by Declan Burke
Assuming, of course, they’re allowed to grow at all.
‘Gerard Smyth’s dead, Martin, and very probably because he wanted nothing more than the truth be told about those kids.’
It was perverse. A frail old man was dead before his time and most likely because he could corroborate a story Shay Govern wanted to tell the whole world. Maybe it was like Martin said, the big guys thrive and the little guys get squeezed. Or shoved into canals.
‘That’s all very noble, Tom. But I’m thinking you should worry less about those kids and think a little bit more about your own.’
‘That’s cheap, Martin. I’d have thought that you of all— Oh fuck.’
‘What?’
But it wasn’t a what. It was a who.
Strolling across the car park towards the playground like the Cheshire Cat, all menace and smile.
Kee.
She was still wearing the knee-length grey wool coat and her nose was every bit as interesting, although the bird’s nest bob was a little more ragged than I remembered. The proofreading ruler was in her right hand, or what was left of it. She sat down on the bench with Martin between us and handed it across, mangled and just about hanging together on the thin metal strand.
‘Careful you don’t get a splinter,’ she said. ‘I’d hate to see you go down with blood poisoning.’ She looked exhausted, drained and wan, which gave her smile a manic edge. ‘So where are we?’ she said. ‘Someone bring me up to speed.’
‘I’ll just go grab Emily,’ Martin said, standing up.
‘Sit down, Martin,’ she said. He hesitated and glanced across at me. ‘Sit down,’ she repeated, ‘Martin Banks, chartered accountant, of fifty-seven Meadowvale Grove, Rathfarnham. Unless you want me to make a call right now, have you pulled in for aiding and abetting.’
‘He’s only here to collect Emily,’ I said. ‘He knows nothing.’
‘Really?’ She looked up at where Martin was standing, shading her eyes, still with the smile. ‘So you didn’t happen to mention at any point that the reason you needed to bolt with Emily was because you’d assaulted a detective in the course of her duties, in the process obstructing the course of justice and detaining her against her will.’
‘Martin and me, we’re not really that close.’
‘No, I can see that. A purely professional relationship, accountant and client. And there’s no chance that you might have given him Gerard Smyth’s testimony, had him lock it away on your behalf, when you visited him the other night. Would that be right?’
‘Couldn’t be righter,’ I said.
‘So when we search Martin’s premises, haul in his computer, we won’t find any sign of the manuscript. Correct?’
‘Not unless you plant one while you’re searching, no.’
‘Martin?’ Kee said. ‘Would you mind sitting down for a moment? I’ve had a long night and the last thing I need right now is a crick in my neck.’
Martin, looking a tad peaky, sat down again.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘So you’ll have heard of the Official Secrets Act. Yes?’ Martin, uncertain, nodded. ‘Great,’ Kee said. ‘So everything that’s happened in the last couple of days, every interaction you’ve had with Tom here – physical, digital, emotional and psychological – it’s all covered. Are we clear?’
‘Not really,’ Martin said.
Kee sighed, puffed out her cheeks. ‘For now,’ she said, ‘just assume that anything Tom has told you is covered by said Act. Failure to comply, by which I mean talking about any aspect of this, to anyone, your lovely wife Jennifer included, will find you in breach. And once that particular shit hits the fan, and even if you don’t see the inside of a cell, you’ll never get the stains out. Am I any clearer now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Great. So I’ll ask again – where are we now? You go first, Tom.’
‘Anything Martin’s done,’ I said, ‘he’s done as a favour to me. The reason he’s here is because I asked him to come collect Emily. So he gets to walk away, take Emily with him. Then we can talk.’
‘Good,’ Kee said. She closed her eyes and massaged them with her fingertips. ‘Standing up for your friend, I like it.’ She opened her eyes again, blinking heavily. ‘Where do you think we are, Tom? The fucking playground?’
There was a moment’s awkward silence, punctured by a gleeful ‘Wheeeeeee!’ as Emily went careering down the slide. Then Kee said, ‘Martin? I’d imagine Emily would love a push on the swings. What do you say?’
As soon as he was gone I said, ‘Martin isn’t involved. Yes, I asked him to hold the manuscript. Last night he emailed it to me, and now he’s here because I need Emily gone. Once I know she’s safe, you and me, we’re good to go. I’ll tell you what I know.’
