by Rowan Casey
“Everything alright in there?” he asked, aware that he was almost filling the opening to the alleyway, as if he had managed to make himself larger, more imposing.
“Fuck off!” one of the kickers said. “Not your problem. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll just walk on.”
“Can’t do that,” Matthias lied. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to do, but he was part of it now and he couldn’t bring himself to leave. The man on the ground didn’t look as if he was going to be able to take much more of what the two others were handing out. Matthias was tempted to give them a moment to save face and get out of there with their pride and appearance intact, but he had a feeling that he would be wasting his breath.
The first of the men took a step closer, moving out of the shadows just enough to give Matthias a better view of the man’s face. It was a brutal face; one used to seeing violence. Matthias had encountered people like this many times, but not like this. Not in real life. They had all been men who had been playing a part. This one was for real. He felt a moment of fear, a feeling of panic and he recognized it. This was the feeling he used to get the moment before he stepped out of the wings and onto the stage. He was ready. He was ready to play his own part.
He heard the sound of metal on brick as the man drew a blade and scraped it against the wall. It was all for show, an attempt to intimidate him, but it wasn’t going to work. These had once been his streets and he wasn’t going to be pushed around by some upstart who got his kicks mugging people in back alleys, and only then when he had someone else with him to make sure that they outnumbered their prey.
The thug was a big man, used to pumping weights and augmented with steroids. The other man was smaller, and he remained deeper in the alley. He had stopped kicking the man on the ground. That was something at least. Just because a man was big didn’t mean that he was going to be good in a fight, even if he was the one with the knife. Matthias was more than happy to take the man on in a straight fight, but the knife might give the guy the edge, whether or not he knew how to use it. It might only take a lucky strike and it would be all over. At that moment though, Matthias didn’t feel that he had that much left to lose. This wasn’t just about saving the guy on the ground from a beating that he might not recover from, it was about testing himself against the edge.
The big man lunged forward suddenly, but his movements were deliberate and slow. Matthias saw the attack coming and had more than enough time to step outside the man’s arm and let the blade slide past him. Matthias grabbed the man’s wrist and tugged him forward, sending the hulk stumbling toward him. Matthias didn’t pause for so much as a heartbeat as his other hand caught the man’s elbow. He pushed the arm down hard as he raised his knee. The man cried out in pain and the blade clattered to the ground. Matthias released his hold and allowed the man’s momentum to take him sprawling to the alley floor. He cried out again as he fell then rolled to clutch at his injured arm. Matthias was pretty sure that he had broken it, but was not going to lose any sleep over it. The man didn’t look like he was going to reach for the blade, but Matthias wasn’t going to take any chances. He snatched it up from the ground.
The thinner man pressed himself against the wall, his hands raised in surrender or as if he was trying to say that none of this was his fault.
“Get out of here,” Matthias said, his immediate need for physical combat sated for the moment. The little guy was even more of a weasel than Matthias first thought; the kind of man who would only kick another when he was not able to defend himself. There would be no sport in taking this runt on, but Matthias made sure that the smaller man knew that he was holding the blade. He had not seen the man holding a weapon, but had no intention of letting him take an easy shot if he was. He pressed himself against the wall to keep as far from Matthias as he could get until he had to step over his fallen comrade. For a moment Matthias thought that he was going to leave him behind, but just as he reached the entrance of the alley he turned and helped the big man to his feet and offered his support. He shrugged the little man aside and turned back with a snarl.
“You won’t get so lucky next time, so you’d better hope that there isn’t one.”
As exit lines went it wasn’t going to go down in history, Matthias thought, but he let him have the moment. He waited until both men had left before he bent down to help the man who had fallen victim to their attack.
“How you doing?” Matthias asked as he crouched down in front of the man. There was no response. “Shit.”
He took the man’s wrist in his hands and felt for a pulse as he leaned in to try to hear if he was breathing. He let go of his hand and let it fall limply in the man’s lap. “Shit,” he said again.
Matthias laid the man down flat on the ground and started to press on his chest to the rhythm of the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive. He might only have been back in the country for a matter of weeks, but he had seen the advertisement often enough to have had it drummed into him. It seemed that mouth-to-mouth was no longer the order of the day and that chest compressions were. Now he had the tune stuck in his head and he was going to have trouble getting rid of it.
“Need some help in here!” he shouted when he saw a pair of figures pass by the entrance of the alley; a couple of girls who looked more than a little worse for wear, but neither of them looked in his direction. He needed help and he wasn’t going to get it by shouting and hoping. He took one hand off the man’s chest and tried to keep up the rhythm with the other, not sure if he was applying enough pressure. As he reached for his phone he realized that his hand was slick with blood; the man had been stabbed. He swore again and called 999, almost forgetting where he was and calling 911. That wouldn’t have got him anywhere.
