by Jay Stringer
“Where’s Mike, by the way?”
“Gone down the road for another pint,” he answered before thinking. Then, “Why?”
“Why did the two of you move down here? He had a good job, right?”
“Yeah, he loved it.”
Slowly I could see the wall going up. He was going to realize where we were headed, and that would be when I’d find out what kind of a man he was going to become.
“So why move down here?”
“No, no. Look, I know what you’re—”
“Did it never strike you as strange, all the things that kept happening around you? Your school, your work? Or did you know, deep down? Did you cover for him? Is that what brothers are meant to do?”
I stood up. He didn’t make a move.
“His room’s just upstairs, yeah?”
I turned and opened the door behind me, the one that led to the staircase. Robin burst into life then and made a grab for my arm. There were tears in his eyes, and his cheeks were flushed red. I pushed him away with the heel of my fist, and he slammed back down into his seat.
I pulled on a pair of gloves as I walked upstairs and looked into the door to my left. There was Robin’s damp towel on the floor and the smell of freshly sprayed deodorant. There were an assortment of photographs pinned to the wall, of Robin and the girls. At the cinema, at a theme park, sitting on a bed grinning vacantly. I turned to the back bedroom as Robin ran up the stairs after me.
“You’re wrong. That, the thing back home, it wasn’t—”
I ignored him and stepped into the bedroom. It was much the same as the living room, sparse but piled high with DVDs and video games. There were a few posters on the wall taken from men’s magazines and a Newcastle United football shirt draped on the end of the bed. The smell of cigarette smoke hung thick in the air.
“See, there’s nothing here.”
I nodded as though I was agreeing with him while I checked out the rest of the room. Aside from the bed, there was no furniture, just piles. A pile of clean clothes, a pile of dirty ones. A box full of deodorants and aftershaves. I felt under the bed, but there was nothing but a mess of clothes and papers. I looked through his clothes, his DVDs. I didn’t know what I was looking for until I found it.
A sports bag dumped in a corner of the room.
I opened it up and tipped the contents out onto the bed. Pieces of women’s clothing that smelled as though they had been worn. A pile of photographs on cheap paper that I guessed he’d made himself at home with a color printer. The pictures were of women and girls who didn’t seem to know they were being photographed. Most were from the street or in a pub: blurry photos taken in a hurry. I turned to the next photo and felt sick. The angle made it impossible to tell which girl he was with, but he’d clearly held the camera at arm’s length and posed. The black mask covered his features. Everything except his grin.
Smile for the camera.
The picture quality was the same as the others, but the image wasn’t quite the same. It looked like a still from a video clip—it just had that quality of movement that doesn’t exist in normal photographs. I suddenly thought of the stash of video clips he likely had on his mobile phone and realized I didn’t want to be the one who went through them. I dropped everything back onto the bed, and for good measure I slipped Ruth’s iPod earbuds out of my pocket and dropped them on the bed, too.
Robin looked over my shoulder at all the evidence. His fists were clenched, and he looked like a bottle rocket ready to explode. The color of his face was changing from the red of defensiveness to the white heat of adrenaline-fueled rage. I heard the front door open downstairs and the sound of some classic rock song being murdered through a tuneless whistle. Robin heard it too, and he exploded into action, like a bottle rocket set alight. He turned and burst from the room.
I followed, but not fast enough. I could already hear a dull thudding noise as I reached the stairs. When I reached the living room, Mike Banaciski was curled in a damaged ball just inside the front doorway, and his younger brother was all over him like a wild animal.
I tried to pull Robin back, but he was driven by the animal strength that had been unleashed inside him. I heard something crack as his fist drove into his brother’s face again, and this time I found enough muscle to drag him away. I pulled just as his own momentum was in my favor, and he fell backward across the room, nearly sending me tumbling in the process. He turned to me as if about to attack, and in that moment I saw nothing human in his eyes. As he coiled for another leap, I pulled Boz’s gun out and pointed it right at him. I hoped that I looked like a tough guy and not someone who was scared shitless. I must have managed to hold the gun convincingly because I saw the white heat fade from his face. His eyes softened, and he looked human again.
He nodded to show me he was calm enough, and I turned to his brother. Mike laughed, but it came out as a gurgle. Air bubbles formed in the blood around his smashed nose, and a wheeze followed as he tried to take a breath. One of his eyes was already vanishing beneath the swelling.
“What’re you laughing at?”
“You.” It came out sounding like “mniew.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because I want to, and because I can. Nobody cares. If they did, they’d have stopped me back home, the first time, not just covered it up and asked me to move.”
My stomach turned over. “With the evidence I’ve got now, the police would be all over you.”
He laughed again, a wet and sickly noise. “Mngight. Do that, and I’ll ruin them. All of them. The illegals? The old man? Salma? I’ll bring them all down with me.”
I looked down at him over the gun. He was right. Turn him in, and the whole thing would be pointless. The girls would be ruined, and the illegals would be deported.
I stepped in closer to make sure he could see the gun with his one useable eye. I noticed as I did that his collarbone was at a funny angle.
