by Claire Askew
‘You okay to help me with these cunts?’
‘You bet,’ Birch said. Her voice sounded thick and oily.
She’d tucked her handcuffs into the pocket of her jeans, and now she turned and stood over Fenton. He’d pulled himself into a sort of crouch, and was gingerly touching the open wound on his forehead. Birch gave thanks once again for the silver-topped cane.
‘What’s this scumbag’s name?’
Charlie was standing over Jones, who was flat out on the carpet, whimpering. He smirked at her.
‘Gordon,’ he said.
Birch reached down and yanked Fenton’s hand away from his wound. She clicked one cuff around his wrist.
‘Gordon Fenton,’ she said, ‘I am arresting you for breaking and entering, and assaulting a police officer.’
Fenton tried to drag his hand away, pushing himself to his feet as he did so. He looked unsteady. Birch was ready: she did what he’d been trying to do to her, twirling him round as though they were dancing, and twisting the cuffed arm behind his back. His other hand flailed, trying to hit her.
‘Oh,’ Birch said, dodging the blow. ‘Wanting to add resisting arrest to those charges, are we?’
‘Fuck off,’ Fenton said. But he dropped the flailing hand, and Birch slotted it into the other cuff.
‘Good lad,’ she said.
Fenton spat blood onto her carpet. ‘Bitch,’ he replied.
‘You do not have to say anything,’ Birch said, with some glee. ‘But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’
‘Yeah yeah, yadda yadda,’ Fenton muttered.
Birch steered him round to the other side of the sofa, then gave him a good hard shove. He slumped into the cushions.
‘Have a seat, why don’t you?’ she said. With her good hand, she patted Fenton down. In the pocket of his coat, her phone, its screen smashed and webbed with crazing. ‘Thanks,’ she said.
Her whole face hurt. She was going to have to do something about these injuries, soon. She was still listening for sirens, though she could tell her hearing wasn’t functioning quite right. There was blood in her eyes, and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. For now, adrenalin was still spangling in her veins, keeping her going. And they weren’t done.
She walked around the edge of the sofa, back to where Charlie was standing over Jones.
‘What did you do?’ she asked.
‘Whacked him in the throat,’ Charlie said. ‘Then I just sort of . . . lost it.’ He was still holding the cane.
‘Holy shit, Charlie.’
Her brother snorted. On the floor, a bloodied Jones opened and closed his mouth like a guppy, trying to haul in small gulps of air.
‘What?’ he said. ‘He was about to fucking go for you. I had to put him down.’
Birch nodded backward towards Fenton.
‘Watch that one,’ she said. Then she dropped to her knees beside Jones. ‘Can you breathe?’ she asked him.
He swivelled his eyes around to look at her, and made the face of a small child who’s about to throw a tantrum.
‘I’m asking,’ Birch went on, ‘because if you can’t, I will need to give you a tracheotomy. That means I will need to cut your windpipe open.’
It was the adrenalin talking. For all the first-aid courses she’d been on, she’d have had no idea how to do this. But the bluff worked.
‘I can breathe,’ Jones coughed. He didn’t sound healthy, but she didn’t much care.
‘Then you’re not going to die,’ she said. She stood, and inspected him for a moment, before walking to the kitchen and opening a drawer. Back in the living room, she could hear Fenton and her brother talking in low voices. It didn’t sound friendly. She rummaged, and found a very old pair of handcuffs she’d managed to partially break a while ago. They would lock, but unlocking them was less straightforward: a suspect had struggled while being uncuffed, and managed to break off a tiny piece of the key in the keyhole.
‘Get on your front,’ she said to Jones, back in the living room. He stared up at her. She glanced over at Charlie, who was standing beside Fenton, glaring. Jones got the message.
‘Okay, okay,’ he said. With some apparent difficulty, he rolled over.
‘Real name?’ Birch asked, and to her surprise, it was Jones who answered, though she’d been addressing Charlie.
‘Kristof,’ he said.
‘Kristof Jones, I’m—’
‘No,’ Jones said. ‘Kristof Majewski.’
