I Want Him Dead

by Anthony Masters

  I WANT HIM DEAD

  ANTHONY MASTERS

  PROLOGUE

  “Thin ice,” she said. “That’s what really gets me going.” His mam was radiant in the cold nip of a November Sunday, the high clouds tumbling over the orange orb of a tepid sun.

  Myriad cobwebs covered the hedgerows around the pond and the grass was stiff with the night’s frost.

  Mam ran to the edge, her tall figure wrapped in the old black overcoat, her prematurely aged face pale and craggy, her thin red hair blowing in the harsh little breeze that was springing up, breaking the stillness of the morning, making the ice in the long grass crackle.

  “Come on, Joe.”

  “It won’t take me,” he muttered, his skinny eleven-year-old frame shivering in the thin anorak.

  “It’s not deep.”

  “I’ll catch me death.”

  “Have faith,” she said, walking out on to the dull ice in her wrinkled boots.

  She looks a right old witch, he thought. If the ice goes she’ll walk on water, but he didn’t have her luck. The luck of the devil, Eamonn had said. Joe knew he’d been a fool to venture out with her.

  “We’re two of a kind, Joe,” she had told him. “We’re the wild ones.”

  Well, she was anyway.

  “Come on, Joe!”

  Reluctantly he followed her on to the ice. The surface was more sticky than slippery, and he could feel it give, but it was too late to go back now.

  “You have to get to the other bank,” Mam dared him. “Come on. You’re my strong man. You’re going places, Joe.”

  He tried to slide, but he could see a thin crack beginning to spread.

  “It’s breaking up.”

  “Not if you hurry yourself.”

  She was already at the opposite bank and her thin veined hand was reaching out to him.

  “Come on, Joe.”

  The ice sagged and he couldn’t move.

  “Make a spurt of it,” she said.

  A thin stream of water oozed out of the crack and Joe heard a shifting, grinding sound.

  He shuffled warily towards her and broke into a slithering run as the ice gave way beneath him, ending up scrabbling at the bank whilst his plimsolls filled with numbing cold water.

  As Mam pulled Joe up she laughed and clasped him to her, and they both gazed down at the miniature ice floes below, lapped by the dark horror of the freezing water.

  “That’s what it’s all about,” she whispered to him.

  “Goodnight, Eamonn. Sweet dreams.”

  Mam kissed him and he could smell the scent she always wore. Later he knew that it was jasmine, but at nine years old he just thought of it as Mam. The light evening breeze rustled his bedroom curtains, blowing through the crack of window she always insisted on leaving open. “Stuffy nights make for stuffy minds,” she told Eamonn. “Mam’s Law,” his brother Joe said.

  It had been a bad day in the stone cottage which stood on the edge of town and had once belonged to a shepherd, for Eamonn knew that his mam had just been stood up again. Of course she had always insisted the stand-ups were his fault.

  “No man wants to take on a bed-wetter,” she had told him. “No decent man. You’re ruining my life, Eamonn Coyd, that’s what you’re doing. Why can’t you be more like your brother? He’s a regular little charmer, that one.”

  He wished he could be, for he would do anything to please her. Eamonn loved to see his mam get into her fine linen dresses or light blue suits, and then she was off to the Tara Ballroom. She had a way with her, and she would have because she was a beauty, wasn’t she? Everyone knew that. Any man would fall for her pretty red hair and freckles.

  “You’re the skeleton in my fucking cupboard,” she had once told Eamonn, slapping him round the face until his cheeks were blistered sore. It was true that once she brought a man home it was not long before he took off. “One look at you,” she had said, “and I never saw him again.”

  Once she had introduced Eamonn to a Dermot Crane as “the runt of the litter”. As a small child, he had never been sure what that meant.

  Despite all his mam had done to him Eamonn still loved her. She couldn’t do any wrong, and the fact that she openly loathed him had only made him cling to her more closely. “You’re a fucking limpet,” she had told him, as he clasped her waist while she belted him over the head with a hairbrush. “One day I’ll kill you,” she had promised. “So help me God.”

