Catalyst

by Mark Eklid

  ‘Who the hell would send a wreath?’

  She shrugged. ‘As I said, there was no card.’

  ‘What did the delivery person say?’

  ‘He said somebody put money in an envelope and wrote a note asking them to send this to our address.’

  ‘No name?’

  ‘No name. Just a note saying we would know what it means.’

  Darrell felt a chill run through his body.

  ‘Jesus!’ He reached to put his phone down on the floor. ‘What kind of a sick fuck…’

  They were both motionless, their minds churning, their thoughts mulling the same conundrum but leading them in separate directions.

  ‘Do you think it might be the same person? The one with the gun?’ he asked, tentatively.

  ‘How should I know?’ she snapped, her anxiety showing in her unintended sharpness.

  ‘We need to get in touch with the florist. They might still have the note. Which one was it?’

  ‘Pam’s Petals. The one on the main road.’

  It had been so long since Darrell last surprised her with flowers that she had to assume he did not know where the shop was.

  ‘Should we tell the police? It might be connected to…’

  She considered this. If the source of all this led back to where she feared it might, it may not be such a good idea to have the police investigating it too closely. That might prove more than awkward. It could prove costly.

  ‘Yeah, we probably should,’ she replied, attempting to sound like there could not possibly be anything to hide but that she was not exactly sold on the idea.

  ‘Maybe in the morning, eh? Maybe we’ve both had enough of all this for one day and we should leave it. Get a good night’s sleep and then think about letting the police know. They’ll be very busy anyway.’

  Darrell said nothing. His mind had started to race. The big question that had tormented him all night in the hospital – who could have done this? Who would want to do this to me? – had so far failed to produce an answer, but now he felt as if he might have one. He did not like to face that possibility but could not dismiss it. Could it be?

  ‘Yeah, in the morning,’ he said. ‘We can tell them in the morning.’

  ‘It’s for the best,’ said Helena. ‘I’ll go and put this in the garage, shall I? Out of the way. Then I’ll bring us that tea in. It’ll be going cold.’

  She hurried out of the room.

  ‘Yeah, put it in the garage,’ Darrell muttered to himself. He was barely conscious of having said the words. His thoughts were rampaging away on a frightening course.

  Helena ignored the two mugs of cooling tea. She went straight to the drawer where they kept keys in a pot and picked up the one for the back door and the one for the garage side door, then snatched up her phone off the kitchen surface on her way outside.

  The chilly air was welcome. It had made her feel nothing other than more desperate to get home when she left the hospital, but it was soothing now, easing the bubbling anxiety within that was overwhelming her. She sucked in a deep lungful and released it again with a low, suppressed tormented call. She wanted to scream out loud but did not want to alert anyone to the turmoil she felt. There was only one person she could tell.

  Unlocking the wooden side door, she tossed the wreath into the gap between their car and the garage wall, then quickly closed and locked it again. Practically in the same motion, Helena unlocked the screen to her phone and scrolled down her list of contacts to the only entry under the letter ‘Y’. Yuvraj Patel.

  Yuvraj was the city council’s Senior Scientific Officer. As the Head of Planning and Regeneration, Helena had worked closely with Yuvraj in her own job with the council, especially in the last months while the Swarbrook Hill project gathered pace. The Swarbrook Hill project had taken up a huge proportion of their and many other council officers’ workloads over the last months – a multi-million-pound housing development on the edge of the city on which so much rested, for the authority, the local economy and for themselves personally. It was at a delicate stage and much more work was needed to see it over the line. It had been a stressful time for them all, but Helena knew it would be worth it in the end.

  If it were not for Yuvraj, she would not have got the job as the city council’s Head of Planning and Regeneration in the first place. She was in no doubt about that.

  Yuvraj was a trusted colleague.

  He had also been her lover for the last eight months.

  She pressed the green call button.

  ‘Yuvie, it’s me,’ she said, as soon as he answered.

