Lost in Shadows

by Alex O'Connell

  “I can try, I know the D.I. running the case. But it all depends on how co-operative Johnston wants to be.”

  “We can’t offer him any deals, of course. He’s murdered two people. Besides, Johnston himself is Essex’s case not ours.”

  Goodwin wished he could go down to Essex himself and simply retype the entire statement. In the old days, he thought, the good old days, he might have got away with it, but not now, not with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act putting the kibosh on effective policing and him personally under an ever tightening stranglehold. “I’ll see what I can do, sir” he offered reluctantly but he held out little hope. Brian Young, he thought, wasn’t the type to forgive and forget.

  “That’s the spirit, David. It’s very important that you succeed. I’m sure you realize how damaging for the Force such accusations can be, even if they are totally unfounded. And for the officers concerned personally. Many a fine policeman’s career has been ruined when a project they instigated goes badly wrong. I’d hate to see that happen to you.” The threatening tone to Bannister’s voice wasn’t even barely concealed.

  Goodwin got up and made for the door. “Yes, sir” he said. “I’m sure you would.” Suddenly he felt shattered and very, very old. All his efforts, everything he had done to make sure that events turned out as well as they could for everyone, well for almost everyone, had been futile. Dave Morris had died for nothing. He had killed Dave Morris,murderedhim, for nothing. It stung him as he said the word silently to himself for the first time. It was like, Goodwin thought, that he had been sucked into the immense, unendurable gravity of a supermassive black hole. His own, personal space time had been distorted to such a perverse degree that the laws of physics even, the universal constants, no longer seemed to apply to him. He was in free fall. He realized that at last and he knew he would never be able to stop. He knew that he could never break free.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Superintendent Goodwin had been right about one thing. Frank Doyle had not wasted time in Essex but had made his way straight back to familiar territory. He had no intention of staying in London, however. Doyle realized that that would not be safe but that did not seem to matter any longer. He couldn’t quite explain it but the city now seemed dirty to him, obscenely corrupt in way that he had never been party to before. He was filled with an overwhelming desire to leave it, to get out as soon as possible and to go far, far away. He accepted that he was now in his end game and he wasn’t really sorry. He saw with an unusual clarity that, one way or another, by the end of the day, he would be dead. The irony was that Doyle, the last living lone wolf, couldn’t face the world on his own. Not for long. He had been too dependant on Don Bellini for too long and now even he had let him down. Doyle felt somehow like a small child lost in a shopping mall, scanning wildly for a friendly face but seeing only the harsh, uncaring stares of strangers. Waiting for the public address system to carry the promise of imminent rescue, but secretly knowing it will remain forever silent. Doyle had had plenty of time to reflect during the early morning drive back from Southend on Sea to his old stamping ground of south London. His brain had seemed more alert than at anytime in the last forty years. Even now, despite everything that had happened, he couldn’t bring himself to hate Bellini for what he had done. Perhaps it would have been better for him if he could. The hatred might have driven him to carry on, to fight back. To hit out at anyone and everyone; that had been his way in the past. But now it was different.Hewas different, he thought. No longer the man he had been. He accepted the fact that it had been so long since he had experienced any real, genuine emotion, that he was now no longer able to. He knew the words, of course, despite his limited education but he had no idea what they meant. Not what theyreallymeant, what they really felt like, the pain ….. the pleasure ….. the heartbreak. He sat now in the over ground N.C.P. car park in Southwark, the one near the main campus of the South Bank University. He sat, dead still, in the blue Peugeot. Its engine was switched off but both his hands remained clamped firmly on the steering wheel as if they were locked in position. Behind him, under the thin moulded plastic tray concealing the boot still lay the corpse of the good Samaritan who had tried to come to his assistance last night. Since he had slammed down the hatchback and driven him from sight, Doyle hadn’t even deigned to give the man a second thought. He didn’t care that he might have a wife and children who loved him and depended upon him for their daily bread and for their emotional succour. He never gave a thought to the fact that he was somebody’s son, somebody’s brother. He was just somebody who got in his way, somebody who he could use. It was neither good nor bad. It was just the way things were. Doyle hadn’t changed that much. He wasn’t that different. He watched the sun rise before him, bestowing even at this early hour a gloriously golden hue on the drab metropolitan cityscape as it climbed slowly and majestically over the roof tops, investing them with a beauty that was rare and transitory. It was going to be a glorious day in the city. The sort of day when office workers flock to the parks in their lunch breaks to bask in the seductive warmth of the spring sunshine. The sort of day when commuters pause, just for a moment, as they swarm across Waterloo bridge and notice for the first time in years the serene glories of the city skyline from the Palace of Westminster in the west to St. Paul’s Cathedral in the east, and whisper a prayer of silent thanks for Wren. It was the sort of day when perhaps, just maybe, the world wasn’t quite such a bad place and life was, after all, almost worth living. Such feelings still by-passed Frankie Doyle. They went over his head and, even if he knew that they could be there, he wouldn’t have appreciated them.

