by Graham Marks
He looked over at Paul, eyeing him up and down. ‘Paul, right?’ Slow, soft American accent, like wood that had been sanded down and polished.
It was Sky.
Paul nodded. ‘Yeah. And you must be, um, you must be Sky.’
The radio was on. Green Day’s ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’. Neither of them spoke, almost like they were both listening to the music, waiting for the track to finish.
Sky took a small tin out of his jacket pocket and Paul saw that there was a packet of liquorice papers and some hand-rolling tobacco inside.
‘You smoke, Paul?’
‘No.’
‘Sensible. Wish I didn’t.’ Sky held up the cigarette he’d made. ‘You mind?’
‘Go ahead.’ Paul opened the window next to him an inch or two.
Sky wound down his window a bit, then took out a bronze Zippo, flicked it open and lit the cigarette. He inhaled, blowing a stream of smoke out of the van. Paul watched and waited. Everything the man did seemed to be measured, calculated, unhurried, done to his own personal timescale.
‘You weren’t ticked off at being kidnapped?’
The question wasn’t what he’d been expecting – he’d been expecting something like ‘Why d’you want in with Omega Place?’ It took Paul by surprise. He started to answer, then stopped for a moment to think to remember how he had felt at the time. ‘Yeah… to begin with, I was pretty pissed off. Scared the shit out of me.’
‘And then?’
‘Realised I must’ve looked suspicious, following Terri.’
‘You’d seen them before.’ A statement, not a question.
‘Yeah, in Graingertown.’
‘That was careless of them.’ Sky tapped ash out of the window.
‘Not really. I was right in the back of a doorway, covered by a cardboard box. No way they’d have seen me.’
‘So it was just one of those rare, rare things, like a totally pure coincidence, that you saw them again?’
Paul studied the man, staring at his face, searching his pale brown eyes, looking for some kind of sign as to what was going on in his head. Did this Sky bloke really think that he was up to something? He wondered what Terri and Rob had said… surely they must’ve talked him up, otherwise why bother to bring him this far? Paul looked over at the red car. Had his fate already been decided, and was Sky just playing with him before delivering the message?
‘You can believe what you like, mate. You and Orlando.’ Paul nodded at the Almera. ‘They trusted me, and I never let them down. I proved myself. Ask them.’
‘I did. But why should I trust you, guy?’ The Zippo came out and was flicked into life again. ‘Why should I put my neck on the line on their say-so? See my point of view? Entirely selfish, I know, but that’s how I got this far. Doing it my way.’
‘You think I’ll let you down, or you think I’d, like, go to the cops? Is that it?’
‘Maybe you don’t know… they didn’t tell you… but I’ve been on the outside a very long time. Like more than thirty-five years. Since I was nineteen and went over the border into Canada, rather than go and fight in that bullshit war in Vietnam.’ Sky saw Paul’s frown and smiled slowly. ‘Yeah, I really am as old as I look… and there’s a part of me, the leery, suspicious and goddam paranoid part of me, that’s kept my bones safe all these years. And it doesn’t believe in coincidences and the right people turning up at just the right time. Like you, my friend… just like you.’
Paul waited, expecting the axe to fall, but Sky looked away and didn’t say anything. Was that it? What was he supposed to do – just walk off? Not him.
‘You could give me a chance, couldn’t you? Someone must’ve given you a chance once, let you prove them wrong. Why not me?’
Sky narrowed his eyes, fine lines radiating out across the side of his face in a fan, and smoothed his moustache with his right hand. The very picture of a man thinking hard. Was he taking the piss? Paul didn’t know him well enough to know.
‘In a strange kinda way…’ Sky turned to look at Paul, ‘… in a strange way you kinda remind me of me at your age. I was in Washington D.C. then, burning my draft card – a war resister, not some chickenshit draft dodger, or some dumbass boy with a rich daddy, like George W. We had something to protest about back then, because they wanted to take the ultimate freedom away from us, sending us to die in the jungles…’
Another silence, during which Paul wondered what the hell all this stuff that happened a couple of lifetimes ago had to do with him now, and the DJ started playing an Oasis track.
