Catalyst

by Mark Eklid

  ‘Where are we going?’

  He resisted her attempt to take him away. Surely, the show was over and they could pick up where they left off?

  ‘He’s heading towards the footbridge to get over to our side. We need to get a good look at him.’

  Sam did not understand her urgency. ‘What for?’

  ‘He had a gun, Sam. What kind of a person carries a gun and then throws it in the river? My dad’s a police officer…’

  ‘Your dad’s a copper?’ He wondered for a moment if he had done anything to the daughter to incriminate himself.

  ‘… and I think he might want to know who this person is. If we can get a picture of him…’

  The two of them quickened their pace, at least one of them eager to get into position before the mysterious man reached the other side of the footbridge.

  ***

  Wesley Hughes stepped purposefully along the path, hunched under the peak of his cap with his hands in the pockets of his dark jacket. Being short usually made it easier to remain inconspicuous and he knew that after he did what he needed to do and crossed the river towards the centre, he could melt into the Saturday evening bustle and slip away unnoticed. All he had to do was keep his wits about him until it was done.

  It was usually quiet in this part of the city at this time of day and he had not encountered anyone on the path so far, but he noticed someone heading towards him and cautiously dipped his head to shield his face.

  The other person seemed unaware of Wesley’s approach. He was of similar height and build, though slimmer, and appeared to be distracted by something, shaking his head and muttering as he closed the gap between them at a bustling pace. Wesley moved to one side, allowing plenty of room to pass by, but the other man ploughed on along the middle of the path, unaware he was on a collision course, until they were practically on top of each other.

  In almost the last step, the other man realised there was another presence on the path and diverted himself just enough to avoid contact, passing with a mumbled ‘Sorry, ‘scuse me,’ and scurrying on his way again.

  Wesley shot him a filthy glare and carried on to where there was a break in the bushes to his left, a point where there was a slight kink in the line of the path. He assessed in front, behind him and to the side before quickly snatching the handgun from the waistband of his trousers and flicking it, in one movement, towards the river, barely breaking stride as he walked on towards the footbridge.

  He stepped out over the river crossing. Already, his attention was turning to what he needed to do next before he would return home. Suddenly, he saw a distracting flash of light in the corner of his eye and looked up towards it. A young girl and boy were posing with a phone for selfies – her pouting, him pulling a face of mock excited surprise. Wesley silently wondered why kids felt the need to take so many pictures of themselves and carried on towards the centre.

  Chloe watched him go and began to thumb through her handiwork. The camera had not been set in selfie mode but had captured a sequence of movement as the short stranger who had thrown away the gun walked by them and looked straight towards their camera. They were good, clear images. Her dad would be pleased.

  17

  ‘I promise you I am never doing anything like that again.’

  Evelyn sat in the armchair next to the bed and listened to Martin’s tale of trauma and near-calamity, a suppressed smile playing on the corners of her mouth. He was so melodramatic, but he played the role of victim so well and that made him an excellent storyteller. She loved to listen to him talk, whether it was the latest gossip about customers in the café or the full harrowing account of how he – eventually – disposed of an illegal weapon.

  ‘Well, it’s done now,’ she offered, deliberately minimising the extent of the emotional scarring he was suggesting he had suffered. ‘It’s gone and you don’t need to worry about it anymore. That should be the end of it.’

  ‘Thank goodness,’ he replied, quietly. It had taken him a long time to feel normal again following the events of the previous evening and every stinging reminder from the sore patch of skin on the inside of his thigh brought it all back. Talking it through with Mrs Dawes had been a help. She was the only person he could tell.

  Martin turned to look at the large clock on the far wall of the ward.

  ‘I’d better be off. I’m sorry to have to cut you short today, Mrs Dawes, but I’ve left Maggie on her own in the café and I said I’d be back by three.’

  He stood and took his yellow jacket from the back of his seat to put it on.