  Her hatred was justified, Eamonn had instinctively thought. He was a bed-wetter, a skeleton, a limpet. It was his fault.

  Mam always went easy on Joe, saying he had “a bit of a man about him”. She would cuddle him a lot and draw him into her bed, but not Eamonn. “I can’t take your wet knickers,” she always said. “You stink of piss.”

  He knew he did, but the wetting wouldn’t stop even though she warned him that she’d “turn him over to the welfare”.

  Eamonn had never been jealous of his brother, but there was nothing that Joe could do for him. Nothing that anyone could do. Mam had needed a scapegoat and now Eamonn had invented his own scenario, spun his own yarn.

  The story was that Mam loved him and didn’t harm him and had never hated him at all.

  Sometimes she got worse and had to go away while the boys went to their Auntie Deborah’s, but Eamonn always missed his mam, however badly she treated him.

  Today, Eamonn had seen the anger in her eyes from the moment he got up. She was in one of her moods, though even then she was still beautiful. Tall and willowy like Joe, not short and wiry like him. “Satan’s imp,” she nicknamed him.

  When he first glimpsed his mam that morning he knew she had been awake all night. She had been angry when he went to school and angry when he got back, but later she had gone quiet and Eamonn couldn’t think why; normally her temper rose in the evening although to his knowledge she never touched a drop. Tonight, uncharacteristically, she was calm and loving and patient, even when he spilled his orange drink on the floor. That would normally have meant a whack round the head, but all she gave him was a sigh and then an unexpected smile. “You’ll be the clumsy boy, then.”

  “I’m sorry, Mam.”

  “Come on — it’s not the end of the world, is it?”

  Even Joe was surprised, and when she was crashing the washing-up in the kitchen he whispered to Eamonn that she “had that look”.

  Now, as Eamonn lay in bed, he wanted to go on remembering his mam’s good mood for ever, the gentle kiss, her scent, the calm. Was she always going to be good to him now? Was she going to stop being angry? Stop getting sick? Eamonn shut his eyes and imagined life with a loving Mam.

  He woke to her shouting and at first he couldn’t make out what she was yelling. Then he realized she was repeating one word over and over again. “Burn.” He heard a splashing sound, the striking of a match, and then the spluttering of the first flames. “Burn, you little fucker. Burn.”

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  A Note on the Author

  PART

  ONE

  The Candy Man

  Lying in the darkness, grim with anger

  against the one lying by your side,

  herself grim with anger

  at your lying

  so gri
m with anger by her side.

  This night only absence will be her lover,

  only wrath will be your bride.

  JOHN MONTAGUE: Wrath

  Chapter 1

  Joe watched the snow falling on the Thames, each flake merging with the next, the flurry becoming a white blanket, distorting distance, reducing visibility, immuring him on the sixteenth floor. He was idly watching an old movie and Timothy was asleep in the next room, lying on his back, the tiny blankets a tight sheath around him, a pale-blue cocoon.

  The intercom buzzer sounded and Joe gazed into the screen, wondering as usual whether his precious moments of easy lethargy were over, the cold sweat breaking out on him as it so often did nowadays. He was always waiting, but the Candy Man never came. Eamonn was sure he was just biding his time, but Carla said he would never come. Not now. But that was Carla — she could convince herself of anything. She was an optimist.

  They should have gone abroad, he told himself yet again, but Carla had disagreed.

  “Think about it, Joe. We changed our names, we changed the way we look and we’re a long way from Glasgow. What more do you want? We’re not big enough for the Costas. We’re the sprats, not the mackerels.”

  Joe picked his teeth and with sudden resolution stretched his tall skinny frame and went to the intercom.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr Barrington?”

  “Who wants him?”

  “Police.”

