by John Barlow
“There he is,” Steele says.
She stops, rewinds, plays.
2.10 a.m. The Porsche mounts the curb and drives headlong into the showroom’s entrance. The footage is low quality and the car seems to jerk forwards, Chaplin-style, before coming to an abrupt stop, its nose close up to the steel shutters. On another quarter of the screen the big sliding doors turn instantly into a wall of cascading crystal droplets, and a second later are a mound of shattered glass on the floor.
John remains in the car. For a while he doesn’t move. Then the door opens. His hands snake up onto the roof and he draws himself out in fitful, energy-sapping movements. His face is dark, smeared with what might be blood. And he’s drunk, mouth hanging open, eyes rolling, unfixed and unquestioning, as if he’s already forgotten that he’s just crashed the car.
His legs seem to give way and he catches himself, throwing his arms out onto the roof. He remains there for some time, his body rising and falling with fast, heavy breaths.
Then he’s rummaging in his jacket pockets. Pulls out a packet of cigarettes, standing upright now as he lights a fag, the packet and lighter both falling to the ground as he inhales. Then, for the first time, he looks at the showroom. And even through the rough, pixilated images of the video they can see, just for a second, a self-loathing so intense that all three of them, crouched around the monitor, wonder how low a man like John Ray can go, and whether it’s right that they are witnessing it.
Then he turns and staggers off down Hope Road, right in the middle of the street, as if he owns it but is leaving for the last time. They continue watching as he turns left past the White Horse and disappears.
Connie fast-forwards and they watch an accelerated summary of the next couple of hours. It’s not really necessary. They all know that the prodigal son is not coming back.
“Right,” she says, having slipped out the back and returning with a crowbar in her hands. “They’re towing the Porsche away. Can I start to secure the place?”
Baron nods, hardly blinking, and watches as she makes her way across the sales floor, the holding crowbar like a baseball bat. She aims it at the car-shaped bulge in the steel door, and swings. Since she arrived, Connie has been restrained and to-the-point. But now, as she lays into the metal, the showroom fills with the echoes of her anger, bare and undisguised, until it’s clear that she doesn’t care what she’s hitting, or what shape the door ends up.
“She’ll frighten the birds off,” Baron says.
“Eh?”
“Nothing. Let’s go.”
“John Ray?” Baron says, as Steele drives the short distance back to Millgarth. “Why was our investigative journalist interested in him? An easy way in?”
“Well, she had no problem getting into his trousers,” says Steele, turning left up a deserted Regent Street, the hefty brick bulk of police HQ already visible in the dawn sky and looking particularly cruel and ugly in the orange light.
“Someone like her doesn’t need an easy way in. She got into Lanny Bride’s party yesterday. You think she was on the guest list?”
Baron winds down his window, lets the cold air blow into his face. Jeanette Cormac had contacted him a week ago, said she wanted a chat about Tony Ray and crime in the city. He sent her away with a flea in her ear. A mistake. But what had she really wanted?
“She was on somebody’s hit list, is all we know. We’ve got two main suspects and we can’t find either of them.”
Baron lets the cold wind inveigle its way into his eyeballs. They’ve got Lanny Bride in the cells, dragged him in yesterday evening. But Dennis Reid wasn’t up at the golf club when they arrived with arrest warrants. He’d given them the slip. Then, before they had time to do anything about Lanny, Cormac’s dead body was called in. They’d been up at her rented cottage until two in the morning, after which the Super ordered them both to go home for a few hours’ sleep.
Baron hadn’t slept, though. He’d sat in a ridiculous armchair called Bjørn and stared out at the sleeping city two hundred feet below, a pallid web of empty streets that had cost him his marriage and his boys. How long would he be able to stand it, pushing the filth around those streets, never really changing anything, but knowing that without coppers the filth would become unbearable? By the time the call had come ‒ a Porsche found smashed into Tony Ray’s Motors, covered in blood ‒ he’d just about managed to get his eyes shut, still thinking about John Ray, but making absolutely no sense of it all.
