Scar Tissue

by Ollie Ollerton

  Seeing it, Cuckoo tensed, his head jerking left and right, then up to the windows of surrounding buildings.

  At the same time, his phone chirruped. Without taking his eyes off Foxhole he pulled it from the pocket of his mac. Number not known. ‘Hello?’ he answered, watching Foxhole, who, apart from giving the signal, had not moved a muscle. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘You don’t know me,’ came the voice, ‘my name is Mr Kind.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re Alan Roberts? Abbott’s friend.’

  This was bad. Again, that thought: what would Abbott do? He’d play for time. He’d stall and assess the situation. Look for an opening.

  ‘OK, Mr Kind. Sounds like you want to talk. How about you show yourself?’ said Cuckoo, gratified to hear that his voice was steady.

  ‘No, I don’t think I’ll do that, Mr Roberts. I think I prefer it where I am.’

  ‘And where is that?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry. I’m within range.’

  Cuckoo froze. Slowly, he made to get to his feet.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t do that if I were you, please, Mr Roberts. Let me show you why. Do you see the badge that Mr Foxhole is wearing?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Look closer.’

  Cuckoo leaned forward. Sure enough, he noticed something about the badge. Disguised by the red of it was the pinprick of a laser sight.

  ‘You see that?’ said the voice in his ear.

  ‘I see it.’

  ‘Good. Now, if you do anything other than something I’ve asked you to do, I’ll kill him and then you. Do you follow that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cuckoo. His face was wet against the phone.

  ‘Good. Now listen, do you know who hired Hexagon Security to bug Travis Bryars?’

  Cuckoo’s mouth opened and closed. ‘Um … um … I don’t even know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘No,’ sighed Kind, ‘I’ve been hearing that a lot, including from our friend Foxhole. Oh well, couldn’t hurt to ask. Now where were we?’

  The thought came to Cuckoo that he didn’t want to die. He was not a coward but nor was he especially brave, and nothing like this had ever happened to him before.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ continued Kind, ‘I need to know, where is our friend Abbott? Wait – before you answer, one thing. I’ll check your answer. I’ll check your answer here and now, and if it’s the wrong one, then I’ll kill somebody. Do you see that woman at the table next door?’

  There was a family beside them. They were probably on holiday, boisterous and enjoying themselves. ‘Yes,’ said Cuckoo. He saw the red dot dance on her back. ‘I thought you were going to start with Foxhole?’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ said Mr Kind.

  ‘So you’d kill her, too, would you? A complete innocent?’

  ‘How about I haven’t decided who I’m going to kill? How about that, Mr Roberts? Keep you on your toes. Now. Give me your answer, make it the correct one, and we can avoid me having to decide which of you to shoot first.’

  Cuckoo knew it was a bluff. After all, Abbott was in Baghdad. How the hell could Kind check his whereabouts? Answer: he couldn’t. Could he?

  Except that Cuckoo knew how woefully under-equipped he was for situations such as this, because the honest answer was that although logic told him Kind was bluffing, he had no real idea how these people worked. For all he knew, Kind could easily confirm whether or not Abbott was in Baghdad. And, of course, Kind knew that.

  Across the table from him, Foxhole was urging him with his eyes, whispering, ‘Tell him. Tell him what he wants to know. Please just fucking tell him, man.’ The laser sight was back on him, dancing slightly on the red button badge. Cuckoo thought of Kind asking who had hired Hexagon and wondered what tortures Foxhole had already had to endure.

  ‘Foxhole whispers the truth, Roberts, old fruit,’ said Kind in his ear, laying on the Britishness thick, enjoying himself. ‘Heed his wise words.’

  Cuckoo’s thoughts were wild. He didn’t have the training or the temperament of an Abbott. Cool in a crisis was not in his vocabulary. His brain had fixed on one thing and one thing only. If he told a lie, then he was dead. If he told the truth, then Abbott was dead.

  Then again, and on second thoughts, was he dead? Was he really? After all, Cuckoo could warn Abbott. Plus, Abbott was SF, for fuck’s sake. He was already in the most dangerous place on earth. He would take it in his stride.

