Catalyst

by Mark Eklid

  Where did I leave them?

  The wardrobe. He was fairly sure he had put the photos on the top shelf in the wardrobe. All his walking gear was in there and, as he opened the door, he noticed something he had forgotten he had also decided to store there. The shoulder bag he was keeping safe for Mrs Dawes. The one she had with her on the night of the accident.

  Martin looked at it and the memory of her reaction, when he asked her if she would like him to bring the bag to her in hospital, washed back over him.

  She was so angry! Scared, almost, shouting at him to leave the bag alone. What was that all about?

  He thought again. Were those the only words she had spoken to him over these last few days? He could not recall hearing her speak at all apart from that, which made her reaction even more bizarre.

  Martin picked up the bag and stared at it, as if trying to figure out its secret just by taking it in his hands. He sat on the spare bed with it on his knees and his hand moved to the zip.

  He hesitated. He shouldn’t do this. It wasn’t his bag and Mrs Dawes had the right to ask him not to look inside, but he was intrigued.

  He unzipped the bag and took out the one thing within it, wrapped in blue material. Whatever was concealed within was heavy and solid, like something metal. He put the bag to one side and began to peel back the folds of material.

  He saw it and his eyes opened wide.

  7

  ‘I said I didn’t want you to touch the bag.’

  Evelyn pursed her lips to confirm her disapproval.

  ‘But,’ Martin shuffled his chair closer to the side of her bed, the legs making a squeal as he dragged them across the hard floor, ‘there was a…’ He checked to make sure no one was close enough to hear and reduced his voice to a whisper.

  ‘There was a gun in the bag! What were you doing with a gun in your bag?’

  Evelyn turned her head from him to show that she had no intention of responding to his question, like a child refusing to take their medicine.

  ‘Why were you going out with that in your bag? You weren’t going to do something to yourself, were you?’

  She glanced back towards him, quizzically, and then realised what he was asking.

  ‘No!’ she replied with indignation. ‘I could never do something like that. How messy!’

  Martin continued to stare at her with alarm written all over his face, waiting for her to provide him with a logical explanation to counter-balance the many wild and frightening theories that had dominated his thoughts since the previous night.

  She remained stubbornly silent.

  ‘So?’ he prompted at last. ‘What were you doing? Where did you get it from?’

  Evelyn sighed. She could see he was not going to let it drop.

  ‘It was my father’s,’ she said. ‘He took it from a German captain who surrendered to him at a town called Belzig, just outside Berlin, in 1945. He smuggled it back with him, as a souvenir. It’s sort of a family heirloom.’

  That was not enough information to ease Martin’s agitation.

  ‘And?’ he added. ‘Why did you have it in your bag? Don’t tell me you were going to show it to somebody on the Antiques Roadshow. Where were you going?’

  ‘I was going to my ex-husband’s house, if you must know,’ she relented. Evelyn was growing irritated at his questioning but could see no way of stopping it other than to provide a few answers.

  ‘Your ex-husband! You weren’t going to shoot him, were you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she answered, a hint of regret in her tone. ‘It isn’t loaded. I just wanted to… scare him a bit.’

  Martin’s head and shoulders drooped. This was altogether too bizarre for him to comprehend at the moment, but he began to feel as if he was tapping into a deep-seated story that was sad, rather than dangerous, at its origins.

  He raised his head and reached over to take her hand.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Dawes. Why?’

  Her resistance was broken. Despite herself, tears sprang to her eyes. She wanted to tell him now. She had never told anyone before, and it weighed heavily on her.

  ‘He deserved it,’ she said. ‘He ruined my life.’

  Martin leaned to take a box of tissues from the top of the bedside cabinet and offered her one. She pulled it from the box and blew her nose.

