Local Poet

by Paul Trembling

  He nodded at the men holding me, and they let go of my arms, stepping aside as he moved forward.

  “I am Mateo Canoso.” There was only the faintest trace of an accent in his voice. He looked more Spanish than he sounded. “And you are the bastard who killed my sister.”

  “Look, I’m truly sorry, but it was an accid –”

  He punched me hard in the stomach.

  Like most blokes, I’d always reckoned I could take care of myself in a fight. Would be pretty useful in fact, if it came to it. I didn’t get a chance to prove it. He was too fast and too strong. Before I even saw it coming I was doubled up and collapsing to the floor, gasping desperately for breath. I was grabbed from either side before I could hit the ground, and hauled upright.

  “I know it was an accident,” Canoso said softly. “This is not important. But that she was my sister – this is the thing that is important.”

  He hit me again. He took his time about it, making sure that this time I saw it coming. I couldn’t do anything about it; just hung there while he drove his fist into the side of my face.

  “It is good that you have come here,” he continued. “I would have come to find you eventually. But this is more convenient.”

  I could taste blood.

  “Thank you for that.” He hit me again, kept on hitting me, body and face, but it was hard to tell where through the red agony that overwhelmed me.

  After a while it stopped. There were hands going through my pockets, taking my phone, my wallet, my keys. My watch from my wrist. There was talking. Questions. A sudden splash of cold water over my face that brought me back to awareness.

  “I asked you something! Who did you call?”

  “What?” I gasped.

  “The call you made as you were leaving. This was seen. So, you will tell me now who it was that you called. Who did you speak to?”

  “I…” It was hard to think with the pain. “June… I was calling June.”

  “Who is June?”

  Even in my befuddled state, “police officer” seemed like the wrong answer. “She’s my girlfriend.”

  “What did you speak of to her?”

  “I was making a date.”

  One of Canoso’s little helpers had been fiddling with my phone. I was still using the old one, and hadn’t got round to locking the screen. Not that I’d have kept the pin number from them if they’d asked.

  “Last number dialled was another mobile,” he announced.

  “Call it again,” Canoso ordered.

  I started to understand what was going on. They were trying to find out if I’d called the police. I couldn’t remember if June’s voicemail message announced her as a police officer. I didn’t think so. It was her personal number, not a work phone. But what if she answered it herself? Would she say PC Henshaw or just June Henshaw?

  “Voicemail,” he announced. “It’s the right name.”

  “Good. So you tell the truth, Mr Seaton.” I was slumped on the floor, though I didn’t remember getting there. Canoso grabbed my hair and dragged my head up. “Keep going. Tell me where you got this.” He was waving a piece of paper in front of me.

  I struggled to focus on it; a task made more difficult because my right eye wouldn’t open properly. But I could make out handwriting in blue ink.

  “Laney’s poem,” I muttered.

  He jerked harder on my hair, sending additional waves of pain crashing round my skull. “This I know. I asked where you got it.”

  Behind me, a door opened and closed. Something was tossed onto the floor next to me.

  “There’s her bag. The notebook’s inside.”

  My head was released. With an effort, I kept it up. In front of me, Canoso was emptying the contents of a large handbag onto the floor. My vision was still slightly fuzzy, but there didn’t seem anything out of the ordinary. A purse, in the same buff leather as the handbag. Make-up, keys, some tissues. A small bottle of water, half empty. Pens. Quite a few pens. A diary, and a notebook: A5, same size as the torn sheet.

  He opened it, flicked through, found a place, and laid the sheet in it. “Ah. It is the missing page,” he said. “And nothing on it except one of her poems.”

  “Guess we can relax, then?” The man sounded relieved.

  “I think so. It seems that my sister left no loose ends. No suicide note, no cry for help, no message to the police. Just poetry.”

  “Was it just an accident, then?”

  “Who knows? She had taken La Paz. I thought this was to make her suicide easier, but perhaps she had not intended to kill herself. Maybe with the stuff in her, she just forgot to care. A huge inconvenience! Her contacts, they would have been useful for our distribution. And just when I’d got her to see sense, as well. But it is of no matter. We will find other couriers, other routes.”

  “What about him?”

  “Ah, yes. The van driver.” Canoso turned back to me. “Now this does seem curious. This very same man who killed my sister, now he comes into my place with paper from her notebook! Please explain this to me.”

  “Got it from the library,” I mumbled. It was hard to talk properly. One whole side of my face felt swollen.

  Canoso sighed, shook his head, and kicked me very hard in my side. “A stupid lie,” he said. “This is not from any printed book. It did not come from a library. Try again.”

  “The librarian was a friend of hers,” I gasped.

  Canoso frowned.

  “No, please, it’s true!” I was desperate to avoid another kick. I’d felt something crack inside me the last time and now it hurt to breathe. “She ran Laney’s website for her. Laney posted the poem to her; must have been just before she died.”

  Canoso was still frowning, but he kept his feet on the floor. “And why did she give it to you?”

  “I’ve been reading Laney’s poems. To try to find out about her. After what happened, I wanted to… to… know about her. So the librarian lent me that – Laney’s last poem. Thought it might help.”

