Promises of Blood

by David Thorne

  25

  THE ROOM I am in is a prefabricated cabin above a loading area, accessed up an outside flight of black-painted steel stairs. It is not big and has a sofa at one end next to a sink and table with a kettle, cups, milk. At the other end is a desk. There are open windows along the wall which look out over the docks. I can see high lights illuminating the people working, forklift trucks moving pallets, trucks arriving, cranes lifting swaying shipping containers into the night sky, the hazily lit bulk of tankers shifting on black water beyond. I am sitting on the sofa, watching a woman work at the desk. She is in her sixties and is smoking a cigarette, going through a large pile of papers, entering I do not know what into a computer which looks almost as old as she is. She has not spoken to me, barely glanced my way. She has the radio on and it is tuned to a station which plays music from the sixties and seventies. In between the records the DJ reads out a list of pensioners who have recently been victims of crime: burglaries and physical assaults, scams and rapes.

  I was walked here by two men, one of them English, the other a very large black man with an African accent. They locked the door behind them so that both myself and the old woman are prisoners in this room. Apparently they do not believe I am a threat to her. They have not told me what is going to happen to me, have not said anything. The woman sighs and opens a filing cabinet next to her, looks through it, finds what she is looking for. She takes it out, enters numbers into a calculator on her desk, makes a note of something. In my pocket my mobile vibrates. Somebody has been trying to get hold of me for some time and I imagine that it is Maria, wondering where I have gone. I consider what would happen if I pulled my mobile out right now, made a call to the police. I am sure that I am somewhere in Tilbury Docks. What could this old woman do to stop me?

  The phone rings on her desk and she reaches over to the radio, turns it down, picks up.

  ‘Yes?’

  She listens to the person on the other end, looks across at me.

  ‘In one of the cars. I don’t know.’ She gets halfway up from her chair, gives me a good look, up and down. ‘Big. Missing a finger. What? Waiting to sail.’ She listens carefully, frowns, sighs in exasperation. ‘Fuck sake, hands, feet, put him over the side. Ain’t fucking brain surgery.’

  I had thought this woman was the bookkeeper, some grandmother hired to go through the accounts. Seems I was wrong. I stand up and she shakes her head at me, calls, ‘Joey!’ The door to the room opens and the big black man walks in. I hear footsteps ringing dully on the stairs and the other man joins him. The old woman waves a hand at them, calms them down, says into the phone, ‘I’ll find out. Yes. I fucking said I would, didn’t I?’

  She hangs up, sighs again as if she has been charged with some onerous duty which is beneath her. She looks at me and takes off her glasses. There is no humanity in her eyes; they are empty and steady, as if the body of a kindly old lady has been inhabited by the soul of a killer. ‘So,’ she says. ‘Who are you?’

  The African man punches me hard in the kidneys and I turn, swing at him but he has the advantage and I walk into a blow to my stomach which pushes all the breath out of my body. I feel my knees momentarily go and the other man kicks my legs out from underneath me. The floor is covered with carpet tiles which are wiry and rough and smell of damp. The African man kicks me in the side, hard enough to make me curl up like a child.

  ‘All right,’ says the woman. Now she is standing above me, looking down, and I wonder if I briefly lost consciousness for her to have walked across so quickly. ‘Answer the question. Who are you?’

  I think of Maria and my promise to her to stay away from violence, to turn the other cheek if necessary. I breathe in the rotten odour of the carpet tiles. That comfortable existence seems ridiculous, unreal, a fairy tale I somehow tricked myself into believing. This is real life. This is who I am. This is what happens.

  I shake my head. Breathing in hurts, a stabbing pain, and I think that the African man has broken a rib. I wonder if I can get up. I want to hurt him, want to so much.

  The English man is filling the kettle at the sink. He turns the tap off, closes the kettle, plugs it in. I can see the orange light. There is a half-empty paper bag of sugar and he pours it into the kettle. The African man stands over me, squats, sits down on my chest. He is huge and the pressure on my chest is enormous, my broken rib like a knife twisted into my lung. There is no way that I can move. I feel somebody undo my belt, work my trousers down my legs, the same with my pants. I try to kick out but there is pressure across my knees and shins too, a weight I cannot move. I can hear the kettle, its gentle roar as it heats up.

