Long Time Coming Read Online Free PDF

bay, with the lights of Torquay twinkling in the distance.
    Eldritch was breathing hard but shallowly after climbing the stairs, a smoker’s cough rumbling away in his chest. It didn’t stop him lighting another Sobranie, though.
    ‘I reckon my lungs are shot,’ he said when he’d recovered his breath. ‘Smoking was about the only pleasure there was in prison. On the other hand, my liver’s probably A1 on account of the enforced sobriety. The way I was going in 1940, cirrhosis would probably have got me long since if the Garda hadn’t felt my collar. It’s not much of a consolation for spending all those years inside, but maybe I should be grateful. What do you think?’
    ‘I … don’t know.’
    ‘No. No more you do. No more does anyone who hasn’t gone through it. Buried alive. That’s what I was. Entombed. Walled up. After a few months at Mountjoy, they sent me to Portlaoise. And there I stayed until January of this year. I first saw the town the day I was released. I’d arrived at night in the back of a van. And you could only see sky from the cells or the exercise yard. Just a patch of sky. Grey, usually. Grey and blank. Like wadding inside a box. You have no idea, Stephen. You can’t imagine what it’s like. Icouldn’t, unless I’d been through it. And if I
had
been able to, I couldn’t have imagined surviving it.’
    ‘How
did
you survive?’
    ‘I’m not sure. By not counting the days, I suppose. By not expecting it to end. By not hoping. But I’m hoping now. That’s the worst of it. That’s what happens when people offer you money. I can’t sell my story to Moira Henchy or anyone else. But I
can
do what Twisk’s client is asking. It’s a calculated risk. But I have to take it.’
    ‘And what is it?’
    He sighed and drew on his cigarette. ‘He – or she – wants me to prove the Picassos in the Brownlow Collection were stolen from a man called Isaac Meridor. In 1940.’
    ‘Were they?’
    ‘Certainly.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘Because I helped steal them.’
    I stared at him in silent astonishment for a moment. His responding gaze was sardonic, almost mischievous.
    ‘It’s not what the Irish put me away for, Stephen. Ironically, I was innocent of what
they
accused me of. But innocent of all wrong-doing?’ He smiled. ‘Hardly.’
    ‘Why are you admitting this to me?’
    ‘Because I need your help. And because, as Neville’s son, you’ve shared to some degree in our family’s ill-gotten gains.’
    ‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’
    ‘Let me explain. According to your mother, Neville used a bequest from our father,
your
grandfather, to fund his early retirement and the purchase of Zanzibar. It was a lot more than he might have expected to receive. And not just because he didn’t have to split it with me. The old man was as big a rogue as I am in his own way, you see. I don’t suppose your father ever told you that. Well, maybe he never knew, though I find that hard to believe.’
    Dad had always attributed Grandad’s unsuspected affluence to shrewd investment. I’d suggested it might have had less respectable (or more interesting) origins myself a couple of times, much to hisannoyance. Naturally, I wasn’t about to admit that to Eldritch. But I did want to know where his claims were leading. ‘What kind of rogue exactly?’ I prompted.
    ‘The bribable kind, Stephen. Isaac Meridor was a Belgian diamond merchant, one of Antwerp’s wealthiest. A Jew, as almost all the merchants were, and are, I dare say. Unlike most of them, however, Meridor had stakes in several mining companies in the Belgian Congo, where the diamonds actually came from. He’d been out there as a young man, employed as an agent by one of the companies. Ever read
Heart of Darkness
?’
    ‘Yes, I have.’ And who, having read it, could forget it? Conrad’s defining vision of horror and brutality in the Congo of the late nineteenth century was as powerful as it was forbidding.
    ‘Enough