A few cigarettes later Sally, who had been slowly pacing the bandstand as she smoked, came and sat down next to me.
“O.K. It seems to me that what we have here is a Thunderbolt and Lightfoot situation.”
I looked at Sally, my brow fully furrowed.
“It’s a movie, Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges?”
My brow remained furrowed as I shook my head.
“You don’t need to know it; the point is that these two guys get thrown together by circumstance and have to figure a way through some tricky situations. Seems to me that’s just about where we’re at.”
“Yes, that sounds about right.” I nodded. “Do you think it’s all true Sally? Everything we’ve found, all those pages you photocopied, do you think it’s true or are we seeing things that aren’t there?”
“Honestly Hun I don’t know. I’ll grant you it all seems a bit farfetched but who knows, the clues are there aren’t they?”
“Are they? I don’t know. Even if it is true it doesn’t prove the girl was in the house, it doesn’t prove that the man killed her.”
“True, but that’s why we’re here Hun. The evidence for the girl is the business card. If everything else we found, all the history of the Sons of Charlemagne, if all of that is rubbish, we still have the card. The card that has the crest of Charlemagne on it and an address and phone number. That’s why we’re here isn’t it? That address is over there. Someone in that building knows everything we need to know about the Sons of Charlemagne and the girl. Whatever the truth of it all is Hun, it’s all over there.”
“So how do we get it?” I asked
“That I don’t know just yet. We have to be patient. We have to wait for the answer to show itself.”
I was frowning again.
“What do you mean?” I asked. Sally lit another cigarette.
“When I was fifteen I had this friend, Mary DuCase.” Sally began. “Now Mary loved to smoke, she got me started on it, but she never had any money. She wouldn’t take my money, said borrowing from a friend was a sure way to lose one. What Mary did was wait and watch. She would pick a store or a bar and she would watch it for a few days. When she’d learnt the routines of all the staff she would know when to go in. See, breaking into a place is a whole clandestine thing. Well you know that right? You gotta pick a lock and hunt around in the dark, Mary didn’t see the need. She would watch and find the weakness during opening hours. She was so good she’d be in and out in a few minutes. All she needed was that tiny window of opportunity and she would walk straight in, grab six or seven cartons of smokes, and walk out again. See, Mary figured out that people lock up at night but in the day, when they’re around, they are very slack on security. No-one believes a thief would just walk in in broad daylight so they’re never looking for them. That’s the situation we have here. I bet the office of The Sons of Charlemagne has all sorts of locks and alarms. I bet if we tried to get in there at night we’d get nothing but arrested. In the day though? Who knows, maybe we have a shot.”
“What happened to Mary?” I asked.
“What?”
“You said she was your friend when you were fifteen. You left New Orleans when you were nineteen. If she wasn’t still your friend then, what happened to her?”
“Yeah well, Mary wasn’t always careful. She killed a guy in a bar when she was sixteen. She was in the back, stealing cigarettes when he came back early from the bank. She didn’t mean to kill him but she pushed him, he fell backwards and the corner of the table hit him right at the base of the skull. He died pretty much straight away. Mary called the cops herself and waited there to be arrested.”
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered. It took me a moment to compose myself. I didn’t know what to say. I thought it best to stay concentrated on the office.
“So, one of us needs to go and check it out.” I said
“I’ll go,” said Sally, “you stay here.”
“No,” I replied, standing up, “it should be me. I started this thing, I saw the girl, if anyone’s going to be put in danger it should be me. Besides, as your friend Mary knew, no-one ever suspects a kid.”
“Mmmm,” Sally conceded with a nod, “fair point. O.K but just go and have a look. Don’t try to get in, don’t talk to anyone, just look and come back. We’ve got to be smart here, we’ve got to be patient.”
“O.k.”
I left the bandstand and, when there was a break in the traffic, I ran across the road. I walked past the bike shop towards the single, black wooden door beyond it. I saw the security camera fixed to the wall above the door, pointing downwards to capture anyone waiting to gain entrance. I didn’t stop but walked slowly past, my head looking forward but my eyes turned to the left. After a few metres I turned and walked back the way I had come, head still forward, eyes to the right this time. I crossed the road back to the bandstand. Sally dropped her cigarette and crushed it beneath her foot.
