shifting shadows waited. They parted for him, moved around him, as he opened the front door and stepped out onto the street.
The three Brits came to him and stared over his shoulder at the house, hateful longing on their faces.
“No,” Fegan said. He crossed the street. An alleyway faced the priest’s house. He let its darkness devour him and the nine followers. The bricks cooled his forehead as he rested against the wall.
“Christ,” Fegan said. “He doesn’t deserve it.”
The three Brits pointed to the door.
“Jesus, he didn’t do anything.”
The priest’s upstairs light glared for a moment before blinking out again. The Brits walked out to the street, their arms raised towards the window.
“I didn’t give him a choice. Not really.”
The Brits went to the door, and one pressed his ear against it. The woman stepped out into the orange glow of the street lights and pointed to the window. The butcher joined her, then the cop and the two UFF boys.
Fegan followed them.
“He was scared,” Fegan said. “All right, he could have stopped it, but I threatened him. Look, he knows he did wrong. You heard him.”
The woman moved close to him, her eyes blazing. Fegan looked down at the baby in her arms. It stared back up at him, its toothless mouth contorted with hate.
“Christ!” Fegan backed into the alley’s dark harbour and covered his eyes. “Leave me alone. I can’t do it.”
He reached for the small of his back and pulled the Walther from his waistband. He chambered a round and placed the muzzle between his teeth. It was cold and slick. He had a moment to wonder what it would feel like, that explosion in his skull, before another thought appeared in his mind.
He thought about Ellen’s small hand, and how his skin felt clean where she held his fingers in her fist. Then he thought about how the sun found the gold flecks in Marie’s hair. And then he thought about the promise he’d made, that he would protect them from McGinty’s threat.
Slowly, Fegan took the pistol from his mouth. He released the round from the chamber and dropped it into his pocket, alongside the priest’s key. The nine followers stared as he emerged from the alley. He tucked the Walther back into his waistband and began the walk home. The Brits overtook him, pointing back to the priest’s house.
“No,” Fegan said. “Not him.”
They were screaming even before he was in his own home. The sound of their agony echoed through the streets, and Fegan wondered how the city could sleep through it. Once inside, without turning on the lights, he went straight for the sideboard and the bottle of Jameson’s. He unscrewed the cap and brought the bottle to his mouth. He was on his fifth deep swallow, trying not to retch from the burn, when the baby started crying.
22
Fegan woke late the next morning and immediately ran to the bathroom to throw up. He’d drunk almost a full bottle of whiskey the night before and it had taken its toll. He would have retreated to bed, dug himself in beneath the covers while he waited for the greasy waves of the hangover to ease, but he had a mobile phone to buy.
He walked to the supermarket on watery legs, keeping his gaze from the morning shadows. Every step of the way he felt eyes on his back. Occasionally, he spun on his heels, looking for whoever followed. But part of him knew.
Campbell, probably sent by McGinty.
Once, as he paid for the cheap phone, he looked up and caught a flash of denim disappearing behind a magazine rack. On his way home he considered stopping, doubling back, and confronting Campbell. He dismissed it as foolishness. He kept his head down and kept walking. A quick glance up and down Calcutta Street didn’t reveal anything, but once he was inside his own home the feeling left him.
While he waited for the phone to charge, Fegan worked on the guitar to soothe his aching head. He polished the frets with steel wool in the good light from the window. He had shaped them with a rounded fret file and sandpaper, sighted a line down the fingerboard to make sure they were even, and now he worked over them one by one, giving them a mirror finish.
Fegan thought of Ronnie Lennox as he worked. The old man got his release letter around the same time he did. Like Fegan, it had brought on sleepless nights, but for different reasons.
They talked about it often in those last days. While Fegan swept up chippings from the workshop floor and Ronnie rested on a stool, they talked about the changes outside, the Good Friday Agreement that supposedly settled it all, and the referendum that followed. Two years after Ireland, north and south, had voted in favor of the Agreement, the Maze Prison stood almost empty. The last few inmates moved around the place as they wished, captives and guards happy to keep the peace and count the days.
Ronnie looked at Fegan with rheumy eyes and said, “If it sticks, if this peace deal works out, you’ve got to ask yourself something.”
Fegan propped the broom against the workbench and scooped up chippings with a dustpan. “What?”
“If there’s peace, if it’s really over, then what use are we?”
Fegan had no answer.
Ronnie turned his attention to an acoustic guitar that a guard had left for repair. The guard had said his son was driving him crazy about it, that the boy loved the guitar more than his own mother. Ronnie would get a couple of sets of strings for payment. His face glazed with concentration as he held his ear to the guitar’s face. He pressed the wood with his fingertips and squinted.
“Aye,” he said. “There’s a brace gone.”
