by Phil Redmond
‘Sean collected all the cards for you.’
‘Except this one?’ Luke said, as he pulled it from a large wreath on the top.
Joey took it and read: ‘Miss you always. B.’ He immediately picked up the wreath, patted Luke on the shoulder and started back towards the Volvo. ‘I’ll er… wait by the car. Give you a moment.’
Luke nodded and turned back to the grave, not seeing Joey toss the card, then the wreath, into a nearby rubbish skip.
• 16.00 p.m. Police Car Pound, Highbridge
They were about to drop on to the M6, heading south for RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, when Joey got the call. It was Hilary Jardine. They had found Janey’s car. Twenty minutes later she was leading them across the police yard.
‘There’s not much to see,’ Hilary Jardine said as she led Luke and Joey towards what looked like a small roller-shutter garage door, but took them through a side door to a search and inspection area, where Janey’s car was being stored awaiting a forensic examination. It looked exactly as both Joey and Luke had last seen it.
‘No obvious signs of …’ she hesitated. ‘The incident,’ she finally said.
‘Let’s just see it, eh?’ Luke asked. Insistent. Irritated by her use of the word incident.
‘It’s evidence now, Luke.’
‘I just want to look at it. Not interfere with it, Hilary.’
Hilary looked at Joey, wondering how close to the edge Luke was. Joey gave her a reassuring nod. He’s OK. But he had a question of his own. ‘Evidence about what? Thought you said Janey died in a hit and run?’
‘Yes,’ Hilary nodded. ‘But the car’s been used for something else. There’s traces of drugs on the front and back seats. We just need to give it a good check, then…’ She stopped as she saw Luke peering into the car, examining the dashboard then opening the passenger door to look under the seats.
‘Luke!’ Hilary barked. Now the police officer. ‘I’ve just told you not to––’
But he shot back. The army officer. ‘It’s not material, Hilary. My DNA’s all over this car anyway.’
She turned to Joey, with an accusatory look. Thought you said he was OK?
‘He’s looking for Buddha,’ Joey tried to explain.
‘Well, I’m looking for God but I doubt you’ll find him in there,’ she snapped back.
At any other time Joey and Luke might have laughed at the crack, but now it served only to remind Luke who was in charge. A look went between Joey and Luke. It conveyed two thoughts. One was a reminder of who was doing whom a favour. Luke apologised, explained about the sentimental significance of the nodding Buddhas and in return received Hilary’s permission to search the car properly before having to accept that the Buddha was missing. The only thing taken from the car.
The other thought was one they waited to share until they had thanked Hilary and were driving out of the police car park. Janey had been killed by druggies.
‘She knows it too,’ Luke said. Now bitter. ‘They might want to log it all as two separate “incidents”, as she called them. But she knows Janey was run over by her own car that was then used for something else.’
Joey nodded his agreement. ‘And she didn’t want to share that bit with us. In case?’ He didn’t wait for Luke to finish his rhetorical question: ‘… we end up causing her trouble, doing the job they should be bloody doing.’ He shouted it at the windscreen.
Luke didn’t respond. He knew they each needed to process what they had just learned. They didn’t need any police investigation. They knew. Janey had been killed by some druggie. It happened all the time. People killed or injured trying to stop their cars being stolen. They also knew they didn’t need a judge and jury. They were sitting next to each other.
• 20.30 p.m. – A40, Oxfordshire
Just over four hours after crossing the latticed ironwork of the bridge out of Highbridge, but less than 24 hours since picking up Luke at RAF Valley, Joey was slowing down at the entrance to the RAF Brize Norton.
‘No, carry on,’ Luke said. ‘This time we are going in the side gate.’
Joey followed Luke’s satnav-like directions through a few side streets until he came to what looked like a small country lane leading nowhere. At least nowhere the car could go.
‘Where are we?’ Joey asked.
‘The place you have to start from to get home.’ Luke grinned. ‘Can you remember how to get out?’
‘You always this evasive in the forces?’
