Norton has put his phone on vibrate, but the noise it’s now making as it rattles on the glass table in front of him is almost as much of an intrusion as any ringtone would be.
He picks it up and looks at the display.
Fitz.
‘I have to take this,’ he says and stands up. There are six people sitting around the table – three tax advisers, two lawyers and a management consultant. As Norton turns away, there is a general redeployment of energy in the room, papers get shuffled, throats cleared, water sipped.
Norton says, ‘Yeah?’
‘How’s it going?’
‘OK.’
He steps out into reception.
‘I got your message,’ Fitz says. ‘Sorry I couldn’t take the call. I was swamped.’
‘Right. Anyway, er… I need -’ Norton glances over at the receptionist. ‘I need to talk to you about something.’
‘OK. But listen, I have an update for you.’
‘Oh?’ Norton crosses reception and stands at a window looking down onto Baggot Street. It’s raining. Traffic is at a standstill. ‘What is it?’
‘The skinny fella, yeah? He went for coffee yesterday with your one, the sister.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah, she went to the office and then they came out. Went to a coffee shop. About twenty-five minutes in total.’
‘You’re only fucking telling me this now?’
‘Look, I just got the report myself.’
‘Fuck.’
Gina Rafferty talking to Dermot Flynn? Jesus. What is the bitch up to?
‘Anything else?’
‘Yeah, she met some other bloke for coffee as well, earlier, but we don’t know who he is.’
Norton swallows and runs his free hand over his head. ‘A young guy? Old? What?’
‘Thirtyish. Tall, dark. In a suit.’
Feeling as if the room is about to detach itself from under his feet and start spinning, Norton reaches out and leans against the sash of the window. ‘We can’t talk about this on the phone. Meet me down in the car park.’ He looks at his watch. ‘In an hour.’
‘But -’
‘Don’t fucking start with me, Fitz.’
‘Right. Right. OK.’
Norton puts his phone away and walks back towards the boardroom. Since he likes to stay as clearheaded as possible for these financial meetings he didn’t take any Narolet this morning as he normally would have. And now he needs some.
Badly.
Standing at the door, he reaches into his pocket for his pillbox. But it’s not there. Which means he must have left it at home, on the bedside table maybe, or in his bathroom.
Damn, he thinks, totally distracted now as he re-enters the boardroom.
An hour later he’s down in the building’s small underground car park. Fitz is sitting next to him.
They sit in silence for a while.
Over the fifteen years that these two men have known each other they have become mutually dependent in ways neither of them is keen to dwell on. Not long after they met, and with Norton’s financial backing, Fitz set up High King Security and emerged from his pre-ceasefire chrysalis of republican activism into the open air of so-called legitimate business. The firm specialised in on-site security for the construction industry, and Norton quickly became its principal client. But when new developments in technology nudged High King in the direction of private investigations and electronic surveillance, Norton found himself relying on the company quite a lot, and on Fitz in particular.
Lately, of course, things have moved to another level. They both know this but have yet to have a proper discussion about it. Nevertheless, the two men do understand each other: Fitz is no choirboy and still has his connections from the old days; Norton is a hard-nosed pragmatist and not someone to let fools stand in his way.
A vehicle passes behind them, and the interior of the car darkens over momentarily.
All the same, it is a little awkward sitting here like this. Because the most glaring aspect of what they haven’t discussed yet, and very pointedly, is the terrible fuck-up that led to things getting so complicated in the first place. OK, it was rushed and frantic, no one’s arguing with that, and it was Norton who came up with the idea originally – so he’s prepared to accept some of the blame at least…
But my Christ.
There was serious money involved as well.
He stares straight ahead at the dull concrete wall in front of them.
Now isn’t the time, though. He needs Fitz. He can’t just replace him.
‘OK,’ he says, ‘first the skinny lad, Flynn.’
‘Yeah,’ Fitz says, shifting his weight in the seat. ‘Do you want me to have another word with him? From what I understand he’s been acting up a bit lately. Maybe he needs a stronger message. We could take one of his kids for a couple of hours, go for a drive sort of thing, up the Dublin Mountains. That’d scare the shit out of him.’
‘I don’t know.’
Left on his own, Norton thinks, Flynn would probably be safe enough, but with Gina Rafferty at him, asking questions, probing, he could easily crack.
She’s the problem.
‘Leave the kids alone,’ he says after a long pause. ‘It’d be messy. You’d only be asking for trouble.’
‘Right.’
‘Keep it simple. But have a word with him all the same.’
‘Right.’
‘So.’ He exhales. ‘The sister. What’s the story there? Any joy with the mobile calls?’
‘Yeah, I finally got this new piece of kit I was telling you about, it’s amazing, about the size of a laptop. You target someone’s phone, right? Then you can listen in, record calls, download texts and emails. It’s fucking brilliant.’
‘How does it work?’
Fitz shrugs his shoulders. ‘I dunno. How does anything work these days? You install the software and that’s it, off you go.’
‘Yeah, but… do you have to insert anything in her phone, or get -’
‘Ah, Jaysus no, no. It’s all remote. It picks up the signal. It’s got this sniper antenna thing on it. For long-distance use. So you can be anything up to seven or eight hundred yards away.’
‘OK. Good.’
Norton is still annoyed about the Narolet, and as a result is feeling massively irritated by everything – by Fitz here beside him, by the texture of his own suit, by the colour of the car’s leather upholstery, by the fact that it’s Tuesday. He needs his pills. As soon as he has a chance, he thinks, he’s going to have to drive out home and get them.
‘Anyway,’ he goes on, still looking straight ahead, ‘I want you to keep a very close eye on her from now on.’
‘Yeah. No problem.’
‘And listen. There’s someone else I want you to keep an eye on. I think it might be that other fella you mentioned, the one she met earlier.’
Norton’s voice has a slight tremor in it. He finds this, in equal measure, embarrassing and annoying.
He’s not sure how noticeable it is.
‘Right,’ Fitz says, seemingly oblivious, and taking a small notebook out of his pocket. ‘What can you tell me about him? Shoot.’
The Dáil chamber is packed for Leaders’ Questions, and there’s an air of excitement about the place that you normally wouldn’t get unless something major was in the offing. In the front row of the government benches, three seats along from the Taoiseach, Larry Bolger sits stony-faced, keenly aware of the cameras, keenly aware that he’ll be in frame whenever the Taoiseach is speaking. On the other side of the chamber, opposition party leaders limber up, consult their notes, confer with colleagues.
These will be key exchanges this afternoon and may even have a bearing on the outcome of the next election. They’ll certainly have a bearing on Bolger’s future. A lot will depend, of course, on how the Taoiseach chooses to play it. Most commentators agree he’s in a very difficult position and has only two options. In the first, he comes on strong and hangs the minister out to dry. This addresses the issue at hand and sees off a challenger, making him look strong and decisive. But it’s also quite risky because what if he comes on too strong? What if he appears disloyal or even vindictive? As well as bringing Bolger down, he could very well take a serious hit himself. In the second option – the path of least resistance – he gives his unequivocal support to the minister. But this is also inherently risky for the Taoiseach because it means he’d be throwing a lifeline to someone who everyone knows has been plotting against him for months. And that would only make him look weak.
Clearly, this second option is what Bolger wants, and needs – though there isn’t much he can do to bring it about now. Apart, that is, from sitting there with a serious look on his face. And regardless of how he does that, he’ll still be perceived in a variety of different ways – as defiant, or contrite, or reflective, or baffled, or bored even.
All of which, in a sense, he is.
Not to mention exhausted, and anxious, and angry.
As the leader of the main opposition party gets to his feet and starts framing a predictably labyrinthine question for the Taoiseach, Bolger fixes his gaze on a section of carpet in the middle of the floor. To look at him you would think he was concentrating hard on the question being asked, analysing and parsing it, but in fact his thoughts are elsewhere. What he’s doing – and has been doing all day – is analysing and parsing the brief, cryptic conversation he had the previous evening in Buswell’s Hotel.
Because he’s extremely upset about it. It’s not the fact of being accosted in a toilet that’s troubling him; it’s the shocking and downright scandalous reference to his brother. Initially, and after speaking to Paddy Norton, he dismissed it as a tabloid hack’s calculated attempt to provoke him. But later on he wasn’t so sure. On reflection, the young man didn’t seem like a hack at all. There was something odd about him, something tentative, a nervousness that didn’t square with the lizardlike weariness you get with most working journalists.
Later still, when he was in bed and unable to sleep, Bolger gave some thought to the charge itself. Once again, he dismissed it out of hand – but as he lay there in the dark, as he tossed and turned, it kept re-forming in his mind.
Inevitably, it gained a certain traction.
The thing is, Bolger’s recollection of that whole period is patchy at best. He wasn’t even around when the accident took place – he was a junior associate for a legal firm in Boston, a job he’d got through a cousin of his mother’s a couple of years earlier – so his take on the event is the received one, i.e. what happened was a simple road accident, a tragedy, a statistic. He was very upset of course, but by the time he got back from the States pretty much everything had been settled and it was straight into the funeral. Almost immediately after that, he was taken in hand by the party, and the grooming process began.
At the time, Bolger had a sense that he was being shielded from certain things, that information was being carefully managed, not to say manipulated. Nevertheless, he does have a vague recollection of someone mentioning alcohol, and in reference to the driver of the other car.
But then last night in the toilet of a hotel, and according to this total stranger… it was Frank all of a sudden? Frank was the one who was drunk? The one who caused the accident?
It was certainly the first time Bolger had ever heard this. Even though the idea, if he thinks about it, is hardly outlandish. Back in those days it was common practice for people to drink and drive – three, four, five pints, whatever – it was almost expected, and Frank, like anyone, was fond of a jar, so…
Bolger stops.
He knows full well what’s at work here. It’s the insidious nature of rumour and hearsay. It’s the impulse to believe, the instinctive rush to judgement, the feeling that if someone says something to your face, and with conviction… then it must be true.
It’s a dynamic, after all, that on a professional level Bolger is familiar with.
He glances around the chamber. The opposition leader is shaking a finger in the direction of the government benches.
‘And furthermore, let me put this to the Taoiseach…’
Bolger can see the sprays of spittle from here.
His own mouth feels thick and grainy. He didn’t get much sleep last night, and he’s been drinking coffee non-stop since he got up.
He shifts his weight in the seat.
In any case, if it is true about Frank, he can understand why they kept quiet about it, at least on one level – because he wouldn’t be sitting here in this chamber today if they hadn’t.
But what if the story gets resurrected now? It would be awful, a PR disaster. Even though it’d be impossible to prove, a story like this, a sort of Chappaquiddick by proxy, would in all likelihood scupper any chances Bolger had of bouncing back from the current crisis.
But what he really can’t get his head around – and it’s been working on him like a slow burn since late the previous evening – is how this rewrites everything, and not just the facts, the circumstances surrounding a terrible tragedy; it rewrites his own personal history, his reasons for going into politics in the first place.
Actually, talk about a slow burn.
That one’s been working on him for the best part of twenty-five years – resentment of his father for putting so much pressure on him, frustration at a career he never truly ‘owned’, a sense of loss for the life he could have led, and in fact had been leading, over there in Boston.
It pains him to think of it even now, of how young he was, and idealistic, and of how stimulated by everything he was: the summer heat, the atmosphere around Cambridge, the exotic fare on offer at Faneuil Hall (exotic back then, to him), his apartment on Comm Ave, his colleagues at the law firm, the conversations, the women he met.
To say nothing of the money he could have earned.
Larry really wanted to stay, and if he had known the truth, the alleged truth at any rate, about Frank – that he got into his car that night drunk as a fucking lord and killed all those people as well as himself, he would have stayed. He would have had the moral advantage, the leverage to resist, the courage to stand up to his old man.
It could all have been so different. So is it any wonder that along the way he went off the rails a bit?
Across the chamber, the opposition leader concludes what one editorial will later call ‘not so much a question as a Kalashnikov-hail of bullet points’.
He sits down. The Taoiseach gets up.
In a reflex reaction, Bolger and others around him adjust themselves in their seats.
The Taoiseach clears his throat.
Bolger braces himself.
Regardless of which way it goes for him here today, he intends to follow this other business up. He intends to make discreet enquiries. Look at the records. Talk to people. Maybe he’ll even go out to Wicklow, to the nursing home, and talk to the old man.
He needs to know the truth.
He turns his head slightly to the right and refocuses.
‘Before I answer your, er, question, Deputy,’ the Taoiseach begins, ‘I’d like to state for the record that Laurence D. Bolger is a public servant of the highest calibre, a man of integrity and an esteemed colleague…’
He sees them approaching from the other end of Ashleaf Avenue and his heart starts pounding. It’s nearly nine o’clock and already quite dark, but it’s the suburbs, and in the orange glow of the streetlights the two figures are clearly visible.
Dermot slows down and swallows.
Something like this was inevitable, and in a weird, alternative-universe kind of way he almost welcomes it. He recognises the guy on the left. He’s the one with the small beady eyes and the denim jacket – except he’s not wearing the denim jacket this evening, he’s wearing an overcoat. The guy on the right is tall and is wearing a tracksuit.
Dermot is walking home, briefcase in hand, up the few hundred yards from the DART station. These days he leaves work as late as he can to minimise contact time with Claire and the girls – which he knows is ridiculous, and unsustainable, but it’s a survival mechanism.
He quickly looks behind him, and then around. The road is quiet. Leafy. Deserted.
Oh God.
Just up ahead there is a right turn off Ashleaf Avenue – onto Ashleaf Drive – where Dermot lives, halfway down, on the left.
He can’t believe this. If he maintains his current pace, they’re all going to converge on the corner.
So… should he turn around? Should he head back towards the train station?
He feels sick.
‘Dermot?’
And what do they want? Is it because they saw him talking to Gina Rafferty? It has to be.
