Chasing the Dead dr-1

by Tim Weaver

  ‘Malcolm?’

  Mary again, her voice barely audible. I glanced back at her. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, her face white and fixed, almost frozen by the shock. She swayed a little and placed a hand on the wall. I turned back to Malcolm — his eyes hadn’t left me.

  He shook his head. ‘You amuse me, David. You’ve no idea what it’s like to raise a child. No idea. I loved Alex, loved him, but he was reckless. What he did was stupid. Talking about it and doing it are two entirely different things. He offered to talk to Al, not to drive a car through him. When he came to me, he came expecting me to believe in what he had done. But what he had done was wrong. I told him to go somewhere and lay low. It ripped the heart out of me, but it was the best way to protect him.’

  ‘It was the best way to protect yourself.’

  ‘I was protecting our son.’

  ‘You sent Alex to the farm. You weren’t protecting him.’

  ‘He turns up on Michael’s doorstep after five years — it wasn’t going to be long before he started leaving a trail. I wanted him away from the places that could hurt him.’

  ‘You tried to erase his memory.’

  ‘You’ve got it all wrong, David. I protected myself at the beginning. I had to. When the police came calling I was very focused. When Alex’s car turned up in Dover they came here and asked some questions about Al, but by then I’d decided to use this disease as cover, which made it difficult for them. Mary answered most of their questions. She could handle that. They were generic questions. I could tell they didn’t have a clue where to start. But it wasn’t them I was worried about. They were the front line. If it got any further, they would bring out their best soldiers. That was what I was really worried about. But, as it turned out, we never heard from the police again. And by that stage — unfortunately — I had chosen to take this route. And I’ve had to stick to it.’

  ‘And this is it now — one big lie?’

  He didn’t reply. But I could see the answer in his face. This wasn’t it. It was going to be Mary waking up one day and finding he was gone.

  ‘No one wanted him on the farm,’ Malcolm said. ‘No one. Andrew fought against me, so did Legion, even Michael didn’t know if it was a good idea. Michael. This was a boy I’d known since he attended the church down the road. A boy who watched his brother get stabbed to death dealing ecstasy. A boy who tried to get away, go travelling, but came back because he had nothing here and nothing out there. His parents were dead. And I took him in, told him about what we were doing and what a difference he could make to our cause. I changed his life. Turned it around. And when I asked for one thing, he fought me on it.’

  ‘Michael has some humanity, whatever his flaws,’ I said. ‘He could see what you were doing to Alex. To all of them.’

  ‘Malcolm?’ Mary said from behind us again.

  He didn’t acknowledge her. ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘You knew what they would do to him.’

  ‘I knew because they told me,’ he said. ‘After he left, I thought about Alex every day for five years. I thought he was dead. Then when he came back, when he went to see Michael, I knew the next stage of his life might be even harder for us than the last. Because I had to learn to know my son again through other people. Through Michael and Andrew and the others on the farm. And Alex had to forget in order to get on with the process of living. It was painful, but I helped him. I gave him a way out. But he couldn’t know the farm was mine. He couldn’t know I knew about him. It would have been too difficult for him.’

  ‘You mean it would have been too difficult for you.’

  ‘I never forced him to meet with Al. I told him Al might listen to him. I told him Al liked him. He did like him. But I never believed Alex would do what he did. I’ve thought about it often since he left, and after he came back. Thinking is what I’ve got instead of a voice. I’ve wondered whether I would sacrifice what I have now for a moment again with Alex. If I had the time over again, I’m always thinking what choice I might make.’

  ‘Why would there even be a choice?’

  ‘Al would have ruined our lives. If he had got his way, we’d be living on the street somewhere, looking in the gutters for dinner. You think he would have had second thoughts? He wouldn’t. So, what Alex did changed our lives. Because our lives carried on. If he hadn’t done that, we all would have been dead, dying in some fucking dump somewhere. There’s a choice, David, believe me.’

  He sat down on the edge of the sofa.

