Find Me

by Nell Grey

  The guard signalled to the sign behind him.

  No drugs. No alcohol. No cigarettes. No food. No drink. No phones.

  “It’s only a bike mag. Ahhh, go on, Sir, don’t be tight. Have a skeck yourself, if ya want?”

  He held out the motorcycle magazine for the prison officer who gave it a good shake and flicked through the pages, examining them carefully.

  “It’s his birthday next week, he’s mad on motorbikes, our kid.”

  “It’ll be a good few birthdays before he gets one of these,” the officer sneered.

  Irish played along in friendly agreement.

  “Yeah, bet we’ll all be ridin’ bleedin’ hoverboards by the time he gets out, the poor sod.”

  The prison officer’s face cracked a fraction as he handed it back to him.

  He eyeballed Irish.

  “Go on with yer, this once. But no more magazines, alright?”

  Irish nodded back at him gratefully. He was fully aware of the business card that had been slipped inside the pages and he made sure that the guard saw that he’d tipped it into his hand before stowing it discreetly away in his pocket.

  On the card he was sure that there’d be details of where to put the payment later, probably a PayPal account.

  He grinned gratefully at the guard.

  “Thanks, Officer. It’ll make his day.”

  The bastards. It was the same everywhere. It felt like the whole lot of them were on the take.

  Wandering over with the group of families and children to the large visitor hall he spotted his younger brother sitting on a plastic chair at one of the middle rows of tables.

  Tony was like the rest of them now. Gone was his sharp look and the designer brands. His hair badly needed a cut and he was dressed in a prison regulation stone-grey sweatshirt paired with saggy jersey joggers.

  “Our Tony! How you doin’ lad?”

  Irish hugged his brother briefly, aware that a prison officer was hovering hawkishly nearby.

  “Brought you a little pressie.”

  He handed him the magazine.

  Tony took it and raised an eyebrow.

  “Ta.”

  Irish winked.

  “No dirty pics in this one. Only bikes.”

  They both knew that every page was soaked with highly addictive synthetic marijuana. The prison’s psychoactive drug of choice.

  The heavily tattooed lifer sat at the table next to them knew it too, and stole a shifty glance their way.

  “Make sure you keep it safe, yeah?”

  Irish spoke a little more loudly for the benefit of their earwigging friend to the left.

  “This place is full of robbin’ bastards.”

  Tony smirked as his neighbour’s eyes promptly shifted away. He flicked through the magazine doing the calculations in his head. Each page cut up and sold in small squares was worth hundreds.

  “Can you get me next month’s edition too?”

  “Ya don’t ask much do ya? I’ll see what I can do.”

  Irish lowered his voice to a murmur.

  “Did ya get on the cleaning gig like I said?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good lad.”

  Being a cleaner was a ticket to ride. It meant you could go everywhere, across the floors into different wings, even into cells. It was the perfect job for a man who needed to make discreet deliveries.

  “You managed to find him yet, Irish?”

  His eyes narrowed. Thirty families without lads and dads, all doing long stretches in prison. The man who’d put his little brother inside, Sion Edwards was a professional ghost. He’d been elusive enough when he’d been their hired gun. But after the botched grab in the pub by that idiot barman, he’d disappeared completely off the grid.

  He’d put the word out and he’d gone big on the reward. He wasn’t messing about here. He sent a clear message that he wanted the rat found, and there were ten big ones for a location and another hundred for anyone who could keep him there to be collected and killed.

  Throughout the UK, even onto the continent, if Sion Edwards put so much as a single toe down anywhere between Liverpool and Larnaca, he’d have him.

  With so much dosh being offered, there’d been a few unreliable sightings from across his British network, but all of them had been quickly dismissed and the trail had gone stone cold.

  The reality was that the grass was probably already in witness protection in some far-flung place. Whether he was in Nova Scotia or Nowheresville Nebraska, Sion Edwards had become Irish’s obsession. He was unfinished business and he intended to personally find him in the name of his brother.

