they’d moved away months ago, that he’d been trying to find out where they’d gone since then.
Instead, he said, ‘Ten quid ought to do you.’
‘All right, big spender,’ she said as she looked for the money. ‘I get the message. I’ll be out of your way in —’
She stopped talking.
‘There’s bound to be a ten in there,’ he said.
She stared at him, and he understood.
He raised his hands, said, ‘Look, I—’
‘A fucking cop?’
‘I—’
‘You’re a fucking peeler?’
She threw the wallet. It slapped against his chest and fell to the floor. She looked down at it. She stooped, picked it up, pulled out two ten-pound notes, threw it again. This time he caught it. He tossed it on the bed beside him.
‘Jesus, if anyone knew I’d gone home with a cop,’ she said. ‘Fuck me, I’d be burnt out of my house.’
Lennon smiled. ‘Then tell them I’m an airline pilot.’
Arsehole,’ she said, gathering bits and pieces of clothing. ‘Jesus, I knew peelers made decent money, but a place like this?’ She pulled her jeans from the chair in the corner, disturbing the jacket underneath. ‘How much is your mortgage? Or do you rent? Must be a fucking—’
Something heavy dropped to the floor. She stared down at the leather pouch.
‘Is that what I think it is?’
He shrugged and nodded.
She kept her eyes on it as she slipped her jeans on and tucked the money into her pocket. She picked it up. She turned it in her hands, slid the pistol from its sheath. ‘What make is it?’ she asked.
A Glock,’ he said. He watched her drop the holster to the floor. She had chips in her nail varnish.
‘You ever shoot anyone?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said. The lie was well practised.
‘That scar on your shoulder. You said you got it in a car crash.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
He didn’t answer.
She traced the Glock’s lines, brought it to her nose, smelled it. Her tongue brushed her upper lip. ‘It’s heavy,’ she said. ‘Is it loaded?’
‘Of course,’ he said.
‘Shouldn’t you tell me to be careful? Shouldn’t you take it off me?’
‘Maybe,’ he said.
‘There’s a safety catch or something, right?’
‘No,’ he said. He made a gun with his fingers and aimed at her. ‘You just point it and pull the trigger. Simple as that.’
She looked up from the Glock. Her eyes couldn’t hold his. She walked slowly to the dressing table, cradling the pistol like it was made of tissue, and set it down. It hardly made a noise against the wood.
She said, ‘I should go.’
8
The Traveller eased back onto the bed and pulled the sheet up around him. ‘Going away for a while,’ he said.
Sofia kept her naked back to him, the late afternoon light pooling in the valleys of her flesh. A scar, pale against her tan, spread across the small of her back. He’d never asked how she got it, but he had a good idea. ‘What for?’ she asked.
‘Business,’ the Traveller said.
She stretched as she rolled onto her back, her skin brushing against his, the stubble of her underarm scratching at his shoulder. ‘When will you be back?’ she asked.
‘Depends,’ he said. ‘Not long, maybe.’
‘Maybe,’ she echoed. ‘You said that last time.’
‘Then get yourself someone else to play with. Won’t bother me. Just make sure he wears a johnny. Don’t want to catch nothing off some dirty bastard.’
‘Pig,’ she said as she rolled away.
He reached under the sheet and squeezed a fleshy buttock. She slapped his hand away. The sound of it reverberated around the high-ceilinged bedroom. It was made up to look like some grand old place, with cornices and an elaborate rose above the light, but the house couldn’t have been standing more than five or six years. New money trying to look like old, the Traveller thought. Sofia had inherited the place from her dead husband, along with half a dozen other properties, a fat investment portfolio, and a luxury-car dealership. Did she know he was the one that did the husband in? He reckoned so, but she’d never let on. That scar on her back wasn’t the only one. The first time he’d bedded her there had been something close to gratitude in her eyes.
Not that she’d bought the hit. That had been a rival businessman the husband had shafted on a deal. When the Traveller had been watching the doomed man’s comings and goings, figuring out the job, he’d seen Sofia driving the big Range Rover away from the massive house. He’d followed her to some young lad’s place where she drew the curtains and emerged two hours later with her skirt crooked and her hair messed up. He’d made a mental note then to call on her once the job was done.
Two years ago, that was, and he visited her at least once every few weeks. He’d even taken her to Benidorm. She got drunk and tearful on cheap sangria and talked about her only regret: the husband hadn’t given her a baby. He sometimes wondered why she didn’t just quit the pill and not tell him about it, get pregnant and say goodbye. Maybe she had an honest streak in her. He laughed out loud.
‘What’s so fucking funny?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ he said. He turned onto his side and slipped his arm around her waist, pulled her in close to him. She took his hand and placed it on her plump breast.
‘Fancy another?’ he asked.
‘Already?’
He squeezed. ‘Me? Sure I’m always raring to go.’
‘Bastard,’ she said.
It took an hour and a half to drive north through Ardee, Carrickmacross, and Castleblaney before hitting the outskirts of Monaghan town a few miles south of the border. The Traveller had bought a ten-year-old Mercedes from a dealer he knew near Drogheda. It was a big, wallowing estate with 200,000 miles on it. An automatic with plenty of room in the back if he needed to stash anything or anybody.
The Bull had described the place well, even drawn a map. The Traveller stopped at junctions as he got nearer, traced the shape of the words on the map with his finger, and matched them to the road signs.
He remembered the word ‘alexia’ as a shadow, how a doctor explained it to him in broken English fifteen years ago. Another name for it was acquired dyslexia. Something about the piece of Kevlar they dug out of his head, how it fucked up something in his brain, made written words turn into a jumble of criss-crossing lines.
The doctor had told him he’d never read anything again. That didn’t bother the Traveller at first; he’d never been one for books. But when he re-entered the living world, the lack of words became an obstacle. So he had trained himself to memorise the letters as shapes, all twenty-six of them. He could study a word, judge each letter in turn, and decipher its meaning if he tried hard enough. But more than one or two words, and it might as well be Chinese. It suited him to let the likes of Bull O’Kane think he was illiterate. No one ever suffered for being underestimated.
Another thirty minutes and he found Malloy’s place, just as it was getting dark. An old cottage set back a hundred yards from the road with a single-track lane running up to the small garden.
He stopped the car halfway along the lane, far enough so the Merc couldn’t be seen from the road, and not
