Long Time Coming (24 page)

It was late afternoon when we docked at Ostend. Seaside resorts need sunshine to look their best, a commodity this one currently lacked, along with people and warmth.

We left the ferry terminal and walked round the largely deserted promenade to the Hotel Hesperis, a modern medium-rise balconied block that looked out over a stretch of empty sand at a greyly heaving North Sea.

Our rooms were ready for us. My impression was that numerous other rooms were ready as well. We asked if there was a message for us. There wasn’t. Cardale asked if a Mr Quilligan had checked in. He hadn’t, though there was a reservation in his name. The receptionist then asked us if we were the people who’d phoned earlier, enquiring about Mr Quilligan. We weren’t, of course.

Nor was Eldritch. I called him as soon as Rachel and I made it to our room. ‘Do you think I’m a fool?’ he snapped. ‘Of course I didn’t.’

‘No one else knows Quilligan’s coming here,’ I pointed out.

‘Wrong, boy. Somebody else does know.’

I was too perturbed to complain about him reverting to calling me
boy
. He was right, anyway. Somebody knew. But how? ‘Cardale must have let something slip when he spoke to Linley,’ I said. ‘What do we do?’

‘Sit tight and wait for Quilligan. It’s all we
can
do.’

Not quite, in my assessment. I marched round to Cardale’s room and demanded to know what he’d told Linley.

‘Nothing, Fordham. Not a thing. I swear it. Maybe the call was from some friend of Ardal’s in Majorca who knows he’s due here.’

I conceded this was possible, partly to keep Cardale calm. I felt far from calm myself. I went back to our room and found Rachel standing out on the balcony, despite the chill wind that was blowing. She was smoking a cigarette and gazing down at the darkening beach. She didn’t give Cardale’s theory much more credence than I did. But the fact remained that neither of us could come up with a better explanation. We just had to hope he was right.

Several hours slowly and uneventfully passed. There was no word from Quilligan. He hadn’t said when he’d contact us, of course, but the later he left it the nervier the waiting grew. Eldritch was holed up in one hotel and we in another, watching the clock and wondering when, or if, we’d hear something.

Eventually, we went down to the hotel restaurant with Cardale for a meal. There were few other diners and we were in no state to concentrate on food and drink. Conversation was faltering and aimless. Cardale embarked on an account that never seemed to reach any kind of conclusion about how he’d been called out recently to value a vast hoard of paintings at a country house in Norfolk. If the story had a point, it was lost on me. And his confident assertion that his uncle would be in touch soon didn’t make much impact either.

‘What if he isn’t?’ asked Rachel.

‘But he will be, Miss Banner,’ Cardale blithely insisted. ‘He wouldn’t have brought us all this way just to stand us up.’

It was hard to disagree with him about that. But the fact remained that we still hadn’t heard from Quilligan – and nor had the front desk – when I phoned Eldritch at eleven o’clock.

‘Do you think he’s got cold feet?’ I asked.

‘Either that or he’s playing safe and waiting until morning,’ Eldritch replied. ‘Which is exactly what we’ll have to do.’

‘There’s something you ought to know,’ I said then, Rachel and I having agreed we couldn’t delay telling him about the break-in any longer.

I’d expected him to be alarmed, or angry with me for not telling him sooner. But his reaction was undismayed, not to say muted, as if he’d already assumed something of the kind was bound to have occurred. ‘Linley’s pulling out all the stops,’ he said. ‘The only question that really matters is whether we can move faster than he can anticipate. And the answer brings us back to Ardal Quilligan.’ I heard him sigh. Then he surprised me by asking, ‘What’s the Hotel Hesperis like, Stephen?’

‘Modern. Comfortable. Why?’

‘The Hotel du Parc was modern and comfortable forty years ago. I stopped here for the night on my way to Antwerp to take up my post as Isaac Meridor’s secretary. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be stuck in Belgium, working for a Jewish diamond merchant, beholden to my father for fixing me up with the job in the first place. I seriously considered not going through with it. But I was short of money
and
options. So, I carried on to Antwerp. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t. Whatever I’d have done instead couldn’t have ended worse. I wasn’t to know, of course. You only recognize turning-points in life when you look back at them.’

‘What are you trying to say, Eldritch?’

