The Accused

by Owen Mullen

  He stabbed a knowing finger at me. ‘That the same as sendin’ her on her way? ’Cause the smile on her face when she left makes me think it isn’t.’

  My silence said it all.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, when will you learn? Whatever Sean Rafferty’s wife wants, the answer is no! It has to be. She’s bad news. The fact she even came to you is too close for comfort. Any contact…’

  ‘Patrick—’

  The red on his neck rose to his cheeks. ‘Rafferty hates you. Have you forgotten? I’d rather slam my tits in a car door than go up against him again.’

  ‘Pat, listen—’

  ‘You should feel the same.’

  ‘I haven’t said I’ll help her.’

  He hammered his fist on the desk and shouted, ‘Don’t insult me, Charlie! Don’t fuckin’ do that! I understand you better than anybody in this town! Better than you understand yourself! You haven’t said you won’t! Find some other maiden in distress to play the knight in shinin’ armour with. Not this lady. Not Sean Rafferty’s wife.’

  ‘Listen—’

  ‘No, you listen. Another case, a different client, fair enough, I’m here. But there’s a line you don’t cross. Not recognisin’ that will get you killed. Which makes you a man with a death wish or a bloody fool. Either way, I’m out. Commit suicide if you want. I’m havin’ no part of it.’ He pushed the chair back and turned at the door. ‘Never thought I’d say this, but you’re on your own, Charlie.’

  The outburst was so untypical of Patrick Logue it forced me to reconsider what I’d said to Kim Rafferty. Being married to Sean wouldn’t be easy. She’d probably gone into the relationship believing he’d change. Discovering that underneath the promises of everlasting love made in the middle of the night lay a heartless bastard must’ve been a surprise, expecting him to treat her differently from the rest of the world an error she was paying for. Tossing a child into the mix added a complication other people managed to work round.

  Sean Rafferty wasn’t other people.

  And Pat Logue wasn’t wrong about how the gangster felt about me.

  Disappointing a woman wasn’t a novel experience for me, but Kim Rafferty would need to get by without my help.

  Back in NYB, the first of the lunchtime crowd were arriving from the salt mines. Pat kept his nose buried in his newspaper and ignored me. Jackie poured the takeaway I’d asked for, black with the two sugars, and smiled slyly.

  ‘Aren’t you a dark horse?’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Have to say I’m surprised.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  She paused, considering how hard to twist the knife.

  ‘Without putting too fine a point on it, Charlie, it’s fair to say she’s not exactly your type.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware I had a type.’

  She made a noise in her throat. ‘You amaze me, you really do. ’Course you have. Everybody does.’

  ‘What’s mine?’

  She handed me the cup and took my money. ‘You usually like them smart and she’s… well… blonde.’

  I’d noticed.

  ‘Joking aside, it’s about time. She’s gone home to Malawi and isn’t coming back. Get over her.’

  She was talking about Alile, my last girlfriend – another great woman I’d let slip away. She’d wanted more than I had to give and gone back home to Malawi. I missed her. Though I was reluctant to admit it, Jackie was right. Not for the first time I’d let something fine slip through my fingers.

  ‘She isn’t my girlfriend.’

  ‘Then, who is she and what did she want?’

  I kept her waiting – the only victory I was getting this morning.

  ‘If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me, Jackie.’

  4

  He looked different. Prison did that to a man and it had done it to Dennis Boyd. His hair was grey and he’d grown a beard. He raised his face to the sky, for the first time in fifteen years breathing air free from the sweat of a thousand captive bodies. It felt good.

  He’d been thirty-seven, still relatively young, when they’d brought him handcuffed and flanked by two officers to Barlinnie, the Victorian building in the East End of Glasgow, almost as famous as Alcatraz. On a cold October morning, Boyd had stepped down from the police van and gazed without emotion at the walls, aware the guards were watching for even the smallest shadow of fear to darken his brow. They’d be disappointed. He was everything they’d heard and more: a hard man from an old school.

  In court, Boyd pleaded not guilty to the charge and, before sentencing him for the callous murder of Joe Franks, Lord Justice Connor McGuinness asked if there was anything he wished to say. The question went unanswered and he was taken down.

