Ruthless (8 page)

He caught the man in the stomach.

The man doubled over, dropping the cosh, retching and trying to draw breath as he clutched at his belly.

Rufus unjammed the chair from the sink rim and kicked the man in the head, hard, while he was down. Then he propelled himself towards the window, launching himself at it head-first, chair and all.

He shot through the tattered drapes. Felt the impact as his head went through the glass, the rotten frame disintegrating under his weight. He hit the ground hard, with bits of broken window raining down all around him in the dry dirt. And
still
the fecking chair had him in its grip, though a couple of the legs had broken off in the fall. He looked wildly around him, blood dripping in his eyes so that he could barely see, knowing that he had to get clear before Big Don and his men recovered their wits.

Scrambling to his feet, bent double with his arms still strapped to the chair, he ran as best he could.

He could see the hotel through the trees, about five hundred yards away. They hadn’t even bothered to take him far, confident that they had him, that they would incinerate him in the old building in the woods and make their escape before anyone realized what had happened.

Expecting them to overtake him any minute, Rufus hobbled towards the driveway, hunched double under the chair’s weight, bleeding, sweating, and reeking of petrol. When he made it to the entrance he toppled through the door with a crash, causing the thin receptionist to leap to his feet, hands raised in alarm, face contorted in disgust at this bloody apparition messing up his nice clean hotel. He shot out from behind his desk to stop Rufus coming any further.

‘Merde!
’ cried the man, gawping at the blood dripping from Rufus on to the marble floor.

‘Yeah, you got that right,’ said Rufus. ‘Now will you for feck’s sake get these ropes cut before the people who tied me to this damned chair catch up with me?’

Something in Rufus’s expression convinced the receptionist that he’d best do as he was told. He found a pair of scissors and with trembling hands cut the ropes. To his obvious relief, Rufus was not inclined to stick around. The moment he was free, he ran out of the hotel and leapt into the Rolls-Royce. Picturing the diplomat’s outrage at this disruption to his schedule, Rufus sped off down the drive. He didn’t stop until he reached the border, where he abandoned the car and crossed on foot into Spain.

18

Don was still on his tail through Spain. Rufus was pursued into Italy, then Switzerland. He started to know how a fox must feel, with the hounds baying at its heels. He was being chased by an implacable enemy, and despair began to eat into him.

Rufus became paranoid, jumping at shadows, seeing danger everywhere. He took a plane to Tenerife and worked the clubs along the Playa de las Americas for a while. He chilled – or tried to – in Bobby’s Bar, drinking pina coladas, touring, lying in the sun on black volcanic ash, sometimes almost choking on the red dust that blew over from the Sahara. Maybe
that
was the place he should head for next – Africa. Get some mercenary work; there was always trouble there.

Then one of his bouncer mates pulled him to one side. ‘Rufus, I’ve heard something . . .’

And there went Tenerife. The man told him that Don and a contingent of hard boys were sitting in Dublin airport ready to come and get him.

Don was never going to give up on this. Three, four, five near misses, and now Rufus was feeling truly desperate. And Christ, how he missed Ireland, his own true home. What the hell. Feck it. Don could find him anywhere, that much was obvious. So let him find him
there,
if he could.

Not wanting to go within a mile of his mother, the whining old cow, he went to the farm, the place by the Shannon where he’d played as a teenager with his cousins. Fatalism gripped him now. He’d given up caring whether he got caught; he couldn’t run forever. He was tired, exhausted from it all. Rory’d been right: Don was never going to let this go. So to hell with it. Let him do his worst.

As a boy, he’d visited the farm as a poor relation. Now, as a man, he supposed he still was. He stood on the drive and looked at the big imposing stone building, the same way he had all those years ago.

‘It’s the proceeds of crime,’ his mother had sneered whenever she and her husband and son were invited there. His mother claimed that her high-and-mighty brother Davey’s branch of the family thought their poorer relatives beneath them. But Rufus suspected that she, with her make-do-and-mend life, was merely jealous of the material wealth they so obviously enjoyed, and it stuck in her craw to see it.

