Skyfire

by Sam Galliford

  “So what did he say?” prompted Aunt Gwendoline.

  Chapter 44

  "He began by saying, ’I can’t forget her, Gerry. I can’t forget how she was when I last saw her. You didn’t see her, Gerry, and be grateful forever that you did not. You didn’t see how they tore her. You didn’t see her broken teeth and bruised lips where they forced a bottle of brandy into her mouth and made her swallow whatever nasty little pills they had it in mind to dope her with. You didn’t see the cuts they made down her thighs, deliberately while she was still alive, to make her thrash around and give them more pleasure while they were having her. You didn’t see the score marks they made down her ribs and round her breasts and belly for the same reason, to make her writhe and squirm so they could get even more excitement yet out of her as they were fucking into her. You didn’t see the bruising around her throat where they half strangled her, trying to get yet more orgasmic pleasure still as they screwed her, or the pillow they used to half suffocate her with the same end in mind. And you didn’t see her final moment of terror, frozen for all time in her eyes in the instant she died. You didn’t see any of that, Gerry. Be grateful for it, because I did.

  "’It’s Billy Crater who is the psychopath. He’s the vicious brute with no conscience whatsoever, and he’s the one who finally killed her. George is the younger and he adores his older sibling, admires him beyond all reason, hero-worships him, so whatever Billy does George follows and does exactly the same. That’s why whatever terrifying bestiality Billy unleashed on Janet she had to go through it all over again a second time at the hands of his slimy little toad of a brother. Even now I cannot imagine everything they put her through.

  "’It was Billy’s twenty-second birthday and the two of them decided to go out and celebrate. They started off getting well drunk on alcohol and goodness knows what else by way of so-called recreational drugs at one of their family establishments, then they drove around randomly out of their usual territory and ended up in our street. It was nothing more than that. It was a random, mindless, drug and alcohol fuelled opportunistic celebration of Billy’s birthday that brought them into our street and led them to knock on our door. Damn it, Gerry! Why couldn’t they have gone somewhere else? It wouldn’t have upset the statistics of the universe if they had found someone else’s street and knocked on someone else’s front door. Why did they have to end up on our doorstep?

  "’I didn’t know she was pregnant, Gerry. I didn’t know until I found out at the inquest and the pathologist announced it so casually as part of his report. I suppose they all thought I knew, but I didn’t. Janet hadn’t yet told me. When Billy and George Crater forced their way through our front door she had just got out of the bath. She was in her dressing gown and making a special effort to be extra special for me when I got home. She was smelling all nice and clean and she had put on the very best of her perfume, and all her special clothes were laid out to put on for me, because that evening was going to be special. She was going to tell me she was pregnant; that the family we both wanted and looked forward to had started; that she was carrying our child inside her; that we were going to have our baby. She was going to tell me when I got home and we were going to celebrate. It was going to be such a special evening. But she never got the chance. Billy and George Crater knocked on our door first.

  “’After the abortion of their trial, I was gutted. I couldn’t believe that they would walk away free, out into the world again as if nothing had happened. Something had happened. My Janet had happened, the woman I loved, the woman who made me laugh, the woman who was carrying our baby, she had happened. And suddenly it was as if she hadn’t happened at all. Suddenly, she could be killed by animals like Billy and George Crater and nobody and nothing in the whole universe was ever going to notice. The police, the legal system, even the Craters themselves, were all back smiling, shrugging,”oh well, on to the next one" attitude. You saw the prosecution barrister turn and shake hands with the defence silks, congratulating them on their result, “interesting case, some interesting points of law” and so on, and all the time all of them knowing full well what Billy and George had done. They had murdered my Janet in the most bestial, sex and drug crazed manner possible, and not just her but our baby too. They had killed them both and now they were going to walk out into the sunshine as if nothing had happened because of a legal technicality. No one was ever going to do anything about it. They had “no case to answer”.

  "’I didn’t know what to think when I heard the judge say those words. There was no doubt about their guilt, yet it seemed as though the question was never going to be put. My Christ! My Janet and our baby had been murdered and there was no case to answer. I didn’t know what to do. I just had to get out of the court and go somewhere in the fresh air and throw up. I remember asking you to field the press pack for me, which you did and for which I am still very grateful. But apart from that I just too numb to think. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t swallow, I couldn’t talk, nothing. I know I walked off and after that I just walked and walked and walked for God knows how long before I finally had to sit down. So, I found a café with an outside table and ordered a coffee.

