A psychological thriller written by a counselling psychologist…
Updated on 15th June 2019:
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The Relentless Flow of Fate
By Kurt Llama Byron
An Inspector SB Glasheen Mystery
Copyright (c) The Institute for E-CENT Publications, 2019
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DEDICATION
To those who were lost in the storm.
And to those who tried to offer shelter.
But most of all, to those who hunted down the perpetrators of evil deeds and made them pay.
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Disclaimer
This novel is entirely fictional. Any similarity between any person, place or institution, described in this novel, and real persons, places and institutions, is purely coincidental. To repeat, no person, living or dead, is indicated or identified by any of the characters described in this novel.
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Chapter 1: What hell is this?
“A bitter heart devours its owner”.
– Herero adage. Source unknown.
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- Thursday 24th September 1964
Waking and sleeping are like parallel universes. The function of waking is to learn about life; and the function of sleep is to collect up the broken pieces of another futile day: like sweeping debris from a barroom floor.
Those were strange thoughts for a man who had only attended technical school, in a poor rural village, up to the age of sixteen years; and who lived in a bookless home. But perhaps they were the thoughts of a visiting muse, who inhabited his sleeping life, but had no place in his waking day.
He stepped bravely out from among the trees on to the shamrock blanket that grew profusely in the fields to the south and west, abutting the sprawling sea of grey, corporation houses that was Wattling Town, on the outskirts of Dublin City. Finbar Furey was playing a lament on the union pipes: a love song about a young woman who lives by the Lagan River. The shamrock was just as alive and active as normal in the cold, pre-dawn breeze, despite being almost invisible. But it was still the same shamrock that had inspired generations of Irish men and women to strive for freedom in a world of permanent serfdom, and perpetual slavery to alien ideas and false gods.
He was not normally so brave; indeed hardly capable of a single brave word or deed.
He felt the poor shamrock crushing under the weight of his big, black, riding boots; the ones he used to wear many years ago, when he was a proud, young farmer, many miles from here. He could sense the black blood flowing out of the crushed shamrock leaves, as he stepped forward. And then he noticed a change in texture, and realized that his right foot was now completely bare, and buried up to the ankle in a warm, sticky mound of cow dung. And he was wearing his pyjamas! In public!
Michael Curran awoke to the sound of the mechanical alarm clock ringing violently, like the bell of a local fire engine. His head was pounding. Picking up the clock, and switching the alarm bell off, he noticed the time – 5.30 am. The damn thing had gone off half an hour early. But he was glad to be awake, since waking pulled him out of the nightmare in which he had been submerged, up to a moment ago.
Bravery was all very well; but it was dangerous.
He swung his fifty-five-year-old legs out of bed, and looked up at the crucifix on the wall opposite the right side of his lonely bed, above the holy water font, by the light switch, inches from the jamb of the bedroom door. He scratched his greying head of wavy, formerly-black hair, and yawned. Over to his left he could see his son Christopher’s blankets rising and falling rhythmically, as the little whelp snored through his drunken stupor. The little drunken bastard, he thought. Under the chair, to the left side of Christopher’s bed, Michael could see the quarter bottle of whiskey which Christopher would slug down as soon as he awoke. Sixteen years old, and already an alcoholic for more than two years. And getting his booze money by driving a coal truck; despite being below the normal, sensible age for driving. Sometimes he felt like killing the little bastard. But he felt powerless to do anything.
Michael, who never drank alcohol, stood up on the cold lino, and began to scratch his chest and back, under the long-sleeved vest he always wore in bed. He was sick of his life. Sleeping alone in this cold, double bed, in the box room, for the past eight years, had been a great strain on his mental state. His nerves were shattered. He was depressed and angry – bitter – and he constantly felt an ache in his heart. He was sure he would have a heart attack one of these days. ‘My heart is scalded with the lot of them’, was his constant mantra. ‘The lot of them’ being his wife – who slept separately in the front bedroom – and seven children.
