‘Have a seat.’
Looking at him there, with his casual gesture and only slightly informal clothes, Jake realized they’d been kept waiting so long because Halliday needed the time to dress. The man carried a sense of being comfortable. He underlined it constantly to keep them unbalanced. They were seeing him at home, in his own kitchen: how did they expect him to look?
Johnny let his box of tapes drop to the table with a sullen clunk. Gary Halliday grinned and pulled the box over. Inside, the tapes were sleeveless and black, stacked together.
Halliday glanced across the upturned spines, the arrow of a frown brushing the top of his nose. He waved for Jake to slide his box over, and looked at them, too. ‘Where are the labels?’
Johnny was still standing. He said, ‘You’ve given them titles?’
‘They were numbered.’ There was a pause before he said, ‘I’ll just have to watch them all before I give them to my colleagues.’ The way he broke open a smile, he let them know he wasn’t complaining about this extra work.
Johnny had to look away. He still hadn’t taken a seat and, when he started talking, his eyes were always somewhere else: on the floor tiles, the kitchen range, the dog basket tucked behind the kitchen door.
‘How long you been here?’
‘Must be…’ Halliday’s eye flickered over a calculation ‘…just coming up to three years. After university I did a year’s voluntary work overseas, and then came here.’
He had international experience in what he did. Maybe that’s what gave him his confidence. Jake dropped to a chair and kept his head down, too… apart from a swift look at Johnny as the boy finally decided that he needed a seat.
Halliday was moving around the kitchen. He lifted a hob cover on the kitchen range and reached for a kettle to stand on top of it. In the silence, Jake heard the whirring rattle of a washing-machine on spin-cycle and, after a second or so, another one. There was a whole Laundromat of soiled clothes, working away in a room somewhere behind him. Everything about the house was clean and efficient, free of evidence. Apart from the tapes.
The kettle boiled inside a minute, it had been waiting primed on a cooler ring. Halliday poured out three mugs and slopped the bags into the sink. Before he handed them over, he took a bunch of keys from his pocket, selected one, and opened a padlocked cupboard above the work surface. Inside were two bottles of whisky and one of gin.
‘Anyone care for a drop in their tea?’
Jake waited for Johnny to say something. When he said, ‘Alright,’ Jake just nodded.
Johnny was chewing at the inside of his mouth. Finally, he said: ‘So who’s the boss here – you?’
‘Not officially, but I always seem to get my way. It’s the fuhrer principle.’
‘The Nazis?’
Halliday shook his head; the arrow frown made a short reappearance. ‘Just a figure of speech, Johnny. The theory that leaders emerge naturally, when the times call for it. The other masters here, they’re that little bit older, a little more timid.’
‘You turned them on to this?’ Johnny nudged a hand towards the box of videos.
Halliday laughed. ‘Christ, no. The bastards had been at it for years. During my first month here, I used to hear them shuffling about the corridors at night, trying to avoid each other. It would start soon after midnight. They’d hiss at the boy they’d had their eye on, and lead him back to their room. Then, around six in the morning, you would hear the alarm clocks begin ringing and it would happen all over again in reverse.’
‘You brought them out into the open?’
The laugh again. ‘Something like that. I mean, I took this job because it appealed to my sensibilities, but I was never exactly open about it, not even to myself. It was only when I realized the others shared my tastes, I was able to validate myself and take responsibility.’ He flashed the whisky bottle again. ‘A little more?’
They shook their heads. Halliday just shrugged.
‘I think the situation here is remarkably free now. We each have our favourites, what you might call stable relationships, but that needn’t imply exclusivity. We’re pretty open in that sense. All of us, the boys and the men, are prepared to share. But I suppose you know that?’ He tapped the top of a video. ‘You’ve probably seen one of our parties.’
Halliday stood his mug down, empty on the table. As he rubbed his hands, he said, ‘So, what do I owe you?’
‘One-sixty.’