“So,” he says, feeling the rush of cold morning air on his face as Steele pulls onto the roundabout at the bottom of the Headrow. “Friday morning, Roberto is found dead at the Park Lane. Lanny sends John Ray to investigate. But he also has this Reid guy come down, ex-IRA, heavy duty. Does Lanny already know there’s a journalist hanging around asking questions? She’s interested in the Leeds bombing, suspected IRA job. But does Lanny know that?”
“Google her,” Steele says, as if it’s obvious.
Baron, too tired to prickle at the idea of taking orders from Steele, does as he’s told. Less than a minute on his phone and he has Jeanette Cormac’s name linked with Sheenan’s.
“The Bookseller-dot-com,” he reads. “Contract signed late last year to write a book about ex-IRA bomber Bernard Sheenan’s life. The Reluctant Bomber.”
“If we can find out that easy, so can Lanny.”
“Look,” Baron says, holding the phone up. “Picture search as well. There she is. Not difficult to recognise, is she?”
“Especially if she gatecrashes your golf party. I wonder what she said to Lanny?”
“Dunno, but whoever killed her wants us to know he did it. Bullets in the shin? The champagne cork? First Roberto, now her.”
“And you know what the Super’s gonna say?” Steele says, breaking into a macabre grin as he turns into the car park behind Millgarth.
“Oh, I know,” Baron says, as the car comes to a halt. “One more and it’s a serial killer.”
“Aren’t we forgetting Sheenan, in Ireland?” Steele says, tossing the keys up into the air and catching them with a deft swipe of the hand. “If he was the first, that’s three already.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
He stares at a tiny hole in the corrugated iron roof. A chunk of light cuts through the darkness, a thread of watery blue light hitting the floor in front of him. His eyes hurt, but they’re wide open, despite the crippling effects of last night’s vodka. From somewhere or other comes the scratching of vermin and the faintest of squeaks, their newborns crying for food. The air is damp and smells of oil.
He’s back where it all began, just half a mile from the showroom. If Baron had thought to search the area, he might well have found John here, sprawled on the oil-stained concrete floor, his head resting on an old cardboard box full of junk, and beside him a green Kawasaki 750 shrouded in a large grey blanket.
When Dad had arrived in Leeds in 1963, fresh-faced from Franco’s Spain and eager to make a name for himself, he rented this place as a storage unit. Just about big enough to fit a car or a small van inside, it has never changed, hidden at the back of a warren of old red brick workshops. There’s a tyre retreading workshop here, and behind it a place where old washing machines come to die. The Ray name has never been on the lease, always rented cash in hand, a secret space to hoard whatever needed hoarding.
John reaches up, feels the gash on his forehead crusted with blood, its edges like puckered lips. He stabs his finger into the wound, his body jerking with sudden pain, like a cold knife slicing through flesh.
Jesus, he’s thirsty. His head is spinning, and he’s sprawled on the floor, drifting in and out of sleep. Moments of sudden expansiveness, when it seems as if he has all the answers, give way to blind confusion, and he’s left wondering who the hell he is, and why Jeanette is dead. Alone in the dark, he has gone over every aspect of his dad’s life, dredging up memories he hardly knew he had. But still he doesn’t believe it. It’s just not Dad’s style.
1985: Tony
Ray, nice suit, cheery face, emerges from the Old Bailey an innocent man. Even the press seemed to love him, treating his acquittal as the satisfying end to the Tony Ray Show, two weeks of evidence that all seemed to point to a cocky, low-level criminal whose only real crime was trusting too many people as he moved up from knock-off perfume to banknotes. The Artful Dodger, the papers called him, still not a single conviction to his name! Every photo was the same, neat tie, plain, straightforward smile, nothing extravagant. The perfect criminal.
He sits up, hears the rats again, wonders where they are. Pats his jacket for fags, knowing there are none. Instead he pulls out the champagne cork that he took from beside Roberto’s body and turns it in his fingers as he thinks, trying to put some sort of order into everything that’s gone through his mind since he collapsed on the floor, so drunk he could hardly walk, his face smeared with blood and tears.