  From somewhere Cuckoo summoned a little steel. ‘For your own safety I shouldn’t tell you where he is.’

  At the other end of the line, Kind gave a dry chuckle. ‘You let me be the judge of that. Where is he?’

  ‘Baghdad,’ said Cuckoo.

  ‘Baghdad? Is that so? And what is he doing in Baghdad?’

  Cuckoo ignored the question. ‘You can’t check it, can you?’ he said.

  ‘Careful, I might find I want to scratch my itchy trigger finger. What’s he doing in Baghdad?’

  ‘He’s looking for his son, and may I recommend you don’t get in his way.’

  ‘Strong words, sweaty man.’

  ‘You don’t know who you’re dealing with.’

  ‘Nor do you. But of course you have my name. And you can tell that to Abbott when you warn him, can’t you?’

  Cuckoo said nothing.

  ‘And I can’t let you do that.’

  Cuckoo opened his mouth to say something when Foxhole stood up.

  ‘Go,’ he shouted. Faces of other customers turned their way. ‘There’s a gun,’ Foxhole yelled at the top of his voice, directing himself at Cuckoo. ‘Run!’

  And then his head jerked, a hole in his forehead opened and the back of his skull exploded in a shower of blood and brain matter. There was no bang – Kind must have been using a suppressor – but even so, the people around them knew what was happening and a sense of general pandemonium began to spread across the café terrace and then into the square like a shockwave.

  Instinctively, Cuckoo ducked as another round ricocheted off the table, hitting a nearby diner in the shoulder, her scream further adding to the panic. A third round thunked into the table, smashing a coffee cup and missing Cuckoo by inches as he turned to run. Then more bullets, this time on automatic fire. Another customer span and fell. Others panicked, overturning chairs and tables, crockery flying. Inside the restaurant the realisation spread and customers dived for cover, while around them in the square a scream went up and the serenity of the day was shattered as customers and sun worshippers scattered.

  Cuckoo joined them.

  He felt like a sitting duck as he ran. He heard a bullet ping off the ground behind him. More shots came, the lack of a corresponding gunshot sound adding a surreal edge to the general terror. And then Cuckoo felt a pain – a bright, agonising pain that flared – and in the next instant he was falling, pitching headlong forward.

  And then there was blackness.

  CHAPTER 32

  Abbott awoke on his bed at the Al Mansour hotel fully dressed.

  He awoke with a start, partly as a result of last night’s booze, which lay upon him like an oil slick, and partly as a result of a dream, a vision of the Robinson boy’s dying face that had morphed into something else: another boy, much younger, though, a boy who called his name: ‘Alex … Alex …’

  ‘We know you couldn’t save him, Alex. We know you did your best.’

  But I didn’t save him. It was on me.

  He thought of Nathan as a tiny baby. Whenever he was home, Fi had used the opportunity to insist he did the night-time feeds, which meant getting up at 3 a.m. The way she played it, it was like she did it to punish him, a means of saying, ‘Look what I have to put up with.’ But the fact was, he loved the alone time with Nathan. He’d fix himself a drink, just the one, and with the warmed bottle of milk in one hand, and his drink in the other, he’d rouse the tiny Nathan from his slumber, taking a seat in a leather armchair to begin the feed, and just watch. Suffused with love, as though it were an ac
tual present entity in the warm, darkened room, he’d watch Nathan. The way his tiny hands grasped the bottle. The way that he watched Abbott as he fed. Occasionally, he would fall asleep and Abbott would have to gently rouse him (Fi insisted that he took the whole bottle on pain of death – Abbott’s death). Sometimes, if the bottle was secure, he’d reach up one hand to grasp Abbott’s finger in a tiny, chubby fist. During those moments Abbott felt truly bonded with his son, and he’d pledge to be home more, to do more. His own father had been remote and cold, as loveless in fatherhood as he seemed to be in marriage. He didn’t want that for Nathan. He told himself he’d break the cycle.