  The panic surged through him so fast and so suffocatingly that he could hardly stand. His throat tightened and an ache spread inside that was like a twisted gut.

  “Come up.”

  While Joe waited, he conjectured. He’d done nothing so it had to be the car. Were they coming to say she was dead? Isn’t that what they usually came to say? Outside the snow seemed to have thickened again. Carla must have skidded. It was so cold. He should never have let her go out. She wasn’t that experienced a driver. Joe felt sick and then faint, not able to focus on anything but his heartbeat pumping so painfully.

  The knock on the white-panelled, imitation Adam door was brisk, but when Joe wrenched it open the first thing he saw was the barrel of the silenced automatic.

  The Candy Man had come at last. Eamonn had been right.

  McMarn was well dressed as usual in light tweeds with a wide floral tie, but there were lines on his face that Joe hadn’t seen before and he looked all of his seventy years.

  He and his companion moved casually into the well-furnished room and gazed round appraisingly, shaking off the snow on their coats so that it fell on to the deep pile of the white carpet, glistening for a moment before the damp spread.

  Apart from the lines, Michael McMarn was unchanged. He was short, with powerful shoulders and a boxer’s misshapen nose, and had the same old hesitant smile, as if he was shy, unsure of his ground. In fact Joe had never met a man who was more certain, more obsessive.

  “Very Laura Ashley. Can’t think where the money went. Not on this tat.” McMarn gazed round with distaste.

  “My wife’s mother —” began Joe.

  “Doesn’t have a fucking bean.”

  “You changed your name, and the way you look, but it was a waste of time, wasn’t it? Especially as your brother’s still loyal to the family name. In fact it’s the only name he uses, isn’t it? Coyd. Sounds like cold fish, doesn’t it?” McMarn turned to his silent companion. “Don’t I get a chuckle, Leslie?”

  Leslie chuckled.

  So that’s how they got to me, Joe thought. Through Eamonn. But how?

  McMarn smiled comfortably. “We watched the lady wife leave. In the Volvo. The one I indirectly bought her. When does she get back?”

  “An hour.” Joe was so relieved that nothing had happened to Carla that he felt drained, unable to react to all this.

  “I’d like a drink from that walnut-veneered cocktail bar over there. Does it play a tune?”

  “What will you have?”

  “Malt.”

  Without speaking he poured them both Glenlivet.

  “Not having one yourself?” asked McMarn. He was sitting on the sofa as Joe handed him the glass and the younger man, Leslie, was standing with his back to the window, the automatic resting on the sill.

  “I can’t pay you,” Joe said flatly, wanting to take the initiative and assess his negotiating position, though he didn’t think he had one.

  “How long’s it been? A year?” McMarn was jovial, but he looked exhausted.

  “Maybe.”

  A long contemplative silence followed.

  “I thought you’d gone across the water to have fun and games with the ex-pats.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Your brother’s distinctive, isn’t he?”

  “He told you where I was?” But he wouldn’t have. Joe knew that Eamonn wasn’t a grass, could never be bought. His brother was the only one he trusted.

  “Nothing so disloyal.”

  “You had him followed?”

  “I had you followed.”

  “When was that?”

  “Saturday. You and Eamonn had a drink together at The Blue Boy.” He sipped his malt. “Leslie here had your pizza-face brother under surveillance for a week. Just to see if there was any brotherly love left. And there was.”

  “Now you’ve found me,” began Joe, “there must be some way we can do business.”

  But McMarn was determined to milk his mounting agitation. “What have you been doing with yourself?”

  “Not a lot.”

  “Money run out?”

  “I want to talk about that.”

  “I don’t accept hire purchase. Payments can be erratic.”

  “Mine won’t.”

  McMarn shook his head.

  Joe felt a wave of nausea rising from the pit of his stomach and he cursed himself for being so naive. The Candy Man had the worst kind of reputation, but he had been relieved to get the job at short notice. He had been flat broke and the pay had been generous — even before he had seized the opportunity to make off with the take.

