Winterland

by Alan Glynn

He decides not to leave a message. What’s the point? He knows it’ll come up as a missed call.

  Standing under the portico, he gazes out over the hotel’s front lawn and beyond it to the hushed suburban tranquillity of Ballsbridge.

  Why didn’t Fitz answer just now?

  Norton turns right and takes a few steps along a manicured pathway.

  He really wants to believe it’s because Fitz is busy – that he’s being thorough and scrupulous.

  But something won’t let him.

  An angsty thrumming in the pit of his stomach.

  He looks at his watch, and mouths the word fuck.

  The problem is, there’s no one else he can call. He has no choice but to wait.

  He turns back towards the portico.

  His phone rings.

  He freezes, thinking, Well thank Jesus. He fumbles in his pocket, but when he gets the phone out he sees at once from the display that it’s Miriam.

  ‘Damn,’ he says, and loud enough to draw a surprised look from the uniformed porter at the entrance to the hotel.

  He stares at the display and decides not to answer it. They’re still not speaking face to face, so why should they speak on the bloody phone? If he wants a review of the Friel play, can’t he read the Irish fucking Times in the morning?

  He puts the phone away and storms back inside.

  As Gina is standing there, gazing across at Unit 46, a vertical slit of light appears. It’s the steel door opening, a fraction at first, then wide. Terry Stack comes out and looks around.

  ‘Gina?’

  She takes a few steps forward. ‘I’m here.’

  Stack sees her and starts walking across the yard, his shoes click-clacking on the concrete. He huddles into his overcoat and shivers loudly.

  Gina stands, waiting. She’s still in shock from seeing that name on the caller ID of Fitz’s phone.

  Paddy Norton?

  She’d been so convinced by him that day – by his indignation at what had happened, by his impatience with her. He’d seemed hurt as well, and sad. She tries in vain to remember if there was anything about him that might have been suspicious. But she can’t.

  Terry Stack comes to a stop directly in front of her. ‘Right,’ he says.

  Gina looks at him, her mind swimming now with other stuff she is remembering – questions about Norton and her brother, for instance. They had a drink that evening in town. But where? At what time? And what did they talk about?

  ‘Gina?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Quick update. Little fucker in there is a former INLA man, Martin Fitzpatrick, a republican –’

  ‘Republican socialist?’

  ‘Socialist me hole, love,’ Stack says, laughing. ‘He owns about twenty apartments all over town and runs a private security outfit. High King. They do construction sites, that sort of stuff.’

  ‘Construction sites?’

  ‘Yeah. Mainly.’

  Gina nods along. Sagely. She feels light-headed. She feels drunk.

  ‘Anyway,’ Stack goes on, ‘he arranged the job on Noel. I got that much out of him. And he did your brother.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘Yeah, both of them. He’s a cunt.’

  ‘How? How did –’

  ‘The brakes. He did something with the brakes in his car. Got him loaded and then …’

  ‘Oh my God.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I’m working on it. Give us a bit more time.’

  ‘Mark Griffin?’ Gina then says, almost in a whisper.

  ‘I haven’t got that yet either. He’s holding out, says he doesn’t know where he is, that no one was here when he arrived, but that’s bollocks. We’ll get it out of him, don’t worry. It’s all about pacing, this is … the build-up –’

  Gina swallows.

  ‘– the threshold, if you know what I mean.’

  She does, in theory, of course, and wants to tell him enough, wants to be the one to end this, even though she’s the one who started it. But what she says instead is, ‘Get him to tell you about a man called Paddy Norton.’

  Stack furrows his brow. ‘Paddy Norton? He owns Winterland Properties, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s … that’s the crowd High King does most of its security work for.’

  ‘Yeah well,’ Gina says, ‘I’m pretty sure you’ll find he’s also the one Che Guevara in there is answerable to for this job.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Stack says. ‘How do you know that?’

  The phone is in Gina’s pocket, but she doesn’t want to give it to him. She ignores the question. Besides, isn’t it obvious now? ‘Just get him to tell you the reason for all of this, will you? Why? What did Noel ever do?’ She pauses, then adds, ‘My Noel,’ and gets a stinging sensation behind her eyes as she says it. But now isn’t the time. She stares into Terry Stack’s eyes. ‘Will you do that for me?’

  ‘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 – th
is 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.

  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.