I Want Him Dead

by Anthony Masters

  McMarn’s hand was shaking and Timothy was bawling.

  “For Christ’s sake get him to bring my baby back.”

  McMarn helped himself to another malt as Leslie searched the room. He was much younger, probably in his early thirties, with designer stubble, dark glasses and a bald head. His clean-shaven pallor had a sheen to it and Joe wondered what he shot up.

  “You’ll wash the glasses, won’t you, Joe? I wouldn’t like the lady wife to think you’d had visitors,” said McMarn.

  “What’s he looking for?”

  “Tape.”

  “There isn’t any.”

  “Who knows who’s in bed with who these days. You might be fucking Mr Plod.”

  Timothy was back in his cot now, whimpering slightly.

  “What have I got to do?”

  “Leslie’s my winged messenger and he’ll get back to you in a day or so.” McMarn turned to his diligent finder.

  “Happy?”

  Leslie said he was.

  “Well now,” said McMarn, searching for a cliché and finding one. “There’s always work for idle hands. And by the way — if you behave badly, Joe, I’ll behave worse. I’m afraid I’ve got vindictive in my old age.” He drained his glass and licked his lips.

  Leslie strolled across to Joe and kneed him in the balls again. As he collapsed across a chair, the waves of renewed agony made him retch a thin grey bile.

  “Bye, Joe,” said the Candy Man.

  Chapter 2

  Eamonn Coyd closed the top of the piano regretfully. This was usually the best part of his day. The shop was shut, Freda was asleep, he had played the Schumann and now he was going to make his tea. It was time to relax, knowing there would be no more customers to avert their eyes — to pretend they hadn’t seen his face. Years of petty crime with frequent prison sentences had conditioned him to scorn and Eamonn had learnt to endure, just as he had with Mam, not with the patience of a saint but with the indifference of a man who rarely inhabited the real world. His brother’s telephone call had been an unwelcome intrusion into his carefully cultivated detachment, and he had been mulling it over all day with little hope of resolution.

  Eamonn shivered. It was cold in the draughty shop and the dirty windows were already hazed with frost, but once he had lit the gas-ring and switched on the one-bar electric fire on the wall, the kitchen seemed less bleak. It would never be cosy but at least there was a glimmer of warmth. A spider ran across the floor and he stamped on it, gazing up at the webs on the wall, deciding to get them down tomorrow morning. But Eamonn knew he never would. Freda rarely came into the kitchen. He did all the cooking, basic as it was, and he regarded the space like his bedroom: a box that didn’t matter to him — providing minimal comfort, servicing Eamonn sufficiently so that he could seal himself off, hold cold reality at bay.

  Ever since Mam’s fire, he had developed a strategy for survival: he read voraciously, continued to reinvent his life and played the piano — when not in prison. Pianos were never easy to come by, but since his last release and his meeting with Freda, Coyd had found a comfortable billet that might last, and he could play her grand piano any time he liked. The memories, though, would never go away completely whatever he did; they were etched into his mind, however many different scenarios he invented.

  Even now, Eamonn could see the fireman in his breathing apparatus, like a comic-book monster, dragging him off the burning bed, the dense clouds of black smoke burrowing their way into his lungs. He had woken hours later, screaming with the agony of the second-degree burns to his face and chest and upper arms. Joe had escaped from his room by jumping out of the window, but had tried to get back up the stairs when he realized his brother was still trapped, fighting the firemen furiously until he was forcibly restrained. As a result, Joe became the only person in the world Eamonn could trust.

  Weeks later, he had been told by a social worker that his mother had been arrested.

  They had always known Mam had periodic bouts of “illness” and both boys, in their different ways, had learnt to recognize the signs — the look that crept into her eyes, the lightning changes of mood when she either sat, rigidly catatonic, in the chair by the range in the kitchen or pursued Eamonn round the house, clouting him with everything she could lay her hands on. Then Joe would grab at her and they would roll in a screaming, unseemly heap on the floor until she quietened. But Mam was the only mother they’d got. That was what the windy liberal social workers thought, too. “Never take a child from the mother until absolutely necessary,” they had advised, not understanding, or wanting to understand, how advanced her psychosis was.