‘Told you. That’s why they call us special, Joe.’
Joey grinned. ‘Nice one. When you coming home again?’
Luke just exhaled. ‘Dunno. Was supposed to finish this tour in a couple of weeks. But …’ He shrugged. ‘Might sign on again for a bit. Take it all out on Terry.’
‘Who?’
‘Nickname. Taliban.’
‘Wish I could.’
Luke shook his head. ‘No you don’t. Believe me.’
Joey thought back to the night before when he had a Browning pistol stuck in his face and Luke came out still covered in blood. Perhaps not. ‘But it won’t stop me looking. I’ll keep hunting. I’ll find whoever—’
But Luke interrupted him. Vehement. ‘Christ, Joe will you stop it. Have you not been listening all day? I know how you feel. How do you think I feel? But don’t … Don’t go trying to tear the town up yourself.’
Joey spat back, ‘And what do you want me to do, eh? Watch you fly off into the night and then go back to wiring sockets while reminding myself that “shit happens”?’
The two old friends sat in silence for a moment, staring at the same undefined and distant halo of light at the end of the lane. Luke knew it was the end of the runway. Joey didn’t. But they both knew enough about each other to also know that they were both right. They couldn’t just press the reset button. But they had to try and move forward. It was Luke, perhaps because he had faced this sort of dilemma before, who broke the silence.
‘It’s times like this that I used to consult the Buddha.’
Joey looked confused for a moment. Caught by his friend’s non sequitur, until he saw the wry grin as Luke continued. ‘Flick the nodding Buddha and think of Janey. Smiling. And remember. It does, though. It happens all the time. Shit. We’re just lucky that most of the time we can dodge it. And it happens to others.’
‘So what happens when it hits us? We just cope?’ Joey asked.
‘We do. We have to follow the cliché’, don’t we. Because we have to think of everyone else. Like we said at the Warwick services?’ Luke asked, turning to face Joey directly.
‘What?’ Joey turned to Luke. ‘Think about Nat and the kids?’
‘And your Sean and his. Your mum and dad? What effect will it have on them if you get lifted on some wild vigilante mission? Life is about family, Joe.’
Joey looked at the best friend who had become his brother-in-law. Family. Appreciating what he had lost and admiring him for the way he was carrying it. But still, he could not hide his own frustration. ‘So …’ Joey made the sarcastic in-quotes gesture. ‘You go back and hug Buddha and we let it go?’
‘No, not …’ Luke started to say, but was interrupted by his phone vibrating. He looked. ‘Got to go.’ He started to get out of the car. Joey climbed out and went to join him at the front.
‘OK,’ Luke then said. ‘I’m not saying we let it go. I’m saying that time will tell. It’ll come out if you can keep hunting. But do not do anything – anything –’ he emphasised. ‘Until I’m back. Wherever I am. I’ll find a way back. Clear?’
Joey just nodded. But Luke wasn’t going to let that get past him.
‘Say it, Joe.’
‘OK. I won’t do anything until you get back.’ Then he shrugged at the reality. ‘If I manage to find anything.’
‘And that will also be hard to deal with. But …’ He left it unsaid as his phone vibrated again. Joey didn’t need another reminder about coping.
‘I have to go.’ Luke held up his phone.
‘But thanks for the lifts.’
And on that the two men went into a firm wrist-grip and hug, held for a few seconds before Luke broke and turned away down the track.
Joey moved back to the car but stopped as he thought he saw Luke fishing out his ID and then show it to a bush. However, Luke didn’t break step so Joey thought he must have been watching too many movies as he dropped into the car and performed a tight three-pointer, grateful for the Volvo’s short turning circle.
JUST DROPPED. ON WAY BACK LXXJ, Joey sent, then looked in the rear view mirror as he prepared to drive off. Luke was now at the end of the lane but silhouetted by bright light that swept round in an arc. Then Joey got it. The shadowy world where Luke was not travelling by commercial airline but being picked up at the end of the runway. As the lights dimmed Luke was obscured by something and Joey knew he wasn’t imagining it this time. It was a figure. With the unmistakably sharp outline of something he had seen close up the night before. An automatic weapon. Time to go, Joey thought. He didn’t need another turning over or cup of begrudged tea. He didn’t need to know anything more.
