Borrowed Time

by David Mark

  ‘Shit, it’s Mum,’ says Adam, as a buzzing noise emanates from his back pocket and Tilly points out that his ‘hone’ is going ‘bzz’. He takes the call, trying to sound bright. ‘Hiya. Yeah, I’ll be there. No, no of course not. Same old, same old. Just with Tilly. Yeah. You can talk to her if you want … okay, another time …’

  As he talks, Grace picks up her own phone. She smiles at Tilly, who has picked up a Lego creation and is talking into it like a mobile, keen to be part of the gang. Quickly, she types out a text message and sends it to the number on the bottom of the website.

  Hi – I’m a researcher. I’d like to know about a girl called Pamela Garner who died in 1971. There may be a link to Francis Jardine. Would you be able to help? On the QT, of course.

  She sends it without a second thought, rather pleased with herself for striking the right tone. Then she turns her attention back to Adam, convinced he will see that she has done the right thing. He’s still talking – tickling Tilly with his foot as he stands, awkwardly, staring out the window as if planning an escape and holding the phone to his ear.

  ‘… of course I remember him, he was Dad’s, wasn’t he? Sorry, partner. Aye, loudmouth but one of the good ones. Okay, whatever. Right, I’ll see you when I’m looking at you … ace. Bye. Bye.’

  Adam hangs up and gives Grace a knowing look. She has long since stopped teasing him for the sickeningly insincere way he speaks to his mother. He treats her like she’s made of glass and rose petals, though she supposes he learned that from his father. If she were to think about it at all, Grace would probably admit that she thinks of Adam’s mum in a fond, bemused, kind of way. Bit dotty. Bit flighty. Frail and high-pitched; good-natured and kind. She doesn’t know what to make of his dad. Strong. A big man. Loud. Solid. Down-to-earth, but clever with it, before his mind started to slip last year. Something about him, though. Something harsh, underneath the smiles and the old-fashioned shades of chivalry. He is always civil to her, though, in their rare meetings. Offers tea. Asks her about her work. Had given her a kiss and a cuddle when she and Adam told him she was pregnant.

  ‘I thought you were just friends,’ he’d said.

  ‘We are,’ Adam had replied. ‘It just happened.’

  She’d wanted him to say something more powerful, more lusty and romantic, but all she heard was apology. He’d been OK about it all, though, for a man of his age. Didn’t disapprove when they said they were going to lead separate lives. Said his son would have his blessing no matter what he chose to do or whom he chose to do it with. Good with Tilly, too. Good with all kids, Adam had said. Used to have half the neighbourhood in his house when Adam was growing up, making them Roman swords and shields amid the sawdust and poster-paint of his shed; spinning tales about adventures after the war. Grace found it all strangely disingenuous, now.

  ‘I should go,’ says Adam, shyly. ‘An old colleague of Dad’s has been round, or he’s coming round – she’s in a flap. Needs biscuits and the right kind of milk, or something. Look, thanks for letting me offload on you, and yes, I realize how mucky that sounds. Honestly, you’re the best. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

  Grace grins, madly, and accepts the cuddle that he offers. She fancies that he may have sniffed her hair as he held her. Certainly she took the chance to press her nose into his neck. Tobacco. Soap. Clothes dried in a too-damp room. And something else, too. Something animal and raw, that makes her want to rake Zara’s eyeballs out of her stupid bald head and squish them between her toes.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ he says, as he makes a fuss over Tilly and tells her to be a good girl.

  ‘Nooo … Daddy stay …’

  ‘Please, Tilly …’

  ‘Peeese, Daddy …’

  ‘I can’t, baby girl …’

  ‘Can. Can!’

  ‘Oh Jesus, fine … Grace, can I take the car seat?’

  Grace nods, grateful that she has not interceded. She cannot commend her daughter’s emotional manipulation skills, but she will admit to being grateful for their efficacy. She looks away in case her smile should betray her, listening as Tilly starts shouting ‘woo-woo’ and ‘shoe-shoe’ as Adam wrestles her into her outdoor clothes. Blurrily, her eyes land on the screen of her phone. It’s a reply from King Rat, written in capital letters.