  ‘I’m so pleased to see you’re able to get properly up and about now and it sounds like the physio is really happy with your recovery.’

  Evelyn smiled, proud that he had acknowledged her progress.

  ‘You’ll be out of here in no time.’

  Her smile slipped. ‘Well, we’ll have to see about that.’

  ‘Of course you will.’

  Martin zipped up his jacket and picked up his cycling helmet.

  ‘You’ve not forgotten, have you?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course not. It might be a bit full-on early this week and I’ve got the accountants coming in on Tuesday, but I promise you, I will go to visit your ex-husband before the weekend.’

  He leaned towards her and kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  She watched him leave. She always felt a little sad after he had gone but the closer she was to the end of her time in hospital, the harder it was. There might not be many more visits to come.

  Thankfully, there were only two customers and their dog in the café when he arrived back. Maggie was busying herself by tidying away clean dishes and cutlery.

  ‘Hi!’ he breezed in from the back room after changing out of his cycling gear. ‘Sorry I’m a bit later than I said I would be.’

  ‘No bother.’ Maggie was thirtyish and comfortably rounded. She had given birth three times in five years and had saw no reason why getting back to the same shape she was in when she was twentyish should even come close to the top of her priority list. ‘It’s been fairly quiet.’

  Martin looked out of the front window.

  ‘Get off home to the kids if you like, Maggie.’

  She paused midway through drying a coffee cup with a tea towel.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s too cold out there for people to be out and about. I’ll probably close up at five today.’

  Maggie finished drying the cup and put it with the rest. ‘I will, in that case. Thanks.’

  She started to unfasten her apron on her way to the back room but then remembered.

  ‘Oh, I took a message for you.’ She picked up a piece of paper from behind the counter and handed it to Martin. On it, she had scribbled the name ‘Valerie’ and a phone number.

  He stared at it quizzingly. ‘I don’t know a Valerie. Did she say what it was about?’

  ‘Just that it was personal.’ Maggie pulled the apron from over her head. ‘She asked if you’d call back.’

  He shrugged and pushed the slip of paper into his pocket.

  Once the couple and their dog had left, it was quieter still. Martin finished the few jobs he could think to do and decided there was little point even hanging on until five to shut up shop. The temperature had barely struggled into plus figures all day and anyone with any sense was at home with the heating on.

  After everything he had been through that week, a few hours at home listening to music with a couple of glasses of wine sounded like an appealing prospect.

  The message. Might as well return that call and find out what this Valerie wants. Get that out of the way.

  He retrieved his phone from the inside pocket of his jacket and keyed in the number Maggie had left him. The call was answered on the fourth ring.

  ‘This is Martin Bestwick from the Better World café. I understand you called earlier.’

  There was a pause, then a woman’s voice, dark as liquid chocol
ate and smooth as pure honey, purred down the line.

  ‘Martin, so good of you to return my call.’

  OK, he thought. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘We’ve never met, but I’m familiar with the wonderful work of you and your group,’ she said.

  So, it’s group-related, nothing to do with the café.

  ‘That’s nice. I’m glad you appreciate our objectives.’

  ‘I’d like us to meet,’ she said, suggestively.

  ‘Well, we have meetings every…’

  ‘No,’ the voice cut in. ‘Just you. I’d like to meet you.’

  ‘I see,’ Martin replied, not seeing at all. ‘Well, I…’

  ‘I have something that will be of interest to you. Information.’

  ‘Oh!’ This was getting odder. ‘What sort of information?’

  ‘I understand you know about Cranford Hardstaff.’

  He had not been able to hear mention of that name without blushing since the beer can incident in the Peace Gardens the previous weekend. Even though he had not been responsible, he felt he had been blamed.

  ‘I know a bit about him, yes.’

  ‘I can tell you things about Cranford Hardstaff that will make your toes curl,’ she promised, and Martin felt his toes curl at the prospect.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Meet me at the Chianti Club wine bar on Division Street tomorrow at eight and I’ll show you everything I’ve got.’