‘Why d’you want to come in with us? You want to change things, mess with the status quo?’
‘Me?’ Another surprise question. What was the right answer? How the hell was he supposed to know, and did he care? As Paul sat back and looked out of the van, something his dad had often told him, a quote he’d seen in some magazine and cut out, came back to him. Any fool can tell the truth, it said, but it takes a clever man to lie well. What was the honest truth about why he wanted in? Paul looked back at Sky.
‘I dunno about changing things… I liked what it said in the Manifesto. I did good, you know, up in Leeds and stuff, it was a blast. And I need somewhere to stay.’
Sky made another thinking face as he nodded to himself. ‘And Terri is quite cute, which is another way of looking at it.’ He rolled up his window and opened the door. ‘Get your bag.’
‘What?’
‘I’m giving you a chance.’
12
Monday 31st July, St Martin’s Lane, London
Nick was late. Henry Garden had got to the phone booth at around five to seven and had been hanging round like some sad, lovelorn teenager, waiting for the phone to ring, ever since. About five minutes ago it had occurred to him that he’d either got the time or the place wrong, but, as he’d shredded the email printout, there was no way of checking for sure.
As the seconds built steadily into minutes, the temptation to cross the road and buy a packet of cigarettes and a disposable lighter was pretty intense. But he didn’t dare move. Not because he didn’t want to give way to the little devil on his shoulder but just in case the call did, finally, come through while he was away. If he didn’t pick up PDQ, Nick would give him a load of crap, and after the day he’d had that was the last thing he wanted. Really.
It was almost a quarter past seven when the phone rang. Garden pulled the booth’s door open and almost pounced on the receiver. It was, he registered as he picked it up, unpleasantly tacky. With the door closed the confined space smelled like an ashtray, which, looking at the ground, was what it was. Garden’s nostrils pricked and synapses snapped together in his brain as he breathed in deeply.
‘Nick?’
‘Yes.’
‘You did say seven o’clock?’
‘I was delayed. Unavoidably.’
The day Nicholas Harvey apologised, thought Garden as he took a paper handkerchief from the packet in his suit pocket and wrapped it round the receiver, would be the day you could ice-skate in hell.
‘You got my message on Friday, then, Nick?’
‘I did.’
‘I thought I might hear from you over the weekend.’
‘Well, you thought wrong, sunshine. I had a bit of electronic housekeeping to do… covering my tracks, so to speak.’
‘It’s serious, then?’
‘You bet your life, Henry old son…’
There was a pause, one of those almost-silences in which all you could really hear was static. Like when someone puts their hand over the mouthpiece to talk about you.
‘Nick? Are you there?’
‘Yeah, sure. Look, tell me what happened on Friday, and what’s happened since, Henry. All the detail.’
‘Not a lot to add to what I said on Friday, except that I gather Markham has set in motion this taskforce. Put some junior officer in charge, so may not be taking the whole thing as seriously as he might. That’s the scuttlebutt, anyway. But, as you might imagine, I’m
keeping as clear of all this as I can.’
‘Don’t get too far away from events. I need to be kept in the loop on this one, Henry… right in the loop. And I’m relying on you like never before, OK? So just exactly how did they find out about Omega Place?’
Garden’s eyes were drawn to the blanket of tart cards Blutacked to the wall in front of him, his concentration momentarily distracted by the display of flesh. He looked away.
‘Someone found some flyers or leaflets and stickers during a raid on a squat, apparently. It was the mention of the RPAs that set the cat among the pigeons.’
‘I’ll bet.’
‘I thought “Omega Place” was just a code name, Nick. Not real, not an actual thing.’
‘True enough, Henry, that’s what it was supposed to be. Originally. Shit happens, though… isn’t that what they say?’
