Incinerator

by Niall Leonard

  “We had an agreement, Mr. Sherwood,” I said. “How am I expected to make my repayments if those jerks on your staff drive away all my customers? Or is that part of the service too?”

  “The agreement you proposed was predicated on your providing collateral,” said Sherwood. I guessed he was lapsing into financial jargon because he was scared. “But you don’t own the title to that property.”

  Interesting, I thought. Few people apart from Nicky would have known that. “Who told you?” I said.

  Sherwood licked his lips. “I spoke to the sellers.”

  That answer was plausible, although it didn’t sound like the truth.

  “No, I don’t own the building,” I said. “So don’t bother sending any more goons around, unless you like visiting people in hospital.”

  Sherwood clutched his briefcase in both hands like he planned to use it as a shield. “The contract your friend Delroy signed is still valid,” he said.

  That was the point of trashing the gym—not to put the squeeze on me, but on Delroy. I was itching to stick Sherwood’s face through the windscreen of his flash car, but it wouldn’t help. Delroy needed a lawyer. Sod it, I thought, I can find another one—I’d get Vora out of retirement if I had to.

  “You’re not getting Delroy’s house, you prick,” I said. “Take him to court and see how far you get.”

  “Well, I prefer to explore other avenues first,” he smirked. His eyes flicked over my shoulder, and when I turned to follow his look I saw a traffic warden patrolling the street nearby, casting sideways glances at us as if he could smell the adrenaline from across the road. Sherwood was probably hoping to goad me into taking a swing at him in front of a witness.

  Leaning down close I kept my voice as soft and gentle as I could.

  “You go anywhere near Delroy, and I’ll be exploring your avenues. With a broken bottle.”

  His smirk got smirkier, and I decided to leave before I lost my temper and thumped him anyway. We both knew my threats were bluster. Delroy had signed a loan agreement, and I wasn’t in a good position to negotiate—I’d just have to wait till Sherwood’s representatives got in touch. Then I’d negotiate their teeth in.

  But Sherwood would have a special goon fund for situations like this, I suspected, and his money would generate infinite heavies coming at me in waves until it felt like I was trapped inside some urban combat video game with a dwindling supply of pound coins.

  I’d been banged up in a young offenders’ institution when I was way too young, and even though I’d deserved to be there, it was a hellhole. That’s where I’d learned how two plastic knives taped together could make a blade hard enough to puncture a lung, that boiling tea with sugar in could scar someone’s face like napalm, and that if all else failed you could hang yourself with the plaited pages of a magazine. But back then what really kept me awake at night were the rumours that the place had been declared overcrowded, and that some of us would be transferred to Dalston Prison.

  Dalston was an adult nick in North London, a decrepit Victorian cesspit that should have been shut down and demolished years ago but was always being reprieved. The politicians needed the cells because they were trying to show everyone how tough they were on crime, arm-twisting magistrates into locking more and more people away for dodging their TV licence or carrying a pinch of blow. It was notorious for being run not by the management but by the prison guards, who on a whim would lock the prisoners in their cells for twenty-three hours a day, only opening the doors to cart away the corpses of lags who had topped themselves in despair.

  As I entered HMP Dalston that afternoon and those black wooden gates and six-metre-high walls closed around me, it wasn’t the acrid tang of cheap bleach, the clammy overheated air, and the stench of sweat and fear and misery that made me tense. It was the smell of the fake ID burning a hole in my pocket. As I joined the queue for the security desk I could feel the palms of my hands tingling with perspiration.

  A mate of mine—Jonah, far more bent and vicious than I ever was—had pulled this stunt years ago when he’d come to visit me. He wasn’t there to cheer me up—he was convinced I was hiding another stash of free drugs—and he’d proudly shown me the ID card, complete with photograph and official stamp, he’d used to get in. It had been issued by the Royal British Archive, just across the river from our hunting grounds, and it looked totally kosher, because it was. The Archive staff would issue an ID card to anybody who claimed to be researching historical records for schoolwork, and it was easy to give them a fake name. I had gone there myself after seeing Zoe, and found the same system in place. Nobody checked that you were actually there to look up records or archives, or even that you could read, which was just as well for me.

