Winterland Page 5

  Flynn stared at him in disbelief.

  The man nodded at the envelope. ‘There’s two things in there,’ he went on. ‘One to show you we can be generous, and the other to show you we can be seriously, and I mean seriously, unpleasant.’ He smiled again, but this time it was thinner, less convincing. ‘So. That’s all clear then, yeah?’

  Flynn swallowed. He was still in shock, still puzzled. He said nothing.

  ‘That’s all clear then I said, yeah boss?’

  ‘Look, I don’t know –’

  The man lunged forward. ‘No fuckin’ “looks”,’ he said, ‘or “I don’t knows”, all right?’

  Flynn recoiled at this sudden change in tack.

  Had the guy actually been about to headbutt him?

  ‘Yeah, it’s clear,’ he said, holding up his free hand, ‘it’s clear.’ He wanted to add ‘take it easy’ or ‘back off, pal’, or something even stronger – but nothing came out.

  ‘The envelope,’ the man said. ‘It’s all there in the bleedin’ envelope.’

  He then turned and walked away.

  Up in his office, at his desk, Flynn opened the envelope and looked inside.

  His heart has been pounding ever since.

  He lifts the briefcase open now and takes another look. Earlier, in his office, he emptied the contents of the envelope into the briefcase – so there it all is, right in front of him: the sheet of paper with the two Polaroids taped to it and the solid bricks of cash.

  Given how thick each brick is, and the fact that they’re in fifties – he reckons there’s probably about a hundred thousand euro here.

  But of course that’s not why his heart is pounding.

  He lifts up the sheet of paper with the Polaroids on it.

  The top one shows Orla. She’s coming out the main gate of St Teresa’s. She’s in her green and grey uniform and is carrying her school bag. There are other kids in the background. The second photo shows Niamh, also in uniform, but she’s alone, walking – skipping – along what looks like Ashleaf Avenue.

  Flynn takes another deep breath and lets it out slowly.

  He stares at what is written on the white border below the photographs. It is a spidery scrawl, done in black ink – the same three letters on each.

  R.I.P.

  Two

  1

  After twenty minutes on the treadmill, flicking between Sky News and CNN, Mark Griffin decides he’s had enough and heads into the bathroom. He takes a shower and shaves. Back in the bedroom he chooses the charcoal grey suit, the pale blue tie and a white shirt. He gets dressed, occasionally glancing over at the bed. He goes down to the kitchen. He puts on coffee, stands at the breakfast bar and slices a grapefruit into neat segments. To the right, his laptop is open. He looks through his schedule for the day.

  Mark runs a small company, Tesoro, that imports handmade stone and ceramic tiles from Italy. It started out as an excuse to make regular trips to places such as Brescia, Gubbio and Pesaro, but it soon took on a life of its own. As recession in Ireland gave way to boom, so linoleum and thick shag gave way to travertine and terra-cotta, and it wasn’t long before Mark found himself supplying high-end product to the high end of the residential property market.

  After secondary school, and mainly at the insistence of his uncle Des, Mark did a business degree at Trinity College. The prospect of becoming an executive or an entrepreneur was always something he’d viewed with dread, but running Tesoro has never really felt like that, like a business. How could it? He travels to Italy and watches dedicated artisans at work. He deals in the aesthetics of tone, in the endless harmonies of colour, form and design.

  Behind him, he hears Susan coming into the kitchen.

  ‘Morning,’ she says, in her sleepy drawl.

  ‘Hi. There’ll be coffee in a minute.’

  He doesn’t turn around. After a moment, Susan appears behind the breakfast bar. As she passes on her way to the fridge, she swipes a segment of his grapefruit, upsetting the formation he’s made on the plate. Then she goes to the fridge and stands there, holding the door open, staring into the light, humming.

  He looks at her and smiles. She’s wearing one of his shirts.

  Reaching into the fridge, Susan disappears from view.

