by David Thorne
‘Maria!’ Jade screams and hugs her, turns to me, hugs me as well. She has big white perfect teeth. I can see most of them. ‘You must be Daniel! You’re so big!’
I do not know how to respond to her observation, smile and nod. Rufus puts out a hand and gives it a firm shake.
‘Enjoying yourself?’ he asks.
‘Thanks, yes,’ I say, and it is true. I don’t ask him the same question; he looks as if he would rather be anywhere else.
Young women marrying money has a long tradition and in my neighbourhood has never appeared to go out of fashion, feminism never having gained a convincing toehold in Essex. To strike gold there were, broadly, two options: find a local up-and-coming self-made man, or get a PA diploma and head for the City, as Jade had done. Villains or bankers – in the final analysis, the money was equally grubby. It would still buy a mansion, furs, pay for summers in St Tropez, so really, who cared?
But perhaps I am being uncharitable. Jade seems happy and I am sure that Rufus will be as well, just as soon as the immediate threat of Jade’s friends and relatives is removed, driven back to wherever they came from and out of his life.
I have been placed at a table at which sit relatives of the bride, along with a young man whose place name says Bellamy, although I cannot tell if that is his first or second name. Maria is at the top table. I can see her talking to Jade, laughing. A big man with cropped silver hair is talking to Bellamy and the rest of the table is listening; the big man is called Stan and has told me he is in the building trade. I saw him earlier helping his wife climb out of a year-old specced-up jet-black Range Rover. He must have been building a lot of houses.
‘So go on, what you driving, Bellamy?’
‘Oh, well,’ says Bellamy modestly. Bellamy has told me that he trades in derivatives, that it is actually quite tedious, mostly just spreadsheets. He called me ‘chap’ when he addressed me and has a lazy upper-class drawl and unruly hair and I disliked him immediately.
‘No, go on,’ says Stan with a smile that tries at angelic but fails. His head is huge and his florid face is so dark it is almost purple, as if he has been holding his breath for too long or is being invisibly throttled.
‘A Ferrari,’ says Bellamy, as if he is ashamed of it, which I am sure he isn’t.
Stan smacks his hands together, looks around the table. ‘Fuck me, he don’t look like he’s started shaving.’ He turns his attention back to Bellamy, who is looking uncomfortable. ‘Three five five?’
‘Three sixty Spider,’ says Bellamy. ‘Black.’ He cannot help but let the smugness creep into his tone. I dislike him more than ever.
‘Now then, you know what they say about young men in sports cars, dontcha?’ says Stan. ‘Know what it means, driving a motor like that?’ The whole table is almost reverentially following the exchange, a circular table with a rapt audience of sixteen people around it hanging on Stan’s every word.
‘Yes, yes,’ says Bellamy, a little testily. ‘I know what it is supposed to mean.’
‘Means,’ says Stan, leaning closer in to the table. The rest of the table leans in too, all part of the conspiracy. Stan holds up a little finger, waggles it. ‘It means… You’re an arsehole.’
Stan laughs with an abandon that is almost demented, smacks his hands together again, looks around in delight. Everybody apart from Bellamy and me obviously know Stan well and join in the laughter. I cannot help but smile too.
Bellamy, however, is a son of privilege, privately educated, working a six-figure job in the City: he is not used to this kind of rough ridicule, cannot help but take offence, is intrinsically unable to see it for what it is, normal wedding sport. I know he will react badly, misjudge the situation woefully.
‘Now steady on,’ Bellamy says. ‘There’s no need for that.’ He sounds as prim as a Victorian vicar.
‘No, no,’ says Stan, holding his hands up in apology. ‘No, you’re right, Bellamy, son, that weren’t on.’ He nods seriously and the table waits for what comes next, a collective holding of breath. Stan points at Bellamy. ‘You’re a rich arsehole.’
This time the laughter around the table is unrestrained and I watch Bellamy’s face blush with impotent rage; I am willing to bet he has never been spoken to like this before in his entire charmed life.
