He’d lost them. For a moment there he’d thought he was a dead man, yet here he was, still in one piece.
God be praised.
Rufus staggered to his feet, opened the door and ran in the opposite direction to the one the men had taken. He was finished here. There was no one he could truly count on any more, not even his oldest and dearest friend.
It was time to get out of Ireland. Try his luck across the water in England. He had cousins there, they were big news in criminal circles. Best of all, Don wouldn’t have such an easy time tracing him there, as he’d managed to do here.
Rufus found that London was ripe for the plucking. There were all sorts of scams going down. The big gangs had the town sewn up tight, there was always breaker work on offer, sooner or later everyone needed some muscle at their disposal. But when he went looking for his Delaney cousins, he couldn’t find them.
Only rumours remained. That there had been a shooting and Tory and Pat were long gone. That Kieron was abroad somewhere, no one knew where. And as for the twins, they had gone home to Ireland. The irony of that didn’t escape Rufus. He’d come here, they’d gone there. He’d wanted to see his cousin Orla again. Very badly. And he was disappointed.
The old Delaney manor was now under the control of the Carter mob. Even the tiny bit of Limehouse the rival gangs had been squabbling over for years had fallen into Carter hands. As time went by, he pieced together bits of the story of how that came to be.
‘Christ, it was a right old bang-shoot,’ said Gabby James, one of Rufus’s new drinking buddies. ‘Word is, Redmond and Orla stuck Max Carter’s missus in the bloody crusher – she would’ve been squashed like a grape.’
‘Would have been?’ Rufus was downing a pint of Guinness.
‘The Bill got to her first.’
‘What about Redmond? What about Orla? They’re back in the auld country, are they?’
Gabby puffed out his cheeks and shook his head. ‘I heard they took a plane from Cardiff to Cork, or was it Dublin?’
Rufus thought of the farm in Limerick. ‘Shannon, I would think.’
‘Well, wherever. It never landed.’
‘You what?’ Rufus spilled his Guinness. He’d not had much to do with Redmond, but Orla… ah God, there was something about Orla that had eaten into his very soul.
‘It was in the papers, what, three years ago? Nineteen seventy it was. Where have you been, on the moon? They reckoned the plane crashed in the Irish Sea. No bodies were ever recovered. Not even a scrap of wreckage.’
Rufus stared into his beer, deeply troubled. He couldn’t bear to think of Orla perishing that way, in the icy churning waters.