Dead Man's Gift and Other Stories

by Simon Kernick

  People run down towards the site of this, the second assassination of a member of our organization in the space of a month. They want to help, but there’s nothing they can do. Trudy T – she of Christian faith and Tijuana hotel rooms – lets loose this stinging scream that’s probably got every dog in a ten-mile radius converging on the church, and the two cops shout for everyone to keep calm and stay put, one of them already talking into his radio. They are roundly ignored.

  I just keep walking, ignored by the crowd, knowing that my disguise, coupled with the plastic surgery I’ve recently under-gone, means that no one will have recognized me.

  Now that I’ve got my revenge, it’s time to start my new life. I always trusted Danny, and I think that’s been my problem. I don’t know when his affair with Diana started, but I guess it must have been a while back. Me and her haven’t been so good lately, and this has been the reason why. I think it was a bit much that they wanted to kill me, though, and make it look like an assassination. Not only is it the worst kind of betrayal, but it was stupid, too. How did they think I wouldn’t find out about it? Maybe love makes us all foolish.

  Anyways, I did find out. A friend of Rootie’s knew the bomb-maker and it didn’t take much to get him to tell me when he was going to be planting his product under my Merc. Diana’s got an older brother – her last living relative, but a guy she rarely sees. His name’s Earl and he lives alone. At least he did. He’s dead now. Being roughly my height and build was a bit unfortunate for him. I had him killed – just to spite her – and his body planted in the Merc on the morning that I was supposed to die. Rather than being ignition-based, the bomb was on a timer (something the cops’ll probably work out eventually, not that it’ll do them much good), and when it went off, tearing the corpse into a hundred unrecognizable pieces, everyone simply assumed it was me who was dead in there.

  Not wanting to give anyone the chance to disprove this theory, I disappeared off the scene, having already opened bank accounts in false names and bought a house for myself in the Bahamas. Only thing was, I couldn’t resist coming back to watch my own funeral and, of course, see the bomb-maker’s talents put to work for a second time. And it was a nice bonus, too. Getting both of them at once. Saves me tracking down Diana later.

  As I get in my own car and leave the scene of carnage behind, I think back to the friendship Danny and me had, and it makes me a little melancholy that it had to end like this. Like the time with Blue, though, I don’t have any regrets. Danny knew the score. It had been banged into him from our earliest days.

  To dishonour your comrades is to deserve their bullets.

  And now he’s had mine.

  I think that if he wasn’t splattered all over the pavement, he’d probably approve.

  Robert Hayer’s Dead

  ‘I used to have a boy like you,’ the man said quietly. ‘A son. His name was Robert.’

  The kid didn’t say anything, just kept his position, sitting on an upturned plastic bucket in the corner of the cellar. He was staring down at the bare stone floor, staring hard, like it mattered. His naturally blond hair was a mess – all bunched and greasy – and his clothes, which were the usual early-teen uniform of baggy jeans, white trainers, white football shirt, had a crumpled, grimy look, like he’d been sleeping in them, which he had.

  ‘I’m going to tell you about my son,’ continued the man, whose name was Charles Hayer. He was stood five feet away from the boy, watching him intently, his face tight and lined with the anguish he felt at recounting the story. ‘He was all I ever had. You know that? Everything. His mother and me, we were still together, but things between us … well, y’know, it just wasn’t right. Hadn’t been for a long time. We’d been married getting on for twenty years, and the spark, the love, whatever you want to call it, it had just gone. You’re too young to understand, but that’s sometimes the way it goes between a man and a wife. You’ll find out one day.’

  ‘Will I?’ asked the kid, still not looking up. No obvious fear in the voice. More resignation.

  Charles Hayer gave the kid a paternal smile that the kid missed. ‘Sure you will,’ he said. ‘But you’ve got to listen to me first. The fact is, Robert was my life. He was a good kid, he never hurt anyone, and he was everything a father would ever want in a child.

  ‘Then one day when he was thirteen years and two months old, they came and took him.’

  He paused. Waited. The kid said nothing. The kid knew.

