Murder in the Monto : A tense thriller set in the aftermath of the 1916 Irish rebellion by Tony O'Reilly

Author:Tony O'Reilly [O'Reilly, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poolbeg Press, Historical Crime, historical mystery, Kindle Unlimited, serial killer, Irish Fiction
ISBN: 9781781997000
Publisher: Poolbeg Press
Published: 2022-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

Mordaunt receives the news, initially with intense rage and then, almost immediately, calmness and acceptance. He had learned this technique from an old Chinese man he had shared a cell with in Amarillo, Texas. Still in his teens, he had been locked up for several months for nearly killing a fellow cowboy with his bare hands for no other reason than some casual remark the man had made about his appearance. It could have been about his height or his thinness, he couldn’t remember exactly — it never really mattered to him in those days anyway. Confined in the smouldering cell, body bruised and bloody from beatings by the guards who took great pleasure in baiting this crazy young gringo, he learned from the old man how to tap into his fury and see it for what it was, something the Chinese man called anatta, or the illusion of self. He didn’t fully understand what the old man was saying all of the time, but he sensed that he was on the precipice of something that could change his life.

Within several weeks he had learned to tap into his fury. Not to throw it away in one blind, senseless burst, but to stretch it out, until it took the form of a longer story. Within that longer story, he learned, anything was possible. He began to ask himself questions. Why did the guards bait him? Because he was easy to bait and it gave them the motive to drag him out of the cell and beat him up. But when he refused to be baited the tension was sucked out of the air and the guards left him alone and went on to somebody else. Over time he was able to put the anger of being locked up aside and to plan his escape. Unfortunately, it meant bribing the same hated Mexican guards with money he did not possess. But the Chinese man did, several gold sovereigns tucked away in the tresses of his hair which he kept plaited in a long pigtail — but not all of the time. He justified murdering the old man in his sleep by using the very principle his fellow cellmate had taught him: the illusion of self. It was not him that wrapped his fingers around the old man’s scrawny neck, it was somebody else.

In the time it takes his informant to finish telling him everything that had occurred in the last couple of days, Mordaunt has already mapped out a plan and how to go about carrying it out. These main traits in his personality, his fury and lack of empathy, he knows, are inherited from his mother and father. The fury side he has managed to tame thanks to the Chinaman all those years ago. But the other side of his personality — his complete lack of a moral centre, as a judge once told him — he often wonders about. Now he suspects it comes from his mother’s antecedents.

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