25
Hastings, New York
The River View Motel was a brown brick building located five miles from State Highway 87. It was inappropriately named. Unless you had an excellent telescope and a forty-foot high platform on which to stand, you’d never get a glimpse of any river. The view, such as it was, was obstructed by the roof-tops of surrounding houses and by trees. Seamus Houlihan stood on the balcony outside his room and looked out across a concrete forecourt at two small neon lights that said OFFICE and VACANCY. He saw the shadow of the man who sat behind the window down there. Then, changing his angle of vision, he saw the yellow truck. It was the only vehicle in the whole bloody place. Scratched and dented and splattered with mud, it resembled some old wagon of war.
Houlihan leaned against the rail. So far as he could tell this place had no other residents besides himself and Rorke and McGrath. He yawned, turned around, stepped inside his room. He locked the door, sat down in his armchair, picked up his M-16 from the floor and wondered why bloody McInnes had been so insistent when he’d called a while back. The man had turned into a nag. He was like an old woman, Houlihan thought. Worrying over this, over that, fretting and whining. He’d be taking up crochet next. Dump the weapons indeed!
Houlihan heard Rorke and McGrath move along the balcony. They knocked quietly on his door. He got up, slid the chain, let them come inside. Rorke was carrying a sixpack of Genesee Cream Ale, and McGrath had a pint of Johnny Walker Red Label.
Houlihan produced a deck of cards from his duffel bag and shuffled them. ‘Want to play a few hands?’ he asked.
‘Aye, why not,’ McGrath said. He and Rorke sat down at the small table by the window. Houlihan popped one of the beers and proposed a game of three card brag, nothing wild.
They played a hand for American pennies and Houlihan won it with a queen high. Rorke had a ten, and McGrath the worst hand possible in brag, a five high. Houlihan smiled and sipped his beer, which tasted like soapsuds in his mouth.
Rorke dealt a second hand, which Houlihan also won, this time with a pair of eights.
‘Shitty cards,’ McGrath said, turning over a four, a six and a nine.
McGrath dealt another hand. Houlihan received three threes, called a prile, the highest hand in the game. He had quite a collection of pennies by this time, a small coppery heap in front of him.
‘You’re a lucky sod,’ McGrath said.
Houlihan scooped the pennies towards himself. He liked the simple pleasure of winning.
Rorke yawned. McGrath shuffled his feet. Neither of them ever enjoyed playing cards with Houlihan for long. Seamus had a way of always winning. When he started to lose he’d begin to cheat, palming cards in the most obvious fashion. Nobody ever complained when he cheated.
From the forecourt below the window there was the sound of a car. Houlihan stepped to the drapes, parted them deftly, saw a small red car go past the truck and then it disappeared around the other side of the building. After that there was silence again. Houlihan dropped the curtains back in place.
‘Anything wrong?’ Rorke asked.
‘Just a car,’ Houlihan replied.
McGrath ran a tattooed hand through his short brown hair. ‘I don’t mind saying, I’ll be glad when we’re out of this place. It gives me the willies being the only people in this whole dump.’
Even though the car had gone, force of habit kept Houlihan listening. He experienced a small shrill sensation of unease, and he had been trusting such instincts for a long time now. He reached down and picked up his automatic weapon, a movement that was almost involuntary.
He looked at the other two men. ‘Where are your guns?’ he asked.
‘In our room,’ Rorke replied.
‘Get them and come back here.’
‘Get them?’ Rorke asked.
‘Do as I tell you.’
Both men turned towards the door.
‘One of you,’ Houlihan said. ‘It doesn’t take two men to pick up the weapons.’
McGrath went outside, closing the door behind him. Houlihan, stepping back to the drapes, saw him move along the balcony. Outside, the forecourt was still, lit only by a couple of pale lamps and the neon signs burning above the office.
‘What’s wrong?’ Rorke wanted to know.
Houlihan didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure anyhow. There were times when he had feelings he just couldn’t explain. Some people called it a sixth sense, but to Seamus Houlihan it was nothing more than a survivor’s caution. One time, in Armagh Jail, he’d known in advance that some Catholics were lying in wait for him in the lavatories. Nobody had actually told him this. He hadn’t seen anything unusual either. It had simply occurred to him. There had been a slight pricking sense of danger, nothing he could truly identify, but he’d heeded the sensation with enough attention that when he stepped into the lavatories he was armed with a lead-pipe wrapped in a rag. The Catholics had been there all right, but when they saw what he was carrying they dispersed quickly. Consequently, Seamus had a healthy respect for his own antennae. With his fingers holding the drapes about a half-inch apart he scanned the forecourt.
