‘
Don’t
,’ she whispered. ‘
Please. I don’t care about you . . . I don’t care about the drugs . . .
’
But O’Callaghan wasn’t listening. He made a flame, then touched the dog bowl.
The fuel, whatever it was, didn’t erupt. It ignited gently – a blue and orange flame that grew no higher than six inches. But that was high enough. It started to singe the skin on the side of Siobhan’s naked left leg. She gasped and gritted her teeth. ‘
Put it out
,’ she begged, just as the acrid stench of her own burning flesh reached her nose.
O’Callaghan just looked on without expression.
‘Please . . .’
The skin was fizzing and blistering. She could hear it.
‘
Please . . .
’
‘I don’t think so, lass—’ O’Callaghan started to say, but he didn’t finish his sentence. Siobhan had started screaming. The voice didn’t even sound like hers. More like that of an animal. And once it started, a little part of her mind wondered if it would ever stop.
The second scream Jack heard was worse than the first. A million times worse. He knew what pain sounded like, and that was it. It continued for more than a minute.
He was on the A7 now, only five miles from Crossgar, tipping 100 with his heart in his throat. He told himself that the scream meant that at least she hadn’t been killed outright.
Yet.
That wasn’t much consolation.
It was all he could do to stop himself from shouting out too, in panic and frustration. In fear at the thought of what was happening to Siobhan.
He kept his foot on the accelerator, and his gaze on the road.
Siobhan had never known agony like it. Vaguely, she was aware that O’Callaghan had thrown his heavy overcoat over the flames to extinguish them; that she’d stopped screaming, and that noise had been replaced by short, desperate gasps of hyperventilating pain.
‘What do you have on me?’ O’Callaghan demanded. He seemed quite unmoved by her agony.
Siobhan clenched her teeth. She wished she was stronger, that she could withstand this. But she knew she couldn’t. She knew she didn’t have any option other than to talk.
‘Khan,’ she breathed. ‘I know about Khan. I followed him.’ As she spoke, she was looking at O’Callaghan, and she saw an expression of surprise pass over his lined face. ‘He’s got my daughter. He’s a terrorist.’ Even through her pain, she knew it sounded feeble.
‘It’s my experience,’ O’Callaghan hissed, ‘that one man’s terrorist is another man’s—’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Siobhan interrupted. ‘He’s got a chemical weapon, a dirty bomb, enough to kill thousands. I don’t know what his target is. I don’t even know which country, but . . .’
She couldn’t speak any more. It was just too much. The nausea was almost as bad as the pain in her leg and she thought she was going to vomit. O’Callaghan, though, looked almost thoughtful, as though this new piece of intelligence had explained something to him.
He narrowed his eyes. Contemplation. The sound of Siobhan’s renewed gasping filled the air.
Cormac O’Callaghan turned back to her. His eyes, suddenly, were fierce. Fiery. He aimed his shotgun at Siobhan’s pelvis and inclined his head slightly like a man curious to observe the effects of what he was about to do.
‘Where is Khan now?’
‘I don’t know.’
It wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. Or maybe it was.
Without another second’s hesitation he put a flame to the dog bowl again.
When the screams returned, they pierced Jack’s core.
The hedgerow whizzed past him in a blur. He passed a car coming in the other direction that was forced to swerve into a ditch. Jack didn’t care. Horrific images had filled his head. He pushed them away. There was no space for them. He had to concentrate on what was important. Getting there quickly.
Getting there in time . . .
Cormac O’Callaghan deadened the flames again. He had long grown immune to the sight and sound of people suffering. He knew of his reputation, of course – that he enjoyed inflicting pain – and was perfectly happy to foster it. But the truth was he felt nothing. As a younger man he had done terrible things to people, more to see if he could stir up some sort of feeling in himself than anything else. It never did.
So it was that the sight of this naked, burned, brutalised cop failed to move him; her screams, growing increasingly hoarse by the minute, barely attracted his attention; the stink of her burning skin and her blood failed to nauseate him. It would have been the same even if his mind hadn’t been on other things.
Like Khan.
For months now, he’d been wondering why the man had been supplying him with high-quality heroin at such a low rate. Truth was, Habib Khan could have named his price and O’Callaghan would most likely have paid it. There had to be an ulterior motive, and Cormac wasn’t so stupid that he didn’t realise Khan’s ‘additional’ packages, smuggled in on the southern Irish coast, over the border into Northern Ireland then across to the mainland by sea, were something to do with it. But what the pig had just told him made the pennies drop . . .
He turned back to look at her. She was a mess, no two ways about it. Strapped to that post, with flames licking up her legs and hair straggling over her agonised face, she reminded him of figures he had seen as a child, etched on the stained-glass windows of the churches his mother had dragged him to on Sundays. The young Cormac had never known who those figures represented, and as an adult he’d never been inclined to find out.
Khan was a clever guy. Everyone thought he was a goody-fucking-two-shoes, and Cormac had always assumed that this was just a front for his drug business. If what the cop was saying was right, though, he had bigger interests.
Bigger plans.
It didn’t matter to Cormac O’Callaghan what they were. His only concern was that the drugs kept coming. And if this pig was on Khan’s case, if she had something on him . . . well then, she was a threat to Cormac’s business. To his livelihood.
And that wasn’t something he could allow to continue.
She was murmuring something. At first he tried to work out what it was. Perhaps it was of interest. He thought he caught a single word.
‘Lily’, maybe.
He smiled. The woman had said Khan had her daughter and a face rose in his mind: pale, thin, with greasy mousy hair and black rings round her eyes. Khan had wanted a girl when they first met, and O’Callaghan of all people was in a position to supply him with one of the helpless junkies that littered the streets of Belfast. Her name had been Lily.
