The Elephant Tree

by R. D. Ronald

  ‘Did he take all the cannabis to sell this morning?’

  ‘Yeah first thing. Said he expected to be back sometime today. How did things go back home?’

  ‘Jack claims he doesn’t know anything about it, but he’s harder to read than the Chinese alphabet,’ Scott said, walking into the living room and collapsing onto one of the couches.

  ‘You think your uncle ever did confide anything in Jack?’ She asked, sliding onto the couch next to him.

  ‘I don’t know, but I doubt I’ll get anything else out of him. I did see that detective though.’

  ‘The one you heard had been looking for you, Fallon was it?’ she asked, slightly alarmed.

  ‘Yeah, he turned up at the house with a warrant when I stayed there last night.’

  ‘Oh my god, what happened?’

  ‘He was OK to be honest, he had a few guys and they went through the place but hardly with a fine toothed comb. They didn’t stay for long. I think he was looking at me more as a source of information than a suspect for anything. Felt like a kind of arm around the shoulder approach,’ Scott said, and shrugged.

  ‘You still have to be careful though, especially now with Jeff’s thing up here.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Angela said, grinning as she stood up and pulled Scott to his feet, ‘I’ve missed you way too much to sit around on a couch chatting all day.’

  ‘Really, so what did you have in mind?’

  She leant in to kiss him again and hooked a finger through one of Scott’s belt loops. Giving him her best wicked grin, Angela turned and walked towards the door, her finger securely pulling him along behind.

  Scott woke to the sound of Jeff’s truck crunching through the snow outside the cabin on its way up to park beside the house. Angela’s naked body was pressed up against him with her arm draped across his chest. The deep sound of her breathing indicating the noise outside hadn’t woken her.

  Scott carefully untangled himself from Angela, re-dressed in the clothes that had been hurriedly discarded across the floor and made his way to the house to see Jeff.

  ‘Everything go OK?’ he asked Jeff as he entered and walked through to the kitchen.

  ‘Yeah it sold. The first of many,’ Jeff said, patting the backpack he’d put down on the kitchen table, and gave an uncharacteristically wide grin.

  ‘You get what you’d expected to?’

  ‘More than. There’s been some turbulence it the market, so it would seem, and it’s driven the prices up.’

  Jeff put an unopened bottle of vodka on the table and took two glasses down from a cupboard. ‘Join me?’ he asked Scott.

  ‘Sure.’

  They sat opposite each other and Jeff half filled the glasses.

  ‘Cheers Scott, on a job well done. Putty was right about you,’ he said, and clinked his glass against Scott’s. ‘Did you get your family stuff taken care of that was bothering you when you left yesterday?’

  ‘No not really, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter. It’s all stuff from the past I’m just finding out about now. Be nice to have loose ends tied up but maybe it’s not meant to be.’

  ‘What about the other matter that had been troubling you?’

  ‘That obvious, is it?’

  ‘Anyone could see there was something you were eager to get away from when you first landed up here. Wasn’t my business then and still isn’t now, but we’ve spent a bit of time together and maybe the trust has grown enough between us for you to want to share.’

  ‘I got mixed up with some people I shouldn’t have and decided it would be for the best to let the dust settle without me being around.’

  ‘Is there anyone after you?’

  ‘The cops came round to my place for a quick search when I got back home, but there’s nothing they can put on me, it was just information gathering I think, or an attempt to anyway.’

  ‘What about anyone other than them?’

  ‘Well, there was a guy I did a job for which turned out to be more of an initiation, so I expect as I’m not there to follow on from it he might be a little pissed.’

  ‘Is that what your little bag of money was about then?’

  ‘You went through my stuff?’ Scott asked, and laughed a little but couldn’t help but feel a twinge of betrayal.

  ‘I have a few times since you’ve been here. Putty’s recommendation was a good start but I wanted to find out as much as I could about you before I told you anything about the plants,’ Jeff replied, unapologetically.

  ‘Yeah that was what the money was from. I doubt McBlane will be happy but I’m out of reach up here while I decide my next step after all of this.’

