Collusion

82

Lennon’s phone rang again and again, the number always withheld. He ignored it as he drove. Embankments and bridges blurred. Would Hewitt squeal? Would he tell his bosses to catch Lennon and that lunatic Gerry Fegan? Or that the hole in his leg was put there by Lennon’s personal protection weapon? Or would the fear of what Lennon knew about Hewitt keep him quiet? Lennon couldn’t gamble either way. If Hewitt talked there could be roadblocks going up even as he drove. Here, across the border, the Gardai might be on the alert, searching for them. Then all would be lost. He had to move, get there before anyone had the chance to find them.

Fegan sat silent beside Lennon, his hands on his knees, his body stiff. The killer’s breathing remained steady and even, no sign of worry or fear on his face.

‘How do you live with it?’ Lennon asked. ‘People like you. People like that animal I caught at the hospital. How do you look at yourself in the mirror? How can you face yourself when you’re alone?’

Fegan turned his eyes to the window and the landscape beyond. If Lennon’s words meant anything to him, it didn’t show on his face.

Lennon said, ‘I think of the things I’ve done, the things I’m ashamed of. It makes me sick to my stomach. How can you stand to—’

‘Stop talking,’ Fegan said.

‘How can you—’

‘Stop,’ Fegan said, his voice tight like a fist. He turned his eyes away from the window and back to Lennon.

Lennon swallowed his retort and stared at the road ahead. They continued in silence, the motorway stretching into the grey morning ahead.

The Audi’s satnav gave directions in its soothing voice. A woman’s voice, refined and calm, as if the world still turned. Lennon had stopped twice so far to throw up at the roadside, the fear too heavy for his stomach. His nostrils stung, his throat burned. Fegan had watched him with those cold eyes, making the act all the more emasculating.

The speedometer read eighty-five as they approached the last exit north of the Boyne. The satnav’s disembodied voice told Lennon to turn off here for Torrans House. A convalescent home, a place for the elderly to recover from broken hips, a place for Bull O’Kane to nurse his ruptured gut and his devastated knee, injuries caused by Lennon’s passenger. The other man would also be there, the southerner who talked like a traveller, but who Lennon suspected was not. Two monsters in one house, surrounding the only good thing he had ever done in this world.

And now Lennon ferried a third monster to this place. That idea forced bile up from his stomach once more, but he willed it to subside as he hit the slip road.

His foot barely touched the brake as he reached the roundabout. Lights flashed, tyres screeched and horns blared as he cut across the early traffic. They might as well have been moths against a window.