by Mark Timlin
‘Time to split, honey,’ I shouted above the sound of the flames. ‘We’ll be getting company soon.’
As if to confirm what I’d said, I saw a tiny light blink on about a quarter of a mile away across a darkened field, as a householder in a previously invisible dwelling woke up, and decided to see what all the excitement was about.
We got back into the Mondeo and took off down the secondary road in what I guessed to be a southerly direction for a few miles until we came to a village called Frating Green, where the A133 bisected the B1029, and we swapped cars again. I found a Volkswagen Golf GTI neatly parked on a grass verge, whose doors opened to my hoister’s key. We transferred the guns to the back of the VW, left the police car down the next lane with the keys in the ignition but no thank you note, took the A133 to where it joined the A12 at Colchester and we were back in London before it was light. I drove sedately across town, dropped Dawn and the guns off at the Chevy, then parked the VW in exactly the same spot, give or take a couple of yards, where I’d nicked the Audi the previous afternoon. That would give Old Bill something to think about when they found it and traced its movements back.
I strolled round to where my wife was waiting behind the wheel of the Caprice, she drove us home, and we were in bed as the birds were waking up.
Sunday we laid low. There was a mention of the truck fire on the local news, but they didn’t go into much detail.
On Monday I bought the Telegraph and found this item on page five:
Mysterious Fire in Essex
An unexplained fire destroyed an articulated lorry and its load of flat-packed furniture valued at over £150,000 en route from Amsterdam via the Hook of Holland to a showroom in Wimbledon, south London, early on Sunday morning.
The fire started at approximately one-thirty a.m. in a lay-by on the B1029, just off the A120 close to the village of Frating Green, and the truck and contents were completely gutted by the time emergency services arrived at the scene.
The driver of the vehicle has not been traced although a police spokesman reports no sign of any casualties. The same spokesman refused to comment on suggested links between the fire and the theft of a police patrol car shortly before the incident, from a service station on the A120, but it is known that investigations are taking place in Frating Green itself where a Volkswagen Golf GTI was stolen the same night.
Forensic experts are studying the wreckage as to the cause of the fire which is suspected to be arson.
I passed the paper to Dawn. ‘We’ve had a result,’ I said. ‘That truck’s history.’
She read the piece.
‘They suspect arson,’ she said.
‘You amaze me.’
‘No mention of the drugs.’
‘There wouldn’t be, but I wouldn’t put it past forensics to find some remains.’
‘You think they might?’
‘Depends on how much of the cargo is left and how hard they look. I dunno, love. If we’re lucky they’ll put it down to an insurance fraud and blame the driver. Depends if they catch up with him.’
‘And if they do find the driver and he tells them what happened?’
‘He’s going to have a hard time explaining why a heavily armed man and woman hijacked his load of cheap furniture and destroyed it. What’s he going to tell Old Bill? That we were from the good taste in home furnishings police? No. He’s long gone if you ask me. And even if they do catch up with him, so what? There’s no way of tying any of it in with us.’
‘Except for a trail of stolen cars from Clapham to Harwich and back.’
‘There’s a lot of villains in Clapham.’
‘So that’s it finished?’
‘Looks like it. The case of the private detective’s daughter webbed up in the rave scene has come to a satisfactory conclusion.’
‘You don’t seem very happy.’
I shrugged. ‘That’s not all that’s finished,’ I said.
‘What else?’
‘Judith as a child. She’s nearly a woman now. And I don’t think I did the best job in the world as a father.’
‘So what father does?’
‘Some do. And time’s going past so quickly. There’s not much left to make it up to her.’
‘Poor Nick. What did you do in the beat boom, Daddy, when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were fighting it out for domination in the top twenty hit parade?’
‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘I’m only . . .’ Then I looked up and saw that she was laughing at me. ‘All right. I get you, I’m acting like an old fart.’
‘An extremely boring old fart at that. And you could have another chance.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.
‘Me and you and the patter of tiny feet.’
‘Do what?’ Then it dawned on me what she was saying. ‘You don’t mean you’re . . .’
‘Well I’m not thinking about taking up breeding chihuahuas.’
‘You’re pregnant?’
She nodded.
‘And you came out with me and beat up that truck?’
‘I’m only a little bit pregnant.’
‘How little?’
‘A couple of months. I don’t even show yet.’
I got up and held her. ‘You’re mad,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I’m telling you now. Aren’t you glad?’
‘Course I am. It just takes a bit of getting used to.’
‘We’ll need to get a bigger place.’
‘Whatever you want.’
‘It’s not what I want, Nick, it’s what we need.’
‘Then we’ll do it.’
‘Are you really pleased?’
‘Of course I am.’
‘Then hold me tight. I’m scared.’
‘You don’t have to be scared when I’m around.’
Which of course was patently untrue.
part three
dark is the night
It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood.
Macbeth
They murdered Dawn one night in March. Dawn and her best friend Tracey. Dawn was eight months’ pregnant at the time.
