Father and Son

by John Barlow

  “So, Freddy,” he says at last, “sometime late on Thursday night Mr Swales was murdered down at the Park Lane. According to CCTV from Lower Briggate, you turned up towards the bar that night at around eight o’clock, and came back the same way an hour later. Why don’t you tell us what happened in that hour? Oh,” he adds, before Freddy has a chance to open his mouth, “coffee, tea anybody?”

  A general shaking of heads.

  He takes the photo off the table and returns it to its large brown envelope.

  “Right then. Thursday.”

  Freddy rubs his face with his big clumsy hands, and begins. The same story he told John, leaving nothing out, almost word for word. Baron nods occasionally, asks the odd question for clarification, keeping it polite, matter of fact. At his side DS Steele says nothing, taking his cue from Baron, knowing now that this isn’t going to be an opportunity for the bull terrier treatment. His job is to watch for the body language, to listen for the pauses, the finest trace of calculation in Freddy’s voice. He may act like a loud-mouthed, rugby playing thug, but DS Steele knows when to keep his mouth shut. And he knows it instinctively.

  As Freddy finishes, he points to the bruise on the side of his head where Roberto laid him out.

  “Single punch,” he says, looking at Steele as if he’ll get some sort of reaction. He gets none. “I mean, you wouldn’t normally put me on the floor with one punch.”

  He raises his arms as if to explain what he means.

  “Handy with his fists, Mr Swales was,” Baron says. “Ever seen him use ’em before?”

  “No, he never had to.”

  “So, if you had to sum up Roberto’s frame of mind,” Baron says, “in one word, what would it be?”

  Freddy shifts in his seat. “I dunno. Regret?”

  “Regret?”

  Freddy nods.

  “Regret that he’d spent his life in the company of criminals,” Baron says, summarising what Freddy has said, counting the points off on his fingers, “because he had never had children, because he seemed depressed, because he had compared himself to a fictional child murderer.”

  “Yes.”

  Baron looks right at Freddy. “Why now? Any thoughts? Anything at all?”

  But Freddy’s bright enough not to start speculating to CID about one of Lanny Bride’s employees.

  The four men sit there in silence until it becomes clear that Freddy has no intention of answering.

  “And you, Mr Metcalfe?”

  “Me?”

  “Are you going to take the advice?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Really? That surprises me. John Ray, he’s something of a father figure to you, isn’t he?”

  “Well, he’s a…”

  “I mean, he gave you a job, and together you built that ridiculous showroom on Hope Road. A year later you’re locked up for counterfeit money, the same racket Mr Ray’s own father was involved in. And Mr Ray’s brother too, before he was shot down in cold blood. Dangerous family to know.”

  Freddy’s brief shifts in his seat, begins to raise a hand, as if he’s about to restrain Freddy from saying anything else.

  “Sorry,” Baron continues, “I was simply wondering whether, given the circumstances, you might have considered taking the advice to walk away. After all, it wasn’t John Ray sitting in a prison cell last year, was it?”

  Freddy sniffs, looks away, as if he’s already tired of the innuendo. But the truth is he’s been asking himself the same question ever since he learned of Roberto’s death.

  “How is Mr Ray?” Steele says “How’s he been, y’know, the last week or so?”

  “John? Same as ever. You know John…”

  A bit of a grin from Freddy. Baron forces a quick smile himself, even Steele and Freddy’s solicitor raise their eyebrows. They all know the script: John Ray, confident, unconventional, flamboyant, and one of the best-known bon vivants in the city. Yes, they all know the script; it’s smiles all the way with John Ray.

  Not when it comes to murder, though, Baron tells himself. John Ray is in this deeper than he’s letting on. When this gets sorted, no one’s going to be smiling, least of all Ray himself.

  “Nothing different, then?” Steele asks. “Spring in his step? I mean,” and he fishes in the envelope for a another, smaller photo, “I’d be pretty pleased if she was making my toast and marmalade of a morning.”

  He lays an image of a woman on the table, taken outside, like a paparazzi shot, the subject unaware of the camera. She has masses of red hair and a pale complexion. And she’s strikingly attractive.

