Fire of Lies

by David Mark

  On his bunk, the quiet man slides into a more comfortable position. His bones ache. He’s seventy-six years old and feels every day of it. He’s had a decent enough life. It hadn’t been a difficult decision to spare the boy the horror of what Mattie suggested after the orgy of violence subsided all those months ago.

  He thinks back. Remembers it all. Paul had been his usual self all night, talking bollocks, getting pissed, trying to impress with tall tales and bullshit. Even little Jay, the inquisitive and polite young man, had grown tired of him. Paul had tried too hard to impress and had shown the boy a video of some young naked blonde being brutalised by three dwarves. Jay hadn’t liked it and told Shania. Shania had lost her temper and ordered Paul to leave before she told the others about it. He’d refused. Embarrassed, he’d started mouthing off. The quiet man had sat there, drinking his pint, watching it build, savouring the familiar aroma of impending violence.

  When Shania grabbed Paul’s arm and dragged him to the door he pulled out the switchblade that he had always bragged about. He threatened her. Said he would take her eyes if she didn’t let go of him, slashing at her and opening a thin red wound across the rose tattoo on her left breast. Jay saw his mum in distress and ran to her aid. Paul backhanded him. And Deano struck. One moment he was a docile, slumbering bag of rags and the next he had his mouth on Paul’s throat and the two were clattering to the ground. The other drinkers tried to drag the dog away and began beating on Paul, caught up in the frenzy of the moment. Shania dragged Deano into the snug and came back to find Mattie and Alan kicking at the prone Paul and her son cowering on the floor, eyes full of tears.

  All eyes turned to the quiet man – the only person who had done nothing. He’d known this day would come. He’d been a bad lad in his youth. Served a few stretches for hurting people who’d put his back up and half killed a security guard who got in his way during a raid on a building society in ’81. He got away with that one, but served nine years for breaking a jeweller’s kneecaps with a hammer during the burglary of a watch shop in Henley in 1987. He had behaved himself since coming out. For nigh-on twenty years his interests were horses, real ale and watching old mysteries on the little telly in his small flat off Mayville Avenue. He has no grandchildren. No family to speak of. He’s been waiting for the end ever since his release – killing time in the pubs where he finds the conversation most tolerable and keeping his mouth shut out of practice. He knows how he’s seen. He’s an old man. A frail old bugger. Quiet and harmless.

  It was Mattie who suggested they finish him off. His big friend Ronnie had been hiding his shotgun at the pub for months, hoping to resume his armed robbery career when the heat cooled off. Everybody knew about it. Shania got a little stack of notes as compensation. Mattie went to the cellar to get the weapon while the others stood around Paul’s twitching body and realised the enormity of what they’d done. He was still twitching. His broken mouth bubbled with blood. Even now, the quiet man cannot shake the feeling that the one word he kept trying to form was simply ‘sorry’.

  Who’ll do it? asked Mattie, offering the gun around the crowd as if proffering a bag of sweets.

  Heads were shaken. Profanities exchanged. Alan suggested leaving him to bleed out. They should dump him outside and chuck his bike in the river. But there was no disguising the bite wounds to his throat and that would lead the coppers to Shania’s door. Mattie toyed with the idea of cutting his head off – slicing through the ragged neck wounds. The quiet man sat and listened, counting down the seconds in his head until the inevitable suggestion was put forward.

  ‘Let’s say it was self-defence,’ said Mattie. ‘He went for the boy. He was a perv. The dog was just defending his master . . .’

  ‘We’ve all got form,’ said Alan. ‘And we kicked the fuck out of him.’

  ‘We could disguise the wounds. Shoot him close up, turn him into meat and get rid of him. Anybody asks, we’ll say we were at Gordo’s. He’ll cover – he has before.’

  ‘But that’s Ronnie’s gun,’ snapped Alan.

  ‘We could say the gun was Paul’s. He pulled it on us. We got it off him but it went off . . .’

  ‘You’re going to pull the trigger, are you, big man?’

  All eyes turned to the boy, crying and snotting and huddled up to his mother.

  ‘He’s only nine,’ said Mattie. ‘I read somewhere, you can’t be done for murder at that age. If he pulls the trigger then even if the body’s found we’ve got a cover story.’

