by Tim Weaver
On the farm.
The weathervane was an angel.
‘Where did you get that?’ I asked her, pointing at it. She looked back at the house. As she did, a second reaction hit me, even more powerful than the first.
My mouth.
‘… colm bought it from a shop before he got Alz…’
I lost what she was saying. Suddenly it was like I’d been smashed across the face with a baseball bat. At the tip of my ear, I could feel someone’s breath, warm and saccharine like the smell of boiled sweets. The night down in Bristol, before they’d taken me out to the woods to kill me. The man with the saccharine breath.
His tone had altered, but I’d recognized his voice.
It hadn’t been Andrew.
I opened the door and headed up the path. Behind me, I could hear Mary saying my name. I turned to her and held up a hand.
‘Wait there,’ I said.
I left her like that and moved back inside. The heat of the house hit me. I could see Malcolm had changed positions. He had his back to me.
‘I knew there was something off about you.’
He almost fell off the sofa. When he saw who it was, surprised at the sound of my voice, he held up a hand, made a noise. A grunt. Fear darted across his eyes.
‘Don’t hurt me.’
‘I saw it that first time I came round.’
‘Don’t hurt me,’ he said again.
‘Is this all an act?’
He shifted position on the sofa, moving back to where he’d been before. He looked me up and down. His eyes darted backwards and forwards. Left to right. He was trying to see whether there was anything nearby he could use to protect himself with. There wasn’t. He moved further across the sofa.
‘Don’t hurt me,’ he said a third time.
His voice trembled. Frightened.
‘Is this all an act?’
‘Where’s Mary?’
‘You want Mary?’
He remembered her.
‘Where is she?’
‘Mary!’ he yelled, looking beyond me.
‘Malcolm,’ I said again. ‘Are you listening to me?’
‘Where’s Ma–’
‘I know about you.’
He was up on his feet now, over on the other side of the sofa. In front of the window that looked out over the garden. He glanced over my shoulder again.
‘Mary!’
‘You wanted me dead.’
‘Mary!’ he screamed again.
‘You tried to kill me.’
Tears filled his eyes.
‘Do you remember?’
‘David?’
I turned. Mary was in the doorway, her face white.
‘David, what the hell are you doing?’
Her eyes darted from me to Malcolm, then back again.
‘Wait there, Mary.’
‘David!’
‘Wait there.’ I turned back to Malcolm. ‘How did you do it?’
‘Take whatever you want,’ he said.
‘Are you listening to me?’
‘Take it!’
‘You know I’m not here for that.’
‘There’s money in the kitchen!’
I paused. ‘You remember where Mary keeps the money now?’
‘Malcolm?’ Mary said, a small voice from behind me.
He glanced at his wife as the crack started fragmenting, the shield disintegrating, piece by piece. After a few seconds, his body relaxed. Straightened. He smiled and held out his hands.
‘You got me, David,’ he said.
This time his voice was different.
The same one I’d heard in Bristol.
‘Malcolm?’
Mary again, even weaker this time. I looked back over my shoulder. Her eyes were fixed on her husband, tears running down her face. When I turned back, Malcolm was staring at me, his face, his physicality, changing in front of my eyes. He seemed to broaden, to fill out, nothing of him sagging any more. He ran a hand through his black hair, the grey flecks passing between his fingers, and then the fading shell of a dying man was gone completely.
‘You’re him,’ I said. ‘You’re the one Jade talked about. You’re the reason they couldn’t kill Alex. That’s how you were on to me from the beginning.’
He shrugged, glanced at Mary. Back to me.
‘The first time you came here, I spoke to Andrew and told him it might come to this. That was why he sent that… freak down to visit you in Cornwall. We wanted to see what kind of a man you were. When
I ran a hand across my face, across the bruises put there by him.
‘How did you get to Bristol without Mary knowing?’
‘Mary’s a nurse, David. She works shifts. The people she gets in here to look after me…’ A pause. A smile. ‘They’re fucking monkeys. Useless. That night I came to see you… I drugged them.’ He brushed himself down, like he was blowing dust away from an old book cover. ‘I wanted to see first hand what we were dealing with.’
I looked at him.
‘How did you become involved?’
‘Involved?’ he said, smirking. ‘I didn’t become involved, David. I ran the fucking thing.’
‘The farm?’
‘Everything. Where do you think Al’s money went?’
‘You took the five hundred grand?’
‘I took more than that.’
‘How much?’
‘It doesn’t matter now. It’s untraceable. The money’s been through the system and back out again. Al threatened us, threatened all of us. I took what was mine.’
‘It wasn’t yours.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘Whatever helps you sleep at night. Buying a farm and a bar and renting a flat with some stolen money – that’s not the same as murder, David. It’s not the same at all.’
‘You murdered Al.’
‘What?’
Mary’s voice from behind me.
‘No, I didn’t,’ he said.
‘Malc?’
He glanced at her, then back at me.
‘It was your idea,’ I said to him. ‘You wanted to do it. But you didn’t have the balls. You pushed Alex into doing what you wanted then turned your back on him when he cried out for help.’
