Dead Man's Time

grief. And now he felt utterly alone in the world.
    He had everything. This beautiful house, a staffed villa on Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, more money than he could ever spend, and none of it mattered; that was the damned irony. He stared
bleakly out through the sash window into the darkness. All around him in the oak-panelled room were reminders of his past. The black-and-white photograph of his stern, deeply religious maiden aunt,
Oonagh, who had raised him and his sister. Next to her was a row of framed photographs of his father, Brendan Daly.
    One, a youthful picture, showed the big guy striding towards the camera, wearing a three-piece suit, white shirt, black tie and a boater at a jaunty angle; he was flanked by two of his White
Hand Gang cohorts, Mick Pollock – later known as Pegleg Pollock after he lost a leg to gangrene following a shooting incident – and Aiden Boyle. Two of the men whose names were written
on the reverse of the front page of the
Daily News
from February 1922, in which the shooting of his mother and the abduction of his father was the headline story. The paper he had been
given all those years back by the messenger boy on Pier 54.
    Next to that was a photograph of his father in bathing trunks, on Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach. He was grinning, his jet-black hair tousled, a chain with a silver rabbit hung around his neck.
The chain had belonged to Gavin’s grandfather, his aunt had once told him; he had been one of the lieutenants in the New York Irish Mafia’s Dead Rabbits Gang in the 1880s. Another photo
showed his father, sharply dressed, wearing a Derby.
    He heard a knock, then the door behind him opened. It was Betty, his faithful housekeeper, only a few years junior to himself. ‘You’ve not touched your supper, Mr Daly,’ she
chided.
    He raised a hand in acknowledgement, without turning around.
    ‘I’m clearing up,’ she said. ‘Would you like a hot drink or anything before I go to bed?’
    ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I’m expecting visitors, but I’ll see them in.’
    She wished him goodnight and closed the door.
    The house felt gloomy and lonely since his second wife, Ruth, had died. In front of him sat a framed photograph taken way back when she was in her late-thirties and he was in his mid-fifties.
The two of them on a terrace in the South of France, with the flat blue Mediterranean Sea behind them. She had been a red-haired beauty then; Irish, like his first wife Sinead; but unlike Sinead
she had been faithful, he was certain, for all the time they were together. Sinead, his son’s mother, had died of an overdose of barbiturates after years of addiction to booze and affairs. He
did not have her photograph anywhere in his home. Lucas, his son, was a bitter enough reminder of her.
    Lucas had tried for some time to persuade him to think about moving into sheltered accommodation, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He loved this place and remembered thinking, when he had
bought it all those decades ago, how proud his dad would have been of him. To be sure, he hadn’t made all his money honestly, but then who in the antiques world had? He’d been a player
in the Brighton antiques ring, rigging prices at auction, and once – something that still made him smile – at a big country-house auction he had even locked a big London dealer in the
lavatory to prevent him from bidding against him.
    On another occasion, many years before satellite navigation had come in, he and his ring of Brighton antiques dealers had altered all the road signs the night before one of the largest
country-house auctions in the county, so that none of the major London dealers had been able to find the place.
    He glanced up, impatiently now, at the CCTV screen showing the front of the house and the driveway, waiting for his son’s black Range Rover to appear. Lucas had inherited some of his
mother’s bad genes. He was a lousy son, a school dropout who had failed to maintain the family business, and who had on several occasions narrowly avoided doing time both for violence and for
drug dealing. Gavin felt sorry for his son’s wife, who was a decent person and, in his view, deserved someone better.
    He drank some more whiskey, then puffed his cigar back to life and stared around the room where he used to bring his most important customers, and where he now spent most of his time these days.
It was designed to impress, to give the air of a learned man of culture, an aristocrat