  She hung up. Martin held the phone to his ear for several seconds longer, as if waiting for someone else to come on the line to explain what that conversation was about.

  ‘Well, that was weird,’ he announced to the empty café.

  He had never heard of the Chianti Club and he had no idea who this woman Valerie was. Should he go there to meet her? He decided to go home, to think it over.

  ***

  Even as he sat at the bar, nursing a soda and lime the barman had made unpalatable by putting in too much lime, Martin was still not sure he had made the right choice. Curiosity had got the better of him and now he perched on a tall stool, facing the main door, waiting for a strange woman to turn up with toe-curling information about the leader of Sheffield City Council.

  In the context of everything else that had happened over the last couple of weeks, it was a situation that hardly even rated as odd.

  Chianti Club was underlit and underpopulated. Apart from three young men at the other end of the bar, drinking over-priced lager from long, thin glasses, and a couple in their thirties who seemed as if they had already run out of things to say to each other, Martin was the only customer. The interior design was more Lower Manhattan than central Sheffield. The walls had been stripped down to the bare brick and the furnishings looked as if someone had taken great care to make them appear old and worn. Part shabby chic, part nouveau desolate. The faint sound of avant-garde jazz gnawed away at the ear from an expensive sound system and practically the only lighting came from the glass-fronted cabinets behind the bar accommodating tall racks filled with wine bottles that no one appeared eager to sample. On a cold Monday night, it was not a place to be if you were already contemplating throwing yourself under a bus.

  The security man on the door, his credentials fastened with a reflective green strap around his considerable right bicep, had looked down with distaste when Martin arrived in his deep red beanie hat, mid-blue all-weather coat and all-terrain hiking boots but let him pass without a challenge. Perhaps he realised that, rather than keeping out undesirables, he would be doing the bar a better service by attempting to throw people in.

  Eventually, someone else did come in.

  Martin noticed her first but one of the group of three men soon saw her too and alerted his two friends straight away. Even the male half of the bored couple chanced to lift his head, which had been dipped over a small glass of beer almost the whole time, to steal a glance and risk getting a kick under the table.

  She clearly wanted to be noticed, pausing midway across the floor to flick the black cocktail jacket off her bare shoulders and reveal a red satin dress. It was cut daringly low at the neckline to reveal her full, pneumatic cleavage and high at the hem to allow complete appreciation for her spectacularly long legs. She folded the jacket over her arm and wiggled on red heels like a catwalk model, heading straight towards Martin, homing in like a hawk swooping for the kill.

  She must be freezing coming out dressed like that, he thought.

  Slowly and without seeing a need to check she had approached the right man, she parted her plump strawberry-red lips and breathed: ‘Hi, I’m Valerie.’

  She was mid-twenties and elegantly slender. Her smoky black mascara and shaped eyebrows framed the ice blue of her eyes, sparkling like a topaz and as ravenous as a wild husky’s. She stroked strands of golden blonde hair behind her right ear to uncover the long, gold drop of her earring and stood so close to Martin that her perfume tingled his skin like soft kisses. She paused, waiting to see if he was capable of answering her greeting or would melt in a pool at her feet.

  ‘Martin. Pleased to meet you,’ he said and held out his hand to shake.

  She took it gracefully in the fingers of her right hand and squeezed lightly.

  He withdrew his hand. ‘Could I get you a drink?’

  ‘Vodka,’ she replied, tilting her head slightly to the side, ‘with two ice cubes.’

  Martin glanced up to try to catch the eye of the barman, who was pouring more glasses of lager for the three men. They had their eyes fixed on Valerie.

  ‘I’ll go to find somewhere we can talk more privately,’ she said, picking up Martin’s glass of soda and lime and, before he could object, carrying it away with her to a booth in the dingiest corner of the bar.

  Obviously not hot on manners, thought Martin as he attempted to attract the barman with a wave.