Jane Mercer looked up from the document she was reading as the door to her office opened and Ray Salter, her second-in-command, came in. She watched him pull out a chair and sit down.
‘Wild goose well and truly chased, boss.’
‘Translation?’
‘You asked me to look into the name, Omega Place?’ Mercer nodded.
‘Well, it turns up in a grand total of twenty-three locations throughout mainland UK. From West Lothian in the north to Tiverton in the south and lots of places in between.’
‘Anything in London?’
‘Yup.’ Salter flicked through the file he was carrying, pulled out a sheet of paper and slid it across the desk. ‘A tiny little cul de sac at the bottom of the Caledonian Road, the scuzzy end. It’s ringed in red, for ease of location…’
Ignoring the comment, Mercer examined the printout of the map. ‘You been to take a look at it yet?’
Salter shook his head. ‘Not yet, boss.’
Mercer sat back, pointing at the file. ‘You leaving that for me?’
‘With pleasure.’ Salter put the file on the desk and stood up.
‘Have you started looking into James Baker’s past?’
‘All I’ve got so far is in there with whatever the Threat Evaluation lot gave us.’ Salter nodded at the file. ‘Basically, the only extra thing I managed to add to it, apart from some stuff from when he was at Birmingham, was his birth certificate. Or at least a copy of it. His middle name’s Hudson… James Hudson Baker.’
Mercer reached over for the file. ‘And nothing to show that James Hudson Baker ever lived anywhere called Omega Place?’
‘No such luck, boss.’
‘OK, see you in our new accommodation tomorrow.’ ‘How many others have we got?’ Salter stopped at the door.
‘Two, John Perry and Tony Castleton.’
‘Very generous.’
‘Inordinately.’ Mercer sat back in her chair. ‘We are going to have our work cut out for us.’
‘Don’t stay too late, boss.’
As the door closed behind Salter, Mercer rifled through the file until she came across the birth certificate; opening it out she saw that James Baker’s mother’s maiden name had been Hudson, which explained that. A couple of pages later she found a reference to the fact that both Mr and Mrs Baker were deceased and that James had been an only child. So the family wasn’t going to be much help.
Tidying up the papers and closing the file, Mercer wondered what and who James Baker was. Because, whoever he turned out to be, he’d somehow managed to get hold of some highly classified material and thereby yanked the chain of some people with very short tempers. Real Rottweilers. Unfortunately for James, because his were the only prints that had been found and identified, he was the one everybody now had in their sights. And when they caught him, which they probably would, life was going to get fairly unpleasant.
13
Monday 31st July, Kingsland Road, east London
Sky turned the car off a main road and into a nondescript street, like almost every other one they’d driven down since they’d left the car park, and Paul still had no idea where he was. Sat in the back, with Rob and Terri, he’d tried to take in his surroundings, get to grips with the concept that he was actually in London – more accurately, driving through some drab bit of it – but he was finding it difficult.
All he’d seen since they’d left the M1 was mile after mile of the monotonous, low-rise housing and strips of shops that lined the roads. Roads, it seemed, that were filled with a stop-start blanket of cars. He’d seen nothing that looked so very different from home and he didn’t want to appear naive by asking too many questions about where they were. Certainly not in front of Rob, although he’d now fallen asleep, head lolling forward like someone had taken the bones out of his neck. He seemed to be able to catch a nap whenever the opportunity arose. Another of his odd talents.
Paul was sitting behind Sky, who whistled through his teeth as he drove, but throughout the journey he’d kept looking out of the corner of his eye at the man in the passenger seat. Orlando. He’d hardly said a word to anyone since Paul had got in the car and been introduced – and that had only been a mumbled hello, a nod as he looked him over and not a lot else. What was his problem?
Not that it was easy to tell when he was sitting down, but Orlando didn’t give the impression of being a tall person; maybe that was his problem. He certainly didn’t look like much, with his narrow, slightly dandruff-specked shoulders and untidy, brown hair (thinning on top, it looked like). And he wore glasses, wire-rimmed. Hard to say how old he was.
