Manchester Slingback

by Manchester Slingback (retail) (epub)

  Johnny was at the door, looking up and down the landing. He waved for Jake to follow him.

  The staircase had a signature creak, the low wheeze of a house that was solid and settled but was ready to flex and accommodate new pressures. Jake watched Johnny test each step as he edged his way down. Johnny gave a thumbs-up sign before disappearing into the living-room below. When Jake followed, he spent a minute casing the front door, locating the key on the hall-stand and then slipping open every lock and bolt so they had some chance to escape. When he finally pushed through into the living-room, he found Johnny knelt by the jagged tower of a Christmas tree, lit blue in the rays of the buzzing TV set, his fingers ready and waiting to receive an old tape from the mouth of the VCR.

  ‘It’s VHS.’ Speaking in a grinning whisper, Johnny was all systems engaged, everything going super-slick. Jake only felt sick. He tried to pull the two videos from out of his jacket pocket but they’d split the lining and the damp cloth had stretched and clenched again, sealing them tight. Jake couldn’t free them with his frozen-banana fingers, so used Johnny’s knife to cut his pocket open. When he handed the tapes over, Johnny placed them under the tree with one of his own two tapes, making a stark black pyramid against the glitter of the other presents. Johnny’s last tape was ready slotted in the machine.

  Something jarred with Jake. He said: ‘Four tapes?’

  ‘Yeah, I took copies of all of them.’

  ‘I thought there were only three.’

  ‘No. Four.’

  Jake said, ‘Oh, right.’ He must have been mistaken. He slipped into the space behind the living-room door, tucked between the settee and the wall, with the knife in his hand. If John Pascal came down, Jake was hidden.

  Jake hissed, ‘What time is it?’

  Johnny checked his watch, held up three fingers. The clock at the front of the VCR was flashing the right time. Johnny was setting the timer for 7:00 a.m. He had Pascal figured as an early riser. If he wasn’t, the tape would still be running at ten o’clock. He had his finger on the FF button, checking to make sure the whole of the three-hour tape had been used. On the floor beside him was a photocopy of the note he’d spent an hour assembling, ransom-style, from letters cropped out of the Evening News. A Pistolero demand: RaId tHis pErvERT! Gary Halliday’s name and the address of Colchester Hall underneath.

  Jake said, ‘Stop. Forget it. We get out now.’

  ‘It’s okay, mate. I’m almost done.’

  ‘I mean it. We get out now.’

  Jake tried to keep the desperation out of his voice but he knew for sure: that night as he sat in the car with Halliday, still breathless from the street fight, Halliday handed him three video tapes. The next morning, when Halliday walked him to the gates of Colchester Hall and said, winking, ‘You won’t forget these now,’ there were four tapes in the bag.

  Johnny was staring up at him. ‘Keep it down, mate. I told you, I’m about done.’ The tape had reeled to its stop and his finger was now pressed to the rewind so he could play the last few seconds and make sure they were full.

  ‘Don’t play the tape.’

  Jake’s hand tightened around the knife in his hand.

  Johnny’s finger hovered over the PLAY button.

  Jake finally said it: ‘I’m on one of the tapes.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘One of those tapes… I’m there, me and Halliday and… some others.’

  ‘You.’

  Johnny’s eyes rounding out of his wet blond hair.

  Jake didn’t want to have to say it again. ‘Please. Just forget it now. We just go.’

  ‘No.’

  It was definite, Johnny’s last word, and it wasn’t in a whisper.

  Jake lunged across the settee, his hands outstretched for the pile of tapes beneath the tree. Johnny shouldered from the side, taking him down in midair. Jake swiped back, not even realizing he was using his knife hand, but he was blind-sided and hit nothing. His face hit the carpet. Two hands gripped tight to both his wrists.

  He felt Johnny’s breath in his ear: ‘Quiet, you twat. Listen. We’ll find your tape, okay. We’ll find it and leave the rest. That’s it.’

  Jake nodded. As Johnny swung off him and returned to the VCR, Jake slid backwards until his back touched the edge of the settee. He huddled there, watching glumly as a boy appeared on-screen, flitting from an open doorway to a kitchen table, naked on the tabletop.