Another brother.
Another liar.
My breathing stopped, and my heart felt like it was going to pound right out of my chest. I stepped in closer and tightened my grip on the gun.
“Do I look like I’m going to turn you in?” I said.
THIRTY‐THREE
“You did the right thing.”
“I’m not sure what the right thing is these days.”
“Well,” Father Connolly said as he leaned back and looked up at the altar, “whatever it is, I think you did it.”
I’d called him after leaving Robin’s house, and he’d agreed to meet me at the church. I talked at him for a long time. I guess you could say he took my confession. I told him about my family and my fight with Noah. Then I told him about Mike and holding the gun on him.
The power it had given me.
Then I told him how I’d called Becker and handed Mike over to the cops, even though I didn’t quite know what they would or could do with him. That was when Connolly had told me I’d done the right thing.
“He’ll talk. You know that?” I said. “Mike, I mean. He’ll tell them all about the charity, what it really does. The cops will have to come for you and Salma.”
He chuckled, but it turned into a brief cough. “Let them come. If they want to arrest a sick old man for giving people food and shelter, they can try. I don’t think they’ll get very far.”
“But Salma?”
“She made her choice. We all did.”
“You knew what Gaines was doing with some of them, right?”
I would have expected him to avoid my eyes, but he met me dead-on.
“She gave them jobs and a home. Some of those jobs were not”—he winced, trying to find the right word—“ideal. But they were jobs. I’m just doing the best I can. Like you, I would say.”
Ouch.
“The case is still difficult. Becker’s working it, but it’s touch and go. There’s video on his phone that could be used to make a case that he’s raped a number of girls, but if none of them are coming f
orward…And so far he’s not confessing to anything.”
“But surely that is proof enough?”
“Well, at this stage it’s not about whether there is proof that would stand up in court; it’s about whether there is proof that will get it taken to court. The police gather evidence and file paperwork, but it’s the Crown Prosecution Service that will decide if the case goes any further. It’s almost like an audition. The more holes there are, the more a defense lawyer can do, and that makes the CPS twitchy.”
“So he could get away with it.”
“I’m no lawyer. I don’t really know how it will work out. But no victim and no confession? Yeah, I’d say he could get away with it. What then, Father? What if he turns up at your door, looking for forgiveness?”
He shrugged. “It’s what I’m here to do. What’s the alternative? The girls come forward and the media eats them alive—at least until the illegal ones are sent packing?”
“Yes. Or he cuts a deal, uses what he knows about the immigrants to get off. The cops are big on that kind of thing right now.”
“You think we should move them?”
“I think that’s Gaines’s problem. She’s got people in the police who’ll tell her the moment he starts giving anything up.”
He nodded again. “How close did you come? Were you going to pull that trigger?”
“Maybe I should have, you know? I keep thinking that.”
He sat back and smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile, but it was comfortable. He seemed at peace with what had happened. “I didn’t make any big speeches when you first came in here. I don’t really believe in them, to be honest. But there is one thing I believe in that’s worth saying: I believe in God. I believe he’s up there. But down here it’s just us, and we have to show some responsibility.”
“We’re not very good at it.”
“No, we’re not. People come in here looking for things I can’t give them. Forget the sermons. You don’t earn redemption in one act or one prayer. Doing the right thing once isn’t enough. You have to keep doing it. That’s what gets you there.”
I unfolded a news story I’d printed off at the Internet café and passed it to Connolly. He scanned it and nodded. Then he handed it back to me.
“I shouldn’t be surprised, really, that someone like you found that out.”
“What happened?”
He started to talk, and I wondered if anyone had ever heard his confession. Who listens to the guy who always listens?
“I was a lot like you when I was younger. Except I had maybe more places to direct my anger. This was back when there were the pub bombings, the blackouts. Anyone with my accent, or my parents’ accent, could get arrested and beaten. It made it very easy to be angry.”
I looked again at his large hands and pictured him in a different light, as an angry young man with strong fists.
“Sounds familiar.”
He held my look for a moment before drifting off into whatever part of him held the memory. “My family goes back a long way with the Gaines clan. Ransford and I were practically brothers. I ran with him, worked with him. I did things I’d rather forget.”
“What changed?”
A shrug. “I did. The anger was burning me up. I realized it would kill me if I couldn’t make some kind of peace with myself. So I followed my family’s other tradition.”
“And after you took your vows—”
“Yes, they came to me. I heard confessions. I gave advice. I heard so many things—that family trusted me with so much.” He laughed. “It would make a hell of a memoir.”
“So the girl who was raped?”
“Was Ransford’s older sister, Veronica. She came to me for advice, and I gave it. I stayed quiet, didn’t tell anyone. Sometimes I pretend it was because of my vows or some moral code. Really, I was just scared of their old man. Michael Gaines was a scary son of a bitch. And I used every excuse I could not to confront him or report him. I was a coward.” He hung his head. “You become a prisoner to something like that. It starts to define who you are. It changed me.”
“You never told anyone.”
