by Sharn Hutton
Using a combination of fingers and spoon he pressed about five inches of render onto the stone-free surface. Easy. Bob would be impressed. He grabbed a handful of shingle from the bag and poked the first stone into the bed he’d made.
It immediately fell out. He tried again, this time giving it an extra hard push.
It fell off, taking the render with it in an orange peel curl. Rachel caught his eye and he gave her an enthusiastic thumbs up. He scooped another glob and decided to go for a more aggressive approach. He spooned and pressed render into all the gaps that surrounded the window. No quick task. The render was drying out and, in places, was not co-operating. He’d seen professionals do this. They heaved great buckets of stones at the wall—no wonder some of them stuck. All at once, in one big hit, that was the key.
Jerry took a handful of stones and chucked them at the wall with all his strength. They clattered on the glass, ricocheting off in a multitude of directions, but mostly back in his face. “Argh!” Jerry put his hands up too late and ducked beneath the window sill. Peanut choked out a shocked whimper from her basket, then revved up for a full on fit.
“For the love of God, Jerry!” Rachel yelled from the kitchen. He peered over the sill just in time to see her scoop Peanut up and storm off to the front room.
Right. Jerry took up a new position, at an angle to the window. He scooped and then hurled another handful. A couple stuck, but the vast majority bounced off. Jerry adopted a machine gun action, scoop and hurl, scoop and hurl, scoop and hurl. Multiple sharp pointy stones ricocheted into his face and body, but he ploughed on, eyes screwed up tight.
When the bag seemed to be empty, Jerry gingerly opened one eye. He stood ankle deep in a sea of shingle. The occasional gap had been filled by a stone. The glass was pitted in numerous places. Jerry bit at his lip.
He sank to his knees and pushed at the pile with his hands, encouraging them back into the bag. Those at the bottom had mingled with the odd dollop of render and stuck together. Of course. Jerry reached for his teaspoon and scraped together the remaining render on the floor, mixing it with a good measure of stones. He scooped a handful, rolled it into a sausage shape and squelched it into place with his hands. It stayed. He worked his way around the frame and stepped back to admire his work. It had a certain rustic charm, in a knobbly uneven kind of way, but there were definitely stones now.
Drawn by the silence, a curious Rachel appeared at the back door, a placated Peanut in her arms. She eyed Jerry’s handiwork with a furrowed brow. Sensing disapproval, he wasted no time passing the buck.
“Hey, Bob really has used a very poor quality render here, Rach. Got absolutely no strength to it. I think you should tell him that you’re not happy with the materials.”
Rachel stepped forward to examine the window more closely. Sunlight glinted off the pits in the glass. Random stones protruded from Jerry’s misshapen sausage like sweet corn in a turd. She turned impassive eyes to Jerry, who stood hands on hips, shaking his head and tutting.
“Yes, he really has done a shit job, hasn’t he?” she said, deadpan. “I’ll call him, shall I? Ask him to come over and fix it.” Jerry’s eyes widened and his jaw flapped.
“Ah, well, we don’t want to seem ungrateful though, do we? Good old Bob.”
Rachel looked at him for a long moment, eyebrows raised and Jerry managed a weak smile. “Just perfect,” she grumbled and turned on her heel to go back inside, stumbling over the flap in the vinyl as she went.
NINE
JERRY FIDDLED WITH HIS PEN AND THOUGHT ABOUT THE WEEKEND. Isabell had run rings around him, again. This latest game was getting on for blackmail. He had to sort her out, somehow. Rachel didn’t exactly suspect, but she was catching on. He could see it in her squinting eyes, her hesitations to reply. She knew. She didn’t know what she knew, but she knew.
Jerry leaned back in his office chair. The ceiling tiles, stained yellow from a leak, hung ominously bowed above his head. Remi wouldn’t stand for this, he thought. Remi would have got that statement, he’d have sorted it out like ‘that’. He mentally clicked his fingers.
