Winterland

1

After twenty minutes on the treadmill, flicking between Sky News and CNN, Mark Griffin decides he’s had enough and heads into the bathroom. He takes a shower and shaves. Back in the bedroom he chooses the charcoal grey suit, the pale blue tie and a white shirt. He gets dressed, occasionally glancing over at the bed. He goes down to the kitchen. He puts on coffee, stands at the breakfast bar and slices a grapefruit into neat segments. To the right, his laptop is open. He looks through his schedule for the day.

Mark runs a small company, Tesoro, that imports handmade stone and ceramic tiles from Italy. It started out as an excuse to make regular trips to places such as Brescia, Gubbio and Pesaro, but it soon took on a life of its own. As recession in Ireland gave way to boom, so linoleum and thick shag gave way to travertine and terra-cotta, and it wasn’t long before Mark found himself supplying high-end product to the high end of the residential property market.

After secondary school, and mainly at the insistence of his uncle Des, Mark did a business degree at Trinity College. The prospect of becoming an executive or an entrepreneur was always something he’d viewed with dread, but running Tesoro has never really felt like that, like a business. How could it? He travels to Italy and watches dedicated artisans at work. He deals in the aesthetics of tone, in the endless harmonies of colour, form and design.

Behind him, he hears Susan coming into the kitchen.

‘Morning,’ she says, in her sleepy drawl.

‘Hi. There’ll be coffee in a minute.’

He doesn’t turn around. After a moment, Susan appears behind the breakfast bar. As she passes on her way to the fridge, she swipes a segment of his grapefruit, upsetting the formation he’s made on the plate. Then she goes to the fridge and stands there, holding the door open, staring into the light, humming.

He looks at her and smiles. She’s wearing one of his shirts.

Reaching into the fridge, Susan disappears from view.

Mark pops a segment of grapefruit into his mouth. He rearranges what’s left on the plate and turns his attention back to the laptop. He has to swing by the showrooms in Ranelagh to pick something up, and after that he’s going out to the warehouse, where he’ll be for the rest of the morning. Then at two o’clock he’s got an appointment in town. He’s chasing a tiling contract from a builder who’s just put up a new five-star hotel with 120 bathrooms in it. Single property refurbishments are suddenly a lot harder to come by these days, and a hotel contract, if he can get it, makes good business sense.

He looks over as Susan emerges from the fridge carrying a slab of cheese, some sliced ham and a tub of olives.

As she lays the stuff down on the breakfast bar, she makes a face at him, half apologetically, and says, ‘Starving.’

Mark looks at his watch. He clicks his tongue. ‘I have to go in a few minutes,’ he says, ‘but I’ll leave you a key and the alarm code.’

Susan looks a little surprised. ‘A key? Wow. But… I see you’ve already chosen the curtains.’

Mark snorts at this. He met Susan on a skiing trip last winter, and a few nights ago they bumped into each other again in town.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I went ahead. I didn’t think you’d mind.’

‘No, go on. Jesus. They’re fab.’

She tears a slice of ham in two and puts one of the pieces into her mouth.

‘How do you like your coffee?’ he says.

‘Strong. Black.’

Ten minutes later, getting into his car, Mark glances over his shoulder at the house. It’s a weird, unfamiliar feeling to be leaving someone behind like this, inside the house.

He pulls out onto Glanmore Road.

It isn’t a bad feeling.

He reaches down, flicks on the radio and tunes it to Morning Ireland.

Actually, it’s a nice feeling.

But Mark doesn’t want to dwell on that, because feelings like these – he knows from experience – tend not to last.

2

Gina opens her eyes.

She rolls over in the bed, onto her back, and stares up at the ceiling.

Something is bothering her. It’s not just her nephew, that’s a given. It’s something else, a separate strain of anxiety.

She looks at the clock on her bedside table: 8.45 a.m.

She got home at around three. Yvonne and Michelle had taken charge of things, so there wasn’t much point in her sticking around any longer. Besides, she had to get home and change.

She called a taxi at 2.30.

Her mind freezes for a second. Then she remembers what’s bothering her.

Noel.

He’d told her outside the house that he had to go and meet someone and would be gone thirty minutes, forty-five at the most, but by the time Gina was leaving nearly three hours later he still hadn’t shown up. Yvonne tried him on his mobile a couple of times, but got through to his voicemail. Catherine really seemed to need Noel and kept asking, in between sobs, where he was, so instead of anyone getting worried about the fact that he hadn’t come back, they got increasingly annoyed about it. At one point, out in the kitchen, Gina found herself defending him.

‘Look, he had some business thing in town. He’s -’

‘Oh don’t give me business,’ Michelle said, spitting the word out, ‘I’m sick of hearing about business. Everything has to stop for business.’ She had tears in her eyes. ‘It’s the middle of the fucking night for God’s sake…’

Gina slides off the bed and walks over to the en suite bathroom in the corner.

Maybe Michelle was right, but the question remains… where did Noel get to?