  ‘We were married for forty-eight years. He was the love of my life. We were so happy together but then he changed. He became moody, remote. He wouldn’t talk to me anymore and it became like he hated me, all of a sudden. He started getting, I don’t know – spiteful, nasty. He wasn’t my Frank anymore. I couldn’t work out what it was I’d done wrong. I didn’t think he’d found somebody else, not at our age, but there was this poison in him and all he wanted to do was to take it out on me, whatever it was that was controlling him.’

  Martin took her hand again. ‘You poor love,’ he said, sympathetically.

  ‘He told me he was divorcing me, and I was shattered. Married life with Frank was all I’d known for so long, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was scared – but that wasn’t the worst part. We have a daughter, Tanya, and he turned her against me. I have no idea what he told her but, all of a sudden, she stopped coming round, wouldn’t even answer my calls. I tried going to her house, many times, but she wasn’t there anymore. I haven’t seen or heard from my only daughter in more than three years and it’s all because of him.’

  The tears pooled in her eyes and dribbled slowly down her sullen cheeks as her tormented mind drifted deeper into the pain of the memory. Martin felt a lump in his throat and tried to swallow it down. He allowed the silence to settle between them as he composed himself.

  ‘That’s such a terrible story. What must you have gone through?’ he said. ‘But what did you expect to achieve by going to his house and threatening him with a gun?’

  Evelyn shook her head. ‘I was at my wit’s end, I suppose. We sold our house as part of the divorce and I had no idea where he was living until I had a letter from my solicitor a week or so ago and that had his address on it. I thought if I went there and threatened him I could scare him into telling me where Tanya was now and then I could go to her and show her that, whatever it was he told her I’d done, it wasn’t true. I thought it might be my only chance of seeing my daughter again.’

  There was nothing Martin could think to say. It was such a pitifully desperate plot that to point out the inevitable futility of it would have almost been cruel. He could not imagine how low an ebb someone must have stumbled into for them to hatch such a plan. It truly must have been a last resort.

  ‘But then I was hit by a falling branch from the tree you saved and I never got the chance,’ added Evelyn, the tone of her voice changing. The resentment she had felt towards Martin in the days after the accident came bubbling back to the surface.

  So, too, did his overbearing sense of guilt.

  ‘I told you how sorry I am for what happened and if I could…’ He broke off. There was no point wishing it had not happened. ‘I promised you that I’ll do anything to make it up to you.’

  An awkward quiet fell on the corner of the hospital bay.

  ‘You should do it,’ she said suddenly, decisively.

  Martin did not understand. He looked for a clue in her expression and saw none.

  ‘Do… what? What do you want me to do?’

  ‘You should go to my ex-husband’s house and get him to tell you where my daughter is.’

  He attempted to absorb the information and process it in a way that could possibly make it a good idea.

  ‘You want me to go to see your ex-husband?’ he repeated, needing to be sure he had heard correctly.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said, firmly.

  ‘But why on earth should your ex-husband tell me, a total stranger, where I can find your daughter?’

  She looked at him and spoke with the tolerance a teacher would allow a slow child.

  ‘Because you will have the gun, of course.’

&n
bsp; For a second or two, the full realisation did not dawn. Then, with the impact of a cup of cold water to the face, it did.

  ‘No!’ he said, recoiling. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no! You cannot be serious. That is such a bad idea.’

  She shrugged, clearly satisfied, in her mind, with the plan.

  ‘It’s quite simple. I give you the address, you say you are an associate of mine and let him know that he’s not going to get away with it anymore. He gives you the information, you go to see my daughter and explain the situation, then you bring her to me in hospital. What could go wrong?’

  ‘What could go wrong?’ Martin raised his voice so much that the old man at the opposite far end of the bay and his two visitors turned to look at him.

  ‘What could go wrong?’ he repeated in more hushed tones. ‘Where do I start? Apart from the fact that you’d be asking me to do something that is totally illegal, it’s also highly dangerous to threaten someone with a gun…’

  ‘It’s not loaded,’ she reminded him. ‘Check the magazine in the handle. There are no bullets in it. It’s not been fired for seventy-five years, so it probably wouldn’t work even if there were any bullets for it. It’s not dangerous at all.’