  He sat there for a while. He wanted to move but he found his inactivity too comforting and seductive and it was only when car after car began appearing and parking up nearby that he forced himself to cast off his lethargy. He abandoned the car, leaving it unlocked with keys in the ignition. He thought for a moment about leaving the ignition running, to advertise the fact that it could easily be stolen, thus buying him a little more time and anonymity. He decided against it, it would probably only flatten the battery. People didn’t care anymore; there were so many opportunities, what did it matter if one was missed? He was wrong though. Within forty five minutes, the car would be re-stolen by an enterprising fifteen year old joy rider who got a little more than he bargained for when he opened the hatchback to see if there was anything worth stealing. It was two days before the car was eventually recovered, the best part of twenty miles away. Two days of rotting, of decomposing, of putrefying. Such thoughts were not of interest to Doyle as he made the short journey to Waterloo station. He climbed the grand steps to the station’s monumental main entrance, pausing to glance at the names of the railway’s glorious dead from two World Wars. He imagined his own name up their with the others, cast into a cold bronze slab of immortality. That was where he belonged, he felt, not here, not today, a pariah with no where to run and no-one to turn to. He glanced up at the big, old black and white clock, which was suspended above the concourse, as he passed below it. He could almost feel it ticking away the seconds and minutes of his life. It was no longer early, the clock told him, it had gone twenty past seven already, and people were flocking out of the arriving trains, with an inexorable pulsating regularity. It was as if, he thought, they in a sold mass only dispersing gradually as they passed through the ticket gates and made their way unsmilingly but uncomplainingly to their day’s business. Doyle stood and stared up at the constantly changing electronic departures screens suspended above his head. He had no particular destination in mind. There wasn’t anywhere he had ever really wanted to go. He made his selection purely on departure time. Seven twenty five. That would do. Platform thirteen. He had to run but he made it. Just. The train was empty. All the traffic was one way at this time in the morning and Doyle hadn’t even heard of the leafy Hampshire market town that was to be his final destination. He didn’t suppose that many people had. But it was out of London. And it was the end of the line. Th
at, he mused, seemed quite appropriate. He moved along the carriage and spread himself out on a seat designed to accommodate three people. Its blue upholstery had probably once been plush but that was now just a dim and distant memory. Now it just felt harsh and uncomfortable. Still the train was on time and that was preferable to a luxury that he was far from accustomed to. It slowly juddered away from the platform with an initial jolt and he turned his attention out of the window by which he sat. It was ingrained so deeply with dirt that it had taken on a sort of opaque brownish hue from which no amount of effort and detergent could ever hope to release it. Doyle sat with his back to the engine and remembered the Euro Star trains, proudly wearing their distinctive livery, that used to pull out of the futuristic tunnel like exit in their own sanitized part of the station. For a moment Doyle wondered whether or not he should have taken that train and gone to Paris or Brussels instead. Did you need a passport? No, it would have meant a schlep across London. It didn’t matter, he thought, he would rather stay in England. Finish up in England. He no longer thought of himself as Irish. That, like everything else from his past was long ago forgotten, buried in the recesses of what on a good day passed for his mind. The train seemed to be going very slowly, he thought, but he took the opportunity it afforded him to see Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Why the hell did they put up that big wheel, he thought. What a way to celebrate the Millennium, the march into the new world of the twenty first century; a bloody Ferris wheel. ‘Oh, brave new world, that has such people in it.’ Still, it wasn’t as bad as that bloody Dome had been. After the train had passed through Vauxhall, without even noticeably slowing, it seemed to pick up speed and soon was travelling at a steady pace. By the time they passed the upturned skeletal dinosaur that is Battersea Power Station the train was rattling and jarring along at its full pace. It slowed down as it passed through the myriad maze of tracks at Clapham Junction. Doyle thought back to his visit to that seedy Clapham bedsit all those months ago. He thought of his sawn off shotgun. He thought of Micky Doyle and his kneecap. I didn’t blow it off, he said to himself. His leg was still there when I walked out. He should blame the bloody surgeon, not me. He thought of Tommy Windsor waiting for him back at the club. He thought of Don Bellini and that drunk in the Mount of Venus. The one he had worked over. That was the day, he thought, the day that it had all kicked off. In truth the chain of events had started many years before. It had started back in the village near Galway Bay with the sharp bite of his father’s thick leather belt ripping into his bare back. Perhaps it had started even earlier still, in the dark comforting security of his mother’s womb as cells divided and divided and sent a million electrical impulses to one another. Perhaps it was all a matter of genetics and Francis Doyle could never have been anything other than what he was, afatale monstrumsent from hell to torment humanity.

