by Gary Bell
‘What can you see, Sean?’ It must’ve been obvious; I could feel the impossible, sickening whiteness spreading across the surface of my skin as clear as the frost on the windows around us.
‘For fuck’s sake.’ He stamped his boot, shaking more slush off onto the floor, and necked half the can. ‘Come on,’ he said, catching the overspill from his chin with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. ‘Come and have a sit-down. Have a drink, for God’s sake.’
I pushed my weight against the exit, clenching the dead phone so hard it hurt all the way up my arm. ‘What are you going to do if I don’t, Sean?’
‘I’m not gonna do a damn thing,’ he said, turning his back on me.
‘No?’
He shrugged, finishing the beer, and swapped it for another two cans. ‘What were you expecting? You want me to tell you I’m off to get Dad’s old Browning? We’re mates, aren’t we? We both know you’re going to come and have a sit-down anyway.’
‘Why’s that?’ I was trying to push the veiled threat of the gun to the back of my mind.
He took a step away. Paused. ‘Because you’ve got to know, haven’t you? I can see the bit between your teeth, driving you up the wall. So, let’s just sit down, have a beer, and talk about this like a couple of grown men, shall we?’
I didn’t answer.
I should’ve walked away, but as he’d guessed, I couldn’t. Not without knowing.
He reached towards his uniform hanging from the coat hook, unclipped the expandable baton from his jacket, and hooked it neatly onto his hip. ‘Just in case you’re thinking of doing anything stupid,’ he said, before disappearing further into the dark of the house.
I followed.
Like Billy Barber before him, he had me. He had me, and he fucking knew it.
40
We went into the sitting room, and that’s all it was: a perfectly ordinary sitting room in a perfectly ordinary house.
It was untidy – dirty plates on the floor, more empty cans and bottles piled around a fifty-five-inch television, Xbox wires in a tangle, and a stack of pornographic DVDs by the open wooden staircase leading upstairs – but it was far from squalid.
I could’ve been wrong. It wouldn’t have been the first time.
He closed the curtains, blocking out the snowfall, turned on the lamps in opposite corners, and invited me to sit. I remained squarely on my feet. It stank of stale smoke and sour beer. There were photographs of children – his children, I assumed – at varying ages framed around the room. No sign of a wife.
‘She isn’t dead,’ he said coolly, reading my thoughts as he collapsed wearily onto the sofa and opened his second can. ‘She’s dead to me, but she’s still got some life in her body, as well as the cock of a twenty-five-year-old wog, last I heard.’
A long drink, shaking his head. The low lamplight cast shadows from his high, handsome cheekbones.
‘Twenty-five,’ he said. ‘That’s only five years older than Brett, our eldest.’ He gestured to a photograph of a teenager who bore a fierce resemblance to the feisty blond hooligan I’d known – or thought I’d known – many years ago. ‘She’s a sick cunt,’ he added, and then spat on the rug in the middle of the room and left it there.
I was still clutching the phone.
‘I’m gonna have to take that from you,’ he said. ‘Just for now. You understand, don’t you, mate?’
Mate. Though I hadn’t realised it at the time, the word had made me happy when we’d been able to say it to one another upon meeting again; it had felt like a long time since I’d been able to do that, and mean it, with anybody.
Now the word sounded thin.
‘It’s dead,’ I told him, indicating the lifeless screen.
He nodded apologetically. ‘Probably for the best, but still …’
I handed it over, trying to play it cool, painfully aware that I’d just surrendered my last bullet to the firing squad.
As he slipped it into his pocket with the tooth, my thoughts leapt to Zara, sitting within throwing distance in the passenger seat.
It seemed unlikely that he hadn’t noticed her in what was unmistakably my car with the headlights on, but why hadn’t he mentioned it?
Perhaps he couldn’t see her through the snow; maybe he’d already come to the conclusion that I’d left the engine running because I hadn’t planned on staying, and he was more than happy to leave it unmentioned, knowing that my only escape was, with every passing moment, entering the same terminal death throe as my phone.
