Lennon stood back and looked at the car, its radiator jammed into a gulley. It wasn’t going anywhere without a tow rope.
‘Christ,’ he said.
He looked to the water beyond the trees, the Boyne making its way to the coast. No other way to go, Lennon started walking.
85
Fegan stopped and studied the shadows around the entrance to the estate. Leaves and branches stirred in the breeze, but no human form emerged. They were there, Fegan was sure of it. They probably watched him as he stared back. He set off again, his eyes and ears open, ready for any movement, any challenge. When he reached the gates, he stood still, his heels together, his hands at his sides, and waited.
It had been only a few months since he’d last travelled to meet Bull O’Kane. That time he had thought he was done with it, that he would never return to this island again. Fegan supposed he knew deep down he would have no peace until either he or O’Kane was gone. And neither Marie nor Ellen would be safe while O’Kane breathed and hated, so the choice was clear. Fegan had to finish the Bull here, in this place. He had no idea how he would accomplish such a task, but then he never consciously knew how to kill. He simply did, and that was all there was to it. So, he would get inside and find a way.
A man emerged from the trees by the gate and approached. He held a shotgun and a piece of paper which he examined as he drew close. Fegan recognised the image printed on it as the one the Doyles had shown him back in New York.
‘You’ve aged,’ the man said. ‘Go on. Straight up to the house. You’ll be met at the door. Do whatever they tell you. No fucking about.’
The gates opened with a slow mechanical movement. Fegan started walking without speaking to the man. The road turned from rough tarmac to gravel as he passed through the gates. The stones crunched beneath his feet.
The trees thinned to reveal an open sweep of green leading to the three-storey mansion at the end of the driveway. Flower beds punctuated the neat lawns, and smaller gardens split away from the main grounds to form enclaves of shrubbery and rock. A waterless fountain sat at the centre of the semicircle of gravel that fronted the house. Fegan skirted it and watched the vast wooden doors open.
A broad woman in a trouser suit descended the steps. A man came behind her, dressed like the man at the gate in jeans and a khaki jacket. Something bulged beneath themuddy-green material, something very like a pistol.
The woman took a step closer. She had hard features, narrow eyes and thin lips. Make-up failed to mask a bruise on her cheek. Her mouth split in a joyless smile.
‘We’ve been expecting you,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’
86
Orla O’Kane led Fegan through the entrance hall and into the drawing room. She indicated the man who followed them and said, ‘This is Charlie Ronan, and he’ll shoot you dead if you move one single inch. You understand?’
Fegan nodded as Ronan pulled the small pistol from his jacket pocket.
Orla regarded the great Gerry Fegan. Tall and thin, but strong, a face cut from flint.
‘You look tired,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ Fegan said.
‘How did you find this place?’
‘A cop,’ Fegan said. ‘He told me everything.’
‘A cop?’ Orla asked. ‘Which cop?’
‘I don’t remember his name,’ Fegan said. ‘Big house off the Lisburn Road.’
‘Dan Hewitt,’ Orla said.
‘Maybe,’ Fegan said.
‘How did you get here?’
‘Drove,’ Fegan said.
‘Where’s your car?’
‘I left it out the road a bit,’ Fegan said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. ‘An Audi. I stole it in Lisburn. You can send your boys to look for it if you want.’
Orla looked him up and down, the whole of him, trying to find what it was about this sad thin man that haunted her father’s dreams. Then her eyes locked with his, and something cold shifted inside her. She looked away.
‘I won’t be long,’ she said, and left the room.
87
The Traveller dreamed of dismembered children, bodies stacked upon bodies, blank little eyes staring to heaven. He dreamed of crackling pyres and burning meat. He dreamed of the boy who’d come at him with an AK47 in one hand, a newspaper in the other, no more than thirteen or fourteen years old.
Three short bursts of his MP5 cut the boy dead. In his dream, the boy floated to the floor like a sheet of fabric, the AK47 falling to one side, the newspaper to the other. But a draught caught the newspaper and spun it in a slow circle, before carrying it to the Traveller’s feet.
He looked down at the ragged paper. There, his own face staring up at him, the letters forming shapes that said ‘soldier’ and ‘killed’ in the headline, the words beneath the picture coming into focus, a name becoming clearer until—
Wake up.
—the letters formed into words, words he could understand if he really wanted to, for the first time since they’d taken the Kevlar from his head, if he had the will to face—
Come on, wake up.
—them, but he could not face them, yet he could not turn away from them, they burned—
‘For fuck’s sake, wake up, you lazy gyppo bast—’
Before he even knew he was awake, the Traveller was up from the bed, on his feet, the stocky man’s windpipe pinched between his fingers. The man croaked and his eyes bulged. His face turned red then purple.
‘What did you call me?’ the Traveller asked as he blinked the sleep away.
O’Driscoll grabbed his wrist, tried to loosen his grip.
‘What did you call me, you fat cunt?’
O’Driscoll gagged as his mouth opened and closed. He tried to dig his fingers in between the Traveller’s. Strong and hard as they were, they found no purchase. As sleep fell away from the Traveller, the room around him closed in from the edges of his vision. The hospital bed he had lain down on what seemed like an age ago, the clean functional furnishings, the tiled floor. He released O’Driscoll’s throat.
O’Driscoll fell to the floor, gasping and clutching at his neck.
‘Breathe,’ the Traveller said. ‘Slow and deep. Come on, breathe.’
O’Driscoll hauled air in and coughed it out again. He rolled to his side, moaned, and spat on the tile.
‘Dirty fucker,’ the Traveller said.
O’Driscoll’s colour crept back to his normal pasty white and his breathing settled. ‘What’d you do that for?’ he said between mouthfuls of air.
‘I don’t like people sneaking up on me,’ the Traveller said.
‘I was only waking you up,’ O’Driscoll said, hoisting himself into a seated position. ‘They told me to come and tell you when that Fegan fella arrived.’
The Traveller’s heart fluttered with something that might have been joy, or fear, or both. ‘He’s here?’
‘Downstairs,’ O’Driscoll said. ‘The Bull wants you beside him when he’s brought up.’
The Traveller hauled O’Driscoll up by his lapels. ‘Jesus, why the fuck didn’t you say so?’
O’Driscoll could only blink back at him, his mouth sagging open. The Traveller let go of the jacket and was out of the room before O’Driscoll landed in a heap on the floor. For a moment, as he marched down the corridor, an image of a boy with an AK47 and a newspaper in his hands flickered in the Traveller’s mind, a stuttering snapshot of something he couldn’t quite place.
88
Fegan stood silent in the drawing room, his hands loose at his sides. Ronan stared from the other side of the room, that same pistol held useless at his side.
Fegan knew five paces would take him across the space between them faster than the other man could react, and he’d have the gun off him before Ronan could think of pulling a trigger. But what then? Better to stand and wait.