  ‘It’s definitely illegal,’ he retorted, though he still wasn’t willing to totally concede the possibility of no danger attached.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ she chided. ‘Are you telling me you’ve never done anything that wasn’t legal? You’re not suggesting to me you didn’t realise you might be arrested when you chained yourself to that tree.’

  ‘That was different,’ he replied. ‘That was taking a stand for a just cause. It was an acceptable risk.’ Martin realised he might have implied that Mrs Dawes’ cause was not a worthy one.

  ‘I’ll happily call around to see him. I’ll tell him about the accident and that you want to see your daughter again. I’ll appeal to his better nature. I’ll reason with him.’

  ‘He has no better nature,’ she said, bitterly. ‘Unless you threaten him with the gun, he’ll never give you the address and then he’ll tell Tanya more lies and I’ll be even worse off than I am now. I know my husband. Believe me, I’ve thought this through. There is no other way.’

  ‘I won’t do it.’ All the firm resolve Martin could muster was put into those four words. He meant it. The argument had already gone much further than reasonable logic demanded it should have.

  She softened, slumping back into her pillow, defeated. She dabbed at her eyes with the tissue and reverted to vulnerable little old lady mode.

  ‘You said you would do anything to make up for what happened to me,’ she reminded him, a pitiable tremor in her voice. ‘This is the one thing I ask. I know I haven’t much longer in this world and all I want is to see my daughter for one last time, then I can die contentedly. This is my only chance. You are the only one who can grant a poor, lost soul her dying wish.’

  She turned her head slowly to him, as if the effort of it demanded all that remained of her strength.

  ‘Please do this for me, Martin. It’s all I need.’

  His heart was crumbling. He was powerless.

  ‘He lives at number fifty-two, Silverwood Close. It’s not far away. Only a half-hour walk.’

  Her head sank deeper into the pillow.

  ‘Martin,’ she pleaded. ‘I’m begging you.’

  8

  Of course, he knew it was emotional blackmail and, of course, he knew he should not have given in to it. He had always been what some might uncharitably term a ‘soft touch’, though he preferred to think of it as a sign of his caring, empathic nature.

  Either way, Martin already regretted telling Mrs Dawes that he would pay a visit to her volatile ex-husband Frank and that he would play it her way. With the gun. Even though he knew the chances of the plan succeeding were none to zero and that he would, quite frankly, regard the mission as a success if he could get away without Mr Dawes collapsing from a heart attack and dying on the spot.

  Oh god! What if that actually happened?

  Much of the rest of his afternoon was spent thinking through how to fulfil his promise to Mrs Dawes with minimal risk to himself, as well as his intended victim.

  It was ludicrous to contemplate doing it the way Mrs Dawes wanted him to. It was highly illegal, hugely dangerous, completely reckless, utterly nonsensical and probably completely counter-productive, too, even if – and this was a big ‘if’ – he went through with it and somehow managed to walk away with the information he wanted.

  There had to be a better way.

  The best option would have been to cut out the whole gun confrontation thing altogether. Martin knew that if he could somehow find the daughter himself, he could try to deliver the desired outcome without having to behave like an undersized mobster.

  He tried Google-searching for any trace of a Tanya Dawes in the Sheffield area but drew a blank. Nobody of that name in the phone directory or the electoral register search, no likely matches on social media. Perhaps she had taken on a married name. Perhaps she had moved away. Martin regretted not having asked Mrs Dawes for any more information that could have helped his search.

  Reluctantly, and after pursuing all the possible alternative options he could think of, he allowed his thoughts to return to the original plan and decided his best starting point would be to reassure himself that the gun was harmless.

