Winterland

by Alan Glynn

  She thinks of Noel’s SUV skidding off a country road, swerving, plunging … then the impact, then Noel crushed and battered inside, surrounded by fumes and burning smells, oil, blood, rubber. She thinks of him lying there half conscious, groaning, dying …

  What went through his head in those last few moments?

  Tears come into her eyes. She rolls sideways, onto the pile of newspapers, and starts to sob.

  After a few minutes, the tears subside. Using her sleeve, she wipes her eyes. She curls up. She gets drowsy. She falls asleep.

  About an hour later – in the middle of a confused dream – she wakes up, startled.

  The phone is ringing.

  She rubs her eyes.

  She gets up from the sofa. The phone is on the desk in the corner, next to the computer. She goes over and picks it up. She pulls the chair out and sits down. ‘Hello?’ she says, sniffing.

  ‘Hello, Gina, it’s Jackie Merrigan.’

  Gina furrows her brow. She is puzzled. Does she know any Jackie Merrigan?

  But after a second it hits her.

  That old friend of Noel’s she met at the removal. The detective superintendent.

  ‘Oh. Hello. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine. I’m fine. I was just ringing to check in and see how you are. I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘No, no, not at all. Thank you.’

  ‘I was thinking about Noel today and … he was very fond of you, you know. He often mentioned you.’ He pauses. ‘It’s still only sinking in, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. It’s hard to believe.’

  Gina pictures Merrigan – tall and stooped, silver hair, distinguished-looking. He seemed quite gentle, not at all the stock image of a detective superintendent.

  ‘And how are your sisters?’ he asks.

  ‘They’re OK,’ Gina says. ‘Catherine isn’t, of course. She couldn’t be, really.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  As they chat about Catherine and then Noel, Gina has a growing urge to put a few direct questions to Merrigan, to air her theories, but something holds her back. She doesn’t want to be patronised. She doesn’t want to be told, yet again, that there’s nothing mysterious here, that it was just a tragic accident.

  ‘Strange about Larry Bolger,’ she eventually says, for want of something else to say. ‘I’ve just been reading about him in the papers.’

  ‘Yes,’ Merrigan says. ‘It looks pretty serious for him all right. I don’t see how he can wriggle out of this one.’

  ‘No,’ Gina says. She stares at her reflection in the blank computer screen. ‘Though one thing I didn’t know about was his brother being killed in a road accident. Did you?’

  ‘Oh God, I did, yeah. I remember that well. It was awful. I was actually stationed in Swords at the time. I was still in uniform.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She hesitates, but then says, ‘How did it happen?’

  He sighs. ‘Well, it was a quiet stretch of road, as I remember. It wasn’t late, eight or nine in the evening. There were two cars and they swerved to avoid each other … but one of them hit a wall and the other one hit a tree. There were four people killed. Awful.’

  Gina nods along, biting her lip.

  ‘Anyway,’ Merrigan says, ‘two or three months later Larry Bolger wins the by-election, and the rest, as they say, is history. But I’ll tell you one thing.’ He laughs. ‘Frank Bolger was a very different kettle of fish from his brother.’

  Gina refocuses. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Ach … he was a bit of an idealist. Always getting people’s hackles up. He’d object to everything. There was never any question of a compromise with Frank, or of being pragmatic. I’m not sure he’d have lasted as long as Larry.’

  ‘He didn’t, though,’ Gina says, ‘did he?’

  ‘No, I suppose you’re right, he didn’t.’

  There is a pause.

  Then Gina says, ‘But getting back to the accident. Whose fault was it? Do they know?’

  ‘That’s an interesting one,’ Merrigan says, ‘because there was quite a bit of talk at the time.’

  ‘Talk?’