  ‘Eight years ago — it was 29 May — I was working for the bank, and a man came to me and asked me for a loan. When I enquired what it was for, he said he wanted to set up a rehabilitation clinic for kids with problems. A safehouse. A place they could come and start again. I didn’t know how the hell he would ever repay the loan. When I asked him how he was going to make money from it, he didn’t know. Didn’t have a clue. He just wanted to do it because of something that had happened in his life. He had no plan, and a criminal record. So, of course I turned him down. It would have been financial suicide even if he hadn’t been a convicted felon, and if I’d given it to him I would have got the sack.’

  ‘Andrew.’

  He nodded. ‘Then I began to feel very strongly about the idea.’

  ‘Alex’s brother.’

  For the first time he glanced at Mary. A brief look. Then back at me. ‘I watched someone else I loved dearly die on the streets with a needle in his arm, and I wasn’t going to stand by and watch other kids do the same.’

  ‘The boy in the photograph.’ I thought of the kid kicking a ball around in the picture Jade had showed me the night she’d died. She’d talked about the boy’s father. I think, in some ways, he’s even worse. ‘The boy is yours.’

  Malcolm nodded.

  Mary made little noise. That surprised me, but I didn’t turn around to look at her. Malcolm was in full flow now, feeding off the fact he could finally say what he’d stored up.

  ‘He wasn’t Mary’s son?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘So, whose son was he?’

  ‘A girl I met through the bank,’ he said. ‘At the end, she was just a junkie, selling herself to fund her habit. But the boy was wonderful. I tried to see him as often as I could. That was why I took the job with Al. The office was in Harrow. Robert lived in Wembley.’ He paused. ‘But then Al found out about him.’

  ‘About the boy?’

  ‘He saw me taking Robert to school one day.’

  ‘That was why he flipped?’

  ‘When he found out who Robert was, he wanted me to tell Mary. I refused. He said he’d tell her himself. So I threatened him, told him I’d kill him if he said anything. He said, if I didn’t tell her, he’d take back everything that was his. I don’t think he believed I would kill him. So, it became a stand-off. Mary hated Al — but, in the end, all Al was doing was trying to help her.’

  ‘But Mary never found out.’

  ‘No. It had been going on for two months, Al threatening to tell her. I tried to close off all other avenues, like paying Robert’s mother to keep her trap shut. But she ended up using the money to buy smack. One day when I went round there, I found a needle mark in his arm. He was ten years old. If I’d known that was going to happen, I would have killed her and brought him back here. I would have done that. In the end, she was just a hooker. No one would have missed her. But, a couple of days later, she called me on the phone and told me he’d been found in the Thames. He’d overdosed. A ten-year-old boy.’

  I remembered the newspaper cuttings, in the flat and on the farm. BOY, 10, FOUND FLOATING IN THE THAMES. This is the reason we do it.

  ‘Al didn’t have anything on me then, not once the boy was dead, but all I felt was anger. All I wanted was to hit out at someone. I suggested to Alex we take his money. That was the first step. But that wasn’t enough. It didn’t quell anything. So I started thinking about killing Al, thought a lot about it. Then Alex really did kill him. When
it happened, it suddenly seemed so huge. But after Alex had gone, I started to feel it again, eating away at me. I couldn’t suppress it. Couldn’t suppress the hatred I felt for Al, even after he was dead. And the hatred I felt for her.’

  ‘The boy’s mother?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I’d taken a lot of my contacts from the bank with me when I went to work for Al. Sneaked them out, just in case I ever started up my own business. One of the numbers was Andrew’s. I called him after Al died, told him I wanted to help him with his plan. It was the right thing to do after what happened to Robert. And we grew close, got on well. But all the time, the anger just burned in me. I think if she’d shown any kind of remorse, I would have let her live. But she didn’t. She seemed pleased to be free of the responsibility.’

  ‘So you killed her?’

  ‘About a year after we bought the farm, I just exploded. Couldn’t contain the anger any more. So I asked Andrew whether he knew anyone. He said he did, a guy he was in the army with, and that was when he sent Legion out to see her. Some things you regret. I don’t regret that.’

