Dead Man's Time (8 page)

The interior of the car smelled of leather and stale cigar smoke.

‘What the—?’

‘I’m sorry. I truly am. You have to believe me. I don’t like hurting people.’ Then he gripped the man’s left thigh, trapping the nerve. Moore screamed and writhed
in so much agony he was unable to speak.

‘I’m sorry. Don’t know my own strength.’

Moments later, Moore felt his phone being removed from his pocket.

‘Hey!’

The Apologist was six foot seven inches tall and weighed three hundred and forty pounds, most of which was muscle, and not much of which was brain. The last time he had been in prison,
he’d thrown a full-size fridge up two flights of stairs. Because he was angry. It wasn’t good to be around him when he got angry.

Moore was panting and sweating. In the glare of oncoming headlights, he saw the man’s face above him. He looked almost Neanderthal, his high forehead capped with a fringe like a
monk’s tonsure. ‘What do you want?’ he gasped. All he could see of the driver in front of them was shaggy hair beneath a chauffeur’s cap.

‘Nothing,’ the Apologist replied. ‘I’m just doing my job. It’s not a nice job. I need the code for your phone.’

Moore screwed his eyes up in agony. The car was turning left. More streetlights flashed past. ‘You’ve made a mistake. I think you want someone else.’

The Apologist squeezed his leg, making Moore scream again. ‘Please trust me, I haven’t. I haven’t made a mistake. You’ll have to trust me on that. I need the
code.’

Now the car was turning left again. ‘Where – where are we going?’ Ricky Moore gasped, both in agony and terror.

‘I’m sorry,’ the Apologist said. ‘I can’t tell you. You have to believe me. I’m truly sorry.’

He noticed for the first time music playing. A choral sound. ‘Ode To Joy’, although he didn’t know its name, nor did he appreciate the irony. Classical music wasn’t his
thing. It sounded sinister and creepy. He saw the tail lights of a vehicle ahead, through the windscreen. They seemed to be following it along a dark country lane.

Then he felt the vice-like grip on his left thigh again.

‘Stop!’ he screamed.

But the grip kept tightening.

‘I’m sorry,’ the Apologist said, ‘but I have to make sure you don’t try to run away. I’m sorry if I’m hurting you, I really am. The gentleman who wants
to see you won’t be nearly as gentle. Trust me. Now the code, please.’

Moore gave him the four digits. He saw his captor tap them in and the display came alive.

The vehicle in front, a Range Rover, halted and the Mercedes stopped behind it. A man walked up to the rear window, and Ricky Moore became increasingly afraid. He heard the window go down, felt
the cool breeze on his face, smelled freshly mown grass, heard the rumble of the Range Rover’s engine. He saw his iPhone being passed through the window, then it closed again.

‘Hey! I want that back,’ he said.

His captor said nothing. Several minutes passed. The Range Rover remained static in front of them. Then, suddenly, it drove off. The Mercedes followed.

‘My phone!’ Ricky Moore said.

The Apologist squeezed his thigh again, even harder, and he shouted out in pain, anger and fear.

‘Sorry.’

A half-smoked cigar, with undisturbed ash on the end, lay in the large glass ashtray, beside a crystal tumbler of Midleton whiskey, Gavin Daly’s regular tipple, for which
he paid £267 a bottle. The thought of what the rare Irish whiskey cost gave him even more pleasure than the taste. It meant there was a little bit less of his fortune for his idiot,
debt-ridden son, Lucas, to get his hands on after he was gone, although he had no problem leaving it to his sister’s granddaughter and family. But at this moment, for one of the few times in
his adult life, his son was proving useful.

Dressed in his blue smoking jacket, Daly was seated at his wide, leather-topped desk in the study of his magnificent Palladian mansion, ten miles north-east of Brighton, blinking away tears.
Trying to occupy his mind by focusing on the rare J. J. Elliott clock he was checking for a client before freighting it later this week to an important auction in New York, while he waited for some
of the people he had phoned today to call him back.

