Family

by Owen Mullen

  Nobody needed to tell him he’d failed.

  5

  I tried to make Danny understand.

  ‘It’s not about a holiday. I just don’t want to do it any more.’

  His response was everything I’d expected it would be.

  ‘Don’t talk daft. What else would you do?’

  ‘Go abroad, maybe.’

  His expression twisted in disbelief.

  ‘Abroad? You mean away from England?’ The idea appalled him. ‘And then what?’

  ‘That’s as far as I’ve got.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like you’ve thought this through. More like a reaction to coming out.’

  His ringtone broke into our argument. Reluctantly he took the call. I watched his expression tighten and his mood change from bad to worse. The mobile snapped shut.

  ‘Rollie Anderson just hit the King Pot. Let’s go.’

  We sat in the back of the Lexus, as far from each other as it was possible to be, him facing away, staring through the car’s tinted glass so he wouldn’t have to look at me. I’d gone from long-lost brother to the invisible man. When I was able to set aside my gratitude for what he’d done for us growing up, this was how I remembered my brother: Danny got what Danny wanted or there were consequences. Experience had taught me it was better to leave him alone, so I did.

  The car came to a halt thirty yards from the pub close to a line of blue-and-white tape already stretched across the road. Beyond it, two police cars, an ambulance and a body on the ground clearly showed that ducking out of the party had been one of my better decisions. An outside table had been knocked over and people stood in groups, strangers mostly, under wrought-iron hanging baskets filled with flowers, reminders that the King of Mesopotamia had been a decent local boozer, a typical South London watering hole, before my brother took it over – VE Day, the World Cup victory in 1966 and, for close on seventy years, the Queen’s birthday had been celebrated here.

  Danny got out and marched through the cordon. I followed. A young policeman who must have been new tried to stop him. He brushed the constable aside and didn’t bother to glance down at the body on the pavement as we went through the door.

  The first face I saw was the guy who should have been behind the wheel the awful morning Albert Anderson murdered Cheryl and Rebecca: Marcus. Still around. And he’d clearly come up in the world.

  Acrid smoke and the sweet smell of burnt caramel caught in my throat. On the floor, surrounded by shards of glass, a redhead was having her picture taken from different angles by a police photographer who’d clearly seen it all before and wasn’t impressed; he looked up at us and went on doing what he was doing. The victim’s auburn hair was matted and dark with blood, her open eyes staring at the ceiling, seeing nothing, the surprise in them impossible to miss. When she was putting the finishing touches to her make-up the prospect of seeing Danny Glass’s famous brother probably seemed exciting. She died because of me and we’d never even met.

  Near her, a man stared at the ceiling waiting his turn to have his picture taken. His suit jacket had been oatmeal. Once. Now it was dirty red. It was no coincidence Rollie Anderson had chosen today to make his move. Walking away wasn’t going to be as simple as I’d imagined.

  The officer in charge broke from talking to his men and came towards us.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Glass, we had no idea. DCI Stanford said—’

  Danny grabbed his lapels and threw him against the bar. A banner with WELCOME HOME LUKE hanging at an angle from a solitary tack dangled above his head; the bullet had gone through the female’s skull and obliterated the pin holding up one end.

  ‘Shove the excuses. Tell Stanford I want to see him.’

  The policeman stuttered. ‘He’s… in Hendon. At… at the college.’

  ‘You tell him Danny Glass says to get his arse down here. Pronto.’

  ‘I’ll… I’ll call him… call him now.’

  ‘Yeah, you do that.’

  Danny’s eyes were wild and he was breathing hard, a heartbeat away from losing it completely. Marcus got it next. Cheryl hadn’t liked Marcus and had complained to me more than once about his attitude. There was no attitude today. The guy was six feet two or three, towering above everybody in the room, but that didn’t stop Danny.

  ‘What happened?’

  Marcus kept his answer short, no doubt wishing he wasn’t the one who had to tell it.

