by David Mark
I look up and open my eyes. They’re heavy and everything hurts, but I’m paying attention. I want to know.
“You see, Mr Lee, I do not expect you to understand. You are not a part of this little world of ours. You are a decent man, a man who goes to work and pays the bills and flicks the channels looking for somebody to wank over while his girlfriend is out. You are an ordinary man, Mr Lee. And Mr Petrovsky is extraordinary. He has vision. He has respect. He has loyalty. And he has no problem with having people thinly sliced from the feet up. I do not call him my friend. I do not call him my employer. He is simply the man who says how things are. And he says that if you have killed our associate, then you must die.”
I cough and try to speak but the pain in my back turns the words to a hiss of pain.
“Now I must make a decision, Mr Lee. I must decide if the creature snivelling on his back before me is capable of killing a man like Prescott. A man whom Mr Petrovsky has used time and time again, with impeccable success, to eliminate those who have chosen to stand in the way of his happiness. And I do not see that, Mr Lee. I do not see how you could do this thing.”
“Nobody ever does,” I say, spitting out the words in a spray.
I shuffle back against the sofa and sit up a little straighter. I’m starting to feel myself creeping back into my body. The monsters are testing the windows and giving the doors a gentle kick, as they look for a way in.
He stands up, and I hear his knees clicking.
“So, Mr Lee…”
“Call me Owen,” I say, and manage to twist my grimace into a bloody smile.
Petruso smiles and snorts through his nose. He lights a cigarette, then drops it on the floor near my hand, as though he’s feeding a dog a titbit. I take it, and inhale.
“Owen, then. Owen, I am in your shit-tip of a home, watching you cry, and I am being forced to breathe in the stench of your broken sister, because Mr Petrovsky has told me to. He is the only man who tells me what to do. You, have many. You have rules. I do not believe you killed our associate. However, you have his gun. The police suspect you were involved. Your car was parked at the woods where this thing happened. I have seen from your rather comical actions at the press conference that you have a temper like my own. And so I am here, to ask you, like a man, to tell me the truth.”
I suck an inch off the cigarette. I smile, and choose my words carefully. “Fuck. Off.”
Petruso shakes his head, a little smile on his face. “I admire you, Owen. You are being very… English. Very northern. Very stupid. You can show me the size of your testicles all you want, but I will still cut them off.”
I try to think of some witty retort. Nothing comes. “You don’t need an excuse to touch me, pal. You only have to ask.”
Petruso lets out a slow breath, as though releasing the fluff from a dandelion clock.
Shrugs.
Looks past me.
Looks down at Kerry.
And picks up my gun.
Grabbing Kerry by the hair. Pulling her upwards as though yanking a turnip from hard earth. Her eyes remain closed, her face motionless, but her legs take her weight as Petruso stands her up in front of him and presses the barrel of my gun to the back of her neck.
“Did you kill my associate?”
I test the water by jumping in. “Fuck you.”
Petruso pulls her face close in to his mouth and sniffs her cheek, his mouth against her ear. Slowly, as if launching a paper-boat at the water’s edge, he pushes her into the bear’s grasp. He catches her before she falls. Something passes between animal and master. Unbidden. Wordless. Passionless. The bear tears her dress at the neck and pushes my coat from her shoulders. They puddle around legs that look like twigs stripped of bark. She stands there, naked and barely conscious.
The bear spins her back to Petruso, who hugs her in tight. He peers over her shoulder, her eyes still closed, and looks down at her body.
And he slides his gun through the ravaged crook of her arm, rubs it across her chest and then moves it down her body.
“Your sister’s boyfriend stole from us, Mr Lee. He took our drugs to sell, and did not sell them. He used them. He was beaten for this, but we forgave him, because he was a man who could occasionally be useful. Then he got arrested. He was stupid, and he got caught. And he made a deal. A policeman friend of Mr Petrovsky’s informed us that we were going to be betrayed. That Beatle was a dishonourable man. A rat. He was going to wear a tape recorder when we did business. So my associate was called. And he arranged to meet this piece of shit at a quiet, dark place. And he brought drugs and money as bait. Now they are both dead. The police think that you did it, or at least, they are starting to. I am starting to as well. Now, you will talk to me. You will tell me the truth, Mr Lee.”
