Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2)

by Giles O'Bryen

  Daniel Cady had recently started work on his father’s boat. ‘John was old school,’ said Nash. ‘He had a bit of a reputation among the local hands. But we were shocked when he took his son to sea. The deck of a working trawler is no place for a boy.’

  The article was dated 16 October 1979. I looked in vain for a follow-up – Irene Cady had escaped arrest, it seemed, and the police never looked for anyone else. She must have left her boy with the Order of St Hugh in Northampton, then fled the country somehow. I wondered why she had chosen that place. It wasn’t convenient; nor was the Order well known. At any rate, Father Wulfstan had evidently not handed poor Daniel over to the police – a considerate if risky decision.

  I left the newspaper section and went in search of the library’s solitary Internet terminal. I had to wait my turn, but when I ran a search for the Cady family, I got lucky: a librarian and amateur genealogist from Maine had lovingly traced his family history and set it out in a website entitled All Things Cady: Our Family Story.

  It turned out that John Cady was the only son of a man who, in the decades following the Second World War, had owned half the Lowestoft fishing fleet. Most of the boats had been laid up or sold off during the sixties, but it was a fair guess that, far from being a modest solo trawler captain, John Cady had been a wealthy man. If that was the case, then his fortune would very likely have passed to Father Daniel.

  I spent a cheerless night in an empty lock-up, then cycled on to a village a few miles south of town and called TJ.

  ‘Change of RV. Car park of the Peeping Tom in Burton Mawsley. Six miles north-west of Wellingborough. Look for the water tower. Same time and don’t be late.’

  ‘Why, what happened?’

  ‘You tell me. No, wait. Don’t tell me, Jimmy, for I do not want to know.’

  He hung up. The cracked perspex window of the call box looked out over a rainswept road, a clump of cottages with tiny windows and tiny painted doors, an empty bus shelter, a shop sign shuddering in the squally wind. Why was there no one else I could turn to? A grim, reproachful kind of loneliness flooded through me. I thought of the girls I’d been out with: Corinna, for instance, who looked into my eyes and asked me what I was thinking, first with curiosity and affection, then with mournful resignation, finally, terminally, with exasperation. What was it about me that she had liked and wanted? And what had she seen that made her step away? Or not seen. . . Making love to me was like opening the door to someone and finding they weren’t actually there, another girl had said. I was empty, then, a void, the human embodiment of my definitively soulless career.

  I chewed on a stale croissant I’d fished out of a bin at the back of a Tesco store the night before – as poor a consolation as I no doubt deserved, but it made me feel better. Back on the Jack Taylor, I meandered south-east, navigating by the drone of traffic on the A6, brooding and cursing this limbo into which I’d been pitched. At four in the afternoon, I saw the water tower, a white-ribbed cylinder like a giant chef’s hat, and pedalled into Burton Mawsley, past the Peeping Tom, then on to a copse just outside the village. I hunched under my pac-a-mac and watched the crows tumble around the treetops like scraps of charred paper, until darkness fell and they settled to their roosts, swayed this way and that by the bitter February air.

  TJ Farah isn’t as mean as I’ve depicted him. It’s just that in the space of ten days I’d idolised him as the very model of the supremely effective combat soldier, then resented and mistrusted him, then feared him as the embodiment of a world of casual savagery that had sucked me almost unawares into its dark heart. Now, confounding that panoply of ill-assorted feelings, I depended on him.

  In the pub car park was an immaculate sapphire blue Jaguar, parked up with its nose facing the exit, two men inside. I got closer and saw Peanut in the passenger seat. Neither of them looked round as I climbed into the back. The interior was like the late-night bar of an executive hotel, all cream leather upholstery and ambient blue lighting. They were watching a mixed martial arts film on a portable DVD player.

  ‘Have a look at the neck on that, Jimmy. Like a fucking hippo.’

  ‘S’why the fat fuck can’t get out the way,’ said Peanut. ‘One more chop to the teeth, he’ll be eating from a liquidiser.’

  ‘Peanut here is thinking of going in for this MMA stuff when he retires,’ TJ remarked. ‘I’ve told him after about five seconds with one of these steroid queens he’s going to get pissed off and go in for the kill. What d’you reckon, Jimmy?’