There were only a limited number of dealers in the world who handled really high-end vintage clocks and watches. Most of them were straight, but over the years he’d had a good relationship
with the straight ones and the crooked ones. He’d put the word out and reckoned there was a strong chance that if any were approached by someone trying to sell his father’s watch, most
of them would phone him.

Although he was ninety-five, he had never really retired, just gradually wound down over the years. Even now he still kept an eye on the shop that bore his name in the Brighton Lanes, despairing
because his son was letting the business slide away. Not that he really cared, he had more than enough money to see out his days in the style in which he liked to live. And he still had a few
clients whom he advised on timepieces, and for whom he sometimes bought and sold, such as this clock he was selling for a wealthy English collector, which kept him occupied.

His chest pains from angina, becoming increasingly frequent now, were returning. His doctor had told him to stop drinking and smoking, but what the hell did it matter? He popped a nitroglycerin
tablet under his tongue, waited until it had dissolved, then relit his cigar. He’d always had an eye for fine craftsmanship, and this clock was a particular beauty. Its square case, with its
fine marquetry and gold inlay, was a masterpiece of carving, and its movement, with a single hammer to strike its large brass gong, was exquisite. It would never tell the time as accurately as one
of today’s quartz watches you could buy for a few quid, but that was not the point.

He made a small adjustment to the length of the pendulum, then put his tools down. He was tired, and his mind was all over the place. He’d barely slept a wink last night; he just felt sick
all the time. Sick with grief. And now he felt utterly alone in the world.

He had everything. This beautiful house, a staffed villa on Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, more money than he could ever spend, and none of it mattered; that was the damned irony. He stared
bleakly out through the sash window into the darkness. All around him in the oak-panelled room were reminders of his past. The black-and-white photograph of his stern, deeply religious maiden aunt,
Oonagh, who had raised him and his sister. Next to her was a row of framed photographs of his father, Brendan Daly.

One, a youthful picture, showed the big guy striding towards the camera, wearing a three-piece suit, white shirt, black tie and a boater at a jaunty angle; he was flanked by two of his White
Hand Gang cohorts, Mick Pollock – later known as Pegleg Pollock after he lost a leg to gangrene following a shooting incident – and Aiden Boyle. Two of the men whose names were written
on the reverse of the front page of the
Daily News
from February 1922, in which the shooting of his mother and the abduction of his father was the headline story. The paper he had been
given all those years back by the messenger boy on Pier 54.

Next to that was a photograph of his father in bathing trunks, on Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach. He was grinning, his jet-black hair tousled, a chain with a silver rabbit hung around his neck.
The chain had belonged to Gavin’s grandfather, his aunt had once told him; he had been one of the lieutenants in the New York Irish Mafia’s Dead Rabbits Gang in the 1880s. Another photo
showed his father, sharply dressed, wearing a Derby.

He heard a knock, then the door behind him opened. It was Betty, his faithful housekeeper, only a few years junior to himself. ‘You’ve not touched your supper, Mr Daly,’ she
chided.

He raised a hand in acknowledgement, without turning around.

‘I’m clearing up,’ she said. ‘Would you like a hot drink or anything before I go to bed?’

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I’m expecting visitors, but I’ll see them in.’

She wished him goodnight and closed the door.

The house felt gloomy and lonely since his second wife, Ruth, had died. In front of him sat a framed photograph taken way back when she was in her late-thirties and he was in his mid-fifties.
The two of them on a terrace in the South of France, with the flat blue Mediterranean Sea behind them. She had been a red-haired beauty then; Irish, like his first wife Sinead; but unlike Sinead
she had been faithful, he was certain, for all the time they were together. Sinead, his son’s mother, had died of an overdose of barbiturates after years of addiction to booze and affairs. He
did not have her photograph anywhere in his home. Lucas, his son, was a bitter enough reminder of her.

Lucas had tried for some time to persuade him to think about moving into sheltered accommodation, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He loved this place and remembered thinking, when he had
bought it all those decades ago, how proud his dad would have been of him. To be sure, he hadn’t made all his money honestly, but then who in the antiques world had? He’d been a player
in the Brighton antiques ring, rigging prices at auction, and once – something that still made him smile – at a big country-house auction he had even locked a big London dealer in the
lavatory to prevent him from bidding against him.

