by David Mark
“Time to play,” says Downey, and is rewarded with a trio of smiles.
They head outside, into air that feels baking hot despite the hour. The sky reminds him of a white towel that has been mixed in with a dark wash.
Downey and his men climb, wordlessly, into a large American four-by-four. Bruno had turned up in it tonight and nobody has questioned him about its origins. It’s large, comfortable, and stylish, and Downey feels very much at home as he slides, dizzily, into the leather passenger seat and hears the throaty hum of the engine turning over.
“We good, boss?”
Bruno asks the question quietly. The two Turks are on their team, but there is an unspoken agreement that the men in the front of the car are in charge.
Downey’s head is spinning. His eyes are open but he’s struggling to take in much about the scene before him. He shakes his head and slaps his cheeks. Focuses. Sees . . .
The SUV is cruising down Hedon Road, past the entrance to the docks; the cemetery; the prison. He watches the landscape change as they approach the overpass. To his left is Sammy’s Point, where the glass-paneled city aquarium sits on a jutting spit of land. They cross the River Hull; its muddy banks curving down to chocolate-colored water. They pass through a city that Downey thinks of as his own. He finds himself giggling as he waves a hello to the statue at the crossroads. It’s a man on a golden horse. It might be a king. It’s stood there for as long as he can remember. Downey once heard a rumor that the sculptor killed himself because he got the stirrups wrong. It’s outside a pub that used to be run by a local rugby legend called Flash Flanagan; a good old bloke who wore Elvis glasses and became a fixture in the Old Town after he retired from the game. Played on a Lions tour, apparently. The story goes that he turned up for the flight without a passport and carrying his clothes in a carrier bag . . .
My city, my people, my city, my people . . .
Downey’s mind feels alive.
Wired.
Memories are fizzing inside his skull. The lights on the highway seem to be blurring and forming shapes. He wants to talk to Bruno. Wants to tell him that he’s on top of everything and that this is just another step down a road he’s already mapped out. But his mouth feels dry and his heart is beating too hard, so he says nothing. Just closes his eyes and lets the car drift toward the Humber Bridge. Enjoys a fantasy or two and lets his brain become a pan of popping corn.
You’re the man, Downey. The man!
He feels powerful. A fucking king! Feels tired, too. Feels his eyes closing even as his blood seems to hiss in his veins.
Minutes later, Bruno’s hand is on his shoulder, shaking him awake. The vehicle is parked on a nondescript side street in the small town of Hessle. He vaguely remembers telling Bruno this was the plan.
“This way.”
He points and sets off up the road, looking in the windows of the large, three-story town houses. Nice place. Decent folk. Could kill them all with a point and a nod . . .
He crosses a main road, then down a little back alley; leaves and branches sticking out from the slats in the old fence. Dead leaves crinkling and turning to dust underfoot. They emerge on the foreshore. Downey looks up at the Humber Bridge. He’s walked across it plenty of times. His mom did some sort of charity jog for breast cancer across it a few years back. It’s a familiar, comforting thing.
The Turks are muttering between themselves. He gives them a nod and they smile back, all teeth and stubble.
“Oh, we’re going to have such fun . . .”
Downey checks his phone. Double-checks the address. Walks on, softly, until he finds the house. Four cottages, side by side. White paint and a pale blue trim. Picket fence and dainty eaves. Welcoming lights and herbs in a window box, freshly labeled, the soil a rich brown.
Cautiously, urging the others to stay back, Downey walks to the front of the property. The small fence shields a front yard of no more than six feet by ten, and he can see straight into the front room.
“Bingo.”
She’s there. The gypsy bitch. She’s unpacking some cardboard boxes and turning to talk to somebody on the sofa. He angles his head and is surprised to see the seamstress. She’s wearing a hoodie and is hugging a cushion, feet drawn up. Cross-legged on the floor is a young lad with red hair. He’s drawing in a coloring book, his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration.