But Zara … What if she –
‘Would you sit down?’ he said, derailing my train of thought. ‘And take that stupid hat off. You’re making me nervous.’
I chose the most distant seat available, a threadbare footstool close to the television, and placed my hat on the floor.
He offered me a cigarette, menthol, and lit them in turn, laying a heavy glass ashtray onto the cluttered coffee table between us.
I wondered, if it was to come down to it, whether he could take me in a fight. Once upon a time, almost certainly, and he wouldn’t have needed a skull-cracking truncheon to do it either. I reached for the cigarette.
‘You and DeWitt were in this together?’ I asked, thinking out loud, filling my lungs.
‘DeWitt?’ He actually chuckled. ‘Christ almighty, I thought you’d be more understanding of a man born in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’s done well for himself, our Chief Super, but a past is a hard thing to leave behind, especially when it gets dragged up in the courtroom once a year by every half-arsed defence lawyer with access to the Internet. No wonder the fucker finally snapped on you.’
A tiny, delicate part of my pride was wounded by that. I’d thought we were unique in our discovery.
He drained the second can, tossed it alongside the drying streak of spit, and opened the next.
‘Let me ask you something, Rook …’ With one long finger he tapped the cigarette’s ash onto his boots. ‘Why do you care?’
I blinked, smoking as fast as he was drinking. ‘Why do I care about what?’
‘Any of this. You won, didn’t you? Got paid. So, why do you care? Why are you here, skulking around my property on the coldest night in December?’
‘Parinda Malik,’ I told him, keeping my tone conversational, keeping his mind off the alleged pistol somewhere in the building.
‘Prindo what?’
I took the poster out from my pocket and held her face up for him to see.
‘Who’s that then?’ he asked nonchalantly.
‘A young woman who disappeared from Nottingham three and something years back, but I think you probably know that already. What you probably never knew was that she spoke to a solicitor the day before she vanished. Had a lot to say about being harassed by a local copper.’
His eyes widened a notch, pupils smothering green. ‘Sounds like bullshit to me.’
‘No bullshit, Sean.’ I flattened the paper onto the coffee table. ‘We’ve got the solicitor’s receipts to prove it.’
‘To prove what? Do you know how many complaints are filed against the force each year? She probably got stopped and searched one too many times and fucked off back to wherever she came from.’
‘I don’t think so.’ I watched him steadily, drenching my tight throat with lager, casting my mind back to our meeting in the country park: there isn’t a girl alive who could resist. Why else do you think I became a copper?
I stubbed the menthol out in the ashtray. He did the same, splitting his filter in two.
‘How many, Sean?’ I asked quietly. ‘How many girls? Two? Three? More?’
He watched me back, fingers rapping his aluminium can. ‘You didn’t answer my question.’ His words were slurring at the edges.
‘What question?’
‘Why do you care about any of this? You’re in no position to determine what’s right or wrong. How many criminals have you fought to defend? How many killers have you freed?’
‘This is different.’
‘You told me that Billy had tried to blackmail you …’ I recalled slowly. ‘Over what?’
‘A load of shit,’ he snapped. ‘We both spent some time in the BNP a few years back, but so what? Nothing illegal in that …’ He leaned closer. ‘What if you were my barrister? You’d do everything you could to keep me out of prison, wouldn’t you? You’re not a copper. You’re not a grass. You’d never stand as a witness for the prosecution. So, what’s the difference?’
I couldn’t find an answer; somehow, I was being lectured on morality by him. ‘What happened over Easter weekend, Sean? How did she end up out there, alone, with nothing but that jacket? Why break her legs when she was already dead? Why did you do it?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Come on, Rook. You’re talking to a copper for Christ’s sake.’
‘Only on the outside. You might as well wear fancy dress to work.’
‘Well, that makes two of us then.’ He lit another cigarette; clenched it between his teeth, thinking hard, before exhaling. ‘Our uniforms mean something, don’t they? That’s why we put them on. Why we worked so hard to get them. Our uniforms are power.’
