Dispossession

by Chaz Brenchley

  “Well. I think I’d like to hear that from her directly. Where is she?”

  “Gone back to wherever she was hiding out before,” I said, lying in my teeth. “No good asking either of us, I told her not to tell us. Oh, and she’s got a copy of the file on disk, the one you pinched my computer for? Maybe I’ve been lying to you, maybe she does know by now. If she’s read the file yet, she does.” It’s too late to hush this up, I was telling her; and, if we turn up dead, you’ll have an avenging angel on your back, too loud to silence.

  “Mm. What’s on the file, Jonty?”

  “What, haven’t you cracked the password yet?”

  “Not yet, no. Have you?”

  I debated inwardly, whether to give it to her. Once she’d read the file, she’d know how little I was certain of; but she’d also know that given that much to start with, any good investigative reporter would dig out everything there was to dig. And she clearly knew something at least of my mother’s reputation.

  Besides which, I had a lie to support. If I played mysterious she might not believe even that I’d got into the file myself, let alone given it and its key to my mother.

  “John Hughes,” I said. “But don’t ask me why, you have to work that out for yourself.”

  Not much sense of humour, in the glance she gave me then; but no blame to her for that. I wasn’t feeling so much like laughing myself. Being defiant was only another way to pass a little more time, to slow down what was coming. Just a tad, perhaps, but every breath counted. I could measure out my life, I thought, in the number of breaths I had left, and no danger of losing count. I’d put the last one off, any way I could; but that again was just reflex. I had no expectation of a miracle for me. Best I dared hope for was miracles for other people, for my mother and Suzie; I could maybe bargain for those.

  John Hughes. She jotted it down in a little notebook, showed it to me to confirm the spelling, put the notebook away with a satisfied snap! to the catch of her handbag; and then said, “The other thing I want from you, Jonty, is your assurance that you will say nothing to Vernon. About Lindsey Nolan, or anything else you have learned. Your problems with him are your own concern and none of mine; you’re in his hands now, we were contracted only to supply you. But I need to know that you won’t try to divert him, with stories about me and my business activities.”

  “And if I do?” I challenged.

  “I have your wife,” she said, “locked in a room in the main house. Vernon wants to talk to you, not to her.” Which meant no limits, that didn’t need spelling out. Suzie was hostage against my good behaviour. No contest.

  “No stories,” I conceded immediately. “Though I can’t see why you’re worried. After what he did to that girl, right in front of me—I mean, what have you done that’s going to bother him?”

  I was only talking, counting breaths, putting off the bad time. I didn’t really expect her to tell me. But she smiled again, and said, “Vernon has his own scruples. I don’t share them.”

  “Murder?”

  She made a little face, a little gesture, comme çi comme ça, that seemed to me to be saying yes and no, that and other things and that not the worst of them, not the big one. I thought perhaps I’d given something away there, shown her too much of my abiding ignorance. Too late to salvage that; my eye wandered around the cell and found again what I’d noticed earlier, patches of fresh white paint showing clearly on the grubby walls.

  “What do you use this thing for, anyway?” I asked, hoping only to get her talking, to win back a little of what I’d lost. “Most security firms don’t run to private detention facilities, they don’t need them. Even if they were legal, they wouldn’t need them.”

  “We don’t operate on quite the same basis as most firms,” she said, with a hint of smug.

  “No, I’d twigged that. Keep that kid here, did you, before you killed him? The one whose body you swapped for Marlon Thomas?”

  Her eyes widened slightly, all the reaction I needed. Point to me.

  “He was a client of mine,” I said conversationally, “did you know?”

  “Yes, I knew that.” Of course she would know that, I was only trying to misdirect her. Leave her wondering how I’d found out about Marlon, whether the boy had been in touch with me, or with anyone else who might have come back to me with the news. It was a fruitless game, but I did want to rock her certainties a little. “And yes,” she went on against my expectation, “we did keep that other boy in here for a while, though the cabin was in our compound then. We brought it here this evening for Vernon’s convenience.”