  ‘You don’t want this,’ the woman says. ‘Who are you? Who are you with?’

  I will speak. There is no way that I will not speak. Who am I protecting? Only myself. But some stubborn part of me does not want to submit to these people. They will kill me anyway. I feel nothing but anger and hate for them. I am twisting and bucking so hard that the African man is struggling to hold me down, despite his size. His eyes are wide and intent, trying to pin my arms. Somewhere behind him I hear the other man laugh.

  ‘Fuck me, man’s a fucking animal.’

  ‘You understand what we’re going to do?’ says the woman.

  I understand. I must talk. Why is it that I cannot just answer their question? Was I born so cussed? They will pour boiling sugared water over my genitals. This is what they will do. The African man gets a knee on one of my biceps, puts his free hand over my mouth. I try to bite but his hand is cupped and I cannot get to it. I buck so hard that my back leaves the floor, my broken rib like a hole torn in my chest. I hear the frothy burble of the boiling kettle.

  ‘Now,’ the African man says, his voice a grunt of exertion.

  When the Molotov cocktail hits I am so disoriented that for some moments I think that the heat is from the boiling water. The African man jumps off my chest and when his mass has gone I can see fire, blue flames floating and licking up the wall of the room. The English man is taking off his jacket, starts beating the flames with it. I turn on to my hands and knees, stand up. Pull up my trousers. The African man has joined the other man and they are both working on the flames. The woman is watching them. Her glasses are back on and I can see the flames reflected on the lens. She sees me, shouts, ‘Joey!’

  I pick up the kettle and swing it, the water flying out in a steaming arc. Most of it misses but some catches the African man across the neck, the side of his face, and he screams. I haul the door open and run down the stairs, down, turn, down, turn, down. Already there is a crowd watching what is happening. I stop, have no idea where to go. A man I do not recognise jerks his head, indicates a direction. I look at him and he nods, once, slowly. I have no choice and I run in the direction he has shown. I pass shipping container after shipping container, cross a narrow metal walkway over a flooded dock, run beneath huge looming fixed cranes with only my footsteps making any sound until I hear a voice say, ‘Danny, you stupid bastard.’

  I stop, see Harry Rafferty, a man I have known since childhood. He is standing underneath a street lamp and wearing a look of amazed disbelief.

  ‘Harry.’

  ‘You need to get the fuck out of here.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here.’ He starts off at a lope and I follow him. He ducks down a narrow gap in a stack of shipping containers. I follow him, come out the other side in a car park. He slows to a walk, passes rows of cars until he gets to an old Japanese four-by-four, chunky tyres and raised suspension. He looks around, then opens the door at the back and moves aside a tarpaulin. ‘I’ll be back,’ he says. ‘Need to show my face.’

  I get in and Harry covers me with the tarpaulin and closes the door, and once again I am in darkness.

  Growing up, Harry Rafferty and I had whiled away neglected hours in car parks and beer gardens, played childish games while our fathers drank and boasted and intimidated in pubs across Essex. He now runs a charter boat service, although his boat is so
powerful that I have always suspected he also uses it for less legitimate purposes. What he has just done for me, though, goes above and beyond what our collective history might demand; he has put everything on the line for me, saved my life. I have no idea how I will be able to repay him.

  As I wait I check my phone and see that I have missed twelve calls from Maria. I wonder what I will tell her, how I will explain my absence. It is now almost four in the morning and whatever I come up with, it had better be good. At just after half past four Harry comes back; I hear the car door open, hear him say cheerfully, ‘Stay down, Danny boy. We’re out of here.’

