Irregulars (28 page)

‘We’ll see how he behaves and then decide,’ Just Albert says, holding Jeremiah by the arm and guiding him to the rear door of the Bentley.

The gang leader is about to speak when a smaller boy approaches him and whispers into his ear.

‘Here, right. Them shoes he’s on. Can we get ’em back off ye when yis’re finished with him?’ the oldest boy says.

A pair of shoes a matter of life and death on these streets of his city, O’Keefe thinks. He says, ‘You,’—pointing to Jeremiah—‘take off those brogues and give them over.’

Jeremiah Byrne shoots O’Keefe a look of disgust, but bends and removes the shoes, making no move to hand them to the boys. One of the smaller lads skips forward and takes them. As he hands them to his leader, he turns back and spits at Jeremiah’s feet.

‘Fuckin’ dead, you are,’ he says, his voice high and young.

‘Get in the car, Jerry,’ O’Keefe says, ‘I’m not sure how long I can hold this mob off you.’

‘You’d not hold us back one tick of the clock if we wanted him now, Mister,’ the leader says, and O’Keefe, looking over this wolf pack of boys, thinks that he may be right.

They pull away in the Bentley, O’Keefe in the back seat with the boy, and drive onto the river quays, past the blast-charred ruins of the Four Courts, east towards O’Connell Street.

After a long moment of silence, Jeremiah says, ‘Where’re yis takin me?’

‘We need to ask you some questions is all,’ O’Keefe answers.

‘And you’d better answer them right or there’ll be only bits of you left to hand back to your mates,’ Just Albert adds, his voice cold.

‘They’re not my mates.’

They continue on in silence, and O’Keefe thinks they are going back to Ginny Dolan’s house in Foley Street when Just Albert turns the car left at Liberty Hall and onto Store Street, pulling up in front of the morgue.

O’Keefe is torn between admiration for Just Albert and worry that this is the wrong thing to do. The boy is too young to see what is inside on the slabs. He decides to let things play out, thinking that there is less chance of Just Albert threatening the boy injury if the boy is shocked into telling them what he knows by the sight of his dead comrades inside.

‘Right,’ he says, holding him by the arm, ‘let’s go.’

Just Albert leads them into the building, and down the main hallway through the sets of swinging double doors. He appears oblivious to the chance they are taking of being caught and having to hand the boy over to DMP detectives, batting through the doors as if he owns the place.

Through the final set of doors and they are in the morgue proper, the room several degrees cooler than the hallway, the cement floor damp and the slab in the centre of the room empty and clean. The same attendant O’Keefe had bribed the evening before is there at the desk eating a cream bun and drinking tea.

‘What’s this, you can’t be in here …’ He recognises O’Keefe and lowers his voice. ‘Jaysus, Mister, you can’t be barging in like this and with a boy and all? Jaysus. I could lose me job over this.’ He makes no move to rise from his seat, and O’Keefe peels
a pound note from his roll and tosses it onto the desk beside
the bun.

‘You’ll be rich before the week’s out. Now stand out in the hall and keep an eye out. If anyone you can’t refuse entry to is coming, you let us know and we’ll head out through your office there, right? Anyone else, you stall until we’re finished.’

‘Well, since we’ve had no bodies today and the post mortem on your boys there,’—the attendant points to two trolleys against the far wall of the room, on which rest sheet-covered bodies—‘was finished this morning, a quid’s worth the risk, but mind you be quick about it.’

‘What were the post mortem findings?’ O’Keefe asks, as the attendant makes to leave.

‘Dumdums to the back of the head for the both of them. There is nothing left inside the boys’ skulls at all.’

‘Jesus. Any idea what calibre round?’

‘Oh yes, the sawbones here, he used to be with the Royal Army Medical in the war. He says it looks like nine by nineteen millimetres, by the size of the entry wound and from the look of the flattened slugs.’

‘Luger Parabellum?’ O’Keefe says, trying not to match the attendant’s enthusiasm but finding it difficult. How many times had he stood as a Peeler speaking in rooms such as this in the past, with men like this one?

‘Most likely. Some of the newer sub-machine-guns are using nine millimetre, but it’s rare enough here in Ireland so far. At least as far as we see. Still 7.62 and .353 mainly. Some .45 calibre. The Thompson handheld machine-gun loads .45. A fierce big hole it makes too.’