  Now, at fifty-two, his skin was the colour of the Bar-L’s accommodation halls.

  Two guards walked with him as far as the main door. ‘Down the pub, is it, Dennis?’

  ‘No.’

  He let the screws draw their own conclusions.

  ‘A minute of her life she’s never going to get back, eh?’

  ‘A minute the first time, maybe.’

  The guards shook their heads and shared a dirty laugh. ‘What about your drawings? Not taking them with you?’

  He patted the leather portfolio. ‘’Course I am. Worth a fortune someday.’

  Someday. He’d got through fifteen years dreaming of someday.

  Now, that day was here.

  As he stood on the pavement the murmur of traffic on the nearby M8 reminded him his old stomping ground was just miles away. It would’ve changed. Boyd let his eyes adjust to the light and wondered why his sister wasn’t here to meet him. That wasn’t like Annie, his sole visitor during his time in the Big House. Once a month, regular as clockwork she’d come to see him; in the beginning, fired with outrage over the injustice of his conviction, gushing nonsense about appeals, until reality arrived and resignation to the inevitable took hold. Boyd had already been there. Day after day in the dock, listening to the prosecution argue the case against him, he’d known it would end exactly the way whoever set him up meant it to. And it had, ably abetted by the inexperienced lawyer appointed to defend him.

  A car racing down Lee Avenue got his attention; it braked hard alongside him. From behind the wheel a female wearing over-sized sunglasses, a headscarf and a double strand of pearls over a blue silk shirt spoke in a husky voice through the open window. ‘Get in.’

  Boyd didn’t move. He was done with being told what to do and when to do it. She tossed the cigarette she was smoking at his feet and followed its progress to the gutter.

  ‘Your sister isn’t coming. Get in.’

  They drove towards Cumbernauld Road and the city. When the lights at Alexandra Parade brought them to a halt, she held out slender fingers painted to match her lipstick and smiled. ‘Welcome back, Dennis.’

  He still had no idea who she was and didn’t respond; her shades made it impossible to tell.

  Her exasperation was genuine. ‘Oh, come on, Boyd, surely I haven’t changed that much, have I?’

  She swept the glasses away and studied his face for the reaction she was determined to have, knowing the last person he’d expected to be waiting for him was the wife of the man he’d been convicted of killing.

  ‘Diane?’

  ‘The very same.’

  The lines at the corners of her mouth were new and her hair was blonde and short where in the past it had been brunette and fallen, long and straight, to perfect breasts. But the eyes remained the same. At night in the early years, alone in the darkness of his cell, he’d conjured them and they’d appeared. Sometimes grey, sometimes green. Eyes that had lied for him and to him.

  ‘For God’s sake say something.’

  ‘Can’t. What the fuck, Diane?’

  They’d been friends. Once. She hadn’t come to see him because the doubt in her mind would always be there; it would never go away. The jury hadn’t shared it.

  ‘Where’s Annie?’

&nbs
p; ‘Told her I needed to speak to you. You’ll see her soon enough.’

  ‘Why’re you here?’

  The question didn’t go down well with her; the fingers were withdrawn. He caught the sparkle of a ring on her right hand. Diamonds, what else? Diane feigned disappointment. ‘You certainly know how to make a girl feel welcome.’

  ‘That isn’t what I meant.’

  Her next statement took him by surprise. ‘Just for the record, I never believed you did it.’

  A decade and a half too late to do him any good. ‘Glad to hear it.’

  His expression gave nothing. He’d done his stretch, it didn’t matter what she believed, what any of them believed. Fifteen years had been taken from him. Nothing could bring them back. She shifted in her seat and her skirt rose up, just as she intended. He ignored it and gazed out of the window at the city.

  ‘Stop somewhere for a quick one, will you?’

  ‘I’ll have you know I’m a happily married woman.’

  He felt himself stir and turned away. ‘I meant a quick drink.’

  ‘Where? Most of your old haunts are gone.’

  ‘Then surprise me.’

  The world he’d known no longer existed, that was something he was going to have to get used to. Diane grinned, tapped a Benson’s from a packet and passed it over. ‘So, how does it feel?’

