by David Mark
“Then bang! Boom-shack-a-lack, we’ve got a double murder on the first day of the trial, and most importantly, on the first day of the documentary. I’m a busy boy, but I take it. And there it is. My solution. My salvation. I let Tony H into the incident room. Let him see the pictures, and the boy does a double-take when he sees the shoot of the lad with the bullet in his head. Almost loath to tell me he is, but he’s a greedy little weasel and he knows I remember a favour, so he tells all. It’s only Owen Lee’s least favourite human being, his sister’s drug-addicted boyfriend. Really, I say. She into that scene, is she? Oh yeah, says Tony. She’s a smack-head. Lives in a bedsit, spreads her legs for cash, never been the same since, well, since you did what you did. And it all crystallizes in my head, Owen. All the little pieces come together. I see a way out, and I see a way to thank you properly for what you did for me.
“So here’s where we’re at, laddo. Here’s the deal. You killed Beatle. And the other one. Prescott. Your car was in the car park at the time. You’ve got quite the history and quite the motive. You killed them both. Personally, factually, I doubt it. That other one was a real star. Hard as nails. Doubt you could have offed him, but juries are more easily persuaded than I am, and the most important thing is, I can make it stick. Almost as good as the Butterworth case. But that’s the word. Almost. It isn’t going to set the world alight, is it? Half-decent journalist offs his sister’s boyfriend and his mate. Page 15 of the Telegraph, if I’m lucky. I’m a bright boy, though, Owen. And it comes to me. Two birds, one stone. Two cases, one lucky bugger. That’s you, by the way. I’ve got to get the conviction in the Butterworth case. Got to. No argument. What’s the sticking point? What’s the obstacle? The cell-mate. The witness. He has to go away, Owen. He has to leave the picture. How do I make that happen? I need somebody to make him disappear. Who can do that, I ask? I’ve got a lot of people I can call upon in said circumstances, but none of them I could trust to truly shut the fuck up in an interview room. Nobody who wouldn’t save their own skins by flaying mine. Of course, I could do it myself, but it’s a bit tricky getting time to indulge yourself when there’s a TV crew following you around 24/7 No, what I need is somebody who’s fucked already. Somebody who’s capable of doing the job and then keeping their mouth shut. Somebody with a past to die for, a present that’s a gift. I need you, Owen. We both know I’m going to get you for Beatle’s death. That’s a given. But I can hang fire for a day or two. We’ll do a ‘no comment’ interview, and I’ll bail you. Set you free. Give you a change of clothes, and an address. A room number, in fact. A room at a rather plush hotel where the infamous cell-mate is staying, and you’re going to kill him. Then I’m going to arrest you, for three counts of murder. The two in the woods, and the cell-mate. Minns. Big fucker, but you’ve got a pedigree. Maybe a couple more, if needs be. And we’re going to have quite the time, you and I. Some wonderful dialogue in the interview room. You’ll be a serial killer, Owen. And I’ll be the man to catch you. It’s hard to avoid the word ‘nemesis’ isn’t it? We’re aiming for primetime, here, Owen. I know you’re the sort of guy who’ll play nicely with me, despite what we both know you’re capable of. I doubt you’ll mention this little chat, because your sister, who seemed so very taken with me, will still be on the outside, with me. I don’t have to go through the cliché of threatening her life, do I? You get it, I’m sure.
“So there we are. An interview, we go through the motions, and I let you out. You find him, and you kill him. Use this. It’s one of a pair and it’s taken life before so you’ll get on famously. I’ll slip the bullets in your pocket as you leave. Don’t think of getting cute. He’s a big guy. Use your looks, what’s left of them. Then you can run, if you like. I’ll catch you, and the chase will be good TV. Or you can just hang around until I feel like bringing you in. Then we do the interview properly, we charge you, and after that, your future’s whatever you want it to be. I’d end it all, if I was you, but there’s no pressure. You do whatever makes you happy. Just don’t confess too early, yeah? I want them to see me break you. Are we clear, here? Any questions that won’t irritate me?”
I try to hold his gaze. Cough. Spit blood. I ask: “How much did Tony know?” My voice is so weak as to be little more than a smoker’s last breath.
He smiles at that. “Tony knows what I tell him. He told me where he was meeting you, and I thought the arrest would make good TV. I promised him the exclusive, and I’ve kept my word. Anything else?”
“Jess?”
“Your girl? Interesting. We got a report on her early this morning. Friend of hers said she was still missing. Said you were the last person to see her alive. Don’t worry, I’ve taken over the investigation. Leave it all to me. I’m sure she’s fit as a fiddle. What d’you reckon? Now get dressed. Remember, no comment answers to every question. Then out the door, and do what you’ve got to do. Console yourself with the fact you’re giving justice to the Butterworths. They’re a nice family, like yours were once. And try not to read the papers. They’ll just upset you.”
And he’s up. Opening the suit-carrier and tossing me a black suit, black shirt, and my own muddy boots. He pulls my rings and chain from a pocket and drops them on the floor. Then he hands me a gun.