• 21.00 p.m. – JCT 9, M40, Oxfordshire
By the time Joey turned the Volvo north on the M40, reflecting on the irony that the same junction that took bargain hunters to Bicester Outlet Village also led to where the military deployed to protect their right to do so, he had decided that Luke was right. Time would tell. Time to track and hunt down whoever killed Janey. Someone, somewhere, still had to pay.
It was then that Natasha replied. BE UP. WAITING. NO MATTER HOW LATE. EVEN IF THAT OLD CAR CONKS OUT. BE CAREFUL LXXNXXX
Luke was also right about one other thing. Life is about family. So Joey tapped the message and then the call button. She answered in two rings. And then stayed on the phone for the three hours it took him to drive home. She was not going to let him dwell too much on the journey home.
Prologue
Like most people, Janey knew she was going to die. But like everyone else she just didn’t know when. She never imagined nor expected it to be outside the Co-op.
Like a lot of people she was simply looking forward to a great Friday night out with her sister-in-law and gang of mates, so had stopped at the cash machine. She had just got back to her car and was fumbling for her keys when she felt the shove that sent her one way and her bag and keys the other.
Lying sprawled on the ground she saw the indicators flash, heard the doors unlock, and realised she was being mugged. As the engine started she pushed herself up and leaned over the front of the bonnet holding her hands out, instinctively, perhaps in the vague hope that whoever it was would stop before running her down. But when her eyes locked with the wild, dilated ones peering over the nodding Buddha she kept on the dashboard, she knew there was no hope.
The Peugeot 207’s low-profiled front end did what it was designed to do and scooped her up to prevent her being run down. Before the car swerved right to throw her off – where she smashed her skull against the car park wall. This in itself might have been fatal, but the carjacker couldn’t know this.
But those wild eyes had seen hers. And her eyes had seen the face that contained them. That was why the car stopped. Then reversed. At speed. To run her over.
Then, just in case, the car jumped forward and crushed any remaining life out of Janey. Then, again, to make sure, reversed. Then leapt forward over what was now nothing more than a lifeless shape. To escape. Swinging out into the High Street and off into the night.
The withdrawal receipt from the cash machine fluttered and blew in the backdraught, coming to rest against the lamppost that illuminated the place where Janey had died. The latest random casualty of the so-called war on drugs.
The receipt was for £45. It was all she had had. Just enough for a night out. Or a night’s supply.
Janey never knew her killer. Neither did Buddha. Three years on, nor did anyone else.
1
Coming Home
The trouble with living in a mediocre town is that you end up having to support a mediocre football team. Something might happen every forty years when, somehow, they get to something like the semi-final of a cup competition. Everyone gets excited. Mayors make fatuous speeches about it being an historic day. Then 95 per cent of the fans are disappointed because the ground is too small to hold them all. Then they get whacked and everybody goes back to sleep for another forty years. But at least they tried. Typically British tosh.
Well, it used to be like that until Sky Sports came along. Now you can see Arsenal and Chelsea shirts in every High Street. And even Man U in cities like Newcastle and Liverpool. At one time that would have been like wearing a suicide vest. These days, it’s just kids following the telly, isn’t it?
It was one of Joey Nolan’s recurring themes as he drifted in and out of consciousness, during his weekly journey home. Back to Highbridge. Where once was a rural village with rural villagers with rural mentalities is now a sprawling urbanised place on a map. A collective of urban dwellers. With urban dwellers’ mentalities. Home is where the Internet is.
The town owed a lot to its inn, the Lion, still at its centre but once a famed stopover for its game pies. Then the canal came by and after that the railways, which took the pies the length and breadth of Britain and then the four corners of the Empire. In Rawalpindi and Christchurch they knew of Highbridge pies. And in return people came to see for themselves. This tiny village that supplied the Empire with pies. And so the street market that sold the pies grew. To become a thing in itself.
