Mickey Take: When a debt goes bad...

by Steven Hayward

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I snarl, pummelling the steering wheel with the heel of my hand, ‘but I didn’t have a spare twenty grand in my wallet when he decided to reappear as the lord of the frigging manor.’

  ‘Twenty thousand? Jesus, Mickey. Now you owe him.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Don’t I know it?’

  ‘And a man like that isn’t going to let you forget it.’

  ‘Yeah, I know that too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That’s the only reason I got involved in all of this. Because I already owed him.’ She finally turns and looks straight at me, wide-eyed.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘It was a long time ago – a lifetime,’ I say. But it no longer seems so distant, so incongruous. ‘It doesn’t matter now. Forget it.’

  I count to ten, waiting for the knockout blow. Thankfully it doesn’t come. I’m saved by the bell.

  ‘It was lucky the police showed up when they did,’ she says.

  I’m so relieved by the let-off, I can feel my collar slip from the hook and my feet return to the ground. Relieved I don’t have to tell her about my fledgling career as a burglar at the tender age of seventeen. How my very first job went horribly wrong. And that it was Herb who cleared up the mess. I’ve often reflected on how he effectively gave me a second chance that night, allowing me to choose another path, so I could go on to live a perfect life. The cynic in my head stifles a laugh, but the irony isn’t lost on him either. If those were Herb’s intentions back then, his motives have changed. He seems to be trying to lure me back in. Why else would he set out to test me?

  ‘I called Melville,’ I say, glad for the opportunity to be smug. ‘He seemed really worried for you; said he’d send in the local plod. Fat lot of good they turned out to be.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘I’m not sure what would have happened if they hadn’t arrived when they did.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I say. ‘You know, while I was waiting for them I sneaked back into the house. Thanks for leaving the back door unlocked, by the way.’ At last I get a smile as I continue recounting my heroics. ‘I couldn’t hear much but I did see Herb banging the bench with that hammer. Did he try to hurt you?’

  ‘No,’ she whispers. ‘He doesn’t realise.’

  ‘Doesn’t realise what?’

  ‘He just thinks I’m Terry Pinner’s daughter.’ She looks straight ahead into the darkness.

  ‘Sounds like Pinner owes him something too.’

  ‘Yes,’ she turns to face me again, her expression now subdued. ‘But it doesn’t sound like something that can be repaid.’

  ‘So what does he want with you?’

  ‘Revenge?’ she says and a cold chill runs up my spine.

  ‘You’d better tell me everything,’ I say, and she starts from the point I was frog-marched out of the house…

  Relatively Speaking

  Herb had told Mac to stay at the front door and asked Grace to follow him to the storeroom.

  ‘No way,’ she said, staying seated. ‘I know what goes on in there.’

  He laughed dismissively and replied ‘Of course. You’ve been here before.’

  ‘We came back because of the camera.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘He has told you about it. He said he hadn’t. Never mind, I don’t suppose it really matters now you’re here.’

  ‘It was you in the pub ten years ago,’ she said.

  ‘Yes it was me.’

  ‘You stole my camera.’

  ‘Yes. I should have got the film developed years ago, either that or thrown it away. I didn’t think there was likely to be anything on there of much use. Six frames, one I took, the other five just party shots of you and your school friends. Nothing there to get back at him with.’

  Grace tried to ignore the additional irony that had he developed the film there was certainly something he could have used against her. Instead she simply echoed him.

  ‘Get back at him?’

  ‘Your old man, the bastard that helped ruin my life.’

  ‘Terry?’

  ‘Terry Pinner.’ He spat out the words like venom. ‘Even his own daughter can’t bring herself to call him Dad.’

  ‘He’s not...’ she started to protest, but the intensity of his glare and her confusion at his next words cut her short.

  ‘Why don’t I introduce you to my family... what’s left of it,’ he said and started to get up.

  She reached inside her coat and took out a package. ‘Is this your wife?’ she said, holding up the framed photograph she’d removed from its gaudy wrapper. Now it was his turn to be shocked.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘It is her, isn’t it?’