  Jeff’s hand brought his glass down hard onto the table with a bang, startling Scott. ‘Paul McBlane?’ he asked; his body had tensed and eyes become urgent.

  ‘By your reaction I assume he’s someone you’re aware of, yeah Paul McBlane,’ Scott said, putting his own glass carefully back down.

  Jeff unscrewed the cap from the vodka, and this time filled both glasses to the brim.

  ‘He’s a nasty bastard, Scott,’ Jeff said, fixing him with an unwavering stare. ‘After my attempt at a drug enterprise with Putty years back, me and McBlane got something going there for a while. He hadn’t long been working the doors and was dabbling with powders and pills, knocking them out to the clubbers. I’d wanted to get into the growing side of things, but needed a place to do it and funding to get started. I was a bit naive back then, maybe a bit like you are now.’

  Scott let the judgement pass without comment and took a sip from his glass.

  ‘He sorted me a house to set up in and paid for the equipment to get it going and for a while we made some decent money. I didn’t want anyone else to know what I was up to so he took all of the buds to sell. After a couple of crops he wanted to expand, get a big industrial unit, said he’d take care of everything, all I had to do was grow it.’

  ‘I gather you didn’t do it then, so why not?’

  ‘Sometimes you can see things when you look a man in the eye. And looking at him right there and then, I knew when it came down to it he’d leave me dead in a ditch sooner than split that type of money. A retirement crop, he called it. Retirement alright, he’d have had me retired permanently,’ he said, and pointed two fingers against his temple like the barrel of a gun.

  ‘So what happened when you told him no?’

  ‘Men like McBlane don’t get told no, not by anyone who stays around to tell of it later. I just got out of there. I could have stuck around and kept it on a small scale but his idea wouldn’t have gone away, and sooner or later he’d have forced me into it one way or another. That’s when I moved away, started work on the trucks. Never in one spot for long, suited my needs just fine. Course that’s around the time I met Mary and he was the last thing on my mind after that,’ Jeff said, with a genuine smile that looked somehow out of place on him, like trying on an outfit he hadn’t worn for years.

  Jeff’s smile faded and he exhaled heavily, looking into his drink as if trying to read something way down at the bottom.

  ‘You ever see him since?’

  ‘No. Heard of him from time to time, he always seemed to be involved in something, but I never let on the connection we once had. To be honest though, the talks we had about it, the vision he described is more than likely where my own thoughts about doing what I have here came from. He might not be the smartest man on the planet but he had a way of looking to the future and then making it happen. He’s not someone who gives up easily. If you’ve gotten onto his bad side he won’t forget you in a hurry.’

  Scott nodded. Jeff’s summation of McBlane’s character confirmed his own impression of the man.

  ‘So was it after Mary died that you decided to turn back to the plants again?’

  Jeff nodded slowly. ‘When she was around I used to function a lot better. We’d go out, socialise, do the regular things that couples do. After she died I tried to keep going t
hrough the motions but being out amongst other people, happy people especially, I just felt removed from it all as if it were just a bad TV show I was sat at home watching alone. After a while I just stopped trying and got used to my own company again. It made me think back to the past when I would lock myself away from the world for weeks at a time tending to the plants. That kind of solitude would be too much for most people but now I was living that lifestyle anyway but with nothing to show for it,’ he said. Scott noticed he’d begun twisting his wedding ring between finger and thumb. ‘Avoir le cafard, the French colonialists called it, a kind of cabin fever: extreme depression, boredom, pointlessness of existence.’

  Scott lit a cigarette and swallowed the last of the vodka from his glass.

  ‘I started looking for opportunities, places where people who kept to themselves were the norm rather than standing out as different. After a while my search broadened and then I came across this place and knew this was the one I’d been looking for.’

  Jeff lit a cigarette of his own and refilled both of the glasses.

  ‘What was the job you did for McBlane then?’ Jeff asked, taking a sip from his brimming glass.

  ‘We picked up a shipment from the docks, me and another guy. We’d been told it contained a large amount of coke but apparently it had just been a test to see how we did and there were no drugs in it.’

