KILL ME GOODBYE

by A K Reynolds

  Less than half an hour later my taxi was dropping me off at my destination. I got out with the collar of my jacket turned up, and I kept my baseball cap-covered head lowered, in case informants were lurking on the street. It helped that it was raining. The way I was dressed could have been taken as reasonable precautions against the inclemency of the weather, rather than trying to conceal my face.

  My destination was Victoria station. I hurried inside and bought a single to Leeds. My stomach was groaning so I grabbed a steak pasty from the Greggs on the platform and scoffed it down while waiting for the train.

  By the time the train pulled into Leeds it was dusk.. As I alighted onto the platform I felt instantly safer. Surely the tentacles of the criminal organisation I had somehow got on the wrong side of didn’t extend to Leeds? If they did, Kim Diaz might be working for it for all I knew. With that in mind, I made my way to Briggate via a round-about route through the shopping centre and along Headrow, frequently checking to see if I was being followed.

  I halted at a distinguished Victorian building made of stone with architectural features derived from the classical buildings of ancient Greece. The ground floor jarred with the rest of it, having been modernised with a steel and glass façade. It was home to a number of businesses, including Caffeine Highs. I went in through the grey glass door, took a seat, and perused the menu.

  The place was crowded, providing me with good cover. Every now and again I raised my eyes and looked around the interior, doing my best to check out the staff without making it obvious. They were mainly women.

  A waitress came to my table and asked what I wanted.

  ‘I’ll have a coffee, black, and a piece of your millionaire’s shortbread please.’

  She took a notepad from her apron, a pencil from behind her ear, and scribbled my order down in the notebook, then said, ‘Coming right up.’

  She returned with my order five minutes later.

  While drinking my coffee and eating the millionaire’s shortbread I kept my head lowered for the most part, but now and again I furtively scanned the room looking for Kim Diaz. I didn’t see any sign of her until I’d finished the shortbread. As I was swallowing the final mouthful she appeared from a back room and went straight to work, checking which tables had given their orders and going to those which hadn’t. She paid no attention to me, presumably because she knew I’d been attended to.

  At 6 p.m. she went to the back room and emerged shortly afterwards, having removed her waitress outfit and replaced it with jeans, a red sweater, and a white ski jacket which she wore unzipped. She waved a quick goodbye to her co-workers and left. Once she was out the door, I stood up and followed her along Briggate as she darted in and out of the late afternoon crowd of shoppers still doing the rounds in search of bargains. Night was closing in but her white ski jacket made her easy to see. I caught up with her and was walking alongside her within a minute. At first she didn’t notice, or if she did, she thought the best policy was to ignore me. The fact I didn’t look too wholesome with my visibly scarred face may have had something to do with her behaviour towards me.

  While Kim Diaz stared straight ahead I looked at her profile closely, taking in every detail of her appearance. She had platinum blonde hair in a short spiky style, just like the photo on the acting website. Her eyes were clear blue and her features were attractive, what I could see of them under the layer of makeup she wore. She had so much of it there was a visible line on her neck where it ended. When she blinked, I noticed that her eyelids were dark blue. Her eyelashes were so long and thick I could’ve swept the street with them.

  After a while I said, as if I was a long-lost friend, ‘Mary, I thought it was you. How are you keeping?’

  She turned her head towards me and for an instant looked as if she was going to keel over with shock. But she recovered well, probably because she was an actress.

  ‘It has been a long time.’ She pasted a false smile on her face that beamed warmth at me. ‘I’m very well, thank you. How are you?’

  My eyes narrowed.

  ‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’

  ‘Of course I do. I was at your wedding.’

  We got to Boar Lane and she turned left with me at her side. We halted at a crossing, waiting for the lights to change.

  ‘So you were. But I bet you can’t remember my wife’s name.’

  Her eyes widened.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘My wife is one of your best friends. You work with her. Tell me where it is you both work and what she’s called.’

  The green walking man appeared on the sign and we crossed the road together.

  ‘Sorry, I can’t talk to you right now, I’m in a hurry,’ she said, quickening her pace as she headed along the other side of Boar Lane.

  I quickened my own pace.

  ‘What’s my wife’s name?’

  She ignored me.

  ‘Where do you and my wife work?’

  ‘I don’t have to answer your questions.’

  She said that as if I was being unreasonable and she was the one in the right. It pissed me off, frankly. I grabbed her arm and pulled it so that we were facing each other. We were standing below a streetlight and right next to the window of a clothes shop packed with shoppers, so we couldn’t have been more conspicuous. But it was too late to backtrack.

  ‘Yes you do. And by the way, I know exactly who you are. You’re Kim Diaz, aka Mary Mangano.’ She tried to wrench her arm away but I held it fast. A few passers-by gave us odd looks, but no one came to her aid. ‘You can talk to me and tell me everything, or I’ll put a load of information online about what you’ve done and how you’ve deceived me. I’ll send it to every casting agent in the country, and I’ll blacken your name so much that by the time I’m through with you, you’ll never get another acting job again.’

  A big middle-aged man grabbed my shoulder. ‘Leave her alone.’