  ‘What about the other kids you killed? Do you regret them?’

  ‘We tried to save them.’

  ‘You murdered them.’

  ‘No one died who didn’t deserve it.’

  ‘Did Simon deserve it?’

  ‘Simon,’ he said, disgust in his face.

  ‘Did he deserve it?’

  ‘Simon became a problem.’

  ‘Because he refused to give up his memories?’

  ‘No! Because he almost beat one of our instructors to death! I never wanted the violence. I only wanted Legion’s help for that one thing. She killed that boy. She deserved it. But things happened up there, and I started to realize it was the only way we could protect ourselves. What we built and what we worked for had to be protected. And, in the end, we protected what I cared about most. We protected Alex. What we did to Simon protected Alex.’

  ‘But you murdered Simon.’

  ‘We gave him a chance, but he threw it back in our faces. Some of these kids were so fucking ungrateful. When they fought back, what the hell were we supposed to do with them? They couldn’t go back. We couldn’t put them back on the streets. They would have talked to people and we would have been found out and everything we built would have come tumbling down. They gave us no choice.’

  ‘So you killed them.’

  ‘There were challenges.’

  ‘So you killed them.’

  ‘There were unexpected challenges. And when one of our instructors, one of Andrew’s friends, was killed right back at the start, we realized that, in order to continue our work, we’d always have to make a sacrifice. In an ideal world, every kid we took to the farm would understand the magnitude of what we were doing for them. But some gave us nothing in return but their bile.’

  ‘What did you expect? You kidnapped them.’

  ‘Kidnapped them?’ He smirked again. ‘Hardly. We invited them, we didn’t force them to come to the farm. We’ve never had a kid turn us down. They took the opportunity they were given because they knew it was a good one.’

  ‘What about Alex?’

  He paused for a moment. ‘Andrew and the others, they made mistakes. Terrible mistakes. Alex wasn’t like the other kids we tried to help. He wasn’t wheeled in on a trolley with a needle in his arm. They were treating him differently, how he was meant to be treated. Not the same drugs. Not the same programme. But then that freak didn’t like it, and eventually neither did Andrew. They put Alex on the programme when he shouldn’t have been anywhere near it. They put him on it because they didn’t think he deserved special treatment. He was my fucking son! He deserved special treatment! And when he didn’t respond how they wanted, when he fought back, they put him on that fucking cross! All I’d done for them, all the money I’d put in, and that’s how they repaid me.’

  He paused, his eyes moving left and right. Thinking.

  ‘Andrew used to call me when Mary was out and I listened to his reports about Alex, about what they were doing to him, and I knew it would go wrong. Putting him on the programme just because he spoke to them in the wrong tone of voice? That was a massive misjudgement. But I was powerless to intervene. I knew Alex would fight the drugs, I knew he’d fight the containment. Alex was a fighter.’

  He looked at me; thought he saw something in my face.

  ‘I don’t give a fuck what you think,’ he said.

  ‘You protected your son by sending him to a place where they’d make him forget about you like you pretended to forget about him. That wasn’t for his sake. You sent him there to protect yourself. All of this has been about you.’

  I paused, thought I had him.

  But I was wrong.

  The smallest of smiles wormed its way across Malcolm’s face, and — very gently — I felt a gun barrel press against the back of my neck. I turned my head an inch to the left. In the window, I could see a reflection. Michael. There was strapping around his thigh where I’d shot him. Mary had been pulled in to him, her fingers wrapped around his arm, her mouth covered by his hand. It was the reason she’d gone quiet.

  ‘I told you to walk the other way,’ Michael said. ‘I tried to help you. All I want is to go back to helping those in need.’

  ‘You fucked with the wrong people, David,’ Malcolm said, coming around the sofa. ‘The minute I found out Mary was going to you, I knew it would end in bloodshed.’

  I glanced around me. Nothing to pick up. No weapons.

