26

Roscommon, New York

Celestine Cairney had been unable to sleep. It was five past three and totally dark when she decided she’d tossed and turned on the bed long enough. She got up, went to the window, looked out across the blackness of Roscommon. Earlier, there had been a wisp of a moon in the sky, but even that had gone and the waters of the lake were invisible. She sat in the window-seat and listened to the uneven sounds of Harry breathing.

She looked at the luminous figures on the dial of her watch. When you were excited, when anticipation touched you like this, time had a way of prolonging itself. She got up from the seat and moved through the darkness of the bedroom. She rubbed her hands together because she was tense. She wanted Patrick Cairney to come. She wanted to see Patrick Cairney alone.

She caught this thought and held it.

She was remembering Patrick Cairney again as she’d seen him that night in his bedroom. And suddenly she felt sad. There were times when you wished everything had been different. Birth and circumstances, the history of your heart, every damn thing about you.

She sat in the armchair in front of the cold fireplace, legs crossed, placing her hands flat on her stomach. Her nipples were hard, and the very soft hairs that grew on the lower part of her belly stirred.

Patrick Cairney.

She wanted him to be the first to get here.

‘Can’t sleep?’ Harry’s voice startled her.

‘A little restless,’ she said. She lowered her hands to her side and clutched the silk of her nightgown, bunching it in the palms of her hands. It felt like Patrick Cairney’s flesh to her.

Harry turned on the bedside lamp. He reached out for a Kleenex and blew his nose. It was a trumpeting sound, an old man’s sound. Even this room smelled like an old man’s flesh. She had the urge to get up and throw the windows open and let the cold Roscommon night perfume the air with winter.

‘Come here,’ Harry said.

She rose slowly, went to the bed, looked down at him. He wore maroon pyjamas with his monogram stitched into the breast pocket. HC, in fine gold thread.

‘A kiss,’ the old man said.

She lowered her face, brushed her lips against his, stepped back from the bed. ‘Get some sleep. You need it.’

‘What about you?’

‘Don’t worry about me.’

Harry Cairney watched her with eyes that never ceased to be adoring. She rearranged the bedsheets, turned off the lamp, returned to the window. The room seemed even darker than it had before. She placed one hand under the cushion of the window seat, where she’d concealed Harry’s old Browning, and she removed it. There was a terrifying certainty about the gun, the weight of it, the hardness in her hands. She turned it over a couple of times, then returned it to its hiding-place.

Make him come here, she thought.

Just make him come here.

Soon. Soon now. Soon she’d be gone from this house.

She laid her cheeks against the glass and looked out across the night, and thought how hard she’d tried to pretend she cared for Harry Cairney. And how close she’d come to the peril of actually believing she felt something, when all she carried in her heart for him was no more feeling than a slug had when it slinked insensately through blades of grass and left a trail of crystal. When you pretend to be something for long enough, you become that thing.

But she’d done her duty. She could always say that about herself.

Poughkeepsie, New York

Patrick Cairney pulled into a closed gas-station and turned off the engine of the car. The pain he felt was searing, as if the flesh were peeling away from the bone. He reached down and turned up the left leg of his pants and gasped because even something so simple as the brush of clothing against the wound was excruciating. He drew his hand back up. It was covered in blood. He knew that a bullet had passed through, close to the shinbone, burrowing a ragged hole in his flesh. Pretty soon he’d feel numbness around the wound, and then there would be the sensation of uselessness in the limb. He wondered how much blood he might have lost since leaving the River View Motel.

He struggled to take off his coat, which he tossed into the rear seat. Then he removed his shirt and tugged at the sleeve, managing to separate it from the rest of the garment. With this improvised bandage twisted around a ballpoint pen he found in the glove compartment, he made a very crude tourniquet which he applied to the wound. It was extremely painful to do so, but he realised his choices were more than a little limited. He could bleed to death or he could attempt to stem the flow of blood with anything he had at hand – and hope he’d make it to Roscommon before he became weak and delirious.

He rolled the window down and breathed night air deeply into his lungs. He had to keep a very clear head. When he reached Roscommon he’d make up some kind of story – something about an accident. He wasn’t sure quite what yet. That was the easy part anyway.

For a moment he sat with his eyes closed and his head tipped back against the seat. It was odd how, when he thought of Finn now, he was unable to bring into his mind an image of the man’s face. It was lost to him suddenly. He could hear the voice still and he imagined he was listening to Finn whispering quietly in his ear. I asked too much of you this time. I sent you in there on a wing and a prayer. I was only thinking of the money. I wasn’t thinking about the danger to you. Nobody could have done anything better in the terrible circumstances. I’m sorry, boy.