  ‘Yeah, there were conflicting … opinions, let’s say, about what caused it. The official story was that the driver of the other car was seriously tanked up, the usual bloody story.’ He pauses. ‘But then claims were made that maybe this guy hadn’t been drinking after all, that he was a teetotaller in fact, and that maybe Frank Bolger was the one who’d been drinking and that there was a campaign on to protect his reputation.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It blew over. These things usually do.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Of course none of it was in the papers, or in the public domain, as they say. It was all just rumour and speculation. I mean, God, you know what this town is like.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘There was even a suggestion at the time that it might have been convenient for certain people to have Frank Bolger out of the way.’

  Gina is stunned at this. She waits for Merrigan to say more, to elaborate, to go further and join up the dots.

  She’s ready to do it for him.

  ‘But you know what?’ he then says. ‘Whenever a public figure dies in an accident you always get this kind of crackpot nonsense. It’s typical.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Gina looks down at the floor.

  ‘Today, I suppose,’ Merrigan goes on, with contempt, ‘you’d call it a conspiracy theory.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But the sad fact is –’

  ‘I know,’ Gina says, swallowing. ‘I know. People die on our roads every day of the week.’

  ‘Exactly, Gina, exactly. I mean, take –’

  He stops here. Gina is pretty sure he has just looped back in his mind to Noel and to what happened and that he feels a sudden awkwardness.

  ‘Well anyway,’ Gina says to fill the space, ‘it’s still awful, no matter what caused it. I mean, Bolger died, this other guy died, his wife died.’ She pauses here and closes her eyes. ‘And their little girl died …’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Merrigan says. ‘It was awful. Absolutely tragic.’

  They both remain silent for a moment. An articulated truck rumbles past outside, along the quays. Somewhere in the distance an alarm is ringing.

  ‘But then of course,’ Merrigan says, ‘there was the little boy.’

  Gina opens her eyes. ‘The what?’

  ‘Yes,’ Merrigan goes on, ‘there was a little boy, too. The second car had four people in it. The father, the mother and two kids. The girl died, but the little boy survived. And with nothing more than a few scratches. It was a miracle. They reckon it was the side of the car he was in, and the angle, in relation to the impact.’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘But he more or less got up and walked away. They kind of played it down afterwards. Again, the tabloids would be all over a story like that today, but back then they were a little more circumspect. I mean, the kid would have been only what, five, six years old.’

  Gina sits up. ‘And what happened to him?’

  ‘As far as I remember someone in the family took him in, adopted him.’

  They both go silent again. All Gina can do is shake her head in disbelief.

  Eventually she reaches forward, across the desk, and grabs a pen. ‘Jackie,’ she says, holding the pen poised over a piece of paper, ‘I don’t suppose you can remember the name of the little boy, can you?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I can,’ he says. ‘I remember it very well. His name was Mark Griffin.’

  7

  ‘Australia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Dermot, people in their twenties go to Australia. I don’t know, they get drunk and go surfing and stuff.’

  Claire holds her wine-glass up and studies her husband.

  He can see that she’s struggling to take this seri
ously.

  ‘The girls would love it,’ he says.

  ‘What? The beer and the surfing?’

  ‘No, the –’

  ‘Dermot, what is this? I thought –’

  ‘OK, not Australia, somewhere else, the States, Canada.’

  He looks around. Being Sunday evening, the place is not that busy. It’s also the first time he’s been in a restaurant where the tables are so far apart you’d have to shout to be overheard.

  But he likes it. He likes the privacy.

  ‘I don’t understand where this is coming from,’ Claire says. ‘I thought the job –’

  ‘Look, BCM have offices all over the world.’

  ‘Oh God.’ She’s on the point of getting annoyed.

  ‘What?’ he says, taking a mouthful of risotto and hoping they don’t end up being overheard after all.

  ‘You want to know what?’ She leans forward. ‘I’ll tell you what. The girls are settled in school. They have friends. You can’t just yank them out of that for six months or a year. And besides.’ She skewers a scallop with her fork. ‘Mum and Dad aren’t getting any younger. I don’t want to be thousands of miles away.’

  Which is precisely where Dermot wants to be.

  But he nods in agreement. She’s right and he knows it. They can’t just take off the way he’s proposing. It’s not that they’re trapped here exactly, but they’re settled too, they have responsibilities.