  ‘You don’t give up secrets worth protecting,’ he said. He moved up close to me. Nose to nose. ‘Not without a fight, anyway. You’ve injured us, killed us and called in the police — but good will always triumph over evil.’

  I spat the sweet into his face.

  He backed away, wiping his chin with the back of his hand.

  ‘I’m going to enjoy this,’ he said.

  Behind me, Mary tried to scream, as if she could see what was coming next — and I felt the gun move a fraction across the back of my head as Michael tried to contain her.

  I ducked below the barrel of the gun, dropped my shoulder and made a dash for the kitchen. Michael fired. A bullet fizzed off right, hitting the top of the wall on the far side of the room. The sound was devastatingly loud, ringing in my ears, even as I made for the basement. Behind me, over my shoulder, I could see Michael pushing Mary away. She made a break for it, scrambling across the carpet on her knees and diving for cover behind a sofa.

  Malcolm and Michael headed after me.

  I took the basement stairs so quickly I almost fell down. The lights were off. I headed for the place Mary and I had been sitting before, and sank back into the darkness.

  It was black.

  Above me I could hear movement, but not much. The occasional creak. A short whisper. I tried to force my eyes to adjust quicker to the darkness, but it was like trying to force yourself to hear something that wasn’t there. Darkness became shapes. Shapes became movement. I shifted right, my back against the wall, trying to give myself a clearer view of the stairs.

  Then the lights came on.

  For a moment I was completely disabled, as if I’d been hit in the face with a concrete block. Then, as the white light started to dim, shapes formed again, blurs becoming edges, and I could see them coming down the stairs, Malcolm taking two at a time, Michael limping more slowly behind him.

  Malcolm had the gun out in front of him.

  I looked around me. About six feet further to my right were the electrics. Next to that, propped against the wall, were the walking sticks I’d seen earlier. They were thin and breakable. Except for one. It was thick, maybe three inches wide, with a hard ball for a handle.

  There was a cardboard box close to it, probably four feet deep, with a second box, smaller, on top. I edged to my right, half-crouching, using the cardboard boxes close to me for cover. Briefly, as I passed from one to another, they spotted me. A second shot rang out, hitting
the roof close to where I’d been. Plaster fell to the floor like snow.

  I got to the electrics box and flipped the front. Rust had eaten into the casing, but the wires looked new. There were a series of switches across the top and a main red lever to the left. I reached down and gripped the walking stick, turning it over so I was holding it at the tip and not by the handle. Then I flipped the red lever.

  Everything went black again.

  In the darkness, sound became important. I heard shuffling. Frustration. Readjustment. One of them said something quietly, but not quietly enough. It sounded like Malcolm.

  I ducked left again, back towards the place I’d been before. In the stillness, I could feel little stabbing pains right inside the cuts on my back, travelling through the torn flesh and up to the surface of the skin. And as my brain registered that, it remembered the pain in the fingers of my left hand too, moving down from the remains of my nails to my knuckles and wrists. A shiver passed through me.

  As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I could see one of them, edging towards me without knowing it. Michael. He was nervous, moving tentatively, way out of his depth. The strapping around his leg looked like an amateur job. They hadn’t taken it outside the organization. Someone within it, probably someone with some medical knowledge, had removed the bullet.

  I gripped the walking stick as tightly as I could and slid down on to my haunches, using the wall for support. The darkness was as thick as oil. He looked ahead of him, slightly off to my left, where some of the gardening equipment was stacked, then back in the direction he had come. He was still too far away, even with his back turned.

  Within seconds, something else caught my eye. On the other side of the electrics box, I could see Malcolm. He was coming around one of the cardboard box pillars, half-covered. The gun was out in front of him. It was difficult to define him, but I could see some of his face and a circle of light in his eyes.

  His eyes. He can see you.

  I used the wall as a springboard and went for Michael, just as he was turning to face me. A third shot hit the space I’d left, ripping through cardboard and into the garden tools. They clattered to the floor behind me.