  ‘I thought I lost that, weeks ago. Where was it?’

  ‘Here, two days ago.’

  ‘Hmm, bring it with you,’ he said. ‘There’s someone else you should see.’

  A wide metal shelf spanned the entire length of the store room, suspended on brackets against the bare wall, doubling as a workbench, with two chairs tucked neatly beneath. He pulled them out and offered her a seat. Apart from a variety of wooden crates, stacked in order of size on the bench, the room was empty. He held out his hand and she gave him the package, watching as he carefully placed the photograph on the work surface and then discarded the glossy paper in a crumpled ball onto the floor. Reaching into one of the boxes, he produced two items. Both made Grace’s pulse quicken. First he put a lump hammer onto the table without ceremony, like it was a mug of tea. The second item was another photo frame, smaller and virtually identical to the other. He kept it in his hands and looked at the picture.

  ‘I once had a daughter,’ he said before standing the frame alongside the other one. ‘This is all I have left.’

  Grace turned hesitantly to look closer at the second photograph. A newborn baby, swaddled in hospital-issue pink, her tiny fingers clinging loosely to thin air, eyes closed, contentment spoiled only by the transparent tube looping from her little nose, blissfully unaware of her harrowing birth and uncertain future.

  As tears welled up in her eyes, she couldn’t find the words to say to him; to claim the image as her own. For one thing, she couldn’t be certain it was her, but also she could tell Herb was in no mood to have his memories violated. She had to accept this wasn’t the time or the place.

  The room was spinning and she was finding it hard to focus. Although Herb was speaking, his words didn’t register. She had a vague awareness he was talking about someone. Someone else – another man.

  ‘...he killed my wife,’ he said.

  The last words broke the spell, and she was able to take her eyes off the photograph. Trying to refocus, she realised he’d mentioned a name, but she hadn’t heard it. She wanted him to say it again but he didn’t. All she could gather was the other man was a rival. She tried to concentrate.

  ‘I lost everything,’ he said, putting both photographs into the box. ‘After that it was almost not worth living.’

  ‘What’s it got to do with Terry?’ she said.

  ‘Pinner, the bastard. They were in it together from the start.’ His voice rose to a crescendo on every other phrase as if this was a mantra he’d repeated in his head many times. As he continued, he took the hammer and bounced the cold metal on the palm of his hand. ‘I’ve waited a long time for this. I should have finished it before when I had the chance. The other one has already paid the price. Now it’s that bastard Pinner’s turn.’

  Grace jumped when he slammed the hammer down, narrowly missing his own thumb. The noise obscured his shout but she thought he said, ‘It was rigged!’

  ‘He killed her,’ he yelled as the metal bench hummed like a tuning fork. ‘And your old man covered it up. Might as well have put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.’

  He ignored her attempts to reason with him and continued ranting about wanting revenge. Although she couldn’t explain why, when he pounded the bench a second time, she knew he wasn’t going
to use it on her.

  Psycho Analysis

  ‘And then,’ she says to me, ‘I managed to slip out when the police arrived.’

  ‘Well that makes me marginally less pissed off with their incompetence in being so easily conned,’ I say. ‘Surely, they had to be suspicious of an old guy and a thug shacking up together in an empty dump like that. Even if they’d held hands, the state of the soft furnishings would have given them away.’

  ‘No,’ she says with a chuckle. ‘The big guy was hiding in the garden the whole time. He was literally on the other side of the fence from me. I could hear him huffing and puffing after he’d run out of the house. I thought he was after me but he just went to ground and let me get away.’

  ‘I still think they gave up a bit lightly. They couldn’t have been in there long enough to even search the house, let alone have a look around the back.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘Then again, without a warrant they’d have had to suspect a crime was being committed.’

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘I forgot you lived with the Old Bill. But… I really got the impression that Melville bloke believed me. Wouldn’t that have given them sufficient cause?’

