by Nicky Black
Nicola had been up, waiting in her big, white dressing gown downstairs when he burst into the house before the sun had even come up. He’d hardly made it up the stairs when they’d kicked the door in and he’d heard her shouting his name frantically. Then her voice was stifled by the hand of one of the heavies sent to haul him in. He didn’t make it to the bedroom, his hand didn’t make it under the bed to the box covered by the spare quilt where his defence lay. Four hands were on him, brought him to the floor, kicked him in the ribs, face, head.
Dragged to his feet, his arms up his back, he’d tripped down the stairs, Nicola struggling to get free of an orange-faced bull of a man with slits for eyes. She’d kicked backwards with her bare feet, eyes bulging, arm outstretched towards her husband. Micky couldn’t look at her, all he could do was try to maintain some dignity as he was pushed down the last few stairs into the hallway. As soon as he let her go, Nicola was on the orange one’s back, pummelling his shoulders. Let him go! Micky had tried to tell her to stop, that he’d be back soon enough, but his face was smashed into the full-length mirror that adorned the hallway wall, and she was thrown backwards into the living room, knocking a full ashtray from the arm of the sofa over her face and white dressing gown. He’d glimpsed her powdery face before all he could do was allow himself to be bundled into a waiting car which sped off before the doors had even closed.
His face took another blow. Something had gone wrong? That was the understatement of the year. Raided. Armed police – undercover. Knew everything. All down the Swanee because of Micky Kelly. The first man’s voice was low and gravelly, the other was strained and high-pitched like the Godfather. Both were Mackems – brought in from outside, no doubt, to do the job then piss off.
Micky raised and lowered his eyebrows in an attempt to loosen the blindfold. It moved enough for a little light to squeeze in under his eyes. It wasn’t natural light, a yellow bulb of some sort. He remembered carpeted stairs and a banister, felt the walls around him, no echo, a small room, an empty bedroom. There’d been no talking until now. Just the flushing of a toilet, then the hammering of his face and legs and chest.
Micky mumbled downwards to his chest. ‘It wasn’t me, man. I swear it wasn’t.’
‘Funny that, coz everyone was there except you. Some people lost fifty grand’s worth. All had to be sent back once the tip-off came.’
Micky knew these suppliers. Once they’d been let down and the police had got the sniff, they’d be off. There’d be no refund. Obviously he’d have to speak to Tiger himself to do the explanations. These two were hardly here to listen to his excuses. He only fell asleep, for Christ’s sake: it wouldn’t happen again.
‘Why was everyone there.... if there was no gear?’ Micky panted.
One of the men leant in closer to Micky, making him flinch and breathe blood in and out of his one working nostril. ‘Had the tickets, might as well have the party,’ he said. ‘Sell a bit of leftovers.’
‘See Tania,’ said Micky, trying to appease them. His lungs were too tight to hold any oxygen, his whole body was alight with pain. ‘Get some of .... my gear. Have it.’
‘Fucking guilty conscience.’
‘Just sharing,’ said Micky, ‘with me mates.’
The two men laughed. ‘Don’t worry, son,’ said the gravelly one. ‘We’ve got it all.’
Micky raised his head, even though it felt like a bullet was lodged in his brain. ‘All?’ The resonance of his voice brought more pain. ‘What ... what am I supposed to do?’ He swallowed. ‘I’ve got ... a business to run.’ He felt the two men’s breath on each ear.
‘You’ve ceased trading.’
‘Sold up.’
‘Retired.’
‘Through ill health.’
They sounded like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle fucking Dum. He didn’t know what he heard first, the swish of the baseball bat, the hollow crack as another rib shattered, or his own scream. He coughed, he forced himself not to throw up, he spat on the floor. Who did they think they were?
He lifted his head and smiled a bloody, delirious smile. ‘I was on this scene long before you, you fucking amateurs.’ He gave a half-laugh and waited for the next blow.
Instead, he heard the cocking of a semi-automatic pistol.
In Carole Meadows’s stuffy, overheated office, Lee sat in one of the leather chairs opposite the DI’s empty one. His knee bounced uncontrollably. It was eight a.m. and he’d been up all night, the coffee forcing his eyes open and keeping his nerves on edge.