Kerry’s eyes open, then close again, and she gives herself back to the world behind those eyelids.
“I will kill you,” I say, say it so quietly I can feel the words on my lips like a kiss. “I will be the man that ends your life.”
Petruso does’t speak. He simply kicks her legs apart with the outside of his right boot.
“I am not enjoying this, Mr Lee.”
I hear my own heart beating. I hear my blood roaring in my head.
“Yes,” I say, breathing hard. “Yes, I killed him. I went for a walk in the woods and he was busy shooting somebody. Then he tried to shoot me. So I bashed his fucking brains in and took his gun and his money and his drugs. Who wouldn’t have done that? Who would have acted differently? Would you? You’d have called the police, would you? Done the decent thing…?”
Petruso holds up a hand to silence me and puts the gun back against Kerry’s head. He clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “You killed him?”
“I had to…”
“And you have his money?”
“I don’t even know what’s there.” I look at him hard, hoping to see some spark of humanity, something I can bargain with. “Leave Kerry be,” I say, pleading. “She’s no threat. Leave her be…”
Petruso looks at the bear.
“His money. Now.” Petruso’s tone is flat. Emotionless.
“Bedroom,” I say, quietly “In the bed.”
The bear turns and walks into the bedroom.
“I will kill you first,” says Petruso. “As a courtesy.”
“Don’t do this…” I say. “It doesn’t have to be this way…”
The big man re-emerges, shrugging. He says something in a language I don’t understand. Petruso looks puzzled, giving his associate more of his attention. Kerry opens her eyes, looks at me, then slams her head backwards into her captor’s nose; blood exploding like a firework.
And I’m moving. Moving towards the big man. Reaching down as I go, and scooping my winged Pegasus from the floor. Swinging it upwards with all the force of all my rage. It connects with the side of the bear’s jaw and I feel his head break, and hear it again as he slams against the wall.
I turn to face Petruso, hurl the Pegasus and it thumps into his chest, splintering ribs. As he falls he puts his foot on one of my toy cars, and his leg slides out to one side, snapping at the knee. It sticks out at a forty-five-degree angle, grotesquely bent, and he screams in pain as he writhes on the floor.
I pick up the Pegasus again. Bring it down two-handed on his head. Hit him again. Again. And when I’ve stopped, it’s dark, and there is no head to hit anymore, and I can’t feel my arms.
Lighting a cigarette with hands that can barely take its weight, and with fingers that turn the filter tip crimson.
And I search around inside myself for something good. Something decent. Something kind.
I find emptiness.
So I hold my sister tight. And pretend.
39
“And you’re sure about this?” asks McAvoy, trying to keep his tone even. “He ordered it in August last year? And it would only fit that make of car, yes? Wonderful. Thank you.”
McAvoy hangs up. He’s alone in the office, save f
or a cleaner emptying waste-paper bins into black sacks. Everybody else in the pub or doing the rounds. They’d asked him, of course. Asked him to join them for a swift one. But they’d known he would say no, and he’d duly obliged. He couldn’t think of anything worse than breathing in their cigarette smoke, their lager breath; hearing them talk about old cases and past glories, and how marvellous life seemed to be before he’d passed his exams and transferred over from uniform. Better to stay here. Work hard. Nose to the grindstone.
He sits back in his chair and breathes deeply. He can feel a bit of a cold coming on. A tickle in his throat and a sniffling in his nose.