He put on his work clothes, and laced up his ankle boots. He knelt by the side of his bed and began to say his morning prayers. He couldn’t understand why God was tormenting him so much. His wife having sex with other men; his youngest ‘daughter’ not really his; trapped into extreme poverty; and this horrible wretch of a son – a degenerate alcoholic at sixteen years of age. And Dermot, his oldest son, who was just eighteen years old, and the only son who really respected him, had left for England three months earlier, in the middle of June. He prayed fervently for redemption; for release from his suffering. He had always tried to be a good man; but he’d lost his farm; then his first job and his tied cottage; then his wife, as a wife – though he was still saddled with her as a thorn in his side. And now his life revolved around working as a poorly-paid gardener for a family of rich toffs on the outskirts of Dublin City; and handing over his pay packet each week to a woman who hated him.
He crossed himself; stood up; and walked to the door. He unlocked it with the key that was in the lock. He stepped quietly out onto the landing, locking the door behind him, and putting the key in his pocket.
He went down the stairs with a heavy heart, as silently as he could, to avoid waking the house. In the kitchen, he cut and buttered two slices of homemade brown bread, put some jam on, and made a pot of tea. In the front room, he sat at the table and read the unread parts of yesterday’s Evening Herald.
Later he took some Fynnon Salts, in a cup of warm water, as an essential laxative, drank it quickly, and took the newspaper into the toilet, where he sat on the seat to wait. Being constipated gave him headaches. Just one of the many sources. As he sat there, he tore off the back pages, which contained racing and sports pages, and then tore them into squares, which he dropped in a clump on the floor to the right of the toilet bowl. Without the evening newspaper, they’d all be in a bad way for toilet paper. But nobody noticed, or thanked him, for this services which he provided helpfully. Nor for anything else he did. He was an economic slave to a baby-factory! Seven semi-starving children, and no hope of making ends meet.
He emerged from the toilet semi-triumphant, and went into the bathroom to wash and shave.
At 6.45 am, he put on his second-hand overcoat, of herringbone brown wool, and the chocolate-brown cap with orange flecks that he’d got from his boss. He put his bicycle clips on his trouser ends, and wheeled his big, black Raleigh bicycle up the hall and out the front door. He closed the door quietly behind him and wheeled the bike down the front path to the little metal gate.
He missed the early morning ritual of calling Dermot, before leaving for work himself. Dermot was long gone!
Although there was still a whole week to go to the end of September, it was cold and damp that morning, and the light was gloomier than it had been just last week.
Out on the road, he mounted his bicycle and pedalled to the corner of the road, turned left, and then pedalled more vigorously up Sligo Avenue, to raise his temperature; and then he settled down to a steady pace, which would get him to his workplace in about thirty minutes.
He was in the blackest mood he had ever experienced.
He could not imagine carrying on with this farce of a life for much longer.
Perhaps, this day, the Lord would liberate him. Oh God. Why hast thou forsaken me?
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~~~
“I wish I had never married, ‘cos the humour is off me now!”
Popular song.
~~~
- Around 6.45am on the same morning…
Moira Curran heard the front door close, even though it was done quietly. The Old Man was off to work. Good riddance, she thought! The cold bastard! She knew she should get up at once, to get the younger children ready for school, but instead she reached out and switched off her alarm, which was due to go off in about fifteen minutes.
She was very tired. It was the tiredness of depression and grief, as well as the effect of endless domestic drudgery; and late evenings knitting, to earn some money from neighbours who had no time to knit garments for themselves and their children. She closed her eyes for a quick, forty winks.
Moira heard the door close, even though it was done quietly. She knew there was something wrong. Surely she’d been here already this morning? Surely she’d heard the door close once already. And the second time was slightly louder than normal. That was very odd!
She sat up in her big, pink cotton nightdress, and leaned her head and shoulders against the metal bars of the head of her little, single bed. Reaching out, she picked up her clock, and checked the time. It was 7.20. She’d slept for thirty-five minutes after the Old Man had gone out. (She and the children all called him ‘the Old Man’, even though he was only fifty-five years of age. It was part of the modern way of speaking. Before they called him the Old Man, they had all called him Daddy! Even Moira had called him Daddy, which was part of the family culture of Catholic Ireland. Once a married couple had children, they were just two members of an institution. No longer a couple. Mammy and Daddy as baby-factory. Fresh soldiers for the army of the Pope).
She felt confused. Why would the door close twice? In the past, it would have been Dermot going out to work. But he was no longer here.
There were four beds in this, the front bedroom: two of which were occupied, including her own. The one that was arranged sideways at the end of her bed had belonged to Christopher up to about two years ago, when she had to have him locked into the Old Man’s bedroom at the back of the house, to stop him interfering with Aileen, who was just eight years old.
