I didn’t sleep much that night. It was stuffy and I had the windows wide open. It felt as if the whole street was in my bedroom with me; the yappy dog, cars and taxis, a car alarm. When I did drop off my dreams were fretful. I was at school but I’d left Maddie at home. I got in the car but the steering wheel had gone. I was late; I was horribly late. I was so late that they’d all gone and left me. I was standing in the rubble and all the alarms were screaming but my legs wouldn’t move. I reared awake and felt a wave of relief–just a dream. It was six o’clock. I lay there until the dream had faded then I started my day.
I was careful enough to leave details of where I was going with Ray. I’d keep my mobile phone with me, and if anything seemed dodgy I’d get out of the situation as fast as possible. I hoped that I wouldn’t get a call from Debbie Gosforth or her neighbours when I was halfway to Wales. Underneath my caution I was running with excited anticipation; things were on the move now. I had the buzz of making headway, the hunger to find out more. So I could finally make sense of the events of that fateful New Year’s Eve.
Chapter Twenty-Two
After depositing the children at school I topped up the car with petrol and checked my oil, tyres and water. It was hardly a mammoth journey but I didn’t want car trouble cocking it up.
It was a beautiful day for a trip to the seaside, sunny and still. The route into North Wales runs down around the outskirts of Chester, past Port Sunlight, home of soap and a host of chemical factories, and then along the coast.
There was an unmarked white transit van that had been a few cars behind me for some miles. Was I being followed? I watched it for the next few minutes. It was too far distant to see the occupants. Paranoia? After all, if the van was going to Rhyl or Llandudno this was the only route. Nevertheless I needed to set my mind at ease. There was a lay-by ahead with a Greasy Joe flying a Confederate flag. I pulled in and watched as the van passed me by. I got a glimpse of two people but couldn’t tell anything more; it was going too fast. I sat for a while; the knot in my stomach gradually relaxed and then I drove on.
In the heat the farms and fields looked their best: luminous yellow rapeseed and green sugar beet stretching away to the distance, cows browsing. Now and then I caught the stench of fertiliser. I was sticking to the seat but I was only three miles from Prestatyn.
The resort was pretty much as I remembered it. I pulled into the car park next to the promenade. There was a large leisure centre to one side and behind me across a small road, a café and games room. I’d plenty of time to spare, as the station was only a few minutes’ walk away. Good – I could fit in a paddle. I took my socks and shoes off in the car.
On the beach, the tide was out and the sand was still damp and hard-packed. My feet made little impression on its surface. I took a big breath of the briny smell and stretched my arms, then walked down to the sea’s edge. The water was very cold. I dug my toes into the sand again and again, relishing the sensation, neither solid nor liquid.
There were a few families on the beach, though it was still term time, and a handful of individuals walking dogs. In a couple of months the place would be heaving, full of the ingredients of the great British seaside holiday: the smell of hot fat and vinegar and candy floss, shouts of children and sudden outbursts from harassed parents, rows of windbreaks and vacuum flasks, buckets and spades. And as often as not, rain or wind or jellyfish to round it all off.
I paddled along the shore for a while then made my way back up the beach looking for shells. There were a few cockles, small white and orange ones. The sand was littered with small dead crabs, pale green and brown, almost translucent. Oh God – the flies…Mr Kearsal…I shook the thoughts away and ran back to the car.
I made sure I was exactly on time. Joey D was waiting as he’d said by the ticket office. He wore a long-sleeved, outsize Adidas top and shiny black Adidas joggers. The baggy clothes seemed to emphasise his small frame. If I hadn’t known better I’d have guessed he was thirteen or fourteen. He had short wavy blond hair and was very pale. Awfully pale – as though he’d been indoors all year or was malnourished. He wore black shades so I couldn’t see his eyes. I introduced myself and he nodded, then looked around, beyond me. Was I being followed?
‘I parked down at the beach and walked up here. Where do you want to go? Get a coffee?’
He shook his head. ‘This way, there’s some gardens.’
I didn’t try to talk to Joey as we walked. I was busy assessing his mood. He was tense, twitchy and he kept coughing – a raw, painful sound.
