Now I see Julianne clearly. She’s safe. I feel a quickening torque of my heart. She takes off Marco’s shirt. Blood is leaking over the waistband of his underwear and jeans.
At the far end of Merchant Street a black Range Rover pulls up. Carl Guilfoyle jumps into the passenger seat. I glimpse a woman behind the wheel. Rita Brennan.
Ruiz is charging after them. He runs like a front-rower with his head down and knees lifting, everything happening below the waist. He grabs the driver’s door and pulls it open. Rita Brennan accelerates and the door swings out and back in again. Ruiz grabs at the wheel and wrenches it down. Moments later I hear the crunch of metal on metal but can’t see what happened.
There are police sirens. Growing louder.
The pain in my chest is overtaking every other sense. My fingers are cold, my skin clammy. Nothing feels like it is happening to bring help. Where are the paramedics? Someone get a doctor.
Julianne looks up and sees me. I wish I could smile bravely, but I’m scared and I’m shaking.
She’s with me now. Kneeling.
‘Where?’
I lift my arm. She can see the puncture wound below my rib cage. The hole seems to be breathing. She takes off her trench-coat and presses it to the spot.
‘That’s going to stain,’ I tell her.
‘I’ll soak it.’
Straddling me, she presses her fingers against my ribs, keeping pressure on the wound. Her eyes are shining. She’s not supposed to cry.
‘I need you to stay awake, Joe.’
‘I’m just closing my eyes for a second.’
‘No, you stay awake.’
‘You were right,’ I tell her. ‘I should have protected you and Charlie.’
She shakes her head as a signal that I’m not supposed to talk about this now.
‘How’s Marco?’
‘He’s going to be OK.’
My heart is no longer battering. It’s slowing down.
‘I’m just going to have a little rest.’
‘Don’t! Please.’
‘Sorry.’
Julianne lowers her head to my chest and it feels like we’ve slipped back through the years since we separated and she’s listening to the same heartbeat that serenaded her to sleep for twenty years.
‘Don’t be angry with me,’ she whispers.
‘I’m not angry.’
My lips are pressed into her dark hair.
I remember the last time we made love. I had come home late and Julianne was asleep or only half awake. Naked. She rolled on top of me in the darkness, performing the ritual half-blind, but practised. Rising and descending inch by inch, accepting my surrender. I thought at the time that it didn’t feel like make-up sex or new-beginning sex. It was goodbye sex, a dying sigh drawing colour from the embers.
If that has to be the last time then I can live with that, I think, opening my eyes again.
‘Charlie is going to be OK,’ I say.
Julianne raises her face to look at me. ‘I know. It just makes me a little sad because you two are so alike.’
‘You think she’s like me?’
‘I know you both too well.’
She runs her finger down my right cheek, tracing the scratches.
‘Who did this to you?’
‘The woman who killed Ray Hegarty.’
‘It wasn’t Sienna.’
‘No.’
Epilogue
I have a student waiting to see me outside my office. His name is Milo Coleman and I’m supposed to be overseeing his psychology thesis, which would be a lot easier if I had something to oversee.
Milo, one of my brighter students, has spent the past four months trying to decide the subject of his thesis. His most recent suggestion was to pose the question whether loud music in bars increased alcohol consumption. This only slightly bettered a proposal that he study whether alcohol made a woman more or less likely to have sex on a first date.
I told him that while I appreciated how diligently he would research such a subject, I doubted if I could get it past the university’s board of governors.
Opening my office door, I don’t find him waiting on the row of chairs in the corridor. Instead he’s chatting to Chloe, an undergrad student who answers the phones in the psychology department. Milo is dressed in a James Dean T-shirt, low-slung jeans and Nike trainers. Chloe likes him. Her body language says so - the way her shoulders pull back and she plays with her hair.
‘When you’re ready, Milo,’ I announce.
Chloe gives him a look that says, Next time.
‘Professor O’Loughlin, how’s it hanging?’
‘It’s hanging just fine.’
‘I heard about you being stabbed and I was, like, shocked, you know. I mean, that’s a heavy scene.’
‘Yes, Milo, very heavy.’
He takes a seat opposite my desk, leans forward, elbows on his knees. A long fringe of hair falls across one eye. He brushes it aside, tucking it girlishly behind his ear. Smiling quietly. Beaming.
‘I think I’ve got it: the big idea.’
‘Hit me with it.’
‘Well, I went to see a comedy night last week and I was watching this black dude telling jokes, really edgy stuff, racist, you know. He’s telling nigger jokes and all these white people in the audience are laughing and cheering. I got to wondering what effect racial humour has on prejudice.’
Milo looks at me nervously. Expectantly. Hopefully.
‘I think it’s a great idea.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. How are you going to do it?’
Milo gets to his feet, pacing the room while he lays out his ideas for a cognitive study involving an audience and a series of questions. He’s energised. Animated.
‘So how long do I have?’
‘Start work now and you can update me at the end of November.’
He cocks his head, looking at me with one eye. Milo often looks at me sideways so I never see both his eyes at the same time.
‘That’s only two months.’
‘Sufficient time.’
‘But I got to work out questions. Parameters. Study groups . . .’
This is the other side of Milo’s personality - making excuses, questioning the work involved.
‘Two months is plenty of time. Show me too little and I’ll mark you down as being lazy. Show me too much and I’ll think you’re sucking up to me.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Huh?’
‘You’ve spent four years studying human behaviour. Decide if I’m lying.’
Milo pushes back his fringe. Frowns. Wants to argue.
‘I know what you’re like, Milo. You cruise. You coast. You wear that earring and that T-shirt because you see yourself as a rebel without a cause, channelling the spirit of James Dean. But let me tell you something about Dean. He was the son of a dental technician from Indiana, where he went to a posh school and studied violin and tap dancing.’
Milo looks completely bemused. I put my hand on his shoulder. Lead him to the door. ‘Start your thesis. No more excuses. Show me something by November.’
I watch him disappear along the corridor with his exaggerated slope-shouldered walk. My old headmaster at prep school, Mr Swanson (who looked like God with long white curly hair) would have barked at him, ‘It took a million years for humans to learn to walk upright, Coleman, and you’re taking us back to the trees.’
Coop Regan is sitting nervously on a chair. Dressed in a coat and tie, he has combed his oiled hair across his head and buttoned his jacket as though waiting for a job interview.
This is a completely different man to the one I met four months ago in Edinburgh, hiding away in a dark lounge watching old home movies of his missing daughter. Now clear-eyed and sober, he stands and shakes my hand firmly, holding my gaze.
‘Ah’m sorry to bother you,’ he says, in a voice ravaged by years of smoking. ‘Ah know you’re a busy man.’