Impulsively, he calls home. He tries to ration out these moments: perhaps one text in a morning, another in the afternoon, and a call as and when time allows. Roisin makes no such demands of him and doesn’t hold herself to an equal standard. She calls when she’s thinking of him, and she thinks of him a lot. She’s spent most of her life in love with him. They met when she was still a child and he a green-as-grass police constable. She was briefly resident of a halting site outside Carlisle and he’d been sent with a sergeant to have a quiet chat with some of the lads. Things had gone bad. Roisin had got separated from her family. Bad men came. They began to hurt her. And more by luck than anything else, McAvoy came to her aid. He hurt the men so badly he cannot allow himself to look at the memory for fear of what he sees. But Roisin knew then that when she was old enough, she would marry the big, blushing police officer. She was seventeen when she saw him again. Arrested after being witness to an act of violence in Edinburgh at New Year’s Eve, she refused to speak to anybody save McAvoy: then working as a trainee detective with Cumbria Police. In the days that followed, they fell in love. They found the parts of themselves that were missing. She fell pregnant, and he proposed with a borrowed ring. And now he is a detective sergeant and she is his wife, and every day he thanks the fates for bringing her into his life, and begs whatever force controls the universe that she never tire of him, or stop seeing the hero she claims lies beneath the blundering, clumsy exterior. She is absolute in her assertion that he is the only good person she has ever met. The thought shames him, now. Shames him, as he considers Shane Cadbury, and Doug Roper, and the fact that he is lying to himself because he is scared, and doesn’t want to mess up his career or fall foul of a man who exudes charm and confidence and might, perhaps, be the devil.
“Hey you,” she says, brightly, when she answers. “Was just thinking of you. The boy rang your father. Had a nice wee chat. Wouldn’t speak to me, of course, but I heard enough. Your brother’s doing grand. Drinking less. Met somebody, actually. She used to be a nurse, so that’s good, isn’t it? Anyway, Fin’s happy, so that makes me happy. How’s you? Is it coming together? That trip to the Country Park all turned out OK, eh? Right place, right time. I can do some asking around, if you like. Somebody on the radio said it was maybe a drugs thing? I can ask Valentine, he knows about that stuff, and he dotes on you…”
McAvoy sits and listens. Lets her words wrap around him like a blanket. He wishes he could find the courage to write poems for her. He recites them, in his head, and hopes she hears them when her ear is pressed to his cheek.
“I’m panicking, Ro,” he says, quietly. “They’ll call me to give evidence, I know it. And I don’t know what to say. Do I have doubts? Of course I do! If I show Roper I can be trusted then I’m in his good graces and we have a future that offers Fin the very best. And yet…”
“And yet you can’t talk bollocks to save your life,” she finishes, a smile in her voice. “Aye, life would be easier if you could lie, but you can’t, and that’s hardly a character flaw. Do what you think is right. Whatever that is, is the right thing to do. Don’t worry your pretty head. I’ve baked, by the way. If you catch the killer before bedtime I’ll stay up and make you a baked camembert. Is that the right way to say it? I camembert getting stuff wrong…”
He’s laughing as he hangs up. Giggling, his shoulders shaking. He wonders what he would be without her. Wonders what he would be for.
He turns back to the computer, feeling equal to the task. He’s an investigator. A detective. It’s his job to look into things. To find answers. Justice, if such a thing is possible.
I’ve got something, here. Worth following up. I’m in my own time now, he thinks. No harm in digging…
No point bothering Roper with it now, either. He’s got his own way of working, anyway. Never tells anybody anything, but always brings in his man.
Sitting there, skin clammy, cold, he thinks of that day. When he’d found her. That poor girl, diced and violated. So much blood. And that smell. The smell that will never go away. Thinks of Cadbury’s calm face. His words. “She was a gift,” he’d said.
The thought, that has pervaded his dreams, denied his sleep, drumming again.
He didn’t do it. He took her body and had his fun, but he didn’t stick the knife in. There’s somebody else. Somebody hateful, violent, broken-up inside. Somebody free.
He remembers Roper’s arrival. Slick and polished and calm and hungry. Took a look at Ella. Pulled a face. Turned away. Spotted McAvoy, white-faced, staring at nothing, bile in his mouth, and told him he’d done well. That he’d go far. How he’d taken over. Spun plates and juggled balls.
No harm putting the name in the computer, see what it throws up.
No, he thinks. Roper’s a strange one, but his way seems to work.
And this is my job. I’m good at it. I’ll show him.
His fingers hit the keyboard.