Standing under the jet of hot water, Gina wonders if he turned up later, or at all. She’ll call Catherine’s in a few minutes and find out – after she gets dressed and puts on some coffee.

Though on reflection, these are serious commitments to being awake – clothes, coffee, a phone call – and she’s not quite sure she’s ready for them yet. She lingers in the shower, still a little drowsy – turning slowly, arching her back, stretching. Not that there’s any plausible route back to sleep at this stage. She’s awake, and the new day is already in full swing. A few moments earlier, through the open window in her bedroom, she could hear traffic rumbling and the general din of the streets. In fact, her last hour of sleep, with its busy parade of dreams – by turns scrappy and full-blown, lucid and phantasmagoric – had probably been moulded to some degree by this soundscape of the city coming alive six floors below her.

She is normally out of bed by seven, when the process is just beginning – having breakfast, listening to Newstalk, rallying her senses. But as she turns the water off now, steps out of the shower and reaches over to the radiator for her towel, Gina is struck by how abnormal this particular day, even before she’s left the apartment or spoken to anyone, is shaping up to be.

She dries herself, standing at the washbasin. The mirror is steamed over, her reflection a grey blur. She lets her towel drop to the floor. Then, as she takes a moisturiser and some cotton discs from the narrow glass shelf above the washbasin, the reality of what has happened hits her again – her nephew’s life cut brutally short, her sister’s life rendered permanently miserable. With Catherine’s anguished face in her mind’s eye, Gina stands there for up to a minute, staring into the blur.

Out in the kitchen a while later, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, she packs the Gaggia, switches it on and then gets her phone from where she left it the night before – on the desk in the corner, beside her computer. She calls Catherine’s. When Yvonne answers, she asks straightaway how Catherine is and can’t imagine any other answer than the one she gets. She then asks if Noel ever showed up.

‘No, he didn’t, and we’re starting to get worried.’

‘Worried?’

‘Jenny phoned about an hour ago. He never went home, and she can’t reach him on his mobile. It isn’t like him, she said.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘She’s actually freaking out.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘When you spoke to him outside the house, did he tell you where he was going?’

‘No, he just said town.’ They went over this last night, more than once. ‘He said he was meeting someone. He didn’t say who.’

Gina wants to articulate something here, but she can’t bring herself to do it. What she wants to say is either too ridiculous or too scary.

Yvonne, who quit smoking a couple of years ago, pulls audibly on a cigarette.

‘What about his office?’ Gina says.

‘Jenny was going to call them. She said she’d call me back if she heard anything. I thought you might be her.’

‘OK, look,’ Gina says, detecting a slight impatience here, ‘I’d better get off, but call me back, will you, if you hear anything? Or text me.’

‘Yeah.’

Gina goes over to the coffee machine. She pulls down a cup and puts it in position. She presses a button and waits for the coffee to trickle out. But when it’s ready, she doesn’t move. She stands there, staring at the cup, and all of a sudden, in the emptiness, in the silence, her eyes well up. She steps back and leans against the counter. She puts a hand up to her chest and takes a few deep breaths.

It was hard watching Catherine like that last night. It was hard watching Yvonne and Michelle coping with her, and in such different ways. It was hard not having Noel around to provide some kind of ballast. It was all hard, every aspect of it, every passing second. What is hard about now, though, is almost worse, this creeping sense of dread that it’s not over yet, that something else is going to happen, or maybe even has happened.

Gina wipes her tears away and rubs her eyes. She reaches over to the coffee machine, takes the small cup and looks into it. She swirls the coffee around for a moment and then knocks it back in one go.

She looks at her watch: 9.25.

She picks the phone up again. She calls Siobhan at the office and says she mightn’t be coming in today, but Siobhan reminds her that she has an eleven o’clock meeting with Tom Maloney.

Gina rolls her eyes.

Most VC-fuelled start-ups have independent boards of directors. Typically, these will include one or two industry experts, people who can keep an eye on things, give advice and occasionally even get some traction for the company’s product. Tom Maloney, the CIO of a financial consultancy firm, is one of these. He’s not exactly what you’d call interfering, but he likes to be briefed on a regular basis. Gina meets him now and again for coffee and feeds him a line of bullshit about how things are going.

She looks at her watch again.

But if Lucius is ever to secure a second round of funding, she knows she’ll need to be a bit more rigorous than that, a bit more convincing.

‘Is P.J. busy this morning?’ she asks, suppressing a groan. ‘Maybe he could do it. My sister has just… I’m…’

She doesn’t want to get into it. What’s the point? Lucius Software has a staff of only eight and operates out of three rooms on the first floor of a Georgian house in the centre of Dublin. Soon enough there’ll be no avoiding the subject.

‘He’s in London today,’ Siobhan says, ‘and then -’

‘Of course, of course, yeah,’ Gina says, remembering about London.

‘If you’d like I could ask -’

‘No, no, leave it. It’s OK.’ Gina shakes her head. ‘I’ll do it.’