  Valerie bent gracefully into the seat of the booth. She glanced back towards the bar where Martin was still waiting to be served and unclipped her red clutch bag, taking out a small, folded piece of paper. Holding Martin’s glass out of sight beneath the table, she unwrapped the paper and tipped in the white powder contained within it, stirring the drink with a plastic stick before re-placing the glass on the table.

  She smiled to him as Martin joined her at the booth, picking up her vodka and, almost as soon as he had sat down, tipping it towards him.

  ‘Cheers,’ she said. Martin lifted his drink to chink hers and grinned, uncertainly. Valerie took a sip of her drink, but he did not.

  ‘You said you had something you wanted to tell me.’

  Even in the low half-light of their corner of the bar, he noticed the twinkle of her eyes. Do not hurry, they said. Allow yourself to enjoy the view for a while.

  ‘All in good time. I thought we might get to know each other a little first. Tell me all about you, Martin Bestwick.’

  ‘OK,’ he replied. If that’s what you want.

  ‘Well, I’m currently single.’ He instantly regretted leading with that detail. This already felt like he was a mouse being seduced into laying down on the trap and the inference of those words had not helped his chances of survival.

  ‘I’m a part of the Sheffield Environmental Action Network awareness group, as you probably know, and I own a small vegan café called Better World in Broomhill. Apart from that…’ His words tailed off as he felt himself dissolving in her scrutiny.

  ‘A café, how interesting,’ she cooed, and he wondered if she was actually interested or was being sarcastic.

  ‘What about you? What do you do?’

  ‘I work for myself,’ she ran her fingers gently through her hair. ‘I suppose you could say I specialise in personal services.’

  Martin gulped. He could tell that he was being steered down a road he did not want to travel. He felt beyond uncomfortable. He needed to divert the conversation back on track.

  ‘Look, Valerie, I appreciate your coming out to see me on a cold night such as this, but I have other things I need to
do tonight, so if we could just…’

  Martin was suddenly aware of a shape looming over him from behind. One of the three young men from the bar, tall and assured, was leaning casually with his elbow on the backrest of the booth, holding a half-filled glass of lager in his other hand. All his attention was on Valerie.

  ‘Hi,’ he oozed. ‘I’m Alex. Me and my friends were wondering if you’d like to come over for a drink.’

  Valerie picked up her glass and took a sip. ‘That’s very kind but, as you can see, I’m with someone.’

  The man glanced dismissively at Martin and turned back to her.

  ‘Yeah, but wouldn’t you rather be with me?’

  She raised her eyebrows and gave the slightest shake of her head.

  ‘No, actually. I wouldn’t.’

  Alex was not about to give up easily. Going back to his friends so plainly defeated was not an option.

  ‘We’re staying here for one more and then we’re going to the casino. I’ve got a feeling that we’ll have a good night. I think you could be our lucky charm.’

  Martin shuffled in his seat. He hated men who treated women like objects.

  ‘Look, the lady said she’s not interested.’

  The man sneered. ‘I didn’t ask you, short arse. I don’t need a fucking leprechaun.’

  ‘Hah!’ Martin let out a single hollow laugh and grinned ruefully. ‘You arrogant prick.’

  Alex felt his ears redden. Nobody got to talk to him like that. In a moment, he considered throwing a punch but, instead, he picked up Martin’s glass and threw its contents all over him.

  Martin gasped. Even Valerie’s cool was, for a second, disturbed. Alex loomed over the pathetic dripping figure beneath him but then felt the grip of a large hand on his arm.

  ‘You – out!’ growled the door security man.

  As Alex was dragged away, Valerie cursed silently.

  Shit. The drug.

  She swiftly dropped back into character and shuffled around the booth to offer comfort.

  ‘Martin, are you all right? You’re soaked.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ he replied, soda water dripping off his nose as he brushed his coat with his fingers. ‘It’s one hundred per cent shower-proof.’