“Agent Red, this is Aqua,” said the phone call in his head. “We need you to retrieve a Top Secret file from your arch enemy, Kitty Princesa. She’s hosting a fundraiser at her Acapulco mansion. Your mission is to gain access to her private study and steal the document. The British government is relying on you.”
Yeah, that’s a good one. Jerry settled back in his chair to picture the scene.
Princesa’s mansion stood at the top of a particularly jagged cliff face. Its buttressed walls were a good twenty feet high and armed security flanked the gate, checking invitations and searching through cars. Remi wasn’t going in through the front door tonight though. Scoping out the mansion from the safety of his yacht earlier in the day, he’d spotted a service stairway carved into the craggy cliff. A crumbling jetty at its foot was the perfect place to moor his mini jet boat. Remi scaled the steps two at the time, designer tux moving easily with his athletic frame.
The concrete foundations and plinth on which the mansion stood loomed grey and foreboding above his head. With every stair climbed, sounds of the party filtered down a little louder.
A metal gate, seven feet tall and barbed with razor wire, stood lone sentry at the top of the stairs. A keypad and a heavy padlock held it shut. Remi had no code or key. He examined the gate, running his fingers around its edges, deducing that the gate hung from two pin hinges just visible through a millimetre’s gap. Remi took two Semtex pads from the Agent pack strapped to his chest and slid them in the gap just below the hinges themselves, connected detonation wires from his watch and stepped back down the steps, as far away as the wires would allow. Music fell down from above, chatter gliding with it on the wind and Remi listened for the beat. The explosion synchronised with the music exactly, blowing the back gate off its hinges. It swung wide on its pointless lock and Remi stalked inside.
You’d never get away with it in real life, obviously, but Jerry wasn’t worried about that. In his fantasy world he could get away with anything. In this fantasy world Kitty Princesa was Remi’s Isabell: an ex-partner who continued to interfere in his life. Kitty had been Remi’s partner at MI5, until she went bad and stole millions from the British coffers. Destroying the gate was enormously satisfying after his hour and a half spent freezing in Isabell’s garden. He had to get his kicks where he could find them.
Beyond Princesa’s broken gate the path stepped back behind a fat concrete wall and widened to a long curved courtyard. To his left the natural cliff face climbed steeply up, domesticated by decorative ferns and succulents, to the right a series of louvered shutters, stretched in a protective arc toward a pair of tall glass doors. Fine voile flapped with the breeze, flashing glimpses of the partygoers within: bejewelled women in fine long gowns and tuxedoed men all looking like each other.
So this was how Princesa spent the money she’d stolen from the British Government.
Remi peered in through the dipped shutters. The first room was a storeroom of some kind, the second, a gym. The next looked more promising. Its own door to the courtyard was unlocked and Remi slipped in, still undisturbed.
An enormous expanse of glass curved around the outer perimeter in place of a wall. Beyond it a flat terrace reached out, seemingly into air. The view of Acapulco Bay was both breathtakingly beautiful and alarmingly high.
Remi tore his eyes away to scour the room. Princesa’s long 70’s styled desk stood in its centre and Remi wasted no time rifling through the drawers. The final drawer, lock picked in seconds, gave up the secret file that Remi sought. He flicked through its pages: plans for a new superweapon that Princesa intended to use against the government. “Now this is the kind of document that could really get a girl in trouble,” he mused aloud.
“Oh, I don’t think so, Agent Red.”
The voice, thick with malice, came from behind him and Remi spun around to see his old adversary, Kitty Princesa, her Medite
rranean good looks marred by unnatural golden teeth, glinting in her withering smile. She cradled a hairless Sphynx kitten in her arms and stroked its wrinkly head.
“I’ll take that if you don’t mind, mi amigo,” she said and two tuxedo-clad henchmen followed her into the room, sneering and flexing their fists.
“You’ll have to prise it from my cold dead fingers,” Remi crowed and leapt into a sprint, toward a thin opening in the glass wall. Out on the terrace, he slid to a halt just shy of the platform edge. Beyond its unguarded rim lay a five-hundred metre drop to certain death in water topped with moonlit foam, whipped up by jagged rocks beneath.