  Mark pops a segment of grapefruit into his mouth. He rearranges what’s left on the plate and turns his attention back to the laptop. He has to swing by the showrooms in Ranelagh to pick something up, and after that he’s going out to the warehouse, where he’ll be for the rest of the morning. Then at two o’clock he’s got an appointment in town. He’s chasing a tiling contract from a builder who’s just put up a new five-star hotel with 120 bathrooms in it. Single property refurbishments are suddenly a lot harder to come by these days, and a hotel contract, if he can get it, makes good business sense.

  He looks over as Susan emerges from the fridge carrying a slab of cheese, some sliced ham and a tub of olives.

  As she lays the stuff down on the breakfast bar, she makes a face at him, half apologetically, and says, ‘Starving.’

  Mark looks at his watch. He clicks his tongue. ‘I have to go in a few minutes,’ he says, ‘but I’ll leave you a key and the alarm code.’

  Susan looks a little surprised. ‘A key? Wow. But … I see you’ve already chosen the curtains.’

  Mark snorts at this. He met Susan on a skiing trip last winter, and a few nights ago they bumped into each other again in town.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I went ahead. I didn’t think you’d mind.’

  ‘No, go on. Jesus. They’re fab.’

  She tears a slice of ham in two and puts one of the pieces into her mouth.

  ‘How do you like your coffee?’ he says.

  ‘Strong. Black.’

  Ten minutes later, getting into his car, Mark glances over his shoulder at the house. It’s a weird, unfamiliar feeling to be leaving someone behind like this, inside the house.

  He pulls out onto Glanmore Road.

  It isn’t a bad feeling.

  He reaches down, flicks on the radio and tunes it to Morning Ireland.

  Actually, it’s a nice feeling.

  But Mark doesn’t want to dwell on that, because feelings like these – he knows from experience – tend not to last.

  2

  Gina opens her eyes.

  She rolls over in the bed, onto her back, and stares up at the ceiling.

  Something is bothering her. It’s not just her nephew, that’s a given. It’s something else, a separate strain of anxiety.

  She looks at the clock on her bedside table: 8.45 a.m.

  She got home at around three. Yvonne and Michelle had taken charge of things, so there wasn’t much point in her sticking around any longer. Besides, she had to get home and change.

  She called a taxi at 2.30.

  Her mind freezes for a second. Then she remembers what’s bothering her.

  Noel.

  He’d told her outside the house that he had to go and meet someone and would be gone thirty minutes, forty-five at the most, but by the time Gina was leaving nearly three hours later he still hadn’t shown up. Yvonne tried him on his mobile a couple of times, but got through to his voicemail. Catherine really seemed to need Noel and kept asking, in between sobs, where he was, so instead of anyone getting worried about the fact that he hadn’t come back, they got increasingly annoyed about it. At one point, out in the kitchen, Gina found herself defending him.

  ‘Look, he had some business thing in town. He’s –’

  ‘Oh don’t give me business,’ Michelle said, spitting the word out, ‘I’m sick of hearing about business. Everything has to stop for business.’ She had tears in her eyes. ‘It’s the middle of the fucking night for God’s sake …’

  Gina slides off the bed and walks over to the en suite bathroom in the corner.

  Maybe Michelle was right, but the question remains … where did Noel get to?

  Standing under the jet of hot water, Gina wonders if he tu
rned up later, or at all. She’ll call Catherine’s in a few minutes and find out – after she gets dressed and puts on some coffee.

  Though on reflection, these are serious commitments to being awake – clothes, coffee, a phone call – and she’s not quite sure she’s ready for them yet. She lingers in the shower, still a little drowsy – turning slowly, arching her back, stretching. Not that there’s any plausible route back to sleep at this stage. She’s awake, and the new day is already in full swing. A few moments earlier, through the open window in her bedroom, she could hear traffic rumbling and the general din of the streets. In fact, her last hour of sleep, with its busy parade of dreams – by turns scrappy and full-blown, lucid and phantasmagoric – had probably been moulded to some degree by this soundscape of the city coming alive six floors below her.