She changes into something more formal and spends half an hour at the desk in the corner, checking emails and scribbling down a few notes for this meeting.

Before she leaves the apartment, she texts Yvonne:

‘Any news?’

She knows she’s clutching at straws, but she needs to hear something.

On her way down in the elevator, she holds the phone tightly in her hand. When she comes out of the building, she turns right and keeps walking.

It’s a pleasant morning, not quite sunny, but bright and fresh. The flow of traffic along the quays isn’t particularly heavy, but as she approaches the IFSC, things in general get busier – more cars, more pedestrians, more noise. When she hasn’t heard back from Yvonne by the time she’s turning onto Matt Talbot Bridge, she decides to put the phone away. She drops it into her bag.

Up to this point she has kept fairly focused, staring straight ahead, but halfway across the bridge, unable to resist, she glances to her left.

Down in the docklands, Richmond Plaza dominates the horizon. Next to it there are two enormous cranes, which look like mechanical high priests, supplicants kneeling before some holy monolith. On previous occasions, Gina has stared in wonder at this rising structure at Richmond Dock, but today it’s a little different. Today her only reaction to it – and this reaction is located in her stomach – is a dull steady thrum of anxiety.

Then she hears a mobile ringing close by and it makes her jump. She glances around. She knows from the tone that it can’t be hers and even sees a passing suit raise his arm and bark into his – but as she moves off towards George’s Quay, she still slips a hand into her bag, pulls her own phone out and checks it.

Just in case.

3

About a mile outside the Wicklow town of Rathcross, retired machine-parts salesman John McNally is walking along a winding tree-lined stretch of road. Since the new section of motorway opened last year these back roads have been quieter and more suitable for walking on. Cars still pass pretty frequently, but pedestrians are not in constant fear of being whooshed into a ditch by the slipstream from an articulated truck.

McNally lives nearby and walks the route as often as he can. His wife isn’t well and requires a good deal of around-the-clock care, most of which McNally does himself, but a nurse comes in for a couple of hours three mornings a week and when she’s there he makes a point of going for a walk. It gets him out of the house. He can stretch his legs and clear his mind.

During a long career as a salesman McNally travelled the length and breadth of Ireland and was familiar with every road in every county – arterial roads, side roads, ring roads, back roads – all of which he thought of as one continuous road, his road. What’s left to him these days of the greater whole is just this tiny segment, a meandering mile and a half that runs from the small church outside Rathcross to the Coach Inn at Hannigan’s Corner.

McNally begins to slow down now, and deliberately so – because until he gets to the bend a hundred yards up the road and catches an inevitable glimpse, beyond Hannigan’s Corner, of that new housing development, of its rooftops and satellite dishes, he knows he will remain protected from any sign of the creeping suburbanisation that is, quite frankly, wrecking this part of Wicklow.

But for the moment it’s OK. There are woodlands on either side of him. To his right, the trees rise up on a steep incline. To his left, beyond the ditch and thickets of bush, there is a fairly steep descent to a stream running parallel with the road. Beyond the stream, the area of woodland continues, rising back gradually and evening out, more or less, with the level of the road. McNally glances every now and again into these dark woods and is entranced by their stillness, which seems inviting, dense with mystery, even at times a little menacing.

Some night, when his wife is deep in her medicated sleep, he’d love to come out here to these woods, to the pitch blackness and the silence, and sit for an hour at the foot of a tree. But he knows he never will. Because wouldn’t it be a slightly crazy thing to do? Wouldn’t it be dangerous, and irresponsible? How would he find his way? What if someone saw him?

He looks around as a car passes, a Volvo estate. McNally watches it rush forward and disappear at the bend up ahead.

Then, a couple of yards in front of him, he notices something in the road – strange marks, a series of curves. They are interlaced and go left from the centre of the road and disappear into the ditch. He knows that these can only be one thing, tyre marks – the result of severe skidding. As he moves closer to the marks, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing, he notices that the thick bush at the side of the road where the skid marks disappear has been disturbed – flattened, in fact – leaving a large gap. He approaches the gap and walks right into it, drawn irresistibly to whatever it is he’s going to find. He steps across the ditch and looks down the slope. At first, he sees nothing unusual. There is the line of the stream, the glistening water, an occasional boulder on one side or the other.

Then he sees it, and can’t understand how it wasn’t the first thing he saw. Forty or fifty feet below, at the bottom of a now obvious track through the grass and bushes, he sees the back end of a vehicle. It is wider than a normal car – like a four-wheel drive, possibly an SUV.

It is sticking up out of the stream, which means its front end is probably submerged in water.

Which means the driver…

McNally has taken a few steps down the slope before he knows what he’s doing, before he realises it’s too steep. If he goes on he’ll slip and fall, and maybe break his neck. He turns and struggles back up.

Standing in the ditch again, catching his breath, he looks up and down the road, but it’s deserted.

He takes out his mobile phone. He hates this bloody thing and hardly ever uses it. Everyone seems to have one these days, and it’s all ringtone this and text message that. He bought his to have in case of an emergency.