  He didn’t sound at all confident about confronting me. In one quick glance I sized him up. Just over six foot, grey hair in a parting, double chin, black overcoat over a grey suit, beer-belly bulging through the middle of the overcoat. Satisfied I knew what I was dealing with, I pushed him so hard in the chest he had to take a couple of steps back.

  ‘Keep out of this Grandad, or I’ll fucking level you.’

  I guess I’d been mixing with the wrong kind of company and some of what I’d experienced had rubbed off on me. While he was weighing up the risk of taking me on, Diaz said to him, ‘It’s all right, she’s not going to hurt me.’

  ‘If you’re sure,’ he said, sounding relieved.

  ‘I am sure.’

  Looking like he’d just had a very narrow escape indeed, he turned and walked away. I gave Diaz a hard stare.

  ‘Start talking. Why can’t you tell me my wife’s name?’

  She lowered her head and spoke softly. ‘Because I’ve forgotten it.’

  This set me off laughing.

  ‘Forgotten it? But she’s your best friend, isn’t she? How do you forget the name of your best friend?’

  Diaz gave me a regretful look. ‘All right, you don’t have to rub it in. Let’s go to The Beer Hawk. We can talk in there. It’s just down the road.’

  She led me to a pub on the corner with an art deco façade of dark marble. We went inside and were greeted by an atmospherically dark interior. The bar was the one part of the interior that was bathed in light. I made a bee-line for it and bought Diaz a glass of wine and myself a pint. Pints seemed to have become the norm for me. I’d only ever drunk halves before my recent crises had enveloped me. It was a pint of weak beer. I could’ve done with a strong one but thought it best to keep a clear head.

  Diaz initially headed for a table by the window but I insisted we sit in a booth which screened us off from the street. Above it was a dull light with a big shade. It cast a baleful glow over our table.

  ‘So tell me,’ I said, ‘what’s going on?
’

  She took a sip of her wine.

  ‘Less than meets the eye.’

  I leaned nearer her. ‘What do you mean?’

  She took an e-cig from her bag, noticed a sign saying the place didn’t allow them, and returned it to her handbag, then said, ‘A few months before you were married, a woman got in touch with me. She’d found me on the agency website but she didn’t want to go through the agency. She told me she had an acting assignment for me and for a couple of friends of mine as well, if I knew anybody who’d be interested.’ She got out her e-cig and surreptitiously took a drag. A white haze emerged from her nostrils as she continued speaking. ‘I asked her what the job was, expecting it to be a stage or film role. Then she explained that she was getting married but didn’t have any friends she could invite to her own wedding. She said she didn’t want anyone at the wedding, least of all her future wife, to think she was a freak who had no friends and she was willing to pay us to pose as her friends for a day.’

  I scratched the scar on my cheek. ‘And you agreed to this?’

  ‘Look, she did a big pity sell on me. I felt sorry for her. Plus, she offered me a lot of money. And by the way, acting isn’t a steady job unless you make it big. That’s why I take any gig I can get. I make no apologies for that.’

  Taking one of my wedding photos from my pocket, I put it on the table in front of Diaz, and pointed to Sarina.

  ‘Just to clarify, was this the woman who hired you?’

  She nodded nervously. ‘That’s her.’

  ‘Did she tell you anything else?’

  ‘Yes, she gave me some background about you and your friends and family. She said we had to make it look as if she’d told us about you to make it convincing.’

  ‘What was with the wigs?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You all wore wigs to the wedding. What was that all about?’

  ‘Your wife was paranoid you could bump into one of us one day and we’d be found out. That’s why she didn’t use anyone from Manchester and it’s also why we wore the wigs. It was all about making it harder for you to work out who we were if you bumped into us by chance. Our precautions didn’t seem to work.’

  ‘No, they didn’t. What else did she tell you?’

  She took another pull on her e-cigarette.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Did she mention Martin Von Koss?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Jake Devlin?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hench? Did she talk about Hench?’

  ‘No, I’ve told you everything I know. There’s nothing more to tell.’

  Even though I’d been half expecting something of the sort, the revelations Diaz gave me made my stomach churn. I drank half my pint in one gigantic gulp in an attempt to settle it, then wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

  ‘All right, we’re done here. You can go.’

  Diaz got to her feet then hesitated, looking at me sorrowfully with her blue eyes.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘What do you care?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have done what I did. Sorry.’

  She walked away, the sound of her stiletto heels clicking on the wooden floor towards the exit being her final farewell to me. It took me about five seconds to finish the rest of my beer. When my glass was empty, I did something I’d never have dared do in Manchester. I bought a pint of a strong brew followed by three more of the same. I don’t know how I got that much fluid inside me.

  By 10 p.m. I was incapable of walking in a straight line, and I staggered through the evening murk to the railway station and caught the late train back to Manchester. As my train pulled in at Piccadilly station I called Yablon Taxis and booked a taxi to take me back to the Premier Inn in Prestwich.