  On that far-off day Joe and Eamonn had made no comment, guessing their mam was probably in the psychiatric unit in Praed Street because they had once overheard Auntie Deborah telling a neighbour that that was where she often ended up. “Poor soul — what with her demented spirit she’ll be after killing the little one,” Eamonn had once heard his auntie say in her carrying whisper. “It’s the sex drive that’s brought her down. She can’t leave men alone.”

  Like his brother Joe, Eamonn had become a petty criminal as a means of earning a living, but his mental survival entirely depended on self-deception, and this was on a grand scale for he still reinvented his mother, as he had tried to do when he was a child. Eamonn took his mam through his make-believe world of might have beens, fantasizing experiences with his love object, and by retiring so often into these delusions, he had successfully shut himself off from much of reality.

  Although his sense of isolation was obvious, psychiatrists had found it hard to categorize him. Initially Eamonn had capitalized on the inconclusiveness of their reports as a means of evading custody, but in the end the judicial view had been that he was sane and should be sentenced accordingly. As a result, Eamonn went to earth in his reinvented world: seaside holidays with reconstructed Mam, playing ball with her in an idealized park, magic times at cinema or fairground, travelling to unknown grandparents — the whole paraphernalia of childhood memories, completely reinvented. After the fire, after the many years of plastic surgery, after the sure and certain knowledge of her hatred for him, this was the only way Eamonn could survive.

  Now he got up, collected his music and stacked it on one of the shelves at the back of the dusty shop that read SECONDHAND SHEETS. Then he took his cup and saucer into the squalid little kitchen labelled STAFF ONLY. Freda had everything labelled, including herself. INVALID. Eamonn was WILLING WORKER. But the glorious thing about Freda Kostec was that she never appeared to notice his face. He had arrived when her health was failing and she saw him as the saviour of her equally failing business as well as the only companion she was now likely to have. Freda didn’t expect any more. She knew she wasn’t entitled to. They had both been lonely, he with his face and she with her weight, and had come together in a twilit world, sheltering, passing the time that dragged less slowly when they were companionable in different parts of the flat.

  For many years few customers had found their way to the grimy and faded shop-front, positioned in an obscure back street, and since Eamonn had arrived business had fallen away still further. Nevertheless, she still managed to pay him a small salary in cash and his dole money eked out the rest of his income.

  Whistling softly he walked upstairs to Freda’s flat which he now shared on the most platonic basis, occupying the second bedroom but bringing few personal possessions.

  Freda didn’t even look up from “Neighbours”, such was her all-consuming interest. She lived for the soaps. Stretched out on the sofa, her huge limbs covered by a blanket, winter or summer, her head resting on a cushion, she, like Eamonn, extended her fantasy life to the full. Since her adored ex-violinist husband, André, had died of inoperable cancer a decade ago she, his submissive and utterly dependent wife, had sheltered in the tacky and all-embracing world of daytime television. She ate hugely, a couch potato despaired of by her doctor, not least because her increasing asthma required continuous medication, her lun
gs unable to ventilate her twenty-two stone body.

  Freda would have closed the shop that her husband had founded as a specialist sheet music and instrument resource for friends and acquaintances and recommended customers, had Eamonn Coyd not offered his services in response to the tentative MANAGER WANTED advertisement in the window. Hardly any new stock was ordered so he had little to manage, but at least he kept the small mail-order service ticking over. They spoke rarely, accepting each other but also respecting mutual withdrawal, shadowy presences, linked only by endless cups of tea and Eamonn’s attempts at meals, bought from the “housekeeping” which they jointly shared. Since he had arrived, Freda had put on another stone.

  He gazed down at her, hardly noticing the huge doll’s face surmounted by wispy fair hair, the firm growth of moustache and the many chins below. Glancing at his watch, Eamonn saw that the time was just after five thirty and Freda would not require sustenance until six. They were in a rut, but it was a comfortable one that suited them both.