The three of them – I say three, because as far as I was concerned the child was a human being too, though still in Dawn’s womb – were driving back from Tracey’s mother’s place in Milton Keynes, down the M1. Dawn was too big with child to drive by then. She couldn’t fit behind the steering wheel. So they went up for the brief visit in Tracey’s little Renault. They drove back late. Very late. It was three o’clock in the morning when they left for London. Three o’clock on a clear, bright night with an almost full moon and lights down the motorway. Tracey’s mother told me that Tracey hadn’t had a drink or anything else all day. I believed her. Tracey was going to be godmother and she loved Dawn and she loved the child inside her. They couldn’t do a blood alcohol test, because her body was too badly burned. But if they’d been able to, I’m sure it would have come up totally negative.
The crash happened just before junction eleven, the Dunstable turnoff, where a road bridge crosses the motorway, at about three-thirty a.m. There were no witnesses of the actual incident, but another car arrived as the Renault was burning fiercely. But I believed that there were witnesses. I believed that another vehicle was involved, that forced Tracey’s car off the motorway and into the buttress of the road bridge where it burst into flames. But of course there was no proof.
Not then.
I didn’t get the news until around nine that morning. I wasn’t expecting Dawn back until later that day. Tracey’s mother called me. The fire brigade had dowsed down the car, and although it was completely burnt out, the rear number plate was readable. The Renault was registered at Tracey’s flat in Wandsworth. It took that long for the police to do a PNC, get round there, find the place empty, get hold of a neighbour with a spare key, get in, find Tracey’s mother’s address and get hold of her.
She was crying when she telephoned to tell me w
hat happened. I was crying by the time I put down the receiver.
It was then, at nine o’clock on that March morning, with more than just a hint of spring in the air, that I might just as well have died myself. I did. I was dead, but I didn’t lie down. That’s the way it goes.
I drove Dawn’s Chevrolet Caprice station wagon up to Milton Keynes right away. I don’t know how I made it without racking that car up too. I couldn’t stop the tears welling up in my eyes and running down my face. I couldn’t swallow for the lump that was stuck in my throat and I wanted to scream.
I was there by eleven. I took Tracey’s mother to the mortuary in Dunstable. On the way we passed the spot where they’d died, but we didn’t stop. What would’ve been the point? At the mortuary they didn’t want to let us view the bodies. I insisted. I argued that they needed positive identification by a member of family. The pathologist told me that the bodies would be impossible to identify. I insisted some more. I threatened violence at one point, I think. Eventually the pathologist agreed. At one o’clock he took us into a room to see the charred remains of our loved ones.
Now I’ve seen some bad shit in my life, but this was the worst. They were still in the sitting positions they’d been in when they died in the car, but the fire had shrunken the bodies to pygmy size and the only way I could tell one from the other was that beside Dawn was the tiny, blackened skeleton of our baby that they’d removed from her body. God alone knows why. The pathologist told me she would have been a little girl. That made it even worse. Knowing that. We didn’t want to know previously. But we’d agreed that if our child was a girl, we’d call her Daisy. I looked at those little bones and promised all three of them that I’d find out what really happened, and if anyone else was involved, avenge them.
What with seeing the bodies, and the smell of charred flesh and bone that hung like a miasma over the room, I had to leave or I’d’ve thrown up. I went outside with Tracey’s mother and we both lit cigarettes. Mine tasted of burned flesh. I think hers must have too, because we both only took one drag before putting them out. We were both crying again by then, and I felt so cold and lost that I held on to her for comfort. She asked me why they hadn’t tried to escape from the car but I couldn’t answer.
Police forensic scientists checked over the remains of the Renault. It wasn’t an easy job, being so badly damaged by fire. The front nearside was a mess from hitting the bridge, but as far as they could ascertain the steering had been OK. The tyres had all melted, so there was a possibility of a blow out, but they’d never be certain. Otherwise the car seemed mechanically perfect. I guessed that it had been.
The coroner at the post mortem two days later gave a verdict of accidental death.
I didn’t.
Tracey, Dawn and Daisy, who was replaced inside the body of her mother, were buried in Greenwich, side by side, next to the graves of Dawn’s first husband and her first daughter, ironically also killed in a car crash on a motorway.
It would have been too dark a gesture to have had them cremated.
I talked with Tracey’s mother, hard and long, about whether she wanted her daughter buried closer to where she lived. But she said that as Tracey and my wife had been together in life, and together in death too, they should lie together for ever.
She was a brave woman. Braver than me, I think.
The funeral took place on a bright, sunny day, with the Thames running sluggish and brown along one side of the cemetery.
There were about fifty people at the service. The organist played ‘Amazing Grace’, and I cried. Afterwards a lot of us went for a drink at the pub by the side of the river. I wanted to get drunk but couldn’t. Someone drove me home. I can’t remember who.
Laura and Judith came down to visit whilst I was sorting out the arrangements for the funerals and stayed on for the service. They were great. As supportive as anyone could be. But they both had lives to live in Scotland, and after a week or so they went home. That was when things got really bad, because after they’d left I had nothing else to do but wonder who the ‘they’ were that had murdered my wife and child and my wife’s best friend.
I decided to try and find out, but came up with zip.