‘Only this: if you want to leave now –
you
, I mean, not Rachel, or me, or Cardale – if you want to clear out and leave us to it, I wouldn’t blame you. In fact, I’d probably give you credit for being sensible.’

‘What do you take me for? I’m not going to do that.’

‘I know.’

‘Then—’

‘Try to get some sleep, Stephen. That’s my final piece of advice.’ And he hung up, leaving me wondering, not for the first time, what went on in that old man’s mind.

I woke late the following morning, grey light and the whisper of the sea filtering into the room to rouse me. Rachel was still sleeping soundly when I went to take a shower. I stood under the hot jets of water, helpless to resist as the frustration and uncertainty of the previous night reassembled themselves in my mind. Where was Ardal Quilligan? Why hadn’t he contacted us? And how much longer did we have to wait?

Rachel was awake when I came out of the bathroom. She’d opened the curtains to the dull Belgian day and ordered breakfast. ‘I want you to know something,’ she said as I bent to kiss her. ‘This would be a whole lot harder to bear on my own.’ It was almost as if she’d guessed what Eldritch had said to me. ‘Oh, and there’s something else as well.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I think you’re very sexy with wet hair.’

I laughed and kissed her again, then ambled to the window. Instantly, I locked eyes with a man leaning against the railings down on the promenade. He was tall and rangy, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket. He had dark, tightly cropped hair, a rawboned face and a fixed, intent gaze.

Then I heard the doorbell buzz behind me. I looked over my shoulder at Rachel. ‘They’re quick with the breakfast here,’ she said. ‘Can you get that, Stephen?’

‘Sure.’ I took a glance out of the window as I turned away from it. The man was walking off along the promenade now, lighting a cigarette. Had he been watching our window? I couldn’t be sure. Yet I sensed he had. I sensed it very powerfully.

The bell buzzed again as I neared the door. ‘Hold on,’ I called.

‘They obviously don’t want our croissants to get cold,’ said Rachel. ‘I like that.’

I flicked off the safety chain and opened the door. My smile of greeting for the waiter with the breakfast trolley froze, then faded. Three men, two of them uniformed police officers, were standing in the corridor.

‘Mr Swan?’ said the one not in uniform. He was thin, balding and narrow-faced, dressed in a suit and raincoat. He was holding out some kind of warrant card for me to see. ‘Police. My name is Leysen. Miss Banner, she is with you?’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Miss Banner?’

‘Yes. She’s here. What—’

‘We need to speak to her. And to you.’

‘What the hell’s this all about?’ demanded Rachel, tightening her bathrobe round her waist as she joined me at the door.

‘We talk inside, please.’ With that, and no indication that our permission was being sought, Leysen advanced into the room. One of the policemen stayed outside. The other strode in at Leysen’s shoulder and closed the door behind him.

‘What’s happened?’ asked Rachel. It was the right question. Clearly something
had
happened. And clearly it was nothing good.

‘You’re Stephen Swan and Rachel Banner?’

‘Yes,’ we replied in unison.

‘You know Mr Ardal Quilligan?’

‘Yes,’ I began. ‘That is—’

‘We were due to meet him here yesterday,’ Rachel cut in. ‘He didn’t show.’

‘You and … Simon Cardale?’

‘That’s right,’ I replied. ‘The three of us came here to meet Quilligan.’

‘But Mr Quilligan never arrived?’

‘I just said that,’ Rachel responded.

Leysen pursed his lips, pausing for a moment to take note of her tetchiness. ‘Mr Quilligan was found dead in his car in the hotel’s underground car park early this morning,’ he said, with quiet emphasis.

‘
What?
’

‘We think he died some time last night.’

‘
How?
’

‘His throat was cut.’

‘Oh God.’ Rachel reeled as if struck. If I hadn’t grabbed her, I think she’d have fallen to the floor. ‘Oh dear God.’ She rested her head against my shoulder.

‘Your meeting with Mr Quilligan,’ Leysen went on: ‘what was it about?’

‘He had something for us,’ I replied, my mind struggling to assimilate the reality of what had happened and all its many consequences and implications.

‘What was the something?’

‘We don’t know … exactly. It’s … complicated.’

‘Do you recognize this?’

He must have been holding the transparent plastic bag at his side the whole time. Only now did I notice it, though, as he held it up for us to see. There was a wooden-handled knife inside. The blade was about six inches long and was caked with blood.

