Jim walked past the house, continuing on down the lane, scanning for a parked car hidden in the hedgerow with a Dublin registration plate and two bored figures sat inside, or any movement at all elsewhere in the dark. He saw neither.
Satisfied, he started to double back.
He had never really believed that Eve would be under any kind of police protection. She thought she was looking for an old man who hadn’t felt the urge to kill in nearly two decades, and the Gardaí would assume that an offender who’d got away with what he’d done for this long would want to keep it that way. Jim had been counting on it.
He reached the gates.
Now that his eyes were better adjusted to the dark, he could see that they had changed. Eighteen years ago they’d been cast-iron railings, hanging lopsided, paint peeling off. To open them, all you’d needed to do was reach through and lift the latch. Now they were solid wood, at least two feet taller and firmly locked. And electronic: the buttons on a small keypad glowed green in the dark.
He couldn’t climb over them. Not these days. He was going to have to force his way through the perimeter hedge.
Now was as good a time as any to suit up.
Gloves first. Two sets. White Latex ones, the kind they might use at a hospital. He had chosen these over the standard blue type the Gardaí used, for obvious reasons. He pulled them on and up his arm as far as they would go, which was a couple of inches past the cuffs of his jacket. Then, over them, the black leather set. The double layer restricted his movement somewhat, but it prevented hair-shedding and protected him from fingernails.
He took the same approach to the head. First: a rubber skull cap. He wasn’t entirely sure what it was supposed to be used for; he thought maybe women’s hairdressing. He pulled it down over his forehead and tucked his own hair up underneath it. The black knit mask went on afterwards. He rolled it down, over his face and neck, tucking the hem of it into the collar of his jacket. He adjusted it until it felt comfortable and only revealed his eyes.
He touched a hand to his chest to check for the reassuring bulk of the gun and then went looking for the thinnest section of the hedge.
He pushed his way through it.
It was easier than he’d thought it was going to be: he only had to make a big enough hole to climb through. He landed hard on the ground on the other side, sending a shooting pain through his hip and guaranteeing him a bruise there tomorrow, but he was in. He was on Eve’s property.
From here on in, patience was his greatest asset.
He crouched down with his back against the hedge and held his breath while scanning the area. No sounds. No movement. When he was confident he was the only one out there in the night, he began advancing towards the house.
Up close, he saw that he’d been right: there seemed to be only one light on inside and it was the fixture on the ceiling in the hall.
Combined with the silence, that told him Eve was at home but already in bed.
He walked all the way around the house once, checking each window for signs of life and the walls for an alarm-bell box. He found neither. No motion-activated security light surprised him, and there were no barking or scratching dogs.
Just as he’d hoped.
Jim went to the back door. He fixed the elasticated band of the torch around his head, crouched down until he was at eye-level with the lock and reached up to turn the light on. When a bright spotlight fell on the lock, it was as if eighteen years fell away.
Four people had been asleep in their beds inside this house – or so he had thought.
One of them, it turned out, was awake.
And she would prove to be no victim.
The house in Bally’s Lane had had a conservatory door that wouldn’t lock. The girl in Covent Court habitually forgot that closing her front door wasn’t the same as locking it. Fermoy was a building site with people coming and going all the time. But this house and the one in Westpark had required a homemade bump-key to get Jim past their backdoor locks.
Tonight he had a new toy.
Jim reached a hand into his pocket and carefully withdrew the pick-gun. It looked like a silver electric toothbrush with a long, thin needle instead of a brush head. He’d taped a picking needle to its handle with masking tape, which he pulled off now.
He’d bought it a few years back just because he thought it’d be a handy thing to have around. Tonight, it would be the most important part of his kit.
Moving quickly and quietly, Jim slid the picking needle into the lock on the back door, then pushed the pick-gun’s needle in after it. There was a knack to this – he had to move them around until he got the tension just right – and the gun made a mechanical clicking noise, but it was so much better than his old bump key. Within seconds, the door was unlocked.
Jim switched off the head torch and held his breath, listening.
Nothing.
He stowed the pick-gun and needle, depressed the handle of the back door and slowly pushed it open. It happened silently, with no creak or whine from the hinges.
He stepped inside, into the darkness of the kitchen.
The air was still. The light in the hall was just detectable through the gap between the kitchen door and its frame. As his eyes adjusted to the dim, he could see that very little had changed. There appeared to be fewer items of furniture in here now, fewer things, but the layout was the same.
Jim crossed the kitchen, opened the door and stepped into the hall. The front door faced him now, at the other end of it. He could see that since he’d been here last, a second dead bolt had been added to it along with a safety chain.
Two doors led off the hall, one on either side. Both were standing slightly ajar. The living room was to the left, the study to the right.
Jim took three steps forward and turned to look up the stairs.
He had been standing in this very spot on that night eighteen years ago when it happened.
The moment that had changed everything.
When he’d looked up these stairs back then, he’d seen a ghostly little figure standing at the top, looking down at the broken body lying splayed across the bottom steps.
‘Dad ...?’ she’d said.
Quietly. Uncertainly. As if she were confused about what was happening in the house.
About what had just happened, moments before.
Jim had been confused, too. He had come downstairs, leaving – he thought – the man a floor above, secured and waiting, and the other little girl hiding in a bathroom whose door he’d easily be able to kick open when it came time. But then he’d heard a noise and returned to the hallway just in time to see it happen.
A little figure on the landing, running with arms outstretched.
An adult body tumbling down the stairs.
Coming to rest at the end of it.
Silence.
It was the man. The blue rope Jim had bound him with was still tying his wrists and ankles, but he had somehow slipped the one that had tied him to the radiator. The arrangement of his limbs seemed utterly incompatible with life but just to be sure, Jim bent down to put an ear close to the man’s lips, to listen for the sounds of his breath or even to feel the weak tickle of it.
There was nothing. He was dead.
Jim looked up, to the girl at the top of the stairs. Her eyes were on the man’s body.
‘Dad ..?’
Then her gaze lifted and she looked right at him.
At Jim.
Who realised then that he wasn’t wearing his mask.