Birch snorted. ‘Good lord,’ she said. ‘An honest thief.’
She read him his rights, then hauled him to his feet with Charlie’s help, and deposited him on the sofa alongside Fenton.
‘Well,’ Charlie said, ‘now what?’
Birch had entirely forgotten the third man, who’d gone upstairs. But now there was a clattering of feet, and a figure appeared in the unlit hallway.
‘The fuck?’
Fenton twisted his head round. ‘Get the fuck out, pal!’ he yelled. ‘Polis are on their way!’
The man’s face was in shadow. Charlie began to advance towards him, the cane raised. Birch saw the man’s hand twitch, near to his hip, and her heart kicked out. But then Fenton yelled again.
‘Ye’d better be running, pal!’
Before Charlie could reach him, the third man wrenched open the front door, and was gone.
‘Don’t,’ Birch called, and her brother turned. ‘Don’t go after him. I need you here.’
Charlie came back to stand next to her, and they looked down at Fenton and Jones – Gordon and Kristof – battered, sullen, hanging their heads. Out of nowhere, Charlie slid his hand into hers.
‘Sorry, Nella,’ he said. ‘Sorry it took me so long.’
She looked at him. The adrenalin was starting to wear off now, and her whole head vibrated with pain. The arm Fenton had twisted hung useless at her side. At last, she could hear a siren on the road out back, then two, then three. Charlie, she thought, feeling the weight of brother’s warm, wet hand in her own, this is Charlie. This is my little brother. There was no mistaking it now. Looking at his face then, she could see exactly what he was thinking.
‘You ready for what’s next?’ she said.
He looked away for a moment, down at his feet. Then he lifted his head again. ‘Yeah,’ he said.
When I opened my eyes, Vyshnya was gone. The force of the bullet had thrown the chair over, and she was lying slumped on the ground. My face was spattered with blood. I looked down at my clothes: they were wet, sticky-looking. I was glad they were all black.
It turned out I didn’t have anything left in my body to throw up, but I hawked bitter phlegm and spat it onto the swimmy red of the floor. I was able to look up at Malkie: my closest ally, I reckoned, in the room. One side of his face was flecked with flown blood. He looked amazed: I’d done it. I’d actually done it.
A hand hit my back and I flinched. It was Solomon, patting my shoulder blade.
‘It’s hard, isn’t it?’ he said in his forked voice. ‘The first time.’
I couldn’t look at him. My hands were shaking so much it scared me. I pulled the safety back into place on the gun.
‘You’ve done well.’ Solomon moved his hand to the back of my neck, and grasped it. ‘You’ve walked through the fire, Smith. You’ve chosen your side. I’m pleased with you.’
Don’t touch me, I wanted to scream. Get your disgusting hands off me. But I was mute. I felt sick, and I had the strong urge to lie down, right there in the gore on the hard tiles, and just sleep.
‘You’ve proven yourself an excellent employee,’ Solomon was saying. ‘Which means you get to leave this house tomorrow, and go back to the Emerald.’
Still, I said nothing.
‘Would you like that, Smith?’
Somehow, his words reached me.
‘Yes,’ I said. It was a child’s voice, small and afraid.
&
nbsp; ‘Good.’ Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Solomon make a hand gesture at Malkie and Fitz. They walked over, stood behind him, alongside Ez. Outside my line of sight.
‘There are a few things I need you to do before you go,’ Solomon said. ‘First, and most importantly: deal with this mess. I want this room and the car outside forensically cleaned, do you understand me? If a policeman were to walk in here in the morning, they would find nothing whatsoever amiss – am I correctly understood?’
I knew that would be impossible, and that he’d no doubt get some team of clean-up guys in after me. But I had no room to argue.
‘Yes.’
‘Second, I need this’ – Solomon poked a wing-tipped toe in the direction of Vyshnya’s body – ‘cleanly disposed of. That needs to happen tonight. I assume I can entrust that task to you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And when I say cleanly disposed of, I mean without any link to this place, do you understand? It is in your interest to make that happen. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what would happen to you should this body be discovered.’