  “’I had been thinking all the time I was walking, of course, not consciously or deliberately but somehow on autopilot in the back of my brain. It seemed to me that it could not be right that Janet and our baby should be dismissed like that. There had to be some accountability somewhere. They couldn’t just let her die like that and nothing happen, although clearly that was the intention of our ponderous and idiotic criminal justice system. And without realising it I began to get what at first seemed like a crazy idea. I got to thinking that if I could get to speak to old man Crater, Billy and George’s dad, and tell him what his boys had done, what animals they were, what they were capable of, then perhaps he might do something. I didn’t expect him to kill them or anything like that, but boys generally respond to their fathers. And whatever his reputation as a gangster he was at bottom a businessman, and businesses of all descriptions, even illegal ones, must depend on good relationships between people, so having a couple of murdering loose cannons around like Billy and George is not going to help any business run smoothly. I thought I could tell him that. And after that I would tell him exactly how his two sons had killed Janet, how they had doped her and cut her and raped her and strangled her, and make him see what evil they had done. And then I would leave it to him to sort them out in the way that a father can, so they knew that what they had done was wrong. I didn’t want revenge. Life’s too short for that. I just wanted to sit across a table from him and see his face change as I told him the full horror of what his sons had done to Janet and our baby. And at the end of it I wanted to hear him say”I’m sorry, Dr Brinsley. Leave it to me, I will deal with them".

  “‘It was naïve thinking, of course, and I wasn’t really myself as I sat there at the café table. As I found out later, the Craters, the whole family from the old man downwards, don’t have any human feelings like the rest of us. They are criminals and violence is the standard currency in which they deal. But I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that I wanted to hear one of them say “sorry”. I wanted to get to see the old man and have my say, and then hear him say “I’m sorry for what my two boys have done”. I wanted him to acknowledge that my Janet and our baby had once had some existence and some meaning in the universe, that she couldn’t be done away with like that and nobody notice. Anyway, I was thinking all these things when a young woman came up to my table.’”

  Chapter 45

  "‘Dr Brinsley?’ she asked. ‘I’m Amanda’ something-or-other, I forget her surname, ‘from’, and she mentioned one of the provincial newspapers.

  "‘Go away,’ I replied.

  "‘Dr Brinsley, please. I don’t want to disturb you, particularly at the moment when you must be suffering terribly from the shock of what has just happened in court, but I was wondering if I could help.’

  "I didn’t want to talk to her. I j
ust wanted to be alone but I was so shattered that I didn’t have the strength to push her away. She looked very young and her approach was not polished or confident, although that was what she was trying to be. She was on her own as far as I could see. She had no camera and she didn’t thrust a recorder on to the table in front of me, and when I smiled at her there was a good deal of relief and nervousness in her answering grin.

  "‘You’re new at this, aren’t you?’ I said to her.

  "She nodded. ‘Yes. My first big story. Do you mind if I have a coffee?’

  "She gulped it down as soon as it arrived.

  "To cut the story short, Amanda was very much a junior on her newspaper, an inexperienced assistant sent out by her news editor to be a coffee fetcher for the one whose job it was to get the cover on the courtroom story. When she saw me escape from the crush outside the court, she slipped her leash and followed me, and did so for the whole two hours and more while I wandered aimlessly around trying to sort things out in my head. It wasn’t until I sat down at the café table that she finally plucked up the courage to approach me and blurt out her introductory words.

  "Maybe I did fall for a slick, innocent approach but, like you Gerry, I have dealt with enough students to separate those who are genuine from those who think they can fool you. She was genuine, and I think she was just out of her depth and overwhelmed by her own gall at seizing an opportunity that luck had dropped in her way.

  "Once she sat down, she didn’t know how to proceed. I found her uncertainty touching. She was like a student who has suddenly seen the implications in an idea you have just presented to them and whose vistas are now so wide that they have no idea in which direction they should start running first. It’s the joy of teaching, isn’t it, Gerry? It’s the one thing that keeps us hammering away with our words of wisdom to tribes of bored undergraduates week after week. It’s that single moment when you see the light flash in the eyes of one of them when they find they can suddenly see a further horizon. That’s the opium of it, isn’t it? That’s why we do it.

  "Anyway, I’m afraid I was a bit of a bastard to her. I needed to know about the Craters and how to get to see them and she wanted a few words for her paper on how I felt about the dismissal of Billy’s and George’s trial. I gave her a few words, and in the process I got out of her as much about the Craters as she could remember from the contents of her newspaper’s archives. She remembered quite a lot. She told me about old man Crater and his three sons. There was Frank, the eldest, who we had seen in the public gallery at the trial. He had been groomed to take over the family’s businesses and had been kept scrupulously clean as far as the law was concerned for that purpose. He was the bright one. He had gone to university and studied business and law. She told me also about Billy and George who, it seems, were little more than hoodlums from the time they were born. They were never given any responsibility in any of the family’s businesses because everything they touched they wrecked in short order. Consequently, they lived lives of protected criminal idleness, literally, with nothing to do except enjoy themselves and cause chaos and havoc wherever they went. They were a constant source of worry to the old man and a good deal of the Craters’ resources were spent keeping them out of trouble. That was important because it was through Billy and George that the police saw their most likely chance of getting into the Craters’ organisation and destroying it. There was no mention of a Mrs Crater, although presumably there was one somewhere.

