Winterland (7 page)

‘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.

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 McNally 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.

Then, a couple of yards in front of him, he notices something in the road – strange marks, a series of curves. They are interlaced and go left from the centre of the road and disappear into the ditch. He knows that these can only be one thing, tyre marks – the result of severe skidding. As he moves closer to the marks, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing, he notices that the thick bush at the side of the road where the skid marks disappear has been disturbed – flattened, in fact – leaving a large gap. He approaches the gap and walks right into it, drawn irresistibly to whatever it is he’s going to find. He steps across the ditch and looks down the slope. At first, he sees nothing unusual. There is the line of the stream, the glistening water, an occasional boulder on one side or the other.

Then he sees it, and can’t understand how it wasn’t the first thing he saw. Forty or fifty feet below, at the bottom of a now obvious track through the grass and bushes, he sees the back end of a vehicle. It is wider than a normal car – like a four-wheel drive, possibly an SUV.

It is sticking up out of the stream, which means its front end is probably submerged in water.

Which means the driver …

McNally has taken a few steps down the slope before he knows what he’s doing, before he realises it’s too steep. If he goes on he’ll slip and fall, and maybe break his neck. He turns and struggles back up.

Standing in the ditch again, catching his breath, he looks up and down the road, but it’s deserted.

He takes out his mobile phone. He hates this bloody thing and hardly ever uses it. Everyone seems to have one these days, and it’s all ringtone this and text message that. He bought his to have in case of an emergency.

His hand is shaking as he prepares to key in 999. He glances back towards the stream.

This isn’t exactly the kind of emergency he had in mind.

At about 7.30, Paddy Norton gets out of bed and puts on his dressing gown and carpet slippers. Bleary-eyed, unshaven, he wanders downstairs. He goes into the reception room at the rear of the house and starts circling the full-sized snooker table he put in a few years back but has hardly used since. He played a lot when he was a young man, and to this day he still derives visceral pleasure from the memory of a maximum break he once scored against Larry Bolger. It was his first – and only – 147, and it actually ruined the game for him, because unless every frame he played after that was another 147, what was the point? Anything less was a taunt – if you were this good once, type of thing, what the fuck is wrong with you now? He got the table put in imagining he’d be able to just mess around on it and relax, but it never felt right – whereas walking around it does feel right. And it’s probably because of the sheer size of the table, not to mention the size of the room, that it feels like he’s doing more than just pacing up and down, that it feels, sometimes, like he’s in the chariot race from
Ben-Hur
.

This morning, though, as he stops to lean against a corner pocket and catch his breath, it feels a bit more like the Stations of the Cross – so he decides to give it a rest. After a moment, he opens the double doors and goes through into the living room.

When Norton left things with Fitz last night and went home, the first thing he did was to take two more Narolet tablets, but instead of knocking him out they kept him awake. He had a glass of Power’s and went to bed, but he couldn’t sleep, so he lay there staring up at the ceiling. At one point, he even thought about leaning over to Miriam’s night table to get her bottle of sleeping pills, but …

No.

He sinks into an armchair now and turns on the TV. He watches Sky News for a while – then some
Dr Phil
, then an episode of
Cheers
, whatever is on, his thumb working the remote control, the rest of him, every other muscle in his body, freeze-frame still.

Miriam comes in shortly after nine, already dressed and with her make-up on. She asks him what he’s doing.

He looks up. ‘I’m watching TV.’

His mouth feels dry.

‘Sweetheart,’ she says, walking over to him, ‘you know I don’t like the TV on in the mornings.’ She gently extracts the remote control from his hand and points it at the huge plasma screen on the wall above the fireplace. ‘It’s unhealthy.’

The screen goes blank. She throws the remote control onto a sofa opposite Norton, out of his reach.

A tall woman, elegant and self-possessed, Miriam is wearing a Paul Costello suit and a string of pearls Norton gave her for their last wedding anniversary. ‘I’m going into town for most of the day,’ she says. ‘Then I have that fund-raiser at six.’

It is only then that Miriam seems to notice the dishevelled, exhausted state her husband is in.

‘Darling. Are you all right? You look dreadful.’

‘I’m fine. I’m fine. Really.’

‘Oh, Paddy, honestly.’

What does this mean? He isn’t sure. Her tone is dismissive, but indulgent at the same time. He can’t wait for her to leave.

‘I’m going upstairs now to have a shower,’ he says, but he doesn’t move.

Miriam leans down and pecks him on the forehead. As she withdraws, he thinks he sees her wrinkling her nose.

‘The sooner the better,’ she says, and quickly adds, ‘OK, I’ll see you later.’

She turns and walks out of the room.

Norton doesn’t move. He looks over at the remote control. The obvious thing to do would be to get up, walk across to the sofa and retrieve it, but somehow initiating this simple sequence of physical manoeuvres proves beyond him.

When he eventually does stand up, over forty minutes later, Norton ignores the remote and walks out of the room. He stands in the hallway for a moment, hesitating. Then he wanders across the hallway and into the kitchen, where he puts on the coffeemaker – because that’s what he needs to kick-start his day, surely, a good strong dose of coffee.

He sits at the huge rectangular breakfast table and waits. Miriam had the kitchen redone recently and it’s a cold, industrial look, all chrome and brushed steel, a bit like a restaurant kitchen – which of course was maybe what she had in mind, seeing as how they do so much entertaining.

He looks up at the clock. It’s nearly ten.

He goes back to the coffeemaker and pours himself a cup. Then he reaches over to the transistor radio beside the toaster and flicks it on to get the news headlines.

He resisted doing this earlier. No one has phoned yet, so he isn’t really expecting anything, but he figures he might as well check. The first story is yet another worrying ESRI report on the economy. Then comes the announcement of a new investment in the Waterford area by the electronics giant Paloma. Then the stalled CAP reform talks in Brussels. Then the bit he already knows about, the shooting dead last night of a young man in the beer garden of a Dublin pub. This is followed by a drugs seizure story, a car bomb in Baghdad and a row in London over a security breach at Clarence House.