Types.
O-w-e-n L-e-e.
*
The rain is turning from an irritation into a downpour; fat droplets exploding as they thump down from a leaden sky. The wind is sweeping in from the coast and one side of Tony’s face is raw and stinging as he huddles inside his coat and scurries, stiff-legged, down the deserted street.
Ten miles from the city boundary, and a whole fucking world away. They’ve even got geese in the duck pond and there are no cock-and-balls spray-painted on the church door. Classy bastards, one and all.
Ripe for the picking, he thinks. Plenty to lose.
Although it’s the only road in the village, there are no cars to turn the deep kerbside puddles into mucky spray. The street lights are on and the air is midnight black. Perfect conditions to duck and weave. To keep your head down, meet your source, and bribe her into handing over a folder full of gold.
He puts a hand on the door to the little pub. Takes a look over his shoulder. There’s a little old woman on the far side of the street, pushing a tartan shopping trolley, but other than that, he’s got the village to himself.
Tony doesn’t really like it out here in middle England. He prefers a city. Likes the smell of exhaust fumes and industry. It’s all too clean, this. The rain falls with a spirit of optimism, a poetic timbre, as if it still believes it can wash the filth away and make the world sparkly again by morning.
He pushes the cracked oak door and enters the gloom of the pub. A barmaid with rabbit teeth and David Hasselhoff hair is standing behind the bar, in conversation with an old boy who’s leaning on a bar stool and drinking bitter. Tony gives the room a quick once-over. Tiny place. Two rooms in an L-shape. Oak beams. Old timbers and black-and-white Edwardian pictures showing how the village used to look when a double-barrelled surname meant something. Horse brasses and a copy of Yorkshire Life in the newspaper rack.
“Double Bells,” he says, pleasantly, using his sleeve to dry his face and push back his hair. “No ice.”
The barmaid pours his drink from the bottle and he gives an appreciative nod. He likes a lass who knows her measures. Doesn’t need a fucking optic to tell her when she’s reached 35 ml. He downs it, and asks for another. She pours, gives a smile, and pours another. It’s larger than the last.
“Quiet today,” he says, waving his glass.
“The weather’s putting them off for now. We pick up after dinner time,” she says, conversationally. “And usu
ally get a good after-work crowd.”
“Those that aren’t retired,” says the old boy, eager to get in on the conversation.
“Aye, it’s an ageing population,” says Tony, in his most understanding tone of voice. “You’ve got to feel for the young ’uns, trying to buy a house in this day and age. Ain’t got a choice but to move to the city. It’s no wonder places like this are losing their identity. Only people who can live here are outsiders.”
There are nods from the old boy and the barmaid. Vague mutterings of agreement. A general consensus that the world is going to the dogs. Won’t be long until somebody mentions Poles and darkies, thinks Tony.
“We were saying that,” she says. “Poor Dan up on Tranby, he can trace his line back 300 years, but his son’s having to get himself a flat in Selby because it’s all he can afford.”
“Dan Atkinson?” asks Tony, pretending to try and place him.
“No, Sheridan. Tall bloke with grey hair. Drives a Passat.”
“Yeah I know him.”
He files the information away. Will be worth a favour from Sue in the features team. An in-depth analysis piece on the loss of identity in East Yorkshire’s most beloved villages. The sort of bollocks he would never read, but which he can write with his eyes shut.
They talk bollocks for a while longer. Rugby. The idiots on East Riding Council. Why it’s up to the man in the street to sort out his recycling when they’ve already paid their bleeding council tax. He sinks three more whiskies and finds out the old boy was a prisoner of war in Greece during the Second World War. Keeps himself steady and dries himself on the fire, wishing Owen was here to help him take the piss out of the rich fuckers who occasionally scamper by the leaded glass.
Ah, Owen. You poor fuck.
At exactly 7 p.m., the door opens, and the woman he’s waiting for walks in. He gives a satisfied smile, though he never had any doubts she would stand him up. They may be too good for him when it comes to hugs and kisses, but when he’s got them by the balls, they’re putty in his hands.
