But that wasn’t it at all.
The fella they found in the woods.
What was it Ruth had said last night, about summoning up old ghosts?
But the weird thing is it’s not the body in the woods he’s worried about. Not only. There are degrees of separation there. It’s Bolger he’s worried about. The man was unhinged this morning. Maybe it’s that he’s bored or frustrated, or that retirement doesn’t suit him and he has too much time on his hands, but it almost seemed as if in some perverse way he was looking for trouble.
What the man needs is a job. To chair some committee or head up a review group or something.
Keep him busy, keep him distracted.
Because the last thing Conway himself needs, as he bargains for his financial survival with these Black Vine people, is to be linked, however tenuously, to the three-year-old disappearance of a security guard… who then turns up in a shallow grave in the Wicklow hills.
Unable to dwell on this, even for a second, Conway turns and goes back inside. He rushes across the room and out into the corridor. He switches his torch on again and makes his way back to the stairwell. On the way down, he focuses on taking the steps two at a time.
As he’s approaching the second floor, he hears a weird sound and stops. He remains still for a moment. There is silence. Then he hears the sound again.
It’s a dog barking.
He hears it a third time.
It’s close by.
He steps out into the second-floor corridor. It’s much darker down here, and the air is heavier, dustier. He stops and listens carefully.
The dog barks again, a yappy sound – it’s probably some sort of terrier.
Conway looks at an open door a little further along the corridor and thinks he detects movement inside. He quickly realises that it’s something flickering – a form of light, a flame perhaps, a candle.
Slowly, he moves towards it.
His heart jumps when the dog barks again.
He peers in through the door. The windows have been blacked out with plastic sacks. Protruding from a bottle on the floor is a red candle. In the middle of the room there is an empty shopping trolley and tied to the trolley with a dirty piece of rope is the dog, a scruffy little terrier.
The place reeks of piss.
The dog barks again.
Conway shines his torch over the room. In one corner he sees what at first appears to be a bundle of old clothes and newspapers. After a second he realises that the bundle is moving, that there’s someone lying there. A pair of eyes stare up at him, squinting, a hand raised to block out the light from the torch.
‘Ah fuck, pal.’ It’s a man. ‘What’s going on? What do you want?’
For a fleeting moment it is on the tip of Dave’s tongue to respond, ‘What do I want? What do you mean? This is my hotel.’
Pal.
But he knows how absurd that would sound.
He goes on pointing the torch, and staring.
The man goes on squinting and holding up his hand but he doesn’t say anything else – all resistance spent, seemingly, in those first few words.
The dog, who has been quiet for a bit, starts yapping again. It tugs at the rope and causes the shopping trolley to move.
Conway is startled by this. He retreats, walks quickly back to the stairwell and down to the ground floor. He rushes across the lobby and out onto the Concourse, all the time wondering how many of the other rooms are… occupied? Is that the correct word? And how many of the houses? There’s no security here, there’s no surveillance. The money ran out, work stopped and the place was just abandoned.
With a sick feeling in his stomach Conway makes his way back along Tara Boulevard and gets into his car.
Holy fuck.
What is happening?
These bastards at Black Vine had better come through with the funding, otherwise this place will be devoured.
His life will be devoured.
And not just by overgrowth and weeds and graffiti and tramps and squatters.
He starts the car.
It will be devoured by lawyers and creditors and injunctions and journalists.
Appalling vista number two.
He does a three-point turn and heads for the exit.
But going back to the first appalling vista, the more immediate one, what does he do about Larry Bolger? There’s no way he can possibly allow this sad sack of a man – who also lives in a hotel, as it happens – to jeopardise everything Conway Holdings has built up.
He stops at the exit.
And then it hits him.
That other little pulse of anxiety, the one from yesterday afternoon…
Misdirection.
Displacement.
He pulls out his mobile, finds the number and dials.
As he waits, he glances to the right and up at the peeling billboard for Tara Meadows. It shows an artist’s impression of the development – spectral, stick-insect people with shopping bags crisscross the Piazza. The strap reads: ‘First line of defence, last word in sophistication.’
‘Dave?’
He refocuses.
‘Phil.’
‘Two days in a row? This must be a record.’
‘Yeah. How are you?’ He leans forward, over the steering wheel. ‘But listen, Phil, that thing we were talking about yesterday? I’ve just had an idea.’
It is reported in an afternoon edition of France-Soir that a middle-aged man, believed to be an American tourist, has been seriously injured at the scene of a motorcycle accident in central Paris. The incident took place at about 6 a.m., not far from the man’s hotel.
The story gets picked up straightaway and within an hour three different American news websites are speculating that the ‘tourist’ in question might be none other than US Senator John Rundle, who is currently in Paris as part of a trade delegation. The story is then confirmed a couple of hours later on another website. Sitting in his office now, Clark Rundle is going through this report line by line.
The Senator was apparently out jogging alone in the early hours when he witnessed a motorcyclist careering out of a laneway and colliding with a barricade. He ran to help, but in attempting to get the man out from underneath his bike, the senator slipped in some oil, lost his grip and fell. Part of the motorcycle, a 1500cc Kawasaki, then collapsed on the senator’s hand, crushing two fingers and breaking several bones. He remains in the American Hospital in Paris and a spokesperson says that although surgery will definitely be required the fifty-year-old pol is nevertheless in good spirits.
The motorcyclist himself received only minor injuries and has praised the senator for his quick reflexes and extraordinary courage.
Hhmmmm.
Clark Rundle turns away from his computer terminal.
Slightly overcooked, he would have thought.
It’ll do the job, though.
He hasn’t heard from J.J. in person yet but understands that because he’s still on strong pain-relief medication he might need a little more time to clear his head.
Rundle will have to talk with him, however, and soon. Because J.J. is the only one who can fill him in on what the colonel is thinking – and not just in relation to the Chinese, but now in relation to this Buenke incident, as well.
Details of which conversation Rundle himself will then have to pass on to Jimmy Vaughan.
It’s a delicate set of circumstances, a delicate balance. You’ve got a PR nightmare on two fronts, each one potentially feeding into the other, which means if either one of them blows up they both do, and if that happens the whole fucking shebang blows up.
He rubs his stomach.
But even if they’re successful in extracting J.J. from the equation and in smoothing over Buenke, there’s still no guaranteeing the whole shebang won’t blow up anyway. No guaranteeing the colonel won’t side with the Chinese and take their infrastructure deal. No guaranteeing he won’t unravel years of hard work on BRX’s part and sign away the rights to… whatever it is…