When he was a kid people would say now that’s a grand coat, John! There’d be a hint of distaste in their voices, knowing that the coat was probably nicked. And when he was in town with his parents there’d be the odd nudge, eyes following them around. At home everything was stolen or counterfeit, although he didn’t know it at the time. There’d be toys in November, big, complicated ones in boxes you could hardly get your arms around, the kind of stuff kids pray they’ll get on Christmas Day. His mum too, always trying on new fur coats or evening dresses like the ones film stars used to wear, laughing as she gave everybody a twirl. But the next day the dresses and coats would have disappeared.
Joe’s Kawasaki smells of oil. Two years it’s been here, since the day he was shot in the head at point blank range, someone or other he’d crossed, case never solved. Joe, always keen to follow in his father’s footsteps, had got his head blown off. But what footsteps were they? Who was Tony Ray?
By the time John was in his teens, he knew his dad was not on the level. Second-hand car dealer was the official line. But it wasn’t difficult to piece the truth together: thief, conman, rogue. But he was also Dad. He’d be there in the mornings reading the paper, and he’d normally be home for tea. It was just a job, and eventually it had led to counterfeiting banknotes. With that his reputation was made, right down to a starring role at the Bailey.
The light is getting stronger. He turns, so many aches he doesn’t know which part of him hurts the most, and yanks the blanket off the motorbike. It seems remarkably clean, the chrome catching what little light there is, its green tank fat and full of fury, a massive, obscenely powerful machine. But it also looks pristine, untouched, like a toy right out of the box. Another memory: scale models that his dad used to import from the Philippines and Hong Kong, cars and bikes, knock-offs of famous brands that would go straight onto market stalls for the Christmas rush.
He runs a hand over the front tyre of the bike. Can’t a person just be who he seems? Tony Ray, dealer in toy cars and dodgy perfume, now slumped in a chair at the nursing home, dressed in multicoloured shell-suits and hardly able to speak. There was always so much fun in Dad; it was as if he’d been born for the specific purpose of being Tony Ray. He was the real deal, the perfect rendition of himself. Even when John was at Cambridge, desperate to avoid the shadow of his larger-than-life father, the thought of Tony Ray in his shirt garters holding that magnifying glass up to a fake Chanel box and admiring the printing still made him smile.
Was it an illusion? What if it was nothing but a facade? Had Tony Ray been involved in bringing Semtex into the country for the IRA? If so, what else had he done? All the cocky criminal bullshit, was it a front? Had he counterfeited his own innocence? Because if so, Tony Ray had not only fooled police and newspaper editors for forty years, he’d fooled everyone else around him. Including his son.
“No,” he says, managing to kneel up, his hands resting on the seat of his brother’s bike. “Joe was the shit. Not Dad.”
He gets to his feet, ignoring the killing ache that shoots across his kidneys and up into his spine. Reaching out for the handlebars he realises he still has the cork in his hand. He doesn’t dare look at it, slips it back in his pocket as if he’d rather it didn’t exist.
It does, though. And he knows what it means. He just doesn’t want to accept it. Not just because of his dad, either.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Den waits in the main entrance at Millgarth, no clearance to go through on her own. There’s a drunk slumped on one of the white plastic chairs bolted to the floor over by the wall, but no one else on this side of the security desk, the late-night rush of brawlers and trouble-causers all safely down in the holding cells. The uniform on the reception doesn’t know her, must be new this year.
Another cigarette? She’s been outside for a couple already. Dragged in at six in the morning, and now she feels like a naughty schoolgirl outside the headmaster’s office. Whatever they want her for, they’re keeping her waiting. Shit, shit.
Has she done anything wrong? Of course she has. She’s been meddling in police business, and this is the second time she’s been called in to explain herself. But she tries to put it into context. After dropping John off at the home yesterday evening, she’d tipped Baron off about Dennis Reid, the ex-IRA bloke that had frightened the living daylights out of John’s dad. Plus, it was all pointing towards the Leeds bombing. She’d told Baron that too. If it was about the bomb, she’d given him two brilliant leads. Perhaps they’ve got her down here to say thanks, she tells herself with grim irony, deciding to have another smoke after all.
