‘Of course I will, love. Jesus.’
He holds her gaze for a moment. It’s a long moment, and she doesn’t look away or even blink. But she feels unreal doing it, numb, like she’s on smack.
‘Look,’ he says eventually, and a little too excitedly, ‘I’ll be as fast as I can.’ He glances at his watch. ‘Are you going to wait here?’
She nods.
‘Probably just as well.’ He clicks his tongue, and winks at her. ‘I won’t lock it.’
He turns and walks back to the other side. Gina watches him disappear behind the steel door. Then she retreats to the concrete ramp and huddles down into the corner, shivering. After a moment, she takes the packet of Major out of her pocket, looks at it and flings it away. She does the same with the Zippo lighter. Then she takes Fitz’s mobile out but doesn’t look at it. She wants to throw this away too, but resists. It might contain evidence, numbers, messages.
She tosses it from one hand to the other.
Paddy Norton.
She pictures him – this portly respectable man with his pinprick blue eyes and soft, chubby features, his thin wisps of grey hair, his expensive overcoat. She remembers his smell, too – cologne, mints, cigars, the smell of money. Then she thinks of Martin Fitzpatrick. She looks across at Unit 46. Did this burly, bottom-feeding former INLA piece of shit take his orders directly from Norton? Did he carry them out himself?
She lowers her head and closes her eyes.
If that turns out to be the case, and she suspects it will, probably already has… then what happens next?
Here. Tonight.
Terry Stack vowed that whoever killed young Noel would pay the price. Is that what will happen next – and as a direct consequence of her actions?
Suddenly she feels sick.
Get him to tell you.
Would you do that for me?
Oh God.
Taking a deep breath, fighting the nausea, she opens her eyes. But the first thing she sees makes her heart jump. It’s what’s on the dimmed display of the phone in her hand. She presses a key and the backlight activates.
Five missed calls.
The most recent of these was from Norton, just a short while ago. And the others? She doesn’t know, but wonders if they could all have come in the last twenty minutes. Is that possible, or likely? Of course it is, and as the full significance of this hits her, she also realises that it’s too late to do anything about it. Because what she’s hearing now, from her left, is the unmistakable sound of an approaching vehicle.
She turns to look, and freezes.
It’s a small white van. It comes screeching to a halt next to the Saab. Driver and passenger doors open simultaneously and two guys get out, then a third. They’re carrying things – she can’t see them clearly, but they look like… sticks or bats.
There’s no point in Gina’s moving or trying to hide – she may be visible here, but these guys are in a hurry and unlikely to look in her direction.
She thinks of using the phone to warn Stack, but there isn’t time – this is all happening too fast.
The three men converge on the steel door, kick it open and pile in.
The door remains wide open.
Immediately, from across the yard, and through the wind, she hears voices… shouting… roars… then a loud crack, followed by more shouting, followed by two more loud cracks.
Gina is paralysed, not shivering anymore.
She is barely breathing.
The shouting continues. Then it stops.
There is silence for… what… ten seconds? Fifteen seconds? She doesn’t know, her ability to gauge non-existent. She’s about to lean forward and get up when she sees something. There’s a shadow at the doorway. It’s moving. Remaining still, Gina stares across the yard as one figure, then two, emerge from the warehouse into the orange light. The first figure is limping. The second one is doubled over and clinging to the first one.
‘Ow… jaysus… fuuuuuuck.’
This comes from the one with the limp. The other one is groaning, or crying.
It takes them a while, but they eventually make it to the passenger side of the van. From the way the van is parked, Gina can’t see clearly, but she hears the door being opened. Then she hears the door being slammed shut again. A moment later the first guy comes around, hopping on one foot, and gets in on the driver’s side.
The van starts up immediately. It reverses, seems as if it’s about to back right in on top of Gina, but then turns suddenly, tyres screeching, and speeds off, heading in the direction of the exit and the main road.
Mark opens his eyes, stirred, it seems, by this awful silence, this rude stillness. Moments before, he was lost in a dream, and an ugly one – hellish, frenetic, noisy, and… of course, he’s now realising, not actually a dream at all.
Which means those must have been gunshots he heard just now, real ones, and the screams too, and the screeching tyres. As well as the voices he heard earlier – from the open window six feet above him…
Talking, shouting, arguing.
Those also must have been real.
He tries to move, responding to the panicky signals coming from his brain, but he can’t. The pain is too intense, and all-pervading. Like the freezing cold. It’s as if he’s set in cement.
But what about Gina?
Is she…?
He parts his lips to say her name – not even to call it out, because he knows that’s not going to happen – but in the end nothing happens anyway. He makes no sound at all.
What is going on?
He closes his eyes again, squeezes them shut.
Kaleidoscope eyes.
He dragged Gina out here. He’s responsible for…
Newspaper taxis… appear on the shore.
This is his fault.
Waiting to take her away…
Minutes pass before Gina can move, or even take her eyes off the steel door on the far side of the yard. Eventually she looks away. She reaches an arm out and struggles to her feet. She slips Fitz’s mobile phone into her pocket. Then she takes a step forward, but stops at once, acutely aware of the sound her own shoes are making on the concrete. She doesn’t want to attract any attention. She doesn’t want to be seen. But most of all, she doesn’t want to see anyone else, and especially not anyone walking out of that door.
She looks around. Apart from the wind, there is absolute silence.
She turns left and starts walking. All she has to do now is keep walking, and in ten or fifteen minutes she’ll be clear of here, past the roundabout, into one of the housing estates – near a pub, near people.
Safe.
But when she’s halfway to the exit, she stops and turns around. She hesitates. Then she starts walking back the way she came.
She can’t just leave.
She needs to know what happened. She needs to know that there wasn’t anything else she could have done. She needs to know – for later – that she didn’t walk away.
The steel door to the warehouse is wide open. As she approaches it she sees blood inside, streaked on the floor. She realises that there’s blood outside, too – a trail of it on the concrete, leading over to where the white van had been parked.
She swallows, and braces herself.
Incredibly, the first blood drawn here tonight was drawn by her – so she doesn’t get a pass on this.
She steps inside the door. She has to adjust her eyes for a second to the harsh fluorescent light, a fleeting respite before the full horror materialises in front of her. She did the math walking back… two got away, which means there should be four left.
And there are.
On the floor, all of them, evenly spread out, two over here, two over there. But she still has to count them – one, two, three, four – and more than once, as if she doesn’t trust herself to get this simple calculation right.