Falling Glass (24 page)

“Tell me what?”

“You think he’d pay half a mill to get these two wee skitters back? No way. Hardly spent any time with them when we were together. This isn’t about that.”

Killian’s mobile rang.

“Excuse me, I have to take this,” he said. “Hello?”

“Killian, it’s Sean. What’s cooking in the fair Lough Erne?”

“I’m getting everything sorted. Any word on Ivan? Is he on the road yet?”

“Not yet, no word. What about Rachel? Did you find her?”

“I found her.”

“And the girls?’

“Aye.”

“Excellent! What’s your next move?’

“I’m working on it. I’ll call you back, okay?”

“Keep me informed.”

“I will.”

Killian hung up.

“You told him that you’d found us,” Rachel said.

Killian nodded. “Well I have, haven’t I?”

Rachel smiled and squinted into the sun. “So the game’s up, eh?”

“The game’s up,” Killian agreed.

“You’re not the first he’s sent.”

“I know.”

“He sent creeps the last time. You look okay. I’m actually relieved in a way. I was beginning to think I’d bitten off a bit more than I could chew, you know?”

Killian didn’t understand. “You did bite off more than you could chew.”

“No, that’s not what I meant, I was beginning to think…well to tell the truth, I was beginning to think that he’d send someone to top all of us, you know?”

“What?” Killian said.

“I thought maybe he would just send someone to kill us. After I had spilled the beans to Tom about the Dell. That was a stupid move. My head wasn’t straight. But who would have thought Richard would be such a control freak that he wouldn’t even tell Tom.”

Killian frowned. “What exactly was on this computer?”

“Would you like a cup of tea?” Rachel asked.

“No.”

“Okay, no tea. Do you want to go for a wee walk and talk?”

Killian looked at his watch. It was 8.20. Ivan wasn’t on the road yet, apparently, but there was no point taking any unnecessary risks.

“It’ll have to be a
wee
walk.”

“Just dander down the beach a bit.”

“The girls?”

“They’ll be fine. Both of them can swim and they know better than to go in the water,” Rachel said. Killian nodded. “Girls! This is Mr Killian. I’m going to go for a wee walk with him, okay?”

“Mummy!” Sue shouted and came running over.

“What is it?” Rachel asked.

“He told me all about the butterflies and the wheatear bird that flies across the desert. But the butterflies are the best. There’s the painted lady and the holly blue and the French one, the citron, except in Ireland we call it the brimstone butterfly,” Sue said proudly.

“You’ve got a good noggin, well done,” Killian said.

“Come on, we’re ready!” Claire called and Sue ran back to her sister.

“You told her about butterflies?” Rachel asked.

“Aye, she saw me before the rest of you did and we had a wee chat about butterflies. Smart as a whip that wean.”

“Sue’s got learning difficulties. She doesn’t even know the alphabet,” Rachel said.

“I didn’t learn the alphabet till I was twenty,” Killian said.

“Are you serious?”

“Aye.”

Rachel studied his face. Who was this big eejit? She bit her lip and offered him the cigarette box. They were Marlboro Lights too. He took one and lit it.

“Okay, so let’s go for that dander and I’ll talk you out of turning us in,” Rachel said.

“Talk me out of half a million? It’ll have to be good.”

They walked along the beach, Rachel turning every few feet to check on the girls.

It was nice here. No boat traffic. Only birds. On the far shore it was bogland with a line of white heather like strands of grey hairs. They smoked and didn’t speak.

Killian looked at the phone clock again. 8.30. Ivan was bound to be awake by now. Time to speed things up. “Love, if you’re going to say something you better say it now, because I have to go; we have to go,” Killian said allowing in some of the menace he’d been keeping back. After all, a man he knew was dead because of this woman, her parents were dead because of her, and he himself had had the shit knocked out of him because of her.

She was a junkie. She was a fuck up.

“Where are you from? If you don’t mind me inquiring,” she asked.

“All over,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“I’m Pavee.”

“What?

“A tinker.”

“Oh, you don’t look it.” she said.

