Taking Pity

by David Mark

“What was that fella’s name, Raymond? The poofter. Big bloke. Wouldn’t buckle?”

  Mahon turns. His employer is standing in the doorway of the little chalet. He’s dressed in burgundy cord trousers and a blue golfing jumper beneath a tweedy jacket. His clippered white hair clings to his craggy head like moss to a cliff, and the designer spectacles on his nose have turned dark in the light of the kitchen strip light. He looks at least ten years younger than his age. Could be a movie icon on a TV chat show, giving a little twinkle and showing he’s still got the moves.

  “Which poofter, Mr. Nock?”

  “Ran that bar. Stuck a coin to the floor so he could check out people’s arses. You remember.”

  Mahon nods. “Began with an S. You gave him a pass when he put Alan through that window. Said you couldn’t offer him better protection than he could provide for himself.”

  Mr. Nock smiles. His teeth are whiter than his hair. “Why did I do that, d’you think?”

  Mahon smiles back. “Good marketing. Good for the image. You made it clear that if anybody thought they were better off without your help, they were welcome to try and demonstrate it.”

  “Nobody did, did they?” asks Nock with a slight shake of the head. “Nobody tried to go their own way. And the poofter bent the knee in the end, didn’t he? Soon as people heard he wasn’t under my protection, his life got very difficult. So he paid. They all pay in the end, don’t they, Raymond? Even now.”

  Mahon takes another sip of his drink. Begins to make Mr. Nock a cup of tea. He enjoys these episodes, when Nock confides in him or asks him to fill a gap in his memory. They have been more common, of late. Mr. Nock’s memory is beginning to leak. He cried out in the early hours this morning. Seemed lost and confused. Mahon had sat with him for a while. Hadn’t known if he should talk or sing or hold his bloody hand. Just sat and watched the man who has guided his life. Watched him wriggle and kick like a toddler with flu.

  “They all still respect you, Mr. Nock. They all still pay what they should.”

  “Changing world,” says Nock with a sigh. “Don’t reckon we’d have done so well if we were starting out now, eh, Raymond? How do you get a McDonald’s to pay protection money? How do you nail somebody to the Tyne Bridge when there’s video cameras everywhere? How do you launder money when everything’s kept on a computer? It makes my head hurt. I think the young ones are welcome to it, to be honest. Let them find a way to make money as a criminal when the whole fucking system’s run by crooks.”

  Mahon presses the tea bag against the side of the cup with fingers that don’t feel the scald.

  “You’d still find a way, Mr. Nock. You’ve got that kind of mind.”

  Nock takes the tea from Mahon’s outstretched hand. Looks around him. “It’s nice being back here. Haven’t seen it in years, have we? Lovely view when the sun shines.”

  Mahon busies himself tidying the kitchen. He doesn’t want to tell him that they were here just a couple of days ago. That they sat in a café up the road and ate eggs and chips and talked about Mr. Nock’s daughter and the time the three of them came here when she was a teenager and had played miniature golf and eaten cotton candy and sheltered in a little cave on the beach as great frothy waves rushed up the shingle and sand.

  “Good cup of tea, Raymond. Just the way I like it.”

  Mahon has been making cups of tea for his employer for half a century but still enjoys the compliment. He turns to say thank you, but Mr. Nock has already returned to the living room. He’ll be sitting in his high-backed chair, watching the waves. Might be listening to something only he can hear. Might be on the phone to his daughter, sighing as she explains how she has managed to ruin her latest relationship and write off the new Maserati.

  Mahon’s thoughts drift. He finds himself remembering the night they came for him. It was late spring, early summer, not long after the deaths at the church. He hadn’t really expected to get away with it. Was still looking over his shoulder and telling lies. But he had allowed himself to hope. Had begun to imagine that perhaps his relationship with Mr. Nock would be enough to spare him the southerners’ retribution. It hadn’t. Not that time, anyway. Not the night they came for him. It was his bloody soppiness that got him in trouble. Should have been paying attention. Should have had his hand on his gun and the other on the bag of money in the passenger seat. Should have seen the van as it pulled up. Should have seen the bloke in the donkey jacket standing by his window, blocking his only other escape from the idling, old-man car. He’d been watching blossoms fall. Had been enjoying the sight of the pink confetti tumbling from the tree. He can’t quite recall where the tree was now. Can’t remember what he was doing there. Collecting, probably. Maybe keeping an eye out for Mr. Nock while he saw one or two of his girls. But he knows it was cherry blossoms. Knows it seemed incongruous against the landscape of grays and browns.