The one in the corner, by the wardrobe, used to be Dermot’s bed, up to three months ago. She looked across at the tidy bed cover, and the tears welled up in her eyes, as they had done every day since he’d left for England. And now, about twelve weeks later, she’d only had one letter from him, and that was of little comfort, since she detected no warmth in his dutiful words; and no sense that he missed her or his home. And he enclosed no money!
He was a cold fish, was Dermot; even though he was her big boy; her brightest son; the brains of the family; the one who would become a doctor.
She cupped her hands over her eyes and sobbed gently, until she heard Aileen stirring in the adjacent, single bed. She immediately suppressed her tears and sobs, so as not to wake her daughter; swung herself out of bed; and began to get dressed. She didn’t have to replace her big, pink flannelette knickers anymore in the mornings, since she could not be bothered taking them off at bedtime, in her changed circumstances. She changed them weekly now, whether they needed it or not. Why bother, since nobody else ever sees her knickers anymore. It’s been a long time since she’s had sex with anybody. And she only thirty-eight years old!
She remembers how exciting knickers used to be, as a symbol of her womanhood – her femininity – ever since she was thirteen years old. She would never forget the thrill she got when she cycled down the hill from her mother’s cottage, aged fourteen years; past the entrance to Healy’s farm, where two boys from the village were sitting on the wall with two of the Healy sisters. She was cycling as fast as she could down the hill, the wind blowing her long brown hair out behind her, like streamers. It was a hot, summer’s day, and she was wearing a hand-me-down cotton dress, with a bright, floral-print pattern, that had belonged to an older sister.
“Get off and piss on it and it’ll go faster”, shouted one of the boys.
They couldn’t have expected what happened next. Moira pulled on her back brake, first; and then her front; and the bike skidded to a rapid stop, to the screeching of brake rubber on chrome-plated steel, within two or three yards of the point at which the instruction had been shouted. She got off, laid the bike down on the dusty, tarmacked road, pulled up her loose dress, and dropped her knickers. Bending low, she began to piss on the back gear wheel. When she looked up, the boys were clearly in a state of high arousal. She loved that feeling of power. She got up, stuck her tongue out at the taller one, who had called out the challenge; remounted her bike, and rode off down the hill.
No such excitement came into her life these days. She hadn’t slept with the Old Man for eight years: ever since he realized that Aileen could not have been his child. Terry Lynch, her most recent and main lover, never came to see her anymore, because he had very bad piles, which made it difficult to walk. Declan Cummins was afraid to show his face, in case the Old Man killed him, since she had had to tell her husband that it was Declan who made her pregnant (against her will) one evening when he drove her home from work at the Nurse’s house. Kevin Jenkins had lost interest in her; and Sergeant Kelly never came near her anymore: not since his wife came out of the hospital and he didn’t need her as a child minder or a stand-in lover in his new situation.
She pulled the big pink nightdress over her head, and put on her sizeable bra, which she always removed for comfort; and dressed as quickly as she could. She went down to the toilet, for a quick visit; and then into the bathroom, at the back of the ground floor, and washed her face. Then, when she checked the clock in the front room, she found it was almost 7.30. Time to go and wake Christopher and let him out.
Christopher always slept in the locked bedroom of his father, because he could not be trusted to stay away from Aileen, who was just eight years old. He also could not be trusted to resist molesting the younger boys. The Old Man locked his bedroom door as he left his room each morning, and took the key with him. There was a bucket under Christopher’s bed, in case he needed the toilet. Moira, who had a spare key, had to let Christopher out to go to work, around 7.30 each morning.
Moira retrieved the spare key from her hiding place, behind the hot water tank, in the front room – where nobody else would think of looking – and went up the stairs quickly. When she reached the landing, she had the mortise-lock key in her right hand. Her routine was to jab the key into the lock with her right hand, while knocking on the door with her left, and simultaneously twisting the key to open the lock. She wanted to get as far away from the door as quickly as she could, because it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that Christopher would grab her and rub himself up against her big fat thigh, while babbling some tripe about loving her. In her frustrated state, this was quite disturbing; and she did not know how to discipline him.
But, on this occasion, she was thrown into a frozen state. For in the lock, she could clearly see, the Old Man’s key was still jutting out of the door, instead of being in his pocket, at work. This had never happened before, in the two years that Christopher had been sleeping in the Old Man’s room. What could this mean?