“Well?”
“There’s a security camera above the door. The door is a normal wooden front door with a normal Yale lock and a Chub lock below it. It looks completely normal but there’s a speaker box with a button screwed to the wall beside the door. You must have to buzz for entry and they unlock the door from the inside. There’s no sign telling you who’s office it is. It’s completely blank. If that’s where The Sons of Charlemagne are we’re not getting in there. I reckon if they don’t recognise you on the camera they won’t open the door. So, what do we do?”
“We wait. If we can’t get in, we have to wait for someone to come out. When they do I’ll follow them and see if I can find out anything.”
“How are you going to do that?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet but it’s all we’ve got right now.”
“Why don’t we phone the number on the card? At least we’d be able to speak to someone.” I said. I reached for the card in my pocket.
“And say what?” Sally replied. “Hello? Are you the slave traders that killed a black girl a few months back? They’re hardly likely to admit to it, are they? No Hun, we need to wait and gather information. We don’t know how many people are in there, what they’re like, anything. If we show our hand now we’re just giving the advantage to them. Right now we know about them but they don’t know about us. Let’s keep it that way. We wait, we watch and when someone comes out I will follow them.”
I had to concede that Sally was right. It was frustrating to be so close and yet so far but she was right. We had to wait. We had to watch. I sat down on the plastic seat and Sally sat down next to me.
“This next bit is a bit weird.” Said Sally without taking her gaze from across the street. “Mary always said it was like trying to ride a horse indoors and she was right. Whenever I’d go with her to steal cigarettes I’d always feel it. Bored and nervous all at the same time. You gotta be still but your mind is racing. Best thing is to just get through it.”
I knew what Sally meant. My mind was screaming at me to do something, to get up, to walk around, to look somewhere else, to leave, to shout something. It was like a game of hide and seek but I had a terrible hiding place and the only way to remain undiscovered was to remain completely still. As I sat next to Sally watching the door across the street I felt what I hadn’t felt for a while. I felt the cold, thrill of panic and imminent harm I had felt that day, crouching behind the hedge on Grove Road. I tried to remember to breathe. I tried to sit still. I tried to wait and watch. I had to, for the girl. It was two hours before anything happened. I was exhausted with the effort of it all but Sally seemed quite calm. And then the door opened and he stepped out into the Bristol sunshine.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
When the door opened I instinctively ducked for cover. There was no need to, the man who emerged had no reason to suspect two random people in a bandstand across the road but I did anyway. Sally didn’t move, she coolly sat there smoking yet another cigarette, watching him. The man was tall, I estimated he was about the height of my father which woul
d put him at about six foot four, but whereas my father stooped slightly, he stood tall and confident. His jet-black hair was short on the sides and back but on top was longer and thicker. As he moved the high sweep of his hair bobbed about but never fell across his face. He must have been in his forties judging by the flecks of grey that were starting to show in his short, neat beard. He was well dressed in a dark blue suit with a white shirt but no tie. He looked every bit the ordinary business man right down to his shoes. Or his boots to be more accurate. The heavy nature of the matt black footwear didn’t sit right at all with the rest of the attire, his footwear seemed more suited to the military than an office in Clifton. When he started walking off down the hill Sally turned to me.
“Well we know he works alone.”
“How?” I replied weakly.
“He chub locked the door when he left.” Sally smiled. “So, unless he’s got a slave of his own in there I’d say he’s alone. Time for me to go to work.”
“What do you mean?” I asked as Sally stood.
“I’m going to follow him. You stay here, I’ll be back in a bit.”
Sally moved off after him.
“But..” I started. Sally turned back to me.
“He’s going to the post office, look at the envelopes he’s carrying. If I can get behind him in the queue I might be able to see who he’s sending them to. I’ve got to go.” And with that she turned and jogged off after him.