It’s a nice scene.
There’s no sign of the copper.
Downey wonders if he should just knock on the door. The orders are clear enough. He’s to hold a phone to McAvoy’s ear and play him a message. That’s it. Roisin is not to be harmed. Not now. Not yet. But the bitch had hurt him. She’d kicked him in the balls and took his money. She’d made him doubt himself and reminded him what a pathetic little weakling he really is. He wants to hurt her.
Downey chews his cheek with his back teeth. Rubs a hand across the scabs on his chest. He begins to consider the consequences. His employers have indulged him this far. He’s proven his usefulness several times, and they moved mountains to get the charges against him dropped. Would they lose patience if he were to slap the bitch around a little? After all, it’s his crew. His patch. It’s his city . . .
He feels Bruno approach him. Smells marijuana and clothes dried in a damp room. He turns and looks into the big man’s face. Downey looks at him, questioningly, and Bruno gives a nod that could mean anything.
“Playtime, boss?”
With coke coursing through his veins, Downey takes it as an affirmation. Takes it as agreement that they should kick the door in and drag the bitch to the ground by her hair.
“That’s them,” he says, pointing. “It’s the right house. There’s a kid, but—”
“A kid?” asks Bruno. “Fuck.”
“Take him in another room. There’s no need for him to see.”
Bruno presses his lips tight together. He sniffs. Turns to the Turks and tells them they’re to follow him inside. Then he turns back to Downey.
“You sure, boss? I’m game, but you’re going to have to stuff something in their mouths not to wake the neighbors.”
Downey considers the adjacent houses. None of the others seem occupied. While there are people strolling past and enjoying the warm air down by the water’s edge, the area is quiet enough for him and his team to do what they want.
“She needs to learn her lesson,” says Downey. “They all need to see.”
He opens the garden gate.
One step.
Two.
Three.
Fuck, fuck, fuck . . .
Before he can talk himself out of it, Downey bangs on the painted wood of the front door. A moment passes in which a part of him begins to hope that nobody will answer. Then Roisin McAvoy opens the door, smiling wide, halfway through inquiring whether he has lost his key—
It all happens fast and loud.
Bruno pushes past Downey, causing him to stumble against the doorframe. He hears Roisin let out just the quickest of shrieks and then Bruno’s hand is around her mouth. He’s dragging her down the hall, knocking a photograph from the wall so that it smashes on the cord carpet.
“Keep her quiet, keep her quiet!”
The Turks run past him, too. Downey finds himself staggering; one arm on the wall to keep himself upright. He hears a door bang, then there are cries and shouts.
Christ, what are we bloody doing?
He slides along the wall, his mind racing and his heart thudding like two rams butting heads. Then he staggers into the living room.
One of the Turks has Roisin against the wall. Her feet are off the floor and her face is turning purple. The other is pressing Mel’s face into the sofa, pulling down her tracksuit trousers as he does so. There is a tattoo at the base of her spine. Downey suddenly wants to cut the thing off. Wants to stick her with pins. Sew her bloody
lips together.
“Little bastard bit me!”
Downey turns to see Bruno, sucking a wound on his hand, kicking a sideboard over in front of a small door beneath the staircase. The muffled cries and screams within suggest that the boy inside is fighting to get out.
“Close the fucking curtains,” says Downey, and Bruno does as he is commanded.
Downey crosses to where Memluk is throttling Roisin.
“You like that, sweetie?”
He looks into her eyes. Sees nothing but fear. Sees frothy spittle pop from between her lips and land on her chin. The sight reminds him of an earlier fantasy, and he lashes out with his right fist, hitting her hard in the mouth. The blow bursts her lips and smashes her head back against the wall.
“Aw, did that sting?”
Behind him, he can hear Mel kicking and biting, and then mumbled, foreign curses.
“Drop her,” says Downey to Memluk, and Roisin tumbles to the floor. Rather than lying there as he had expected, she scrambles to her feet, looking around for her child.