‘Martin,’ she said, ‘will piss off home when I tell him he can go. And he’ll be going without Emily. As far as I can make out, she’s about the only thing that puts manners on you.’
‘Now wait a fucking minute. There’s no way I’m—’
‘I’ve already waited a minute, Tom. I waited three fucking hours locked in that wardrobe trying to kick out the doors. So I’m all done with the waiting. From here on in, I tell you what to do and you do it.’
‘Emily’s out of here. That’s non-negotiable.’
‘Is that a fact? Try this one, Tom. You’re the guy who dragged your daughter into this mess. Not exactly the actions of a fit parent.’ She leaned in. ‘I make one call, Tom, and little Emily over there will be bounced into care so fast she’ll be dizzy for the first six months. And you better believe she’ll know all about how and why it happened, whose fault it is she can’t see her mother any more.’ She sat back, rearranged her coat and crossed her legs at the knee. ‘So let’s try this one last time. Start with the guy you met for breakfast. Who’s he?’
By then the playground was starting to fill up, bleary-eyed parents and hyperactive kids, toddlers bumbling along, tripping up and sitting down hard on their padded diapers. The sun warm enough to take the edge off the breeze. Martin, bless him, played his part to the hilt, pushing Emily higher than she should have gone, then running around in front of her to play toreador as she swished past.
‘I’m going to take a flying guess here,’ I said, ‘and say you already know who I was having breakfast with.’
She conceded that one. ‘I just want to be sure you know who he was,’ she said.
‘He’s calling himself Franco Govern. Shay Govern’s brother.’
‘So what’d he have to say?’
‘Mainly he wants me to keep my mouth shut or Emily gets hurt.’
It was a gamble, but I was pretty sure Kee and whoever she was working with weren’t so good they’d been able to overhear my conversation with Franco. Not that they weren’t good – they’d been all over us from the start, tracking me from the meet with Gerard Smyth out to Martin and Jenny’s house that night. But good enough to plant some kind of bug at the right table in Belle’s Kitchen? Organized enough that they’d have a long-range listening apparatus in place in Rathmullan? I didn’t think so.
‘He made an explicit threat against your daughter?’ Kee said.
‘Not up front, the way you did,’ I said. ‘But it was there, sure.’
She didn’t like that. Then again, she wasn’t supposed to. She said, ‘So what is it he wants you to keep your mouth shut about?’
‘Are you serious? We’re going to have this conversation here, where anyone can see us?’
‘You’re worried we’re being watched,’ she said. ‘That’s good. Paranoia can be a healthy early-warning mechanism. But what’s worrying me is you’re thinking about Franco, not me. Which leads me to believe that you think Franco’s the dangerous one. That he can hurt you more than I can.’ She spoke softly but the words were precise, hard and cold. ‘Now, maybe I shouldn’t take that personally; maybe it’s just that he’s a bloke and I’m a woman. Or maybe it’s because you’re kidding yourself that Franco’s off the charts and I’m obliged to pla
y by the rules. Is that it?’
There was no right or good answer to that question, so I just waited for her to make her point.
‘Tom,’ she said, ‘you need to understand that you’re in a very bad place here.’
‘I didn’t ask to—’
‘Don’t come the innocent with me, Tom. Maybe you didn’t know what Shay Govern was letting you in for when you first met him, but you’ve had plenty of time since to think it over. And you’ve made more than a few bad decisions over the last couple of days, made choices and taken sides. Your problem being, right now, that you don’t even know who the sides are. Or what they’re capable of.’
‘Yeah well, I’m all ears now.’
‘What?’
‘Feel free to put me straight, Kee. I mean, if you’d told me the score when you sat down in the coffee shop that time, we very probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. Correct?’
‘Do not fucking—’
‘Whoa. Easy on the language there, Kee, we’re in a play-ground.’
For a moment her face looked a lot like something that had ripped loose from a Picasso. She was already pale from exhaustion, but now her complexion turned milky with suppressed fury.