  “Is that her?” Freddy asks.

  “You tell us.”

  “I dunno. He was with someone, last few days. Didn’t mention her name. I don’t know anything about her.”

  “Would he normally keep that kind of thing quiet, an old Casanova like John Ray?”

  Casanova? Baron’s thoughts turn for an instant to Den. Nobody at Millgarth knows that he had an affair with DC Denson, right as his marriage was breaking up. In fact Den was the reason Baron finally left his wife. A clean break. A new start. Then John Ray walked in and took Den from him. Nobody at Millgarth knows, apart from the Super, and she’s so discreet you could tell her the pin number of your bank card. Casanova?

  “Jeanette Cormac,” he says, putting Den out of his mind. “Investigative journalist. He never mentioned her by name?”

  “John? No, like I said.”

  “What about Mr Swales?”

  “Roberto?”

  “Jeanette Cormac met him at least once. Did he mention that when you spoke to him on Thursday night?”

  “No.”

  “And you? She’s been getting around a bit. Very interested in the Ray family, apparently. Lanny Bride too. Sure you haven’t come across her recently.”

  Freddy blanks them.

  Baron turns to his colleague.

  Steele nods.

  “I think we’re done,” says Baron, already getting to his feet.

  But then he sits back down.

  “One more thing, almost forgot. The Park Lane. Do you go in there a lot?”

  “A bit. I know a few blokes who drink down there. And it’s quiet.”

  Baron thinks. Concentrates.

  “Where do you sit, as a rule?”

  Freddy frowns.

  “I dunno… at the bar normally, I suppose.”

  “Describe it to me.”

  “What, the bar?”

  “Imagine you’re sitting there, having a drink. What do you see?”

  Freddy casts a glance at his brief, who nods.

  “The bar… it’s, y’know, black. Flat, nothing much on it…” He feels like an idiot. What does Baron want him to say?

  “Go on. Just tell me what you see when you’re sitting there.”

  “No pumps. Beer’s all bottles. On the wall behind there are optics, and a couple of shelves of whiskies. About fifty bottles, I think, good stuff an’all…”

  He looks at Baron, like a child seeking approval.

  “What else can you see, Freddy? Think.”

  “There’s a cabinet behind the bar. Next to the whiskies. Big thing. Glass, gold edges. It’s lit from behind. When you come in off the street you can see it at the other end of the room, like it’s glowing.”

  “What’s in the cabinet?”

  “Champagne. Full of the stuff. Orange labels.”

  “And was the cabinet there on Friday night? Chock-a-block with champagne?”

  Freddy nods slowly, as if he’s just said the wrong thing, but can do nothing about it.

  A minute later the interview is over and Freddy is free to go.

  “Telling the truth?” Baron says at a whisper as he and Steele make their way back up to the incident room.

  “Yep,” Steele says, as if it’s a formality. “Bring on Lanny.”

  “Somehow I don’t think that’s gonna be as cordial.”

  The salacious grin returns to Steele’s face.
>
  Chapter Thirty-four

  “She told me she never committed anything to digital,” he says, staring at the screen of the MacBook as Den takes it steady out of town.

  “What did she need a laptop for, then?”

  “There’s loads of background on the bomb, Connie said. Articles and what have you. I assume it’s the important stuff she doesn’t save. Shit,” he says, screwing his face up, holding the Mac up close, “I can’t find Internet Explorer.”

  “It’s a Mac, thicko. Try Safari.”

  “Done a course on computers as well, have you?” he says, clicking open Safari.

  “No. That’s common knowledge, Mr Stone Age. Thing I don’t get,” she says as they follow a bus up Roundhay Road, “where’s all the pressure coming from? Your journalist friend turns up in Leeds. Then Reid. Someone kills Roberto, and a day later Reid’s giving your dad a scare. Why? And why now?”

  “Bernard Sheenan,” he says. “The Leeds bombing. It’s the same deal. Got to be.”

  “And she got the last interview with Sheenan, right before he was murdered?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t get the full story from him. Just enough to know where to start looking for answers. You think she led the killer to Roberto?”

