The Death Collector (50 page)

Mary grabbed Joe round the waist. She tried to wrestle him back, grimacing with effort, but then she remembered the knife Declan had thrown.

She scrambled back for it, and when she had it in her hand, she lunged forward, sinking the blade into Declan’s arm.

He screamed loudly, letting go of Joe, who crawled backwards quickly, breathing hard.

Declan was hanging by one hand, his legs swaying wildly, his injured arm hanging uselessly, blood dripping down. He glanced downwards and swallowed. He looked back to Mary and said, ‘Pull me up, please,’ desperate, pleading.

Mary stood and stared down at him. She gripped the knife in her hand, her lips set tightly in fury.

Joe reached out. ‘No, Mary, don’t.’

Declan looked up again, desperation in his eyes. The tension in his fingers was visible, clasped around the sharp edge on the rock, taking his weight, his right arm useless. ‘Please,’ he said.

Mary stared and didn’t move.

His fingers started to slip, his mouth opening into a scream. Mary shook her head. She wasn’t going to help him.

His fingers slid slowly over the sharp edge. He tried to strike out at the rock with his feet as if he could somehow support himself that way, but it was useless.

Declan screamed as he fell, his body launched into the glare of the headlight beam from below, his limbs splayed. The scream was short-lived, as breath was punched out of his body, his back catching a rock, broken over it.

Joe rushed forward and looked over the edge, sucking in deep breaths. Mary stayed still. She looked down, unmoved.

Joe turned onto his back and let the view of the stars roll over him for a few moments, exhausted and emotional, his arms stretched out, the rock cold on his hands.

Sam turned away and grimaced as Declan Farrell hit the rock, the still air broken by the sound of a loud crack. Then all he could think about was Alice.

He went to his haunches and fought the urge to vomit. He didn’t know if he would ever find her.

Then Gina gripped his arm. ‘There, Sam, look.’

He straightened and followed her gesture. The beam of her phone pointed towards something dark in the wall.

‘There’s some kind of tunnel,’ she said.

Sam wasn’t waiting to find out more. He scrambled over the wall and slid down, landing in the water with a gasp. It was up to his thighs, cold and murky. He started to stride through, slow and exhausting. There was a splash next to him and then a shout. It was Gina, nearly fully submerged, unable to manage her balance as she tried to keep her phone out of the water.

‘Shit!’ she said, as she stood up, and then they both began to wade towards the tunnel entrance.

The faint beam reflected off slimy bricks and the steady stream of water heading downhill. Sam tried to see inside.

‘I can’t see her,’ he said, desperation in his voice. ‘Alice!’

His shout echoed but was competing with the noise of the water. It was a smooth fast stream until further in, where it seemed to bubble up, as if there was some kind of obstruction.

Gina strode ahead of him, pointing the phone to illuminate the way. The tunnel didn’t seem to have an end. She put her hand out to steady herself. The walls were wet and slimy.

‘She’s not in here,’ she said. ‘Farrell wouldn’t bring her down here.’

‘No, down there,’ he said.

Gina shone her beam that way again. ‘What is it?’

‘There’s something in the water, I’m sure of it.’ He started to wade forward again. Gina kept up with him, so that his shadow didn’t block out the light.

‘She can’t be this far down,’ Gina shouted above the roar of the water. ‘We need to get out.’

‘No, I saw something.’ Then he shouted, ‘There!’

There was something there, being tossed around as water poured into the tunnel from a different direction.

‘Alice!’

He started to run, the best he could manage, his movement slowed down. He needed to go faster.

He was crying out, shouting her name. He was going to be too late.

Alice couldn’t see anything. It was too dark. The sound of the rushing water filled her head, her fear just muffled gasps as she fought to breathe through the gag. A few seconds with her head above the water, before the force of it rushing over her shoulders forced her back under, until she was able to find the surface again. Her gag was soaked and kept her mouth from closing properly, so that she coughed up water every time she found some air.

