Maloney's Law

by Anne Brooke

  ‘Not much of a fighter, are you? PI work or no PI work.’ I heard the sound of a zip being undone.

  A sudden jerky series of movements told me he was bringing himself to hardness. I didn’t have much time. I had to reach him, somehow. All the months I’d known him, in the bedroom he’d always been tender. Now his cock was jabbing at me, but somehow he couldn’t find the entry to my arse. I could feel the blood filling my head, pounding, pounding, I—

  Then, just as I knew he’d found me, I whispered his name.

  ‘Nic.’

  At once, I felt him go limp. His breath burnt my neck and then a second later he rolled off me.

  ‘God, God. This whole thing is impossible. You’re impossible. Don’t you see?’

  I said nothing. I just let him talk himself out, listening as he swung between anger and shock and being careful not to make any sudden movements. Underneath his words, I could hear the dark pulse lurking still and couldn’t tell if he might attack me a second time. If he did, I had no more resources to make him stop.

  When at last he was quiet, I slowly, so slowly, eased my arms free from the shirt sleeves trapping me and turned over onto my side. Even so the act made bile fill my throat, and I spat out blood and a thin stream of vomit onto the carpet.

  ‘God, Paul.’

  He reached for me, and, without thinking, I flinched and kicked him away. As if from nowhere, the rage took hold of him again, but this time it wasn’t directed at me.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, can’t you see this is no good?’ He slammed his fist against the wall and the plaster cracked. ‘It’s going nowhere. I’ll never leave Cassie or my children. We’re finished.’

  ‘No, please, Dominic, I can’t not see you.’ My mouth was full of staleness. ‘Please stay, we can talk. I don’t mind about Cassie, please just stay, just—’

  ‘No.’ He swung around and crouched next to me. Taking my face in his hands, he drew his thumb across the blood on my lip and stared for a long moment into my eyes. Then he spoke slowly and simply as if speaking to a child. ‘I’m going now. We won’t see each other again. You won’t see me again.’

  He stood up. He took two steps towards the door, away from me; then the door opened, the sharp April air filled the hall, the door shut, and he was gone.

  10.21pm. 10.28. 10.33. The doorbell didn’t ring again. He wasn’t coming back. There would be no more of this.

  Unable to cry, unable even to feel, and registering only the slow twist of pain in my gut, I staggered to the bedroom. There I opened the champagne and drank it from the bottle. Then for the first of many, many times, I took out my mobile, switched it on, and, still shaking, dialled his number.

  Chapter Thirteen

  When morning comes, I’m lying in my bed remembering. I spent a long time just walking around the streets last night and am aware, as if from a great distance, that I might be lucky to be here today. Bearing in mind Egypt and, more to the point, Jade. The wash of grief when I remember my friend no longer takes me by surprise, and I let it ride over me for a while, even as I’m still thinking of the past. About Dominic, about Jade, and then, slowly again as if slinking back into my own mind after a long journey, about my dead sister and my family.

  All of it is floating in darkness together: Dominic’s face and my father’s anger; Teresa and Jade; my mother. All my life I have tried not to remember what has led me here, but now there’s no choice. Today I should be trying to see Blake and Dominic together: later this afternoon. I should be trying to understand what my ex-lover has done and why he is now so angry, angry enough to blackmail me, destroy me and my business.

  In the depths of me, I know the answer, but now it’s the past that haunts me, not the present. There will be time enough for confrontation and maybe confession.

  Now I remember Teresa again, the way she smiled, her rich black hair so like mine. I remember a different moment, played out like a film in my head. I remember how she always cheated in Hide and Seek and would never admit it. It was impossible to count to one hundred in the time she claimed. I never minded, though, not when she was with me. Later, when she was taken away and when I came to understand what might have happened that late October afternoon when I saw her once and then no more, I would have been overjoyed to have her cheat again. Sometimes now there is in my dreams a glimpse of an unknown face, shrouded so I can’t make out its features, and a sense of a suppressed threat, but I can’t grasp the connection of this image with what I remember about Teresa and me. On those occasions when it passes through my mind, I wonder if I’ve simply imagined it, just for the need for completion, and what good it would do if it were true.

  It might, after all, be an echo of the pain my parents went through. After Teresa vanished, I don’t remember being told anything concrete, either in the immediate aftermath or when the knowledge of loss was rising. It was as if, when my sister left, a long rope was attached to me that kept me fixed to the day it happened, even as I travelled onwards and ever onwards. Maybe I’ve been walking with it wrapped around my flesh for too long. Maybe none of it could have been any different. My parents’ grief, and mine, was on the whole something we each handled alone. There were three times only when we tried to talk together, as if a boy of six and his parents can talk together. Each time, it drove us further apart. Not that I understood that then. I was simply aware of the emptiness of the house, the deep gloom that I could never break through. It became part of my growing up: my mother’s sorrow; my father’s anger.

  Yes, my father’s anger. It’s one of the memories overshadowing the whole of my family’s life after Teresa had gone. So much so that anything there might have been before that time, what he was like, how he was with us, is lost to me. Just as much as my sister is. My father’s black rages cancelled out the grief my mother suffered, and from then she became almost a ghost in her own home, a vanishing presence in my life. All I fought or moved against in the school years, the teenage years, even today, was the overpowering knowledge of him.