  Eamonn Coyd went to his room and lay on his bed. Nowadays he wanted a quiet life. Apart from Freda he only saw his brother. Mam had now been transferred to a secure unit in Cork and to all intents and purposes was dead to both of them, ideally suiting Eamonn’s scenario. Joe’s anger, however, was still inflamed by his brother’s condition, and the fact that he had so quietly accepted the status quo, even down to keeping the family name, but it was a tragedy they never discussed.

  Eamonn continuously worried about Joe, although he had always been a survivor. Throughout their shared experiences in children’s homes, it was Joe who had fought the dying of the light, Joe who was an optimist, living for the day, taking risks, grabbing at opportunities, convinced that the good times were always just around the corner. Once on his own, however, he had drifted and got into trouble. He joined the army at eighteen, and within its institutionalized structure discovered a foundation on which he might have built, but each time Joe looked set for promotion or a good relationship he drew back from the brink and systematically destroyed his chances.

  Eventually he was court-martialled for assaulting an officer, and six months of renewed drifting followed, until he began to steal expensive cars with considerable skill. Indeed, such was the excellence of his high speed driving that Joe soon came to the attention of the underworld in Newcastle, and later in Glasgow, until he was hired by the Candy Man — Michael McMarn, who managed the all-male drinking club, Hell’s Gate, a contact point for a powerful pederast ring. McMarn ran young rent-boys, and occasionally carried out meticulously planned armed robberies.

  “To work for the Candy Man is to work for Satan himself,” Eamonn had told his brother from the start, but Joe had seen the warning as somewhat melodramatic. Later, however, he realised Eamonn had been right and that almost every Glaswegian gangster wanted McMarn terminated. Joe knew he ran the risk of being wasted with him, but in the end the underworld, like Joe himself, procrastinated too long, and when the McKinnon boy was found dead, throttled, the Candy Man escaped south, taking with him the only member of his staff that he could control.

  Joe had been the driver on McMarn’s last job before he left Scotland, and had neatly taken advantage of his crumbling empire.

  Eamonn knew Joe loved him, had always loved him, but his wife Carla quite obviously regarded him as someone — something — to be feared and he had soon learnt to avoid her. He accepted her aversion much as he had accepted his mother’s, but Eamonn never reinvented Carla; it was only Mam’s approbation he needed.

  For almost a year Joe’s life had been on hold; he had gone to earth with his wife and child, but the previous day much-despised reality had caught up with him. When Joe had telephoned to tell Eamonn that the Candy Man had tracked him down and asked him to discharge his debt, Eamonn had despaired. Joe should have seen this coming, but he knew he would have to help him, whatever the cost, for he had always been determined that his brother should have a chance. The Candy Man, however, even in his decline, was a formidable enemy.

  When Joe was depressed, he would walk round the Docklands, with its modish new housing developments and decaying back streets, some still leading down to a grey expanse of river, where the Thames flowed greasily past the abandoned wharves and crumbling jetties.

  To stay free, rootless, had always been something of a passion with Joe, one pastime he had shared with his mam who had lived at so many different addresses, her longest tenancy being the old shepherd’s cottage on the outskirts of Dublin. Sometimes she and Joe had tramped round the streets at night, hoping for uncurtained windows, gazing in at other people’s lives, making up stories about them, the more melodramatic the better.

  Now he had been given a true story. He had to kill a man. The idea made him incredulous, unable to grasp its reality. Eamonn had been horrified, later promising to help him, although Joe couldn’t possibly see how. Yet he had always relied on his younger brother in a way he could never really define but had something to do with Eamonn’s ability to survive a hostile world. He had inner resources. He had the ability to go to ground, living off his inventions.

  He walked down one of his favourite streets where the old wharf buildings had been transformed into airy, large-windowed apartments. There was a light in one of them and curtains were drawn back to reveal a high-ceilinged room with pictures closely hung on the walls. Peering in, Joe saw two boys, aged about eleven, fighting on a large beige carpet, rolling over, punching and kicking at each other, soundless in their battle behind the double glazing.

  Without thinking what he was doing, Joe rapped on the glass and the boys sprang apart, staring at him, startled and bewildered. He wagged an admonishing finger and walked on, not waiting to see if they had started to fight again, wondering if he had played God sufficiently to make them stop. Soon he was about to interfere in someone’s life, to play God in a much more terminal way.