  ‘He probably only has so much influence up here.’

  ‘Hmm… you’re probably right. The locals didn’t seem to have a lot of respect for him as they left. So what did you do then?’

  ‘I stayed the other side of the fence until everything had gone quiet.’ She looks down at her feet. ‘I had to see what you would do next. I realised everyone else had gone when I saw you talking to me through the wall and sitting on the step with your head in your hands. That’s when I decided to follow you back to the car.’

  ‘Are we okay?’ I say, reaching across and taking her hand in mine. She squeezes it gently and smiles.

  ‘Herb obviously has some grudge against Terry,’ she says. ‘Thinks he’s somehow caught up with some other Mr Big and the crash that killed his wife.’

  ‘You said yourself, Pinner’s no angel.’

  ‘I know. But all those years ago?’

  ‘Dish best served cold,’ I say and she returns my frown with a nod. ‘So, again he planned to kidnap you. Then what?’

  ‘And why now?’ We sit in silence, both trying to find a logical thread to unpick.

  ‘Let’s say,’ I say, tracing a timeline with my finger on the fogged-up windscreen, ‘Herb only became aware of you about ten years ago, before gate-crashing your Millennium Party. If he’d known Pinner all along, wouldn’t he have known he already had a son long before you joined the family?’

  ‘Not necessarily. Remember, Simon was born in Gibraltar. Terry and Gillian hadn’t long got back before they started thinking about adoption. So it’s possible, by the time he discovered that Terry was back, I was already part of the family with no reason for Herb to think I hadn’t been there all along.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘But even if he did know about Simon, he might have been more interested in you because of the loss of his own daughter.’

  ‘That’s probably true. He said the other man had already suffered, whatever that means. I got the impression he believes in an eye for an eye. Yet, there was something about him that made me doubt he could carry it through.’

  ‘So, Pinner returns to Herb’s manor and starts his meteoric rise through the ranks. After a year or two he’s back on Herb’s radar. Herb does some digging and finds that the copper has a teenage daughter. He tracks her down to a pub on New Year’s Eve and watches her. Then decides to take a little memento with him and snatches one last shot before he leaves. Make sense so far?’

  ‘Okay,’ she says, watching me embellish my screen graphics with little stick-people and stick-children. ‘But if he wanted to kidnap me why didn’t he do it then? Instead, he goes home and throws the camera in a drawer and leaves it there for ten years, waiting for some mug to show up!’

  ‘Hey, that’s not nice.’

  ‘Harsh but fair,’ she says, callously wiping out the little camera I’ve drawn on the glass.

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘He said he didn’t think there was anything on the camera to get back at Terry with,’ she says, shaking her head.

  ‘Lucky for you he didn’t develop it,’ I say and she returns my smirk with a nervous laugh.

  ‘But it’s strange he kept it all that time and did nothing with it. It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I nod. ‘He said he was going to throw it away, but maybe Pinner’s pissed him off again.’

  ‘Anything’s possible with him.’ She nods back. ‘Or maybe he’s come across some new information.’

  ‘Surely if he’s got new evidence about his wife’s death, he could pursue it through official channels.’ As soon as I say it I realise my naivety.

  ‘Pinner is the official channel and even if he wasn’t, men like Herb don’t settle their differences in court.’ She was right. Especially after twenty-five years of simmering, they don’t.

  ‘How did he seem?’ I ask. ‘When you were alone with him?’ It felt like a daft question, but from what I’d heard of their conversation in the dungeon, I couldn’t really gauge Herb’s state of mind, especially as he’s a man who seems to value emotional detachment.

  ‘That’s something I’ve been thinking about,’ she says, staring back out into darkness. ‘Although he acted like he wanted to frighten me, and don’t get me wrong, I was upset and stressed with the situation, I didn’t feel intimidated by him. What he was saying was all between him and Terry. It was like he wanted me to understand, to see his side. He was looking for my sympathy. He wasn’t aiming his anger at me. He spoke to me like he knew me. He came across as very lonely. In spite of what he was saying about Terry, it felt as if he wanted me to like him. Or at least respect him.’