Cairney shook his head, opened his eyes.

Roscommon. He’d go there and see his father. He’d go there and heal for a time. It was a safe place for him now. He’d avoid Celestine. He wouldn’t think about her. When he passed her in the hallway or ran into her at mealtimes he’d be polite but aloof. She’d get the message quickly.

Goddam, the pain was agonising. He bit on his lower lip hard. There was a way to transcend this kind of pain, if he could only reach inside himself deeply enough. The trick was to remove yourself from your physical cage and soar. To cross that bridge between the corporeal and the spiritual. To divide yourself.

Bullshit. Pain was pain, no matter what you tried to think.

Groaning, he retrieved his overcoat and drew it around his shoulders. Then he turned the engine on. You’re young and strong and the wound will mend. And after that you can go looking for Finn’s money again.

Finn’s money, he thought. He’d been sidetracked, detoured, that was all. When he’d healed, he’d go back to Kevin Dawson’s house. And if Dawson didn’t have the money, then the President’s brother might be able to give him a lead to the character Mulhaney had called The Old Man. When his wound was better, he’d go back out again, he’d find the money and take it back to the house near Dun Laoghaire.

The empty house.

The room of muted harps. Finn’s old wall posters, collected over the years. There were a couple from the Irish general election in 1932. End Unemployment! Vote Fianna Fail. Vote Cumann na nGaedheal! Cairney recalled them with clarity, the way he remembered the whole whitewashed house, the airy rooms, the crooked hallway, the stairs that went up to Finn’s immaculately spartan bedroom, which was like a monk’s cell. But he still couldn’t see Finn’s face. He wondered if he’d ever be able to bring it to mind again or if, like the man himself, it was lost to him for all time.

He drove the car out of the gas station and headed back in the direction of the highway. For the next twenty miles he wasn’t even conscious of the pain. He’d found a useful trick to deal with it. He kept thinking of his father, the sick bed, the claustrophobic enclosure of an oxygen tent – and these images dispelled at least some of his own anguish.

Not all. Just some. Maybe enough to keep him plugging through the miles still ahead.

Danbury, Connecticut

Inside the diner, Artie Zuboric waited impatiently for Tyson to finish his coffee but Bruno was obviously reluctant to hurry. He’d been like this all the way from Kevin Dawson’s place, hemming and hawing, wondering aloud if what they were doing was the right thing. It never occurred to Bruno that what they were doing was the only thing and that questions of right and wrong didn’t come into it.

Tyson Bruno dropped a sugar lump into his coffee and said, ‘When Korn finds we’ve split, he’s going to shit bricks.’

Zuboric was tired of hearing his colleague talk about the things Leonard M. Korn was going to do. ‘Look, you want out, that’s fine by me. I’ll go on alone.’

Tyson Bruno shook his head. ‘I’ve come this far.’

Zuboric was very anxious to be on his way, but Bruno had insisted they stop for coffee. Now, though, Zuboric felt the kind of urgency that had the relentless quality of a runaway train. He knew he’d overstepped his authority, that he’d defied the personal instructions of The Director, but he hadn’t seen much point in hanging around Dawson’s house and waiting for Korn to show up just to vent his considerable wrath on himself and Bruno.

This was all or nothing time now.

It had taken nerve to walk away from the situation. But then his own reserves of nerve had astonished him. He’d actually gone upstairs in the Dawson home and interrupted Kevin in the middle of his grief, gently taking him aside, pulling him away from the figure of his sedated wife, saying he had a couple of questions to ask and they had to be answered even though the time was wrong, but the process of justice couldn’t wait, sorry sorry, a million apologies, but that’s how it had to be. Zuboric didn’t want to go through all that again ever. Kevin Dawson had responded to the questions like a man submerged in ten feet of stale green water.

‘If we bring in Jig,’ Zuboric started to say.

Bruno interrupted. ‘If we bring in Jig we’ll get medals. And if we also happen to bring in Frank Pagan, hey, write your own citation.’ A bruised little smile appeared in the middle of Tyson Bruno’s face. ‘But you can’t open a bank account with ifs, Artie. First off, you got to keep in mind that Kevin Dawson wasn’t exactly at his best when you talked to him. The man’s in an awful lot of pain and turmoil. In that condition, you don’t always get your facts right. Second, you could be making a trip way out to the sticks for absolutely nothing, because by the time you get there Jig might have been and gone, and Frank Pagan as well. If either of them was ever headed there in the first place, that is.’

