The Undivided (5 page)

‘I be right!’ Plunkett said in a singsong voice. ‘We found him, we found him.’

‘Plunkett, shut up.’

He dropped himself down beside her on the bed and nudged her with his elbow, grinning broadly. ‘I thought ye’d be happy. We found him. We be heroes!’

Trása shook her head. ‘We won’t be heroes, Plunkett,’ she reminded him grimly, ‘until Rónán of the Undivided is no longer in a position to destroy us.’

‘
Better the blood of two innocents, than the blood of twenty thousand …
’

Ren woke to a sharp, horribly familiar pain, feeling sick as he realised he’d had The Dream again. He hadn’t dreamed The Dream for weeks. He’d even dared to hope, for a fleeting moment, that it might be gone for good.

That had proved a futile wish.

The Dream was back, more vivid and real and disturbing than it had ever been.

The Dream had plagued Ren Kavanaugh for as long as he could remember. It was so pervasive that he capitalised it, even in his thoughts, to differentiate it from other, more ordinary dreams. Sometimes he dreamed it so often he was afraid to go to sleep. He’d woken in a cold sweat from it more times than he cared to count. It had earned him scores of sleepless nights, his very own shrink and a whole lot of medications he lied about taking more often than not.

The pills never worked anyway, so he didn’t see the point in them.

Lately, though, The Dream had faded somewhat. Or he didn’t remember dreaming it, which amounted to the same thing.

He remembered this one, though. And he would have given a great deal not to.

Ren grunted and doubled over, feeling something soaking his T-shirt, as he struggled to sit up. It was blood. That was new. Although he was accustomed to discovering injuries he couldn’t explain, they had never come with The Dream before. Ren tossed back the covers and forced himself to sit up. It was important he not bleed all over the sheets. A T-shirt he could toss away. Bloody sheets meant questions, lectures and another visit to the shrink, where he would have to talk about The Dream again. Above all else, Ren didn’t want to talk about The Dream.

Even if he confessed to his nightmares returning, after last night and his unforgivable quip to the reporter on the red carpet, there was no chance his mother would believe this latest episode was anything other than Ren trying to wriggle out of the inevitable shit-storm he’d unleashed, by responding off-script to that idiot reporter from the E! Channel.

Ren staggered into the bathroom, biting his bottom lip to ward off the scream he could feel building in his diaphragm. He grabbed the edge of the basin, took a couple of deep breaths and gingerly raised his T-shirt to examine the wound. Sure enough, a long, shallow cut had opened up across his ribs on the left side of his body. The wound was bleeding profusely.

On the upside, it didn’t seem life threatening.

Life
style
threatening, perhaps, if he was caught with another injury like this.

Ren knew nothing he said — no protestations of innocence, no swearing of a sacred oath on Kiva’s wretched Oscars that he wasn’t responsible — would convince his mother he hadn’t done this to himself.

Ren squinted in the sudden brightness as he flicked the lights on, leaving a smear of blood on the switch. Noting he’d need to clean that off before the housekeeper spotted it, he grabbed
a fluffy white towel from the pile by the marble vanity, ran it under the tap and then pressed the damp cloth to the wound, wondering if it would need stitches. He didn’t think it would, but these mystery injuries, that appeared with alarming regularity of late, had a nasty habit of turning septic.

‘
Christ!
’ he muttered through clenched teeth as he applied pressure to the wound, which stung as if someone had poured vinegar into it. His eyes watering with the pain, Ren glanced out of the bathroom window. It was just after dawn, the low-hanging clouds still pink with the promise of the oncoming day.

Dawn meant Kiva wouldn’t be up yet, particularly after last night’s premiere and their late-night flight home from London. But dawn meant it was only an hour or so before Kerry Boyle arrived for work. Ren might get away with convincing his mother all was well, but nothing got past his mother’s cousin and housekeeper.

There was really only one place to go for help. Only one place he was guaranteed assistance that wouldn’t be reported to his mother … or the tabloids. Wincing, with the damp towel pressed to his side, Ren headed back to his bedroom. He threw open the wardrobe, pulled out his Nikes and tracksuit, a clean pair of socks and a clean T-shirt, and shoved them in his gym bag. Still pressing the towel to his side, Ren tiptoed out of his room, down the hall to the staircase, past the priceless antiques of his mother’s Georgian mansion, and out through the kitchen to the garden.