  ‘This one?’

  Jake shook his head.

  Johnny waited for the tape to eject, already reaching for another. His fingers poised on FF and PLAY. The long wait before a raft of figures cartwheeled across the screen, made indistinct by the line of static that wiped, north to south, across them, blurring the differences between fat grown men and fleshless boys.

  ‘This.’

  Jake in head-down shame, muttering ‘No’ into the fold of his jacket.

  Johnny pressed EJECT. The carriage mechanism wheezed through at its too-slow pace.

  In the silence… a soft creak from somewhere above them. Jake said, ‘What’s that?’

  Johnny’s nails scratched at the tape nosing out of the VCR slot. He had another tape ready in his free hand.

  ‘What?’

  Jake was ready to scream but held it to a whisper. ‘The man’s awake. Forget the last two, just get them and go.’

  Jake was already on his feet, urging Johnny on from the living-room’s doorway.

  Johnny shook his head: not refusing, just confused. He couldn’t get out of the rhythm he’d set himself: FF- PLAY, STOP, EJECT, out, in. He had a tape in either hand; one pre-viewed, one fresh. Mouthing okay, okay as he looked from one to the other.

  ‘Come on, Johnny.’

  The footsteps were falling on the upper landing but Johnny had it figured. The first tape slotted back in the machine, the PLAY button down. The unseen tapes clenched in his hand.

  ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  Jake knew it was too late. He had his hand on the front door, he pulled it open and stepped out into the snow. Behind him, Pascal’s feet were clattering on the stairs, but Jake was out and clear.

  The black of a figure passed across the slim gap between the door and the jamb. Jake followed it across and watched, through the window, as John Pascal stormed the room: dressed in a long brown dressing-gown, Terylene like monk’s sacking, holding an axe.

  There was nowhere left for Johnny. He was caught, scootering across the carpet on his backside as he tried to get out of the way. Pascal stood there, axe heavenwards, his eyes on the screen where two men held a slim, struggling boy down to a massage table: hands on back and bottom, head and shoulders, penises in hand. The tape was moving in regular time; it was Pascal who was caught on pause. When he started yelling, it was a slow whirr, gathering momentum only as the words began to spew out: ‘Outrage of Satan. Child of Sodom…

  ‘You bring this to my house – this evil to my house.’

  The axe lashed down, cutting through the tinderbox of the TV and shattering the tube into a cascade of sparks.

  ‘My house. My house.’

  Pascal’s face was underlit with pinprick explosions, coloured red and blue in fairy lights. His mouth twisted and his head seemed carved into slabs of heavy colour, heavy shadow.

  ‘Spring this serpent here, out of Gehenna, out of Sodom… Into my home!’

  Johnny was clattering, hand over foot, trying to dodge the swinging axe. Shouting, ‘Not me!’

  Pascal was flailing in a prophet’s rage, speaking in a voice that filled the entire room with booming judgements, past inarticulate, talking straight to God. ‘He knows thee, as the beast knows thee. As thou hast no mouth to hear nor lips to speak nor sign of righteousness.’

  Johnny’s arm was up, protecting his face from the swinging axe. The arm broke under the shaft, and the axe-head met his head in a sheet of blood.

  ‘Yea, as the Lamb commands, flesh as flesh, as my eye offends. Strike it out.’

  The scream of a woman w
as coming out of nowhere. And the axe kept on falling, blunt side like a golfclub onto the side of Johnny’s neck.

  ‘The Lord everlasting, screed of his dawning, the Lord ever-reaching.’

  The axe shuddered from tip to shaft. On the floor, Johnny’s head was bent around in a right crook… as a woman wailed at the doorway. John Pascal raised his axe again. One more time it thrashed down. ‘To the last word.’

  Jake pushed out into the blizzard. Into a trackless gulf of fog until the road widened to a square. He slipped to his knees, dog-crawled, panting, to where the houses on the lower side broke open. In a passageway, hidden from the wind and the banking snow, he sludged to the doors of the Jericho Chapel. The doors were unlocked.