  It must have been about twenty or twenty five minutes into the journey when the train pulled in at Woking station. More people got on, quite a lot in fact but they all seemed to give Doyle a wide berth. It wasn’t so much the fact that he hadn’t slept or washed, although there was no mistaking those facts. It was the look in his eyes that made them keep away. It was difficult to define, but people could tell. This was not a man to go close to. The train sat at platform three for what seemed at eternity. It was so long, in fact, that Doyle was beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong. But it hadn’t and the train eventually juddered off once more, picking up speed more quickly this time, now that it was free of the urban confines of the city and heading through Surrey to the rustic tranquillity of north Hampshire.

  “Tickets, please.” The man came from behind him and took him by surprise. He was still more on edge than he had thought and his hand moved instinctively to his jacket pocket, towards one of his guns, but he let it drop to his side as he saw that the uniform he wore was merely that of a ticket collector, nothing more insidious. Over the rattle of the train on the tracks, Doyle hadn’t heard the same question repeated several times already as he moved slowly down the carriage. He pulled the holdall, which had sat on the seat next to him since London, a little closer. For comfort.

  “I haven’t got one” he admitted. “I had to get on quickly at Waterloo.”

  This seemed to be a regular occurrence for the ticket collector as he began dialling into a compact little electronic machine fixed to his belt. The official thought for a moment about castigating Doyle for not hunting him down to buy a ticket straight away like any upright passenger would. He thought better of it and settled for a simple “Where to, sir?” instead.

  “The end of the line” Doyle replied, savouring the sound of phrase as he uttered it.

  “Single or return?”

  “Single’s fine.”

  The man, his stomach straining against a uniform jacket that looked to Doyle to be two sizes too tight, finished inputting the data into his machine and it produced a ticket. “That’ll be £14.60 please.”

  It seemed a lot to Doyle and he wondered if he had been fined for not having a ticket in the first place but he didn’t argue and pulled a grubby looking twenty pound note from his pocket and handed it to the man.

