by Lee Stone
“I’m not sure why he did it, or even who he was, really. I know the LAPD are making enquiries, but I think I owe it to David Barr to find out what he was running away from. It’s a real-life mystery, and it strikes me that if he chose to jump off the roof so publicly after the Lakers game then it’s a mystery that he wanted someone to solve. So, I’m planning on solving it.”
The gaggle of hacks threw out more questions as she came to the end of her sentence.
“How will you do that, Rachel? Will you be on air tonight?”
The shot zoomed in closer, as the cameraman tried to cut all the arms and microphones out of the picture. Rachel White’s face filled the screen in Daud’s bedroom.
“I’ll be flying to Pine Bluff tonight. I’ll be back on the air once I’ve got something to report about David Barr. I’m telling you, there’s a lot we don’t know about his story yet.”
She was holding her cell phone up in front of her.
“I’ve just had a call from some place called Woodridge in England, you know, a call from the other side of the world. From a stranger. The guy said he was Charlie Lockhart. That’s the name that Barr shouted as he fell.”
There was an excited reaction from the media scrum.
Daud never heard the end of the interview. He had already taken the warm key from his pocket and was unlocking his desk drawer. He flicked frantically through the sixteen Facebook profiles he had printed out. He found what he was looking for on the seventh sheet.
Name: Charlie Lockhart
Location: Woodridge, UK.
Sixteen became one. Daud had found the man he was going to kill.
He was alone in the house and before he left he spent a few minutes sitting on Ajmal’s old bed, talking softly. Speaking to his missing brother like he used to, even though he wasn’t there anymore. The room was just like it had been when Ajmal was at home.
Ajmal’s clothes were still hanging in the wardrobe. He’d been gone so long that they looked hopelessly out of date. Daud knew that Ajmal wouldn’t be seen dead in them now. But nobody had had the heart to throw them out. Daud clung to the hope that Ajmal would be home one day.
Downstairs, he stood for a moment in front of his grandfather’s picture of Quetta. He climbed up on the sofa and reached up to the picture. He ran a finger over the window that his grandfather always pointed out. The window that Ajmal had traveled the world to see. He held his lips on the glass for a moment to see if he could feel the magic that his grandfather always talked about.
Then he stepped down and grabbed his car keys. He thrust the fishmonger’s revolver deep into his rucksack and covered it with his hoody. Then he set off to search for Charlie Lockhart.
Chapter Forty-Six
Taynton Hollow, Near Woodridge, England.
“And by five o'clock everything's dead,
And every third car is a cab,
And ignorant people sleep in their beds,
Like the doped white mice in the college lab”
– Del Amitri, Nothing Ever Happens
Taynton Hollow was a sleepy Cotswold village in a county where nothing ever happened. As a kid, Charlie Lockhart had hated it because of its idleness. He was born in industrial Birmingham in a crowded street where everyone knew everyone else’s business. There were rows and fights and friendships and opportunities.
His parents were academics. They were wise and calm, always with their heads in books. As a teenager he had found them frustrating. They’d discovered Buddhism and flung themselves into it. They prescribed meditation as a solution to every problem under the sun, the way Catholics hanker after a good Mass whenever trouble is afoot.
Tom Lockhart was a research scientist, always working on a cure for something or other. He was always dedicated, diligent, and selfless. Deirdre Lockhart taught Medieval Spanish in Birmingham, but was poached to run Galician Studies at Oxford University. Teaching English kids about a language of ancient Spanish farmers and fishermen. The whole family moved house to be closer to Oxford and settled into Woodridge.
Despite following his wife’s career to Oxford, it was Tom Lockhart who struck gold for the family. A pharmaceutical company paid him a small fortune for a compound he accidentally discovered and the family became fairly rich fairly quickly. Charlie’s parents huffed and puffed about how the money wouldn’t change them, and it didn’t. They were decent folk who turned into decent rich folk. Lockhart respected them for that. None of the extra money came his way, either.