  ‘So what was it you picked up?’

  ‘Just electrical stuff in boxes, nothing really.’

  Jeff scratched his beard thoughtfully as he listened to Scott. His face had taken the appearance of someone trying to locate misplaced car keys.

  ‘And the other guy who did the job, he’s still working for McBlane then?’

  ‘No, he didn’t even make it through the pay off. McBlane had apparently been feeding the guy’s heroin habit and he overdosed right in front of me just as we were getting paid.’

  ‘Fucking hell, did he prepare the works himself?’

  ‘No, one of the men did it before we got there.’

  ‘Sounds like he was removed on purpose, I’ve heard of McBlane using that one before.’

  ‘Faking an overdose to kill someone?’

  ‘Yeah something tied him to it a long time ago and it looked like he was gonna go down. But one of his henchmen took the fall.’

  Scott thought back to a conversation with Twinkle and Neil where he’d heard Dominic Parish ingratiated himself by serving a sentence to get McBlane out of a jam and wondered if this was what Jeff was referring to.

  ‘Had your friend done anything to piss McBlane off?’

  ‘No. Well, there was a moment in the van when we were on the way to drop off the shipment, he talked about running, taking what he thought was a huge amount of coke and selling it himself. I was the only one with him though and I’ve never told anyone what he said.’

  ‘McBlane doesn’t like anyone talking out of turn, ever. And if you’re on the payroll then he’s twice as aware that you’re alive, and he listens twice as hard,’ Jeff said, and watched Scott sternly as he took a drink from his glass.

  ‘You mean he might have had the van bugged?’

  ‘If this was an initiation to see how you both coped under pressure then it would seem like more than a possibility. No drugs in the shipment so no chance of an arrest and whatever happened to be on the recording falling into the hands of the police. McBlane might be an old world type of figure but he’s never been shy of embracing technology where it could help him out.’

  Scott’s mind raced back to the night in the flat when Twinkle had died, or been murdered. Had they said anything to indicate they’d heard what had been said in the van? Scott’s thoughts now fuelled by alcohol and anger ran fluidly into and through one another. He couldn’t be sure.

  ‘Twinkle, the guy that died. They’ve framed him in a shooting outside of a club now too. They took his wallet and stuff the night he died. A doorman told the police he grabbed for the attacker which is when he dropped the wallet.’

  ‘Older heads are wiser heads, or they should be. If McBlane did hear what your friend said about ripping him off, then no way was he gonna ride off into the sunset with a pocket full of cash. And now with the disappearance and the setup?’ Jeff laughed. ‘The more mystery that surrounds McBlane the better, as far as he’s concerned. He knows that mystery won’t win any convictions in a court room, but it elevates his status above dangerous to that of iconic, mythological even amongst the people on the street. He summoned you into the circle, Scott. For whatever reason, I don’t know. But now you’ve left, you’ve become a loose thread. He won’t sit back with the possibility you might cause his whole world to unravel around him. Everything with him is about victory. Win or lose. Pass or fail.’

  Scott knew Jeff was still talking about McBlane, but his last words could just as easily have been describing his brother, Jack. He was a fixer, he made things right, made them work, whether you wanted him to or not.

  Chapter 13

  Scott slept fitfully that night and awoke on a number of occasions to terrible dreams that, once awake, he couldn’t quite recall. The bus dream had been in there though, of that much he was sure. But this time, sitting next to him, staring blank eyed on a journey to an unknown destination had been Jeff.

  He got up and dressed quickly. The cabin was cold and Angela must already have gone up to the main house to prepare breakfast. He pulled on his boots and jacket and braced himself for the blast of icy air before opening the cabin door.

  The morning was bright with little cloud cover, and it didn’t appear to have snowed any more during the night. The ground was still very much frozen though and Scott wondered if his car had been towed up the hill to Bloody Bush.

  He climbed the steps to Jeff’s house and stamped his feet, more to warm them up than to shake off snow before entering.