  The only other link to Sion Edwards was Claire Williams, the bird who’d got her neck sliced. She’d blindly added his fake profile to her social media accounts and he was watching them closely. Not bad on the eye either from the pictures he’d seen. Long, dark hair and olive coloured skin. Nice tits.

  There hadn’t been anything of interest from her as of yet. She was back working behind the bar at that pub.

  But he could guarantee one thing, everyone made a mistake eventually. And when she did, he’d be ready.

  ◆◆◆

  “Crystal’s husband’s Greek and he’s got me a job at his brother’s café in Crete. They need English speaking waiting-on staff.”

  “Seems like you’ve got summer sorted.”

  “Yeah, I’ve handed in my notice here.”

  Annie takes a sip of her beer as I tell her my news. A Facebook friend has come through for me. It’s a quiet night in The Cross Keys.

  I lean across the bar to her.

  “To be honest, this place’s creeping me out.”

  I glance over at the new bar manager. She’s been good to me since the attack but I’m still nervous about the place. Especially at nights on my turn to lock up.

  It’s only The Cross Keys, I keep telling myself. A country pub. But even so, I can’t help but get the feeling that I’m being watched.

  Strangers keep coming in. Men on their own. Drinking one pint slowly, studying their phones or reading a paper. I’m sure I’ve never noticed that happening before. Or is it me, projecting my fears?

  One guy was reading a copy of the Liverpool Echo. I completely lost it, when I saw that. I couldn’t stop shaking. It is probably in my head, which also confirms that it’s time for a change of scenery.

  Annie covers my hand with hers on the bar top. Her face is full of concern.

  “Claire, I think you’ve got some post-traumatic stress.”

  “No. It’s nothing. I’ll get over it.”

  “Jac says it’s more common than people realise. He had it after his truck got blown to bits in Afghanistan. He had counselling. You need to get some too. It’ll help.”

  Jac’s playing a game of pool with two lads from school. He looks perfectly sane to me. He looks much happier these days. It gives me hope that I can get over this too.

  “I’ll be better when I’m away from here. I’m ready for a new start, Annie.”

  She smiles at me. She’s been there too.

  Chapter 5

  ---------✸---------

  Shaun had stayed two days at Frank and Celia’s place.

  The first night, he’d tasted Celia’s delicious roast beef dinner, drank a glass of crisp Marlborough sauvignon and promptly crashed.

  He’d been out for the count. And in his deep sleep he’d found himself back in the fox hole in the Helmand dust. Machine-guns rattling around his head, stuck, unable to move. Hunkering down as small as he could. Scared shitless that at any moment a bullet would catch him.

  He jumped awake with a start.

  His eyes took a second to focus, his heart to stop pumping. His muscles were taut, ready to punch.

  Where the hell was he? It was late. Mid-morning.

  The sound he’d heard was a heavy clattering coming from something on top of the zinc roof.

  Then he remembered. He was in Frank and Celia’s converted shed at the bottom of thei
r garden. A sleepout, they called it.

  When he emerged outside he saw the culprits. The garden was teeming with birds. Strange ones that he came later to know as myna birds and fantails. And more familiar ones, like a kingfisher who sat as bold as brass on the branch of a heavily-laden grapefruit tree.

  After lunch, Frank got his assistant to close up and insisted on taking Shaun out fishing.

  “You’re not a proper Kiwi ‘til you’ve got a rod in your hand,” he told Shaun. “And today we’re gonna chuck a line off the beach. The offshore wind’s sweet as.”

  He took a box of bait out of the fridge in the shed.

  “Make yerself useful will ya and grab us that chilly bin.”

  He howled with laughter as he registered Shaun’s total confusion.

  “Chilly bin … Mate? The beers!”

  Shaun rolled his eyes and took the coolbox of beers out to the pickup truck. Screwed to the flatbed was a large winch.

  “Bloody hell, Frank. How big are these fish?”

  Frank grinned.

  “You’ll see.”