‘Oh Christ,’ murmured Rachel. ‘The knife.’

I looked down at her. ‘What is it?’

‘There’s one just like that in the kitchen at the flat.’

‘One just like … or the same one?’

‘The same. It has to be. I’ve often used it. My fingerprints will probably be on the handle. The break-in, Stephen. Don’t you see?’

And I did. Much as I didn’t want to.

‘
Do you recognize this?
’ Leysen repeated.

Sunlight slides across them as the half-closed curtains stir in the breeze from the open window. Swan gently withdraws from Isolde as their breathing slows. She falls away from him, rolling on to her hip, her eyes closed. He bends over her, stroking her shoulder, then running his fingers through her hair, flame-red where his ruffling of it catches the light. She opens her eyes and watches him slide down on to the bed beside her. She smiles and so does he. But neither speaks. Loving words would sound false, if not absurd.

Isolde rolls on to her back and lets out a long, slow breath. Somewhere below them a clock begins to strike. It is five o’clock this hot Wednesday afternoon in Dublin. The practicalities of life and the precautions necessary in the leading of it intrude upon the small, secret world they have shared these past few hours. Swan swings his legs to the floor and stands up. He stumbles slightly as he does so and Isolde chuckles. He turns to face her.

‘Has this afternoon taken a lot out of you, Eldritch?’ she asks, waiting for him to look her in the eye.

He smiles. ‘Rather more than I expected, certainly. You’re a very … demanding woman.’

‘And you’re just the man a demanding woman needs.’

‘I’m glad to have been of service.’

‘We must do this again … some time.’

‘So we must.’ He stoops over her where she lies and kisses her nipples, then her wide, smiling mouth. ‘Some time very soon.’

*

Eldritch Swan walked away from the Quilligan house half an hour later, reflecting upon the difficulties of arranging another afternoon of sexual abandon with Isolde any sooner than the following week, disappointingly distant though that currently seemed. She had spoken of persuading Edna to take a half-day off in addition to her usual allowance, but if Ardal learnt of it he might grow suspicious, a risk Swan could not run given how vital Ardal’s help was in securing his brother’s release from the Curragh. Isolde could come to the Shelbourne, of course, but was concerned that many ladies of her acquaintance took tea at the hotel on a regular basis. It was all a damnable pity in Swan’s estimation, and, he did not doubt, in Isolde’s also, but he consoled himself with the thought that delay is perhaps the most potent of all aphrodisiacs.

Isolde’s perfume, the softness of her skin and the taste of her lips still filled his mind as he entered the Shelbourne Hotel and went to the desk for his key. There, to his slight surprise, a letter was waiting for him, delivered by hand. He read it on his way up in the lift.

Swan could not for the life of him imagine what interest he could share with a man who incorporated a middle initial and an academic qualification in his signature. In ordinary circumstances, he would have ignored the invitation. But his arrangement with
Linley meant the circumstances were far from ordinary and Henchy had succeeded in arousing his curiosity as well as his suspicion. He debated what to do while soaking in the bath and had made up his mind by the time he towelled himself dry.

It was well gone seven o’clock, though still short of 7.30, when Swan entered O’Connor’s Bar. Trade was brisk, generating thick clouds of smoke and blather. The door to the snug was closed and the frosted glass that partitioned it off meant he could not see into it. ‘Is there anyone in the snug?’ he asked the barman as he paid for his whiskey.

‘There is, sir,’ came the tight-lipped reply.

‘Lorcan Henchy?’

The barman smiled. ‘The very same. You know him, do you?’

‘You could say so.’

‘I’m guessing he backed nothing but losers at Leopardstown races this afternoon. That’ll explain his stand-offishness. You might tell him that if all our customers drank as slowly as him, we’d have to close down.’

‘I’ll do that.’

Henchy looked up from a rapt perusal of the
Irish Times
as Swan stepped into the snug. He was a short, round, ruddy-faced man of fifty or so, bald-headed but extravagantly bearded. He was wearing a frayed tweed suit, a shirt that looked as if it had missed the iron and a grubby yellow silk cravat. A three-quarters-full pint of Guinness stood on the table in front of him. He studied Swan over the rims of his half-moon spectacles and nodded at the door.