The Dark Divide (53 page)

No matter how hard he tried to fight it, the drugs worked their magic on him and Darragh was soon drifting back down into the warm dark embrace of unconsciousness.

When he woke some time later, Darragh’s eyes focussed more slowly than he would have liked. His throat was dry and raw and when he tried to move, he discovered he was strapped to the rails of the hospital bed with wide strips of Velcro.

But at least the tubes — especially the catheter — were gone.

He looked around, as much as he could with the restraints. He was in a hospital, he realised, calling on Rónán’s memories of this reality, something he hadn’t done the first time he woke up in this strange place — he had panicked because of all the tubes they’d thrust into him.

He was no longer in the ICU, he guessed. The machines were gone. The walls were a tacky shade of mustard, there was an inoffensive, matching geometric pattern on the curtains, a single hospital bed, a small basin with a mirror on the opposite wall. The detective who had caused his brother so much grief of late, Pete Doherty, was sitting beside his bed, flipping through a magazine.

‘You’re awake.’

Darragh nodded, not certain there was an answer to such a blindingly obvious statement.

Pete put down the magazine, leaned forward in his seat and fixed his attention on Darragh. ‘What did you take?’

‘What?’ Darragh croaked. His throat was as dry as driftwood. He looked at Pete imploringly. ‘Water?’

The detective stood up, poured some water into a plastic cup on the chest by the bed and then held the cup for Darragh while he drank. ‘Better?’

‘Thank you,’ Darragh said, dropping his head back on the pillow.

‘All part of the service,’ Pete said insincerely. ‘You gave everyone quite a scare.’

‘I wasn’t aware anyone in this realm knew me well enough to be concerned, Mr Doherty. I’m touched.’

‘What did you take?’ he asked again. ‘All the tox screens have came back negative so far, but you went down too fast and bounced back too quickly, for your collapse to be just a bad dose of some nasty twenty-four-hour bug.’

Darragh frowned, not sure to what Pete was referring. He hadn’t taken anything. He had — to his amazement — survived
Lughnasadh
. At least, he was alive for now. That didn’t mean he would live for very much longer. Maybe this was a temporary reprieve. He might still be dead by the end of the week, although he felt well enough to believe that might not be the case. But he wasn’t going to be falsely accused of trying to kill himself. ‘How could I take anything?’ he asked. ‘I have been in prison.’

‘Sure … and nobody has
ever
smuggled anything narcotic into a prison.’

‘Then it could not have been something I took,’ Darragh agreed, pretending not to notice the detective’s sarcasm. He glanced down at the straps holding him to the bed. ‘Are these really necessary?’

‘You took some putting down the last time you woke up,’ Pete reminded him. ‘Hospital staff don’t take kindly to that sort of behaviour.’

‘It was not my intention to hurt anyone,’ he said. ‘I was just surprised to discover I was still alive and in a strange place with tubes poking out of every orifice.’

‘That’s what happens when you drop into a coma without warning.’

‘I warned Doctor Semaj something would happen to me.’

‘Yeah, he told me about that.
Lughnasadh
wasn’t it?’

Darragh was pleased the detective seemed to have some grasp of the situation. ‘I am as surprised as you that I have lived through the night and I’m here talking about it, officer.’

‘
Let’s
talk about it,’ Pete said, leaning back in the mustard-coloured armchair that matched the disheartening décor of the rest of the room. He appeared quite relaxed, but Darragh had a feeling very little got past this man. He would know if Darragh was lying. That put the detective at a disadvantage, because Darragh hadn’t lied about much at all.

It was not his fault what he was saying was completely unbelievable.

‘What did you want to know?’

‘I want to know about your relationship with Jack O’Righin,’ Pete said.

Darragh shrugged. ‘I barely know the man.’

‘And yet the first person you called for when you woke up out of a coma so deep you were damn near brain-dead, was the inimitable Jack O’Righin.’

‘From your tone, I gather you dislike him a great deal, detective.’

‘I dislike people who profit from other people’s misfortune,’ Pete said. ‘O’Righin’s a thug, profiting from the death of innocent people while masquerading as a political activist. It’s people like him who give the other side all the ammunition they need to continue to suppress the very people he purports to help.
That’s
what I don’t like about him.’

