“No,” he said. “I’ve never seen him before.”
Caffola reached down and pulled the gag away from the man’s mouth. He pointed to Fegan. “Do you know him?”
The man looked to Fegan, then back to Caffola. He shook his head.
“You sure?”
The man lifted his bound hands and began to plead in some Slavic language. Caffola placed a hand on either side of the door frame to brace himself and swung his boot into the cupboard, punctuating his words with the sound of leather on flesh. “Speak . . . fucking . . . English . . . you . . . dirty . . . bastard . . . or . . . I’ll . . . kick . . . your ... face . . . in.”
“Stop!” the man wailed. “Please, sir, stop!”
“Out you come,” Caffola said as he grabbed a handful of blond hair. He heaved and the man came screaming after. “I need the chair, Gerry.”
Fegan stood up and went to the edge of the room.
Caffola hoisted the man up onto the chair and indicated Fegan. “Do you know him?”
The man shook his head.
“He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him,” Fegan said.
Caffola held a hand up to silence his old comrade. “All right, I just wanted to be sure. Now let’s see what he does know.”
The man’s terrified eyes darted between Fegan and Caffola. His breath came in shallow rasps. A bitter, stale smell filled the room.
“Who is he?” Fegan asked.
“This is Petras Adamkus,” Caffola said. “Say hello, Petras.”
Petras looked from one man to the other.
Caffola gave him one hard slap across the cheek. “I told you to say hello.”
“Hello,” Petras said in a small, high voice.
“Better,” Caffola said. “Now, let’s get down to it. Why did you kill Michael McKenna?”
Petras gaped up at him.
Caffola slapped him again, harder. “Why did you kill Michael McKenna?”
Petras held his bound hands up. “No, no. Michael my friend. We make business. Good deal. Good girls. Young girls. No hurt him.”
Caffola drew back his heavy fist and launched it at the Lithuanian’s chin. It connected with a wet smacking sound, and Petras’s head rocked back, tipping the chair. He landed hard on the floor, blood dripping from his already swelling lip.
Caffola smiled at Fegan. “Brings it all back, doesn’t it?”
When he took a pair of pliers from his pocket, Fegan asked, “Can I go?”
“No stomach for it any more?”
“No.”
“All right,” Caffola said. “You say you had nothing to do with it, that’s good enough for me.”
Fegan opened the door to the corridor. A spark flared in his temple, and he looked back over his shoulder. The two UDR men raised their fingers to Caffola’s bald head.
“Another time,” Fegan said.
“Yeah,” Caffola said as he lifted the Lithuanian back onto the chair. “See you again, Gerry.”
Fegan turned his back on them and walked through the corridor and the bar beyond, out onto the street where Patsy Toner waited in his Jaguar.
5
The Minister of State for Northern Ireland, Edward Hargreaves MP, teed off in afternoon sunlight. He shaded his eyes as the ball soared up and away into the sky above the Old Course at St Andrews. It drifted, veering to the left, and began a slow descent. It bounced three times and disappeared into a patch of gorse.
“Bastard,” he said, and handed the club to the caddy without looking at him.
“Bad luck, Minister,” the third man present said as he placed his tee. A gun bulged at the small of Compton’s back as he bent over.
Hargreaves was glad his new Personal Protection Officer was reasonably affable, unlike the sour fellow he’d had before, but did they have to give him someone so good at golf? Compton’s perfect swing sent the ball off to land precisely between two bunkers, an easy chip away from the green.
Today had been rotten so far, and would likely worsen. The phone at Hargreaves’s hotel bedside had woken him at eight, bearing bad news. Hargreaves had found Michael McKenna to be entirely objectionable on the few occasions they’d met, so he felt no grief, but the trouble his killing would stir could derail years of hard work.
The hard work of Hargreaves and the Secretary of State’s predecessors, admittedly, but still.
God help him, he might even have to visit the forsaken place again this month. He’d just returned from a solid week there, and surely that was enough? Had it been up to Hargreaves he would have cut the hellish waste of land
