Stolen Souls

92

SUSAN WAITED BY Lennon’s bedside when he woke, Ellen in her lap.

“Welcome back,” she said.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“The Royal,” she said. “They moved you here from Antrim hospital two days ago.”

“I don’t remember,” he said, his voice cutting through his throat like sandpaper.

“I’m not surprised,” she said. “They had you doped up to the eyeballs.”

“Were you there?”

“Yes,” she said. “I held your hand in the ambulance. I’ve been with you every day.”

“How long?”

Susan smiled. “Well, I wished myself a Happy New Year last night.”

“Thank you,” Lennon said.

She nodded.

Lennon looked at his daughter. He forced a smile for her. “Hiya,” he said.

She kept her expression blank. “Hiya.”

“You been a good girl?” he asked.

She smiled then, and said, “Mm-hm.”

He reached his right hand out toward her. She gripped two of his fingers in hers. He went to say something, he was sure it was important, but sleep outran his words.

TWO DAYS LATER, CI Uprichard sat by Lennon’s bed.

“The standard of visitors is going downhill very badly,” Lennon said.

“It’s going to get worse,” Uprichard said. “You get yourself into some messes.”

“How bad?” Lennon asked.

“Don’t worry too much about it now,” Uprichard said. “Just concentrate on getting better. That’s the best you can do at the moment.”

“How bad?” Lennon asked again.

Uprichard sighed. “Pretty bad. The way things look right now, I can’t see a way out for you. Helping that girl flee the jurisdiction was probably enough to end your days as a police officer, but with young Connolly’s death, even if it was selfdefense … Well, you better have a hell of a case to present to the inquiry.”

“Has anyone looked into Connolly?” Lennon asked. “Why was he there?”

“His wife gave a statement,” Uprichard said. “And we got access to his bank accounts. They were in debt up to their eyeballs. Loans, credit cards, three months behind on their rent. Then two big deposits from an offshore account, one of them sent on Christmas Eve that didn’t clear until after the holiday. His wife said they were close to being put out of their house, and then he told her he’d found a way to make the cash for a deposit on a place of their own. It looks like someone was paying him good money to go after you.”

“It was Dan Hewitt,” Lennon said.

Uprichard stood up. “I didn’t hear you say that.”

“It was Hewitt. He was working for Strazdas. He put Connolly up to it.”

“Proof, Jack,” Uprichard said, waving a finger in Lennon’s direction. “Evidence. Unless you’ve got plenty of it, don’t you dare blacken a good officer’s name.”

“It was him,” Lennon said. “I’m going to get him. I’m going to bring him down.”

“Enough!” Uprichard’s face reddened. “Enough of that. I won’t listen to it.”

He put his head down and bulled his way to the door. He paused, his shoulders rising and falling with his anger. Eventually, he allowed Lennon a backward glance.

“I almost forgot,” he said. “I have something for you.”

Uprichard returned to the bed without looking Lennon in the eye. He dropped an envelope onto the sheets. Lennon picked it up, turned it in his hands. It was addressed to “Police Man Jack Lennon, Ladas Drive Police Station, Belfast, Northern Ireland.” The postmark said “Kyyiv.”

“I looked it up,” Uprichard said. “It’s Kiev. It came this morning. I thought you might want to see it.”

“Yes,” Lennon said. “Thank you.”

Uprichard shuffled his feet. “Well, I’ll leave you to it, then. Get well, Jack. You’ll need to be fit as you can to get out of this hole you’ve dug for yourself.”

When he was alone, Lennon examined the envelope, studied the neat, girlish handwriting. He went to open it, but found his eyes too heavy to hold, too dry. He looked up at the clock opposite his bed.

Right on cue, a nurse entered the room ready to release a dose of painkiller into the IV drip that hooked into his hand. Once she did, he would fall into a fathomless dark sleep.

“What have you got there?” she asked.

“A letter from a friend,” he said.

“Do you want to read it before I hit you up and you go bye-bye?”

He placed the letter on the bedside locker.

“For later,” he said.