  Even in my drunken state it was hard to get to sleep. The feeling that I’d been betrayed by the woman I loved ate at me all night along. I desperately wanted there to be an innocent explanation for it all, one which would absolve her from blame on all fronts, and which she would divulge when I found her, which I had no doubt I would.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  TUESDAY

  A banging headache woke me up at 7 a.m. The first thing I did was shower; the second was head to the downstairs lounge and grab a coffee. I needed to be in a large space. My room felt claustrophobic.

  In one corner of the lounge there were a couple of grey leather sofas. A low table had been strategically positioned next to them with a selection of newspapers on it. Making myself as comfortable as I could under the somewhat dismal circumstances, I picked up the Manchester Daily News. The headline read: Gangland Murder. And was subtitled underneath: Mutilated body of local man found in Peak District. The victim was horrifically executed and dismembered. The opening paragraph stated: The body of James Cunliffe, aged 35, of Didsbury, Manchester, was found late yesterday by a woman walking her dog in a wooded area in the Peak District . . .

  My hands shook. I lowered the newspaper and took a deep breath.

  James Cunliffe. Tara’s boyfriend.

  When I’d got over the initial shock of learning that someone else I knew had died, I rang Sarina but as usual got no response. Then I checked my emails, and saw an email from Sarina. But before I could open it, the thing disappeared from view, as if it’d been a mirage. I checked my junk folder to see if it’d somehow moved, then checked the rest of my Hotmail folders but it wasn’t in any of them. It’d been a figment of my imagination, some sort of crazed wish-fulfilment trick that my mind had played on me. I wanted to see Sarina so badly that I’d imagined she’d been in touch. But she hadn’t. And, presumably, based on events to date, she had no desire to. I didn’t know where she was, or how to begin looking for her. I seemed to have reached a dead end. I was in a Catch twenty-two situation. If I could solve the puzzle of the mobile phone, it would tell me why Sarina had disappeared and where she was; but I needed Sarina to solve the puzzle. My only options were to, A: get an expert to probe the mobile phone and unlock its secrets for me. I dismissed that as too risky because I’d have to part company with it, and I was certain I wouldn’t get it back. Or B: find Sarina. That would take time. There could be little doubt that the private army of villains looking for me were also looking for her and hadn’t found her yet. If they had, I’d know about it. She’d have been used as a bartering tool to get me to break cover. If, with all the resources at their disposal, they weren’t able to find Sarina, I would have a job and a half on my hands finding her myself.

  I had a third option. It was a gamble that could get me killed but I was, by this time, desperate enough to try it. The young thug whose leg I’d broken – Jarrad Stronach – had told me about a businessman called Jake Devlin. I could speak to Jake Devlin and find out once and for all if he was in command of the people pursuing me. If he was, I might be able to use Tara’s mobile phone as leverage to get him to leave me alone. I might even be able to get him to disclose the secret it contained. It’d call for a lot of subterfuge on my part.

  I devoted an hour to finding out as much as I could about Devlin. The few pictures of him that were available online showed a man who had brown hair swept back and held in place with a layer of what looked like grease, a flabby face the colour of weak piss, and a cruel mouth full of yellowing teeth. His corpulent physique was similarly unattractive. He had a fondness for white suits matched with dark shirts and loud ties. He was fifty years old and had never been married, but in some photos he flaunted stunningly attractive women on his arm.

  Devlin’s entrepreneurial career had begun in the ice cream business. His competitors developed a tendency to sell to him or simply disappear shortly after he entered the industry. From there he’d branched out into funeral directing, car-washing, pawnbroking, pubs and clubs, and taxis, building up a network of outlets for these businesses all over Manchester. Devlin had never been taken to court for a crime. That said, it was common knowledge in the circles I moved in that he’d been in
vestigated a few times, and the witnesses who might have put him in court had a habit of withdrawing their testimonies.

  All things considered, I couldn’t help but conclude that the rumour Stronach had told me about Devlin was likely to be true. Namely, that information had surfaced which was prejudicial to Jake Devlin and could get him put away. Given that I’d been targeted by Devlin, it made sense to assume that this information about him was on the mobile phone Tara had given me.

  I decided to find out for certain if that was the case and rang one of Devlin’s funeral parlours.

  ‘I need to speak to Jake.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Jo Finnegan. You’ll find your boss is eager to talk to me.’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘If you don’t put me in touch with him, he’ll be very annoyed. I’m sure you wouldn’t want that.’

  ‘I’ll pass on the message. How can he get hold of you?’

  ‘He can’t. I’ll call back shortly. When I do, make sure you’re able to give me a number I can reach him on.’

  I hung up and switched the mobile off, my heart pounding. Getting in touch with Devlin was winding me up more than buying the gun had done. An hour later I called Devlin Funeral Directors Ltd a second time.

  ‘Finnegan here. Have you got a number for me?’

  The man on the other end of the line reeled off a number. I hung up and called it. A silky smooth voice brimming with confidence answered. ‘Is that Ms Finnegan, by any happy chance?’

  ‘It is. Call me Jo. You must be Mr Devlin.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I have something for you.’

  He didn’t reply for about five seconds, during which I heard him breathing, almost excitedly. ‘I know. That’s why I’ve been looking for you.’