by Bud Craig
“Mam,” I shouted. “Come and look at this.”
No answer. Maybe she was out. I dashed into the kitchen, waving the sheet of paper. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a figure slumped on the floor. Catching my breath, I looked properly. It really was my mother lying there. A couple of seconds must have elapsed before the fact of her being there properly registered.
“Mam,” I shouted again, panic in my voice this time.
She had fallen awkwardly and lay on her left arm, her head touching the concrete floor. I searched for a pulse on my arm before I went towards her. I found the same spot on her arm. Nothing. She can’t be dead, I said to myself. Bloody hell. A song from There Goes Rhyming Simon ran through my mind: Loves Me Like A Rock. There was a line about the way a mother loved her son.
Then for some reason I thought of Tony Murphy. Phrases from his letter came back to me: I won’t be back; the pressure’s too much for me; where I am going perhaps I’ll get some peace; you’ll never find me. I’d thought he was just attention seeking, then I thought he had simply run away. He hadn’t come back, had he? Nobody had found him. Now Tony’s letter could be explained in a quite different way. That night the dreams started.
PART THREE: 2012
CHAPTER NINE
“Right, Tony, where the fuck have you been all these years?” I asked about quarter past eight that night in the Park Hotel.
Up to that point our conversation had been a bit of a walk down memory lane, punctuated by much laughter. Now, though, I had tired of reminiscences about buying Hollies records from Snelson’s, taking a trip to Wembley for the 1969 challenge cup final, and getting off with two Geordie girls on holiday in Scarborough. Tony Murphy grinned at my question, picking up his pint of Red Devil from the table and taking a swallow.
“I’ll tell you all about it,” he said.
I looked at the diminutive man in the beige jacket and open necked striped shirt opposite me. I’d forgotten how small he was.
“On the day I left I put a bet on. A fourfold accumulator.”
I wondered if I would have recognised him had I not arranged to meet him. The lines criss crossing his face spoke of a lifetime of smoking. He was a bit thin on top and his once red hair was now mostly grey.
“A four what?”
“I bet two pounds on four horses.”
When two pounds was two pounds, I thought. You could get about 6 pints for a pound in those days.
“The winnings from the first horse go on the next horse and so on,” Tony explained. “All 4 horses won.”
He paused as if collecting his thoughts. In the few minutes leading up to this I had learnt remarkably little about Tony; he knew a bit about my family and my job in social work. He went on with his story.
“About five o’clock I went to the precinct to take my library books back. Then I went to Ladbrokes next door to get my winnings.”
“Right.”
“Nearly six hundred pounds in cash. I’d never seen so much money in my life.”
Over three thousand pints, I thought, sticking to that system of measurement.
“That might have made marriage a bit easier,” I suggested.
Brenda would have thought so, I might have added. He took a deep breath.
“Maybe,” he said, “but as soon as I had the money in my hand, I thought, why don’t I go to London now?”
I recalled he had planned to go to University in London after ‘A’ levels.
“I could just bugger off. Sod exams, sod getting married.”
The adult me felt sorry for Brenda and believed in taking responsibility for one’s actions, but I asked myself what I would have done in the circumstances.
“The money would more than tide me over while I got settled somewhere. I’d get a job without too much bother.”
He explained how he went home for his tea, got some things together and set off with six hundred quid to drive in an old Volkswagen to London.
“How come you never got in touch with anybody?”
“I wasn’t coming back,” he said. “Nothing to come back for. I didn’t want anyone trying to persuade me to come home.”
“What about your family?”
He gave a half laugh of derision.
“You’re a social worker, Gus,” he said, “you must know about, what do they call them these days, dysfunctional families?”
I nodded, remembering the Murphy clan. Everybody had heard of them when I was growing up. I don’t think I ever saw Tony’s mother again once the fuss about his ‘disappearance’ had died down. I just got on with my life. Anyway, I soon had other things to worry about.
“What about Brenda?”
He shook his head.
“She’d be better off without me.”
A rationalisation if ever I heard one.
“She came to see me when you’d gone,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“She showed me the letter you’d sent her. I thought it was a suicide note.”
He laughed out loud at this.
“Suicide? Don’t be daft. I’ve always enjoyed life too much.”
I could see that now.
“A policeman came round too.”
He looked at me in surprise.
“Police?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, an ongoing inquiry or something.”
He drank more beer as I remembered how pissed off I had been at the constant interruptions.
“I don’t know anything about that,” he said, “it was a long time ago.”
It certainly was. I thought for a moment. A question came to mind.
“What made you contact me now?”
He shrugged.
“Well, it was a number of things, I guess,” he began, before taking another drink and pausing for thought.
“Such as?”
“A mate of mine died a little while ago. Younger than me he was, just dropped dead. Heart.”
