by RJ Dark
‘Why?’
‘Because you’ll end up in prison.’
‘Better than you being dead – that’s where this is heading, Mal. If I’m going to hit them before Donald comes after you, it needs to be quick, before they expect it.’
‘Just …’ I wanted to give him a reason not to, but I couldn’t find one. ‘Just give me a couple of days before you do anything.’
‘Why?’
‘Because …’ I rubbed the side of my head but I couldn’t rub away the clouds of tiredness. ‘Because there is something, Jackie, I know there is. I just can’t see it. I need a few days, that’s all.’
He tapped the steering wheel of the car.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But not two days. Frank will be expecting me to do something the closer we are to the deadline.’ He moved his hands around the circumference of the steering wheel, bringing them apart and together again. ‘I have something I need to do tomorrow, so I’ll be out of town until the evening. You have until I get back, Mal. If you haven’t found something that helps us out by then, well, I’ll get us out of this. No matter what it takes.’
‘We’re in proper trouble, aren’t we, Jackie?’ I said.
He nodded.
‘In the local vernacular, Mal, I believe you could say that we are fucked.’
31
In one of my many short and useless sentences of community service, I met a man called Kev. Kev was small, nervous and itchy and was on the final year of a ten-year stint for armed-robbing his way across Essex. He used to say that a deadline sharpened the mind – although I don’t know what sort of deadlines a man who armed-robbed his way across Essex for heroin money would have, and I didn’t ask Kev because he scared the living daylights out of me.
I wasn’t finding a deadline sharpening my thoughts, and I was thinking about Kev cos he was always so antsy, couldn’t sit still, and that was how I felt. Maybe Kev mixed up a feeling of impending doom with a sharp mind. I’d like to ask him about it, but as soon as he got out of prison he went straight back to heroin and overdosed.
I was the only person at his funeral.
Jackie has never been to prison, as far as I was aware. He would be able to look after himself, but it would be a waste of a life. And I’ve never met anyone who is as full of life as Jackie Singh Khattar.
I was trying to write things down, in a notebook. Trying to get all my thoughts together in one place so I could make sense of them. Missing lottery tickets, laundered money and a murdered man. Larry’s debts. His son. Books with buildings of drawings in. Benny Callaghan. Maybe if I couldn’t find the ticket, I could find something else. Leverage? Motive? A smoking gun?
But I couldn’t write the things down that were in my head because my hand was shaking, and the veins in my arms were burning, and my stomach was cramping with nausea. My head ached, and I felt like my temperature was soaring, then I was shivering and unable to get warm.
I’d felt this way before. Nine years ago, when Jackie dragged me out of an empty house in Bradford and locked me in a room with a bucket, ten bottles of water and a fridge full of service-station sandwiches. I’d hated him for it for the first week. Screamed abuse at him. Begged for him to let me out to get a hit, just one. The second week I changed tack. Cajoled and whined and promised I would give up the drugs. Not once, for either of those weeks, did he answer me as I raved and begged. He just came in to empty the bucket, and after the first time I tried to make a run for the door and he knocked me on my backside, I didn’t try again. I’m not sure how long it was after that until the night I tried the door and found it wasn’t locked. Didn’t open it straight away. I took my shoes off and sneaked out, walking in that weird exaggerated way they do in cartoons when they are trying to be quiet – lifting my feet really high because I thought that might stop the floorboards creaking.
It didn’t, of course.
If it had, it wouldn’t have mattered.
Jackie sat in a corner of the room twinned with mine. While I was locked in the room, never getting any answer from the outside, I’d imagined he was out partying, living it up. But he wasn’t. If anything, his room had less in it than mine. A sleeping bag on the floor. A camping stove. The chair he sat in, sipping tea from a metal cup.
‘Can I go?’ I’d asked.
He nodded, didn’t say anything. Pointed at the door with the hand holding his steaming tea. I opened the door and was nearly blinded. I’d thought it was dark, that it was night. But Jackie had just covered all the windows. Outside, it was summer, the heat like a fist; kids were running up and down the road screaming and laughing. It was like a film set, hyperreal; the colours too vivid, the people too beautiful and healthy. A world I could barely remember. I took a step back.
‘The physical addiction is gone now,’ said Jackie softly. I turned.
‘What?’
‘You want to go out and score? I’m not going to stop you.’ His voice was dead, and in the light streaming in from the door, he looked grey.
‘Okay,’ I said. Took a step forward.
‘Now it’s about you though, Mal. I mean, I made a decision to bring you here, rightly or wrongly. That was on me. But if you step out there and score, Mal, that’s on you. You don’t need it, not physically. Only up here.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘So, if you go it will be on you, and I won’t come for you again. You’ll have made your choice.’
I remember it felt like that moment lasted for ever. The sunlight warming me. Jackie sat there, his stare boring into me with all the intensity of a bird of prey. He says that I made the decision then, that I chose to shut the door. But if he hadn’t been there, sat in that corner?
I know what I would have done.