‘I’ve got nothing to lose,’ Zuboric said. ‘Neither have you.’ And he thought of Charity Zuboric taking off her copious bra and her G-string for the gratification of sick old men.

Tyson Bruno finished his coffee, pushed his cup aside. ‘That’s the truest thing you ever said.’

Zuboric started to get up. Tyson Bruno tugged at his coat sleeve. ‘I want you to know it took a lot of balls to talk to Kevin Dawson the way you did.’

‘I did what I had to,’ Zuboric answered.

Both men stepped outside into the parking-lot of the diner.

‘It would be neat if we happened to find both these guys in the same place,’ Bruno remarked as they reached the car.

Zuboric said nothing. He surreptitiously patted his shoulder holster, a man taking inventory of himself. He got inside the car on the passenger side and Tyson Bruno sat behind the wheel.

‘Drive,’ Zuboric said. ‘Drive like your life depends on it.’

‘It does,’ Bruno said.

Rhinebeck, New York

The old guy in the twenty-four hour convenience store did everything slowly and deliberately. When he said the word ‘Roscommon’ Pagan thought he counted at least fourteen syllables.

‘You mean old Franz’s place,’ the man said. ‘Used to belong to a brewer before Harry Cairney came along.’

‘That’s the place,’ Pagan said.

‘Can’t figure why you’d want to go there this time of day.’

‘I’m looking for a friend.’ Pagan kept the impatience out of his voice.

The old guy stepped out of the store to the sidewalk. The cold apparently didn’t bother him. ‘Go down that a way,’ he said, pointing one long bony finger down the main street of Rhinebeck, which was sleepy and clean. ‘You want three oh eight for five miles. There’s a crossroads down there. You take the left fork. Quiet road. There’s no signs. Keep going maybe two miles. You can’t miss it. Big house about a hundred yards back from the road.’

Frank Pagan thanked the old man and went towards the truck. He climbed up inside the cab and turned the key in the ignition. His whole body, still shaking from the vibrations of the vehicle and all the miles he’d travelled, felt like a tuning-fork. Fatigue gnawed at him. There was some small corner of his brain that was still alert, but it was like a room lit only by a twenty-watt bulb. It was a room occupied by two people. Jig sat in one corner. Ivor McInnes, the Terrible, was silent and surly in another. I know what you’re up to, Ivor, Pagan thought. And all your silences, all your denials, won’t save your white Presbyterian arse now.

But first there was Jig.

He backed the truck up, headed out through Rhinebeck, passing the unlit windows of small stores. He adjusted his rearview mirror, catching a quick flash of his own reflection. He looked like something disinterred and carted home by a dog and dumped in the middle of the Persian rug to the general dismay of the whole family.

Frank Pagan, an old bone.

But an old bone with a mission.

Roscommon, New York

There was a weak suggestion of dawn in the sky when Patrick Cairney drove through the gates of Roscommon and passed the security jeep that was parked between the trees. The driver of the jeep recognised him and waved him to continue.

Cairney, who felt disoriented because the pain in his leg had been crippling for the last twenty miles, slowed the car in front of the house. He made no move to get out at once. He reached down and grabbed the leg, massaging it lightly, trying to ease the pain with his fingertips. The cuffs of his pants were soaked with blood, his sock squelched inside his shoe, and there was barely any feeling left in the limb itself. It might have been a stranger’s leg, a graft that hadn’t worked. He pushed the car door open and got out awkwardly, standing in front of the steps that led up to the front door. The injured leg pulsated, several scalding little spasms. Cairney moved towards the steps, dragging one foot.

She materialised there in the shadows, a sudden bright spectre in the gloom. She wore a blue robe and her hair was tied up on her scalp with a simple rose-coloured ribbon. Cairney stared at her expressionlessly. He didn’t move. Nor did he want her to see him in pain because he didn’t need her concern or any offer of assistance. He didn’t want her to touch him, a supportive hand on his elbow, the nearness of her body, her perfume, anything. No contact. No connection.

He gazed at her. She was standing very still, her arms at her side. She looked remote. He had absolutely no way of knowing if she was pleased to see him. But then she wasn’t going to smile, was she? There was a sick man inside the house, it wasn’t a situation for merriment or pleasure. It wasn’t a time for happy reunions, even if he’d wanted one.

He moved up on to the first step.