  This was sanctuary. He skirted beneath the shelter of the circular gallery until he reached the vestry. There, in the corner where the poles for the marching banners leant upright, he found the old chapel wardrobe. He moved the poles to the side, careful not to let them fall, and found a hiding place among the embroidered banners that were folded at the bottom of the wardrobe. After he pulled the door shut against him and drew the banners over his head, he waited for morning.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Less than an hour after dropping DI Green off in central Manchester, Jake was back in Caldenstall. He left the hire car in the car-park, on what used to be church land. Jericho Chapel stood in the corner, its door shut and the plain, leaded windows as blank as tired eyes. Jake stood and stared until he had the same look pat. He used it himself, turning it onto the moorland that was spread below him like a sun-drenched blanket, and stood above him like a dark cowl. This was where Pascal had dumped Johnny’s broken body, leaving the night’s snow to bury it. The corpse stayed there, Jake wasn’t sure how long. It was finally sniffed out by a sheepdog digging for strays in the snowfields.

  There were always a lot of sheep, but they were spindly and ragged-arse things. Whatever image you had of a flock, these didn’t fit. They were dumb stragglers, ugly loners. Like DI Green had said on the drive back to Manchester, ‘What is it with these sheep? I see them every time I drive this way, but they’ve got crap fur and I know no one eats them… what the fuck does a hill farmer do?’

  There was a sheep scrabbling across a breach in a farm wall, its hind legs like skinned black bones, blurring as they tried to find some purchase on the stone. Like all the sheep round Caldenstall, it was too wretched to be believed. But Green hadn’t thought it through: it wasn’t the sheep, it was their lambs that were farmed. When Jake told him, the man slapped his forehead for effect: ‘Fuck, yeah. And I call myself a detective.’

  One piece of detective work Green did admit to: he’d found Jake because his name appeared in Kevin Donnelly’s address book. Green asked if he and Donnelly stayed in close contact.

  Jake shook his head: no, they never did. But he knew Donnelly had his address – and had seen Donnelly the week before he was killed.

  Donnelly came to London to find him. He had seen Halliday’s tapes and needed to know more. He at least wanted to hear Jake’s side of the story. What he never expected to hear was Jake confessing to the death of Johnny. The exact same story Halliday would swallow whole, Donnelly wouldn’t even listen to. Jake didn’t know why; it was more than plausible. It fitted every aspect of his life, because everything Jake had done was shaped by a killer’s despair. This was his hell and he walked through it, his eyes fixed at a spot he would never reach, his crime unpunished and unpunishable. It was an endless spiral in a world without end. A vacuum where his own death had become meaningless and what life he had ticked along in killer’s time, beyond judgement.

  Here in this miserable hill town, fifteen years ago.

  Jake watched at the window as the axe fell. Play it in slow-motion, the axe falling one-time, two-time, and the soundtrack drone of Pascal’s insane preaching. PAUSE – REWIND and PLAY. Johnny struggling backwards across the floor, skating on his arse as Pascal comes for him, a pantomime and then the horror: kicking through the pyramid of tapes and then lunging, the axe blade connecting. And on-screen: Halliday’s party… the figures moving deliberately in and out of the TV frame as the axe kept falling. Jake made it happen, he couldn’t replay the scene without proving it to himself over and over again. He killed Johnny. It wasn’t a point for debate.

  Jake turned, making his way up the chapel car-park to where a passageway cut through to the village centre. There used to be a red telephone box by the white-painted pub. It was gone now, but there was a brushed-aluminium replacement. As Jake walked over, he rehearsed his lines. The answer-machine clicked on so fast, he was caught off balance, but the sound of her voice often threw him, especially when he hadn’t heard it in a while.

  ‘Jacob and Sarah Powell are out right now. We’d like you to leave a message, so do it after the beep.’ It was so up-beat, accentless and welcoming, but still a stranger’s voice. He told himself it was a long-distance call and she was using her telephone voice… two good reasons for it to sound so distant.

  He waited through the rush of beeps for the longest tone. When it came, he began awkwardly: ‘I’ll erase this message if I…’

  But she didn’t need to know that. He coughed and began again.