  FREE TO TALK NOW. IF YOU’RE A MATE OF LARRY PARIS, I’M SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS. IF YOU’RE NOT A MATE OF LARRY PARIS, YOU WONT GET A CHANCE. HA HA.

  For once, Grace is pleased to see the back of the man she tries so hard not to love.

  NINE

  Somewhere between Saffron Walden and Bishop’s Stortford, Essex

  5.58 p.m.

  Under a canopy of grey, his feet sinking into sodden grass and coffee-dark mud, Irons stalks purposefully through the woods. The strong wind, which has ensured his isolation on this afternoon walk, seems to split around him, like water around a boulder. He has his phone to his ear, and each word spoken seems to drive another nail into his wounded skin.

  ‘Say that again,’ he growls. ‘Say it like you would if I was standing over you.’

  The bent copper at the end of the line has a tremble in his voice, as if he’s talking while being observed by a slavering pit bull.

  ‘Bosworth’s briefed the unit. This Nunn, the one they picked up and let go at lunch – he’s saying that he hired Paris to look into a personal matter for him. Says they do a bit of work together – he handles odd jobs, dirty work, all the off-book stuff. He didn’t blink at the mention of our, erm, mutual friend. Nor the other one – the dead one, though Bosworth’s already hearing rumours on that front …’

  ‘Leave that to me,’ growls Irons, stomping his booted feet harder into the damp ground.

  ‘They’ve done a proper trace on Paris’s phone, bounced the signals off all the towers – his route went through half a dozen premises all associated with our mutual friend …’

  ‘You told me that already.’

  ‘The post-mortem,’ he says, urgently. ‘They had to bring in an expert from the university because the pathologist couldn’t be sure but it appeared as though somebody had gone to great lengths to make it look like he’d been in the water a very long time. The skin is in a state completely inconsistent with being submerged for such a short time. It was like he’d been parboiled before going in … we thought we had something from decades ago when he was pulled out but it couldn’t have been there any longer than twenty-three days. The skin samples show he was in contact with a substance called methylene chloride – do you know what that is?’

  ‘Of course I fucking do,’ he snaps.

  ‘Paint stripper,’ says the copper, urgently. ‘That’s as much our mutual friend’s calling card as barbed wire and a car battery.’

  ‘Cause of death?’ asks Irons, without emotion.

  ‘Multiple injuries, but there’s a hole in the skull that looks like it was put there by a fucking Viking.’

  Irons says nothing. A faint whisper of regret is starting to reverberate inside his head. He didn’t speak up when Alison suggested using the discovery of Larry Paris’s body as an excuse to take out an ambitious rival, Nicholas Kukuc. It’s what her father would have done, were he able. But now he is beginning to wonder whether or not she may have accidentally stumbled onto a truth. Somebody seems to be trying to point the finger at the Jardines. And by extension, they’re pointing the finger at him. Mr Jardine rarely wielded the weapons himself. He was happy enough to stand there and ask his questions and smoke his cigarettes but it was always Irons who made the men scream on his behalf. Always Irons who sank the barbed wire into their fleshy parts and connected up the battery. It was Irons who had to spend a godawful night in the woods at Dead Man’s Vale, pulling out body parts, barbed wire and old bin bags from the soft mud at the bottom of the pond where he had dumped half a dozen old friends back when the world was a more psychedelic place. It had been unsettling, seeing them all again. Some of them seemed to have aged better than he had.

&nb
sp; ‘I can’t keep sneaking away like this,’ comes the voice in his ear. ‘Bosworth’s heading back to London so if you’re going to lean on Nunn, now would be the time. This is worth something, yeah? Only I think she got suspicious, and …’

  Through the trees he sees them. Two young men and a girl. They’re all skinny. All got bad skin and eyes that never seem still. Timothy Jardine, his pal Logan, and the girl they seem to share as if she were a bag of pick-and-mix. She’s dressed for Malibu despite the chill and bluster of the day: a tiny top showing jewelled midriff and a skirt short enough to wear as a hat. Her bare legs are the colour of cheap ham. Even so, she could do better than Tim and Logan. Were it not for his surname and the money in his trust fund, Timmy would struggle to attract anything further up the evolutionary ladder than a macaque.

