by John Barlow
But his dad? He never dealt in drugs, never got involved in prostitution. His forte was counterfeiting, toys, electronics, perfume, money. It was as if even his criminal career was infused with Old Spice, mild and old-worldly, like an Ealing comedy. Dodgy? Of course he was. The sepia-tinged image is bullshit. John knows that. He’s not stupid. But that doesn’t make Tony Ray a terrorist. Semtex for the IRA? It doesn’t fit. He can’t make it fit.
Andrew Holt appears at the door. His step slows, both men looking first at each other then across at Tony, as if to deflect their mutual embarrassment.
“Popular, you are today, Tony!” Holt says, as if the old man can hear.
He goes over to the wardrobe and starts going through the suits, ignoring John.
“I thought you were off duty,” John says.
“I am,” Holt says, taking a pinstriped two-piece out and dusting it down. “I forgot this. He’s having it dry-cleaned. Graeme’s collecting it first thing tomorrow, I said I’d leave it out ready.”
“Ah, Mr Thornton, the old soldier. You’ve been helping him, I hear.”
“Graeme’s a good bloke. And he’s good for your dad. His face lights up every time Graeme walks through the door. I think your dad likes the fact that he’s trying to make a fresh start, his own business, pick himself up. People respect that. It shows character.”
“But it’s not his own business. He works for Carr’s Dry Cleaners, doesn’t he?”
Holt is choosing shirts to send for pressing.
“I don’t know the details,” he says, delving deep into the wardrobe. “But anything that puts your dad in a good frame of mind, I’m in favour of.”
John nods.
“That reminds me,” he says. “Dad had a visitor this morning. See him, did you? Because he didn’t put Dad in a very good frame of mind.”
Holt starts fussing with the shirts, their wire hangers getting tangled as he tries to count them.
“I would have asked you this morning,” John adds, “but you vanished into thin air.”
Holt lays the shirts on the bed.
“What happened this morning,” he says, speaking low, something hateful and contemptuous in his voice, “was that someone doesn’t want your father to live out his life in peace. How many reasons might there be for that?”
“Reaping what you sow, eh? I thought you didn’t judge.”
“He that sowest to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption. Take away the eths and there’s a lot of common sense in the Bible.”
“Forget the Bible. What did the guy say?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
“So,” Holt says, holding his arms wide, almost laughing with derision, “beat it out of me. Isn’t that what your type do? That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Violent men and how their lives end? The sword shall perish with the sword…’”
“Do you practice biblical clichés at bedtime?”
Holt grabs the shirts, lays them over a vacant chair along with the suit.
“I don’t have to listen to this.”
“I read the letter again last night,” says John. “That was full of clichés too, you smug, illiterate twat. You don’t care about good and bad. You care about your own place in Heaven. He that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.”
A sudden rush of anger takes him by surprise. He forces himself to stay sitting down, just in case he feels tempted to pay Holt back for that letter. It was written more than quarter of a century ago, when Holt was just a kid, but the effect on John Ray had been profound. In those three cruel, badly written paragraphs was the suggestion that he’d never really be free of his dad and his family. And now he knows it was true. Every word of it.
“You read the Bible, do you?” Holt says, sneering from the relative safety of the doorway, the door itself wide open.
A moment’s respite. Both men remain there, staring at each other, all pretence now gone. Their mutual loathing is out in the open, and it seems to release something in Holt. The drop-in centre, all touchy-feely, the joss sticks and cups of tea, it’s all a front. He’s worse than his father ever was, blinded by his own self-righteousness. The question is, how far would he go?
“What did they say, you know, about Roberto?” John asks.
He watches the confusion spread across Holt’s face.
“Roberto?” John repeats, his tone reticent, as if trying to smooth over of the unpleasantness between them. “He’d been coming to see you. So you went to the police, right? Once you knew he’d been murdered?”
Holt turns and is gone.
“You never told ’em, Andrew!” John shouts. “You never went to the bloody police, did you!” He springs to his feet, bawling down the corridor after Holt. “Good and bad, eh? You fucking hypocrite!”
He closes the door, rests his head against it, smelling his own sour breath.
“See that, Dad?” he says. “There walks a man of God.”
He senses movement behind him, his dad’s body shifting in the armchair, the faint clack of his mouth opening. Tony Ray is awake.
“I’ve been talking to a redhead, a real beauty. She told me some things that I didn’t like. But perhaps they’re true. Now I don’t know what to believe.” He bangs his forehead against the door three times. “Dad?”
But when he turns and looks, his father’s eyes are closed.
John walks over to him, leans down and embraces him, lips brushing the old man’s thin, close-cropped hair.
“I’m gonna to find out, once and for all. You hear me?” He holds him closer, tighter. “I know you can hear me, Dad. I’m going to sort this out. And they’re all gonna leave you in peace.”
He’s back in the car.
I don’t know what to believe.
It’s not true. Not quite.
He’s still hiding behind a wall of doubt, the same wall he’s hidden behind for most of his life. But now it’s coming down. He’s got to be sure, though. Absolutely sure.
Jeanette knows more than she told him. Ring her? No, this has to be face to face.