Once, Rufus’s father had been given a chance to join the family firm, but Mother had shouted the old man down, the way she always did. As a result, they remained poor, and
she
remained stubbornly and stupidly resentful of anyone who wasn’t in the same boat. ‘Talk about ill-gotten gains,’ she’d say. ‘It’s all robbed from London fellas, that place of theirs.’

But Rufus’s memories of his visits to the farm were sweet. Mostly, they centred on his cousin Orla. He had never got on with Tory or Pat; they were ham-fisted thugs without finesse. Brutality came naturally to them, and they’d pushed and shoved and bullied the younger members of their family – Orla, her twin Redmond and the baby of the clan, Kieron – mercilessly.

Rufus might
look
like a wild man, but at least he had some sensibilities. The Jesuit fathers had raised him, instilled a little common decency – something that was completely lacking in Tory and Pat.

He carried on walking up the great sweeping drive towards the house, the vision of Orla as she had been that long-ago summer’s day when he’d kissed her in the garden filling his mind. Sadness gripped him. She was lost to him, lost forever. Dead and gone.

He thought of her, as beautiful as any Dante Rossetti painting, with her lustrously tumbling auburn hair and her fine white skin. Her eyes, green as emeralds, always with that sad shuttered look about them.

Keep out,
those eyes told the world around her.
Don’t come near.

He remembered her so well. Wished he could have seen her again, got to know her better. They had shared one illicit kiss, one juvenile embrace. He remembered how madly excited he’d been, he’d loved her with a kind of desperation. She, on the other hand, had kissed him close-mouthed, her jaw tense. Her neck under his hand had trembled and strained, and she had broken free as soon as she could.

He’d been hurt by her reticence. He’d thought his affection was returned. But no, obviously not. She’d looked at him as if he was a monster, and run off.

He’d never kissed her again.

He would have liked to show her Paris, the City of Light, the Eiffel Tower all a-sparkle. Forget Don and all that shit. But now . . . now it was too late. He would never get the chance.

It was a bright sunny day, the river gleaming, the morning mist burned away by the sun. The farmhouse loomed ahead of him. He noticed that the grounds were no longer manicured, the way they’d been in the glory days when the Delaneys ruled the London underworld and the coffers overflowed. Some of the stonework was crumbling away, the paintwork was peeling. And no scaffolding up, no sign of repairs underway.

He went to the door. That was the same, though the oak had been stained to grey by the passing years. Rufus yanked the chain, and heard the bell ring in the bowels of the place. He waited. Finally, he rang again. There was no movement from within; no dogs barked; no hurrying footsteps approached.

He stepped back, peered up at the bedroom windows. He could see nothing, no movement. He walked around the side of the building. The sun beat down on him, he was sweating lightly. High summer, just like that day long ago.

And . . . oh God . . . she was there.

He stopped, dropped his bag and jacket to the ground in shock.

He was hallucinating. He’d wanted so much to see her again that here he was conjuring up a vision of her from his imagination. She was wearing a faded flower-sprigged tea dress, a rough windcheater over the top of it, and Wellington boots. Her hair was blowing straight out in the stiff breeze, a blood-red banner. She was hanging washing out to dry on a rotary clothes-line.

He felt his heart banging hard in his chest, felt his mouth go dry. He stood there and stared.

She was older. There was a frown line between her brows, a cobweb of crow’s feet around those heartbreaking eyes of hers.

He closed his own eyes, opened them again.

She was still there. This was no illusion.

‘Orla?’ he said aloud.

The wind whipped the word away. She didn’t turn, didn’t hear. She pegged out another garment, an old woman’s underwear.

‘Orla?
’ he said, louder this time. It wasn’t her, it couldn’t be. This was an illusion. He’d wished it so much that he was seeing it.

She stopped what she was doing, turned her head, stared at him. For a moment her eyes widened in alarm. She looked as if she was going to run indoors.

‘It’s me,’ he said. He let out a bewildered half-laugh. After the hell he’d been through, was this a sign of heaven at last? ‘For the love of Christ, is it you? Is it really?’

‘Rufus?
’ she asked.

‘You’re supposed to be dead,’ he said in wonder. He walked towards her in a daze.