  “For us,” I said, nodding. He’d want his prisoners where he could lay his hands on them any time, day or night; Deverill liked to witness his justice being meted out, in person. I’d seen that.

  “For you,” she confirmed, “and for that wild man you brought here. When we lay our hands on him. I’ve men out looking now. Who is he?”

  I laughed. “Luke? He’s not a wild man, he’s an angel. Your men won’t find him, he’ll be long gone now.”

  “You could tell us where to find him.”

  “I could, but I won’t.” Not that I was concerned about Luke. Even if they found him, they’d never hold him. Never come near to hurting him. I just needed to mark a boundary, to say thus far and no further. “How long did you keep that boy, then? Before you used him?” My mind was filled with pictures, a terrified kid crouched in here—in his own filth and stink, most likely, I doubted that they’d given him a pot to piss in—using perhaps his belt buckle or a rivet from his jeans to scratch his name in the paintwork, desperate to leave a mark before they took him away and put him down, before they came back with new paint to obliterate his traces.

  “Oh, a few days. But we’d used him already,” she said, “before we brought him here. We already had a supply of boys; it was easy enough to find one who fitted the description.”

  She paused, looking at me with a half-smile, waiting for reaction. All I gave her was a shake of the head, I don’t understand, but that it seemed was all she wanted. The smile grew, still more prim than generous, and utterly in contrast to the words it shaped itself around.

  “We have an ongoing arrangement,” she said, “with some clients who are fond of teenage children. Paedophiles, I suppose you’d call them. The clients are an informal grouping, and they’re quite widely scattered across the country. We pick up suitable children, deliver them, move them around the country; often we hold them for a while in facilities like this. And when they’re no longer wanted, of course, we dispose of them.”

  So many fresh-painted patches on the walls, so many obliterated names; I couldn’t suppress a shudder. Carol and I had visited Belsen once. Now, for the first time, I thought I’d found a place I could shrine beside that in my head, nothing truly changes. If I lived long enough to make a memory of it...

  “What,” I said lightly, “and no one’s noticed? You’re stealing schoolkids and killing them after, and it’s not front page shock-horror news in every tabloid?”

  “We only take runaways,” she said, “off the street. Pick them up with a promise of food and shelter, it’s easy. No one much misses a kid who’s already missing. I daresay there’s a file on some police computer, but it’ll not be much more than a list of names and queries. The bodies don’t turn up.”

  “Why not?”

  “I own a fishing trawler,” she said, “under another company name, and the seas are deep.”

  “Okay, so you deal in flesh and butchery. What else? Drugs, I expect? It must be a convenient way to move them around, in a fleet of security vans.”

  “Actually,” she said, “I didn’t come here to answer your questions, only to make sure you weren’t going to be stupid with your wife’s life.”

  Perhaps so, but she’d seemed to enjoy answering the questions none the less. The urge to confession is well documented, as is the frustration of the clever criminal who can’t claim their just recognition. I thought perhaps I could get
away with just a couple more.

  “That truck that nearly killed us,” I said, “when I was in the hospital. Was that your man did that?”

  “Yes, it was. He was stupid. I’d set him to keep an eye on you, and I had said that if he saw an opportunity to finish you quietly, an accident I’d said, that would be all right. Vernon would have written you off, I think, as a bad investment, and simply cut his losses. But the man had to go for the big gesture,” like with Jacky? I wondered, and thought probably yes. So there’s your revenge, Suzie love, he died just as bad as your brother, “and he chose to do it while Vernon was in the room. That was unacceptable. I’m very protective of Vernon.”

  Indeed. And that left me just the one more question. “Why do you do it?” I demanded, as politely as I could manage. “What’s the point? It’s not for profit, your legit business is worth millions...”

  “You should never turn your back on profit,” she said sententiously. “But largely, I do it because I enjoy it.”