‘Okay, then. You’ll have to come along. I don’t have the money on me, and you’ll understand that I can’t leave you here on your own.’
‘Because of what we’ll see?’
Another laugh. ‘Christ, no. Because this is a secure care home. The government has rules, you know.’
They followed him back out of the kitchen to the front staircase. His room was on the first floor, left along a corridor. As they walked, Halliday continued to talk. His voice wasn’t exactly soft but it was unforced.
‘Since I arrived, I’ve encouraged the feeling that we share something unique. And as long as everyone understands that sharing means we’re mutually implicated, we can foster a deeper sense of security. The parties and videos help ensure security.’
He had the key-chain in his hand again, a bright new silver deadlock for his own door. The room wasn’t large but there was enough space for a bookshelf, a desk and two beds. Halliday’s bed was the larger, wide enough for the steel cot to run across its foot.
The cot was made up with a few grey blankets. The boy lying under them didn’t move and didn’t open his eyes. Maybe he was asleep. Johnny gave the boy only a quick glance, as though he was cross-checking, seeing if anyone was Kevin Donnelly’s old place. The scene was just as Donnelly described it; they didn’t need to look twice. Johnny walked to the window at the far side of the room and fixed his eyes on the grounds outside. Jake followed.
They were up above the tennis courts now, looking across to the one-storey changing-room block at the far side of the grounds. The building there was a pre-fab painted a dumb white that held out against the dark.
Halliday slid behind them. ‘Do you want to take a look over at the clubhouse?’ He pointed to the pre-fab building. ‘I’m sure I could get a party together tonight.’
They jolted round. Halliday continued giving them that same, even smile. Now he was fingering a roll of twenty-pound notes, twisting them into a tight tube before passing them to Johnny. ‘How about it?’
Johnny didn’t say anything. Halliday turned to Jake. ‘How about it, Jake? Anything you want to do? I could wake up William for you.’
Jake shook his head, but Halliday wasn’t through. ‘Come on, I know you could wear out two or three of them. William for starters, perhaps. I know I’ve been neglecting him recently.’
Johnny started towards the door. Halliday turned aside to let him brush past.
‘Just an offer – no strings attached.’
As Jake followed Johnny into the corridor, Halliday added, ‘And it stays open.’
Johnny didn’t look back. Jake did.
He saw a hand go out to William, and heard Halliday saying, in that same voice, ‘Come on, Billy boy. Let’s show these two men out.’
As they walked down the stairs and to the front door, the two sets of footsteps followed them. Halliday’s confident footfall, the scampering of a barefoot boy alongside him. Johnny opened the inner door but, once in the vestibule, they had to stop and wait for Halliday to unlock the main door. The jangling of the keychain made them turn. Halliday was there with his smile, standing tall, his hand in the hand of a thin, young-faced boy of fourteen. The boy was wearing a pair of Speedo swimming trunks and nothing else, his ribbed chest shivering in the tiled coldness of the vestibule.
‘Do you want William to walk you to the car?’
Now the outer door was open, the fierce winter cold raged through full-blast. Johnny was muttering, ‘Fucking hell,’ striding, head hunched into his shoulders, as fast down the driveway as he coul
d without slipping in his high heels. Jake skipped out to catch him. At the bottom of the drive, the gates began to haul open.
Chapter Seventeen
Standing outside the prison gates in the handy car-parking area, Jake was struck by the mean use of space. The prison was so isolated up here, the grounds could have rolled out as far as the horizon. Yet the distance from the prison wall to the perimeter fence was barely thirty feet. There didn’t seem to be any reason for this. At least, Jake couldn’t see one but, like DI Green said, he was no penological expert. Ha ha ha!
The teenage guard inside the Portakabin gatehouse looked down his clipboard list. ‘See Gary Halliday?’
Jake nodded.
