Eoin Miller 02 - Old Gold

by Stringer, Jay

  They were both mixed up in it somehow, and now it seemed they were mixed up in it together. What the hell was going on?

  Laura seemed surprised to see me.

  She stood in the doorway for a moment without speaking before cocking her head to one side.

  “I didn’t expect to see you,” she said.

  Subtext: How long were you out there? What did you see?

  “I thought I’d surprise you,” I said.

  Subtext: I’m not sure what I’ve just seen, but I’m sure you know I’ve seen it.

  She turned and walked inside the flat, leaving the door open for me to follow. The small hallway opened onto a large living room. It was not quite as I’d imagined it. The floor was hardwood, and the furniture matched it, aside from the wooden sofa’s pale-blue cushions. Besides unread magazines, the coffee table held a pile of paperwork and two coffee cups. Her work clothes were slung over the back of an armchair against the far wall awaiting ironing. Next to the television on a wooden entertainment unit was a turned-down picture frame. I wanted to see the photograph, but I’d need to distract her first. The room still smelled of Veronica Gaines’s perfume, and my memory kicked me in the back of the head. It was the same perfume Laura had worn at Bauser’s funeral, and I’d not made the connection.

  The silence was broken as some people walked past outside singing football songs.

  “You going to the game?” Laura asked as she cleared away the coffee cups.

  “No. Becker is, though.”

  “He told me you’d found the missing student. Good work.”

  “Thanks. He told you the rest?”

  She shrugged. It said, I already know.

  “So Perry’s going to be allowed to carry on?”

  She shrugged again. “Why not?

  “I suppose to expose him now would smear the force. Why spill all that blood when you can have a pet commissioner?”

  “Something like that.”

  She took the cups through to the kitchen, and I heard them clink as she set them down. Then I heard the sound of a kettle boiling and more cups being fetched out of a cupboard.

  “Do you have sugar?” she called out.

  “No thanks,” I said. While she was in the kitchen, I looked at the turned-down photograph. It was of the two of us a couple hours after the wedding. I was in a casual shirt and dark trousers, and she was wearing a black dress. We were both grinning like children.

  My heart skipped a beat at the thought that she still kept the photo on display. Then I drifted to the obvious question. Why was it facedown?

  Did she not want Veronica Gaines to see it?

  I put it back as I’d found it when I heard her footsteps and turned as she stepped back into the room, holding two fresh mugs of coffee. She handed one to me and then sat on the sofa. I sat next to her.

  “Listen, about the other night—”

  She had cracked first, but I was losing interest in keeping score.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Bad timing, that’s all.”

  She nodded, and we settled into silence again. Familiar. Expected.

  I looked around at the expensive furnishings. If not for Gaines’s perfume hanging in the air, I half expected I’d be able to smell fresh paint.

  “Nice place,” I said. “The rent decent?”

  She shook her head. “No rent. I own it.”

  Interesting. She owned the flat just as I owned the house. I thought back to what she’d asked me the other night. What happened to us?

  “So it’s half mine then? Wow, I have better taste than I thought.”

  She laughed it off, and we eased back into the seat. I smiled at her, and she smiled back. In my head I was still trying to find a way into it, the correct question to ask. I didn’t want to give anything away.

  “Who was the cute woman I just saw you with?”

  I watched her eyes as her brain ticked away. She knew. The fact that I knew about Perry’s dirty secrets told her I knew who Gaines was.

  “Just a friend. She runs a local community program.”

  I just sat there and nodded, watching her reaction. We never could completely bullshit each other. It had been part of what had made us work and what had torn us apart. We read each other better than anyone else.

  “Are you getting involved with her program?”

  “It’s not really my scene. But she has some good ideas, so I’m helping her out a little. You know, it helps the career.”

  “Sounds interesting.”

  “It’s really not. I’m already thinking it might be a waste of time. Thinking I might pull out before it becomes too much of a commitment, you know?”

  “Just make sure you don’t get dragged in over your head. You could get dragged into something against your will, like me.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said.

  “Don’t believe what?”

  “The part about it being against your will. I’ve known you a long time now, Eoin, and you never do anything you don’t want to.”

  I made a noise of protest, and she put up her hand.

  “You quit a job that everybody told you to stay with. You left a marriage that everybody wanted you to work on. You’ve worked for people that all of your friends have told you to avoid. And now you’ve clearly found something else to worry about. None of that was ever against your will.” Laura was peering at me intently, as though reading something written at the back of my eyes. “Why are you here, Eoin?”

  “Trying to see if you need my help, I suppose.”

  “There you go. Trying to be a knight in shining armor.”

  “A knight in rusty armor, maybe.”

  “Old gold,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Wolves’ color, right? A knight in old gold armor.”

  I laughed and pretended not to like that. How had she turned this into a conversation about me? Part of my brain was telling me she’d scored again.

  “You’re never as hard or cynical as you’d like people to think.” Laura set her drink down on the coffee table and then put her hands on mine. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  That was as close to it as she was going to let me get.

  “I hope so,” I said.