His hand is shaking as he prepares to key in 999. He glances back towards the stream.

This isn’t exactly the kind of emergency he had in mind.

4

At about 7.30, Paddy Norton gets out of bed and puts on his dressing gown and carpet slippers. Bleary-eyed, unshaven, he wanders downstairs. He goes into the reception room at the rear of the house and starts circling the full-sized snooker table he put in a few years back but has hardly used since. He played a lot when he was a young man, and to this day he still derives visceral pleasure from the memory of a maximum break he once scored against Larry Bolger. It was his first – and only – 147, and it actually ruined the game for him, because unless every frame he played after that was another 147, what was the point? Anything less was a taunt – if you were this good once, type of thing, what the fuck is wrong with you now? He got the table put in imagining he’d be able to just mess around on it and relax, but it never felt right – whereas walking around it does feel right. And it’s probably because of the sheer size of the table, not to mention the size of the room, that it feels like he’s doing more than just pacing up and down, that it feels, sometimes, like he’s in the chariot race from Ben-Hur.

This morning, though, as he stops to lean against a corner pocket and catch his breath, it feels a bit more like the Stations of the Cross – so he decides to give it a rest. After a moment, he opens the double doors and goes through into the living room.

When Norton left things with Fitz last night and went home, the first thing he did was to take two more Narolet tablets, but instead of knocking him out they kept him awake. He had a glass of Power’s and went to bed, but he couldn’t sleep, so he lay there staring up at the ceiling. At one point, he even thought about leaning over to Miriam’s night table to get her bottle of sleeping pills, but…

No.

He sinks into an armchair now and turns on the TV. He watches Sky News for a while – then some Dr Phil, then an episode of Cheers, whatever is on, his thumb working the remote control, the rest of him, every other muscle in his body, freeze-frame still.

Miriam comes in shortly after nine, already dressed and with her make-up on. She asks him what he’s doing.

He looks up. ‘I’m watching TV.’

His mouth feels dry.

‘Sweetheart,’ she says, walking over to him, ‘you know I don’t like the TV on in the mornings.’ She gently extracts the remote control from his hand and points it at the huge plasma screen on the wall above the fireplace. ‘It’s unhealthy.’

The screen goes blank. She throws the remote control onto a sofa opposite Norton, out of his reach.

A tall woman, elegant and self-possessed, Miriam is wearing a Paul Costello suit and a string of pearls Norton gave her for their last wedding anniversary. ‘I’m going into town for most of the day,’ she says. ‘Then I have that fund-raiser at six.’

It is only then that Miriam seems to notice the dishevelled, exhausted state her husband is in.

‘Darling. Are you all right? You look dreadful.’

‘I’m fine. I’m fine. Really.’

‘Oh, Paddy, honestly.’

What does this mean? He isn’t sure. Her tone is dismissive, but indulgent at the same time. He can’t wait for her to leave.

‘I’m going upstairs now to have a shower,’ he says, but he doesn’t move.

Miriam leans down and pecks him on the forehead. As she withdraws, he thinks he sees her wrinkling her nose.

‘The sooner the better,’ she says, and quickly adds, ‘OK, I’ll see you later.’

She turns and walks out of the room.

Norton doesn’t move. He looks over at the remote control. The obvious thing to do would be to get up, walk across to the sofa and retrieve it, but somehow initiating this simple sequence of physical manoeuvres proves beyond him.

When he eventually does stand up, over forty minutes later, Norton ignores the remote and walks out of the room. He stands in the hallway for a moment, hesitating. Then he wanders across the hallway and into the kitchen, where he puts on the coffeemaker – because that’s what he needs to kick-start his day, surely, a good strong dose of coffee.

He sits at the huge rectangular breakfast table and waits. Miriam had the kitchen redone recently and it’s a cold, industrial look, all chrome and brushed steel, a bit like a restaurant kitchen – which of course was maybe what she had in mind, seeing as how they do so much entertaining.

He looks up at the clock. It’s nearly ten.

He goes back to the coffeemaker and pours himself a cup. Then he reaches over to the transistor radio beside the toaster and flicks it on to get the news headlines.

He resisted doing this earlier. No one has phoned yet, so he isn’t really expecting anything, but he figures he might as well check. The first story is yet another worrying ESRI report on the economy. Then comes the announcement of a new investment in the Waterford area by the electronics giant Paloma. Then the stalled CAP reform talks in Brussels. Then the bit he already knows about, the shooting dead last night of a young man in the beer garden of a Dublin pub. This is followed by a drugs seizure story, a car bomb in Baghdad and a row in London over a security breach at Clarence House.

But that’s it.

Norton turns off the radio and takes a sip from his coffee. What was he expecting? Who knows? He remembers another occasion like this – also in a kitchen, and a much more modest one, if memory serves. The kitchen in the house on Griffith Avenue. He’d been up all night, waiting for a phone call, which never came.

Norton drinks the rest of his coffee quickly and then refills his cup.