  Shania opened her mouth, colour draining from her face. That was when the quiet man stood up and cleared his throat. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen blood before. But if any of you say a word I’ll spill an awful lot more. We’re in this together now. Shania, love – we need an empty keg.’

  He can still feel Paul’s blood and brains upon his clothes and skin, soaking through to stain him pink. Can still remember the sparks in that dark cellar and the grunt of exertion as Mattie stuffed the limp, unrecognisable corpse into the keg. The quiet man has waited for discovery ever since. It was almost a relief when the body bobbed up down at Northcoates. He told them all to stay calm. Stick to the story. Remember their promise. He’d already had to reprimand Mattie for being dumb enough to give Paul’s switchblade to Ronnie as recompense for the loss of his shotgun. He isn’t surprised that the police made Ronnie their number one suspect. He would have thought the same. He wonders whether McAvoy will believe him when he tells him Ronnie wasn’t even there that night. Wonders whether he should keep that to himself. He’d like to see Ronnie go down. But the important thing is keeping Shania and Jay out of it. They’re a nice family. Deserve better. He hopes they think of him kindly, though that wasn’t his motivation for agreeing to pull the trigger. He just knew that his own soul was already damned and his shoulders could bear a little more weight.

  The quiet man thinks about what passed between himself and McAvoy in the wake of the fight. McAvoy looked around him and clocked the weapons that each man had instinctively picked up when the violence began. The quiet man had gripped his pint glass and was preparing to throw it – to smash it into the face of the dog or the big man or whoever looked like they were going to cause the boy harm. McAvoy saw it, in his left hand, and read the rest in his eyes.

  The quiet man is looking forward to the next few hours. He doesn’t think McAvoy will judge him and, if he does, he has no intention of biting his tongue. He’ll tell the big man what he needs to know. He’ll confess to murder and try to take the silly bastards who ruined his favourite boozer down with him. He’ll die in prison, but the knowledge causes him little distress.

  He hears heavy footsteps in the corridor. The window in the metal door slides open and he looks into the deep brown eyes of the man who tore through someone calling himself Hull’s hardest as if he were made of dust. He returns the gaze and gives a little smile.

  He receives a nod, the tiniest gesture of respect, and then the window closes and he is alone once more.

  In the corridor outside the cell, McAvoy leans against the wall. The old man looks so fragile in there. Five foot four in his stockinged feet and hair like margarine. McAvoy isn’t looking forward to the interview. He already senses what he will be told. He saw it in the old man’s eyes in the aftermath of the incident at the bar. Saw the way he looked across at Shania and her boy. There was a quiet acceptance there – a knowledge of what was to come. In that moment, McAvoy understood – even before Mattie and Alan, groaning and broken, began to bark their accusations that it was the old man who had done it all. McAvoy knew what the old man had done. He’d done what he felt he had to. Took charge when others faltered.

  He wonders what he would have done, in that situation. Whether the old boy has suffered for his actions. Wonders, for a moment, whether there will be any fallout from what he did to Ronnie and Mattie. Then he rubs his hair with a big rough hand and forces himself to get his thoughts in order. They have caught a killer. He has found redress for the dead. It brings
him no joy – just a sense of vague satisfaction.

  This is what he is for.

  This is who he is.

  COMING SOON

  CRUEL MERCY

  DS MCAVOY: BOOK 6

  David Mark

  McAvoy’s Irish Romany brother-in-law has gone missing in wintry New York. Of the two men he travelled with, one is dead, and the other only survived by a miracle. Violence is brewing – on both sides of the Atlantic.

  McAvoy travels in the desperate hope of finding out what really happened, and soon comes up against mafias old and new, and the culmination of a crime forty years in the making . . .

  Keep reading for an extract of Cruel Mercy.

  1

  10.15 p.m. Seventh Precinct, Lower East Side

  Now . . .

  There’s a chunk of plastic cat shit in Detective Ronald Alto’s Zen garden. It’s just sitting there, next to the little rake, forming a gruesome mouth beneath three shiny pebbles.

  Alto fights back a smile as he wordlessly picks up the offending addition and deposits it in his top drawer. It clatters down among the other pieces of artwork that the detectives of New York’s Seventh Precinct have seen fit to place in the little bamboo and sand construction that sits in the in-tray on top of his age-blackened desk. He presumes this evening’s contribution was made by Detective Hugh Redding. Reviewed critically, the cat shit lacks subtlety but has a certain potency. The same could be said for the man himself. It certainly doesn’t possess the creative genius displayed by Sergeant Kendricks, who last week recreated a beach homicide out of Lego figures in the ten minutes that Alto was away from his desk.

