by S. B. Caves
He’d opened up the fridge, unsure as to whether he was hungry or not, when the doorbell rang. The sound jarred him out of his stupor and stirred an image in his mind: May dolled up to the nines, smiling as though their argument had never occurred. He pressed his forehead against the fridge door and sighed deeply, wondering what to do. He didn’t have the tenacity or the emotional dexterity to deal with her tonight, and yet the doorbell would keep ringing, of that much he was certain.
He knew there was no way she would ever understand this business with Morley, especially considering she didn’t know that his wife had been murdered. May knew that Jack had been married once a long time ago, but she never seemed particularly interested in his life before they became a couple. She had been married once too, but all she ever said about her ex-husband was that he was a bastard, and Jack always assumed that to mean he either beat her or cheated on her, or both.
He waded through his dark, silent house and answered the door.
Emily was standing there, not May.
‘Hey,’ she said, holding up a bottle of wine. ‘Can I come in?’
‘Sure, of course.’ He held the door open for her, his brain struggling to process the surprise.
‘What’re you doing sitting in the dark?’ she asked, moving through the front room and planting herself down on the couch.
‘I was sleeping,’ he lied, switching on the lamp, stirring up a tornado of dust motes beneath its shade. His house was simple and Spartan. May called it soulless, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t into films, he didn’t read or have any hobbies, and he had successfully resisted all her attempts to clutter his house with ornaments and pictures. It was the husk of what it had once been – a place of light and laughter – and yet he had never really thought of it that way until he saw Emily glancing around, trying to spot something that she recognised from years before.
‘You have any glasses?’ she asked, holding up the wine bottle. Perhaps he was reading too much into it, but Jack thought she seemed unsettled by the house, as though somewhere among the faded wallpaper and tatty old furniture, she could still sense her sister’s presence.
‘I do,’ he said, and fetched the only two wine glasses he owned. They were wedding presents, dusty from years of neglect. When May came over, they drank their Shiraz out of short Ikea glasses.
He rinsed them out and Emily filled them up. They didn’t say cheers. He sat in the armchair opposite her and sipped the wine. It went down with a sharp bite that started to revive his headache before it reached his stomach.
‘Morley served prison time in 2006,’ Jack said, swirling the wine absently. ‘He robbed a woman on a train with a knife. Only got six months.’
‘I know,’ she said.
‘Oh?’ He leaned forward in the chair. ‘You saw the article?’
‘No.’ She reached into her jacket pocket, removed a scrap of paper and unfolded it. ‘Should’ve brought my reading glasses.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Sitting comfortably?’ she asked dully, and then drained her glass. ‘Craig Jacob Morley, aka Flashy Menace aka Flashy, born March 2nd, 1989. In February 2005, he was arrested for robbing a boy on a train with a seven-inch knife. In August 2005, he was arrested again for criminal damage; says here he broke a pawnshop window, tried to do a smash and grab, but ended up breaking his hand and severing some tendons. Idiot almost bled to death.’
‘What is this?’ Jack asked, setting his glass down on the coffee table. ‘This is Craig Morley? The one from Frazier Avenue? The same one?’
‘The very same. Let me finish. It gets better. He closes 2005 with a drunk and disorderly, but he starts 2006 with a bang. In January, he’s arrested for TDA.’
‘TDA? What’s TDA?’ Jack asked frantically.
‘Um, hold on…’ She paused to remember. ‘It’s stealing a car. Um… taking and… taking and driving away, that’s it. The little bastard steals a car, speeds down the street doing eighty, and wraps it around a lamp post. It doesn’t say here whether he was injured or anything.’
Jack was on his feet, pacing the living room. ‘I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this. Keep reading.’
‘OK, where was I? Right, again in 2006, he pulls a knife on a woman on a bus, and gets caught a couple of days later from the CCTV. It says here he threatened to slit the woman’s throat if she didn’t hand over her phone.’
‘That’s when he did his stretch in Feltham,’ Jack said eagerly.
‘Where’d you hear that?’ she asked.