His hands are on the steering wheel, and he’s gasping for breath, trying to think, but nothing coming, only the thought of the bomb, that lad walking out amid the devastation, a small bundle in his arms.
He feels the nausea overwhelm him, a sudden blood-rush of horror that courses through his body. His hands are sweaty, slipping on the fat leather steering wheel as he tries to remain upright. A Porsche! Flash motor from his flash showroom, his business, his life… and all of it a sham, one that he didn’t even know was a sham. No; he did know, but he had never admitted it to himself, could never bring himself to make the connection.
There he remains, slumped at the wheel, shivering with cold. His body is so heavy and lethargic that when he tries to raise an arm it feels like he’s in chains.
Jeanette knows the truth. She must do. Whatever game she’s playing.
Finally he pulls himself up in the seat, staring straight ahead, avoiding the mirror. He’s got to see her.
The silver Porsche pulls away from Oaklands Nursing Home with a low growl. And as it goes, Andrew Holt watches from an upstairs window.
Chapter Thirty-six
Jeanette’s Toyota is outside when he gets there. It’s not really a village, just a couple of rows of old weavers’ cottages looking out across what he supposes is a rolling swathe of farmland, although in the darkness it is almost uniformly black, with the occasional pin-prick of yellow light. In the distance Leeds is a smudge of ethereal grey, its modern high-rise towers majestic but packed tight together, as if for protection.
He can imagine Jeanette up here looking out towards the city, knowing that the truth lies somewhere within, that everything she’s looking for is there, and she simply has to walk down the right streets and talk to the right people. Perhaps she knew all along, and she was only here to confirm what Sheenan had told her. Then something had scared her. She’ll be in there n
ow, packing her bags, ready to move on, another story, another city with its own strata of filth to dig down into.
He turns, reads the numbers on the doors. The cottages on both sides have lights on, Jeanette’s place too. Everyone’s at home tonight.
He rings her cellphone first: unavailable.
The front garden is tiny, little more than a yard. He opens the gate as noisily as he can, not wanting to unnerve her. Knocks hard, three times, calling out her name. Nothing. Tries the door. It isn’t locked.
He opens it, still knocking, saying her name again as he enters. There’s no hall, and he find himself in a living room, decked out in the tasteful but bland furnishings of a rental property, polished wooden floor, brown sofa, russet curtains.
The smell isn’t right, though. Dull and acrid. Two paces and he’s in the middle of the room. The smell isn’t strong, but it’s not right. There’s a metallic edge to it, and it’s setting something off in his head. It only takes a second.
His body reacts before his brain, the bile rising in his throat, hands beginning to shake. He grabs the edge of the sofa, his legs almost giving way, the sudden thump of blood in his ears sending him dizzy.
She’s behind the sofa, her body flat out on the floor, hair forming a cushion for her head. Her eyes are wide open, staring up at the ceiling, dumb and expressionless.
Dropping to his knees he cups her face in his hands, tears already dripping down onto her cheeks. She’s cold, but her flesh is soft, that dusty smoothness to her skin, and her angular beauty now like a mask. He lifts her head a fraction, snot and tears dribbling from him as he tries to say something. But he can’t hear his own voice, his ears full of a drumming, incessant noise.
He kisses her on the forehead, his body shaking so hard that his mouth bangs into her. He pulls her closer, running his hands around her head, his fingers digging deep into her hair.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry…” he cries, pushing his face onto hers. He wants to bite her, to eat into her and stay here, sharing the pain, to leave this behind and go with her.
Because this is his fault.
And then, as he collapses down onto her, his forearms resting on the floor, he feels the wetness soaking through his sleeves. He struggles up until he’s kneeling beside her again, gasping for breath, his eyes stinging with tears, almost blinding him.
Wiping a hand across his eyes he realises he’s covered in blood, sticky and cold. It’s on his face, jacket, trousers, everywhere. She’s been shot in the chest and lies in a sump of her own blood that extends from both sides of her torso, perfectly symmetrical, like narrow wings on the floor beneath her.
He pushes himself away until his back is against the wall, and starts to bang his head against his knees, sobbing through his mouth, feeling his kneecaps pummelling his face, again and again. Tries to catch his breath, hardly able to look at her body. Then he’s pawing at the wall behind him, trying to get up. His hands find the door frame. A lamp crashes down. He sees it fall, hears nothing. When he finally makes it to his feet, he sees the gunshot in her shin, centred, clean, accurate. And at her side, lying in the blood, is a champagne cork.
Staggering to the door. Then somehow he’s outside, car key in his hand. There’s blood all over the keys. His hands are shaking so much he needs to hold the key with both hands to get it in the ignition. Great cries of anguish are coming from his mouth. He can feel the sound, his neck straining with the effort, the ringing in his ears.
First gear, foot to the floor. The car shudders violently then shoots forwards, side-tailing into a dry stone wall with a thud.
Speed takes over. Instinct and fear, second, third, fourth… His mind is leaping forward, starting to think.
Just drive.
PART THREE - SUNDAY
Chapter Thirty-seven
First light. The time of day when nobody should be awake, the indigo sky hauling itself out of a deep, satisfying sleep, and you like a voyeur watching it.