‘What’s wrong?’ Rorke asked again.
‘Probably nothing,’ Houlihan answered. ‘But I’m not in the business of taking chances.’
‘How do you know this isn’t an elaborate trap?’ Pagan asked. ‘How do you know that this isn’t something McInnes and I cooked up between us? We play out a dramatic scene. I get to punch Ivor. But it’s all fake. It’s all done for the purpose of luring you here to Arsehole-on-the-Hudson so we can kill you. How do you know that isn’t true?’
Patrick Cairney stared through the windshield of the Dodge at the side of the motel building. He wasn’t really listening to Frank Pagan. He was looking up at the balcony. At the lit windows of one room. There was a pain inside him that throbbed endlessly. He shut his eyes a second, and what he saw pressed behind his lids was Finn, Finn the indestructible, the immortal. Finn in his baggy cords, standing by the window in the room of harps. Finn’s finger tunelessly plucking strings. Everywhere he searched his mind he saw images of Finn.
Cairney opened his eyes and stared hard at the yellow rectangle of window above. When he’d called the house near Dun Laoghaire, an unfamiliar voice had answered the telephone. Not Finn. Finn, who always answered the phone himself because there was never anybody else in the house to do it, would have picked up the receiver if he’d been there to do it. And he wasn’t. The strange voice had been hard and sharp and edgy. Who is this? Who’s calling? Patrick Cairney had a mental image of Garda officers going through the house, and somewhere lay Finn’s body covered in a plastic sheet, surrounded by photographers and fingerprint men and all the other officials who attended so clumsily to violent death. A murder investigation, Finn’s house ransacked by careless fingers, files opened and read, correspondence analysed for clues.
Finn was dead.
Patrick Cairney tried not to think. But this one incontrovertible fact kept coming back at him. Again and again. It surged up out of all the hollows he felt inside. It echoed, died, returned with vigour. Finn was dead. He’d never felt loneliness like this before.
‘You haven’t answered my question,’ Pagan said.
Cairney couldn’t take his eyes from the window. He needed to kill. It was the first time in his life that he felt he really needed to shed blood. Beyond that lit window were the men who had slain Finn. The butchers. ‘McInnes is telling the truth. This isn’t a trap.’
Frank Pagan sighed. It was when McInnes had mentioned Finn that the atmosphere of the room in the Essex House had changed. Jig bought the whole story. Everything. Lock and stock and all the rest of it. He remembered Finn’s name from his files, recalled the mystery of the man who was said to have controlled the finances of the IRA, and what he wondered about now was the nature of the relationship between Jig and Finn. Ever since McInnes had pronounced the man dead, ever since that phone call had been placed to Ireland, Jig had gone into a place that was beyond Pagan’s reach. A place where with every passing moment it seemed to Pagan that something quite volcanic was going on inside of the man. Pagan thought about taking his chance now, grabbing the gun in Jig’s hand and seizing it. But he wasn’t going to be lulled by Jig’s apparent distraction or the volatile nature of his mood.
Cairney said, ‘McInnes was right about Finn. He was right about the Ryder truck.’
‘He said four men checked into this hotel. The guy at the desk says three.’
‘McInnes got his numbers wrong. That’s all.’
Pagan asked, ‘Have you ever heard of this Houlihan?’
Cairney pressed his fingertips to his eyes. There was a dull pain behind them. He thought he heard the sound of his whole life collapsing inside him. ‘Pagan, I don’t know the name of every person associated with the IRA. We’re talking about a large and secretive organisation arranged in cells. It’s highly unlikely that I’d know the man.’
Patrick Cairney continued to study the motel. A balcony ran the length of the upper floor, studded here and there with dim overhead lights. Across the forecourt two neon signs shimmered. One read VACANCY. The tension he felt was strong, like acid rising inside him. He tried to relax, tried to put his mind in a place beyond Finn. There isn’t time for this, he thought. Finn wouldn’t want you to grieve over him. What Finn would want was retribution, plain and simple. Get on with it, boy. Don’t dwell on death. People come and people go, only the Cause remains. All at once Cairney was standing in Glasnevin Cemetery and Finn was handing him a revolver, and Cairney wished now that he’d reached out – just once in the whole time he’d known Finn – and goddam held him. On that day. Or any other. Just once. Somewhere. But death took everything away, sealed all the hatches, killed all the possibilities, and whatever he felt now for Finn could never be said.
