“All right. When you get there, don’t make big declarations, or look like you’re going to make any. Don’t prepare anything, it’ll sound as if you’re very pleased with yourself if you do. Pay a lot of attention to the girls. That shouldn’t be hard. And then listen to what Geri says. She’ll probably do a lot of talking. Don’t pick up on points she’s making, she isn’t making them really.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, there’s no point trying to respond to what she’s saying, she won’t really be listening to herself.”
“But I should?”
“Yes. I know, it doesn’t make any sense. She’ll just be talking to see how things go. Agree, but not in any major way, occasionally she’ll tune into herself and think she’s just prattling on, so you don’t want her to think you’re patronizing her by agreeing vehemently with things she doesn’t necessarily mean.”
“But I kind of will be. Patronizing her, won’t I? If I don’t take what she says seriously.”
“No, you’ll just be…not taking control. There might come a point at which she’ll want you to take a bit. But if you can get through the first half hour or so without giving the impression that you’re doing her a favor, or that it’s all very difficult for you, or that at any moment you might burst into song, I think you’ll be doing well. And don’t stay longer than an hour or so, unless things are going really well.”
“What about the champagne?”
Anne shakes her head.
“She might offer it. Shake your head and ask for tea. Then the champagne won’t look like a move. Even though you both know it is.”
“I know some of this stuff.”
“You probably know all of it. It’s just so easy to forget. I’m an expert when it comes to other people’s situations, of course, not my own.”
“I’m sure you do all right,” Jack says, and gets up from the table.
“And if you have an apology to make, make it when you’re intending to leave, but not when you’re on your feet. Again, that way, it’s as if you’re giving her the option of responding or letting you go, as opposed to giving yourself a big operatic exit line. Letting her know the apology is for her, not you.”
As Jack walks down the hall, Aoife and Ciara pile out of the living room, still in their pajamas, their uncombed heads all tousled. When they see Jack, they fade back with a sigh.
“Uhhh,” Ciara says. “We thought it was Ed.”
“Rude,” Aoife hisses at Ciara.
“This is Jack, a friend of Ed’s,” Anne says.
“Is he your secret lover?” Ciara says, barely able to control her giggles.
“Ciara,” Aoife says, and puts her hands to her head in pantomimed outrage at her sister. “What are you like?” Then she bursts out laughing.
Anne, laughing herself, and maybe blushing, sees Jack to the door.
“Looks like fun,” Jack says.
“It is. Sometimes.”
The last thing she remembers saying to Jack Donovan that morning is “Good luck.”
CHAPTER 28
I’m tempted to blurt something out to one of the Guards at Passport Control, but I hold off until I make it to the arrivals hall. Casting around for a public phone, I spot Tommy Owens waiting, his face drawn and pale, his tiny eyes glittering with anxiety and unease. He looks like I feel.
“Ed—”
“I need your phone. Now.”
Tommy gives me his phone and I call Anne Fogarty—and get the runaround from her service provider yet again. What the hell is the matter with her cell? I get her home number from directory inquiries and call it. It rings four times before connecting to a voice mail service that informs me that this customer has no voice mail.
“We need to get to Anne’s place. I think…I’m pretty sure…Mark Cassidy is the Three-in-One killer. Anne could be in danger. What are you doing, Tommy? We’re in a fucking hurry here. Geri Foster, Geri Foster, I need to call her, too. Shit, all my fucking numbers are in my phone and the battery’s dead. Tommy! Get out of the fucking way!”
Tommy tries to stop me getting out of the arrivals hall; now he’s trying to prevent me from crossing the road to get into the car park.
“Ed, we’re walking into an ambush. Listen to me man.”
Tommy draws me to one side behind a line of passengers waiting to board a coach for one of the long-stay car parks.
“Podge Halligan knows you went to L.A. That prick who works for Immunicate, Brian Joyce, they got rid of him off the set, but Immunicate is riddled with Podge’s men. There was all gossip going the rounds about the Three-in-One Killer because of the three girls going missing, and then it came out you had gone over.”