  “And who would that be? Dennis Reid?”

  “That’s what I’d be thinking. Bloke like Reid arrives on the scene, and someone dies? He’s gonna be your main suspect, whatever motive you can come up with. You really should tell Baron that he went to see your dad.”

  “Yeah, right, and implicate Dad in something he can’t defend himself against.”

  “Reid goes there to tell your dad to keep quiet? That’s the beginnings of a motive.”

  “Dad can’t answer for himself,” he says, hardly listening, squinting at the screen of the laptop. “Connie was right, it’s all yachts.”

  “You’ve got internet?”

  “No. But I can see the names of the websites. She’s got a list of favourites, and they’re all yachting sites. What does that mean?”

  “You’re the expert. Are they well known?”

  “The sites? Yeah. All the popular ones.”

  “So, she likes yachts. Bingo for you, sailor boy.” The bus pulls in, and off they go, the Astra straining up the hill in third, past the dark red brick monster of St Aidan’s Church and next to it the Shezan Kebab House. “What was it Freddy told you? That Roberto had killed a baby?”

  “Yeah. Something about a character in The Godfather.”

  “It’s the Leeds bombing again. Little baby died in the blast.”

  “But that was the IRA.”

  “It wasn’t, John. They never claimed it.”

  “But I remember, on the news…”

  “I was a copper here for ten years, you think I’ve never heard about that bomb? No one ever claimed it. Not officially.”

  “Perhaps Jeanette knows? Perhaps she got the whole story out of Sheenan before he died?”

  “Perhaps she didn’t, which would explain why she’s here, looking for answers. Face facts, John. This is either about Lanny Bride or your dad.”

  “I’m not trying to avoid the truth. It’s just…”

  He fiddles with the touchpad of the Mac, holding the laptop at different angles against the sun that streams in through the windscreen.

  “Veuve Clicquot,” he says.

  “A yacht?”

  “No. It’s champagne.”

  “Mean anything to you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll take that as a maybe. Right-click on all the links. It tells you the date and time they were added.”

  He goes through the first five. Then jumps to the last one, the website for Veuve Clicquot.

  “Yesterday morning,” he says.

  “All of them?”

  He checks several more at random.

  “Yes. The lot, within ten minutes of each other.”

  “She didn’t even have time to look at them. Not a yachting fan, then?”

  “Apparently not.”

  A sudden wave of thunder hits them as a pack of bikers file past, each one slaloming back into the lane as they glide smoothly around the Astra.

  “You should have got into motorbikes, instead,” she says. “My uncle’s a massive bike nut, three vintage BSAs in his garage. Whereas you’re still drooling after those bloody yachts in magazines and dreaming of a windfall.”

  And getting involved in counterfeit money, she decides not to add.

  He closes the laptop and lets it rest on his thighs.

  For a while Den concentrates on driving, giving him time to think. Know when to shut up: the most useful skill an investigating officer can have.

  By the time they’re up at the home, he still hasn’t said anything. She pulls off the road on the edge of Soldiers Field and kills the engine.

  “Sutcliffe did one of his victims up here,” he says.

  She snorts. “Think I don’t know that? I know what clothes they were all wearing. I know their middle names. I was a copper at Millgarth. The Ripper’s in my bloody DNA.”

  “Got an fags?”

  “I’ve stopped,” she says.

  “What, even when you’re working? I thought you needed one, y’know, if you had a bad job?”

  “Funny, dead Lancastrians don’t make me as queasy.”

  “You’ve changed!”

  “A lot of things have changed.”

  They look out across the open space. Time is ticking by, the day drawing to a close, and she wonders what Steve’s doing down at Millgarth now. Tick-tock. First full day of a murder investigation. He’ll be busy. Tick-tock.

  There’s no time for this.

  “You’re not gonna tell me, are you?” she says, pulling herself upright, ready to drive off.

  “That obvious, is it?”

