75
Lennon waited alone in the kitchen. A constable from Carrickfergus lingered uselessly in the corridor outside the flat while a sergeant took statements from the residents on the floors below. Everyone who could be spared was at the scene of DCI Gordon’s murder. The best the Carrickfergus station could do was send their one patrol car, which had been on traffic duty looking for drunk drivers, to the apartment block. Lennon got there before them and came straight up to find the door blown in and the place empty.
Worry and fear quarrelled within him like feral cats. He couldn’t keep his mind in one place long enough to plan a course of action. He phoned the station again, looking for CI Uprichard. When the duty officer finally answered the call, he told Lennon yet again: Uprichard was too busy, just wait there, secure the scene until a team from D District could be assembled.
‘I can’t just wait here,’ Lennon said. ‘He has my daughter. The same man you had in custody three hours ago.’
‘I understand that,’ the duty officer said, ‘but an officer has been murdered here. Everybody who can be contacted is being brought in. Besides, you know Carrickfergus is D District; we can only send men if it’s an emergency. Otherwise you’ll have to wait for a team from Lisburn.’
‘Emergency?’ Lennon said. ‘What the fuck are you talking about? This is my daughter. The same man who killed Gordon has her.’
‘But he doesn’t have her there,’ the duty officer said.
Lennon had no answer for that, no words to express his frustration.
‘To do any good, you need a proper MIT and forensics to go over the apartment,’ the duty officer continued. ‘Forensics are tied up here for the time being, and Lisburn will get an MIT over there as soon as they can. I’m sorry, sir, that’s the best I can do at the moment. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s bedlam here.’
Lennon hung up. He paced a single circle around the small kitchen and stopped at the sink. He ran the tap, splashed water on his face, dried himself on his sleeve. He walked out through the living room and into the hall. His Glock lay on the floor. It hadn’t done Marie any good. He stooped and picked it up.
The constable shuffled his feet and coughed in the doorway. Wallace, his name was, and he watched Lennon with nervous deference. He didn’t look like he’d been long on the job, most likely a probationer paired up with the older sergeant to learn the ropes.
‘Should you lift that, Inspector?’ His face dropped as Lennon gave him a hard look. ‘I mean, it’s evidence at the scene, isn’t it?’
Lennon patted his shoulder as he stepped past him to the corridor. ‘You’ll go far, Constable Wallace,’ he said.
The lift doors slid open and Sergeant Dodds stepped out. He reviewed his notebook as he walked.
‘Anything?’ Lennon asked.
‘Nothing useful,’ Dodds said. ‘Only three other flats occupied. All of them heard the gunfire, and two of them called 999. Everyone locked their doors and kept their heads down till they heard our siren. Nobody saw anything.’
Lennon had expected nothing more. ‘All right,’ he said. He walked towards the lift. ‘An MIT from Lisburn will be here when they have the people gathered, and forensics when they can get away. Wallace, you stay here. Dodds, you wait downstairs at the entrance. Don’t let anyone use the stairwell if you can help it.’
Dodds followed Lennon into the lift. ‘And where are you going?’
‘To see a man.’
‘What man?’
‘Just a man,’ Lennon said. He prayed Roscoe Patterson was on drinking form tonight.
76
The Traveller put his shoulder to the door and pushed. It budged only an inch or two before the hedgerow pushed back. ‘Fucking bastard arsehole,’ he said. He slid the other way and struggled over the armrest, going head first. The gear stick caught him in the balls and he groaned. In a second or two, that sick, heavy ache would join the throb in his chest where the seat belt had crushed the air out of him. And his neck hurt too. That pain seemed to begin in his shoulders, creep up to the back of his skull, then trace a line up and over to his forehead.
He opened the passenger door and climbed out. He grabbed Marie’s mobile phone and hit a button. The screen had cracked, but it still worked, casting a weak light. He used it as a makeshift torch so he could inspect the damage to the car. It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. The hedgerow had cushioned its impact with the embankment, and the old Volkswagen was built tough. He shone the light down at the tyres. The earth wasn’t too wet; he should be able to reverse the car out of the tangle of green.
The light died as the phone went back into standby. The Traveller turned in a circle at the edge of the little country road. An orange glow hovered over Lurgan to the west. To the north he could make out the soft rumble of night-time traffic on the motorway, lorries hurrying to make the early ferries to Britain, or holidaymakers heading to one of the airports.
He listened hard for noises closer to the road, for the sound of feet creeping through the hedges and fields. Was that a wheeze and a rattle from across the way? The sound was so small, perhaps he only imagined it. He closed his eyes, held his breath, and listened harder. A cold, damp breeze washed across his face.
There, a child’s soft cry, then a hoarse whisper.
The Traveller opened his eyes. He looked in the direction of the sounds. A light, maybe a window, glowed dim in the distance. A farmhouse, about half a mile away. He thumbed the phone again. He turned, crouched down, and used it to find Hewitt’s Glock in the passenger footwell.
As he straightened, the pistol cold in his hand, a weariness came over him. He leaned on the car’s roof and breathed deep. New pains signalled from all over his body. He wished he’d never entered the bar in Finglas. He wished he’d never taken the note from Davy Haughey, the one with Orla O’Kane’s phone number on it. He wished he’d never accepted her invitation to that fucking convalescent home near Drogheda, the one where Bull O’Kane wallowed in his own hate and shit-smelling stink.
An insane notion flitted through his mind, one so ludicrous he couldn’t help but examine it as it passed. Just get in the car, reverse out of the hedge, and drive away. Leave the woman and her kid to their fate out here. Whoever was in that house would take them in, see them right. The Traveller could go to one of the flats he kept in Dublin, Drogheda or Cork, gather up his passports, and disappear. He had money stashed in accounts in Ireland, Brazil, the Philippines and more places besides, enough to see him to his dying day if he was careful with it.
But what kind of life would that be, hiding under stones like a woodlouse? And then another thought came to him.
Gerry Fegan.
The Traveller wanted to know if he could take Gerry Fegan. He considered his condition, the injured shoulder, the sprained wrist, the stinging eye. He inhaled, igniting a fresh pain in his chest. Maybe add a cracked rib to that list. He’d be at a disadvantage, and that gave Fegan a fighting chance.
If the cops didn’t get to Fegan first, the Traveller could have a go at him. May the best man win, and all that.
Alone, in the dark by the side of the road, the Traveller smiled to himself as he made his mind up. He turned towards the sound he was now sure he had heard and started walking. When the crunch of country road under his feet turned to the soft squelch of damp grass he thumbed the mobile and let its glow reach into the dark. He watched and listened.
Another rattling inhalation. He trained the light on its source. Eyes glittered there. He marched forward, and he heard, ‘Go, go, go!’
A small shape sprang from the hedge and disappeared into the black. The woman tried to raise herself from the tangle of greenery, but stumbled. He was on her before she could move. She didn’t have the strength to struggle, just lay limp beneath him, her breath shallow and stuttering.
‘Easy now,’ he said, letting her feel the cold of the Glock against her neck.
The Traveller put the phone into his pocket, then eased back and slipped an arm around her waist. He got to his feet, taking her with him. She shivered against his body as he held her close, the pistol’s muzzle beneath her chin.