  He hardly seemed to notice me. Now I think Teresa was the one he must have lived for and after her loss everything died for him. Even me. Even my mother. Not his work, though. His career as a barrister and then a judge has never faltered, and neither has his subsidiary career as a radio and TV legal expert. It must have been a constant irritation for him to have a son like me, with so little ambition then and with no career now. If Teresa had lived, I’m sure she would have been the one he could be proud of.

  Maybe that was why I did everything I could during my teenage years to get his attention. Smoking, drinking, drugs, and sex with what my father, if he’d known about them, would have seen as unsuitable people, and how much worse that they weren’t girls. Whatever, it worked, and some of our arguments were the most memorable I have known and the most unresolved. The king of all these rows had come the day he discovered I’d fallen in love with David.

  I’d been nineteen, back from University in the Christmas of my second year, and living in a home that hadn’t for a long time welcomed me. My parents had new neighbours, the Cunninghams, if neighbours were what you called them, living as they did out of sight of the house itself and across two vast expanses of lawn, although estate is a more accurate description. The Cunninghams moved on afterwards, of course.

  I met them and their son, David, for the first time on Tuesday 15 December 1992 at a pre-Christmas drinks party my mother was giving. I say my mother as my father had no interest in socialising with people who would not be able to advance his career. I wasn’t interested in making polite conversation either. But my mother’s silent rebuke all that day, together with the fact that I’d finished my last illegal smoke only that morning, drove me down the wide, curved stairs into the warmth and noise of the living room at gone 6pm.

  I was glad I’d made the effort. David was beautiful. He was just fifteen years old, as my mother mentioned his birthday had been the previous week so there’s no excuse for what I did. No forgiveness. It haunts me still. H
e was tall and fragile, with soft fair hair, deep brown eyes, and a smile that took hold of my heart and twisted it to a new shape inside me.

  There’s a world of difference between being fifteen and being nineteen, but in that room full of people whose lives and lifestyles I’d long since left behind, David was the nearest to me in age and experience. It wasn’t long before I realised how in awe he was of me. To him, I was someone grown-up, someone who most of the time lived away from home, someone who lived in London, and I lost no opportunity in pressing that advantage. I wanted him to envy me. So I told him tales that were only one-quarter true about the people I’d met, the nightclubs I’d been to, the things I’d seen.

  At the end of the evening, all we’d done was talk to each other. Before he left to go home, and in a second or two of time when there was nobody in the hallway but us, he gave me a sweet, shy grin.

  ‘Would you like to come ’round tomorrow after lunch or something?’ he said, hardly seeming to dare to look at me. ‘We could just do stuff, you know? If you like?’

  I pretended to think about it. I didn’t want to lose my “adult” dignity or cool in front of David.

  ‘Sure.’ I shrugged. ‘Why not? Might get the parents off our backs, huh?’

  He nodded, mouth suppressing another smile, and was gone.

  After that, things moved quickly. And so Christmas and the start of the New Year passed, with David and me spending long afternoons enjoying each other in either his parents’ or my parents’ house. I had no idea what our parents might think. David told me once his father had joked with him about me, and he’d talked about our shared interest in computer games, a lie David’s father must have believed. Twice my mother mentioned how delighted she was and how pleased the Cunninghams were that I had befriended their son. I didn’t know what to say in reply, so I just nodded and mumbled something. I could see nothing beyond the next kiss, the next touch. My father kept his silence, and I never knew what he thought ’til later. Looking back, I wonder how they missed the dance in my eyes, the sheen of happiness glittering from my skin. David was like a drug to me; with him, there was no need of other stimulation.

  I convinced myself I was doing nothing wrong; we were just young blokes messing around with each other, making each other happy for a while. We were fine as we were, nobody knew anything, and there’d be no fall-out from this. It was a matter for David and me alone.

  Or so I thought. God help me, I’d always been able to fool myself. Until, that is, the last time I saw him, two days before I was due back at University. Downstairs, I could hear the faint sounds of his mother watching TV and now and again the opening of the patio door as she wandered into the winter garden. She’d smiled when I’d first come in and offered coffee. She hadn’t made any further comments when I’d shrugged and said I wasn’t thirsty, adding something about the computer while David led the way eagerly upstairs.

  This time there was an urgency in our love-making we hadn’t experienced before. It hit me then how stupid it was and how wrong; he was fifteen and I was nineteen. When I left to go back to London, I told myself, I would end it.

  But already it was too late. When the door opened — as somehow I’d always known it would — and Mrs. Cunningham, fresh and cold from the garden, stood motionless on the threshold, I remember thinking it was no more than I deserved. And it was then that the real nightmare began.

  I don’t remember much about what happened afterwards; it’s a blur of accusation and guilt, yelling and confusion. All I can remember is how lost David looked, how alone, and how the road between him and me was covered with so many brambles that I could never find my way through again. There were warnings and threats of police involvement, then questionings and official cautions. David swore and kept on swearing that I hadn’t done it to him, that his mother’s appearance had meant I hadn’t finished what we’d begun, that it was just a one-off incident brought on by drink and curiosity. I don’t know what my mother thought, but my father, at last compelled by circumstances to notice me, shouted and hit me once across the face in the privacy of his office. The force of it knocked me down. When I got up, jaw stinging, he’d gone, caught up in his campaign to keep what I’d done out of the eye of the press.