Princesa swished out after him, scarlet evening gown clinging to her voluptuous figure, skirts skimming the concrete.
“Where are you going, mi amigo? It is a little late for a swim, no?”
Laughter rumbled through the henchmen, but Remi wasn’t beaten yet. He tucked the secret file into his waistband and pulled off his jacket to reveal a body harness. Reaching behind his neck, he pulled a wad of folded silk from the slim pack on his back, gave Princesa a wink then tossed his fabric bundle into the air. The updraft from the sea snapped it open into a parabola.
“So long, Kitty,” Remi said and stepped over the edge to disappear from view.
“¡No! ¡Vuelve aquí, cabrón,” the henchmen above his head shouted and ran to the rim.
Remi barrel-rolled the paraglider to glimpse his pursuers gaping mouths then dropped into the darkness as they reached for their weapons.
He’d got what he’d come for. It was time to get back to his boat.
TEN
RACHEL STIFLED A YAWN, the dull red glow of the nightlight pooling at her feet. Peanut gripped the bottle with mittened hands and guzzled milk, while out in the hallway Grandma Ray’s clock marked time. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. The slow metallic thunk echoed in its wooden coffin. She tried to match her breathing to its beat, but the rhythm was too slow, too unnatural and made her feel, even more, like she was drowning.
Peanut coughed out a mouthful of milk and whimpered and Rachel’s spirits dropped farther still: another feed that was to be punctuated with despair. Her infant gasped and, tiny body rigid, let out a cry. Helpless, Rachel pulled her close, rocking and patting, turning her this way and then that, trying to find relief.
Nothing she did made any difference. Peanut yelled out, high pitched protests that clenched Rachel’s jaw and wrenched her guts. Shrill screams that lasted seconds? Minutes? Rachel closed her eyes and rocked and after a while, spent black and helpless, the writhing calmed. Rachel knew she’d done nothing to help. Time had passed and that was all. Peanut relaxed and grasped the bottle once again when it was offered. Rachel drew the thin cotton of her dressing gown up at the neck and hunkered down.
The nightlight threw long shadows: the bars of the cot reaching fuzzy fingers full stretch to the ceiling, confining the ever present Bilbo Bunny in their prison. Gay curtains turned grey in the night’s half-light. The nursery, so jolly by day, became her dungeon in the gloom. Rachel’s bleary eyes starred blindly into the red-tinged darkness and her thoughts wandered back to the hospital, back to the maternity ward.
She hadn’t expected it to be so busy: endless visitors flocking in to meet the latest additions to their families. Peculiar to be surrounded by strangers when you felt so fragile and overwrought. Of course, Rachel’s parents had visited and Jerry too. The most vivid memory though, was of the hours just after their baby had been delivered. She’d been so tired. Every muscle ached, exhausted and elated. Her heart swelled with love for their precious child. She’d looked at Jerry through softer eyes then. Up until the phone call came: Isabell with her latest drama. Jerry shouldn’t have gone, shouldn’t have given in. He should have seen it for the game move it was, but he didn’t or couldn’t. Isabell laid on the guilt and he had buckled under the pressure.
Looking around the maternity ward that afternoon, Peanut clasped to her breast, she’d felt the emptiness of the chair next to her bed in the hollow of her chest. Other cooing new fathers fussed around their clever wives and embraced their babies with tenderness and joy, while she had sat alone.
A lump formed in Rachel’s throat as she looked down at Peanut in the grim nursery, reliving the sadness. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. The clock beat on, consistent and unending. This was how it was. Take each breath as it came. It was always worse at night.
The bottle drained, Rachel patted Peanut’s back in vain hope. Her stomach growled, but nothing came. Fidgeting in discomfort she cried out again: shrill cries that set Rachel’s teeth on edge; escalating sobs that rolled silent tears down her mother’s cheeks too. “There, there, little bubba, don’t cry, don’t cry.” She rocked back and forth in the chair and the minutes passed, clutched chest to chest.