O’Keefe nods. He had seen men with the Luger, had even lagged one or two in Cork during the troubles there. It was a well-respected gun by men who had fought in the war, known for its reliability. He would wager that the IRA had had their share of them brought in from various sources, but they are rare enough, as the morgue attendant had said. It isn’t much, he thinks, but it could be something. He has heard that there has been progress matching bullets to individual guns in the laboratory. Kevin Barry himself had been hanged on the basis of this new science of ballistic evidence.

‘And the other bodies you’ve seen,’ he says, remembering his previous conversation with the attendant, ‘the ones with the same trauma and bullet wounds …’

The attendant answers before O’Keefe can finish. ‘Same-o, same-o. Point nine rounds, contact wounds, back of the head.’

‘Is there any chance it’s the same gun?’

‘Ah now, what I think and what I’d be able prove is a-whole-nother story.’

‘Look,’ O’Keefe says, taking another pound note from the roll, ‘I know we’re putting you in a hard place. We need five minutes is all, to ask this lad a few questions.’

‘And you thought this was a good place to do it?’

O’Keefe shrugs. ‘You never know what seeing his pals laid out under a sheet might do to motivate a lad towards the truth.’

The attendant takes the note, reverting back to the compromised morgue sentinel that he is. ‘Now be quick about it, Mister. Two quid’s grand for a piss up or a fortnight’s grub and rent, but it won’t feed the family come winter if I’m out a job.’

‘That won’t happen if you keep proper sketch, right?’

The attendant leaves and O’Keefe crosses the room to where Just Albert stands with Jeremiah Byrne before the two sheeted forms on the trolleys. He nods at Ginny’s man and receives a nod in response. Without pausing he whips back the sheet from the first body, the sheet billowing and wrapping itself around Jeremiah, the sour, sweet scent of decay wafting forth like Dublin fog. O’Keefe had not intended for this to happen but it has the desired effect of shocking the boy, who begins a panicky flapping of his arms in an attempt to shrug free from the sheet. Just Albert grabs Jeremiah by the back of the neck and forces him down until his nose is nearly touching the corpse’s cheek.

By chance, it is the body of the boy found wearing Nicholas’ jacket, the rough skin of his feet marking him for Jerry’s friend. Visible now on his skin, running from his sternum to pubic bone, is a thick, forked trail of stitching from the post mortem. Under the dead boy’s hairline, O’Keefe can just make out the stitching of the cranial cut, where the skin of the boy’s face had been peeled back and the top of the skull sawn off to reveal the desecration the dumdum nine millimetre had done to the boy’s brains. Thankfully, the corpse’s eyes are closed, but the cigar burns and terrible bruising are still evident.

‘Your mate, is it?’ Just Albert says, and Jeremiah nods, still trying to work himself free from the sheet.

‘Why was he wearing Nicky Dolan’s jacket?’

‘Whose jacket?’

‘Nicholas Dolan’s jacket,’ O’Keefe says. ‘A black schoolboy’s coat. Where did he get it?’

‘I don’t …’

Just Albert presses down on Jeremiah’s neck, burying the boy’s face underneath his dead friend’s chin, his lips pressed tight to the stitches. Jeremiah struggles but Just Albert’s grip is too strong.

‘Take a good sniff, young Jerry. You smell that? That’s what you’ll smell like by morning if you don’t start giving me answers.’

The boy grunts and yelps, the sound halfway between a sob and a shout, and O’Keefe begins to wonder are they are being too hard on the boy. He has given his share of slaps as a copper, has taken the hard line once or twice, but rarely with someone so young. And a slap was one thing. Pressing a boy’s face into the corpse of his friend another.

‘Tell him, Jerry. Where did you get the jacket?’ O’Keefe asks, his voice softer and more reasonable than the doorman’s.

‘Let me up, jaysus fuck. Let me up an’ I’ll tell you for the sake of holy God.’

Just Albert lets him up, keeping a firm grip on the back of his neck. ‘Well?’

‘He stole it.’

‘Stole it from Nicky?’

Jeremiah nods, and looks to O’Keefe as if for mercy. There is a pleading in his eyes that moves something in O’Keefe.

‘And when was this? Where?’ O’Keefe says.

Before Jeremiah can answer, Just Albert leans into the boy’s ear and says, ‘Did yis hurt Nicky? If yis hurt our Nicky you’re a …’

‘Albert, leave off him.’

‘We didn’t hurt him. We only wanted his shoes and jacket.’

Just Albert tightens his grip on Jeremiah’s neck.

‘And any shrapnel, any coin, he’d on him. I swear on the life of me sisters, I do.’

