by David Mark
The fury has chilled her skin.
Adam holds Timmy by the hair. His mouth is bleeding. His nose plastered across his face. His new tracksuit an artist’s palette of crimson and claret.
He looks up and sees her coming. Holding the gun. Turning it upon him.
He flashes her a smile as she takes aim.
Then slams Timmy’s head through the car window.
Another ear-splitting thunderclap. Another squeal of birds.
Then a thud, as a crow falls from the sky and lands on the damp gravel.
Adam and Alison turn their heads to the treeline.
Irons stands there, a blob of pitch against the jet of the forest.
Alison looks at the gun, lying on its side a few feet away. There is a dint in the barrel where the knife struck it. The knife, having ricocheted off, turns slowly, on the bonnet of the car, like a bottle being spun at a school disco.
Timmy slowly slides down the car door. Glass in his hair. Smaller shards stuck in his forehead. Cage bars of blood run down his face.
Irons stalks forward.
He has made his choice. Saved Pamela’s boy, at the risk of Jardine’s girl.
He can feel his heart beating.
He fancies that if he were to rub his hands over his face, he would feel nothing but smooth skin.
Dozzle? Riley? Ace? It doesn’t matter.
He knows who the boy’s mother was.
And that is enough.
The fight goes out of Adam as he looks down at the teenager at his feet.
He looks around as if waking from a sleep.
He is standing in the shadow of an expensive house. His hands are covered in blood and glass. Alison Jardine is standing nearby, massaging her hands, breathing hard; her face somewhere between a snivel and a snarl.
Irons is walking across the gravel. He has stepped into the illumination being cast from the house, but he has grown no lighter.
The man who must be Franco Jardine is leaning against one of the columns at the front of the house, clutching his chest.
Adam looks at him. Locks eyes on the little old man who sent him away.
‘Go.’
He looks up.
Irons is beside him, hauling Timmy to his feet as if he were weightless.
‘Go.’
‘But …’ begins Adam.
‘This is the end of it.’
‘All this.’ He gestures, feebly. ‘What I’ve done.’
‘We’ve all done things we shouldn’t.’
‘He’s Franco Jardine …’
‘The person he’d send after you is me. And I’m not coming.’
‘What about you?’
‘He owes me.’
‘What about Alison?’ he says and looks up. She is still standing there, looking at her father as he gasps for breath. She is making no move to help him. Or her son. She looks as though everything she has ever known has just been made a lie.
‘She’ll understand. Eventually.’
‘But …’
‘Go.’
He climbs through the open door. As he closes it, more shards of glass erupt from the broken window and rain in his lap. He looks up again, his lungs full of honey, his whole body shaking.
Irons is already walking away.
Adam reverses carefully, and turns the car. He is tensed for the sound of a gunshot. The explosion of a tyre. The smashing of a rear window. Even an explosion, from beneath the chassis. None comes.
He drives down the dark driveway, his eyes two white circles in the mirror.
He sees Irons stoop to Jardine. He picks him up like a child, and carries him indoors.
The yellow light dwindles to black.
Alison, a statue.
Slowly sinking into the ground.
Her father’s words still rasping at her ears.
Two words.
The Wop.
PART FOUR
FORTY-EIGHT
Songbrook Manor
January 11th, 2008, 11.04 a.m.
The footsteps sound clipped and businesslike as they resound on the bare flags of the hall. It is hard not to liken the sound to the ticking of a clock. The beating of a heart monitor. The steady metronome of a life nearing its end.
Here, now, in this place.
This place with its smell of damp clothes and spilled medicine, ointment and phlegm.
Here, where thick white bedsheets are made extravagant maps by piss stains, dribbled tonics and the bloody coral reefs of sputtered breath.
Here, where Francis Jardine lays like a skittle on the covers of a wrought-iron bed, surrounded by gilt-edged frames and plum-coloured walls, indecipherable tapestries and ornate maple furniture.
Here, where a gangster sucks in oxygen through the gap between his skeletal lips, and hisses a blackened, poisonous mixture of carbon dioxide and bile into the greasy cloud of spit-infused misery that hangs above the bed like a canopy.
The footsteps are brusque.
The crisp, wooden clarinet quality of the sound tells of expensive high heels, expertly worn, leading up black-stockinged calves to a tailored dress and jewellery chosen for understated extravagance.