  ‘How does what feel?’

  ‘To be free.’

  ‘Is that what I am?’

  ‘To get your life back.’

  ‘I’ll tell you when it happens. Give me a tour.’

  ‘Anywhere special you want to see?’

  Dennis Boyd shook his head. ‘Just drive.’

  They went west as far as Anniesland Cross and back through the city centre, down Renfield Street, across the river and south. Boyd recognised little of it; it had been too long. After a while, he stopped trying. Occasionally, she pointed to where a building had been and told him the history. He wasn’t listening. Almost an hour later, they parked outside a pub on Paisley Road West.

  ‘What do you make of it so far?’

  He grunted. ‘Not much. Could be anywhere.’

  Inside, she ordered Johnnie Walker Black Label for both of them. Large ones. Boyd watched the barman ring up the sale. ‘Fucking hell. Drinking isn’t cheap, is it?’

  ‘Nothing is, Dennis, as you’re about to find out.’

  They sat at a table; he nodded at her glass. ‘Bit early for you to be starting on the hard stuff.’

  Her reply was tart. ‘How would you know?’

  And she was right. After so much time what did he know about her?

  Their affair had been passionate, maybe the most passionate Boyd had ever had. The first afternoon in particular stood out in his memory: Joe was in Amsterdam on business; they had sex upstairs in his house, in his bed. Not the slow melding of a man and a woman in love; the coupling of strangers, brief and intense.

  What happened next seemed even more natural. Diane rolled onto her side, her body long and lithe and naked, eyes lowered, desire already building again in them. Words were unnecessary. Boyd understood. The workaholic Franks had a fax machine in the corner – another reason why a man was in bed with his wife; Boyd tore paper from it and rummaged in a bedside cabinet until he found a pencil. The pencil was blunt; it didn’t matter. Diane watched his unhesitating strokes capture the moment. When he was done, he joined her on the bed and they went at it again with even more urgency than before.

  She’d been somebody else’s wife then and she was somebody else’s wife now.

  After three – or was it four? – years the drawing Blu Tacked to the wall in his cell was damaged by an idiot prison guard during a fruitless search. Boyd taped the pieces together and put it back up. Over time, the edges of the paper curled and he started to go grey. But the woman he’d drawn remained unchanged. Sometimes, in the wee small hours, it was all that was left of him.

  One morning he noticed the definition was faded and blurred. His finger traced where the lead lines should be and weren’t. Without a second thought he ripped the drawing up and flushed it down the toilet. Today, outside Barlinnie, Dennis Boyd had come full circle and hadn’t recognised her. They’d returned to the strangers they’d been.

  Boyd let the memory go and topped his whisky up with water. ‘Better hope you don’t get stopped. Goodbye licence.’

  ‘Fuck them. There’s no way I’m joining the mindless morons who order in a curry, download a movie and guzzle Tesco’s finest plonk without moving off the couch.’

  Dennis struggled to picture her spending her evenings with reheated chicken tikka, Asti Spumanti and Fifty Shades of Grey.

  ‘How long have you been married?’

  She pretended to have to think about it. ‘Thirteen years.’

  ‘Who’s the lucky man?’

  ‘Ritchie Kennedy.’

  ‘You didn’t hang about.’

  ‘Couldn’t afford to.’

  She blew smoke into the air and he was reminded what a cold bastard she could be. ‘Joe messed up everything. Not just him and me. He was up to his ears in debt and kept me in the dark about it. After he died, I discovered we were overdrawn at the bank and the mortgage hadn’t been paid in months. Same story with the guy who owned the office in the Arcade.’

  ‘How could that be?’

  ‘That’s the question, Dennis.’

  ‘He was successful when I worked with him.’

  ‘Or so everybody imagined.’ The edges of her mouth turned down. ‘It was a front. My husband was good at appraising stones but shit at selling them. He was drowning. Owed money all over the place. And the diamonds, the ones that got him killed? Not on the books, so no insurance. I would’ve gone under if it hadn’t been for Ritchie.’ She tilted her chin, pride creeping into her voice. ‘He’d always had his eye on me. Moved in a couple of times when he came round to talk business with Joe. Cheeky bugger. ’Course, I knocked him back. But with Joe out of the picture there was nothing to stop him trying again. Thank God he did.’

