The Prodigal: Valley Park Series 1

by Nicky Black

  Tiger stood up. ‘You’re off the team,’ he said, taking his jacket from the back of the chair and putting his glasses back on.

  ‘What?’

  Tiger blanked him and indicated with his head to Stevie that the meeting was over. Micky pointed at Tiger, who eyed him with barely hidden revulsion. ‘I’ll prove it wasn’t me,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Tiger, as Stevie took the back of Micky’s wheelchair and spun him around, pushing him out of the door and letting go.

  ‘I will, I fucking will!’ Micky shouted, trying to stop the wheelchair hitting a tall tower of stacked plastic chairs. The pain in his arms was excruciating. When he was stationary, he turned in the chair awkwardly, and watched Tiger’s back as he headed for the door of the gym. He called after him, ‘Look at state of this, man!’ But Tiger was gone, and the gym fell silent. ‘There’s no call for it,’ he muttered, fighting back tears of anger and humiliation. He wheeled himself slowly to the door of the building. So Stevie was on the team now, got what he wanted – his job. Well, he’d make sure they knew it wasn’t him. Micky Kelly grass? Never in a million years.

  Nicola watched Micky’s profile from the back of the taxi. He stared to his left out of the window. Computing. She watched the theories clocking systematically through his head like the meter of the taxi. If the clock stopped at her name and it all added up, she was finished. Micky was capable of murder, of that she was sure. He’d promised to kill her many a time, if she left him, if he ever found her with someone else, if, if, if. She feared not her own death, but the lives her children would lead without her. Left with Micky, what would they learn? To be tough, to take no shit. Violence. Who would teach them please and thank you, the value of money and the importance of justice and friendship? They would end up like Mark, but with no big sister to vouch for them in court.

  She took her phone from her bag and checked the sent and received call lists, making sure she’d deleted all communication with Lee. Only Micky’s and the hospital numbers were displayed and some unanswered calls she’d made to Kim that morning. It was sad. Less than half a dozen numbers on her phone. Who did she have left in the world whom she could trust?

  She felt sweat prickle her brow. Lee knew never to call the mobile number, but the fear that he might crack just for the need to talk to her made her feel sick. She was finding it more and more difficult to live with the constant anxiety. She didn’t sleep more than three hours a night, and her appetite was gone, the food sticking in her gullet and making her retch. And now that Micky was coming home and his activities had been shut off by Tiger, she saw no end to the nightmare. How could she get information on him if he wasn’t working?

  Names, Lee had said. Get me names. Names that will drop him in it. She swallowed hard, wondering if it was all worth it.

  Getting Micky up the steps into the house was a feat in itself. Michael stood by, embarrassed at the spectacle and Micky’s irreverent use of language. With so many broken bones, hopping his hulk up the steps on one leg was impossible. Neither arms would take his weight, so trying to get him up the steps on his backside was equally unworkable. Scotty, the pub landlord, had to be fetched from over the road to get Micky into the house and back into his chair. Scotty’s nervousness was palpable. Word had got around, and he made it clear that he was doing the favour for Nicola, not Micky, and that there was a condition – she was to tell no one he helped. He heaved Micky unceremoniously back into his wheelchair without word or gesture, making sure the coast was clear before he crept back over the road to his house.

  Once inside, Nicola moved the armchair out of the way and wheeled Micky to a position opposite the TV. He sat dead still, swallowing the shame and mortification. She saw his hand cover his mouth, concealing a trembling lip. Michael and Liam sat together on the displaced armchair. Micky looked up and held out his best arm as wide as he could to them and they blinked at Nicola, unmoving, not wanting to commit to anything.

  ‘Haway man, I need a cuddle,’ said Micky.

  Michael cautiously made his way over, eyes down. ‘Come on, I’ve missed you,’ said Micky, pulling Michael towards him by the arm. Michael climbed onto his lap and Liam, seeing all was safe, leapt off the chair and ran onto Micky’s lap, screeching with delight. Micky held onto them both and kissed their heads.