Pissed off at life and unsure how to be anything other than Franco’s daughter.
Unsure how to forgive a dying man for a moment of weakness that tore the scales from her eyes, and replaced the rich oil painting of her father with a shaky line drawing of broken weakling.
The footsteps grow louder as they near the bedroom.
They reach a zenith without a pause.
Continue on.
She has seen all she needs to.
Sniffed more than she can stomach.
She has changed seats and wiped spit and puss from a sandpapered chin.
And now she’s done.
Irons sits by the bed, cut in two. The light from the lamp only covers the lower half of his body, like a shawl pulled up to the waist of a seafront pensioner. It illuminates his dark trousers, his black shoes, crusted with mud and broken glass. His torso and face drown in the puddle of darkness. His eyes are two glasses of soured milk, each crowned with a pitted olive.
This is the deathwatch.
Irons has not left the room since he laid Franco upon the high, comfortable, double-mattressed bed so many days ago. He has eaten only the mush that he could not spoon through the cracked mouth of his employer. Drunk the water which ran down the scratched slate of Jardine’s face. He has shut himself down. Become a watchman. A carer. Protector and nurse. Become what Mr Jardine needs him to be. As he has always done.
Irons will not himself wallow in the sadness of the moment. He has experienced enough death to know that tears do not help.
He sits in the darkness, watching his friend breathe; each gasp more difficult than the last.
There had been some brief talk of taking the old man to hospital, but neither he nor Alison had seriously expected the other to condone the suggestion. Their reticence had nothing to do with any desire to help him see out his days in his own home, but rather a reluctance to allow anybody to see what the man with the most powerful name in the north east had allowed himself to become.
That Jardine still lives is almost miraculous. His skin is garish and clammy, like a marble statue exposed to lichen and rain. His mouth, toothless, the grin of cartoon worm. His eyes are closed, but in the moments when they flutter open, the pupils are black, flecked with deep red, like pieces of shit forced from a cancerous bowel.
It is unfinished business that powers Francis Jardine. A detestation of leaving things unfinished, or injustices unrevenged.
He should be dead. His heart is barely beating. The cancerous tissue eating at his flesh has grown hungrier and he is fighting with everything he has left not to be completely devoured. He can feel himself crumbling. Breaking apart. He is a sculpture of compacted ash, left out in a storm.
In his lungs is a flaming sunflower, its petals glowing hot, searing his insides, making each second of life more painful than the
last.
It is the fire of having made a mistake. Of having spent more than thirty years believing the correct blood had been spilled.
In a brain lost in time, in a body that has outlived its usefulness, Francis Jardine remembers the men he knew. Their faces are indistinct; a watercolour painted too damp. Colours blend and features intermingle.
Ace Howell, eager to please, crippled with debts, dancing like a barrel-organ monkey to whichever tune was playing.
Riley, strutting like a peacock in the council chambers and shivering like a girl, naked and blood-soaked, begging for help, forgiveness; justifying a moment of raw and unleashed fury by snivelling about his years of good deeds.
And among it all, green eyes and felt-tip jawline.
Dark hair.
Pale fingers and ink.
A man from then. Before. A fleeting glimpse of a passenger on his and Riley’s money train.
A man who he spotted in the crowd, that night, in 1971.
A face he saw again, days ago. Standing there.
Jardine coughs and feels the spray of blood rain down upon himself. Senses movement. A sensation of silk upon his chin.
His eyes roll open and lock upon those of his killer. His friend. His monster.
Irons.
He looks out through red-seamed eyes. A grapevine of blood. It lends a more terrible aspect to the scarred and inhuman face, looking down, inches above his own; grey beyond the burns, painted beyond that, pink and innocent so far beneath.
The moment lasts.
A union of memories. Regrets over words unsaid. Laughter at a moment shared. Fear, at what one will be without the other.
He speaks so softly his lips do not part.
‘Riley,’ he says, in a voice snapping bird bones. ‘Pamela … Riley’s man. Inked …’ He falls silent. ‘The Wop.’
The words wheeze and flutter, rise and cool, to form droplets of water on the leaded glass.
Inside the prism of the orb, a swirl; a rainbow of lurid greys.
The hint of a face.
A last command.