He can hear the Hoover going upstairs. Mrs Burke has begun her daily round. He’ll wait until she has finished the bedrooms before going up. He doesn’t want to give her a fright.

As he is pouring a third cup of coffee, his mobile rings. It’s in the pocket of his dressing gown. He fishes it out and looks at the display. There is no number, which means that it isn’t Fitz and it isn’t the office. He quickly moves back to the table with his coffee and sits down.

‘Hello.’

‘Paddy. Ray Sullivan.’

‘Ray.’ Norton stands up. He glances over at the clock.

‘Ray, it’s 10.15 – what is it, 5.15 there? Jesus, I thought I was bad.’

‘I can’t sleep, Paddy. Never could. I do my best work at 5 a.m. This new business cycle we have these days? With all the twenty-four-hour non-stop global bullshit? It’s only just catching up with me. But listen, how are you?’

‘I’m fine, Ray, I’m fine.’

Norton sits down again. He takes a quick sip from his coffee. Ray Sullivan is the CEO of Amcan, a company Norton is hoping to secure as the anchor tenant for Richmond Plaza. But several thorny issues – installation specs and naming rights among them – remain unresolved, and negotiations have been dragging on for months.

‘Good. Now. Listen to me.’

Sullivan has a particular style, and you don’t have much choice but to go along with it.

‘I’m listening, Ray.’

‘OK. I had lunch with our friends yesterday, like I told you, yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And what do you know, they’d like to meet with Larry when he’s over next week.’

Norton tightens his fist and gives it a little shake. ‘Excellent, Ray. I’ll set it up.’

‘Good. Good.’ He pauses. ‘But I want to keep a firm lid on this, agreed?’

‘Of course.’

Sullivan clears his throat. ‘Because let me make something clear to you, Paddy. These are very private people. They like their privacy.’ He pauses. ‘And they go to great lengths to protect it.’

‘I understand that, Ray.’

In addition to being the CEO of Amcan, Sullivan also sits on the board of the Oberon Capital Group, a private-equity firm that has extensive business interests in more than a hundred countries worldwide.

‘They just want to meet him, have a talk, get the measure of the man. No press releases or publicity or anything.’ He pauses again. ‘So we’re on the same page here?’

‘Absolutely.’

Ray Sullivan leaves that hanging for a moment. ‘OK,’ he says. ‘OK. We’ll talk again. Say hi to the lovely Miriam for me.’

‘And to the lovely Caroline.’

This way of finishing their telephone conversations has become something of a routine.

Norton puts his mobile down on the table.

After a moment, he stands up. He needs to make another call. He goes and gets the cordless phone from the wall unit beside the fridge. Better to use the landline, he thinks. In case anyone is trying to reach him on the mobile.

Still standing, he bangs out the number and waits.

Voicemail.

He doesn’t leave a message. He tries another number. And waits.

‘Good morning, the Depart -’

‘The Minister, please. It’s Paddy Norton.’

‘Just a moment, please, Mr Norton.’

With the phone cradled on his shoulder, he reties the belt around his dressing gown.

‘Mr Norton? The Minister is unavailable at the moment. Can I -’

‘No. It’s OK. I’ll call again later. Thanks.’

Norton should have known. With that Paloma announcement on the news, there’s no way Bolger wasn’t going to be tied up.

He puts the phone down, then picks it up again almost immediately. With the Oberon Capital Group now firmly in the picture, Norton is pretty sure negotiations with Amcan will be stepping up a gear or two. There are several people he needs to talk to.

But as he stares at the phone in his hand, he realises he’s not in the right frame of mind, that his celebrated ability to compartmentalise has – for the moment at least – deserted him.

A while later, at nearly eleven o’clock – and on the jittery side of four cups of coffee – he grabs his mobile from the table, walks out of the kitchen and wanders down the hallway towards the rear of the house.

Once inside the large reception room, he starts circling the snooker table again. This time he falls into a slow, steady rhythm and tries to empty his mind. What he can’t get out of his mind, though, is how reckless he has been. The thing is, he panicked last night, he overreacted, he left himself exposed – and that’s something he wouldn’t have done when he was younger, or even a few years ago. After Rafferty showed up at the hotel, direct involvement of some sort was unavoidable, and he did his best to limit that involvement, but the question remains: How much damage has he done? Has he compromised Richmond Plaza? Has he compromised Winterland Properties?

Or is it even worse than that?

After another lap of the table, Norton finds himself wondering if he shouldn’t give in and call Fitz. As before, they agreed no contact, but by this stage of the morning he really needs to know what’s going on. Because until he gets word from someone, Fitz or whoever, or hears something on the radio, he simply won’t be able to shake off the feeling that things are spinning out of control.

He’s a few paces into the next lap when his mobile rings.

Spring, winter, whatever.

He stops and fumbles at the pocket of his dressing gown. When he eventually gets the phone out, he stares at the number on the display for a second, then presses Answer.