Moira approached the door and listened, with her left ear against the wood, to hear if the Old Man might still be in there, speaking to Christopher. That might explain why the door closed twice. Perhaps the Old Man had come back, and closed the door noisily after he was inside again.
She listened carefully, for a good while. But the room was silent. When she tried to open the door by pressing down on the handle, it wouldn’t budge. So she put her key into her apron pocket, and turned the Old Man’s key in the lock, while simultaneously knocking to wake Christopher. She stepped away from the door, and prepared to head down the stairs, but she was struck by the silence of the room. No loud yawns. No door opening. No sound of feet on lino.
So she went back to the door, and gingerly tried the handle. The door opened freely. And as she stepped into the room, it was like she’d been struck by a hurling stick between the eyes.
Her brain froze.
Her heart raced.
Her stomach turned over and dropped.
For there, on the pillow of Christopher’s bed, was the remains of his crushed face and skull, with blood splashes up the walls, behind and to the side of his bedhead. His face no longer existed in a recognizable form!
She screamed once, and fainted.
The floor opened up beneath her and she fell into a living, sleeping hell of horrible possibilities and gut-wrenching pain.
~~~
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“Joy and suffering never leave us. Life is a long march with a heavy burden”.
Patrick Jenkins: Understanding Life.
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- The police take over…
Sergeant Tony Delaney was worried. He’d been working with Inspector John-Joe McNally since 1960, when they’d set up the Special Crimes Unit in a caravan out the back of Baggot Street Garda Station. After one year, they got their new offices, just across the street, at the junction of Haddington Road and Baggot Street Upper, overlooking Baggot Street Bridge, which crosses the Grand Canal. Delaney and McNally always worked very well together, mostly by working different cases, or working in parallel rather than in tandem. In that way, Delaney never felt overly-controlled or overshadowed by his boss; and McNally never felt insecure about the possibility of being undermined by his subordinate. They’d shared an assistant, Detective Una Gilligan, for the past two years. The first female detective in the Dublin Gardaí. And Gilligan fitted in very well, because she never allowed either of her bosses to know what she did for the other one; and she never gossiped about any aspect of the simplest of cases.
But now Sergeant Delaney was worried, because Inspector McNally had been admitted to Jervis Street Hospital with a serious heart condition.
Detective Gilligan had opened the letter, three days ago, which informed them that they would be under the leadership of Detective Inspector SB Glasheen, from Wednesday of that week, until further notice. Nobody knew if Inspector McNally would survive the heart surgery that was planned for him at Jervis Street.
But Inspector Glasheen had failed to turn up yesterday, or this morning, and now there was a special request from the Murder Squad to take on a new case in Wattling Town which had just been phoned in this morning.
The note had been sent round by motorcycle courier – and then read out by Gilligan. It announced that the Murder Squad was too busy to deal with this case: in which a sixteen year old boy has been murdered in his own bed, in his parents’ home, in the absence of any evidence of a break-in. The Murder Squad suspect that this is a domestic crime, and a complex one at that; and so it falls under the remit of ‘special crimes’; and besides they cannot spare the manpower to investigate it.
Sergeant Delaney is already up to his eyebrows with special, complex cases. Just writing up the case notes keeps him at his desk until eight or nine o’clock every night, including Saturdays!
So, in the absence of Inspector Glasheen showing his face, Delaney has, nervously, and unhappily, asked Detective Una Gilligan to get out to Wattling Town, to interview the family of the dead boy, and to report back to him as soon as possible. She was, he knew, a very competent detective, on most cases she’d handled so far, but this one might be a challenge too far for her.
“What kinds of motives should I consider?” asked the detective, who was only twenty-six years old, and just starting her third year in this role. They were sitting in adjacent desks, facing the office door.
“Violent father?” said Delaney, squeezing his throbbing head. He was prone to headaches when the pressure of work built up too much. And he’d been finding it difficult to sleep at night, for about two weeks now.
Detective Gilligan scribbled in her notebook, and then looked to her left at Sergeant Delaney’s pained face, with a big question mark in her eyes.
“Perhaps a father with a record of alcohol abuse?” continued Delaney.
“Or a mother who has been pushed beyond human endurance by some kind of unusually challenging behaviour by the dead boy”.