  He nodded. “Ah. Perhaps this is the truth. But why did you come here with it?”

  “I was walking around. Seeing where it happened. Hadn’t been back since… came in here for a pint and a bite, that’s all. Didn’t know about you being related. Didn’t know she’d ever been here.”

  There was a long pause. I hoped he believed me. I hoped desperately that he believed me. It was hard to think with the pain. If he started kicking me again I wouldn’t be able to come up with any more lies. It might all come out then: all that I knew about Laney and La Paz and the police. I really didn’t want Canoso to know that I knew all that.

  He shrugged. “Well, this is of no importance.” Canoso turned away from me. “Go and speak with the old man. Give him plenty to drink and make sure he knows to keep his mouth shut.”

  “No problem. He’ll be bladdered before he leaves anyway; probably won’t remember much.”

  “Yes, that is what should happen. I will need to change my shirt – this one has blood on it. Then I’m going to the library. If this story is true, then we are in the clear and can start production again, but I need to make a few arrangements. If it is not, then our guest will explain things to me once more.”

  He kicked me as he said it. Not hard, just emphasizing his point, but it sent a new burst of pain through me and brought out a strange noise. Something between a scream and a groan. A distant part of me wondered at it.

  “What do we do with him for now?”

  “Leave him here. He will go nowhere. As for later, that is one of the things I will arrange.”

  There were footsteps, more conversation. A door slammed, and I was left in silence.

  For a while, I just lay still. As long as I didn’t move and kept my breathing shallow, the pain was bearable. As long as they didn’t come back, I was OK.

  But they would come back. Canoso would come back.

  The library would confirm my story, I was sure of that. If he told Sandra he was Laney’s brother, she’d
tell him all about it. There was no reason why she shouldn’t. I hoped desperately that she would tell him everything, without reservation. Not that he would hurt her – would he? Not in a public place like a library. But now I knew what Canoso was capable of…

  No, he would have no need to hurt Sandra. She’d tell him everything he wanted to know. And then he’d make his arrangements for me. The pain was still fogging my head, but I didn’t need to think very hard to understand what that meant. He wasn’t about to let me go; not after beating me half to death. His arrangements probably involved some wet concrete and a building site, or perhaps a deep lake and a few weights.

  People might look for me, of course. Colin would check my flat after a while, might report me missing. Perhaps June would look round a bit. Mickey would want to know where I’d gone, for his own reasons. But even if they tracked me to the Prince William, even if they spoke to Ed and he was sober enough to remember me, what would that prove? I came in, had a drink, left again. I’d been snatched off the street so quickly that even I hadn’t realized what was happening until it had happened. If anyone had seen it, they wouldn’t remember.

  Laney’s bag was still on the floor in front of me, contents strewn round it. The notebook lay open, with the torn-out page next to it. Canoso must have been really worried by it – not knowing what she had written, or who she’d sent it to. Now that loose end was cleared up, things were looking good for him. Bad for me, though.

  It was fear that got me moving again. I forced myself to sit up. Some of the pain wasn’t too bad now. It was the way it hurt to breathe that really worried me.

  My stuff had been dumped on the floor with hers – wallet and keys and the other things taken from my pockets. But not my phone; they’d kept that. I picked them up, checked my wallet. They hadn’t even bothered to rob me.

  Laney would have had a mobile phone. Did she leave it in her bag or take it with her? I rummaged through the bag and contents without success. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy; they wouldn’t just leave it there for me.

  I carefully got to my feet and went across to the door, trying to breathe as lightly as possible all the way. Obviously, it was locked. What was more, it was faced with a metal sheet that would need some heavy-duty power tools to break through. There wasn’t a handle, or even a keyhole. So I had no chance of picking the lock – even if I’d known how to do it.

  There was a keypad inset into the wall next to it. Numbers one to nine, plus zero. They had something similar on the warehouse door at work. It needed four digits in the correct order. The bloke who’d installed it told me that there were ten thousand possible combinations, so I wasn’t likely to stumble across it by chance.

  Nevertheless, I punched in four zeros, hoping that it might have been left on the factory setting. The LED stayed stubbornly red and the door remained firm. I hadn’t really expected anything else.

  I had a brief fantasy about forcing off the cover and rewiring the electronics. But quite apart from the fact that that was something else I didn’t know how to do, the keypad was deeply recessed into the wall, and inaccessible without proper tools.

  I glanced round the room, looking for something I could use. Not to get out, but perhaps to attract attention, get help. The pile of plastic crates and empty beer barrels didn’t seem promising. I could try banging on the door with a barrel, but the most likely people to hear would be Canoso’s lads. And in any case, the way I felt I’d struggle just to lift one of them.

  That also took out the possibility of using them as weapons, or of setting up elaborate obstacles. I had fantasy visions of Canoso and his lads tripping over strategically placed barrels, giving me the chance to make my escape while they floundered. But the chances of that actually working were somewhere between improbable and impossible. And shifting enough barrels to construct a decent trap would be likely to finish me off, saving Canoso the trouble.

