HE RAN back upstairs, emotions packed away. All of what remained ahead involved Folan Corey, a man capable of slipping through gaps left by hotheads. Darian remembered going back up the stairs, his mind clear enough now to take in every detail. The front door of the flat still open, but no sound or sight of the neighbors. All that had gone on and nobody in the building had taken an interest, hiding until they understood the consequences.
He walked in and along the corridor to the living area and stopped in the doorway. Corey was on his knees beside Gallowglass, the reddened knife on the floor beside him. Blood was pulsing out of the wound and rolling thickly down his side, and Gallowglass was lying with his head slumped sideways, eyes shut. Darian took a step closer as Corey stood up and looked at him.
Corey said, “The knife fell out. Have you called an ambulance?”
It was only later that Darian thought how revealing it was that Corey hadn’t used the last few minutes to call an ambulance himself, relying instead on a man who wasn’t even in the building to do it for him. Instead, Darian was thinking about the knife, about how firmly planted in Gallowglass’s stomach it had been before Darian left. It had stood upright without being touched, Gallowglass lying back against the wall and letting it rest there, settled and waiting to be removed by a medical expert. He wouldn’t have pulled it out, and it couldn’t have worked itself loose.
Corey seemed to read his thoughts in his expression, and said, “It was his breathing. He was breathing faster, coughed a bit, and his stomach pushed out the knife. He’s losing a lot of blood. Have you called an ambulance?”
“Yes, I called an ambulance.”
Darian dropped down beside Gallowglass and put his finger to his neck, trying to feel for a pulse. There was nothing, but his own nerves could have been causing him to miss the target. He jumped up and ran to the kitchen area, coming back with a towel. Corey was still standing in the same spot. Darian dropped down and pressed the towel against the wound, trying to stop bleeding that had finished its escape, trying to keep a dead man alive.
Corey said, “It’s too late, he’s gone.”
He was right. Darian left the towel where it was but he stopped pressing it, stopped fighting a battle that had passed by without him. Death always walks a little faster than life. He stood up and glared at Corey. “Why didn’t you try to stop the bleeding? Why didn’t you help him?”
“I did help him. Jesus, I’ve been helping him his whole working life, long past the point where he deserved it. I’ve carried his deadweight longer than any man should and as long as I could. I did nothing but my best for him. It was too late, Ross. It’s over.”
They were both silent for a few seconds, staring over the body at each other. Corey almost smiled when he said, “I take it your flying girlfriend landed hard. Is she dead?”
It was an attempt to bring mindless anger into a conversation that Corey didn’t want to be mindful. Darian said, “She is.”
“Probably just as well, a trial would have been embarrassing for you. An evil woman like her, getting you under her thumb and into her bed. Tricking you like that, tut tut. No, this is the best thing that could have happened for you. A truly evil woman.”
Darian could see where this was going already, and he thought he knew where it had come from. “He said you were going to set him up, make him the scapegoat. He had sussed you out, Corey. He knew you were only in it for yourself. If he didn’t know it before Moira Slight’s house then he knew it after. That’s why you pulled the knife out. Making sure he couldn’t repeat what he told me.”
“The only people left who heard him are you and me. You, the son of a murderer and employee of an unregistered private detective agency who appears to have been in a seedy sexual relationship with a double killer. Murder seems to hang around your family like a noose. And me, the decorated DI, head of the anti-corruption unit whose protégé died trying to stop that evil woman. He was like a son to me.”
The smile on his face as he spoke said as much as the bloody knife on the floor beside Gallowglass. Darian wanted to lash out because he knew Corey was right and knew he was going to get away with it. There might be consequences for him, but they would be no more than a single drop of the bottle of poison he deserved. It was a stark reminder of the futility of truth.
Before Darian could say something in response he heard the first distant scream of a siren in a hurry. Things began to happen more quickly now. From the still of death to the energy of life racing to confront it. It could have been an ambulance or a police car; it didn’t matter to Darian which; he just wanted to be the first to meet them. He ran out of a flat that contained no one he could help, and back down the stairs. He was standing next to Maeve when an ambulance careered round the corner, the driver enthusiastic about the freedom his siren gave him.
Darian told the medics what had happened, both to Maeve and to Gallowglass. He repeated the story again thirty seconds later when a police car screeched to a halt, half on the pavement, and Vinny spilled out of it. He had PC Sutherland with him, but the young cop stayed pale and silent in the background. Darian told Vinny everything quickly, and Vinny wrote it all down.
In seconds the place was throbbing with people, cars and ambulances choking the narrow road, all the neighbors rushing out to form a gawping crowd now authority had shrilly announced its arrival. At one point Darian was sure he spotted DC Vicario talking to Vinny, reading from his notebook on the pavement near where Maeve had fallen. She was from Whisper Hill station, this shouldn’t have been her patch either, but Vinny must have called her. Then Sholto was there, a hand on Darian’s shoulder, trying to comfort him.
He watched them cover Maeve and her dead smile with a blanket. He watched the police debating among themselves who should speak to who. Corey left with a detective Darian didn’t recognize, but was later told was Lee Kenyon from the anti-corruption unit, and MacDuff. Sholto made sure Darian was left alone for a while by marshaling former colleagues away from him. After half an hour of empty movement and light, Sholto drove him to Earmam police station. Above them, on the crest of Dùil Hill and lit by moonlight, the Neolithic standing stones, An Coimheadaiche, looked down on human folly. It’s a cruel moon that shows you all the night can hold.