‘Let the kid go, Albert. For fuck sake.’ O’Keefe and Just Albert lock eyes for a long moment before the doorman reluctantly releases the boy.

‘Look, Jeremiah,’ O’Keefe says. ‘We’ll not hurt you, but we need to know what happened. How’d your mate end up dead here? And this other boy.’ O’Keefe removes the sheet from the second body, but gently this time. ‘Do you know this lad?’

Jeremiah looks down at the second corpse and nods. ‘I think … I think he was with the other one who went in the hotel, the one whose jacket we …
Tommo
nicked. They must have lifted him as well.’

‘The other lad … Nicholas, you mean? He
was
in the hotel? Show him the photograph, Mister O’Keefe,’ Albert says.

O’Keefe takes the photo from his jacket and hands it to the boy. ‘Who lifted him, Jerry?’

Jeremiah looks back up at O’Keefe. ‘You know the man he battered back in the baths there, at the Achill?’ He indicates Just Albert with a nod.

O’Keefe tells him he does.

‘Well, I think it was his mates lifted him. They wanted all four of us.’

‘But they didn’t get you?’

‘Nor the other lad.’

‘Nicholas?’ Just Albert asks again.

‘Sure, how to fuck would I know his name? I was robbin’ him not ridin’ him.’ Some of the brashness of the streets, along with colour to his face, has returned to Jeremiah Byrne.

‘Mind your tongue, youngfella, or I’ll cut it out,’ Just Albert says, and O’Keefe frowns at him and signals to go easy.

‘And what, did these men come up on ye when you were robbing this boy and his friend?’ O’Keefe taps the photograph in Jeremiah’s hand. ‘This boy?’

Jeremiah studies the picture. ‘It was dark. It could be him but I don’t know. Sure, it wasn’t him I was worried about once I stabbed …’

‘You stabbed Nicholas?’ Just Albert’s voice is a low rasp that sends an icy dagger of panic up O’Keefe’s spine.

‘No, no. I didn’t stab no youngfella, no fuckin’ jaysus way I didn’t not! I swear on me sister’s eyes. I stabbed one of the trenchcoats, I did. I’d say that’s why yer man, the man he bate,’—Jeremiah indicates Just Albert with another tilt of his head, still afraid to look at him—‘is lookin’ for me. And why, I’d reckon, they’re lookin’ for your lad as well. I done the stabbing, but sure, they might think the four of us was together. Maybe that’s why Jerry and this lad are dead, but. I’d say it is.’

O’Keefe thinks for a moment. ‘Stand over there for a tick, Jerry. I need talk to my friend. And don’t think about legging it, right?’

‘I won’t. Any chance of a smoke?’

Jeremiah takes O’Keefe’s proffered Player’s Navy Cut and a light and steps over to the sink, some feet away from O’Keefe and the doorman but farther still from the exit. He takes in the welcome burn of smoke and turns, the cigarette pinched between his lips, to the sink to scour the smell of death from his hands and face. He turns on the water and looks down into the deep basin, and for the first time in several days, smiles. Miming his ablutions, his back to the two men, he reaches down and slips the long surgical scalpel into his trousers, covering the handle of it with his shirt.

Across the room, Just Albert says, ‘Nicholas went into the hotel. He was running messages and that fucker Murphy knows who for and how to contact him. He has to.’

O’Keefe considers this. ‘It seems likely all right.’

‘Then why are we still standing here? The hotel’s a five minute walk away and we need to have another chat with Mr Murphy.’

‘Remember his minders, Albert. They’re not men to be trifled with.’

‘Neither am I, am I?’

‘No, you’re not, but I’m asking you, right? No more violence, Albert. We’ll not be lucky every time.’ O’Keefe points to the angry welt the CID man’s bullet had carved in Just Albert’s skin.

‘Luck’s nothing to do with it,’ Just Albert says for the second time this night before turning, pushing through the swing-doors, leaving O’Keefe with Jeremiah in the morgue. O’Keefe covers the two bodies with their sheets.

Jeremiah takes a final pull on the cigarette and drops the end on the floor.

‘You’d better go,’ O’Keefe says to the boy. ‘Now, while he’s forgotten about you. And stay away from the lanes. Those boys want your blood and won’t be as gentle as we were.’

The boy sneers and laughs. ‘That sorry fuckin’ gaggle? Once they don’t cough on me I’m not afeared of them, I’m not.’

O’Keefe shrugs and crosses to the doors, holding them open for the boy. ‘Suit yourself, so.’

