Her next words had been, ‘Shall we get out of here?’ She had taken the initiative from the beginning, otherwise he would never have got as far as ‘Go’. They had driven down the coast in her small blue Mercedes. Everything was autumnaclass="underline" the air, the sea, their mood. She drove too fast for the narrow Irish roads and too skilfully for it to matter. It was dawn when they arrived back at his house. ‘You have appalling taste’ was the last thing she said before leading him to bed.
After leaving the CIA, he had returned to Ireland to finish the doctorate he had abandoned eighteen years before. Coming back to Dublin had been like a physical blow: the old places, all the memories rushing at him, striking him deep in the pit of his stomach, and him helpless before their onslaught. Rathmines, Ranelagh, Donnybrook, Ballsbridge - the names had leapt out of maps and off the fronts of buses at him, each with its own sweet or bitter flavour, its own particular weight of memories and associations.
He had returned with such hopes, such expectations. Dublin would restore him to youth, or something like that. Dublin would revive in him the ideals of twenty-four years ago. Well, that had all been a fantasy, and he knew it now: even if the city had been preserved in aspic all these years, nothing of the past would have returned to him, or at the most a glimmer, a teasing reflection in a rusted mirror.
His years at Trinity had shaped his life. He had lived and worked in a palace of grey stone, surrounded by dreams and poetry. Not the past only, but a present that seemed not wholly real. It had been less the magic of the place than the enchantment of youth: he had come to understand that in time. But then he was aware only of snow falling on dark, pitted cobblestones, and sunlight on mullioned windows, and the bell in the campanile ringing out against the shadows at dusk as he walked through soft-lit courtyards to Commons. And Francesca. Always Francesca.
Now he was back, but the magic and the poetry had gone. He had tried to find them again in Ruth, but all that remained was a sense of bewilderment and shame. Pressed for a reason, he could have given a dozen. But at heart he knew there had only ever been one reason for his inability to love or be loved: Francesca’s death. But that was the past. He had to come to terms with that. In the dark, he lay listening to the sound of his own breathing, unable to surrender himself to sleep.
He slipped out of bed again, knowing sleep would not come. There had been so many nights like this: they just had to be endured. He crossed to the window, as though drawn by the pale lamplight. A man can resign from the Agency, but his mind and body never relax.
He heard the footstep just as his hand reached for the curtain. A single step followed by silence. He stiffened and lowered his hand. Silence. Cautiously, he eased back the edge of the curtain and bent his eye to the crack.
His dark-adjusted eyes found the man almost at once. On the opposite side of the street, away from the lamp. He was cold and restless and looked like someone who had been standing there a long time. Waiting for something. Or someone.
FIVE
Patrick let the curtain fall. For half a minute he stood by the window, forcing himself to be calm. Ruth was still asleep, her heavy breathing plainly audible to him across the room. Moving quietly in the darkness, he found his trousers and the thick sweater he had been wearing the day before. His shoes were beside the bed.
Downstairs, he paused in the kitchen. A row of gleaming, wooden-handled Sabatier knives hung on a magnetic rack. He selected one with a six-inch blade and slipped it into his belt. It was razor-sharp: he knew, because he had honed the entire set three days earlier.
The back door led into the garden, but he knew better than to go that way. There might be more than one watcher, and the odds were that a second man, if any, would be at the rear of the house.
A side window gave onto the drive. He unlocked the dead-bolt and opened it without a sound. A blast of cold air took him unawares. The wind was rising. There was a roll of thunder, very far away, moving behind unseen clouds. The storm was coming.
He dropped to the ground, poised against possible attack. Here, beside the house, the darkness was complete. Clouds came up fast, obscuring the stars. He crouched, listening. Beneath the pounding of his heart, he heard cold waves turning on the shore. Above him, branches shifted. His skin felt taut and nervous. In spite of the cold, he was sweating.
Crossing the gravel of the drive took an eternity. Then grass, then the fence dividing him from the next house. A frosted lawn led down to a low wall on the other side of which lay the road. From here he could still see the street lamp, but there was no sign of the watcher. Automatically, he checked the knife: the other man would carry a gun, he was sure of that.
Though he knew the darkness hid him, he felt utterly exposed as he sprinted across the road. On the other side, he vaulted the sea wall onto the path that wound along the beach. The tide was well in now, a heavy swell pushed by rising winds. The thunder sounded again, nearer this time, a low, animal growl threatening violence.
He kept to the sand, crouching low. The waves covered any sound. The man was still standing where Patrick had last seen him, in the shadows just beyond the lamp. His back was to the sea. He moved restlessly, trying to keep warm. About six foot, Patrick reckoned, and well built. There would be a car nearby, perhaps another man waiting in it.
Patrick removed his shoes. It was bitterly cold, but he had to be sure of silence. He slipped behind the wall, then over, never letting his eyes wander from his target. The frost felt like daggers on his bare skin. With his right hand he slipped the knife from his belt. Thunder like stones in the sky. Darkness closing in. The sea tormented, moving landward from the night.
He was behind the man now. Without a sound, he set his shoes down. Faint as gossamer, his breath hung in front of his face, trembling. He braced himself and reached with both hands at once. His left grabbed a clump of hair, pulling the man’s head back fiercely, while the right brought the knife round hard against his throat. He could feel the blade touch flesh, the Adam’s apple neat on steel.
‘Kneel.’
The old voice out of the darkness; his own voice, and yet not his voice.
The man grunted, about to scream, his throat bulging unseen against the blade. Then, slowly, his legs buckled and he lowered himself to his knees. Patrick moved hard behind him, a knee in his back, the knife well poised, the long throat taut. He could feel the stranger’s fear, acrid in the sea air, in the electric presence of the storm.
‘Take your gun and throw it to the ground. Please don’t force me to hurt you.’
The man struggled for words.
‘No ... gun ... I ... swear.’
‘Who are you?’
Silence. The wind moving, cold as death.
‘Who sent you?’
The knife again, a trickle of blood, frost on the blade. Silence. Death hovering breathless in the thin air. The man’s fear was rapidly giving way to something else: Defiance? Indifference? Transcendence?
‘Why are you watching me?’
Silence. Then a roll of thunder that echoed across the bay.
He switched to Arabic.
‘Min ayna ta’ti? Where are you from?’
No sign of comprehension.
He tried Persian.
‘Az koja amadi?
No answer.
Suddenly lightning flashed, turning the world to light for an instant. An image fixed itself in Patrick’s mind: a dark-haired man, his head held back, a knife against his throat, a thin line of blood across bruised flesh.
Patrick blinked, and in that instant the stranger made his move. His right hand came up, grabbing Patrick’s wrist, knocking the knife away. He swung in sideways, his hair twisting painfully in his captor’s grasp, his left arm pivoting, his fist striking out hard. Patrick rocked, loosening his grip. The man staggered with him, then dropped forward, using his head to butt Patrick, knocking him down. At that very moment, the storm broke. Like a river bursting through a dam, rain came flooding out of the sky, thick and cold and heavy.