by Mark Tilbury
Liam laughed. He sounded like a hissing cat. ‘Good.’
Carver stepped close to Liam, and spat in his face. ‘I’m going to enjoy killing you.’
I shouted, ‘You can’t do—’
‘Shut up,’ Kraft snapped. ‘And stand up straight.’ He turned to Carver. ‘Have you any further questions for Tate?’
‘Yes, your honour.’ He walked over to me, that dreadful, lopsided grin hitching up one side of his face. ‘So, Tate, do you admit accompanying Truman on his rampage of destruction and thievery?’
The stupidest question I’d ever heard. ‘Yes.’
‘Do you admit stealing from the school?’
‘Yes.’
‘The church?’
‘Yes.’
‘Burning the Dolphin Public House to the ground?’
‘Yes.’
‘Abusing a police officer and resisting arrest?’
‘Yes.’
Carver turned to Kraft. ‘No more questions, your honour.’
Kraft thanked him. He then addressed me. ‘Well, Tate, at least you’ve had the good sense to admit to your crimes, and I will take this into consideration when passing sentence. However, that does not excuse or condone your behaviour in any way whatsoever. You have proved every bit as devious, every bit as conniving, and every bit as willing to undermine authority as Truman. A proper little double act.’
Fuck you.
Kraft adjusted his wig. ‘I don’t think Morecambe and Wise have too much to worry about, though.’
Dutiful laughter from Malloy and Carver. McCree combed his hair with his fingers.
‘Having taken into consideration your willingness to admit to your folly, and that you opened the door after setting fire to the cellar, I am prepared to show some leniency in your case. You are to spend one month in the boiler room in solitary confinement. You will be afforded two bowls of porridge and a glass of water a day. And Tate?’
‘What?’
‘I’d use the time wisely, if I were you. Consider your actions. Do you understand?’
Oh, I understood, all right. The bastards held all the cards. But, Liam was right. The only way I could ever get revenge was by staying alive.
Kraft banged the table with his mallet. ‘Court is dismissed.’ He stood up and turned to Carver. ‘McCree and Tate can assist you with the body.’
‘Yes, your honour.’
‘Thank you, gentlemen. Goodnight.’
Chapter Thirty-Four
Carver turned to McCree. ‘I’ll be back in a minute. You keep an eye on these two.’
‘Okay.’
McCree looked at me and grinned. ‘Better hope no one gobs in your porridge, eh, Tate?’
I wanted to rush at him, headbutt him, break his nose, smash his face into a thousand pieces, and poke out his eyes.
‘Perhaps Uncle Bernie might come and pay you a visit one night. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
‘Piss off.’
When Carver was out of sight, McCree walked over to Liam. ‘I’m going to enjoy watching you die.’
Liam didn’t answer. He could barely breathe. He reminded me of Jesus nailed to the cross. Blood covered most of his face, and one of his shoulders was out of line. All he needed was a crown of thorns.
‘Look at you,’ McCree said. ‘A fucking coward, just like your daddy.’
‘Fuck… you…’
McCree punched Liam in the side of his head. There was a loud popping noise. Liam cried out.
‘Leave him alone,’ I shouted. ‘Just leave him alone, you fucking bully.’
‘You want some as well, Tate?’
Carver rescued us, if you could call it that. ‘Dearie me, I’ve only been gone ten seconds, and the peasants are already revolting.’
McCree brushed hair out of his face. ‘Truman was getting lippy.’
Carver held a truncheon in his right hand. He told me to get in the corner of the room by the boiler.
‘Why?’
‘Just do it, Tate. McCree, you stand guard over Little Jack Horner.’
McCree made a big deal of shoving me as I walked. He was probably hoping I would trip up and smash my face on the concrete floor. He shoved me against the wall. I hit my head for about the fiftieth time that day. He then kicked my legs out from underneath me. I hit the ground and cracked my elbow on the floor.
Carver walked over to Liam. What happened next is too painful to describe in detail. In a nutshell, he beat Liam to death with the truncheon. Broke every bone in his body by the sound of it. When he was finished, he dropped the truncheon on the floor, panting and wheezing.