I watched Sally go with a growing sense of fear. I had to trust that she knew what she was doing, Christ she knew better than me though that wasn’t difficult. I had to sit and wait and trust that Sally would do what needed to be done. The problem was I didn’t know what needed to be done and I wasn’t very good at trust. From an early age I’d been as self-sufficient as I was able. It wasn’t that my parents hadn’t tried to help me but for some reason I had always pushed back against needing help. Maybe it was something in my nature, a chemical imbalance or a biomechanical fault, but I always preferred to fail on my own rather than take instruction. It caused no end of conflict in my childhood and I’ve learnt that it’s me that caused it, no-one else, but I’ve never been able to eradicate it from my nature. Even nowadays I have to endure the punishment of non-compliance in this place and for some reason I enjoy it. I enjoy pissing people off, deliberately doing the wrong thing, saying the offensive thing, wearing the wrong clothes. I don’t know why but I’ve always needed to be the outsider. As far back as I can remember I never wanted to be part of the crowd. The crazy thing is it doesn’t matter what the crowd is doing, I always want to do the opposite just to see what happens. I was once told in group therapy that some people just want to watch the world burn, I think I prefer to see myself burn. But you know all of this, you have my file.
So, as I sat there I tried to stop myself from doing the wrong thing. Sally was following the man from the office so there was nothing I could do. The problem was I didn’t like sitting still and waiting on someone else. I tried really hard to do the right thing but after a few minutes I couldn’t stop myself. I jumped up and ran across the road to the black door with the security camera and buzzer entry system. I tried the door pointlessly. It was locked of course but I played with the handle a few times anyway. I pressed the buzzer. I had no idea what I would do if someone answered it, I was working on instinct at that point. No-one answered the buzzer. I paced up and down outside the door for a minute before slumping down on the step in front of the door. What was I doing? What was I expecting to achieve? There was no way of getting in to that office. All I was doing was putting my face on the security camera. Oh fuck, I thought, the security camera! I jumped up and ran back across the road to the bandstand. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! I thought. Surely the camera was on when no-one was in the office and the man would probably check it when he got back which would mean he’d see me trying the door. I sank onto a plastic seat and put my head in my hands. I’d fucked up big time. Sally was off following the man and I couldn’t just do the right thing and wait, I had to go and fuck it all up as usual. I sat with my head in my hands and tried to figure a way out of the mess. It got worse when I realised that I was wearing my school uniform. My blazer had the school badge on it with the name stitched below. If the man from the office was a Son of Charlemagne, he would definitely check the camera footage when he got back. He would see me and, if the camera was pointed in the right way, he’d see my school badge on my blazer. It wouldn’t take a Son of Charlemagne long to track me down from there. All he had to do was go to the school, show them my photo from the surveillance camera and he’d have my name.
“Fuck!” I said out loud, staring at the floor thorough my hands.
“Fuck what?”
I jumped so high I nearly hit the roof of the bandstand. I hadn’t seen or heard Sally come back. I stood staring wide eyed and panting to get my breath.
“What the fuck?” I managed breathlessly.
“Sorry Hun, didn’t mean to scare you.” Sally said, concerned. “What’s going on?”
“Why are you back? Is he coming?” I panted, my eyes darting back and forth.
“Relax Hun, he’s stopped in at the bakery. He’ll be a few minutes with the queue in that place. What’s wrong with you?”
“I fucked up Sally. I went over to the door when you were gone, I tried the door a few times, pressed the buzzer. If he checks the camera footage he’s gonna see me and my school badge is on my blazer.” I pointed to my left breast as I told her. “He’s gonna find out who I am. He’s gonna come and find me Sally.”
Sally put her arm around my shoulder. I tried to control myself as she stared out down the hill. Her face was fixed in determined concentration, her mind racing to find a solution. After only a few seconds she released her hand from my shoulder and took a step so she was in front of me. She took my face in her hands and looked me deep in the eyes.
“You fucked up,” she began, “you fucked up big. But that’s O.K we all fuck up. The question is what to do now. Seems to me we have two choices. We can run and hope he doesn’t check the camera, hope he doesn’t find you, hope he doesn’t torture you and then find me, hope he doesn’t kill us both. I gotta be honest with you though Hun he looks like he’s got some military skills to me, did you see his boots?” I managed a little nod despite still having Sally’s hands on my face.