  ‘I should imagine that’s against the rules.’

  ‘There you are, what did I say?’

  ‘What the fuck does Jimmy P know about it?’

  ‘Peanut, it’s play-fighting,’ said TJ. ‘Not fucking murder.’

  He handed me an envelope containing a passport – my new name was Anthony Skinner – and two hundred pounds in cash.

  ‘What’s the matter,’ he said, ‘you expecting a good-luck card signed by all the lads?’

  ‘I can’t get the girl we found out of my head, that’s all. Thanks for this, TJ.’

  ‘There’s a hundred other girls like her dying a fucking horrible death right now, Jimmy. Bombs, bullets, fires, fists, whatever. You can’t save them.’

  ‘I saved this one. Then I handed her over to a gang of pimps.’

  TJ was regarding me thoughtfully. ‘You look like you’re sitting on a thistle.’

  ‘Cracked rib.’

  ‘Breathing OK?’

  I nodded.

  ‘It’ll pass. I got called in by some little pimp called Silk. Know him?’

  ‘My MI6 liaison,’ I said.

  ‘Practised his whole fucking playbook on me – promises of this, threats of that, hints of the other. Then he tells me there’s matters of significant national interest at stake and it’s my patriotic duty to turn you in.’

  ‘Did he say why?’

  ‘Take a wild guess. Do your own frigging patriotic duty, I wanted to tell him, if you even know what it is.’

  ‘Came for me, too,’ said Peanut. ‘Puddle of wank.’

  ‘They arrested me on a charge of child abduction,’ I said nervously.

  ‘Bollocks. You know something, or Her Majesty’s Secret Slimeballs think you do.’

  ‘I wish I did.’

  ‘Might help to work out what it is.’

  No one spoke for a minute. Play-fighting grunts filled the interior of the car.

  ‘What happened out there, TJ?’

  ‘Plenty.’

  ‘That night in the woods.’

  ‘The Bura boys? They thought they were the most evil motherfuckers in southern Kosovo. Turned out we were.’

  ‘That’s it? Like gangs on a council estate? I thought we were soldiers.’

  ‘What the fuck do you think soldiers are? Gangs, tribes, races, nations – they all need to do some killing every so often.’

  ‘And when they do,’ said Peanut, ‘it’s murderous bastards like us get the work.’

  ‘So I am one of us, then,’ I said uneasily. ‘I thought you weren’t convinced.’

  ‘I like you, Jimmy,’ said TJ. ‘You’re the silliest fucking Rupert I’ve come across in a good many years, but OK, Ollie was right, you’re one of us. Most people can’t kill – most soldiers can’t kill. You train them to do it, but if they ever do, they hate themselves for it. They fall apart – you’ve seen it, we all have. But you can kill, Jimmy Palatine. I’ve got a photo of you doing that lame fuck with the corpse tattoo. You press your blade against his bare skin and you lean in. You’re not bothered by his pleading eyes or his orphaned baby daughter or whether you’ll go to hell for it. No, you’re working out the best way to get the tip of your knife into his gristle. So you lean in. Like you’re pushing a mate’s car or something.’

  I remembered the scene. It had set up camp in my mind, every detail saturated with its own slippery but indelible meaning. A cold, cold memory that made me shiver in my plush leather seat. Could you not kill just because you had
to? How did TJ know I wasn’t falling apart? My head felt swollen with unwanted feelings. TJ fired the ignition and the instrument cluster winked, illuminating the smooth underside of his jaw. The world might be handed over to murderous bastards and their paymasters, but the oil pressure was good, the airbags were present, the brakes were functioning correctly. I’d never felt such a gulf between the things around me and the things within. I heard TJ sigh, and when I looked over, I saw how hard his face was set, even in repose.

  ‘Not many like us, Jimmy,’ he said. ‘There’s Silks fucking everywhere, but Farahs and Palatines? Not so many.’

  ‘What about Peanuts?’ asked Peanut.

  ‘Only one, thank fuck – or three, if you count your nan’s haemorrhoids.’

  Peanut aimed a jab at his ribs, which TJ was laughing too much to parry.