  But of course he broke that promise every time. And every time he left Fi on the doorstep holding Nathan and every time he returned with booze on his breath and more blood on his hands, and little Nathan would cling more tightly to his mother, who would give Abbott eyes over the boy’s shoulder, the gap between them getting wider and wider.

  But not this time, Nath, because it’s not too late, it’s never too late to be the father you deserve. The hero you want. I’m coming for you.

  And then came a voice in his head. A voice from the past saying, ‘We know you couldn’t save him, Alex. We know you did your best,’ and he reached for his iPod, like a toddler clutching at a comforter. Faces. Corpses. Thoughts of Tessa. Over on the desk the curtain shifted in the morning breeze. Sunlight dropped through a gap in the curtain and pointed the way to a bottle of wine on the desk, remnants of last night, giving the bottle a green shine.

  Just one nip of that. One little slug will set you straight.

  But one’s too much and ten’s not enough.

  Just a nip will silence the voices.

  We know you couldn’t save him, Alex.

  Only who were they talking about? Were they talking about a figure from years ago? Were they talking about Jeremy Robinson?

  Were they talking about Nathan?

  From somewhere he found a surge of strength. He pulled himself from the bed, tearing off his iPod headphones at the same time. The next thing he knew, he had swiped the half-empty bottle from the desktop. But instead of upending it into his mouth, he took it to the bathroom. He poured it down the sink, telling himself he’d taken his last drink, that his days of waking up feeling this way were at an end.

  A voice inside reminded him that he had been here before. But it was a lot easier to pour away your booze when there was still so much in your bloodstream. The real test would come later. In the meantime, he sank back to his bed, trying to work out his next move but guiltily knowing that lying here, hungover, wasn’t helping him find his son.

  He tried poking away at Nathan’s laptop again but turned up nothing new and ended up closing the lid with a small cry of frustration. He wished there were somebody with him now.

  No, not somebody. Her. Tessa. He wished she were here to tell him that everything was going to be OK. That he wasn’t going to make a mess of things this time.

  CHAPTER 33

  He had met her in London. Two months ago. Only two short months ago.

  There were times when Abbott couldn’t quite believe what he had done in offering to meet her. Telling her that he had a meeting in London. What a fucking idiot.

  And why had he done it? Well, that would be the booze talking. Mostly, booze made you do stupid stuff. Sometimes it made you do the things you otherwise wouldn’t have done. Things you ended up thanking it for. Christ, there were so many marks in the minus column, there had to be some upside, right?

  The whole stuff with Tessa. The writing to her, pretending he needed to be in London the very night that her husband was away and her children elsewhere – he lived in Singapore, for fuck’s sake – was all down to the booze.

  Yet instead of inventing an excuse and pretending that his London business had been cancelled, Abbott found himself going through with it. Why? Because it never occurred to him to do anything different. Because Tessa was in his head night and day, and he told himself that he wanted to expel her from his thoughts, or at least get the idealised seen-through-rose-coloured specs version of her out of his head, and what better way to do that than meet the current version of her.

  After all, in his mind, Tessa remained in her twenties. But she was older now. She had a couple of kids. That changes you. It takes away some of what you once were. Life did that. Would she be different? Would he be different? Answers on a postcard, please, addressed to ‘Of Course You’ll Both Be Different, You Arsehole Competition, PO Box 555’, and that was why he wanted to meet her. To replace the romantic, idealised version with the reality.

  Or that’s what he told himself, anyway.

  The restaurant she chose was Kettner’s, a famous old London landmark on Romilly Street in Soho.

  He remembered that she had used to talk about going there, that it was an ambition she had held, something to do with it being her dad’s favourite place, and he guessed that she’d long since fulfilled that ambition, and choosing Kettner’s was a way of stating it, of saying, ‘Look how far I’ve come, with my degree in law and my familiarity with restaurants that long ago seemed so distant and out of reach.’ And among the many things that he wondered and worried about ahead of the meal was just that: was she meeting him to show him that she’d moved on, and therefore to rub his face in what he was missing, what he’d given up?

