Chapters (43)
- Pronunciation
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Acknowledgments
A match flared, and by the light of its flame he saw the illuminated face of Paul Kelly. He was sitting in a chair by the window on the east side of the room. He puffed several times on his cigar until the end of it glowed red, then he reached across to turn on a glass standard lamp. Fin saw the sawn-off shotgun lying across his lap.
Directly opposite him, perched on the edge of the settee, Donna sat clutching her baby. The black-haired young man from the villa in Edinburgh stood beside her with another sawn-off shotgun extended towards her head. He looked nervous. Donna was like a ghost. Shrunken and shadow-eyed. Visibly shaking.
Fin heard the crunch of broken glass behind him, and Morag’s gasp. The dog had gone silent, but Marsaili’s whispered “Oh my God!” seemed almost deafening.
No one moved, and in the seconds of silence that followed, Fin’s assessment of the situation was bleak. Kelly had not come all this way just to frighten them.
Kelly’s voice was obversely calm. “I always figured it was John McBride who murdered my brothers,” he said. “But by the time we got people up here he’d vanished without trace. Just like he never existed.” He paused to draw on his cigar. “Until now.” He lifted the shotgun from his lap and stood up. “So now he can watch his daughter and his granddaughter die, just the way I watched my brothers die in my arms.” His mouth curled into a barely controlled grimace, ugly and threatening. “I was in the hallway behind them that night when they were gunned down and left bleeding to death on the steps. You’ve got to know what that feels like to know how I feel right now. I’ve waited a lifetime for this day.”
Fin said, “If you kill one, you’ll have to kill us all.”
Paul Kelly smiled. His eyes creased with genuine amusement. “You don’t say.”
“You can’t take us all at once. Shoot that girl and you’re going to have to deal with me.”
Kelly raised his shotgun and swung it towards Fin. “Not if I take you first.”
“This is crazy!” Marsaili’s voice pierced the still of the room. “My dad is in an advanced state of dementia. Killing people won’t serve any purpose. It won’t mean a thing to him.”
Kelly’s eyes turned cold. “It will to me. In the end, an eye for an eye’ll suit me just fine.”