Gang War

by Graham Johnson

  ‘But slowly I got a bit better. I just accepted that I’d been raped. I kept thinking that it was just fate or something. That it wasn’t my fault. And that helped. I told myself that it only affected my body, not my mind. I let it go, Dylan. I let it go.’

  CHAPTER 34

  PLANS

  He stays in Lacoste. He wants to get to know her properly this time. They’re settling in to the good life now, a touch of healthy living, spending their weekends at the beach. He’s stopped answering his mobile from back home, turned it off a few weeks ago. A few messages still come through from Holland now and again, saying Dean is asking about him, asking him to come back to work, promising him all kinds of dough. But even they drop off as the summer draws to a close.

  Dylan’s getting addicted to swimming in the sea, charging off the cold, the shock, the saltwater each time. For a moment, he’s cleansed. He even manages to forget about Chalina in the water. As things have settled down, Chalina’s drifted back into his mind more and more. Hours of tossing and turning, the hollow feeling in his stomach growing sicker. He tells himself over and over again that it was an accident, that it wasn’t his bullet, that it was Nogger or Jay, those mad cunts. But no matter how many times he tells himself it was nothing to do with him, the shadow of Chalina is still there.

  * * *

  Dylan catches his breath in the waves, the shadows of the mountains darkening the water. Elizabeth’s sitting on the beach in shorts and a T-shirt, reading her book, a cold bottle of beer on the go. He swims back to join her and she makes him a cheese sandwich as he gets dry.

  ‘I’ve got some good news, Dylan,’ she says. ‘That job I applied for in Italy . . . I got it.’ She’s smiling and laughing, but Dylan tenses up. ‘It’s in Milan, a teaching job at the university.’ Dylan looks down between his wet, sandy legs, not knowing what to say. ‘You could come with me,’ she says finally, giving it her boss smile.

  ‘What? You want me to go with you?’

  ‘Yes. We could spend the year there. Or just see out the winter, if you like. Get a flat. It’ll be amazing. Once I’ve finished my studies, the world’s our oyster. We could go travelling, anything you want. I want you to come with me, Dylan. Just me and you.’

  ‘But what could I do?’ asks Dylan, playing along, not letting her know that the shadow of Chalina is hanging over him, even there on the beach, scraping out his insides, gnawing at his conscience.

  ‘Chill out. Get a job,’ answers Elizabeth. ‘Whatever takes your fancy. Learn the language. I’ve got a friend who works in photography over there. You could help him. Money’s no good, but it’s about time you learned a trade.’ She smiles.

  ‘Wow. Yeah. Never really thought of that, but it sounds good.’

  ‘We could even stay there. Italy’s a great place to bring up kids,’ she says, laughing her mischievous laugh now. Dylan smiles but freezes up again. Thinking of kids just brings up the spectre of Chalina. He feels chilled by the late-summer breeze rushing in off the Camargue across the wide flat beach. He pulls his hoodie down over Elizabeth, hugs her from behind, goes to take a trackie top out of his bag for himself.

  Then she calls to him, ‘Wait here,’ running off behind the dunes on her own, buzzing. ‘OK, I’m ready now!’ Dylan wallows up the dune. At the top, he sees her lying on the other side, wearing the white bikini she put on that first night. She’s more gorgeous than ever. Slowly, she pulls him to the ground.

  ‘I think we’ve got to celebrate the good news,’ she tells him.

  ‘I haven’t got a condom.’

  She smiles.

  Afterwards Dylan lies gazing up into the sky, the clouds moving fast and moody now. He’s half thinking of just telling her about Chalina, here and now, like he meant to do when he first found her. He’d lost his bottle. She was still a touch fragile on him, and it was still his baggage, after all. How could you unload that on anyone? Especially her, after he’d already fucked her up once with his shit. She wouldn’t wear it again. And who the fuck would? A baby killer? Even Elizabeth wouldn’t forgive him for that.

  He’s para about it, though, in case she finds out by accident. Luckily, she didn’t have a TV when the story broke – she only got one after Dylan arrived and doesn’t watch it much – and she avoids the papers. Says she doesn’t want to know what’s going on back home. Of course, she’s heard about the troubles on the streets, but she’s never said anything much about it to him, so he’s sure she doesn’t know he was involved.

