by D J Harrison
‘Not at all, I believe WOS are entirely ignorant of what’s going on at Composites. The acquisition must have been engineered by Composites to make it even less obvious what its primary purpose really is. As part of a huge conglomerate, it’s much easier to hide individual transactions. No, I think WOS have been misled, that’s what Martin discovered and that is why he was murdered.’
The faces on both father and daughter betray a growing antipathy to me and my explanation. Glances are exchanged, father nods some unspoken signal and she rises from her perched position.
‘We have nothing more to say to you except that you are a liar. If you repeat these ridiculous allegations to anyone else we’ll take legal action to protect our family name. Now get out.’
I fumble with my bag and extract the small item that Gary gave me under cover of a large tissue. Eyes are boring into me, she is standing above me in a threatening pose, arms on hips, jaw jutting out, like a chicken about to peck. If I wasn’t busy trying to surreptitiously push the device between the cushions of the settee I might have time to appreciate the effort she was putting into the pose. Pushing my hands back onto the seat I stand up and turn to retrieve my handbag. The thing is nestled in place, camouflaged by its tiny blackness. No handshakes are offered, no goodbyes exchanged. My impression of these two is of intense dislike and I fully expect the relationship to deteriorate from this point onwards. These are cold-hearted, inhuman, self-serving people. Before I exhaust my stock of adjectives I am out of the flat and heading down the stairwell. A huge man waits for me on the next landing, smiling as he sees my approach.
55
Gary doesn’t normally hang around work much after 4 p.m. except for football parking nights. Tonight his Range Rover is sitting askew, across the front entrance to the office, and he is sitting in it, eyes closed. Before I can walk over to tap gently on his window to rouse him, the peace is shattered by the roar from a large un-silenced motorcycle engine. As the three-wheeled beast pulls to a halt, it’s revved up to its limit one more time before becoming still. The silence it creates is complete and welcome.
Michael Powell, or Big Mick as Gary calls him, eases himself out of an almost fully reclining position and staggers slightly as he disembarks from the trike. The predominantly bright orange machine consists of three big wheels, a large plush seat and a huge engine. It’s not difficult to imagine that Mick built this thing himself.
Gary, fully awake now, winds down his window to hear our reports.
‘You never told me you were sending Mick to keep an eye on me,’ I complain half-heartedly.
‘Not just Mick,’ Gary smiles proudly. ‘Ian and a few other lads volunteered to hang around the place, just in case. After all, you do their wages, they wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.’
I shouldn’t let this display of casual concern touch me but it does. It goes straight to my heart and melts me down into a puddle of need and vulnerability. Gary and the lads are looking out for me, that means a lot. I shouldn’t be surprised, I shouldn’t be moved, but I am.
‘Thanks.’ I turn to Mick who is so big he practically surrounds me. Now beyond his fiftieth year, most of his bulk is soft and flabby. He walks stiff-legged because his knees are bad and he complains about any job that keeps him on his feet. Looking at his bright-eyed smile, I see the magnificence of his youth shining through. At twenty, Big Mick must have been a colossus, a mountain of muscle and a man commanding instant respect.
‘Didn’t see nobody, boss.’ Mick reports, double negative no doubt unintended. ‘At least nobody lurking about, intending harm to our Jenny.’
‘Did you think they were going to hurt me?’ I can’t help but feel alarmed by the thought. If I hadn’t told Gary about my meeting I would have been completely unprotected. Gary seems to believe I was exposing myself to danger which is why he sent the lads. Come to think of it, the interview in the flat did feel quite threatening. Miriam and her father were unsympathetic, but would they cause me actual harm?
‘You can’t be too careful,’ Gary answers. ‘Anyway, did you manage to plant the bug? Did they notice it?’
‘I put it down the side of the settee, I’m not sure it’ll work there, won’t it be muffled or something?’
‘As long as they don’t know it’s there, that’s the important thing.’ Gary’s eyes sparkle with excitement. ‘We’ll collect it tomorrow and see if there’s anything on it.’
