Nothing Sacred

by David Thorne

  ‘But my kids. Could prove it weren’t me. What happened to them.’

  She was right. But she had not met Alex Blake. She did not understand.

  ‘Vick, believe me. You don’t want to get involved.’

  She did not respond to this, gazed back out of the window.

  ‘He was doing well,’ she said eventually. ‘Doing so well.’

  I looked across at her, frowned. ‘Doing well?’

  She nodded. ‘We still spoke. He told me. How good work was going.’

  ‘Yeah, but Vick, rent-a-cop for a shopping centre? Bit of a come-down from the army, wasn’t it?’

  Vick frowned. ‘Rent-a-what? No, Danny. Ryan weren’t no security guard: he worked up at the nick. High-security.’

  I did not understand. ‘The nick?’

  ‘Yeah. He was a prison guard. And doing bloody well too, if what he said was right.’

  ‘Prison guard,’ I said. I had a feeling of floating, of anchors cast off. My chest and arms felt numb and I barely trusted myself to hold my coffee.

  ‘Loved it, he did. Reckoned he’d be running the place one day.’

  I did not reply. There was a meaning here, a significance that was only barely discernible, like a dark shape submerged in murky water – a meaning that changed everything. I did not know what Vick had told me meant. But I knew that it could mean nothing good.

  It did not take me long to do a search for Connor Blake, did not take me long to read four or five news stories that all carried, essentially, the same sparse information. I remembered the headlines from months ago, one more violent incident in my neighbourhood. I had not read the details, had not known the names of the people involved. Connor Blake.

  On a Friday night three months ago he had been drinking in a local bar with a group of friends. The bar was open only to clientele aged twenty-five and over, in an attempt to reduce violent incidents caused by inebriated teenagers high on testosterone. That evening, though, the policy had not been enough to prevent what happened. The police described the attack as motiveless; they also described it as horrific. A young man named Karl Reece had been drinking in the bar that night. He was a medical student visiting a university friend over the Christmas holidays. He apparently exchanged words with Connor Blake and an argument broke out. Karl’s friends managed to cool the situation down and both parties continued drinking. But at around two o’clock in the morning it had flared up again and Connor Blake had attacked Karl Reece, beaten him half unconscious. Then, not satisfied that the other man’s disrespect had been sufficiently punished, he dragged Reece out of the bar and laid him face-down against a wall so that his forehead was resting against the bricks, his neck at an angle. He had taken a four-step run-up and launched himself at Reece, landing with both feet on the back of the other man’s neck, killing him instantly.

  Connor Blake was currently on remand having been refused bail due to the severity of his crime, and was waiting for his trial to begin. The prison he was being held in was Galleys Wood, about fifteen miles from my office, and was, I knew even before I called Vick to confirm, the same prison that Ryan had worked in.

  I sat in my office, turned it all over in my mind. Thought about what I had done, following Ryan, talking to bookies, treating him with contempt for his gambling, his failings as a father, his weakness. But did what had happened have anything to do with that? Or was something else, something far darker, to blame?

  Outside my windows the streets were quieter, commuters home from work, shops shut. Maria was at home and it was time for me to see her, even though I was in no mood for company, even hers. I was about to close up when my office phone rang. I had no urge to answer it, but after listening to it ring four times I reluctantly picked it up.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Daniel?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  It was a man’s voice, but not one I recognised. He did not say anything for a moment.

  ‘Who is this?’

  He ignored my question. ‘Need a lawyer. One I’ve got now, he’s fucking useless. Won’t do as he’s told.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, my hand gripping my phone tightly. ‘You got a name?’

  He laughed. ‘You know who this is.’

  I picked up a pen with my free hand, just for the reassurance of touching something familiar. ‘I don’t know you.’

  ‘You will do, Daniel. You prefer Danny?’

  ‘This conversation is over.’

  ‘No. No, it isn’t. I need a lawyer. You’re it.’

  ‘Sorry, friend. Doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘You’ll do what you’re told.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Hear me? You want legal representation, try the Yellow Pages.’