  The pain in my chest wasn’t going away. The kick in my side might have cracked or broken a rib. I had frightening thoughts of jagged bones puncturing my lungs; of drowning in my own blood. Nevertheless, I staggered over to the barrels. There really wasn’t anything else to look at. Perhaps there might be something behind the pile.

  I pulled on a barrel, and the pain spiked. Even empty, it was too much for me to cope with in my present condition. A ceiling-high pile of plastic crates offered more hope. I gave one of them a tentative pull. They had not been stacked too carefully. My one small tug set the whole stack wobbling. A crate toppled, and suddenly they were all clattering and crashing down around me. Around me and on top of me. A corner impacted my ear and I dropped to my knees. When I looked up again, I was facing a king.

  He was dusty and a little faded, but still impressive. Wearing some sort of military uniform from a past century, he struck a heroic pose and looked out across the cellar with regal disdain. In case there was any doubt as to his identity, his name was written below: King William.

  So this was where the pub’s former identity was hidden. The old king, buried down here to make way for the new prince.

  Deep in the grave of a forgotten past,

  Once resplendent for all to see,

  Now cast down, its glory tarnished.

  Laney’s words came back to me. Like all her writing, it seemed so cryptic till you saw what she meant. Then it was so vividly clear that you wondered how you could have missed it.

  The implications set the back of my neck tingling. Laney had been here, in this cellar, perhaps in this exact spot, and had seen exactly what I was now seeing. Which meant that this was the Black Gull’s nest. The place where it laid its poisonous eggs.

  But where, exactly? There was nothing here but crates and barrels. If Canoso had been making or storing La Paz here, there was no sign of it now. He must have cleared the place after the police raid. Though if it had been after, then surely Fayden’s team would have found something? Hard to believe that they would have overlooked the cellar. Perhaps they had come too late, after the merchandise had already been moved on.

  And had Laney written “Black Gull” before the raid, then? That was possible, but I’d assumed that she’d scribbled down the words just before she went to carry out her suicide. They seemed to have that immediacy to them; a sense of something happening now.

  Looking for further inspiration, I went back to her bag and picked up the crumpled sheet. As I did so, I remembered the bag being dumped on the floor – by someone who had come out of a door behind me. But there was only one door in the room, and I’d been facing it.

  I looked at the wall that had been behind me. It appeared solid enough, the same brickwork as the others, only this one wasn’t whitewashed, probably because of the metal pipes that ran all over it. They were a dull silver in colour, except around some of the joints, which looked rusty. I’d noticed the pipes when they hustled me in. I’d seen similar arrangements in pubs before, part of the pump system that delivered beer on tap to the bar. These didn’t appear to be in use. They weren’t connected to anything that I could see. Perhaps they were part of the old system from the King William days.

  Or perhaps they were something else. I read Laney’s original words again, to check my memory.

  Secure behind an armoured web.

  The mesh of pipes could be seen as a web. And metal pipes would make it an armoured web.

  I went over to the wall and examined it as closely as I could with one eye. There were no obvious cracks in the brickwork, no neat door outline, no convenient breaks in the pipes. I pushed, pulled, and swore at likely places, all without effect. If I hadn’t remembered the door opening, I wouldn’t have believed it was there. As it was, I was doubting myself. Laney had it right…

  Which does not,

  yield,

  But what else had she said? I looked at the poem again.

  Save to the knowing hand,

  That which is empty.

  The knowing hand would obviously be the hand that knew how to open the door. That did
n’t help much. And what was in an empty hand? Nothing? What did she mean by that?

  Nothing – as in zero? Nought? A number on a keypad, for example? There was no keypad on the wall. But there was one by the other door. And just because it was over there, there was no reason why it shouldn’t control something over here.

  I went back across the room, trying to remember if anyone had been standing here when the wall opened, but I hadn’t been paying much attention at the time.

  If those strangely structured four lines were actually a code, then the most obvious way to read it was by counting the words. So… “Which does not” was three. “Yield” would be one. “Save to the knowing hand”, five. And “That which is empty” equalled four.

  “Three, one, five, four.” I spoke the numbers aloud as I pressed the buttons, a desperate incantation, because if it failed…

  The LED remained red. I looked at the far wall, but nothing had changed. I swore. Laney had let me down. The poem was just a poem, nothing more. Like Canoso had said.

  That didn’t make sense though. The old pub sign, the “armoured web”… Laney had to have been here. If Canoso had bothered reading it properly, he’d have seen it as well. But it was “just poetry” to him. Which, I realized, was obviously why she’d done it like that. A final defence to hide her message from her brother.

  So what was the message?

  I read it again, and could have slapped myself, except that I was already hurting enough. I’d already worked out what “that which is empty” meant.

  I tapped in another set of numbers: three, one, five, zero.

  The LED turned green. Across the room, a section of wall, complete with attached pipes, slid smoothly and silently inwards before rotating off to one side. Beyond, bright fluorescent lighting flickered on.

  I had no idea what a drugs factory would look like. It wasn’t something I’d had previous experience of. The closet thing to it I could think of was the science classroom at school, only with better equipment.