And even though he went back to the army, or whatever it was he did, for a few years afterwards, he was always there. I always knew that Jackie was sitting in the corner, sat in my corner. Now he would go to jail, for me. Cos he got us into this. But I couldn’t let him go to jail, not just because I needed him there, in my corner. But because he was my friend.
Without a friend, I was lost, and I was scared of being lost, because I’d had friends before. Other friends who came when I was lost, and they weren’t good for me.
So, I sat in front of my book with a pen and my hand shook and I wanted so desperately to write something down, but there just wasn’t anything to write.
I woke up in a pool of my own drool. My head on the uncomfortable pillow of an empty notebook. I sat up quickly, made a comical snorting noise like someone waking up suddenly in a film. Swore. How much time had I wasted? I looked at the clock. Swore again.
I had nothing. Nothing at all.
No.
In the book I’d scrawled a word. Written it down when it was so late and I was so tired that I didn’t even remember doing it. It didn’t even look like my handwriting, more like Beryl’s unreadable hieroglyphics.
Daddy
What did that mean? It was the sort of thing someone wrote when they wanted help, but I would never have asked my father for help. One of the few good decisions my mother ever made was to throw him out. Many of her bad ones involved letting him back in.
So why did I write ‘Daddy’? I had no idea. I’d not even called him ‘Daddy’. He’d always insisted on being called ‘Father’. I think it made him feel like the man he never was. I couldn’t ever imagine throwing myself into his arms and whispering, ‘Daddy,’ the way Cristophe Stanbeck did.
The way Cristophe Stanbeck did.
And just like that. Everything made sense.
The temptation was to rush out of the door and start confronting people.
I didn’t.
I spent the whole day with a pen and my book, writing things down. Making connections. Checking it out and looking for weaknesses. Beryl came in at some point.
‘Beryl,’ I said, ‘did you write this?’ I pointed the scrawled Daddy.
‘You think I come to work at night?’
‘Well no … but …’
Even though she wouldn’t want to see me.
I ran into the back, found Beryl.
‘My friend Lucy at the credit agency.’
‘Uh?’
‘I need to know when Larry Stanbeck ran up his debts. Can you ring her?’
‘Uh.’
Half an hour later, I drew up outside Janine Stanbeck’s house. It wasn’t the first time I’d passed her house that evening, but it was the first time I’d been brave enough to stop the car. Then I rang Jackie again, no answer. I left a message telling him to meet me back at my shop.
Then I did nothing.
Just sat in my beat-up old car and watched the house. I think part of me was hoping it would be empty, but it wasn’t long before I saw movement, and then I had to decide whether I was going to go in and talk to her or go back to the office and wait for Jackie.
I knew what the sensible option was: call DI Smith, or wait for Jackie. But I had no real proof, so DI Smith wouldn’t be much use. And Jackie’s solution would be violent, and I wanted to avoid that, really.
So I unlocked the car door.
Crossed the street.
Knocked on Janine Stanbeck’s door.
We all make mistakes.
32
She looked good when she answered the door. The bruises that had been on her face when I saw her that first time in my office had faded enough that the make-up she wore covered them completely. She was dressed in a skirt, a tight top and a small jacket. An expensive handbag on her shoulder and her short blonde hair had been styled to make it look like she hadn’t bothered styling it.
‘What?’ she said.
‘I need to talk to you.’
‘I’m going out.’
If I’d just waited ten minutes, just driven once more around the block, she wouldn’t have been there and things would have been so different.
‘It can’t wait?’ I said. She tried to shut the door, and I shoved my boot into the gap, stopping her.
She stared at me. ‘Well, if you’re that determined, you’d better come in then.’ She turned and walked into the kitchen. ‘I do like a strong man.’
I followed her, she’d been cutting vegetables and had left the board, the peeler and the knives out. Something was simmering in a slow cooker.
‘Where’s the boy?’
‘With his grandad.’
‘Mick?’ I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice.
‘He loves his family.’
‘I thought Mick didn’t like you.’
‘Cristophe makes me blood, whether he likes it or not.’
I nodded and leaned against the countertop behind me. She leaned against the island opposite me, against where she’d been preparing food. ‘So what do you want, Mal, it’s not about the ticket, is it? Now you’ve decided that it isn’t mine.’
‘Did you kill Benny Callaghan?’ I said.
She stared at me as if I’d just landed from another planet. Then her mouth creased up into a smile, genuine amusement.
‘Benny? Me? No.’
She wasn’t lying. But I knew that. I didn’t know how Benny’s death was related to all this, but I was pretty sure Janine Stanbeck didn’t kill him. Worth checking though. And it put her at ease as well, for when I hit her with the next question.
‘But you did kill Larry.’
The smile vanished. Only for a moment. Then it was back, but it was a mask, not real. Not like the smile when I’d asked about Benny. And her voice was missing that one hundred per cent I-can-laugh-at-you confidence.
‘No,’ she said. But it wasn’t true. I read people. I knew.
Did I know?
‘Don’t lie,’ I said.
Yes. I did know.
‘What makes you think I killed Lawrence?’ Now she wanted information, of course she did. Because up until now, she had been sure she was safe. Now she wasn’t.