Pete’s position made a great deal of sense when he explained it like that, but Darragh, like his brother before him, still had trouble reconciling the old man who loved his glasshouse and his bromeliads with the terrorist he had been as a younger man.

‘I have no interest in Jack’s politics, sir.’

‘So you’re an opportunist.’

‘I don’t mean to be,’ Darragh said, feeling as if he should be
apologising for something. ‘Can you tell me what they did to my hand?’

Pete glanced at Darragh’s right hand. ‘Your tattoo washed off.’

‘That’s not possible.’

‘Clearly, it is possible. What did you do it with? Henna? A sharpie?’

Darragh knew what henna was, but he had no idea about the other method Pete was talking about. ‘It must have been the ceremony at
Lughnasadh
. When the power was transferred, the brand went with it.’

Pete sighed. ‘I see. We’re back to that again, are we?’

‘I wish there were some way to prove I’m not lying,’ Darragh said.

‘Let’s start with why you were demanding to speak to O’Righin.’

Darragh smiled. That was easily explained. ‘I want to talk to Jack, because he might know where Sorcha is.’

‘Ah … the mysterious Sorcha,’ Pete said, his tone giving away nothing. ‘I thought you said she went back through the rift to another reality with Hayley Boyle?’

‘I thought you didn’t believe me about the rift?’

‘I don’t,’ the detective said. ‘But the first rule of being a good liar is having a good memory, kid. Yours sucks, apparently.’

‘I lied about her still being in this realm because I didn’t want Sorcha getting into trouble,’ he admitted.

‘And all this time she’s been at Jack’s?’

‘I assume so,’ he said, figuring the only way he was going to get a message to her was to level with this man who had the power, he knew, to pass the message on. He vaguely remembered a guard in the room the last time he’d regained consciousness. Darragh realised being relocated to a hospital in no way altered the fact he was incarcerated, and that he was likely to remain that way until somebody from his own realm came for him, or the authorities in
this reality accepted that he really hadn’t done anything seriously criminal and let him go. But it was important to let Sorcha know he lived. She was too dangerous to leave in this realm without any sort of guidance or restraint, and who knew what she would do if she thought she was stuck here now, alone and friendless, in a realm she didn’t know and didn’t understand?

‘Must be hard for her.’

‘More than I can say,’ Darragh agreed, genuinely concerned for the woman.

‘What about Warren?’ Pete asked.

Darragh’s brow furrowed. ‘What about him?’

‘Did Sorcha take care of him, too?’

‘She was planning to take care of the matter the last time I saw her,’ Darragh told the detective, encouraged by how sympathetic the detective seemed to be to Sorcha’s plight.

‘Do you know what she was planning?’

Darragh nodded. ‘She felt it necessary to protect Rónán. I realise in this realm, such things are not nearly so cut and dried, but in our world — Sorcha’s world — things are much more black and white.’

Pete nodded, looking pensive. ‘Black and white, huh? Is that what you’re calling it?’

There was a slight change in Pete’s tone — an undertone of menace that made Darragh wonder if he might have inadvertently said something foolish. That memory of Rónán’s rattled around inside his head again, along the lines of ‘never talk to the cops without a lawyer’, but it was only now that the alarm bells rang in his mind.

‘Rónán was quite insistent that we not kill him,’ Darragh assured the Gardaí officer.

‘But you and Sorcha disagreed?’

Darragh nodded. ‘My brother has not seen what we have seen, sir. He did not really understand.’

‘But you and Jack understood he needed to be eliminated?’

Darragh nodded.

‘Did Jack help?’

Darragh didn’t worry for himself. He was confident someone would come for him, and he would not be held responsible for anything he had done in this realm. He knew Rónán would have preferred to keep Jack out of this, but Darragh wanted to protect his brother. To do that, he needed to make sure this detective understood Rónán had been innocent and any trouble they had caused was not Rónán’s doing.

‘He kept Warren silent until Sorcha could arrange a more permanent solution to the problem,’ he admitted.

‘So Jack O’Righin, you and the lovely Sorcha conspired to murder Warren Maher?’

‘Detective, you make it sound like —’ Darragh cried out as a sharp pain attacked the lower half of his left arm. He struggled against the restraints as the pain grew worse, but there was nothing he could do to relieve or stop the intense agony.