  “I’ll bring you your change, sir” the ticket collector said and made off down the corridor between the seats, moving his hands alternately along the metal hand grips on the head rests as he did so. Doyle assumed that the money would go straight into his pocket and, strangely, he did not begrudge him. He failed to understand the accountability that the microchip in the machine enforced.

  The ticket collector took less than two minutes before he was back, passing over the change to Doyle.

  “I’m sorry about the pound coins. We didn’t have a five.”

  “That’s alright” said Doyle obligingly. “The end of the line – what time do we arrive?”

  The collector looked at his watch automatically and un-necessarily, he knew the answer off pat. “8.35” he said and added proudly “We’re running on time” as if Doyle should be grateful, if not actually impressed.

  In another ten minutes they arrived at Aldershot. A large sign proudly announced that it was the home of the British army and an uneducated hand had scrawled underneath, in thick black magic marker ‘whats left of it’ not bothering about the punctuation. That would explain all the crew cuts and large, bulging green rucksacks that Doyle saw as he looked out of the window. A group of school boys opened the door by Doyle and he had to move back his legs to allow them to enter. They didn’t bother to thank him as they sat down, three facing him and one on his side. He moved his holdall across to make a little more room but, once more received no thanks, it was as if the boys were oblivious of the presence of the old man who had become their enforced travelling companion. It was a good job that they didn’t look into his face, look at the snarling brutality of his old scar and into his one cold dead eye. There, they would have seen an icy chilling severity. They would have seen death. Instead they chattered loudly about this bird in their class, the general consensus of opinion about whom was that she was well up for it. Terry James had proved that already, or so he claimed. Their interruption of Doyle’s reverie didn’t last long and after no more than five or six minutes the train pulled in at the next station. As a well spoken, vaguely female voice announced “Westchurch. This is Westchurch. The train standing at platform two is the 8.14 service from London Waterloo calling at Lordern and Netherton only”, the boys got out and made their way towards the covered bridge that crossed the track. They left the door wide open behind them and as Doyle reached out to slam it shut he thought 8.14, twenty minutes to go.

  Everything was very green here, he thought, it looked wild and natural, not like the order imposed on nature in the parks in London that he would occasionally pass through as a short cut to somewhere else. It was too green. Too healthy. Doyle felt a little disturbed by it and as the train pulled into Bentley station he noticed a small gate on either side of the rail track, where people could cross and a rough path which led
into the adjacent woods beyond. There was no concrete on the floor, no pavement, no street lighting Doyle couldn’t imagine anything worse than heading so completely away from civilization. He wondered once more, if he had done the right thing coming here. Maybe it would have been more fitting to face up to things back in London, than down here, in another country.

  He was still wondering this as the train pulled into its final station. Half of him wanted to stay on the train and go back to London. More than half of him, perhaps but the metallic voice announcing ‘all change’ forced him to move. Now wasn’t the time to procrastinate; it was too late for that. He had needed to get out of the filth and grime of London earlier that morning and he knew that the same need would return with a vengeance if he went back. He stood and gathered his bag, at the door the next round of the day’s commuters waited patiently for him to descend. As he stepped onto the platform, he turned his head suddenly at the loud toot of a steam whistle and saw an old black locomotive, re-furbished to a pristine condition and proudly bearing the insignia of the Watercress Line on its blood red fender, chug off, on the adjacent track. It billowed forth great, voluminous clouds of cloying, greyish steam which hung for a moment on the still morning air before dissipating peacefully into the ether. Doyle liked this place. He could tell instantly, just by the feel of it, its unseeing, unspoken atmosphere. Fate had chosen well for him. The station was pretty after Waterloo, a bed of pretty flowers was well tended and the paintwork was clean and freshly painted in green and beige to keep the tourists who came to the steam line happy. It was a far cry from the old days of British Rail, or from the new days of privatization and profiteering, even. It harked back to an older, more genteel, more civilized age. Although Doyle didn’t know it, Superintendent David Goodwin would have liked it too.