by John Barlow
Den manages to keep her breathing under control, takes stock, remembers where the exits are, her eyes never leaving the gun.
“Alice, you don’t have to…”
“My house, my life. Don’t you dare tell me what I can do with either.”
A standard round-chambered pistol, long chamber, black. It fits her hands perfectly. She holds it at arm’s length, both hands clasping it, a finger already on the trigger. She’s not shaking much. And the gun’s pointed at Den.
“Terrorists,” she says. “You can almost understand ’em. They’ve got a cause, a war they call it.” She pauses, swallows. “Afghanistan. That’s a war, right? How many have we killed there, innocent families, children? But the Leeds bomb? Whoever sold them the Semtex, they knew what it was for, and they didn’t give a toss. For them it was just business. And there was a lot of money on offer. Problems with supply. I’ve read all there is to know about it, believe you me. One of my many hobbies.”
“So you killed them all,” Den says, as she leans forward, dropping her shoulder as if deflated by the information, and making sure her feet are planted firmly on the floor.
“Just watch the screen!” Alice says, moving a little way back. “And no heroics, officer.”
“You killed them all? Jeanette Cormac, the journalist? What had she done?”
“What had my baby boy done?” There are tears welling in Alice’s eyes, but apart from that she’s as solid as a rock, the shaking gone, and in her voice there’s a new confidence, as if this is bringing her a kind of satisfaction.
They both watch the screen as the camera is finally trained on its subject and brought into focus.
There sits Tony Ray, slumped in a chair.
“Live video link. Amazing, isn’t it? All done with mobile phones.” She leans on the back of the armchair. “I didn’t know whether you two would come here first, or go straight down there.”
“Where?”
Alice laughs to herself.
“We saw you yesterday. You and John Ray, snooping around here. So we knew there wasn’t much time.”
“John’s not here.”
“Added bonus. He’ll be down there all the quicker. I was going to ring him, but since you’re here and he’s not, I assume he’s on his way.”
Den’s head is spinning. On the screen Tony Ray looks petrified, his jaw hanging open, his body trembling. He’s been dumped on a stool. Around his chest is what looks like a twisted white sheet. It runs under his arms and up behind him, where it is tied to a large plastic barrel. The sheet is all that stops him toppling to the floor.
Barrels?
There are more barrels close by. Blue chemical barrels. He’s in a factory of some sort, at one end of a large workshop. About fifteen feet away from Tony Ray is a doorway.
“It’s the dry cleaning unit,” Alice says, as if to put an end to Den’s confusion. “You probably passed it coming here. And, for your information, the journalist woman never mentioned John. She said Reid was the courier. Which was a lie. I know how terrorists work. Reid wouldn’t have brought the stuff across on the ferry himself. But lying about it saved her from a worse fate. She didn’t deserve to suffer, not like the rest of ’em.”
“Jesus,” Den whispers, trying not to look at Tony Ray, but unable to take her eyes off his pathetic, shaking frame. “You killed them all.”
“Not me. I couldn’t even look at those men, knowing what they did. But this one,” she says, nodding to the screen, “I want to see this.”
“You killed them, one after the other, till you had all the names.”
“Sheenan talked in the end,” Alice says. “But he could have been lying. We needed to double-check. And we also needed the last man, the one Sheenan didn’t know. Roberto wouldn’t say a thing, apparently, not until he was almost dead, then he gave us Reid. And Reid talked as soon as he saw the gun. He confirmed what we already knew. Plus, he gave us the last man, the courier: John Ray.”
Den’s head is shaking wildly. “It’s not what you think… it’s…”
“It never is, love. He didn’t mean any harm… never knew a thing… loved his mum…”
“No, no… Not John, it wasn’t like that.”
“I know exactly what it was like, believe me. Your boyfriend and his family are pretty well known in these parts. I know what they’re capable of, and I’m not the only one. But that’s all too late. Oh,” she says, “throw your phone into the fire.”