The guy with the beady eyes – a few paces ahead of his partner now – is strutting towards the opposite corner.
Dermot gulps and swallows back some vomit.
He’s a fucking coward and he hates himself for it. In fact, over the last few weeks he has experienced the emotion of self-hatred more intensely, more completely, than he’s ever experienced any other emotion in his entire life – more so even than his grief at the death of his mother, or his love for Claire, or his exhilaration at the births of his two daughters.
Which strikes him as pathetic, not to say unforgivable.
Nevertheless, as the guy with beady eyes steps off the pavement and onto the road, something unexpected kicks in.
Dermot realises that there is no way he is going to allow either of these two guys onto Ashleaf Drive, let alone anywhere near his family.
He looks to his left.
Across the road, between two large semi-detached houses there is a narrow walled laneway that leads out onto Bristol Terrace.
He makes a run for it, knowing they will follow him.
Within seconds he is in the laneway, sprinting, panting, resisting the urge to look around.
‘Hey! Stop! HEY!’
Unable to gauge from this how far behind him they are, Dermot gives in for a split second – but as he’s turning he puts all his weight into flinging the briefcase in his hand backwards and hopefully right into the path of the two men. As he withdraws his arm, he catches a glimpse of the guy in the overcoat. He then hears a thwack and takes it to be the briefcase making contact with the chest or shoulder of the guy in the tracksuit. It is followed by a loud, ‘Ow… bollocks.’
Seconds later Dermot emerges from the dim laneway, but he’s going so fast that he can’t make a smooth turn and is forced, in a wide arc, out onto the road.
There is a roaring in his eardrums. Which is what? The rush of blood to his head? Maybe, he doesn’t know, but through it, in the middle of it, he hears a voice, ‘Wait… wait… WAIT.’
He hears another sound, too, in the background, like some kind of overlay, but he never gets to identify it as the hum of an engine because he slips in a streak of oil on the road and falls sideways, his head colliding with the polished chrome bull bars of an oncoming SUV.
The next morning, just before twelve, Mark Griffin arrives at his aunt Lilly’s, but instead of pulling into her driveway, as he normally would, he parks out on the street – a few houses down and on the opposite side. He remains in the car. He has a clear view of the front door. He waits. It’s a bright, chilly morning and everything on this tree-lined suburban street is dappled in sunlight. Mark is relieved not to be hungover, as he was the previous day, but he still feels awful – sick, anxious, barely human.
After a while, Aunt Lilly emerges from the house. She shuts the door behind her and walks down the driveway. She’s wearing her navy overcoat and a paisley headscarf. She has a carrier bag folded under her arm. She turns left at the gate and heads in the direction of the shops, which are about a fifteen-minute walk away.
Mark stares across at her as she passes. He then looks in the wing mirror and tracks her until she disappears from view.
A couple of minutes after that, he lets himself into the house. He goes upstairs and straight into the small room at the back that his uncle used as an office. There is a table with a PC on it, a chair, a filing cabinet, a wardrobe and a stack of boxes – some of which are the ones Aunt Lilly had been going through that day down in the kitchen.
He opens the first drawer of the filing cabinet and starts flicking through it. He knows vaguely what he’s looking for. It’s something he remembered yesterday, out of the blue – something he overheard his uncle referring to once, many years ago. Mark was curious at the time but he never gave it much thought afterwards. The occasion was a Christmas party or a birthday celebration, and his uncle was talking to… someone. In the living room. Mark doesn’t recall exactly. All he remembers is him saying, ‘No, no, me and Tony were very different. He was the good-looking one.’ This got a laugh, and then his uncle added, ‘I have a bunch of old photos upstairs. I must dig them out sometime.’
These words came back to Mark yesterday in the middle of what was a searing hangover, so it took him a while to process them. But when he did, finally, it was like waking up from an oppressive dream, and one that had lasted for years.
He opens the second drawer of the filing cabinet.
He never wanted to see the photos before, and maybe for good reason. Fine. But now he does. Now he’s excited at the prospect, feverish almost.
When the third drawer yields nothing, he moves on to the wardrobe. As he opens it, he glances at his watch and tries to calculate how much time he’s got. There’s no reason why he couldn’t be doing this with Aunt Lilly in the house, downstairs, working in the kitchen – she wouldn’t object to anything he wanted to do, and he wouldn’t have to explain himself – but he’s so agitated at the moment that he doesn’t think he’d be able to deal with her, talk to her, look at her even.
At the bottom of the wardrobe there are some old shoe boxes. He lifts these up and places them on the table. He removes the lid from the first one.
Photographs.
There are hundreds of them, some loose, some in packets. Most of them are of places in Italy: the Pantheon, the Colosseum, Mount Vesuvius, the Grand Canal, churches, palazzos, piazzas, vineyards. Uncle Des and Aunt Lilly feature in a lot of them, separately and together. Mark himself is in some of them, pale and gawpy-looking. The second box is the same. In the third box he finds a plastic bag, folded over and sealed with tape. He peels off the tape and opens the bag. Inside it is a padded brown envelope. Inside the envelope are more loose photos, dozens of them.
Upending the envelope, Mark pours the photos out onto the table and sees at once that these are what he came for. Using his arm, he shoves the keyboard of the computer as well as the three shoe boxes sideways and onto the floor. He spreads the photos out, face up, as many as he can fit on the surface of the table. His hands are shaking. These photos are older than the Italian ones. The colour in a lot of them has faded. Some are in black and white.
Most of them are of his father.
Tony Griffin.
Some of them – colour ones – feature his mother, Marie, and his sister, Lucy. He’s even in some of them himself – as a very small child.
Mark steps back and gazes down at this random collage – at his father, pencil thin in a suit and tie, standing outside the old Adelphi Cinema on Abbey Street; at the whole family on a beach, blue skies in the background, towels and sandcastles in the foreground; at his parents in a gaudy seventies-style living room, holding hands and smiling; at himself and Lucy, both impossibly small, enfolded in their father’s arms… the three of them on a lawn somewhere, in a garden…
A garden? Their garden?
Mark takes another step backwards.
He doesn’t remember any of this, any of these places. Jesus, he doesn’t even really recognise his mother. He knows it’s her, because… it can only be her, it -
He takes in a gulp of air. This becomes a sob, a loud one, and then a series of them…
He puts his hands up to his head.
This is his family. These are people whose very existence he’s been more or less denying for years, out of an irrational and misplaced sense of shame. But now, through a film of tears, he looks at them, goes from the first photo here to the last – and each one, in its own way, is a shock, each one a revelation.
He looks at his sister, a spindly young girl bristling with energy and intelligence; he looks at his mother, a woman who seems to be at just that point in her life when the early flush of having kids has caught up on her, and suddenly she’s weary… but still glamorous, still holding on…
Above all, though, he looks at his father – younger in most of these photos than Mark himself is now, yet somehow older-looking, more grown-up – and it just hits him in the gut… he’s known it for days, but he feels it now… this man was wronged, he was made into a scapegoat. Mark isn’t being naive here, he realises values were different back then, attitudes were different, but at the same time not everyone was reckless and irresponsible, not everyone was capable of putting their family in mortal danger for the sake of a lousy few pints.
This man wasn’t.
Mark is sure of it. But his name was blackened nonetheless… in order to protect someone else’s reputation. And as a result Mark’s own life – slowly, relentlessly – was contaminated as well… polluted with lies, and with toxic silence, and with guilt…
He walks out of the room, crosses the hall and goes into the bathroom.
He lunges at the toilet bowl and throws up.
Gina’s not used to being at home like this on a weekday morning. It feels strange. She’s sitting at the breakfast bar in her kitchen, dressed for work but with no intention of going to work, or even of leaving the apartment. What she’s doing is waiting for the phone to ring, and has been since Monday night – since her conversation with Mark Griffin.
It was her mobile number she gave him, so there’s nothing keeping her in the apartment. But this morning, for some reason, she dreads the thought of going out, of having to negotiate crowded streets, and traffic, and people…
She looks around. Objects in the living room that should be familiar to her seem slightly alien, even a little threatening. The light coming in from outside, a muted, late-autumnal grey, feels uncommonly bleak.
Nothing seems to be in proportion.
Gina thinks she might be on the cusp of a nervous breakdown – or would be, if she weren’t so bloody self-aware. Because she knows exactly what’s going on here. She has deferred the grieving process – parked it, but left the motor running. And in the absence of any conclusive evidence about what actually happened to Noel she’s had to suppress a whole range of emotions, especially anger. Throw a little denial into the mix, about the future of Lucius Software say, and you have the ingredients for a panic attack.
But her heart isn’t racing, she isn’t dizzy, she doesn’t have a dry mouth.
Not yet, anyway.
She reaches across the counter for her phone.
The thing is, either she succumbs to this incipient… whatever it is, breakdown, depression, collapse, or she just keeps pushing and doesn’t give in. She does whatever it takes to move on from this. Because Gina would like to move on. She’d like to grieve. She’d like to come to terms with the loss of her only brother. She’d like to stop having to ask all these questions. She’d like to look in the mirror and recognise the person she sees there.
She’d also like to meet Sophie for lunch and talk about movies, talk about shoes.
But none of that, she knows, is going to happen for some time.
Gina flicks open the phone and calls Mark Griffin’s home number. Once more she gets through to his answering machine. Once more she rings off without leaving a message.
She’ll try again later.
Because if they’re both right about this, then they really need to talk.
Next, she scrolls down through her phone list. She has three numbers entered for Noel – home, mobile and work. She calls the third one.
This has been nagging at her since the other day. It doesn’t really fit in with the Larry Bolger scenario, but the more she thinks about it, the more it needs to be explained. Neurotic behavior is one thing. This was different. This was off the charts.
‘Good morning, BCM, can I help you?’
‘Yes, good morning,’ Gina says, adopting her no-nonsense office voice. ‘Can you put me through to Dermot Flynn, please?’
When Mark has finished throwing up, he staggers over to the washbasin and turns on the cold tap. He rinses his mouth out and splashes water on his face.
When he looks up and meets his reflection in the mirror, something occurs to him.
Why was Uncle Des always so angry? Up to now the working assumption has been that he never forgave himself for something that happened in the days following the crash. It was put about that Tony had been drunk at the wheel, which Des must have known to be highly unlikely, so either he said nothing at all, or he raised objections… but was told to shut up.
And did. For the rest of his life.
Why, though? Was he threatened, intimidated? Did he not have the balls to stand up to them?
Or maybe it was something else.
Again – like the rest of it – this is only speculation. But the more Mark thinks about it, the more it makes sense. Because Uncle Des’s anger wasn’t directed at other people – it was directed at himself. In fact, there was probably quite a thin line, where Des was concerned, between anger and self-reproach, between anger and self-loathing.
Mark goes back into the little office room. He turns to the stack of boxes containing the documents Aunt Lilly was sorting through the other week. He opens the first one and pulls out a thick wad of ESB and Bord Gáis bills, hundreds of them. After a moment he drops these back in the box, pushes the box aside and opens the next one down. It contains miscellaneous papers, tax certificates, letters, God knows what. The third box contains the bank statements.
Standing there, Mark thumbs through wads and wads of these, going back ten, fifteen, twenty years. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, and he certainly doesn’t come across anything that jumps out at him – no large, unexplained deposits, for example. But is that really what he thinks? That they paid him off, that they bought his silence? That he accepted their offer… both of the money and of the life sentence that came with it – twenty-five years of silence, of bitterness, of corrosive guilt?
Maybe – except there’s nothing here to back this up. And would he find it anyway? Would that kind of payment show up on a normal bank statement?
Mark doesn’t have a clue.
Probably not, he thinks.
And that’s when he spots it.
The address. It changes. On the bank statements. From one month to the next. In April, Des and Lilly are at an address in Broadstone – and then suddenly in May they’re living here in Clontarf.
The accident happened in January.
Of the same year.
Mark looks around. He looks through the door and along the hallway. He’s always taken it for granted, this place where he grew up. It’s a large, detached redbrick Victorian house. It has four bedrooms, off-street parking, rear access and a substantial back garden. It’s ordinary enough, but twenty-five years ago it would have been a very dramatic trade-up from what had probably been a pokey little terraced house in Broadstone.
Mark feels his stomach lurch again.
There could be a hundred explanations for this, but -
He lets the wad of statements he’s holding slip from his hands. Loose pages fan out and glide, landing everywhere.
Uncle Des was a low-ranking civil servant on a very modest income. So how could he possibly have afforded to buy a house like this?
What happened?
Mark bends down and retrieves a few of the pages. Then he picks up a few more. He examines these closely, looking from one to the next, flicking them back and forth.
He swallows, feeling an uncomfortable lump in his throat.
Before May there were monthly mortgage repayments, presumably on the property in Broadstone. After May – it appears – these just stopped.
Mark lets go of the pages and stands up again.
They could easily have inherited the house from a relative and then sold the other one.
But no. Mark shakes his head. The timing is too much of a coincidence.
They fucking bought his silence.
Come on, Des, they probably said, stop this, would you? Leaveit alone. There’s no point. And anyway, think of the boy, think ofhis future… we could maybe help you out there, you know…
Mark turns to face the window. He stares out at the long garden and thinks back to when he was a kid. He never really wanted for anything, did he? His uncle and aunt sent him to good schools. They took him on all those trips to Italy. Later, when he was at college, they bought him his first car.
He swallows again.
They helped him out when he was setting up his business.
They gave him the deposit on his house.
He closes his eyes.
Jesus Christ.
It was blood money. And they used him as a bargaining chip. Which means that his whole life, his education, his career, everything… it’s all been based on lies, on blood, on his own family’s blood.
He takes out his mobile phone.
And when Mark thinks they, of course he means him. He means Larry Bolger…
Standing there but looking out the window, he calls the number he got the other day from directory enquiries. When he gets through to the department press office he asks – politely, in a controlled voice – if someone could tell him what public engagements the minister has on for the rest of the day.