‘Larry told me,’ I said. She laughed then, a little laugh. A bit nervous, but she was a woman who believed in herself and she pushed the nerves away.
‘Are you going to take that to the police, Malachite? A dead man told you? I thought the spirits didn’t just speak to you? I thought it “didn’t work like that”?’ She rested her hands on the top of the island work surface, her arms tensing like she was going to leap off it and attack me.
‘You’re right, it doesn’t,’ I said, and the tension in her arms lessened. ‘They point you in the right direction, show you things you’ve missed. Like your boy.’
‘Cristophe?’
‘Yeah. You gave me what I wanted to see in my office, another Blades Edge beaten wife dressed in awful clothes because that’s all her husband would let her have.’
‘He was a bastard.’
‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but he didn’t beat you up.’
‘What makes you so sure of that?’
‘Because your son misses him. And he avoids you. Cristophe hugged me, you know, talked to me about his daddy. There’s no way that the child of a violent father would feel that comfortable around men.’ She stared at me.
‘I have never hit my son.’
‘What about your husband?’
She looked away.
‘I thought you were so uncomfortable in my office because you didn’t believe in the spirit world. But that’s not true, is it? You were uncomfortable because you were worried it might be real, that Larry might tell me what happened.’
‘If I believed that, why would I even come?’
‘Jackie,’ I said. ‘Because it would look weird if he offered help and you, desperate, sad little Janine, didn’t take him up on it. Because he can be really insistent if he thinks he’s helping. Because I think you really do want that ticket. Just not for the reasons I thought.’
She grunted.
‘And what did you think?’
‘I thought you wanted it so you could run away, but it was Larry who was going to run.’
‘And why would you think that?’
‘Massive debts,’ I said. ‘He was taking cash from all his credit cards, every penny he could get his hands on. And he started doing it the day Cat Maudy won the lottery. I thought he had a gambling problem, but I forgot to check back in his records, before the lottery ticket turned up. When I did, I found he never even had a credit card before. No, he was getting ready to run.’
She stared at me.
‘I think you should leave,’ she said, her face hard.
‘You don’t want to know what else I have?’
‘Nothing!’ she shrieked it, and then she moved. Crossing the distance between us in a moment with the vegetable knife in her hand. She brought it up and pressed it against my throat. Her face blocked out the rest of the room. Her breath smelled of mint. ‘You have nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’
My breath came quickly, I tried to back away, to get away from the blade and the wildness in her eyes, but I couldn’t go any further back and I couldn’t stop myself speaking. It was like my panic was forcing the words out of me.
‘Did he hit you back, is that what it was?’
She laughed, a real laugh.
‘Lawrence?’ she said, her voice high and mocking, ‘Call me “Larry”, be my friend little Lawrence, hit me? Never. I really did walk into a door.’ She laughed. ‘Larry always just took it. He was pathetic. I married a Stanbeck, for money and danger and excitement. I got a fucking Sc
out leader who was sick of crime. He was going to take my fucking boy. He wasn’t even going to steal the ticket, just thought he could use it as “leverage” to get his dad to “leave us alone” and give us some cash. What world did he live in? As if Mick would ever forgive him.’
‘He loved you.’
I don’t think she even knew she nodded. ‘Leave the Edge. Start again, he said. He had false IDs, new names for us. Wanted to bring his kid up in some shit hole, thought maybe I could get a job in call centre or something.’ Her eyes came into focus and she was staring at me. The danger felt very real as her eyes scanned my face.
‘If I told Mick, what you did …’
‘He wouldn’t believe you. Even if he did, he wouldn’t care. Mick needs me, and I’ve got the proof. Larry’s false IDs, nicely hidden away, showing his son was going to betray him. He’d have killed Larry himself if he’d known he was planning to run away with his grandson.’ She stared at me, licked her lips, the pressure of the knife eased a little. ‘It is not too late to save this. If you can find that ticket, I will pay you to stay quiet. My cut of the money will be pretty substantial.’
‘Your cut?’
And something clicked. Larry’s workmate telling me he screwed up the numbers for the office outing. Miss Feeney, reeling off the subjects he was good at and never mentioning maths. Canon Armitage telling me how badly Larry had kept the Scout troop’s books.
‘It was you, not him, that came up with the money laundering idea?’
Something furious appeared in her eyes. ‘It was all me. I’m Mick’s fucking accountant.’ She laughed. ‘You think you’re clever and you don’t know half of it! Larry couldn’t count his own fingers, but Mick couldn’t have some woman showing up one of his boys, could he? And believe me, you’d have beaten Larry up if you had to brief him on the figures so he could get them past Russian Frank once a week. He had to make those bloody stupid diagrams to remember any of it. He just wanted to play with the kid, never gave a thought to how he would provide for me further down the line.’ She stared at me. I said nothing. Then she leaned in close so she could whisper in my ear. ‘If I cut you, here and now,’ she said, ‘Mick would clear it all up. You’d just vanish, Malachite Jones. No one would ever know.’