  Jeff and Angela were in the kitchen talking, with Boris circling eagerly around them as a pan of sausages sizzled on the hob.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you up for a while, the way you slept last night,’ Angela said, as he slid an arm around her waist and kissed her on the neck.

  ‘Angela told me about your car trouble on the trip back yesterday. I was just about to head down to the village and see if Maurice had remembered to sort out that tow.’

  ‘Thanks Jeff, I’ll come down with you after breakfast.’

  ‘No need,’ he said with a dismissive wave of the hand, ‘you keep Angela here company, I’ll be back soon enough then we can plan out our next crop down in the cave.’

  Angela buttered some bread while the sausages browned, then made up their sandwiches. They sat down and ate together at the kitchen table. Spirits were high, even Scott’s, despite his night of fragmented sleep. The seclusion he felt up in the mountains, away from the troubles and dangers of the city, offered Scott a respite from the anxieties that had been plaguing him. By the time they were finishing up breakfast, the ghosts of dreams that had passed through into his conscious mind upon awakening had all but faded.

  Jeff was the first to notice the sound. He tossed the remainder of his sandwich to Boris and walked into the living room to look out of the window. Angela and Scott stood and followed him to see what had caused his sudden alertness. A few seconds before it came into view all three could now hear the crunch of tyres on the frozen driveway, and it wasn’t Scott’s car or a familiar vehicle from the village that emerged around the side of the cabin, but a white van that caused Scott’s heart to lurch up into his throat.

  ‘That’s the van,’ he gasped, ‘the one from the job we did, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘There’s a lot of white vans in the world, Scott,’ Jeff said, but he never took his eyes from the window as he spoke. The concerned expression remained rigid on his face.

  ‘There’s a square on the side that’s cleaner than the rest, that’s where the logo was, for the company we were supposed to be from.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Angela said, seizing Scott by the forearm, ‘you can se
e where it’s been peeled off.’

  Jeff walked to the fireplace and took down the revolver; he opened a small wooden drawer at his writing desk and withdrew a handful of bullets before hastily inserting them into the gun.

  ‘Scott, you take Angela, grab the bag in there too and head out the back. Down to the cave if you need to. I’ll go out and see what this is about,’ he said, and handed the loaded weapon to Scott.

  ‘Jeff you can’t go out there on your own, you know what they’re capable of.’

  ‘If it’s a couple of McBlane’s thugs then they don’t know who I am but if they see you then we’re all fucked, take it and go, Scott. Now.’

  Angela had already begun to walk back into the kitchen. Scott trotted after her; the cold heavy revolver felt alien in his hand. He picked up the backpack which still lay where Jeff had dropped it the previous day. The front door lock snapped shut after Jeff as he walked outside. Boris began to whine and paw at the door after him.

  ‘Wait,’ Scott said, moving gingerly back towards the living room.

  ‘Come on Scott, we have to go,’ Angela pleaded.

  He crept back towards the window and watched Jeff approach the van, which had come to a stop around twenty feet from the house. The morning sunlight reflected on the van’s windows turning them to mirrors, preventing Scott from seeing anyone inside. Jeff stopped by the van, the driver’s side window opened a few inches revealing only a rectangle of darkness beyond. Scott couldn’t hear anything being said but Jeff was gesturing almost casually as if to say he didn’t know the answer to a question he’d been asked. Jeff’s hands now fell by his sides, and then almost immediately his arms folded across his chest. He stood like that, unmoving for around another ten seconds before finally shaking his head.

  The driver’s door was thrown open suddenly, rebounding against Jeff and knocking him to the ground. Behind Scott, Angela cried out and clutched his arm.

  Scott stood rooted for a moment longer. The driver’s door opened again and the hulking figure of Shugg climbed out. The passenger door opened and Dominic climbed out carrying a baseball bat in one hand, and cast a searching glance in the direction of the house. Scott instinctively shrank back against the wall. There was no light on inside the house so they couldn’t be seen, but it would surely be a matter of moments before McBlane’s men smashed their way in. Scott could no longer see Jeff since he had been knocked down, but the last thing he saw before he turned and ran was Shugg’s foot slam down toward the ground.