Then he turns back around and looks down. He selects three of the photos from the table and puts them into his jacket pocket. He walks out of the room and goes downstairs. But instead of leaving straightaway, he hesitates. He stands on the bottom step, with his hand on the banister.
Please, Mark, listen to me. Don’t do anything rash.
After a moment, he turns and goes into the kitchen. Over by the cooker, he pulls open a drawer that contains various trays of cutlery. He rummages around and selects a knife, a big one. It has a laminated wood handle, a long, narrow stainless-steel blade and a curved tip.
It is used – he thinks – for filleting fish.
He opens his jacket, but there isn’t anywhere for him to put it.
Using the blade of the knife, he makes a rip in the jacket’s silk lining. He slips the knife inside and then lets the jacket hang loosely to see how it feels.
It feels fine.
On his way out, he glances at himself in the hall mirror to see how it looks.
It looks fine, too.
‘Oh my God.’
Gina is off the stool now, her free hand flat on the counter, pressing down.
‘Yes, we’re all in shock here,’ the BCM receptionist is saying. ‘I mean, it’s just awful. No one can believe it.’
Gina doesn’t know what to say.
‘And of course, as well,’ the receptionist continues, ‘coming so soon after your brother.’
Gina winces. She turns around and leans back against the counter. ‘So… you’re saying it was an accident?’
‘Yeah, he stepped out onto the road, near where he lives apparently, and didn’t see the car coming.’
People die on our roads every day of the week.
Gina closes her eyes. ‘And did, er…’ This isn’t the first question that occurs to her, but she asks it anyway. ‘Did he have any family?’
‘Yes. A wife and two little girls.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘Jesus.’
Gina doesn’t ask any more questions.
When she gets off the phone, she walks over to the window and looks out. There’s been a break in the cloud cover. Crisp sunlight has replaced the grey of a few minutes earlier. But it’s not going to last.
It never does.
Gina shakes her head.
Another accident. What are the odds? Way too long for comfort. Which means that she was right before – this doesn’t fit in with the Larry Bolger scenario. Her whole thing with him was based on… what? Very little really. It was supposition. It was tenuous and fanciful. It was wishful thinking. This is still supposition, but it makes a lot more sense. The two men worked in the same office, they worked on the same projects and they both died a couple of weeks apart in what appeared to be road accidents. There is good reason to believe, however, that Noel was actually murdered. And it also seems clear to Gina – in retrospect anyway, from the little she saw of him the other day – that Dermot Flynn was walking around in fear for his life.
She turns away from the window.
So there must have been something going on at BCM. Big international firm? Contracts worth billions every year? They’d go to any lengths to protect their interests, wouldn’t they?
She holds her breath. The idea is simultaneously horrifying and exciting.
But then, letting go, she deflates.
Because…
What? Sensitive information got leaked? By accident? Deliberately? There was an ‘impropriety’ – something financial, something personal even? The scandal had to be covered up, and not everyone was prepared to cooperate?
Gina groans.
Whatever it might be, what chance does someone like her, a complete outsider, have of finding out? Who does she talk to? How does she even broach the subject? What kind of attitude does she adopt? What kind of vocabulary does she use?
And how soon, in the face of implacable corporate self-preservation, does she fold?
It occurs to Gina that maybe what’s required here is a countervailing force – someone with the authority to ask awkward questions and demand answers, someone with a ready-made attitude and vocabulary of their own.
Jackie Merrigan?
Although the detective superintendent wasn’t exactly sympathetic to the idea that Noel’s death was anything other than an accident, maybe when he factors in Dermot Flynn’s untimely passing, Gina thinks, then he’ll -
But before she can complete the thought, something else occurs to her.
Where does all of this leave Mark Griffin?
She rushes over to the counter and picks up her mobile. She calls his number again, and waits.
As before, the answering machine comes on.
Damn.
‘Mark, hi,’ she says. ‘It’s Gina Rafferty. Please call me.’ She repeats her own mobile number. ‘Please. It’s urgent. I think I might be wrong about… you know, what we were saying the other night. So call me, OK?’ She pauses. ‘And listen, whatever you do, don’t… don’t… just call me, OK?’
It takes Mark just under an hour to get to the Garryowen Business Institute in Terenure. Set in old church grounds – half of which have been redeveloped for residential use – the Institute consists of three single-storey modern buildings. There is a parking area to the front and a large playing field to the side. The parking area is more than half full, and Mark finds a space not too far from the main gates. He stays in the car after he has parked it, and looks around. This campus may be fairly nondescript, but the Institute has a reputation for churning out successful young entrepreneurs and future business leaders. Today it is hosting an IT conference, and the minister is due to address the delegates at half past two.
Mark looks at his watch.
It’s 2.17.
He shifts in the seat.
Driving out here he was aware all the time of the knife concealed in the lining of his jacket – he could feel it pressing against his side. He can feel it now.
He looks around again.
There are a few people gathered at the entrance to the largest of the three buildings. They could be a reception committee. Or smokers. Mark can’t quite see from this distance.
Another car – the second or third since he arrived – comes through the gates behind him and cruises around looking for a parking space.
Mark glances at his watch again: 2.21.
He puts his hand into his jacket pocket and takes out the three photographs. He glances at each of them in turn, but tentatively, as though afraid he’ll react again. But he doesn’t feel anything – except a curious sense that his emotions, as well as his reason, have been fast-tracked, heightened to a pitch where he’s no longer conscious of them. He feels that he’s now operating without any guidance system, that his internal GPS has been deactivated.
In the distance he hears seagulls squawking.
He puts the photographs back into his pocket. He opens the door of the car and gets out. He straightens up and automatically buttons his jacket – then remembers, and unbuttons it again.
He glances around. There is no one nearby. He reaches into the slit in the lining of his jacket, takes the knife by the handle and partially withdraws it.
He looks down. He tests his grip on the handle. When he’s satisfied, he eases it back in.
He starts walking very slowly towards the main building.
Thick grey clouds are gathering, and it seems as if it could rain at any second. The trees along the far side of the playing field – a straight line of tall evergreens – are swaying in the wind.
Mark doesn’t look back, but he’s aware of another car – or cars, maybe – coming in through the gates behind him. A moment later, a black Mercedes glides by on the driveway. It is followed by another car, a silver Opel. The two cars pull up at the main building, the ministerial car flush with the entrance.
More people have gathered, and as Mark gets closer he sees that it is a reception committee – made up, no doubt, of students, lecturers, administrative staff and conference delegates.
Two men get out of the second car first. They are in their late thirties or early forties, and are obviously Special Branch. One of them, medium height, thin, and with a moustache, walks forward and opens the back door of the Merc. The other one, tall and burly, goes straight inside the building.
The minister gets out and is greeted by a man in glasses and a grey suit – the Director of the Institute presumably.
Mark has walked to the edge of the parking area and approaches the little gathering from behind. He moves through it and within seconds is at the front – barely three yards away from the minister, who is standing with his arms folded, nodding, listening to the Director of the Institute.
Mark studies the Special Branch detective. He is standing next to the minister, and is doubtless armed – but Mark has the advantage here because no one will be expecting anything… because no one, surely, looks on this as any kind of a security risk. The scene, in any case, is informal, it’s relaxed, with the minister and the director – clearly for the benefit of those gathered around – engaging in some good-natured banter.
‘That’s right, the Venture Capital Symposium. Yes, I remember now. Lord, that must be, what -’
‘Two years ago.’
‘Two?’
Mark closes his eyes.
‘I’m afraid so, Minister. Tempus fugit, as the man said.’
‘Well, let me tell you, if greying hair and stomach ulcers are any index to go by, it feels a lot longer than that.’
This gets a generous laugh, and as Mark lets the sound of it wash over him he tries to visualise the next twenty seconds – to see himself pulling out the knife and lunging forward, driving the blade into the minister’s side, twisting it, shoving it up as far as it will go. Then releasing it and withdrawing. Then bedlam, maybe a gunshot or two, the minister falling forward into the arms of the director, both of them staggering sideways for a moment before falling over. Then the Special Branch man and others grabbing Mark, like in a loose scrum, forcing him down, pinning him to the ground.
Screams, groans, chaos.
Blood.
Mark opens his eyes. Now is the time to move. But his arm feels leaden all of a sudden. He feels leaden. It’s like an anaesthetic taking effect… those final few moments before you go under.
As he stares at the minister, in profile, Mark realises that this isn’t going to happen – that he can’t do it. So he just stands there, paralysed, disorientated, watching the next twenty seconds unfold for real – though in slow motion it seems, in silence: the director raising an arm and mouthing Shall we? at the minister, then guiding him towards the entrance to the building… the Special Branch man following close behind, the small crowd moving forward as well, people shuffling through the door, disappearing in twos and threes.
Then, from one second to the next, everyone has gone, and Mark is standing alone, out in the open.
Holding his breath.
Eventually, he exhales. His whole body is trembling. The anger is still there, still raging inside him, but its power has been undercut by an awful, creeping, undeniable sense of relief.
After a few more seconds, he puts a hand out to feel the first, tentative drops of rain, and turns to go – at which point he sees that he’s not alone.
Standing a couple of yards away, and looking directly at him, is a tall man in jeans and a green parka. ‘Have a word there, boss?’
Mark looks at him, confused. ‘Sorry… what?’
‘I need to have a word with you.’ The man then indicates to the right, with his hand, as though inviting Mark into an office.
Mark shakes his head. He moves away, and quickly, to the left, towards the parking area. The raindrops are more persistent now and he can feel them on his face.
The man follows him.
Mark thinks rapidly. He’s done nothing wrong here. He’s got a knife concealed in his jacket, but that’s just what it is, concealed – no one knows it’s there. Besides, this man doesn’t look like… anything. He doesn’t look like a security guard, and he certainly doesn’t look like a cop.
So who is he, and what does he want?
‘Hold on there,’ the man says. ‘Slow the fuck down, would you?’
‘Look,’ Mark shouts over his shoulder, ‘what do you want?’
‘Just stop for a bleedin’ second and I’ll tell you.’
Mark reaches the last row of cars before the playing field begins. He turns left. His own car is parked at the end.
The man is right behind him now.
Half glancing back, Mark says, ‘Get away… get away from me.’
Then his right foot catches on something, and he stumbles forward. He reaches out to try and keep his balance, but there isn’t anything there to hold on to. He falls to the ground, careful as he lands to sweep his jacket back. He then rolls sideways and just about manages to sit up. But the tall man is standing there, towering over him. Mark leans back on one hand and holds his other hand out in front of him.
‘Jesus,’ he says, and glances over his shoulder. There’s no one around. All he can see is parked cars. It’s also raining properly now, and getting heavier by the second.
‘OK,’ the tall man says, ‘you fucking keep away from him, right?’ He points in the direction of the buildings they’ve just come from. ‘Right?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Mark’s head is spinning. He attempts to get to his feet, holding one hand out to protect himself. ‘Just let me get up.’ But the man steps forward and in a quick, efficient manoeuvre tackles him back to the ground.
On his knees now, Mark leans forward and groans.
‘You don’t approach him,’ the man is saying, ‘you don’t talk to him, you don’t contact him. That clear?’
Mark stays hunched forward, covering his stomach with both arms.
‘You got that, prickface?’
Mark looks up and makes eye contact. He opens his mouth as though he’s about to say something, but in that same moment – and still on his knees – he draws the knife from the lining of his jacket and lunges forward, aiming at the man’s thigh. He sticks the knife in and pushes it hard. Then, using the handle of the knife for leverage, he pulls himself up. As he does so he feels the blade tearing deeper into flesh. The man screams out in agony. Mark lets go of the knife and stands back.
The man staggers sideways and slumps against the nearest car. He clutches the knife with his left hand and bangs on the roof of the car with his right. This triggers the alarm. He slides his hand off the roof and brings it down to his side.
Mark turns and runs towards his own car. A couple of seconds before he reaches it, he hears a sound – it’s loud and sharp, but with the pounding in his ears, and the adrenaline pumping, and the wind, and the alarm, not easy to identify. At the same time, from behind – but without making the obvious connection – he feels something… an aggressive dig in the back, like the sensation of being shoved forward in a crowd. As a result of this, he stumbles and falls to his knees, but he immediately struggles up again and lunges for the car door. He opens it, gets in and looks back.
The man is glaring at him. ‘Bastard!’ he shouts. ‘You’re bleedin’ dead!’
He then hops forward on one leg and raises his right arm.
There seems to be something in his hand.
In a blind rush, Mark pulls the door shut, starts the car, backs onto the driveway, turns and accelerates. As he approaches the main gates, he slows down and looks in the rearview mirror – but with the rain pelting down now he isn’t able to see anything clearly.
A few seconds later, in any case, he’s out on the main road, heading towards Terenure. It’s only then, as he tries to get his breathing under control, that he gives it any consideration – this sudden, intense throbbing in his side, this pain – and that it dawns on him what is causing it.
‘Hold please.’
Gina watches the first raindrops hit the windowpane. She can actually see the shower approaching, almost in its entirety, sweeping in from the other side of the city. In five or ten minutes it will have passed and it might even be sunny again.
This is no climate for a sane person to live in. Which maybe explains a lot.
‘Hello?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m afraid Detective Superintendent Merrigan is away for the day.’
‘Oh.’
‘He’s due back tomorrow. But if you’d like to leave a message?’
Gina considers this. ‘No, that’s OK,’ she says. ‘Thanks.’
She places the phone on the window ledge and walks over to the sofa. She picks up one of the newspapers that has been lying there since Sunday. She looks through it, page by page, until she finds what she’s looking for. At the bottom of the editorial page there is a small box with the paper’s contact details in it.
She goes back over to the window. Sheets of rain are now pelting against it, and the city below is little more than a kinetic, impressionistic blur.