  ‘Out you get,’ he said to me when he’d recovered. ‘I’ve got another life to live, one that doesn’t involve sitting in a pub car park with your miserable face for company.’

  ‘What happens to that photo you took?’

  ‘This one?’

  TJ pulled a print from his shirt pocket and passed it to me. I didn’t like what I saw. It was all much too clear.

  ‘Goes in the vault, Captain,’ he said.

  ‘The vault?’

  ‘Insurance policy – keeps you Ruperts honest. No one needs to see it.’

  ‘S’long as you behave y’self,’ said Peanut.

  ‘So you guys have a whole stash of—’

  ‘Out. No point telling you not to do anything stupid because you can’t help yourself. But keep it simple, right?’

  28

  I retrieved the Jack Taylor from the copse, ate the rest of my food, and rode east. The moon was weak again, and dogged by cloud. I studied the contours of the road ahead and was careful to avoid any rut or ridge that might throw me off or buckle a wheel – or if not that, cause bits of rib to grind against each other. My mission had begun, and I was not to be delayed by such things. I must find the girl and restore her to a place of safety. I must do whatever it took. I’d be one of us. I’d be a murderous bastard. When it was over, there’d come a time for searching through the unshriven byways of my soul. Until then: keep it simple.

  The pac-a-mac was not much more than a few shreds of plastic now, so I cycled into Huntingdon and spent some of the money TJ had given me on a black rain jacket and a JCB-logo baseball cap. A fine rain hung in the air, so the hedgerows and trees and fields and the shapes of church towers and country manors looked soft and grainy, like pictures on an old television set. I ate in the saddle, stuffing down bread and cheese and lumps of sodden cake that fell apart in my fingers.

  The food kept me going for thirty miles or so, then I started slowing down and had to snatch a few hours’ sleep in a stable somewhere south of Newmarket. I got to Harwich just before eleven a.m. There was a golf club to the south of the international port. I cycled up the short tarmac driveway and locked the Jack Taylor in a rack behind the clubhouse, sheltered by a corrugated plastic awning. That bike deserved a safe berth after all the favours it had done me. Then I set off round the perimeter of the course until I reached a small network of streets alongside the docks.

  I soon found what I was looking for: a café that served lorry drivers waiting for the ferry over to the Hook of Holland. I ordered spaghetti Bolognese and sat down opposite an old trucker. His forearms bore tattoos which had softened and spread into the wrinkled, tawny skin. He was small for a trucker, and looked dead beat. For sixty pounds he agreed to let me hide out in the sleeping compartment of his cab. He said his name was Luke, that he was from Leytonstone, and that he knew David Beckham’s uncle. Then he clammed up.

  His lorry was parked in a holding area outside the terminal gates, along with thirty or so others. It wasn’t fenced, but there were cameras everywhere, mounted on high posts, snouts cocked at the apron of tarmac below.

  ‘Thirty-six-wheeler Daf, blue trailer.’ He pointed it out.

  ‘I’ll join you in half an hour,’ I said. ‘Shake hands, so it looks like we’re parting company.’

  I walked back the way we had come, looking for a way to get to the door of the Daf without being caught on CCTV. There was a children’s playground at the end of a residential street at right angles to the lorry park, and I saw that from there I could cross the road and get in amongst the vehicles under cover of a row of empty containers. The rain was good: no one was out unless they had to be, and those that had to be had their heads down. Once I was out of sight of the cameras, I walked around for twenty minutes, then circled back to the playground and took off my jacket and baseball cap. I sloped past the containers to Luke’s truck. Maybe the cameras hadn’t seen me, but Luke had: the passenger door swung open and I pulled myself up into the cab. He had the curtains drawn.

  ‘You can give me the sixty now.’

  I handed over three twenties and he pointed to a steel ladder that led to a narrow hatchway in the roof of the cab. The sleeping compartment had about six inches of headroom and smelled of dirty feet and engine oil. I lay down on a vinyl-covered mattress in the semi-darkness and went to sleep, only to be woken an indeterminate amount of time later by a series of thumps from below.

  ‘We’re going through. You snore like that, they’ll think I’ve got meself hitched up to a pig.’