The sirens approached faster than he expected and for a moment he wondered if they were heading for another incident. There was a time when he would have been able to tell the difference between an ambulance, a police car, and a fire engine, but now they all sounded the same. He was still pressing on the man’s chest, still holding the beat in his head when shapes appeared in the entrance of the alleyway.
“In here,” he shouted, not breaking his rhythm. “This man’s hurt.”
3
“Let’s start from the beginning again, shall we?”
Things hadn’t gone quite the way he had expected. The police had arrived ahead of the ambulance, but only by a couple of minutes. Matthias wasn’t sure what he had expected was going to happen after that, and while he wasn’t surprised about being taken to the police station to make a statement, he wasn’t feeling too comfortable about the line of questioning.
Matthias leaned back in his chair, expecting it to tip back onto two legs, but he was surprised to find that all four were fixed firmly to the floor. It threw him off guard for a moment.
“I don’t know how many times you want me to tell you. I was walking past the alley and I heard a man cry out for help. I took a look inside and saw two guys giving a third a good kicking. I tried to break it up and the two muggers, or whatever they were, took off.”
“Two against one and they didn’t have a go at you?”
Matthias shrugged. “That’s the way with cowards though, isn’t it? They don’t like it when you stand up to them.”
He figured that t wasn’t worth giving all the ins and outs about how he had taken care of the big guy. He had a feeling that would only complicate matters.
“Did you get a good look at either of them? Think you could give us a description?”
“Not really. It was kind of dark in there. One was a big guy, well over six feet, thick set. The other was much smaller and skinny. Once the big guy left, the smaller one couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Don’t you have CCTV in the area?”
“Sadly not. At least that way we’d know if they really exist.”
“Really exist? Of course they exist. What are you trying to say?” And that was when the penny dropped. “You don’t think I did this, do you? I was
trying to save the man’s life. I could just as easily have walked past and left them to it. What are you accusing me of here?”
The man said nothing, instead he flipped the pages back in his black notebook until he found whatever he was looking for. “Perhaps you could run me though your whereabouts earlier in the evening?”
“I had dinner at Le Pont. I arrived there a little before 7:30.”
“That pricey French place near the castle? You must be doing well for yourself?”
Matthias nodded but didn’t rise to the bait. He wasn’t going to be judged by his interrogator.
“Who with?”
“I arrived alone.”
The policeman gave a sigh. “Please, Mr. Matthias, the sooner I get all this, the sooner we’ll be finished here. Who did you have dinner with? Or are you going to tell me that you dined alone?”
“No. I spent the evening with Tom Faraday. He works for the BBC.”
“Business, or pleasure?”
“Purely business on my part, I can’t speak for him.”
“What line of work are you in, Mr. Matthias?”
“I was, or rather I am, an actor.” He was trying desperately trying not to sound bored by the line of questioning, but it wasn’t proving easy.
“You don’t sound too sure about that.”
“I’m between jobs,” Matthias said. These were the kinds of responses he had been practicing in case he took the plunge and went to see his mother, but they rang just as hollow as they had sounded inside his head. It brought a smile to the police officer’s lips.
“Resting, isn’t that what they call it?”
“I suppose.”
“So, what’s an out-of-work actor doing at a place like Le Pont?”
“Trying to be a not out-of-work actor.”
“How did it go?”
Matthias shrugged. “Nothing for me at the moment.”
“Bit of a wasted evening, then?”
“You never know, sometimes these things take a while. Sometimes you just have to keep putting your face in front of people.” He had lost count of how many people he had sat in front of without getting anywhere, but he wasn’t about to share that with the policeman.
“Isn’t that your agent’s job?”
“He set up the meeting.”
“So you met with Mr. Faraday to have a chat about possible projects over dinner, he didn’t have anything for you, so what then?”
“We went our separate ways. I decided to walk home, but managed to take a wrong turn somewhere along the way. It took a while for me to get back on the right road.”
“Maybe you should have taken a taxi.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing, but then I wouldn’t have been able to help the guy in the alley, would I?”
“Perhaps, but I’m afraid that I have to tell you that your efforts were in vain.”
“He’s dead? Why didn’t you tell me before?” He wasn’t sure why it came as a surprise. The man had been in bad shape before the paramedics arrived, but somehow he assumed that they would have been able to help.
“What difference would it have made? Would you have given me different answers if you’d known?”
“Of course not.” He wanted to ask if the man was dead before the ambulance arrived; if he had wasted his time trying to save his life, but decided against it. He wanted to get out of there as quickly as he could, but there was no sign of the interview coming to an end until he had answered however many questions the man wanted to ask. Fighting him was not going to speed this up.
The officer reached into a folder at his side and pulled out a plastic evidence bag and slid it along the table without taking his hand from it.
“Do you recognize this?”