  Hayer continued. ‘There were three of them involved. The one driving the car was called Louis Belnay. He was forty-two and he had convictions going back to when he was in his mid-teens. Bad convictions. The kind that get you segregated when they put you behind bars. He should have been locked up for life, because everyone knew he was going to remain a constant danger to young boys, because he always had been, and even one of his psychiatrists said he was untreatable, but I suppose that’s not enough for some people. And Belnay was no fool. He knew how to pull the wool over people’s eyes. That’s why he’d only ever done time twice, just a couple of years on each count, which isn’t a lot, considering he’d been a child molester for more than a quarter of a century.

  ‘He didn’t look like a child molester, though, that was the thing. They often say they don’t. He just looked like a normal guy. One of his tricks, if he didn’t have a kid he knew to hand, and he needed to get hold of one, was to impersonate a police officer, a plainclothes guy. Flash the badge, call them over and, bingo, he was away. That’s how he did it with my son. Robert was walking home from his friend’s place – and we’re talking about a walk of a hundred yards here – one night last summer. It was about a quarter past nine, and it wasn’t even fully dark. Somewhere on that hundred yards, Louis Belnay pulled up beside him, flashed that false badge of his and called Robert over. Robert was a trusting kid. He had no reason not to be. His mother and me had warned him about talking to strangers plenty of times, but this guy was a cop, so of course it should have been no problem. Robert did as he was told and approached the vehicle, and while Belnay spoke to Robert, his accomplice came round the other side of the car, had a quick check round to see that the coast was clear, then bundled him in the back, putting a cloth soaked in chloroform over his face to make sure he stayed nice and quiet. The accomplice’s name was Patrick Dean.’

  Hayer couldn’t entirely suppress a shudder. Just repeating Dean’s name aloud could do that to him. Always would now.

  ‘Now some people say that child molesters can’t help what they do, that they’re diseased rather than wicked, and I don’t know, maybe that’s true for some of them. But not Dean. Dean was – is – just pure fucking evil. He just liked to hurt people, kids especially. It was a power trip to him, a way of showing how strong he was to the world, that nothing was sacred to him. If he was here with you now, he’d hurt you bad. Do things to you that you cannot even begin to imagine. Sexual things, painful ones. And he’d enjoy every minute of it too, right up to the moment he put his hands round your neck and squeezed, or put the knife across your throat.’

  The kid flinched. Hayer saw it. Like someone had threatened him with a slap. He still didn’t look up. Hayer felt bad. He didn’t like putting the kid through it, didn’t like putting himself through it. But there was no other way. He had to explain.

  ‘Dean was strong. Big too. Six three and fifteen stone. That’s why they used him for the physical stuff. That, and the fact that he didn’t scare easily. Ten years ago, while he was in Brixton prison, serving time for some assault and molestation charges, he made a formal complaint to the governor about the way he was being treated. The guards doing the mistreatment warned him that if he didn’t drop the complaint, they’d stick him in with the general jail population and let him take his chances. He told them to go fuck themselves. They carried out their threat, he got the shit kicked out of him, but he still went through with the complaint. The guards ended up suspended, several of them lost their jobs, and he got released early, even though he
was what one detective called “a walking time-bomb”.

  ‘And on that night the walking time-bomb met my son, and Robert never stood a chance. He must have seen Dean coming round the car, but because he thought he was a cop he didn’t run. Maybe if he’d been a couple of years older he would have done, and I guess they counted on that. It was all over in seconds. One minute he was walking down the street minding his own business, looking forward to the holiday the three of us were going to have in Spain the following week, the next he was unconscious in the back of a car, being driven away by two dangerous paedophiles who should never have been out on the streets in the first place. And no one saw a thing.

  ‘I don’t know how long he lived after that. I don’t like to think about it, to tell you the truth. It’s too much. Either way, they took him back to the home of the third guy, Thomas Barnes, and that’s where they raped and killed him. Barnes said that the other two made him film it … everything … but the police never found the tape, so I don’t know if he was telling the truth or not. But then, why would you lie about something like that?’