It was a brave effort, but he couldn’t pull it off. The leg buckled under him and he went down, and suddenly she was coming down the steps towards him, her arm held out and her look one of worry.

She saw the blood on his clothes. She went down on one knee and moved the cuff of his pants aside and her touch, which he still didn’t want, was pleasantly cool, almost a cure in itself. She raised her face, looked at him. Cairney closed his eyes. Pain could be seductive at one end of its spectrum, it could lull you out of your body, carry you away into a numb place.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘I had an accident.’

‘We better get you indoors,’ Celestine said. She helped him stand, let him support the weight of his body against her. They went up the steps, bound together as surely as if they’d been roped one against the other. She aided him inside, took him along the hallway, made him lie down on the living room sofa. His blood came through the useless tourniquet and soaked the velvet material of the couch.

She decided to undo the tourniquet he’d created. She tossed aside the bloodstained ballpoint pen, the sleeve of the shirt, and then she was studying the raw wound itself. She saw at once that it was a gunshot wound, but she didn’t say anything. She looked at him, and what she felt was pity for him.

She didn’t want to feel such a thing. If she entertained pity, then it would only make everything more difficult. She lowered her eyes and examined the wound again. She touched it gently. Cairney winced, drawing his leg aside.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

He struggled to control the pain. ‘How is he?’

‘As well as can be expected.’

‘I need to see him.’

‘It can wait.’

Cairney moved his leg. Celestine pressed firmly on his shoulders. ‘Stay where you are,’ she said.

‘I can get up. I can make it upstairs.’

‘Patrick,’ with a warning in her voice.

Cairney swung his leg to the floor. She wasn’t going to stop him from going upstairs. He tried to stand, but the leg gave way and he had to sit down again.

‘I told you,’ she said.

Cairney stared at her. He hated feeling so damned feeble in front of her. He hated the idea of being at her mercy.

She said, ‘There’s a way to take your mind off pain, Patrick.’

She undid the buttons of her robe and leaned towards him, her small breasts swinging very slightly.

Cairney caught her by the hair and turned her face to one side. Her ribbon came undone and the hair spilled out over his hand and he remembered how, when she’d come to his bedroom, she’d woven that same hair around his penis in a gesture that was perhaps the most intimate he’d ever experienced. Desire and pain. There was a strange interlocking of sensations inside him right then, as if desire and pain had fused together in one feeling that was indescribable and fresh and beyond any emotion he’d ever registered. He shut his eyes, let his hand fall away from her hair, felt her fingers move over his thighs.

‘Trust me,’ she said.

It was a whisper, barely audible. He felt her breasts against the palms of his upturned hands.

She undid his belt slowly. Then she slid her fingers against his groin.

‘Trust me,’ she said again.

He felt her mouth, the slight friction of lips, the motion of her tongue. He retreated into the darkness of himself, a refuge of pleasure, a place where all the pains subsided like dead tides. She was climbing up into his lap, and he could feel the edge of her open robe rub the side of his face, then she was taking his hand and directing it between her legs, where she was moist and warm and open for him.

He opened his eyes, looking directly into her face. There was a quality of opaque glass to her beauty, he thought. Just as you thought you could see straight into her, a glaze moved over her eyes, leaving you with nothing.

‘Love me,’ she said. ‘Love me just one time.’

He closed his eyes again and felt himself float out through the estuaries of pain as if on some very frail raft of himself. He wasn’t thinking now of Finn nor of the sick man who lay upstairs at this very moment nor of the money stolen from the doomed Connie O’Mara, he wasn’t thinking, he was out of the range of his own thoughts, beyond the radar of conscience or guilt, moving his hips while Celestine tilted her head back and her hair toppled in disarray over her bare shoulders. It was a fragile moment, and an intense one, and he wanted to believe he was capable of this treachery, that nothing else mattered to him except this woman who straddled him now and in whose body he had lost himself. That the man who lay ill upstairs meant absolutely nothing to him. He had lost Finn – what was the loss of his father compared to that? Besides, he had spent years creating and maintaining fictions. What was one more? He could imagine all the events of recent days collapsing behind him into oblivion. Here and now, nothing else.

And then it passed. The moment was gone. Cairney sighed and fell motionless against the back of the sofa.

Celestine stared at him. She was also conscious of a precious moment passing away. She had an empty feeling, a realisation that this particular segment of time was never going to come again, no matter how long she might live. And it couldn’t be otherwise. She slid away from him, lowered herself to the carpet, looked up at his face.