She picks up the phone. She’s never done this before, spoken to a journalist, not in this way, and she isn’t clear in her mind how she should approach it.
When she gets through, she asks to speak to John O’Driscoll.
‘Please hold.’
There is a click and then an electronic version of ‘Summertime’ comes on.
Gina is nervous. She takes a deep breath.
O’Driscoll is a political reporter. She’s read his stuff over the years. He’s seems reasonable enough, objective, sane even.
But who knows?
As she waits, the sound of the driving rain merges in her mind with the desecrated Gershwin coming down the phone line.
Eventually, after what seems like ages, O’Driscoll comes on. ‘Yep?’
As Paddy Norton walks out of the pharmacy, he feels he has a true understanding of what it is to be schizophrenic. OK, not in the strict clinical sense – he knows that schizophrenia is a complex disorder – but rather in the popular-misconception sense… of being schizo, schizoid, a split personality, two people at the same time sort of thing. Because right now that’s the deal. Right now – at the same time, in the same skin – Norton is giddy with relief and incandescent with rage.
He glances around.
The rain has stopped and the sun has broken through the clouds.
Again.
It’s been like this all day, unsettled – showers, sunshine, overcast, more rain. But for the time being at least, everything is still, and wet… glistening, luminous – this little block of shops, the pavement slabs at his feet, the neat row of boxed shrubs at the kerb. The neat row of houses opposite. The passing traffic.
His own car.
He gets into it and settles himself. He rips open the paper bag from the pharmacy. He takes out the packet and opens that. He slides the top blister of twenty pills out and pops two of them into his cupped hand. He breathes in deeply and swal lows the pills back dry.
He looks down at the packet.
He’s used to getting them in a bottle, and from Dr Walsh. These are a different brand – Nalprox – but it’s the same stuff. When he got home on Monday he couldn’t find his Narolet anywhere, and it transpired that Miriam had flushed them down the toilet. Then he went to Dr Walsh, and it transpired that she’d more or less flushed him down the toilet, too – scaring the man off with talk of overprescribing and of possible complaints to the HSE.
Norton didn’t argue with him – though he did argue with Miriam later, when he got home.
They haven’t spoken since.
Which is a major pain in the arse. Plus it’s taken him all day, and endless phone calls here, there and everywhere, to organise this.
But now that he has it, a fresh supply, he is walking on air.
He checks the box again. Three blisters, sixty pills, minus the two he’s just taken, that’s fifty-eight. Four a day, give or take.
So two weeks. More maybe. Or less.
OK.
He puts the packet away, into his pocket, and then looks at his watch: 4.15.
By the time he meets Fitz – in about twenty minutes, down on Strand Road – the tablets will have kicked in, and his rage will have subsided somewhat. So he’ll have to… well, act it, he supposes. Put it on. From memory.
Not that it’ll be any less authentic for that.
Mark turns left off the Cherryvale roundabout and heads for the industrial estate. He’s been driving for more than an hour now, aimlessly – south-side, north-side, the M50 – sitting in traffic for most of it. The pain in his side is intense, but steady. If he sits in a particular position and keeps a very tight grip on the steering wheel, it’s just about bearable. He should really head for the nearest A &E, or see a doctor – but he’s not going to. Because without having examined the wound or even looked at it properly, he knows what it is. It’s a bullet wound, and how’s he supposed to explain that? Or the fact, which would inevitably surface, that before getting shot, he stabbed the other guy with a kitchen knife – an action he’s been replaying over and over in his head as he cruises around… the split second of contact, the pressure he applied, the resistance he can still feel in the form of tiny spasms, like nerve ends twitching in his hand and wrist…
Mark doesn’t know how this stuff works, the neurology of it, but it’s giving him something to focus on when the broader picture gets too chaotic, when the questions start multiplying, and the answers mutating – like, for instance, where does he go? Where is it safe to go?
He exhales.
Not home, certainly, and not the showrooms. But why not? Because they know where he lives? Where he works? Is that it?
Multiply, mutate.
Because maybe Bolger had him followed the other night from Buswell’s? And now realises who he is? Or maybe knew him anyway? Realised who he was straight off? Recognised him somehow? Had been expecting this for years and isn’t going to stand for it?
Stopped at a red light, Mark leans sideways, puts a hand inside his jacket and dabs at the wound as gently as he can. Then he withdraws his hand and holds it up to look at. His fingertips are smeared with blood – though it doesn’t seem too bad. Maybe the bullet just grazed him, and the wound is superficial. Or maybe there’s an actual bullet lodged in there, and most of the bleeding is internal. But what does he know?
The light changes.
So. Where does he go? Where is it safe to go?
Eventually, because he can’t drive around for ever, he decides on the warehouse – his unit at the Cherryvale Industrial Estate. It’s down the road here, and is anonymous, unmarked, safe as anywhere. Most of Tesoro’s business is conducted from the showrooms in Ranelagh, and Mark comes out this way only a couple of times a week, whenever there’s a shipment in or a delivery to be organised.
He comes to the estate and drives into the yard. He turns right and then takes the third left. He goes past several of the larger units – past busy loading docks, freight trucks, forklifts – and arrives at his own unit, about halfway down. He parks in front of a rolling steel shutter. When he gets out of the car – which ends up being quite a struggle – he immediately feels dizzy. It also seems really cold. But at least the rain has stopped.
Holding the car door open, shivering now, he looks down at the seat and sees that it’s smeared with blood. He looks away.
Was it this cold earlier?
He pushes the car door shut and locks it. He glances around the yard. A few units back, towards the entrance, a freight truck is reversing and pulling away. At the far end of the yard there is a graffiti-covered wall, and beyond that is Cherryvale Downs, an irregular grid of nearly four hundred identical houses.
At his feet there is a pool of rainwater. Scraps of cloud drift across it. For some reason looking at this makes him feel vaguely hysterical. At the same time, he feels weak, and wonders if he wasn’t better off driving around – though all of a sudden the notion of being at the wheel of a car and negotiating traffic seems implausible to him, remote in its complexity and danger.
Moving slowly, he makes his way over to the black metal door next to the rolling steel shutter. He pulls a bunch of keys out of his jacket pocket and holds them up.
It takes him a while, but he eventually manages to get the door open. Inside, he clicks the door shut again and reaches out for a switch on the wall. A second after that fluorescent tube lights flicker and stutter into life overhead. He looks around. On one side of the warehouse there are rows of wrapped pallets stacked on raised wooden platforms, as well as some loose boxes and crates and a small forklift truck. On the other side, there is an area of unused floor space, and in the far corner there is a modular office unit.
Mark goes over to the office, which is bare and strictly functional. There is a small bathroom to the left and a kitchenette to the right. He eases himself onto the hard plastic chair behind the metal desk in the middle. He leans forward for a moment and rubs the back of his neck. His skin feels clammy even though he’s cold.
His heart is thumping. His mouth is dry.
He sits up and holds his jacket back to feel the wound again. It seems to have stopped bleeding.
Is that good or bad? He isn’t sure.
It hurts like fuck, though.
He works to get his shivering under control. He stares at an irregular mark scratched onto the surface of the metal desk.
What happened this afternoon?
He finds it hard to believe. Quite clearly, his intention had been to attack, to lash out, to exact some form of revenge – and who could blame him for that – but he hadn’t acted, they had.
He shakes his head.
They attacked him. They intimidated him, provoked him, and when he finally tried to defend himself, they fucking shothim in the back…
And clearly by they he still means Larry Bolger. The Bolger family. Someone in the Bolger family. Up to now – at least since he spoke to Gina – that’s been the working assumption.
Jesus.
He gets up from behind the desk. He limps out of the office, looks around and picks up the nearest object that catches his eye – a crowbar lying on a wooden crate. He holds it up and imagines what he could do with this, imagines how much more satisfying it would be to use than a knife… imagines the whoosh of air, the solid… contact, the sinew and muscle, the brain tissue and bone… blood spurting…
As he walks across the warehouse floor, swinging the crowbar, Mark feels a rush of energy. But this lasts only a few seconds.
It is followed by a blinding wave of dizziness.
He staggers forward, losing his footing. He reaches out to grab on to something and finds the side of the small forklift truck. After he regains his balance and catches his breath, he looks at the crowbar again, examines it.
Who does he think he’s kidding?
Where? When? How?
He tosses the crowbar onto the plastic seat of the forklift truck and takes a few more tentative steps forward, each one causing him to wince. He stops at the first row of stacked pallets. Next to them is another wooden crate. He leans his back against the pallets, puts a hand onto the crate for support, and slides down into a sitting position on the floor.
In his mind’s eye, he tries again to picture what happened earlier, to retrace his steps, but it’s all out of sync now and won’t settle down. There’s a feverish, shape-shifting quality to it, the quality of a nightmare.
A while later, he reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out the three photographs. He lays them side by side on the cold concrete, next to the wooden crate. He passes his eye over each one of them in turn, does this again and again, quickly at first, but then less so, lingering a bit longer each time – a few seconds, then more – on the faces of his father, his mother and his sister…
The tide is out and it’s very cold, but the sky is spectacular – red, painterly streaks of cloud are all that is left of the day’s storms.
It’s going to be a clear night.
Norton is sitting on a wooden bench, legs crossed, hunched into his overcoat. A few isolated figures are visible out on the strand, people with dogs, throwing sticks. Behind him is a small parking area. Directly behind him is his own car. He hears another car pulling up beside it.
A minute later, Fitz appears from the right. He sits down next to Norton and grunts.
Norton pauses and then takes a deep breath. ‘What the fuck is going on, Fitz? I mean, sweet holy suffering mother of Jaysus.’
‘I know, I know. But let’s face it, Paddy, this isn’t exactly everyday stuff we’re dealing with here, is it? I mean, High King is more used to -’
‘Oh, what, all of a sudden this isn’t your… your métier? Is that it?’
‘What?’
‘Because that’s not what you told me before. Piece of piss you said.’
‘Yeah, but -’
‘And it’s not like you were shy about taking my fucking money -’
‘Ah, Paddy, come on, would you?’
‘No, you come on. You come on. For fuck’s sake.’
The first of the three calls that day came early in the morning. Norton was at home, in the kitchen, fighting to keep down dry toast. He was also shivering, and not just because of the arctic chill that had developed between himself and Miriam. When the second call came, much later, he was in the middle of his frantic search for a new, more pliant GP. Then, not too long after that – about an hour ago now – the third call came. He was in his car at the time, driving out to a doctor’s surgery in Milltown.
But it was only as he was leaving the surgery – scrip safely in hand at last – that the gravity of the day’s developments hit home, and that he found any space in his head to think about them.
Taking a deep breath, Norton fills his lungs with healthy sea air. In front of them, two seagulls flap past, squawking. Out on the horizon there is a ship, a tiny dot, one of the ferries.
Anyway.
About Dermot Flynn, he’s ambivalent. What happened was a mess and should have been avoided – though in the heel of the hunt no real harm was done, and in a way they’re lucky to have him out of the picture.
But as for the second situation, Norton is barely able to get his head around it. Mark Griffin stalking Larry Bolger with a kitchen knife? Going around stabbing people in the leg with it?
It’s not an image he can dwell on for too long.
Eventually, and as calmly as possible, he says, ‘Look, there’s nothing we can do about Flynn now, but this other guy… you’re going to have to find him. You’re going to have to stop him.’
‘Stop him? Jesus, Paddy, I don’t know. This is all getting -’
‘What? Out of hand? And whose fault is that?’
Fitz doesn’t answer.
There is a long silence. An elderly couple stroll past. The man nods at the two gents on the bench and says, ‘Grand evening.’
The two gents nod back.
‘None of this would have happened,’ Norton then says, ‘if the original hit on Noel had gone according to plan. All the focus now would be on gangland crime, and how it’s getting out of hand. Your one Gina wouldn’t be going around asking awkward questions.’
Fitz grunts again but doesn’t speak.
‘Right,’ Norton goes on. ‘The phone call. What did she say exactly?’
This was arguably even more serious than the Mark Griffin situation. Because it was clear that Mark Griffin was traumatised, disturbed, whatever. He was weak, and wounded. He could be dealt with.
But Gina Rafferty?
No.
Leaving messages on Mark Griffin’s answering machine?
Putting a call through to Harcourt Street? Talking to a journalist?
No fucking way.
Fitz exhales. ‘Well,’ he says, his voice thick with reluctance, ‘basically she asked him if they could meet. He asked why. She said she had a story. He asked what it was and she said she didn’t want to go into it over the phone. Then he said he was busy and did she know how many calls like this he got in a week, that she’d have to give him something. So then she went on for a bit about the two Noels, but by this stage she was sort of rambling, and I don’t think your man was too impressed.’
‘Did she mention any other names?’ Norton says. ‘Terry Stack? Larry Bolger?’
‘No. I think she was going out of her way to be, what’s it, circumspect?’
‘Right.’
Norton swallows. He feels a sudden tightness in his chest. This Nalprox stuff is supposed to be the same as the Narolet, but he’s not so sure – he’s detecting subtle variations, little wrinkles in the texture of it.
‘So, how did it finish up?’
‘O’Driscoll said that unless she could come up with some hard evidence she was wasting her time. And his. Then your one went all quiet. And that was it.’
That’s not it, of course, Norton thinks. He looks at his watch.
‘Something has to be done,’ he says. ‘Tonight. This can’t be allowed to spill into another day.’
‘Jesus, Paddy.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know, I mean… another two -’
‘What’s the alternative, Fitz?’ This comes out in a loud, desperate whisper. ‘Tell me. Because it’s only a matter of time. A few more bloody questions from her, to the wrong person, and we’re at the tipping point. This could all fall apart.’
After a long pause, Norton then says, ‘Look,Fitz,things have got out of control here, I know that. And I take some of the blame. I do. But if you can contain this tonight, end it…on top of what I owe you already I’ll give you five hundred grand. Offshore account. No traceability.’