‘I never asked him to do anything.’
‘You put the seed of an idea in his head, hoped and prayed he would do it, even told him to do it when he started having doubts – and then turned your back on him when he did exactly what you wanted. Have you any idea what you did to him?’
‘Malcolm?’
Mary again, her voice barely audible. I glanced back at her. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, her face white and fixed, almost frozen by the shock. She swayed a little and placed a hand on the wall. I turned back to Malcolm – his eyes hadn’t left me.
He shook his head. ‘You amuse me, David. You’ve loved him, but he was reckless. What he did was stupid. Talking about it and doing it are two entirely different things. He offered to talk to Al, not to drive a car through him. When he came to me, he came expecting me to believe in what he had done. But what he had done was wrong. I told him to go somewhere and lay low. It ripped the heart out of me, but it was the best way to protect him.’
‘It was the best way to protect yourself.’
‘I was protecting our son.’
‘You sent Alex to the farm. You weren’t protecting him.’
‘He turns up on Michael’s doorstep after five years – it wasn’t going to be long before he started leaving a trail. I wanted him away from the places that could hurt him.’
‘You tried to erase his memory.’
‘You’ve got it all wrong, David. I protected myself at the beginning. I had to. When the police came calling I was very focused. When Alex’s car turned up in Dover they came here and asked some questions about Al, but by then I’d decided to use this disease as cover, which made it difficult for them. Mary answered most of their questions. She could handle that. They were generic questions. I could te
ll they didn’t have a clue where to start. But it wasn’t them I was worried about. They were the front line. If it got any further, they would bring out their best soldiers. That was what I was really worried about. But, as it turned out,
‘And this is it now – one big lie?’
He didn’t reply. But I could see the answer in his face. This wasn’t it. It was going to be Mary waking up one day and finding he was gone.
‘No one wanted him on the farm,’ Malcolm said. ‘No one. Andrew fought against me, so did Legion, even Michael didn’t know if it was a good idea. Michael. This was a boy I’d known since he attended the church down the road. A boy who watched his brother get stabbed to death dealing ecstasy. A boy who tried to get away, go travelling, but came back because he had nothing here and nothing out there. His parents were dead. And I took him in, told him about what we were doing and what a difference he could make to our cause. I changed his life. Turned it around. And when I asked for one thing, he fought me on it.’
‘Michael has some humanity, whatever his flaws,’ I said. ‘He could see what you were doing to Alex. To all of them.’
‘Malcolm?’ Mary said from behind us again.
He didn’t acknowledge her. ‘You don’t understand.’
‘You knew what they would do to him.’
‘I knew because they told me,’ he said. ‘After he left, I thought about Alex every day for five years. I thought he was dead. Then when he came back, when he went to see Michael, I knew the next stage of his life might be even harder for us than the last. Because
‘You mean it would have been too difficult for you.’
‘I never forced him to meet with Al. I told him Al might listen to him. I told him Al liked him. He did like him. But I never believed Alex would do what he did. I’ve thought about it often since he left, and after he came back. Thinking is what I’ve got instead of a voice. I’ve wondered whether I would sacrifice what I have now for a moment again with Alex. If I had the time over again, I’m always thinking what choice I might make.’
‘Why would there even be a choice?’
‘Al would have ruined our lives. If he had got his way, we’d be living on the street somewhere, looking in the gutters for dinner. You think he would have had second thoughts? He wouldn’t. So, what Alex did changed our lives. Because our lives carried on. If he hadn’t done that, we all would have been dead, dying in some fucking dump somewhere. There’s a choice, David, believe me.’
He sat down on the edge of the sofa.
‘Eight years ago – it was 29 May – I was working for the bank, and a man came to me and asked me for
‘Andrew.’
He nodded. ‘Then I began to feel very strongly about the idea.’
‘Alex’s brother.’
For the first time he glanced at Mary. A brief look. Then back at me. ‘I watched someone else I loved dearly die on the streets with a needle in his arm, and I wasn’t going to stand by and watch other kids do the same.’
‘The boy in the photograph.’ I thought of the kid kicking a ball around in the picture Jade had showed me the night she’d died. She’d talked about the boy’s father. I think, in some ways, he’s even worse. ‘The boy is yours.’
Malcolm nodded.
Mary made little noise. That surprised me, but I didn’t turn around to look at her. Malcolm was in full flow now, feeding off the fact he could finally say what he’d stored up.
‘What do you think?’
‘So, whose son was he?’
‘A girl I met through the bank,’ he said. ‘At the end, she was just a junkie, selling herself to fund her habit. But the boy was wonderful. I tried to see him as often as I could. That was why I took the job with Al. The office was in Harrow. Robert lived in Wembley.’ He paused. ‘But then Al found out about him.’
‘About the boy?’
‘He saw me taking Robert to school one day.’
‘That was why he flipped?’
‘When he found out who Robert was, he wanted me to tell Mary. I refused. He said he’d tell her himself. So I threatened him, told him I’d kill him if he said anything. He said, if I didn’t tell her, he’d take back everything that was his. I don’t think he believed I would kill him. So, it became a stand-off. Mary hated Al – but, in the end, all Al was doing was trying to help her.’