We turned into a small formal park resplendent with municipal bedding plants; busy lizzies, brick-red geranium and silvery cinerama, its leaves like thick felt. There were benches around a bowling green, the grass smooth as peach skin. A party was playing, elderly men and women, joking with each other as they took their turns. The place felt tranquil and the atmosphere cheery. I wondered what they made of us; we were hardly here for the sport but no one paid any attention. How did he know this place? Had he been here before? I had a sudden image of Mrs Deason in full throttle playing for the away team, Joey on the sidelines. As if! I was sure he wasn’t hiding in Prestatyn, but if he’d gone to ground in Liverpool or Warrington or Wigan he could have got here easily enough by train.
We sat side by side. He bit at his fingers, kept his face averted. Hard enough to read anyway behind his black glasses.
‘Joey, you understand who I am and that I’m working for Luke Wallace’s father?’
‘Yeah.’
Now I’d got Joey D I didn’t want to pussyfoot around. As far as I was concerned, the fact that he was here meant he’d talk to me, and I didn’t want to have to drag it out syllable by syllable.
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘I’m not going back,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to be a witness – right? No police, no lawyers. Nothing.’
I felt a flash of anger at all his conditions.
‘Why did you agree to see me, Joey?’
‘I didn’t do it – Ahktar,’ he spoke rapidly. ‘It was my knife but I didn’t kill him. They could charge me, if you tell them about the knife. They’ll think it’s me then. They set Luke up, they can set me up too.’
‘Hang on.’ I rifled in my bag and brought out a small Dictaphone.
‘Oh Christ.’ He shook his head. ‘No way.’
‘Listen,’ I made my voice hard, ‘you telling me that you didn’t do it is not enough. I need an account of what happened and I need it on the record. Especially if you intend to disappear later. If I go back with just your word and no proof to back it up, they’ll be pulling your grandma in for questioning before the week’s out. I need your statement. You say Luke was set up, I need proof. And if you haven’t got the guts to come back and tell–’
‘They’d kill me!’ He became agitated.
I switched on the tape. ‘Who’d kill you?’
‘You don’t get it, do you? They’d kill me. I go anywhere near Manchester, I’m dead.’
‘Who? Why? Look –just tell me what happened,’ I said gently.
He rocked back and forth on the bench a couple of times. Was he going to bolt?
Then he began to talk. ‘We were coming out, been a good night, one of the best. All this energy, you know, no grief. Everyone’s flying. Luke needed to throw up, he’d been mixing it, too much booze. We were gonna meet him outside, on the corner.’
We? Him and Ahktar? I didn’t interrupt.
‘There’s these two guys, this big guy and another one. We’re just going past them and one of them, the shorter one, grabs Ahktar from behind. He’s got his arm up his back and he’s holding his face so he can’t turn round. At first I thought they were fooling around but then they hustled him into the alley. I’m going “Hey, hey, what are you doing, man? Get off him.” They thump him in the guts and I get my knife out, right?’ He swallowed, coughed violently and rubbed his hands on his thighs. The sun was hot. I felt a bead of sweat trickle down my side.
&
nbsp; ‘This guy turns and he moves so fast, he’s twisting my arm, nearly breaks my wrist and I drop my knife.’
‘Where’s the other one?’
‘Still got Ahktar, he’s got his arms round his neck, holding him up. The one by me, the big one, gets the knife and…shit.’ He squeaked the last word and fished in his pockets. Pulled out a packet of Benson & Hedges. It wasn’t a cigarette he lit up but a small joint. Oh great, I thought. Now he gets busted for smoking dope before I get the full story. But no one blinked an eyelid. He dragged hard, sucking the smoke and holding it deep in his lungs. He erupted in a fit of coughing again.
‘He’s bending down, right?’ His voice was tight. ‘And he’s just got the knife and Ahktar kicks out, kicks him in the face, hard. The guy rears up, he’s screaming and…it happens so fast he sticks the knife in Ahktar. Then, I can’t remember, it was all going off at once.’ He took another toke, held it in, released a stream of smoke.
‘What did Ahktar do?’