He stands up abruptly, says, ‘Cigarette,’ turns and leaves, walks stiffly to the exit of the function room. He will stew over this for a week.
Stan’s wife, a tanned middle-aged lady with big hair, enormous diamond earrings and garish make-up, slaps Stan on the arm affectionately. ‘You are a cunt, Stan,’ she says.
‘I am, ain’t I?’ Stan says, grinning proudly, taking his sweet time to make eye contact with everyone at the table. I cannot imagine him being more pleased if he had backed the winner of the National. ‘I really am.’
Stan runs a book on the length of the speeches, which is won by a lady two places down from me called Lisa who had guessed twenty-eight minutes, Stan handing over the £150 with comic unwillingness. He has also been disappointed by the lack of controversy and dirty jokes, has attempted to heckle the best man, but his wife put her foot down at that.
Now the formalities are over and Maria comes to save me from Stan, takes me by the arm. As I leave the table, I hear Stan call after me, ‘You drive a Ferrari ’n’all?’
‘Having a good time?’ says Maria.
‘Yes,’ I say.
Her face is glowing with happiness and drink. She kisses me and then whispers, ‘Let’s explore.’
She takes my hand and leads me out of the dining room, down a vaulted corridor, into what might once have been a library. I have the feeling I had as a boy, sneaking off with a girl for an illicit make-out session. Maria must feel the same because there is nobody in the library and she immediately kisses me again, this time long and hard, and after some moments I feel her body melt against my hand around her back.
‘Can’t beat a good wedding,’ she says afterwards. ‘Let’s not stay too late. Get back to our room.’
I smile once again at her unashamed frankness, can only nod dumbly. She steps back, looks at me, looks around her. The room we are in is large and panelled, lined with mounted heads of different animals: deer, elk, boar, a wolf, a tiger.
‘Poor beasts,’ says Maria. ‘Reminds me, there was a crow in my bedroom yesterday. Dead. How weird’s that?’
‘What?’ I say. The noise of the wedding is gone. I am aware only of the humming contours and limits of my body, of the heaviness of my hand; of Maria’s face, white and blurred and indistinct.
‘Nearly stepped on it. Think it got down the chimney?’
‘In your room?’ I say.
‘Beak open, wings spread. Freaky deaky. Let’s get something to drink.’
Maria moves away, heads back towards the wedding party. I do not move. At the doorway she stops, turns. She seems ethereal, barely there. ‘Daniel? Daniel? Hey. Daniel?’
There is dancing and drinking, laughter, a woman in tears followed out of the room by a gesticulating boyfriend or husband in a kilt, more laughter, the evening underpinned by the unconditional goodwill people bring to weddings along with their best suits and dresses. But throughout the evening my anger grows and grows until a deep well of rage fills my body. I am so tense that people watching me standing rigidly at the margins may believe that I am undergoing some kind of seizure.
Somebody put a dead bird in Maria’s bedroom. While she slept. What else did they do to her? I want to find the people who did it, make them pay, cause them to suffer. I can think of nothing else.
‘Dance?’ Maria asks me. She has picked up on my mood and there is a forced enthusiasm in her voice like a mother cajoling a recalcitrant child.
‘No thanks.’
‘Come on, Daniel. Show me what you’ve got.’
‘No.’
Something in the way I refuse, an irritable jerk of my head, stops Maria, freezes the teasing smile she has tried on.
‘What’s up?’
>
‘Nothing.’
‘So dance.’
‘Yeah, listen. I don’t fancy it.’
‘Okay. Understood.’ Maria searches my face, comes up with nothing. She is a little drunk and infuriated by me, and is not going to let me hijack her fun. ‘Just have to find somebody who does.’
At some point I head upstairs to our room. It is still in the state of disorder that Maria left it in: scattered make-up bottles, discarded tights, towels and an abandoned pair of heels in a corner where they were disdainfully flung. This was the room that so recently had seemed to serve as a validation of our status as couple; we were like everybody else, as entitled to happiness as they were. Now it just seems to mock me. What had I been thinking?