‘But Mary never found out.’
‘No. It had been going on for two months, Al threatening to tell her. I tried to close off all other avenues, like paying Robert’s mother to keep her trap shut. But she ended up using the money to buy smack. One day when I went round there, I found a needle mark in his arm. He was ten years old. If I’d known that was going to happen, I would have killed her and brought him back here. I would have done that. In the end, she was just a hooker. No one would have missed her. But, a couple of days later, she called me on the ten-year-old boy.’
I remembered the newspaper cuttings, in the flat and on the farm. BOY, 10, FOUND FLOATING IN THE THAMES. This is the reason we do it.
‘Al didn’t have anything on me then, not once the boy was dead, but all I felt was anger. All I wanted was to hit out at someone. I suggested to Alex we take his money. That was the first step. But that wasn’t enough. It didn’t quell anything. So I started thinking about killing Al, thought a lot about it. Then Alex really did kill him. When it happened, it suddenly seemed so huge. But after Alex had gone, I started to feel it again, eating away at me. I couldn’t suppress it. Couldn’t suppress the hatred I felt for Al, even after he was dead. And the hatred I felt for her.’
‘The boy’s mother?’
He nodded.
‘I’d taken a lot of my contacts from the bank with me when I went to work for Al. Sneaked them out, just in case I ever started up my own business. One of the numbers was Andrew’s. I called him after Al died, told him I wanted to help him with his plan. It was the right thing to do after what happened to Robert. And we grew close, got on well. But all the time, the anger just burned in me. I think if she’d shown any kind of remorse, I would have let her live. But she didn’t. She seemed pleased to be free of the responsibility.’
‘So you killed her?’
‘About a year after we bought the farm, I just exploded.
‘What about the other kids you killed? Do you regret them?’
‘We tried to save them.’
‘You murdered them.’
‘No one died who didn’t deserve it.’
‘Did Simon deserve it?’
‘Simon,’ he said, disgust in his face.
‘Did he deserve it?’
‘Simon became a problem.’
‘Because he refused to give up his memories?’
‘No! Because he almost beat one of our instructors to death! I never wanted the violence. I only wanted Legion’s help for that one thing. She killed that boy. She deserved it. But things happened up there, and I started to realize it was the only way we could protect ourselves. What we built and what we worked for had to be protected. And, in the end, we protected what I cared about most. We protected Alex. What we did to Simon protected Alex.’
‘But you murdered Simon.’
‘We gave him a chance, but he threw it back in our faces. Some of these kids were so fucking ungrateful. When they fought back, what the hell were we supposed to do with them? They couldn’t go back. We couldn’t put them back on the streets. They would have talked to people and we would have been found
‘So you killed them.’
‘There were challenges.’
‘So you killed them.’
‘There were unexpected challenges. And when one of our instructors, one of Andrew’s friends, was killed right back at the start, we realized that, in order to continue our work, we’d always have to make a sacrifice. In an ideal world, every kid we took to the farm would understand the magnitude of what we were doing for them. But some gave us nothing in return but their bile.’
‘What did you expect? You kidnapped them.’
‘Kidnapped them?’ He smirked again. ‘Hardly. We invited them, we didn’t force them to come to the farm. We’ve never had a kid turn us down. They took the opportunity they were given because they knew it was a good one.’
‘What about Alex?’
He paused for a moment. ‘Andrew and the others, they made mistakes. Terrible mistakes. Alex wasn’t like the other kids we tried to help. He wasn’t wheeled in on a trolley with a needle in his arm. They were treating him differently, how he was meant to be treated. Not the same drugs. Not the same programme. But then that freak didn’t like it, and eventually neither did Andrew. They put Alex on the programme when he shouldn’t have been anywhere near it. They put him on it because they didn’t think he deserved special son! He deserved special treatment! And when he didn’t respond how they wanted, when he fought back, they put him on that fucking cross! All I’d done for them, all the money I’d put in, and that’s how they repaid me.’
He paused, his eyes moving left and right. Thinking.
‘Andrew used to call me when Mary was out and I listened to his reports about Alex, about what they were doing to him, and I knew it would go wrong. Putting him on the programme just because he spoke to them in the wrong tone of voice? That was a massive misjudgement. But I was powerless to intervene. I knew Alex would fight the drugs, I knew he’d fight the containment. Alex was a fighter.’
He looked at me; thought he saw something in my face.
‘I don’t give a fuck what you think,’ he said.
‘You protected your son by sending him to a place where they’d make him forget about you like you pretended to forget about him. That wasn’t for his sake. You sent him there to protect yourself. All of this has been about you.’
I paused, thought I had him.
But I was wrong.
The smallest of smiles wormed its way across Malcolm’s face, and – very gently – I felt a gun barrel press against the back of my neck. I turned my head an inch to the left. In the window, I could see a reflection. Michael. There was strapping around his thigh where I’d shot him. Mary had been pulled in to him, her fingers