56
I can still hardly bear to look at the photograph. Even though it only shows the man’s face, I know what the rest of him was doing when it was taken. It took a lot of bravery to carefully mask the bits of his body and mine, using a piece of card with an appropriate aperture. The photocopying was carried out in Carrie’s absence and I now have fifty copies distributed.
If Miriam is not feeling helpful I have to pursue my own lines of enquiry. Gary has reluctantly passed them on to all the lads and told them to keep their eyes out. Short of pinning it up on every lamp post in Manchester with my phone number underneath, it’s all I can do for now.
Since my meeting yesterday with Miriam and her father, Gary has been unusually attentive, popping in and out of the office with uncharacteristic regularity. The opportunity is too good to be missed and I force him to scan the pile of outstanding paperwork and make his childlike signature where appropriate.
Big Mick has been given my key to the apartment. It occurs to me that his massive bulk and dodgy knees don’t make him an obvious candidate for a job requiring stealth. I think Gary is as anxious as I am to find out if the recording device overheard anything useful.
Carrie seems oblivious to the tension and is keen to elicit what information she can from me about the photograph.
‘If I knew who he was, I wouldn’t have had to distribute his picture, Carrie.’
‘Yes, but is he a relative? Why do you want to find him?’
‘He might have information about what we talked about, you know, the way I was imprisoned, what happened to me.’
‘He looks funny with his face all screwed up like that,’ she observes. ‘What was he doing?’
‘It’s hard to say, Carrie.’ I try to leave it at that, but she returns to the subject at every available opportunity, leaving me glad for once when she skips off home at the end of the working day.
The gloom is gathering outside and my stomach is crying out for its evening meal. I should have gone out for my run half an hour ago but I’m rooted to my chair, waiting for Gary, waiting for Mick, waiting for the device. To distract myself I look at the WOS website for the hundredth time. Already I can recite the long list of countries where they have offices or factories. I’m familiar with their products, their markets, their turnover, their profits and their shareholdings.
Almost idly, almost by chance, I flick to a graphic showing the Board of Directors, names and tiny photographs arranged in a nice circle. Some of the faces are familiar from my dealings at Landers Hoffman, but one of the others catches my eye. The photograph is very small and disassembles itself into a soggy blur when enlarged, but I’m convinced this is a picture of Miriam’s father when he was younger and fatter.
The tag line reads: Lieutenant General Sir Algernon Tristan Wallace, KBE, Non-Executive Deputy Chairman.
My brain freezes, overwhelmed by the implications of this discovery.
57
The red light is flashing at my bedside. I am awake. The dull glow of the alarm shows 3:54 and someone is in the flat. There has been a break-in, exactly as Gary expected. It’s as if I’ve never slept, as if I sat up all night waiting for the tell-tale shaft of red.
Sliding slowly and gently from beneath the duvet, I lie for a moment on the thin carpet, long enough to locate the smooth wooden nightstick. Grasping it firmly in my left hand, I slither to the bedroom door and listen. My breath seizes up, making me gasp suddenly as the oxygen deficit overwhelms my need for silence. Soft footsteps are approaching. Crouching behind the door, trembling with excitement, infusions
of adrenalin fuelling my bloodstream, I pray for an intruder to come my way.
My bedroom door handle turns softly. Two men make a sudden entrance and glide over to my bed. They stand transfixed for an instant when they realise their quarry is not lying asleep and unaware. I take three steps, half crouched, fast, and transfer the energy into the point of my stick as it smashes into the nearest man where the base of the skull and the top of his neck meet. I scream my loudest kiai as I make contact. I channel every ounce of my being into the hit.
The second man dives across the bed to grapple with me but he becomes unbalanced as I step back to avoid his hands. As he overreaches, I hit his temple with my fist while I’m still clutching the heavy truncheon. He slumps forward and I rain blows onto his head and neck. These are the men who violated me, these are worse than animals, they deserve to suffer. I shout my pain at them as I make sure they stay down, that they don’t leap up and harm me, even though they are lying still, even though my stick and hands and forearms are slick with blood, I keep on making sure.