I tried not to think too much about my health, but Tony’s words inevitably brought back the day I’d had a stroke at work.
“It made me think, I can tell you. I went for a check up and the doc was worried about my blood pressure. Put me on medication.”
Join the club, I thought.
“I began to think about, you know, what if I died? What would I leave behind? I’d have no... roots.”
He looked into the middle distance, waiting a while before going on.
“I thought about my mother. To cut a long story short, I decided to try and find her.”
“Is she still alive?”
“Yeah, I caught up with her on Thursday.”
“Never.”
“I went to our old house in Carrfield Avenue. They told me she had a flat on Kenyon Way.”
“How is she?”
“Still going strong. You’d never think she was 80 odd.”
I nodded, trying to picture Tony’s mother. All I got was a vague image, like a blurred photograph.
“She goes to a day club a couple of times a week, gets to the pub and stuff.”
“Great.”
“The only relatives she’s still in touch with are her brother, Vic and his family.”
“I remember Vic. He was another one who came looking for you the day you left. I think he was after money you owed him.”
Tony looked blank.
“Don’t remember that.”
Why should he? Steve had had to remind me. Then Tony laughed.
“I hope he doesn’t want interest.”
We sat in thoughtful silence for a moment.
“How did your mam react to seeing you again,” I asked.
He smiled ruefully.
“Shock.”
“I’ll bet.”
“She recognised me straight away, that was the funny thing. She was in floods of tears but basically she was over the moon.”
The prodigal son, I thought.
“Anyway, she asked after you.”
“What?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, “she always thought the world of you.”
Did she bollocks.
“So I decided it was time...to look up old friends, lay some ghosts to rest.”
I nodded.
“And I was coming up here anyway, so...”
We both drank in silence for a while.
“You know, Gus,” Tony continued, “I might even look up Brenda as well while I’m here. You don’t know where she is, do you?”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t seen her for years.”
After Tony had buggered off, Brenda had been to my house a few times asking after him. Then my mam had died and we’d moved. So had Brenda as far as I could recall.
“Do you think you could find her for me,” he asked.
I looked hard at him.
“Seriously?”
I took another swallow of beer.
“Sure. I googled you the other day,” he said.
“They can’t touch you for it.”
“True. The worldwide web told me what an interesting bloke Gus Keane was.”
“Yeah, fascinating.”
“Top Rugby League player in his youth, independent social worker with a very impressive CV. All good stuff, but the best bit was something called GRK Investigations.”
So that was what he meant.
“You want to hire me to look for Brenda?”
“Yeah,” he said, picking up his pint. “You’re a private investigator, that’s what you do, isn’t it?”
Tony offering me work, the last thing I’d expected. He drank some more beer and put his glass down.
“Listen, Gus,” he said. “I could make inquiries myself, but apart from the fact that you’re a professional...”
Don’t flatter me, I almost said.
“...I think it would be better if somebody else kind of paved the way, know what I mean?”
“Yeah.”
He gestured with his hands.
“I’m not sure how she’d react if I just landed on her without warning. I mean, she could well not want to have anything to do with me.”
True enough, I thought, seeing as he left her holding the baby. Literally. Tony looked straight ahead for a few seconds as if daydreaming. Then he seemed to snap out of it.
“She always liked you, you know,” he added.
“Who? Brenda?”
He grinned at me.
“Don’t sound so surprised,” he said, “all the girls liked you, mate.”
I shook my head in disbelief.
“First I’ve heard of it.”
He shrugged.
“Bet they still do. Anyway, if you find her, when you find her, I want you to sound her out about seeing me.”
I could do that, I thought. If I found her, if she agreed to talk to me and if she then agreed to meet Tony. A lot of ifs.
“You need to bear in mind,” I said, “that I might not find her.”
“I know, but...”
“If she’s married, she’s probably got a new surname.”
And there must be thousands of McDonalds anyway and a fair few women of a certain age called Brenda.
“I have every confidence in you, Gus.”
If you say so, Tony, I thought, as he took his wallet out of his inside pocket. He handed me five twenty pound notes.
“There’s a ton on account,” he said, “plenty more where that came from.”
“Cheers. I’ll get onto it as soon as I can.”
We finished our drinks. I got up.
“Another?”
As I waited to be served at the bar I thought about what Tony had told me. I had sympathy for him even now, but couldn’t bring myself to let him off the hook completely. To abandon Brenda like that. To cast his family aside. Social workers were constantly warned against being judgemental, but it was hard not to be. Odd snatches of what he had said on that drunken Saturday spent watching Sunil Gavaskar make a century were coming slowly back. I got to the bar.
“Same again, please, Arthur,” I said.
The landlord’s massive frame dominated the area behind the bar, as he pushed his long hair away from his face and got a couple of glasses ready.
“Great win for Salford on Friday night, wasn’t it,” he said.
