Eoin Miller 02 - Old Gold

by Stringer, Jay

  The living room and kitchenette were decorated the same as the flat I’d used. The bedroom had been used recently—the bed was rumpled, and the smell of sweat and deodorant was in the air—but there was nothing in it of interest to me. It was in the bathroom that I found the corpse.

  Dumped in the bath, a thick layer of congealed blood in the bottom, was the broken body of a man. Blades and tools were arrayed on the floor, and in the corner was a bucket filled with lime and a roll of bin liners. Somebody would be coming back to clear away the remains.

  I didn’t think the man had been dead for very long. His skin still felt human to the touch, not hard and rigid like Mary’s when I’d found her in the boot. I didn’t touch him more than once, though, for fear of leaving evidence. Had I not known better, I would have believed he had been mauled by a bear. The fingers were missing from his right hand. His left hand was tucked out of sight beneath him. His right leg twisted in unnatural ways, and his teeth were lying in the blood in the bottom of the bath. His face was puckered and swollen, and his jaw didn’t line up correctly with the rest of his head. He’d been tortured more than my stomach could handle, and I backed out of the room and crouched in the hallway until I could breathe again.

  When I’d met Bobby here, he’d said he was feeding someone with a broken jaw. I’d heard the whimpers myself and made the assumption it was Lee Owen in there. Because in my head the whole world revolves around me. But I’d just seen Owen, and his jaw wasn’t broken.

  The name I’d heard twice in the last few days, Mr. Robson, fizzed in my mind. In a town obsessed with football, there would be an obvious nickname for someone with that surname.

  Bobby.

  Bobby fucking Robson.

  Every football fan in England would make that connection it seemed, except for me. But then, I’d never supported the English national team. I pretended that gave me an excuse for missing the obvious. I spent about ten seconds wondering what his real first name was, but some mysteries don’t matter even to me. It was his surname that had done me. It was all so silly that I couldn’t help but sit and giggle for a while. Bobby was involved. Slow Bobby. Fast Bobby. Quiet Bobby. Quiet enough to have sneaked into my house and killed Mary without waking me, quiet enough to have stood behind me taking pictures. He’d been at my house when it was trashed, and he could have used decorating it as an excuse to take a further look. The reason I’d always found him so useful was that people underestimated him, but it had been me doing that all along.

  I felt the buzzing at the base of my skull. The world felt distant again and the world’s background noise started to sweep in over me. I fought it back. Not now.

  Bobby was the killer.

  And the man in the bathtub, even broken and swollen, was recognizable from his passport picture as Thomasz Janas.

  I counted to ten.

  Then I counted to ten again, but all the counting in the world wasn’t going to make things better, no matter what the marriage counselors might say.

  I crouched in the hallway, breathing through my mouth and trying not to smell the corpse. Bobby would have to come back soon to deal with it. He could have dealt with Mary too, but he’d dropped her in my lap. I’d thought I’d just about gotten a handle on things earlier this day. I’d been bracing myself to find out that my wife was involved and that the Mann brothers could bail me out.

  Now it seemed, one way or another, everyone I knew was involved. And the sick joke of it was the question I’d asked Gav outside The Robin the night this had all started: “Business close by?” Sure enough. He’d been here when I’d called him. If I had to make a guess at what he’d been up to, torturing Janas was probably a good bet. The Robin was only a couple minutes away, which was why he’d turned up so fast.

  The walls closed in around me for a second.

  My father’s voice was in my head again, telling me to run. Telling me this was a situation I couldn’t win. Well, the voice was right. I was in way over my head. But I never do the right thing at the right time. Running had gotten me nothing so far, and I had to do something to get Mary out of my dreams.

  I checked that I’d not left any traces of my visit and let myself out of the flat, making sure the door locked firmly as I pulled it shut. I called Gav Mann, and the phone didn’t ring for long.

  “I think we need to talk,” I said when he answered.

  “Do we?”

  “Nobody been talking to you today? You not listened to the radio?”

  He paused long enough for me to know he knew exactly what I was talking about.

  “You have something of mine,” he said at last.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “OK. Where do you want to talk?”

  “Somewhere public. West Park, by the bandstand. And Gav? Come alone.”

  “How do I know you’ll be on your own?”

  “Who the hell do I have?”

  He laughed.

  He was just bigheaded enough to underestimate me, the same way I’d always underestimated Bobby. I told him to meet me there in half an hour and disconnected the call. I made two more calls before heading home.

  The house was silent, which meant Rachel was doing as she’d been told. I called out for her to come downstairs, and after a moment I heard her soft footsteps on the landing and she appeared at the top of the stairs. She looked sleepy and scared.

  I smiled at her, but I must have been looking even worse than she was, because it only seemed to make her more worried.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Get your coat and bag. I’ve got a friend coming to pick you up.”

  “What’s wrong with staying here? You’d said Tommy wouldn’t—”

  “Tommy’s dead. Like I said, get your coat.”

  I told her as much of it as I’d pieced together, leaving out the details about the amount of pain Janas must have gone through in his last days.

