The other thing that hits her is the smell.
It is sharp and overpowering, a combination – she quickly realises, glancing around – of smoke, piss and shit.
Over to the left, in a grey tracksuit, is the third guy from the white van. He’s flat on his back and has a bullet hole in his forehead. In his hand he’s still clutching what Gina had assumed outside to be a stick or a bat but now sees is a machete.
It is smeared with blood.
A yard farther on from this guy lies Terry Stack. He’s slumped on the floor, facing Gina. His eyes are open, but so too is the side of his neck – a clean, deep swipe from the machete, leaving blood everywhere. He has a gun in his hand.
Over to the right, near the pallets, lies Stack’s young associate, the hoodie. He’s also on his side, but facing away from her. There is a pool of blood forming around his legs. Gina takes a few steps forward and looks at him more closely.
He’s still breathing.
She bends over him and sees his chest moving – he’s unconscious, but definitely still breathing.
She stands back up. Very slowly she turns around to get a proper look at what previously she only allowed herself a glimpse of – having had to avert her eyes before a coherent image formed.
Martin Fitzgerald is lying on the ground. He’s in the same position as earlier, and still tied up, but now his jeans and boxers are bunched down around his ankles. There are small clamps and wires attached to his genitals. The wires are connected to a black rectangular device on the floor next to the toolbox. There is a cable running from the device through an extension over to a socket in the wall. Fitzgerald has soiled himself, and pretty badly – it’s seeping out on both sides. He has also vomited, down his neck and all over his chest. In fact, there are still deposits of vomit in his mouth and caked on his chin, and it even looks as if he might have choked on it. Or maybe not. She can’t be sure. It hardly matters, though. The expression on his face is startled, terrified… and frozen.
The state this man is in – not forgetting, of course, the gash on the side of his head – is the most awful, most appalling, most unforgettably distressing thing Gina has ever seen in her entire life.
She looks away. Her impulse is to throw up as well, or to cry, but not wishing to add to the sum total of excretions and effluvia in here, she steels herself and resolves to get outside before allowing anything like that to happen.
Stepping gingerly around the streams of piss and pools of blood, she makes her way across the warehouse floor. At one point someone’s mobile goes off, and she freezes, the frenzied hurdy-gurdy ringtone piercing the silence like a scream. She waits for it to ring out, her heart pounding, but halfway through the sequence someone else’s goes off. This time it’s the absurd, bombastic theme from some TV series she can’t remember the name of.
Eventually, they both stop. In the miraculous silence, Gina gets to the door and staggers out into the cold, fresh air.
Breathing heavily and with arms outstretched, she leans against the wall. She’s ready to get sick now, and really wants to, but in the end she can’t.
She straightens up.
Through the confusion and turmoil, she then remembers that one of the four men inside is still breathing – or at least he was a couple of minutes ago. She reaches into her pocket and takes out her phone. She’s about to dial 999 when something else strikes her. She takes out Fitz’s phone instead and uses that. She gets through to the police and gives them the address. She says that three men are dead and one is still alive. She cuts them off before they ask any questions.
She looks at her watch and then over at the Saab.
Which she’s assuming is Fitz’s.
She considers it but shakes her head.
Vigorously.
It would mean going back inside. It would mean kneeling down next to him again. It would mean rummaging through his pockets for the keys.
Gina is still shaking her head a few minutes later when she gets to the exit of the industrial estate, turns left onto the footpath and starts walking towards the Cherryvale roundabout.
Hearing a sound, Mark opens his eyes and struggles to bring the world around him into focus.
He’s been drifting in and out of consciousness for what feels like ages, and has little sense anymore of what is real or imagined. Time, space… sound, temperature, pain – these have all come to seem fluid to him, and interchangeable.
Oceanic, ubiquitous, immeasurable…
But this is different.
What he’s hearing at the moment is concrete, and penetrating, and increasingly real.
In fact, as the sound gets louder, and seems to divide into separate strands, he realises what it is. Of course. It’s a medley of approaching sirens, the sirens of what must surely be multiple police cars and – more important right now, as far as Mark is concerned – an ambulance…
Seven
1
The next morning there is saturation coverage in the media, with newspaper headlines ranging from the hysterical – BLOODBATH! – to the soberly informative – THREE DEAD, TWO INJURED, IN GANGLAND FEUD. On one of the radio breakfast shows the Minister for Justice declares all-out war on the city’s criminals and drug barons. Among commentators a consensus about what happened quickly emerges: it was a dispute between a senior gangland figure and an ex-paramilitary activist, with its roots possibly going back many years. It was also quite clearly an incident that got way out of hand. Live reports from the scene of the discovery – the result, it appears, of an anonymous tip-off to Gardaí – are shocking enough, but as usual it’s in the tabloids that the truly gruesome stuff is to be found.
The dead men are named as Terry Stack, Martin Fitzgerald and Eugene Joyce. One of the injured men – both of whom are still in intensive care – is named as Shay Moynihan. The other one has yet to be identified.
Investigations are ongoing.
‘I mean, honestly,’ Miriam says, flicking off the radio with one hand and pouring freshly brewed coffee into her husband’s cup with the other, ‘what are these people anyway, savages?’
‘Yes,’ Norton says, ‘they are, they’re animals, pure and simple.’
He and Miriam’s rapprochement started late last night and he doesn’t want to do or say anything now to endanger it – such as disagreeing with her, or pointing out to her that one of these savages may actually have been in this kitchen once, may have sat where she’s sitting, may even have drunk from the very cup she’s holding in her hand.
Norton stares into his coffee.
Since first hearing the news this morning – and on the radio like everyone else, though probably earlier than most – he’s been trying to visualise the scene, to conjure it up in all its graphic horror. But he can’t. More sober calculations keep getting in the way.
He raises his coffee cup and takes a sip. Miriam is concentrating on peeling an orange.
These two men in intensive care, for instance – he can only assume that the unidentified one is Mark Griffin… in which case he can only hope that the little fucker doesn’t make it. Terry Stack’s being out of the way, however, is a major plus, his involvement even breathing new life into Norton’s original strategy of trying to make the whole thing seem gang-related. Fitz himself – who clearly couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery – wasn’t much of a threat, but he was the one direct link between Norton and pretty much everything that’s happened recently.
There are variables, of course. Knowns and unknowns. What happens if Mark Griffin does make it? And what kind of a trail did Fitz leave behind him at High King? Documents? Recordings? Transcripts? Probably. But Norton’s not too worried, because it would hardly be in High King’s interests to compromise the confidentiality of their single most important client.