  She is normally out of bed by seven, when the process is just beginning – having breakfast, listening to Newstalk, rallying her senses. But as she turns the water off now, steps out of the shower and reaches over to the radiator for her towel, Gina is struck by how abnormal this particular day, even before she’s left the apartment or spoken to anyone, is shaping up to be.

  She dries herself, standing at the washbasin. The mirror is steamed over, her reflection a grey blur. She lets her towel drop to the floor. Then, as she takes a moisturiser and some cotton discs from the narrow glass shelf above the washbasin, the reality of what has happened hits her again – her nephew’s life cut brutally short, her sister’s life rendered permanently miserable. With Catherine’s anguished face in her mind’s eye, Gina stands there for up to a minute, staring into the blur.

  Out in the kitchen a while later, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, she packs the Gaggia, switches it on and then gets her phone from where she left it the night before – on the desk in the corner, beside her computer. She calls Catherine’s. When Yvonne answers, she asks straightaway how Catherine is and can’t imagine any other answer than the one she gets. She then asks if Noel ever showed up.

  ‘No, he didn’t, and we’re starting to get worried.’

  ‘Worried?’

  ‘Jenny phoned about an hour ago. He never went home, and she can’t reach him on his mobile. It isn’t like him, she said.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘She’s actually freaking out.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘When you spoke to him outside the house, did he tell you where he was going?’

  ‘No, he just said town.’ They went over this last night, more than once. ‘He said he was meeting someone. He didn’t say who.’

  Gina wants to articulate something here, but she can’t bring herself to do it. What she wants to say is either too ridiculous or too scary.

  Yvonne, who quit smoking a couple of years ago, pulls audibly on a cigarette.

  ‘What about his office?’ Gina says.

  ‘Jenny was going to call them. She said she’d call me back if she heard anything. I thought you might be her.’

  ‘OK, look,’ Gina says, detecting a slight impatience here, ‘I’d better get off, but call me back, will you, if you hear anything? Or text me.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Gina goes over to the coffee machine. She pulls down a cup and puts it in position. She presses a button and waits for the coffee to trickle out. But when it’s ready, she doesn’t move. She stands there, staring at the cup, and all of a sudden, in the emptiness, in the silence, her eyes well up. She steps back and leans against the counter. She puts a hand up to her chest and takes a few deep breaths.

  It was hard watching Catherine like that last night. It was hard watching Yvonne and Michelle coping with her, and in such different ways. It was hard not having Noel around to provide some kind of ballast. It was all hard, every aspect of it, every passing second. What is hard about now, though, is almost worse, this creeping sense of dread that it’s not over yet, that something else is going to happen, or maybe even has happened.

  Gina wipes her tears away and rubs her eyes. She reaches over to the coffee machine, takes the small cup and looks into it. She swirls the coffee around for a moment and then knocks it back in one go.

  She looks at her watch: 9.25.

  She picks the phone up again. She calls Siobhan at the office and says she mightn’t be coming in today, but Siobhan reminds her that she has an eleven o’clock meeting with Tom Maloney.

  Gina rolls her eyes.

  Most VC-fuelled start-ups have independent boards of directors. Typically, these will include one or two industry experts, people who can keep an eye on things, give advice and occasionally even get some traction for the company’s product. Tom Maloney, the CIO of a financial consultancy firm, is one of these. He’s not exactly what you’d call interfering, but he likes to be briefed on a regular basis. Gina meets him now and again for coffee and feeds him a line of bullshit about how things are going.

  She looks at her watch again.

  But if Lucius is ever to secure a second round of funding, she knows she’ll need to be a bit more rigorous than that, a bit more convincing.

  ‘Is P.J. busy this morning?’ she asks, suppressing a groan. ‘Maybe he could do it. My sister has just … I’m …’

  She doesn’t want to get into it. What’s the point? Lucius Software has a staff of only eight and operates out of three rooms on the first floor of a Georgian house in the centre of Dublin. Soon enough there’ll be no avoiding the subject.