  There was a police report; of course there was. Not even my father is above the law. But that too was a shadow of actual events and was hushed up, a lost file in some police archive. Not lost enough though that Dominic was unable to uncover it.

  I never saw David again. A week later, the Cunninghams had moved out. I returned to London, taking my belongings with me. Giving up my study of law, I took a series of dead-end jobs in shops and businesses, delivering sandwiches and later filing and running errands for an insurance company. In the hope of dislodging the picture of David from my mind and my conscience, I cut myself off from everyone I’d known before. Instead I concentrated on getting to the end of each long day and earning enough money to live.

  The thought of David took a long time to loosen its grip on my heart, but there was one person from University who wouldn’t let herself be cut off from my life.

  Jade.

  She tracked me down, God knows how, as my parents didn’t know then where I was, sweet-talked herself into my tiny, shared flat, took away the bulk of the drugs I was using, and listened when I cried. Without her, I think I would have been dead. Despite long nights of arguing, she never persuaded me to go back to my course; that part of my life was over. When she realised nothing she did would change my mind, she switched the focus of her arguments. So, after six months, I found myself helping out, on a casual basis that soon became more formal, for the investigating firm used by the insurers I worked for.

  The law, but not the law. Near enough to the path I thought I’d travel on to be interesting, but not so near as to be dangerous. Soon it became obvious I was a natural at finding out what nobody wanted to tell me. Later I realised I loved it. I’d discovered a way to be involved in other people’s lives but always from a distance where it wouldn’t cause me pain. I’d found a place in the world that couldn’t be taken away.

  And solving other people’s mysteries went a little way towards burying the guilt of not being able to solve Teresa’s. Sometimes.

  It was 1979 when Teresa was taken. Saturday 27 October 1979. If she’d lived, she would have been 34 years old now. Thirty-four years, five months, three weeks, and two days old.

  Even Jade didn’t reach that age. The debt I owe her is still outstanding.

  This is why this morning, after I’ve made things ready in the event that the worst should happen, I’m going to put the case and revenge to one side for a while and at last do what I should have done the day I discovered Jade’s body. Delta Egypt, and the answers I need, can wait.

  ‘Thank you.’

  I take the tea offered to me by Mrs. O’Donnell and lean back into my chair. It’s the first words I’ve said since I arrived here five minutes ago, crumpled from the journey. When Jade’s mother opened the door to me, she smiled as if she’d been expecting me, stepped aside, and said, ‘Please, come in, Paul.’

  I’d followed her, thinking again how thin she looked since her daughter’s death. In the hallway, she’d come to an abrupt halt.

  ‘Wait here for a minute, would you?’

  There was no reason not to obey. As the man most responsible for what had happened, I was here under sufferance, lucky to be allowed entry at all. She opened the door to the living room, keeping her gaze on me as if afraid I might either push past her or vanish, though which was the better or worse option I couldn’t have said. As Mrs. O’Donnell slipped into the living room, I glimpsed her husband standing at the window, and then the door was shut.

  Now I sip my tea as if I’m here to make polite conversation about the weather. I do not know why I’m here at all, I only know I had to come.

  Mrs. O’Donnell settles herself onto the sofa opposite me, and the light from the window frames her grey hair. She takes a long time arranging he
r skirt and picking fluff I can’t see from her blouse. At last she speaks.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry about my husband. He doesn’t mean to be—’

  ‘Please,’ I cut in, anxious above all things to avoid causing this woman any more pain. ‘It’s okay, I understand, please don’t worry.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says.

  There’s a pause, and I know I must fill it. She’s already walked one pace nearer me by giving me tea. It’s my turn now. Still, it’s hard to know what to say or how to begin at all.

  I place my cup and saucer on the coffee table between us, lean forward, and focus on a point somewhere between the carpet and Mrs. O’Donnell’s knees. Then I talk, slowly, seeking confidence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘For everything I’ve done. I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you after Jade died. I should have come, but I was too afraid.’

  ‘Why?’ she says, cutting me off. ‘Why didn’t you come to see us? Why were you so afraid? I would have liked to see you then. We both would, I think.’

  ‘I know.’ For the first time I look into her face. What I see there encourages me to stop for a moment and think a little deeper about what I’ve done. ‘I know that. I was frightened of what you might say.’

  ‘What did you think that might be?’

  I take a breath, lean back in my chair, and gaze upwards at the white swirling ceiling patterns. ‘I thought you’d say it was my fault. I thought it was my fault. We were working on a case, Jade and I, a difficult one. I knew it was becoming dangerous, but I was stupid. I thought the danger was only for me, not for her. I never thought she’d be... God. Anyway, I should have been there, I shouldn’t have left early, I should never have left her on her own. I knew she’d work late, no matter what I said. I should have been there to help her. I should have been, but I wasn’t.’