Winterland

by Alan Glynn

  The man follows him.

  Mark thinks rapidly. He’s done nothing wrong here. He’s got a knife concealed in his jacket, but that’s just what it is, concealed – no one knows it’s there. Besides, this man doesn’t look like … anything. He doesn’t look like a security guard, and he certainly doesn’t look like a cop.

  So who is he, and what does he want?

  ‘Hold on there,’ the man says. ‘Slow the fuck down, would you?’

  ‘Look,’ Mark shouts over his shoulder, ‘what do you want?’

  ‘Just stop for a bleedin’ second and I’ll tell you.’

  Mark reaches the last row of cars before the playing field begins. He turns left. His own car is parked at the end.

  The man is right behind him now.

  Half glancing back, Mark says, ‘Get away … get away from me.’

  Then his right foot catches on something, and he stumbles forward. He reaches out to try and keep his balance, but there isn’t anything there to hold on to. He falls to the ground, careful as he lands to sweep his jacket back. He then rolls sideways and just about manages to sit up. But the tall man is standing there, towering over him. Mark leans back on one hand and holds his other hand out in front of him.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says, and glances over his shoulder. There’s no one around. All he can see is parked cars. It’s also raining properly now, and getting heavier by the second.

  ‘OK,’ the tall man says, ‘you fucking keep away from him, right?’ He points in the direction of the buildings they’ve just come from. ‘Right?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Mark’s head is spinning. He attempts to get to his feet, holding one hand out to protect himself. ‘Just let me get up.’ But the man steps forward and in a quick, efficient manoeuvre tackles him back to the ground.

  On his knees now, Mark leans forward and groans.

  ‘You don’t approach him,’ the man is saying, ‘you don’t talk to him, you don’t contact him. That clear?’

  Mark stays hunched forward, covering his stomach with both arms.

  ‘You got that, prickface?’

  Mark looks up and makes eye contact. He opens his mouth as though he’s about to say something, but in that same moment – and still on his knees – he draws the knife from the lining of his jacket and lunges forward, aiming at the man’s thigh. He sticks the knife in and pushes it hard. Then, using the handle of the knife for leverage, he pulls himself up. As he does so he feels the blade tearing deeper into flesh. The man screams out in agony. Mark lets go of the knife and stands back.

  The man staggers sideways and slumps against the nearest car. He clutches the knife with his left hand and bangs on the roof of the car with his right. This triggers the alarm. He slides his hand off the roof and brings it down to his side.

  Mark turns and runs towards his own car. A couple of seconds before he reaches it, he hears a sound – it’s loud and sharp, but with the pounding in his ears, and the adrenaline pumping, and the wind, and the alarm, not easy to identify. At the same time, from behind – but without making the obvious connection – he feels something … an aggressive dig in the back, like the sensation of being shoved forward in a crowd. As a result of this, he stumbles and falls to his knees, but he immediately struggles up again and lunges for the car door. He opens it, gets in and looks back.

  The man is glaring at him. ‘Bastard!’ he shouts. ‘You’re bleedin’ dead!’

  He then hops forward on one leg and raises his right arm.

  There seems to be something in his hand.

  In a blind rush, Mark pulls the door shut, starts the car, backs onto the driveway, turns and accelerates. As he approaches the main gates, he slows down and looks in the rearview mirror – but with the rain pelting down now he isn’t able to see anything clearly.

  A few seconds later, in any case, he’s out on the main road, heading towards Terenure. It’s only then, as he tries to get his breathing under control, that he gives it any consideration – this sudden, intense throbbing in his side, this pain – and that it dawns on him what is causing it.

  ‘Hold please.’

  Gina watches the first raindrops hit the windowpane. She can actually see the shower approaching, almost in its entirety, sweeping in from the other side of the city. In five or ten minutes it will have passed and it might even be sunny again.