‘You’ve only got McInnes’s word,’ Pagan said, with the air of a man making one last plea which he knows in advance will be useless. ‘You’ve only got his word that the men in this motel are responsible for all the violence. In my book, Jig, that’s a damn frail thing to go on.’
Cairney looked at Pagan. ‘Your own story was also frail, if you remember. And I accepted it, didn’t I? I accepted the story you told me about McInnes, didn’t I? It was me who decided to take a chance on you, Pagan, and go back to New York City.’
‘There’s a difference,’ Pagan said. ‘I don’t lie.’
Cairney returned his eyes to the balcony. Then he glanced across the parking-area at the yellow truck. It dully reflected the neon signs.
‘So what now?’ Pagan asked. ‘Do you go in? Is that your scheme? Do you go in with your six-gun drawn and your fingers crossed?’
Pagan lowered his face wearily against the rim of the steering-wheel. He was tired of arguing the case against McInnes. Besides, Jig was running this show. Jig had the guns. It was Jig’s baby. And if Jig wanted to believe Ivor, if he wanted to believe that the men inside this motel were some renegade faction of the IRA, well that was the way it was going to be, and there was nothing Pagan could do or say to change it.
Cairney tapped the barrel of his gun against the dash, a quiet little tattoo. ‘You’re going in with me.’
‘Right,’ Pagan said. ‘Unarmed, of course.’
Cairney reached inside the pocket of his overcoat and took out Pagan’s gun, the Bernardelli.
‘I can’t do this alone,’ Cairney said.
Pagan stared at his own gun. He made no move to take it from Jig’s hand.
Cairney realised that this gesture could easily backfire. He was holding the gun out, reaching across a gulf that was far more than the handful of inches separating him from Frank Pagan. But what was the alternative? If he went in alone against the three men, his chances were very thin. Besides, that would entail leaving Frank Pagan right here in the car – and Pagan might just sneak away to make a phone call, bringing in reinforcements. It was possible. Cairney, who knew he was gambling, dangled the Bernardelli in the air.
‘I can’t do this alone,’ he said again.
‘Goddam,’ Pagan said.
‘I need you, Pagan. Take the gun.’
‘Then what?’
Cairney said, ‘I don’t think you’re going to shoot me in the back, Pagan. You had a chance at that already on Canal Street.’
Pagan still didn’t take the weapon. He kept his hands clamped to the wheel.
Cairney thrust the Bernardelli forward. ‘There are three men in this place, Pagan. They shot up a school bus, and they bombed a church. More than that, they killed Padraic Finn. That’s all I need to know.’
Pagan suddenly hated the idea that he was transparent to Jig. Jig saw straight through him. Jig understood there was no way in the world, given Pagan’s private code of behaviour – which was bound up with such antiquated notions as decency and honour and justice, the very sounds of which suggested they belonged in their own room in the British Museum – that Pagan would turn the weapon on him. Frank Pagan wished he were devious, that he had hidden lodes of cunning and could simply take his gun back and shoot Jig through the eyes and drive away from this place, forgetting the three men allegedly responsible for so many deaths. Praise from The Yard. Love and kisses from Furry Jake. Fuck them. Fuck them all. He didn’t need their pressures. He’d do this thing his own way. And if it meant going up to that balcony with Jig, then that’s what he’d do.
He raised his hand, brought it out towards the gun, didn’t touch it.
‘Imagine this, Jig,’ he said. ‘We go in there. There’s gunplay. We come out again intact. What then? Do you expect me to hand this weapon back like a good little boy? Because I have no bloody intention of doing that.’
Cairney didn’t respond to the question. He couldn’t see that far into the future. Nor did it matter. He turned his face back to the balcony.
‘It’s one of those unanswerable questions, is it?’ Pagan asked. ‘We play it as it comes.’
‘There’s no other way.’
Pagan took the pistol from Jig’s fingers.
Jig opened the door of the Dodge. The night air that came in was cold and smelled of damp leaves and the musty odour of the river. Honour and decency and a sense of justice, Pagan thought. They weren’t always wonderful qualities to bring into a situation, but they were inherent in him, a perception that irritated him. Why couldn’t he have been more sly? He opened his own door now and stared up in the direction of the balcony. Another man might simply have shot Jig there and then. But he wasn’t that man, nor could he ever be.