I heard the plink-hiss of the boiler. McCree was silent. Carver unlocked Liam’s handcuffs and let his body fall to the floor. His head hit the concrete with a loud smack. I tried to tell myself it was all over for Liam. They couldn’t hurt him anymore. He was in a better place. But, all I could think about was the terrible sound of his bones snapping like twigs.
Carver retrieved the truncheon and walked over to me and McCree. He banged the blood-soaked thing against the wall above my head. ‘Get up, fuck wit.’
I struggled to my feet.
‘Here’s what we’re going to do,’ Carver said. ‘We’ll go to Hodges’ shed and get a wheelbarrow and two shovels. Then, we’ll take that worthless pile of poop down to the bottom of the field, and bury him. Clear?’
‘Won’t the ground be too hard to dig at this time of year?’ McCree asked. ‘It’s bloody freezing outside.’
‘Did they postpone the war in the winter, because the ground was too hard to dig trenches?’
McCree shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there.’
‘And thank fuck you weren’t. All the best men died in that war.’
‘Don’t say much for you, then, does it?’
‘Don’t get smart with me, you little ponce. You can disappear as easily as anyone else.’
‘I was only kidding.’
‘Well, don’t. You’re not big enough or ugly enough to pull jokes with me. You stick to bullying the little kids. Understand?’
McCree nodded, his cheeks flushed red.
Carver turned to me. ‘Are you ready, Tate?’
Don’t let them bastards get away with it. Go to the fucking newspapers if you have to. Someone will believe you. I nodded.
He ordered me to turn around. ‘I’m going to unlock your handcuffs, but be warned, one false move, and you’ll be going in the grave with that useless idiot.’
‘Maybe we ought to kill him anyway,’ McCree said.
Carver was silent for a while. My legs turned to custard. It was amazing how you could still be terrified of death, even when you didn’t have anything to live for.
‘Kraft wants him alive.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. You just keep it buttoned and do as you’re told.’
Carver unlocked my handcuffs. ‘Just for the record, Tate, I have a 9mm handgun in the waistband of my trousers. I’m sure Kraft would have no objection to me shooting an escaping prisoner, so I’d think very carefully about every single move you make. Capiche?’
I owed it to Liam to do my best to stay alive. ‘Yes.’
Carver picked Liam’s glasses up off the floor. He held them up in his blood-soaked hand for inspection. He walked over to the discarded rucksack, dropped them inside, and zipped up the bag. He handed it to McCree. ‘It can go down the hole with him.’
Just as I thought it couldn’t get any worse, Carver took a polaroid instamatic camera out of the desk drawer, and started taking pictures of Liam’s battered body. At least a dozen snaps. The whirr of the camera’s mechanism like the final nails being hammered into Liam’s coffin.
Carver studied the pictures for a while, then put them in the drawer along with the camera. He grinned. ‘Evidence for the judge, in case you’re wondering. Right, let’s get the gear. We haven’t got all night.’
About halfway up the steps, Carver turned around, and pointed his truncheon at Lia
m’s lifeless body. ‘You stay right there, Truman. We won’t be long.’
By the time we’d loaded Liam’s body into the wheelbarrow and taken it to the bottom of the field, I was about ready to collapse from exhaustion. Carver had a powerful torch. He kept shining it in my eyes every time he spoke to me. I tried not to think about what we were doing. To pretend I was somewhere else. Out for a walk with Oxo. Anything other than the awful truth.
Carver ordered me and McCree to dig a hole in the corner of the field.
‘What about Hodges?’ McCree asked.
Carver shone the torch in McCree’s face. ‘What about him?’
‘What if he finds the grave?’
‘I’m not planning to put a headstone on it and lay a wreath, am I? As long as we trample the earth back down, he will be none the wiser.’
And so we set to digging. Carver kept making me jump into the hole to check its depth. A marker for my best friend’s grave. McCree huffed and puffed and moaned. Said he didn’t understand why Carver didn’t make me dig the grave on my own.