  This is no climate for a sane person to live in. Which maybe explains a lot.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m afraid Detective Superintendent Merrigan is away for the day.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He’s due back tomorrow. But if you’d like to leave a message?’

  Gina considers this. ‘No, that’s OK,’ she says. ‘Thanks.’

  She places the phone on the window ledge and walks over to the sofa. She picks up one of the newspapers that has been lying there since Sunday. She looks through it, page by page, until she finds what she’s looking for. At the bottom of the editorial page there is a small box with the paper’s contact details in it.

  She goes back over to the window. Sheets of rain are now pelting against it, and the city below is little more than a kinetic, impressionistic blur.

  She picks up the phone. She’s never done this before, spoken to a journalist, not in this way, and she isn’t clear in her mind how she should approach it.

  When she gets through, she asks to speak to John O’Driscoll.

  ‘Please hold.’

  There is a click and then an electronic version of ‘Summertime’ comes on.

  Gina is nervous. She takes a deep breath.

  O’Driscoll is a political reporter. She’s read his stuff over the years. He’s seems reasonable enough, objective, sane even.

  But who knows?

  As she waits, the sound of the driving rain merges in her mind with the desecrated Gershwin coming down the phone line.

  Eventually, after what seems like ages, O’Driscoll comes on. ‘Yep?’

  5

  As Paddy Norton walks out of the pharmacy, he feels he has a true understanding of what it is to be schizophrenic. OK, not in the strict clinical sense – he knows that schizophrenia is a complex disorder – but rather in the popular-misconception sense … of being schizo, schizoid, a split personality, two people at the same time sort of thing. Because right now that’s the deal. Right now – at the same time, in the same skin – Norton is giddy with relief and incandescent with rage.

  He glances around.

  The rain has stopped and the sun has broken through the clouds.

  Again.

  It’s been like this all day, unsettled – showers, sunshine, overcast, more rain. But for the time being at least, everything is still, and wet … glistening, luminous – this little block of shops, the pavement slabs at his feet, the neat row of boxed shrubs at the kerb. The neat row of houses opposite. The passing traffic.

  His own car.

  He gets into it and settles himself. He rips open the paper bag from the pharmacy. He takes out the packet and opens that. He slides the top blister of twenty pills out and pops two of them into his cupped hand. He breathes in deeply and swal lows the pills back dry.

  He looks down at the packet.

  He’s used to getting them in a bottle, and from Dr Walsh. These are a different brand – Nalprox – but it’s the same stuff. When he got home on Monday he couldn’t find his Narolet anywhere, and it transpired that Miriam had flushed them down the toilet. Then he went to Dr Walsh, and it transpired that she’d more or less flushed him down the toilet, too – scaring the man off with talk of overprescribing and of possible complaints to the HSE.

  Norton didn’t argue with him – though he did argue with Miriam later, when he got home.

  They haven’t spoken since.

  Which is a major pain in the arse. Plus it’s taken him all day, and endless phone calls here, there and everywhere, to organise this.

  But now that he has it, a fresh supply, he is walking on air. />
  He checks the box again. Three blisters, sixty pills, minus the two he’s just taken, that’s fifty-eight. Four a day, give or take.

  So two weeks. More maybe. Or less.

  OK.

  He puts the packet away, into his pocket, and then looks at his watch: 4.15.

  By the time he meets Fitz – in about twenty minutes, down on Strand Road – the tablets will have kicked in, and his rage will have subsided somewhat. So he’ll have to … well, act it, he supposes. Put it on. From memory.

  Not that it’ll be any less authentic for that.