  He drove Shaun out towards the beach over a rough gravel track, then down through what Shaun would class as more of a dry riverbed than a road.

  Holding the wheel tightly and managing the gears, Frank skilfully guided the truck as it slipped and skidded down the steep sandy gully onto the vast sandy beach below.

  Miles and miles of rugged, deserted west coast beach stretched each way into a gloriously sunny haze. And in front of him, Shaun counted ten lines of waves pounding the shore relentlessly in fierce walls of surf.

  The sand was compacted and Frank drove easily along it waving at the odd fisherman as they went.

  On they drove, past a craggy outcrop and along more beach, pausing occasionally to study the waves until they found what Frank assessed to be the perfect fishing spot.

  “We’ll stick the ute here.”

  Frank swung the pickup around so that the flatbed faced the waves.

  “D’ya like yer nose?”

  Shaun looked back at him.

  “Yeah. I guess?”

  “Well, if you do, you’d better get used to wearing these.”

  He threw him a soft-brimmed Tilley hat and a bottle of sun lotion.

  “Hole in the bloody ozone right above us. Too many of my mates have had melanomas. That fair Pommy skin of yours’ll get burned to a crisp in no time.”

  Doing as he was told, Shaun put the hat on and applied the suncream onto his face while Frank got the lines together.

  Then, Frank patiently instructed him on how to prepare the kite and bait lines onto the winch, casting far out across the boiling surf. The kite took the lines out further into the ocean beyond the shore, aided by the offshore winds.

  When Shaun tried it he caught nothing, but Frank snagged three decent-sized red snappers that any fisherman would have been proud of, except for Frank. It was a pretty average catch he grumbled, passing Shaun a cold beer. But it would do for their supper.

  ◆◆◆

  The next afternoon Shaun stood with Frank and Celia, keys in hand on the steps of the rotten porch at the lake lodge.

  Celia, a small red-haired Irish-looking lady with boundless energy, had a pen and a large pad of paper at the ready. She’d already begun making a list of things that Shaun could do with. It had pretty much everything on there already, and they hadn’t even gone in yet.

  “And you’re not getting a shipment, ya say?” she probed.

  “No.”

  “Most of you Poms when ya come out here, you ship your stuff out too.”

  “This place was given to me.”

  It was tricky. Shaun was answering as truthfully as he could.

  “And no family back home?”

  “No. I was in the army.”

  He was beginning to feel a little hot under the collar. He needed to close down Celia’s digging.

  “Hey, Frank. Can you fish this lake?”

  “You’re dead right you can, in season.”

  Frank had taken the bait.

  “Best trout you’ll find, this side of Auckland. You can try a fly off the shoreline but the fish here go deep, it’s best in a boat.”

  Celia huffed.

  “Obsessed!”

  “You never complain when I bring fish home.”

  “I do when you’re too bone idle to gut ‘em.”

  Turning the key in the kitchen door, they all made their way in tramping over Shaun’s footprints in the dust and carefully stepping over the piles of empty bottles.

  Celia sniffed.

  “Kids, I’ll bet. They come up here in summer to camp out and drink. I’m pretty sure it’s not squatters. ‘Sides, who’d wanna stay here after dark, unless you wanted to be scared?”

  Her words trailed off as Frank threw her a look.

  Shaun hadn’t appeared to hear that. He’d opened a kitchen cupboard and was surprised to see that it was neatly stacked with piles of matching crockery. The place was fully kitted out.

  “Hey, you can scratch half of your list, Celia. Look, there’s pans, plates, cutlery. Everything’s here.”

  Celia followed him, working her way through the cupboards.

  “Well, who’d a thought it?”

  Shaun turned to Celia.

  “Did ya know Jake?”

  Celia coughed.

  “Err… I think he was… err... the caretaker for the place… eh, Frank?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Years ago.”

  Shaun opened more drawers. Cloths in one, batteries and string in another and one with cooking equipment in. All tidily stored away and clean.

