'Go on . . . move . . . move,' Maxi whispered.

Patricia was climbing out. She seemed to stumble, then fell to her knees. I couldn't be sure if she was hurt or acting. The alarm continued to sound. The rain was driving sideways, and the wind was whipping up bits of paper, which were swirling around her. There was an awful lot of it; the crash must have crushed the rubbish bin attached to the lamppost.

People began to rush towards her.

Towards her . . . and past her.

'What the fuck . . .' I said.

The people of the Shankill were literally dropping their umbrellas, and running around the car. Vehicles began to stop. Drivers jumped out and joined everyone else charging about like headless chickens. They were all ignoring Trish. They were jumping up and down, up and down, as if they were taking part in some bizarre flashmob dance extravaganza. They reached up into the air, grabbing, grabbing and grabbing.

And then a piece of the paper slapped into our back window. And the Queen's damp face on a twenty-pound note stared in at us.

'Oh, Christ,' I said.

Patricia's crash had been powerful enough to tear a gash in the boot, which also ripped open the bin bag full of cash, and the wind did the rest.

It was raining money.

Miller money.

'We're on,' said Maxi.

I turned to see the hoods darting through the abandoned cars to join in the paper chase. Snooker players were spilling out of the church after them and shops on either side of the road were emptying. It was turning into a huge scrum, a melee of greed and good fortune. Through it all Trish remained on her knees, completely ignored, and I had a desperate urge to run to her instead of into the church.

But I couldn't.

She would have killed me.

Maxi was out of the car. Joe followed. They paid no attention to the money. They held their guns at their sides, parallel to their legs. I scrambled out after them, my useless revolver held similarly and pointlessly.

I followed as they weaved effortlessly through the throng. Maxi stepped into the vestibule first, bringing his gun up as he did, and led the way up the stairs, which were only wide enough to go single file. Maxi went second, while I brought up the rear, bravely guarding for assault from behind. The steps were old-church wooden, and loud. Before we were a third of the way up, the guard who'd been reading the Sun on my last visit appeared at the top. He had a newspaper tucked under his elbow. I don't know if he was there because he'd heard us or because he'd been alerted to the commotion outside. Whatever he was not expecting what he now encountered: he came to a dead stop, his mouth opened, and he began to paw at the interior of his zip black jacket.

And that was as far as he got.

Maxi fired once, straight into his chest, and the Sun man shot backwards, hitting the ground before the sound had finished reverberating in the confined space. Maxi stepped over him and continued on. As Joe passed, he leant down and punched him once, hard in the face, to make sure he didn't try to get up. I looked down at his fluttering eyes and his bubbled bloody breath and also swept past. The table at the end was abandoned and the door behind open. Maxi and Joe charged along and took up positions on either side of the entrance. As far as I knew, Joe had been in the UVF, which was hardly renowned for training its killers in the etiquette of storming enemy fortresses, or indeed anything beyond saluting the flag and kneecapping, but he seemed to know what he was doing. Two shots sounded through the open door, and I hit the deck.

'Stay there,' Maxi hissed. I did as I was told. Maxi looked at Joe, nodded, and they turned into the doorway at the same time, guns raised and shooting. The noise was incredible, the air caustic; when there was a momentary lull, I scrambled forward on hands and knees and peered through the opening. The second of the guards was face down, his T-shirt a bloody mess. Rab was on his back; there was blood pumping out of his throat; his whole body was juddering. Maxi and Joe were already at the other door, in similar positions.

'Windy?' Maxi called out. 'You in there?'

'What's it to you?' Windy yelled back.

'It's Maxi McDowell. You killed my wife.'

'Prove it!'

'Don't need to.'

'Windy . . .' said Joe. 'It's Joe Martin. Joe the Butcher.'

'I know you, Joe. This is none of your business.'

'You have my boy.'

'Your boy?'

'He works for me. You let him go.'

'Yeah, balls I will.'

Maxi calmly began to reload his gun.

'Don't be stupid, Windy,' said Joe. 'Your brother needs help, he's not going to get it while you're in there.'