  ‘If this message is still here when you get back, it means I’m not coming back. I don’t know where I’ll be. Christ knows, I’ve no idea where I’ll be. But I want you to know how much I loved you. I know you always thought I was kind and considerate because you always told me. I never lost my temper with you because I was scared what would happen if I did… and because if I ever did, it wouldn’t have been at you. I never wanted to use you as an excuse for something else. And I know you sometimes got frightened because I always seemed so distant. You didn’t have much proof I loved you. I’m sorry. It was never anything to do with how I felt about you. I was just cold to myself.’

  It was more than he wanted to say, without saying anything that he wanted her to remember him by. But he didn’t want to be seen crying, here in the only public phone-box. So he hung up.

  At a strictly automatic level, he was a good husband. While she was out of work, he held down a good job that he hated. When she got herself a good job, he kept on working, because her money was her own and he didn’t want her ever to worry about money as much as she had during the months she was unemployed. Anyway, she never knew he hated the casino. She assumed – if he was so good at the job that he couldn’t keep from getting promoted – he must like it. In lots of other ways he never told her how he felt.

  When they got married, he hadn’t loved her. He wanted to. He desperately appreciated her patience and her conviction: she loved him so much. But now that he loved everything about her, he always stumbled whenever he tried to put it into words. It was partly because of that bad beginning when he didn’t quite love her. But it was chiefly because of everything that had happened years before they met.

  *

  A month ago, Jake was leaving the casino at maybe three in the morning. Someone appeared on the steps outside a bank and called his name.

  As Jake turned to look upwards, a short and stocky man stepped out from the recessed doorway. He was dressed in a scrappy T-shirt and jeans, but Jake only saw his face as he reached the footprint of the streetlight.

  It was Kevin Donnelly, Jake was almost certain, though he still hovered. The man wasn’t skinny; he was short and bullish. His shoulders strained at the caps of his T-shirt. The other difference, he was wearing spectacles: large, plastic, red-framed circles, out of style and barely supported by his pug nose.

  But it was the same voice – trying to be cheerful, normal. ‘Hiya, Jake. You alright?’

  Jake’s first thought, standing out in the street, was: Donnelly’s flipped. There was something vacant and misdirected about him. He at least should have been wearing a coat; it was a cold night.

  He said, ‘I got the tapes of you and Halliday.’

  He wasn’t threatening; there was no blackmailing wheedle… nothing like
that. But he didn’t have the tapes on him either. He wasn’t carrying a bag: it was just him in his T-shirt and jeans. Maybe Donnelly was deranged, but Jake couldn’t leave him out there and he couldn’t think of anywhere to go.

  He left it to him to choose, saying: ‘I live round the corner. Either we go back to my place, which is fine, but my wife’s asleep. Or we go back to the casino, I’ve got an office.’

  Donnelly said, ‘You’re married? You’re not gay?’ Jake didn’t know what to say. But, because Donnelly seemed somehow upset, he forced a grin and said, ‘No. Billy-both-ways, mate.’

  Donnelly nodded, like he was turning it over and over, but it was an alien concept as far as he was concerned. Finally he said, ‘Would you mind, Jake, can we go to your place? I think I need somewhere to kip.’

  That settled it. Kevin Donnelly wasn’t an operator; he couldn’t put on a face to cover his feelings. He didn’t want to cause any trouble. Jake had no idea why he didn’t want to cause trouble.

  They sat in the front room of Jake’s apartment, drinking tea. Jake lit the fake fire without asking Donnelly if he was cold. Donnelly still seemed too dazed to feel anything, but staring at the fire was a painless way to get intimate, watching the flames seep around the edges of the black-painted bricks. It put Donnelly’s getting-to-know-you questions into a context. The way he asked them, he could have been running through the all-terrain script of a game-show host. He asked Jake how long he’d been married, did he have any children. Jake’s answers: three years and not yet. Sarah had suggested they should maybe get to breeding but the whole idea of children terrified Jake – though he didn’t say so to Donnelly. He wasn’t looking for a real exchange. He hardly even tried to keep the ball rolling, keeping to yes or no or whatever was the next shortest reply.