  Dylan switches on the news channels when she’s at work. He sits off with a smoke, catches up. He likes BBC World. Better than Sky and BBC News 24 put together, he thinks. Sometimes he watches it when she’s gone to bed, sits in the other room with the sound turned down. There’s less and less about it on the news. The Chalina investigation has wound down. The CPA is still in there, the army still on the streets of Liverpool, as well as Salford, Moss Side, Glasgow, Nottingham, Newcastle and south-east London. The PMCs had been booted out and the torture stopped, the news said. The focus was on regeneration now. The Imperator had been right. Nogzy was going to be the next Canary Wharf or Cheshire Oaks or Trafford Centre. Whatever it was going to be, it was going to be the Imperator’s finest piece of graft to date. No back answers. Dylan and the lads are dinosaurs now, and now they’re gone, the Jez is wide open. It’s the turn of businessmen and bankers to reap the rewards.

  * * *

  He knows something’s very wrong the moment he walks in, the second he opens the front door, from the sullen silence of the house. Her trainies are strewn across the floor untidily, which is unusual for her. She’s been sick the past few mornings and a bit moody, not wanting to get out of bed, but as he steps inside this already feels like something deeper. The whole house is silent. No scran on the go. She’s usually busy making them their tea by now. But it’s dead. No scent of fresh cucumber and big tomatoes, which Dylan has got used to. No chopping sound of her making a salad. No Elizabeth humming along to the mad French indie station she listens to. The house is gloomy. Dylan’s abdomen turns like a cold sea. He knows she knows.

  He goes up the stairs. When he gets to the top, he can hear muffled sounds of sobbing and gagging and sighs coming from their room. Dylan waits in the corridor for a second, steeling himself to front it out. He thought this day would come. But not so quick. He’s flummoxed on how to play it.

  He edges the little wooden door open. She’s curled up on the bed, foetal-style, no kecks on, just a pair of pale-blue cotton knickers and a white vest. Spread around her on the bed are printouts from the Internet. His mugshot next to Nogger’s and Jay’s. And pages and pages of text, old stories from the BBC website and a couple from a French newspaper’s site. Dylan stares at the pictures of Jay and Nogger. Fucking it up again.

  ‘You never told me, Dylan. You never fucking told me.’

  She’s white as a sheet, eyes red and painful looking, her face bloated and soft. Dylan tries to front it out. But his head’s down. He squeezes out a murmur: ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  Elizabeth explodes. ‘What? You killed a three-year-old girl. You shot a child. And there’s nothing to tell. What kind of a . . . What kind of a person are you?’

  The question stings Dylan. It’s as though she’s saying she doesn’t know him, like the day he arrived in Lacoste. As though she’s cutting him dead again. ‘It wasn’t me,’ he says. ‘That there is just pure paper talk. It’s an old story . . . means nothing.’

  ‘What? It’s just all made up, is it? It’s all just written out of thin air, is it? Just another little thing in your past that you forgot to tell me about?’

  ‘It’s not like that. It’s just . . .’ But he’s lost for words.

  ‘Well, what is it like, Dylan? Shall I remind you?’ She starts to read one of the stories. ‘“The suspects in the murder of little Chalina Murphy have been named. Dylan Olsen, 17, of Norris Green . . .”’ She bursts into tears again.

  ‘Listen, that’s just Internet jangle, them th
rowing names in the hat without anything to back it up. You know what I was about. But I didn’t shoot her. I didn’t murder no one. That’s just fucking shit put out there to fuck us up.’

  Elizabeth picks up another piece of A4 at random, taunting him now. ‘What about this one? “Chalina was killed, police say, after being shot twice, once fatally in the head. She died in her mother’s arms.”’

  Dylan tries furiously to explain the situation. ‘“Fatally in the head.” That makes it look deliberate. It was an accident, for fuck’s sake. That’s what it was – an accident. Was not meant to happen, d’you get me? Wrong place, wrong time, that’s all. All that shit about being shot in the head makes it sound as though she was dropped on purpose. By an assassin or something. It’s just the bizzies chatting shit.’

  Elizabeth guffaws in horror. ‘An accident? An . . . accident?’

