Redmond was moving forward, coming over to the table. He tilted his head to one side, stared down at her. ‘Am I, though?’ he asked her tauntingly.
‘You’re dead,’ she repeated. ‘I’m drunk, and you’re dead.’
‘Some people are hard to kill,’ said Redmond.
Hadn’t Max said something very like that? And maybe he’d been right. Perhaps Redmond was here, alive.
Or maybe not.
‘You died years ago,’ said Annie. She wanted to believe it. Wanted to know that this was just the drink, summoning up old demons.
‘Oh, the plane crash?’ Redmond’s eyes were mocking. ‘You think I’m that easy to rub out, Mrs Carter? I survived it.’
Just like Orla, Annie thought. She didn’t say it aloud, didn’t dare: she didn’t want to fasten his attention on Orla, on what had happened to her, because then…
Then I’ll be finished.
But it was all right. Because he wasn’t real, she was imagining this, it was OK. Her brain told her it was real, that he looked like a living, breathing man, but her brain was awash with alcohol. The danger here was Rufus, not Redmond.
But he looked so real…
‘And you know what happened, after I survived that crash, Mrs Carter?’ he asked.
His voice was just the same, with that cool southern Irish lilt. Annie shook her head.
‘I decided that Orla and I… ah, it was a painful decision, you know, but I decided that I wasn’t going down the criminal path after that. I knew Orla would, but I didn’t want that. I felt – and this may sound strange to you Mrs Carter,’ he said with a wry half-smile, ‘but I felt I’d been spared for a reason. Orla would never understand that, so I had to keep apart from her. I didn’t want to go down evil ways any more. I wanted to make changes.’
It was a big bloody change all right. Annie looked at this apparition and now she knew it was all in her head. Redmond was evil to his bones; he didn’t have it in him to change.
She stared up at him, the dim light from the lamp hollowing out his cheeks and his eye sockets, giving his pale skin an eerie, skeletal patina. He looked like something otherworldly, something spectral and terrifying. She shivered hard.
Like someone walked over my grave, she thought.
‘And that’s what I did,’ he went on, his eyes burning cold fire into hers. ‘I repented, Mrs Carter. Like you should repent.’
‘Me?’ Annie blurted out.
‘You have blood on your hands,’ he said.
Annie looked down at her hands, clasped there on the table. In the lamp’s glow, for a moment they were red. She drew in a gasp of horror, sickness rising into her throat – she could almost smell