  The prison guard on the visitors’ admissions desk looked at the ID card, looked back at me, flipped the card over and peered at it, then handed it back. I very gently breathed a sigh of relief, but I wasn’t in the clear yet. He slid his finger down a clipboard until he found the name I’d used when I’d phoned the prison to arrange a visit. He ticked the column beside it with blue biro, promptly forgot I existed, and nodded at the next in line to approach his desk.

  Then it was the security cordon. I’d left everything metal at home—watch, phone, coins, even my belt buckle. The prison provided lockers for your valuables, but you might as well have spread your stuff out on a table marked with a notice reading STEAL ME. A bored guard who looked like he ate chips three times a day waved a metal detector in my general direction and nodded me through to the visiting area.

  About two dozen tables were laid out in rows, and I was suddenly reminded of all the examination rooms I’d been in, and all the exams I’d so spectacularly failed. Here and there tetchy, fractious kids perched on the wooden chairs swinging their legs while Mum filled Dad in on what was happening at home, trying not to make life outside sound too interesting. I took the table as close to the prisoners’ entrance as I could manage; I wanted to see the guy I was visiting before he started looking around for the son he expected. He was not going to recognize me, and there was a real chance I wouldn’t recognize him either. The newspaper archives I’d found online were a few years old and his picture had been a standard full-on mugshot with no human expression. But I had only just sat down when a prisoner who looked very much like James Bisham entered. I immediately stood up again and called out, “Dad?”

  Bisham saw me and hesitated. I beamed at him with my broadest, warmest smile, and I saw doubt cross his face, then curiosity, and when he at last smiled cautiously and approached me I knew I had cleared that last hurdle. I held out a hand to shake before he reached the table, in case he thought I’d want to hug him or something. He gripped it firmly and shook, grinning broadly as if he was delighted to see me, when he didn’t know me from Adam. Out of the corner of my eye I’d been watching a prison guard watch us. Then I sensed his attention flick to two four-year-olds who had decided to chase each other up and down the rows.

  “You’ve changed a lot, son,” said Bisham. “I’d hardly recognize you.” He pitched his voice low and kept his posture relaxed.

  I pitched my voice even lower. “Mr. Bisham, my name’s Maguire,” I said. “Your wife told me you were banged up in here. I had to use Gabriel’s name to get in. I was hoping I could talk to you.”

  “I’m listening.” He was curious, but distant too, and I knew I would have to tread carefully, because he could still drop me in the shit if he wanted to. It probably wouldn’t be very deep shit—impersonating a kid to visit his dad in prison hardly counted as depraved and violent conduct—but the staff might accidentally scrape my face along a few brick walls before they threw me out, just for showing them up.

  “A friend of mine left the country in a hurry,” I told Bisham, “because she was getting threatening messages, emails and texts and tweets. Your wife said she’d been getting a lot of messages like that too.”

  Bisham rolled his eyes, but he smiled ruefully. He’d heard this stuff befo
re, I could tell. “And she told you I’d sent them?” he said. “Yeah, everybody’s issued with an untraceable phone when they come in here, free unlimited calls and texts. It’s like a holiday camp.”

  “I wondered if it was a well-meaning friend of yours,” I said.

  “What friends?” he said. “I had all the same friends as her, until she screwed me over. Cleaned me out, had me banged up. You one of Gabriel’s mates or something?”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  Bisham nodded. “You’ve never met him, have you?”

  “I have, actually,” I said. “He seems like a nice kid.”

  “He was, before my wife got hold of him,” he said. “She’s why he never comes to see me.”

  “I could try and get a message to him, if you like,” I said. Bisham blinked, and I sensed that he was almost tough enough to bear years of confinement, but losing touch with his son was really pulling his guts out. But then that’s how prison works.