The teenage Lockhart had hated Taynton, because nothing ever happened there. The Lockhart house was serenity itself as his parents continued their new age pursuits of meditation and acupuncture and yoga with a mute vigor. Even more silence gathered momentum across the endless rolling hills surrounding the village and then crashed down like a wave over the family home.
Lockhart knew that his parents were good people, but life was dull. He felt like everything he knew came from books. Lockhart longed to get out of Taynton and see the world. To taste it and smell it. Get scared by it and run away from it if necessary.
Taynton Hollow was tiny compared to the city where Charlie was born. It had a small shop and two pubs. There was a tiny church which was well attended on Sundays; cars traveled in from all the nearby villages and clogged up the narrow country lanes.
But then for his fifteenth birthday his parents bought him a bike which he rode every day. Something told him that there was a lot to explore beyond the monotonous fields and spires surrounding him. He could smell adventure on the wind.
The nearby villages were smaller than Taynton. Some had fewer than fifty houses. No schools or pubs or shops. The smallest of all was the hardest to reach on his bike. It was a tiny place on the top of a huge hill. It was called Woodridge.
Welcome to Woodridge: the middle of nowhere. Years later, when he returned from his travels, Lockhart realized that the middle of nowhere was the perfect hiding place. The perfect place to prepare to deal with Tyler.
Others had hidden in Woodridge before. Years ago, when the teenage Lockhart had returned from his bike ride one evening, his father asked him where he had been.
“I went up the hill to Woodridge,” Charlie had replied. “It’s the smallest place I’ve ever seen.”
Tom Lockhart folded his newspaper over and gave his son his full attention.
“Did you see the manor house? It was built by a Catholic family at a time when their faith was outlawed by the Queen.”
“How old is it, then?” Charlie had asked.
“How old do you think?” his father had replied. He liked his son to do his own thinking.
“Four hundred, maybe?”
“Yes, probably,” said Tom, looking pleased. “Maybe older. The Catholic family commissioned the famous lay preacher and architect Nicholas Owen to come to Woodridge and build secret panels and tunnels in their home, so that their clergymen could escape if the priest hunters should come knocking.”
“Priest hunters?”
“Yes, they were paid by the Queen to stamp out the Catholics,” Tom continued. He stood up and wandered over to the family bookcase and started looking for a history text. “Don’t forget, the gunpowder plot happened not long after that manor house was built. The Catholics tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.”
“I wonder if Guy Fawkes ever hid out up at Woodridge” Charlie asked his dad. Suddenly, the tiny village seemed more interesting.
“Well, you never know,” said Tom, “but probably not. The stakes were very high though. Nicholas Owen himself was discovered in one of his own tunnels a few months later, just after the gunpowder plot. They killed him on the rack in the tower of London, while three of his accomplices were hung, drawn and quartered.”
So, the manor house proved to be Lockhart’s first adventure. His first taste of traveling alone, with his eyes open and his spirit alive. The world had rewarded his adventuring with a glimpse of history and a smell of excitement. Murderous gangs hunting for priests to kill, lowly
families outwitting the monarchy, secret panels and gunpowder plots.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
“I never really gave up on
Breakin' out of this two-star town
I got the green light, I got a little fight,
I'm gonna turn this thing around”
- Killers, Read my Mind
Rachel White was holed up in a place called Lucky Bar on Dollarway Road. Dollarway stretched up towards the US Army Arsenal just north of Pine Bluff. The bar didn’t live up to its name. It was functional and unloved. There was a small counter propped up by two deadbeats. The floor was dark and wooden. The varnish had long scuffed off, but the color had been replaced by years of spillages.
Rachel was at a wooden table which was all glued up with decades of beer and nicotine. All the chairs in the place were leather, all different shades of brown. None of them matched. None of them were clean. It looked like years since the place had seen a broom, let alone a lick of paint. Whoever had decorated the dark green walls with horseshoes and railroad memorabilia had long since left. There were wilted flowers in small vases on each table which seemed to be the only attempt at brightening the place up. They probably looked good about a week ago.