When she finally walks into her old Superintendent’s office, Den has to conceal an involuntary shiver. It’s not that she’s intimidated by authority. But it was here in this room that she’d risked her career for John. As soon as she’d started seeing him, she’d requested an official integrity interview, setting out the precise details of her relationship with John Ray and his family, how she’d found him, covered in the blood of his murdered brother, and how, in the days and weeks that followed, she’d nursed him through it, the only person he could talk to. Their relationship had grown out of that, out of trust and dependency and the shared horror of it all.
The three senior officers who heard her case gave her the all-clear, with the normal rider that she should stay out of any investigation involving the Rays and any known associates. Now she’s with a different force, which is just as well, because she’s up to her neck in the Rays and their known associates.
Deputy Superintendent Shirley Kirk had been one of the officers at that interview. She hasn’t changed. Her short dark hair is still meticulous, her austere wardrobe still ranges from charcoal grey to black, and the good looks she was well-known for twenty years ago still just about visible beneath the precision of her gaunt, almost fleshless face.
Six-thirty in the morning and she’s at her desk, a cup of coffee in front of her, looking focussed and alert. Early starts like these are exactly why she’s risen so high at Millgarth. She’s probably been here half the night. No wonder she never had kids, not much of a private life either, apparently.
“Good to see you again, Denise,” says Kirk with a smile. “How’s life over the Pennines?”
It’s not really a question. She looks straight back down at the file on her desk. “Take a seat.”
Baron is also here, leaning against the wall behind the Super, dour and ashen, as if he hasn’t slept for a day or two. He squeezes out a smile, part sympathy, part apology. That doesn’t auger well. Den lowers herself onto the chair in front of the desk and tries not to look apprehensive.
She knew Baron would be here. But still her heart sinks. This is the man she had an affair with, right as his marriage was falling apart. She never asked him to leave his wife. But he did. Then she dumped him for John Ray. There’s so much water under the bridge she doesn’t know where to begin, only that she wishes she’d stayed in Manchester this week, or gone walking in the Lakes on her own. Whatever this is about, it involves John. It always does.
“Sorry to drag you out of bed,” Kirk says, doubl
e-checking something on the page in front of her before looking up. “I hear you’ve been helping John Ray with his enquiries, so to speak. The murder of Roberto Swales. True?”
“Yes. Ma’am. Sort of.”
“You spoke to Inspector Baron about it yesterday, I hear. Care to fill me in?”
“John’s been trying to find out who killed Roberto. He was an old friend of John’s, from when he was a kid. I was over here visiting my sister. John wanted to talk to someone. Couple of times. That’s about it.”
Kirk nods.
“Oh, by the way, thanks for your help with our enquiries. The tip-off about Dennis Reid, very good. Heard anything else about him? Where he might be staying?”
Den shakes her head.
“Oh,” the Super continues, “and the Leeds bombing. Very useful. The investigation’s coming together. But the thing is, Detective Sergeant,” and she puts both hands around the mug of coffee, criss-crossing her fingers, “I’m not sure the Manchester Force would see things the same way. Involving yourself in an illicit manhunt instigated by Lanny Bride and involving one of the city’s best known criminal families?”
Den opens her mouth, discovers that she doesn’t know how to respond, and closes it again. She glances up at Baron, but he’s staring down at the carpet as if it’s hypnotising him.
The Super takes a sip of coffee.
“How well do you know Jeanette Cormac?”
“I don’t. Met her once.”
“But you know she’s been seeing John Ray? Staying at his flat?”
“Yes.”
“And presumably you know she has been investigating Bernard Sheenan and Leeds bombings.”
“Y-yes,” Den says, a little confused. “I mean, yes, I told Steve that last night…”
“Indeed. You also told him that there was a possibility that the Ray family were involved in the shipment of Semtex used in the bombing. Let me see,” she says, pointedly taking her time to find the relevant note, “you visited John Ray’s father at Oakland’s Nursing Home yesterday, just as a man fitting Dennis Reid’s description was leaving. We’ve got the security video. Tell me, Den, when did you last speak to John Ray?”