But while he didn’t look like much, not even kind of rugged, like Sky, there was something about him. He had that way about him that some teachers did, broadcasting his mood, ‘radiating the vibe’, like Dave said, and dominating not through in-your-face aggression, but the threat of what he might do or say. Mr Sanders – the Napoleon of the science wing – had been like that. Sarky bastard.
The car pulled up. ‘We’re here, boys and girls…’ Sky cut the engine, got out and opened Paul’s door. ‘Be it ever so simple,’ he pointed with his chin at the terraced house they were parked opposite, ‘there’s no place like home.’
Paul looked at the place, taking in the small, overgrown front garden, weather-beaten paintwork and general air of shabbiness. It didn’t look like home to him.
Orlando had disappeared upstairs the moment they’d got in the house, leaving Sky to introduce Paul to Izzy Morley and Tommy Walsh, the final pieces of the puzzle. And it was awkward, weird to be standing there with his backpack, the stranger coming in from the outside. An unknown quantity, there to replace a friend who had died.
This is Paul, guys… he’s the new Jez.
Sky hadn’t actually said that, but that was how it felt.
Rob yawned and slumped into a chair at the kitchen table. ‘We found him in Newcastle,’ he said to no one in particular, as if that explained everything.
‘Is he any good?’ This from Tommy, shaven-headed Tommy, who was sitting perched on the work surface, cradling a mug of tea, a wide, innocent-looking smile beaming out from his pale, freckled face. Below which, Paul noticed, hung a small gold crucifix on a chain.
Izzy – small, dark-haired, intense, standing by the cooker, looking spiky – took a drag from her cigarette. ‘Are you the new Jez, then, Paul? That’s gonna be one hard act to follow.’
‘No, I’m not…’
Sky moved into the room and sat at the table. ‘He’s cool, Izzy, and he’s not the new anyone. Why should he be?’
‘Dead man’s shoes.’
‘Leave it out, Izzy, OK?’ Terri checked the kettle, then filled it at the sink.
Sky started to roll a cigarette. ‘Terri and Rob put him through his paces… they say he’s fine, so that’s fine by me.’
Tommy slid off the work surface. ‘He in with me ’n’ Rob?’
‘Yeah.’ Sky nodded.
Paul, standing at the door to the kitchen, not quite in, not quite out, watched the proceedings with a feeling of dreamlike detachment, like this was all some TV soap and not actually happening to him. A
lthough he was the one who’d asked to be a part of what these people were doing, they’d said he could tag along and now they were making other decisions for him. Which wasn’t quite what he’d been looking for in joining Omega Place.
‘Want to take your stuff upstairs, mate?’
Paul realised Tommy was looking at him. ‘Me?’ He pointed to himself, immediately feeling stupid.
Tommy grinned as he walked towards him. ‘Yeah, mate, you… come on.’
* * *
Tommy had helped put up the camp bed that Paul was now lying in, a garish tartan blanket over his sleeping bag and a lumpy pillow stuffed under his head. He couldn’t sleep, even though he was tired. Thoughts and feelings and questions were streaming through his mind like a torrent and all he could do was stare at the ceiling and hope that the flow would stop and they’d just go away.
What a weird, fucking weird day. Really.
He was in London, in a squat! He’d always imagined a squat would be a filthy, rat-infested place with plaster hanging off the walls and holes in the floor. Although this place was no way a palace, and nothing like the home he’d so recently left, it wasn’t that bad. There was power and water and pretty much all the basics. If you called a TV a basic.
Eyes wide open, brain racing, he thought about the rest of the people in the house. He’d kind of got used to Rob on the way down to London (a quiet voice in the back of his head whispering that he’d love to get more used to Terri…) and Sky, for all that he was quite serious about stuff, and so much older, seemed easy enough to get along with. And what wasn’t there to like about Tommy? He gave the impression he didn’t give much of a shit about anything and would, as his dad liked to say, rather be laughing.