‘Online, there’s an article. They wrote about him in the Weekly Chronicle,’ he said impatiently. ‘What about 2007?’
She looked up at him. ‘Nothing in 2007.’
‘What does that mean?’ He was shouting now, breathless from his own enthusiasm. ‘So he didn’t get arrested in 2007?’
‘Jack, calm down.’
‘I am calm,’ he said dismissively. ‘What is that paper? Where’d you get it?’
‘A friend of mine works as a detention officer. They have a computer system that shows all the people that go through custody all over London.’ She waved the paper. ‘He said that when he checked Morley’s name on the system there’s a warning marker, because he’s known to carry knives. So anyone that goes to book him into a cell has to be extra careful.’ She tried to get a read on Jack, but his face now seemed unusually vacant, his eyes staring through her. ‘But the thing is, this isn’t Morley’s criminal record. This is just a list of the times he was booked into the various holding cells before they shipped him off to court. It doesn’t tell you where he’s done time, only what he was booked in for.’
‘But there’s nothing for 2007?’
She shook her head slowly. ‘No.’
Jack sat back down, his knees trembling convulsively. ‘Nothing in 2007,’ he murmured. ‘And 2008?’
‘Nothing until 2009. He got arrested for driving without a licence.’
Jack clapped his hands together. The sound reverberated around the room. ‘That’s it! That proves it, then. It’s him.’
‘How does that prove it?’
‘He did the stretch in Feltham in 2005 but he didn’t get arrested again. That has to mean that he was on the streets, not locked up somewhere. If he had an arrest anywhere near July 2007, we could assume he’d be in jail during that time, couldn’t we?’
‘Maybe. But my friend said these records can be spotty. He could’ve been booked in and it might not be recorded. He said it’s only really accurate back to about five or six years ago.’
‘He wasn’t locked up anywhere in 2007,’ Jack said defiantly. ‘He was roaming around, free as a fucking bird, and on July eighth, he came to this house and killed Kate.’
Emily gasped as though he’d smacked her. She hadn’t been braced for that kind of bluntness. She sat there, panting quietly, fingering the neck of her jumper, pulling it away from her throat for air.
‘It’s him, Emily. Go on Google and type his name in. There’s an article that shows his face. You’re asking me for more proof? How’s this – I saw the picture of Morley and I nearly vomited. Now I’m telling you,’ he said, his voice rising again, ‘that Craig Morley is the one that killed your sister – my wife!’
Emily cradled her head in her hands. Memories rushed through her mind like a speeding train: going to the funfair on their tenth birthday; the argument they had over the broken Madonna CD; sneaking downstairs to watch Fatal Attraction when their parents went to bed, only to be caught when Emily screamed in fright during the film’s climax.
‘Emily, I’m sorry I shouted. But every day it’s like a weight sitting on my chest, crushing me. Sometimes I dream about her, and I’ll wake up, and for a second I truly believe she’ll be lying right there beside me.’
‘I believe you,’ she said, the grief strangling her voice to a whisper. ‘If you tell me it’s him, then I believe you. After all, you were the only one that saw him, so you’re the only one that would know what he looked like now.’<
br />
Jack licked his lips, suddenly thirsty again. He began to feel faintly dizzy. With a blink, two tears rolled down her cheeks, and she looked away.
‘Let me refill you,’ he mumbled, groping for the wine bottle.
‘Thanks,’ she said, her slick cheeks reddening. ‘And you’re sure you don’t want to go to the police,’ she asked, catching a stray tear on the knuckle of her index finger.
‘If I knew for certain that they would charge him and he’d get a lengthy sentence then maybe I would.’
‘Would that be enough for you, though?’ She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. ‘Knowing that he’s in jail, still socialising, still eating three square meals a day. Would that be justice?’
‘What do you think?’
Her expression became bitter. ‘He’d get adjusted to it, wouldn’t he? I mean, it’s not like a South American or Russian prison like you see on the documentaries. It’d be a nice comfy cell, probably with TV and a PlayStation and god knows what else. It’d be more than he deserves.’