  And then they smashed the glass. He’d had no time to react. Before he could even gather his thoughts he was being dragged through the broken window, glass cutting deep into his skin. Boots were thumping into the side of his head. He felt metal at his wrists. Felt coarse material over his face. Banged his knee and fractured his thumb as he landed on the wooden floor of the van. Kept fighting until they hit him in the back of the head with something hard and metallic.

  He’d awakened in a large, stinking room with sawdust and shit on the floor and a high roof of curved corrugated iron. He was naked and tied to a chair. Blood had run down his neck to pool in his lap and he could feel more blood at the base of his back.

  There were three of them. Smart suits and bad teeth. Broken knuckles and broad shoulders. They wanted to know what had happened to the man Mr. Nock had vowed to look after. Wanted to know more about what the man had said the day he disappeared. Asked him about Flash Harry. Asked why he had taken a trip to a little place in the arse-end of nowhere a few months back.

  Mahon had kept silent. Kept his mouth shut as they beat him with a length of chain. Bit back his screams as they broke his fingers. Sent his mind somewhere else as they took the blade to his face and slashed the corners of his mouth as far back as his ears. He only lost consciousness when they put the bullet in him. They’d been almost respectful of him by that point. They knew he wasn’t going to speak. Had stopped even trying to persuade him to save his own life. The kill shot was delivered almost grudgingly. It entered his chest from a little more than three feet away and opened a hole in him that seemed to suck the rest of him inside it. He disappeared in a tunnel of blackness and air. Woke up only as they lifted the gate and let the pigs come for his corpse. Woke up as a great stinking mouth closed upon his blood-soaked face and tore away half his cheek. Lashed out with a bare foot as another bristled snout closed upon his calf muscle in an orgy of squealing, ravenous madness.

  They came back for him then. Heard his shouts above the noise of the beasts. Took another shot at him as he rose up from amid the mass of thrashing bodies. The shot missed. Hit one of the animals in its shit-streaked side. The other beasts fell upon it. Tore flesh from bone. And Mahon had leaped from the pigpen like a demon. The man with the gun had been the first to die; his neck snapping cleanly in Mahon’s huge, bleeding hands. Then Mahon picked up the gun and shot the other two men in the back as they ran for the sliding door and the safety of the darkness beyond.

  The doctors didn’t expect him to live. When he arrived at the hospital, three hundred miles from home, the nurses had screamed. The doctors thought he was already dead. But word reached Mr. Nock. And Mr. Nock said that Mahon’s death would be unacceptable. No time or expense was wasted. They put him back together. Saved what they could of his face. Wouldn’t let him see a mirror for months. Mahon hadn’t cared. Something had changed in him. He felt reborn. Transformed. And when Mr. Nock walked into his hospital room and held him like a father, tears had spilled from both their eyes and soaked the bandages and bedsheets. Then Mr. Nock had examined Mahon’s f
ace. He had kissed his head and told him he was beautiful. And he had told him that the southerners were not going to be a problem anymore.

  Mahon brings himself back to the present. Thinks of all that the coming days will bring. He has enjoyed his communications with the man who had introduced himself as Mr. Mouthpiece. Liked his style. He’s seen his type before, of course. Seen them all come and go. Ambition is an ugly thing, and not something he has ever been troubled by. The Headhunters could have made a fortune if they hadn’t brought in the wrong man to run one of their teams. Now that man is destroying what they had carefully cultivated, and Mahon is going to have to put it right—provided the man at the other end of the phone stays alive long enough to make good on his side of the bargain. Mahon knows his time is running out. Times are changing. The events of half a century ago are coming back into the light. Bodies are rising from that cold, damp ground.

  As if his thoughts have willed it to life, Mahon’s phone beeps. He reads the message from a man who understands what loyalty really costs.

  Do you know a Sergeant McAvoy? Been asking. What do we say?

  Mahon dabs at his mouth. Pulls his wallet from his trousers and retrieves the two business cards. He knows intuitively what has to happen now. He just needs a little more time. He needs to give the copper just enough. Needs to put his face in the light and let the big, ginger bastard decide what he sees.

