The other three had vanished, faded into the mists of time. Their surnames popped up, meaninglessly, on his internet searches, along with Daly countless times.
Your old men shall dream dreams; your young men shall see visions.
His aunt, who brought him and his sister back to Ireland, had a deep faith. She had read them passages from the Bible daily on that voyage from New York, and every night of their childhood outside Dublin.
He’d never had any truck with religion, but the book of Joel had been right in that one passage. He’d had plenty of visions as a young man. And now all he had were his dreams. He looked up at the bust of the handsome, equine face of Lawrence of Arabia. There was a quote from that great man’s book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, that had been his mantra throughout life.
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
He had always been a dreamer of the day. But now he realized that maybe he had only been a sleepwalker. He was ninety-five years old and he had failed to keep the biggest, most important promise he had made in his life. A promise he had made standing on the stern of the Mauretania, as a small boy, all those decades ago.
One day, Pop, I’m going to come back and find you. I’m going to rescue you from wherever you are.
He looked again, for the millionth time, at the only clue he had ever had. Those twelve scrawled numbers below the names of the four men.
9 5 3 7 0 4 0 4 2 4 0 4
He had tried endlessly. Checking plot numbers at every cemetery in the New York area. Checking prisoner numbers – but the numbers were too long. Checking co-ordinates – but they were too short. Telephone numbers. House numbers. Car indexes. Bank account numbers. Safety deposit box codes. He’d even employed code breakers to see if they represented letters or words of a secret message. But always the same negative result.
Then he was distracted by a steady beep-beep-beep sound.
The intruder alert system. It warned of anyone approaching the perimeter of his property. He looked up at the bank of CCTV screens on the wall to the right of his desk. And was pleased at what he saw.
They were here.
About time, too.
22
‘Arrivederci, sunshine,’ the driver said, turning round, showing his face to Ricky Moore for the first time. He looked an old, unkempt git, Moore thought, sullenly.
The Apologist hauled Moore out of the rear of the Mercedes as easily as if he were a cardboard cut-out. Then he held him upright in the ankle-deep gravel, in the glare of the floodlighting and the silence of the night, outside the grand entrance porch of the white mansion.
They were half a mile down a tree-lined private driveway and three miles from the nearest dwelling. From his knowledge of Sussex Ricky Moore had a vague idea where they were, but he wasn’t familiar with all the back lanes beyond Lewes. He heard an owl hoot somewhere close. In front of him a burly middle-aged man, with short, gelled hair and a sharp business suit, climbed down from the driver’s side of the black Range Rover. Something was bulking out the front of the man’s jacket.
A cooling engine ticked steadily, like a clock. The man in the business suit strode up to the porch. In the darkness and the silence and the total absence of any neighbours, Ricky Moore was becoming increasingly frightened with every passing second. He had to escape, but how? His brain was all over the place, almost paralyzed with fear. Then he cried out in pain as one of the nerves in his right arm was agonizingly crushed.
‘I’m sorry,’ the Apologist said to Moore, escorting him forward, maintaining the excruciating pressure. ‘Really, I am. Believe me. You may find it hard to believe, but I am sorry, truly.’ He smiled. Most of his teeth needed work. ‘I’m just doing my job.’
‘Look,’ Moore said, urgently. ‘I’ll pay you good money to take me back to the pub. A lot of money. I mean it, a lot.’
The Apologist was a loyal man. He’d been given his nickname in prison for constantly apologizing to everyone, about everything, and he’d liked the name. He hardly ever used his real name, Augustine Krasniki. Apologizing was his nature; he couldn’t help it. As a small boy, in his native Albania, his mother had blamed him for his father leaving her. She’d blamed him for everything, and the only way to calm her was to apologize, constantly, day and night. It was even his fault when it rained, so he learned to apologize for that also. Eventually she had put him into care, for reasons he never understood, but he assumed it must have been his fault. From there he had been moved from foster home to foster home. People felt scared by him, intimidated by the way he looked – and by his physical strength. It had taken him a while to understand and control his own strength. Once he killed a child’s pet gerbil by stroking it too hard; another time he crushed a budgerigar to death by accident. Often people screamed in pain when he shook their hand. He tried to remember to be gentle, but his brain did not always work that well.
When boys had picked on him at school for being so ugly, he had tried – but failed – to control his strength. With one punch he would smash their ribs, or knock all their front teeth out, every single one of them, like a ten-pin strike! He couldn’t help his temper when other kids taunted him, calling him Boris Karloff, telling him he looked like Frankenstein’s monster, so he just got used to hitting them and then apologizing after.
Only one person had ever been kind to him in his life. His boss, Lucas Daly. He gave him money, let him have the flat above the shop in the Lanes, which he guarded fiercely, and had him sit in on all his drug deals. No one ever messed with Lucas Daly, not after they had taken one look at the Apologist. He was unswervingly loyal to his boss.
‘I’m sorry,’ the Apologist said to Ricky Moore. ‘I’d like to say yes, really I would. I’d like to say yes and take your money. But I can’t. You’ll have to trust me on that one.’
The man in the business suit opened the front door with his key and Ricky Moore, propelled by the grip of the Apologist, stumbled in. The door closed behind him. They were in a huge hallway, with a black and white chequered floor. Two suits of armour, each with a lance in their steel right hands, stood either side of a grand stairway. Fine, classical oil paintings hung from the walls, the kind of paintings that would normally have piqued Ricky Moore’s interest. But tonight he barely noticed them through his tears of pain.
There was a strong smell of cigar smoke. Moore was craving a cigarette. An elderly man with flowing white hair, wearing a smoking jacket and monogrammed black velvet slippers, walked towards them, with the aid of a silver-headed cane. He held a large cigar in his free hand, and fury blazed in his cornflower-blue eyes.
‘Ricky Moore?’
He nodded sullenly.
‘I’m Gavin Daly. I appreciate your dropping by.’
‘Very funny,’ Moore said defiantly.
Daly grinned back. There was a flash of warmth that was gone in an instant, like a fleeting glimpse of the sun behind a storm cloud. ‘Funny? You like jokes, do you? Think it’s funny to con vulnerable old ladies out of their possessions?’
‘I dunno what you’re talking about.’
‘Get nice kickbacks, do you, for your information? Send your leaflet out in advance, then go into houses and take photographs of anything of value?’
‘Nah, not me. I honestly dunno what you’re talking about.’ He gasped in pain as the Apologist crushed the nerve in his arm again, as if to remind him not to bother thinking about trying to get away. ‘It’s not me.’