  Hayer sighed. His throat was dry. He felt awkward standing there, looking down at a silent boy who was only a few months older than Robert had been on the night they’d taken him. Hayer wanted to cry again, to let his emotions do their work, if only because it would show the kid that he wasn’t such a bad man – that he too felt pain – but no tears came out, in the way they’d done on so many occasions before. It seemed like the well of sorrow and self-pity had finally run dry.

  ‘After they’d finished with him, they cut up the body. Took off his legs, his arms, his head, and tried to burn the pieces separately. It didn’t work properly – apparently the body fat melts and it acts to stifle the flames – so they ended up having to put everything in separate bin bags and dumping them at different sites. The bag containing one of his partially burned legs and a section of his torso was found washed up on a riverbank a couple of months later by a man walking his dog. Other parts turned up after that beside a railway line, and at a landfill site. But they never found his head. We had to bury him in pieces.’

  This time the kid did look up. His face was streaked with tears. ‘Listen, please. Why are you telling me all this? I don’t want to hear it.’ His eyes were wide, imploring. Innocent.

  Hayer’s inner voice told him to be strong. ‘You have to hear it,’ he said firmly.

  ‘But I don’t—’

  ‘Just listen,’ snapped Hayer.

  The kid stopped speaking. His lower lip began to quiver and his face crinkled and sagged with emotion. Robert had pulled an expression like that once. It had been after he’d broken an expensive vase while he’d been fooling about in the family kitchen. The vase had been a birthday present from Hayer to his wife, and on discovering what Robert had done, Hayer had blown his top at the boy, shouting so loudly that he could have sworn his son’s hair was standing on end by the time he’d finished. But when Robert had pulled that powerless, defeated face, all the anger had fallen away, to be replaced by guilt at his own unnecessary outburst. God knows, he hadn’t wanted to hurt him. His only child. His dead-and-gone son.

  ‘They found DNA on some of the body parts,’ he continued, his voice as dispassionate as he could manage under the circumstances. ‘The DNA belonged to Barnes, who was also a convicted child sex offender. Barnes was arrested, admitted his part in the death of my son and expressed terrible regret. He also named Belnay and Dean as being involved.

  ‘Belnay and Dean both went on the run, but were caught quickly enough and charged with murder, as was Barnes. We buried what was left of our son and waited for some sort of closure with the trial. But of course we never got it. Because a man called Gabriel Mortish denied us that.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said the kid.

  Hayer nodded. ‘Oh God, indeed. Gabriel Mortish, QC, one of the best defence barristers in the country, well known for taking on the cases that no one else wants to touch. He’s defended all sorts. Terrorists, serial killers, rapists. If you’re one of the bad guys, he’ll be there supporting your right to maim, torture and murder with everything he’s got. If you’ve never done a thing wrong in your life, tried to treat others like you’d want to be treated yourself, then he’s not interested in you. So, of course, it went without saying that Mortish took on the defence of Belnay and Dean. Not Barnes, because Barnes had shown some remorse for what he’d done, admitted that he’d played a part in it. That made him part-human and Mortish is only interested in helping out sub-humans.

  ‘Belnay and Dean denied everything. Said it was nothing to do with them, but it came out that a neighbour remembered seeing the two of them leaving Barnes’ house the day after Robert disappeared, and when the police found the car used to abduct him, they found Belnay’s DNA in that. But the two of them stuck to their story. Said that they knew Barnes and had been round his house, but that was the extent of their involvement. Instead they blamed him, claiming that he’d been acting very erratically when they were round there, and came close to admitting that he’d been the one responsible for the abduction. But Barnes said it was the other way round. According to him, it was Dean doing the killing with Belnay encouraging him, and it was Dean who did the chopping up of the body afterwards.’

  Hayer sighed. ‘Your dad did a good job, son. I had to give him that. I watched him every day in that courtroom. He sowed doubt like it was a breeding rabbit, put it everywhere. Sure, he said, Belnay and Dean were not nice guys, no question of that, but were they guilty of this heinous crime? He said the evidence suggested strongly that they weren’t. He made the neighbour, the witness who’d seen them leave Barnes’ place, sound all confused about whether it was actually them she’d seen. Then Barnes got put on the witness stand and your dad wound him up in knots. Did he see Dean or Belnay kill Robert? If so, why didn’t he try to stop it? Wasn’t he just blaming them to take the heat off himself?’