  A tear forms on her long eyelashes. She blinks and it drops onto her cheek. I want to wipe it away, but at the same time I want to watch it rolling slowly down the contour of her beautiful face.

  ‘You know, it’s funny,’ she says with a sad smile. ‘When I saw the opportunity to run and get out of there, I hesitated. For a fleeting moment, I really wanted to stay and talk to him.’

  I nod as if I understand, and give her a few moments of silence. ‘Remind me why we ran from Melville?’ I say. ‘I thought you said he was one of the good guys.’

  ‘He is. But, did you seriously want to explain all of this to him tonight?’

  ‘Fair point. I’m not even sure I could,’ I say, peering out the side window and starting to consider our next move. ‘He’s going to catch up with me sooner or later and want to know why I wasted police time and ruined his evening with the wife and kids.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she says, ‘He’s not married.’

  ‘How well do you know him?’

  ‘He came to Terry and Gillian’s a few times back when things were still normal,’ she says. ‘Before their divorce. I’ve only seen him a couple of times since.’

  By now the windows are weeping and the word divorce ricochets around the car. It’s not one I want to dwell on at the moment but I do want to move the conversation away from nice bloke Jim Melville.

  ‘Why am I not surprised that Pinner couldn’t keep a happy family together?’ I say.

  ‘Remember it takes two to tango,’ she says. Great. Now I’m thinking about Sam and what part I might have played in causing her disaffection. I’m struck by the ease with which I’ve taken sides with Gillian without even knowing her, based on what little I do know of her husband. Luckily, on this occasion, Grace hasn’t read my mind.

  ‘The penny only dropped for him,’ she’s saying, ‘when Gillian went back to Gibraltar last year and moved in with that Spaniard. Then it looked like she was the marriage-breaker all along.’

  ‘So did you move out when they split?’ I ask, moving the conversation away from the complexities of relationship breakdowns as much for reasons of self-doubt as out of a genuine desire to know more about her life.
r />   ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Part of their settlement included buying the flat for me and Simon to share. Once they bought it I was keen to move in straight away. Simon wasn’t eighteen and had to stay with his mum, so I had the luxury of a place to myself for a couple of years. He only moved in when he started at university.’

  ‘Lucky girl!’

  ‘It’s not so bad. I probably only see him once or twice a week unless he wants something. I suppose one day we’ll sell it and split the money.’

  ‘You didn’t fancy following Gillian to a warmer climate then?’

  ‘She wasn’t exactly good company at the time. When she was drinking, her moods were like a pendulum. If you timed it right she would be your best friend. A minute later she could be screaming at you.’

  ‘No wonder Melville stopped calling round,’ I say.

  ‘It’s a shame. He’s a really nice guy.’ Her voice tails off.

  ‘The feeling must be mutual. He certainly seemed to drop everything to come and rescue you tonight.’ I suddenly feel uncomfortably jealous and straighten myself up by pulling on the steering wheel. ‘He’s a bit old for you though isn’t he?’

  ‘We’re just friends.’ She looks back at me with a wry smile.

  ‘Right,’ I say, unconvinced. ‘Well if you’re such good friends, wouldn’t it be best for us to go and see him tomorrow and try to smooth things over?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Let me sleep on it and see how I feel in the morning.’

  ***

  Clean Sweep

  The front door opens with a click. He steps inside and closes it silently behind him. Even though the little space behind the door is in virtual darkness, he knows the stairs straight ahead are steep and narrow. His arm brushes against coats hanging from a rail on the wall to the side. He pats them down carefully with his gloved hands and frowns when he finds something bulky in an inside pocket. As he carries it upstairs, he doesn’t believe it can be either of the things he came for, even though it feels like it could be one of them. There’s no way it would have been left lying around. In the neon light of the landing his suspicion is confirmed, and he takes the item into the front room and puts it on the coffee table.