  The call is answered on the eighth ring. A Scottish voice, whispering, as if trying not to wake a sleeping child.

  “Sergeant,” says Mahon. “I have a nagging suspicion you’ve found some old friends of mine. We really should talk. Can we meet?”

  • • •

  MCAVOY CAN’T GET the sensation of bone off his hands. It feels as though his palm is still holding the cold, rigid femur with its strands of matter that could either be flesh or fabric. He imagines it as something yellow and unyielding, like pig’s teeth. Can see the tiny, porous holes along the side of the limb. Can imagine the joints moving against each other; grinding, as stone against stone, twisting in the sockets, coming apart like pieces of chicken. Can see the knuckled ridges of a kneecap, sitting above joints that gnaw and mash; flesh decaying, cartilage crumbling, deep in the fetid blackness, in an underground place that was never intended as a tomb.

  He wants to spoon up behind Roisin. Wants to hide his face from the horrors by pressing his nose and mouth into her hair. But Roisin is gone.

  He looks again at the pictures in his phone. They were snapped, in the darkness, with a flash that bounced off the walls and made his pupils shrink in pain. They are vague and blurred. But they are unquestionably corpses. There are bodies in that hole in the ground. Bodies shoved into a ventilation panel in the ceiling of a subterranean bunker. Bodies that were put there years before by somebody who knew just where to find it and how to keep it hidden.

  McAvoy sits in the early-morning light, his arm around his sleeping son, and listens to the soft slap of shifting water against sand and rotting timber. He cannot even find the mental space to file away his thoughts on John Glass’s death. He’d received the news via e-mail, on the nightly CID roundup. An old man, found dead in his flat, by a neighbor who had popped by to borrow some gravy granules. Heart attack, it seemed. Poor old boy. Used to be a copper . . .

  He feels the sensation of bone once more. Wonders if it would suggest he was losing his mind if he were to go wash his hands one more time. He has felt blood and bone before. But before, he has been able to cocoon himself inside Roisin. He has found strength in her kisses and grown braver for her love. Alone, he feels weak and sick. Wants to phone somebody stronger so they can tell him what to do next. He knows he needs to tell Pharaoh what he has found. There are at least two bodies down there and it is inconceivable to him they are not linked to the events at Winestead. What troubles him most are the pictures by Peter Coles. The lad seems to have used the place as his personal treasure trove. It’s his special place, his refuge. It’s a cozy, dark, private cave where he could write down his fantasies and keep his dirty little secrets. McAvoy knows how its discovery will be received. It will condemn Peter Coles to a life inside. He doesn’t know how he feels about that. He wants to ask him. Wants to know where Peter Coles wants to be, even though he hates himself that such a thing matters.

  He holds up the pieces of old, dirty paper. Reads again the young boy’s fantasy about the girl next door. Reads again about how he wanted to cut her bra off with a Stanley knife, the way he had read in one of his mucky magazines. McAvoy purses his lips. He’s trying not to be a hypocrite. He knows that what exists in the imagination does not have to damn the rest of the soul. There are things that he and Roisin have talked about while exploring their darker sides that would horrify those not used to letting their physical and mental desires intermingle. But he cannot escape the conclusion that there was a dark side to Peter Coles and that the boy’s secret and special place is littered with the dead.

  By the light of his phone, McAvoy looks afresh at the newspaper clipping. Looks again at Vaughn Winn, done up to the nines and with his hair slicked up in a pompadour. He’s handsome. Confident. Standing shoulder to shoulder with a well-groomed thirty-something and two very familiar faces.

  Neither of the calls McAvoy is waiting for have come through. Vaughn Winn has yet to call him back and explain the significance of the photograph. The CID team at Newcastle have not replied to his three phone calls, requesting information on a local man by the name of Francis Nock. He’s not sure he needs the second call. A Google search has filled in some of the background. And a picture is starting to form in McAvoy’s mind.

  He sits, stroking his son’s hair with a hand that still remembers the touch of bone. He shouldn’t have taken the boy. Shouldn’t have made a murder investigation into a game. But Fin’s sleep remains untroubled by nightmares. The boy’s eyes had been filled with excitement, not fear, as they made the drive back to the crappy little hotel. And Mammy is not here to tell either of them off for being so reckless.

  McAvoy feels his eyes closing. Feels the weight of the day pressing down on him. Feels his limbs grow warm as sleep takes him. Turns the sound of his ringing phone into a part of his dream.

