They’d stood like this for ten minutes now; not a word had been spoken since he’d been led into the room. Fegan closed his eyes and let his mind rest. An image of a face in a newspaper burst brilliant in his consciousness, but was gone in an instant, along with the smell of burning flesh. Sweat broke on his forehead. His stomach reeled. A weight settled in his gut, dense, sickly and insistent. He swallowed. A chill rippled from his heart to his groin, then down through his thighs to his calves, and on into the soles of his feet. He shivered like a horse overjoyed with exertion.
When Fegan opened his eyes again he saw Orla O’Kane by the open door. Something moved across her face. Fegan recognised it instantly, like a brother lost but not forgotten. Fear, sweet and giving, the one emotion Fegan knew by sight.
‘Come on,’ she said, dropping her eyes from Fegan’s gaze.
Ronan indicated that Fegan should follow Orla to the grand entrance hall. Fegan did as he was told, glad to be moving, glad to get it over with. The thug closed the door and came behind them as they crossed the hall to the staircase.
Fegan’s heart quickened as he climbed. The stairs levelled to a gallery, then doubled back on themselves to form an atrium beneath a stained-glass ceiling. Morning light shone through it, making orange, green and red shapes on the walls. When Orla reached the first floor gallery she turned right into a corridor leading to the east wing. Ronan gripped Fegan’s shoulder to steer him after her.
Half a dozen rooms branched off the corridor, but Orla kept walking to the double doors at the end. She threw them open in an ostentatious gesture and stepped inside. Fegan entered the room and was met by a low smell of human excrement. He stopped, but Ronan pushed him ahead. Fegan halted as the plastic sheeting rustled beneath his feet.
‘Hello Gerry,’ O’Kane said, his lips parting to form a jagged smile.
The Bull sat in a wheelchair, a blanket covering him from midriff to feet. The chair was high-backed with small wheels, the kind hospital porters used to ferry invalids along disinfectant-smelling corridors. The Bull’s flesh hung loose from his face. His eyes gazed too bright from their darkened pits, his cheeks sunken and hollow. A small bubble of spit glistened at one corner of his mouth.
Two men flanked the chair. Fegan recognised one of them, Ben O’Driscoll, who’d done a short stretch in the Maze during his own time there. He had fat hands and a pugilist’s build, thick around the torso and broad at the shoulders. But the other man was something different, something altogether more dangerous. Medium height, wiry build, and dead eyes. A killer. Fegan smelled it on him through the haze of odours that tainted the air. He knew beyond doubt this was the man Tom the barman had told him about, the one who had prowled Belfast in recent days.
From its size, Fegan guessed this to be some kind of recreation room for the convalescent home’s patients, but all the furniture had been hastily pushed to the walls. Formica-topped tables stood stacked alongside vinyl-coated chairs, overlooked by paintings of the Drogheda countryside. The floor was empty save for the six people gathered there on the plastic sheeting that covered the parquet flooring.
‘Where’s Marie and Ellen?’ Fegan asked.
‘Don’t worry about them,’ O’Kane said.
‘Me for them,’ Fegan said.
‘That was the deal last time.’ O’Kane nodded. He laughed then, high and fractured. ‘Didn’t work out that way, though, did it? It’s not going to work out this time either.’
Orla went to her father. She took a tissue from her sleeve and wiped the spit from his mouth. He slapped her hand away.
‘Da,’ she said, leaning down to him. ‘I don’t want to watch this.’
‘All right, love,’ O’Kane said. ‘You go on, take a walk or something. I’ll call you when it’s done.’
Orla did not meet Fegan’s gaze as she passed. He heard the double doors close behind him, followed by footsteps fading into echoes. Five in the room, now. He glanced back over his shoulder to see Ronan resting against the wall. Fegan noted their positions. The man at O’Kane’s right hand, the killer, stepped forward.
‘I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine,’ the Bull said. ‘He’s been dying to meet you.’
89
Lennon edged along the riverbank, mud sucking at his shoes. Swans watched from the shallows, while others waddled through the grass and ferns between the wall and the water. They hissed as he neared them, raising their heads and opening their wings. Lennon went to the wall and clung to it as he passed them.
A gate sealed an opening in the old stonework. It bordered a landscaped area that stretched down to the water. The ground had been levelled off, and benches and picnic tables arranged on the lawn. A life ring was suspended from a post on the short wooden pier. A small rowing boat sat on the dry slipway. The convalescent home’s patients must have used this place to relax when the weather was good.
He went to the opening and peered through the gate. A wide path cut through well-tended gardens, leading up to the rear of the house. Shutters blinded many of the windows. A quiet hung over the place like a shroud. Lennon leaned close to the bars and scanned the grounds, looking for movement. He saw nothing but magpies squabbling over scraps near a door at the back of the house. It was small and functional, probably an old servants’ entrance leading to kitchens, Lennon thought.
A fire escape had been built on to the western side of the house, ugly steel steps and platforms just visible at the corner.
To the right there was nothing but open ground that would leave him exposed if he went for the fire escape. He could just make out a copse to the left, the trees forming a buffer between the wall and the gardens. They ran up to the east of the house. If he could get over the gate he might be able to use them as cover, then sprint to the door where the magpies fought over morsels.
Thick tangles of barbed wire raised the gate’s height by a foot or so. Lennon stood back and studied it. He could climb the gate, but the barbed wire would cut him to shreds. The wall stood a good ten feet tall; he had no hope of scaling it, unless …
Lennon walked to the landscaped area and crouched by one of the picnic tables. Nothing rooted it to the ground. He tested its weight. Heavy, but not immovable. He set his feet apart, gripped each edge of the table. It moved more easily than he expected, the damp grass providing a slick surface to pull across. A few minutes’ effort had it against the stonework. He climbed up and eased his fingertips over the top of the wall. As he thought, shards of broken glass had been set in concrete. It was a lawsuit waiting to happen, any insurance company would balk at the idea in case some burglar would claim for the lacerations, but Lennon imagined Bull O’Kane had no such qualms.
He pulled his jacket off and folded it into a pillow. He stood on tiptoe, balanced on the table, and laid the jacket across the glass shards. The swans watched with interest from the riverbank as Lennon took a deep breath and hauled himself upwards. He drew his knees up, wincing as the dulled points of glass dug into his kneecaps, then manoeuvred his legs out from under him. The glass tore through the jacket to grab at his thighs. He eased himself over the edge, one arm clinging to the top. Jagged glass ripped through the fabric and scraped at Lennon’s forearm. He let go, and his weight dragged his arm across the point of glass.
Lennon fell towards a bank of dock leaves, tatters of shirtsleeve trailing behind him. He tumbled down through the greenery and slammed against a tree trunk. He stifled a cry as pain shrieked in his ribs. A tapered streak of red blossomed on Lennon’s exposed skin, six inches long. He righted himself, his back against the tree trunk, and examined the wound. It wasn’t that bad, just a scrape, lucky it hadn’t been worse. He reached out and grabbed handfuls of the dock leaves, wiped the sheen of fresh, bright blood away with one handful, then pressed another to the cut.