5

Gina has her phone on the table, neatly lined up beside her cappuccino and her notebook. Willing the damn thing to ring, she glares at it every chance she gets. But she’s not getting too many chances, because Tom Maloney, sitting opposite her in this small café on Dawson Street, is one of those intense people who insist on maintaining unbroken eye contact as they speak. He also has bad breath and an even worse habit of using it to state the obvious.

‘Look, it’s OK if your version one point zero is a little rough around the edges: what’s crucial is to get it out there, get it launched, get it known -’

How could he think she doesn’t know this?

‘- and then you can work on landing the marquee customers.’

Gina realises that what they’re talking about – strategy, the future of the company – is important, but at the moment she couldn’t care less about any of it.

‘And of course,’ Maloney is saying, ‘it may even turn out that your best customers aren’t the ones you expect them to be -’

Her phone rings. She whips it off the table. It’s P.J. She’s disappointed, but doesn’t show it. She looks at the time: 11.25.

Short meeting.

‘Hi, P., listen -’

‘Hey, Gina, so that was pretty useless, and I -’

‘Can’t talk now, P.’

She says it so firmly that P.J.stops in his tracks. ‘OK.’ He then says, ‘You all right?’

‘Yeah. I’ll talk to you later.’

‘OK.’

She puts the phone down, aware that Maloney is probably flattering himself about how riveted she is to what he’s been saying. But what she’s actually thinking is Get me out of here. Because if she’s not going to talk to P.J. -

Her phone rings again.

As before, she whips it off the table, but this time she stands up, having seen from the display that it’s Yvonne.

She turns away from the table, doesn’t indicate anything to Maloney and heads for the door.

‘Yvonne?’

It’s noisy out on Dawson Street, with traffic, tourists, a plane passing overhead.

‘Gina?’

‘Yes.’ She stares at the pavement. ‘I’m here.’

‘OK, Gina, listen to me.’

‘Yvonne, what’s wrong?’

Gina presses the phone to her ear. Oh God, here it comes.

‘It’s Noel.’ Yvonne pauses. ‘Our Noel.’ Gina closes her eyes. ‘He was killed last night. His car ran off the road.’

‘Oh God.’

‘Somewhere in Wicklow.’

‘Wicklow?’

Yvonne is sobbing now, and Gina can’t make out what she’s saying, or even if she’s saying anything at all.

A dozen questions occur to Gina, and as quickly it occurs to her that none of them matters.

‘Oh Jesus,’ she whispers, ‘poor Jenny.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘Where -’

‘They brought the body to Tallaght Hospital. Jenny’s on her way out there now.’ Yvonne then says something incoherent about ‘the two Noels’ and starts sobbing again.

Gina nods along. She doesn’t know what Yvonne has said exactly, but the impact of putting these three words together is as much as she can deal with.

She swallows. A raw, uncomfortable lump has formed in her throat.

After a long and painful silence, the sisters somehow manage to get practical for a few seconds and make an arrangement. Yvonne says that because Catherine has just come back from identifying young Noel’s body and is naturally inconsolable she and Michelle will stay with her for the time being. Gina says that she’ll go out to Tallaght. They can talk later on the phone, or text.

As her arm drops to her side, Gina realises that she won’t be having that chat with Noel over the next couple of days, the one he seemed so anxious to have. She realises that she won’t be seeing Noel again, ever.

She looks around. The sun is shining now. Dawson Street looks beautiful, as it always does in the sunshine, and she wonders what is to stop him from just showing up here? What is to stop him from appearing, this minute, on the pavement in front of her, striding down from St Stephen’s Green, say, or up from Trinity College?

She shakes her head, slowly, as the lump in her throat approaches critical mass.

Where is he?

Gina walks back into the café. She retrieves her notebook from the table and her bag from the floor.

‘Have to go,’ she says, not looking at Maloney.

Outside again, she turns right and heads in the direction of the taxi rank halfway up the street, her eyes filling with tears.

6

‘Joining me now from our Dáil studio is the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Larry Bolger. Good afternoon, Minister.’

‘Sean.’

Waiting for his first question, Bolger stares at a point on the wall directly opposite him.

‘Minister, a four-hundred-million-euro investment package, over three hundred and fifty new jobs. In these straitened times it doesn’t get much better than that, does it?’

‘No, indeed, Sean, it certainly doesn’t,’ Bolger says, taking off like a greyhound, ‘and days like today make my job worth doing, I can tell you. Paloma Electronics is a global player, and the fact that they’ve chosen to invest here, in the current economic climate, is a vote of confidence in our skilled workforce. But you must bear in mind, too – and it’s always the case in these matters, be it HP, Intel, Eiben-Chemcorp, Pfizer, Amcan, whoever – that we did face stiff competition for this, both from other locations in Europe and from further afield.’

Bolger shifts in his seat and at the same time adjusts his headphones slightly. He’s done countless radio interviews over the years, but he’s never liked them. He gets restless and fidgety. TV is better, he thinks, because it’s more of a full-on performance. Besides, radio presenters tend to grill you a little harder.