‘I don’t abuse that power.’
‘No?’ He clicked his tongue, leaned back into the sofa and eyed me through rings of smoke. ‘You don’t use it to your advantage? Please. Before our uniforms, we had nothing. No power. No choices. You were born in the Midlands in ’65, you went down the pit. Back in Belfast, things were even clearer. I was born Catholic, so I went to Catholic school and knew only Catholic people. Maybe that’s how society is supposed to be, you know? My old man said there was a reason they called them Peace Walls. Segregation is peace, and when you blur those lines you get war. It’s inevitable. It’s coming.’
‘Fitting words to come out of a war zone,’ I said drily, ‘especially from a nationalist who left his own country.’
He shrugged. ‘Dad was complicated, I’ll give you that, but he knew the power of a uniform. That’s the whole reason he started a paramilitary with my uncle. They thought the IRA was too soft on outsiders. Got tanked up one night in ’75 and shot a couple of black citizens to prove the point.’ He smiled at the memory, introspective, almost proud. ‘Course, the IRA had to punish them for it. Uncle Pat got his throat cut, and Dad spent the next seven years hiding down the pit in fucking Cotgrave, the arse end of nowhere, before they tracked him down. And what did he do wrong, really? He drew a line in the fucking sand, that’s all.’
I was shaking my head. I’d known Sean’s dad – we all had – up until he’d walked out on the family. He was certainly a hard man, like the rest, but a killer?
‘You are so full of shit,’ I said coldly. ‘You always were.’
The temperature shifted fast. Sean glowered. He smashed his second cigarette to dust in the ashtray, half smoked. ‘You boys were always pulling me to fucking bits. Everything I ever said, just like my wife. Just like all those stupid slags! What the fuck would you know about my dad?’
I sipped my lager, watching the heat rise in his cheeks. Sean McCarthy, like any cornered defendant, had lashed out. Every criminal has a weakness. I took a steady breath, battling nerves.
‘Your father was a lot of things, Sean,’ I told him, ‘but at the end of the day, he was just another lousy shit who didn’t come back from the bookies one morning. Whatever lies he told you, whatever fantasies you’ve cooked up to help justify what you’ve done –’
‘Fantasies?’ He slammed his beer onto the coffee table, sending droplets into the air between us, and I flinched. ‘You want to fucking bet on that, do you?’
Sean had a weakness all right, and that weakness had always been pride.
I managed a cool, unconvinced shrug, goading him.
He staggered across the room to the wooden staircase, ducked into the cupboard underneath, and began rummaging through a jumble of old shoes and coats inside, cursing beneath his breath. Something hidden at the back of the cupboard beeped five times. The keypad of a safe. I glanced through the kitchen. Snow was still falling beyond the glass door, covering the tracks I’d made in the garden. I was just wagering the probability of outrunning Sean when I found myself thinking of the Copper at the Door, the test I’d played with Zara.
A uniformed police officer comes across an attractive young girl on the morning of Good Friday in the quiet village of Cotgrave. He attempts to lure her into his marked vehicle.
‘Has he done this before?’ imaginary Zara interjected, bobbing in Sean’s former seat on the sofa.
Almost certainly. Perhaps the girl speaks English, maybe not, but she does have enough wits to get away. Hours later, she stops to use the toilet at the Welfare Scheme Social Club, still rattled, and then walks northwards in the direction of the country park.
‘But she never steps foot inside the park after all, does she, Mr Rook?’
No. She never does.
The same officer finds her a few streets away from the social club, not by accident, but because he’s been looking for her. This time he refuses to take no for an answer. He gets her into the car – his car by now, after finishing work for a supposed weekend holiday – and drives her north, entirely parallel to the railway, bringing her here.
She fights back as he undresses her. Escapes somehow, grabbing only her jacket on the way out. She slips in the rain trying to scale the garden wall and loses the first tooth. He catches up to her a few hundred metres west. He beats her, strangles her under the cover of the storm, and the crime is pinned on a local racist.
