Falling Glass (21 page)

“I’ll want to know when the owner of this here Range Rover finally gets his car going. I’ve slowed him a wee bit and he’ll need to call a mechanic.”

“You’ve knackered his car?” the kid said. “Why didn’t you just drive it in the lough?”

“I don’t want him to catch on straight away. If you nick his car he just hires another one, doesn’t he? But fuck with it a bit and he’ll spend hours trying to sort it, see?”

The wean nodded. “Ohhh, aye,” he said.

Killian and the kid were both enjoying the pedagogical aspect of this relationship. But it couldn’t last. Killian had to get moving. “I’ll give you a phone number and you’ll need to tell my associate the exact moment he gets back on the road, okay? Have you a mobile?”

“Aye.”

“And you think you can handle it?”

“Aye. I can do that,” the kid said.

Killian give him five more fifties.

“And in case you’re thinking about just sleeping in and giving my mate any old shite, remember what I said before: I am not someone to be fucked with,” Killian added.

In Ulster there were at least two or three hundred convicted murderers walking the streets these days – paramilitaries who had been released under the Good Friday Agreement. Killian wasn’t one of them but the kid didn’t know that.

“Look, I’m in it for the money, and maybe if you’re down this way again, you could use me?” the kid said.

“Maybe,” Killian nodded and gave him Sean’s number.

“Name’s Bobby,” the kid said. Killian shook his hand but did not offer his own name.

He got in the Mercedes.

Everything was familiar.

He put it in first, wound down the window and said thanks to the wean.

He drove to the BP garage and bought a map of Fermanagh and some smokes.

“Can you tell me where Dervish Island is on this?” he asked the man behind the desk.

“Dervish Island?” the man said and rubbed his chin. “I think that’s down on the upper lough.”

The man got out his glasses, took the map and showed him. It was an
actual island island – which might prove interesting – on upper Lough Erne almost over the border in the Republic.

It looked miles away on the map, but that was only because the scale was massive on a county map.

“How far of a drive is that?” Killian asked.

The man considered.

“Well now, hard to say, maybe a two-hour drive depending on the state of the roads.” Killian nodded. Unless he completely fucked up he could certainly be there by first light.

He didn’t fuck up.

He was there by 4.00 a.m.

Or at least the car park at the ferry.

The island itself was a mile out into the lough. A sign said “Ferry Operational from 8 till 8”.

Killian parked the Mercedes, got out and looked across the water. He lit himself a cigarette.

She must have thought that that would give her security.

Being on an island.

An island on an island.

But it wouldn’t do her any good.

Not from Ivan. Not from him.

He smoked the Marlboro Light. Sean had told him to call any time day or night when he had solid info.

The poor bugger would get a thumping from Mary but he called him anyway.

“I found her,” he said.

“Jesus! That was good. It was on Ivan’s satnav?”

“Aye, just like I thought.”

It was the hire-car company’s satnav tracker that had told them where the Range Rover was in the first place, after a few pennies had greased the wheels; now Ivan’s programming had told them where to go next.

“And Ivan himself, did you have to get heavy?’

“No, no, I just let him sleep.”

“Good work, mate. So where is she?”

“Place called Dervish Island on Fermanagh. I’ll go over there when the ferry starts running in the morning.”

“Great. Unless you want to go over there now. You know, middle of the night, element of surprise and all that.”

“What? Fucking swim it?”

“No, no, there must be a rowing boat around somewhere.”

“I’m not going out there in the dark.”

“So what
are
you going to do now?” Sean asked.

“Probably just have a smoke.”

“Get some kip,” Sean suggested.

“Oh, I paid a wee mucker to keep an eye on Ivan’s car, he’ll call you when he gets moving and you’ll call me.”

“Can you trust him?”

“Aye. Wee joyrider shite. Oh and one more thing.”

“What?”

“I fucked with Ivan’s Range Rover. Cut the sparks.”

Sean was impressed. “You’ve done a good night’s work, mate. Get some kip. And remember she’s no bloody picnic either. Just confirm that she’s there and I’ll tell Tom and we’ll get further instructions. Half a million! Jesus, what a week!”

“I’m hanging up. Apologies to the missus.”

“None necessary if this pans out.”