'My brother is dead, I saw him shot.'

'No he's not, but he soon will be.'

'Rab? Rab!' Windy called. 'Can you hear me?'

'He's shot in the throat,' said Joe. 'He can't talk, but he's still breathing, I can see it. C'mon, Windy, let the boy go.'

Joe began to reload as well. I moved up beside him at the door. Almost the only sound was the frantic gasping coming from Rab. Somewhere in the background there were sirens. Surprise and bravado had got us this far. Now Maxi and Joe were stuck with the knowledge that the first of them through the door would almost certainly be shot. But there was a cold determination about the both of them. Maxi had nothing left to lose. His wife was dead. The man in the next room was responsible for it. Joe's motives were obscure but possibly even more admirable. He was sacrificing his own life for a relative stranger, for nothing more than good.

And then there was a sound from the next room, a clump of something heavy falling.

Maxi looked at Joe, and Joe back at Maxi, and they both looked at me. I shrugged my classic shrug.

'Windy?' Joe called.

'Windy's dead,' came the response.

Unmistakably: Bobby.

I stepped around Maxi. He tried to stop me, but I walked straight through the door, and a fraction of a second later they came after me, one on either side, and there was a sight we would never forget.

Windy was face down on the floor, blood from three gaping wounds haemorrhaging out of his back and spraying the room like a garden sprinkler. Bobby was standing over him, in his gore-spattered stripy apron. He was grinning through swollen lips, three front teeth missing, and a butcher's knife dripping in his hand. His other hand was clutching a chair for support. At the base of the chair there were three teeth that very probably matched the gap in his frightening smile.

'I gutted the fucker!' Bobby cried. 'I gutted the fucker!'

51.

'Poor wee skitter,' the doctor said. 'That must've hurt like hell.'

He was a burly man in his fifties; if he'd worked through the bad-olds, then a few missing teeth and an interesting pattern of cigarette burns on the palms of Bobby's hands hardly qualified as major trauma.

'Never mind him,' I said. 'Can you give me something? My head's busting.'

He declined.

Bobby had been shifted up from Casualty to the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, on the grounds of the RVH, for which he just about qualified. It was an open ward, and full; lots of baldy-headed kids insatiably curious about the new arrival and his connection to the police milling about wanting to ask him questions. They had a lot of questions. When they couldn't ask Bobby, they asked me. They might have asked Maxi, or Joe, if they'd been able to find them.

Maxi had been resigned to the fact that he would be arrested; he didn't care. It was Joe who persuaded, cajoled and finally dragged him away by arguing that they had to finish their work. Springer had fled down the fire escape. He had as much to do with Bobby's kidnapping and Maxi's wife's murder as the Millers. So they went looking for him, and that left me with toothless Bobby and four corpses for all of about five seconds, until the cops came storming up the stairs, armed to the teeth and screaming at us to put our hands up. So I did, but Bobby said, 'I can't, I'll fall over,' and it was all the funnier because he was pasted in blood. We started giggling, and we could hardly stop, and the cops looked at us like we were mental.

The fact that they had then allowed me to accompany Bobby to the hospital yes, of course I'm his legal guardian meant that they at least partly believed that I was the innocent bystander I claimed to be. I had, of course, planted my useless replica gun on one of the corpses, and my pointing out towards the fire escape and proclaiming, 'They went thataway,' as the peelers entered also contributed to my pulling the wool over their eyes. It couldn't possibly last.

Once she was assured we were safe, via the expeditious method of spotting us being brought out by the cops and escorted to an ambulance, Patricia managed a quick smile and wave, but otherwise kept her head down. As more and more police arrived, she quietly got into her car, started the engine, and gently pulled its mangled rear end free of the lamppost with the minimum of screeching and drove away, completely unnoticed. The cops were too busy with the carnage in the church, while the people of the Shankill had no further use for her now that they had picked her car clean. Not only was every single twenty-pound note gone, but the cocaine with it; not content with that, they'd stolen a family bag of mini Mars bars from the dash, and rifled Trish's multi-CD player, removing Van, David Gates and Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits. For some strange reason they left behind my sole contribution to her playlist, the Ramones' It's Alive, even though she pursued them up the street offering it to them for free.