‘He smiled,’ there was a note of disbelief in Joey’s voice. ‘The guy lets go of him and starts jabbering on. Ahktar sits down.’
‘What was he jabbering about?’
‘I didn’t get it all. Lot of it was Punjabi or whatever.’
‘They were Asian?’
He nodded. ‘But he was swearing, at his mate. “You fucking prat,” he said, “we weren’t supposed to do him, just a little warning. You stupid cunt, you stupid, stupid fucking cunt.” He’s really going mental. I shouted to them to get an ambulance and I called Ahktar. He’s slumped over. I tried to get near but the guy that done it’s between us. I’m calling, “Ahktar, Ahktar,” and the guy stares at me. I say, “He needs an ambulance, he could die, man.” He just stares at me, really freaky, then the little one starts screeching again, really losing it. “You done wrong,” he’s going, “you done wrong, man. What’s he gonna do when he finds out?” On and on he goes till the big one tells him to fucking shut up. I could see all this blood soaking through Ahktar’s jacket and I legged it. I wanted to get help. The big guy comes after me.’ He shuddered and drew hard again on his joint. ‘He pulled me back into the alley. He got me real close and said he’d find me. if I breathed a word he’d find me and he’d kill me. He asked me if I understood. I said yes. Then he got my hand. He twisted my finger back.’ He rubbed his little finger, looking at it as he spoke. I could see it was slightly crooked. ‘It snapped, he broke it.’ Joey began to shake. ‘He asked me again if I understood and I said yes. Christ, it fucking hurt. Then he broke the other one next to it. I was crying, right, and he slapped me. Told me to shut up. He said if he ever heard of me, any whisper about it, he’d find me and he would kill me very slowly, bit by bit.’ Joey paused. ‘I went home,’ he said flatly, ‘I rang an ambulance up on Oxford Road. Then I went home.’
I recalled Mrs Deason, the fleeting gesture she’d made with her hands, on the brink of telling me what they’d done to Joey’s fingers.
‘Did you go to hospital?’
‘No. My gran, she strapped them up.’
I watched the bowlers for a while. The gentle banter as one player missed her stroke. Joey ground the roach out underfoot. Coughed some more.
‘And Luke? When the ambulance arrived they found Luke with Ahktar. Unconscious.’
He shook his head. ‘They set him up.’
I wondered how. Had Luke come looking for Ahktar and been given a timely blow to the head, or had they found him by chance, passed out perhaps. A suspect of convenience. They must have wrapped his hand around the knife to get the prints.
I asked Joey to describe the men. He did, and I quickly recognised the picture that he drew of the larger man, the one who had used the knife. Rashid Siddiq. Killer turned witness.
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘I got to go.’ He made a move.
‘Hang on, I’ve a few more questions.’
‘Christ,’ he rocked with impatience. The dope didn’t seem to have settled him any. He sniffed again. Summer cold or cocaine eating away his nostrils? Joey D was a mess.
‘Why do you think they killed Ahktar?’
‘It was an accident,’ he said simply. ‘They were meant to give him a warning about something, that was all. The guy just went ballistic when Ahktar kicked him.’
And if he hadn’t had your knife, I thought, the blow wouldn’t have been fatal.
‘If you talked to the police,’ I began.
‘No way.’ He went rigid. ‘I already said, no police, no lawyers, nothing.’
‘You could get protection,’ I said.
‘Oh yeah?’ he said sarcastically. ‘Twenty-four-hour guard, safe house, you reckon? All that for me? No way.’
‘What would they want to warn Ahktar about?’
‘Search me.’ He twitched again, an involuntary movement as though his skin were alive. ‘Look, I got to go.’
‘I’ve nearly finished. You hadn’t heard anything about Ahktar getting involved in anything?’
‘Dodgy? No. Bit of a nerd really, Ahktar. Nice guy but he wanted to be a lawyer, lot of studying. He partied at weekends, getting happy with the rest of us but that’s all.’
Secretly, I agreed. His recreational drug use was not reason enough for the heavies to come along and threaten him.
‘Do you remember Zeb having a go at you that night, in the club?’