‘I asked too much,’ she said very quietly. ‘Or maybe I didn’t ask enough. Go see your father now.’

How could he go upstairs and into the old man’s sick room with the smell of Celestine on his fingers? How could he stand by the bed and look into that dying face and not feel the weight of a terrible guilt? He stared down at his wound. Dear God, he’d been so determined to avoid this woman, so intent on staying away from her – and then this had happened, this travesty, this bastard intimacy.

His father’s wife.

He stood up slowly.

The leg didn’t yield this time. But his eyesight blurred, and he felt very weak.

He turned towards the door, where he stopped and looked back at her. ‘There’s a name for people like us,’ he said.

‘I’m sure there is.’ Kneeling on the floor, her robe open, Celestine looked impossibly lovely. He understood he was always going to see her the way she was right then. She had a curious smile on her face.

‘It was my last chance,’ she added. ‘I didn’t want to waste it.’

That finality in her voice. It was odd. He wanted to know what she meant by her statement, but he didn’t ask. He didn’t think he could stand the sound of his own voice.

He began to move towards the stairs. He climbed slowly, stiffly, hearing the sound of Celestine at his back.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

She caught up with him on the landing. Ahead, the door of Harry Cairney’s bedroom lay half open. Celestine reached for him, caught him by the wrist.

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated.

‘You don’t have to be. It takes two.’ He paused. ‘In this case, the wrong two.’

He moved towards the bedroom door. He raised his hand to the wood and pushed the door open very quietly.

‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘How could you?’

Frank Pagan saw the jeep come out of the trees towards him. It moved quickly, blocking the truck on the driveway, then it stopped. Two men stepped out of the vehicle. They carried shotguns and moved cautiously but with a certain dead-eyed determination. Pagan saw a grim quality about the men. Like security guards everywhere, they had enemies all over the place. A mailman, a delivery boy, a milkman – anybody who came to this place was a possible carrier of destruction.

Pagan took his gun out of his pocket and held it concealed between his knees. He gazed past the oncoming guards into the first few bars of dawn that had slinked across the sky, and he thought it was a hell of a way to begin a new day. Two men with shotguns. He hoped it wasn’t downhill from here.

He didn’t move. He didn’t roll his window down. He just watched them coming. They wore plaid jackets and had baseball caps, and they reminded Pagan of archetypes in the American nightmare, those rednecks who seasonally take to the forests and wage a bloody one-sided war on anything with four paws or a beak. Beyond them, through bare trees, he saw the house itself, a big grey stone building that lacked the one quality every country house should have – enchantment.

His attention was drawn back to the two men.

They approached the cab of the truck. One of the men rapped on the glass with the barrel of his shotgun. It was an ominous gesture. Frank Pagan braced himself. He smiled, reached for the door handle, hesitated. He wasn’t going to let such a trivial matter as two men with shotguns spoil his day.

He turned the handle. This was going to take all the scattered elements of his concentration. This was going to need everything he could find in himself.

‘Where the hell do you think you’re going, buddy?’ one of the men asked.

Now! Pagan shoved with all his might and the door flew open, swinging back swiftly on its hinges. It hit the first man with terrific force in the dead centre of his chest, and the window smashed into his face, and he dropped to his knees, clutching himself and groaning. It was a violent collision of metal and glass and bone, and Pagan felt the connection shudder through him. The second guard quickly brought his shotgun up, but he was a pulse too slow because Frank Pagan was already out of the cab and pointing his gun at the man in a deliberate way, the expression on his face as severe and forbidding as he could make it.

‘I’ll use it,’ Pagan said. ‘Make no mistake.’

The guard with the shotgun appeared subdued. His look suggested that of a hunter confronted by a duck with an M-16. He stared into Pagan’s pistol and dropped his weapon and stepped back from it, raising his hands in the air.

‘Cooperation,’ Pagan said. ‘I like that.’

The man who’d gone down was staring up at Pagan through eyes that showed nothing but intense pain. Pagan kicked both fallen shotguns into the shrubbery and said, ‘Get up.’

Moaning, the guard got to his feet. He was a short man and he moved with uncertainty, in the manner of somebody betrayed by his limbs. He wouldn’t stop groaning as he shuffled. He raised a hand to his nose and touched it in a tentative way, afraid that it had been broken. Pagan saw slicks of blood gather in his nostrils.

‘Get inside the truck,’ Pagan said. ‘Both of you.’

