Ruthless - [19]

18

Don was still on his tail through Spain. Rufus was pursued into Italy, then Switzerland. He started to know how a fox must feel, with the hounds baying at its heels. He was being chased by an implacable enemy, and despair began to eat into him.

Rufus became paranoid, jumping at shadows, seeing danger everywhere. He took a plane to Tenerife and worked the clubs along the Playa de las Americas for a while. He chilled – or tried to – in Bobby’s Bar, drinking pina coladas, touring, lying in the sun on black volcanic ash, sometimes almost choking on the red dust that blew over from the Sahara. Maybe that was the place he should head for next – Africa. Get some mercenary work; there was always trouble there.

Then one of his bouncer mates pulled him to one side. ‘Rufus, I’ve heard something…’

And there went Tenerife. The man told him that Don and a contingent of hard boys were sitting in Dublin airport ready to come and get him.

Don was never going to give up on this. Three, four, five near misses, and now Rufus was feeling truly desperate. And Christ, how he missed Ireland, his own true home. What the hell. Feck it. Don could find him anywhere, that much was obvious. So let him find him there, if he could.

Not wanting to go within a mile of his mother, the whining old cow, he went to the farm, the place by the Shannon where he’d played as a teenager with his cousins. Fatalism gripped him now. He’d given up caring whether he got caught; he couldn’t run forever. He was tired, exhausted from it all. Rory’d been right: Don was never going to let this go. So to hell with it. Let him do his worst.

As a boy, he’d visited the farm as a poor relation. Now, as a man, he supposed he still was. He stood on the drive and looked at the big imposing stone building, the same way he had all those years ago.

‘It’s the proceeds of crime,’ his mother had sneered whenever she and her husband and son were invited there. His mother claimed that her high-and-mighty brother Davey’s branch of the family thought their poorer relatives beneath them. But Rufus suspected that she, with her make-do-and-mend life, was merely jealous of the material wealth they so obviously enjoyed, and it stuck in her craw to see it.

Once, Rufus’s father had been given a chance to join the family firm, but Mother had shouted the old man down, the way she always did. As a result, they remained poor, and she remained stubbornly and stupidly resentful of anyone who wasn’t in the same boat. ‘Talk about ill-gotten gains,’ she’d say. ‘It’s all robbed from London fellas, that place of theirs.’

But Rufus’s memories of his visits to the farm were sweet. Mostly, they centred on his cousin Orla. He had never got on with Tory or Pat; they were ham-fisted thugs without finesse. Brutality came naturally to them, and they’d pushed and shoved and bullied the younger members of their family – Orla, her twin Redmond and the baby of the clan, Kieron – mercilessly.

Rufus might look like a wild man, but at least he had some sensibilities. The Jesuit fathers had raised him, instilled a little common decency – something that was completely lacking in Tory and Pat.

He carried on walking up the great sweeping drive towards the house, the vision of Orla as she had been that long-ago summer’s day when he’d kissed her in the garden filling his mind. Sadness gripped him. She was lost to him, lost forever. Dead and gone.

He thought of her, as beautiful as any Dante Rossetti painting, with her lustrously tumbling auburn hair and her fine white skin. Her eyes, green as emeralds, always with that sad shuttered look about them.

Keep out, those eyes told the world around her. Don’t come near.

He remembered her so well. Wished he could have seen her again, got to know her better. They had shared one illicit kiss, one juvenile embrace. He remembered how madly excited he’d been, he’d loved her with a kind of desperation. She, on the other hand, had kissed him close-mouthed, her jaw tense. Her neck under his hand had trembled and strained, and she had broken free as soon as she could.

He’d been hurt by her reticence. He’d thought his affection was returned. But no, obviously not. She’d looked at him as if he was a monster, and run off.

He’d never kissed her again.

He would have liked to show her Paris, the City of Light, the Eiffel Tower all a-sparkle. Forget Don and all that shit. But now… now it was too late. He would never get the chance.

It was a bright sunny day, the river gleaming, the morning mist burned away by the sun. The farmhouse loomed ahead of him. He noticed that the grounds were no longer manicured, the way they’d been in the glory days when the Delaneys ruled the London underworld and the coffers overflowed. Some of the stonework was crumbling away, the paintwork was peeling. And no scaffolding up, no sign of repairs underway.

He went to the door. That was the same, though the oak had been stained to grey by the passing years. Rufus yanked the chain, and heard the bell ring in the bowels of the place. He waited. Finally, he rang again. There was no movement from within; no dogs barked; no hurrying footsteps approached.