  “If you work for the Candy Man you’re rolling in shit,” Eamonn had told him.

  “I’ll roll in shit for anyone if the pay’s good,” Joe had replied.

  “You know he runs rent-boys?”

  Joe had told his brother that he did and that it didn’t make any difference.

  “Forty grand?” McMarn was laughing gently at him now. “You’re not going to pay that back, are you? You’ve spent it, haven’t you?”

  “So what are you going to do?” asked Joe hopelessly.

  Timothy made a whimpering sound and McMarn glanced up. “That’s nice. A kiddy.”

  The look in his eyes made Joe so afraid that he could feel the cold sweat breaking out all over his body.

  “Comfort the bairn.”

  Leslie gave McMarn the automatic and began to walk towards the bedroom door, but Joe got there first.

  “You touch him — and I’ll fucking kill you.”

  McMarn smothered a yawn while Leslie kneed Joe in the balls.

  He was curled up on the floor, the pain gradually receding, when Leslie returned with Timothy gurgling in his arms, the baby looking trustingly up into his captor’s eyes, his cheeks pink, bringing with him the smell of sleep and his mother’s milk.

  “You’re a natural, Les,” said McMarn admiringly. “Isn’t Les a natural, Joe?”

  He struggled to his feet, but the pain bit again.

  “Go to the window, Les,” said McMarn. “Baby needs fresh air.”

  Joe grabbed at the sofa for support, and stood there, gasping and wheezing, unable to move. “For Christ’s sake!”

  Leslie was opening the balcony door.

  “Don’t take him out there.”

  “The air’s cleaner at this height,” observed McMarn. “Or so I’ve heard.”

  Using all his will-power, Joe Barrington began to stagger towards the balcony. As he painfully inched his way across the room, McMarn h
it him in the stomach with the butt of the automatic and he went down again, vomiting over the white carpet.

  “What are you going to do?” Joe whispered when he had found the strength to communicate again.

  McMarn sighed. “If Les went and dropped your bairn he’d end up raspberry jam, wouldn’t he?”

  Joe never realized the man could be so barbaric — but then he hardly knew him. Now he stared at his features, swollen and battered, his face clean-shaven, with the white and pink look that some elderly men seemed to acquire. His eyes were grey, and Joe remembered them from the first time he had met him. Then they had had a cool, appraising, mocking quality, but now they seemed almost disdainful, as if he was already tired of playing this game, as if it was just a means to a wearisome end.

  “Rock-a-bye, baby, on the tree-top. When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. Do you get a lot of wind up here, Joe? I’m not speaking personally, of course.”

  Joe was leaning against the sofa again, the sweat streaming down his face while the sideboard clock musically chimed the hour.

  McMarn gazed at a Dresden shepherdess that Carla had bought last year. “You’re not the type for a piggy-bank or a nest-egg, are you, Joe?” he observed. “With you it’s just spend, spend, spend. And what have you got to show for it? Laura Ashley, a few knick-knacks, the Volvo. Here today. Gone tomorrow. You just live for the day, don’t you?” He glanced at his watch and sighed. “But money makes the world go round, doesn’t it?”

  Timothy was crying now, feeling the cold, losing confidence in his minder.

  “What do you want me to do?” Joe demanded, but he knew he was begging.

  McMarn sighed again, as if in commiseration. “I want you to waste somebody.”

  The long silence was punctuated by Timothy’s whimpering.

  “How does this get your money back?” Joe asked eventually. He had never killed before and doubted if he was capable of doing so.

  “You’ve got a lot to lose, Joe, haven’t you? As for the money — let’s say you had your fee in advance. Your whole fee.” McMarn stood up and came over to Barrington. His dentures weren’t quite even and his breath smelt of Marmite. “Glasgow’s out looking for me, Joe.” He paused and ran his fingers over the little shepherdess. “I need to show muscle.”