All Rachel had known about Pine Bluff when she first headed east was that it ranked as the most dangerous metropolitan area in the United States. Neilson had told her that. Several times. She had flown to Dallas regardless, and then driven another two hundred miles east to Pine Bluff, Arkansas. She’d driven through a town called Hope on her way, and she’d watched Hope disappear in her rear-view mirror. Neilson had been right; Pine Bluff was a hole.
The sign at the city limits said “Population 55085” but when Rachel had Wiki’d the place last night she had learned that over five thousand residents had left in the last ten years. Ten percent. She looked at the sprawling low-slung place around her. Half of it was boarded up, and half of the boards were scrawled with badly written threats and ghetto slogans. She could see why the population was in decline; there wasn’t much worth sticking around for.
Some people called it Crime City. Or Heroin City. The sidewalks weren’t swept. The houses had falling in roofs and rotten floorboards. Shop signs were faded and broken. The only things thriving were liquor stores and beatnik bars on every corner. As Rachel headed into the heart of the city, the people she drove past looked ruined and aimless.
She checked in at a Super 8 at midday and headed into town. The guy behind the reception desk had told her that the best place to find army folk would be at Lucky Bar. He made it sound like a busy place. Rachel had expected to have to muscle her way through tightly packed gangs of uniformed men to get near the bar. But it wasn’t like that. The place was next to empty.
Apart from the two deadweights drinking at the bar, the only other customer was a grubby-looking Filipino girl who sat in the far corner and looked up hopefully every time the door opened. After a while, Rachel found herself doing the same. The men always shuffled straight over to the girl and spoke quietly before walking out again. Eventually one man struck a deal with her and the girl stood up. She wasn’t wearing much of anything and looked like she could do with a good hot meal. She’d lost the way of carrying herself that blossoming young women ought to have. She didn’t seem to care that the man didn’t wait to hold the door for her. She hadn’t been expecting him to.
The woman behind the bar shouted after the Filipino, who turned on her heel and came back in. Without saying a word, she peeled off a couple of notes and left them on the counter before leaving once more. The door rattled shut.
Rachel watched the girl go, and a sadness washed through her. Maybe it was no surprise that the vibrancy of youth had been sucked out of the girl if she hung around in Lucky’s all day waiting for business.
The waitress came out from behind the counter and headed over to the far corner where the young girl had been sitting. She looked about six months pregnant, but she was brisk and efficient. Pretty too, in a downtrodden way.
She swung by Rachel’s table on the way back over.
“Can I get you something else?” she asked in a soft low voice, totally different to the way she had barked at the young girl a moment earlier.
Her clothes were crisp and well ironed. Starched even, maybe. Rachel thought they must have been unforgiving for a woman as swollen as the waitress, but she looked like pregnancy suited her anyway. She was wearing a name badge pinned to her blouse, which said that she was called Raven. She had undone one button too many on her blouse, and it looked like it was only the top of her apron which was keeping her from spilling out altogether. Rachel wondered if she was enjoying an extra cup size since getting knocked up. Or maybe she was just squeezing the two drunk guys for tips. They didn’t look like they had much spare.
“Can I get more coffee, please?”
Rachel could see the waitress trying to figure her out. She felt like a fish out of water with her west coast accent and her west coast tan. She was sitting in a rough bar in a rough town and she’d been there for almost an hour. No wonder the waitress was interested. Rachel looked like she’d been stood up on the worst date of her life.
Raven returned behind the counter and got a fresh pot percolating. There was no music in the place, and the sound of the percolator was the closest thing to atmosphere the place ever experienced. The boys at the bar looked like it was a distraction to their near-slumber. Raven leaned forward and clean the counter in front of them for twenty seconds, which was long enough for both of them to fall into her cleavage and grapple back out again.
