Dead And Buried
You can bury a body, but you can’t bury the past.Sometimes, doing the right thing can change your life forever. When vet Conor Maguire agreed to dispose of a corpse for his wife’s desperate brother, Patrick, he prayed that would be the end of the matter. He couldn’t have been more wrong.Now Conor is returning to Belfast after five years self-imposed exile. He wants to rebuild his shattered life with the family he left behind, but the past won’t leave him alone. Patrick has risen through the ranks of gangland criminality, and wants Conor’s help once more. This time he isn’t asking nicely.
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You can bury a body, but you canât bury the past.
Sometimes, doing the right thing can change your life forever. When vet Conor Maguire agreed to dispose of a corpse for his wifeâs desperate brother, Patrick, he prayed that would be the end of the matter. He couldnât have been more wrong.
Now Conor is returning to Belfast after five years self-imposed exile. He wants to rebuild his shattered life with the family he left behind, but the past wonât leave him alone. Patrick has risen through the ranks of gangland criminality, and wants Conorâs help once more. This time he isnât asking nicely.
Dead and Buried
John Brennan
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2015
Copyright © John Brennan 2015
John Brennan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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 HarperCollins.
E-book Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9781474030762
Version date: 2018-09-20
JOHN BRENNAN
was born in Edinburgh in 1974, and relocated to London to work in advertising in 2001. He is married with three children.
Contents
WHAT had woken him? A voice?
No â there was no voice â only the strident double-tone of the phone, and then, from under the covers, Christine sleepily asking, âWhat time is it?â
The bedside clock told 3.12.
As Conor reached for the receiver, the cold air of the bedroom raised goose flesh on his arms and chest.
A thoroughbred with a torsioned colon up at the McGill stables. A sheep hit by a lorry out on one of the high roads. A cow that canât calve in some godforsaken byre down Ballycullen way. Thatâd be it. Conor turned over the possibilities in his head: breech birth, prolapsed uterus, dead calfâ¦
âConor â fucking hell.â
This wasnât any Ballycullen farmer. He half-recognised the voice through the layers of panic. âPatrick?â
âFuckinâ hell, Conor, man â you have to help me.â
Patrick Cameron â Christineâs little brother. Conor swallowed; kept his voice level.
âWhatâs up?â
âIâve done somethingâ¦something stupid.â On âstupidâ Patrickâs voice broke into a strangled sob. Pissed again, Conor supposed. Patrick liked a drink, no question. Hadnât he done for the best part of a bottle of Bushmillâs at Conor and Christineâs wedding in the summer and made a twat of himself on the dance floor?
How many have you had? Conor wanted to ask. But with Christine listening he couldnât ask that. So instead: âWhatâs the problem?â
âI think Iâve killed somebody.â
Jesus. Conor thought his heart had stopped. He cleared his throat.
âSay again?â he managed. Calm, professional, just another late-night call-outâ¦
But Patrick only sobbed into the phone. Then he said, âCome out, Con. Iâm outside. Come outside.â
It was a freezing night, black and cold and hard as iron.
Conor, closing the front door quietly behind him, made out Patrick jogging back from the callbox at the end of the road. Right down the middle of the empty street, between parked cars, his feet a soft crunch and skidding in the frost. As he passed under the streetlamps, he saw the bloodstains. On his tracksuit bottoms, on his face and hands. He was only a rag of a lad, Paddy Cameron. Twenty-two years of age but couldâve passed for eighteen. A scallywag, to hear Christine tell it â a sharp-edged little scanger, to hear anyone else.
He approached slowly, hands shoved deep in his pockets like he was searching for a lost bit of change. âWhatâd you tell Chris?â he whispered.
âHad to go out to Nesbitâs place to foal his mare. The poor girlâs six months pregnant, what am I going to tell her?â Conor glanced anxiously over his shoulder, but all down the street the upstairs windows were unlit. No one awake on Rembrandt Close â no one watching.
He fixed Patrick with a stare. âSo?â
Patrick rolled a plug of chewing gum over in his mouth and then, with a half-shrug, said, âIn the car.â