  As she closed the front door, Nicola heard a familiar barking and spotted two small, brown eyes looking through the bars of the front garden gate. She held her hand to her heart and ran to open it. Rufus bounded around her legs. He was filthy, skinny and absolutely beside himself. She picked him up, held him out at arm’s length in front of her and took him into the house. He twisted to be free as he saw Liam and Michael, and she set him down on the floor of the living room.

  ‘Rufus!’ they cried in unison, falling off Micky’s lap and charging over to the dog. Nicola smiled happily, her gaze meeting Micky’s. Her smile faded as she noticed his shrunken, watery eyes, his posture hunched, defeated. He looked away from her, out of the window, and the guilt ate her up like the hungry dog.

  As the week went on, Micky became more and more withdrawn. His unshaven face aged irrevocably and great bags of pink, wrinkled flesh appeared under his eyes. He filled a bottle with his piss and made his way slowly and excruciatingly up the stairs to the bathroom every morning for a crap and a flannel wash. His breath reeked. He slept on the sofa: he came nowhere near her. He accepted the food, tea, beer and kind words with silent tolerance. He kicked grumpily at the dog and stared vacantly at the TV, the remote control untouched on the table next to him. He had no visitors – for all the mates he had just a few weeks ago, they’d deserted him now. Not a phone call, not a Get Well card. Nothing.

  She held his hand – sometimes he grasped at hers as she said goodnight to him. She would lie beside him, teetering on the edge of the sofa. He never touched her, never asked her to touch him, and she wasn’t sure how to take it. Perhaps he knew exactly what she had done and was lulling her into a false sense of security. Perhaps he was so depressed he’d lost his sexual appetite. Perhaps he just didn’t fancy her anymore.

  She looked at him now, sleeping, snoring slightly, the bruises turning green and yellow. She’d never known him so quiet and introverted and she wondered if it was possible that he’d gotten a taste of his own medicine. The punches and kicks, bruises and battered limbs.

  She settled herself on the floor in front of the sofa, her face next to his and she studied it. He was supposed to take care of her. When she married him, that’s what she’d expected. She couldn’t remember her father, but perhaps he would have taken care of her had he been able to stomach her mother’s dreadful moods. Nicola would feed herself and Mark out of tins when her mother went AWOL, too embarrassed to ask for help from the neighbours or a teacher. She would steal money from her mother’s purse, save it in a jam jar under her bed for the eventuality when her mother would forget she had children at all. The absences became longer and longer until one day their mother didn’t come home at all.

  After several weeks, the money and the tins ran out. They would watch adverts on the TV for Super Noodles and McDonald’s with hungry, dinner plate eyes. The truancy officer who found them had covered her mouth and gasped back her tears. A big, buxom, bouncy castle of a woman, soft as clarts and posh as the Queen. She’d held them both to her soft pillow of a chest and said no, they couldn’t stay here, they needed to be taken care of, they were too little to take care of themselves. Care. Something she’d never really had. Foster parents tried to care, but Mark wouldn’t let them. He spat and kicked and screamed. He broke their heirlooms, hit their children, pissed in their plants and in their beds. And when he went back to the home, she went with him because she was the only one who could take care of him.

  Micky’s face twitched. He grunted and wriggled himself into a more comfortable position. It struck her that she’d never thought about having to take care of herself for a very long time. But she knew now that she had been doing it for y
ears, and was going to have to do it forever. She thought about Lee. She missed him. She thought of him every hour of every day. She had almost called him several times, but fear overshadowed desire.

  Micky’s eyes opened sleepily and he reached out for her hand. He muttered something, but she couldn’t hear. She put her ear next to his mouth.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.

  The depression soon turned to paranoia. A few days later, Micky was eyeing her every move, even from one side of the room to the other. He timed her trips out to the shops or to Kim’s. Every minute had to be accounted for. Her phone was confiscated. No money for phones. He’d banished the dog to the back garden, telling her he wanted rid of it, she could take it down the cat and dog shelter, tell the kids it got run over. She’d offered to take him down the gym and he’d looked at her with such disgust that she felt it pierce her skin and poison her blood. Sometimes he looked at her with infinite tiredness, daring her to sympathise, then lashing out if she so much as touched him.