  *

  Mark turns left off the Cherryvale roundabout and heads for the industrial estate. He’s been driving for more than an hour now, aimlessly – south-side, north-side, the M50 – sitting in traffic for most of it. The pain in his side is intense, but steady. If he sits in a particular position and keeps a very tight grip on the steering wheel, it’s just about bearable. He should really head for the nearest A&E, or see a doctor – but he’s not going to. Because without having examined the wound or even looked at it properly, he knows what it is. It’s a bullet wound, and how’s he supposed to explain that? Or the fact, which would inevitably surface, that before getting shot, he stabbed the other guy with a kitchen knife – an action he’s been replaying over and over in his head as he cruises around … the split second of contact, the pressure he applied, the resistance he can still feel in the form of tiny spasms, like nerve ends twitching in his hand and wrist …

  Mark doesn’t know how this stuff works, the neurology of it, but it’s giving him something to focus on when the broader picture gets too chaotic, when the questions start multiplying, and the answers mutating – like, for instance, where does he go? Where is it safe to go?

  He exhales.

  Not home, certainly, and not the showrooms. But why not? Because they know where he lives? Where he works? Is that it?

  Multiply, mutate.

  Because maybe Bolger had him followed the other night from Buswell’s? And now realises who he is? Or maybe knew him anyway? Realised who he was straight off? Recognised him somehow? Had been expecting this for years and isn’t going to stand for it?

  Stopped at a red light, Mark leans sideways, puts a hand inside his jacket and dabs at the wound as gently as he can. Then he withdraws his hand and holds it up to look at. His fingertips are smeared with blood – though it doesn’t seem too bad. Maybe the bullet just grazed him, and the wound is superficial. Or maybe there’s an actual bullet lodged in there, and most of the bleeding is internal. But what does he know?

  The light changes.

  So. Where does he go? Where is it safe to go?

  Eventually, because he can’t drive around for ever, he decides on the warehouse – his unit at the Cherryvale Industrial Estate. It’s down the road here, and is anonymous, unmarked, safe as anywhere. Most of Tesoro’s business is conducted from the showrooms in Ranelagh, and Mark comes out this way only a couple of times a week, whenever there’s a shipment in or a delivery to be organised.

  He comes to the estate and drives into the yard. He turns right and then takes the third left. He goes past several of the larger units – past busy loading docks, freight trucks, forklifts – and arrives at his own unit, about halfway down. He parks in front of a rolling steel shutter. When he gets out of the car – which ends up being quite a struggle – he immediately feels dizzy. It also seems really cold. But at least the rain has stopped.

  Holding the car door open, shivering now, he looks down at the seat and sees that it’s smeared with blood. He looks away.

  Was it this cold earlier?

  He pushes the car door shut and locks it. He glances around the yard. A few units back, towards the entrance, a freight truck is reversing and pulling away. At the far end of the yard there is a graffiti-covered wall, and beyond that is Cherryvale Downs, an irregular grid of nearly four hundred identical houses.

  At his feet there is a pool of rainwater. Scraps of cloud drift across it. For some reason looking at this makes him feel vaguely hysterical. At the same time, he feels weak, and wonders if he wasn’t better off driving around – though all of a sudden the notion of being at the wheel of a car and negotiating traffic seems implausible to him, remote in its complexity and danger.

  Moving slowly, he makes his way over to the black metal door next to the rolling steel shutter. He pulls a bunch of keys out of his jacket pocket and holds them up.

  It takes him a while, but he eventually manages to get the door open. Inside, he clicks the door shut again and reaches out for a switch on the wall. A second after that fluorescent tube lights flicker and stutter into life overhead. He looks around. On one side of the warehouse there are rows of wrapped pallets stacked on raised wooden platforms, as well as some loose boxes and crates and a small forklift truck. On the other side, there is an area of unused floor space, and in the far corner there is a modular office unit.

  Mark goes over to the office, which is bare and strictly functional. There is a small bathroom to the left and a kitchenette to the right. He eases himself onto the hard plastic chair behind the metal desk in the middle. He leans forward for a moment and rubs the back of his neck. His skin feels clammy even though he’s cold.

  His heart is thumping. His mouth is dry.

  He sits up and holds his jacket back to feel the wound again. It seems to have stopped bleeding.