They crossed a little stream by going over some stepping stones. She had trouble getting up the bank on the other side. “Give us a hand,” she asked. He pulled her up onto the other side, their hands in each other’s grip for a second. Rachel’s knuckles were calloused but her fingers were strong. It was a small surprise.

“I know what I’ll do. I’ll take you back to the day I fled. I’ll tell you the whole story, how does that sound?” she said, releasing her grip from his.

He nodded. “Just make it quick.”

“What’s the hurry? You’ve won, I’ve lost.”

“I’m on my own schedule. I’m a busy man. Let’s walk back and you can tell me what you like.”

“Okay,” she said, staring into his face with lovely green eyes that weren’t going to work their magic with him, he told himself. “Okay, so we’re in Donegal. That’s where it happened. Richard was very generous with the
divorce settlement. A hundred thousand a month and we could use the house in Donegal anytime he wasn’t there.”

“That is decent.”

“I mean he’d bought us a wee place up in Cushendun, but we still liked to go to Donegal.”

“Why? Cushendun’s nice.”

“The place in Donegal had its own beach, fields, the girls loved it. So we’d go there at the weekends when he wasn’t using it.”

They strolled past Claire and Sue, and Rachel rubbed Claire’s head.

Killian’s phone rang.

“Your boy says that Ivan just left,” Sean said.

Killian looked at the phone clock. It was exactly nine. Earlier than he’d been expecting, but that would still give him a couple of hours.

“Okay,” he said and hung up.

They walked to the cabin. It was a small, clean affair, much better than the places she’d recently been staying, Killian noted. On an island like this, in a nice place, she should never have sent that letter to her da. Could have holed up here indefinitely. Rachel put the kettle on and started cleaning a couple of mugs. “You were saying?” he insisted.

“About what?”

“Donegal.”

“Oh yes, so we were in Donegal and the divorce was amicable and the sun was shining and Richard was great. Feeling guilty no doubt. He’d even sent flowers to the house for us, you know? All the latest DVDs for the girls.”

“And then what happened?”

“Well, it was raining and the DVD player wasn’t working and the girls were desperate to see
Toy Story 3
.”

“Right.”

“But the DVD player just wouldn’t go. And Sue’s screaming, as she does. Basket case that wee girl. So I start rummaging around looking for a DVD player and up in Richard’s office I’m hoking through the drawers
and I see this old laptop. I look at the side of it and sure enough there’s a DVD slot.”

Killian sat on the edge of the kitchen table. Outside the girls were laughing. Steam was pouring from the kettle. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing up. His skin was tingling. The old Pavee ladies would tell you that that’s what happened when you could feel the future coming.

That was when you had to be on your guard and pay special attention.

Events from tomorrow were leaking back into today.

“And then what happened?” he asked slowly.

“Well,” she began and he watched carefully as she poured the scalding hot water into a tea pot. “I brought the computer downstairs and plugged it in. Milk, sugar?”

“Both.”

She poured milk and a teaspoon of sugar into the mug and handed the tea to him. She sat down on the sofa.

“Go on,” Killian said.

“We watched
Toy Story 3
,” she said.

Killian waited for her to sip her tea and when she did so, he sipped his. “That’s it? That’s some fucking anecdote,” he said.

She put down the mug, went into a back room and returned with an old Dell 2800 laptop. She put it on the table and turned it on.

“After I put the girls to bed, I was tootling around on the laptop looking for Solitaire when I found this.”

She dragged the mouse pointer onto an avi file. “I’m going to leave. You can watch it. Let me know when it’s over.”

She clicked on it and went outside. It was Super 8 footage that had been converted into a video file. It was a sex tape. Shaky camera. Roughly cut.

Men having sex with children. Girls, about thirteen or fourteen years old.

Something not quite right about them. He couldn’t put his finger on it before finally noticing that they all had 1970s haircuts.

“What is this?” he asked her.

“Keep watching,” she said from the cabin door.

The film continued and half a dozen men appeared in a scene with a blonde, vacant-eyed but enthusiastic teenage girl. Someone held up a card that said “Gang Bang Special!”