  ‘They burst in and shot Gracie. Didn’t have to, just did. Our guy made a move and got the same.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Four, maybe five.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They wanted to know where the three of you were. Put a bullet in Harry on their way up the stairs. They didn’t find you so they trashed the place. Felix killed one of them.’ He pointed to a body.

  ‘Is it anybody we know?’

  ‘No.’

  Danny nodded. ‘So not local. Brought in for the job. His mates will be getting on a train in Euston to Liverpool or Bolton or some other hellhole as we speak. Who was outside?’

  ‘Bruno and Felix. Bruno’s dead.’

  ‘And Felix?’

  ‘Felix is okay. Told you, he killed one of them.’

  Marcus hesitated and Danny said, ‘If Bruno’s dead, how come Felix is okay?’

  The big man shifted uneasily. ‘Because… he wasn’t at the door when they hit.’

  A full half-minute went by. Nobody moved. Danny stared at Marcus. Marcus looked at the floor. Eventually, my brother broke the silence; he went mental.

  ‘Fu-u-u-uck! Morons! I’m surrounded by morons! Where was Felix?’

  Marcus reluctantly replied. ‘Having a drink.’

  Danny cupped a hand behind his ear, pretending he hadn’t understood.

  ‘Say again.’

  ‘At the bar. Felix was having a drink.’

  ‘And you knew about this?’

  ‘No, I was—’

  ‘Shut up! Just shut up! Get Felix. Take him to Fulton Street and do him.’

  ‘But, Danny…’

  ‘Doooittt!’

  Surrounded by witnesses and coppers, Marcus was being ordered to commit murder.

  Danny said, ‘Is he outside? Is he? Well, what’re you waiting for? Go! We could all be dead. You’re paid to make sure that doesn’t happen. Felix gets what’s coming to him. Think yourself lucky it isn’t you going in the ground.’

  So far, I’d been a bystander. This was my brother’s kingdom, he made the rules, although a blind man could see he was beyond reason. Publicly ordering an execution in front of a room full of coppers was crazy.

  I pointed at Marcus.

  ‘Stay there. Just stay there.’

  Danny was ashen, drained by the fury he’d let loose. I dragged him to the other end of the bar and tried to reach him.

  ‘Listen to me. Go through with this and nobody can save you. It’ll all be over. The end of Team Glass. Anderson will have won.’

  I held onto him until he started to come back to me. His eyes lost the glaze and regained their focus.

  I kept talking.

  ‘We can’t let that piece of shit beat us.’

  He nodded and put an arm on my shoulder like he always did. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse from screaming.

  ‘You’re a good boy, Luke. A good boy.’

  ‘I’ll deal with Felix. In my own way and in my own time. Don’t forget he took one of them out.’

  ‘Yeah, you see to it,’ he said, and let me lead him upstairs.

  My brother kept a safe in the wall behind a drinks cabinet in the office above the pub. It hadn’t been touched; the raiders weren’t interested in money. Neither was Danny. He knelt, gently brushing glass off what was left of the photograph of Her Majesty, smoothing it out, close to tears, then picked up one of the records spilled from the toppled jukebox and cradled it like a bird with a broken wing.

  For some guys it was cars or racehorses or houses. Even women were collectable if you looked at
it that way. With him, it was British pop music; he was obsessed with it – nothing later than the early seventies. To him, the Swinging Sixties was about more than just music. It represented a time, a national identity, something to be proud of. His biggest regret was that he’d missed it. Every few weeks he’d put his current favourite songs on the jukebox. I couldn’t say how many records he had, but it was a lot.

  His voice was ragged with emotion.

  ‘They’ve scratched “Waterloo Sunset”. A fucking classic. One of the best songs Ray Davies ever wrote. Bastards!’

  It didn’t feel right to be there, so I left him alone and went back down. Marcus was at the other end of the bar talking to a couple of guys – one of them would be Felix – no doubt filling them in on Danny’s meltdown and discussing me, the unknown quantity. They stopped when I appeared.