  ‘He’s in London today,’ Siobhan says, ‘and then –’

  ‘Of course, of course, yeah,’ Gina says, remembering about London.

  ‘If you’d like I could ask –’

  ‘No, no, leave it. It’s OK.’ Gina shakes her head. ‘I’ll do it.’

  She changes into something more formal and spends half an hour at the desk in the corner, checking emails and scribbling down a few notes for this meeting.

  Before she leaves the apartment, she texts Yvonne:

  ‘Any news?’

  She knows she’s clutching at straws, but she needs to hear something.

  On her way down in the elevator, she holds the phone tightly in her hand. When she comes out of the building, she turns right and keeps walking.

  It’s a pleasant morning, not quite sunny, but bright and fresh. The flow of traffic along the quays isn’t particularly heavy, but as she approaches the IFSC, things in general get busier – more cars, more pedestrians, more noise. When she hasn’t heard back from Yvonne by the time she’s turning onto Matt Talbot Bridge, she decides to put the phone away. She drops it into her bag.

  Up to this point she has kept fairly focused, staring straight ahead, but halfway across the bridge, unable to resist, she glances to her left.

  Down in the docklands, Richmond Plaza dominates the horizon. Next to it there are two enormous cranes, which look like mechanical high priests, supplicants kneeling before some holy monolith. On previous occasions, Gina has stared in wonder at this rising structure at Richmond Dock, but today it’s a little different. Today her only reaction to it – and this reaction is located in her stomach – is a dull steady thrum of anxiety.

  Then she hears a mobile ringing close by and it makes her jump. She glances around. She knows from the tone that it can’t be hers and even sees a passing suit raise his arm and bark into his – but as she moves off towards George’s Quay, she still slips a hand into her bag, pulls her own phone out and checks it.

  Just in case.

  3

  About a mile outside the Wicklow town of Rathcross, retired machine-parts salesman John McNally is walking along a winding tree-lined stretch of road. Since the new section of motorway opened last year these back roads have been quieter and more suitable for walking on. Cars still pass pretty frequently, but pedestrians are not in constant fear of being whooshed into a ditch by the slipstream from an articulated truck.

  McNally lives nearby and walks the route as often as he can. His wife isn’t well and requires a good deal of around-the-clock care, most of which McNa
lly does himself, but a nurse comes in for a couple of hours three mornings a week and when she’s there he makes a point of going for a walk. It gets him out of the house. He can stretch his legs and clear his mind.

  During a long career as a salesman McNally travelled the length and breadth of Ireland and was familiar with every road in every county – arterial roads, side roads, ring roads, back roads – all of which he thought of as one continuous road, his road. What’s left to him these days of the greater whole is just this tiny segment, a meandering mile and a half that runs from the small church outside Rathcross to the Coach Inn at Hannigan’s Corner.

  McNally begins to slow down now, and deliberately so – because until he gets to the bend a hundred yards up the road and catches an inevitable glimpse, beyond Hannigan’s Corner, of that new housing development, of its rooftops and satellite dishes, he knows he will remain protected from any sign of the creeping suburbanisation that is, quite frankly, wrecking this part of Wicklow.

  But for the moment it’s OK. There are woodlands on either side of him. To his right, the trees rise up on a steep incline. To his left, beyond the ditch and thickets of bush, there is a fairly steep descent to a stream running parallel with the road. Beyond the stream, the area of woodland continues, rising back gradually and evening out, more or less, with the level of the road. McNally glances every now and again into these dark woods and is entranced by their stillness, which seems inviting, dense with mystery, even at times a little menacing.

  Some night, when his wife is deep in her medicated sleep, he’d love to come out here to these woods, to the pitch blackness and the silence, and sit for an hour at the foot of a tree. But he knows he never will. Because wouldn’t it be a slightly crazy thing to do? Wouldn’t it be dangerous, and irresponsible? How would he find his way? What if someone saw him?

  He looks around as a car passes, a Volvo estate. McNally watches it rush forward and disappear at the bend up ahead.