  Still he slept downstairs, like a Bullmastiff, guarding the front door should she mean to escape. Her nights swung between wide awake and stressful dreams. Any trip to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and she’d find him standing on one leg at the bottom of the stairs, looking up, making sure she got back into bed.

  Tonight she was in a deep sleep for a change, when she woke up in the pitch dark, wondering whether the loud thud had been part of an instantly forgotten dream or reality. She heard another clatter coming from the boys’ room, dragged herself out of bed, and swayed towards the bedroom door. She squinted against the landing light as she made her way across to the opposite bedroom where Liam sat on his bunk whimpering, ‘Bottley, Mammy!’ and Micky lay on the floor, holding himself up with one elbow, trying to right himself. She helped him sit up and Liam cried louder, ‘Bottley!’

  Micky was breathless with the effort, ‘I didn’t want him to wake you up –’

  ‘It’s alright, I’ll get it.’ She ran downstairs and put some milk in a bottle, bringing it back upstairs. Liam grabbed it from her desperately and lay down on his pillow, sucking furiously, rubbing his head with his fingers. She pulled his quilt up to his neck and kissed his head.

  ‘Bastards!’ she heard Micky swearing under his breath. She sat next to him, her arm just stretching around his massive shoulders. ‘They think I grassed them up. Jesus, if I was gonna do it, I’d do it big time, not a stupid riverboat party.’

  ‘At least you’re out of it, eh?’

  Micky held a piece of paper in his hand. ‘They’re all here,’ he said, holding it aloft, hate oozing through his clenched teeth. ‘The whole syndicate – it’s got to be one of them. I’m telling you, I’ll find out who it was, you watch. And when I find out. They’re dead.’ His hand started to shake and it fell to the floor as if the paper weighed a tonne. He half-turned to Nicola, not able to look her in the eye. ‘I can’t even fetch for me own kids. What am I gonna do?’ Micky’s shoulders started to shake. ‘Me foot, Nicola, they nearly took off me foot!’ Nicola’s arms went around his neck and he buried his face in her hair, his hand still limply holding the piece of paper in front of him. She felt him sob and she held onto him. The man was in pieces, and it was all her fault. What the hell had she been thinking? This was her life, her husband, her house, her children, Kim, Amy, Margy, if only she’d come home. Perhaps if she was good to Micky, he’d make sure Margy and her family could come back safely. But his power was gone, he held no sway with the big boys now. She sighed. No matter. She’d been a fool. What did she think she would do with Lee? A copper’s wife? Hanging around with other coppers’ wives? Dinner parties with coppers? Living in a place where she knew no one, always looking over her shoulder, her children living with a new dad who didn’t even know them? She needed to be near Kim, but would Lee ever be accepted? A filthy copper?

  Christ, she’d been such a stupid, stupid cow.

  Lee’s legs became heavier with every step as he left the cemetery where they’d first kissed, Nicola still sitting on their bench, head bowed, with relief or sorrow, he wasn’t sure. She couldn’t live with herself, she’d said. She’d done a terrible thing. He was never to contact her again. She’d meant it, too, every word. There was no persuasion, no reassuring hug, the panic alarm back in his possession. Never. That word again.

  SEVENTEEN

  Lee felt the pounding in his head about one second after consciousness reclaimed him. The room was outrageously light, the long white voiles no defence against the streaming sun that shone directly into the room – directly onto his face. He crushed his eyes shut against the fiery heat then snapped them open again. He stared at the ceiling, rigid, as the realisation of where he was dawned on him. Lying flat on his back with one bare foot on the floor, he turned his head slowly to his left. Debbie lay with her back to him, her shoulders rising and falling rhythmically under the quilt. Was she naked? Shit!

  He pulled back the duvet silently, relieved to see his boxers, one sock and his T-shirt still on his body. The night was a fog of red wine and malt whiskey and he didn’t remember going to bed at all. There’d been music, dancing in the living room, The Specials, The Pogues, the rest he couldn’t recall.

