Mark.
It has to be.
Gina feels simultaneously sick and relieved.
Then Sophie takes a step towards her and says, ‘You were there, weren’t you, last night?’
Gina doesn’t answer.
‘I mean, come on,’ Sophie continues. ‘The time you got here, the state you were in.’ She pauses. ‘The blood on your shoes.’
Gina’s eyes widen.
Sophie points. ‘They’re over there on the kitchen floor. I cleaned them.’
Gina nods, and then sits on the edge of the sofa. After a long silence, she says, ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’
‘Don’t worry. I called in sick.’
Sophie takes off her jacket and places it over the back of a chair. She turns the chair to face the sofa and sits in it. ‘I didn’t like leaving, and then when I stuck my head in the door to check up on you before heading out, I noticed your shoes.’ She shrugs. ‘And well, on top of what I’d just heard on the radio…’
Gina nods again. Then she does her best to explain. She goes through it in detail, and in sequence – from her earliest suspicions on that awful Tuesday morning to everything she endured, and witnessed, last night.
Sophie is pale by the end of it.
‘Holy God, Gina. Jesus Christ. You’ve got to go to the Guards.’
‘I can’t. I -’
‘But you’re still -’
‘Look, I brought Terry Stack in on it, I called him, I encouraged him to…to interrogate that guy. I mean, listen to me.’
Sophie leans forward. ‘But Gina, you’re still… it sounds to me like you’re still in danger.’
‘Yeah. I suppose I am.’ She shrugs. ‘Yeah. But listen… do you have any coffee?’
Sophie nods. She gets up at once, heads over to the kitchen and with all the focus of a staff nurse preparing to dress a wound or give an insulin injection, she gets busy filling the kettle and then her cafetière.
Gina stands up and walks back over to the spare room. She sits on the end of the bed and picks up her jacket. She goes through the pockets and extracts whatever doesn’t belong to her. Mark Griffin’s mobile. Fitz’s mobile. Fitz’s gun. The three photographs.
She spreads all of these items out on the bed.
She glides a hand over the photos.
I finally saw them today. For the first time. Saw what they looked like. My family. I’m looking at them now. Lucy was so small, she -
Gina turns away, and stares at the floor.
Jesus. Poor Mark. Seeing these… these faces, after so many years, and then…
Then whatever happened to him. Getting shot…
Though she wonders now when exactly that happened, and where. Because something occurs to her. Mark sounded very weird on the phone. Out of it. Delirious almost. So could he actually have been shot before they spoke?
Then something else occurs to her. Sophie is right. Gina herself is still in danger. This isn’t going to stop just because Fitz is no longer around. And if she keeps on asking questions the way she has been, she’s probably going to wind up seriously injured – or even dead – herself.
Unless she gets some real answers first.
‘I’m stunned.’
Gina looks up. Sophie is leaning against the doorjamb with her arms folded.
‘Sorry?’
Sophie exhales. ‘I’m in total shock, Gina. At all of this.’
‘I know. I know. Me too.’
Gina tugs the jacket towards her to cover the items on the bed.
Out in the kitchen, the kettle whistles to a boil and then clicks off. Sophie steps away from the door. ‘So,’ she says over her shoulder as she moves off, ‘what are you going to do?’
Gina flips the jacket back. She looks down at the charcoal-grey gun lying on the bed. It is dense and angular, and radiates an undeniable seriousness. Next to it, the mobile phones, metallic and shiny, look like trinkets. She picks the gun up, holds it in her hand, feels it.
‘I don’t know,’ she says, her voice a notch or two louder, ‘but I think I’m going to continue doing what I’ve been doing all along.’
‘What’s that?’
Closing one eye, Gina raises the gun and points it at the wall. ‘Asking questions.’
2
Norton feels a little dizzy as he steps out of the elevator onto the third floor. His secretary greets him with a list of calls he absolutely must return, but when he gets to his desk the first call he makes is to Dr Walsh’s surgery.
But Dr Walsh won’t talk to him.
Prick.
Norton then looks at the list of names his secretary gave him, stares at it. He has no interest in returning any of these calls. He looks at his watch. Twenty minutes to go before the Amcan meeting. He’s finding it hard to drum up any interest in that either. What he really wants to do is to reach into his pocket and take out his pills. He wants that sensation, that little ritual, with its attendant promise of…
But he’s done it already, that’s the problem – less than an hour ago he took three of the bloody things. He can feel them in his system all right, just not in the way he’s used to. It’s very frustrating.
No less frustrating was his attempt to find Gina Rafferty. He cruised along by the quays four times, then parked and walked around for fifteen minutes. But he didn’t see any sign of her.
The Amcan meeting passes in a blur. He pretty much agrees to everything on the agenda and proposes that the contract be signed tomorrow. He can see that the chief negotiator, a fortyish RFK wannabe from Boston, is a little perplexed – but Norton doesn’t care. Besides, this is what he wants, and where’s the point in breaking their balls just for the sake of it? With Amcan on board, and the name of the building officially changed to reflect this, the project’s success isn’t exactly guaranteed, but it stands a pretty good chance. And all those people who predicted that thirty or forty floors would remain unoccupied, thus making a mockery of Norton’s ambitions… well, they can now go and fuck themselves.
Soon after the meeting concludes, Norton gets a call from Ray Sullivan in Vienna. He’ll be back in Dublin tomorrow for the signing.
Norton welcomes the news.
‘… and what’s more, my friend,’ Sullivan goes on, ‘get a load of this. Mr V. is in London at the moment, so he’s going to fly over, too. All informal, of course, and strictly private. He’d just like to have a look around. Do the tour.’
When he hears this, Norton bucks up a little in spite of himself. James Vaughan? In person? Of course he’ll keep it informal and strictly private – though that won’t stop him from making damn sure the right people hear about it all the same…
Norton savours the moment. But it doesn’t take long for the excitement to abate. Because where the bloody hell, it occurs to him, is Gina Rafferty? Running scared? Waiting in the long grass? He tunes in to Newstalk at 12.30 and listens to the headlines. There are no developments.
Then, as he’s considering his options, a courier arrives with a package from High King Security. Norton rips open the envelope and empties its contents onto his desk.
He can only imagine the panic they’re in over there, but he’s glad they decided not to destroy these documents, because within less than a minute he has in front of him Gina Rafferty’s full address and telephone number.
He’s still not sure what to do, though.
He thinks calling her up might be the wrong move. It might frighten her into making a wrong move. He’ll go down by the quays again later, go to her building, confront her in person, and find out what he can.