Dead Man's Time

It felt wrong to be leaving. He needed to find his pa. But now they were about to sail thousands of miles away. Away from his pa. He did not understand why.

He stared up at tall people. At the cranes and the derricks, and the massive hull of the ship, the Mauretania, with its four fu

Now his aunt Oonagh, whom he barely knew and did not like, was taking them to a new life, she said. A place where they would be safer. To a farm in the countryside where there were chickens, cows, pigs and sheep.

He didn’t want chickens or cows or pigs or sheep. He wanted his pa.

He didn’t want to leave. He was crying. Every few minutes his aunt would dab his eyes with a handkerchief. His sister, who was three years older, clutched her ragged little bear, Mr Stuffykins, under her arm and was silent. The three of them waited, watching an endless procession of people making their ascent up the gangway, some elderly, but most of them young and many with babies and small children. They carried suitcases, packing cases, wooden and cardboard boxes, and sometimes dogs and cats in baskets. Occasionally one of them lugged a piece of furniture. One man he watched was staggering under the weight of a wooden grandfather clock.

None of them noticed the youth, with a cap low over his face, elbowing his way through the crowd behind them. Not until the boy heard his name called out.

He turned. ‘Yes?’

The youth thrust a heavy brown-paper bag into the boy’s hand. ‘I was told to give you this,’ he said. ‘For you and your sister. And to tell you, ‘Watch the numbers!’

‘Excuse me!’ his aunt called out.

But he was already moving away, quickly and furtively.

‘Excuse me!’ she called out louder. ‘Young man, who sent you?’

‘A friend!’ he replied. Then within seconds, like a sinking stone, he was swallowed by the crowd and vanished.

‘Aunt Oonagh, who was that boy?’ his sister, engulfed in a duffel coat too big for her and wearing a bobble hat, asked.

‘Let me see that,’ their aunt said, snatching the bag from the boy’s hand, surprised at how heavy it was. She peered inside it, and frowned. It contained a small black revolver, a broken pocket watch and a folded page from a newspaper.

She removed the paper and opened it carefully. It was the front page of an old copy of the Daily News. The headline was the murder of Brendan Daly’s wife, and the abduction and disappearance of Brendan Daly, chief contender for the role of boss of the White Hand Gang. The children’s parents.

There was a photograph of Daly. A big, handsome, angry-looking guy with a shock of shiny black hair, slicked back, wearing a three-piece suit, with a draped pocket watch chain, a rumpled white shirt and a plain tie, beneath a greatcoat.

Scribbled down the margin in blue ink were four names and twelve numbers.

‘What does it say?’ his sister asked.

His aunt showed it to her, then turned it over. The boy looked too. He couldn’t read what the newspaper said, and he struggled with the names, but he could read the twelve numbers.

9 5 3 7 0 4 0 4 2 4 0 4, the boy read out, slowly. ‘What do they mean?’ he asked.

‘You tell me!’ his aunt said, handing it to him. ‘They were given to you. You tell me.’

It was something important, he knew. It had to be. But he had no idea what.

‘Are they the names of the bad men who took Pa?’ his sister said.

His aunt said nothing.

The boy folded the piece of paper and tucked it carefully into his inside pocket. Then he looked at the gun that his aunt had lifted from the bag and was holding nervously, as if scared it was about to sting or bite her. ‘I should get rid of this,’ she said. ‘It’s a bad thing to have a gun.’ She turned, and started weaving through the crowd towards the edge of the quay. But as she was about to throw it into the water, the boy grabbed her arm.

‘No!’ he said. ‘It may be Pa’s! He might want it back! He might come for it, he might!’ He burst into tears.

She looked down at him and her expression softened. ‘All right, we’ll keep it for the voyage. Just in case your pa’s waiting for us at the other end.’

He nodded eagerly, wiping away his tears with the back of his right hand.

His aunt put the gun into her purse, then removed the watch. It was a man’s gold-case pocket watch, on a chain, with a moon-phase on the dial. The crystal was cracked and the crown slightly buckled. The moon hands were stopped at five minutes past four. He snatched it from her hand and stared at it. ‘Pa’s watch,’ he said. ‘It’s Pa’s.’

There was a long, loud, single blast of the ship’s horn. That and the five gunshots in the night and the screams of his mother were the sounds by which the boy would, for the rest of his life, remember New York.

Together with the image of the watch.

16

2012

In the hushed warm air of the Intensive Care Unit of the Royal Sussex County Hospital, the old man, tired from his flight back from the South of France, sat beside the unconscious woman, holding her frail, veined and liver-spotted hand. Somewhere near he heard the swish of a curtain being pulled.

‘Aileen, I’m here, can you hear me?’

He felt a faint squeeze back. Her silver hair, normally elegantly coiffed, looked ragged and matted. Her face, beneath the bandages, was puffy, bloated, mottled with black and orange bruises, and there were a mass of what he had been told were cigarette burns all around her neck. The patches of her bare flesh that were unmarked were the alabaster colour of a cadaver.

Anger seethed in him. He was thinking about the long journey through life they had both made. To end up like this. He was not a man who often cried, but at this moment, he was crushing tears with his eyelashes.

She had compound and depressed skull fractures, a lesion to the cervical region of her spinal cord, from where someone had stamped on her, which was likely to leave her a paraplegic if she survived, as well as an almost irrelevant – at this stage – fractured right clavicle and fractured pelvis.

Aileen had been in steady decline throughout the day, and although he was still clinging to a desperate, increasingly irrational hope, he was starting to sense a terrible inevitability.

Every few moments he heard the beep-beep-bong of a monitor alarm. He breathed in the smells of sterilizing chemicals, the occasional tang of cologne, and a faint background smell of warm electrical equipment.

She was in the bed, bandaged and wired, endotracheal and nasogastric tubes in her mouth and nostrils. She had a probe in her skull to measure her intracranial pressure, another on one finger, and a forest of IV lines and drains from bags suspended from drip-stands ru

‘Aileen, I’m here with you. It’s Gavin. I’m here.’

Then he saw her lips moving, although he could not hear her voice. He leaned down, close to her lips, but still could hear no sound. He looked back at her.