Ruthless (4 page)

Orla let her eyes drift over the stonework. It looked tired in places. But the house was still a fine big place, with panoramic views across open country towards the great grey sprawl of the river.

This was home, and she did have a few good memories of it. But oh, everything had happened here. For every good memory, there were ten bad ones.

She went to the big oak brass-studded door and pulled the bell chain. Far away in the house, she heard the thing echo and jangle.

She waited. And waited. Finally she rang the bell again.

At last, there was the sound of movement, and then her mother was standing in front of her, white hair awry, a blue-sprigged cream pinafore tied around her dumpy waist, a querying expression in her eyes and a vague smile on her lips. When she saw her daughter standing there, the smile dropped away in shock.

‘Orla! God in heaven, what are you doing here?’

‘Ma!’ said Orla, overcome with a mixture of relief at seeing her mother standing there, so familiar, and the realization that nothing would ever be the same again. She had survived the tempest, but she had come through it alone. Every moment since had been a living hell, trying to hold it together, focusing on getting home. Now she was finally here, she lost all control.

‘Oh, Ma,’ she sobbed. ‘He’s gone. I’ve lost Redmond.’

8

London, 1980

‘I am here to tell you that this. Just. Won’t. Fucking. Do,’ said a stern female voice.

Annie pulled the covers further over her head, trying to block out the world. She recognized the voice. And right now, she
hated
the damned voice too.

‘Go away,’ she moaned. ‘Leave me the hell alone.’

‘No can do,’ said Dolly.

‘Yes, you bloody
can
do,’ snapped Annie, her head emerging from the covers.

Through gritty eyes she could see Dolly, turned out in her usual sharp-fitting skirt suit – powder blue this time – standing by the windows in the dimness of the master suite. Dolly threw back the curtains and Annie winced as light flooded in.

‘Jesus
,’ she complained.

‘It’s eleven thirty, nearly lunchtime. You intending to just lie there in your ruddy pit all day?’

‘That’s the plan,’ said Annie.

Dolly came over to the bed and looked down in disgust at her old mate.

‘That ain’t a plan,’ she pointed out. ‘That’s a waste of a day.’

‘So fucking well shoot me,’ said Annie, sitting up irritably and tucking the bedclothes more firmly around her.

‘Look at the state of you,’ marvelled Dolly.

Annie didn’t want to do that. But her eyes were irresistibly drawn to the dressing table mirror, where she could see a pale, frowning woman sitting up in bed, hair all mussed up and eyes red-raw from crying.

It was her.

And she never cried, right?

Ah, not true. This past few months since he’d left, it felt as though she’d done nothing
but
cry.

‘What have I got to get up for?’ Annie groaned, rubbing her eyes.

‘Layla’s away, I take it?’ Dolly was watching her, hands planted on hips.

‘Yes, she’s away. In Barbados. With
him
.’

‘And how’s that going? The Layla thing?’

‘She hates me.’

‘She don’t hate you. She
blames
you. There’s a difference. Now shift your arse.’

Annie clutched the bedclothes tighter. ‘Why did Rosa let you in?’ she complained. ‘I told her I didn’t want to see anybody.’

‘I’m not anybody, you berk, I’m your best mate,’ said Dolly more gently. ‘Come on. Out of that bed and get yourself smartened up, you look like an effing bag lady. I’m taking you out to lunch, then we’re going to hit the shops.’

Annie put her head in her hands. The very idea of it exhausted her.

‘Do I have to?’ she whined.

‘Yeah, if you don’t want my boot up your crotch.’

Annie gave in. She threw back the covers.

‘Shit,’ she complained as the sunlight from the window hit her eyes. It felt like a scalpel, cutting into her aching brain.

‘It’s a beautiful day,’ trilled Dolly, holding Annie’s dressing gown at the ready.

‘Oh, shut the fuck up,’ said Annie, snatching it from her and heading for the bathroom.

9

Ireland, 1970

Orla told her mother about the crash.

‘Ah, God,’ the older woman said over and over, weeping. ‘My poor boy, poor Redmond, oh dear God.’