Fitz turns to look at Norton. He makes a whistling sound. ‘You serious?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Fuck’s sake.’
Norton stares out at the horizon, waiting.
Fitz runs a hand through his hair. Eventually he says, ‘Yeah. Fair enough.’
‘Do it any way you want, just take care of it. And you do it, do you hear me?’
‘Yeah.’
‘No operatives, no outsourcing. You do it.’
Fitz nods.
After another long pause, Norton says, ‘Where is she? At the moment?’
‘Er… at home. In her apartment. She’s been there all day.’
Norton stands up. It’s darker than when he sat down, and chillier. City lights are shimmering now along the bay.
He looks at Fitz. ‘Well, what the fuck are you waiting for? Get back there. Stay on top of her. Maybe she’ll phone Griffin again. Maybe he’ll phone her.’
Gina’s mobile rings at a quarter to eight. She’s on the sofa watching an old episode of Seinfeld. Half watching it. Not really watching it at all. She presses Mute on the remote and looks over at the desk, at her phone, stares at it – disinclined, though, to get up and answer it. She’s not in the mood for dealing with anyone.
Earlier in the day her incipient panic gave way to despondency, then torpor. After a brief but humiliating conversation with that journalist she threw her mobile on the desk, went into the bedroom – still dressed for work – and lay down. She was fuming.
But she knew he was right.
If she’d been more explicit and mentioned people by name, he still would have said what he said, which was, ‘Yeah, fine, great, but where’s the evidence?’
Later, in the afternoon, she changed into jeans and a T-shirt. She made coffee, sat at her desk and went online in the vague hope of… she didn’t really know what. She googled BCM and found out as much as she could about the company her brother worked for. She followed links to other engineering companies. She read an official report on an EU website about corporate malfeasance. She read an article somewhere else about a recent scandal in Greece involving bribery, blackmail and a couple of supposedly accidental deaths – which, when she first came across it, sent a little pulse of excitement through her system, as though the story might actually provide her with some sort of corroboration. But the excitement didn’t last, because none of it was relevant. It wasn’t evidence of anything. It was stuff on the Internet. It was stuff she’d have to be out of her mind to imagine could have any bearing on anything.
And as she waits now for the phone to ring out – hours later, slumped on the sofa – she thinks, Yes, out of my mind, that feels about right. Eventually, though, when the phone does stop, she can’t help getting up off the sofa and going over to it.
One missed call. New number.
She presses Reply. She stands there, waiting. She is out of her mind.
It answers. ‘Gina?’
She recognises the voice straightaway. ‘Mark?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you OK? Where are you? Did you get my message?’
‘No, I’m… message?’
‘I left a message on your home phone this morning, I didn’t have your mobile number.’
‘I -’
‘It’s just, I was saying… I think I’m maybe on the wrong track, about Bolger. I mean, it doesn’t seem -’
‘I went… after him today -’
‘What?’
‘At least tried to. I didn’t come close.’
‘What do you mean went after him?’
Silence.
‘Mark?’
‘I tried to… attack him.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I really wanted to, but… I didn’t even…’ He stops here, struggling, it seems, to get the words out.
Gina turns and looks at the TV, as though for assistance on this, as though it should be running a news flash or something, a crawl, anything. What she sees instead is Kramer hurtling through the door of Jerry’s apartment.
She looks away again.
‘You didn’t even what?’
‘I had a knife. I -’
‘Oh God.’
‘I didn’t even take it out. I couldn’t. I was just standing there, looking at him, and -’
‘Where was this?’
He explains, but his voice is shaky, and he pauses constantly to take deep breaths. When he gets to the part about sticking the knife in the guy’s leg, Gina flinches.
‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘What happened then? Did you get hurt? You sound -’
‘No,’ he says quickly. ‘I didn’t. I’m… I’m fine.’
‘Well, you don’t sound fine. At all.’ She waits, but he doesn’t respond. ‘You actually sound awful, Mark. Spacy. Are you OK? Where are you?’
He still doesn’t answer.
‘Mark?’
‘Listen,’ he then says. ‘I… I finally saw them. Today. For the first time in…I saw them. Saw what they looked like.’
Gina closes her eyes. ‘Who?’ she whispers.
‘My family.’ He pauses. ‘I’m looking at them now. Lucy was so small, she…’
‘Mark?’
‘…she was tiny, but the funny thing is… what I remember is…how big she was, I remember her hands, her -’
‘Mark,’ Gina pleads.
‘What?’
‘Where are you?’
He tells her. But he says he can’t move. He’s afraid to move. He’s been sitting here for ages, maybe hours – he doesn’t know. His heart is pounding, he says, like it’s about to explode. He feels sick.
‘That’s… that’s anxiety,’ Gina says, ‘trauma… it’s post, er…’ She doesn’t know what she’s saying. ‘You’re in shock.’ She pauses. ‘Mark, do you want me to come out there?’
‘Yes.’ He groans. ‘No.’ He groans again. ‘Would you mind?’
She takes directions. The Cherryvale Industrial Estate – right at the entrance, third row along, eighth warehouse on the left.
Unit 46.
Norton is standing in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel, waiting for Ray Sullivan to appear, when his phone rings. Sullivan has made a surprise stopover on his way to a conference in Vienna and wants to have dinner. Norton didn’t mind changing his plans – the opening of a Friel revival at the Gate – but he’s agitated about what’s going on and isn’t exactly in the mood right now for a full, high-energy dose of Ray Sullivan. He’d much prefer to be sitting in a theatre, constrained to silence, letting his mind wander.
He looks at the display. It’s Fitz, which is good. Maybe. Hopefully.
He presses Answer and holds the phone up to his ear. ‘Yeah?’
‘Paddy, listen, I’m in the car. I’ve located your man.’
Norton is relieved. But what now? And does he really want to know? He glances around the lobby. What he said in the carpark – standing there, doors open, wind blowing all around them – was that he didn’t want the details, just the broad strokes.
The timeline.
He said he wanted closure.
‘Paddy? You there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘OK. So I’ll talk to you in a while then?’
‘Yeah. Good. Good man.’
That’s it.
As Norton is putting his phone away, he glances across the lobby and sees Ray Sullivan stepping out of an elevator.
Gina puts on a sweater and then her brown leather jacket. On the pavement outside her building, waiting for the taxi, she zips the jacket up. The rain has moved on and the sky is clear, but it’s cold.
As she wills the taxi to arrive, her heart is pounding.
She looks up and down the quays, sighs, turns.
The building she lives in is just one of many in this riverside regeneration, but there is a desolate feel to the place at night. At ground level everything is closed, except for the odd Spar, or empty Italian restaurant or theme pub attached to a new hotel. The streets here, between these new hotels and new apartment blocks, lack any atmosphere – they seem forced, a developer’s idea of ‘new’ city living.
Gina still has a hard time thinking of this as town.
The taxi arrives.
The driver appears to be the silent type, which is good, but instead of going back the way he came, from town, he heads for the toll bridge. This makes sense – it’s just that Gina isn’t prepared for the shock of having Richmond Plaza loom up on her so suddenly like that.
But once they get past it and are heading west across the city, Gina can think of only one thing. What is she letting herself in for here? Since Monday, either face to face or over the phone – and while remaining, effectively, complete strangers – she and Mark Griffin have had this series of intense, urgent, almost intimate conversations. It’s been very weird. Actually, in a way, she feels responsible for him – because if she hadn’t steered him in the direction of Larry Bolger, would he have…?
But a knife?
Her stomach sinks.
He seemed a little dangerous to her the other day, and she was obviously right about that. At the same time he seemed vulnerable.
Gina stares out of the window.
Soon her thoughts are a blur, like the view, which has become this gentle strobe effect, this seemingly endless, self-replicating pattern of semi-detached suburban houses.
After a while, tired, apprehensive, she closes her eyes.
Lucy in the sky…
He remembers that now. His father used to say it all the time, and Lucy used to love it, used to pretend that she could fly… arms out… running…
In that garden maybe? The one in the photo?
Mark shifts his position on the floor and winces. The pain is severe and constant, additional shoots of it accompanying even the slightest movement. But that’s exactly what he has to do now – move, and all the way over to the door, to open the damn thing, because otherwise how will Lucy get… Gina… how will Gina get in when she arrives?
He hasn’t been on his feet in a while and doesn’t know if it’s going to be possible. He leans back against the wooden crate and manoeuvres himself up, one inch, one searing shock wave of pain, at a time.
Lucy in the sky…
It’s funny, but his sister today – if she’d lived – would be about the same age as Gina is… and might even, he imagines, look a bit like her, too.
Up on his feet, he moves tentatively, shuffles forward, reaches out to the nearest sturdy object for support.
It seems blindingly obvious to him now, but having seen his family, even if only in photographs, having seen their faces, he realises what it is that in one form or another he’s been experiencing all these years. Loneliness. He’s been missing them. After all, he was only five at the time. He was happy. They were his entire world, and he loved them, as purely, as unconditionally, as viscerally, as only a small child can love.
And then one night it all came to a dead stop.
So what did he expect?
As he looks over at the door, the throbbing in his heart falls into a sort of rhythm with the throbbing in his side, making each footstep he has to take, each passing second, that shade more bearable.
And then, quite suddenly – grunting, gasping – he’s there. He flicks the catch with his hand and pulls the door open slightly, letting in a gust of cold air.
Mark doesn’t know why he called Gina. It seemed to make sense, and to be about the only physical action he was capable of taking – picking up his phone, pressing the keys – that wasn’t liable to kill him.
But it still felt proactive – contacting the one person with at least some understanding of his situation, the one person who could appreciate, for example, how important finding those photographs was for him.
And maybe she has new information.
Because didn’t he interrupt her? On the phone? Wasn’t she about to say something when he cut across her?
He wonders now what she’d been going to say.
He stares at the door.
In the meantime, though, there’s something he needs to do, and urgently – he needs to take a leak, has done for the best part of an hour. Back over there on the floor, he even debated whether or not he shouldn’t just surrender to it, and let it happen, let it flow, because what difference would it make?
But then he thought, no… not with Gina coming.
He shuffles across the floor towards the office, and when he gets there he stops and presses his forehead against the wooden door frame. He is dizzy and weak, and could easily, almost happily, collapse right here on the floor.
But he’s not going to.
He feels his way like a blind man along the wall and goes into the tiny bathroom. He struggles with his zip and eventually manages to get going, but halfway through he hears something outside – a car door being closed.
He groans, half in pain, half in relief. When Gina sees the state he’s in, she will insist on calling an ambulance, and he won’t be able to stop her. But that will be OK… now, at this stage, that will be OK.
He does up his zip with great difficulty and turns around.
When he hears the steel door clicking shut, he tries to call out – something like ‘In here’ or ‘I’m in the bathroom’, or just simply ‘Gina’, but he can’t get anything past his lips. His throat is dry as a bone.
Then he hears a voice, and freezes – because it isn’t Gina’s.
‘Hello?’
It’s a male voice.
‘Hello? Mr Griffin?’
Mr? Who is this?
Footsteps on the concrete floor.
‘Hello? Anyone here?’
There’s already a hint of impatience in the voice, and Mark feels a rising sense of dread. He doesn’t move, just leans against the wall and waits.
The next time he hears the voice it is closer – if not actually inside the office, then at the doorway or just outside it.
‘Griffin?’
No Mr this time.
Mark remains still.
He hears footsteps again, but this time they’re on wood – inside the office.
The door leading to the toilet is open, and from the angle Mark is standing at, he’s -
But then a sound cuts the air. It’s a mobile ring tone – the theme tune from some movie. An impatient sigh overlies it. The ring tone stops.
‘Yeah?’ Silence for a moment. Then, ‘There’s no sign of him, Shay. There’s a fucking car outside all right, but… I don’t know. I’ll have a squint around.’ The voice moves away. ‘Look, I have to go. Your one’ll be here any minute. Give us a bell in half an hour if you haven’t heard from me, right?’
Footsteps again, back on concrete, receding.
No sign of him? Your one? Here any minute?
How does he know all of this?
Mark pats his jacket pocket for his own mobile, to call Gina, to warn her… but shit, it’s not there. He left it on the floor over by the wooden crate.
Fuck… what has he done?
Mark leans back against the wall and slides down into a sitting position on the floor, next to the toilet bowl.
Calling her in the first place was clearly a mistake because… because whoever this guy is, he must have been listening in…
And that guy today, at the Garryowen Institute, how did he know that Mark would be there?
They must have been following him all along; there must have been… operatives, surveillance, everything…
The pain is almost unbearable now, and Mark can feel himself sliding even further, down into an abyss of darkness, but he fights it, pushes himself back up against the wall, off the floor, and into a standing position again.
He can’t let this happen.
He can’t…
But what he can’t do either is stay here, where he is, in the warehouse, because he wouldn’t stand a chance, not if it came to…
What he needs is to get away, to raise the alarm, he needs to…
Up…
He looks up. High above the toilet there is a window. It’s small, but…
He puts the lid down on the toilet. He clambers onto it and then onto the cistern. He reaches up to the window and nudges it fully open. Cold, invigorating air streams in. Drawing on some deep reserve of energy, he pulls himself up and wriggles through the opening. When he’s more than halfway out, and facing the wall of the next warehouse along, he realises there isn’t going to be anything to grab on to for leverage and that he’s going to have to drop the six feet or so to the ground.
Which, a second before he’s ready to do, he does.
And as much energy as it’s taken him to get out here to this dark alleyway, it takes him as much again, if not more, to absorb the pain of the fall and not to scream…
He rolls over on the cold, wet concrete, clutching his left arm, which he may have broken, and gags into his chest.
After a few moments, he raises his head.
Twenty yards in front of him, at the end of the alleyway, there is a tall coruscating monolith of orange light, and as Mark gazes at it, something flickers past… a figure.
He recoils, slams his head back against the wall.