Den hesitates.
“Or I’ll shoot you in your gut. And if I go a bit high you’ll have a burst lung and no one to phone for an ambulance.”
Den tosses the phone onto the coals and watches as licks of green and blue flames curl around it.
Then she looks at the laptop again. Tony Ray shifts on his stool, his torso pulled to one side, as if a sudden blade of pain has run through his side. His face is gripped in agony, and spittle trickles from his mouth as he begins to shake.
“He’s having a heart attack,” Den says. “Are you sure about John? What about Lanny Bride? Where’s he in all this?”
“I’m sure,” Alice says.
“It doesn’t have to end like this.”
“You have kids?”
Den shakes her head, squeezing her eyes together, desperate not to cry. “You don’t want this, Alice. Please. I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry… But don’t let it end like this.”
“It ended for me when my baby died.”
“So why not just kill him? And why… why all this!” she says, looking again at the screen.
“Because I didn’t want to die in a room with that animal,” says Alice, watching now as Tony Ray squirms with pain.
Right.
Gripping her armchair with both hands Den swings a leg out. A year of taekwondo classes channelled into one kick. Her leg arcs through the air so fast she flies out of her seat, her whole body lifting up, before her foot crashes into the side of Alice’s head.
Then they’re on the floor, a flurry of arms, heads smashing into each other. The gun clatters to the floor and skids out of reach beneath the coffee table. A year of taekwondo, and every moment of every class, each kick and punch and grunt a means of forcing John Ray out of her system.
It’s not much of a fight. Alice claws and bites and scratches, arms flaying out, a vile, pathetic scream in her throat. But Den is practiced, focussed. Half a minute and she’d landed three clean blows to the side of Alice’s head. Then she leaps back, up-ends the coffee table, and gets behind it, grabbing the gun.
She kneels there, feeling the heat from the fire on her back. Panting heavily, she waits until she gets her breath back. Alice is now curled up on the floor, her legs up against her stomach, hands covering her face. She gulps in great breaths of air and sobs quietly to herself, the contents of the upturned Dom Perignon bottle trickling out onto the floor beside her.
Den looks in the chamber of the gun. One bullet.
It had been for Alice.
Den gets to her feet, the gun in her hand, tries in vain to stop shaking. Something takes her attention. She picks the laptop up off the floor, brings it close to her face, straining to make sense of the dark patterns on the screen.
Then she sees him: John, standing in the doorway, slowly raising his arms.
Chapter Fifty-six
Baron storms out of Oaklands Nursing Home and through the steel security gate, which is now wide open, a uniformed officer stationed there. Nobody knows, he tells himself. How on earth can nobody know?
The car park is full, blue-tops and CID cars at all angles, half a dozen of them. There’s another officer posted on the entrance to the road. At least the Super’s stayed at Millgarth this time. No good having brass here now, they just add to the confusion, and there’s enough of that already.
He rubs his head until the scalp hurts, trying to get some oxygen to the brain, trying to make sense of everything, to think fast.
Steele jogs out to join him, shaking his head, fag already in his mouth.
“Have you tried absolutely everybody in there?” Baron asks him as he approaches.
“They don’t know!” Steele says, shaking his head in disbelief, patting every pocket he’s got but not finding a lighter. “Nobody’s got a clue who this bloke is. We’ve even asked the bloody inmates.”
“Residents.”
“They’ve got a career criminal living on the ground floor, and someone’s let him out with a bloody dry cleaner.”
“And Holt, the moral crusader.”
“How many dry cleaners in Leeds?” Steele asks.
“Nearly a hundred. List’s coming through now,” he says, nodding towards an unmarked Ford Focus behind them, inside it two DCs, phones pressed to their ears, laptops balanced on their thighs.
Shit. Shit.
“It’s Holt,” Baron says.
Steele isn’t so sure.
The driver’s door of the Focus opens.
