RÓISÍN LOWERED THE gun out of view and kept it trained on my waist while I drove back towards Culdaff, knuckles white on the steering wheel. I tried to calm myself down by asking questions.
“What’s going on, Róisín? What’s in Culdaff?”
She didn’t reply.
“What have you got to lose by telling me? There’s not much I can do with a gun pointed at me, is there? Do you know where Susanne is?”
My questions belied my fear. But I was appealing to the Róisín I’d known before, the sweet girl who was anxious to please. This one was stony-faced, impenetrable.
“You’re involved with that animal rights organization, aren’t you? The email address is your dog’s name. Did you have something to do with what happened in the office?”
She snorted. “Nothing happened in your office.”
“I don’t think you can say planting an explosive device is nothing.”
“There is no explosive device.” She nodded towards the back. “Those are explosives. So it might be a good idea to just shut the fuck up and drive.”
I did. I shut the fuck up and drove, glancing fearfully at the bag stuffed so carelessly into the back seat, just behind where Róisín was sitting. She remained silent for the rest of the journey, eyes and gun trained on me, while I tried to get my brain to function, to piece things together. I knew she’d been the one who’d whistled for Fred on Christmas morning; I knew now that she’d run the animaloutrage site. I knew that she’d left Australia to go traveling. Had she gone to Spain? Was that where she’d met Luke? I caught sight of her expression. It was cold as steel, all trace of softness gone. Her wet hair hung in rat tails about her face, and there was an intensity about her that reminded me of Dominic Stoop.
Before we reached Culdaff, she ordered me to turn left, and I did so, passing a petrol station and some housing estates. I saw a client on the road, a woman in a motorized wheelchair who recognized my car. I tried to wave, but Róisín slapped my hand down painfully. It was stupid of me. About a mile later, she told me to turn right. We were heading towards the pier.
“Is it a boat?” I asked. “Are you leaving on a boat? Is that why we’re going to Bunagee?”
Again, I was met with silence. Before we reached the pier, she directed me to drive up a laneway to a small boatshed surrounded by scrubby bushes.
“Drive around the back.”
I did what she said and parked the Mini at the rear of the building, behind a stack of old crates and fish boxes, wind and icy rain battering the little car. Róisín took the keys from me and forced me out with the gun. I stumbled towards the shed in the driving rain, trying my best to get my bearings. The laneway we’d driven up snaked ahead along the coast, but there wasn’t a creature to be seen, human or beast. She took a key from her pocket and used it to unlock an old rusted padlock, then pulled open the door and pushed me roughly inside. A stale, salty odor with something rotten underneath greeted us. The shed must have been used to store fishing equipment, but all that remained now were a few torn nets and buoys piled up in the corner. There was no light and Róisín made no attempt to switch one on.
Something moved in the corner by the nets, and I started, thinking it was a rat. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that it was a person, shunting from a lying position to a sitting one against the wall. In the gloom I made out a face. Susanne Craig. She was tied at her feet, with her hands behind her back and her mouth gagged. She looked at me with wide eyes, her cheeks dirty and tear-stained.
Róisín pushed me over to her and tied me up in the same way, gagging me with a stinking rag that made me want to retch. Then she left us without a word, slamming the door behind her and turning the key in the lock. I shivered in my damp clothes, my skin starting to sting. I looked at Susanne in an attempt to convey something – I wasn’t sure what; it wasn’t as if I had anything comforting to say – but she avoided my eye.
The gag was digging painfully into my cheek when the door opened again. Luke Kirby strode in, wearing a long waterproof coat with a hood, which he pushed back as he approached, and carrying a small stool and bag. I felt my whole body contract when he placed them on the floor beside us and flinched as he untied my gag. Despite the removal of the stinking rag, it was his expensive scent that turned my stomach.
“What about Susanne?” I asked, when I could speak.
“No point. Susie rarely has anything interesting to say.” He sat on the stool, his long legs stretched out in front of him, and cocked his head to one side. “Has other talents, though. Just like your sister.”
I bit back a response and tried to keep my voice calm. “What are you doing? Why are you even here in Donegal?”
“I told you I wanted to come up and see you, didn’t I?”
I had a flashback of his phone call to the office. It’s been too long.
“But—”
Kirby raised his hand to stop me speaking, then looked at me for a minute without saying a word, regaining control. I held his gaze, my heart beating wildly.
Eventually he bowed his head. “Since you ask, an opportunity fell into my lap. Thanks to you, I’m not a high-earning lawyer anymore, so I needed another occupation. That’s the thing with these organizations. You can start again from scratch: new identity, safe passage. Especially if you’re carrying something they need.”