“Veronica never recovered. In and out of hospitals, homes. Hidden away from the world. She took her own life. She was about twenty-two, I think. She’d been on medication for years, and she’d had enough. She was already gone by the time Ransford found her.”
He’d named his eldest daughter after his dead sister. It was almost sweet.
“After the funeral, I confronted the old man. I threatened to kill him. I talked about God and judgment and all of that. I used all of my anger up, I think, in that one go.”
He paused with a faraway look as if dusting cobwebs from old memories, and I unfolded the news story again and reread it to give him the chance to collect his thoughts. He paused for a cough.
“Was it you?”
“No, I didn’t kill him. I’d made all those threats, but I didn’t have it in me to follow through on any of them. I was an angry young man, you know, but I was still scared.”
Did I ever.
I’d picked out a fresh detail as I’d reread it, and now I was curious. “When they found him, he had a coin pressed into his mouth. Did that mean anything to you?”
He laughed. “The police asked me if that was my little Judas joke. They really can be idiots sometimes. But no, it didn’t mean anything.”
“So the police treated you like a suspect. Why?”
“Witnesses had heard me threatening him. I wouldn’t tell them why because I still felt I had to protect Veronica’s trust, but they pushed me hard.”
“But you didn’t know who’d done it?”
“I realized it didn’t matter. Not to me, anyway. My anger had gone, and the saddest part of the story was over. I didn’t need to know everything about everybody anymore. Two people were dead, but there were a lot of other people left alive, and I had work to do. I think that was when I grew up.”
He’d evaded my question a little bit. I decided it didn’t matter because I had a more burning question. “You knew my father?”
“A troubled man. I see so much of you in him.”
“Tell me about him.”
“No. I think that’s a conversation the two of you should have.” He coughed again, bent double this time and bringing up something cold and wet with it. He sat drawing in deep breaths after he’d finished, and relaxed a white-knuckle grip on the bench. “Both of you have so much anger. You’ve got to make peace with who you are. Otherwise, you’ll be carrying this anger around until the day you die. Believe me, I’ve seen it.”
THIRTY‐FOUR
Make peace with who you are.
I drove around for the best part of an hour. I half listened as Tom Waits sang about getting behind the mule and I let the low-key rumble wallpaper my tired brain. I must have known where I was driving to, but I didn’t admit it to myself until I was there.
Channy Mann answered on the fifth ring. He lived with his wife and children in a decent-sized house in Marlborough Gardens. It was a quiet estate made up of three- and four-bedroom houses; these were homes for teachers and middle managers, not criminals. It backed onto a private tennis club and was across the road from the Wolves’ private training ground.
Like most of the middle-class areas in the Black Country, the estate was an island. If you took a wrong turn at the end of any of the estate’s roads, the money started to drop away. Five minutes farther on and you’d be heading into immigrant central. Poverty and privilege have always lived next to each other in the Midlands.
Mann opened the door wearing a robe over faded pajamas. The house behind him was in total darkness as he stood in the doorway. He brushed sleep from his eyes and asked me what I wanted. I said I needed to talk, and he stepped aside, waving me in. He pointed me to a door at the back of the dark hallway. I walked past the wall of family portraits and a bag of golf clubs and pushed through the door. It opened onto the kitchen, and Channy switched the lights on as he stepped in after
me. The room was large, divided in two by a handsome kitchen island topped by a thick wooden counter. On one side was the kitchen itself, gleaming with modern appliances. To the other side was an open dining area. A child’s schoolwork lay open on the table.
Channy waved for me to pull up a stool at the kitchen island. I slid into the seat and leaned on the counter, still feeling numb. He opened the cupboard above the sink and pulled out a bottle of Jameson and two tumblers. The bottle was already half empty. He unscrewed the top and pointed the end at me. I shook my head, and he put one of the tumblers back in the cupboard before taking a seat opposite me. He poured himself a large measure. Some of the whiskey spilled over the edge of the glass as he poured, and the sharp, beautiful smell of it wafted up to my nose.
“It’s late,” he said.
“Sorry if I woke your family up.”
He shrugged. “It’s my house. If I want to talk to someone, I’ll talk to someone.”
Right.
As a man with a failed marriage behind him, I could recognize a defensiveness in his voice, a tone I’d hidden behind on many an occasion early on. I wondered if there was anybody sleeping upstairs and how long that homework had been sitting on the table.
“Nice house.”
“You’ve been here before, when you first started working for us.”
“Gav talked to me in the garage. I never came into the house itself. It’s not what I was expecting, somehow.”
“What was that?”
“I don’t know. Bigger, more showy. Something a bit more Scarface or Godfather, you know what I mean?”
“I love both those films, I’ve got them in the living room, but I wouldn’t want to live in them. You have to know what you want. Do you want to be rich, or do you want to be seen to be rich? You’ve seen that big house that old man Gaines lives in? It’s almost a palace, innit. Me? I’m simple. I just want a warm place and some nice clothes. Money goes further if you don’t spend it.”
“Makes sense.”