  Diane lit cigarettes for both of them and passed one to Boyd. An expensive watch on her wrist caught his attention; he guessed it was the real McCoy. This lady had landed on her feet, albeit via her back. She shifted the conversation away from her. ‘Now you’re out, what’re your plans?’

  Boyd sat back, sensing hidden meaning in the words. ‘You were at the trial, Diane, what do you think my plans are?’

  She tapped ash on the floor. ‘Go after them.’

  ‘Got it in one. I took the fall for something I didn’t do.’ His eyes bored into her. ‘You don’t look surprised.’

  Diane considered her reply. ‘Why would I be surprised? Look, Dennis, apart from you, nobody has a bigger investment than me in this thing. They beat my husband to death in his own house, for Christ’s sake. I’ve waited all this time to say what I’m going to say to you. It’s why I was at the Bar-L.’

  ‘Thought it was because you still fancied me.’

  Boyd’s flippancy irritated her. ‘In your dreams. Understand this: as a lover you were okay. I’d say you were a seven. Seven and a half on a good night. I’ve had better. Listen. I want you to hear this. What’s done is done. Forget it and get on with your life. I have. So can you.’

  ‘And the bastards who put me away?’

  ‘Keep your voice down. Take the heat out of the situation. Whoever did it knows you’re on the street. They’ll be expecting you to come after them. Don’t. Don’t play their game.’

  She went into her Gucci bag, brought out two envelopes and laid them on the table between them. ‘Joe dying the way he did…’ She gripped Boyd’s arm. ‘Even though I didn’t love him I was numb. But I made a decision, and I want to help you make one.’

  She lifted her glass in a toast. ‘To survivors.’

  Boyd didn’t join in. ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘Never been more so. Okay, you didn’t kill Joe. Except we’re the only ones who think that’s true. Rake up the pa
st and these people – whoever they are – aren’t just going to stand by and let you. Enough of your life’s been lost to this.’ She pushed the envelopes towards him. ‘This will get you started.’

  ‘Your concern is appreciated, Mrs Kennedy. What am I missing?’

  She leaned across the table until their faces were inches apart. Boyd thought she was going to kiss him and wouldn’t have resisted. It didn’t happen. She lowered her voice to a whisper and the moment passed. ‘Let’s tell the truth, Dennis. You and I – but especially you – should’ve realised Joe was in over his head. You were his bodyguard, after all. He spent more time with you than anybody, including me. The way I see it, our affair was responsible for you going down. So yes, however crazy you think it is, I feel you’re due something. Besides, calling you a seven might not be quite true.’

  Boyd put a hand on her shoulder and gently eased her back in the seat. ‘You haven’t answered my question. Helping me is one thing. Why so keen I disappear?’

  She lifted her head and glared. In the old days, the fire in those eyes would have been enough to arouse him. ‘You went to prison. I almost ended out on the street. But I got lucky; you didn’t. Fifteen years is a long time. Joe screwed both of us over. He kept you in the dark instead of letting you do the job he was paying you to do. Think of me as your guardian angel. Take the cash and get away from Glasgow.’

  Boyd drew deeply on his cigarette. ‘Nice speech, Diane. Touching. Is Ritchie in on how you’re spending his money?’

  ‘Ritchie doesn’t have any part of this. The money’s mine.’

  ‘Your own little nest egg and you’re prepared to give it to me. How did you come by it?’

  A smile appeared and disappeared. ‘What can I tell you? I’m a saver.’

  ‘Careful with other folk’s cash. Admirable.’

  Her patience was wearing thin. She snapped. ‘Just take it and stop fucking about.’

  Boyd shook his head. ‘No can do. Sorry.’

  She scribbled her mobile number on a beer mat and threw it at him. It struck his chest and fell to the floor. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse with frustration. ‘Now I remember why it didn’t work out with us. You were a fool then and you’re still a bloody fool.’