‘Because, it will be light soon. It’ll take that idiot too long on his own, now shut up, and get on with it.’
Carver eventually called a halt. ‘Right, that should be deep enough. Put him in.’
McCree wheeled Liam to the edge of the grave and tipped his corpse into the hole. Carver dropped the rucksack in after him and ordered us to fill it in.
When it was done, Carver made us replace the turf on top, and trample down the earth. He fussed with it, getting McCree to hold the torch while he did so.
Satisfied, Carver said, ‘That’ll do. I’ll come back when it’s light and take a proper look. Let’s get this stuff back to the shed.’
With the garden equipment returned, Carver and McCree took me back down into the boiler room. He told McCree to go to bed, and then turned to me. ‘You can have this one of two ways, Tate. The easy way or the hard way. Which would you prefer?’
‘I don’t care.’
‘You’ll care when I smash your teeth down your throat.’
‘The easy way.’
‘Good choice. I’m going to leave the cuffs off. First sign of trouble, they go back on, understand?’
You’re all heart. ‘Yes.’
He took the camera and the pictures out of the drawer and walked up the steps. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’
I paced around the room. There was blood all over the floor by the railings. I massaged my throbbing wrists. ‘I’ll get them for this, Liam. I swear.’
The boiler hissed and clunked as if answering me. I retrieved Liam’s book of poems. Would it really be safe to give it to Hodges? I mean, there was a whole raft of difference between listening to war stories, and trusting him with something as important as Liam’s poems.
I clutched the book to my chest and closed my eyes. I felt the rhythm of my heart beating against the words; the rhythm of the words beating against my heart.
You’d better not tell, boy
You’d better not scream
No one can hear you
In the abattoir of dreams.
The concrete floor suddenly seemed soft beneath my feet. The stale air in the basement was replaced by cool fresh air. Wind ruffled my hair. Then, the tears came, rolling down my cheeks, hot and fresh. I cried for my mother. I cried for Liam. And I cried for every kid who had ever suffered at the hands of evil cowards hiding behind positions of power.
Spent, I opened my eyes. I was no longer in the boiler room at Woodside. I was sitting in my wheelchair at the gates, a fully grown, crippled adult once more. I saw lights in two of the downstairs windows. A young kid cleaning a window. Another sweeping the path in front of the building. A delivery van pulling up at the kerb.
Kalvin Kraft appeared and marched along the front of the building. He stopped next to the kid, punched him in the back, and walked inside, without missing a beat. The kid dropped the cleaning cloth and fell to his knees.
Don’t let them bastards get away with it. Go to the fucking newspapers if you have to. Someone will believe you.
The wheelchair turned around and headed into the dark obscurity of the tunnel. The journey back to the hospital flashed by in a few seconds. No more voices, no stop-offs, just straight back through the emergency door and back into bed.
I watched the wheelchair take its customary place next to the emergency door, tyres screeching on the tiles. The brake snapped on. The bolt slid back into place. The magazine with the photos inside was still on the bedside locker. I heard the faint chatter of nurses at the night station.
How long had I been gone? It felt like months, yet…
I watched, transfixed, as fresh writing appeared on the door. The Abattoir of Dreams.
‘Liam?’
No answer, just the faint whirr of the fan sitting on top of the chest of drawers. But, I now knew, with near certainty, my mother had been murdered by my father, and Liam Truman had been murdered by Detective Inspector Carver.
But, none of this altered the fact I had killed my girlfriend and jumped from the top of a block of flats, did it? Or that I was lying in a hospital bed, paralysed from the waist down.
I tucked Liam’s book of poems under my pillow. I was fucked whatever way you looked at it, and soon, I would be in prison, at the mercy of Carver and anyone else who wanted to abuse me.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Sharon, the nurse with all the personality of a disturbed rhinoceros, announced I had a visitor. It was mid-morning. I’d slept quite well after being returned to my bed. Probably exhaustion.
Jimmy walked in and sat down. ‘How’s it going?’