A figure appeared overhead.
Cairney and Pagan, drifting into the gloom beneath the balcony, heard the footsteps rap on concrete. There was the sound of a key turning in a lock, a door opening, closing. Some yards away a flight of iron stairs led to the upper storey. Cairney and Pagan moved quietly towards them.
Jig started to climb. Pagan was surprised by the way the man moved, swiftly and yet without a whisper of sound. He was like a bloody shadow rising, something created by the moon amid latticed metalwork. He appeared not to have substance, weight. Pagan felt clumsy and leaden and old by comparison. When they reached the balcony Jig stopped. Two lit windows threw lights out at an oblique angle ten yards ahead of them.
Pagan pressed himself flat against the wall, echoing the way Jig moved. He didn’t like the idea of creeping towards the window where the lights now seemed rather bright to him. If he had been running this show, he might have chosen to wait outside in the parked car until morning, when at least there would be the definite benefit of visibility.
There was a noise from along the balcony. A door swung open. Framed faintly by electricity from the room behind him, a man appeared. He was holding what looked like two automatic rifles, one stuck under either arm. He struggled to remove a key from his pocket, which he did do in an awkward way, then he turned and somehow contrived to lock the door.
When he’d done this to his satisfaction he started to move towards the place where Pagan and Jig stood. Then, seeing them for the first time, he stopped dead. His features were indistinct but Pagan had the impression that the man’s mouth hung open in astonishment.
For a long time there was no movement. It seemed to Pagan that the place had been drained of air, that there was nothing to breathe. Then the man stepped forward and, as if it were the most natural thing in the whole world to be carrying automatic weapons under your arms, moved to the door of the room adjacent to the one he’d just left. He raised his knee and rapped it upon the wood panels.
Somebody opened the door from inside. Pagan saw a heavy shadow fall across the threshold. The character holding the weapons made to step inside when Jig, suddenly going down on one knee like a determined marksman, fired off a shot. Pagan heard it whine in the dark, glancing against concrete. The man with the weapons turned and faced them and this time Pagan was certain that the expression on his face was one of pure astonishment. The man dropped one of the rifles and clutched at the other, trying to swing it into a firing position. Before he could even get a decent grip on the gun, Jig had shot him.
The man was knocked sideways, sprawling against the handrail. The rifle flew out of his arms and clattered across the balcony. Somebody ducked out of the room, grabbed the automatic weapons up, then vanished back inside, slamming the door shut.
All this happened so swiftly that Pagan felt like a spectator at a deadly game. He looked at the body lying halfway along the balcony, face tipped back, legs crooked. Jig was still incautiously pressing forward, his spine flat against the wall. There was more determination than foresight in the way Jig was conducting business here, and Pagan didn’t like it, but he felt trapped inside a sequence of events over which he had no control. He weighed his own gun in his hand and realised that the back of Jig’s skull made a perfect target for him. The simplest thing in the world, he thought. One shot. One well-placed shot. Finis. But it wasn’t simple at all.
He saw Jig going towards the light that spilled out of the open doorway five yards ahead. Pagan crouched and followed.
Seamus Houlihan shoved one of the weapons into McGrath’s arms. It was rammed with such force into McGrath’s body that the man was momentarily winded.
‘Who the fuck is out there?’ McGrath asked. His face was white. One minute there had been cards and beer and the prospect of going home to Ireland, the next gunfire.
‘The enemy,’ Houlihan replied. He went closer to the door, opened it a fraction.
‘What bloody enemy?’ McGrath asked.
‘You name it, McGrath. People like you and me don’t have many friends.’ Houlihan sniffed the air coming in through the open door. He could see, even though the angle was narrow, the outline of Rorke’s body lying some feet away on the balcony. When he’d stepped outside a moment ago to retrieve the weapons there hadn’t been time to assess the strength of the enemy. Houlihan had been conscious only of the need to get the guns as fast as he could, which he’d done successfully because the enemy was concentrating on Rorke at that point.
Seamus Houlihan picked up the pint of Johnny Walker from the table, took a long swallow, then slid the bottle to McGrath. McGrath drank. When he was finished he set the bottle down on top of the playing cards. He noticed that his last hand, which had gone unplayed, was a reasonable flush. Good hand. But Houlihan would have beaten it somehow. The big man always did.
‘We better get the fuck out of here,’ Houlihan said.