When she was finally allowed in to see Bobby, Trish was all concern for him and daggers for me.

'My car . . . you used my fucking car . . .' she hissed, as he began to drift off. 'How dare you!'

'How dare I what? Come up with a plan that saved Bobby?'

'That . . . that . . . that was not part of the plan!'

'Sure about that?'

'You're a deceitful, untrustworthy, lying son of a-'

'Hold your horses, Trish,' I said, raising calming hands, which were guaranteed to inflame her further, and didn't disappoint. 'Didn't it all work? All's well that ends well?'

'Don't fucking give me that!' She leant across the bed, her elbow resting on the covers where one of Bobby's legs should have been. 'What if I'd been stopped by the peelers and they'd checked the boot and found all that money? How would I have explained that away?'

'You wouldn't,' I admitted. 'But look on the bright side, they mightn't even have noticed it. They would have been distracted by the cocaine.'

'The . . . Holy fuck . . . you didn't.'

'Holy fuck I did.'

She raged as only Trish can.

'You fucking big waste of space, you can't even look me in the eye, can you?'

I couldn't, but mainly because I'd spotted DS Hood coming towards us over her shoulder. His lips appeared red and swollen, probably from being taped shut. His demeanour was earnest and concerned. Not for me, obviously.

'What about Maxi?' he asked.

'What about him?'

He made an apologetic hand to Trish, and took me by the arm and led me off to one side. 'I'm talking to you now as a friend of Maxi's, not as a police officer.'

'Aye, right,' I said.

'I swear to God I didn't know Springer was . . . involved.'

'Involved?'

'I know, I know. I had no idea. Honestly. Just, just tell me what I can do to help Maxi.'

'Detective Sergeant Hood,' I began, 'forgive me, but I've forgotten your first name?'

'Gary.'

'Detective Sergeant Hood, Maxi's wife is dead, killed by your colleague and partner. His life is over, there's not a damn thing you can do to help him.'

'Then . . . save him. What can I do to save him?'

'From what?'

'I don't know. Himself. From doing anything worse.'

'I think that horse has bolted.'

He studied me. I studied him back. His demeanour changed.

He said, 'I'm going to have to take you in.'

'For why?'

'What do you think? We haven't even spoken to you about the bomb outside your office, about how you came into possession of an incriminating photo of the late Paddy Barr, what your connection to Malone Security is, what your connection to a serious assault on the head of that company is, why you accompanied two gunmen into the headquarters of the de facto leaders of the Ulster Volunteer Force, what you have to do with the death of the Miller brothers, and why your wife's car, according to the CCTV footage I've just watched, appears to have disgorged several million pounds' worth of banknotes on to the Shankill Road.'

'You'd have to ask her about that,' I said.

Hood was no more Maxi's friend than I was, but I think he cared enough. However, he was still a cop, and had to do his business. Fortunately, there was enough going on, what with everything he'd just pointed out to me, plus the fact that there were two gunmen on the loose, and in pursuit of a rogue cop, that he didn't have to haul me down there and then. We came to a gentlemen's agreement that once we'd sorted Bobby out, then I would volunteer myself at Comanche Station. I would do my very best not to incriminate myself, and possibly not Patricia either, depending on her attitude.

We remained on the ward, either side of Bobby. After a while, the police disappeared. It should have been a depressing place. Sick kids, dying kids. But they were up to their necks in mischief. It was good to see, and might have brought a tear to the eye, if I'd been the type.

I looked at Trish across the bed. She was a brave, compassionate, funny, beautiful woman, and I'd loved her since the year dot. We were older now, but clearly less sensible.

I said, 'What do you want to do?'

'About?'

'The boy wonder.'

'Oh, I don't know.'

'He's a one-legged drug-dealing hoodlum who has just cut his mother's killer to ribbons with a butcher's knife.'

Trish smiled. 'I know. Every home should have one.'