  After the horrifying first moment he discovered the Luger the previous night, Martin had hurriedly rewrapped it in the material, zipped it into the shoulder bag and had pushed it as far back in the wardrobe as he could. For extra peace of mind, he had also concealed it beneath a mass of spare clothing, boxes and whatever else came to hand. No amount of precautions, however, had been unable to crush his illogical fear that the police might telepathically pick up on the panic within his soul and decide this was the time to conduct a random search of his home.

  After carefully removing the pile of jumble, he unwrapped the blue cloth again and stared at the gun. The shock of seeing it for the first time was so great that he had not taken in the detail of it, but he dared to touch it now and feel the weight of it as its wooden grip slipped snugly into the palm of his hand. He raised and extended his arm, squinting one-eyed down the length of the barrel as if taking aim at the face of an otter on the 2012 Yorkshire Ecology Conference poster on the far wall of the room and curled his forefinger around the trigger.

  A sensation of power surged through his body, frightening Martin and compelling him to quickly lay the gun down on the bed. He deplored violence and had told himself that he could never imagine firing a weapon at another living creature, in anger or in defence, in peacetime or at war. But he had felt the adrenal kick and had heard the whispered seductive call of the gun, enticing him to embrace the dark thrill of its menace. He shuddered.

  So that’s what it feels like to hold the balance of life and death in your hand.

  Martin tried for half an hour to figure out how to remove the magazine from the handle before resorting to finding a YouTube video in which a scary-looking American man with a large beard performed the function with easy nonchalance in less than a second. Five minutes later, he had the magazine in his fingers and had satisfied himself, by peering at it from every conceivable angle, that it did not contain bullets, as Mrs Dawes had assured him. That was a relief. He clicked the magazine back into place.

  Mrs Dawes had grossly underestimated the time it would take to get to the address at Silverwood Close. The computer map told him it was reachable in twenty-four minutes by bike and would take him almost an hour to walk there. Cycling was the better option. He worked out he could leave his bike at a large Asda store and cut through a small park to get to the house, satisfying himself the plan would offer a good chance of slipping away unnoticed after completing the task.

  He closed his eyes. How the hell did it come to the point where he was devising a plan to sneak halfway across Sheffield to threaten an old man with a gun, all at the request of a woman he
barely knew? This is madness!

  But then he thought about what poor Mrs Dawes must have been through. Not only did she have to cope with the shattering impact, the humiliation, brought about by the forced ending of her marriage, the man she had loved and trusted for more than half a century had twisted the knife by taking their daughter from her too. What sort of a person would do that? He should not be allowed to get away with treating her like that. Mrs Dawes should be reunited with her Tanya and if there was a chance that he could bring that about, however unconventional the method, then he would have done a good deed. He would have righted a wrong.

  He owed it to Mrs Dawes to at least try.

  Steeling himself, Martin made a decision. He would do it tonight when it went dark. That way, he would cut down his chances of adding to the many perfectly good reasons to back out he had already come up with. Once it was done, he would be able to get rid of the gun from his home.

  That had to go. Family heirloom or not, he would come up with a way of disposing of it so that it could never be traced back to him. That was the condition Mrs Dawes would simply have to accept.

  ***

  Martin walked briskly along the asphalt path on the outer edge of the small park and tried to give the impression there was absolutely no reason to believe he was doing anything out of the ordinary whatsoever. No one was around to confirm whether he had succeeded in his aim but, deep within, he felt far from ordinary.

  The sun had set an hour ago and the park was shielded from the housing estate that ran beside it by a thick band of mature trees and bushes, so that the only light in the park fell from the dim, far-distanced street lamps alongside the path. Martin was grateful for all the anonymity he could get. He hunched under the hood of his black sweat top, a black scarf tucked within it, and buried his gloved hands into the pouch of its front. It was a chilly enough night to justify the look and he was showing no distinguishing logos to give away his identity. He had never been one for designer gear. There were too many horror stories of developing nations and their exploitative production culture to tolerate buying from the big brands.