The pain from the cold was subsiding though. She felt warmer inside, but it was unreal, too good, as if she wanted to relax with it.

There wasn’t just the noise of the water with her now. The laughter of her children was loud in her head, the sound of bathtime, splashing and fun. Their smiles, innocent joy, and she could kneel down for them, to kiss them on their foreheads, to say goodnight.

She went under again and the noises became muffled. There was comfort in it somehow, that it would end her terror. She couldn’t find the surface this time but she stopped trying. She let the torrent buffer her and pressed her tongue against the gag to keep out the water. She couldn’t hold on. It seemed almost silent under the surface and she thought of her children one last time. She wanted to say sorry that they would grow up without her. It was getting tighter in her chest, the need for air getting too strong, but she didn’t have the strength to try to reach for it.

She opened her mouth.

The water rushed in past the gag. She coughed as it filled her lungs, but more followed. Her chest pushed outwards but it was no use. This was how it was going to be, but it felt right, natural, euphoric.

She didn’t feel lonely any more. Sam was calling her name, memories fooling her, but she was glad she was with him as she was thrown about by the water, her lungs aching for air. She couldn’t say goodbye without Sam, and he was there, like always. His arms were round her, hugging her, lifting her up, pulling at the gag, his breath in his ear. She was cold, the air freezing as she broke the surface.

Then she coughed, water spewing out. She coughed again as she took a breath, long and painful.

It was over. She was safe.

Joe smiled to himself as he drove along one of the roads around Dublin, making his way from the airport, just a stop-start journey of small retail parks and then past housing estates, the homes small and grey. Mary was sitting next to him, Aidan in the back.

Mary looked intently out of the window, sometimes turning round to look at something that had changed. Aidan was more relaxed, just enjoying his freedom and getting over the shock of his release, granted bail pending his appeal, although the appeal was a formality, everyone knew it. He’d emerged onto the street to the flash of camera bulbs, which was so different to when he went into prison, leaning forward in the small cubicle in the prison van, the image that was used in the papers the following day, the lucky shot of a photographer who had picked the right tinted window to jam his camera against.

Weaver had been dismissed from the Force but had escaped prosecution for conspiring to murder Declan Farrell. The only evidence had come from what amounted to questioning when under suspicion, and he hadn’t been cautioned. He’d made no comment in his police interview and the only other two people who had known about the plot were both silent. Hunter was dead, and as for Declan Farrell himself, a rock broke his fall but his back too, his head taking the rest of the force. He survived, if you could call it that. He couldn’t move or talk, and would spend the rest of his life breathing and eating through tubes.

Even though the court didn’t get hold of Weaver, the employment tribunal did, where the interview rules didn’t apply. He lost everything when he was dismissed. His pension. His wife. His friends. It wasn’t the plot to kill Declan Farrell that cost him. No one cared about Declan Farrell and Weaver would have secretly been a hero to many if he had killed him. No, it was the way that he had helped to bury a seemingly dead colleague and let his widow grieve over his disappearance without knowing the truth.

It became too much for Weaver one night, when he was at the wrong end of a whisky bottle, which was overturned on the floor next to his body and the shotgun that he had jammed into his mouth. He had been dead for more than a month before he was discovered. People didn’t visit him any more.

For Joe, it was all about a new start. His gamble had worked. He had addressed the media with the firm’s name on a board behind him. Honeywells had become the firm to go to when there was a fight to be won. The day-to-day routine stuff still made up his diary, but Joe was receiving a stream of letters from prisons around the country, from people wanting help in being released. Gina was vetting them. Some were hopeless, but others were from prisoners whose campaigns had long since run out of energy. Joe was deciding which ones he would try to bring back to life.

‘It hasn’t changed much around here,’ Mary said, her voice quiet as they entered greener areas and into Raheny, the last major suburb before Dublin slowly petered out towards the small fishing towns like Howth and Portmarnock. Joe noticed that her accent had become a shade stronger ever since he had collected her from the airport. He’d been making a short holiday of it before Mary and Aidan arrived.