  ‘B minus,’ announces Alto, without looking at the trio of detectives at the far end of the long room, who sit shovelling Chinese food into their mouths with plastic knives and forks.

  ‘Objection,’ shouts Redding, beginning to rise. There is rice on the front of his off-white shirt and the seams of his grey trousers strain under the pressure of his flesh.

  ‘Overruled,’ says Alto, waving Redding back into his chair.

  ‘It’s a litter box,’ shouts Redding, picking a shrimp off the rolled-up cuff of his shirt sleeve and popping it in his mouth. ‘I want the shit back. Belongs to my stepson.’

  ‘Early Christmas present, was it?’

  ‘Little prick left it in my shoe.’

  ‘And you thought of me?’

  ‘I always think of you, Ronny,’ says Redding, puckering up and blowing a kiss. ‘Can’t sleep unless I’m spooning you in my mind.’

  Alto decides to end the conversation with a grin and a raised mid-finger. He is a veteran of the Seventh and well-versed in the foul-mouthed sexual banter that is as much a part of the squad room as the black linoleum, the beige walls, the battered silver filing cabinets and an aroma that would make a perfumer’s head cave in. It’s a pungent cocktail of perspiration, ethnic food and clothes dried out in a too-small room; marbled with coffee and stale cigarettes. Alto associates the smell with home. He missed it when he spent his year on temporary assignment with Homicide South. That was a hard time. He made the right contacts, put away some bad people but it was a difficult few months for his soul. He had to stand by while deals were made that turned his stomach and he found himself starting to see the advantages, the opportunity for manipulation, rather than seeing the victims and the villains. His time with Homicide came to an end through a combination of failing to kiss the right asses, and becoming too fond of the bottle. He knows himself to be tenacious but in drink he becomes obsessive.

  For the last few months of his time in Homicide he was doggedly pursuing a money-launderer who had links to Paulie Pugliesca’s crime family. Loose lips alerted him to the crooked lawyer’s existence and he became convinced that if he could put a face to the legend he would have a useful lever to use against Pugliesca. The old man’s soldiers were responsible for a half-dozen hits during his time on Homicide and he had fought tooth and claw to keep the murder investigations under his remit instead of being folded up into the larger Federal investigation into organised crime. Instead he found endless layers of bureaucracy and legal red tape and became so entangled in who owned what and which company belonged to what offshore account, he found himself drowning. Like any drowning man, he reached for more liquid. He returned to the Seventh as a borderline alcoholic. The file he collected on the lawyer still sits in his desk; the smug, round-faced bastard grinning up through the sheets of arrest reports, requests for information and legal documentation. He doesn’t know why he keeps it other than a feeling, deep in his core, that it matters.

  Adjusting his glasses, Alto sits down in his swivel chair and slaps his hand down on the keyboard of the chunky computer. The machine is all but useless and he prefers to use his own slimline laptop for his casework, but when the screen desktop is dark he can see the reflection of the squad room in all its grey misery, and at this hour, on an evening this grim, he is far too short on self-loathing to put himself through it.

  Ronald Alto is forty-two years old. He’s tall and slim and is one of the few detectives in the Seventh who worries about how much exercise he is getting, how much he drinks, and whether he has consumed enough portions of fresh fruit and vegetables each day. His colleagues have stopped inviting him to join in their nightly banquets of cultural cuisine, though tonight the smell of chicken chow-mein is so strong that he could well be passively consuming a share of their artery-hardening calories. It took Alto a year of hard work to lose the sixty pounds he packed on after Lisa walked out on him and he is obsessive in his desire not to let a single ounce of fat slip back onto his middleweight boxer’s torso. Lisa would consider this typical of him. If he had been less obsessive about his work, perhaps she would never have left. Alto would disagree. She was always going to leave him. Obsession had nothing to do with it. He considers himself neither more nor less devoted to his work than any of his colleagues. He simply struggles with going home to watch shitty TV and eat dinners off a tray when he could be taking steps towards catching killers. He presumes he would be the same in whatever profession he chose. Were he a carpenter, like his father, he would not be able to stop sanding or varnishing simply because his shift had finished. He would need to see the job through to completion. He told Lisa that long before they were married and continued to mutter it, sullenly, in the face of her tears and tantrums through the course of their three-year marriage. She was already gone a week by the time Alto realised she had made good on her threat. It was not the absence of Lisa that plunged him into misery – more the fulfilment of the gloomy prophesies made by friends, family and colleagues when he announced his intention to wed. Cops’ marriages don’t last, they said. Marry another cop or marry nobody. He ignored their grim predictions, confident that he would be the exception to the rule. Nobody was pleased when he was proved wrong.