‘Yeah.’ He was puzzled by my interest.
‘What was that about?’
‘He wanted a loan – he owed a lot of money. He was trying it on, promised to pay me ten per cent interest. I have this trust fund,’ he explained. ‘I told him no way, might as well flush it down the bog, never see it again. So he tries getting all heavy, threatening me, says he’ll put me out of business. I laughed at him. I’m only getting stuff for friends, I’m not a dealer, for chrissakes.’
‘Did you ever get stuff from Zeb?’
‘Once, maybe twice. And a couple of times he gets some from me. Dunno why, he could get more than I ever saw. Reckon he’d been helping himself, got a bit greedy, needed to top the bag up. He’d be paying over the odds getting it from me – last in the chain you get the highest mark-up. No head for business.’ Joey was serious. We could have been talking about building society flotations.
‘I’ve heard he was involved in bringing drugs into the country. Did you know about that?’
He shrugged. ‘You hear stuff; I didn’t want to know. That’s way out of my league. I never got into all that, I’m strictly small time.’ He grinned and for a fleeting moment he was a teenager having fun walking on the wild side. He coughed again.
‘Did you ever meet Rashid Siddiq? He worked with Zeb and his brother Jay?’
He shook his head.
‘How did you get the knife into the club?’
‘Gerry, one of the bouncers, he’s a customer of mine. I slip him a bit of something to help him relax at the end of the night, we had an understanding.’ He bit on his fingers again, tearing slowly at the skin around his nails.
‘How are you?’ I asked him. ‘Your grandmother’s worr–’
‘Sound,’ he cut me off. Sniffed.
‘You doing a lot of drugs?’
‘You a social worker in your spare time?’
‘You look rough, Joey. You look ill.’
‘Fuck off.’ But he didn’t move.
I watched the next couple of strokes.
‘It’s hard to get hold of stuff sometimes, that’s all. I get a bit shaky. Start crashing, you know. Stressed out, start to see things that aren’t there.’ He twitched. ‘Think people are following you. Does my head in. I just need a steady supply, that’s all. Get that sorted, no problem. I can handle it.’ He was all bravado now. ‘Tell her I’m OK.’
‘You still in business?’
He burst out laughing. ‘Yeah. You think I’m gonna start working at McDonald’s or something? Go on some pissy training scheme?’
A bee, heavy with pollen, careered towards us and bumped into Joey’s cheek.
He swatted at it with his hand and knocked his shades off. The sunlight made him wince and he shielded his eyes with one hand while he searched for his glasses with the other. I got them first and handed them to him. His eyes were bloodshot, streaked with red capillaries, watering in the sudden light. Was that drugs too? Or illness or lack of sleep?
My guess was that it was all bound up together. The drugs that once gave Joey pleasure, not to mention profit, now brought paranoia and pain. He was an addict like his father before him, out of control.
‘I got to go.’ He stood up, trembling a little.
I clicked the tape recorder off. ‘Another appointment?’
‘Need to see if anything’s arrived yet, stuff’s been in short supply this last couple of days.’ No wonder he was so twitchy.
‘If you change your mind about…’
‘I won’t,’ he looked away from me.
‘I can play them this tape but I don’t know whether it’s enough to get Luke off. They have witnesses who are prepared to testify, to appear and say Luke killed Ahktar. If you’d come to an identity parade?’
‘No.’
‘But—’
‘It won’t bring Ahktar back, will it? And they’ll kill me.’
‘How long are you going to hide?’
‘Long as it takes.’
‘And Luke?’
‘I told you what went down. That’s it. I got to go.’ He walked away.
I watched him go, off to buy a bit more oblivion. I wondered what the drug culture would be like by the time Maddie was exploring it. How would I protect her from the worst excesses whilst letting her take the risks that all teenagers sought? Hah! I thought, I won’t. I’ll be on the sidelines worrying, trying not to let it show. If I can’t even get her to talk to me now about what goes on at school, she’s hardly going to confide in me about her drug taking!
A patter of applause at the end of the game and then the bowl-players were called for tea over at the small clapboard pavilion at the far side of the green.
Dead Wrong Page 15