Killian threw his cigarette butt into the water.

He got back in the Merc and leaned the driver’s seat back as far as it would go.

He took off his jacket and draped it over himself.

Killian was very tall but the W112 was a big car back when that actually meant something.

He closed his eyes.

It was quiet here save for a few geese and the pitter-patter of rain which was back on again of course. Killian wasn’t the world’s best sleeper, but he had done a good night’s work. And he was shattered.

He drifted…

On the edge of sleep. On the edge of the Dreaming.

Over the water.

This was another important place in the Pavee mythology. Site of the first Neolithic settlement in Ireland. More ancient even than Newgrange or the Giant’s Ring. It was here that Badhbha, Goddess of crows and war, made her home. His ma and even cynical old Uncle Garbhan wouldn’t have come here.

Rain clouds came and passed above. Stars moved in a giant circle around his head, strange constellations brushing against his cheeks.

It was a dream of old Ireland. In the old speak. He heard the Ernai on the water and he spoke their true name. He talked in his sleep and his thoughts were weird and when the light woke him at seven he knew that this day wasn’t going to go the way he or Sean or Dick Coulter or Tom or Ivan or anyone else could possibly have foreseen.

chapter 12
farewell my lovely

T
OM EICHEL DROVE FROM HIS APARTMENT IN CENTRAL BELFAST
to Dick Coulter’s house in Knocknagulla in a speedy twenty minutes. If it had been rush hour it might have taken him an hour but at this time of the morning all the traffic was going the other way.

He zipped through Carrickfergus and Kilroot and turned left at the big No Entry sign just before the Bla Hole turn.

Viv nodded to him at the gate and lifted the barrier.

Security had been tightened at what the locals called Castle Coulter since 2006 when a Continuity IRA abduction scheme had to come to light. CIRA had planned to kidnap one or both of Coulter’s two daughters and ransom them back to him for a million each.

With an estimated worth of twenty million and triple that in shares of Coulter Air he could have paid easy. But the CIRA were fuck-ups and the peelers had heard about it and the whole thing had come to nothing.

But now Coulter’s place here on the shores of Belfast Lough and the house in Donegal and the house in Tenerife were guarded by ex-SAS.

Of course, Tom reflected, as he drove up the gravel driveway, no one had expected the girls to be kidnapped by their own mother.

The early rain had passed and the sun was shining and the house looked particularly lovely today. It was an art deco affair, very unusual in Northern Ireland, where tastes in country piles were primarily for the
Gothic and the Georgian. It was pink and long and arched and fluted. Someone doing a profile years ago had compared it to the Hoover Building on the A40. Dick had been incensed by that of course until Tom had shown him a picture of the Hoover Building and explained that it was the finest art deco structure in England.

What really set Castle Coulter apart from other Irish country homes, discreetly hidden away in valleys or forest estates, was its cliff-top location. Set above Whitehead it commanded 360-degree views of Belfast, County Down, County Antrim, the entire Galloway peninsula in Scotland and on clear days the Isle of Man and the Mull of Kintyre further up the Scottish coast. Coulter even claimed that you could see England through a telescope but Tom knew that the curvature of the Earth made this materially impossible.

Not that the house needed additional superlatives: fourteen bedrooms, an indoor and outdoor pool, a squash court, a stable, a snooker room and the piece de resistance – an airstrip that could accommodate Coulter’s six-seat Gulfstream 270.

As places to doss went, it would do.

Tom parked in his usual spot and walked up the marble steps to the front door.

He rang the bell and since Paul was at the hospital visiting his brother Mrs Lavery answered it.

“’Tis yourself, Mr E,” she said, somewhat startled to see him at 7.20 in the morning.

“It is I, Mrs Lavery,” Tom agreed with a forced grin.

“I believe he’s not even up yet, Mr E, and neither is the Mrs for that matter.”

“Really?” Tom asked, surprised, for Dick was an early bird.

“They were watching the telly last night till after two, so they were. Come in now, don’t be standing there,” Mrs Lavery said.

Tom walked into the spacious entryway. Here the marble gave way to Portland stone and little alcoves filled with beautiful statuary from
eclectic corners of the world where heritage laws either did not preclude export or could be suspended for the right price.