I glanced down at Vyshnya. I knew only too well the ways in which Solomon could hurt a person.
‘Good. I expect you to have removed your personal items from Abdul’s room by the morning. Malcolm here will contact your friend Mr Scissors, and let him know that you’ll be back at the helm of the Emerald tomorrow night.’
I realised I was nodding, my head lolling loosely back and forth.
‘You understand everything I have said.’
I looked round then, for the first time. Solomon was too close for my liking, and behind him, Malkie, Ez and Fitz rose up like a bank of storm cloud.
‘I do,’ I said. ‘It’ll all be done tonight.’
Solomon clapped me on the back again. It felt feeble.
‘Good man, Smith,’ he said. Malkie and Fitz were already headed towards the door. Solomon turned and followed them, letting Ez bring up the rear. Once Solomon’s back was turned, Ez looked me up and down as though I were something poisoned, something rotten.
‘If it was up to me?’ he hissed. ‘You’d be a dead man.’
I could say nothing. I dropped my gaze and looked at the pile of flesh and rags that had been Vyshnya. Ez stalked after Solomon, and I heard him close the door on me. End of discussion. Another box ticked.
I dealt with Vyshnya’s body through a sort of haze. Her head was a detonated bomb, and I needed to gather all the pieces. It felt important to me that all those pieces be kept together: something about body and soul, something, something, something. I had no coherent thoughts. I untied the solid parts of her from the chair, and rolled her into one of the industrial black sacks I found under a sink. She was a smallish woman, but I had to fold her fast: the flesh was already stiffening, turning grey. She was lukewarm to the touch. Her hands had curled into tight fists, knots I couldn’t undo.
I remember I swished chunks of her hair up from out of the ocean of spatter. I remember I used a dustpan to scrape up fragments of jelly and bone. I found her ear, intact, feet away, and wept over it.
Once all her solid parts – the body, and the many fragments made by the gunshot – were all wrapped in black plastic and put into the same big bag, I used up yards and yards of blue roll to mop up the blood. This soaked tissue went into the bag as well: I think now that I was working with the fucked-up delusion that if I got every single particle of her into the same place, she’d somehow coagulate, re-stitch, come back to me. Instead, of course, I had to tie up the bag and haul it out back. Solomon’s garden was huge, and flat, and dark.
I left Vyshnya outside, swaddled in her plastic mourning gear, and returned to start the fiendish job of the clean. I was trying to do my allotted tasks in order of difficulty, from the very hardest, and working on down. With the blue roll and an antiseptic spray, I went around the kitchen inch by inch, foot by foot, mopping up any spatter, any droplet that I found. The stainless steel and the tiles all came clean, but anything fabric was forever soiled. There were oven gloves, spattered with a bright stripe of blood. Tea towels crusted with it. I dumped anything I couldn’t clean into a sink, and ran the hot tap over it until steam cascaded up. No use.
With that same steaming hot water, I mopped every inch of the floor. It took over an hour. I mopped myself out of the back kitchen door, to where Vyshnya’s black cocoon still lay between the back step and the decorative fencing that hid the bins from view. I reopened the black wrapping, unscrewed the soiled mop head, and threw it into the bag with Vyshnya.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and hoped she could hear me.
I sat outside on the step with her, waiting for the kitchen floor to dry so I could go back in and get the cloths, dispose of those, too. I was beyond shivering: my whole body radiated with the cold, pulsed with it. I didn’t care.
I am alive, I thought. How dare I be alive? I wanted more than anything to throw up, but I’d tried, over and over. There was nothing left. My throat tasted like acid: I was filled with it. Acid ran in my veins, pumped through my heart.
Why aren’t you dead, Charlie? I thought. You fucking well deserve it.