  Irons stands still and watches. This little clearing, half a mile from his own quiet cottage, seems to have bypassed autumn and gone straight to winter. It’s bitterly cold, and the rain blows in from every angle. Timmy is lounging on what used to be a boundary wall, but which has settled into the damp earth in the decades since Mr Jardine bought the estate and told the tenant farmer they were about to retire to somewhere warm.

  From behind the mossy trunk of a big sycamore, Irons considers the young man. He was already a tearaway when Irons had been released from prison for gutting Tommy Dozzle. Six years old and getting expelled from expensive schools for sticking pins and needles into the fleshy places of pupils he didn’t like, and rubbing himself against the legs of those that he did. Irons does not claim to understand the complexities of raising a child but from what he has seen, Alison has done her best with her parcel of damaged goods. She’s been through tough times herself and has never been a natural mother. Irons, in his moments of introspection, wonders whether the thing that happened to her best friend had also, in some unfathomable way, happened to her too. She had lost the only person who understood her. She had seen the vulnerabilities in her father’s armour. The man who knocked her up had no doubt enjoyed bragging to his mates that he’d fucked a Jardine. Franco had personally put him in the water at Dead Man’s Vale. Alison had agreed to it. Turned her back on some of her bad ways in exchange for coming back into the fold, and allowing her dad to bind her lover in barbed wire and smash in his skull with a caulking mallet.

  Irons looks again at the boy. He’d done okay the other night, out at the airport, hiding in the loft hatch with his gun. But he’d enjoyed it a little too much. Irons knows what it is to take a life. He understands the magnitude of it. Timmy seems positively hungry for opportunity.

  He watches, silently, as Logan passes Timmy the clear polythene bag and the aerosol. Watches him suck throatily at the solvent, then lay back on the mossed stone as if in ecstasy. The girl takes the bag from his hand. Treats herself to a hit, then starts to tug at his jogging trousers. Her eyes are dead.

  Irons turns away. He has no appetite for seeing young girls degrade themselves. Were Tim’s surname different, Irons would plant him where he lays. But he is kin to the man he serves, and the only time he has gone against an order it cost him eighteen years of his life.

  He experiences a moment’s weakness, his resolve faltering for just long enough for the memories to reach out for him.

  Inside, he hears her voice. The angel’s song.

  He can almost see her, hovering just out of reach.

  Can almost feel her hair tickling his still-handsome features as she giggles into his blue eyes.

  Can almost see Pamela.

  Pam.

  Can almost see the child he couldn’t save, and whose desecration haunts him like a burned church.

  Pain stings his chest and he savours it. Pain means his heart still beats, and where there’s life, there’s still hope for a man who deals in death.

  He forces himself to move. Turns his back on the clearing and trudges on through the woods towards the road. He half hopes that the fresh air will blow away some of the corruption in his lungs. All the people who’ve tried to take him down and it’ll be his own metastasizing cells that will kill him. He hasn’t had time to think much about the doctor’s diagnosis. Six months, she reckons, though he won’t let it get that far. He’ll go once Mr Jardine has slipped away. It seems right that they enter the next world together. They’ve always walked side by side through this one, and he fancies that he will need an ally in the afterlife. He fancies Mr Jardine will be running Hell within the year. If not, he doubts the fire and brimstone will hurt any more than the wounds he has experienced in life.

  Thoughts of his own mortality cause a vision of Alison to flash inside his mind. He should tell her, he thinks. Should start making contingency plans. She’s tough and capable, but she’s not her father, and neither Jimbo nor her halfwit son are capable of doing the things on her behalf that he has done, without flinching, for as long as he can remember. Even when the twins went to work on him, he took what they dished out without once letting the family down. His kind of loyalty is absolute.

  The woodland thins out as Irons pushes through the tangle of trees and emerges in a clearing, criss-crossed with deep tyre tracks. His new vehicle is waiting for him, the keys in the ignition. He pulls open the door of the eight-year-old Toyota pick-up truck. Checks beneath the passenger seat to ascertain that the other items he has requested are where they should be. He slides his gloved hand along the blade of the bayonet and is gratified to feel the soft leather slice like ripe fruit. He doesn’t check that the gun is loaded. Nobody would be fool enough to double-cross him.