The house was neglected inside, every surface covered in dust. The curtains hung uncleaned, the nets were grey, there was a slew of dirty crockery on the draining board. Orla knew that taking care of Pa must be hard, and it was clear that housework was at the bottom of her mother’s to-do list. She supposed she should have kept in touch more,
done
more, as the only daughter, and the guilt of it added to her woes.

All she hoped was that the old couple who lived by the sea would just let the matter lie, and someone would reunite Donny with his bike which she’d left up against the post office wall in the village. He would probably mention it in the pub, tell the regulars about the girl at the door saying she’d been in a dinghy that foundered, and her brother was lost. Perhaps he would search the shoreline for a few weeks, maybe even report it to the Garda; but the only name Donny and Cissie had for her was a false one she had concocted.

No, they could not trace her here. Everyone would go on thinking her missing, dead like Redmond. So she would stay here. Why not? There was nothing else left for her in life.

Her mother was delighted when she said she would stay. Then Pa wandered into the kitchen.

‘Look, Davey, our Orla’s home,’ said Ma.

But Davey Delaney just stared at his daughter, not a hint of recognition in his face.

‘Who’s this?’ he asked.

‘I told you, it’s Orla.’

‘Oh.’

Ma cast an apologetic look at Orla. ‘Take no notice.’

‘Dinner ready yet?’ asked Davey.

‘It’s only an hour since you had breakfast.’

‘I want dinner!’ shouted Davey, and thumped the table, making both women jump.

Orla’s mother stood up, her mouth set in a long-suffering line.

‘I’ll help,’ said Orla, and Ma gave her a grateful smile.

‘Will you tell him about Redmond?’ Orla asked her later in the day, when Pa was napping.

‘I will. But he probably won’t understand – or even remember who Redmond is. Was. Oh my poor boy . . .’ The tears started again.

A cleaner came in once a week. The woman brought a few groceries with her, did a bit of ironing, and pottered around chatting and moving the dust from one place to another. Orla kept out of sight and got her mother to sack the woman. A milkman called, and a baker. Orla hid away from any visitors to the farm – thanking God there were few – and started tidying the place up. Shattered by Redmond’s death, she found solace in creating order out of chaos.

Then the Garda called. She was chopping wood when she saw the car coming up the track to the farm. Heart thumping, she ran and hid in one of the big disused barns at the side of the house until they left a half-hour later.

Only then did she go indoors.

‘What did they want?’ she asked her mother.

‘They were asking if you or Redmond had been here lately,’ said her mother.

‘And what did you say?’

‘Don’t worry, I said neither of you had. And then they said I had to prepare myself, that there had been a flight out of Cardiff and that you both were on it, and the flight had vanished so we must fear the worst.’

So the British police had liaised with the Garda, as she had known they would, asking them to call by the house after the plane went missing, to check if either she or Redmond had shown up.

Now
that
was out of the way, Orla began to relax a little.

Her mother was watching her face closely. ‘It must have been hell for you, that plane crash.’

‘It was.’

‘And poor Redmond . . .’ Her mother crossed herself and her eyes filled with tears. ‘Ah, God rest him.’

‘Who are you talking about?’ asked Davey, wandering into the kitchen, his eyes bright with curiosity.

‘Redmond,’ said his wife.

The old man looked at the two women in bemusement. ‘Who?’ His eyes fastened on his daughter. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

Orla stayed on, living in a dim twilight world of cooking and cleaning, exhausting herself so that she fell into bed at night unable to think, unable to do anything other than sleep. Her mother was sharp as a tack – although clearly ground down and aged from the burden of caring for her husband – but Pa’s dementia had left him with no interest in the daily business of living. He would subsist on bread and water if you let him. Baths were things he had to be reminded to take on a fortnightly basis – Ma had to run his bath for him, then wash his reeking clothes.

Someone had once told Orla that grief had its passage of time. Nothing could hurry it. Two to five years was normal to grieve, going through all the processes of anger, guilt and acceptance.

Five years passed. The Garda, despite her fears that they might, never returned. The farmhouse came slowly back to life under her care. And still she longed for Redmond, for the presence of her twin at her side. And she felt plagued by guilt because she had lived, and he had not.