  “Not sure there’s any point, now,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe what that bitch has told him about me.”

  “I know she says it was you who torched that old pub.”

  “That’s not the worst part. Gabriel wouldn’t have cared about that.”

  “Then what?”

  I saw him hesitate, wondering if he wanted to blurt all this out to some yob he’d only just met.

  “It was Messy, the cat,” he said.

  “What happened to Messy?”

  “Someone soaked her in lighter fuel, put a match to her. Made it look like I did it when I was drunk. Little Gabe was catatonic, traumatized. You can bet the wife brought that up at the divorce hearing.”

  “But it wasn’t you?”

  “Of course it wasn’t me! I’m not the goddamn nutter—she is!” He’d raised his voice, and I was worried that we’d attract the attention of the guard, but I guessed plenty of families squabbled during these encounters, because no one seemed bothered. Bisham took a deep breath and calmed down again, but the way he’d lost it to start with half convinced me he was telling the truth. “It was her bloody lighter fuel—I found the can hidden in her car …” It sounded hideous, but I couldn’t see what a tortured cat had to do with Nicky, so I cut across him.

  “Have you heard of a woman called Nicky Hale?”

  “Yeah, she was Joan’s lawyer. Nice enough, but the silly bitch should never have taken Joan on. Cross my wife, you end up soaked in petrol. Or in here.”

  “Nicky was the friend of mine getting the obscene messages,” I said.

  “Then she shouldn’t have given Joan her contact details,” said Bisham.

  I was here under false pretences; nothing Bisham told me could ever be used as evidence. He knew that, and I’d kind of been counting on him knowing that—hoping he’d boast about what he’d done, or at least deny it unconvincingly. But he’d convinced me; everything he said about his wife and her mental state sounded pretty much on the money, from my encounter with her. And that meant I was back where I’d started.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said.

  “We’ve still got twenty minutes,” said Bisham.

  “What would you like to talk about?”

  “Know any jokes?”

  “I know one about a pig with a wooden leg.”

  “Nah, not that old one.” He looked down at his hands, steeled himself, and asked, “How was he? Gabriel? When you saw him?”

  “He’s big,” I said, mentally fishing for some compliment that wouldn’t be a transparent lie. “Looks smart. Plenty of courage too. Was willing to have a go at me when he thought I was overstaying my welcome.”

  “Good,” he said. “He was always a bit of a mother’s boy.”

  “Do you want me to give him a message?”

  Bisham took a deep breath, then shut his mouth, as if he had too much to say to fit into the time we had left. Or as if what he had to say to his son couldn’t be entrusted to a stranger.

  “Tell him I said hi.” He suddenly reminded me of my dad, and how I’d taken him for granted, and how as a teenager I’d stopped even listening to him, and how one day I’d come home and found him murdered, and it was always going to be too late to fix that. I’d get past Gabe Bisham’s crazy mother somehow, I decided, and shake the pasty little runt till the teeth rattled in his head, and tell him to go and talk to his dad while he had the chance.

  I stood, and offered Bisham my hand again. Bisham took it, and there was warmth in his grasp. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “Seriously. It’s so bloody boring in prison you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “I would, actually.”

  He smiled to recognize a fellow old lag. “Come again, yeah?”

  “I’ll try,” I said, and we both knew what that meant—that I would sooner peel the skin off my leg with a blunt knife than walk in through those gates again.

  * * *

  Dalston Prison was on the other side of the city from my gym and I went back the way I had come, by train, through the bleak hinterland of North London, with its railways sidings and decaying brick tenements dotted with weeds on their facades and parapets. The wheels of the carriage didn’t even have a reassuring clickety-clack, they just rattled and banged over endless points, and the thoughts rattled and jostled in my head the same way. So the Bishams loathed each other and their kid was caught in the middle? I’d heard that story a hundred times. At least when my mum had walked out I’d been left with one parent who loved me enough to put up with all my attitude. I knew a few kids who had ended up wandering the streets all night, seething with rejection and humiliation, because their folks couldn’t agree whose turn it was to feed them. Gabe Bisham’s mother might be bonkers, but she loved him and was there for him, and I knew in that respect at least he should count himself lucky.