“Explosives.” I ignored the warped thinking that allowed him to blame me for the loss of his career.
“I made some interesting contacts in prison.” He smirked. “Can pretty much get anything these days. Still a whizz at striking deals.”
Still an arrogant, slimy bastard, I thought. “Dominic McLaughlin,” I said.
He nodded assent. “Dominic, my old cellmate from your neck of the woods. He thought a legal brain could be useful to ‘the cause,’ so I told him I wanted to do something I believed in for a change. Fucking obsessives, Sarah, you know what they’re like. They’ll believe any old shit once it accords with their own twisted view of the world. And of course,” he reached out to run his finger slowly down Susanne’s cheek, “I met the beautiful Susie when I went to join my new tribe in Spain.”
She pulled back, her eyes wild and panicked.
My mind raced ahead, trying to make connections. “But what about Carole? What did she have to do with it?”
Kirby picked up a piece of loose timber from the ground and started to tap the floor with it. “Dominic was surprisingly chatty – prison can get pretty fucking dull, you know; told me all about his marriage and son, how his wife had conveniently forgotten both and moved on to a new family.”
“You blackmailed her.”
“If you want to call it that. When Dominic went back to prison in the UK, I contacted her pretending I was him.”
“How?”
“How do you think? Do you know how easy it is to get a mobile phone in prison? I texted her, dropping hints about our son, saying that I wanted to find him, to get to know him again.” He shrugged. “When I got out, I asked for money. And she paid it, on the condition I left him alone.”
The money she’d earned from taking on extra work, I thought, and what she’d taken from Eddie.
“And you made her hide explosives for you.”
“I told her we needed somewhere to keep some equipment for the cause. She came to Dublin to collect them; said she’d store them in the cellar of the pub. At that stage, I told her I was a colleague of Dominic’s.”
That was why she’d taken the bus back from Dublin rather than the plane, I thought. And why she needed the suitcase. The noise Stan had heard was probably Carole panicking in the days beforehand, moving things about, trying to find somewhere to hide the explosives.
“Why the hell would Carole help you?”
“You’re a lawyer, Sarah. You know that secrets are power. I made it clear what I knew and I think she’d have done anything to keep me quiet.” He grinned. “If she’d been more of a looker, I might even have been tempted. Although she was a bit fucking stupid. Lord knows what Dominic saw in her – he was a lunatic, but no fool. I mean, who thinks Christmas is a good time to hide anything in a pub cellar?”
“You made her bring you to the cottage.”
He dropped the wood and sat back with his arms crossed. “Clever girl. I told her to come up with somewhere remote to move the explosives to. She took me there when she’d finished work. Nice pub that, shame it had to burn down.” He winked at Susanne and she whimpered, her eyes wide and hurt.
I pictured Carole in her final hours walking up to that creepy cottage with Luke Kirby and I felt a wave of nausea wash over me. “But there was no trace of explosives in the cottage.”
“That’s because they never got there. Róisín sorted that out – moved them to her parents’ cowshed.” Kirby gave a bark of laughter. “Explosives in a fucking cowshed – it’s like something out of the IRA.” He leaned forward, so close I could feel his breath on my face. “Don’t you miss the bright lights?”
I pulled away, and was surprised to feel a slight slackening of the ties on my wrists. They weren’t as tight as I’d thought they were. Had Róisín tied them loosely on purpose? I began to work them, rotating my wrists back and forth behind my back, hoping Kirby wouldn’t notice in the half-light.
“You killed her,” I said.
“What do you say, Susie? Did I kill the barmaid?” Susanne withdrew deeper into the corner. “Did you know Susanne didn’t like Carole very much? Ever since she had a thing with randy old George when she was a youngster?”
Susanne looked towards the wall, her eyes wet with tears. “Anyway, she’s been useful, haven’t you, Susie? She remembered this shed where she used to meet George. And she got him to organize a trawler. There’s another man with secrets he doesn’t want getting out. Of course, you did think you were coming with us, didn’t you, Susie?”
It still didn’t add up. “But why would you kill her? Why would you plant Dominic’s DNA?”
He laughed. “I expect that caused PC Plod to do a bit of head scratching. Dead man’s DNA. Unfortunately, that was a bit of a fucking cock-up, since I didn’t know he was going to die when I took it. But I thought I’d plant it anyway, stir things up a bit.”
“Carole turned you down, didn’t she? That’s why you killed her,” I spat.
Kirby’s smile faded. “I’ve never had to force myself on a woman; you should know that, sweetheart. That barmaid had one more thing to do for me. If she’d done it, she wouldn’t be where she is today. It’s her own fucking fault she’s dead.”