‘In your view, Minister, what does today’s announcement mean for the Waterford area?’

Though some interviews, like this one, he could do in his sleep.

‘Well, Sean, I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that the investment we’ve just announced will go a long way towards mitigating the fallout from recent job losses in the south and south-east. Paloma is going to employ upwards of four hundred people at the plant, but many more jobs will be created in surrounding communities. So there’s no doubt about it, this is win-win economics.’

And win-win press coverage, too, Bolger thinks.

‘OK, we’ll leave it there, Minister,’ the interviewer says after a few more questions. ‘Thank you for joining us.’

Bolger takes off the headphones, nods at the production assistant who’s working the console to his left and gets up from the table.

He needs to take a leak. He leaves the little studio and makes straight for the men’s room down the corridor. He had a press conference before this radio slot, and after lunch he has a couple of newspaper interviews to do. Then he leaves for an appointment in Athlone and a reception this evening in Tuam. His PA, advisers and media handlers will all want a piece of him, and at every stage, even as he gets something to eat, so taking a leak – or even better, a crap – is about the only way he can find a moment to himself these days.

Not that he’s complaining. He loves this. The last time he was in the cabinet, over five years ago, he practically had a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t take the pressure, the hours, the constant infighting, and besides, he was still drinking back then, and carrying on with your woman, what was her name, Avril, his bookie’s wife…

He finishes, and does up his zip.

It was a miracle that he survived that period of his life, politically let alone any other way. This time around he’s sober, celibate and extremely focused, and the weird thing is, not only does he have his sights set on the leadership of the party, but it seems to be what a few other people want for him as well.

At fifty-three, he feels that his time has come.

As he washes his hands, he glances at himself in the mirror. He’s better-looking now, too – that distinguished grey fleck in his hair, laser surgery taking care of the glasses, the sharper suits.

Fuck it, he positively exudes gravitas.

Bolger comes out of the men’s room and stands in the corridor. He’ll get a quick call in to Paddy Norton before the vultures descend on him again. He only heard the news about Noel Rafferty as he was going on air, and he wants to check that there isn’t anything about the story he needs to be up to speed on.

But as he’s getting the phone out of his pocket, it rings.

‘Larry, Paddy.’

‘Oh, I was just about to -’

‘Listen, I was on to our friend in New York earlier, and you remember that thing we talked about? Well, it seems they want to go ahead with it.’

‘Right. Jesus. Good.’ He pauses. ‘That’s great.’

‘Yeah, but keep it under wraps, OK? Don’t go around mouthing off about it to anyone.’

‘Paddy, give me a little credit, would you?’

‘No, I’m just saying. I mean, you know what this town is like.’

‘OK, OK, whatever.’

‘But anyway, I’ll get back to you later with the details.’

‘Fine.’

‘Right.’

There is a pause.

‘Listen,’ Bolger then says, ‘I was going to ask you about this Noel Rafferty thing.’

‘Oh? What about it?’

‘I was wondering, you know, what’s the story?’

Bolger knew Noel Rafferty fairly well and had professional dealings with him on a number of occasions – most recently, of course, in relation to Richmond Plaza.

‘There’s no story. What do you mean what’s the story?’

‘No, I just… I thought I’d check that -’

‘Look, he was over the limit, well over, and shouldn’t have been behind the wheel of a car, OK? That’s the story. You won’t read it in the papers, but believe me, I have it on good authority.’

‘Oh.’

‘I had a drink with him earlier, in town, and he was well on at that stage. The other thing is, you know that shooting last night in the pub? The guy who got shot was his nephew.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah, but that won’t be in the papers either. The Guards aren’t releasing his name yet, not for a day or two anyway. Out of sensitivity to the family.’ Norton pauses. ‘Look,I don’t know, I suppose he’d just heard the news about his nephew, he was upset, he’d had too much to drink, and boom, he loses control at the wheel. Before you know it he’s brown bread. Fucking tragic, but that’s the story.’

‘Jesus,’ Bolger says, subdued now. ‘Poor bastard.’

Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch to say that he’d had actual ‘dealings’ with Rafferty in relation to Richmond Plaza, but their paths had crossed many times over the years. There’d been a few foreign trips back in the nineties – those trade delegations to Shanghai. And he’d often met him at the races or at Lansdowne Road. They’d even played cards a few times.

‘But anyway,’ he says, ‘tell us, is this going to delay things at all?’

‘No, of course not. Everything’s in place. It’s like clockwork at this stage.’

‘OK.’

Clearly thinking this over, Norton then adds, ‘And again, don’t you go around mouthing off about it, saying there will be delays, or anything like it, do you hear me?’

Bolger can’t believe what he’s hearing. ‘Jesus, Paddy -’

‘Because we’re at a very delicate stage in negotiations at the moment, with Amcan. If we lose them we’re fucked.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘So, let’s stay on the same page here.’

‘Right, right, whatever. Look, I’ll talk to you again.’