Pete jumped to his feet to see what was wrong. He gasped when he spied blood welling on Darragh’s forearm. ‘What the fuck is going on? What are you doing?’

Darragh cried out again and saw the wound taking shape. Then he knew. At least, he thought he did. He grinned delightedly through the pain. He recognised the timbre of the stinging agony, realised what it must mean. Although tears stung his eyes from the torment of the injury that was manifesting on his arm, he was filled with relief.

‘I am not … doing … anything,’ he said, gritting his teeth, as he watched the blood bead amid the hairs on his forearm and then drip onto the pale blue cotton blanket.

Pete grabbed the emergency call button on the chest beside the bed. He pressed it a number of times and then ran to the
door to call for help. Darragh bit back his pain and glanced down at his arm.

Slowly, painstakingly and with infinite care that only served to prolong the pain, a bloody word was taking form on the flesh of his forearm, carved — he was quite certain — in another realm with
airgead sídhe
by his brother.

Darragh was elated. Rónán was alive and had found a way to contact him.

‘Jesus, what is that?’ Pete demanded, as he returned to pressing the emergency bell. The reaction time here in this ward was vastly different to the immediate response of the ICU staff. ‘What is that? Some sort of stigmata? How are you doing it?’

‘I am not … doing anything,’ Darragh told him, gritting his teeth against the pain. ‘Rónán is.’

‘No fucking way,’ Pete insisted, refusing to believe what he was seeing.

Darragh leaned forward, trying to make out the words, but the angle his arm was tied to the railing with the Velcro and the blood dripping from the wounds made it hard to read. Then a nurse opened the door, stepped into the room, her put-upon expression changing to horror when she saw the blood. She shouted for help and shoved Pete out of the way.

A moment later there were more nurses filling the room, all of them shouting and ordering each other about and generally panicking about what was causing Darragh’s sudden bleeding. With them blocking his view, Darragh could barely see the wound, although he could feel every agonising inch of the bloody characters as they were carved into his flesh. Unfortunately, the nurses were only interested in staunching the bleeding, not reading the message. Before long his arm was bound with a pressure bandage to stop the bleeding — obscuring Rónán’s communication — and Pete was being shooed from the room.

They gave him something for the pain, and someone sent for a doctor, but Darragh wasn’t paying attention to the medical staff. He dropped his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes, conscious of the words still cutting into his flesh, bringing him hope and maybe even a way home.

Darragh tried to recall the small part of the message he’d seen before it was obscured by blood, gauze and a clutch of very rattled nurses.

All he could remember seeing was one word, and it made no sense at all. Carved into his arm was the word ‘bike’.

CHAPTER 54

It took several blows with a short police battering ram to break the lock in the solid oak front door of Jack O’Righin’s house. Once they were inside, the armed ERU team spread out with practised efficiency, checking each room and yelling ‘clear’ as they verified there was nobody in the house brandishing a weapon, ready to die rather than be taken alive.

Pete followed them in, carrying a handgun and wearing a bulletproof vest, but he let the team do its job, knowing he would only be in the way while they cleared the building. He listened to the radio in his ear as they moved, room by room through the house, expecting the call at any moment telling him they had found Jack or Sorcha. Part of him worried he wouldn’t hear it over the comms, but rather shots ringing out somewhere in the depths of this large, echoing mansion.

Cold-blooded and merciless as she must be, Sorcha, he figured, wasn’t going down without a fight. But with her arrest, finally, they might catch a break in the Hayley Boyle case. Darragh was delusional, but Sorcha, his accomplice, was much more focussed. So was Jack O’Righin. One way or another, Pete was determined he was going to find Hayley Boyle and make someone pay for Warren Maher’s murder.

It took the team less than ten minutes to get through the house.

It took them less than ten minutes to discover nobody was home. Not even the old lady who’d been here the last time Pete paid Jack O’Righin a visit.

Pete cursed as he entered the kitchen on the heels of the assault team, wondering who had tipped O’Righin off about the raid. It was the middle of the night, his car was parked in the drive, but there was nobody to be found inside. It didn’t make sense that he wasn’t here. The house had been under surveillance for hours. Other than the housekeeper leaving about four in the afternoon, there had been no other movement in or out of the house.