Although he was ninety-five, he had never really retired, just gradually wound down over the years. Even now he still kept an eye on the shop that bore his name in the Brighton Lanes, despairing because his son was letting the business slide away. Not that he really cared, he had more than enough money to see out his days in the style in which he liked to live. And he still had a few clients whom he advised on timepieces, and for whom he sometimes bought and sold, such as this clock he was selling for a wealthy English collector, which kept him occupied.
His chest pains from angina, becoming increasingly frequent now, were returning. His doctor had told him to stop drinking and smoking, but what the hell did it matter? He popped a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue, waited until it had dissolved, then relit his cigar. He’d always had an eye for fine craftsmanship, and this clock was a particular beauty. Its square case, with its fine marquetry and gold inlay, was a masterpiece of carving, and its movement, with a single hammer to strike its large brass gong, was exquisite. It would never tell the time as accurately as one of today’s quartz watches you could buy for a few quid, but that was not the point.
He made a small adjustment to the length of the pendulum, then put his tools down. He was tired, and his mind was all over the place. He’d barely slept a wink last night; he just felt sick all the time. Sick with grief. And now he felt utterly alone in the world.
He had everything. This beautiful house, a staffed villa on Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, more money than he could ever spend, and none of it mattered; that was the damned irony. He stared bleakly out through the sash window into the darkness. All around him in the oak-panelled room were reminders of his past. The black-and-white photograph of his stern, deeply religious maiden aunt, Oonagh, who had raised him and his sister. Next to her was a row of framed photographs of his father, Brendan Daly.
One, a youthful picture, showed the big guy striding towards the camera, wearing a three-piece suit, white shirt, black tie and a boater at a jaunty angle; he was flanked by two of his White Hand Gang cohorts, Mick Pollock – later known as Pegleg Pollock after he lost a leg to gangrene following a shooting incident – and Aiden Boyle. Two of the men whose names were written on the reverse of the front page of the Daily News from February 1922, in which the shooting of his mother and the abduction of his father was the headline story. The paper he had been given all those years back by the messenger boy on Pier 54.
Next to that was a photograph of his father in bathing trunks, on Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach. He was grinning, his jet-black hair tousled, a chain with a silver rabbit hung around his neck. The chain had belonged to Gavin’s grandfather, his aunt had once told him; he had been one of the lieutenants in the New York Irish Mafia’s Dead Rabbits Gang in the 1880s. Another photo showed his father, sharply dressed, wearing a Derby.
He heard a knock, then the door behind him opened. It was Betty, his faithful housekeeper, only a few years junior to himself. ‘You’ve not touched your supper, Mr Daly,’ she chided.
He raised a hand in acknowledgement, without turning around.
‘I’m clearing up,’ she said. ‘Would you like a hot drink or anything before I go to bed?’
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I’m expecting visitors, but I’ll see them in.’
She wished him goodnight and closed the door.
The house felt gloomy and lonely since his second wife, Ruth, had died. In front of him sat a framed photograph taken way back when she was in her late-thirties and he was in his mid-fifties. The two of them on a terrace in the South of France, with the flat blue Mediterranean Sea behind them. She had been a red-haired beauty then; Irish, like his first wife Sinead; but unlike Sinead she had been faithful, he was certain, for all the time they were together. Sinead, his son’s mother, had died of an overdose of barbiturates after years of addiction to booze and affairs. He did not have her photograph anywhere in his home. Lucas, his son, was a bitter enough reminder of her.
Lucas had tried for some time to persuade him to think about moving into sheltered accommodation, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He loved this place and remembered thinking, when he had bought it all those decades ago, how proud his dad would have been of him. To be sure, he hadn’t made all his money honestly, but then who in the antiques world had? He’d been a player in the Brighton antiques ring, rigging prices at auction, and once – something that still made him smile – at a big country-house auction he had even locked a big London dealer in the lavatory to prevent him from bidding against him.
On another occasion, many years before satellite navigation had come in, he and his ring of Brighton antiques dealers had altered all the road signs the night before one of the largest country-house auctions in the county, so that none of the major London dealers had been able to find the place.
He glanced up, impatiently now, at the CCTV screen showing the front of the house and the driveway, waiting for his son’s black Range Rover to appear. Lucas had inherited some of his mother’s bad genes. He was a lousy son, a school dropout who had failed to maintain the family business, and who had on several occasions narrowly avoided doing time both for violence and for drug dealing. Gavin felt sorry for his son’s wife, who was a decent person and, in his view, deserved someone better.
He drank some more whiskey, then puffed his cigar back to life and stared around the room where he used to bring his most important customers, and where he now spent most of his time these days. It was designed to impress, to give the air of a learned man of culture, an aristocrat who was no more than a curator of all he had inherited from his ancestors and would one day pass on to his heirs.
Except Gavin Daly had inherited nothing. Every item in this room, just as with almost everything in this fine house, he had bought, with great care, with the sole intention of impressing others like him, who were prepared to spend vast sums on antiques to line their grand homes in America, Japan and more recently China, to give the impression they were privileged people of taste.
There were two large, studded red-leather chesterfields. On Doric plinths stood busts of some of his past great fellow countrymen – Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, J. M. Synge, James Joyce and T. E. Lawrence, whose father had been an Irishman, and whose writings he admired. Wall-to-wall bookcases lined with leather-bound tomes. In daylight, the window looked out on a view, framed by a line of Italian cypresses, of acres of lush gardens, an ornamental lake fringed by statues, and the distant rolling hills of the South Downs.
He removed from his desk drawer a crimson, leather-bound book and opened it. It contained a yellowed, decaying front page of the New York Daily News from February 1922, protected in a clear plastic envelope.
There had not been a day in his life when he had not looked at this page of the newspaper, and at the names and numbers on the reverse. Four names that filled him with knuckle-clenching hatred every time he saw them.
Fergal Kilpatrick. Mick Pollock. Aiden Boyle. Cillian Cregan.
The men who, the police had told his aunt, had entered his parents’ house, entered his bedroom, shone torches at him. Filled his bedroom with the stench of their booze and sweat.
The men who had shot his mother dead and taken his pa away.
All of them long dead. But that knowledge gave him no comfort, no satisfaction. Just regret. A deep regret that he had never returned to America years ago and gone looking for those who were still alive. And now it was too late.
He had often googled them. All their names were there, lieutenants of ‘Wild Bill’ Lovett, who had taken control of the White Hand Gang, which controlled the waterfronts of Manhattan and Brooklyn after the murders of the gang’s leader, Dinny Meehan, and subsequently his next in line, Brendan Daly.
His father.
He had long studied the photographs of their hateful faces that came up on his computer. Pegleg Pollock had been the first to die, shot dead in a bar in a turf war, his killers never identified.