She looks at her watch again.
But if Lucius is ever to secure a second round of funding, she knows she’ll need to be a bit more rigorous than that, a bit more convincing.
‘Is P.J. busy this morning?’ she asks, suppressing a groan. ‘Maybe he could do it. My sister has just… I’m…’
She doesn’t want to get into it. What’s the point? Lucius Software has a staff of only eight and operates out of three rooms on the first floor of a Georgian house in the centre of Dublin. Soon enough there’ll be no avoiding the subject.
‘He’s in London today,’ Siobhan says, ‘and then -’
‘Of course, of course, yeah,’ Gina says, remembering about London.
‘If you’d like I could ask -’
‘No, no, leave it. It’s OK.’ Gina shakes her head. ‘I’ll do it.’
She changes into something more formal and spends half an hour at the desk in the corner, checking emails and scribbling down a few notes for this meeting.
Before she leaves the apartment, she texts Yvonne:
‘Any news?’
She knows she’s clutching at straws, but she needs to hear something.
On her way down in the elevator, she holds the phone tightly in her hand. When she comes out of the building, she turns right and keeps walking.
It’s a pleasant morning, not quite sunny, but bright and fresh. The flow of traffic along the quays isn’t particularly heavy, but as she approaches the IFSC, things in general get busier – more cars, more pedestrians, more noise. When she hasn’t heard back from Yvonne by the time she’s turning onto Matt Talbot Bridge, she decides to put the phone away. She drops it into her bag.
Up to this point she has kept fairly focused, staring straight ahead, but halfway across the bridge, unable to resist, she glances to her left.
Down in the docklands, Richmond Plaza dominates the horizon. Next to it there are two enormous cranes, which look like mechanical high priests, supplicants kneeling before some holy monolith. On previous occasions, Gina has stared in wonder at this rising structure at Richmond Dock, but today it’s a little different. Today her only reaction to it – and this reaction is located in her stomach – is a dull steady thrum of anxiety.
Then she hears a mobile ringing close by and it makes her jump. She glances around. She knows from the tone that it can’t be hers and even sees a passing suit raise his arm and bark into his – but as she moves off towards George’s Quay, she still slips a hand into her bag, pulls her own phone out and checks it.
Just in case.
3
About a mile outside the Wicklow town of Rathcross, retired machine-parts salesman John McNally is walking along a winding tree-lined stretch of road. Since the new section of motorway opened last year these back roads have been quieter and more suitable for walking on. Cars still pass pretty frequently, but pedestrians are not in constant fear of being whooshed into a ditch by the slipstream from an articulated truck.
McNally lives nearby and walks the route as often as he can. His wife isn’t well and requires a good deal of around-the-clock care, most of which McNally does himself, but a nurse comes in for a couple of hours three mornings a week and when she’s there he makes a point of going for a walk. It gets him out of the house. He can stretch his legs and clear his mind.
During a long career as a salesman McNally travelled the length and breadth of Ireland and was familiar with every road in every county – arterial roads, side roads, ring roads, back roads – all of which he thought of as one continuous road, his road. What’s left to him these days of the greater whole is just this tiny segment, a meandering mile and a half that runs from the small church outside Rathcross to the Coach Inn at Hannigan’s Corner.
McNally begins to slow down now, and deliberately so – because until he gets to the bend a hundred yards up the road and catches an inevitable glimpse, beyond Hannigan’s Corner, of that new housing development, of its rooftops and satellite dishes, he knows he will remain protected from any sign of the creeping suburbanisation that is, quite frankly, wrecking this part of Wicklow.
But for the moment it’s OK. There are woodlands on either side of him. To his right, the trees rise up on a steep incline. To his left, beyond the ditch and thickets of bush, there is a fairly steep descent to a stream running parallel with the road. Beyond the stream, the area of woodland continues, rising back gradually and evening out, more or less, with the level of the road. McNally glances every now and again into these dark woods and is entranced by their stillness, which seems inviting, dense with mystery, even at times a little menacing.
Some night, when his wife is deep in her medicated sleep, he’d love to come out here to these woods, to the pitch blackness and the silence, and sit for an hour at the foot of a tree. But he knows he never will. Because wouldn’t it be a slightly crazy thing to do? Wouldn’t it be dangerous, and irresponsible? How would he find his way? What if someone saw him?
He looks around as a car passes, a Volvo estate. McNally watches it rush forward and disappear at the bend up ahead.
Then, a couple of yards in front of him, he notices something in the road – strange marks, a series of curves. They are interlaced and go left from the centre of the road and disappear into the ditch. He knows that these can only be one thing, tyre marks – the result of severe skidding. As he moves closer to the marks, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing, he notices that the thick bush at the side of the road where the skid marks disappear has been disturbed – flattened, in fact – leaving a large gap. He approaches the gap and walks right into it, drawn irresistibly to whatever it is he’s going to find. He steps across the ditch and looks down the slope. At first, he sees nothing unusual. There is the line of the stream, the glistening water, an occasional boulder on one side or the other.
Then he sees it, and can’t understand how it wasn’t the first thing he saw. Forty or fifty feet below, at the bottom of a now obvious track through the grass and bushes, he sees the back end of a vehicle. It is wider than a normal car – like a four-wheel drive, possibly an SUV.
It is sticking up out of the stream, which means its front end is probably submerged in water.
Which means the driver…
McNally has taken a few steps down the slope before he knows what he’s doing, before he realises it’s too steep. If he goes on he’ll slip and fall, and maybe break his neck. He turns and struggles back up.
Standing in the ditch again, catching his breath, he looks up and down the road, but it’s deserted.
He takes out his mobile phone. He hates this bloody thing and hardly ever uses it. Everyone seems to have one these days, and it’s all ringtone this and text message that. He bought his to have in case of an emergency.
His hand is shaking as he prepares to key in 999. He glances back towards the stream.
This isn’t exactly the kind of emergency he had in mind.
4
At about 7.30, Paddy Norton gets out of bed and puts on his dressing gown and carpet slippers. Bleary-eyed, unshaven, he wanders downstairs. He goes into the reception room at the rear of the house and starts circling the full-sized snooker table he put in a few years back but has hardly used since. He played a lot when he was a young man, and to this day he still derives visceral pleasure from the memory of a maximum break he once scored against Larry Bolger. It was his first – and only – 147, and it actually ruined the game for him, because unless every frame he played after that was another 147, what was the point? Anything less was a taunt – if you were this good once, type of thing, what the fuck is wrong with you now? He got the table put in imagining he’d be able to just mess around on it and relax, but it never felt right – whereas walking around it does feel right. And it’s probably because of the sheer size of the table, not to mention the size of the room, that it feels like he’s doing more than just pacing up and down, that it feels, sometimes, like he’s in the chariot race from Ben-Hur.