Strong arms envelop me, calm words disturb my concentration.
‘That’s enough, Jenny, stop now, it’s over, take it easy.’ Big Mick is here, holding me. Lights flash on, my bed is scarlet. A man lies prone and bleeding onto my bedclothes, another is on the floor, this one leaking blood from his ear.
‘Fucking hell.’ I hear Ian’s voice as he surveys the carnage. ‘Are they dead? Did you kill them, Jenny?’
The words shock and freeze me to the spot. I discover that blood is dripping off the ends of my fingers onto the bedroom carpet. One of the intruders, the first one I hit, is moving in small spasms, legs and arms shaking in an uncoordinated way. The man lying face down across my bed is quite still.
Mick is already on the phone, reporting.
‘Two guys, both in a very bad way. Might be critical. Head injuries. No not me, Jenny. Hit them both with a truncheon. Yes. Yes, Gary. No. Yes, I think we could. There’s a right mess, carpet and bed clothes. Okay. Yes. Yes I will. Okay. See you later.’ He rings off and looks up at me. ‘Gary says to get them out of the flat.’
‘What about the police?’ I ask.
‘Gary says we can’t afford to involve the police, that they’ll take a dim view.’ Mick gestures towards the carnage.
‘Okay.’ I nod in the realisation that Gary is right, this doesn’t look good at all. Two men broke into my home with the intent to harm me and I defended myself, that’s the truth of it, but all the police care about is the dead or injured and arresting someone they can pin the blame on. And that’s going to be me. I have a history of imprisonment and a record of violence, even though all of it is unwarranted and completely unfair. It’s me they are going to arrest. Gary is right, I can’t afford to have the police involved.
‘What are we going to do?’
‘Gary says to take them to Hope Hospital and leave them there. You need to tidy up a bit.’ He looks down at my feet. ‘There’s a lot of blood on your carpet, might be hard to get out.’
My mind snaps into a vision of my mother sprinkling flour onto a red carpet stain, where my father’s wine glass lies tipped on its side. While she kneels busy and distracted, he is giving me that look. Fear tightens my chest, stops my breathing. A sharp pain doubles me in two; I stagger off to the toilet.
58
My new office is really a caravan, a portable home modified to do the job. It sits in proud isolation at the entrance to the park, out of sync with the serried ranks and regimented rows that confine the other buildings. At least I don’t have far to walk home, I can see my new accommodation from where I sit, an entirely unremarkable chalet, exactly like every other one on the site. Three from the end; one, two, three, I have to count in case I pick the wrong caravan and end up sleeping in someone else’s bed. Not that they would mind, or in most cases even notice. My neighbours are generally quite elderly.
Gary insisted I vacate the Salford flat as soon as I’d packed and cleaned up the mess. Here in Fleetwood, I’m considered far enough away from marauding thugs and enquiring policemen. News of the intruders’ condition is not encouraging. Both are still on the critical list, in intensive care. At least they’re not dead and I ought to be grateful for that.
I’m more or less on my own up here, no Carrie for company, no Gary popping in and out. I do have a handyman, Gerard. What exactly he does to warrant that title I’m yet to discover. Gerard seems to be even older than the clientele he serves. When he potters off to oil a sticking door I half expect never to see him alive again.
Ian, or one of the other lads, arrives most mornings with the post and any other documents I need to see. My new location is fine in terms of getting my work done and being out of harm’s way, but it feels like I’m in an old person’s prison from which there’s no escape.
Tim is still being an arse about Toby, still insisting I come to the house and only see him there. ‘Under supervision,’ he recites. ‘Under supervision – that’s what the court decided, can’t go against the court.’ He really is an even bigger arsehole now than he was when we were married. I can hear that woman’s tinny shriek in everything he says to me. Notwithstanding, I’ll be back down there again on Saturday and am looking forward to seeing Toby’s little face, hearing his vocal cascade.
