Lite

One thing was crystal clear to Willie Anderson. After all the threats, UXBs and high velocity projectiles, he was going to meet his maker in a train toilet flying along at a hundred miles an hour. He opened his eyes slowly to the man leaning over him. What he saw now was badness, pure and simple.
This boyo would stick him in a heartbeat…

He saw his twin grandchildren in the house outside Belfast now, as though through a long lens. The two toddlers were babbling in that comical twin talk of theirs. Mama, Dada, car, ball, OK Google. A late blessing for his daughter and her husband. He realised, almost as an afterthought now, that he would never see them again. He tried to recall his daughter’s pet name now, but it seemed to elude him somehow. Dee-Dee or Fee-Fee. A rhyme of some sort. How could you forget such a thing?
Lee Lee…Yes, that was it. These things were important when you were starting out on a new journey. For you final destination.
His daughter was looking at him now, smiling. He mouthed I love you, Lee Lee to her but no words came from his lips. The women’s voices started fading around him then, like the outplay of some melancholy Sixties’ pop record. He had a feeling of coming in to land. That final moment before a plane touches down, when it flares slightly, like a bird breasting the breeze, as the wheels gently meet the tarmac.
And then Willie Atkinson went and died, much as he had lived really.
Quietly and without making too much of a fuss about it all…

A retired Special Branch officer has his throat cut on the Belfast-Dublin express; an ex-Irish Army veteran of the Lebanese Civil War is shot in a nearby ditch half an hour later; and a thirteen year old boy in a metal box is chatting to himself in English and French.
And all Detective and Forensic Linguist Lucy O’Hara – she calls herself a PolyGlock, in private moments – has to go on is the message left by the dying soldier:

             ‘Bill Frostie Must Die!’