Before the coffee had finished percolating though, both men decided that the day would not get any better than their quick glimpse of warm flesh and lingerie. They sunk what remained of their beers and headed back out of the rattling door without saying goodbye to anyone. Raven grabbed the screwed-up bills and threw them into the register and shook her head.
There was an open doorway beside the bar which led through to the stores and the restrooms. Raven headed out back while the coffee was on the go, and Rachel was left on her own in the bar. Even when the smell of the coffee overpowered the stench of stale beer, the place was miserable.
Rachel imagined Captain Barr sitting in the place, drinking with his unit. The place would be improved with a few rowdy voices smashing through the silence. She thought about him for a moment; the man who had fallen from the roof while he was on her show. While he was talking to her.
Now she was certain that he’d been pushed. And she’d had a phone call from an Englishman who thought she was right. He was Charlie Lockhart, the man whose name Barr had shouted as he fell. He mentioned a man called Tyler who was apparently some kind of giant.
Rachel had checked her mail as soon as she landed back in Dallas. Her newsroom had found out some information about David Barr and his background, and emailed her the details. Probably because their boss Neilson had squeezed them to get on with it. The email said Barr had been in Pine Bluff for most of his service career. After joining the Army, he had been assigned to protect the perimeter at Pine Bluff Arsenal, which was an important job.
For sixty years, Pine Bluff had squirreled away twelve percent of the country’s chemical weapons, although Rachel’s notes told her that the place had just finished destroying the last of its stock. The Arsenal had made itself redundant, and the parasitic city around it was dying. Rachel looked around and wondered whether a catastrophic chemical leak could have made the place much worse than it was today.
The waitress came back with coffee and a smile. She leaned over and placed the coffee down on the table, with a fresh cup and saucer and spoon. Rachel could see that she’d fastened her blouse buttons since the men at the bar had left. She smiled to herself. Next to the fresh cup, Raven placed new sachets of white and brown sugar, and a small plastic wrapped biscuit which might well have been a million years old.
Then she took the old cup and saucer along with its unused sugar and
uneaten biscuits. Just doing her job, by the book. Rachel noticed she was married. She had dainty fingers, and a silver wedding band. Next to it was her engagement ring, with a huge rock. Very expensive looking. Not the kind of ring you get by working in a down at heel bar. Maybe she was married to a soldier and just enjoyed helping out. Maybe she was a soldier, Rachel chastised herself. Maybe she’d come out of the army to have the kid. There was bound to be a connection; there was no way a ring like that belonged in a place like this otherwise.
Rachel thanked her for the coffee and spent the next few minutes thinking about the rest of the email the newsroom had sent. There was a picture of David Barr in uniform and a scan of the photograph he had been holding, up on the roof. It was of a woman in a green dress with auburn hair and a young girl who was about five years old. Barr’s family. There was a bloody black thumbprint in the bottom corner. LAPD had superimposed the words “not for publication” over the scan, but the women’s faces were clear enough. They were beautiful. Rachel could understand why Barr had clung on to the picture right to the end.
The newsroom had also found details of Barr’s military career. He had spent several years protecting the perimeter at the Arsenal, gaining promotions until he was running the unit. What came in and out of Pine Bluff Arsenal was mostly signed off by him. Two years ago, the base had begun to wind down, and at the same time Barr had been sent to Afghanistan to run the gate at Kandahar.
Neilson had also asked the journalists to send details of the rest of Barr’s unit over to her. As she sat drinking her coffee, Rachel double clicked on the attachment they’d sent to her phone. They’d dug up about twelve other names of soldiers who worked with Barr and who were still based in Pine Bluff. The great thing about journalists is that they can work on rumor and innuendo. They can call in favors and play dirty. They don’t have to wait for the official channels. Christ knows how they had gotten the list together for Neilson, but it was impressive for a day’s work.