‘I always do, don’t I?’ the boy says, passing through the doors, the blade of the scalpel warming to the heat of his skin under his shirt.

40

T
hey take the Bentley, Just Albert driving. A short jaunt, four streets away to Burton’s Hotel.

‘These fellas are armed, Albert. You remember that.’

Just Albert looks at him.

‘They are professionals and they’re armed. We’re not.’

‘Fuck them,’ Just Albert says, stepping out of the car, leaving it parked at the curb in front of the hotel’s entrance. ‘Are you coming or not?’

O’Keefe gets out of the Bentley. ‘Let me do the talking, Albert. Will you let me do that at least?’

Just Albert cocks his head and squints in the lamplight. ‘If there’s any call for talking, you can do it.’

They enter the hotel and are greeted by a young man in his twenties at the reception desk. O’Keefe thinks of Nora Flynn, tucked up at home, a book on her lap, tea on a side table, her fags within easy reach. He wonders will this desk man remember their faces and will Nora learn that he has been back to her place of work. How long ago it seems since he kissed her, there on the footpath in front of her digs. He licks his lips, as if he can taste the memory of her, his tongue finding only the tinny essence of fear and flooding adrenaline.

‘Can I help you, gentlemen?’ The night man has a smattering of acne on his chin, bright, trusting eyes, sleeves rolled up over thin, pale arms in the heat of the hotel lobby.

‘Mr Murphy, the Englishman. What room number is he?’ O’Keefe says.

‘It’s quite late, gentlemen. Is he expecting you?’ As he speaks, the telephone in the small closet behind the desk begins to ring, small lights on the switchboard igniting to indicate calls coming in from several rooms simultaneously. The night man glances over his shoulder at the switchboard and frowns. ‘If you’ll excuse me for the moment while I …’

Just Albert ignores the night man, the squawking phone and switchboard with its blinking lights, and walks behind the desk and through to the small closet housing the switchboard. There he rips a fistful of connection plugs from the board, silencing the ringing and extinguishing the lights. As Ginny’s man wheels around, the ends of the cables in his hand lash out at the young night man’s legs, forcing him back against the reception counter, fear in his eyes now, hands out, palms raised.

‘Sir! Sir you can’t!’

‘The room number,’ Just Albert says. ‘Now.’ He does not raise his voice, moving in on the young man, leaning into him and crowding him against the reception desk.

‘Stop,’ O’Keefe says.

‘The room.’

The night man turns his head away from Just Albert, his back arched away and over the desk. ‘Thirty-four. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, it’s thirty-four, for the love of …’

Just Albert grabs the night man by the shoulders and spins him around, pushing his head down on the desk. He takes up one of the loose phone cables and wrenches the young man’s wrists behind his back, looping the cable around them and jerking it tight. He kicks the legs out from underneath him and ties another cable around his ankles, then pulls the night man’s tie from his collar and over his head. Taking a handful of hotel stationery from a shelf under the desk, he crumples several sheets into a ball and says to the young desk man, ‘Open your mouth.’

‘Leave off, Albert,’ O’Keefe’s voice is hard as he leans across the reception and grabs Just Albert by the arm. ‘Leave off him.’

Just Albert shrugs free of O’Keefe’s grip and leans down to the night man, shoving the wad of paper into his open mouth and securing it there with his necktie. ‘Don’t you so much as move a finger for ten minutes. If you wiggle free before that and ring up and warn them, I’m coming back. You understand me, youngfella?

The night man, face down on the ground, nods, terror in his eyes.

O’Keefe circles behind the reception desk, takes out Ginny Dolan’s roll of cash, crouches down and stuffs a pound note into the young night man’s pocket. He is about to rise and follow Just Albert when he stops and takes out the photo of Nicholas Dolan, holding it front of the night man’s face.

‘Have you ever seen this lad? Delivering messages, anything? Looking to visit Mr Murphy?’

The night man shakes his head in the negative. O’Keefe is tempted to take the gag out of his mouth but does not, thinking that there is no gain in a small kindness if it results in dead men.

He follows now, taking the stairs two at a time, and he is halfway between the first and second floors, Just Albert one flight above, when the door leading to the second floor hallway slams open and a young couple hustles out into the stairwell. The woman’s hair is in disarray and the man’s head is bare, his tie and collar loose. Panic is alight in both their eyes, though the woman turns hers to the floor as soon as she sees O’Keefe below her on the stairs. O’Keefe’s heart is pistoning in his chest and his hand instinctively goes to his hip for a side-arm that is not there.