ELEVEN
THE TREADMILL HUMMED TO LIFE. Adam punched up a steady six miles per hour and flicked on his music. Guitar riffs filled his head and the gym faded away.
Between three and four was a quiet time at Solomon’s: office workers were still chained to their desks and ladies that lunched had had their children thrust back upon them at the end of the school day.
With the place to himself, he zoned out for a 5K run. So much time spent at the gym in the middle of the day was an indulgence his old life would never have allowed. He’d have had his nose buried in the file of yet another degenerate, ferreting out the clink in the law to build his case upon.
Adam took a deep breath—it was good to be his own man again. Bottom line, bad people needed to be punished not helped. He couldn’t condone that professional obligation anymore. He’d switched sides. He was a good guy now.
He bumped the speedo up to eight mph and settled into his stride. He’d been used to lying accountants with their fraudulent business practices. Drug and firearms traffickers had been commonplace too. All selfish and vile. His expectations of the human condition had become so depressingly low that he’d accepted their crimes as commonplace. They’d held little significance in his own life. He’d swept them into the system and out through the loopholes.
McGinty had been an eye-opener though—the wakeup call that Adam had needed. Their meeting had been at Wakefield Prison. McGinty was being held on remand until his court date came up in eight weeks’ time. Having negotiated security with practised ease, Adam had swept through the echoing corridors, buoyed by his usual confidence. He’d had no inkling then that this would be his last day at BSL.
The stench of institutional floor cleaner mingled with filthy mop and assaulted his nostrils. Exposed brick walls, daubed brilliant white, were lit by overhead fluorescent strips. The air hung in stagnant pools, swirled into eddies as Adam swept by.
The conference room was filthy grey with no furniture save for a table and four plastic chairs, which squatted in the centre of the scratched linoleum floor. A two-way mirror stretched four feet along the wall opposite the door: a dark substitute for windows. McGinty was already slouched at the table when Adam came in. His back to the door, he wore a grey marl jogging suit and cuffs.
“Mr McGinty.” Adam reach out a professional hand to his client.
“Fox.” McGinty’s hands remained in his lap.
Adam sat down unperturbed and retrieved the relevant file from his satchel.
“Errol James McGinty, date of birth 20th May 1981, place of residence 215 Hill View, Camden.”
No response.
“That you?” Adam pressed.
“There’ll never be another,” McGinty growled across the table.
“Why don’t you tell me why we’re here?”
“If you don’t know then you’re one useless piece of shit lawyer. What am I paying you for?”
Adam looked up at McGinty from his paperwork.
“Mr McGinty, my purpose is to represent you in this prosecution from the Crown. I am well aware that you have been detained in this facility following your involvement in an aggravated burglary. If I am to do this well I must have all the facts, and I
do mean all the facts. Surprises in court don’t make for acquittal.”
McGinty lounged back in his plastic chair, appraising Adam through clear blue eyes, held lazily hooded. His long black hair brushed back from a receding hairline into a tight ponytail. Pallid skin stretched tight over high cheekbones. Only of average weight and build, he had a greater presence than his size should have allowed. Malevolence oozed from every pore. “It was a slow day. Thought I’d make myself a little entertainment.”
Adam rolled his hand, encouraging McGinty to continue.
He jutted his chin out. “I was behind her at the till. Needed some smokes and the stupid bitch took forever to dig out her purse. That’s why I noticed her, noticed the rocks on her fingers. She walked so slow with that piece of shit dog that I caught her up.”
Adam wrote notes. McGinty was clearly a thug. Before even hearing the rest of the story he knew that there would be no clever twist in his tale. He preferred fraud cases. At least then he knew he was dealing with a certain level of intelligence in his client. Adam supposed that he’d been called in on this case because McGinty wanted to minimise his sentence. Adam wondered how he could afford him.