  He just thought …

  ‘Well?’

  He looks up. Claire is nodding at his risotto.

  ‘The truffle,’ she says, an edge in her voice. ‘Can you taste it?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s amazing.’

  She does a quick thing with her eyebrows, a non-verbal It’d bloody better be, at forty euro a plate.

  Dermot pushes the risotto in her direction. ‘Try it.’

  She reaches across with her fork and scoops a bit up.

  What he hasn’t been able to tell Claire, of course, is that for the last couple of weeks he has been under constant surveillance. That’s the working assumption, at any rate. These people know where his office is and where the kids go to school. He takes it they’re watching the house as well, and logging his every move – where he goes, who he talks to. And maybe there’s more to it than that. He doesn’t know. Are they recording his phone calls, for instance, and intercepting his emails? Are they tracking his internet use?

  Are they filming his life – twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week?

  Obviously not. That’d be absurd.

  But the thing is, they may as well be.

  Because Dermot is now painfully self-conscious about every single thing he does. He can’t move or speak without feeling ill at ease. It’s as though he’s been cast against his will in some nightmarish reality TV show – but no one has explained to him what the rules are or who’s producing it.

  Nevertheless, he’s been playing along. He drops Orla and Niamh off at school every morning. He goes into the office. He works. He comes home. He hasn’t uttered a word to anyone about the report – which he has also deleted, along with an early draft of it and any relevant emails. He hasn’t got into a conversation with anyone about Noel Rafferty. Nor does he have any intention of doing so. Because these fuckers have his balls in a vice grip and he’s not going to give them the slightest excuse to tighten it.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Claire says, ‘that is delicious.’

  He looks across at what she is having. ‘How are the scallops?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘they’re fine.’

  Fine? Whatever.

  Dermot smiles thinly across the table at his wife. He has told her more lies in the past two weeks than in all the rest of the time they’ve known each other, which is the best part of twelve years. He has lied about work, about money, about his state of mind.

  He lied to her earlier today about why he wanted to take her out to this overpriced two-star Michelin restaurant. He said he wanted to make it up to her for being so moody and hard to live with recently. But the real reason was that he wanted to send them a coded message. Originally, he’d had a grander gesture in mind – he wanted to go straight out and blow all the cash on a new car, a Mercedes SL or a Jaguar, something that screamed, Hey, I’m not shy about spending your money, I’m not conflicted, I’m in. But he couldn’t have explained it to Claire. The bonus he’d lied about getting at work wasn’t that big.

  So he figured, in the meantime … dinner at Cinq.

  And some jewellery.

  He bought her an expensive pair of earrings and a chain the other day – mainly to be seen buying them – but he hasn’t had the nerve to give them to her yet.

  He nods at her plate again. ‘Well, they look nice.’

  ‘They are. Jesus. I didn’t say they weren’t. Here.’ She skewers a scallop up and holds it out to him. It’s almost like a challenge. ‘Try one.’

  With both forks held high, they make the transfer. It’s an awkward manoeuvre, and slightly combative-looking. Dermot places the scallop at the side of his plate.

  A waiter then glides up to the table and asks them if everything is all right.

  ‘Yes,’ Dermot says, smiling up at him, ‘wonderful, everything, thank you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Claire says, ‘thank you.’

  After the waiter has gone, Dermot says, ‘The service here is great, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  It’s the more abstract lies that he hates, though – the emotional lies, trying to pass his fear off as despondency, trying to make it seem as if he’s burned out and needs a change of scene.

  That stuff is really hard to maintain.

  Because Claire isn’t stupid. Far from it. In fact, from the look she’s giving him right now, he even thinks she might have her suspicions about what’s going on.

  At some level, anyway.

  ‘Dermot,’ she says, and shrugs, ‘I’m not sure what’s happening here, the weird behaviour … Australia, this.’ She spirals a forefinger in the air to indicate their immediate surroundings. ‘I’m really not, but –’

  ‘Yeah?’