‘It’s nice, I like it,’ Joe said.

Mary put her hand on her stomach. ‘I’m so nervous.’ She turned to Aidan, just before Joe made a right turn. ‘That’s where I met your father, in that pub.’ And she pointed at a small building with a black front and gold lettering in the middle of a parade of shops. ‘It was called the Green Dolphin back then, but I bet it has hardly changed.’ She smiled. ‘My daddy used to come and visit me sometimes when I was working, and sit at the front of the pub with the other old guys and watch the horses.’

She went quiet, and Joe didn’t have to look across to know that Mary was trying not to get emotional.

They turned into a road that ran gently towards the sea, a calm blue strip against stretches of green. Houses lined both sides at first, some rendered in concrete and painted pale colours, others with their vivid red brickwork highlighted by thick light mortar. When the houses stopped, the light got brighter and the view ahead opened out into green school fields, the fields that fronted the boys’ school on one side, the girls’ convent school on the other. Mary pointed things out to Aidan as they went – how the old girls’ school had given up some of its field to housing and how some of the old corporation housing had been smartened up.

She stopped talking, though, when they got nearer the sea, driving slowly past stretches of water on either side of the road, where the tide swept in behind the island ahead and where birds floated lazily, towards the slow undulation of grass-covered sand dunes that bordered Dollymount Beach.

Dublin felt far away as Joe turned towards the beach. It was suddenly tranquil, and the steady hum of his tyres was silenced when they drove onto the sand, the slow tumble of the tide just a few yards away. It was just as Mary had described it: an escape, an unexpected oasis on the edge of a capital city.

The beach was quiet. Large rocks lined up along it, placed deliberately to make a breakwater and a small car park. The sea rolled gently onto the sand, a long peaceful strip that fronted the entire island, a three-mile stretch of grass and rolling dunes, with Dublin visible to the south and the gentle rise of the hill over Howth to the north. The thin chimneys of a power station and the high cranes of Dublin port spoilt the view southwards, but it was easy to ignore them and instead feel the gentle coolness of the tide. A man walked a small terrier in the distance, a lone figure against the gentle sway of the water and the hills on the other side of the bay.

The soft breeze blew Joe’s hair as he climbed out of the car, Mary with him. There were tears on her cheeks.

She wiped her face. ‘I spent so much of my childhood down here,’ she said softly. ‘My parents brought us here and we’d play in the dunes, chase each other and fly kites and just enjoy the salt in our eyes.’ She looked around. ‘I miss the sea. I’d forgotten how much it meant to be close by it. I couldn’t think much about it, as memories of this place brought back other memories too. Painful ones.’ Then a glint appeared in her eye. ‘And perhaps some not so painful…⁠’ And she laughed as she blushed.

‘Let’s walk,’ Joe said, grinning, and set off along the beach. Mary was animated as they went, her hands in her coat pockets, turning and looking around, smiling.

‘It’s a nice place,’ Joe said to her. ‘I wouldn’t have expected something like this so close to the city.’

‘Dublin is full of surprises,’ Mary said. ‘It’s not all about the craic.’ She stopped and put her hand on Joe’s arm. ‘Thank you for everything, Joe. I appreciate it, I really do. We both do.’ And she looked towards Aidan, who had walked ahead, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched, as if he was still getting used to the open spaces again.

‘So what now for you?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. I feel a bit lost now that my fight for Aidan is nearly over.’

‘Why don’t you move home?’ Joe said. ‘Rediscover Mary Molloy, the woman you were before you had to fight for everything.’

‘It’s not as easy as that,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot of history here for me. Personal stuff.’

A car pulled onto the beach behind them, next to Joe’s car. No one got out. Then Joe’s phone buzzed in his pocket. When he read the message, he turned round.