90
IT ALL CAME at Lennon as flashes of light, images, tableaux, faces, smears of waking, all of it punctuated by the pain.
First the sky, lost in fog, but all the blacker for it. Then the policemen gathered around him, fingers in his mouth, his head moving through no will of his own. The need to cough, and the agony as it seemed to tear him in two.
Next, the inside of the ambulance, lights so bright they cut into his skull and burrowed into his brain. The paramedics busy around him, the oxygen mask that made him feel as if he were drowning.
Then the hospital, more lights, nurses and doctors, more probing, the urgent voices, the bloody swabs, a long needle that pierced his chest, whines and beeps, then a constant high tone, like a string made of cotton and noise that stretched on and on until it faded to black, and he thought of Ellen and how he wished he’d known her all her life, and Susan with her sad eyes and how he’d like to see them once more, but the darkness was so warm, like a bed on a cold morning and—
Then a lightning crack, and he was back with the pain and the bright, punishing lights, then another mask, and he was gone again.
91
THE DRIVER DID not speak when he took Strazdas’s case, nor on the journey toward the airport. The vehicle looked like the cabs that worked the streets of London, but he had seen many of them in Belfast from the window of his hotel room. A Perspex window separated him from the squat man with the pimpled neck who gripped the steering wheel.
As they travelled, Strazdas pondered what he might say to his mother. The very thought made his scrotum shrivel within his trousers and his bladder ache. Most likely he would say nothing, yet. When he landed in Brussels, he would immediately seek out a flight to some other destination. From there, he would begin tracing records of the girl, who had supplied her to Aleksander, where she came from, her family, anything that might help him track her down.
If he was lucky, she would return home, and there she would be vulnerable. And once her stain was wiped from his mind, he could return to his mother, an honorable son.
Daylight seemed to struggle for a way through the fog, but Strazdas could feel rather than see that the taxi had settled onto a long straight when the driver looked up at his mirror.
“Fuck,” he said.
Strazdas turned in his seat to look out of the rear window. He saw the flashing blue lights first, then the silhouette of the car solidifying in the murk. A siren whooped.
The driver flicked an indicator on and applied his foot to the brake.
“What are you doing?” Strazdas asked.
“I’m pulling in,” the driver said. “What the fuck do you think I’m doing?”
“No,” Strazdas said. “Keep going.”
“Your arse,” the driver said as the taxi mounted the hard shoulder and slowed to a halt.
The car eased up behind and its lights died. The driver’s door opened and a suited man climbed out. As he limped up alongside the taxi, the driver wound his window down. The suited man looked along the road in one direction, then the other.
The driver asked, “Jesus, Dan, what’s going on? You scared me there. I thought I was getting a ticket. I can’t afford any points on my—”
Hewitt pulled a pistol from his waistband, aimed at the driver’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.
Strazdas moved before he heard the shot, grabbed the passenger-side door handle, and threw himself out of the taxi. He hit the ground shoulder-first, hauled himself up on his feet, and lurched up the grass embankment, his feet slipping on the snow.
A gunshot cracked through the cold air, and something slammed Strazdas’s leg from beneath him. He howled as he fell back and rolled down the slope toward the still idling taxi. The icy tarmac of the hard shoulder scraped at his hands and knees before he came to rest by the taxi’s rear wheel. He tried to squirm his way underneath the vehicle, but a hand grabbed his ankle and hauled him back.
Hewitt stood over Strazdas, the pistol staring at the point between the prone man’s eyes.
“I won’t send any letter,” Strazdas said. “It was only talk. I won’t, I swear on my mother’s life.”
“Too late for that,” Hewitt said.
Strazdas screamed.
Two hammer blows to his chest, and he could no longer beg, could no longer scream, only watch as Hewitt stepped closer and leaned in. He felt the heat of the muzzle against his forehead, smelled the cordite, and cursed his mother to hell.
92
SUSAN WAITED BY Lennon’s bedside when he woke, Ellen in her lap.
“Welcome back,” she said.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“The Royal,” she said. “They moved you here from Antrim hospital two days ago.”
“I don’t remember,” he said, his voice cutting through his throat like sandpaper.
“I’m not surprised,” she said. “They had you doped up to the eyeballs.”
“Were you there?”
“Yes,” she said. “I held your hand in the ambulance. I’ve been with you every day.”
“How long?”
Susan smiled. “Well, I wished myself a Happy New Year last night.”
“Thank you,” Lennon said.
She nodded.
Lennon looked at his daughter. He forced a smile for her. “Hiya,” he said.
She kept her expression blank. “Hiya.”
“You been a good girl?” he asked.
She smiled then, and said, “Mm-hm.”
He reached his right hand out toward her. She gripped two of his fingers in hers. He went to say something, he was sure it was important, but sleep outran his words.
TWO DAYS LATER, CI Uprichard sat by Lennon’s bed.
“The standard of visitors is going downhill very badly,” Lennon said.
“It’s going to get worse,” Uprichard said. “You get yourself into some messes.”
“How bad?” Lennon asked.
“Don’t worry too much about it now,” Uprichard said. “Just concentrate on getting better. That’s the best you can do at the moment.”
“How bad?” Lennon asked again.
Uprichard sighed. “Pretty bad. The way things look right now, I can’t see a way out for you. Helping that girl flee the jurisdiction was probably enough to end your days as a police officer, but with young Connolly’s death, even if it was selfdefense … Well, you better have a hell of a case to present to the inquiry.”
“Has anyone looked into Connolly?” Lennon asked. “Why was he there?”
“His wife gave a statement,” Uprichard said. “And we got access to his bank accounts. They were in debt up to their eyeballs. Loans, credit cards, three months behind on their rent. Then two big deposits from an offshore account, one of them sent on Christmas Eve that didn’t clear until after the holiday. His wife said they were close to being put out of their house, and then he told her he’d found a way to make the cash for a deposit on a place of their own. It looks like someone was paying him good money to go after you.”
“It was Dan Hewitt,” Lennon said.