“So, we’re left with choice number two. Take the bastard with us. If he’s gonna find us anyway let’s invite him on. Let’s pick our battleground and take him on on our terms. What do you say Hun? If we’re gonna fuck it up, let’s really fuck it up! You feel like ending this thing today?”
I stared into her eyes and saw them change. My stomach turned as I recognised it. I had never seen it from the outside before, it was beautiful. That moment I had only ever witnessed from behind my own eyes, that flicker as the shadow of the devil settled across the iris and pupil. I saw it and as I smiled my own eyes took on the same filter.
“Fuck it,” I whispered, “I never liked my life anyway.”
“I knew there was something about you kid!” Sally laughed “I knew it the first time I saw you. I just knew you’d be fun! O.K we need to go. He’s going to be back soon and if he sees us here we’re done. Come on!”
Sally grabbed my hand and we ran. We ran across the road, back past the bus stop where we met that morning and on up the hill to the crest where the road met with the Downs. We ran across the two zebra crossings that took us from the confusion of roads to the safety of the tree line around the water tower. We were only a few hundred metres from the office but we stopped there and got our breath. We moved around the tree line into the edge of the expanse of grass, away from the sight line from the roads. We sat down on the short grass and discussed our next move.
“We need to draw him out,” started Sally, “if we’re going to get to him. He will feel safe in that office and it’s an environment we don’t know. He could have weapons in there, if we go in we might not come out.”
“So,
what do we do?” I asked.
“We phone him.” Sally replied. “There’s a phone box over there. We phone the number on the card and tell him to meet us.”
“And then what? If he’s part of The Sons of Charlemagne isn’t he just going to kill us then? We don’t have a chance against a man like that. I’m not strong enough to kill him, are you?” I asked.
“Maybe we won’t have to.” Sally replied. “If we phone the police just before we meet him and tell them where we are they will get there just after us. We give the police the information and they can arrest him.” Sally pulled an envelope from her bag, in it were all the photocopied pages from our library research.
“O.K but what if he does try to kill us before the police get there? What if the police don’t turn up? How are we really going to take on someone like that?”
I was prepared to see this thing through but I was still apprehensive. I may have been unhinged and have the devil in my heart but I was still only twelve years old. I was well aware of my physical limitations. Sally shrugged a little and turned to face me.
“I never had a friend called Mary.” She said flatly.
“What?” I replied. “So that story about stealing cigarettes was bullshit?”
“Not entirely Hun, just the Mary part.” She was smiling at me now, a sort of sorry I lied to you smile, a sort of didn’t know if you could handle the truth smile.
“You stole the cigarettes.” It was dawning on me. “You killed that guy.”
“Afraid so.”
“But that was an accident. He fell. You didn’t actually kill him deliberately did you?”
“Well…”
“Really?” I smiled. Maybe Sally was more like me than I thought.
“He was a bad man Hun. He used to let me drink in the bar underage and one night he followed me home and raped me in an alley two blocks from the hotel. I stole the cigarettes to make it look like that was why I was there but I went to kill that son of a bitch. I waited for him to come into the back room and hit him on the back of the head with an astray. He turned to look at me and I shoved him backwards. He fell and the base of his skull hit the corner of the table. He took a few minutes to die, burbling and spitting blood as he tried to say sorry. I sat and watched him die and then I phoned the police. I claimed it was an accident, my father is good friends with the sheriff so it was all hushed up. I got a conviction for petty theft. My father knew what I’d done, I never told him but I could see it in his eyes, he knew. We never spoke of it, never spoke about anything much at all after that. I’m not sorry I did it. Truth is Hun I kind of enjoyed it. So, there it is. I’m a murderer. That’s who you’ve got yourself mixed up with, a crazy bitch who killed her rapist and her baby. I don’t know if I’ve got what it takes to kill this man but I’m damn sure I’m willing to find out.”
Those who broke the boy: The Sons of Charlemagne Book One Page 13