  He turns the key and eases the car forward. He fiddles with the radio and finds a classical station. The vehicle fills with the angelic sounds of an aria from La Bohème. He hopes it’s just starting. He has a couple of hours of driving ahead of him and he has always found opera to be a soothing soundtrack to a journey. It always drowns out the screaming in his head. He hopes, too, that something similar will be playing on the drive back. He fancies that there will be fresh shrieks to soothe.

  TEN

  7.04 p.m.

  Grace glances at the clock above her fireplace. King Rat has now been talking, without interruption, for forty minutes straight. She feels as though a snooker cue is being inserted, one millimetre at a time, into her ear.

  ‘… wouldn’t know a proper gangster if he was sitting on his chest with a hacksaw and a sock full of batteries, but he gets the money, y’see, because he looks the part and he’s got the wonky nose and the gold chains, whereas I’m more sort of, well, a bit Timothy Spall, if you catch my drift …’

  Grace now knows more about King Rat than she does about anybody else. Almost all of what he has shared has been about himself, his underworld connections, and how he’s the only author that the gangsters really trust. He’d have been boss of his own firm by now, if he hadn’t met the wife. Bad lad. Proper tearaway. Ran with them all. Had to get pretty shirty with the brothers one night in Tangiers in 1968 – had to tell Ronnie he wasn’t like that and that he’d only worn the extra-tight trunks to show off his flat gut. Knows them all, now. Doesn’t fear repercussions because there are people who would do time in order to show they had his back …

  Grace has given up trying to get a word in. She hopes that he will eventually run out of breath, though so far, he hasn’t given any indication that he’s preparing for a pause.

  ‘… but that leads me to your boy Larry, of course,’ he says, his accent a mess of mangled vowels and missing consonants. Every ‘u’ is an ‘a’, every ‘h’ absent without leave. ‘Poor bastard. I got the call twenty-five minutes after the cops did. Body in Dedham Vale? Thought I was having déjà vu …’

  ‘You know the place,’ says Grace, pleased to find her voice still works.

  ‘You’ll have seen the documentary, of course,’ continues King Rat, and it’s not a question. ‘It was only on one of the satellite channels but it got good numbers. Had me looking proper moody, pratting about in the cold. I thought maybe they’d blur me out but to be honest tha
t would have defeated the purpose of the exercise. I’ve got books to sell, love. That’s why I called you back. Researcher, you said. BBC, is it?’

  Grace ignores the question. ‘You knew at once I was ringing about Larry Paris. How?’

  ‘I watch the forums,’ says King Rat, with a smile. ‘Bit of software they make in Korea – gives you the IP address of every casual observer of the chatrooms, unless they’ve got the software installed to block it. Yours is Portsmouth. Larry Paris is Portsmouth.’

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ says Grace, automatically.

  ‘No real loss,’ says King Rat, breezily. ‘We weren’t pals. I do feel like a bit of a prick for not warning him off, but he was a grown man. I swear, I wouldn’t have wanted to go through what he went through at the end. If whoever did this is trying to make it look like it was Effie, they’ll have needed a strong stomach.’

  ‘Effie?’ asks Grace, reluctant to waste the pause for breath.

  ‘Just a nickname, love – in case the one he prefers isn’t one he’d thank me to have in my mouth.’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ she asks, hoping she still sounds like a researcher for a TV company and not a stay-at-home mum who’s worrying about her best friend.

  ‘You don’t know very much, do you,’ he says, without malice. ‘Dedham Vale is where Jardine used to dump bodies. Dead Man’s Vale, that’s what the locals call it. Wouldn’t want to go there after dark – I reckon the place is crawling with the ghosts of dead gangsters, but I won’t say that on air if you think it’s too much. Anyways, I’ve got it on good authority there’s no dead men there any more. Jardine’s men cleared it out when it was being touted for sale as a private woodland. Grim job for some poor bastard—’