Joey grinned when he recalled this bit of history. How where he lived was because someone, at some time, made a great pie. But everything has to start with one idea, he mused, just as the train crossed the motorway. The latest transport revolution, with the strings of pearls and rubies of commuter traffic stretching into the distance. No time for buying pies or napping in that lot, he thought, starting to stir himself as he knew it was now only a few minutes to where the Romans once paused, as did the Saxons, long before it had become the site for a new town, complete with its own industrial estate built not on any entrepreneurial instinct, like that of the piemakers, but from a post-Second World War recovery plan and managed economy.
Out went rationing and dried bananas and in came nylons and the transistor. Gone was rural deference and knowing one’s place, replaced by the promise of a welfare state and the white heat of technology where people never had it so good. Or so everyone thought.
For a decade or two they made white goods, nuclear components and secretive parts for the military. But with old technology. And an increasingly expensive as well as increasingly unwilling workforce. The signs of decline were there but nobody wanted to look. Nylons and fresh veg were gradually squeezed out of the market by tights, bin bags and previously owned DVDs. The pies of Empire are still sold in the supermarket where the cattle market used to be, but now they come in artificial atmosphere packaging, delivered by tailored Euro-lorries from the factory in Kent which is owned by a secretive family from Wisconsin who promised to protect jobs but never said which or where.
The factories were razed. Industrial estates became business or retail parks and every now and then money arrived from various European social funds to build inappropriate leisure facilities in inappropriate places. Rural idyll replaced by political ideal. But there are only so many discount three-piece suites you can buy and only so many hours at the health club when either you don’t have a job or spend all your time commuting, thought Joey, watching the metal lattice of the railway bridge glide past the window as the train slowed on its approach to Highbridge Station.
He once asked his dad why it was called Highbridge and was told it was because it was higher than the old road bridge. For years he believed this, until Sister Maria had pointed out that it had been called that in the Domesday Book, long before Robert Stephenson and his dad George gave railways to the world. Amazing what you take off your dad when you’re a kid.
Joey stood and stretched h
is aching six-foot frame, then reached up for his holdall. It wasn’t there. What the—? He looked up and down the carriage but half were asleep and the others a thousand miles away, tethered to the Internet or their iPods. Then he saw it. The luminous logo. Passing the window.
He grabbed his coat and went up the carriage in the same direction, hitting the platform just in time to see his oversized sports bag heading up the stairs, across the bridge, over the track and towards the station exit. With the weary commuters and weekenders congealing on the stairs and the train still blocking the route across the tracks, Joey decided to go under them. Over the fence into the overflow car park, down the slope and through the underpass.
As Joey turned into the underpass, a couple of miles away, on the hill overlooking Highbridge, his lifelong friend and brother-in-law, Luke Carlton, was pressing his weather-worn face against the buffer, looking down the scope of a Barrett M82A1 suppressed sniper rifle. ‘Where’d Billy get this?’ he asked.
‘Where’d you think? He’s just got back home.’
‘God Bless America. God Bless al-Qaeda,’ whispered Luke, as he turned the ring on the Leupold scope to bring the fat target in the chippy into sharp focus. Nearly a mile away. One squeeze. No frying tonight.
Just under a mile from Luke, on the other side of the hill, Joey’s brother Sean was coddling his suntanned face in thick Egyptian cotton as he emerged from his waterfall shower. As always, Sean took too long in the shower for the environmentalists but he reckoned he’d already put in a life’s worth of sacrifice as a child, when he, his brother and sister were allowed just one bath a week and then only after the immersion heater had been on for twenty- five minutes. No more. No less. Regardless of time of year, regardless of the water temperature. Now he enjoyed the luxury, probably indulgence, of having constant hot water, his conscience salved by the fact that the water came from a water butt, was heated by solar, used less than a bath and was more fun for two to share.