  ‘Who’s Felix?’

  A man nearer thirty than twenty, wearing a brown leather jacket and jeans, nodded. Instead of guarding the door he’d been at the bar ordering a drink. He looked like he could use one now. His tongue moved over lips dry with anxiety and his voice faltered.

  He was afraid and he should be.

  ‘I am,’ he said.

  ‘Make yourself scarce.’

  He didn’t need telling twice. When he’d gone Marcus sidled up.

  ‘What’re you going to do to him? He almost got you killed.’

  He was forgetting his part in the security debacle, prepared to see somebody else take the fall. Cheryl hadn’t liked him. Neither did I.

  Footsteps on the stairs helped him decide it would be better to be somewhere else and he drifted away. Danny came towards me, glass crunching under his feet like fresh snow. His eyes were red and his voice was a monotone but the madness was gone. He stroked his chin.

  ‘Your unexpected detour saved our lives. If we’d been here it would’ve been our brains on the wall. Two for the price of one. A result for Anderson. He’ll be disappointed. But I wasn’t the target. Neither was Nina. You were. It was you he was after.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘The long memories I was talking about.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself. It may look like a war started today – it didn’t. It never stopped and it never will, until we kill Rollie Anderson or he kills us. Forget the crap you were spouting earlier, not coming back isn’t an option. The Glass family stand together.’

  Nina spent the drive to the pub thinking about Eugene Vale, the best lover she’d ever had – an unexpected plus she was more than happy about. In other circumstances, she wouldn’t have given the twice-married twice-divorced accountant a second glance. For a start, he was in his late forties, too old for her. Seducing him had been a means to an end, the initial step in a plan made possible when Danny had put them together. After that, convincing him to do what she wanted had been easy because, like most men, he thought with his dick.

  Vale ran his small firm from an unimpressive office above a florist down a side street in Lewisham – just him and a secretary called Yvonne, a tarty piece who came in three days a week. Nina disliked the woman on sight – over-confident for someone with nothing to brag about. Her lipstick was too red, her skirts were too short, and whenever she interrupted their meeting to get him to sign something, as she made sure she always did, she leaned across so her boss got a good look at her breasts. None of it escaped Nina. Nor did the barely suppressed I-know-something-you-don’t-know smirk on Yvonne’s lips.

  She sensed a rival.

  Much of Danny’s business was done on the street and in cash. No paper trail, invoices or receipts; keeping track of the daily flow of money was almost impossible. Glass was Vale’s only client. Danny trusted him – as far as he trusted anybody – although ‘trust’ in the true sense of the word didn’t come into it.

  Whoever was foolish enough to steal from him was too stupid to live, and wouldn’t for long if he found out.

  If, Nina emphasised. If he found out.

  The trick was to make sure he never did.

  Eugene had done all right out of the arrangement with her brother.

  He was doing better than all right now.

  The affair wouldn’t last, in Nina’s experience they rarely did, but it wouldn’t peter out until she was financially independent and didn’t need the accountant any more.

  Nina turned the corner into the street and froze. Two police cars and an ambulance were parked outside the King Pot; through the crowd she saw a body on the pavement covered in a blanket. Nina braked hard, got out of the car and started running. As she pushed her way to the front, hands tugged at her coat trying to hold her back. She shrugged them off and ducked under the blue-and-white tape holding the onlookers at bay. A baby-faced constable barely old enough to shave made a futile attempt to stop her going inside. Nina brushed past and charged through the door screaming, ‘Luke! Luke!’

  Danny’s temper was on an even shorter fuse than usual. He turned angrily towards the shouting. ‘What’s that fucking racket?’

  Nina burst into tears and ran breathless into Luke’s arms. ‘You’re all right. You’re all right. Thank God.’

  He held her, gently stroking her hair to reassure her.

  ‘I’m fine. Absolutely fine.’