  The refurbished wharf was resplendent with a clutter of designer street-furniture and abstract sculpture, yet the muddy brown Thames flowed past as it had always done. He gazed down at the small strip of foreshore, revealed by the tide in the faint light from the shadowy lamp-posts.

  Joe hadn’t been able to save Eamonn from Mam, hadn’t been able to do anything for his brother at all, but strangely he had the feeling that maybe Eamonn could find a way out for him.

  The clock struck six and Eamonn started. Freda was a creature of habit and liked her meals on time.

  He had asked her to use his surname and she had not objected, for Eamonn was, after all, Freda’s tarnished angel of mercy, her man of all work as well as the antidote to her loneliness. She and André had left Poland twenty years ago and were childless, with only a mother and father apiece who both died shortly after they had emigrated. Their love had been all-embracing; living in their own quiet world above the shop there was no need for anyone else. Concerts, a walk in the park and a meal in a Polish restaurant were occasional treats. Now, with André gone, Freda was content to wait for death and, unconsciously, to draw it nearer with her gluttony.

  Oddly enough, she was confident that Coyd would see her through. He had arrived out of nowhere and settled in — not a marauder, as she had once feared, but a silent companion, content to inhabit some world of his own which she didn’t want to understand.

  * * *

  “Spam fritters?” he asked, arriving silently in the room.

  “That would be a treat.”

  “Won’t be long then.”

  Freda loved Spam fritters. A liking left over from the war, Eamonn supposed as he moved about the kitchen, picking up the frying-pan and trying to work out whether Anne Lucas’s pressing needs might match up with his brother’s.

  “Do you know anyone who would kill my husband?” she had asked him, smiling, ready to make a joke of it all.

  Of course he knew that she had been drinking, but suppose she could be persuaded to go through with it? Suppose Anne Lucas could afford to? If she could, there might be a chance of getting Joe awa
y from the Candy Man.

  Chapter 3

  Michael McMarn’s modest apartment in Islington was a sharp contrast to the glories of the terraced house he had occupied in a better part of Glasgow. Most of the Candy Man’s furniture was in store, but he had managed to retain a few decent pieces for the cramped living-room. The Sheraton table, the Chippendale chairs, the Louis Quinze desk, the smaller of the candleabras, the exquisite Dresden and the ormolu clocks — just a scattering of treasures, mainly gifts from Fergus Quinton, the international architect and household name with whom McMarn had lived for so long.

  Quinton had been dead for many years now. How he would have laughed at McMarn’s nickname, yet McMarn had carried out similar assignments for him throughout their relationship. Procuring had been McMarn’s only job; he himself had been picked up in his mother’s pub and become one of Fergus Quinton’s rent boys, eventually rising through the higher ranks to become, he had hoped, a trusted friend.

  The will had come as a severe shock — Fergus had only left him a small annuity — and McMarn had come down in the world, becoming derisively known as the Candy Man, charging high prices for the labyrinthine connections that were made at Hell’s Gate.

  Business had grown over the years and given McMarn a reasonable living, but since Tommy had died, since the Glasgow mafia had finally moved against him, it had been downhill all the way. Now, with Sears’s latest threat, he was wondering how long he could go on running.

  Tommy had been McMarn’s unofficial nephew as much as McMarn had been Quinton’s, but Tommy had got clever and been disloyal. Nevertheless, McMarn deeply regretted what had happened and as he sat on one of his Regency chairs, the newspaper unread at his feet, he ruminated on the tragic results of infidelity.

  At least a modest success had been achieved, he consoled himself. The tracking down of Joe Barrington had given McMarn renewed confidence in Leslie’s abilities just as their relationship had reached a crisis, reflected uneasily in his companion’s increasing drug addiction. McMarn, however, was taking no more chances and had placed a number of tapes revealing Leslie Ryland’s predilection in a bank vault. They were very candid and were the only possible reason why he continued to work for McMarn. Even so, in the last analysis what was Leslie more afraid of, the tapes or the threat posed by Sears and his like? It was hard to tell, and McMarn knew that what he needed was both hit-man and long-term bodyguard. Someone over whom he could exercise ultimate power.