With so much time to think about it, she’d become convinced that the crash had been orchestrated by Annie Carter and her Mafia pals. She could never forget Fergal tapping that fuel gauge, wondering why it was showing empty when it should have been full. And now the only person she had ever loved in her entire life was gone. The one consolation was that she and Redmond had settled the score with that Carter bitch before they’d fled England. They’d finished her good and proper – there would have been nothing left of her but blood and guts. It pleased Orla so much to think of that. If the police had ever found the remains of her, God alone knew how they would have identified the cow.

The days dragged on, the skies sitting in a grey repressive bowl above her head as she went out to hang the washing. It wouldn’t dry much today, but later she’d bring it in, hang it on the clothes horse in front of the fire.

Her life was dull too, dull like the sky. She was wearing an old cotton dress of her mother’s, pulled in tight with a belt because she was terribly thin these days, as if the grief had eaten her from within. Over that she wore a faded quilted jacket – her father’s – and Wellington boots that belonged to him too. They flopped around her feet, acres too big.

Orla grabbed the peg bag from inside the kitchen door and hurried out clutching the basket of washing. In the living room of the old farmhouse her parents were watching the news on TV. She’d sat with them through the latest reports about the IRA shooting dead a policeman who’d stumbled upon a bomb-making factory in a Hammersmith basement, and the scandal surrounding Indira Gandhi, who’d now been found guilty of electoral corruption. But when the newsreader announced that a Boeing 727 had crashed at the edge of Kennedy airport, killing over a hundred people, Orla had begun shaking uncontrollably. The footage of wreckage in the water had her reliving her own nightmare struggle for life, the icy sea, the plane sinking, the loss – oh God! – of Redmond.

She looked around her at the decaying farm buildings. It was hard to believe that they had been reduced to this. Her father, who’d seen to it that the Delaney name inspired fear and respect in London’s ganglands, now a demented old man. Her mother, once so smart, so elegant, now worn down by the strain of caring for him. Her brothers, dead.

The Delaneys were a spent force.

And so was she.

10

Moyross, Ireland, 1973

‘Jesus, I’m not sure about this,’ said Pikey.

Alongside him, crouched down behind Pardew’s parked car, Rufus Malone gave Pikey a scathing look.

The guy had no balls.

Things got rough, and he started to squirm like a big girl.

‘Shut yer trap,’ hissed Rufus.

Pikey fell silent.

Tosser,
thought Rufus with a sigh. Rather than squatting here, cramping up in the freezing fucking cold with Pikey groaning on about not being sure, Rufus was wishing he was elsewhere. Time was, being a cousin of the Delaneys would have spared him this sort of crap. Maybe he ought to have stuck to the horse trading around St Mary’s in Limerick. Or kept up with the serious betting on the sulky races, travelling all over Ireland having a piss-up and making a packet.

The lure of criminality had pulled him from an early age, even in the school playground where he’d pinched other pupils’ marbles with his old oppo Rory. As one of the Delaney clan, he had a reputation to live up to.

Rufus was built like a rugby player. His size intimidated all but the most determined foe. Added to that, he was fast-moving and had a shock of shoulder-length curly red hair. The hair gave him a primitive, caveman appearance. His facial features were pudgy, not distinctive, but his hard grey eyes promised trouble – and he always delivered.

He’d moved up the ranks since his schooldays. From regular appearances in the juvenile courts, having progressed from stealing marbles to robbing milkmen and grocery stores, he graduated to the district court on charges of breaking and entering. He became a master at blagging old judges with innocent looks and pleas to spare him, he would never do such a thing again, honest.

Of course, he always did.

As a result, he got accustomed to the occupational hazard of brief spells inside. Prison was his finishing school, where he brushed up against real hard cases, learned more about the ways of the world.

While frequenting the races with his old mate, sometime thief and sometime motor mechanic Rory, he encountered smoother, bigger criminals. People with connections to the provisional IRA and dissident republicans. And, of course, Dublin-based gang bosses who liked the cut of him and were impressed by his Delaney connections, thinking he’d be handy in a scrap. Bosses, middle-aged silverbacks, bulky and mean-eyed, like Big Don Callaghan, who owned Rufus’s arse now – and paid handsomely for the privilege.