Dead Man's Time

who was no more than a curator of all he had inherited from his ancestors and would one day pass on to his
heirs.
    Except Gavin Daly had inherited nothing. Every item in this room, just as with almost everything in this fine house, he had bought, with great care, with the sole intention of impressing others
like him, who were prepared to spend vast sums on antiques to line their grand homes in America, Japan and more recently China, to give the impression they were privileged people of taste.
    There were two large, studded red-leather chesterfields. On Doric plinths stood busts of some of his past great fellow countrymen – Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats,
J. M. Synge, James Joyce and T. E. Lawrence, whose father had been an Irishman, and whose writings he admired. Wall-to-wall bookcases lined with leather-bound tomes. In daylight, the window looked
out on a view, framed by a line of Italian cypresses, of acres of lush gardens, an ornamental lake fringed by statues, and the distant rolling hills of the South Downs.
    He removed from his desk drawer a crimson, leather-bound book and opened it. It contained a yellowed, decaying front page of the
New York Daily News
from February 1922, protected in a
clear plastic envelope.
    There had not been a day in his life when he had not looked at this page of the newspaper, and at the names and numbers on the reverse. Four names that filled him with knuckle-clenching hatred
every time he saw them.
    Fergal Kilpatrick. Mick Pollock. Aiden Boyle. Cillian Cregan.
    The men who, the police had told his aunt, had entered his parents’ house, entered his bedroom, shone torches at him. Filled his bedroom with the stench of their booze and sweat.
    The men who had shot his mother dead and taken his pa away.
    All of them long dead. But that knowledge gave him no comfort, no satisfaction. Just regret. A deep regret that he had never returned to America years ago and gone looking for those who were
still alive. And now it was too late.
    He had often googled them. All their names were there, lieutenants of ‘Wild Bill’ Lovett, who had taken control of the White Hand Gang, which controlled the waterfronts of Manhattan
and Brooklyn after the murders of the gang’s leader, Dinny Meehan, and subsequently his next in line, Brendan Daly.
    His father.
    He had long studied the photographs of their hateful faces that came up on his computer. Pegleg Pollock had been the first to die, shot dead in a bar in a turf war, his killers never
identified.
    The other three had vanished, faded into the mists of time. Their surnames popped up, meaninglessly, on his internet searches, along with Daly countless times.
    Your old men shall dream dreams; your young men shall see visions.
    His aunt, who brought him and his sister back to Ireland, had a deep faith. She had read them passages from the Bible daily on that voyage from New York, and every night of their childhood
outside Dublin.
    He’d never had any truck with religion, but the book of Joel had been right in that one passage. He’d had plenty of visions as a young man. And now all he had were his dreams. He
looked up at the bust of the handsome, equine face of Lawrence of Arabia. There was a quote from that great man’s book,
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, that had been his mantra throughout
life.
    All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are
     dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
    He had always been a dreamer of the day. But now he realized that maybe he had only been a sleepwalker. He was ninety-five years old and he had failed to keep the biggest, most important promise
he had made in his life. A promise he had made standing on the stern of the
Mauretania
, as a small boy, all those decades ago.
    One day, Pop, I’m going to come back and find you. I’m going to rescue you from wherever you are.
    He looked again, for the millionth time, at the only clue he had ever had. Those twelve scrawled numbers below the names of the four men.
    9 5 3 7 0 4 0 4 2 4 0 4
    He had tried endlessly. Checking plot numbers at every cemetery in the New York area. Checking prisoner numbers – but the numbers were too long. Checking co-ordinates – but they were
too short. Telephone numbers. House numbers. Car indexes. Bank account numbers. Safety deposit box codes. He’d