“Bit of a weird one, Sir,” says one of the DCs from inside.
“It’s all weird today. Nothing but.”
“The manifest from the ferry? Email just came in. John Ray was driving the van.”
“Yes!” Steele hisses, his whole body jerking as the air forces its way through his gritted teeth.
The young DC isn’t so jubilant.
“Someone else knows, an’all.”
Baron’s face never slips.
“The ferry company. They’re saying someone accessed the same file a couple of weeks ago. Downloaded the manifest. We’re not the only ones looking for John Ray, Sir.”
Baron thinks. He looks at his watch. “Right. Let’s get his face on the news.”
He takes out his phone, about to fast-dial the Super.
It rings. He doesn’t recognise the number. A landline, local.
“Who’s that?” Steele asks.
“Only one way to find out…”
It’s Den.
Chapter Fifty-seven
John’s arms are beginning to ache. He’s standing in the doorway, hands held out in front of him at chest level, palms open as if in peace, or as if they might afford him some sort of protection.
To his left, about four paces away, his father is slumped on a stool, staring at the floor. He’s lashed to a barrel with a white sheet and his skin is grey. In front of them both, perfectly triangulated between father and son, is Graeme Thornton.
“We’re going out live, are we?” John asks, looking at the video camera on a tripod next to Graeme.
“Audience of one,” Graeme says, his head turning to John as he speaks, but his gun pointing at Tony. “Two if you count me.”
“You walk out of that supermarket,” says John, “the baby in your arms. And the mother’s still in there, buried in the rubble. Was this her idea?”
“You hear that, Alice?” Graeme says, raising his voice. “He wants to know whose idea this was!”
John shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“You got that right.”
“What does matter, Graeme?”
“Justice,” Graeme says, as he moves a step closer to the old man, the gun in both hands, held out at arms’ length.
“You’ve got the wrong man tied up over there.”
John feels cold sweat dripping from his armpits. The rattle in his lungs is making it difficult to breath steadily, and his heart is at three beats a second, perhaps more.
Graeme takes his time, searching for the right words.
“Do you know how much I wish it’d been me that took the blast?” The gun never wavers in his hands as he speaks. “Iraq, Bosnia, Ulster, and I never copped a bullet. Every gunshot, every mortar, all I could think about was his tiny face, the eyes hardly open, mouth as big as the end of your thumb. Little grinner he was, from the start.”
“You’ve got the wrong person,” John says.
Graeme chuckles, indulgent, tolerant.
“You couldn’t get to Lanny,” John says, “so you’re taking Dad instead.”
Again, nothing from Graeme…
*
The industrial estate is up ahead. Nothing much, a dozen units, perhaps. She drops down the gears, braking hard as she turns. Not a soul about on a Sunday, the steel grills down on every unit. Then she sees it: a van in the far corner, and next to it the bright green Kawasaki.
She parks three units down, slipping from the car as quietly as she can, the gun in her hand. One bullet. That’s all she’s got, the bullet that Alice Carr was going to use to end her own life.
She inches her way along the wall as far as the van. Three long, deep breaths, then she looks in through the driver’s side window. Just visible in the back is the body of a man, legs and arms heavily bound with tape, his head against the floor. John’s shoes? Can’t see, it’s too dark inside. The man is either unconscious or dead. Instinctively she feels for her phone, then realises she doesn’t have it.
She hears a voice. Relief floods through her body, sending her light-headed: John isn’t dead. His voice is coming from an open doorway just along the wall, Carr’s Dry Cleaning Services above it in neat, functional letters.
She creeps forward, gets to the door, sensing that John is standing just inside. She presses herself up against the wall, gun in both hands, and listens…
“Jeanette? Did she deserve to die?” John asks, hoarse, exhausted.
He can’t be more than a couple of feet away from Den, who is flat against the wall outside, desperately trying not to make a sound.