Maria comes in much later. I can hear her say goodnight to somebody outside the door. The other person laughs and stumbles away down the corridor. She closes the door and turns on the lights, sits down on the bed, ignores my pretence at sleep. She shakes my shoulder gently, folds herself over me so that our cheeks are together, hers on top of mine. She smells of Champagne.
‘Is it me?’ she says softly. ‘Have I done something?’
I do not reply. She lifts her head and looks at me with eyes that are fearful and confused. I cannot meet her eye. I shake my head, do not trust myself to speak.
‘Maybe the wedding freaked you out. It’s okay, it’s not like I expect—’
‘It wasn’t that.’ God, I have not even thought of it. Maria, marriage. Never considered it.
She is silent, makes patterns on the bedspread with a fingernail. ‘You can tell me,’ she says at last. ‘Whatever it is, you can tell me. Daniel?’
But I cannot. Of course I cannot tell Maria that there are men out there who are putting dead birds in her room while she sleeps, the same men who injure children in their beds and burn down homes; that I attract the threat of violence like a magnet attracts iron and I may be putting her in danger.
For all the love I want to think Maria feels for me, I have never managed to shake the suspicion that she also retains a vestige of caution, a wariness that I might be too hard, have too much history, hold inside too much capacity for wayward aggression. A big dog that you cannot entirely trust around people. I do not want to risk it, do not want to give her reason to fear me, fear being around me. I cannot bear to lose her.
‘It’s nothing,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just… with what’s going on. Vick. I can’t get it out of my head.’ It is not a lie, not entirely; but nor is it the truth.
Maria leans down, puts one hand on each side of my face, turns it so that I am looking at her. She gazes at me and again I struggle to meet the honest goodness there, the depth of feeling.
‘I love you, Daniel Connell,’ she says. ‘Whatever happens.’
I wish so much that I could believe it. But later, lying next to Maria sleeping, feeling my heart beat against the weight of her arm across my chest, I know that whatever it is that we have is too fragile; that very soon something terrible will happen to make it disappear forever.
20
MARIA IS ASLEEP and she looks peaceful, her lips slightly parted, one hand half open, palm up, next to her ear. Her hair spills across the pillow in luscious waves. How many times, I wonder, have I looked at her in such a pose, amazed that she is with me, that I have the privilege of watching her sleep? But there is another hand in the picture, and it is holding a screwdriver that dimples the skin of Maria’s throat, the suggestion of pressure. It is this that I have been gazing at for the last I do not know how many minutes, wondering how things have reached this stage, what I could have done differently. And wondering, ultimately, if I am capable of protecting her from the men who have taken the photograph and put it through the door of my office, where I picked it up from the floor on entering this morning.
Intimidation relies on the safety net of anonymity, the certainty that no links exist back to whoever is applying the pressure. The assumption is that they know what it is about, you know what it is about, and there should be an end to it. I know who sent the photograph, know what they want. But even if I had been in any doubt about who was behind it, I would not have had long to wonder.
I am pouring coffee in the corridor outside my office when my phone rings. I pick up though I do not recognise the number.
‘Yes?’
‘Daniel. Where do you think this will end?’
‘What do you want?’
He ignores my question. ‘There is nothing we cannot do to you,’ he says.
‘What do you want?’ I say again. I can think of nothing else to say.
‘Only what I always wanted,’ he said. He sounds frustrated. ‘Daniel, there was no need for any of this.’
‘You were in Maria’s room.’
‘Not me, Daniel. I’m in prison.’
‘If you weren’t, I’d break your legs.’
Connor Blake laughs. ‘Magnus wanted to cut her ear off,’ he says. ‘You should be thanking me.’
The statement is so abhorrent that I do not trust myself to respond and there is a silence during which I can hear him breathing.
‘So come on, Daniel. You going to be my lawyer?’
‘Why me?’
‘That other lot, big City lawyers. Hard to persuade. You show up out of the blue, might as well have come tied up with a ribbon.’
‘What makes you think you can intimidate me?’ But even as I say it, I realise how empty my words sound. Blake does not even answer but I can hear him laughing softly.
‘What do you want?’