  Danny watched his brother and sister, the edges of his mouth curled in a humourless grin. ‘As it happens, I’m all right, too, Nina. Thanks for asking.’

  She ignored him and spoke to Luke. ‘Who did this?’

  ‘Anderson.’

  ‘Bastard.’

  ‘If we’d been here, we’d be dead.’

  Danny said, ‘Rollie reckons he’s waited long enough to settle the score.’ He eyed Nina up and down. ‘Where the hell were you, anyway?’

  I was exhausted, so tired I could have lain down on the floor and slept forever. Booze and adrenaline had done me in. My first day of freedom and it felt like shit. The last thing I remember from that crazy afternoon was the smell of cigar smoke on Danny’s breath as I fell into a taxi and him whispering the mantra I’d been hearing since I was a child in my ear.

  ‘Team Glass. Team Glass, Luke.’

  There were no dreams, only a block of nothing and a noise that wouldn’t go away. My eyes opened. I was in the flat, on the couch, still dressed; my head hurt. It took a minute to realise there was someone at the door.

  She was tall and slim in high heels and a mink coat, red hair falling in curls to what I knew would be flawless white shoulders underneath, and legs that went all the way to Australia. Two glasses twirled between the fingers of one hand; condensation trickled down the champagne bottle in the other. A silver ankle bracelet with a tiny replica of the Eiffel Tower caught my eye.

  She smiled and spoke in a Lancashire drawl.

  ‘Looking for a Luke, that you?’

  I’d assumed Eiffel. I should have been thinking Blackpool.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’m Mandy. Danny sent me. Can I come in?’

  The first time is never the best time. Strangers meeting in the dark. Too many unknowns for the earth to move. It didn’t move for us. But it was good. I knew it would be. When it was over, she lay with her head on the pillow, tracing my face with her eyes, her voice husky with something she was reluctant to admit. Eventually she said, ‘I lied to you. I promised myself whatever happened I wouldn’t and I have.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About Danny.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Danny didn’t send me.’

  6

  Sunlight streaming in the window and a ringing in my head brought me round. My bones ached, even my eyes ached. I rolled off the bed and staggered towards the lounge, the room rolling with me – the noise in my brain got louder. Mandy’s perfume drifted from the bedroom to the sofa next door, sweeter than I remembered. Just as I reached it the phone stopped. No prizes for guessing who it had been. He’d call again.

  Half a dozen cans of Stella Artois in the fridge and an unopened jar of Car
te Noire in the cupboard reminded me what a considerate guy Danny could be: three thousand pounds, a hooker, a phone, coffee and lager; this was my lucky day. Except it wasn’t free. None of it. His generosity was calculated. Team Glass was an obsession he wasn’t about to let go and he was reeling me in. I expected to open a drawer and come across keys for a car with my name on it.

  While I waited for the water to boil, I opened a beer and thought about the previous day. Drinking takes practice and I hadn’t had any. The lager had a metallic taste. Most of it got poured down the sink. My first twenty-four hours on the outside had been eventful, although somebody trying to kill me wasn’t the kind of highlight I was looking for. I made coffee and carried it through to the lounge with a shaky hand. I’d been too out of it to notice anything different about the place; the delightful distraction of Mandy had made sure it stayed that way. Now it was like being in someone else’s home. The only thing I recognised was the cricket bat Danny had bought me when I was twelve, sitting where it had always been, behind the door.

  Because you just never know.

  New wallpaper framed unfamiliar furniture: a sofa, an angular lamp, above the fireplace an ornate clock I wouldn’t have taken if they’d been giving it away and a bookcase heavy with paperbacks purchased by the yard and unread. Then there was the carpet, an orange, yellow and green monstrosity nobody in their right mind would have in their house. My brother’s taste was in his arse. Taken together, the décor and furniture made a powerful case for moving on.

  The phone rang a second time. Danny, all business.

  ‘Ten o’clock. Somebody I want you to meet. Get yourself round here pronto. Important you’re in on this.’