  The brakes spat air and the lorry pulled forward. We rolled through the gates and into the terminal, on for a few hundred yards, then bounced to a standstill. After a ten-minute wait I heard the cab door open.

  ‘All right, Lucky? You get those tickets you were after?’

  ‘Nah. Fucking tout. Daylight robbery, the price he wanted.’

  ‘Always next year.’

  Bangs from the rear of the trailer, then the lorry rumbled down the gangway onto the ferry. Tyres squeaked on the rubbed steel of the car deck, shouts echoed off the walls, chains clanked. Lucky poked his head up through the hatch.

  ‘I’m going to the bar. Sleep tight.’

  Lucky was well known on the Dutch side, too, and no one wanted to poke around in his private sleeping quarters. Anyway, they weren’t looking for renegade intelligence officers, but for illegal immigrants clinging to the chassis or suffocating inside the container. I found out he was going to Mannheim, and for an extra tenner he took me there – dropping me at a service station where I could get a lift south. By dusk I was in Frankfurt; an overnight ride in the company of a voluble Slovenian took me to Klagenfurt; I made Zagreb by lunchtime.

  The direct route to Skopje was via Belgrade, but I could imagine the Serbian authorities taking great pleasure in disrupting the itinerary of a lone Englishman with a passport that might not withstand close scrutiny. I changed my remaining cash at the bus station and got a ticket for Dubrovnik. The coach ground laboriously south, exiting the main road every half an hour to lumber into some sleepy town. At the newly established border with Montenegro, we stopped altogether. The crossing was closed – no one knew why. It would reopen at six-thirty a.m.

  A man of my size could occupy the seat in only one position – which happened to cause my cracked rib to flex with every intake of breath and again with every exhalation of breath. At seven-forty-five an official in a uniform of comic grandiosity checked our documents and handed out forms. At eight-thirty he collected the forms. At ten-fifteen we lumbered into Montenegro. An hour later, we lumbered out.

  The Dubrovnik–Tirana leg was no better. There was an overnight bus to Tetovo, a few hours west of Skopje, but our driver was determined we wouldn’t make it and we didn’t. I lay on a bench inside the bus station and tried to sleep while maintaining a sufficiently ferocious expression to deter the beggars and robbers who haunted the place. It seemed to work. The damaged ribs did some knitting overnight, and when I woke I was able to stretch a bit without gasping for mercy.

  The bus left at dawn and was rammed full. I stood swaying in the aisle while a boy of about seven ransacked the pockets of my trousers. When I frow
ned at him, he froze; when I looked away, he started again. Eventually, I simply grinned and pulled out the pockets to confirm that, as he surely knew after half an hour of indiscreet rummaging, they were empty. He grinned back. I gave him a half-packet of biscuits from my carrier bag and he ate them immediately, then handed back the wrapper. Elbasan, Librazhde, across the border into Macedonia, then north along the lake to Struga and Ohrid, where a number of elderly holidaymakers disembarked with a cargo of tightly clamped bags. Kichevo, Gostivar, Tetovo. After the long, disjointed journey, the proximity of Skopje now seemed miraculous.

  My final bus ride started an hour later. I watched through the window as the sky swung down and darkness drew in, softening the contours of fields and woods. We bustled through the still, sombre landscape, a little box on wheels, splaying the road ahead with a waxy yellow light and leaving a brief outburst of engine noise in its wake.

  29

  I hadn’t even got off the bus in Skopje before I saw someone I knew: an American NATO official who several weeks earlier had subjected me to an inept attempt to pry out some intel on Serbian military supply lines into Kosovo, because he suspected (correctly) the British knew more than we were sharing. I pulled the baseball cap low over my face and joined a crowd of people jostling their way out of the terminal to fight for a place in the bus queues on Nikola Karev Street.

  My plan was to walk to Maria’s. Her restaurant was directly below my apartment, which was quite likely under surveillance, but the kitchen gave onto an enclosed backyard accessible via a derelict theatre on the parallel street. It would be pleasant to sit in Maria’s apartment, eat the daily special and drink a carafe of her especially oily wine while she scolded me for whatever it was I deserved scolding for and her children hunted for an opportunity to amuse themselves at my expense. Tomorrow morning, I could start to set the world to rights.