“So they know—”
“And so they’re waiting for you, your car—”
“What, they’re going to shoot me in the airport car park? Have they not heard of CCTV footage? Do they all want to go to jail? How thick are these fuckers? I can’t make allowances for fucking eejits. I have the Glock Leo gave me in the Volvo, and I want to get it.”
“Which is what I’m saying man,” says Tommy, slipping an identical Glock 26 into my hand. “Leo was very understanding, how I lost the other piece. These are from him.” Tommy puts a hand in his jacket pocket to indicate he is carrying as well. “So we’re ready, know what I mean?”
I know what he means, but I’m not really capable of focusing on it. Podge Halligan in Point Dume, Podge Halligan at the airport. Podge Halligan is not my concern. Podge Halligan is amateur hour compared to Mark Cassidy.
“I still want my car.”
Tommy nods.
“If they come, we’re going to have to get rid of them. We need to get to Sandymount, fast.”
They don’t jump us in the car park. I take the motorway and the Port Tunnel. Tommy tries Anne every five minutes, but there’s no reply. What the fuck has happened to her phone?
“AH, THESE ARE fairly indestructible little guys,” the young fella in the Vodafone shop tells Anne as he slips the sim card from her ruined phone and replaces it in the shiny new model. “Now, you’ll need to give that a good twelve-hour charge, ideally, before you use it?”
“Has it any power as it is?” Anne says. “I’d kind of like to get my messages.”
“A little trace energy from the battery. But it won’t last. Plug it in when you get home, if you want to switch it on quickly and check, that’s fine as long as you switch it off again.”
“Okay,” Anne says. “Let’s go, girls.”
Aoife, who has a phone, is drooling over a more expensive model; Ciara, who doesn’t, is drooling over a phone.
“I didn’t get mine until I was ten,” Aoife says.
“Yeah, well, two girls in my class got them at eight. And all your friends got their phones when they were nine.”
“That’s true. Actually, Mum, maybe Ciara should get a phone.”
“She will get a phone. When she’s ten.”
“Mum!”
“Home.”
“Mum, with no phones until we’re ten and no TVs in our bedrooms, we live like something from the olden days.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t mean that, do you, Mum?”
“No.”
“Grrrrr.”
Oh God, please God, help me, if you only get me out of this, I promise I’ll never, never, never again…
All praise to God the Father,
All praise to God the Son,
And God the Holy Spirit,
eternal Three-in-One…
He has to hold on to logic.
That is all he has left.
He has acted impeccably for eighteen years: three-in-one, one-in-three.
And now, when he has the world’s attention, he has sullied his record, and brought disgrace upon his name.
He will look like a rough beast, like a careless savage. What possessed him?
Overconfidence. Hubris. Delusions of grandeur.
What was Jack doing there?
He rang ahead, said he wanted to drop out some gifts for the girls, Jack had told him all about them, was that all right?
And Geri Foster said, sure. She sounded surprised, but…
But she didn’t say Jack would be there.
The plan was, to get into the house, to disable the mother and weaken her, to shoot the girls quickly, in her sight, and then to strangle her.
One-in-Three, Three-in-One, raised to a kind of burnished perfection.
And then to shoot himself on the scene, with the last map reference in his hand.
That would have been immaculate.
That would have been immortality.
A valedictory death masque.
A Mark Cassidy Picture.
But when Geri Foster opened the door, the first thing he saw across the room was Jack Donovan, kneeling by the fireplace, holding shiny turquoise dresses out to the two little girls.
He wanted to run, but he knew that would have been shameful beyond bearing.
Jack had a strange expression on his face, as if he had figured it out, as if he knew. He left the dresses with the girls and started to walk slowly toward him, while Geri, looking toward Jack, began to retreat.
The idea that they had discussed him. It was unbearable, the humiliation.
