Jack Higgins – The Violent Enemy

She nodded. ‘Once. It was exactly the same. He was all right again within half an hour.’

There was a ghostly chuckle from the bed and when Rogan turned, O’More was looking at him through half open eyes. ‘I received my sentence from the finest physician in Dublin three months ago, lad. A couple of yeais, maybe three and there’s an end of it.’

Rogan stood at the side of the bed looking down at him. ‘Will you be all right?’

Tine. Right as a trivet in half an hour. I’ve had these attacks before.’

‘Good,’ Rogan said. ‘Just take it easy then and don’t worry about a thing.’

When he closed the door, the girl was standing in the passage, a puzzled frown on her face. ‘Why-I don’t understand?

He could have talked to her of old loyalties, of what he owed to a man whose proud boast had been that he had

never let a friend down in his life come hell 01 high water. But the thing went deeper than that.

From the moment he had dropped over the wall back there on the moor, he had been caught in a cunent from which there was no escaping until he i cached the pre-01 dained end.

That was the Celt in him speaking and still a pooi i eason.

‘Make him a cup of tea and lace it with whisky. I’ll sit with him for a while.’

He pushed her along the passage, opened the bedroom door and went back inside. He sat on the edge of the bed, took out his cigarettes and lit one slowly.

‘All right,’ he said to O’Moie. ‘I want the lot. Places, names, who does what and when.’

‘You’ll do it, Sean?’ the old man said eagerly. ‘You’ll handle it for me?’

‘I’ll look into it,’ Rogan said. ‘I’ll go to Costello’s place and I’ll take a look at the set-up. More than that I won’t promise.’

Colum O’More’s breath was exhaled in a long sigh. ‘And that’s good enough for me.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

HARRY MORGAN came awake and stared up at the stained and peeling ceiling. Looked at long enough, it became a pretty fair map of London, and he recalled with nostalgia a little bar off Dean Street in Soho that had been a favourite haunt of his in the old days, and the Greek girl who ran it. Now there was a woman…

His throat was dry and his mouth tasted bad. He

pushed himself up on one elbow and groped under the bed until he located a bottle. It was empty and he dropped it to the floor and stood up, a lean dark man with red hair, black eyes and a mouth that curled sardonically at the corners.

He pulled an old sweater over his head and moved to the door outside; then there was a howl of rage. As Morgan opened the door and moved into the whitewashed passage, Costello’s half-witted son, his mouth gaping in fear, stumbled into him, Fletcher hard on his heels.

Fletcher, a great ox of a man, grabbed for the boy and Morgan barred his way with an outstretched arm. ‘Now what?’

‘The bloody little swine’s pinched all my fags. There were three packets under my pillow. They’ve all gone.’

‘You lost them to me at brag last night,’ Morgan said. ‘You were too damned drunk to remember.’

‘You can stick that for a tale.’

Fletcher pushed him roughly to one side and grabbed at the boy, who ran to the end of the passage and pulled open the door. What happened next was so quick and confusing, that afterwards Fletcher had difficulty in recalling the incident clearly.

One moment he was reaching for the scruff of the boy’s neck, the next he was stumbling headlong to the cobbles of the yard. He started to turn and a foot pushed down haid across his throat. Fletcher began to choke and then the pressure was relieved. When he managed to control his breathing again, he found himself looking up into a hard, implacable face.

Jesse Fletcher had never been afraid of anything or anybody in his entire life and he felt no fear now, only the natural wariness of a born fighting man who senses the same qualities in another.

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