  ‘Hold on. Let me find somewhere private,’ he replied. She heard the commotion of a crowded room fade, followed by silence apart from the echoing sound of his footsteps as a heavy door squeaked closed behind him.

  ‘I heard what happened. Hell, are you all right?’

  Just hearing his voice made her feel better but she was starting to cry again.

  ‘Yeah, I’m OK. Just really tired,’ she said.

  ‘How’s Darrell?’

  She was glad he had asked. Neither of them wished ill of Darrell. It wasn’t his fault they had fallen in love. All they wanted was an opportunity to come clean – get out of their marriages with as little damage done to their other halves as possible and make a fresh start somewhere else. That was what made Cranford Hardstaff’s proposal so attractive.

  Darrell was the victim here and now he had been victimised in a way neither of them could have imagined.

  ‘He’s going to be OK, but Yuvie, I’m so scared. This is all my fault.’

  The tears were beyond control now. Yuvraj’s heart sank as he had to listen to the sound of her sobbing at the other end of the phone. He had to give her time to let the worst of it out.

  ‘Try to be calm. This is not your fault. Just take your time and tell me what happened.’

  Helena battled to regain her composure and breathed deeply.

  ‘It was a man at the door, just after nine o’clock. We think it was a man but he was apparently quite short and he was all in black, with his face covered. Darrell thought it might be one of his Year Tens at first. He tried to get the gun off him, but he was shot in the foot. Oh, Yuvie, there was so much blood and he was in so much pain and I realise now it was all because of me. I was upstairs, working, which was why Darrell went to answer the door, but I think it was me they were after. Darrell had to take a bullet for me.’

  Yuvraj heard another wail down the line. This was hard to listen to and even harder because he could not understand why Helena had taken the blame on her shoulders.

  ‘It’s OK, it’s OK. Why do you think someone would want to threaten you with a gun? No one knows about us and no one knows about our deal. No one has any reason to come for you. This sounds to me like a random incident. Perhaps this person was looking for money. Perhaps he was a drug addict or something. You can’t assume this was a planned attack.’

  ‘Oh, but I can!’ she hissed back. ‘This afternoon, not long after we got back from the hospital, we had a delivery from a florist. Someone had sent us a funeral wreath, Yuvie.’

  ‘Jesus!’ His blood ran cold.

  ‘The boy who delivered it said it was paid for anonymously by someone pushing an envelope through their door and a note said to pass on the message that we would know what it means.’

  Yuvraj was struggling to provide a rational counter to her hysteria.

  ‘Just hold on, hold on,’ he stammered. ‘That doesn’t necessarily mean…’

  ‘It was a fucking funeral wreath, Yuvraj. The note said we would know what it means. What the fuck else could it mean? It means they know we’ve taken money to get Swarbrook Hill through to approval, despite everything. Somebody is on to us. This is a fucking death threat. They’re saying next time it will be a bullet through the head, not the foot.’

  Yuvraj’s throat went dry. His head was spinning, but he had to try to calm the situation. He had to say something to get her thinking straight again. T
hey both needed to think straight.

  ‘There has to be another explanation. Nobody apart from the three of us and the top man at the property development company knows about this and it’s in all of our interests to keep it that way. I don’t know how to explain the wreath, but it must be some sort of misunderstanding. This has to be a random incident. We’ve just got to keep our heads and the truth will out. There has to be another explanation.’

  Helena listened but she was not swayed. She knew. He just didn’t want to face the ugly truth.

  ‘No, Yuvie. This is serious. We have to call Cranford and put an end to this straight away, while we still have time. The development will have to be radically remediated or scrapped altogether because you know as well as I do that there is no way it should go to approval in its current form anyway. People will die if we let it through. We’ll be exposing them to cancer and all sorts of deadly poisons, and we could be signing off irreversible damage to the environment as well. I know we both agreed to take the money and turn a blind eye to the facts because it was the way to secure our future together and I still want that more than anything, but we can’t just ignore this warning. Somebody is on to us. We have to call Cranford. This must stop.’