My phone told me it was after midnight. It also told me I had a dozen texts from Toad. He’d had to go quiet for a few days in Russia. He’d finally told me that Vyshnya was coming, that he hadn’t heard from her, that she wasn’t doing what he’d told her to do. I’d been standing in the darkness of the pub, watching the back of Solomon’s neck, as those texts arrived. I had to be ready for her coming, Toad wrote. The texts were in Ukrainian, and translating them made my head ache. He’d told me I had to be ready to tell Solomon I knew nothing. She has not followed the plan, he’d written, you will not be able to save her. I could feel the anguish in his texts, the realisation that he’d fucked up. The last few were simply pleas for any sort of update: What is happening? Schenok, are you safe? I deleted the texts without replying.
Time seemed to have sped up and raced away. The cleaning had taken so long, and I had so much still to do. But eventually the floor was dry enough to cross, and I grabbed the soiled things from the sink, wrung them out as well as I could, and added them to the bag with Vyshnya. As I made to walk out of the kitchen for the last time, I saw Solomon’s tie: it had slithered almost out of sight down the back of one of the cabinets. I heard Solomon’s words in my head: when I say cleanly disposed of, I mean without any link to this place. Putting the tie into the bag with Vyshnya felt particularly cruel, but I had to do it. It was an insurance policy, or something. I was still struggling to think straight.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I kept saying. I felt like a cuckoo clock. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
I left her there, by the step, and walked round the side of the house to get the car. I stood, psyching myself up to get in, and looked back at the house. One light was on in the centre of the top floor. I imagined Solomon reclining in bed, alone, reading perhaps, or watching TV. I imagined stealing up the stairs and breaking in, strangling him with a pillowcase or just blowing his face off, the way he’d made me do to Vyshnya. But as much as I hated him, the fight in me was mostly gone. I’d killed a person, and I was pretty sure I couldn’t do it again.
I got into the car, started the engine as gingerly as I could, and eased it round to the back. It seemed to purr.
I wandered back and forth between the car and the back kitchen door for a while, fetching more black bags to line the boot with, then scooping up the terrible bundle that had once been Vyshnya, and carrying it over the gravel. In spite of Solomon’s efforts to cut himself off from the world, I could still hear the distant hum of the M8, and every so often a plane passed overhead, flashing red and green like a Christmas toy and pulling a dim blue vapour trail behind it. There was a half-moon, sliced through with a perfectly straight line.
I drove until the city was a dim red glow in the rear-view mirror. I found a narrow, straight road that said ‘access only’, and must have led to a farm. The hedges were high: I tucked the Range Rover
into a field gate, got out and hopped the fence. There was a copse at one corner of the big empty square of ploughed earth, a black, noisy mass I headed towards. The trees were big there: I liked the sound they made. In the wind, a fat oak bent and creaked. There were birches: I knew them from their glowy white trunks. I’d always liked being named after a tree, and Maw used to tell me they were magic. They had no leaves yet, but the night moved through their bristly twigs. I didn’t think I’d ever feel happy again, but I felt a little less wretched, standing under them.
The digging was the hardest physical work I had ever done. I’d found a shovel in the broom cupboard in the kitchen, the same place where I found the mop. One shovel, and me: shaking, sweating, fucked-up Charlie Birch. I must have spent years of my life in the gym but that night I couldn’t feel it. About two feet down, I cursed myself for picking that spot with the trees: the soil was lousy with roots, and they wept sap and water as I hacked into them. The ground was hard. I sweated and spat. I took off my sweater and worked topless in the freezing night, seeing my own arms wet and gleaming and still burning up with the effort of it.
But this is for Vyshnya, Charlie, I told myself. This is for her.
By the time I was done, the sky had started to lighten. In the trees all around me, the dawn chorus had begun.
‘Sorry,’ I whispered, to the trees whose roots I’d hacked at, to the birds who mocked me with their sweet voices. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
I dragged myself back across the field and knocked the head of the shovel against the back wheel of the car, leaving a little spray of soil. My arms were shaking, every tendon hot and loose, every nerve exhausted.
But somehow I found the strength to heft Vyshnya onto my shoulder, and stagger back down the field to the crap grave. The effort made my feet go numb. When I got Vyshnya to the lip of the hole, I tried not to drop her in too hard, but there wasn’t much could be done. The black wrapping fell into the dark pit, and the early grey light gleamed on it.