Inspector Robber had retired to his sister’s on the coast, so I had no friends left on the police force, and when I went to scope out Marshall’s house I found that a young family were living there and nothing was known about the former owner or his girlfriend’s whereabouts.
I wondered what they’d done with the remains of the dog.
Monkey Mann had vanished from his usual haunts too. I spoke to several of his drinking cronies, including the lovely Sonia, but the only information I managed to extract was that he was last seen heading towards Euston and a train bound for the north of England, as relationships between himself and the local police were, to say the least, strained. And to say the most, he was wanted for questioning about a string of second-storey break-ins that had plagued the area for some months.
I even drove to Harwich on a number of Saturdays looking for another Barnhoff truck and trailer, but none appeared on any of the ferries I met.
And that was where the trails petered out.
After that I didn’t do much. I sold the Chevy and my old E-Type Jag to Charlie. I wasn’t planning on driving anywhere. For once he didn’t make any jokes about the motors and told me that if I needed transport he was always there. I suppose I could’ve moved, but I couldn’t bear the hassle. In a strange way I needed to stay in a place that reminded me of Dawn, and Tracey too for that matter. You’ve got to realise I was going crazy then. Quietly out of my head. Maybe if I hadn’t been, all that happened later wouldn’t have. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Then spring came, and not far behind it the summer. I wasn’t in the mood for company and I let the place go. I didn’t wash much, and when I came in from my sporadic trips out, you could tell a man lived in the flat. I dined mostly on takeouts brought to the door. It’s amazing what varieties of cuisine are available for delivery in Tulse Hill. But in the end it was mostly pizza or Chinese that I settled for, and my garbage was full of disposable dishes and cardboard boxes by the end of each week. Disposable dishes, cardboard boxes and bottles, for a disposable life. I was drinking a lot. Hard liquor too. But I was keeping my standards up. No cheap supermarket own-brands for me. It was Jack Daniel’s or nothing. Luckily I had the money. Dawn had been well insured. We’d both taken out policies shortly after we’d found out she was pregnant. Big ones too. And after the coroner’s verdict they paid out a double indemnity on hers.
And I didn’t stop drinking. For weeks I wandered from bar to bar, and the bars were like churches to me. The sacrament came out of a bottle, and I’d drink until the pain went away, but it never did. So I drank some more.
I knelt in these churches too. Knelt in the toilets or in the gutters outside and puked up my guts.
I don’t know how I survived.
My memory of that time isn’t so good. Sometimes days went by that I can’t remember at all, and that’s possibly for the best, because some mornings I woke up with blood on my hands.
By midsummer I was up to a bottle of bourbon a day plus the occasional beer, I hadn’t had my hair cut for months and had grown a beard. A proper one, not just stubble. There was a little grey in it, but when you’ve been through all that I’d been through, a few grey hairs were about to be expected. I was smoking a lot of dope too. I needed a joint to get me out of bed in the morning, several to see me through the day and a big one to help me sleep at night. I dreamt of Dawn a lot that summer. Sometimes in the dreams I didn’t know that she was dead and sometimes I did. Those ones disturbed me the most and I’d often wake up with tears drying on my pillow.
And I listened to music. Fucking stupid things that were lying around the flat. Stuff that Dawn had brought with her when she moved in and I’d never properly noticed before. Some were her favourites and some weren’t. One song in particular I would play over and over again. �
��Dark Is the Night’ it was called, by Shakatak. It had a line that went: ‘Where is the star that lit my skies?’ God knows why she had it. It wasn’t her style at all. Fucking hairdresser’s music from the eighties. But I kept playing it, and I knew where my star had gone. Gone to feed the worms, that’s where.
A pretty sad life, or what? And don’t think I didn’t know it. I thought about topping myself as it goes. Seriously. I had enough guns to make a first-class job of it, and they were the only things I cleaned as the long hot days shortened and autumn loomed.
But I didn’t. I didn’t have the bottle. Enough times I stuck the muzzle of one of the handguns into my mouth and tried to pull the trigger. But I couldn’t. I knew that Dawn and Tracey would never forgive me. Nor Daisy if she could comprehend. And also, even at the worst of times, I had the feeling that one day sooner or later something or someone would turn up that would lead me to the killers of those I had loved, and still did. Maybe they’d try and kill me too. I was up on offer. But they didn’t. Alive I was suffering. Dead, maybe I’d find some peace. And they didn’t want that.
So the year continued until Christmas reared its ugly head, and with it came the bombers.
Even in the state I was in, I’d heard all about the big peace plans in Northern Ireland that year. The newspapers and TV were full of it. The IRA had ceased active terrorism a year or so before and all was right with the world.
But a lot of people were unhappy about it. Work it out for yourself. There was a whole bunch of loose money floating about when the terror campaign was on line. Cash from sympathisers in the US and agitators in the Middle East. Cash from protection rackets. Cash from the sales of arms and cash from the robberies that part funded the Republican movement. Cash from sodding MI6 for all I knew. When the clandestine activities ceased, so did the flow of money, and a lot of people suffered.