  He sighed. ‘You know Cranford isn’t going to do that.’

  ‘He has to!’ she cried. ‘He can’t do this without us. He’ll have to listen to us.’

  The line fell quiet for a few seconds. She was clearly terrified. That was understandable, but he had to buy time so that she might see things differently in the cold light of a new day.

  ‘Let’s just take a breath before we do anything drastic. You’ve had a tough day but, I promise you, you won’t see this the same way tomorrow. If you do and we don’t just find that this was all about a random druggie looking for money for his next fix, then we’ll… look at our options. But it would be wrong to act now while emotions are running so high.’

  Helena rubbed her brow to ease the thumping chaos inside her skull. She wanted to believe that Yuvraj was right. She wanted there to be another, less scary, explanation.

  ‘OK, we leave it for now,’ she conceded. ‘But unless it comes to light that this was not what I think it is, we go to Cranford and we call the whole thing off. I don’t care if we lose the money. I don’t care if we all end up on corruption charges. This is serious shit, Yuvraj.’

  He was relieved. They both needed time to get their heads around what had happened. He had helped to steer Helena away from a potentially huge mistake, but he could not ignore the nagging fear in the pit of his stomach telling him she might be right.

  ‘Agreed. If it looks like you are right, we go to Cranford and we get out. Look, I have to get back now. We’ll speak tomorrow, right?’

  ‘Right.’ She rang off. She had better get back too. Darrell would be wondering where she had got to.

  Darrell heard the back door closing with a slam as Helena headed outside with the wreath and picked up his phone off the floor. He stared at the screen, his thumb hovering over the controls, pondering his next move.

  Should he call Beth? Was it too early to raise the alarm when all he had was an instinctive feeling? Could he be right?

  He hadn’t thought so much about it since, but the conversation, a few weeks earlier, came back to him. He and Beth were in bed. Helena was on some sort of council planners’ thing in Harrogate for the weekend and Beth had been able to convince her husband that an old friend had got in touch and they had arranged a night out with an overnight stay in Birmingham. She did go to Birmingham, but it was to meet up with Darrell.

  They had worked together since Beth arrived to teach modern languages at the start of the new academic year and they had been tiptoeing around a covert, energetic and tremendously exciting sexual relationship for just over two months. They had set about the business of concealing their liaisons from their partners and, more trickily, from everyone at school with the efficiency of a pair of double agents. They had needed to become inventive in finding their opportunities to indulge their considerable lustful appetites for each other. The back seat of her car at the 24-hour Asda had become a bit of a go-to. In a small storage cupboard adjoining the school library while a geography lesson was going on in the next room was the most daring.

  She was eight years younger than him. He loved her firm, supple, heavily-inked body and her short hair, dyed vivid orange, which was the perfect frame for her lively hazel eyes and elfin features, and he loved every snatched illicit moment they shared together. But it wasn’t just that she was much more sexually adventurous than Helena had ever been. Sure, finding such a willing partner to live out so many fantasies had provided a massive boost to his ego, but he was also drawn to Beth’s lack of complication, her plain speaking, her spirit. The world was a more straightforward, happier, satisfying place when he was with Beth.

  He and Helena hardly ever seemed to have time for each other anymore, especially since she started her new job. It was all work and career with her. Their marriage had become staid and dull. He was not ready for steady, repetitive, boring middle age. All Helena seemed to want was to make her name at the council. That was her passion now. Their sex life was dead. It was like she had gone off it completely.

  That day and night with Beth in Birmingham was bliss.

  The only time they left the room was to grab some food and a couple of drinks – recoup a little energy – in the early evening. They made the most of the rest of their time together.

  He remembered now how she lay with her head on his chest, twiddling his gold necklace in her fingers and letting it fall again against his ebony skin as they bathed in the rapture of their complete shared carnal gratification.