“Suit’s my spare,” he nods. “I want to be a part of this.”
He pulls open the door.
I’m just sitting digesting it all.
Holding a gun in my hand.
Cold and metallic and oh so familiar.
There’s a half smile on my face.
He wants me to kill a dead man.
And he doesn’t know.
About the gun.
About the others.
About the six beautiful shots or the bodies I’ve left behind.
He’s opening the door and giving me another chance.
A chance to make a difference.
Put things right.
48
At 6.58pm two uniformed officers come into my cell and bang their palms against the metal door to wake me up. I’m already dressed, but they tell me to get ready, so I lick the last of the ink off my fingertips and rub my hands on my trousers and check my watch and they walk me to the front desk.
The breakfast show is playing Radio Humbershite and I catch the news headlines while I’m signing my bail form. A 29-year-old local man was arrested last night on suspicion of carrying out the horrific double murder at the Humber Bridge Country Park. Detective Chief Superintendent Doug Roper is understood to have made the arrest and is currently interviewing the…
They tell me to come back in the morning and walk me from the belly of the police station through corridors and up green-painted stairs with their posters and noticeboards and damp patches, and we stand aside as a figure in a good suit jogs briskly up the stairs, then it’s on, up, on to the large double-fronted glass doors and the white-painted lobby and its smiling desk sergeant and its rain-mottled windows and the darkness beyond, and I nod a thankyou as they punch a code into a keypad and disappear back into the station and I fold the bail papers and put them in my inside pocket where they tuck themselves behind a tin of cigarillos.
The doors open as I walk towards them, and then the cold and the dark and the rain take me into their embrace and I walk down the steps and into Queen’s Gardens, across the well-tended lawns and barren flowerbeds and frozen earth that serve as the city centre’s lungs in summer and which attract the tramps and the teenagers and drunks and the office workers whenever the sun shows its smile and we sprawl on the grass and read books and drink cider and ogle cleavages and throw a rugby ball and which make us northerners feel like we live in London.
Up the steps at the far side, past the duck pond with its year-round algae and its matted reeds, and look up at the towering apartment building, which seems to be growing all the time, as if craning its neck for a view of something more palatable.
It’s not until I’ve passed the fountains and the benches and I’m scampering across the main road
past the slumbering, half-lit hulk of the shopping precinct that I reach into my trouser pocket and feel the cold, metal object that Roper slipped to me as we passed on the stairs.
One more. One more chance. One more opportunity.
Enough!
Walking briskly on the wet pavements and skirting dirty puddles, watching Hull coughing itself into life with the early morning farts and belches and retches of engines revved, voices raised, buses vibrating, beer-kegs dropping down cellar stairs, street-lights humming, mumbles into mobile phones …..
The rain is so fine as to be barely visible, but it’s the kind that chills to the bone and makes your bruises sing with pain, and I’m huddled inside my suit jacket and almost running as I pass the big screen and it’s 15-foot blonde newsreader telling me they’ve caught someone on suspicion of an horrific double murder…
Consumed with minutiae and tedium. Wondering which photos of me they’ll pull out. Which papers will have the balls to name me. Which of my friends will even try to call and get a quote, and which will simply tell their news editors they tried but my phone was switched off. Wondering how many people will be surprised. Whether they will be telling each other that they always knew there was something dark about me, that they always believed me to be capable of anything.
Cold and wet and with my heartbeat sounding in my head, I creak up the front stairs to the Station Hotel and into the warm and walk briskly across the red carpet of the lobby to the lift. I push the button, and the brass doors open. I step inside, nod to the waiter in his black and white tweeds as he heels his breakfast trolley out into the lobby, then hit three, and lean back against the wall as I’m carried upwards, staring at my reflection in the glass doors; a reflection cut in two when they open, and I step onto the landing with the image of my bruised features and grazed, burned hands dividing and separating like a tattoo on the insides of my eyes.
Down the corridor.
I knock on the door until my hands hurt and hiss Kerry’s name through the hinge and the crack at the base, but there’s no answer and no sound. I tell myself she must be asleep still, but it’s common sense tinged with panic and I’m running through all sorts of hysterical scenarios in my head when the maid comes along with the trolley and loans me her pass-card, and I swipe the lock and it doesn’t work, then swipe it again, and the light by the handle turns green and I push the door open and hold it with my foot, and pass the card back to the maid with a grateful smile and a wink that will keep her going ‘til lunchtime, then turn into the room, and see my sister laid out on the bed in the thick white dressing gown, with her eyes wide and staring at me and a goatee of blood and froth around her chin and mouth. The veins in her face are purple and pronounced against the clammy white pallor of her skin. Legs, like lengths of rope, stick out from the robe. One skinny arm hangs over the edge of the bed, clawed hand almost reaching the carpet. The other is at her side, open handed, displaying the polythene bag she has found in my coat pocket. A ‘comments’ card she has ripped in half and rolled into a tube to snort the poison while she waited for her brother to return and make it all right, has unrolled itself and lays, curved like a bridge, on the pillow next to her face.