He pulled the gun from his pocket but he couldn’t shoot it, had no experience with guns, disliked them intensely, what made him think he could use one in such a high-pressure situation? The amateurishness of his own plan galled him. Jack was still coming, and Mark gripped the gun by the barrel and hit Jack hard on the right temple, once swaying, twice to his knees, a third time to the ground, writhing, gurgling. Geri froze, and he looked around at her, and at the children. Jack was still now, silent. He wondered briefly if he could continue, if he could steel himself to pull the trigger. Geri moved then to protect her children. He closed her down by the fireplace and tried again to use the gun but he couldn’t, he hit her instead, clubbed her down with the gun butt until she, too, had stopped moving.
The children were crying.
He did not like that sound.
Macbeth had not killed Macduff’s children, he had sent others.
At least allow himself that crumb of dignity.
He walks from the house, shutting the door on the weeping children.
He has blood on his shirt.
He doesn’t know whose.
The light is dying…
What he needs to do…
What Jack has always done…
Is come back from the brink.
High Castle was a triumph after Twenty Grand.
Nighttown would probably have been his masterpiece.
(Has that ever entered his thinking? To deny Jack his greatest film? He will consider that later, be rigorous with his conscience. But that is for another time.)
If he is given the chance to speak, he will say, of this moment:
I asked myself a simple question: What would Jack Donovan do?
CHAPTER 29
Tommy thinks we’re being followed, and then he thinks we aren’t, and then he isn’t sure. I just try to keep the car moving, and to spot motorcyclists on Tommy’s blind side. If they’re going to do it in traffic, it’ll come from the pillion of a motorbike. All the while we call Anne Fogarty and call her and call her, and Vodafone won’t accept our messages. At last I send a text, and that gets through. Maybe her phone works for texts but not for messages. I don’t know. I don’t understand mobile phones.
ANNE GETS HOME and plugs in her phone and dumps the papers on the table, and puts the coffee in the moka and puts it on the heat and warms some milk in a cup in the microwave and scans the front page of the Irish Times, the first mention Anne Fogarty has seen of the Three-in-One Killer, rumored to be in Ireland, apparently, and switches on her phone to see if she has any messages, and the doorbell rings.
She walks down the hall as her phone gets its signal, leaning into the living room on the way to check that the girls are okay. Aoife is playing the new Harry Potter DS game Anne was persuaded to buy because their trip back from the Vodafone shop passes Gamestop, and Ciara is looking out the living-room window.
“Hey, Mum, there’s a man at the door with tomato ketchup on his shirt,” Ciara says as the doorbell rings again, and Anne, not really listening, glances at her phone and sees a text from Ed. One text in two days? Cheeky sod. And as she clicks on the text, she opens the door.
And the text says:
Mark Cassidy is the Three-in-One Killer.
And Mark Cassidy is in the doorway with a smile on his face and a red stain on his shirt. And she sees him seeing that she knows, and a gun glows dull in his hand.
And Anne spins around so that her voice will carry and yells,
“Aoife! Ciara! Ghost room! This instant!”
She feels the barrel of the gun against her spine. She thinks she might set it off by pushing against it. She is frightened, but not as frightened as she is that the girls might not pick up on her tone. That’s why she says “this instant.” It takes longer to say, but they know she really means it when she says that. And there they are at the bottom of the stairs. Their frightened faces.
“Go!” she screams.
She thinks at first that she’s been shot, but all that has happened is, Mark Cassidy has smashed the butt of his gun against the back of her head. She stumbles forward and falls on the hall carpet. As she falls, she sees the girls rounding the first landing return. The white flash of Ciara’s bare little legs.