  Because I sure as hell didn’t.

  I needed to think, so I stopped at the supermarket for supplies before driving back home to cook and listen to music.

  I put a couple of baguettes in the oven to warm and started a fresh pot of coffee brewing. As John Prine sang “Souvenirs” through my stereo speakers, I chopped and diced. I set some vegetables sizzling in a pan, pulled a pack of pork out of the fridge, and decided which spices to throw in.

  The lyrics to the song bounced around my head. They seemed to fit Laura and me perfectly.

  I needed to find the notebook, that was still clear. It was what Mary had stolen, and it was what Janas had destroyed my house looking for. If I found it, I could bring him out of hiding. But then what? Laura was involved with Gaines somehow and knew Janas. I couldn’t go to the police. I’d managed to get myself in too deep for that. Was it too late to go to the Mann brothers? Another fine mess I’d gotten myself into.

  The notebook wasn’t in my house. It couldn’t be. Janas had known what he was looking for and hadn’t found it. My brain fizzed as I made another connection that should have been obvious. Posada had been broken into, but nothing much had been taken. That was where Mary had met me, and that was another place the notebook could have been stashed. Had Janas found it?

  I turned the meat over in the pan and piled the cooking vegetables on and around it, turning it around with my wooden spoon, hearing the sizzle almost drown out the music. I threw a pinch of turmeric and cayenne pepper into the pan and mixed it all together. It smelled good, and my world full of worries dropped away for a moment, then drifted back into my mind in some sense of order.

  Draw Janas out into the open, hand him over to either Gaines or
the Mann brothers, then walk away and forget it all.

  On the stereo, John Prine gave way to Sugar. Bob Mould was singing about standing on top of the Hoover Dam and making a deal with the devil.

  As I turned the heat off below the pan, my mobile rang. Everyone had the number, it seemed, except me.

  “Eoin?” Rachel sounded a bit shaken on the other end.

  “What’s up?”

  “My flat’s been broken into.”

  “Hang on a sec.” I pinned the phone between my ear and the crook of my shoulder so that I could continue dishing up the food. “What did you say?”

  “My flat. It’s been trashed.”

  “Does Mary’s boyfriend know where you live?”

  The uncertain silence on the other end was enough of an answer. I set the pan down on the counter and concentrated on the phone.

  “Rachel, pack a bag and come round to my place. Now.”

  I gave her my address and ended the call. I cut the two baguettes open and split the contents of the pan between them. By the time I’d got the food set out onto two plates and two mugs of coffee poured out, Rachel was at the front door.

  “You get a taxi?”

  She nodded. She looked shaken, which would have been natural enough after a break-in, but this was worse. She’d put two and two together and gotten the same answer as me.

  “He was after the notebook,” she said. “He must think I have it.”

  “Do you?”

  She gave me a look that told me to stop being stupid.

  “Stay here for now,” I said. “He’s already trashed this place, so he won’t come back unless we give him reason to. I’ll figure out the rest later.”

  “You want to find the book before he does?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when you’ve found it, he’ll come for you. What then?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  We sat in silence while we ate. The food tasted great, the coffee tasted awful. You can’t win them all. Halfway through the baguette, she looked up at me with a smile, as if she’d just remembered a joke.

  “I’ve been doing some reading,” said Rachel.

  “What kind of reading?”

  “For my project, my ‘you’ project.”

  I laughed in spite of myself.

  “There was a guy called Warren Zevon who died a few years ago.”

  “Yes, I know. He sang “Werewolves of London.” Recorded an album as he was dying. I think I’ve got a copy.”

  “OK. But do you know what he said before he died?”

  “He said, ‘Enjoy every sandwich.’”

  “Oh, OK, so you’ve already heard it.”

  “Rachel, was this meant to be the great new philosophy for me to adopt?”

  “Well, it was just an idea.”

  “The motto that was going to get my life back on track?”

  “I can see it was maybe flawed.”

  “To enjoy every sandwich?”

  “Well, sandwiches are nice.”

  “Oh, I know. I already enjoy every sandwich, but my skills at eating two slices of bread hasn’t stopped me from—” I stopped dead. I was far more comfortable with admitting I had a problem than I was with finding a name for it. “You know, the whole ‘not caring’ thing.”

  “OK, so quoting dead musicians probably isn’t going to help you.”

  “No, it really won’t. Although it won’t make things any worse. Unless you start quoting Kurt Cobain.”

  “OK, I guess I’ll go back to square one.”

  Boom.

  “What did you say?”

  “I’ll start again, go back to square one. You know, think it all through from the beginning.”

  A huge grin must have hit me, because then Rachel smiled as well. The beginning. There was one place Janas wouldn’t know to look, and I should have known it straightaway.

  I leaned over and kissed Rachel on the cheek.

  “You are brilliant,” I said.

  “Pretty much, yes. But why?”

  “Tell you later.” I grabbed my car keys and jacket and stood to leave. “Make yourself at home.”

  I left and headed for Posada.

  Where it had all started.