‘Just before you start in again,’ I said, shifting closer to her on the bench, ‘let me warn you about making the same mistake Franco Govern made.’ I extended an arm, pointing out Emily as she swooped and squealed on the swings. ‘Franco took one look at my daughter and thought he saw a weakness, something that makes me vulnerable. Which was a little surprising, to be honest, because Franco, or so he says, has two girls himself. So Franco, providing he wasn’t bullshitting, should know that Emily isn’t so much of a weakness as she is a strength. Maybe,’ I shrugged, ‘the only one I have. Because there’s nothing I can’t do, and no one I won’t do it to, once she’s in the frame. No, wait,’ I said, as Kee made to speak. ‘The thing about that is once the misunderstanding was cleared up Franco became a totally different guy. Very chatty. Took me into his confidence.’ Emily, spotting us looking over, took one hand off the swing chain and waved, sending herself into a parabolic wobble. Once Martin had rescued the situation and got her back on line, I said, ‘So have a wee think about that. How your life and mine might be a little bit easier if we can come to some kind of arrangement about who we really are and what we really know.’
She had a good gnaw on the inside of her lower lip thinking it over. Then she said, ‘One question.’
‘Go on.’
‘Did he mention salvage?’
‘If you’re talking about the gold, yeah, he did.’
‘Fuck.’
A couple of heads farther along the chain-link fence turned, lips pursed.
‘Sorry,’ I said, wincing. I nodded at Kee. ‘Tourette’s. She can’t help herself. I’ll take her for a stroll.’
There was a sculpture on a grassy rise halfway between the playground and the beach, six or seven life-size but grotesquely thin figures cast in bronze and facing out to sea with their arms raised. At first I thought it was a Famine commemoration but then I realized they were waving off four other figures who were standing on a raised gangplank looking back, their own arms raised in farewell. It could only have been the Flight of the Earls, the O’Neills and the O’Donnells, the last of the ancient Gaelic aristocracy fleeing into exile, hounded out in 1607 by the marauding English, never to return.
It was hard to tell whether those left behind were begging passage, beseeching them to return, or bidding them a bon voyage and good riddance. Given that the Earls were abandoning their followers to the tender mercies of the English army following on, it was probably a combination of all three.
Not a great omen, if you were a man who set any store by omens.
‘You’re not a cop,’ I said. ‘I know that much.’
‘Why would you say that?’ Kee said.
A couple of thoroughbreds were being put through their paces on the hard-packed strand below, chunks of sand kicked up by their hooves, the dull drumming arriving half a second later. Directly across from us lay Delphi in bright sunshine, covered in forest and tricked out in at least half of the forty shades of green. There was something of the wild boar about its hunched back, the prickles of pines along the spine of its ridge.
‘I’m saying it,’ I said, ‘because you’re not a cop. Or not just a cop. If you were, you’d have arrested me as soon as you heard Gerard Smyth was dead.’
‘Maybe I was planning to, once Emily was out of the picture.’
‘Then,’ I said, ‘you catch up with me this morning, I’m a flight risk who’s already assaulted you. Except you sit down and start making threats. Not exactly by the book, Kee. And then there’s the fact that you were scoping me long before Gerard Smyth went into the canal, had me followed to Martin and Jenny’s that night. Then, I disappear, I’m a potential murder suspect, but you turn up here running solo, no back-up, no uniforms. Organized enough to track me down but not making any fuss about it, not dangling the old handcuffs. Instead you’re asking me about Franco Govern and gold bullion, trying to get me onside and giving it all this about the Official Secrets Act. All of which tells me there’s more to you than meets the eye – not that what meets the eye isn’t plenty in itself.’
She’d walked around to the other side of the sculpture, shading her eyes again as she stared up at the anguished faces. Now she squinted across at me, one eye closed, half amused. ‘It’s a bit late to start flirting now, Tom.’
‘You never know. Let’s start with a little honesty, see where that takes us.’
‘See,’ she said, ‘this is my problem. I always assume people are being honest from the get-go.’
‘It’s my experience that they generally are, in a quid pro quo kinda way. So – you quid me, I’ll quid you. But you’ll need to start talking fast.’ I pointed past her, out at the lough, to where the ferry was making for the pier. ‘I’d say you have about fifteen minutes.’