Matthias only had to glance at it for a moment to recognize it as one of his own business cards. “Of course.”
“Any idea how many of these you might have given out?”
“Thirty or forty, I guess, maybe more. This is one of the new ones I had printed when I got back.”
“Back?”
“I’ve been living in the States for a while.”
“Being an out-of-work actor over there?”
“Being a working actor for a fair amount of it.” Matthias exaggerated. He had actually only worked for a fraction of the time that he had been over there, but it had been enough to pay his way. Just.
“Anything I might have seen you in?”
“Who knows?” Matthias shrugged. “So where did you get this from?”
“The dead man’s wallet.”
Matthias looked up from the card and into the policeman’s eyes, his mind churning over all the possibilities as he realized that he must have known the dead man. In the darkness of the alleyway he had not been able to make out his features and had been led away before the paramedics had turned their flashlights on the body.
“Who was it?” he asked after a moment had passed.
“Tom Faraday.”
4
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” They had left him alone in the room to gather his thoughts once they said that he should speak to his lawyer before they went any further. A red light on the camera set high in the corner of the room winked relentlessly and Matthias was sure that somewhere, someone was watching his every move. He needed to speak to a lawyer alright, but it was the middle of the night and he couldn’t even get hold of his agent. He was the only one who might be able to sort something out for him and he wasn’t answering his phone. Matthias had left a message, but he suspected that it wouldn’t be picked up until the morning. He was just going to have to stall them and hope that he wasn’t palmed off with some duty solicitor who was hanging around to represent the drunk and disorderly who might need representation, no matter how basic. He could probably insist that they either charge him or let him go, but he didn’t want to run the risk of calling their bluff only to discover that they were holding all the aces. Matthias had the feeling that he was going to need more than that.
He had been alone in the room for half an hour before he heard the lock disengage and the door opened. For a moment he had the sudden hope that the nightmare was over and that he was about to be released but that melted away when he saw that the police officer was carrying two plastic coffee cups. Clearly this wasn’t over yet. The man set them down on the table but made no effort to take a seat.
“Your lawyer’s here. He’s just signing in. Hope he’s able to talk some sense into you so we can get to the bottom of this.” He left without waiting for a response, and although he closed the door behind him, Matthias didn’t hear the lock engage. A moment later the door opened and a man stepped inside.
It took a moment for Matthias to realize who he was looking at. He was surprised to find that he recognized the man who had come into the room and had placed his briefcase on the table. He could not place his face for a moment.
“Hello, Mr. Matthias,” the man said extending a hand. “So sorry that we meet again in such circumstances.
“Mr. Hautdesert,” Matthias said eventually taking the man’s hand and holding onto it as if he were drowning. He had not quite worked out what the man did for the illusionist, Grimm, but that didn’t make him any less welcome a visitor.
“Just Hautdesert is fine. And please, Mr. Mathias,” the man said gesturing to a chair. “Please take a seat.”
“Don’t think I’m not grateful to see you, but I had no idea you were a lawyer. I didn’t even know that you were in the country.”
“No reason that you should,” the man replied though Matthias had no idea which fact he was referring to. The man picked up the coffee, sniffed it then put it back down on the table. Clearly it didn’t meet his standards, but Matthias needed the caffeine. It had already been a long night.
“I understand that you’ve gotten yourself into a spot of bother.”
“Wrong place, wrong time,” Matthias suggested.
“You think? You go out for a meal with someone you’ve never met before, you don
’t have a particularly good meeting, and you’re found with the man’s body an hour or so later. You have to admit that’s quite a coincidence.”
“I was trying to save the man’s life!”
“So you say.”
“It’s the truth. Now can you get me out of here?”
“That rather depends.”
“On what?”
“The police found a knife in the alley. Looks like it was the one used to kill your friend.”
“He was no friend of mine. I hardly knew the man…”
“Whatever.” The man waved the statement away, clearly deciding that it was of no consequence. “They found a set of fingerprints on the handle of the knife.”
“Great, then they should be able to track the killer down. I would put money on the guy already having a record”
“Unless…”
“What now?”
“Unless they are going to find your prints on the handle. Please tell me that you didn’t pick it up.”
For a moment he was back in the alleyway, reaching out and retrieving the knife from the ground before the big guy recovered enough to pick it up himself. He remembered waving it at the smaller guy but had no recollection of what had become of it after that. He needed both hands to help the victim, and so he must have dropped it. He was still finding it hard to think of the man he had tried to save as being the same man he had shared dinner with. There was no way that he could claim that he knew the man, even less to say that he liked him, but it was easier to think of the fallen man as a stranger.
“Ah,” Hautdesert said without Matthias needing to say a word. His silence had clearly been enough to reveal his error. “Then I hope that they have not asked to take your fingerprints for elimination?”
Matthias shook his head.
“That is something at least. Perhaps we can still make this all go away.”