‘We’ll talk about that. When you come to see me.’
I have an impression of doors closing all around me, leaving me in a dark place, alone. ‘Come to see you,’ I say.
‘We have a lot to talk about. You’re going to get me out of here.’
I close my eyes and I cannot think. My mind seems frozen, starved of possibilities and choices. They got into Maria’s home. Took photographs. What could I do?
‘There are procedures,’ I say eventually. ‘You need to sack your current defence team. We’ll need to go to court, a judge will need to sign it off.’
‘See,’ says Blake, condescension in his voice as if he is geeing up an uncertain child. ‘That’s what I pay you the big bucks for.’
‘Give me your lawyer’s name,’ I say, and it is as if I am casting off the last rope mooring me to my old life, drifting away into a vast unknown place of malevolence and menace. He gives me a name and I say, ‘I’ll see you in court.’
I cut Blake off, push my mobile across the desk far away from me. I look about my office, at my familiar surroundings, and I have no idea what to do, none at all.
While I was contemplating a dark and violent future, Gabe was taking the fight to 7 Platoon, showing a tenacity and appetite for the fray, which only recently I believed he had lost for good. While 7 Platoon may have fired bullets into his home and held a gun to his head, these acts, if anything, only seemed to spur him on. I had always known that Gabe was a contrary man; I had not appreciated quite what little value he put on his own life when there was a mission to be completed.
With the help of Major Strauss, Gabe had tracked down as many members of 7 Platoon as he could; those who had been attached to the platoon at the time of Lance Corporal Creek’s death and those immediately before. He had called them, visited them, appealed to their sense of duty, to their better natures. But few had wanted to talk, and those who did had nothing to reveal, other than a deep and abiding hatred and fear of 7 Platoon, of what they had become and what they had done out there in Afghanistan.
But he had spoken to one man who had asked Gabe to stop by and visit. He had not been with 7 Platoon when Gabe was shadowing them in Kunar Province but he had served with them shortly afterwards, up until just before Lance Corporal Creek’s death. He gave Gabe an address, told him he was there all day every day, that anytime was fine.
Ex-Private Shane Foster was a small man with a restless energy he could not qui
te contain; he ducked and weaved as he spoke as if he was sparring with Gabe, rather than simply talking. He was wearing a t-shirt with the arms cut-off and had crude tattoos on his wiry arms, but around his eyes were lines left by an easy laugh and he emanated an aggressive goodwill. Foster worked at a boxing gym, a small building with a flat roof and two full-size rings inside, punch bags and speed balls and weights at the far end, smell of sweat and leather and vapour rub. Two boys in headgear were throwing jabs at one another in one of the rings, and while Foster spoke to Gabe he kept an eye on them, throwing instructions and profanities their way as they slipped or shipped punches.
‘Creek, right, I heard he was killed. Fucking shame. He was a good man, I liked him. Phil, fuck’s sake cover up. You like getting hit?’
‘Yes,’ said Gabe. ‘He was a good man. Knew him well?’
‘Well enough. Enough to know he was different.’ Foster started to walk around the ring and Gabe had to follow, speak to his profile as Foster watched the boys box.
‘Different?’
‘Yeah, not like the rest of them, of us. Always thinking, always asking questions. Phil, don’t slap, you ain’t a girl. Are you? Phil? You a girl?’
One of the boys who Gabe presumed was Phil looked down at Foster and shook his head. The other boy took the opportunity to hit him, a crisp right to the temple. Phil staggered sideways and Foster laughed.
‘Gal, you’re a little shit, know that?’ He turned to Gabe. ‘So. You reckon, what? He weren’t killed kosher?’
Gabe nodded. ‘But nobody’s talking. Can’t get anywhere. You hear anything, see anything?’
Foster shook his head. ‘I’d left by then, and not a day too soon, I’ll be honest with you. Banyan, Burgess, Shine, all of them, gone over the other side, hadn’t they. Gone.’
‘Think they could have killed Creek?’
‘That lot?’ Foster stopped walking, was momentarily stilled. ‘Reckon they’d kill anything.’