And then Mark Cassidy is past her, thundering up the stairs himself, and Anne knows she needs to call the Guards but she can’t let him go up there alone so she follows him up and hears him thundering in and out of the bedrooms on the first floor and it isn’t as if she even thinks about it, she just continues up the stairs to the top of the house and past her bedroom and through the ghost door and locks it behind her, thanking God the girls know they are forbidden to lock it, and climbs slowly up the stairs and puts her finger to her lips so the girls won’t cry out “Mummy!” when they see her and there they are, shaking with fear without really knowing why, and she can hear the footsteps and the slamming doors and the pounding up stairs beneath her as she huddles with her girls in the attic, as scared as she has ever been in her life, too scared to call the Guards in case she is overheard.
Instead, she texts Ed:
We’re in the ghost room. Mark is in the house.
THEY’VE VANISHED.
Three-in-One, One-in-Three.
They’ve disappeared into thin air.
He has checked every room, every wardrobe, beneath every bed.
He has lost them.
Have they jumped?
It’s like a dream. Is he losing his mind?
He looks out the front window of the top bedroom.
Loy and Tommy Owens are pulling up in an old green car.
He had thought that he could kill himself.
But that would have been the prize for glory.
There would be no dignity in this…humiliation.
He moves quickly downstairs, and out through the kitchen to the yard he has seen from the back bedrooms. There’s a door out to a laneway that gives cars access to the rear of the houses in the terrace. He runs the bolt and steps out into the lane and doubles back around to the front of the house. He parked his car half a mile away, he was confused about which house was Anne’s. He looks quickly into Loy’s car, a heavy old Volvo. They were in such a hurry, they’ve left the keys in the ignition. This is perfect. He can drive to his house, collect his passport, pack a bag, get to the airport, and take the first available flight. Escape into the light…
ANNE HEARS DOORS opening and slamming and footsteps running, and dares to raise her head and look out through the Velux roof window she installed in the ghost room. She sees Ed’s car out front, but she doesn’t want to go down and open the door until the coast is clear. Then she sees Mark Cassidy appear at the front of the house and stand for a mo
ment, as if trying to figure out what to do. He ducks his head in the window of Ed’s car, then opens the door and gets in. Anne reaches for her phone to call Ed to tell him, but she ends up fumbling with the keys and pushing the camera slide back. As the engine of the Volvo starts up, she hears the roar of a motorcycle as it approaches and screeches to a halt alongside the car, and the pillion passenger, who has a full visor and a steroid-swollen upper torso, swings himself off the bike and stuffs what looks like his gloved fist through the driver’s window and then Anne hears shots. The shooter gets back on the bike and the rider punches his fist in the air and the bike revs and revs and then speeds away up Strand Road toward the Merrion Gates.
CHAPTER 30
Jack regains consciousness within minutes of Mark Cassidy’s fleeing the house. He has suffered memory loss, and is extremely confused to find himself in a house he doesn’t recognize with two wailing five-year-old girls he’s never seen before and a vaguely familiar-looking woman slumped on the floor with blood seeping from her head. He does what he would have done anyway, which is to call 999. By the time the ambulance arrives, he has recovered the missing minutes.
Geri comes to in the ambulance, and her injuries, while never life-threatening, take a longer time than Jack’s to heal. The saving grace is that Geri has no memory whatever of Mark Cassidy’s visit, or of the moments leading up to it, and so she gets to relive her reunion scene with Jack as if for the first time.
Anne Fogarty takes it upon herself to help Geri through her recovery. She tells me Geri and Jack are taking it slowly, but they’re doing all right, which is about as much as can be said for me and Anne. Jack said to me: “The fact that she still loved me, that she never stopped. How can I ever live up to that?”
I guess he probably can’t, but it looks as if he’s going to try. I think Anne and I are going to try also, but it won’t be any easier. I know that, while there was no way of legislating for someone like Mark Cassidy, the fact that Podge Halligan carried out the hit on her doorstep, thinking it was me in the Volvo, has made a deeper impression on her, and, indeed, on me. Anne inadvertently filmed the shooting with her phone, and while there was nothing incriminating in the footage, those of us who know Podge Halligan well are certain he was the shooter.
City of Lost Girls Page 27
