The gun wasn’t new. In fact, it was quite old. Balfe had said it had been taken off the corpse of a member of the  Cairo Gang, the British Army intelligence team sent over from Britain to deal with the IRA in the War of Independence.  Strafford didn’t know whether to believe this. Could a  weapon that old still be in working order, as Balfe had assured him this one was? Had it been used to shoot men dead? He found the notion darkly stirring. He had killed a man, mostly by accident, years ago, when he was starting out on the Force. He had hardly been aware of pulling the trigger, and the thing had been over in an instant. Sometimes in dreams he revisited the scene, the cars stopped on the country road, and the bodies lying on the ground in the glare of the headlights, grotesquely asprawl, like life-sized manikins. But it didn’t trouble him. He felt no remorse. The man who died would have shot him if he had fired first.

Now he walked to the window again, with the revolver dangling loosely at his side. One was never too old to learn new aspects of oneself, he reflected. He didn’t know which was stronger, the thrill of being in possession of this murderous object, or the absurdity of the notion of himself as an armed man. He was glad Marguerite wasn’t there to see him so shamingly pleased with himself. He felt like a schoolboy who had got hold of a cache of dirty pictures. He recalled roaming the fields around Roslea as a boy, armed with a toy wooden rifle carved for him from a hurley stick by the family blacksmith. Bang bang, you’re dead.

What impressed him most strongly was how serious a thing the weapon was. Most of the objects that passed through one’s hands were trivial, so that one hardly registered them. The little gun was weighty far beyond what it weighed. It was a thing of dark intent, secret and essential.

He sighed, and closed his eyes and pressed a thumb and the knuckle of an index finger hard against the bridge of his nose. What did he think he was about, exulting like this in the possession merely of a gun? It was the whiskey, he told himself again, but this time he didn’t believe it.

Possession. That was the word. But which was the possessor, and which the possessed? He slipped the revolver into its holster, and went upstairs to finish packing. He stumbled on the top step and very nearly fell backwards down the steps. That would be a fine thing, to be discovered at the foot of the stairs with a broken neck, smelling of whiskey and with a slightly illicit gun tucked neatly under his armpit.

Chapter 34