He herded the guards forward, unlocked the rear door of the truck, pushed them inside. They complained and threatened, telling him what terrible things they were going to do to him when they got out. He slammed the door behind them, locked it, smiled to himself. He hadn’t altogether lost his touch, which was a nice thing to know. When he had to act, he could still be swift and purposeful. There was no better way to begin a day than with some striking insight into your own capabilities. To know that, despite the oncoming winter of forty, a season he feared would be drab and filled with dread, you still had the fire inside.

He turned away from the truck, listening to the muffled noise of the imprisoned guards beating on the interior panels, and walked quickly up the driveway to the house. Outside, he saw Jig’s red car parked at an awkward angle near the foot of the steps. He paused then, noticing that the front door of the house lay open. He didn’t care for the open door. It suggested that the inhabitants of the place had become so distracted by other things that they’d forgotten to close it behind them. Distracted by what, though?

Pagan, whose recent surge of adrenalin was fading, stood very still at the bottom of the steps. He stared up at the grey windows of the house, which reflected very little of the dawn light. It really wasn’t a welcoming kind of house. The windows suggested dark rooms beyond them, large rooms with high ceilings. Pagan just knew there would be chilly crawlspaces and an arctic attic, and, in the dead of winter, the whole house would have corners that no heat could ever reach.

He had to go inside. He had to get out from under the windows, which were beginning to make him feel vulnerable. He went up the steps slowly, stepped inside the large hallway, stopped. There was a silence in the place, the kind of quiet that breeds indefinable fears. Pagan looked in the direction of the staircase, an ornate mahogany construction that went up and up into shadows.

Patrick Cairney stopped as soon as he entered the room. This was all wrong, this was all somehow askew, his expectations wrenched out of synch with reality. There was no oxygen tent, no tubes and appendages, no sick man lying on the bed. Harry Cairney was kneeling on the floor by the fireplace, stuffing rolled-up newspapers into a grate that was creating black smoke. He was trying to build a fire, and the stereo was playing an old John McCormack recording, which filled the room with a familiar melancholy.

She was lovely and fair as the rose of the summer

Yet ’twas not her beauty alone that won me …

It was totally wrong.

Patrick Cairney stood still. He clenched his hands at his side. The song, usually so sentimental and sweet, struck him with terror. He stared at the back of his father’s head, conscious of Celestine moving in the corner of his vision, stepping across the room towards the window. Patrick Cairney felt very cold all at once, and the pain in his leg flared up again and with renewed ferocity. He had the sensation of drifting inside a dream, when all your known realities and all your expectations are perceived through the misshapen reflections of trick mirrors, bevelled surfaces, frosted glass.

Harry Cairney turned. His face was lit by surprise. ‘Patrick!’ he said. ‘Dear God, nobody told me you were coming!’ He dropped newspapers and matches in a flurry and stepped across the room and embraced his son and held him for a long time. Patrick Cairney clasped his father and it was still dreamlike. Even the touch of the old man had no real substance, no depth.

‘Patrick, Patrick,’ the old man said. ‘Welcome back. Welcome home.’

Patrick Cairney stared over his father’s shoulder at Celestine, who was framed by the window. He couldn’t read her face. Suddenly he wanted to know what was written there, what her expression said. He thought of the lie she’d told him about his father’s sickness, and it made him feel as if his heart were squeezed in a vice. There was something wrong here, very wrong, and he couldn’t figure it out. He’d been lured back to Roscommon. He’d fallen into some awful trap. And even though he knew this, he couldn’t find the resources in himself to respond to the bewilderment of the situation.

He closed his eyes a moment, feeling his father’s breath on the side of his face. The old man smelled of burned newspapers and spent matches.

Harry Cairney released his son, stepped back.

‘Celestine knew you were coming, didn’t she?’ Harry asked. ‘This is one of her surprises, isn’t it?’

‘She knew,’ Patrick Cairney said. He heard his own voice echo inside his head. It was the sound of something stirring at the end of a long tunnel.

‘She’s always surprising me.’ And Harry Cairney smiled across the room at his wife. She was standing beside the window-seat.

Patrick Cairney reached out and hugged his father again. He held him very tightly this time.

‘You’ll suffocate me,’ the old man said, laughing.

Patrick Cairney slackened his hold. It seemed to him that the only real thing in this room, the only anchor, was his father. He felt the pain burn, rising the whole length of his leg. He fought to gain control over it, but his will wasn’t fully functioning.

Celestine, he thought. What have you done?