  Only wakes as Fin holds the call to his face and a killer says hello.

  • • •

  SHE COULDN’T, thinks Ray, wiping his nose on his hand. Couldn’t have known.

  For a decade, Shaz Archer has been his pet project. She’s been his understudy, confidante, and friend. She’s been somewhere between a daughter and a wife. He’s tucked her into bed after one too many vodkas. He’s draped a blanket around her shoulders and held her when she has cried. He’s told her about himself. About his wives and children. About the bad things he has done. He’s kissed her cheek, her forehead, the tip of her nose. He’s barely even had a wank over the silly cow. She matters to him . . .

  Her new man has just killed Piers Fordham. Beaten him to death. He’s removing the top tier of the Headhunters and he has just completed the most hostile of takeovers.

  Ray has been a policeman long enough to spot the obvious. Somebody has found a way to get inside the investigation. They’ve done so by getting inside Shaz.

  He crunches over the gravel. Breathes in deep and smells the ale, cigarettes, and vomit that he associates with this hour. Wonders what the hell he is going to say. He’ll help her, of course. He’ll take the blame if necessary. Shaz is his friend. She has a bright future. She’s made a mistake. That’s all. Spilled her guts to the man in her bed and betrayed the identity of Mr. Mouthpiece. But who hasn’t made the odd mistake? She’s a good person. A good cop. A friend . . .

  Later, Ray will wish he had looked in through the windows before he rang the bell. Later, he will have a brief period in which to chastise himself for his foolishness in knocking on Shaz’s door.

  Here, now, he has little time for such regret.

  The door is
answered by a tall, good-looking man in his mid-thirties. He’s naked, save for a sheen of sweat and some tasteful tattoos. Shaz Archer’s perspiration anoints his skin. He’s smiling, and he’s holding a gun.

  “You fucking . . .”

  Colin Ray’s temper takes over and he lunges forward.

  He is hit in the head so hard that he is unconscious before he hits the floor.

  The man who stands above him and scratches his balls is called Mark Oliver. He used to make a living conning vulnerable women into bed and then taking everything he could. Then the Headhunters took him under their wing. Used his skills to find the weak spots of their enemies. They gave him a glimpse of a life he wanted more of. He got greedy. Saw an opportunity and took it. Charmed a posh copper and recruited a few old friends.

  Mark has gotten very good, very quickly.

  He’s not killed a copper before.

  But he reckons he’ll pick it up as he goes along.

  TWENTY-TWO

  NEXT DAY, 1:18 P.M.

  The lighthouse on Flamborough Head. A column of whitewashed stone, jutting from a sodden spit of green headland into a sky of rotten timber.

  Francis Nock is pissing against the lighthouse wall. He’s wearing pajama trousers and a fleecy shirt. His feet are bare. His hair is plastered against his wind-slapped features by the rain that blows in off the sea. Above, gulls swirl and scream, spun by a wind that has not paused in its rush across hundreds of miles of ocean.

  Nock looks up. Sees dragons in the sky.

  He hunches down into his shirt and tucks himself away, still pissing. He puts an arm above his head, as if expecting to be carried off and dashed on the rocks below.

  Nock feels somewhere between sleep and death. He doesn’t know where he is. Has a vague understanding that he is far from home and that people tend to do what he says, but right now he would not recognize either his name or reflection. He is a frightened child, lost and bewildered, shivering in the rain and searching for something that he cannot name and only feels in the memory of his bones. Nothing here is familiar. He feels as though he has awakened into a half-formed world. He expects the green of the newly painted grass to smudge against his feet. He feels that, should he wipe his hand against the lighthouse, then it will pass straight through it. His thoughts feel insubstantial. He has to approach his memories carefully. Needs to sidle up to the flashes of familiarity that his dementia-seamed mind vomits up. He knows only that he is lost. Knows that he is seeking somebody out. Knows that when he awoke, the man who looks after him was gone and that it suddenly felt unacceptable to be alone. He feels, too, the absence of something fundamental; something central to his being. He remembers things like snatches of nightmare. Remembers splashing petrol onto bare legs. Recalls how it feels to stick a blade between two ribs. He feels snatches of guilt and pride. Bristles at the thought of disrespect. Fears discovery. Fears anonymity. Fears bullets and solitude.