McGrath appeared hesitant. ‘We don’t know how many are out there,’ he said.
‘Does it make any difference? Do you want to sit here and let them come for you? Fuck that!’ For a long time now Houlihan had expected to die a violent death. His whole world had been so circumscribed by violence that the notion of a peaceful death, of slipping away in his sleep, was a bad joke. His father had been shot by the IRA in Derry. His brother, Jimmy Houlihan, had been blown up inside a Protestant bar in Belfast at Christmas 1975. Why would he expect his own end to be any different? He clutched the M-16, checked the clip.
He’d gone out once before, and his luck had held. But he wasn’t going to risk going out again unless he had the gun blazing in front of him. He had absolutely no fear of death. It neither mystified nor terrified. He had chosen combat as a way of life, and the simple fact was that you lived through combat or you died in the throes of it. Death had no metaphysical implications for him. He believed more in an M-16 than in any God. He was thinking suddenly about Waddy, who’d held some superstitious beliefs, and what he hoped was that he could live through any forthcoming conflict because he’d promised himself that he’d give Waddy a decent burial. Poor wee Waddy.
Houlihan went closer to the door. It occurred to him for the first time that he and the others had been sold out. And that the seller had to be McInnes. Even this realisation neither distressed nor surprised him. In his world treachery was just another fact of life. People said one thing, then did the opposite. It had always been this way, and it always would be. He just wished he’d been better prepared. But at least he hadn’t obeyed Ivor’s demand to toss the guns. At least there was that, and he was glad he’d made that decision. He looked out into the darkness. There was perfect silence. The night held all sounds like a bloody miser, giving nothing away. He glanced at McGrath, whose face was colourless. Then he turned his eyes back to the door.
He heard something then.
It was barely audible, but there it was.
A movement on the balcony. Leather on concrete.
McGrath whispered, ‘There could be twenty men out there.’
‘Either we go out or we sit back and let them come in,’ Houlihan said. He stepped towards the doorway.
‘Who goes first?’ McGrath asked.
‘We go together.’
McGrath moved to Houlihan’s side.
‘Just think,’ Houlihan said with a smile. ‘If you were a Catholic you’d be crossing yourself right now.’
Frank Pagan saw the shadow fall in the doorway. He brought his pistol up, caught his breath, waited. He stared at the shadow, which was massive and still. Jig, who was perhaps two feet in front of him, stopped moving. The open door was three or five yards away at most.
Pagan lost his concentration a second. He wasn’t sure why. Tension probably. He gazed down at the motel office where the two neon lights had gone out. Had the clerk gone to sleep? Had he slept through the sound of Jig’s gun? Lucky man. It was another world down there, something that came to Pagan as if through filters, gauzy and indistinct. He stared back along the balcony at the dead man, who lay in his very awkward position. Death could be highly unflattering. Pools of liquid, urine and blood, had gathered around the body. Frank Pagan thought he could catch the odour of urine from where he stood.
The shape in the doorway appeared to grow, but then Pagan realised it wasn’t a solitary shadow at all, it was the darkness cast by two men who stood very close together. He tightened his grip on his gun. Fear, he understood, didn’t have that legendary cold touch at all – rather, it was a warm thing, the temperature of your blood rising and the surface of your skin turning hot.
The shapes moved again. Deliberately, slowly. Pagan glanced at Jig, who was going down as close to the balcony floor as he could. Frank Pagan did likewise, feeling hard concrete against his face.
And then the silhouettes took on flesh and substance, emerging from the doorway, turning from two ghostly things to forms that had an imposing reality about them. The sound of Jig’s gun was suddenly loud, ferocious in Pagan’s ears, and he must have flinched or briefly closed his eyes because when he looked again and fired his own gun he was aware of a man falling back into the doorway and the fierce rattle of an automatic weapon, which sprayed the air randomly as the man went on falling. The second man, who had been behind the first, shot from his hip in a series of small flashes, and Pagan heard Jig groan, a sound that was less pain than one of surprise.
Pagan rolled on his side and fired his handgun again even as the automatic weapon continued to stutter, pocking the concrete and zinging off the handrail, creating a tympany of destruction. Pagan kept rolling and turning until his body was jammed against the metal rail. His eyes were filled with dust and small chips of shattered concrete and he had difficulty focusing, but he understood that the one man left standing had either used up the clip in his gun or the damned thing had jammed on him and he was now reaching into the pocket of his seaman’s coat for something else, another clip maybe, another weapon. Pagan didn’t wait to find out. He fired quickly, striking the tall man somewhere in the region of the shoulder. The man spun around and, clutching his shoulder, began to move along the balcony in the direction of the stairs.