  Alto opens his laptop and, in the few seconds it takes for the machine to come to life, turns to look out of the dirty windows at a view he knows better than his reflection. The detective room is on the second floor of the utilitarian Seventh Precinct, which shares its home with the handsome heroes of the Fire Department. It overlooks a dreary, blustery corridor of the Lower East Side. The constant wind seems to have picked up a vast chunk of Manhattan’s most uninspiring constructions and deposited them at the edge of the East River. The Seventh, housed at the pleasingly exact address of 19½ Pitt Street, looks out on a scene almost Soviet in its bleakness. This is a place of housing projects, bridge ramps and squat brick buildings, rattled almost insensible by the constant rumble of vehicles crossing the bridge overhead. Nobody would put this view on a Christmas card, despite the hard, frozen snow that is piled up on the sidewalks like garbage bags. Fresh snow hasn’t fallen for three nights but the temperature has yet to get above zero and the flurries that did fall have turned to jagged white stone. The emergency rooms are overrun with people who slipped and hurt themselves. Alto heard a story yesterday that a Vietnamese shopkeeper had been assaulted by the son of
an elderly lady who fell outside his store. The dutiful son had blamed the shopkeeper for not shovelling the snow away from his building. The shopkeeper had suggested that it wasn’t his responsibility. Devoid of further rational argument, the son made his point by kicking the shopkeeper unconscious. It has been years since such anecdotes shocked Alto. He no longer questions what people will do to one another. He just tries to tidy up afterwards as best he can.

  A buzz from his cell phone reminds him to take one of his vitamin tablets. His hooded, military-issue coat hangs on the back of a nearby chair and he searches its pockets for the correct bottle. He takes two green tablets with a swig of electrolyte-rich water, and then slides himself back over to his computer.

  ‘Dinner-time, George?’ shouts Redding, with his mouth full.

  ‘Just an hors d’oeuvre,’ replies Alto, grinning. The men and women of the Seventh have two nicknames for him. One is George Jetson, a reference to his diet of spaceman pills. The other is Bono, in tribute to the amber-tinted spectacles he wears to combat the migraines he suffers when he spends too much time beneath bright lights. Both nicknames are remarkably affectionate. The Seventh is full of police officers with handles like Boner, Stinkz and Ball-sack. To Alto, Ball-sack seems particularly unfair. After all, her mother named her Deborah.

  Alto’s fingers move over his keyboard and he pulls up the relevant case file. He sends it to the printer and sits back, waiting for the ancient machine to start rattling and spitting like some steam-powered beast. His eyes flick up to the clock above the filing cabinets. It’s 10.18 p.m. He probably has a few minutes . . .

  A moment later, Alto’s posture tenses as he looks at the mugshot filling his screen. The man’s name is Murray Ellison and if Alto doesn’t find a way to put him in prison there is a very good chance he will kill him. Last summer, Ellison drugged an NYU philosophy student he met in a bar off East Broadway. She had been out drinking cocktails with friends and the handsome investment banker had taken a shine to the petite nineteen-year-old with her bubblegum-pink hair, her hippy dress and her little boy’s body. He said hello. Charmed her. Bought her drinks and another round for her friends. Whispered in her ear until she goosepimpled and blushed. High on new experience, lost in drink, she let him near enough to stir Rohypnol into her sangrias blancas. As the drug loosened her inhibitions, she told her friends she was going to stay with her new friend. They were thrilled at her daring; excited that she was going to do something so delightfully brazen. He promised them he would ensure she got a taxi home. Instead, he took her to his East Village apartment and raped her near-unconscious body. He went to bed and left her on his living room floor. The combination of alcohol and Rohypnol caused her to choke to death.