Boijer leaned forward and shut down the email. Then he turned to Rob. He said nothing, but there was a definite wetness in his eyes.
For a while the men sat around the room. Barely able to speak. Rob shrugged, desolately, at the policemen; and he got up to go.
And then the phone rang.
Forrester took the call. His gaze met Rob’s across the room, as he spoke, low, on the phone. At last, the detective put the phone down. ‘It may be too late for…for Christine. But we can still save your daughter.’
Rob stared at him, from the open door.
Forrester nodded, grimly. ‘That was the Gardai. In Ireland. They’ve found the gang.’
42
Forrester and Rob met at Dublin Airport. The policeman was accompanied by several Irish officers with gold star cap badges.
There was little small talk. Forrester and the Irish police led Rob straight through the arrivals lounge into a breezy car park; they climbed wordlessly into a minivan.
It was Rob who broke the sombre and frightening silence. ‘My ex-wife is here?’
Forrester nodded. ‘Arrived on the flight an hour before you. She’s at the scene.’
‘It was the last seat on that flight,’ said Rob. He felt a need to explain himself. He felt guilty all the time now. Guilty about Christine’s death; guilty about Lizzie’s impending fate. Guilt about his own lethal stupidity. ‘So…’ he said, trying to control his emotions. ‘I got the next flight. I let her go first.’
The cops all nodded. Rob didn’t know else what to say. He sighed and bit his knuckles and tried not to think about Christine. Then he lifted his gaze and told Forrester and Boijer about Isobel and her attempts to find the Black Book. He hadn’t heard from her in a day or more, he told them, and he couldn’t get her on the phone; but that silence might mean that she was close to her prize. Out there in the desert, beyond the reach of a signal.
The policemen shrugged as if trying to be impressed, but failing. Rob couldn’t blame them: it seemed a long shot, and pretty obscure, and so very far away, compared to the reality of cold, rainy Ireland. And a cornered gang of murderers. And an eviscerated corpse. And a daughter about to be dismembered.
At last he said, ‘So, what’s the latest…?’
The senior Irish officer introduced himself. He had greying hair and a serious, firm-jawed face. ’Detective Liam Dooley.’
They shook hands.
‘We’ve been staking them out. Obviously, we can’t go straight in. Heavily-armed buncha guys. They’ve killed…the woman…your friend. I’m sorry. But the girl is still alive and we want to save her. We will save her. But we have to be careful.’
‘Yes,’ said Rob. They were struck in traffic on the busy Dublin ringroads. He gazed through the rainsmeared van windows.
Dooley leaned forward and tapped the police driver’s shoulder: he turned on the siren and the Gardai minivan swung through the traffic, which peeled away to let the police vehicle pass.
‘OK,’ said Dooley, talking loudly above the siren. ’I’m sure DCI Forrester has filled you in but this is the scene now. We snatched one of them, the Italian-’
‘Marsinelli,’ said Forrester.
‘Yes, him. Marsinelli. We snatched him yesterday. Of course that’s alerted the rest of the gang: they know we are surrounding them and they’re heavily armed.’
Rob nodded, and sighed, then he gave into his feelings and slumped forward, his head hard against the seat in front. Thinking of Christine. The way she must have heard her own organs boiling…
Forrester put a calming hand on Rob’s shoulder. ‘We’ll get them, don’t worry, Rob. The Gardai know what they are doing. They dealt with Irish terrorism for thirty years. We’ll get Lizzie out.’
Rob grunted: he wasn’t just feeling sad and scared, he was also feeling a rising resentment, at the police. The police had snatched just one gang member, and his daughter was still inside the cottage, still in the hands of Cloncurry. And Christine was already dead. The Irish cops were screwing up. ‘What you’re telling me then,’ he said, ’is that it’s a total stalemate? You’ve got the place surrounded so they can’t get out but you can’t get in either, in case they do anything to my daughter. But he’s already butchered my girlfriend! And we know he has killed before. So how do we know he isn’t killing Lizzie right now? Right this fucking minute?’
Dooley shook his head. ‘We know your daughter is OK. Because we are speaking to Cloncurry all the time.’
‘How?’
‘By webcam. He’s got another webcam set up-a two-way webcam this time. We’ve seen your daughter and she’s OK. Uninjured. Tied up. As before.’
Rob turned to Forrester for reassurance. The DCI nodded. ‘Cloncurry is rambling on a lot. He may be on drugs.’
‘But what if he suddenly snaps?’
There was a weighty silence in the minivan. The siren had been switched off. No one spoke. Then Dooley said, ‘For some reason he seems determined to get something out of you. He wants this Black Book or whatever it is. He goes on and on about it. We think he is convinced you have it. He won’t kill your daughter while he thinks that.’
Rob couldn’t follow the logic. He couldn’t follow anything.
They turned off the motorway, leaving the last of the Dublin suburbs behind, and sped along open country roads, heading into green, well-wooded hills. White-painted farmsteads dotted the fields. A sign said Wicklow Mountains 5km. It was still drizzling.
Dooley added quietly, ‘And of course, if there is any sign that he is going to harm your daughter we will go in, whatever the risk. We’ve got armed Gardai all over. I promise.’
Rob closed his eyes. He could imagine the scene: the police rushing in, the melee and the chaos. And Cloncurry silently smiling and slitting his daughter’s throat with a kitchen knife, or shooting her in the temple, just before the police smashed through the door. What was to stop him? Why would a lunatic like Jamie Cloncurry keep Rob’s daughter alive? But perhaps the police were right. Cloncurry must be desperate to find the Black Book: that was what Isobel had surmised. And Cloncurry must have believed Rob when he said he could find it. Otherwise he’d have just killed Lizzie as well as Christine.
The problem was that Rob had no idea where the Book was. And unless Isobel came up with something, very quickly, this fact would soon become apparent. And what then? When Cloncurry guessed that Rob had nothing, what happened then? Rob didn’t have to guess. When that happened, Cloncurry would do what he had done so many times: kill his victim. Get that grim and macabre satisfaction, and silence the blood-lusting voice inside him. He would placate his Whaley demons-and kill with great cruelty.
Rob gazed at the sodden green countryside. He saw another sign, half-hidden by dripping oak branches. Hellfire Wood, owned by the Irish Forestry Commission, Coillte. They were nearly there.
He had studied the history of the place on the train to Stansted Airport, simply to give himself something to do. To distract himself from his horrible imaginings. On the top of a hill near here was an old stone hunting lodge: Montpelier House. Built on a hilltop also graced by a Neolithic stone circle. Montpelier had a reputation for being haunted. It was celebrated by occultists, ciderdrinking kids and local historians alike. The lodge was one of the main places where the Irish Hellfire members had got together. To drink their scultheen and burn those black cats and play whist with the devil.
Much of what happened in the house was, as far as Rob could tell, legend and myth. But the rumours of murder were not entirely unsubstantiated. A house in the valley beneath Montpelier had also, according to legend, been used by the Hellfirers. By Buck Egan, and Jerusalem Whaley, and Jack St Leger and all the rest of the eighteenth century sadists.
Killakee House, it was called. And when Killakee House was being refurbished decades ago they had dug up a skeleton of a child or a dwarf, next to a small brass statue of a demon.