Dead Man's Time

into the number panel beside the gates. Later he’d entered himself, checked there was no one
watching and no CCTV cameras, and stood in the darkness outside the Grace house, as he liked to call it. He’d watched through the slats in the blinds as Detective Superintendent Grace and his
slut, Cleo, lay curled up on the sofa in front of the television, with the baby monitor beside them.
    Such a cosy scene.
    How sweet would it be for Cleo Morey, Senior Anatomical Pathology Technician at Brighton and Hove Mortuary, to attend the recovery of a baby, suffocated by a plastic bag over its head, from a
rubbish dump? And then find it was her own?
    How symbolic would that be?
    Rubbish father, rubbish baby.
    He liked that image so much. But he also liked the image of Grace coming home to find his beautiful slut permanently disfigured. Acid in her face might teach her not to fraternize with cops.
    Options. He liked having options. You didn’t have much freedom of choice when you were in prison, but free, you had all the options in the world.
    Yes.
    He crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray.
    And now the gates were opening. Someone was walking out. Suited and booted. Detective Superintendent Roy Grace. Looking a bit tired.
    He watched him stride, in the afternoon sunshine, up the road towards the black Alfa Romeo Giulietta in the residents’ parking bay a short distance away.
    He saw the brake lights come on, then the car drive away into the summer afternoon.
    He thought about the pleasure he would get from Detective Superintendent Roy Grace’s suffering.
    Oh yes. The joy of revenge. A dish best eaten cold.
    A cold baby.
    He liked that idea a lot.
    The unit that was for rent was number 4. The Grace House was next door. The adjoining property. Just a few formalities to settle and then, in a week or so’s time, he would become their
next-door neighbour.
    In Roy Grace’s face, for a change, instead of the copper being in his.
    How sweet was that going to be?

15
    New York, 1922
    An icy breeze blew, and sleet was falling, as the small boy stood, with his sister and his stern aunt, amid the huge crowd of people along the wharf at Pier 54. He was
dressed in a long coat, woollen gloves and a tweed cap, and he looked forlorn. The few possessions he owned in the world were crammed into the small leather valise which sat on the ground beside
him. He felt dwarfed by the crowd.
    He was five years old, feeling lost and bewildered – and angry at his aunt. She was taking him and his sister away from his ma and pa. His ma was in the cemetery and she wasn’t
coming home, he understood that much; that she had left for ever. She had gone to another place. She was in Heaven.
    But his pa might come home at any time. He wanted to wait, but his aunt wouldn’t let him. His pa wasn’t ever coming back, she told him. His sister believed her, but he refused to.
The big guy, with a silver rabbit on a chain around his neck, who hoisted him up on his shoulders, who pitched balls at him, who took him on the rides at Coney Island, and went swimming in the sea,
and kissed him with his bristly face, and smelled of beer and tobacco, and told him stories about the Man in the Moon, and sneaked off with him to the zoo when he had promised his mother he was
taking him to church – he was coming home.
    He
was.
He knew it.
    ‘I don’t want to go,’ he said petulantly. ‘I want to go home and wait for Pa. I hate you!’ Then he stamped his foot on the ground.
    ‘You’re going to like Ireland,’ she said. ‘It’s a better place. Safer. Less troubles there.’
    ‘Maybe Pa will be there.’
    Oonagh Daly said nothing.
    ‘Maybe? Do you think?’ he asked hopefully.
    She still said nothing.
    There was a tang of salt in the air, peppered with an acrid stench of burning coke, sweet snatches of cigarette and pipe smoke. All around was the constant grinding of machinery, men shouting,
the cry of gulls. A crate swung on creaking ropes, and pulleys clanked and squeaked high above him. The dark hull of the ship rose even higher, like a mountain. The boy looked around him. His pa
worked on the waterfront; maybe he was working here today? He watched every face. Every single face.
    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
,