‘Did you hear the racket of the …’ the young man begins to say, but stops when he gets a closer look at O’Keefe. He puts a protective arm across the young woman’s stomach and presses her back against the wall of the stairwell, pressing himself in beside her to let O’Keefe pass. Terror blanches the man’s face, though whether at the sight of O’Keefe, or at whatever has driven them out of their room in such disarray, O’Keefe does not know.
What racket?
O’Keefe wonders and considers turning back to ask the man, but as soon as he passes the young couple begin to skip down the stairs as if in flight. He continues on up after Just Albert, stopping with him on the landing outside the door that opens onto the third floor hallway.

‘Thirty-four,’ Just Albert says.

‘Let’s not get ourselves killed this late in the game, Albert, is all I’m asking, all right?’

Ginny Dolan’s man turns and squints up at him. ‘I’ll not let anything happen you until you find our Nicky, Mr O’Keefe. Then you can die or shite for all I care.’

‘Thanks, Albert. You’re a gentleman.’

Just Albert opens the door onto the hallway. He begins to walk, his footsteps silent on the carpeted floor. Thirty-eight, thirty-six. Beside thirty-six there is an unmarked door before the numbering resumes again at the door they seek. Thirty-four. O’Keefe grapples Just Albert’s forearm and hauls him to a stop in front of thirty-four.

He whispers, ‘Do you smell that?’

Just Albert frowns and sniffs the air, the smell of it reaching him but elusive.

‘Cordite,’ O’Keefe says. ‘And that couple on the stairs … they were running from something.’

Ginny’s man goes into his jacket pocket and comes out with the Mauser he’d taken from the CID man in the doss-house baths.

‘Have you ever fired a handgun, Albert?’

‘I’ve done things you wouldn’t like to think on much, Mr O’Keefe.’ Just Albert steps closer to the door. He is about to grasp the door knob when O’Keefe stops him, one hand on his forearm, and points to the door jam. The door, Albert sees now, is not firmly shut. He turns to O’Keefe and shrugs.

‘Gently,’ O’Keefe says, and Albert eases the door part way open until it meets an obstacle and stops. Just Albert turns sideways, and leading with the Mauser, enters the room. O’Keefe waits for a moment and follows. An upended table lamp on one of the bedside tables casts the room in a harsh puzzle of shadow and light. He looks down behind the door in search of the obstruction and it takes his mind a moment to register the body of one of the gun dealer’s guards. The tall, blond one. The one with the smirk, dressed only in undershorts and a white vest saturated with fresh blood. He scans the room, spotting the other guard, a bloody mass in a tangle of bedsheets on the floor beside the bed, part of his skull missing and a spatter storm of brain and blood on the bullet-pocked wall behind the bed.

Just Albert steps farther into the room with the gun raised, the same vigilant calm about him that O’Keefe has come to expect. O’Keefe looks back to the body behind the door and sees the Colt 1914 automatic in the dead man’s hand. He crouches down to take it, smelling its barrel, noting that the gun has not been recently fired. He draws back the gun’s slide and finds, as he’d expected, a round in the breech. Releasing the clip he finds eight more rounds. He thinks to replace the gun, but a dark part of him holds on to it, feeling a certain comfort in its heft and weight. Out of habit more than anything, he places his fingers at the man’s neck and finds no pulse.
Dead before he’d got off a shot.
He considers the pock-marks on the wall and the grouping of wounds on the dead man’s chest. Grouped and ascending like bights of a chain.
Like machine-gun fire
. He rises with the Colt, noticing another door ajar beside the second dead man’s bed. Adjoining room, linking rooms thirty-four and thirty-six.

‘Albert …’ he whispers.

Just Albert turns to O’Keefe, and there is a flash of movement in the adjoining room. Albert senses it and swings the Mauser around, drawing a bead on a young man in the doorway, eyes wide with surprise, a leather satchel in one hand, a Thompson sub-machine-gun in the other, barrel pointed at the ceiling.

A distance of less than ten feet separates O’Keefe and Just Albert from the gunman, and for a long moment the three men stare in silence at each other. O’Keefe is about to speak when the gunman lowers the Thompson and Just Albert’s free hand flashes out to send O’Keefe sprawling over the dead man beside the bed.