Orla was starting to smile. She was so beautiful. It was her, it was his Orla.

Suddenly Rufus was running, and Orla stumbled forward and they fell together in an embrace, Rufus laughing and lifting her off her feet with the joy of it.

He spun her around, roaring with laughter. ‘You’re alive! God be praised, you’re alive!’

There were tears in his eyes as he set her back upon the ground, cupped her dear face in his big hands. He planted a kiss on her lips. As she had once long ago in these very grounds, she stiffened – but still, she smiled.

‘I thought I’d lost you,’ he said, and a tear of genuine emotion trickled down his cheek.

Orla gave a tight little smile. It was
her
smile, the same one she’d had as a teenager; restrained, secretive, closed-off.

‘I’ve been here all the time,’ she said.

‘For how long?’ To think of that! That she had been
here,
and he had been running around the world not knowing.

‘Oh – years. Years and years,’ she said, and there was that sadness again, as if she had been stuck here like a fly in amber, trapped against her will. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked.

‘Long story,’ he said.

‘Well, fetch your bag and come inside, then you can tell me all about it.’

19

‘Who’s this?’ Davey Delaney asked when he saw Rufus sitting in the kitchen with Orla and her mother.

‘This is Rufus. You remember him, don’t you? Sorcha’s boy, Rufus,’ said Ma.

The old man looked as though he didn’t even remember Sorcha, his own sister, much less her son.

‘That Sorcha! What a tongue she had on her,’ said Ma.

Rufus had to smile at that. His mother
did
have a tongue on her, it lashed like a Fury’s. More miserable in her poverty as the years passed, her husband dead so no longer the whipping boy for her dissatisfaction, she had taken to homing in on Rufus as a fair substitute. He found her depressing to be around, and his visits had become less and less frequent. In fact he hadn’t visited her in years, and he didn’t intend to remedy that.

The place was looking tired, for all the efforts that had clearly been made to spruce it up – much like the elderly pair who inhabited it, shuffling around in carpet slippers, eating crackers and cheese at the kitchen table, the old man gazing around him with an air of gentle bewilderment, the old woman living out her days in obdurate, long-suffering tedium.

‘Pa’s not always this mild,’ Orla warned him. ‘He gets a bit aggressive sometimes, a bit frustrated. You know we have guns on the farm, to see off vermin. All the farmers around here do. We have to be careful to keep the cabinet locked though.’

Rufus wondered if she was joking, but soon found she wasn’t when the old man sprang to his feet one night and threw a coffee table at the TV in irritation at something the newscaster was saying. Rufus had to restrain him until Ma and Orla could calm him down, but it was startling to see and a warning that Orla’s words were correct.

That first night, when the old ones went off to bed, Rufus sat there into the late evening with Orla. She got out a bottle of whisky, poured them both a measure, and sat there in her tea dress studying him.

‘You look well,’ she pronounced at last.

‘And you.’ In fact he thought she looked better than well: fabulous. ‘Tell me what happened. I heard talk about a plane crash when I was in London. How could you have survived that?’

Orla’s eyes dropped to the tumbler of whisky. She raised it to her lips, sipped a little.

‘Redmond helped me get out,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Fergal the pilot was done for when we hit the sea, but we were still alive and the plane was filling with water and starting to sink.’

‘It must have been terrifying.’

‘It was. But Redmond saved me.’

‘He got you out of the plane, got you to shore?’

Orla shook her head. ‘He got me out of the plane, but I lost him after that. I swam to shore alone. I’ll never forget how cold that water was. I was sure I would die before I got to dry land. Somehow, I managed it though.’ Her voice broke. ‘But Redmond was nowhere to be found.’

‘Jesus,’ said Rufus, and crossed himself.

She nodded. ‘I can’t talk about this,’ she said.

‘No. I’m sorry. It must be painful for you.’

Orla looked up with a strained smile. ‘And what about you? How’s the world been treating you since we last saw each other?’

Rufus thought of Pikey going up in flames, Don’s unending fury. Losing himself in London, then in Paris and deeper in the heart of France, the flight into Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Tenerife – running and running until the weariness overcame him, and with it the need to touch the soil of home once more.