“Anything else?” asked the slender, red-haired detective, scribbling some more notes in her notebook.
“A sibling with a mental problem? Schizophrenia; straightforward or evil madness; something like that”, suggested the sergeant, in an increasingly irritated tone of voice.
“What about…?” began the detective, looking up from the notebook on her desk.
Delaney was now out of patience with her: “Look! Just go! Use your imagination; apply your three years’ experience; make your best guess! Sniff around; and ask lots of questions!”
Una Gilligan got the message, and leaped from her desk chair. She blushed, and hurried towards the door and left the room. Sergeant Delaney turned his attention back to the case notes he was analysing. A former bank manager from Tokyo, now with the Japanese embassy. Killed in a phone booth. In Grafton Street. With an ice pick, which was left in the back of his skull!
~~~
As the morning wore on, the clouds cleared and the sun shone brightly through the big office windows. Sergeant Delaney pored over his case notes of the most serious murders in the city centre, looking for the overarching pattern which would tie them all together. In the background, he had the old valve radio playing, and he was invigorated by the Beach Boys singing ‘Surfin’ USA’. But still he could find no pattern or patterns to the range of crimes he had written up in recent reports.
The room warmed up, partly from the heating system and partly because of the sunshine through the big glass windows. At 11.30am, Delaney was punch-drunk from bashing his brains against his case notes, and trying to work out the next steps in a dozen cases that were current; and getting no closer to understanding any of them, never mind resolving one of them.
He had an impossible job. There were supposed to be six detectives in this special crimes unit; but three posts were vacant. And now the boss was in hospital, leaving just himself and Gilligan to handle everything.
He stood up and walked to the window, which looked out across Baggot Street Bridge. He stretched his arms out and yawned. Then he sat on the floor, leaned back against the wall beneath the window sill, and felt the warm sunshine through the glass relaxing his scalp. Bobby Vinton was crooning ‘Blue Velvet’ in the background. His headache began to reduce, almost immediately, which brought a tear of relief to his eyes. Within seconds he was asleep.
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A few minutes after Sgt Delaney fell asleep, the office door creaked open, and in stepped an unusually tall man in full buckskin suit and a full Indian chief’s headdress of eagle feathers. At first sight, he seemed like a genuine American Indian. But then there were inconsistencies. He had a wispy chin beard and moustache, like some Chinese men might have, which was a physical impossibility for a pure American Indian. He was wearing shiny, patent leather shoes, with alligator skin inset in the tops. And where his buckskin jacket was open at the neck, he revealed an emerald green tie, with a gold harp tiepin.
His complexion was more that of a Turk or a Persian; and he carried two leather cases. One was a regular, black briefcase, and the other was much bigger, and made from brown mock-leather. The peculiar stranger peered at Delaney, watched for a few moments to make sure he was fully asleep, and then put down his cases quietly, and turned and closed the door silently. He then picked up his cases, walked to the main desk in the room, and put them down again. Then he turned off the radio with the quietest of clicks.
Silence descended upon the room… And Sergeant Delaney floated above the warm pink clouds of pure, sleepy bliss.
~~~
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…End of extract.
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Copyright (c) The Institute for E-CENT Publications, 2018-2019.
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The purpose of this book is to awaken the heart of those who have slumbered through lives of denial and repression. To promote the possibility of self-counselling, and personal therapy, away from the offices of counsellors and therapists as such. Most readers of this page will have had the experience of being changed – utterly transformed – by the reading of a classic novel. And Kurt Byron’s novel is such a book!
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The Relentless Flow of Fate, by Kurt Llama Byron: Buy your paperback copy today, from one of the following Amazon outlets:
| Amazon US and worldwide | Amazon UK and Ireland |
| Amazon Canada | Amazon France |
| Amazon Germany | Amazon Italy |
| Amazon Spain | Amazon India |
| Amazon Japan | Amazon Singapore |
PS: If you want to see the range of ideas that we write about, please go to ABC Bookstore Online: Self-help books.***
That’s all for today.
Best wishes,
Jim
Dr Jim Byrne
Doctor of Counselling
ABC Coaching and Counselling Services
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# Dr Jim Byrne’s Counselling and Psychotherapy Division
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# Renata Taylor-Byrne’s Coaching/Counselling Division
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# Books that change lives by growing the individual: E-CENT Counselling books
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