  ‘Yeah, an accident. Jay or whoever shot her by mistake.’ He points at Jay’s mugshot on the bed. ‘Yeah, I was there. Granted. But it wasn’t me who shot at her. I didn’t kill her.’

  ‘Well, if you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, then why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I didn’t think it mattered. You weren’t around then. It had nothing to do with you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I just wanted to forget about it. I was gonna tell you but . . . I forgot. I mean, I didn’t know how.’

  ‘Forgot? Oh, forgot, eh? Like the time one of your friends raped me? And you forgot I ever existed? How many other things have you forgotten to tell me? Have you forgotten which one raped me, Dylan? Which one was it, Dylan?’ She holds up the picture of Jay. ‘Was it him? No, he looks too young. Was it this ugly bastard?’ she asks, holding up Nogger’s picture. ‘Then again, I suppose it doesn’t matter. After all, it could have been a fucking accident.’

  Dylan looks away.

  ‘Or was it you, Dylan?’ She holds up his mugshot: skinhead, scars, snarly pout. ‘Was it you? And you just forgot to tell me?’

  Dylan’s head’s wrecked by now. He doesn’t know whether to cough to Nogger raping her. So he just says, ‘Come on, listen, this is mad.’ But she’s sobbing heavily again now. Sobbing in her bedroom. Like he imagined she’d done night after night after the rape. ‘If you’re saying that I kept quiet about it, then, yeah, I hold my hands up. But I’m hardly going to start telling everyone, am I? Cos it’s got nothing to do with me.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with you, you say? For fuck’s sake, Dylan. How can you lie to me like that?’

  ‘I never lied to you.’

  ‘You never mentioned it. And that’s a lie by fucking omission, in my book. Which is just as fucking bad. It’s not as though you crashed a car or had an affair. You went and fucking shot a beautiful little girl.’

  ‘OK, I know I was there, but it doesn’t mean it was me.’

  ‘Hold on, Dylan. So you saw a girl shot? By one of your fucking mates? You were there? But you didn’t say anything? Why didn’t you go to the police?’

  ‘Are you mad? Listen, I didn’t shoot her, right. No one has ever said I have. No witnesses. No forensics. No charges. Fuck all. That’s why I’m here. If I’d have pulled the trigger, I’d be in jail now.’

  Elizabeth has her head in her hands. ‘And here’s me talking about our future together, wanting us both to go to Italy. “Oh, hello, Signor Vice Chancellor, may I introduce you to my boyfriend, Mr Olsen. He’s wanted for child murder back in our country. But it’s OK, there’s no forensics on him . . . yet.” How stupid have I been?’

  ‘Come on, Elizabeth, behave. You’ve gone fucking mad.’

  Raging now, she is. A rage she wouldn’t have known before she was raped. And Dylan’s feeling the natural force of it.

  ‘How pathetic am I? Sitting on the beach talking about having babies. But what would it be like, Dylan? Looking over our shoulder all the time. Waiting for the police to come for you. Or maybe you’ll just shoot the kids – by fucking accident.’

  After a few minutes of silence, she calms down. Dylan takes her by the shoulders, looks her straight in the eye. ‘Listen to me. I didn’t kill Chalina. I swear on my life that it wasn’t me,’ he says, using Chalina’s name for the first time, for effect. He carries on explaining. She’s deffo starting to come round, wanting to believe in Dylan’s innocence. But she’s sharp. And he knows it won’t be long before she starts digging into his explanation again, looking for holes.

  Dylan knows the outro he has to take. And he has to take it now, while she’s on the cusp of forgiving him. It’s a cunt’s trick. But he knows he has to do it.

  ‘I’ve got to get this off my chest,’ he says, reaching over to pick up one of the pictures off the bed. She braces herself. Here it goes, she thinks, expecting the worst, that he’s going to confess to killing the little girl.

  Dylan hands her the mugshot of Nogger: ‘You were right,’ he says. ‘This is the feller who raped you.’

  Elizabeth falls to the floor, into a pile of dirty washing, holding up the shirts to hide her howls, soaking up the tears in a sandy beach towel.

  Dylan looks on. Hurting the thing that he loves most. Hurting it in order to keep hold of it. Hurting her to save himself. ‘He raped you. But I never killed the girl. OK?’