  "Amanda also told me about the Craters’ various businesses, both legal and illegal, and she gave me a list of the nightclubs they owned in the city. It seemed that one called Purple Heaven was the one they mostly used as their office. And then she told me the most trivial thing in the archive, the most trivial of all the trivia. She told me what the Craters drank. According to her newspaper’s files all the nightclubs they owned had to keep a bottle of a particular scotch whisky handy in case old man Crater felt like a drink during one of his visits. She couldn’t remember the name of it, only that it was a single malt. It wasn’t the most expensive whisky on the market or an especially difficult one to come by. It was simply the one he drank and a bottle of it had to be kept under the counter in the bar of all their establishments.

  “I never checked to see whether her editor liked her words enough to use them. I hope he did and that she got a timorous toehold on the first slippery rung of the ladder to respectable journalism. She was a nice girl and she had shown me a way of getting through the Craters’ front door and up their stairs into their office. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy but I had to face them. I had to tell the old man what his two sons had done and I had to hear him or someone from his family say”I’m sorry“.’”

  Chapter 46

  Aunt Gwendoline took a deep breath. She had become stiff from sitting for too long, although part of her stiffness she knew was reaction to what she was hearing. Rani remained alert at her feet, looking up at her and watching as if also taking in every word.

  “It would appear that your friend Dr Brinsley was far more disturbed than you supposed,” she observed quietly into the pause.

  “I would have to say the state he was in did upset me,” sighed Gerard. “I had thought he was almost back to the Mark of old, easy-going and sociable, ever ready with a grin and a laugh. But underneath he seemed not to have resolved anything at all. I couldn’t begin to fathom the depth of the anguish that clearly still racked him. The madcap scheme of his to face the Craters was pure insanity. What could it achieve? He more or less admitted he wasn’t thinking straight when he dreamed it up. I was long past being able to understand how he was thinking and what he was trying to do, so all I did was sit and listen to him. It was around two o’clock in the morning by this time and he showed no signs of calling it a day.”

  “I take it he did get to meet the Crater gang?” Aunt Gwendoline queried.

  “Yes, he did,” Gerard nodded. “And by his own account, it took some doing. I still don’t know how far what he told me really happened or whether it was just his imagination running wild under the influence of all the stress he had faced and the alcohol he had consumed. But he was certainly plausible, and that is what worries me.”

  “Gerard, dear boy, you are not making much sense. Would you take your story more slowly so that I can follow you?”

  “Sorry,” he replied. "I was jumping ahead a bit.

  "Mark said he worked out very quickly that meeting the Craters would not simply be a matter of ringing them up and making an appointment. He knew he would have to get through a number of minders, bouncers, bodyguards and so forth, all capable of extreme violence, so he lit on the strategy of going to the night clubs the Craters owned, getting mildly drunk and making a minor nuisance of himself.

  "‘You mean the whole drunken thing was deliberate?’ I challenged him.

  "‘I had to be convincing,’ he replied. ‘I had to build up some sort of track record of a man going off the rails because he had lost his wife. I couldn’t have just walked into the Purple Heaven nightclub, got plastered and demanded to see the boss. That would have put me in the closest rubbish skip in no time.’

  "He reasoned that if he was seen to be an inoffensive drunk not capable of hurting anyone, then the bouncers would regard him as someone they could take in their stride and not get too heavy with him. If at the same time he kept giving them the message that he wanted to see old man Crater, and would go away and be a good boy once he had done that, then eventually the old man would agree to see him just to get rid of him. It all sounded very innocent and naive even as he described it, and no doubt in his emotional turmoil at the time it probably seemed quite reasonable. So, he started to get drunk.

  "‘Mark, you bastard,’ I exploded at him. ‘You mean to say it was all a big act?’

  "‘Oh, no,’ he countered. ‘It wasn’t an act. I really did get drunk and in a big way. It was ghastly. Surely you remember that morning when you collected me from the police cells and I threw up all over y
our shoes? I had some real blinders of hangovers. You can be absolutely certain they were no act.’

  "I could not believe what I was hearing.

  "‘I don’t care how you try and justify it, Mark, but you turned into a major problem. Sue and I thought you were in genuine trouble. You have no idea what you did to us. And we did it because you were a friend and we wanted to help you. And now you tell me it was all a big act, a ploy just so you get close to the Craters?’

  "‘Don’t be angry, Gerry.’

  "‘What the hell do you expect me to be? You caused merry hell in our household. You scared us until we could not get to sleep at night, Sue in particular, and now you are telling me it was all deliberate. Mark, this is the end of whatever friendship you and I ever had. It is too much to ask anyone to accept, even allowing what was done to you.’

  "I was furious with him.

  "‘Please, Gerry. I couldn’t have done it without you,’ he protested. ‘You’re the best friend a fellow could ever have, to put up with me through all that. And you did help. You helped enormously. You were totally convincing. Don’t you see I couldn’t tell you? Your concern had to be genuine otherwise the Craters would have twigged I wasn’t kosher. They have all sorts of lines of information going back to them. You were wonderful to me and they noticed it. That’s what helped me convince them I was genuine. It was your friendship, just about the closest and most important thing in the world to me.’