To the left was the billiards room, to the right was a lounge; the upstairs could be reached by a gently curving deco staircase. That was where Tom needed to go. Dick’s living quarters were on the first floor but Tom felt uneasy about going up to his boss’s domain with him apparently still out for the count. Not even the domestics or the bodyguards went up there without a direct invitation.

“Do you want to wait with me in the kitchen? The living room’s freezing, so it is. I’ll make you a wee cup of tea,” Mrs Lavery said.

“Make it coffee and it’s a deal,” he said with another fake smile.

Fake because smiling had become impossible since he had learned about the laptop.

“Aye, all right now, but I won’t be making any of that Italian rubbish, it’ll be Irish coffee or none at all,” Mrs Lavery said, before turning bright pink with embarrassment. Her mouth opened and closed like the rainbow trout Tom had tickled on the Bann only last week before the trip to China.

Mrs Lavery’s voice descended to a whisper: “By ‘Italian rubbish’ I wasn’t casting dispersions on the new Mistress. You know that Mr E, I was, you know, attempting to be jovial about your good self, sir, so I was.”

Tom touched one of Mrs Lavery’s ham-hock arms, “I knew that. And before the thought even enters your head, let me tell you that Dick has said he wants you to stay after the birth of the little one because – and this is a direct quote – a growing reed needs a good feed for breakfast and Mrs Lavery does the best Ulster fry in the nine counties.”

“Did he really say that?” Mrs Lavery asked, her eyes watering a little.

“He did indeed,” Tom lied through his teeth.

They walked into the ante-room where Tom threw his raincoat on a leather sofa and tied his tie in the Tiffany mirror.

“Okay, let’s get some of that coffee and we’ll wait for himself to wake up,” Tom said and followed Mrs Lavery into the large, spotless, modern kitchen.

Almost directly behind them in the kitchen garden on the other side of the cypresses, the old bugger was not only awake but now completely cognizant of the pair of them as their voices carried through the open window.

Although he had indeed stayed up until 2.00 a.m. showing Helena
Lawrence of Arabia
after it came to light that she not only had not seen the film but had never heard of it, he had tossed and turned all night before finally getting up, with zero sleep, at six, his normal waking hour.

When the dark behind the bedroom shutters had changed from black to brown to grey he had slipped out of the bed, padded onto the back stairs and down to the kitchen garden to have a smoke.

Mrs Lavery might not have known Coulter’s whereabouts, but Bill, one of the two night guards, certainly did, and had informed Viv on the gate, who was just this second texting the information to Mr Eichel in case he was looking for him.

“There you go, Mr E,” said Mrs Lavery, giving Tom a Nescafé with condensed milk and brown sugar, the way he took it. It was about the only taste he had acquired from his father. Tom’s dad was a German who had come to Ireland at the end of the forties to help set up textile factories and who had then become an administrator in Ulsterbus. He had a married a local girl, had two kids and stayed until the Troubles really kicked off in the seventies when he had moved back to the peaceful life in Germany. Tom seldom visited his parents, or his sister who had gone with them.

Tom had been pressured to go into law and it was at Queen’s that he had met Richard Coulter who, after knocking around South Africa and Australia for a few years, was studying business administration. Tom graduated with a first and became a junior solicitor but Coulter had got an even better first and was headhunted to join the prison service, the only booming industry in the mid-seventies.

Coulter had become the governor of a halfway house for wayward youth, getting the kids to stick to the straight and narrow and parlaying the publicity of that rare good-news story into meetings with government ministers. Coulter became one of Belfast’s few entrepreneurs of the
Troubles, dipping his finger into many pies but especially bomb-damage contracting work, which was the pie to have in seventies Belfast.

The rest of Coulter’s trajectory was a well-known and oft repeated tale: his construction firm had branched into the hotel business and the package holiday trade. He had then acquired a small start-up airline operating out of Belfast Harbour Airport and Glasgow’s Prestwick: ten pilots, three Shorts 330s and a DC-10. Of course no one back in 1986 could have foreseen the monster which Coulter Air would become; by 2011 CA had a ninety-plane fleet, it serviced forty European airports, had three million passengers a year and had flights starting at nine quid, plus fees.