  It had become a bit of an unspoken rule that they didn’t talk about each other’s spouses but, for whatever reason at that particular time, he was curious. One of their other rules was that if either of them had something on their minds they should not be afraid to bring it into the open – just say it, be honest – so he decided to ask.

  ‘Babe?’ he said, tentatively.

  ‘Hmm,’ she purred, as lost as if she was floating in the middle of the ocean.

  ‘Your old man.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Tell me about him. What does he do?’

  She stirred and stretched in a supressed yawn that stiffened and straightened her body down to the ends of her toes.

  ‘You don’t wanna know,’ she said, sleepily.

  He considered her reply for a moment.

  ‘Yeah, I’d like to. I’m curious.’

  ‘Honestly, lover, it’s best that you don’t.’

  He thought about it again.

  ‘Yeah, I would. Tell me about him.’

  She sighed, irritated at being stirred from her state of joyful abandonment.

  ‘Don’t spoil the moment, Darrell. What do you want to know that for?’

  ‘I just do. You said we should always be open with each other. No secrets.’

  Beth sighed again. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘He’s a little arsehole who makes a shitload of money from a wide variety of shady and illegal activities but stashes it all away because he says it would bring too much attention on him to spend it. He’s morally bankrupt, incapable of showing compassion to another human being and dead from the waist down, but if he ever had cause to protect what was his I have no doubt that he would be as savage as a hyena with a goat’s carcass. Wesley is a self-absorbed, unscrupulous, uncaring bastard who lives his life scurrying in the shadows like a sewer rat. That’s who my husband is.’

  Darrell lay in stunned silence.

  ‘He’s a fixer. His criminal friends use him to do the dirty work they don’t want to risk doing themselves because they know he’s very good at it. He’s clean, he’s untraceable and there are no depths he wouldn’t go to in order to get the job done properly. When they occasionally fuck up, he’s there to clean up their mess. In the underworld, he’s the man who keeps thieves, gangsters and other such scum out of jail
.’

  ‘Shit,’ he said, finally. ‘How the hell did you end up married to a man like that?’

  ‘Fuck knows,’ she spat out, anger and regret in her tone. ‘I suppose I was in a bad place myself, mixed up in stuff I shouldn’t have been, and I’d lost myself. I’d certainly lost all sense. I met Wesley through this other girl who was even more seriously fucked up than I was, about three years ago, and we got married four months later – just because I decided we should. It was as impetuous as that. I soon realised what a mistake it was. I think the shock of it woke me up. I’ve been getting my life back together since then and part of that was deciding to train to be a teacher.’

  ‘But why did you stay with him?’ He half-wished he had not asked about her marriage at all but was so wrapped in the absurdity of what he was hearing that he had to know more.

  ‘I guess I’m still not completely sure I’m ready to stand alone,’ she replied. ‘Besides, he’s filthy rich and I know where he’s hidden some of it. When someone bumps him off or he gets thrown in jail, as will inevitably happen one day before too long, I’ll be made. Then I’ll be able to do whatever I want to do, with whoever I want to do, for the rest of my life.’

  She threw back the sheets and pounced on him, her naked body astride his, leaning forward so that her breasts brushed against his chest as she pressed her hands down on his broad shoulders.

  ‘Would you like to be the one, lover boy? Would you like to spend the rest of your life in bed with me and live off my husband’s ill-gotten gains? Would you want that?’

  Darrell checked the time. It was long after the final bell would have signalled the end of the school day. Beth would be free now, unless she had been roped in to supervise detention. It should be a good time to call. He might not have long until Helena came back indoors. If he didn’t call now, he might not get the chance to be alone for a while and Beth might not be able to get away from her husband to talk without raising suspicion. It had to be now, or this would start eating him up.

  ‘Hey, babe.’

  ‘Shit, Darrell, it’s been all around the school today. Are you going to be OK? What the fuck was that all about? I wanted to call you or text you all day, but I presumed she would be with you. This is just absolutely fucked up. Are you OK?’