‘That’s what I think too.’
Chapter Seven
Emily took a gulp of wine and laughed drily. ‘Jack, are you saying you really think you could kill him?’
‘Yes. I think I could.’
‘But could you live with yourself afterwards, knowing what you’d done?’
‘If you mean would I feel any guilt, then the answer is no, absolutely not.’
She exhaled. ‘But do you think killing him would make you feel any better?’
‘It couldn’t make me feel any worse.’
She drank a mouthful of wine, placed the glass on the table and stood up. She laced her fingers together and cracked her knuckles. A ghost of memory whispered through him. Kate used to crack her knuckles the exact same way and it drove him nuts. Every time he heard that concerto of pops, he would berate her about arthritis.
‘All right, so how would you do it?’
‘A knife, probably. But I wouldn’t do it quickly. I wouldn’t just cut his throat.’ When he said this, Emily’s forehead crinkled. ‘What I mean is, I have a process. I want him to know who I am, who Kate was, and I want to know why. Why did he knock on our door that night? And why did he…?’ His mouth became a tight line. The leather armrests creaked where he gripped them. ‘Why did he do what he did? What was it all about? That’s what I’d want to find out. And when I had all my answers, I’d put him out of his misery.’
Emily shook her head. She exhaled and said, ‘This is insane. This is absolutely insane.’
‘What’re you talking about?’
‘Everything you’ve just said. It’s just some twisted fantasy, isn’t it?’
‘Huh?’ Confusion fogged his mind. ‘No, of course not.’
‘You said you wanted to kill him. Now you’re talking about becoming his biographer.’
‘Interrogator,’ Jack corrected.
‘Yeah? I thought you were just going to catch him somewhere and do it, in and out.’
‘No.’ Jack shook his head. ‘That’s not what I meant at all. And I never said that.’
‘So let me get this straight,’ she began, rolling her shoulders. ‘You’re going to kidnap him, interrogate him, and then murder him. Am I right so far?’
‘Yes,’ he replied flatly, ‘and you don’t have to sound so condescending about it either.’
‘In fairness, maybe I do, Jack. When you told me you wanted to kill him, I assumed your plan was to get away with it.’
He shrugged. ‘Of course it is.’
‘So explain to me how you plan to carry all this out, without attracting any attention to yourself.’
He stared at her for a few seconds. There was nothing but steel in his gaze. ‘What’s your tone like that for?’
‘My tone?’ She cocked her head, lips pursed, and just that gesture reminded him of arguing with Kate. It was like looking at a very good imitation of his wife.
‘You’re talking to me like I’m an idiot.’
‘No, I’m not. What I’m trying to do is understand your plan, because by the sound of it, there’s a lot of kinks we’re going to need to iron out.’
He leaned back, the muscles in his neck bunching painfully. His sciatica was playing up and his thigh was becoming numb.
‘He has a brand new Mercedes parked on that shitty estate. I’d wait until dark and smash one of the windows, setting off the alarm. When he came down to investigate, I’d hit him, bundle him in the back of the van and take him to Cheshunt.’
‘Cheshunt? What’s in Cheshunt?’
Jack scratched his beard, went into his wallet, removed a business card and handed it to her. ‘Just got these printed the other day with the new warehouse’s details on it. What do you think of the design? I did it myself on the computer.’
The font was awkward and the logo appeared squashed, as though he’d shrunk the image down to fit the card.
‘My boss is expanding the business and we’re shifting stock to a new warehouse in Cheshunt. I’m mostly going to be working out of there in the next few months, but I’m overseeing the transition of stock from the Dagenham warehouse. It’s half empty now, right at the end of an industrial estate.’
She stuffed the card in her pocket, leaned against the wall and tilted her head up toward the ceiling, studying it as though it were a Magic Eye puzzle. He could almost hear the cogs turning in her head. ‘And after?’
‘After? You mean when I kill him?’
‘Yeah,’ she said in a tired sigh. ‘What’re you gonna do with him?’