A man is standing in the reception area. Outside I can see a towing van hitched to the back of an aged Volvo.
‘Do you have any overnight berths?’ he asks. At first I hear the question wrongly and wonder why he’s asking such a weird question. I have visions of babies newly born in the night.
‘No, sorry, residential only, no touring vans,’ I switch into caravan speak and resist admiring his dun coloured anorak as he slopes off.
It’s not a bad idea, though, touring vans, overnight stays, cash payments. I make a note to gradually build up this additional source of income in the accounts. Things are looking good in the caravan business, this could make them better. A quick mental calculation involving ten berths and two hundred and fifty days’ occupation at twenty pounds a night, that’s fifty thousand a year, worth having, or rather worth pretending to have.
The wind must have shifted. I can detect the slightly sweet smell of decomposition wafting over from the immense landfill site that neighbours us to the east. A train clatters purposefully along the track that divides us. In ten minutes it will reach the limit of its track and have to stop to avoid plunging into the Irish Sea. In ten more minutes it will make the return journey south to Blackpool and beyond.
After the hectic flight out of Salford, a couple of weeks of tranquillity and isolation have been a welcome relief. Now the novelty is wearing off. I need to make progress, stop hiding, become the hunter not the hunted. Now I know more about the WOS involvement in my situation I need to ask more questions. Miriam’s father, Martin’s father-in-law, is Lieutenant Colonel Algernon Wallace and this changes everything. The assumption I made that WOS were unwitting accomplices to the criminal goings on at Associated Composites no longer holds water. They are in it up to their necks.
After a distinguished military career, during which I feel sure he’ll have been responsible for awarding large contracts to WOS, Wallace joined the company as the director responsible for negotiating sales overseas. His biography, conveniently published on the British Army website, confirms all of this and more. The Gulf States he saw service in are all major customers of WOS armaments. I can’t be the first person to wonder about Wallace’s connections, after all, the information is out there for anyone to find. Maybe this sort of issue would be dealt with during an Office of Fair Trading investigation. WOS successfully resisted such an enquiry during my time at Landers Hoffman.
As I sit in the cabin, engulfed in the sickly odour, watching the sun slowly set, more of my past surfaces for a new look. Now I’m aware of Martin’s family connection with WOS, how does this modify my own view of events, beginning with Martin’s death? Did Wallace have his son-in-law murdered to protect himself and his n
efarious activities? Was Miriam a party to this? I find it hard to imagine anyone being so callous.
I think of Tim and Toby and the court and revise my opinion. If Tim had been having an affair, what would I have felt, what would I have been capable of doing? What am I capable of?
If Tim were dead then Toby would be all mine, it would be that simple. The thrill of this realisation is quickly followed by an admission that however convenient it might be, I would be sorry if Tim died and certainly not willing to actively contemplate murdering him, whatever the attraction.
Before I finish work for the day so that I can fit in a nice run before it gets too dark, I check my emails one last time. Among the usual promises of a better erection and a larger penis nestles a single item of note.
The device I left at the flat was successfully retrieved by Mick and taken to one of Gary’s mates for downloading. ‘If there’s anything on the recording he’ll find it’ was the promise, but he seems to be taking his time getting round to it. Now I have an email with a voice file attached. My heart is beating faster at the prospect of eavesdropping on Miriam and her dad.
A long frustrating silence is all that I’m hearing, but I can see that there’s over an hour of something on this recording. Five minutes in, I’m shocked to hear a voice, crystal clear and unmistakably Miriam Young’s.
‘This is my father,’ she says and I’m instantly transported back to discomfort and awkwardness. When I speak there’s an embarrassing period of coughing and throat clearing. My voice is tinny and cowering. I am making myself small in front of these people. By the time I’m finally invited to leave in no uncertain terms, the interview sits even more uncomfortably with me than it did at the time.
Had I known he would be there and who he was, I’d have been much more careful about what I said. As it is, I spill out everything I know and all that I conjecture. Why I should think I might have been among allies is a difficult one to answer now.