Killian recognised several of the men. The first was Dermaid McCann,
the
Dermaid McCann: famous paramilitary chieftain, ex-commander of the IRA and now a minister in the Northern Ireland devolved government; Dermaid was important, he had met President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron, he had condemned 2009’s Real IRA bombings, thus preventing loyalist retaliation and saving the Northern Ireland peace process from going off the rails into civil war. Another of the men was now a well-known High Court judge. Another read the news for the BBC. The man holding the camera and whose face was caught briefly in a mirror was Richard Coulter. The very last shot in the footage was an even briefer glimpse of Tom Eichel.

chapter 14
the long goodbye

M
ARKOV WAS FEELING PLEASED WITH HIMSELF
. I
T WAS CLEAR
that Killian – Bernie had found out his name from Michael Forsythe – was not going to call the police over the incident at the farmhouse. It wouldn’t be in anyone’s interest to get Mr Coulter mixed up in that, so clearly they were going to let the cops believe it was a robbery gone wrong or some such thing.

In a way he should be thankful to Killian for that.

He also should be thankful for the fact that his plays were so obvious.

Bush league stuff from twenty years ago.

His scheme had failed almost from the outset.

Markov had checked out of his hotel and gone to his car at six-thirty in the morning. He’d known as soon as he turned the key in the ignition that it had been sabotaged. He’d checked the exhaust pipe for obstructions and after an engine inspection he’d found the cut spark plugs in about twenty seconds.

What was more the skinny red-haired kid who was hanging around the parking lot and looking at him was transparently something to do with it.

He’d walked over to the kid and pointed the .45 ACP at his forehead and without even asking a question the whole thing had spilled.

Markov had tried not to yawn during the kid’s story:

Private detective/stolen car/wait for you/spy on you/call him when you left.

The kid would have turned even without a financial incentive but Markov gave him two hundred pounds sterling anyway.

“Come with me,” he said to the kid.

The rest was a picnic.

This country was easy. It was open territory. Not like the US where people were armed, cars alarmed and cops and cameras lurked everywhere.

He felt like a time traveller from the 2000s unleashed in the 1950s.

He found a 2008 Toyota Camry in the lot that he liked the look of. He cut glass from the window, opened the door, climbed inside, ripped the plastic cover from underneath the steering column, hot-wired it and went back to the kid.

“How long to drive to Dervish Island?” he asked.

“An hour and a half,” the kid guessed.

“Okay, this is what you will do. Wait until nine o’clock and then make phone call as originally planned. Tell Killian I have just left.”

“Okay.”

“What time?”

“Nine o’clock.”

“Perfect. If you fuck up, or try to cross me, I will search four corners of Earth until I find you. Your death will be long. It will be famous.”

It was now seven in the morning, plenty of time to get to the island and take Killian by surprise. Plenty of time. And the money and the prospect of a .45 slug in the temple would keep the little shit honest.

Poor old Killian.

But that’s the price you paid for being old and slow and stupid.

Markov drove the Camry to a gas station, bought a map, a sandwich and a Coke Zero.

It was a full service station and while the man pumped the gas for him, he bounced his rubber stress ball up and down into his left hand. It was
cold and a little drizzly but he was wearing a leather jacket and his jeans and a thick T-shirt. He was okay.

He was feeling good.

He tipped the guy pumping gas five pounds and drove south out of Enniskillen into a boggy sort of woodland.

The rain came on and Markov flipped the window wipers and later he had to hit the fog lights as a mist rolled in from the shores of Lough Erne.

He found it quite pleasant.

He wound the window down, turned off the radio and his phone and breathed the air.

He liked it here. Las Vegas dried you out, wearied you, and after the initial excitement neither he nor Marina nor any of the locals ever went anywhere near the Strip.

This might be a good place to retire to.

Marina’s father was a Volga German who had recently migrated to Berlin. They could probably get German citizenship through him and with German citizenship they could live anywhere in the European Union.

Maybe.

He’d see.

He drove on.

He had to consult the map a few times but he didn’t get lost and he found first Upper Lough Erne and then Dervish Island easily.

When he pulled into the ferry parking lot he saw that the car Killian had stolen was still there.