Huntingdon Lodge was a mid-nineteenth-century plantation house set in fifty-six acres of rolling hills. As Ryan drove through the gates he saw a line of cars stretched right along the gravel drive, waiting to be parked. He pulled up behind a new Volvo; in the rear-vision mirror he saw a red BMW 525i. Here he was in a white Mercedes coupe. To think he had spent a large part of his life getting around in a Mini Moke with bullet holes in it.‘What’s wrong?’ Mickey asked.He couldn’t really say. He checked his look in the driving mirror; dark hair, straying over his collar, a clean-shaven face that somehow contrived to look much the same as it had ten years before. Next year he would be forty. His mates called him Dorian Gray. They were losing their hair and their bellies were sagging, but Sean Ryan, shot to shit half a dozen times, looked like he’d spent his life at a health farm. Something in the genes, he supposed. He guessed his father might have worn well, too, if he hadn’t drunk himself to death.He brushed some imagined lint from his tuxedo.
