Vagabond (29 page)

‘
He’s an oddball
.’

‘
Lives somewhere over here
.’

‘
Knows his stuff backwards. We’re just here for a flavour of it, but he seems to live it.
’

‘
There’s a past, has to be. A past he’s locked into. Poor beggar. The past doesn’t allow escape
.’

They’d be friends by the end. Most would swap addresses and they’d have the guides’ email links. They’d know nothing of the driver, Danny Curnow, and would go to bed remembering it was an early start in the morning
.

‘I’m Dusty. I doubt you’ve heard of me.’

She stood in her doorway and the light from inside was thrown into his face. The geraniums in the windowbox were an exquisite scarlet. ‘I haven’t.’

‘I know you, though. You’re Hanne. I know you through your pictures. I’m a friend – we go back a long way – of Danny Curnow. I know your pictures because where we live he has the room next to mine and it’s full of your work.’

Dusty thought her a lovely woman. They had told him at the gallery where she lived so he’d had his meal, seen the clients back to the hotel, then gone to the house. She had a robe wrapped around her.

She allowed herself to smile and shrug. ‘They tell me each time he is in, and what he has bought. It is supposed to be secret. He chooses well and badly.’

‘They’re on the walls of his room.’

‘He would not give up on something. I don’t know what is “something”. I took second place to it.’

‘It’s what he did before, and me.’

‘Dusty, why did you come?’

‘Miss, not sure it’s any of my business, but it was about a chance of breaking free.’

‘I am not a therapist for the complaint of whatever it was that he did before. I was in second, maybe in third or fourth place to it. I am sorry, Dusty.’

‘He comes here every week.’

‘He watches me and follows me. I am not supposed to know.’ She chuckled, rich and soft. ‘He is behind me. I can set my watch. On a Sunday and on a Tuesday. One day, I tell myself, I will stop and I will turn round and I will walk back. You want to know what I would do, Dusty, when I came close to him?’

‘What would you do, miss?’

‘I might kiss him, and I might take him by the hand, and I might lead him here, and I might cook for him, as I used to, and I might pour wine for him, and I might . . .’

‘Yes, miss.’

‘And I might again be second.’

‘Where is home, miss?’

She tilted her head to look towards the clouds and the gaps where small stars were. ‘There are islands and there are fish, eagles, whales and snowstorms. In the winter it is dark all night and all day. It is very far away.’

‘One day, miss, will you ever stop and turn?’

She didn’t answer but he saw the pain in her eyes and how it creased her mouth.

‘He was called back, miss. A man came for him. He was taken again to do what he did in the past. He was good at it, and it half beat the life out of him. It’s why you didn’t see him tonight.’

‘I wondered if he was bored with the game.’

‘He’s been taken again to do what he used to do. It damn near broke him. Not your problem, miss, and maybe I shouldn’t have bothered you.’

‘We were good together at the start – and I could believe I had softened him, until we came to the line. The red line, not to be crossed, of commitment. Thank you, Dusty.’

She stepped back into the room behind the door. He thanked her for her time and spun on his heel. He didn’t want to linger and see the tears. As he walked away he heard the door close behind him. He wondered where the islands were. His own life was uncomplicated and comfortable, his relationship with Christine warm and happy. He thought the man he loved was tortured. He supposed that so many were who had been in that place and done things there . . .

‘I’m hungry,’ Kevin said.

‘My ma does great cocoa,’ Pearse said.

‘And mine makes a great pie.’

‘The best pie.’

They had to talk nonsense because it kept some of the cold out. A wind rustled the leaves above them and the rain was heavy. Kevin kept in his mind the face of Malachy Riordan. Without Malachy in his life he would have been an ordinary shite, nothing special. Since he was a kid he had craved to be noted and chosen, able to walk taller than others – except Pearse . . .

The door opened across the field, over the hedge and past the parked cars. They were pissed, the men, warm and smart, the women. He saw Eamonn O’Kane, couldn’t miss him because he did a job with an umbrella and sheltered the women as they scurried to the cars. There was music, louder, from inside, and shrieks of laughter. He wondered why so many had come to celebrate with the mother and father of a policeman – and all of them Catholics. The cars made a queue down the track from the garden and the noise of the cattle-grid bars was constant. The stream went down the lane and through the light from Mrs Halloran’s bungalow.

Now the parents hugged their son and kissed his wife. They stayed in the porch and a dog yapped at their heels. The son and his wife ran to their car.

The track was clear.

‘You ready?’

‘Course.’

‘You want me to . . . ?’

‘No.’

His fingers – numb with cold – were on the wires, held poised by the terminals. Pearse would do the watching for him. Pearse told him when the car started, when it moved and when it was close to the grid. He heard the rattle of the bars and used his will to hold the wires steady. He had them beside the terminals.

‘Go for it.’

He made the contact. He could imagine the pulse that flashed from the battery and down the cable, under the ground, then up to the surface in the hedge and into the maroon that was the charge to fire the detonator. His head tilted up. He saw the VW Golf caught in the gate light. It paused, rolled a few feet and then it was gone. He barely saw it go through the light from the Halloran house.

Kevin could have cried. Pearse swore. The door of the house had closed.