“She begged me,” Graeme says. He sounds a little further off, but not much. “Cried like a baby. John’s innocent, she said!”
“She was innocent,” says John. “You killed her anyway.”
“If I hadn’t killed her, she might have gone to the police and I’d never have got you and your daddy down here. I had no choice.”
“She did nothing!”
“Call it collateral damage. Happens all the time in war. Just like it did to my baby boy. And now, John Ray, you know what it feels like to have the person you love dead in your arms.”
“I’d only known her a week. She’s not the person I love!”
But Graeme’s not listening. “I held him in my arms as he went cold. My own son. The bomb? It was a mistake, a fuck-up, sorry lads! Well, they’re all fucking sorry now.”
“Got Lanny have you?”
“You think you’re gonna blame it on Lanny Bride? Then what? I let your daddy go?”
“You think Lanny wasn’t involved?”
Tony Ray’s head is now resting on his chest. If he can still hear anything he’s showing no signs of it.
“Dad?” John says. “The Semtex? Joe and Lanny, right?”
No response. But Tony begins to rock backwards and forwards very gently on the stool.
John looks at Graeme. “I want to phone Lanny.”
“Nice and slow,” says Graeme, watching as John pulls his iPhone out of his pocket, the gun still trained on his dad.
John dials, holds the phone to his ear, his chest heaving.
“Lanny? It’s me. 1990, Leeds bombing. Semtex. Who was in charge? Tell me now.”
And Lanny tells him.
The phone drops to the floor. And the tears are already streaming down his face.
Tony Ray raises his head a fraction. “Hijo, no me acerques,” he says, his Spanish little more than a croak. Son, don’t come near me.
He says it again, straining to get the words out.
Then, finally, he lifts his head until he’s looking at John. His lips quiver and his eyes are glazed; the same eyes that used to shine with fun, father and son reading the Beano together at the kitchen table, that ridiculous Spanish accent making his words sound nutty and exotic; the same eyes that beamed with childlike pleasure when a pile of toys appeared in the living room, where did all those come from!; the eyes of a liar.
He says it a third time: “Don’t come near me, son,” and this time his eyes flick to the side, almost imperceptibly, as if he’s trying to look behind his
head.
John sees it: a wire taped to the blue barrel, running all the way down the side, then onto the next barrel, and the next; finally all the way back to Graeme, and up into his pocket.
“Dad?”
But the old man’s eyes are closing.
“Dad!”
Graeme steps over and slams the but of the gun into the top of the old man’s head.
“Don’t die on me now, Tony. I’ve got something for you.”
“Dad! Dad!”
But Tony Ray is delirious, sinking fast.
“I brought the shipment in,” John says, feeling the tears running down his face. “I drove the van. It was me.”
Graeme shakes his head, laughs.
“I know you did. You were the courier. The last name on the list. I got you all in the end, but I wanted you two last. Alive.”
He grabs Tony Ray’s thin grey hair, yanks his head up and pushes the gun deep into the sallow flesh of his cheek.
“Tony Ray. You miserable cunt. It was your job, your shipment, your contacts. Now you’re gonna know what it’s like to watch your son die in front of you.”
He drops the old man’s head, arms swinging round, the gun suddenly pointing at John.
A single shot.
John feels himself falling backwards, spinning to the ground, the ringing in his ears unbearable. He’s screaming, but as he hits the floor he can’t hear a thing.
When he opens his eyes, he sees Graeme Thornton standing there, gun still in his hand. But his arms have dropped, as a dark red stain spreads across his chest. For a second he seems at peace. A youthful vitality returns to his face, as if the blood is a welcome sight, a relief, a final deliverance.
Then his eyelids flutter and his breath crackles with blood.
His legs sag beneath him. As he begins to fall forwards his hand follows the wire up into his pocket.
A blinding white light fills the place.
And it’s all over.
PART FOUR - AFTER
Chapter Fifty-eight
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him…”