The killer is going to get away with it. How?
The Zara of my imagination tossed her hair back over one shoulder.
‘You just said it, Mr Rook. The pieces of the puzzle are all there. He gets away with it because he is a copper. He gets away with it because he knows how, and he has the patience to spend the night placing broken fingernails along the railway line, tracing a make-believe path back to the last place she was seen alive. It’s a storm, its flooding fast, so he can’t move her to a better burial site – he tries, but a body is heavy, the ground is a swamp, and he snaps her legs with the effort – but he can easily cover his tracks in the groundwater. Everybody believes he’s away with his family because he still wears the ring. Mostly, he gets away with it because he knows we’ll do nothing about it.’
No, I thought to myself. No, he doesn’t.
‘There!’ Sean interrupted, slapping a clutch of papers onto the coffee table. ‘Who’s full of shit now?’
They were photographs – four or five faded seventies Polaroids – of Sean’s father as I almost remembered him, only younger, dressed in a mercenary trench coat and beret, holding a shotgun here, a pistol there, some with a scarf over his mouth.
I shrugged again. ‘Your father’s been out of the picture for a long time now, Sean. Whatever he might have done, one thing doesn’t excuse the other.’
‘I’m not making excuses!’ he roared, pacing the room, fists clenching at his sides. ‘I’m proving that you don’t know shit, Rook! I’m proud of my dad! I’m –’
He stopped talking.
The silence that fell was as thick as the snow outside; somewhere upstairs, a lone pipe creaked, but that was all I heard.
Sean was staring back down the length of the kitchen, out through the glass in the door, as if somebody had just pressed pause on the moment. His fingers absently stroked the steel at his hip.
I got to my feet slowly, praying that Zara had called the police, ready to welcome blue lights over the garden.
But there were no lights. There were only two brown eyes, magnified by thick Ginsberg glasses, and an inquisitive face pressed close against the window.
I heard my hand tighten around the beer, the crunch of tin, and half registered the cold liquid leaking onto my wrist.
Sean raised an eyebrow.
‘Well …’ he
said slowly. ‘Isn’t this interesting?’
41
‘Your junior?’ he asked quietly, walking through the kitchen and holding a single finger up to Zara on the other side of the door: one moment, please.
‘Sean …’ I croaked.
‘Here’s what’s about to happen, Rook,’ he said. ‘The three of us are going to sit down, and you’re gonna use that brain of yours to put this under the rug. The two of you can go home tonight, and she never has to know a thing. Put this to the back of your mind. Forget about it.’ He met my eyes. ‘You can save her life. What do you say?’
What I said was nothing whatsoever; I was standing in the doorway to the kitchen now, straining my eyes at Zara in a hopeless signal for her to run back to the car and drive.
All she did was stare right back, pupils darting between the two of us, measuring the baton at his hip.
Sean opened the door with a welcoming grin, the perfect host, and a wave of cold swept through the house. ‘Sorry, I thought it was locked! You must be the junior.’
He offered his hand. She might’ve been a statue for all it was worth, hands clasped behind her back, chewing her lips. ‘Everything all right, Mr Rook?’
Sean nodded towards me. ‘Course, we were just talking about old times. Come inside, you’ll catch your death out there!’
She didn’t move an inch, but she rolled her shoulders, hands still hidden.
‘Mr Rook?’
‘It’s fine,’ I heard myself say, shuffling towards, and crucially between, the two of them. I put my crushed beer onto the worktop. ‘My phone died before I had chance to reply, but I got your text. Everything’s cool.’
Her head cocked, a glint through the lenses at her eyes, as we came almost nose to nose at the threshold. ‘Everything’s … cool? You sure?’
‘Yes.’ The bite of the weather outside caught sweat on the nape of my neck and sent a violent shiver down the length of my back. ‘It’s all cool.’
‘All right.’ She blinked at Sean, who was standing at my left shoulder. ‘Well, if you say so …’