Jesus, who was that?
And how many of them are there?
Is he going to be able to get away from here? He needs to get to that phone box out on the main road. That’s where he needs to get to, at the very least.
If not as far as…
He tries to move – his right arm, his legs, all of him at once – but he can’t, each option a new route back to the same place, to the same blinding core of pain.
Very slowly, he turns his neck, directing his eyes back towards the light.
But his head is spinning now… he’s seeing double, treble… tracers…
Who was that?
And then, as his head slumps forward, and he slides back helplessly into the abyss of darkness, the horrifying thought occurs to him that maybe it was Gina.
The taxi approaches the Cherryvale roundabout, and a few minutes after that they’re approaching the industrial estate. Gina considers asking the driver to hang on, but she decides against it.
She’s assuming Griffin has a car.
They stop at the entrance, which is wide open and not very clearly marked. Gina pays and gets out. The taxi turns and leaves.
She looks around. The place is desolate, cold and windswept, with everything washed in an unreal orange glow from the floodlights positioned at various points along the perimeter.
Gina goes in, turns right and walks to the third row of buildings. At the far end she can see a wall covered in graffiti. There are two vans and a large truck parked in front of the first unit. Other than that the yard is practically empty, with only a few cars dotted around the place. One of these is parked in front of what she takes to be Unit 46.
Walking towards it, hugging the buildings on the left, all of which are in complete darkness, she starts to feel nervous.
What is she doing?
High in the sky the moon is shimmering. Little scraps of cloud race by. The wind is whistling in the narrow alleyways between the warehouses. As she approaches Unit 46, she sees from a row of frosted-glass windows along the top that there are lights on inside.
The car, a Saab, is parked directly in front of a steel shutter. Next to this is a black metal door with a bell and an intercom.
How prepared is she?
The truth is, not very. What’s driving her forward is this sense of responsibility she’s feeling. In addition to which, if she’s honest about it, she liked Mark Griffin when they met the other day. He was nice. He was interesting. He was good-looking. OK, unstable and possibly dangerous, too – but that’s actually not a state Gina herself feels terribly removed from right now.
She presses the bell.
At least ten seconds pass before she hears anything. Then there is a click and the door opens. At first she doesn’t see anyone. It’s as if the door has opened automatically, and maybe it has. She is about to call out Mark’s name when someone else appears from behind the door, holding it open.
Her heart jumps.
It’s a short, stocky man in his late forties.
‘Er…’
‘Are you Gina, are you?’
The man is wearing black jeans and a zipped-up leather jacket – not unlike the one Gina herself is wearing. He has a round, plump face.
Gina doesn’t move, or utter a word.
‘Because Mark asked me to wait for you,’ the man says. ‘He had to be taken off to hospital, to St Felim’s.’
‘Oh no.’ Gina puts a hand up to her mouth. ‘Is he OK?’
‘Well, I hope so,’ the man says, sighing. ‘He called me in a state. I don’t live that far from here.’ He extends an arm and says, ‘Come in for a second and let me explain.’
Gina steps forward, the word hospital still resounding in her ears, but she’s barely inside the door when it occurs to her… Mark had her mobile number, why didn’t he just get this guy to phone her, or…
She turns.
The man has already closed the door and is leaning back against it.
‘Listen,’ Gina says, holding a hand up, ‘I think I should -’
‘No, no, you’re grand.’ He winks at her. ‘But I need to have a word with you.’
Gina doesn’t say anything, doesn’t react, because there’s something quite creepy about this guy. The silence between them thickens, and eventually, in a calm, controlled voice, she says, ‘Where’s Mark?’
‘Well, he’s not in the hospital, I can tell you that. Yet. He fucking will be though if he doesn’t watch it.’
There is a beat, and then Gina deflates.
She walked right into this. How could she have been so stupid? Jesus. All of her speculation, all of her doubts, her neurotic need to be circumspect, her fear that she might be deluded.
And now this?
She shakes her head. It’s her own fault.
‘Where is he?’ she repeats.
‘Look, don’t…’ The guy pauses, a smirk rising on his face. ‘Don’t be worrying that pretty head of yours, not over the likes of him.’
Gina groans. Who is this vile little person?
She turns and takes a couple of steps across the floor, but then an even more urgent question occurs to her – are they alone? Is there anyone else here? She doesn’t see anyone. She sees an office partition in the corner, and rows of stacked pallets on raised wooden platforms to her right. A small forklift truck. Loose stuff lying around on the floor. A wooden crate. The place is brightly lit, fluorescent units dangling on chains from the ceiling.
No sign of anyone else, though. No sign of Mark.
She turns back and looks at the man again, studies him. He’s doing the same, eyeing her up and down.
He has a round face, with a florid, unhealthy complexion. His features are small and mean – his mouth hardly more than a slit, his eyes tiny and dark.
He has the face of an overfed rat.
Ratface.
He is still leaning back against the door.
Gina realises that she’s actually quite nervous now. But she’s also determined not to show it.
‘And who the hell are you?’ she asks.
‘I’m… I’ve been asked to deliver a message,’ he says.
‘Well. Let’s hear it then, and I’ll be on my way.’
‘Not so quick, love.’ He steps forward, away from the door. ‘I mean, what’s your hurry?’
Gina swallows.
Maybe to deflect attention from herself, maybe because it’s the one thing she actually wants to hear, she repeats her question from earlier. ‘Is Mark OK?’
Ratface cracks a smile. ‘Well,you know how it is with the old post-traumatic stress. It’s never easy.’
Gina stares at him in disbelief. He was listening in on Mark’s phone? He overheard their conversation? Well, of course. Isn’t it obvious? That’s why he’s here.
But who is he? Who is he working for?
Isn’t that obvious, too?
On Monday evening Mark said he approached Larry Bolger, and just a while ago he said he actually tried to attack him – so even though Gina’s own suspicions have moved on from Bolger, Mark’s clearly haven’t, and must be the source of all this unwelcome attention he’s receiving.
But how does that explain Ratface here? There’s no way he’s… official. In any capacity. Representing a government minister?
Look at him.
Gina is confused.
‘So who are you working for?’ she asks. ‘Whose message are you supposed to be delivering?’
‘Supposed to be? We’ll see about that.’ He steps farther away from the door.
‘It’s Larry Bolger, isn’t it?’ Gina says. ‘You’re working for Larry Bolger.’
Ratface laughs at this and says, ‘You haven’t a fuckin’ clue, love, have you?’
He starts walking around her, slowly, in a wide arc, never taking his eyes off her.
Gina glances over at the door but doesn’t move. Did he lock it?
She turns back.
‘I wouldn’t bother,’ he says, ‘You wouldn’t get very far.’
She swallows again.
She’s definitely uneasy now – OK, scared – but her need to understand what is going on seems to be even greater. Because she keeps wondering… if this guy doesn’t work for Bolger, then who does he work for?
It’s frustrating.
‘OK, look,’ she says, fishing now for some hard information, ‘this message of yours. What is it?’
Ratface grunts. ‘The message? You want the message?’
‘Yes. Of course I do.’
‘All right.’
He puts a hand into the pocket of his leather jacket and slowly withdraws something.
Gina’s heart stops.
It’s a gun.
Oh fuck.
‘So, I was going to just give you the message,’ he says. ‘If you know what I mean.’ He waves the gun in the air between them. ‘Get it over with. But now I don’t know. I might give you something else first. Because you’re not being very nice, are you? I think you need some manners put on you.’
Gina watches in horror as he then brings his free hand around to his crotch, applies a little pressure to it and breathes in sharply.
‘Right, come on,’ he says, nodding at her, almost in distaste. ‘Get some of that off you. We haven’t got all night.’
He puts the gun back into his jacket pocket and pats it.
‘Oh Christ,’ Gina says in a barely audible whisper, ‘you’ve got to be kidding.’
She steps away, reeling slightly, and turns to the right.
In front of her is the small forklift truck. Feeling weak, she bends forward, arms outstretched, and leans against it, unsure if she isn’t going to throw up. Then her eyes focus, and she sees what is lying on the forklift’s shiny, worn plastic seat.
‘Oh yeah,’ the man says, from behind her. ‘I like that.’ There is a slight tremor in his voice now. ‘Stay that way… in that position.’
Gina listens hard, gauging the man’s steps as he approaches. Then she reaches down and grabs the crowbar with both hands. Summoning all her strength, she swings it up and around, keeps it moving and smashes it bang on target into the side of the man’s flushed and pudgy face.
‘It’s all about the optics,’ Ray Sullivan is saying. ‘It’s about perception. These days, post-Enron, post-Spitzer, whatever, you just can’t afford to dick around.’
Norton looks at his watch. It’s too soon, he knows. But he can’t help it.
Then he looks at his plate. He has barely touched his chicken livers. Which is another thing. Narolet never used to affect his appetite like this. But maybe it’s not the Nalprox. Maybe he wouldn’t be hungry anyway.
‘What was it Ike said, that phrase he used in relation to Nixon?’ Sullivan slices one of his artichoke hearts in two. ‘After the funding scandal in fifty-two? “Clean as a hound’s tooth?” Even back then, he understood. Ike was no idiot, you know.’
Norton shakes his head. ‘Look, Ray, if we’re talking about Larry here, you’ve got it out of proportion. The media have already pretty much filed away what happened under peccadillo and consigned it to last week’s news. The story this week is how Larry has snookered the Taoiseach into supporting him one hundred per cent.’ He pauses. ‘And on the basis of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I’d say Larry is well on course for the top job, and maybe even sooner than we expected.’
Giving this some thought, Sullivan dips and drags one of his pieces of artichoke heart in the sauce, a spoory trail, running around the plate, of Marsala and honey. ‘I like that,’ he says, the fork poised at his mouth. ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’
‘I know, I know. Who said that?’
As Norton laughs, leaning back, he steals another glance at his watch.
For Gina, each passing second now is elastic, a nanocentury of experience and sensory overload – the fluorescent lights above her too bright, the air around her too cold, the thumping in her ears and chest too loud, too persistent. She’s not sure she’s going to be able to cope.
Without taking her eyes off Ratface, however, and still clutching the crowbar, she staggers backwards a few feet and manages to straighten up.
She tries to assess what she has done. Ratface isn’t moving. He staggered a little himself as he fell and is now lying on his side, facing away from her – so she can’t see where she hit him. Holding the crowbar up, ready to strike again if necessary, she retraces a couple of her steps and takes as close a look as she can bear at the…
At the body?
She remains still for a moment and stares. There’s a slight movement. It’s hardly perceptible. But he’s definitely breathing.
She pulls back.
Fuck.
She’s relieved and not relieved – relieved that she hasn’t killed him and not at all relieved because what does she do now?
What if he wakes up?
Fuck.
She looks around. Sticking out from under one of the raised wooden platforms that the pallets are stacked on is a loose, thin strap of plastic. It’s the stuff they use for securing industrial loads. She puts down the crowbar, walks over and picks it up. She feels under the wooden platform and finds another one.
She goes back, kneels down beside Ratface and proceeds to tie his ankles together with one of the plastic straps. It’s awkward, but she manages to get it done. Then, in order to tie his wrists behind his back with the second strap, she has to shift his weight a bit and pull his right arm out from under him.
When she’s satisfied that he has been sufficiently restrained, she puts her hand into his jacket pocket. Very slowly, she pulls out his gun. She holds it between her index finger and thumb. It’s solid-feeling and quite heavy. She stands back up, careful to keep it at arm’s length. She goes over to the wooden crate next to the first row of stacked pallets and places the gun on top of it.
Then, leaning back against the crate, still in shock, she wonders what to do next. Does she leave? Does she wait to see if he is all right? Does she call the police? Does she call an ambulance? What?
As Gina considers these questions, she glances down at the floor and notices in a distracted way that she’s standing on something, a piece of paper or card. She bends down to pick it up. Her hand is shaking as she turns it over.
It’s a photograph – old, slightly faded, and now slightly smudged as well. It’s of a little girl. She’s thin, has dark hair and is wearing a blue denim dress. She isn’t quite smiling but looks impish, as though she’s doing her best to withhold a smile, as though this is a game she’s playing.
Puzzled, Gina casts her eye around – down at the floor, beside the crate, in behind it. She finds two more photos, one of a man, the other of a woman. She also finds a mobile phone, which she puts on the crate beside the gun. She holds the three photos up together and studies each one in turn.
My family… I’m looking at them now…
Gina slides the photos together and puts them down on the wooden crate. With a sinking feeling, she then reaches into her pocket and pulls out her own mobile. She calls the number for Mark Griffin, waits, and a few seconds later the phone on the crate starts ringing. She presses End and puts the phone back into her pocket.
What does this mean?
Before she has time to think about it, however, there is another, more immediate demand on her attention.
Ratface is groaning, and moving – or at least trying to.
Gina walks around him in a wide arc. She keeps her distance but notices something straightaway. It’s just beneath his head, on the floor… blood, a few crimson drops glistening against the dull grey of the concrete. She hunkers down to see a little better, to see what condition the side of his face is in. There’s a nasty gash there, all right – but she’s having a hard time connecting it to anything she might have done.
Then Ratface opens his eyes, and Gina starts back in fright.
‘Jeeeesus,’ he groans. ‘What the fuck?’
Gina keeps her balance. She remains hunkered down and watches as he struggles to move. She watches him squirm and wriggle and slowly realise what’s going on.
Up to this point he hasn’t looked at her, but now their eyes meet.
‘You…’
‘Where’s Mark Griffin?’
‘… cunt…’
‘Where is he?’
He groans again and wriggles vigorously for a while. ‘Let me go,’ he then says, seeming to accept that there’s no chance he’ll get loose on his own. ‘For Jaysus’ sake.’
Gina stands up. ‘Tell me where Mark Griffin is.’
‘I don’t fucking know where he is.’
‘Yes you do. You heard him giving me directions on the phone and then you rushed out here before I arrived and you took him somewhere, now where?’