  The front doorbell rang, followed by a couple of swift knocks on the door. I opened the door to find Jellyfish grinning at me from behind a pair of fake Ray-Bans, giving it the full Jack Nicholson.

  “Thanks for coming.” I turned to let him in. Jelly waggled his eyebrows instead of shaking hands. I poked him in the ribs. “Is your fella in the car?”

  Jelly pointed out to where his car was parked across the end of my driveway. He waved at Chris, who was sitting in the front passenger seat. Chris didn’t wave back; he seemed to be messing with the radio.

  “How did you know about him?”

  “His parents hired me to find him.”

  “No shit?”

  “I told them you were a good boy, so this is where I need you to prove me right. You’re part of this, and I need you to keep Rachel safe for a while.”

  Jelly made a show of a lewd grin, bowed, and picked up Rachel’s bag. She turned and gave me a small kiss on the cheek. “Be careful.”

  As she walked toward the car, I leaned in close to Jelly.

  “That goes for you too. Behave.”

  He grinned and skipped to the car. As they pulled away, I locked up the house and left.

  West Park is a nice place to visit if you like greenery and open spaces. It’s even better if you like a boating lake and some pointless statues. In the distance I could still hear the sound of the crowd at the football game. The stadium was just a couple of streets away, and the crowds would be pouring out in another twenty minutes. For now the park was almost deserted. A few families were braving the cold on the boating lake, and a couple of teenagers lay stoned on the grass.

  I climbed the steps to the bandstand and leaned on the railing.

  As far as plans went, I had one. It was a flawed plan, though, because it had a more than 50 percent chance of getting me killed.

  Gav Mann was ten minutes late in meeting me.

  He swaggered up to the bandstand with a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon in his hand. He passed it to me with a wide-beam grin.

  “Peace offering, man.”

>   I took the bottle and turned it over a couple of times, inspecting the work of art, the dripped wax effect and the old brown label. He offered his right hand for a shake. I shook my head instead and leaned back on the railing, setting the bottle beside me.

  “So you’ve got a present for me in return?”

  I didn’t answer. I just stared off toward the lake.

  “Come on, man, don’t play it like this. We’re still buddies, yeah?”

  I turned and looked him up and down as coolly as I could manage. “Were you in my house that night or was it just Bobby?”

  If he was surprised, he didn’t show it.

  “That’s what we like about you, Eoin. One way or another, you get the information.”

  “Why didn’t you come to me from the beginning?”

  “You mean in the house?”

  “No. I mean the beginning. You wanted to find the Pole, you wanted to find his stash. Why didn’t you come to me?”

  “You have no stomach for it, Eoin. That’s why we didn’t come to you. You may like to play bad guy, but you’re not. You’ve never got involved in the game.”

  “Why didn’t you come to me about the girl?” I said. “When she came looking for me. That’s what she did, you know. She came to me because she thought I could protect her from you. She thought you and I would work out a deal and everything would be OK.”

  He smiled. “What would you have done? Handed her over? You don’t know when to run and when to fight. We needed to know if we could trust you, which side you were on. You’ve still got the stink of cop on you when it comes to some things. We needed to know if you were really with us yet.”

  “And killing a girl in my house tells you that?”

  “Killing her in your house was just convenient. It was the first chance we got. I tell you, when we thought she was running to the police station, we were fucked. But then she went running to you instead, and we knew we’d be OK.”

  I ignored that, or tried to. I opened the bottle of Maker’s and buried the sting of his words with whiskey.

  “Where does the trust come into it?”

  “That’s where it got fun. If you’d woken up and she’d been gone, you wouldn’t have known anything. I bet you’d never have given her a second thought. Yeah, I’m right. Thing is, this was a chance to test you. I figured if you saw the body you’d have two options. Call the police and prove you’re with them or call me and prove we can trust you.”

  “I didn’t do either.”

  “No. That’s your problem, right there. You took the third option, you always do, Gyp. Like I said before, you don’t know when to stand or when to run.”

  “So then you figured you couldn’t trust me and I had the notebook. You used the photographs to fuck with me.”

  He laughed as if we were remembering a childhood prank.

  “Yeah, and putting the body in your car later? That was my brother’s idea. He can be a devious fuck when he wants.”

  He pulled an envelope out of his jacket pocket and let it sit on the rail between us. I refused to look at it. I didn’t want to start wondering just how much cash was inside.

  “You were not born stupid, Eoin, you just act like it.”

  “It was my house,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “And I’m sorry about that and for all the damage we did. We covered that with the decorating. Don’t try and tell me the house doesn’t look ace. And after all, it was our money that paid the mortgage, wasn’t it?”

  I took a mouthful of Maker’s and let it burn my throat, the heat fading down into my gut and not making me feel any better.

  “So what was the order? You met Mary on the street?”

  “Yeah. I used her a few times. We used her to get information on Gaines from that baps and flaps club.”

  Legs. Rachel had told me Mary worked there for a while.

  “Then when you found out she knew the Pole, you leaned on her to get you what you needed.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got it all straight. I don’t need to tell you anything.”

  “What happened that night?”