On another occasion, many years before satellite navigation had come in, he and his ring of Brighton antiques dealers had altered all the road signs the night before one of the largest
country-house auctions in the county, so that none of the major London dealers had been able to find the place.

He glanced up, impatiently now, at the CCTV screen showing the front of the house and the driveway, waiting for his son’s black Range Rover to appear. Lucas had inherited some of his
mother’s bad genes. He was a lousy son, a school dropout who had failed to maintain the family business, and who had on several occasions narrowly avoided doing time both for violence and for
drug dealing. Gavin felt sorry for his son’s wife, who was a decent person and, in his view, deserved someone better.

He drank some more whiskey, then puffed his cigar back to life and stared around the room where he used to bring his most important customers, and where he now spent most of his time these days.
It was designed to impress, to give the air of a learned man of culture, an aristocrat who was no more than a curator of all he had inherited from his ancestors and would one day pass on to his
heirs.

Except Gavin Daly had inherited nothing. Every item in this room, just as with almost everything in this fine house, he had bought, with great care, with the sole intention of impressing others
like him, who were prepared to spend vast sums on antiques to line their grand homes in America, Japan and more recently China, to give the impression they were privileged people of taste.

There were two large, studded red-leather chesterfields. On Doric plinths stood busts of some of his past great fellow countrymen – Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats,
J. M. Synge, James Joyce and T. E. Lawrence, whose father had been an Irishman, and whose writings he admired. Wall-to-wall bookcases lined with leather-bound tomes. In daylight, the window looked
out on a view, framed by a line of Italian cypresses, of acres of lush gardens, an ornamental lake fringed by statues, and the distant rolling hills of the South Downs.

He removed from his desk drawer a crimson, leather-bound book and opened it. It contained a yellowed, decaying front page of the
New York Daily News
from February 1922, protected in a
clear plastic envelope.

There had not been a day in his life when he had not looked at this page of the newspaper, and at the names and numbers on the reverse. Four names that filled him with knuckle-clenching hatred
every time he saw them.

Fergal Kilpatrick. Mick Pollock. Aiden Boyle. Cillian Cregan.

The men who, the police had told his aunt, had entered his parents’ house, entered his bedroom, shone torches at him. Filled his bedroom with the stench of their booze and sweat.

The men who had shot his mother dead and taken his pa away.

All of them long dead. But that knowledge gave him no comfort, no satisfaction. Just regret. A deep regret that he had never returned to America years ago and gone looking for those who were
still alive. And now it was too late.

He had often googled them. All their names were there, lieutenants of ‘Wild Bill’ Lovett, who had taken control of the White Hand Gang, which controlled the waterfronts of Manhattan
and Brooklyn after the murders of the gang’s leader, Dinny Meehan, and subsequently his next in line, Brendan Daly.

His father.

He had long studied the photographs of their hateful faces that came up on his computer. Pegleg Pollock had been the first to die, shot dead in a bar in a turf war, his killers never
identified.

The other three had vanished, faded into the mists of time. Their surnames popped up, meaninglessly, on his internet searches, along with Daly countless times.

Your old men shall dream dreams; your young men shall see visions.

His aunt, who brought him and his sister back to Ireland, had a deep faith. She had read them passages from the Bible daily on that voyage from New York, and every night of their childhood
outside Dublin.

He’d never had any truck with religion, but the book of Joel had been right in that one passage. He’d had plenty of visions as a young man. And now all he had were his dreams. He
looked up at the bust of the handsome, equine face of Lawrence of Arabia. There was a quote from that great man’s book,
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, that had been his mantra throughout
life.

He had always been a dreamer of the day. But now he realized that maybe he had only been a sleepwalker. He was ninety-five years old and he had failed to keep the biggest, most important promise
he had made in his life. A promise he had made standing on the stern of the
Mauretania
, as a small boy, all those decades ago.