  We get through the checkpoint at Tilbury Docks and a mile down the road Harry pulls over. He lets me out and I get into the passenger seat and we head for town, the sun coming up behind us. Harry looks across at me, my hangdog expression. He pushes me in the shoulder, laughs.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Any idea who that lot were?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Oh, Daniel. Danny. That mob, they’re serious. Cars, electronics, narcotics, arms, people, name it. Got officials on their books from here to Odessa, Cape Town, Caracas. Backing from, fuck, couldn’t even guess. Money money money.’ He indicates, takes a sweeping left-hander on to the arterial road, empty at this hour. ‘Last time I spoke to you, you were a lawyer.’

  ‘Still am.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Harry laughs. ‘Couldn’t’ve written them a stiff letter?’

  I cannot help but smile at his unconcerned amusement. ‘Any problems?’

  ‘Me? Lent them a fire extinguisher. Started the fire, helped put it out. Full service.’

  ‘Thanks. How did you know?’

  ‘Saw you being walked across. Thought, hell’s Danny doing here? Asked around. Didn’t get any answers. That told me enough.’

  ‘Said they’d cut off my hands and feet, dump me in the Atlantic.’

  Harry nods. We pass under the M25, HGVs overhead, hauling goods to the docks. Harry rolls a cigarette, elbows on the steering wheel keeping things steady. ‘So you live to fight another day.’

  We drive in silence for some time. Harry lights up, blows blue smoke against the windscreen. I concentrate on breathing, managing the pain in my chest from my broken rib. But at last I cannot help but ask: ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why help me?’

  Harry frowns, picks a piece of tobacco from his lip. ‘Why. There’s a question.’

  ‘And?’

  Harry keeps his eyes on the road, says gently: ‘Don’t remember?’

  ‘What?’

  He shakes his head slowly. ‘You don’t remember. Don’t remember that. Hell.’

  ‘What? Harry?’

  Harry does not answer and I look at him and then after a time I lean back in my seat, listen to the slap and hum of the road underneath the four-by-four’s tyres, inhale the comforting smell of a warm and well-used vehicle, Harry’s tobacco, somebody else’s life. God, but I am tired. Harry reaches forward and turns the radio on and I listen to the DJ challenge listeners to call in with stories of strange places they have woken up in. This meshes with my dreams and when I next open my eyes the first thing I see is my street, and I wonder where I am, how I have come to be here, whether what I am seeing is real or part of the radio show.

  ‘Home,’ says Harry.

  I do not know what to say so I nod, pull the car door open, get out. Take a breath as I put my feet on the ground, a hand to my chest to smother the pain. Before I close the door I say, ‘Thanks.’

  Harry nods. ‘Do the same again. For you.’ He sits there for a moment, before putting the four-by-four into gear. I have to look up at him, his driving position raised. ‘Any time, Danny.’

  I close the door and he drives away and I watch him out of sight. As I walk up the path to my house I marvel at the people we meet, the histories we share, the chance encounters which can resonate so many years later and change the course of our lives for ever.

  26

  ‘WHERE WERE YOU?’ Maria asks it brightly, with a smile, but behind her pretence of amusement is something uncertain which I have not sensed in her before.

  ‘Spent the night at Gabe’s,’ I say. ‘Thought he could use the company.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Maria nods, processes what I have told her. ‘And you don’t think he would have been the first person I called, up all night waiting for you?’

  Maria has never caught me in a lie before and I do not know how to respond, what to say to her. We are in the kitchen and she is sitting at the table; I am standing, drinking coffee, making an attempt at normality. The magnitude of my dishonesty feels like another presence in the room, mocking me, us. Maria shakes her head.

  ‘Danny. You promised me.’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘So why can’t you tell me?’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with us.’

  Maria smiles, nods sadly. ‘Of course it has something to do with us.’

  And of course she is right. But I cannot tell her, cannot admit that I have already broken the promise I made to her only months ago. Cannot tell her that I spent the night breaking and entering, stealing cars, having violence visited upon me by men who killed without thought or conscience.

  ‘You can’t trust me?’ As I say it I know that it is not fair, that to put the onus on her is the act of a coward. Maria is as wise a person as I have ever met, and she knows it too. She stands up.

  ‘A relationship without trust has no value,’ she says. ‘So I’ll give you this one, Daniel. All right. I trust you. But no more.’ She walks to the door of the kitchen, turns back to me. ‘No more.’