  “She was supposed to meet us and give us the Pole’s notebook, so we could do it all clean. No blood, you see? We tried. But she backed out, said she wouldn’t betray him. Don’t know why, the Polish fuck was always threatening her. She’d told us about it. Then they had some kind of argument, and we had to make our move. We grabbed him, but he didn’t have the book. When we heard that she was talking with you in Posada, we knew we could leave her there for a while. We were walking behind you when you left, but you were both too drunk to care.”

  I gripped the bottle with both hands but didn’t lift it off the rail.

  “Robson is so good at breaking in, he can get in anywhere without a sound. We waited downstairs while you two, well, you know. What you didn’t do. I have to say, Eoin, you are a heavy sleeper when you’re drunk.”

  I was sure the glass was going to break in my hand.

  “You killed her. You killed her in my bed. My house.”

  “She was just a nobody. In the wrong place, with the wrong guy, and nobody is going to miss her. Not even the police care.”

  “And Janas, you killed him too. And not quickly, from what I saw.”

  “We needed him to talk. We thought he could tell us what was written in the notebook, but he didn’t remember it all. We let him stare at his dead girlfriend for a day or so before we put her in your car, but that didn’t help him remember anything. He did give up Bauser, though.”

  Bauser. He was killed because Janas had named him. Nothing to do with me.

  “He was a good kid.”

  “Yeah, he was. But he’d been cheating us. And we have a business to run. You know how it is.”

  “Business?”

  “All it ever is, Gyp. It’s all it ever is. Bauser was a business decision, just like the Pole and just like your dead girl.”

  “Mary.” I practically growled it out. “Her name was Mary.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  He picked up the envelope.

  “You found something for us; it’s what you do. So we don’t have any problem here, do we?”

  He began counting fifty-pound notes out onto the rail.

  What I thought was anger, cold rage building in me, turned to frustration.

  I watched the money stacking up in front of me. The blood money on the wooden perch in front of me mixed with the alcohol in my system. I could take the money. I could have another drink, then another, and after a while this would all fade into nothing. Because I was right in what I’d said to Rachel. Nothing we do matters.

  My father’s hands pressed on my shoulders as I heard his voice again. I always feel them on my shoulder when I remember him.

  “They won’t ask questions. They won’t stop to see who else might have done it. They will kick the shit out of you and lock you up. If your hands are out of sight, they’ll assume you’ve got a knife. Whatever happens out there is not your concern. Walk away.”

  I left the whiskey in my mouth, warm on my tongue, and then swallowed it back. My eyes watered. I started counting out the money.

  My father’s hand squeezed my shoulder again.

  “If there’s trouble, be far away. If you can’t be far away, run like hell.”

  I could take the money and run.

  I stared into the bottle as my body shook and my mind burned.

  Gav Mann was talking, but for a while I wasn’t listening. I was far-off, thinking of cookery and music and my conscience. Thinking of dead women and dead boys and their mothers at funerals. And I was thinking about the money.

  “It was my house,” I said.

  “Look—”

  “It was my house. All I wanted was a house. Where nobody could touch me.”

  To be nothing like my father was what went unsaid, to deny who I really am.

  He put his hand on my shoulder and grinned.

  “Look, Eoin, I’m sorry about the way thin
gs have gone, all right? We should have come to you.” He guided me toward the steps of the bandstand. “Come on, I’ll take you to Angels or the Apna. Get you drunk, get you laid. Let’s go.”

  The smile didn’t leave his face.

  I picked up the money and pocketed it. I gave him a smile that I hoped didn’t reveal a tenth of what I was thinking.

  “The book’s over the road at my house. Come on.”

  I walked on ahead, and I could feel the beam given off by his smug grin as he followed. He would have been feeling pretty good with himself at that point, and it was a feeling that would have lasted until we were crossing the footbridge over the boating lake.

  When we were halfway across, Veronica Gaines and Bull stepped onto the bridge ahead of us. Bull was carrying a cricket bat, and Gaines was carrying a nasty smile.

  “What the fu—”

  Gav turned, but more men were blocking the way we had just come. They looked like they’d been eating steroids their whole lives. And they seemed to like cricket.

  I spun on the balls of my feet to get right into Gav’s face.

  “Her name was Mary. Mary. And Bauser’s name was Eric. I bet you didn’t even know that, did you?”

  “You’re fucking dead,” he said.

  He lunged toward me, his fist connecting with my stomach. I stepped back and caught my breath.

  “You’ve ruined everything,” he said. “Over a woman, a stupid fucking woman.”

  The coldness in me took over, but it didn’t make me sink away from the world; this time it made me more alive. I hit him. I hit him again. The old man in the street. Laura. Mary. My job. Every emotion and every conversation I’d not been able to process suddenly wanted to jump out of me, into my fist, and do some serious damage. I swung the bottle of whiskey at him with my other hand. He fell against the side of the bridge, and I kept hitting him. On and on, the coldness in me burning far more than any heat had ever done.

  I felt Veronica’s hand on my shoulder.

  Far off I could hear the singing of the match day crowd getting closer. Soon the area would be swarming with fans and police.