Hewitt stopped, sighed, and turned around.
‘If you’re lying to me,’ Lennon said.
‘You’ll what?’
Lennon thought about it for a few seconds before telling the truth. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
13
Gerry Fegan stood still and closed his eyes when the long Cadillac slowed alongside him. He’d been as careful as he could, getting off the F Train at Delancey Street station instead of East Broadway, and taking the most circuitous route he could find to his building on the corner of Hester and Ludlow Street. He would have fled when he had the chance, only he needed money and his fake passport. He had no choice but to go back to his shabby little room on the Lower East Side.
The brakes whined. ‘Doyles want to see you, Gerry Fegan,’ a heavily accented voice called.
Fegan opened his eyes and turned to Pye Preval. He was the only black man the Doyle brothers would have about them. The small and wiry Haitian leaned out of the rear passenger side window. Fegan had met him a few times on the sites he’d worked on. In his strange mix of Haitian Creole and English, Pye often told Fegan he wanted to visit Ireland. He asked Fegan about the weather and the landscape, the drink, and the ‘fi’ – the girls. Fegan liked him in a way, but knew a bad man when he met one. Pye would be handy with a knife, Fegan was sure of it.
Pye got out of the car and held the door open. ‘Zanmi mwen,’ he said, his smile as bright as the day. He pointed inside the limo. ‘My friend, get in machin nan.’
‘Jimmy Stone’s going to need surgery on that knee,’ Frankie Doyle said. He speared a meatball with his fork and squashed overcooked pasta into it with his knife.
The tourists on Mulberry Street paid no attention to Fegan or the Doyles as they talked at a table outside the restaurant. The brothers didn’t offer Fegan any food.
‘Tell him I’m sorry about that,’ Fegan said.
Packie Doyle snorted and mopped his mouth with a paper napkin. ‘Christ, I don’t think sorry’s going to do it, Gerry.’
Fegan didn’t protest at the name. ‘Will he be all right?’ he asked.
‘Eventually,’ Frankie said. ‘He’ll be on crutches for a month or two, and he’ll have a limp for a good long while. Some of the boys thought we should do you over for that, Gerry. Do both your knees, see how you like it.’
Fegan said nothing. An image flickered briefly in his mind: breaking a young man’s left knee behind McKenna’s bar on the Springfield Road. It had been more than two decades ago, and remembrance could do no good. He pushed the memory away.
Packie mopped up sauce with a fistful of bread. ‘We don’t want a fight with you, Gerry,’ he said.
‘No fight,’ Frankie said. ‘Jesus, if we wanted that, we wouldn’t be sitting here now. We could just as easy turn you in to the cops, or immigration even, as hand you over to this guy who’s looking for you.’
‘We could’ve done that,’ Packie said through a mouthful of bread, ‘but we didn’t.’
‘Look at things our way for a minute,’ Frankie said. ‘Good men are hard to find.’
‘You can’t get the help these days,’ Packie said.
‘So along comes a good man,’ Frankie said, ‘and we want to put some work his way.’
‘But he throws it back in our face,’ Packie said.
‘And we’re just trying to do him a good turn,’ Frankie said. ‘You see where we’re coming from, Gerry?’
Fegan clasped his hands together. ‘I just want to be left alone.’
‘We all want a quiet life,’ Packie said.
Frankie nodded. ‘What we want and what we get are two different things.’
You owe us, Gerry,’ Packie said. ‘And not just for keeping quiet about who and where you are.’
‘Jimmy’s surgery won’t be cheap,’ Frankie said.
‘Thousands, it’ll cost,’ Packie said.
‘There’s no getting round it, Gerry,’ Frankie said.
‘Everybody pays,’ Packie said.
‘Sooner or later,’ Frankie said.
Fegan eyed the bottle of red wine the brothers shared. He swallowed against the dryness in his throat. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.
14
Lennon watched Marie McKenna’s flat for an hour, his mind working over the documents Hewitt had let him see. The windows were still boarded up, no outward sign that anything had changed since May. He often scolded himself as he sat there, parked wherever the best vantage point lay. This was stalker behaviour, plain and simple, and he hated himself for it.
Worst of all, the one night he could have done any good, he hadn’t been there. Just a day before Marie disappeared, Lennon sat in this very parking space and watched a tall thin man call at her door. When she welcomed the stranger in, Lennon had sped off, almost clipping another car. The next day he found out the man was Gerry Fegan, a known killer. Fegan had been arrested for brawling with another thug outside the flat.
Lennon asked CI Uprichard what was going on. Uprichard made a call while Lennon waited, nodded his head and grunted agreement. When Uprichard hung up, he paused, smiled and said, ‘Best just leave it.’
But Lennon didn’t leave it, at least not for a while. He asked around, begged favours, and leaned on lowlifes. All he could get was that she’d moved away in a hurry, taking the little girl with her.
His little girl.
He had put it to the back of his mind, convinced himself his daughter was lost to him, but still once every week or two he would take a detour by Eglantine Avenue. Like this evening.
The window above Marie’s flat lit up. A young man with a rollup cigarette between his lips appeared for just a moment as he lowered the shabby blinds. An idea presented itself. Lennon pushed it away. The idea resisted. He gave in, knowing it was a mistake.
Lennon climbed out of his Audi, locked it, and walked towards the flat. There were three doorbell buttons. The bottom one, the button for Marie’s flat, had no name tag. The middle one said ‘Hutchence’. Lennon held his thumb on it for five seconds, then took a step back.
The middle blind on the bay window shot up, followed by the sash pane. The young man leaned out. ‘Yeah?’
‘Police,’ Lennon said. ‘I need a word.’
The young man banged his head on the window frame as he ducked back inside. Lennon heard the frantic muttering of at least three voices from above. He guessed it wasn’t tobacco the young man was smoking.
The young man’s head appeared again. ‘Can I see some identification please?’ he asked, his voice breaking like a twelve-year-old’s.
‘If you like,’ Lennon said. He pulled his wallet from his hip pocket, opened it, and held it up. ‘I doubt if you’ll be able to read it from up there, though.’
‘I’ll be down in a minute,’ the young man said, the last word at least an octave higher than the rest.
Lennon scanned the tiny garden as he waited. Marie used to keep it pretty neat. Now litter and dead leaves gathered in the corners, and a summer’s worth of weeds had grown up through the cracks in the concrete.
A light appeared in the glass above the front door. Lennon put on his best scary cop face, ready to put the wind up the youngster. The door opened. He held his identification up at the kid’s eye level. There was no sound but the flushing of a toilet somewhere upstairs.
Eventually the kid smirked and said, ‘John Lennon? Was Ringo busy?’
Lennon gave the boy his hardest stare. ‘Detective Inspector John Lennon. My friends call me Jack. You can call me Inspector Lennon. Understood?’
The kid’s smirk dropped. ‘Understood.’
‘Is your name Hutchence?’
Yes.’
‘First name?’