  Hayer sighed, addressing the kid directly now. ‘You know what happened? Course you do. Barnes ended up admitting that he hadn’t seen either of them actually kill Robert, that he’d been out of the room at the time, but he came across like a shifty witness – someone you weren’t going to believe. Your dad made him look like that. Your dad discredited the evidence to such an extent that Barnes, who didn’t have him as a lawyer, got life for murder, but Belnay got away with seven years as an accessory. And Dean …’ He spat the name this time. ‘The judge directed the jury to acquit him. Said the evidence against him just wasn’t reliable. That was your dad’s doing. He got one of them seven years, meaning the bastard’ll be out in four, and the other – the one who was pure fucking evil, who cut my son into little pieces – he got him off. He walked free, and now he’s living on the outside with police fucking protection, just to make sure that no one tries to take the law into their own hands and trample on his precious human rights, even though no one gave a shit about my son’s human rights. He’s even strode past this house a couple of times, just to fucking torment me. THAT IS NOT JUSTICE!’ He shouted these last four words, shouted them at the non-existent heavens, his voice reverberating round the dull confines of the cellar.

  The kid opened his mouth, started to say something, but Hayer was not to be interrupted. ‘That man … your father destroyed me. He took away the last thing I had left: closure. A week after the trial, two months ago, Robert’s mother and I split up. Neither of us could take any more. She’s contacted a lawyer and the divorce’ll be going through sometime soon. All I’ve got left is my job. Adding up numbers on one side of a page, taking them away on another.’

  ‘Please, I …’

  ‘Shut up. Just shut up. Listen to me.’ He paused for a moment, tried to calm himself down, knew it wouldn’t happen. Not until he’d said his piece. ‘I can’t stand my job, I can’t stand what my life has become. I can’t … I can’t stand fucking any of it, and that’s why you’re here. You’ve got to understand that. What those men did to Robert, what they stole from me, that
half put me in the grave. What your dad did, what he did on behalf of bastards who do not deserve to even be alive, let alone walking free, well that pushed me the rest of the way. I’ve got nothing left to lose now. That’s why I snatched you. That’s why you’re here. Because I’ve got to make him suffer like I’ve suffered. It’s the only way. Some people say two wrongs don’t make a right, some people say that you can’t stoop down to a bad man’s level, but it’s bullshit. It’s all fucking bullshit propagated by people who haven’t been torn apart by suffering, by injustice.’

  ‘But you don’t understand.’

  ‘Don’t understand what?’ he yelled. ‘Don’t understand what? I understand fucking everything, that’s the problem!’

  The kid shook his head. Fast. ‘No, you don’t. Honestly. The man you’re talking about …’ The voice quietened, almost to a whisper. ‘He’s not my dad.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This man, Mortish, he’s not my dad. My name’s Blake. Daniel Blake. Lucas Mortish goes to my school. We’ve got the same-colour hair, but my dad’s an IT director. Please, I promise you.’

  The tension in Hayer collapsed, replaced by a thick black wave of despair. He looked closely at the boy. Was he wrong? What if he was?

  ‘Oh shit. Oh no.’

  The cellar seemed to shrink until it was only inches square. A heavy silence squatted in the damp air. The kid snivelled. Hayer just stood there, defeat etched deep on a face that had seen far too much of it during the previous year.

  Ten seconds passed. The kid snivelled again. Hayer didn’t know what else to say.

  It was the kid who finally broke the silence. ‘I’m sorry about your son,’ he said, trying to look like he understood, ‘but it was nothing to do with me.’

  This time it was Hayer who couldn’t bear to look the kid in the eye. Instead the whole world finally fell apart for him and, with a hand that was shaking with emotion, he reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out the 2.2-calibre handgun he’d bought illegally three weeks ago in a pub (for either a murder or a suicide, he hadn’t known which), fumbled and released the safety, then placed the cold barrel hard against his temple and pulled the trigger.