  His trousers and shirt lay sprawled over the back of a green chaise longue under the window. He moved like a sloth, painstakingly slow, until he was on his feet. His head was in a vice, his mouth full of dough, and he thought he might fall off the edge of vertigo and straight to hell when he stood up. He swayed and steadied himself on the end of the black, cast-iron bedstead. The door to the bedroom was slightly open. He snuck out on tiptoes, his clothes held tight to his chest. In the bathroom he took a piss, swilled some mouthwash and pulled on his jeans and shirt, wondering where the hell his shoes and other sock were – please God, not the bedroom. If she woke up, he couldn’t bear the shame.

  He found the shoes strewn by the sofa in the living room and thirty seconds later he was pulling his jacket from the coat hook and closing the front door as quietly as he could. He was still over the limit, he was sure, but needs must, and he had to get out of there.

  ‘You’re early,’ said Thompson, sitting with her coffee at the station reception. Lee grunted at her and headed to the office. He chewed furiously on an old piece of minty gum he’d found at the bottom of the glove compartment of his car – not his, must’ve been Louise’s, and for once he was glad she chewed like a horse all day long. Anything to get rid of the sickly sweet taste of his own mouth. Lee glowered at Gallagher at the filing cabinet, wondering why he was in an hour before he actually needed to be, and two hours before he normally was.

  ‘Shit the bed?’ asked Gallagher with a wink, eyeing Lee’s crumpled shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Lee ignored him and picked up a bunch of messages in a pile on his desk. He looked at them quickly and threw them back once he realised none was from Nicola. ‘Shit on the pot or get off,’ continued Gallagher, ‘that’s another one of mine. Either get it off your chest or move on.’

  ‘Has anyone ever told you what a disgusting little moron you are?’ asked Lee.

  ‘All the time, Sarge, all the time.’

  The day went from bad to worse. In his Great Escape, he’d left his wallet at Debbie’s house – no money, no cards. A pubic hair greeted him with a bristly wave from the bacon and egg butty bought with a couple of quid borrowed from Thompson. The CPS hounded him all day with phone calls and emails, questioning the legality of the raid on the riverboat, while one of the dealers arrested that night brought a countercharge of assault against the arresting officer. Bruised ribs and a broken wrist were worth thousands to some scrawny scally, thanks to Lee’s little midnight swoop. It pissed down outside all day, the office roof leaked, the pit-pat of water dripping into the empty bins, irritating his slow-cooking hangover. He drank a sea of coffee, his stomach and heart churning, wishing the day would be over so he could crawl onto his sofa and sleep until it all went away. Debbie called him twice, but he didn’t h
ave the guts to answer the call, not today. He felt like the biggest coward that ever walked the earth.

  Five o’clock was almost here, not before he’d had to drive to the edge of the cemetery and have half an hour’s sleep in the car. Still he felt revolting. The words on the computer swam in front of his eyes. Ten minutes, he thought, and I’m out of this wretched place. But DI Meadows had other ideas. Out she swanned, that poker-face again, a red, birthmark-like stain creeping up her neck. She cleared her throat aggressively and stood a few feet away from Lee. He peered at her over the report he was pretending to read.

  ‘Had the commissioner on the phone,’ she said. Lee looked blankly back at her. ‘In my office,’ she demanded and walked away.

  He sat slumped in a chair in her office, legs crossed, watching her mouth move, as she paced in front of him. He wished she’d floss the annoying piece of black debris that was wedged in an incisor. He wiped his tongue over his own teeth, hoping she’d get the message. She didn’t, and his irritation had no limits. The arrests weren’t enough, she was saying, staring at his feet, avoiding eye contact. They needed more, so now was his chance to get that pat on the back. His informant needed to come up with something more solid. Who was taking the bulk of the goods. Delivery dates, distribution networks, cash deposits, where the money was being laundered. She stood over him, staring down at his shoes rather than his face.

  ‘No can do,’ Lee said. ‘She won’t do it anymore.’

  ‘Make her,’ said Meadows going back to her chair, ‘and put both socks on tomorrow, will you?’

  As he dragged his feet up the stairs to his flat Lee tried doubly hard not to roll his eyes as he saw Louise sitting outside his front door, legs spreadeagled, headphones blaring, the contents of her bag spilled out onto the floor between her legs. He stepped over her and opened the door without a word.