  If so, well, who could blame her? She had every right to be that way, of course. He had hurt her badly. And if so, if that was the way it went, then he would take it on the chin. He would accept it as nothing less than he deserved.

  He bought a new shirt and spent an age getting ready, accompanied by a couple of tins of lager, just for Dutch courage, and nothing too strong, either. Cooking lager, nothing over five per cent.

  And it was funny, again, looking back, but booze wasn’t a problem that night. He drank, of course, and certainly he drank too much. But it wasn’t an issue, not the way it always had the potential to be at other times.

  It’s funny. How that night he was a version of himself that he really, truly liked.

  He’d arrived before her, in all his glory, such as it was. He sat at their table with his hands on the tabletop in front of him, feeling like a first-time suitor, a guy on a blind date, the fluttering of nerves in his stomach adding to the whole nostalgic feel of the trip. There’s a lot to be said for nostalgia, he realised then. It took you away from yourself – back to a distant and better time.

  Then she came. And as he stood to greet her, he realised straight away that she hadn’t gone to anything like the same effort as he had. She was smart, of course. But smart in a day-of-business way, complete with sombre grey trouser suit and a small leather briefcase that she plonked down heavily with a sigh, as though it represented more than just a physical weight.

  That sigh. Everything about her seemed to suggest that she was bogged down with work, and instantly he knew that whereas all he’d thought about all day was Tessa, it was work that had occupied her thoughts. Seeing her looking almost preoccupied, still decompressing from her day, he actually found himself relieved that she’d turned up at all.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said, leaning to give him a quick air kiss, the kind of London air kiss that he didn’t understand, like whether you were supposed to go for both cheeks or just the one. Twist or stick, that was the thing. And this was one of those occasions that he got it wrong, going for the other cheek when she was already turning her head to find her seat.

  Gathering herself she beamed at him, and everything about the smile was genuine. No nerves, no agenda that he could see. Just pleased to see him. When was the last time anybody had been pleased to see him? ‘Ever the gentleman,’ she said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ he replied, surprised to hear the words in his mouth, ‘I beg your pardon’ not being an expression he was accustomed to hearing himself use. You what? Come again? yes, but I beg your pardon? – where had that come from?

  ‘You stood for me,’ she explained. ‘It�
�s not a criticism. It’s nice. I like it. It suits the surroundings.’ She waved a hand at the old-school-yet-upmarket fittings around them. ‘You always were a gentleman,’ she added, and he was delighted that she remembered that side of him. Not his bouts of temper, his wayward ways.

  But, God, it was good to see her. She had always been attractive, but what made her better than just good-looking and actually beautiful was that sheer radiance from within. The way she had of making you feel like you were the only one in the room. In that moment, Abbott thought Tessa was everything.

  And then he came back down to earth with a bump.

  ‘I can’t stay long,’ she said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ he said, really getting some mileage out of his brand-new expression.

  She pulled a face. ‘It’s just that I have a lot of work to get through for tomorrow. I mean, it’s amazing to see you and I’m so sorry and everything, but you know how it is?’

  He nodded. Yes, he agreed, he knew exactly how it was.

  ‘Oh, you’re a sweetheart,’ she said, reminding him of how she used to deploy that word, ‘sweetheart’, always using it to disarm friends and old people. And perhaps she didn’t remember – best that she didn’t, really – but he’d once asked her never to use it for him because he hated those exact connotations.

  ‘No, sure,’ he said. ‘That’s fine. I mean, it’s great that you should be able to carve out time to see me.’ That had sounded sarcastic, he knew, so immediately he tried to wind it back. ‘I mean, you know. I know how busy you are.’

  ‘It’s all good. It’s brilliant,’ she said, and thank God, because their attention went to the waiter who appeared at their table.

  They ordered drinks and perused menus. Peeking over the top of his menu at her, Abbott felt a sense of great euphoria. He wished he could bottle this moment. It was not about ‘London ways’, or being in the military or living in a war zone, carrying guns. It was just about sitting here, opposite the best person he had ever known.