  “I lived with you for a year, John. You only shave once a week. You rub a clove of garlic on the bread when you make a sandwich. You love gin but hate rum. Oh, and when you’re lying you open your eyes wide like a kid.”

  She chuckles to herself, suddenly back in his flat, the nights in front of the telly watching Tarantino, or just getting drunk on the floor, arm wrestling on the coffee table, messing about. She’d loved being with him, everything about it, the security of his embrace, but also the way he could hold off, quiet, pensive, those golden eyes following her as if she was the most beautiful woman on the planet. She’d loved everything about him.

  “I want to be sure,” he says. “That’s all.”

  “Reid came to see your dad. Left him petrified. I saw it, John. It’s evidence, and I’m sitting on it.”

  “So, tell Baron.”

  “It’d be better coming from you.”

  “Let me talk to Dad first.”

  “And if it was him? The Leeds bombing? Jesus Christ, John!”

  He shakes his head.

  “Twenty minutes,” she says. “I’m ringing Steve in twenty.”

  “Okay.”

  Then he’s out of the car, his back to the road as she drives off.

  There he stands, on Soldiers Field, and wonders who he’s going to find when he looks into his father’s eyes.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Tony Ray is asleep in his chair. His breathing is light and regular, his face peaceful and composed, head slightly to one side.

  John creeps across the room and sits in one of the chairs against the back wall. He’d never seen his dad asleep before he came to live up here. Not a single time. Dad was always the first up in the morning, there at the kitchen table devouring the paper, every inch of it, a little cup of horrendously strong coffee in his hand. He’d look up when you appeared in your pyjamas, grinning, as if he’d just found treasure.

  “Look at this, kid!” he’d say, jabbing his finger down onto the newspaper.

  It didn’t matter what the news was, a new president in Peru, world land speed record, the dollar hits an all-time high against the yen… H
e’d gather you up, kissing the crown of your head, arms right around you, that easy, unashamed Spanish tactility that set him apart from everyone else’s dad. He smelled of Old Spice and Brylcreem and shoe polish. It was as if he’d jumped straight out of the fifties, this weirdly loveable man who seemed never to have got the hang of being modern, for whom rock music was some quaint and incomprehensible diversion for children. Who loved life.

  And there you’d be, before breakfast, listening to him explain the intricacies of Peruvian politics or exchange rates as if he was telling you the plot of Jason and the Argonauts, making it all real, the personalities, the high drama of it all. He’d explain how whole economies rose and fell and collided, like tectonic plates (which he would also describe in scintillating detail whenever an earthquake was reported in the Yorkshire Post). He spoke in a haphazard mixture of quick-fire Spanish and colloquial English, full of expressions that didn’t quite fit, toe-ragged this and godsforsakeme that, a private language for him and his son, a language of wonder and discovery and faulty grammar.

  Joe was different. A couple of years older, by the time he reached his teens he wasn’t interested in listening to Dad. All he wanted was to be Dad, to drop out of school and join the family business. And whenever he asked if he could go down to the showroom, his father would shrug, his smile never slipping, but the disappointment impossible to conceal.

  Tony Ray didn’t want his sons to follow in his footsteps, dodgy electrical goods and fake perfume, transit vans full of leather coats and a bloke waiting for the five hundred quid you owed him… He wanted his boys to be lawyers or doctors, like all immigrants do. When John got into Cambridge it was the happiest day of Tony Ray’s life. And when Joe got his head blown off, in the old showroom, it devastated him. But it didn’t surprise him; it crushed him with its numbing inevitability. His spirit seemed to drain away, a life-long fascination with all that the world had to offer replaced by the knowledge that his son was dead because he’d wanted to be like his father.

  John looks at his watch. Fifteen minutes and he has to tell Baron about Reid coming up here to see Dad. Either he does or Den will. Quarter of an hour and this is going to blow up, taking them all with it. He doesn’t even know how, or why. Joe? Odds-on he was involved. Bringing a shipment of Semtex into the country? Joe and Lanny were young and arrogant at the time. Explosives wouldn’t have bothered them in the slightest. A mire, Joe used to say. The world’s a mire, and we’re all knee-deep in shit.