‘What day is it?’ I hadn’t been in any mood to ask Sharon when she’d emptied my catheter.
‘Friday.’
So, the whole experience at Woodside had been condensed into one night? ‘Are you sure?’
He looked uneasy. ‘Course I am. It’s Friday morning. I’m on shift at midday. Why? What’s happened?’
I told him everything, right up to holding the book of poems in the boiler room. The way I’d suddenly been transported back to the wheelchair, and along the tunnel to the hospital.
At first, he said nothing. He stared at the wall, where the emergency door now displayed its fresh message. When he spoke, something seemed to be affecting his speech. ‘Jesus Christ. Carver killed Liam?’
‘Yep.’
He rubbed the top of his head as if stimulating thought.
‘But, what can we do?’ I said. ‘He’s the one with all the power, isn’t he?’
‘He can’t be allowed to get away with it.’
‘Don’t you think I know that, Jimmy? But, what can we do? Ask a nice policeman to come and take a statement? Who’s going to believe a load of guff about being pushed in a wheelchair by an invisible pusher? It will just sound as if I’ve lost my mind... which is exactly how I feel.’
‘You’re not losing your mind.’
‘I think it’s Liam pushing me along the tunnel.’
‘What if I look for this Children’s Home?’
I wanted to sound enthusiastic, grateful, but it was virtually impossible. ‘It’s still not going to prove anything, is it?’
‘It might, if I can find Liam’s grave.’
‘How? You can hardly ask Kraft if you can borrow a shovel and dig up the field.’
‘I don’t have to ask him.’
We fell into an uneasy silence. And then, I remembered I’d brought Liam’s book of poems back with me. I fished it out from under my pillow. ‘This is the book he asked me to look after.’
Jimmy’s eyebrows almost reached his non-existent hairline. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah. There’s one called The Abattoir of Dreams. It’s about Woodside.’
‘Can I read it?’
‘I’ll read it to you, if you want?’
‘I’d like that.’
I flicked through the pages until I found it. I thought I might cry again, but my voice remained strong
, right through until the end.
Jimmy shook his head slowly. ‘Jesus. How old was he?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘He sounds so much older.’
I felt proud to have known Liam Truman. Someone who wasn’t afraid to say, fuck you, you can take my body, but you’ll never take my mind. Someone who had the balls to stick two fingers up at Woodside. Someone who deserved justice.
Jimmy wiped a tear from his cheek. ‘I still think it’s got to be worth looking for his grave.’
‘I don’t know, Jimmy. Kraft and Malloy rule that place with an iron fist.’
‘What if I went at night?’
‘But, you’ll need torches, shovels. Someone will see you.’ And then, I had an idea; one that made me stop in my tracks. ‘But…’
‘What is it, Michael?’
‘There’s a groundsman at Woodside. His name’s Hodges. Decent bloke. Some of the lads used to go to his shed and have a smoke, listen to boring stories about the war. It’s a long shot, but if you could talk to him, he might help. He’s got a little cottage in the grounds, near the perimeter fence.’
‘Are you sure he’s all right?’
I wanted to say yes, one hundred percent, but I couldn’t. For all I knew, Hodges had his own dark secrets. ‘I haven’t got a clue, but he’s our only chance. No one will pay any notice if they see him working in the field.’
Jimmy was almost wearing out his bald patch with frantic, circular movements of his hand. ‘I might get Terry to go with me.’
‘Terry?’
‘He’s got your old job. But, he’s solid. You’d like him.’
That was good enough for me. ‘Okay.’
‘Where exactly is the grave?’
‘At the bottom of the field. In the right-hand corner, next to the fence.’
‘We’ll find it.’
I closed the book of poems and handed it to Jimmy. ‘I want you to take care of this for me. Keep it safe. Do you promise?’
‘On my life, Michael. On my life.’
We sat in silence. Everything still felt stacked in Carver’s favour. Even finding Liam wouldn’t be enough. There would still be too many blanks, too many horrors, too many innocent kids suffering. It seemed as if God had left the planet in the care of the Devil.