Harry Cairney took a step back, studied his son, noticed the bloodsoaked cuffs of the pants. Jesus. What happened to you?’

‘I had an accident,’ Patrick said.

Celestine moved at the window.

Oh, no, ’twas the truth in her eyes ever dawning

That made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee …

There was the wretched scratching sound of the needle being struck across the surface of the record and the song stopped. Both Patrick Cairney and his father looked in Celestine’s direction. The silence in the room was suddenly overwhelming. Nobody moved. Celestine created a slim shadow against the window.

‘Why did you do that?’ Harry Cairney asked. He went to the record player and took the disc off and examined it. ‘You’ve ruined it, for God’s sake. Do you know how hard it is to get a duplicate of that particular recording?’

Celestine said, ‘I don’t care.’

The look on her face was one Patrick Cairney hadn’t seen before. It was fearfully cold, and ruthless, and there was a tiny spark of amusement in the eyes.

He also saw the gun in her hand, concealed by the folds of her robe.

Dizzy, he reached for the back of a chair and leaned against it and the pain in his leg went shooting up into. his skull, where it was molten and white-hot like lead in a furnace.

‘What are you doing with my gun?’ Harry Cairney asked.

Celestine pointed the Browning directly at her husband. ‘Harry. Dear Harry. Have you met John Doyle?’

Patrick Cairney gripped the back of the chair. He had the strange impression that the ceiling was lowering itself, that the room was diminishing and the walls were going to crush him.

‘John who?’ the old man asked.

‘Your son,’ Celestine said. ‘John Doyle. Also known as Jig.’

Harry Cairney laughed. ‘What the hell has gotten into you?’

Celestine looked at Patrick Cairney. Her face seemed to him as though it were a fuzzy television image travelling through miles of static. He had no control over his pain now. Wave after wave, each one sickening and depleting, surged through him.

‘Pat,’ Celestine said. ‘Didn’t you know your father headed the organisation that raised funds for the IRA? Didn’t you guess that your own father was on your wanted list? Doesn’t it strike you as superbly ironic, Jig? Doesn’t it strike you as funny?’

Patrick Cairney shook his head, glanced at his father. The Old Man, he thought. Harry Cairney raised an arm slowly, turned his hand over in a little gesture of puzzlement.

‘You don’t know what you’re saying, Cel.’

‘But I do, Harry.’ Celestine smiled. ‘Ask your son. Ask him if he’s Jig.’

Harry Cairney looked at his son. He opened his mouth, but he didn’t say anything. He couldn’t bring himself to talk. He gazed down at the blackened blood staining Patrick’s leg, then raised his eyes to the boy’s face. Jig, he thought. The whole thing was some terrible mistake, a joke, any moment now Celestine would pull the trigger of the gun and a flag would pop out with the words Ha ha, fooled you, but it wasn’t April the First, and the way his wife looked didn’t seem remotely whimsical to him.

Patrick Cairney said, ‘You’re lying, Celestine.’

She tossed her hair back with a gesture of her head that reminded Cairney of a small girl bothered by flies. ‘You’re careless, Patrick. You carry a passport made out in the name of John Doyle. You don’t take the precautions you should. You’re not as good as people say you are. The great Catholic avenger. The Irish freedom fighter. But you’re weak, Patrick. Weak where it really matters. Shall I tell your father how weak you really are? Would you like that?’

Cairney stared at her. He understood that it didn’t matter to her whether she hurt Harry or not. ‘I’d prefer it otherwise,’ he said feebly.

The old man had a fleck of spit at the cranny of his mouth. He reminded Patrick Cairney of a man plunged down in the centre of some totally unfamiliar spectator sport whose rules he has to guess. He stepped towards his wife and asked, ‘Even if he happens to have a passport in somebody else’s name, how the hell does that make him Jig?’

‘Because Jig travels under that name at times.’

The old man’s face was suddenly florid. ‘How do you know that? How do you know any of this?’

Celestine ignored his question. The look on her face dismissed him, relegated him to some unimportant corner of her life. She turned her attention to Patrick Cairney.

‘I liked the archaeological symposium bit,’ she said. ‘It’s a pretty good cover. It explains all the trips you must take if anybody ever asked, but it’s fake. Totally fake. Tell your father, Patrick. Tell him the truth.’