  * * *

  Chalina’s never mentioned between them again. The worst thing is when she thanks him for telling her that it was Nogger who raped her. She says that the knowledge has finally laid it to rest.

  Dylan goes skinny over the next few weeks. He stops eating for a bit. He feels all his muscles are tensed up, even starts panicking a bit, having attacks over little things. He thinks he’s getting followed, starts phoning the lads back home, Pacer, Clone, New Loon, asking about Chalina, if there’s still any heat from it, if the bizzies or the army have been round to his ma’s asking about it.

  The lads can’t believe it. New Loon’s like that: ‘Fuck off, Dylan, it’s safe. Calm down. You’re home and dry.’ He asks Dylan where he is but Dylan’s too para to tell him. He asks Pacer about stupid things they did years ago. Robberies. Aggravated burglaries. Assaults. Asking him whether anyone has been asking about them, throwing him in for them. Pacer tells him he sounds as if he’s been snorting too much. He shakes his head. ‘Dylan’s lost it, la. Properly gone mad. Can you believe that? Dylan Olsen?’

  CHAPTER 35

  REPRISE

  A few weeks after Elizabeth finds out about the accident, Dylan’s watching BBC World and Sky, the sunset shining through the massive open windows. It’s getting cooler now, the gusts of wind outside getting longer and louder.

  Suddenly pictures of the hotel flash up. Paul’s hotel back home. The Imperator’s Palace. All the front has been blown up and mangled. There’s a red car half inside the lobby roaring with fire. The white marble is charred and crumbled, the girders underneath exposed and twisted. The heavy curtains are tattered, blowing out of the windows, drenched in water from the fire hoses.

  Dylan turns up the sound. A reporter’s stood halfway down the street, the other half of the screen showing CCTV images and shots taken earlier.

  The reporter says, ‘Military police have confirmed that a car bomb was driven into the front of the hotel behind me at around one o’clock today. Bomb-disposal experts believe the car was armed with an improvised explosive device and detonated inside the lobby to cause maximum loss of life.

  ‘One source has told Sky News that a cocktail of industrial fireworks, petrol and gas canisters may have been used. Six people are so far reported to have been killed, including three members of the security forces.

  ‘As we know, this hotel, one of the higher-end venues in the region, was popular with officers deployed on anti-TerrorCrime operations in the city’s North End.’

  Dylan fucks this off. He knows what this is about straight away, and it certainly isn’t insurgency against the army or the CPA. Dylan turns the telly down for a second, walks around the room in his boxies, half shocked, half trying to work it out. He notices t
hat Elizabeth has left a note on the table:

  Good afternoon, Gorgeous – you lazy git.

  Felt sick again this morning. But now I think I know why!!!!???? Got something to tell you, I think!!!!! Start packing for next week if you can. See you tonight.

  Dylan puts it down, his head too wrecked to give it the time of day. He turns the telly back up, and the fat-faced local-radio phone-in host he saw visiting the scene of Chalina’s murder is punditing-up the tragedy, saying that the city is pulling together in mourning, that the members of the security forces who were blown up were heroes. But Dylan knows they weren’t the targets, that they were just collateral damage.

  He turns over to BBC World.

  A blonde reporter is positioned outside the police cordon. ‘More casualties have been confirmed, including a forty-seven-year-old man and a second man aged fifty-two.’ Dylan nods, working out how old Paul was. ‘One of the men is believed to be an international businessman.’ The banks in the Far East and the mines in the Baltic. ‘Local sources describe the men as well-known community leaders.’ Journo shorthand for ‘gangsters’. ‘Merseyside Police have confirmed that both men were known to them.’ Dylan laughs at the understatement.

  He rags his mobile out from his rucksack underneath the bed, switches it on and listens as dozens of unread texts and unlistened-to messages bleep their arrival. Dylan bells Nogger, keying in the Dutch mobile number from memory.

  ‘Was that you?’ he asks straight off.

  Nogger doesn’t answer, just tells him to call him back on a safe sat phone, texts him the number a few minutes later. Dylan’s going mad with impatience now. But he knows from Nogger’s silence and the sat phone behaviour what the answer will be.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, lad,’ he says when he gets Nogger again. ‘Why the fuck did you blow up Paul?’ He’s not bothering with his usual careful handling of Nogger. This is too huge.