  ‘We know all about you, Daniel. Where you live, where Maria lives. You’ll do as you’re—’

  But I did not let him finish his sentence. Intimidation worked on power, keeping somebody on the defensive, overwhelming them. I had never been a back-foot player; was not going to let that happen. For better or worse, my instinct had always been to attack.

  ‘You’re Connor Blake. And whatever you did to Ryan, try it with me and I’ll bury you.’

  ‘You know who you’re dealing with,’ said Blake. ‘You know what we can do.’

  ‘This conversation is over.’

  ‘Listen—’ he said, but I had had enough.

  ‘No, you listen,’ I said and took a breath, filled my chest, let my pulse steady. ‘I don’t want anything to do with you. You’re in prison and I hope you never see a blue sky again.’

  ‘Oh, Daniel.’

  ‘We’re done.’

  I hung up on his voice, replaced the receiver. I leaned back from my desk and my office was quiet, as if his voice had never entered. But I could still hear it in my head, could not so easily exorcise his confident swagger. What kind of a man was he? Calling me, demanding that I act as his lawyer, expecting it; his behaviour was so off the scale that for a moment I doubted what had just happened. I had opened no forbidden doors, lifted no rocks. Yet still, suddenly here he was.

  But monsters do not vanish by an act as simple as finishing a phone call; this I should have known.

  I was stretching my shoulders, rolling my neck and shaking off the effects of Blake’s call when my phone rang again. This time I did not pick it up. I rolled my chair back to the window and watched it, listened to it ring. I had not turned the office lights on when I came back from Gabe’s and it was now growing dark outside, my office gloomy, the corners in shadow. I listened to the mechanic click of my answer machine as it picked up the call, listened to my own voice as I explained that I was sorry I was not there but please leave a message. The light of my answer machine blinked red in the dimness, I heard the bleep and then I heard Connor Blake’s voice again.

  Perhaps it was the gathering dark or the acoustics of my office, but there seemed to be something in his voice this time, a wistful quality that made him sound as if he was calling from far away, from some unknowable, distant place.

  ‘They want to lock me away forever, Daniel. They want to lock me away with the crazies and the kiddie killers and never let me out.’

  He sighed, a mystified sadness, as if he was some kind of martyr, victim of a cruel society’s ill will.

  ‘Help me, Daniel. Ryan didn’t and we had to take it all away from him. Be a friend to me. Don’t make us do the same to you.’

  He took a breath and I expected more, but he simply exhaled slowly, a melancholy sound, then he hung up.

  I watched my answer machine as if it was a suspect device, watched its red light blinking to announce what it held. Fuck this, I thought eventually, and I got up to delete what he had left, erase his voice from my world. I would not allow the Blakes to own me. I hit delete, heard the beep that told me his message was gone, erased forever. But even as I pressed the button I knew that it would not be as simple to be rid of him, of the Blakes, that this was not the end of it. Connor Blake had driven Ryan to suicide, then tri
ed to intimidate me. There was an intent there and I was sure that I would hear from him again, and soon.

  14

  ‘AND THAT’S IT,’ I say to Gabe. ‘Everything. The whole story.’

  We are in his kitchen. It is only hours since we were forced off the road coming back from our fishing trip but already it seems like a distant memory: the black car in the rear-view mirror, the impact, the men in balaclavas, the guns against our heads. We have drunk the bottle of Scotch down to below the label now; it has taken that long to tell Gabe all that has happened in the past weeks. Vick, her children, Alex Blake, Ryan’s suicide, Connor Blake’s call from prison. The trouble I have found myself in.

  ‘So, let me get this straight,’ says Gabe. He picks his glass up, swirls what is left at the bottom around. ‘All the time, it was the Blakes putting the pressure on Ryan. The furniture moving, Vick’s kids. All so they could show Ryan what they could do. How they could get at his family.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Why?’

  I shake my head, push my glass. ‘Ryan was a prison warden. Blake must have wanted something from him.’ I shrug. ‘Don’t know what.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘And now, I’m in the firing line.’

  I think again of the guns against our heads, the sound as the racks were slid back, the warning. Last chance.