  Most people do only what they want to do. At least she had the grace to admit it.

  o0o

  She left me, and I went back to sitting and thinking. Useless, probably, but not fruitless: though the fruits of my thinking were hard and ugly, bitter and misshapen and unwelcome.

  o0o

  After a while there were voices again, keys in locks, doors opening. This time two of Deverill’s men had come to visit me, but not to talk. One carried a side-handled baton, with the casual ease of trained proficiency. The other was wrapping a length of inner tubing around his knuckles as he stepped into my cell.

  “This is for Dean,” he said. “First instalment.”

  “I don’t think Vernon’s going to be too pleased,” I said, getting slowly to my feet, “when he finds you’ve beaten me up, just for your own private vengeance.”

  The other man laughed. “Don’t be thick, mate. Vernon sent us.”

  Oh, fuck. “Look,” I said desperately, “before you do anything he’ll regret later, would you take him a message for me? Tell him I really do need to talk to him, in private and right now?”

  “He’ll talk to you,” the first man said, “when he’s good and ready. When you’re good and ready to be talked to. You’re not, yet. You only think you are.”

  And then he lifted his hand, and kicked me. Very hard, very professionally, and right on the kneecap with his steel-tipped shoes.

  o0o

  Did I struggle? A little, I suppose. For the gesture, for honour’s sake. But I’ve always been a realist, and never a willing fighter. They had the training and the equipment, and I don’t believe I made a mark on either one of them.

  They laid many a mark on me. The guy with the rubber knuckleduster didn’t get to use it much, except when he dragged me up onto my knees purely for the sake of landing a punch or two; mostly I spent my time fœtal in a corner with my arms wrapped around my vulnerable head while they used their feet, pausing only occasionally for the other man to be inventive with his baton.

  Pain is relative, I suppose, first cousin to an agony aunt when you can’t cry uncle, but this was the mother of all beatings. No time, no space to worry about my cracking ribs, or the deep damage those feet were doing to my gut; it was more instinct than sense that kept me protecting my vulnerable head against the jabbing baton or the sharp stab of a shoe. I wasn’t thinking. All I could do was hurt, and wait.

  And scream a little, I think, until I had no breath left for screaming. I did hear screams, at least, though they seemed quite distant and not at all connected to me. I can’t imagine anyone else was screaming, even in that place and on that night.

  But screams went to grunts quite quickly, and I did know that I was grunting, because I could feel the grunts coming up and they hurt too, hard little bubbles of air and pain that burst in my throat every time a foot drove into my belly.

  So I hurt, likely I screamed and certainly I grunted; and all the time I waited, and at last the thing happened that I was waiting for.

  They stopped.

  They spat on me, once each, I wasn’t looking but I felt warm spit land on my cheek and dribble; and then they went away, locking the door behind them.

  I was unexpectedly glad of that lock, so glad to be locked in and alone again.

  For a while, for a good sweet while I didn’t move a single voluntary muscle. My skin twitched and jumped a little of its own accord, my lungs and heart went on doing their individual things—though I rather wished they’d stop, because even my heartbeat hurt my ribs and breathing was like being kicked again, every shallow and irregular breath—but nothing shifted more than that. Even my eyes I kept closed, to save blinking.

  There must be some still-primitive corner of the human mind, some enduring vestige of the hunter-gatherer soul which goes on believing that stillness equals safety. I lay curled in my corner, still as I could manage, feeling the edges of pain dull slowly as they sawed at my bones, feeling them fade into constant warning aches, don’t move or we’ll all start up again, bright and new and refreshed; and it wasn’t only that I didn’t hurt so much with my muscles slack and unresisting. There was something in my head also, and more than a simple relief at its being over. Over for the moment, at least. I held no illusions now, nor wanted them. There was a contentment in being utterly still, perhaps a contentment in being itself, that I’d been too busy to discover until I was battered into it. And never mind if it was only a chemical state, some mix of adrenalin and endorphins conspiring to mush my mind so that I didn’t care too much about the damage. Feelings are real, as long as you feel them.