  What I still didn’t know was who had sent those threatening messages to Nicky.

  six

  The estate where Delroy and Winnie lived was a huddle of bright modern houses, clean and cheerful and green; the local playground was full of kids screaming with glee as they spun around on the multi-coloured whirligigs mounted on thick rubber matting. When I had been a kid around here the playground surfaces had been mostly broken tarmac glittering with fragments of glass and dotted with dog shit, and the climbing frames and seesaws were always vandalized with such painstaking effort you wondered why the punks who did it couldn’t get a well-paid job in demolition.

  My dad had hated nostalgia—he said his childhood had been rotten weather and worse food, and anyone who got sentimental for the past was a fool. You had to learn to enjoy the now, he said. He had a point, but I kept remembering how I’d played on those swings, and how he used to stand behind me, pushing me higher and higher while I squealed in fear and joy. Afterwards I’d ride home on my noisy plastic tricycle, asking impossible questions he’d always try his best to answer.

  Winnie opened her door wearing her big flowery apron, and insisted on giving me a huge hug. Her embrace smelled of soap and furniture polish and hairspray, and from inside the house wafted the scent of spiced meat. I followed her into the kitchen, stomach rumbling, to find she was making gungo peas soup—in enough quantities, as usual, to feed a small Caribbean island. While I filled the kettle she drained the water from the pigs’ tails she’d been salting overnight and explained that Delroy had gone to the Benefits Office for tests to see if he was still disabled or had somehow been miraculously cured of his massive stroke.

  “These days,” said Winnie, “if you can stand upright for two minutes, they declare you is fit for work, doing what the good Lord only knows, holding up a sign saying ‘Car Wash’ or some such nonsense, but Delroy so proud he’d rather agree with those … numbskulls before he admit he need help.”

  “I should never have come to him with that idea for reopening the gym,” I said. “I’m really sorry, Winnie.”

  “Lord, it’s not your fault. Delroy big enough and ugly enough to make up his own mind. It’s just a shame it didn’t work ou
t, that’s all.” She slid chunks of yellow yam from her chopping board into the pot that was just starting to boil. “And you know, maybe it’s for the best. You too young to spend your life slaving away in that place. And Delroy too old, he need to be taking it easy, his time of life.” I frowned. I knew Winnie was trying to put a good spin on it; everything she was saying now contradicted what she’d said when we’d first opened. “Maybe we should go home,” she said. “Sell this place, we could live OK back in Jamaica.”

  If Sherwood lets you, I thought.

  “Winnie … have you heard anything else from that moneylender?”

  “That man …” Winnie scowled. It didn’t suit her.

  “Has he been around? Or sent anyone?”

  “That creepy little guy who took our TV, one who look like Elvis. He came here, tried to tell us Sherwood was going to take our house, but Delroy told him to take a hike.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I been to the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, talked to the lawyers down there. They say that man Sherwood can’t take our home, he don’t have a leg to stand on. We repay that loan in our own time, he just have to lump it.”

  “I’ll pay it off, Winnie, I promise,” I said. “Soon as my money’s sorted out.”

  “Oh, that money!” Winnie flapped her hands. “Just goes to show the truth of the Good Book. All that money’s brought nothing but trouble.”

  She had a point. Life had been a lot simpler when I’d been working in that greasy chicken sandwich joint, running for fun and spending evenings at home with my dad, both of us wrapped in blankets to save on the gas bill. But simpler doesn’t mean better, and I’d actually started to enjoy having money, and all the possibilities it offered … until Nicky disappeared with it. That was what had brought us all this trouble, I thought, not the money.