Kevin said they’d have to get it. Pearse said that Malachy Riordan would likely half kill them if they left it to rot in the field. And Kevin said they had to get it because his prints would be over it – he couldn’t have worn gloves because his fingers were bolloxed with cold. And Pearse said, with defiance, that it wasn’t their fault, they’d done what they’d been told to. Kevin said that the man might come down his drive, under his umbrella, to run the dog before shutting up the house. Pearse said they’d wait before they went to get it. Kevin said that he had pictured the flash exploding out of the hedge, the car swivelling round it, the fireball taking hold. He’d seen it too many times. Pearse said Malachy Riordan would kill them if they left evidence in the hedge. Their voices were choked, as if tears weren’t far away.

The quiet fell on them, but for the rain and the wind, and they waited.

The car pulled in. The driver leaned across Malachy Riordan and opened the door. Nothing was said.

He could have spoken out: ‘When my business is done I’ll come looking for you. I’ll find you and fuckin’ break you.’

The driver could have replied: ‘Don’t come looking for me because there might be a roadblock, with cops, and you’d shit yourself.’

No thanks and no good wishes. He took his bag, straightened up and kicked the door shut with his heel. By the time he was on the paving, he heard the car accelerating away.

The hotel building was monstrous. A wall of glass towered ahead of him. He saw clusters of men and women at tables. He thought he saw her. The glass made the image indistinct and there was a swell of smart women and men in suits, who swirled about the foyer and in front of the wide reception desk. She stood and glanced at her wrist, checked the time and gazed out. She seemed nervous, ill at ease. He hated the place. So many tables and so many people. He couldn’t read what was safe and what stank of risk. Throughout the last stage of the journey he had turned in his mind the dangers of where he was. He couldn’t judge the men and women here. She fitted what he had been told. He reached into his inner pocket and took out his wallet. The photograph was where any man kept his sweetheart’s picture. There was no doubt that it was her.

He went forward a few paces and a porter came towards him, a decent-looking kid in a flunkey’s uniform. He asked for a sheet of paper and a pencil. The porter found them for him. He wrote on the paper, and folded it. He took a ten-euro note from the wallet, gave it and the sheet of paper to the porter, then pointed out the woman with the golden hair. He was thanked. Had the porter a street map? No problem. He was given the map, large scale, city centre, and told where they were. He asked a last question; the boy giggled and pointed at the map. He was gone. He didn’t look back at the girl, but was satisfied to see the porter go through the big doors with the note in his hand. It was a precaution, and his freedom depended on suspicion. He stepped out into the darkness, heading for the city’s heart.

‘You have to tell me. This is fast becoming ridiculous, Ralph.’

‘I can’t tell you what I don’t know.’

‘When you meet, what weapons will be test-fired?’

‘It’s not decided yet.’

They were in her bedroom. He had been in bed when she’d phoned him. With a rasp in her voice, she’d told him to dress, then come down the corridor. She had laid on coffee. He had dressed, as instructed, and she had tried, at first, to sugar it. She had been pleasant and – she reckoned – businesslike.

Her reward was vagueness.

‘You’re telling me you don’t know when you’ll meet your contact – it’s Simonov? You don’t know?’

‘Not really.’

‘You’ve been here a night and a full day and you don’t know? The girl’s in place. We reckon Riordan should have hit the city by now. You’re the middle man, the facilitator, but you don’t know when there’ll be a meeting? Level with me, Ralph.’

‘I haven’t been told and that’s the truth.’

He wore his helpless look, usually a winner. She was close to believing him. ‘What about the location?’

‘Not yet.’

He wasn’t meeting her eyes. He had given her chapter and verse on the Irish girl and had had the wit to gossip with her: she was Queen’s, a graduate, lived at the bottom of the Malone road. They had shown each other their passports. Gaby would be able to furnish Thames House with enough details by midnight for the computers to spit out her identity, the accounts where the cash was held and the bank address. All good, except the core of what she needed. She remembered the face of the man with Matthew Bentinick. She had thought it unforgiving, merciless. Ralph Exton was hers and had been since she’d trailed to that provincial police station and lugged Bentinick’s file bag into the interview room.

‘I’m trying to help, Ralph. I’ve played fair with you over the years. Everything I’ve done for you has been based on honesty. It’s no time for you to play fast and loose with me.’

‘Would I do that, Gaby?’

‘This Simonov, it’s the old thing, “the devil in the detail”: where’s the detail? When do you meet, where do you meet, what do you fire? I can move on – where is he coming from in your life, how are you hooked to him and—’

‘I’ve always given you everything I’ve known, Gaby, kept nothing back. The weapons may not turn up. What if they don’t? Riordan a killer. What’ll he do to me? That drill was right in my face. I don’t know how much more I can take. Don’t you believe me? After all I’ve done . . . I’m a little cog in the wheel, and I get frightened.’ His head was in his hands.

She was out of her chair. God’s truth, what was he? An asset or a colleague? Her hand was on his shoulder. ‘We’ll do all we can, Ralph. Your security is hugely important to us, a main priority. Anyway, the detail. We’ll try again in the morning.’

She helped him up and took him to the door. His head was still down and he was breathing fast. She took him along the corridor and he gave her his key-card. She let him in and helped him on to the bed. She closed the door quietly after her.