The grass was damp, the dew icy on his bare feet. Ren didn’t care. It was more important he get across the lawn to the high hedge bordering the property on the eastern side of the estate.

As with many of the estates in this part of town, there were gates in the fences of adjacent properties that allowed the residents to call on their closest neighbours without the inconvenience of having to trek up and down the pavement or
the long gravelled driveways that protected the residents from the riff-raff who used the public streets. Ren reached the small, arched gateway in the high brick wall separating their property from the estate next door, grunting with the effort to force the wooden door open as it pulled on his wound and set it bleeding afresh. He left the gate open, certain nobody would notice. Patrick Boyle, Kerry’s husband and the family’s chauffeur-cum-gardener, had mowed the lawns only two days ago. There was no reason for him to be out this early. Besides, Kiva’s manager was arriving today from the US. Patrick would be leaving for the airport first thing to pick him up. He’d be more interested in making certain the Bentley was spotless than weeding the perimeter of the property.

The house next door was barely visible through the trees, the grounds not nearly as well kept, or manicured, as the Kavanaugh estate. Running toward the main house, Ren noticed a light coming from the glasshouse at the back of the garden. Knowing Jack had no live-in household help, it meant only one thing. The old man was up and about already, pottering about with … what?

Ren wasn’t sure. The old bloke was pretty cagey, as a rule, about what he was up to. Ren didn’t know if it was because he really
was
up to something, or he just liked to foster an air of mystery to help his book sales.

‘Jayzus!’ Jack exclaimed with his back to Ren, as he opened the glasshouse door. ‘Shut the effing door! You’re letting all the heat out, boy.’

Ren hurriedly closed the glasshouse door, letting out an involuntary grunt of pain.

Jack looked up, examined Ren oddly for a moment and then shook his head. ‘So, there’s likely going to be a grand tale behind the reason you’re paying me a visit at the crack of dawn, bleeding like a stuck pig.’

‘It happened again,’ Ren said, limping a little as he made his way between the rows of hothouse flowers toward the back of the glasshouse where Jack seemed to be re-potting a rather forlorn looking
coleus
. In addition to the pain from his side, Ren’s feet were freezing and the sudden, aromatic warmth of the glasshouse set off pins and needles in his toes.

‘How bad?’ the old man asked, wiping his hands on a dirty towel he kept on the bench beside the potting mix that probably made his hands dirtier than they were before he wiped them. He was shorter than Ren, compact and wiry, with white hair and the weight of seventy years of pain and secrets etched onto his weathered face.

‘It’s not fatal,’ Ren assured him. ‘But it hurts like hell.’

Jack sighed and beckoned the boy closer. ‘Better give us a look then.’

Ren dropped the gym bag, lifted his T-shirt and moved the towel. The bleeding had slowed to a welling of beaded crimson along the cut. Jack leant in to examine the wound, his lips pursed.

‘Looks like you’ve been stabbed,’ the old man remarked, as he straightened with an obvious effort. He spoke with an odd, clinical detachment. ‘Or grazed in a knife fight. What were you doing?’

‘Sleeping.’

‘If you’re going to have dreams that turn real, me boy,’ Jack advised, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, ‘you should try to concentrate on getting laid.’

Ren tried to smile, but given the pain he was in, he suspected it looked more like a grimace. ‘Yeah … I’ll do that next time.’

Jack looked at him oddly. ‘Is there something you’re leaving out here, lad?’

‘No. Why?’

‘I can spot a liar blindfolded at fifty paces, Ren.’

Ren shrugged, not sure how much it mattered. ‘I was dreaming when it happened.’

‘About what?’

He shrugged. ‘You know … the usual stuff.’

‘I know what
my
usual stuff is. What’s yours?’

‘Nothing exciting. Does it need stitches?’

Jack shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. It’s a clean cut, and fairly shallow. But it’ll need to be dressed. And kept clean. Does your mam know about this one?’

He shook his head. ‘She’s not awake yet, Kerry doesn’t start work for another hour, and it’s still the holidays, so no school for another couple of weeks, either.’

‘So, we have time to patch you up and get you home again before they decide you’re a complete loon, then.’

Although he’d never doubted Jack would help him, Ren couldn’t help but feel relieved. ‘Thanks, dude.’

‘You don’t have to thank me, lad,’ Jack said, tossing his dirty towel back onto the bench. ‘And you certainly don’t have to keep calling me
dude
.’