She feels like punctuating this with a kick to his abdomen, or his crotch, but she resists.
‘Fuck off.’
Gina takes a deep breath. She knows that if he keeps stonewalling here she’ll start to fall apart. She’ll lose the advantage.
‘If you won’t answer my questions,’ she says, taking out her mobile again, ‘maybe you’ll answer a few for the police.’
‘Ha.’
What does that mean?
She waits for him to say something else and when he doesn’t she holds her phone up and tries to focus.
‘Go ahead,’ he says. ‘Brilliant. Call the cops.’
Gina hesitates. ‘I’m going to,’ she says.
‘Great. Because I’d love to hear how you’re going to explain this.’ He yanks his head sideways at her, exposing his wound. ‘I’ll have an army of bleedin’ lawyers up your arse and down your throat so fast you’ll be wishing I was the one who fucked you. Which I then will, after they let you out on bail.’
He’s playing for time here – because why would he try to dissuade her from making the call, if what he says is true?
But then again, what he says probably is true. The cops arrive – but who do they arrest? Him? Why? What do they charge him with? Being tied up and assaulted? And how does she avoid coming across as deranged and hysterical?
She puts the phone down by her side.
‘You’re right.’
‘What?’
‘You’re right. It’s not the Guards I should be calling.’
She puts the phone into her jacket pocket and takes out her wallet. She searches through the wallet and extracts a business card. She puts the wallet away and takes out the phone again. Looking down at him, business card held up in one hand, phone in the other, thumb poised, she says, ‘Where is he?’
‘Get stuffed, would you?’
Gina keys in the number, spins on her heels and walks away. By the time she’s a couple of yards across the warehouse floor the number is ringing. She looks at the business card again, and swallows.
Electrical Contractor.
She waits. There’s a click. Then, ‘Hello?’
She slips the card into the back pocket of her jeans.
‘Terry? It’s Gina Rafferty.’
There is a pause.
‘Well, well. How’s it going, love?’
‘OK.’ She closes her eyes. ‘Listen, I think I might need your help with something.’
Because of the way he is sitting – fully forward, elbows on the table – Norton can feel his mobile phone pressing against his ribs. It’s in the inside breast pocket of his jacket, and he wishes it would ring.
‘… so we’d like you to consider it,’ Sullivan is saying. ‘I mean, we think in the current climate it makes a lot of sense.’
Sullivan is proposing a last-minute design modification to the lobby of what will soon be called the Amcan Building – the installation of optical turnstiles with infrared sensors.
‘Basically, it’s an ID-card verification system,’ he says, ‘but they can also be fitted with barriers, either a steel arm or a retractable wing. The barriers aren’t essential, but they do add a measure of psychological, what’ll we call it… comfort.’
Norton looks across at Sullivan, trying to focus. ‘I don’t know, Ray. Fine, you’re the anchor tenant, but there’s at least a dozen others, and I doubt if any of them will agree with your assessment of the threat level. They certainly won’t want to share the costs.’
‘Believe me, Paddy, in the long run this shit will be cost-effective. All it takes is one security alert, one nut job, and you’re ahead of the game. Back home, since 9/11, installing these things has been standard practice.’
Norton can see a certain logic to this, and how it might work here as a marketing tool to woo US companies jittery about investing in what they perceive as an increasingly vulnerable Europe, but he isn’t in the appropriate frame of mind to tease the issue out tonight.
He looks at his watch again, this time openly.
When is Fitz going to call him?
‘Paddy?’ Ray Sullivan says, leaning forward. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Somewhere else you’d rather be?’
‘No, of course not.’
Norton busies himself with what’s left on his plate, a last piece of monkfish and some fennel.
Should he call Fitz?
When Gina comes back and resumes her position at the wooden crate, she is overwhelmed by a sudden wave of exhaustion. She gazes down at Ratface. It’s clear that he’s in severe pain now, his supply of adrenaline surely, by this stage, pretty much depleted.
‘You’re in over your head here,’ he says after a while, struggling to get the words out. ‘I’m telling you. Don’t be making things worse for yourself than they already are.’
But not in any mood to be listening to this, Gina looks around, spots something on the floor beside the forklift and goes over to pick it up. Holding it behind her back, she approaches Ratface, hunkers down again and says to him, ‘Where is he?’
‘Fuck off.’
‘You’re not going to tell me, no?’
‘No.’
‘Or who you’re working for, no?’
‘No.’
‘Or who killed my brother, no? No? NO?’
‘No, you fuck -’
In a single swift movement she brings the dirty, oily, bunched-up piece of rag around and stuffs it hard into his mouth. To the sound of him gagging, she stands up again and walks back to the wooden crate.
Over the next few minutes, she looks at her watch several times.
She should have asked Terry Stack if he could bring a couple of Valium with him, or a Xanax, or something. She wishes, at the very least, that she had a cigarette. Not that she smokes anymore, but in the last few weeks she’s had the old craving more than once, and each time she resisted. If there were a pack in front of her right now though, she wouldn’t resist for a second.
Then it occurs to her that maybe he has some.
She gets off the crate and walks over to Ratface again. Seeing her coming, he goes rigid. His eyes bulge and he mumbles something through the cloth. It’s as if he’s expecting her to kick him – which she’s still tempted to do, but instead she bends down, holding a hand out in front of her for protection.
He makes a sudden movement and her heart lurches.
But it’s not as if he’s going anywhere.
The gash on the side of his face is awful-looking. It’s deep and messy. But what can she do? Her concern is genuine, just misplaced – because does she really imagine that when Terry Stack arrives he’ll be busying himself with washing the wound in warm water and gently applying disinfectant and a bandage?
Avoiding eye contact with him, she reaches down to his other pocket. The first thing she extracts from it is a mobile phone, which she places on the floor beside her. Then she extracts a packet of twenty Major and a Zippo. She’d prefer something milder – in another lifetime she used to smoke Camel Lights – but Major will do.
She puts the cigarettes and lighter into her own pocket and looks down at the mobile phone. She should have thought of this earlier. What if it rings?
Shit.
It’d be liable to give her a heart attack.
She picks up the phone and strides across the warehouse. When she gets to the steel door, she opens it and steps out into the cold air. She raises an arm and flings the phone as far away as she can. She just about hears it land – on the other side of the floodlit yard somewhere.
She turns back.
When she gets inside the door again, she stops for a moment and looks around.
They are alone here, aren’t they?
On the far side of the warehouse there is another door. She goes over and tries it, but it’s locked. Then – and conscious of not letting Ratface out of her sight – she goes over to the office unit and pokes her head around the door.
It’s empty.
Walking back towards the wooden crate, she takes the cigarettes out of her pocket and lights one up. Her hands are shaking, but the first drag is exquisite, more than she could reasonably have expected. Her brain chemistry seems to go through a rapid series of changes and her mood elevates.
But this lasts only three or four seconds.
With the next drag, and the one after that, it’s business as usual. After another couple, she looks at her watch.
How much longer before Stack gets here? Five minutes? Ten minutes?
And then what?
When she finishes the cigarette, she throws it on the floor and stubs it out with her foot.
She picks up the gun from beside her and examines it. It’s the first time she’s ever handled a gun and it feels strange. Is it loaded? Is it ready to use? Do you just pull the trigger? What about blowback and recoil? She’s not even sure she knows what these terms mean – but then again, does she really want to know?
Isn’t that why she called Terry Stack?
She puts the gun down again. She walks over to Ratface.
He turns his head slightly and looks up at her.
‘Listen,’ she says, ‘I’m going to ask you one more time, OK?’
She pauses, waiting for him to indicate that he understands, but he just keeps staring up at her.
‘Right. Where is he? What have you done with him?’
Ratface appears to mumble something, but Gina isn’t sure if he’s answered the question or not. She leans down and pulls the rag out of his mouth.
‘Where is he?’ she says again.
‘Get stuffed, you bitch.’
Gina stands back up. ‘That call I made a while ago? Do you know who it was to?’
‘Phone a fucking friend, was it?’
‘Yeah, right. Ever heard of Terry Stack?’
He doesn’t react in an obvious way, but Gina can tell from his eyes that he’s stunned.
‘Yeah.’ She nods her head. ‘I thought you might have.’
But then she looks up, hearing something outside.
A car.
‘That’ll be him,’ she says, and turns away.
She picks up the gun, the mobile and the photos from the crate and stuffs them into her pockets. She walks over to the steel door, opens it and looks out into the yard.
An unmarked transit van is parked a few spaces along from the Saab. The driver and passenger doors open at the same time and two men get out. As they approach, Gina sees that one of them is carrying something by his side, a briefcase or – oh God, of course – a toolbox.
When he gets to the door, Terry Stack smiles and says, ‘Gina, how’s it going? I’m glad you called me. You did the right thing.’
Gina shrugs her shoulders. She’s cold and tired, and suddenly feels way out of her depth. What she wants to do more than anything else right now is cry, break down and sob, but Terry Stack would love that. He’d love nothing more than to be putting his arms around her and going, ‘Ssshhh, there, there, love, it’s all right.’
She stands back, holding the door open for them, and points. ‘He’s over there.’
Wearing an overcoat, Terry Stack struts in, followed by the other guy, who is younger and wearing the standard-issue grey hoodie. This younger guy is the one carrying the toolbox.
Terry Stack turns to Gina and says, ‘You work in software, right? That’s what you told me, data retrieval?’
She nods but doesn’t say anything.
‘Well, I’m pretty good at data retrieval myself, so don’t worry love, we’ll sort this out.’
Gina wants to stop everything right there, to reverse this, but -
‘I just need to find out -’
‘I know, Gina, I know. You told me on the phone. It’s all right. It’s under control.’
She sighs and then trails behind the two men as they walk over to where Ratface is lying on the floor.
Terry Stack leans down and takes a look at him.
‘Ah, well Jaysus,’ he says, half laughing. ‘Will you look who it is?’ He straightens up and rubs his hands together. ‘Fitz, me auld flower, how’s it going?’
Fitz.
They seem to know him. Is that good or bad?
As though in answer to her question, Gina glances over and sees that not only is this Fitz wriggling now, but he’s trembling, and has just pissed himself.
Lightning quick, Terry Stack kicks him in the stomach.
Gina gags.
‘Open the box up there, Shay, would you?’ Terry Stack says. ‘And see if you can find the nearest socket for me as well.’
Gina shakes her head and says in a sort of strangled whisper, ‘I’m… I’ll be outside.’
Without looking back, she makes straight for the steel door, opens it and heads out into the cold night air.
Having extracted a promise from Norton that he’ll look into the optical-turnstiles thing, Ray Sullivan now embarks on an anecdote about his father, the apparently legendary Madison Avenue advertising executive Dick Sullivan. It’s about how some town in California during the sixties decided to change its name for commercial reasons and hired Sullivan Sr., who ended up sketching his ideas out to members of the County Board over lunch on the back of a cocktail napkin.
But Norton has never heard of the veteran adman and is barely listening anyway.
By the time their coffees arrive, Sullivan Jr. has moved on to another story and is getting quite animated. There are gestures involved, and funny voices. For his part, Norton occupies himself with the cream and sugar. At one point, noticing a sudden lull, he looks up. Sullivan is staring at him, and has also – it quickly becomes apparent – asked him a question.
Norton just stares back.
Then he gets up from the table. ‘Ray, I’m sorry. I have to go outside for a minute. I’ll… I’ll be back.’
He strides across the dining room. When he gets out to the reception area and is heading for the main exit he reaches into his jacket pocket.
The sound Gina hears as she takes the next drag on her cigarette is short, shrill and penetrating. She looks up and remains still for a few seconds, listening.
She really can’t be sure that the sound wasn’t just some form of distortion carried here from a distance by the wind.
She closes her eyes.
But neither can she be sure that it didn’t come from nearby, from directly behind her, and that it wasn’t a scream.
She moves quickly, out into the middle of this windswept, floodlit yard.
The cigarette in her hand is a welcome distraction – though in normal circumstances a second one of these and she’d be on all fours, ready to puke.
After a while, feeling a little too exposed, she heads towards the opposite side of the yard. The units here are larger. They have more elaborate loading docks, with metal awnings and concrete ramps.
She huddles in a corner, by the side of one of these ramps. She stubs the cigarette out, and immediately starts shivering.
How long will this take?
She has no idea. It’s not as if she has a frame of reference. But one thing she does know for sure: things are beginning to unravel.
And a couple of seconds later, as though on cue, she hears another weird sound.
She steps forward.
It definitely isn’t a scream this time. It’s also too close to be coming from the other side of the yard.
So what is it?
The direction of the wind changes. For a second or two the sound becomes clearer.
A bloody ring tone?
She looks down and sees it, Fitz’s mobile. It’s on the ground in front of her, a few yards away, emitting the theme music from a spaghetti western, one of the Clint Eastwood Dollar movies.
Rolling her eyes, she walks towards it, this tiny object, its backlight pulsating electric blue.
As she reaches down to pick it up, blood rushing to her head, Gina thinks she sees what is on the display – the caller ID – and her heart stops. She stands up and tries to steady herself. She holds the phone out and looks at it, squinting. But then, in the split second before the phone rings off and goes dark again, it comes into focus for her.
Very clearly.
But not just the two words on the display, not just the name.
Everything does.
He decides not to leave a message. What’s the point? He knows it’ll come up as a missed call.
Standing under the portico, he gazes out over the hotel’s front lawn and beyond it to the hushed suburban tranquillity of Ballsbridge.
Why didn’t Fitz answer just now?
Norton turns right and takes a few steps along a manicured pathway.
He really wants to believe it’s because Fitz is busy – that he’s being thorough and scrupulous.
But something won’t let him.
An angsty thrumming in the pit of his stomach.
He looks at his watch, and mouths the word fuck.
The problem is, there’s no one else he can call. He has no choice but to wait.