  I pushed through the front door, barely responding to the greetings. Now I knew where the book had to be. Anybody following Mary would have known to search the bar area, just as anybody following us would have known to search my house. But there was a place they didn’t know to search, a place the two of us had sat that night after the pub closed.

  I walked through to the back, to the corner table where we had sat. Most of the match goers had already started making their way down to the stadium, so Posada was quiet enough for the table to be unoccupied. Ignoring the sniggers and questions of the people at the bar, I got down on my knees. Being this close to the carpet in a pub is not a nice experience; you can smell every drunken night, every weak stomach or spilled pint. I pushed that aside and focused on what I was down there for. The seat she had sat on was a booth seat, fixed to the wall, with a space underneath where heating pipes ran along the skirting board. I reached my hand under and felt around. It took me a minute, a minute of touching old beer mats and a crisp packet that the cleaner had missed, but my hand closed around something.

  The notebook.

  It looked a lot like mine, but bigger. It was battered and well thumbed. I sat at the table and flipped through it.

  It contained a mix of names, dates, phone numbers written in scrawling handwriting, someone who wasn’t comfortable with the English version of the alphabet. I saw phone codes for Newcastle, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Glasgow, and London. There were foreign numbers, area codes that I didn’t recognize, and postal details as varied as Poland, Ireland, and Afghanistan. There were pages full of numbers, like a coded version of an accounts ledger, and names of local pushers, some with ticks next to their names and some with crosses. My name and address was on there with a question mark next to it.

  In the right hands, this was a business empire; either Gaines or the brothers could use this to take over the routes. The police could use this to cripple an industry. This was like rocket fuel in my hands, waiting for someone to supply a match.

  And it was going to find me a killer.

  The question now was how long it would take.

  Janas surely had someone keeping an eye on me, and word that I’d found the book would reach him soon enough. I needed to speed things up, though. It was time to start pissing people off again, to start setting the pace instead of chasing the game.

  I held the book in my hand for all to see as I left the pub. I crossed over to the churchyard and found Matt wrapped in a tattered Wolves scarf to complement his army jacket.

  “I’ve found it,” I said.

  “Found what?”

  “It. Just spread the word. Tell everyone you see.”

  I left him to it and started talking to the same street dealers I’d spoken to when this all started. I dropped Janas’s name to them and made sure they saw I was carrying a notebook. I called in to the local radio station to speak on its football phone-in. The presenter welcomed me on air and asked me to predict today’s score. I said one-nil and then announced that I’d found the notebook. He was asking me what I meant by that as I hung up.

  I walked round to the post office and bought a pack of A4 paper, a marker pen, and cello tape. Then I drove back to my house. With Rachel watching, I stuck together enough sheets of paper to make a banner. Using the marker pen I wrote a message.

  I’VE GOT THE BOOK.

  Big and bold.

  I taped the banner to my front window from the inside, then locked up and left after telling Rachel to stay out of sight upstairs for a few hours.

  That should be enough. Now I could settle into Posada with a comfortable pint and wait for Janas to come and find me. The football game had just kicked off, so traffic was light. It would have taken a couple of minutes to drive into the city center and f
ind a parking space, but I decided to walk instead. As I passed Molineux, I could hear the songs and the chants of the crowd at the game. After a minute, I heard a loud cheer, followed by goal music over the tannoy. My heart skipped for the first time in a long time at the thought of the Wolves scoring. It felt important again.

  I was waiting at the traffic lights on the ring road as a familiar figure hobbled toward me. It was Lee Owen, his arm in a cast and his left knee buckling as he walked. As he drew near I saw the swelling around his right eye and stitches along his hairline. The fingers of his broken arm stuck out from the end of the cast, but I only counted three.

  We stared at each other as he passed me.

  “Fucking cunt,” he said over his shoulder as he shuffled along the road in the direction I’d just come.

  I’d earned that, I supposed, so I let it go.

  I crossed the road when the lights changed, and it wasn’t until I reached the other side that I realized what I’d just seen and why it mattered.

  I still had the keys to the low-rise flat on Junction Road. I let myself in to the building and climbed the stairs to the level I’d been staying on a few nights before. The first door I came to was where I’d met Bobby when he’d given me the keys, where I’d interrupted him as he worked.

  I put my ear to the door and listened. No sounds came from inside. I stepped back from the door and looked around me. I leaned over the balcony to look down at the car park. Nobody was around.

  I fumbled with my keys until I found the one for the flat I’d been using and tried it in the lock. It slid in but wouldn’t turn. No good. Time for another trick of the trade. Another key on my key ring was a filed-down Yale; all of the tips had been smoothed over with a penknife’s metal file until they were of the same low height. I pushed the key three-quarters of the way into the lock. After taking another look around, I took off my shoe and used it as a hammer, hitting the end of the key so that it surged into the lock with force. The door clicked open.

  They actually taught me that on the force. Preparing me for a life of crime, one way or another.

  I replaced my shoe and pushed the door the rest of the way open. In the hallway, I was hit by the smell and a now-familiar feeling. Now I knew how a building felt when it had a dead body in it.