“It wasn’t half.”
“Were you there?” he asked as he began to pull the first pint.
I thought of the thrilling encounter I’d enjoyed.
“Yeah,” I said, “I took my Dad. It was a belting match. A last minute penalty settled it.”
“Sounds good. It’s hard to get to a match these days. I still haven’t been to the new stadium.”
Arthur watched the beer froth into the glass, then removed the first pint and began to fill the next one.
“You know anything about this Tattersall feller, Gus?”
I hesitated. It was always difficult to know what to say in these circumstances, but Arthur took my silence as a yes.
“I reckon you must do with your job.”
I nodded. Arthur gave one last pull on the handle and let the beer settle.
“I know you can’t say too much. The funny thing was he used to get in here regular.”
“Did he?”
Arthur nodded, topping up the glasses.
“He seemed all right.”
I shrugged.
“They don’t have horns, Arthur.”
“Be easier if they did,” he smiled. “In one way, it’s good riddance to bad rubbish, but I don’t like the idea of people taking the law into their hands.”
“Do you reckon that was what happened?”
Arthur stood up straight, placing his hands in the small of his back, as if easing a pain.
“Vigilantes? Oh, aye. Who else could it have been?”
Who indeed?
“If I were looking into it I’d start with Ian Jamieson,” said the landlord thoughtfully, “He lives in the bungalow next door to Deadbeat Mansions.”
“Yeah?”
“Aye. He knew Tattersall. He knows what goes on all right.”
“Does he?”
He nodded.
“And there’ll be a few in the Mansions who have something to hide.”
Arthur looked at me and winked.
“Oh, by the way,” he said, “are you coming to the quiz?”
He passed the drinks over and took my money.
“Possibly. I’ll see what Tony thinks. A few from work will be in later.”
I picked up the glasses and walked back to my seat.
* * *
“What happened when you got to London?” I asked Tony back at the table.
He took a long drink from his pint and put his glass down slowly. He seemed to be building up to something. Surely whatever he was going to tell me couldn’t be that dramatic, could it?
“The day I got there I went to this second hand car place in Putney, sold my car for cash,” he said.
“And?”
He took a swig from his glass.
“Just on impulse, I asked the gaffer if he needed any staff. I’ve always loved cars as you know.”
I nodded as he continued.
“He said he’d give me a trial. He even told me where there was a cheap flat going. I really fell on my feet.”
You would, Tony, I said to myself, as he went on with his tale.
“I did a few repairs, washed cars, all sorts really. Then they let me out on the forecourt. I found I was a natural salesman.”
That figured.
“I was soon earning good money – I never touched the six hundred pounds or the fifty I got for the car. And I soon accumulated plenty more.”
In the meantime, Brenda was probably having the worst time of her life.
“Anyway,” Tony went on, “Years later, after I’d travelled a bit, I set up on my own.”
I immediately thought of Arthur Daley in Minder and had to make a deliberate effort not to laugh.
“I’ve got a place just near the Hammersmith flyover now. APM.�
�
“Great stuff,” I said, for want of anything better.
“Top end of the market, you know.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” I said.
He shrugged modestly. By the standards of my early life I was well off, but I had the feeling I wasn’t in Tony’s league. I couldn’t think of any intelligent questions to ask about the car business. Tony’s remarks about travelling rang a bell.
“Were you ever in Jersey,” I asked.
He looked at me in surprise.
“How did you know that?”
“I told my Dad I’d heard from you,” I said, leaving out the uncomplimentary remarks, “and he said a mate of his saw you there back in the eighties.”
He nodded.
“Yeah, I was there for a few years. In the motor trade. I made some good contacts in the financial world.”
So my Dad’s idea had been right.
“Well,” I said, not being able to sustain a conversation about money. “Are you married, kids...?”
Again he sought refuge in his beer. He shook his head but a few moments passed before he spoke again.
“No, no. One thing I came to realise as time went on was that I’m not a wife and kids kind of guy.”
A wife and kids kind of guy? That was a new one, though it did remind me of Louise’s words when she left me: ‘I need my own space’ or some such bollocks. I had, I recalled, been quite happy to be a ‘wife and kids kind of guy’ at one time. What was I now?
“I could never settle for the safe option,” he said. “I’m a risk taker, know what I mean?”
Not really, Tony, I could have said. I didn’t think I could face an explanation, but he went on without any help from me.
“It’s been tough getting anyone to invest in my business, Gus, as you can imagine. No point in going to the bank since the recession.”
I drank in silence as I knew nothing much about investing in anything.
“So I prefer to rely on people I know. The idea is they invest on a small scale, ten or twenty grand...”
That was small scale? I managed to avoid choking on my beer.
“APM gives good returns. Everyone’s a winner. So if you’ve got a spare few thousand.”