‘Bury him.’
‘Just like that?’ she said, the words tinged in sarcasm.
He nodded. ‘Yeah. I’ll bury him in a field somewhere. Nobody’ll find him.’
She looked at him hard for a moment, her tongue clicking. ‘You really think you have the nerve to do all that?’
Jack picked up the wine and gulped thirstily from the bottle. He could feel the gentle tug of inebriation sluicing through his system.
‘She was pregnant,’ he said, wiping his lips on the back of his hand. ‘What do you want me to do, Emily? This man stole my whole life, any kind of future I ever had.’
Mine too, she thought.
They were silent for a long time. Eventually Emily said, ‘OK.’
‘OK what?’
Her face was as cold and blank as slate. ‘Let’s talk about your plan some more.’
Chapter Eight
It was breakfast time and the woman sat on the couch eating crisps. Craig could smell the smoky bacon flavouring from the other side of the room.
‘Where’d you find this fucking lump?’ he asked, disgusted.
‘She comes recommended,’ Dillon said, biting his lip in an effort to stifle his laughter. ‘Black Sally says he uses her all the time.’
‘Looks like you just hauled her out of the ocean. The fucking size of her.’
The woman wasn’t listening; she was glued to the TV, where a talk-show host was berating some unfortunate-looking bastard about the responsibility a father has to his child.
‘That’s the point, though, isn’t it?’ Dillon said, stirring his tea. ‘Wouldn’t work if she was thin as a rake, would it? Anyway, don’t let her looks put you off. She’s a pro.’
‘Put me off? She’s already put me off my breakfast,’ Craig muttered.
‘She’s well padded. Won’t be much of a problem,’ Dillon offered.
‘Yeah, we just have to make sure she doesn’t get caught up in McDonald’s and miss the flight.’ He slid his plate aside. ‘Valerie,’ he called into the front room.
‘Veronica,’ Dillon corrected.
‘Whatever. Get in here.’
She left the crisps on the sofa and padded over to the table. She looked bored.
‘Dillon tells me that you’ve done this sort of thing before. He says you’re a pro.’
‘Mmm,’ she grunted, nodding.
‘How much?’
‘Ten grand,’ she said.
‘No, I mean how much did you take over?’
‘Six keys.’
‘Six?’ Craig couldn’t believe it. Six kilos wasn’t a lot of weight if you were carrying it, but concealing it was a different ball game entirely.
‘Mmm,’ she grunted, exhaling noisily through her nostrils.
‘Tell him how,’ Dillon urged.
‘Three kilos in the case, sewn into the lining. One kilo packed into the heels of my platforms.’
‘Bullshit,’ Craig interrupted. ‘How’d you get a kilo in your heels?’
‘I’m a size ten,’ she said, hoisting her leg up so that he could see the length and width of her foot. ‘Three hundred grams inside,’ she pointed to her stomach. ‘Another seven hundred in a cane I use to walk.’
‘That’s five kilos,’ Craig muttered. ‘You said six.’
‘One kilo in my hair.’
Dillon burst out laughing. Craig looked at him coldly. ‘I’m sorry,’ Dillon said, smothering his laughter.
Craig looked back at Veronica. ‘You’re going to have to explain,’ he said.
Veronica laced her fingers into her scalp and removed her bushy wig. Underneath it she was bald as a bowling ball. ‘They made a packet in the lining of the wig, smoothed it out, glued it on my head. No problem.’
‘I don’t fucking believe this.’ Craig glanced at Dillon. ‘If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this sounds like a wind-up.’
‘It’s not a wind-up,’ Veronica said. ‘I’ve done it lots of times.’
‘And you’ve never been picked up?’ Craig asked.
‘I’m here, aren’t I?’
‘I want to take eight kilos across. How’re you gonna deal with another two kilos?’
She shrugged again, a vacant expression on her face. ‘Strap to my arse,’ she said, so matter-of-factly that it even made Craig smile. ‘Strap to my stomach. And some up my vagina.’
