All dark grey slate and cool lighting. Happy young people walked here and there, sat and drank coffee, chatted and laughed. None of them lying bleeding, their heads smashed beyond recognition. The image would not leave Ida. Rea at the top step, the life spilled out of her. Flanagan entered the co...
They were waiting for him at the hostel when the van dropped him and the others off at the end of the day’s work. Serena Flanagan wasn’t there; instead, it was the younger policewoman, the one who had stood at the door and taken notes the night before. Her and two policemen in uniforms. She said ...
The twenty-first century belonged to men like McGinty and his nose for a headline. Thus, as his sixties edged towards his seventies, the Bull seemed content to retire and let McGinty and his political colleagues take the reins. Apparently not, Campbell thought. McGinty and O’Kane were two s...
Its surface rippled as the last drops hit. He dipped his hand below the surface. Cold. He stood up from the edge of the bathtub and turned out the light. There was just enough room behind the door for him to stand unseen.How long could he stand in one place? The longest had been almost four hours...
Not as a boy, and certainly not as a man. Even as a student, duelling with sabres at the University of Vienna, his padded tunic stained deep red, he had fought on long after others had conceded. He recalled a photograph, his smile broad and bloodied alongside those of his brethren, a tankard of b...
She coughed, but couldn’t expel the towel from her mouth. For a few moments she thought she might vomit, and the idea of choking here in this cellar terrified her as much as anything she had experienced in the previous twenty-four hours. She forced herself to breathe deep through her nose, lettin...
She recognised the male as she watched him approach through her living room window. He had been with Flanagan, seemed to be an assistant of some kind, but she couldn’t recall his name. A younger policewoman followed him, a uniformed officer, sturdy, broad at the hips, but pretty enough in her own...