He walked up to the whimpering woman and put his lips to her ears. ‘She’s all fucked up,’ he whispered. ‘And I mean that literally.’
The woman tried to say something, but the words didn’t come. She was clearly on the way out.
There was no point prolonging it. She needed to be dead. He retrieved his gun from the floor, then placed it against her head. He looked away, not because he was disgusted, but to avoid the spatter.
And then he fired.
At the sound of the gunshot, the pigeons in the rafters flocked up in a cloud yet again.
24
Jack saw Siobhan’s car thirty metres up ahead; and beyond it, the barn. He stopped the car and approached by foot, running quickly but quietly, driven by panic, past an old tractor and up to the big main barn, where he stopped by the half-open door, mastered his heavy breathing, and peered inside.
He would never, he knew, be able to forget the scene that awaited him.
There was a body on the floor away to his right. Impossible to tell who it was, but he was male and still had a half-smoked cigarette in his hand. Along one side of the barn, against some hay bales and with his back to him, was another man, stooping slightly as he put something into a small bag. But it was neither of these two people that commanded Jack’s attention. His eyes were glued to the horror in the centre of the barn.
Siobhan was tied naked to a post. At least, he thought it was Siobhan. Half her head was blown away, and her legs were charred and blistered. Her skin was spattered with blood and although her body was still upright, it had the appalling limpness of the newly dead.
Jack felt his strength momentarily desert him. The world seemed to spin, and as he pressed his back up against the outside wall of the barn he struggled to keep his balance. He drew a deep breath, steadying himself, absorbing the shock like a boxer taking a punch.
And then he felt all his emotions turn to anger. More than anger. A kind of blind, all-consuming rage that filled every cell of his body. All self-control left him. He turned into the doorway and burst into the barn.
By now the stooped figure had turned. He was a thin-looking man with a deeply lined face, a full head of hair, unruly eyebrows and a scar leading from the side of his mouth across one cheek. Jack knew the face. It was imprinted on his mind from his time in the Province, the result of having studied any number of photographs of the fucker back in the days of the Provisional IRA. He looked older now, of course, but there was no doubt in Jack’s mind that this was Cormac O’Callaghan himself.
When O’Callaghan saw Jack, his eyes widened, and he tried to open the bag he was carrying. But he didn’t have nearly enough time as the Regiment man bore down on him like a tank, covering the ten metres between them in a second. Jack grabbed him by the neck, then threw him to the ground with a single, brutal thrust.
For an old guy, O’Callaghan scrambled to his feet remarkably quickly, and rather than try to get away from Jack, he continued to fumble with the zip of his bag. Jack went for it, launching himself at his enemy again, swiping the bag from his hands and then cracking it against the side of the man’s skull. The hard metal of the concealed sawn-off knocked O’Callaghan to the ground for a second time, creating a red welt on the side of his face. He didn’t move. Unconscious. How long for, it was impossible to tell.
Jack opened the bag. Inside he found the shotgun, the cross-bolt safety in front of its trigger switched on. He knocked it off, but then looked around him. Two bodies. Two shots. If there were cartridges in the weapon, they’d both been spent. He turned it round, held on to the barrel and started pummelling O’Callaghan’s unconscious body with the butt. He was going to kill the bastard right now.
But something stopped him.
Jack looked over his shoulder, and the sight of Siobhan’s trussed-up corpse was once more like a corkscrew in his stomach. Jesus, he’d seen enough deaths in his time, but this was different.
He turned back to O’Callaghan, ready to finish him off.
But he stopped again. It was almost as if there was a presence in the room. Siobhan, holding him back. What would she tell him to do? Avenge her? No. She’d want to question him. Find out what he knew.
Do it, Jack.
He could almost hear her voice in his head.
Work it properly. Find Lily. For me.
He strode up to O’Callaghan and booted him hard in the stomach to keep him out of action a while longer. He walked up to Siobhan and quickly untied her, carefully laying her body on the ground. Only then did he return to O’Callaghan, dragging him to another of the posts, forcing him up on to two feet and then tying him up in just the same way that Siobhan had been bound. O’Callaghan was conscious now and he tried to struggle – but he was no match for Jack’s strength, or his fury, or his determination.
No match at all.
When he was bound and immobile, Jack stood with his face only inches away from O’Callaghan.
‘Here’s the problem, O’Callaghan,’ he growled. ‘I don’t think you’re nearly scared enough of me yet, so we’re going to do something to make that change.’
Cormac didn’t reply, but the wildness behind his eyes was eloquent enough.
Jack looked around, then jogged to the far end of the barn. There was an old tool here, some kind of scythe, rusty, with a long wooden handle. He leaned it up against the wall, then brought his foot down against it until the handle snapped. Smaller. More manageable. He carried it back to where his victim was waiting.
O’Callaghan’s eyes darted between Jack’s face and the rusty blade.
‘Which side?’ Jack mused. ‘The left?’ He waved the blade just in front of O’Callaghan’s shoulder. ‘Or the right?’ He moved it to the other side of his body. ‘Left or right?’ he murmured to himself. ‘Left or right?’
A pause. And then, suddenly . . .
‘I’d say,
left
.’
Jack’s arm moved quickly and with great force. He skewered the old blade into the area between O’Callaghan’s left shoulder and his torso. O’Callaghan shrieked with agony, even more so when Jack twisted the blade like he was rotating a spit. There wasn’t much blood, but there would be if he removed the blade, and Jack didn’t want the bastard bleeding to death. Not yet.
‘Who killed her?’ he demanded. ‘You or him?’ He indicated the dead male body on the floor.