Winterland (30 page)

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.