  ‘I told Connor Blake to go to hell.’ I pick up the bottle, pour. ‘Didn’t take them long to send me a message.’

  ‘So you think what just happened, that was the Blakes? Giving you a final warning.’

  ‘I don’t do what he asks, he’ll kill me.’

  Gabe picks up the bottle, looks at the label. ‘Could be,’ he says eventually.

  ‘Got to be,’ I say. ‘The Blakes have got resources, you can see that. What they did to Vick, to Ryan. Running us off the road, putting guns to our heads – that’s nothing for them.’

  Telling the story to Gabe, I cannot help but wonder how I have found myself in this position: being manipulated by criminals, blackmailed from a prison cell by a killer. But I have to admit that telling it to Gabe is helping; as always, he takes news of my troubles with a matter-of-factness that I cannot, do not, feel. Nothing seems to surprise him. Given what he has seen and done in his life, perhaps that is not so remarkable.

  ‘Could be,’ Gabe says again. ‘Question is, what do they want with you?’

  I tilt my glass, look at the Scotch coat its sides, run thickly down. ‘Ryan’s gone,’ I say. ‘So I guess now Blake needs somebody else, for…’ For what? ‘For whatever it is he wants.’ I shrug. ‘Christ knows.’

  ‘Well,’ says Gabe, getting up from the table and looking a little unsteady. ‘Shame you can’t get your hands on him.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘He’s safe where he is.’ But thinking about Connor Blake, about what he has done and what he has threatened me with, I have an urge to cause him violence so all-consuming that for a moment I forget where I am.

  ‘These Blakes. They’re that bad?’

  I rouse myself from my seductive thoughts of vengeance. ‘Told you what they did to the guy, Liam. Like it was nothing. Punishment, for what? For letting me follow him home? They tortured him for it.’ I shake my head at my glass, confounded. ‘Driving Ryan to kill himself. Yeah, they’re that bad.’

  The thought of them, the Blakes, some diabolical and inexhaustible force, suddenly makes all ideas of vengeance seem as pointless as weeping into a fire to put it out. What have I got myself involved with?

  ‘Dan?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I cough, pour the rest of the Scotch in my glass down my throat, look up at my friend. ‘Hell, Gabe. I don’t know.’

  We had pulled dented bodywork away from Gabe’s rear wheel, torn off his bumper, which was dragging on the ground, and put it in his boot. The exhaust was undamaged and there did not seem to be any structural problems. The car started, and stopped, and drove in a straight line. A couple had passed us on the road and asked us if we needed any help, a man and a woman in their fifties. He had worn a flat cap and when he had asked us what had happened, Gabe had testily told him that we had hit a moose. The man had nodded in important understanding, apparently unaware that the chances of hitting a moose in Essex were infinitesimally small. Any other time we would have laughed.

  We had driven back to Gabe’s in silence, both occupied with thoughts of culpability, of who had attacked us and why and what we could do about it, how we could make them pay. Gabe’s appearance was never approachable but, looking across at him as he drove, I had an insight into the terrible price he must have exacted from his enemies when in the army. I would not have wanted to encounter him in a fight. Would not have wanted those pale eyes to be the last thing I ever saw.

  ‘Shame about your car,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Gabe across the kitchen from me, doing something to his espresso machine.

  ‘Must be worth a fair bit.’

  ‘Was. Somebody just ran it off the road.’

  I am speaking to his back, which makes it easier to challenge him. ‘You’re up, Gabe. Time to tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says softly.

  ‘People shooting up your house, the guy at the tennis court. All this money you’ve got. Your pension can’t be that generous.’

  Gabe turns to face me. ‘As if. The British Army can’t even pay for battle armour. Think they’re going to pay for a car?’

  ‘So?’

  Gabe sighs. ‘So, Dan, I, like any other soldier with any sense, took out private insurance. Know how much you get for a leg?’

  I do not answer, cannot think of the right response.

