Winterland (6 page)

He looks out the window, into what should be the garden, but it’s late, and dark, and all he can see is his own reflection staring back in at him.

His heart is pounding.

After a few seconds, the vodka burns a welcome hole through his stomach – and his fear. Pretty soon it’s in his bloodstream, shooting warm, happy signals to his brain.

He never thought this moment would come.

He’s been looking forward to it for hours, since the middle of the afternoon in fact.

Which was when it happened. Out of the blue. On the street in front of where he works. As he was coming back to the office. With a can of Diet Coke in his hand.

Flynn pours another large measure of vodka and replaces the bottle in the freezer. He knocks the vodka back, two gulps this time, and puts the glass into the sink.

He wanders into the living room again.

Not saying anything to Claire all evening was hard, but he did need some time to think – and needs
this
time now to work out what they’re going to do. He could have had a drink earlier, but he didn’t want to get sloppy and stupid and maybe blurt something out.

He only hopes he didn’t transmit his panic to the girls.

He looks around. The place is a mess. Normally, he would tidy it up – the crayons and colouring books, the Barbies, the discarded items of clothing, the empty
Shrek
and
Wizard of Oz
DVD boxes – but tonight he just leaves it all and goes through the double doors into what is rather grandly called the dining room. You couldn’t fit a proper dining table in here, but it’s perfect for what they’ve done with it, which is convert it into a study.

Closing the doors behind him, he goes over to the desk and sits down. When he got home earlier, he came straight in here and put his briefcase under the desk. Now he reaches down and retrieves it. He elbows the laptop aside and places the briefcase in the middle of the desk.

His heart is still pounding.

After downing five shots of vodka in the space of two or three minutes he should be well on, no question, but apparently the alcohol and adrenaline in his system haven’t finished slugging it out yet for pole position.

He holds the briefcase, ready to click it open, and takes a deep breath. But he hesitates. He looks up, and around. On the wall above his desk is a framed poster for a design exhibition. Bookshelves cover the remaining three walls. On the floor there are magazines and periodicals stacked precariously high. Ninety per cent of what’s in here is engineering and architectural stuff – manuals on technical drawing, books on skyscraper construction, copies of
American Architect
and
Advanced Structural Review
.

He clicks the briefcase open.

The man who came up to him in the street this afternoon was pale and thin. He wore a denim jacket and had small, beady eyes.

‘Dermot Flynn?’ he said.

Flynn nodded. The man had an air of menace about him, but when he spoke he was disconcertingly soft-spoken and polite. He smiled as he handed over the thick brown envelope.

‘This is for you, boss,’ he said. ‘A little something.’

Flynn took the envelope in one hand and fumbled with it as he used his other hand to put the can of Diet Coke into his jacket pocket.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, puzzled. ‘Who are
you
?’

‘I’m a messenger,’ the man said. ‘And here’s the message. That report, yeah? You know the one I mean. Destroy it. Delete any files you have relating to it. Never talk about it again, to anyone, ever.’

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.

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.

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 turned 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
ab
normal 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?’