She turned to look and watched it come. It had the look of a converted trawler, wallowing a little now as it battled the turning tide. She said, ‘You’re going over?’
‘That’s right.’
‘To meet with Shay Govern.’
‘I have a book to write.’ Starting, I didn’t add, with my signature on a dotted line.
‘The book about the thriller writer,’ she said.
‘Sebastian Devereaux, yes.’
‘So they’ll be expecting you to poke around, ask questions.’
‘I’d imagine they’d be disappointed if I didn’t.’
She thought it over, chewing again on the inside of her lower lip. ‘Shay Govern,’ she said. ‘Has he met your wife?’
‘He knows I have an ex-wife. But no, he hasn’t met her.’
‘OK.’ She reached into the pocket of her coat and took out her phone, brought up a number. ‘Clearance,’ she said, then turned her back on me and put the phone to her ear.
I strode around the sculpture, grabbed the phone out her hand and kept walking, pressed it to my ear.
‘Hey!’
Brr-brr, brr-br – click.
‘Code,’ said a male voice.
I dropped the phone to the ground, stamped it with my heel. Then I turned to face her.
Bad idea. She was right there behind me, already swinging.
SEVENTEEN
It was tough telling Emily she was going back to Dublin with her Uncle Martin for a sleepover with her cousins. What was tougher was that she said nothing, not so much as a token protest, instead channelling her disappointment into giving Kee a good long stare over my shoulder. I knew she was wondering if Kee was my version of Mommy’s Peter, perhaps even a possible new mum. My heart went out to her, a tiny sun trying to map out the coordinates and orbit for a new and unexpected planet that had sailed into her solar system.
I tried to make a game of it, telling her Kee was a wicked queen and that she was a secret princess who had to be taken to safety by the noble knight Martin. She w
asn’t buying. As I belted her into the booster seat in the rear of Martin’s Saab she did that thing she does, reaching up to squidge my earlobe between her fingers, and said, ‘Are you still my daddy?’
‘Of course I am, love. You know I’ll always be your—’
‘No.’ An exasperated sigh. ‘In the game.’
‘Oh. Right. Well, I suppose I could be if you’d like me to be.’
The ferry had rounded the breakwater, was crawling in towards the pier. Kee, who’d wandered by to hurry me along, slipped a plain band off her middle finger and handed it to me. ‘You’ll be needing this,’ she said, taking my left hand and easing it onto my ring finger. Then she ducked out of a thin silver chain she wore around her neck, opened the clasp and allowed a diamond ring to slip into her palm. She pressed it to her lips, then slid it on to her finger and fixed the chain back in place around her neck.
‘You’re married?’ I said.
‘To you, Tom, and just the other day. So try to look happy about it.’
When I glanced into the rear of the car to wink at Emily, let her know it was all part of the game, she was staring out the window beyond us, a glassy gleam in her eyes, the faintest of tremors in her lower lip.
The ferry steamed out into the lough on a heading that looked to be taking us about two miles north. At first I presumed we were bound for Buncrana on the far shore and would divert to Delphi on the return journey to Rathmullan, an entirely endurable prospect on what had bloomed into a glorious spring day, warm and fizzing with the promise of summer. I wedged myself in at the rail for the trip, the ferry’s bow climbing and plunging, spray exploding into salty mist.
Once we’d crossed the central channel, though, we began curving sharply around to the south, picking up speed as we ran with the current and came around parallel to Delphi’s western shore. The coastline was unforgiving, a high rocky bluff crowned with thick forest, and I began to wonder if we’d need to anchor offshore and take a tender to the island. Then, as we were passing a stubby promontory, the pilot pulled a ferry’s equivalent of a handbrake turn, throwing the wheel over and dragging a dull bellow of protest out the engines as he rammed them into reverse. For a moment we hung suspended in the current and then we slid easily into a tiny horseshoe bay surrounded on three sides by sheer cliff. The harbour was so calm that for a second or two, as we steamed towards the village tucked into a crevice in the cliffs, I believed we were going to ram the outlying buildings. It wasn’t until the first few houses began to waver and dance that I realized they were a reflection, the mirror-still surface unsettled by the wake pushed out under our prow.