Nicola had been hysterical, and rightly so. He’d had to take the risk and call her mobile, and thank God she’d answered it. What had happened? Why hadn’t Micky been picked up? You said you’d get him, you promised! He could almost see her, chain-smoking, her green eyes flashing through the fear and exhaustion, her thinning face pale and drawn.
He wasn’t there, he wasn’t there! He’d tried to explain, but he knew it wasn’t enough. He should have made sure Micky was there. He should have had him tailed – should have tailed him himself if Meadows wouldn’t give him the resources. His failure shrouded him like a heavy, black cloak. How was he going to protect her now?
Lee stood and walked to the 1970s-style shelving unit that ran along one side of the wall of Meadows’s office. He ran a finger along the neat row of framed awards, photographs and accolades. DI Meadows shaking hands with the Chief Constable, him old and stout, her fresh and youthful-looking in the same grey suit and white shirt. The unit was a light, teak wood and reminded him of a similar piece of cheap crap that had hugged the wall behind the sofa in his parents’ house. It came with them to Valley Park from Kenton, along with the drop-leaf table and TV unit that matched it. On it, his mother had displayed ornaments of women lifting their flouncy Victorian dresses with a delicate pinch of finger and thumb, plates illustrating the four seasons, family photographs and a collection of ceramic and china Beatrix Potter thimbles. A dusty coffee set of blue Wedgwood lounged lifelessly behind smoked glass doors. At the base of the unit in Meadows’s office, Lee noticed three long, thin, vertical sections, here used for the storage of her various strategy documents, but in his mother’s house, crammed full of vinyl records – The Beatles, Neil Diamond, Val Doonican and his dad’s collection of Derek and Clive albums. Lee recalled fondly the drop-down drinks cabinet, mirrored at the back and lined with bottles of whisky and Martini alongside crystal wine and whisky glasses, opened only at Christmas and New Year before Frank’s accident. And opened pretty regularly thereafter.
Lee was bending down to look closely at a framed press cutting – £26 MILLION JACKPOT FOR VALLEY PARK! – when the office door opened abruptly and DI Meadows entered, harassed and carrying two shoulder bags laden down with files. Her face glowed with the effort, and he noticed several broken veins appearing on her cheekbones.
‘I’m afraid I’ve got a meeting,’ she said as the bags fell with a thud to the floor by her chair.
Lee walked to her desk. ‘I need to talk to you about the riverboat arrests.’
She waved him away with her hand. ‘Thompson’s already briefed me on the way in,’ she said and started logging onto her computer.
He hovered, affronted at her indifference. He raised his chin. ‘I wasn’t your first choice, was I?’
‘Absolutely not,’ she said without taking her eyes from her screen.
‘Can I ask why?’
‘You’re a loose cannon, and I don’t have time for it.’
‘Six arrests, and you can’t even say Good job?’
‘There was nothing! A few grams of weed on Kevin Moone and Stevie Grahame. They’ve all been released. Not enough on them to warrant intent to supply. CPS would never go for it.’
Lee bit his tongue. The other two had had wads of cash on them, thousands, but deep down he knew it wasn’t enough. Meadows waved a finger at him.
‘You bring me the investors who’re cutting the deals and supplying en masse and you’ll get your pat on the back. Now if you don’t mind.’ She
pointed her head towards the door.
Lee felt his face redden. It was no wonder nobody gave a shit about the job in this place. Most of them had long forgotten the vocation, or the thrill they’d felt all those years ago when they’d first stepped out on the streets in their crisp new uniforms. Job satisfaction had done a runner years ago. He made sure the door didn’t slam behind him. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.
At his desk, Lee put his head in his hands. His illusions of a night face to face with Micky Kelly in an interview room were shattered – running rings around him, tripping him up, breaking him down like a scene from Cracker. Fantasies of Kevin Moone shivering in the cell next door were crushed to pulp. Mooney squealing like a pig, telling Thompson everything, then, as the sun came up, Lee reading out the charges to Micky, telling him he would be going down for a very long time and, once everyone was out of the room, putting his face next to Micky’s and telling him, ‘I love your wife. She’s mine now.’ Micky lunging at him, but falling over, shackled and unable to move, helpless.