Baron’s been here plenty of times. As a young, ambitious detective he’d be out at all hours, arriving home at four, five, six in the morning, not a chance of sleep. He’d wait for the dawn to come, mugs of coffee and the TV on low, hoping the boys’d be up nice and early, staggering down, puffy eyed, arses hanging out of their pyjamas. And as the sun came up over the Vale of York he’d watch the sky mutate from black to pink, knowing that only the coffee was stopping him from grinding to a slack-jawed halt, his brain fuzzy and useless, but unable to switch off.
He’s not at home today, though. Not that home, at least. He’s in town, less than a mile away from the Ikea-stuffed studio flat where he’s been living for the past couple of years, twenty-fifth floor of a new tower block, glass lifts, potted plants in the corridors, laundry service. A crippling second mortgage for the privilege of a posh Leeds bachelor pad that he hates.
These days he prefers Millgarth’s ugly, functional spaces, its plastic chairs and green-tinged corridors, watery soup and Kit Kats from the vending machine. As the weeks and months of enforced separation from the boys had become a year, then two, work kept him going. And the Super understood this. A young, dedicated DI living on his own? He gets all the messy cases. What’s he got to go home to?
DS Steele blows his nose. The two of them have been standing here a while without speaking, and there’s nothing Steele hates more than long, meditative silences. They make him jumpy, as if only bad things can come from silence.
“Should’ve gone through the side,” he says.
Baron makes no reply, lets the final remnants of the night disperse around them. Then, as they stand looking at the wreckage outside Tony Ray’s Motors, he realises just how quiet it is. Too quiet.
When he was still living up at the farmhouse, those early mornings were deafening. It would start with a single bird. He used to wait there, out in the garden, see if he could catch the very first note. Within a minute every bird would be at full tilt, something manic about it, as if they were trying to outdo each other, caught up in the pure joy of blasting the sky with their juvenile song. It always amazed him that no one in the countryside ever woke up during the dawn chorus. Perhaps real country folk did, nature’s alarm clock, the rhythms of the land… But Stella and the boys? They never stirred. His sons would never know that it is birdsong, not a Gruffalo alarm clock, that heralds in each new day.
“Side?” he says, resigning himself to the fact that he’ll get no more peace from Steele.
“If he wanted to wreck the place, why not aim for the glass walls?” says Steele.
They’re looking at a silver Porsche, which has been driven straight at the roll-down steel door of the showroom’s main entrance. The car rests at a slight angle, both headlights smashed and the front end knocked out of shape. The metal shutter, meanwhile, bears the full impression of the car’s front end, and behind it the automatic glass doors that used to sweep open without a sound have been reduced to a pile of fragments on the floor, the polished concrete glinting with tiny specs of light.
“Perhaps the impact would have been too much,” Baron says, as they move closer to the car. “That glass is pretty thick. He had it made specially.”
They’re waiting for forensics to arrive, and there’s nothing much to do, apart from wonder where the hell John Ray has gone.
“He was thinking straight, then? Goes for the door? Deliberate?” Steele says, moving forward and peering in through the car’s windscreen. “Any road, it was bad enough. There’s blood everywhere, and some of it looks like it’s dripped. Johnny boy’s smashed himself up bad.”
“If it was Johnny boy.”
Behind them a cab pulls up. Out steps Connie, stern-faced, her hair a bit of a mess. She reminds Baron of the gypsies in Opera North’s Carmen, which he’s seen several times, preferring random opera at The Grand to his Ikea flat.
“She’s probably not been to bed,” Steele says under his breath, “y’know what Spaniards are like.”
The only Spaniards that Baron knows are the Ray
family. He hopes, for the sake of the entire Iberian Peninsular, that they are not typical.
Connie is in tight black jeans and a flaming red mohair jumper which she re-arranges on her shoulders as she approaches them. If she’s Carmen, she’s a very pissed-off version.
“Sorry to get you out of bed,” Steele says, doing a terrible job of hiding his fascination with her face, which is fresh and sculpted, and in the delicate light of the vanishing night could be the face of a geisha.
“I’d only just got in,” she says, looking with mild disgust at the Porsche as Steele takes a moment to digest this thought. “Is that John’s blood?”
“Would you be surprised if it was?” Baron asks.
She blanks him, hunting for keys in the pockets of her jeans with one hand, and fast dialling John with the other. But she’s been doing that for the last ten minutes.
“He’s not picking up,” she says. “We can get in round the back.”
By the time forensics are crawling over the Porsche, Connie, Baron and Steele are in the little office at the back of the showroom. She’s been chain-smoking since they got inside the building, and they look at the screen of the security video through a light blue haze.
“Cigarettes and Rizzlas?” Steele says, noticing the packet of cigarette papers in Connie’s bag, which lies open beside the video.
“Yeah,” she says, closing the bag. “It’s to test the merchandise. I run a drugs cartel on the side, didn’t you know?”
He narrows his eyes, plays hard-cop.
She likes him. Pity he’s policía…
Then they return to the screen. She fast-forwards through yesterday evening as they watch the four quarters of the screen.