Pagan got to his feet. He was conscious of several things simultaneously. The man running. The fact that the two lights below had come on.
And Jig, sitting with his back to the wall, his head tilted back and his mouth open in pain.
Pagan gaped at him a moment and then ran towards the stairs, which the man in the seaman’s jacket was already descending loudly. Pagan’s feet encountered the M-16 the man had discarded, which slid away from him on contact and went out beneath the rail to clatter on the court below.
The running man was heading for the yellow truck. He stopped suddenly, took a gun from the pocket of his jacket, turned and fired. A window exploded in a place just beyond Frank Pagan’s skull. Pagan reached the bottom of the stairs, and the man fired again – a hasty shot that went off harmlessly into the darkness. Now the man was reaching up to the door of the cabin, apparently fumbling with a key in the lock. Pagan ducked beneath the overhang of the balcony where he was absorbed by shadows, and he took very careful aim. His shot went wide, hammering into the side panel of the truck.
He moved out from under the shadows and took aim again. Before he could get a shot off, the big man had fired twice in rapid succession. Both shots went whining past Pagan’s head. Then the big man was climbing up into the cabin of the truck, grunting as he moved.
Pagan levelled his pistol.
This time his shot struck the man directly in the side of the face. He staggered out of the cab, flailing his arms as he fell to the concrete. There was one terrible cry of pain and then a silence that stretched through the night.
Now, Pagan thought. Now Jig.
He raced up the stairs.
There was no sign of Jig.
Pagan looked the length of the balcony. The two dead figures lay where they had fallen, one slumped in the open doorway of the room, the other close to the rail.
But no Jig.
Frank Pagan hurried to the other end of the balcony. He realised there was a thin trail of blood underfoot, which must have spilled from the place where Jig had been hit. He reached the stairs. Then stopped.
The red Dodge was pulling out of the parking-lot below. Pagan saw the tail-lights dwindling as the vehicle moved away.
Pagan went quickly down the stairs. He sprinted towards the yellow truck. The keys dangled from the doorlock. He climbed up into the cabin, stuck the key in the ignition, turned it, listened to the big engine come to life. As he backed the ungainly vehicle out of the forecourt he thought he knew where Jig was headed. It was inevitable. Since he couldn’t go back to Kevin Dawson’s, and since he wasn’t likely to go into hiding and leave his quest for the missing money in some unacceptable limbo, that left only one place – the last address of all.
Roscommon, New York. The home of Senator Harry Cairney. Where else would he possibly go after Mulhaney and Linney? Where else after Kevin Dawson?
Pagan found Highway 9, which went north. This truck was no match for the Dodge, which meant Jig would reach Roscommon before he could. But there was nothing he could do about that. He’d drive as hard as he possibly could and hope that whatever wounds Jig had sustained would slow his progress north.
When he reached a sign that said Tarrytown, he became conscious of something that lay on the floor of the cab, something bulky stuck between seat and dash. At first he assumed it was a sack of some kind, but when he passed under the sudden glare of a roadside light, he realised that his guess was quite wrong.
This particular sack had eyes.
Shocked, Pagan braked very hard, pulled to the side of the road. He turned on the overhead light. The face he saw half-turned away from him was chalk-white and ghastly. The eyes were open in a way that suggested some cruel realisation at the abrupt end of life. They had about them a certain knowing quality. The mouth was twisted and stiff and the one hand that was visible was bent in a spastic fashion. Frank Pagan reached out and touched the side of the corpse’s jaw, almost as if to reassure himself that this figure had once been flesh and blood and not always the wax effigy it resembled now. A ghoulish moment. He pulled his hand away quickly.
He recognised the man. And as he did so, as he realised that this was the body of one John Waddell, whom he had interviewed last year in connection with the murder of an IRA member in London, he perceived a pattern of events, a meaning in the mosaic that was Ivor McInnes’s bizarre story, a flood of understanding. He wondered how he could possibly have missed the truth for so long. Because like most truths, it had been self-evident all the way along.
Blind, Frank.
Very blind of you.
He dragged the body out of the truck and laid it among a clump of bushes at the edge of the highway. And then he was driving again, thinking of Ivor McInnes and the man’s scheme, which was luminous in its simplicity and savage in its execution.