  After she has gone I pour myself more coffee, wonder how I will make it through the day, stay functioning. What Maria has just said shames and diminishes me, shows her to be the better person of the two of us. But then, this hardly comes as a revelation to me.

  Sitting in my office I try to organise my thoughts, make some sense of what is going on. I think of Duncan Gove, standing in the rising frame of the door to Unit 5, overseeing the moving of the cars. Are the missing women linked to him, and whatever illegal activity is going on at the Gove estate? William Gove, weak and afraid and dying in his bed, seemed more faded Victorian schoolmaster than organised criminal. But I have learned that there is little people will not do for money, few morals that remain inviolate in the face of promised wealth.

  Or is the story more predictable, more prosaic; has Luke Gove taken his violent appetites too far, not once, not twice, but three times? Abused women to such an extent that the offer of a car would not buy their silence, taken a more extreme course?

  Either way, the fact is that William Gove was either complicit in these women’s disappearances, or he at least knew about them; why else leave their parents money in his will? William Gove might be dead, but I will not let the truth die with him. I will force an investigation, one way or another. Find answers for Rochelle Farrell, for Sabina Antonescu, hopelessly scraping at her land back in Romania, stunned by her sudden and inexplicable loss.

  If Hicklin will not investigate their disappearances at my request, then I need to escalate. I pick up my phone, put in a call to a friend of mine. Time to force his hand.

  Hicklin is regarding me as you would a botched piece of building work you have just come home to. I am too tired to care about his opinion of me. He agreed to this meeting only because I told him that if he refused, it could have serious consequences for his career. Now he wants to know how. I ignore the question. We are back in the same witness room I spoke with him in last time. I sit forward in my chair.

  ‘I’ve discovered a third missing girl,’ I say.

  ‘Let me guess. Another mystery recipient of this, what was it, Gove? Another beneficiary of his will.’

  ‘Right. Only this young woman, she went missing five months ago.’

  Hicklin raises his eyebrows. ‘Oh?’

  ‘That’s three,’ I say. ‘Don�
��t tell me you can ignore this any longer.’

  Hicklin rubs his chin, mouth, moustache with his palm, thinks. Shakes his head. ‘Listen, I’ll be honest with you. There might be something going on here. But it’s not me. I’ve got to take it upstairs. Soon’s anyone hears that you’re involved…’ He shakes his head again. ‘Not going to happen.’

  I nod, take out my phone. ‘Sorry to hear that.’ I call a number, lay my phone on the table between us. Put it on speaker.

  ‘Now what?’ says Hicklin. I hold up a finger, wait. We listen to the ringtone, then a man’s voice.

  ‘Daniel.’

  ‘Hey, Jack. I’m here with Sergeant Hicklin.’

  I have known Jack since I was a child. He is a reporter on the local paper, was once a respected journalist in Fleet Street before he became more interested in Scotch than the next scoop. Local boy done good, then threw it away before coming back to Essex in disgrace. We’ve got a lot in common, Jack and I.

  ‘Sergeant,’ Jack says.

  ‘Jack’s a reporter,’ I say. ‘He knows about the story.’

  ‘It’s a good one,’ says Jack. ‘We’ll be running it. Only thing is, can’t decide on the headline.’

  ‘Oh?’ says Hicklin. He is watching me through half-closed eyes, as wary as if I am a suspect device.

  ‘Headline number one,’ says Jack, his voice distorted over the speaker. ‘Police refuse to investigate cases of three missing women.’

  I know Hicklin would like nothing better than to have me hauled into a cell, let three of his most disaffected uniforms go to work on me. I smile at him.

  ‘Headline number two,’ says Jack. He is enjoying this, if anything more than I am. ‘Essex force cracks historic case.’ Hicklin does not say anything. ‘Personally,’ Jack continues, ‘I prefer the second. But I’m going to run with one of them.’

  Hicklin leans back in his chair, nods slowly at me. ‘Okay. Very good. You’ve made your point.’

  ‘Jack?’ I say.

  ‘Danny?’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll be in touch.’