  Is that good or bad? He isn’t sure.

  It hurts like fuck, though.

  He works to get his shivering under control. He stares at an irregular mark scratched onto the surface of the metal desk.

  What happened this afternoon?

  He finds it hard to believe. Quite clearly, his intention had been to attack, to lash out, to exact some form of revenge – and who could blame him for that – but he hadn’t acted, they had.

  He shakes his head.

  They attacked him. They intimidated him, provoked him, and when he finally tried to defend himself, they fucking shot him in the back …

  And clearly by they he still means Larry Bolger. The Bolger family. Someone in the Bolger family. Up to now – at least since he spoke to Gina – that’s been the working assumption.

  Jesus.

  He gets up from behind the desk. He limps out of the office, looks around and picks up the nearest object that catches his eye – a crowbar lying on a wooden crate. He holds it up and imagines what he could do with this, imagines how much more satisfying it would be to use than a knife … imagines the whoosh of air, the solid … contact, the sinew and muscle, the brain tissue and bone … blood spurting …

  As he walks across the warehouse floor, swinging the crowbar, Mark feels a rush of energy. But this lasts only a few seconds.

  It is followed by a blinding wave of dizziness.

  He staggers forward, losing his footing. He reaches out to grab on to something and finds the side of the small forklift truck. After he regains his balance and catches his breath, he looks at the crowbar again, examines it.

  Who does he think he’s kidding?

  Where? When? How?

  He tosses the crowbar onto the plastic seat of the forklift truck and takes a few more tentative steps forward, each one causing him to wince. He stops at the first row of stacked pallets. Next to them is another wooden crate. He leans his back against the pallets, puts a hand onto the crate for support, and slides down into a sitting position on the floor.

  In his mind’s eye, he tries again to picture what happened earlier, to retrace his steps, but it’s all out of sync now and won’t settle down. There’s a feverish, shape-shifting quality to it, the quality of a nightmare.

  A while later, he reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out the three photographs. He lays them side by side on the cold concrete, next to the wooden crate. He passes his eye over each one of them in turn, does this again and again, quickly at first, but then less so, lingering a bit longer each time – a few seconds, then more – on the faces of his father, his m
other and his sister …

  The tide is out and it’s very cold, but the sky is spectacular – red, painterly streaks of cloud are all that is left of the day’s storms.

  It’s going to be a clear night.

  Norton is sitting on a wooden bench, legs crossed, hunched into his overcoat. A few isolated figures are visible out on the strand, people with dogs, throwing sticks. Behind him is a small parking area. Directly behind him is his own car. He hears another car pulling up beside it.

  A minute later, Fitz appears from the right. He sits down next to Norton and grunts.

  Norton pauses and then takes a deep breath. ‘What the fuck is going on, Fitz? I mean, sweet holy suffering mother of Jaysus.’

  ‘I know, I know. But let’s face it, Paddy, this isn’t exactly everyday stuff we’re dealing with here, is it? I mean, High King is more used to –’

  ‘Oh, what, all of a sudden this isn’t your … your métier? Is that it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Because that’s not what you told me before. Piece of piss you said.’

  ‘Yeah, but –’

  ‘And it’s not like you were shy about taking my fucking money –’

  ‘Ah, Paddy, come on, would you?’

  ‘No, you come on. You come on. For fuck’s sake.’

  The first of the three calls that day came early in the morning. Norton was at home, in the kitchen, fighting to keep down dry toast. He was also shivering, and not just because of the arctic chill that had developed between himself and Miriam. When the second call came, much later, he was in the middle of his frantic search for a new, more pliant GP. Then, not too long after that – about an hour ago now – the third call came. He was in his car at the time, driving out to a doctor’s surgery in Milltown.

  But it was only as he was leaving the surgery – scrip safely in hand at last – that the gravity of the day’s developments hit home, and that he found any space in his head to think about them.