Just Albert fires the Mauser as the Thompson gun erupts. Smoke and showering plaster and splintering wood. As O’Keefe stumbles to his feet, flicking off the safety on the Colt, Just Albert is still standing. The machine-gun dances in the lad’s one hand, too heavy and unwieldy as he struggles to bring it to bear. Just Albert’s shooting is no more accurate, the doorman squeezing off rounds, also in a single-handed grip, in the general direction of his enemy, gun hand jumping wildly with the recoil of the pistol.

O’Keefe looses off three rounds into the doorway, and there is a sharp scream and the lad is gone, darting back into the adjoining room. Just Albert begins to follow but O’Keefe grabs him by the collar and jerks him back as a final burst of machine-gun fire rips across the room, punching a pattern of holes through the far wall. Just Albert regains his balance and fires again, wildly, his final two rounds clipping the door-frame and ceiling. A ringing silence descends as O’Keefe makes his way to the wall beside the door, the Colt held up in a two-handed grip. Movement, and muffled sound from behind the wall at O’Keefe’s back. The clacking of hollow metal. O’Keefe spins into the room. The gunman is hunched in the corner by the door to the hallway, trying to ram the drum mag onto the Thompson with his forearm. O’Keefe takes this in, the blood on the young man’s hands and the leather bag at his feet and realises that he has shot the lad in the hand.

‘Put it down!’ he shouts, aiming the Colt at the Thompson gunner.

The gunman smiles, and O’Keefe hears the solid click of the drum slamming home, the Thompson’s bolt drawn back with a bloody thumb and the barrel rising, machine-gun rounds sweeping the room from floor to ceiling, shattering the overhead chandelier lights, throwing the room into darkness as O’Keefe dives behind the bed, his fall cushioned by the bloody body of Mr Murphy.

O’Keefe reaches up and over the mattress and squeezes off six rounds from the Colt, and abruptly the Thompson goes silent. O’Keefe rolls away from the arms merchant’s body, rises to a crouch. For a moment there is acrid silence in the room. Then bright, flaring light as the door to the hallway swings open and the Thompson gunner bolts from the room, the leather satchel in his functioning hand catching on the rebounding door as he exits and jerking from his grip. O’Keefe fires at the hand that comes back around the door-frame in an attempt to claim the bag and is then gone. He pulls the Colt’s trigger again and the gun’s slide pops back over an empty chamber. Gun smoke hangs in the shaft of light entering the room from the hallway. O’Keefe tosses the gun aside. ‘Albert? Are you all right?’

‘I’m grand, I am,’ Ginny’s man says, entering the room with another Colt in his hand, blood running from a wound to his forehead and into his eyes. ‘A bit of splinter from the door-frame caught me in the loaf as I was coming through the door behind you. Sure, Mrs Dolan’s girls have done me worse with their fingernails. Did you plug him?’

O’Keefe gets to his feet and feels around the second bedside table until he finds a lamp and switches it on. ‘No, he scarpered. I think I clipped him in the hand, which is why we’re both still breathing.’ He crosses to the doorway and edges a look out into the corridor. Finding it empty, he reaches down and lifts the leather bag dropped by the assassin. ‘Fella was fierce anxious not to let go of this anyway.’

Just Albert takes the bag and sets it on the bed, unfastens the buckles and looks inside. ‘You can see why.’

Peering over his shoulder, O’Keefe attempts to whistle but finds his lips too dry. ‘A knockoff do you think?’

Just Albert shrugs. ‘Them three dead fellas were hardly handing it over. But even now, young stroke artists are hardly robbing hotel guests with tommy-guns, even if the guest is the likes of Mr Murphy there,’ he nods down at the bloody, gape-eyed corpse of the arms dealer on the floor, ‘… and his pair of goons.’

‘That money is republican gun money, Albert. You know that don’t you? Murphy was meant to be dealing guns to the Irregulars. That money is payment for arms I’d imagine.’

‘Not any more it’s not,’ Just Albert says, and the phone jangles on the desk and O’Keefe jumps. Just Albert appears as untroubled as ever, O’Keefe notices, his hands not shaking, his speech level and his shoulders at ease.

‘We need to make a move, Mr O’Keefe. I’d wager there’s guards on the way, what with all the shooting. And more probably soldiers from both sides.’ At this, Just Albert smiles and closes the bag. ‘And if that happens, sure the plasterers and glazers will be busy tomorrow.’

O’Keefe nods and leads the way to the door. ‘We’ll need to talk about that money, Albert. There’s nothing but trouble in that bag and we’ve had our share of it lately. We won’t keep getting lucky.’

Just Albert follows O’Keefe out into the hall, holding the bag by the straps in one hand, the newly acquired Colt 1914 in the other.