‘Okay… Mr Powell.’ The guard dipped slightly, maybe to pull a lever or twist a dial. The gate swung open. ‘They’ll ask for your name again at the main door.’
Jake nodded. He wasn’t likely to forget his name between here and there. He gave a salute to DI Green, sat waiting in the hire car. The man’s last piece of advice: ‘Don’t get detained.’
The prison was a new-built block for remand prisoners, owned and operated by a private security firm. They couldn’t have chosen a better place. On the only road up to the prison, Jake had asked what the building used to be. Green thought, a farm. If that was true, there was nothing left of the older building. Jake tried to think if he ever knew what had originally stood there, but gave the job up. He was born over the crest of the hills to the east, and had rarely walked this way. Even if he had, he wouldn’t have recognized it from this side. All moorland looked the same until you found a definite viewpoint.
The same brown-suited guard that took his name at the main door led Jake to the visitors’ room. Climbing the staircase that only non-prisoners could use, Jake slowed to take another look over the moors: the unflattened stretch of a Pennine dip, green and purple as a bruise except where the peat broke through the overripe grass. Those wounds gaped like black mouths. He lifted his eyes to the mid-horizon where the sky caved down to touch the earth. The sky as white as a bleached-out filmscape, the ground as heavy as lead.
‘Mr Powell.’
The guard was looking down at him, lagging on the staircase. Jake nodded and took the last flight, three steps at a go.
‘Through there, Mr Powell.’
Another guard was waiting at the door to the visitors’ room. Jake found himself a seat while the two guards nodded soundly at each other, doing the dance of transferred responsibility.
The new guard said, ‘The beast is being fed. He’ll be five minutes.’
Jake okayed. He beat his fingers softly on the melamine table-top and waited. His chair was a plastic bucket-seat like a school chair. Before it got too uncomfortable, the guard brought out a prisoner. Jake wondered: is this him? The man was narrow-shouldered and wide-hipped, carrying a pot belly that swelled out of the hollow of his chest. The hair was mostly gone, too. Jake looked him over. In the twenty seconds it took for the man to shuffle round the room and take his seat, Jake decided he recognized him. It was Halliday, only the man had lost his build somewhere along the line.
Jake drew a packet of Rothmans out of his inside pocket and said, ‘I guess you’ve taken up smoking?’
The cigarettes were Green’s idea, though Jake didn’t mention that. He held the pack open, one cigarette standing proud. It was there, ready for plucking if Halliday wanted it… a chance to develop a fresh bad habit to replace the ones he now had to do without.
Halliday looked at the pack but didn’t touch. He said, ‘Jake Powell?’
‘You remember me?’
Halliday nodded. ‘You look good.’
‘You look like shit. What is it: someone found the portrait in your attic?’
Halliday snorted, making a sound that was close to being a laugh. ‘Well, no one’s found yours yet, have they?’
Maybe he thought the ice was broken. Whatever, he took the cigarette, gripping it between slick, ticcy fingers.
Green had tried to ensure that when Jake went in, he was fully primed. At least he had a disposable lighter to go with the Rothmans. Jake used it to light Halliday’s cigarette. Halliday nodded a thanks.
With his long first suck, he dragged the smoke to where it could do the most damage, and held it there. With his lips sealed tight and thin, he held the cigarette out vertically in front of his eyes and fixed his concentration on its burning tip. With a slow-burning will-power, he finally kept his hands from shaking. A practical lesson, if Jake wanted it, in smoking for pleasure when smoking’s the only pleasure left.
As he exhaled, Halliday thanked Jake again, adding, ‘You know, I’m only on remand. The currency’s still cash money – I’m not bargaining with cigarettes yet.’
‘Yeah? Though I imagine you have problems getting to a bank.’
‘Well, that’s true.’ Halliday spread his hands. ‘One of the problems of being a bachelor. So, Jake, why are you here?’
Jake didn’t answer, his eyes drifting to the bluey wisp snaking off the cigarette. A little nicotine Caspar ghost out playing between them.