  Now he hopes she has her suspicions, and that she’s smart enough to work it out, because he’s getting desperate here. He needs to be able to share this. He looks her in the eye, willing her to see, to understand.

  ‘– the thing is,’ she says, and hesitates.

  ‘Yeah … yeah?’

  It’s almost as if he’s panting.

  ‘Look, I hate myself for even asking you the question,’ she goes on finally – and all of a sudden his heart sinks – ‘but, I don’t know … are you having an affair or something?’

  Five

  1

  On the way into town from Dublin Airport the next morning Larry Bolger skims through the statement he’s going to be making at a press conference in twenty minutes.

  Paula is slumped in the seat next to him. She has fallen asleep and is snoring lightly. Bolger himself hasn’t slept in over thirty-six hours and probably won’t for at least another twelve.

  On the plane, he revised the statement endlessly, each time making amendments, but now he’s more or less satisfied with it. On Saturday he issued a bald statement from Chicago denying all of the charges. This is merely a clarification of that denial with some specifics thrown in.

  But it’s the Q&A part of the press conference that he’s dreading.

  It’s not that he’ll have a problem answering any of the questions they throw at him – he won’t – but getting tied up in Jesuitical knots over his personal finances, justifying expense sheets and unauthorised credit-card use – it looks bad. It’s undignified and will dent his credibility.

  Of course, he’ll do his level best to turn things around by focusing on what the trade mission accomplished and by constant use of the phrase ‘going forward’, but they, the media, will drag it back – inevitably, inexorably – to the race meetings and the assignations, to what he ordered from room service on such and such a date …
to the betting slips and the Cristal and the lobster and the porcelain veneers.

  It will be a war of attrition.

  He looks out of the window to the left. They pass the Bishop’s Palace and approach Binn’s Bridge.

  He hates the media. Some of the stuff they dug up in the papers yesterday was despicable. Two of the articles he saw online went as far back as Frank’s accident and even included archive photos of the crash scene.

  He shakes his head.

  They’re a shower of bastards.

  Because of them, as well, he now has to explain to his wife and daughters what he was doing five years ago with some woman they’d never heard of until last week. He has to work on convincing the party that he’s not a loose cannon. He has to maintain his composure and pretend to his supporters that his chances of taking over as leader haven’t been seriously compromised.

  He can’t begin to imagine how all of this is looking from the fifth floor of the Wilson Hotel. According to Paddy Norton, who phoned again yesterday evening, no one’s been in touch about it yet – though of course they will be.

  Bolger looks down and straightens his tie.

  It has certainly raised his profile here, though. Nationally. Bolger is in the cabinet and gets interviewed a lot, he’s well known, but this level of name recognition is something else again. It’s the kind most politicians only ever dream about.

  That is, of course, if you accept that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

  They take a left at Gardiner Street.

  Beside him, Paula is muttering something. He turns to look at her. She’s still asleep.

  ‘… but my phone isn’t charged … yes, I know … nine point seven …’

  Different parts of her are twitching. It’s as though she has a low-level electrical current running through her body.

  Deciding not to wake her up just yet, Bolger turns away again. He glances out of the window, at Mountjoy Square.

  He wonders what Frank would have made of all this – or, if he wasn’t so unwell, the old man? What would he make of it? Politics was big in their house when they were kids. Liam Bolger was a local councillor for many years, and two of his brothers – Larry’s uncles – were in the trade-union movement. All of them were fierce party loyalists. Frank showed an interest from the beginning, and the old man encouraged him, took him to meetings, got him involved. Larry showed little interest, and if he wasn’t a disappointment to the old man, it was never exactly clear what he was. Frank, in any case, was the golden boy, and all of the family’s hopes for a successful political career – all of the old man’s hopes – were pinned on him. But then came that awful night … the trauma and grief of a fatal car crash, the horror of losing a son, the crushing blow of seeing your dreams die. Afterwards, in a desperate attempt to regroup – and with unyielding determination – the old man turned the spotlight onto his next son down.