She fixes her eyes on Downey.
“He’ll kill you,” she says, and blood sprays out to spill on the exposed skin above her tank top.
Downey laughs, hoping Bruno will join in. But nobody does. The only noises are of violence and fear and there is nothing fun about any of it. He loses his temper. Fixes his venom on Roisin, then lashes out with a kick. She’s tiny and tries to dodge, but he still connects where he had intended. She falls forward, both hands between her legs, as Downey finds himself giggling and pointing, excited, like a child . . .
As Downey turns to seek Bruno’s approval, a figure appears in the doorway. Bruno senses him, too, and turns, just as a fist the size of a boiled ham takes him in the jaw. Bruno’s head snaps back as if he has been struck under the chin with a golf club, and he falls like a tree.
The Turks both move toward the new threat and Downey watches, entranced and motionless, as the giant, flame-haired figure in the doorway lunges forward and hits them like a train.
“Stop, stop . . .”
Before Downey can finish the sentence, he feels pain screaming through his left leg. He looks down and locks eyes with the gypsy girl as she sinks her teeth into his skin. He opens his mouth to cry out, but before he can do so, a giant, pale, freckled hand closes around his lower jaw and he is pushed back across the living room and slammed into the wall.
A face is in front of his.
Broad.
Handsome.
Scarred.
Furious beyond words.
“A message,” says Downey desperately. “I’ve got a message . . .”
He winces, waiting for the fist to slam into his jaw, but the big man drops him as one of the Turks hits the giant with a punch to the lower back.
Downey’s mind clears for a second.
Her husband.
The copper.
He watches as McAvoy turns. Watches as the big man grabs Memluk by his shirt and throws him at the wall so hard that a crack appears from floor to ceiling; the fresh plaster splitting like dry wood. Tokcan grabs him by the knees and the two of them go down in a melee of arms and legs.
Downey gasps for air. He reaches down and feels the blood on his leg and the sensation clears his senses for a moment. He looks over and sees Tokcan on McAvoy’s back, his arm around his throat. Sees McAvoy stand; the weight upon him unimportant.
Downey wants to run. He wants to push his way free and run into the warm air. He wants to be somewhere else. Someone else . . .
Without knowing why, without even realizing he is doing it, Downey pulls the phone from his pocket. He fumbles with the buttons. Finds the message on his answering service and turns the volume up as far as it will go. Then he lurches forward and presses the phone to the big man’s ear.
McAvoy can’t see. There is too much rage and fury in his eyes.
But he can hear.
And he can hear his own voice, dribbling out of the telephone that is being held to his ear by some pretty boy in jeans and a T-shirt.
He stops. Shrugs the foreign man off his back and hears him swear as he crashes to the floor.
McAvoy listens.
Hears the words he sobbed at Sabine just yesterday.
“They would have died. All three of them. Roisin thinks they did. She’s never asked. Never checked. I beat them unconscious and left them for dead. I don’t know how the fire started, but it would have cooked them and any evidence. But I couldn’t leave them. I put Roisin somewhere safe and went and dragged them out of there. Then I left. I’ve lived with that ever since. Lived with her thinking one thing, and me knowing another. I let her down. Even now, I know that if it happened again, I couldn’t have killed them. I’m not that man. It’s not in me. She’s married to the wrong man . . .”
McAvoy falls back. Looks up at Adam Downey. Feels the strength go out of him. Feels the man below him scrambling free. Hears them dragging the unconscious men away and the front door banging against the wall.
He feels Roisin’s arms around him and hears Mel’s cries.
“Fin,” he says suddenly. “Lilah.”
He finds himself tangled in a collection of limbs. Feels small arms hugging his knees and kisses from a bloodied mouth upon his forehead.
Through it all, one thought, over and over.
She taped me. She fucking taped me.
And then he is wrapping himself in the people he loves, trying to insulate himself with their caresses. He wants to hurt somebody. He wants answers.
