priest hole behind the panelling in the entrance hall. 

Incredible really.  Who else has a wife who hides in an authentic priest hole whenever somebody comes to the door?  What the Hell does she do it for?  Totally out of character.  It was she, after all, who insisted on minimum security on the premises for fear of “giving the villagers the idea that we think we’re above them.” 

Well, thinks Sir Ronald, we bloody well are above them!  And that’s why any blasts from his own past turning up on his doorstep are likely to be exactly that – blasts, from guns wielded by vengeful ex-cons to whom he has handed, from on high, sentences to match the low nature of their breeding.  If anybody should be hiding, it should be him.

And if this is the inbred Mrs. Boggins from the butchers come merry-a-calling — with her incessant chatter about the weather, her improbable name, and this damned “Beast from the East” he keeps hearing about — he’ll have her nicked.  Plain and simple.  She should know better and be using the tradesman’s entrance anyway.  That’s what he’ll have her nicked for: socially-aggravated trespass. That, or patent genetic unsuitability to be at large in the community at all.

Sir Ronald makes it into the hall and, head bowed with nauseous determination, drags himself towards the front door.  He trudges past the slim wooden panel that conceals his wife’s hiding place. 

She’ll be watching, that’s for sure.  If she’s in there.  But there’s no way of telling if she is actually there, since she always refuses to respond if she is.

Ridiculous behaviour for a forthright woman.  A daughter of Empire!  Sir Ronald warrants that Mary’s mother didn’t hide in the Nairobi night when the Mau Mau came a-massacring back in the 1950s.  Simply not the Family Way — well, not her family’s anyway. 

It is ironic that Mary’s family motto — “constantia et virtute” — is carved at the top of the very pilaster that conceals the priest hole. 

Above:
By firmness and courage.  Firmness represented by one griffin looking very fierce, courage by another looking, to Sir Ronald’s eye, rather smug.

Below:
Inheritor of said values.  Hiding.  Firmly and courageously.   

Courage, he supposes, is all very well when you can afford to have it.

Muttering, squinting, hurting, Sir Ronald pulls back the battered iron bolts of the front door one by one.  He manages to turns the big, brutal key, and winces as the entrance hall is pierced by shafts of fierce, appalling sunshine. 

Sir Ronald squints at the silhouette before him.

It’s not Mrs Boggins.  Standing in the doorway is a tall figure wearing a motorcycle crash helmet — that’s all he can see. 

That’s all he needs to see.  Recognition explodes in Sir Ronald’s head. 

Followed by dread.  It cuts through his hangover like a hail of shrapnel.

Sir Ronald suddenly feels such clarity.  He is almost light-headed with terror.

The last time he saw the man before him, he was abducted.  Mexican-style: hooded, gun to the head, kicked, screamed at.  He was driven to some sort of ceremonial tree in the middle of a playing field, or a clearing somewhere. There, on a black November night, his hood was removed and he was told he was going to die.  It was bloody cold and bloody wet. Being convinced he was going to die was bad enough.  But he knew  exactly why, and knew too that he deserved it.  But he didn’t die.  Instead the little finger on his left hand was hacked off, slowly, as an agonising token punishment.  

“The next time you see me,” the man before him had said with his soft, slow, Spanish voice, “you will wish that you were this finger.”  The man had held the severed finger before the Judge’s puzzled, terrified eyes.  “This has only two more joints to break.  I doubt that it now has the capacity to feel anything.  But you do, and so do the five hundred joints in the rest of your body.”

The finger had looked surreal in the moonlight, stained black with blood at the severed end, fat and white like an obscene, undead grub, both alive and dead at the same time.

“Make sure,” the man had said, bringing his face and a wash of heavy aftershave closer, “Make sure that there is no next time.  I would, gladly, cut you now, properly, in the prescribed manner.  Carve from you el aguila de sangre.  The Blood Eagle.  Your ribs extracted from the meat of your back, one by one, snapped like wishbones to fan your ribcage like a red flower, to make the wings of the eagle so.   There is four and half hours till dawn.  You would be alive for two of them.  But the woman has begged for clemency on your behalf.  I do not know why.  I look forward then, with patience, to the time when clemency is dead.   For that reason alone, I wish you a long life, tu chingada fresa.  For you shall outlive your stay of execution, and die by a righteous hand.  Until the next time.” 

This is, surely, “the next time”?