Page 39 of 56 Days
They leave the warm glow of the hotel and push their way through the revolving doors into the night.
“Can we get a cab?” he asks the doorman, a different one from before.
He steals a glance at Ciara’s face but there seems to be no reaction to this at all.
The doorman steps into the street and waves at something unseen around the corner. A beam of headlights lights up his lower half, and then a cab backs up to the door. Before the doorman can do it, Oliver steps forward and opens the back door, motioning for Ciara to get in.
She gives him a little smile of gratitude as she does, but her face falls when he closes the door and makes no move to walk around to the other side.
He leans down, one hand on the roof, until his face is level with hers.
“I’m gonna walk home,” he lies.
“Oh.” She seems to deflate with disappointment. “Sure. Right.”
“Are you around Thursday evening?” he asks. “We could actually go see the film this time.”
He has no intention of seeing her ever again. But the invitation will makethismoment more comfortable and that’s all he can think about right now: extricating himself from this with as little friction as possible.
She nods, smiles briefly. “Yeah.”
“I’ll text you.”
“Okay. Great.”
“Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
He closes the door and moves to the driver’s open window. He pulls a twenty from his pocket and drops it through, onto the seat. The driver frowns at it, then looks up at him in question. He waves a hand to signal to him that he’s not getting in. The driver shrugs and moves to release the handbrake.
Oliver gives Ciara a wave as the car moves off.
He thinks he’s been lucky, in a way. Her saying that thing about secrets pulled him out of... whatever he was in earlier in the evening. A false sense of security. Complacency. Under some kind of spell.
He’d been enjoying himself, that was the problem. Enjoyingher.
He starts for Grafton Street; he’ll get his own cab. They could’ve shared one, really, but he’s not sure where she lives and he couldn’t risk revealing his address to her.
There’s losing the run of himself for half an hour and then there’s doing something so monumentally stupid it might force him to start all over again.
Again.
Today
The street outside the main entrance to the Crossings has begun to buzz with activity. Lee’s reinforcements have arrived, along with the Technical Bureau—she can see ascenes-of-crime officer unloading equipment from the back of the van, and Tom Searson, one of the deputy state pathologists, suiting up nearby. She waves at him; he waves back. Strips ofblue-and-white Garda tape flap in the breeze, the ends knotted around railings and lampposts and traffic cones. Uniforms mill about in shirtsleeves, despite the fresh chill of this early morning sun. There are a couple of rubberneckers standing with their arms folded across the road, but no press yet. Although with all this out here and nothing else going on anywhere in the country except for the nightly roll call of death from the Department of Health, it’s surely just a matter of time before they arrive.
She’s surprised to find that Garda Michael Creedon has been appointed chiefclipboard-wielderof the outer cordon—a nice, clean gig with a mirage of authority—and she feels a warm ripple of pride at the idea that Karl might have done something nice and that it happened because he’d actually listened to her.
Or, her prayer worked.
Michael is talking to another uniform; when Lee gets close, she recognizes him. It’s Declan, mask hanging around his neck now, looking considerably less gray than the last time they met. She nods at him as she ducks under the tape and then, just as she turns her head away, catches the two of them exchanging looks. Blink and you’d miss it—literally—but its content may as well be written on their faces.
Michael:Tell her.
Declan:Fuck that,shut up.
She stops a few feet away and beckons Declan with a jerk of her head. There’s another silent conversation before he obeys.