The kitchen was a mess, the marble floors sticky, the sink piled with dishes, even though there was a perfectly functioning dishwasher under the counter. Jack flicked on the lights and began looking through the kitchen cupboards until he located a large metal toolbox, which Ren knew from experience contained Jack’s alarmingly well-provisioned first-aid kit.

Ren shoved a pile of empty pizza boxes aside and made room on the counter near the sink. As he sat himself up on the counter, Jack opened the box, took out the antiseptic, swabs, sterile strips and wound dressings, laying them out on the counter beside Ren.

‘Would it be easier if we do this at the table?’ Ren asked, grateful Jack hadn’t questioned him further. The old man
was washing his hands in the sink, and taking his time to be thorough, too, Ren noted with relief.

Jack shook his head. ‘No room.’

Ren glanced through the door to the dining room. Sure enough, the elegant antique table he could just make out in the gloom, seemed piled high with boxes. ‘You moving?’

‘Nah … gotta autograph a whole bunch of books for the publisher. Going on tour in the US come September. Take off your shirt.’

Ren lifted the T-shirt gingerly over his head, tossed it on the counter, exposing several faint scars across his chest and arms from similar inexplicable injuries. He raised his left arm to let Jack get to work. ‘Do you like America?’

‘Hate the place,’ Jack said without looking up. ‘But they love me. So I do fifteen cities in ten days. Book signings, lectures to political science and criminology students trying to pretend they’re cool, and the occasional police department. And I get to smile and pose with snooty-nosed, Irish – American society ladies who’ve never known a moment’s want in their entire fecking lives, who want to be able to tell their friends they’ve met a real terrorist.’

‘But you served your time, didn’t you?’ Ren said, glad Jack was in such a garrulous mood. It helped keep his mind off the pain. And the residual uneasiness from his dreams. ‘You’re not with the IRA these days. So technically, you’re not a terrorist anymore.’

‘Jayzus, lad, don’t say that too loud,’ Jack said. ‘You’ll give me publicist a coronary!’

Ren smiled and then hissed at the sting of the antiseptic as Jack dabbed it on the cut. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘Aye. And the truth is, I much prefer kissing society ladies to being a guest of Her Majesty, but … well, you know …’

Actually, Ren had no idea, but he nodded sympathetically. Old Jack might be a bit odd, but he was one of only two people
in the world who believed Ren when he claimed he wasn’t carving himself up for fun and attention.

And — thanks to Jack’s shady past — the old man had enough medical knowledge to render aid when Ren didn’t want to draw attention to his injuries. Even so, it was hard to credit that Jack O’Righin had once been counted among the most dangerous men in Europe. Even harder to believe he’d spent thirty years in prison, quite a few of them in the infamous H Blocks.

When Jack was released in 1998 — along with a whole lot of other prisoners as part of the Good Friday Accord (or so it claimed on the dustcover of his book) — he moved south to Dublin. There he sat down and wrote about his experiences as a poor, disenfranchised child, as a prisoner in The Maze, and as an active member of the Provisional IRA. A year or so later, the only slightly repentant terrorist found himself with a
New York Times
bestseller on his hands and a whole new career on the speaking circuit where he commanded a six-figure fee. He had more money now than he ever imagined he would see in one lifetime, let alone every six months in a cheque from his agent in London.

He’d bought the house next door to the Kavanaughs’ place last year, upsetting the neighbours who considered the old ex-convict and self-promoting terrorist a blight on their once perfect neighbourhood.

Ren liked him almost as much as the rest of the residents of Blackrock despised him. The old man was interesting. And he could whip up a damn fine field dressing, something Ren seemed to be more and more in need of lately.

Reaching for the sterile strips to bind the skin closed, Jack glanced up at Ren’s pain-etched face. ‘Saw you on TV last night.’

‘I thought you don’t have cable?’

‘This wasn’t on cable, laddie. This was the evening news on the RTÉ. They must have shown you mouthing off to that
reporter a half-dozen times before I went to bed. Did your old lady give you much stick for dropping the F-word on national television?’

Ren grimaced, only this time it wasn’t from the pain. He’d known as he uttered the words that he would pay for them, but it had been worth it. The tantrum Kiva threw in the car on the way to the airport was monumental. It ended with her declaring he would never,
ever
, set foot on another red carpet as long as she lived, which was just fine by Ren. ‘The words
military school
and
Utah brat camp
were bandied about during the discussion.’