He wants to be a different man.
SEVENTEEN
Gnarled fingers of cloud are slowly closing over a nearly full moon. It is the only light in this ebony sky and seems to sit vulnerably on an open palm; a communion wafer waiting to be crushed.
“Stupid,” says McAvoy, again, through thin lips. “Stupid, stupid.”
He has one hand on the wheel. The other is striking his forehead; the heel of the hand rhythmically hitting his sweaty skin.
It’s gone midnight and the road to Beverley is quiet. He could press the accelerator to the floor if he wanted to, but despite his anger he knows where the speed cameras are and can’t afford the bump to his insurance premiums if he got caught doing more than sixty.
“Mouth shut, mouth shut, mouth shut . . .”
He beats the words into his brain, furious with himself for daring to believe there was any benefit to sharing the agony that has sat in his chest for a decade.
“I’m so sorry, so sorry, so sorry . . .”
For the past few hours, Roisin has been apologizing. Telling him everything.
He thinks about it now. Pictures the scene. Sees himself, growing pale, shaking his head and scratching blood from his arms as she told him why Adam Downey was in their home, and why he shouldn’t report the incident to his colleagues.
McAvoy hadn’t lost his temper. He’d refused to shout at her. He wanted to shout, of course. Wanted to tell her she had been bloody stupid and demand to know what the hell she had been thinking. But the words got nowhere near his mouth. Besides, his own betrayal far outstrips her moment of weakness. Instead of shaking her until her false nails fell off, he’d sat her on the toilet seat in the bathroom and used a warm washcloth to remove the blood from her skin. He had stroked her face and pushed her hair behind her ears. He’d hugged the children, straightened up the living room, and made Mel a hot chocolate. Then he’d led Roisin to their bedroom and told her to explain again. Told her he needed to hear it again so he could fully understand.
She’d been there, she said. Been in Mel’s shop when Downey came in demanding the coat that contained the drugs. Downey had offered Mel money but she had refused. So he’d got tough. And Roisin had stood up to him. She’d phoned the police in her pocket and she’d kicked him in the bollocks. Then she’d seen the wedge of cash
. It had been instinct. She’d picked it up and run. It had come to just under six hundred pounds. She’d felt bad straightaway and had offered it to Mel, but Mel didn’t want it. So she’d spent it. Bought him a watch and some furniture for the garden. She was sorry. She hadn’t expected this. She hadn’t wanted to cause trouble. It was just a mistake . . .
McAvoy had held her. He said he understood. Told her he would fix it. Told her that the bad men wouldn’t come back, and then softly kissed her bruised mouth. At that moment, he had been so damn relieved that she hadn’t heard the message on Downey’s phone he would have forgiven her anything. Relieved, too, that he had arrived home when he did. He thinks about what would have happened had Pharaoh not told him to go get some sleep. Feels pitifully grateful that he hadn’t stopped in at a takeaway or a supermarket on the way home for some snacks and a bottle of wine. He makes a squeezing motion with his hand and feels the pain in his fingers where his knuckles had connected with Bruno’s jaw. He wonders how badly he hurt the man. Whether his jaw broke. Whether he snapped a vertebra as his head went back. Whether there will be repercussions.
McAvoy follows the road into Beverley. Passes down quiet streets and through the deserted town center. He doesn’t blink. Just follows the road until he sees the sign.
The village of Molescroft doesn’t stop before it runs into Beverley. It’s a conurbation rather than a suburb, but most people who live here think of the shops in Beverley as being the center of their community. It’s a pretty place, with a good junior school and neatly tended semi-detached homes, spread out around a playing field and a small row of stores.
Sabine Keane lives here. The shrink. The counselor who betrayed him.
McAvoy bares his teeth as he thinks of it. He sees her, now. Sitting in her chair with her handbag open. She must have left her phone on the entire time. Must have called her other employers at the start of each session and let them listen in as he bared his soul.