  ‘They all came in, the big insurance firms; cost fuck all to get covered. They must have thought the war’d be a walk-over, in and out, couple of hundred claims and they’d be quids in. Turns out the Taliban are world leaders at laying roadside bombs, burying IEDs, suddenly they’re shelling out for arms, feet, legs.’ Gabe allows himself a smile. ‘Must have nearly finished them.’

  ‘So that’s it? You’re burning through your insurance?’

  ‘Hardly touched it. Why? Think I haven’t earned it?’ This isn’t fair and Gabe looks at the floor, turns back to the coffee. I do not need to say anything. I pick up the Scotch, pour another measure, pour some more.

  ‘So,’ I say. ‘You’ve got insurance. Big deal. Doesn’t explain why somebody put a bullet through your window. Doesn’t explain why you think what just happened, why that was meant for you.’

  Gabe smiles. ‘No. No, Danny, it doesn’t explain that.’

  ‘What did you say? It was a military manoeuvre. Getting run off the road like that.’

  ‘Still give you good odds they were after you, not me.’

  ‘Know somebody who’d put a gun to your head?’

  ‘I know people who’d do a lot worse. Have done a lot worse.’

  ‘And what they said. That was a warning. Last chance.’

  ‘Yeah. I think that was for me.’

  I see that he is serious. It is time to find out what he is into. We have been through too much for him to keep it from me now. I’ve told him everything that has happened to me. Now it is his turn.

  ‘Go on then,’ I say. ‘Let’s have it.’ I take a drink. ‘The whole story. From the beginning.’

  15

  A LITTLE OVER three years ago, and a bare six months before Gabe had been flown out of Afghanistan in the back of a Hercules, hooked up to a drip and en route to a German hospital, he had been seconded to an infantry platoon for a rotation at a forward operating base halfway up a mountainside in the north-eastern Kunar Province. It was a place of deep valleys and high, creased mountains, green with holly trees and tall cedars and had a reputation as one of the most dangerous places in the country: hard-to-reach villages crawling with insurgents and steep trails so perfectly suited to ambushes that walking them felt like a direct challenge to Death himself.

  The powers had wanted Gabe to see more combat, prior to
them anointing him for greater things. They liked their majors to have seen bloodshed up close, to have a reputation for valour that, they felt, wouldn’t be earned taking armoured vehicles on patrol around friendly villages. You can’t order men into battle, they said, if you’re not steeped in combat yourself. Captain Gabriel McBride needed to go and get his hands dirty.

  Kunar Province was the ideal post: Forward Operating Base Lucifer had seen more contact with enemy forces than the next three FOBs put together. If there was going to be killing, this was where it was going to happen.

  Gabe was leading the platoon and had only a few short weeks to win them over, to impose his will on them. There was an incumbent platoon at Lucifer, a battle-hardened regular infantry platoon of Rifles who were coming to the end of their rotation. It was their job during those weeks to show Gabe’s new platoon the ropes, take them through the enemy positions across the valley from FOB Lucifer, lead them up the trails, introduce Gabe to the elders in the surrounding villages, and explain who could be trusted and who was, in all likelihood, concealing a cache of enemy ordnance in their home even as they looked in his eyes and shook his hand.

  ‘This group of Rifles, 7 Platoon, who we were taking over from, they’d seen it all,’ says Gabe. ‘They’d been ambushed, double-crossed, pinned down. Four of their platoon had been killed and seven more evacced out with serious injur ies. You could see it in their eyes and the way they spoke about the local population – pure hatred.’

  Gabe has found another bottle of whisky and opens it, sets it down as he thinks back to that time, places himself back among his men. ‘Doesn’t usually work like that, in the army. Doesn’t get personal. But these men, they’d had enough. Never expected to see the things they did, have to do what they’d done. Six months is a long time at the sharp end, isolated in a place like that.’ He shakes his head. ‘The place was hell on earth.’

  The men of 7 Platoon had reached a point where morality took a back seat to expedience and where ordinary values of right and wrong, good and bad, had long since ceased to have any relevance. Dirty, demoralised and disgusted by the acts that they had witnessed and committed, they had crossed a line. They were now not so much professional soldiers as officially sanctioned killers.