  “And no one’s lived here since?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Well, everything’s been left intact,” Shaun surmised, checking and finding that the ancient fridge and freezer were all empty and cleaned out.

  Someone had cleaned up after Caretaker Jack had passed. No tins or packets of food had been left, nothing that could rot.

  And now that he’d slept, the place didn’t look quite so bad. They were in a spacious kitchen area. It was dated and needed a damn good clean but it had all the basics, and there was a large range for cooking and heating the water.

  It looked like after Jack the Caretaker had died, the British Consulate had simply sent in the cleaners, then locked the door and forgotten about the place.

  He turned the tap. Nothing for a second, then suddenly with a heavy knocking of pipes came a spluttering, followed by a steady flow of water into the sink. It wasn’t hot, but at least he had running water.

  “What happened to Jake?”

  Celia was picking up the bottles, and Frank had his head stuck behind the fridge, busy trying to find the plug and socket.

  “Died.”

  Shaun tried the door through to the next room. It was locked.

  “At least the kids couldn’t get any further into the house.”

  Shaun tried each of his keys in turn until he eventually found one that opened it.

  Wandering through into the darkness of the next room, Celia grabbed Frank’s hand apprehensively.

  The kids called Jake’s Place ‘the haunted house.’ But no ghosts were required. The story of the police grim findings was enough to make the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. Imagining what happened here creeped her out.

  Celia whispered under her breath to Frank.

  “Was it here they....?”

  He squeezed her hand in affirmation but kept tight-lipped as they found themselves in the main lounge behind Shaun.

  He swiped the torch on his new phone and scanned the room.

  “Hold on.”

  Frank saw Shaun going over to the shuttered windows and promptly gave him a hand to open them up.

  The effect was instant.

  The light streaming in bounced onto the rimu wood that lined the floors and ceiling, flooding the room with warm, golden light.

  Shaun was speechless. The place was stunning.
/>   “Ah! It’s clean.”

  Frank frowned at Celia.

  “I mean, wow!”

  She rushed over to the full-length windows and stood beside her husband.

  “The view. It’s a beaut.”

  Frank looked out towards the lake.

  “I’ll say. Who’d have thought it, eh? And I’ve lived out this way since I was a nipper. Needs a fair amount of fixin’ up, but she’ll be right.”

  “Yes, she will,” Shaun agreed, taking in the large living room with its high vaulted ceilings and large, stone chimney breast. In front of it, there were three large sage-coloured velour sofas placed in a horseshoe around a large rimu coffee table covered in a thick layer of grey dusty.

  “And the guy you got the keys from?” Frank broached.

  “The consulate official?”

  “Yeah, him. They never said nothin’ about Jake to you?”

  “No. Should they have?”

  “No, no,” Frank mumbled breezily, “Just wondering... Struth! Is that a split cane Ogden Smith?”

  Mounted on the back wall, a couple of rows of antique wooden fishing rods suddenly consumed all of Frank’s attention.

  “Please have them.”

  “No, mate, these are worth a bit…”

  “Please.”

  Shaun overrode Frank’s prostrations and pointed at the several mounted stuffed rainbow trout that were surrounding the rods.

  “As long only as you take these too.”

  Taking one off the wall, Shaun stopped in his tracks.

  In an arc, dotted right across the wood-lined wall were twenty or more neatly filled-in dents.

  He pushed it out of his mind. Here he was in this peaceful corner of paradise and all he could think about was bullet spray. He was more damaged by his past than he’d realised. And he needed this place more than he knew. To heal. To start over.

  And boy, now he saw it properly, he could see the potential of the place. His mind raced with the possibilities; a fishing retreat, a hotel? He wasn’t scared of a bit of graft.

  As they wandered around, he saw that the two wings added on to the main house gave four large ensuite bedrooms on each side, in addition to the four bedrooms upstairs in the main body of the lodge. They’d seen better days, but there was furniture in them all, albeit of varying condition. Victorian iron bedsteads, chests of drawers, wardrobes, they were antique and solid, if a little dusty and damp.