Cairney felt the room spin around. He wondered how much blood he’d actually lost. He wanted to sit down but didn’t move. He had the feeling that if he did sit he’d never rise again. He gazed at the gun in Celestine’s hand and experienced an odd little hallucinatory moment when it seemed to him that metal and skin had become fused together. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, focused on Celestine’s face, trying to associate what he saw there with the woman who’d whispered Trust me, trust me on the sofa downstairs. He had the thought that if she was capable of sexual treachery, what else could she bring herself to do? There were no limits, no boundaries. Anything was possible.

‘You’ve been wasting your time from the start, Jig,’ she said. ‘It’s been a lost cause from the beginning. But you must be used to lost causes by this time. You’ll never see that money, Jig. You know that, don’t you?’

Harry Cairney, who felt betrayed by all his senses, couldn’t take his eyes from his wife. ‘What do you know about the money?’ he asked.

‘Harry, Harry,’ she answered. ‘We used your boat to steal it.’

‘My boat?’

Celestine shrugged. ‘Why not? You hardly ever find any use for it, do you?’

Harry Cairney was trembling. ‘Who used the boat? Who are you talking about?’

‘Ask your son,’ Celestine said.

‘I’m asking you,’ the old man said. ‘I’m asking my wife.’

‘Your wife,’ Celestine said.

‘Yes. My wife.’ The old man held his arms out. ‘The woman I love.’

‘Funny. I never really thought of you as my husband.’

Harry Cairney was moving forward, propelled by notions of love, convinced even now that all this was a travesty, some kind of breakdown on Celestine’s part, something he could put right the way he’d put things right all his life. In his time he’d been capable of fixing anything. It didn’t matter what. And he could fix this, whatever it was. Hadn’t some of the most powerful men in the whole goddam nation come to him at one time or another and asked him to bail them out of their problems?

‘I don’t want to hear that, I don’t want to hear you say that kind of thing.’ He had both hands extended in front of himself. ‘We’ve been happy. I know we have.’

‘Dear Harry,’ she said. ‘We’ve had our moments. But they’re finished now.’

‘What are you saying?’

Celestine was very quiet. Patrick Cairney watched her, knew what was coming, understood he was powerless to do anything about it. He watched Celestine shoot the old man through the side of the neck.

Harry Cairney cried out and dropped to the floor, turned over on his back, raised one hand up in Celestine’s direction, and then he was finally still. Celestine turned the gun towards Patrick.

Cairney said, ‘You’re on their side.’

‘The right side, Jig. The side of the angels.’

Cairney kneeled beside the body of the old man. He lightly touched the side of his father’s jaw. There was a grief in him, but he realised he wasn’t going to live long enough to express it. The tightness behind his eyes, the awful parched sensation in his throat. Do something.

‘You are the bonus,’ Celestine said. ‘I never expected you. Not in this house.’

Without looking at her Cairney said, ‘They put you here. You told them about the money. The ship.’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I told them a lot of things, Patrick. I told them about the money. The route taken by the Connie. It wasn’t difficult to find out. Your father always thought he was such a hot-shot at keeping secrets, but he wasn’t. Not really.’ She paused a moment. Then, ‘I also told them about the route taken by a certain school-bus – that New England trip I mentioned, remember? Does that surprise you, Jig?’

A school-bus. Cairney felt very cold. He was fumbling towards the sense of it all, groping for a revelation that he knew was going to be denied him.

He opened his eyes, turned his face towards her. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he asked, thinking maybe, just maybe, he could fish his weapon out of his pocket, if he could be quick enough, slick, but even as he reached for it she took one step forward and fired her gun a second time.

Cairney didn’t feel the entrance of the bullet into his chest. He fell back, knocking a chair over as he dropped, and he lay face down on the rug. He was barely conscious of hearing her footsteps as she approached him.

She bent down to touch the nape of his neck. ‘We had some moments too,’ she whispered.

Calmly, carefully, Celestine changed her clothes. She stepped out onto the landing, without once looking at the two figures who lay on the bedroom floor. The heels of her boots made soft clicking noises on wood floorboards as she entered Patrick Cairney’s bedroom. She stood by the window, gazing out a moment.

She saw a car come up to the front of the house.

She pressed her face against the glass, then she turned away. It was time now. It was time to leave this place.

She opened the closet in Patrick’s bedroom and began to remove old books, boxes that contained ancient board-games, a battered microscope, running shoes, a football, crumpled pennants, a dusty framed wall map with the title LEGENDARY IRELAND in Celtic script. The relics of Jig, she thought.

There was a satchel stored at the very back of the closet. She reached for it and drew it towards her. And then she turned around and, with one last glance at Patrick Cairney’s bed, she left the room.