Fiction. All of it.
SIXTEEN
Lee held the steaming mug of tea in both hands as he sat at the window of the greasy spoon, staring out at lead-coloured clouds that seemed to almost touch the tops of the redundant chimney pots. The sky was about to open its jaws and tip its contents on Valley Park. He wished the rain would drown the damned place, sweep it away into the Tyne and out to sea.
He smiled weakly at the tiny, humming Turkish woman who put his full English breakfast in front of him. He pushed his work papers to one side and took a mouthful of warm black pudding. Another meeting awaited him at the civic centre. Another Valley Park regeneration meeting with the developers, the master-planners, politicians, education, housing, the job centre, social services – you name it, they were there. Lee looked at his papers. He counted forty-three professionals listed as attending the last meeting. How anyone could get anything done with forty-three people sitting around a table, their own agendas displayed like Post-it notes on their foreheads, he didn’t know. He had meetings coming out of his ears. While they took two years to write their anti-poverty strategies and education improvement plans, dozens of new babies had been born into the very poverty they were strategizing to eradicate, the political administration had changed, and the whole thing started again. New strategies with new political messages. In the meantime the people got poorer, the babies grew up and they all got nowhere fast.
The cafe overlooked the dual carriageway onto the eastern edge of Valley Park. He could have gone to the little Italian place by his flat, had a Swiss cheese croissant and a cappuccino. But, aside from needing comfort food, this place was opposite the little supermarket that he knew she shopped in. She’d called him from the payphone there many times – just to hear his voice, she’d said, no doubt blushing at the soppiness of it. But he missed those calls, the simple feeling of happiness he felt when he saw the familiar number light up the screen of his mobile. He looked now at the dead screen. He was losing her.
Lee ate quickly. As his plate was taken away, he looked out of the window and took in the row of terraced housing on the other side of the dual carriageway, a third of it boarded up, the rest looking weary after a lifetime of hard labour housing people who didn’t give a crap about them. Their façades slumped like stroke victims’ faces. Their front paths reached out like gnarled, arthritic fingers, punctuated by broken, peeling wooden gates like the bitten nails of an anxious teenager. It seemed to him that Valley Park had taken a deep breath and screamed, STAY OUT! But the meeting papers in front of him told a different story. This was a place of outstanding community spirit, parents who wanted a better future for their children, a place with huge potential, a land of opportunity. If only they could get the right ingredients. A KFC, a Tesco and considerably more people with disposable income.
Lee sat back in his chair, trying to penetrate his gaze through the houses and down the hill to Elm Street. And Nicola, waiting for her husband to come home from the hospital, a gaping hole in his right foot. The bullet must have gone straight through his trainers and the floorboards, because there’d been none of it left in him.
The stupid bastard was keeping his mouth shut. Lee had questioned him in his hospital bed the day before, the glint of recognition in Micky’s tiny, swollen, black eyes lasting only a second before he turned them back to focus on the bandaged foot in its hoist. Lee had stood by him, looking him up and down with the curiosity of a kitten. He lobbed questions at him. Who would want to torture and shoot him? Did he know where it happened? Did he see them? Hear them? Micky’s eyes clouded over and he continued to stare at his foot, drinking orange squash through a straw. Lee clicked his pen on and off, on and off, the spiral pad suspended in his other hand. Micky stared ahead, coughed, winced, then lifted a butt cheek and farted.
Lee could only take Nicola’s word for it that he had once been a handsome man. Sought after, clamoured after even. He’d asked what she ever saw in him and she’d said she’d felt lucky to have him. He sensed her defensiveness and didn’t like it, so he stopped asking the questions, but that didn’t stop him wondering how two people could live together for so long with such disparity. The successful couples he knew had always been finely matched. He remembered his parents. Both working-class, good-looking people who’d met at a street party celebrating England winning the World Cup in 1966. They weren’t young. Both of them approaching thirty, waiting for the right person, working at careers, he as a linesman, she as a hairdresser and beautician. She’d had plans to open her own shop, but Frank’s accident had put paid to that. Still, they never grew apart. Instead, they grew ugly and bitter together, synchronised their regret and dissatisfaction, almost as if convergence was the only option.