I looked away. I had a sudden horrible feeling he would say the same thing about Faye.
There was a pause before he leaned over me again. “Don’t you want to know what I wanted her to do?”
I snatched my head back and hit it painfully against the rough wall behind me. I felt a wetness – I was bleeding. But the ties on my wrists were getting looser. I kept rubbing them together, terrified that he would notice the movement.
Kirby hissed into my face. “I wanted her to get you to the cottage. I told her Dominic wanted to give it to her. That it could have been a nest egg for her if she ever wanted to leave George. I knew Susie’s story at that stage, so I thought it was a possibility. Said she should ask you to have a look. You’re so fucking nosy; I knew you’d come. And I’d have been waiting for you.”
Suddenly the door creaked open and Róisín appeared, a slight figure silhouetted against the white-grey sky. She tapped her watch and beckoned. Luke tensed, as I’d seen him do in the past when someone pulled rank, his expression dangerous. Unintimidated, she glared at him, clicked her fingers, and left. He stood up, reached into the bag he’d brought and withdrew something, flipped a switch and threw it into the corner. Susanne shuffled away from it in panic, like a crab. A car engine started up outside.
Kirby nodded. “That will go off in a couple of minutes. Don’t worry. It’ll be clean. No missing limbs or anything.” He spat into the corner. “You can join your sister, if you believe in that sort of thing.”
He turned to go. My heart pounded in my chest and waves of terror washed over me, but I couldn’t let him leave, couldn’t let him get away with it again. If we were going to die, he was coming with us.
“Why are you so interested in me?” I shouted. “Why didn’t you just go and join your new tribe? Why even bother with me?”
He turned. Luke Kirby could never resist having the last word.
“Maybe you never got over me,” I taunted. “Is that what it is?”
A vein pumped in his forehead. “I’m not interested in you in the slightest.”
“You killed Carole because of me. You wanted me to know about it. And now you’ve just told me everything like some toddler showing his shit to his mother.”
Temper flashed in his eyes but he suppressed it. “Unfinished business. Nothing more.”
“What unfinished business?”
“You lied about me in court. You said Faye was afraid of me.”
I tried to keep the tremor out of my voice, but it was impossible. “Faye was afraid of you.”
His face took on an ugly sneer. “Faye wasn’t afraid of anything. Without your evidence, the jury would have accepted that what happened was an accident. Your sister liked a good time. Which was more than could be said for you, you boring bitch.”
A noise from outside interrupted him; unmistakably a car driving away, the same engine I’d heard starting up earlier. Róisín was leaving without him. His eyes darted towards the door, flaring with anger. One more rub and my ties would be loose enough to extract one hand. Kirby froze, his head turned. My ankles were still tied, but I had to try. How long would it be before that detonator went off?
“Sounds as if you’re not as important as you think you are,” I said.
He turned. I pushed my knees to one side, twisted my body and lunged at him, screaming, grabbing at his legs with all the strength I could muster. “You fucking coward, you killed my sister. You left her to die.”
I knew I hadn’t a hope; I was no match for him. But it was enough for him to snap. He dived at me in fury and put his hands around my neck, his thumbs pressing into my throat. I tried to swallow and couldn’t, felt myself panic. I clawed at his hands, tried to pull them from my throat, but it was no use.
“You bitch.”
I struggled for air, felt myself getting dizzy. I was going to lose consciousness, and soon.
Then a series of noises: a loud cracking noise as Kirby fell away from me and slumped to the floor; Susanne whimpering beside me; the low, insistent beep of the detonator. I coughed and gasped as I tried to get my breath back, realizing that Molloy, and for some reason, Stan MacLochlainn were in the shed with us. Molloy’s eyes were dark with anger. He shouted at Stan to stay back.
His face was above me, concerned. “Are you okay?”
I managed to nod towards the corner. “There’s an explosive device …”
Molloy untied my feet and I stood up, my legs giving way immediately. He placed my arms around his neck and picked me up. Stan began to untie Susanne, but Molloy barked at him not to, that there wasn’t time. In desperation they half carried, half dragged the two of us outside.
About twenty yards from the shed, we threw ourselves onto the grass. Almost immediately I felt Molloy get to his feet again, and I twisted around on my hands as he ran back towards the shed. I called after him, mind numb with panic. Before he reached it, it exploded, the blast forcing us to flatten ourselves again, Stan covering Susanne protectively. We lay there, face down, noise, heat, and stench filling the air, until we heard the sound of sirens and saw flashing red lights.