FEARLESS FINN'S MURDEROUS ADVENTURE Read Free

leapt aboard his trawler and flung open the wheelhouse door. “Get ya below Finn. No point in advertising I’ve a passenger aboard,” he whispered.
    Like all lifelong trawler men, Kieran Murray keeps his boat spick ’n’ span. Every nook and cranny is hosed and scrubbed down after he lands his catch, so not a whiff of fish do I detect. I know Kieran lands plenty of fish, prawns and razor fish from the sandbanks around the Isle of Wight. This is why I thought of him when I was deciding the best way to get to England; it’s only a short ferry ride from the Isle of Wight to the mainland. Anyway, if rumour has it right, Kieran usually catches a few large turbot not seen by the Harbour Master – to cover the cost of diesel.
    I hear Kieran above my head. He’s muttering about having to collect his good-for-nothing nephews off Newport Quay before he can start on the prawns.
    “Stick the kettle on Finn! We’re five miles off the coast now…there’s no one paying us any mind!” he yelled down.
    I made two mugs of strong tea and carried them up to the wheelhouse.
    “So Finn, what’s the plan, if you don’t mind me asking like?”
    “I’ll leave you at Newport and take the Steam Packet to Liverpool. I can catch my breath in a safe house there, and then I’ll see where the devil takes me. Thanks for this Kieran. Sorry I couldn’t give you any warning, but you know the way it is.”
    “Aye Finn, don’t I just! Why you left Trinity and got yourself mixed up in all this, God only knows. But I’ll say this about ya Finn Flynn, for an Englishman, ya make a hell of an Irishman! I’ll drop ya at the Newport Quay, no problem. Now get yourself below and catch whatever sleep ya can, you’re probably going ta need it.”
    I’d forgot about the day my mother brought Kieran to meet me in the Buttery at Trinity College. His visit was by way of a wee celebration to commemorate my tenth year as a member of Fianna Éireann – the Republican youth movement. Of course he knows the whole story about my parents and my birth on English soil. Kieran fought alongside my father in the old IRA, right up to the time my father was shot dead by the Brits during the last IRA campaign in England.
    In spite of my strange surroundings, and the pounding of the waves against the side of the trawler, I drifted off to sleep. I only surfaced when Kieran shouted down below.
    “Wake ya Finn, lively now, before my cretin nephews get here! I wouldn’t trust them to see ya! Ya never know with the likes of them!”
    I scrambled up on deck and jumped down to the quay. Without a goodbye, or as much as a wave, I slipped into the shadows.
    Next stop, the safe house…then, God only knows.

2

    ENGLAND

    Getting to the safe house in Croxteth, Liverpool is like travelling through an urban war zone. The taxi driver only agreed to drop me outside Croxteth Hall.
    “This monstrosity was the home of the Earls of Sefton. Right posh it was then, but look at the state of the estate now.” The taxi driver sniggered at his double meaning of the word state as he pointed at the ornate red-brick edifice. “I’ll drop you here…it doesn’t do to take a motor like this in there, so it doesn’t. Around here they'd have the wheels off me car before I have the handbrake pulled, so they would. That’ll be six pounds two and six, what with the luggage. I take Irish money like, but I have to charge a bit extra, what with the exchange rate an’ all! All right Mick?”
    Feck him , I said to meself, leaving me a half kilometre short of my destination. I paid him every penny of the fare, plus his ten per cent exchange fee, in Irish florins – no tip. He zoomed off in his shiny new Vauxhall Victor estate car, leaving me stranded on the side of the road outside one of the roughest public housing estates in Europe.
    The safe house I’m heading for is a three-bed, two-reception terrace with a downstairs toilet kind of place, probably built in the 1930s. It’s nondescript,