Around her, across the bed, the floor, the pillow, the cabinet, are £20 notes. Each rectangle of paper touches the corner of the next, forming a pattern that looks like a child’s depiction of a giant snowflake. They have clearly fallen at random, fluttering down from the sky like dead leaves, after my sister, the only girl I ever really loved, found an unopened packet of cash and a bag of powder in her big brother’s pockets, thought her life was about to change, and threw it in the air as she bounced on the bed, excited as a little girl on Christmas Eve, then celebrated with a goodbye toot of poisoned crack; falling into death on a mattress of money.
And I cry until there’s nothing left.
49
An hour goes by, and I get up and take a piss, and squeeze an entire miniature tube of toothpaste into my mouth and swill it out repeatedly, brushing my teeth with my thumb, feeling my tongue go numb and tasting coppery blood through the minty foam; looking at my reflection in the bathroom mirror every time I raise my head from spitting, and never once seeing myself whole. Always disjointed. Fragmented. Sometimes just eyes and a mouth, sometimes a bruise and a sneer. Now just a faceless head. Now an open mouth with a grinning gecko on its tongue.
Back to the bedroom, and Kerry.
I open the bedside table, and there on Gideon’s favourite story, is the gun.
I pick it up and hold it on my palm, as though weighing a fish.
I place my other hand on top of it, as if making a benediction.
Feel its weight, enjoy its power.
Hear its song.
I hold it in my right hand and with my left, pull its twin from my waist.
There is no explosion, no riot of colour, no chorus of circling demons holding ribbons of flesh and banners of bone. But the sensation of metal in my spine and steel in my fingers grows harsh and hard as I close my palms around the two handles, flick the bullets from the clip, take the clip from my pocket and divide the rounds between the two revolvers.
It feels wonderfully precise, all oil and grease and smoothness, and I feel good doing it, the way you feel when you sharpen a pencil with a knife or saw a bit of wood in half without straying from the pencil line.
I lay down, and remember…
JUNE 1985. The day of the shoot.
When I first pulled the trigger.
Kerry asking Mam why the sky was azure blue overhead, but clear by the time it reached the grass.
Mam and Kerry sitting on a blanket at the top of the East field. Kerry in a Liverpool shirt with a gymkhana rosette stuck on the emblem and big pink knickers, slurping home-made lemonade from a beaker. Mam, brown hair tied back, in a floaty gingham dress and bare feet, shielding her eyes from the sun as they stared down at the shooting party below.
Me, watching it all a few feet away, staring at the collection of rich bastards drinking Pimm’s and carrying shotguns and adjusting the angle of their peaked caps, muttering about what an oaf Blake was until he waddled in their direction and they greeted him with smiles and sweaty handshakes. They seemed absorbent. They seemed to have sucked up the water in their last cool bath and retained it in vast rolls of soggy flesh like a camel.
And among them, bowing, scraping, almost curtsying, scampered my father. Handing out drinks. Fetching and carrying. Waving instructions to the beaters in the woods. Never looking up. Knuckles white and cheeks pink. Scurrying wherever Blake pointed his flabby finger.
Me, watching.
Tuning out Kerry’s laughter and Mam’s giggles and jokes.
Ignoring their pleas for me to come and sit with them.
Watching, as the fat men took their places and raised their guns and the air was suddenly alive with flapping and feathers and calls, and bang after bang after bang.
I could smell blood and gunpowder even before it drifted across to me in a ghost of smoke that danced for a moment with the lady in the ballgown before it floated on and over the slopes.
I stayed until they had taken their six shots each, and stood as the last of the pheasant thumped onto the hard earth.
Then Dad put down his gun. Slotted it into the spike on the ground, and strode onto the field to collect the dead birds.
And then I stood, and felt so many eyes upon me and tentacles like cobwebs on my skin, and I felt the dry, rasping kiss of the lady in the ballgown upon my cheek, and I walked down the slope and into the throng of fat men, and I smelled the sulphur and saltpetre and the feathers and the blood and I ignored the hellos of the fat fools and brushed past hands that tried to ruffle my hair and dogs that whined as I passed, and I picked up Dad’s gun, and felt its weight, familiar and pleasant and powerful and so full of promise.
Reaching into the pocket of my dark trousers.
Pulling out a cartridge.
Cracking the gun and breathing its sharp, metallic tang.
Slotting in the cartridge.
Snapping it shut.
Walking, calmly, to where Blake stood, surveying his empire, sweating on his lands.
Standing three feet in front of him, eyes locked.
Watching the puzzled look spread across his jowls, as though he were stifling a burp.
Hearing the cackles.
The excited hissing and yelping of the demons who dance on his shoulders.
Seeing the lady in the ballgown and the look of ecstasy, of unsullied lust on a face that was no longer beautiful.
Hearing my dad shouting my name.
My own voice.
Saying “I’m better than you.”
Her, moaning in ecstasy.
Raising the gun.
Pulling the trigger.
Bang.
Hearing the screaming start.
The thud as he collapses back.
The wet blood sizzling as it hits the sweat of my brow.
And feeling the ground lurch.
As I begin to fall.