‘OK.’

Bolger puts his phone away.

Bad-tempered prick.

Now, as he heads back along the corridor to face his assistants and handlers, he’s in a bad mood as well.

But wasn’t the concern he expressed entirely legitimate? Because take a key player out of any team and who knows what the consequences will be? The thing is, already – months before completion – Richmond Plaza has achieved brand recognition, iconic status even, and with his own name firmly linked to it in the public’s mind, Bolger feels he has an awful lot to lose if anything goes wrong.

Initially, of course – because there was so much opposition to the project – nothing seemed to go right. There was widespread concern about the visual impact a high-rise development would have on the city’s skyline. The number of appeals lodged against it with An Bord Pleanála was unprecedented. Submissions came from An Taisce, the Green Party, the Irish Georgian Society, community groups, local councillors, activists, grey-haired hippies, crusties, every toerag in a beard and a woolly jumper.

But when it came to putting a case for the defence, Bolger was indefatigable. He was also passionate – and never more so than one Monday evening on RTÉ’s Questions and Answers programme. A speaker on the panel was making some laboured, predictable point about tall buildings and phallic symbolism when Bolger cut in saying that Richmond Plaza wasn’t even going to be particularly tall, not by global standards. OK, it was probably going to be one of the tallest buildings in Europe, but so what? With the growth of the new service-based economies, Europe was going to have to get its act together anyway and reform its planning regulations, because ten years down the line, cities like Frankfurt and Brussels, The Hague and Berlin, these would all be just like American and Asian cities, just like Houston and Kuala Lumpur… a process that we in this country – he said, banging his fist on the table – that we in this city, had the unique chance to kick-start, right here, right now…

It was one of his more full-on performances.

But he also did a lot behind the scenes. He persuaded, cajoled, used his charm, and took a lot of flak – so all in all it’s not as if he hasn’t played his part. And what? The thanks he gets for his loyalty is to be talked to like he’s one of the fucking hired help?

Bolger spots his press secretary, Paula, and one of his advisers standing by a pillar in the reception area. They’re both on their mobiles. Paula holds up a hand to indicate that she’ll be with him in a second.

He waits.

Bolger has known Paddy Norton for many, many years and is beholden to him in ways he’d rather not think about. In fact, he can’t really imagine his career without him – but still, there are times, like today, when he wishes to God he’d never met the man.

7

It is just as Mark Griffin is approaching the roundabout that he hears it, and his grip on the steering wheel tightens. ‘… joining me now from our Dáil studio… Larry Bolger…’

At that point, Mark would normally be reaching for the dial to switch the radio off, but with an articulated truck on his tail and the meat grinder of the Cherryvale roundabout directly ahead of him, it is several seconds before this can happen.

‘… no, indeed, Sean, it certainly doesn’t, and days like today make my job -’

Then, silence.

When Mark replaces his hand on the steering wheel, it tightens again, automatically.

That velvety, media-trained voice, both obsequious and arrogant, never fails to unnerve him.

He comes off the roundabout.

It’s also becoming a lot harder to avoid. Bolger seems to be everywhere these days – in the papers, on radio, on TV.

He looks in the rearview mirror, indicates and gets into the left lane.

Though in one way or another this is something Mark has been dealing with for years. When he was a business student (and way before Bolger had anything like the high profile he has today), hearing that voice on the radio, or even the name, would have been enough to floor him. It would have triggered all manner of weird behaviour – depressive, destructive behaviour like not getting out of bed for days, not taking a shower, drinking himself stupid, arguing incessantly, and with everyone, his girlfriend, his lecturers, his uncle Des.

Mark takes the next exit. He has that meeting in town, in the Westbury, with the building contractor.

But these days, it must be said, things are different. He showers regularly, doesn’t drink anymore and is a lot less combative. If he comes across Larry Bolger’s name, he’ll still react, but more or less the way he’s reacting now – in a measured way, nothing extreme. Besides, these days, he has responsibilities. He has clients and contracts, and employs three people full-time at the showrooms in Ranelagh.

It’s all very grown-up.

So much so, in fact, that on occasion Mark has a hard time believing the whole thing is for real. It’s as if he expects an official with a clipboard to tap him on the shoulder one day and announce, politely, that it’s all been a mistake, that his company is to be dissolved, that his house and his car are to be repossessed.

Stopping at traffic lights, Mark closes his eyes for a moment. Then he opens them again and bangs on the steering wheel.

Shit.

Now he’s all anxious.

Shit, shit, shit.

Twenty minutes later, on his way into the Westbury, he gets a call on his mobile. It’s from the contractor saying he’ll be a few minutes late.

As he waits on his own in the lounge, Mark toys with the idea of ordering a gin and tonic.

Just one, he thinks, a quickie.

The waiter approaches. Mark clears his throat. He asks for a black coffee.

Then he turns back and glances at the table in front of him. There is a newspaper on it. After a moment, he lifts the paper up, leans over and tosses it onto the next table along.