Until he said, ‘How long will you get?’
Halliday shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe they won’t even find me guilty.’
‘What’s that – clutching at straws?’
He shrugged again. ‘Maybe. But my lawyer’s experiencing some police obstruction. If it goes on, it might work towards a retrial – who knows? My fingers are crossed.’ Then, again: ‘Why are you here?’
‘You approved me.’
‘I’m desperate for visitors. But why you? I haven’t seen you for fifteen years.’
‘I’m surprised you remember me. We only met twice.’
‘Yes, but that first time, it was such a memorable night. I replayed the moment over and over again.’ Halliday’s smile came with a flash of teeth and a glimpse of coyly bitten tongue.
Jake blinked slowly but kept his breathing even. He was determined to show nothing that could be interpreted as a flinch. He said, ‘It was memorable, yeah. But what came later, I remember that better.’
Halliday nodded. ‘The night you came back with your friend Johnny?’
‘The night he was murdered.’
‘Is that right? It was the very same night? You know, all I can see from my window here are the fucking moors. It almost makes me glad I’m inside, rather than out there – among the elements.’
‘Johnny didn’t notice them. He was dead before he reached the moors.’
‘Was he?’
Jake held Halliday’s eyes until he forced the man down, made him flicker and look away. Jake almost welcomed it, this confirmation that he wasn’t a boy any more. What he didn’t know was whether it meant he was an adult now or just that he’d lost the ability to react like a normal human being.
He said, ‘The police want to pin Johnny’s murder on you.’
Halliday flinched back up, like he’d had a battery shock to his spine. His mouth open, ‘No. How?’ Then pulling himself together, ‘They aren’t serious?’
Jake sat back, giving Halliday just long enough to run through the idea one more time. He could almost see it doubling back across the man’s skull; there wasn’t enough hair to hide the flickers and pulses beneath his scalp.
Finally, Halliday said, ‘Is that what they’re working on? What they’re not letting my lawyer know?’
‘What is this?’ Jake held out his hands, an open question. ‘If you’re practising a courtroom number, go ahead. But I don’t get why you should be surprised.’
‘That I killed your friend?’
‘What? You think, because it was a few years back, they don’t go through their records? They’re computerized now; it doesn’t take them for ever to put cases together.’
‘Why would they drag up him?’
‘Because it was you who killed Kevin Donnelly?’
The surprise sent the man’s arm scurrying in a spasm across the table. Even when it came to rest, it still trembled slightly. The other h
and was fingering at the lapel of his prison jacket.
‘I didn’t kill Kevin Donnelly.’
‘The fuck you didn’t. You know how many people can testify against you? The only thing they’re missing is an eyewitness account of you stabbing him… though maybe that’s something else you kept on video.’
‘Christ almighty. This is the biggest… the most…’
Two things Jake hadn’t seen in a long while: someone trembling in fear, someone lost for words.
Jake said, ‘Talk to me.’
‘What can I say? Have the police been to talk to you?’
Jake nodded. ‘About Johnny? Yeah, they have. I admitted I’d met you, but I told them it was fifteen years ago. They’d better speak to someone else. It turned out they already had: like Lady Good-Day.’
‘Benny? What could he say?’
‘Fuck this roundabout, Gary. You know what he said. Talk to me.’
‘He told them I was looking for Kevin?’ Halliday stopped shaking; he had a thread now, he could see the way things were spinning, he could hope to pull it apart. ‘I was running around looking for Kevin. I never caught him.’
Jake felt the frown tighten his scalp, his ears tingle coldly. ‘You didn’t catch him? What’s that supposed to mean? If this is your defence, you’d better forget it. It’s not going to play.’
‘It’s true. I never caught him. Even if I had, you think I could have killed him? I just wanted the videos he’d stolen off me. I’m not a murderer.’
Manchester Slingback Page 16
