3

The Traveller followed Orla O’Kane along the wide corridor. She had thick ankles. Her blocky heels made dull thuds on the carpet. A property developer by profession, she buried her father’s money in houses, hotels and office blocks. Most likely some of it went into this building, a mansion outside Drogheda, the former home to a British landowner, now converted to a private convalescent home.

He couldn’t help but be impressed when he drove up the gravel driveway, cutting between lawns and landscaped gardens, the house standing three storeys high up ahead. The River Boyne ran behind it, the tall pylon of the new cable-stayed bridge carrying motorway traffic across the water visible above the treetops perhaps half a mile away.

The rest of the building had been cleared; all the rooms were empty. He’d seen one cleaner and one nurse in the grand entrance hall. A few men loitered around the grounds and in the corridors, but they certainly weren’t medical staff, with their watchful eyes and bulges in their jackets.

‘Does he pay a lot of medical insurance, your da?’ the Traveller asked.

She stopped, clicking her heels together. Christ, she had a big arse on her. Broad across the shoulders, too. Her business suit did its best for her, but she was a big lass, there was no hiding it. Not a bad face, though.

‘He values his privacy,’ she said over her shoulder. She had the hard consonants of a woman used to being listened to, not questioned.

The Traveller smiled at her. If she’d been anyone else’s daughter, he might have had a crack at her. She’d be a good ride, he could tell, the hard-nosed ones always were. But this one was too dangerous.

He followed her along a first floor hall in the east wing. She walked to the second-last door on the left. A grunt from inside the room greeted her knock. She opened the door and waved the Traveller through.

Bull O’Kane sat in the corner, tall sash windows on either side of him. A neat lawn edged by copses led to a high wall perhaps forty yards beyond the glass. The river flowed on the other side.

The daughter cleared her throat. ‘I’ll be outside if you need me, Da.’

O’Kane smiled. ‘All right, love.’

A draught cooled the Traveller’s back as the door swished closed.

‘She’s a good girl,’ O’Kane said. ‘Smart as a whip. Can’t keep a man, though. Always goes for gobshites.’

The Traveller walked to one of the windows. ‘Quite a view,’ he said. A heron waded in the shallows across the rain-swollen river. ‘Good fishing here, I bet. Salmon, trout. I should’ve brought my rod.’

‘You don’t look like a knacker,’ O’Kane said.

The Traveller turned to face him. ‘And you don’t look like you could afford a room in this place, let alone the whole lot of it.’

O’Kane sat with his feet up on a stool, a blanket covering his lap down to his ankles. He had a faecal smell about him. The Traveller had heard the old man took a shot to the knee and another to his belly, damaging his bowel. O’Kane wore a bag now, and would do for the rest of his days. He was thinner than the Traveller had imagined, frailer than a photograph he’d seen. Age was catching up with him, spurred on by his injuries, but his eyes still burned hard.

‘Someone told me your real name’s Oliver Turley,’ O’Kane said. ‘Is that right?’

The Traveller sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Might be. Might not. I’ve been called lots of things. Smith, Murphy, Tomalty, Meehan, Gorman, Maher, I could go on.’ He leaned forward and whispered, ‘There’s some people say I’m not even really a Pavee.’

A dead mask covered O’Kane’s face. ‘Don’t get smart with me, son. I’m a serious man. Don’t forget that. I’ll only warn you the once.’

The Traveller leaned back and nodded. ‘Fair enough. But I’m a serious man too, and I don’t like answering questions. You’ll know as much about me as I want you to know.’

O’Kane studied him for a moment. ‘Fair enough. I don’t care if you’re a gypsy, a traveller, a knacker, a tinker, or whatever the fuck you lot call yourselves these days. All I care about is the job I need doing. Are you the boy for it?’

‘I’d have thought a man like you has plenty of boys to do his dirty work for him.’

O’Kane shook his head. ‘Not this job. I can’t have anyone connected to me involved. And it needs done right. Quiet, like. No fuss, no bother.’

‘All right,’ the Traveller said. ‘So, what is it?’

O’Kane’s face darkened. ‘Only a handful of people know what I’m going to tell you. You do this job right, it’ll be just you and me knows the whole story. You’ll be paid well to keep quiet once it’s done. Big money. But if I ever hear a whisper of it down the line …’ O’Kane smiled. ‘Well, I won’t be looking for a refund. Understand?’

‘I understand,’ the Traveller said.

O’Kane pointed to a file on the bedside locker. The Traveller reached for it. He removed loose sheets of paper, photocopies, computer printouts. Some pages had photographs, others blocks of text.

‘I don’t read,’ the Traveller said.

O’Kane eyed him. ‘Don’t or can’t?’

The Traveller spread the pages on the bed beside him. ‘A couple of people thought that made me stupid,’ he said. ‘They don’t think much of anything nowadays.’

O’Kane clicked his tongue against his lower lip three times. He started talking. He talked about the madman Gerry Fegan, how he’d been driven by figments of his drink-addled imagination to kill Michael McKenna, Vincie Caffola, a crooked cop, and O’Kane’s cousin, Father Eammon Coulter. He talked about the politician Paul McGinty’s botched attempts to contain it, how they’d made things worse, costing more lives, including McGinty’s own. It had ended in a bloodbath at an old farm near Middletown, O’Kane’s son dead, shot by a traitorous ex-soldier called Davy Campbell, and the old man injured.

Fegan got away clean, taking Marie McKenna and her child with him. They had vanished into thin air, it seemed. Aside from O’Kane, two survivors from the scene remained: McGinty’s driver, and Kevin Malloy, one of O’Kane’s boys. Malloy was hit in the gut and the chest. The driver Quigley had taken O’Kane and Malloy to a hospital in Dundalk, saving both their lives.

‘This needs to go away,’ O’Kane said. ‘The Brits, Dublin, the boys in Belfast; they all want it cleaned up.’

‘They said it was a feud,’ the Traveller said. ‘On the news. They said those three dissidents ambushed McGinty at the farm.’

‘The Brits put that together,’ O’Kane said. ‘They got McSorley and his boys at the border. They planted the guns in the car, made it look like they’d blown themselves up with their own bomb. Lovely job, it was.’

The Traveller nodded. He couldn’t deny he was impressed. ‘But that’s not all, is it?’ he asked. ‘There’s too many people in the know.’

‘Quigley and Malloy,’ O’Kane said. ‘I want them gone, and so do the Brits. And there’s a lawyer, Patsy Toner. Get rid of him, too. The Brits will turn a blind eye. They’ll make sure the investigation turns nothing up. They’ve as much to lose as anyone.’

The Traveller folded his arms across his chest. ‘But any arsehole could do those three. That’s not why you need me.’

‘I want Fegan,’ O’Kane said. ‘I want him brought to me alive.’ He pointed a thick finger to emphasise the point. ‘Alive. He’s no good to me if he’s not breathing, you understand? Nobody knows where he went. You’ll have to draw him out.’

‘How?’

‘Marie McKenna and her child. The cops have them hidden, but there’s been a bit of luck.’

‘Oh? What’s that, then?’

‘Marie McKenna’s father had a stroke last week. He’s lucky to be alive, or maybe unlucky, depending how you look at it. He’s in a bad way. I’m told there’s a good chance he’ll have another one before he recovers, and it’ll probably do for him.’

‘So you reckon she’ll come out of hiding to go and see him,’ the Traveller said. ‘Her and the kid’ll show themselves.’

O’Kane tilted his head. ‘I’m told you’ve no problems doing women and children. Is that right?’

The Traveller shrugged. ‘Depends on the money,’ he said.