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 …
Seven
The next morning there is saturation coverage in the media, with newspaper headlines ranging from the hysterical –
BLOODBATH
! – to the soberly informative –
THREE DEAD, TWO INJURED, IN GANGLAND FEUD
. On one of the radio breakfast shows the Minister for Justice declares all-out war on the city’s criminals and drug barons. Among commentators a consensus about what happened quickly emerges: it was a dispute between a senior gangland figure and an ex-paramilitary activist, with its roots possibly going back many years. It was also quite clearly an incident that got way out of hand. Live reports from the scene of the discovery – the result, it appears, of an anonymous tip-off to Gardaí – are shocking enough, but as usual it’s in the tabloids that the truly gruesome stuff is to be found.
The dead men are named as Terry Stack, Martin Fitzgerald and Eugene Joyce. One of the injured men – both of whom are still in intensive care – is named as Shay Moynihan. The other one has yet to be identified.
Investigations are ongoing.
‘I mean,
hon
estly,’ Miriam says, flicking off the radio with one hand and pouring freshly brewed coffee into her husband’s cup with the other, ‘what
are
these people anyway, savages?’
‘Yes,’ Norton says, ‘they are, they’re animals, pure and simple.’
He and Miriam’s rapprochement started late last night and he doesn’t want to do or say anything now to endanger it – such as disagreeing with her, or pointing out to her that one of these savages may actually have been in this kitchen once, may have sat where she’s sitting, may even have drunk from the very cup she’s holding in her hand.
Norton stares into his coffee.
Since first hearing the news this morning – and on the radio like everyone else, though probably earlier than most – he’s been trying to visualise the scene, to conjure it up in all its graphic horror. But he can’t. More sober calculations keep getting in the way.
He raises his coffee cup and takes a sip. Miriam is concentrating on peeling an orange.
These two men in intensive care, for instance – he can only assume that the unidentified one is Mark Griffin … in which case he can only hope that the little fucker doesn’t make it. Terry Stack’s being out of the way, however, is a major plus, his involvement even breathing new life into Norton’s original strategy of trying to make the whole thing seem gang-related. Fitz himself – who clearly couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery – wasn’t much of a threat, but he
was
the one direct link between Norton and pretty much everything that’s happened recently.
There are variables, of course. Knowns and unknowns. What happens if Mark Griffin
does
make it? And what kind of a trail did Fitz leave behind him at High King? Documents? Recordings? Transcripts? Probably. But Norton’s not too worried, because it would hardly be in High King’s interests to compromise the confidentiality of their single most important client.
No, the biggest variable in all of this, the least predictable one – the great
un
known known – is Gina Rafferty. She wasn’t mentioned in any of the radio reports, so … where
is
she? Weighed down at the bottom of a river somewhere? Hidden in the boot of a car? Would that be too much to hope for?
Miriam places a few segments of orange before him on a plate. ‘There you are,’ she says. ‘Vitamin C.’
‘Thank you, darling.’
What kick-started the rapprochement last night was an email from their daughter in Chicago. At the very end of it, and almost as an afterthought, she mentioned that she’d be home for Christmas. This was great news, and enough to alter Miriam’s entire mood, taking her in seconds flat from chilly to warm, from clipped monosyllables to a torrent of chatter. Patricia’s last visit over two years ago hadn’t gone at all well, and here would be a rare chance for mother and daughter to regain some lost ground.
For his part, Norton was – and still is – relieved. But he knows from experience that this will now become a major project for Miriam – doing up rooms that don’t need to be done up, organising lunches and drinks parties, as well as endless shopping. He knows her propensity to obsess. He also knows from experience that ten minutes off the plane and Patricia will be choking on all the attention. Ten minutes inside the house and she’ll be on the phone to see if she can’t bring the date of her return flight forward.
But at least it means that for the moment Miriam will no longer be giving a shit about
him
and his supposed dependency on prescription painkillers.
Vitamin C?
Thanks a lot.
Half an hour later he’s in the car on Pembroke Road – but instead of going straight on to Baggot Street, to the office, he turns right at the canal and heads down towards the quays.
He phones his secretary and tells her he’s going to be late.
‘But not
too
late, I hope,’ she says, ‘because you have –’
‘I know, I
know
.’
He has an eleven o’clock meeting with the Amcan people to iron out the final details of the tenancy contract. He gave in to Ray Sullivan last night on the question of the additional security measures, and there’s no reason now why they can’t close the deal, and soon – the beginning of next week or maybe even as early as tomorrow.
‘I’ll be all right,’ he says, glancing at his watch. ‘I’ve plenty of time.’
It’s a crisp late-autumn morning, calm and clear after the high winds of last night. As he moves along South Lotts Road, Norton glances to the left. Dominating the city skyline, defining it, is Richmond Plaza. Then he looks to the right. It used to be that wherever you happened to find yourself in Dublin, you could pretty much rely on the red-and-white-striped twin chimneys of the Poolbeg power station to find
you
. Situated in the bay, these were a sentimental reference point for many people – they defined the city, they were the first thing you saw, through mist and cloud, on the flight path into Dublin Airport. But that has all changed. Because what immediately catches the eye these days is the considerably taller glass and steel structure rising up out of the docklands. It’s a more appropriate structure
anyway
, in Norton’s opinion. Better to have office and retail space, a hotel, condominiums – he thinks – than a brace of ugly industrial smokestacks.
Stopped at a red light on Pearse Street a few minutes later, he reaches into his pocket and takes out his Nalprox. He wasn’t sure about these yesterday. Compared to the Narolet they seemed weaker somehow, but at the same time … stronger? Is that possible? Differently calibrated? He doesn’t get it. They’re all he’s got, though. He pops two of them into his mouth, hesitates briefly, and then pops a third one in as well. For good measure.
The traffic moves and he turns right onto Tara Street. They crawl along and stop at another red light. He reaches over with his left hand and opens the glove compartment. He waits a moment and then looks. There it is, the grey barrel sticking out from under his pouch of AA documents. Before leaving the house earlier, he got this from the safe in his dressing room. He’s never used it, nor does he have a licence for it – but he’s always liked the idea of having a gun. Fitz got it for him some years back after there’d been a spate of burglaries in the neighbourhood.