He turns back towards the portico.
His phone rings.
He freezes, thinking, Well thank Jesus. He fumbles in his pocket, but when he gets the phone out he sees at once from the display that it’s Miriam.
‘Damn,’ he says, and loud enough to draw a surprised look from the uniformed porter at the entrance to the hotel.
He stares at the display and decides not to answer it. They’re still not speaking face to face, so why should they speak on the bloody phone? If he wants a review of the Friel play, can’t he read the Irish fucking Times in the morning?
He puts the phone away and storms back inside.
As Gina is standing there, gazing across at Unit 46, a vertical slit of light appears. It’s the steel door opening, a fraction at first, then wide. Terry Stack comes out and looks around.
‘Gina?’
She takes a few steps forward. ‘I’m here.’
Stack sees her and starts walking across the yard, his shoes click-clacking on the concrete. He huddles into his overcoat and shivers loudly.
Gina stands, waiting. She’s still in shock from seeing that name on the caller ID of Fitz’s phone.
Paddy Norton?
She’d been so convinced by him that day – by his indignation at what had happened, by his impatience with her. He’d seemed hurt as well, and sad. She tries in vain to remember if there was anything about him that might have been suspicious. But she can’t.
Terry Stack comes to a stop directly in front of her. ‘Right,’ he says.
Gina looks at him, her mind swimming now with other stuff she is remembering – questions about Norton and her brother, for instance. They had a drink that evening in town. But where? At what time? And what did they talk about?
‘Gina?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Quick update. Little fucker in there is a former INLA man, Martin Fitzpatrick, a republican -’
‘Republican socialist?’
‘Socialist me hole, love,’ Stack says, laughing. ‘He owns about twenty apartments all over town and runs a private security outfit. High King. They do construction sites, that sort of stuff.’
‘Construction sites?’
‘Yeah. Mainly.’
Gina nods along. Sagely. She feels light-headed. She feels drunk.
‘Anyway,’ Stack goes on, ‘he arranged the job on Noel. I got that much out of him. And he did your brother.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘Yeah, both of them. He’s a cunt.’
‘How? How did -’
‘The brakes. He did something with the brakes in his car. Got him loaded and then…’
‘Oh my God.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘Why?’
‘I don’t know yet. I’m working on it. Give us a bit more time.’
‘Mark Griffin?’ Gina then says, almost in a whisper.
‘I haven’t got that yet either. He’s holding out, says he doesn’t know where he is, that no one was here when he arrived, but that’s bollocks. We’ll get it out of him, don’t worry. It’s all about pacing, this is… the build-up -’
Gina swallows.
‘- the threshold, if you know what I mean.’
She does, in theory, of course, and wants to tell him enough, wants to be the one to end this, even though she’s the one who started it. But what she says instead is, ‘Get him to tell you about a man called Paddy Norton.’
Stack furrows his brow. ‘Paddy Norton? He owns Winterland Properties, doesn’t he?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s… that’s the crowd High King does most of its security work for.’
‘Yeah well,’ Gina says, ‘I’m pretty sure you’ll find he’s also the one Che Guevara in there is answerable to for this job.’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Stack says. ‘How do you know that?’
The phone is in Gina’s pocket, but she doesn’t want to give it to him. She ignores the question. Besides, isn’t it obvious now? ‘Just get him to tell you the reason for all of this, will you? Why? What did Noel ever do?’ She pauses, then adds, ‘My Noel,’ and gets a stinging sensation behind her eyes as she says it. But now isn’t the time. She stares into Terry Stack’s eyes. ‘Will you do that for me?’
‘Of course I will, love. Jesus.’
He holds her gaze for a moment. It’s a long moment, and she doesn’t look away or even blink. But she feels unreal doing it, numb, like she’s on smack.
‘Look,’ he says eventually, and a little too excitedly, ‘I’ll be as fast as I can.’ He glances at his watch. ‘Are you going to wait here?’
She nods.
‘Probably just as well.’ He clicks his tongue, and winks at her. ‘I won’t lock it.’
He turns and walks back to the other side. Gina watches him disappear behind the steel door. Then she retreats to the concrete ramp and huddles down into the corner, shivering. After a moment, she takes the packet of Major out of her pocket, looks at it and flings it away. She does the same with the Zippo lighter. Then she takes Fitz’s mobile out but doesn’t look at it. She wants to throw this away too, but resists. It might contain evidence, numbers, messages.
She tosses it from one hand to the other.
Paddy Norton.
She pictures him – this portly respectable man with his pinprick blue eyes and soft, chubby features, his thin wisps of grey hair, his expensive overcoat. She remembers his smell, too – cologne, mints, cigars, the smell of money. Then she thinks of Martin Fitzpatrick. She looks across at Unit 46. Did this burly, bottom-feeding former INLA piece of shit take his orders directly from Norton? Did he carry them out himself?
She lowers her head and closes her eyes.
If that turns out to be the case, and she suspects it will, probably already has… then what happens next?
Here. Tonight.
Terry Stack vowed that whoever killed young Noel would pay the price. Is that what will happen next – and as a direct consequence of her actions?
Suddenly she feels sick.
Get him to tell you.
Would you do that for me?
Oh God.
Taking a deep breath, fighting the nausea, she opens her eyes. But the first thing she sees makes her heart jump. It’s what’s on the dimmed display of the phone in her hand. She presses a key and the backlight activates.
Five missed calls.
The most recent of these was from Norton, just a short while ago. And the others? She doesn’t know, but wonders if they could all have come in the last twenty minutes. Is that possible, or likely? Of course it is, and as the full significance of this hits her, she also realises that it’s too late to do anything about it. Because what she’s hearing now, from her left, is the unmistakable sound of an approaching vehicle.
She turns to look, and freezes.
It’s a small white van. It comes screeching to a halt next to the Saab. Driver and passenger doors open simultaneously and two guys get out, then a third. They’re carrying things – she can’t see them clearly, but they look like… sticks or bats.
There’s no point in Gina’s moving or trying to hide – she may be visible here, but these guys are in a hurry and unlikely to look in her direction.
She thinks of using the phone to warn Stack, but there isn’t time – this is all happening too fast.
The three men converge on the steel door, kick it open and pile in.
The door remains wide open.
Immediately, from across the yard, and through the wind, she hears voices… shouting… roars… then a loud crack, followed by more shouting, followed by two more loud cracks.
Gina is paralysed, not shivering anymore.
She is barely breathing.
The shouting continues. Then it stops.
There is silence for… what… ten seconds? Fifteen seconds? She doesn’t know, her ability to gauge non-existent. She’s about to lean forward and get up when she sees something. There’s a shadow at the doorway. It’s moving. Remaining still, Gina stares across the yard as one figure, then two, emerge from the warehouse into the orange light. The first figure is limping. The second one is doubled over and clinging to the first one.
‘Ow… jaysus… fuuuuuuck.’
This comes from the one with the limp. The other one is groaning, or crying.
It takes them a while, but they eventually make it to the passenger side of the van. From the way the van is parked, Gina can’t see clearly, but she hears the door being opened. Then she hears the door being slammed shut again. A moment later the first guy comes around, hopping on one foot, and gets in on the driver’s side.
The van starts up immediately. It reverses, seems as if it’s about to back right in on top of Gina, but then turns suddenly, tyres screeching, and speeds off, heading in the direction of the exit and the main road.
Mark opens his eyes, stirred, it seems, by this awful silence, this rude stillness. Moments before, he was lost in a dream, and an ugly one – hellish, frenetic, noisy, and… of course, he’s now realising, not actually a dream at all.
Which means those must have been gunshots he heard just now, real ones, and the screams too, and the screeching tyres. As well as the voices he heard earlier – from the open window six feet above him…
Talking, shouting, arguing.
Those also must have been real.
He tries to move, responding to the panicky signals coming from his brain, but he can’t. The pain is too intense, and all-pervading. Like the freezing cold. It’s as if he’s set in cement.
But what about Gina?
Is she…?
He parts his lips to say her name – not even to call it out, because he knows that’s not going to happen – but in the end nothing happens anyway. He makes no sound at all.
What is going on?
He closes his eyes again, squeezes them shut.
Kaleidoscope eyes.
He dragged Gina out here. He’s responsible for…
Newspaper taxis… appear on the shore.
This is his fault.
Waiting to take her away…
Minutes pass before Gina can move, or even take her eyes off the steel door on the far side of the yard. Eventually she looks away. She reaches an arm out and struggles to her feet. She slips Fitz’s mobile phone into her pocket. Then she takes a step forward, but stops at once, acutely aware of the sound her own shoes are making on the concrete. She doesn’t want to attract any attention. She doesn’t want to be seen. But most of all, she doesn’t want to see anyone else, and especially not anyone walking out of that door.
She looks around. Apart from the wind, there is absolute silence.
She turns left and starts walking. All she has to do now is keep walking, and in ten or fifteen minutes she’ll be clear of here, past the roundabout, into one of the housing estates – near a pub, near people.
Safe.
But when she’s halfway to the exit, she stops and turns around. She hesitates. Then she starts walking back the way she came.
She can’t just leave.
She needs to know what happened. She needs to know that there wasn’t anything else she could have done. She needs to know – for later – that she didn’t walk away.
The steel door to the warehouse is wide open. As she approaches it she sees blood inside, streaked on the floor. She realises that there’s blood outside, too – a trail of it on the concrete, leading over to where the white van had been parked.
She swallows, and braces herself.
Incredibly, the first blood drawn here tonight was drawn by her – so she doesn’t get a pass on this.
She steps inside the door. She has to adjust her eyes for a second to the harsh fluorescent light, a fleeting respite before the full horror materialises in front of her. She did the math walking back… two got away, which means there should be four left.
And there are.
On the floor, all of them, evenly spread out, two over here, two over there. But she still has to count them – one, two, three, four – and more than once, as if she doesn’t trust herself to get this simple calculation right.
The other thing that hits her is the smell.
It is sharp and overpowering, a combination – she quickly realises, glancing around – of smoke, piss and shit.
Over to the left, in a grey tracksuit, is the third guy from the white van. He’s flat on his back and has a bullet hole in his forehead. In his hand he’s still clutching what Gina had assumed outside to be a stick or a bat but now sees is a machete.
It is smeared with blood.
A yard farther on from this guy lies Terry Stack. He’s slumped on the floor, facing Gina. His eyes are open, but so too is the side of his neck – a clean, deep swipe from the machete, leaving blood everywhere. He has a gun in his hand.
Over to the right, near the pallets, lies Stack’s young associate, the hoodie. He’s also on his side, but facing away from her. There is a pool of blood forming around his legs. Gina takes a few steps forward and looks at him more closely.
He’s still breathing.
She bends over him and sees his chest moving – he’s unconscious, but definitely still breathing.
She stands back up. Very slowly she turns around to get a proper look at what previously she only allowed herself a glimpse of – having had to avert her eyes before a coherent image formed.
Martin Fitzgerald is lying on the ground. He’s in the same position as earlier, and still tied up, but now his jeans and boxers are bunched down around his ankles. There are small clamps and wires attached to his genitals. The wires are connected to a black rectangular device on the floor next to the toolbox. There is a cable running from the device through an extension over to a socket in the wall. Fitzgerald has soiled himself, and pretty badly – it’s seeping out on both sides. He has also vomited, down his neck and all over his chest. In fact, there are still deposits of vomit in his mouth and caked on his chin, and it even looks as if he might have choked on it. Or maybe not. She can’t be sure. It hardly matters, though. The expression on his face is startled, terrified… and frozen.
The state this man is in – not forgetting, of course, the gash on the side of his head – is the most awful, most appalling, most unforgettably distressing thing Gina has ever seen in her entire life.
She looks away. Her impulse is to throw up as well, or to cry, but not wishing to add to the sum total of excretions and effluvia in here, she steels herself and resolves to get outside before allowing anything like that to happen.
Stepping gingerly around the streams of piss and pools of blood, she makes her way across the warehouse floor. At one point someone’s mobile goes off, and she freezes, the frenzied hurdy-gurdy ringtone piercing the silence like a scream. She waits for it to ring out, her heart pounding, but halfway through the sequence someone else’s goes off. This time it’s the absurd, bombastic theme from some TV series she can’t remember the name of.
Eventually, they both stop. In the miraculous silence, Gina gets to the door and staggers out into the cold, fresh air.
Breathing heavily and with arms outstretched, she leans against the wall. She’s ready to get sick now, and really wants to, but in the end she can’t.
She straightens up.
Through the confusion and turmoil, she then remembers that one of the four men inside is still breathing – or at least he was a couple of minutes ago. She reaches into her pocket and takes out her phone. She’s about to dial 999 when something else strikes her. She takes out Fitz’s phone instead and uses that. She gets through to the police and gives them the address. She says that three men are dead and one is still alive. She cuts them off before they ask any questions.
She looks at her watch and then over at the Saab.
Which she’s assuming is Fitz’s.
She considers it but shakes her head.
Vigorously.
It would mean going back inside. It would mean kneeling down next to him again. It would mean rummaging through his pockets for the keys.
Gina is still shaking her head a few minutes later when she gets to the exit of the industrial estate, turns left onto the footpath and starts walking towards the Cherryvale roundabout.
Hearing a sound, Mark opens his eyes and struggles to bring the world around him into focus.
He’s been drifting in and out of consciousness for what feels like ages, and has little sense anymore of what is real or imagined. Time, space… sound, temperature, pain – these have all come to seem fluid to him, and interchangeable.
Oceanic, ubiquitous, immeasurable…
But this is different.
What he’s hearing at the moment is concrete, and penetrating, and increasingly real.
In fact, as the sound gets louder, and seems to divide into separate strands, he realises what it is. Of course. It’s a medley of approaching sirens, the sirens of what must surely be multiple police cars and – more important right now, as far as Mark is concerned – an ambulance…