  Sweet irony, of course, that I should finally learn to feel relaxed and easy with life, in what would most likely be the last few hours of my life. Unless it was better-grade irony even than that, and actually I was hurt worse than I knew and dying here: starting to drift, losing all connection with the world and that was why it seemed so good suddenly, all for the best in the best of all possible and not at all a burden simply to lie here and not hurt worse than I did.

  Remembering all those people who claim afterlife experiences and the overall uniformity of their vision, I think I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to open my eyes to a tunnel, a bright light and a figure of welcome, all suffused with this same sense of wellbeing. Be it God drawing His souls to heaven or just the common hallucination of a mind contracting, there were enough witnesses to give it credence, to make it again a genuine experience. I think maybe I figured that I’d earned it, that I’d done enough, that it would be no shame to fail now.

  But not God hailed me in that white cell, not God’s voice summoned or sent me back into my body, into my pain and fear.

  Another voice altogether it was that snagged at me, light and dark, young and old and the most unlikely of voices.

  “Jonty,” it said; and that was all but that was enough, that was plenty. I opened my eyes.

  Swirling giddy sickness and a stabbing white glare, the consequences of that deep vertiginous plunge from metaphysical floating into brutalised flesh, a cage of bones locked in a cage of light. My mouth flooded with an acrid saliva and I had to swallow hard, to spare my ribs the agony of throwing up. Still didn’t try to move, wasn’t that stupid, only focused my mind on the impossible sounds of tearing above my head.

  The walls were steel, I knew that. I’d touched them all. And there were steel bars also over the slit of a window; and still I could hear that steel being ripped away like cardboard, and I could feel the sudden rush of cool air into this airless box.

  I closed my eyes again. Couldn’t hope to recapture what I’d felt before, thought most likely that would be lost to me until the next time I slipped close to death, in reality or expectation; but it was easier not to look, and right then what was easy seemed irredeemably attractive.

  I lay in my own created darkness, in my pain and anticipation, listened to the sounds of destruction and didn’t dare to hope. One moment at a time, that was all I could take now, and moment by moment I hea
rd my undreamed-of miracle take shape.

  Heard him tear a hole big enough to step through, then heard him do that thing: heard how he stepped into my cell, stepped over my prone body, crouched down and talked to me.

  “Jonty,” he said again, my unexpected angel. This time when I opened my eyes all I could see was shadow, where his lean and perfect body was blocking out the light.

  “Luke,” I whispered; and if I hadn’t been crying before with the pain and the fear and the brutal efficiency of the men who supplied them, I was certainly crying now, and he was all the excuse that I needed.

  “You’ve been hurt,” he said, showing again his major talent for seeing and stating the immediate, the clear nature of the world.

  I just grunted, letting myself slip into his simple vision, not even trying to think through the pain any more. I lay like a child at his feet, waiting and trusting; and saw him move, watched how he reached out his hands to hold me.

  Cold hands he had, and in all truth a cold heart to go with. But ah, there was magic in his touch. A cold magic also, I suppose, a hard magic with no kindness to it: if I’d been hurting before, his fingers dug away that pain to find a deeper, truer layer underneath. This was pure agony, he brought it to me like a gift and I was bathed in it. An icy fire filled my hollow bones, flowed like slow oil through all my veins and tissues, lit me up I was sure like a flaming glass. No screaming now: I needed to howl, and could not. If I gasped, if I whimpered, that was as much as I could manage.

  He held me tightly, and it seemed that every steel-ripping finger was a conduit that channelled pain until I was more full of it than human blood and bone was built to bear. I writhed in his grasp, my eyes battered at him as my mouth could make no sense; and at last, at long last he let me go and I fell back sobbing into my corner.

  Wanted to lie still again, to curl up with my back to him and the world and close my eyes and have it all, all of it go away. But that was a child’s reaction again, and I could allow myself no more of that.