Lee had seen Nicola at the hospital after his futile questioning of her husband. She’d been wrestling a can of Coke from a drinks machine as he emerged from Micky’s room. But gone was the delighted smile that had greeted him at Louise’s fashion show. The smile that left him breathless. The sight of him was no longer a pleasure, and all he saw now was fear, confusion and resentment walking quickly towards him down the corridor.
‘What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here,’ she said fretfully.
‘My job,’ he replied innocently enough. He knew it was a ridiculous thing to say before he even said it. She wasn’t stupid, so why would he treat her as such? She actually scowled at him. As if.
‘Nicola...’
‘I can’t talk now.’
‘When then? When can you talk?’
She bowed her head. ‘He’s coming home tomorrow. I don’t know if I can do this, Lee.’
He had no words. He’d let her down. He’d promised. And now there was distrust and uncertainty.
As Nicola passed Lee and walked into Micky’s room, Mooney’s oily face shone a spiteful smile at itself in the glass of the drinks machine. He hovered on his crutches, the clean dressings stinging his seeping wounds. In his mind he’d just been cursing the stupid, foreign bitch who’d cleaned and re-bandaged his legs with the delicacy of a trainee plasterer. But now there was another bitch who warranted his attention. Micky’s lass. And a fucking copper. Oh, life didn’t get much better than this.
Nicola waited impatiently in the taxi, the meter ticking, the twenty pound note burning a hole in her hand. It had to last them all weekend, and Micky had been in the gym ten minutes already. The kids were getting fractious, hungry, punching and scratching at each other. Liam started to howl as Michael’s nail caught the side of his eye. She separated them, putting one on either side of her. She put a finger in their faces and told them to calm down or there’d be no telly and no football tomorrow. Liam screamed louder and Michael joined in: That’s not fair! Life’s not fair, thought Nicola, glancing again at her watch as the meter clocked up another pound.
Inside the gym, Micky waited outside the tiny office for Tiger, whose laughing voice penetrated the door. A minute later, Stevie’s bald head appe
ared and indicated for Micky to come in. Micky veered himself towards the door in a hospital-issue wheelchair, his bandaged foot sticking out like a giant cotton bud. Tiger sat behind the desk, his dark glasses reflecting the white of Micky’s foot to four times its size, his thumbs dancing with each other on his stomach. Stevie stood next to him, his forehead falling over his eyes like a bloodhound’s. They watched him struggle in silent amusement.
Tiger straightened his tie and removed his glasses, his slightly crossed, albino eyes glittering in his crinkly face. ‘Micky. What can I do for you?’
Micky was well rehearsed. ‘I’ve come to see you about the bit of bother. I want you to know that it had nothing – and I mean nothing – to do with me.’ He looked at Stevie, expecting some backup. Micky would never grass: solid as a rock, Micky. But Stevie stared straight ahead.
‘Doesn’t make any odds to me,’ said Tiger, ‘it’s the lads who lost out.’
‘I lost out an’ all, Tiger. They took all my gear and I had nothing to do with it.’
‘Still got to be paid for.’ Tiger’s eyes turned from playfulness to stony indifference.
Micky creased his brow in confusion. ‘But I can’t sell gear if they’ve taken it, can I? I sank everything into that.’
Tiger looked bored and shifted in his seat, crossing one leg over the other and wiping fluff from the leg of his suit. ‘You know the score, Micky: easy terms, fifty per cent cash upfront and the rest a week later. It’s already overdue.’
Micky looked into the blank faces of the two men. ‘Have they paid?’ he asked.
Tiger continued to pick at his trousers and Micky felt panic welling in his chest. ‘Well, can I have more time to pay?’ Stevie’s smirk said You’re joking, and Micky racked his brains for more suggestions. ‘Can I have some more gear, then, and I’ll pay it all at once?’ Tiger shook his head slowly, pursing his lips. Micky leant forward, exasperated. ‘Haway man, Tiger, how long have I been working for you? I’m hardly gonna run away, am I?’ He nodded towards his foot with a forced smile.