FORTY-NINE
Thackeray Road, East Ham, London
January 14th, 9.25 p.m.
Freeman Leo Riley holds the toilet seat with his knotted left hand and squeezes a few drops of pinkish piss from the shrivelled crayfish tail in his right. It trickles over his fingers.
He looks up to watch himself in the mirror above the sink, and his reflection bounces back garish and bright, overly illuminated by the pristine white walls, the powerful bulb, the reflective tiles around the Victorian bathtub. He’s not upset by the picture. He has always accepted himself as unattractive, but he knows that there are ways to make these things unimportant. He has never been deterred from achieving his goals by the absence of a movie-star smile. He knows that cash is an aphrodisiac. Power enough to loosen any pair of knickers. And fear a crowbar to stubborn legs.
As he examines his reflection, he hears the telltale patter as the stream of piss misses the enamel bowl and splashes the linoleum floor. Without changing his expression, he purposefully redirects the flow, and forces a cup-full of liquid onto the floor, where it pools. Tucking himself back into his pyjama trousers he looks at the puddle. He gives a vague thought to the possibilities that the opportunity presents. Make her sit in it, perhaps? Soak it up with those silly grey jogging pants she likes to wear. Make a damp map of Africa on her arse. Tell her to strip naked and mop it up in rubber gloves, on her knees, back-arched, tiny tits pointing at the floor. Oh the possibilities.
He fastens his dressing gown and shuffles over to the sink. Lathers himself with the expensive, scented soap on the porcelain dish.
Despite the way he intends to spend the next few hours, he cannot raise any excitement. The Viagra only gets him half-hard and it has been a long time since he experienced an orgasm that was worth the shortness of breath and blinding kidney pain that accompanied it.
He continues to allow himself his extravagances only because he cannot imagine how else to live. He has retired from public life and politics, but not from himself. His hunger is the same. His tastes. His peculiarities. He may have slowed down, but he still likes to fuck somebody until they cry.
From the master bedroom comes the sound of the brass band. Urszula doesn’t care for the CD, but he finds the music stirring. Patriotic and fitting. He imagines it as a fanfare ahead of his performance.
Looking at himself, he pictures Urszula in the neighbouring room.
Bitch better be doing as she’s told, he thinks. Best be wearing the new stockings with the wartime seam; the red high heels and the schoolgirl gym knickers. Cost good money. Weren’t easy to come by. Better be grateful. Better be smiling. Best not fucking cry ’til I’m good and ready …
The sound of trumpets and euphoniums fill the bathroom as he opens the door and the soft red light spills in. His feet find the thick cream carpet, and he walks into the large, crimson-painted bedroom with its mirrored ceiling, its ornate brass bed, its 1920s glamour postcards in varnished black frames.
He looks up and sees Urszula. Tears are cutting channels in her make-up. She’s standing by the bed in jogging suit and winter coat – the lingerie and high-heels untouched on the quilted blanket.
‘You fucking …’ he begins, with a snarl full of malice and contempt.
The words catch in his mouth as the cord fastens around his neck.
Leo Riley rises to his tiptoes, hands clawing at the constriction around his scrawny throat. His eyes bulge, pupils swivelling like the eyes of a mad and frightened horse.
He feels a forceful shove to the back of his knees, a draft on his bare belly as his gown falls open. He leans back to try and relieve the pressure, and feels another shove, pushing him forward, cutting off the airway.
‘Go,’ comes a voice.
Riley’s eyes fix on Urszula. She is looking past him, at something behind.
Her gaze travels down.
There is a malice in the goodbye she smiles.
Then she is running for the door.
Riley senses something behind him. He can smell piss and posh soap. He can hear his own heart. Feel flecks of frothy spit upon his lips.
The shadow moves.
A darkness seems to stretch out and elongate, block out all light, then withdraw, shrink, and take form before him.
He blinks and takes it in.
Him. Jardine’s monster.
Steam rising from his black jacket, his bald head, his burned face.
His anger a physical, tangible thing, that seems to engulf his massive bulk in a black tar.
Riley can’t scream. Can’t breathe. He fears closing his eyes in case they never open again and he goes to his death with Irons’s face seared upon his irises.
‘Mr Jardine’s dead.’
A pause.
‘Tell me what I don’t know.’
The response is guttural and strangled, squawking and base.
Irons jabs a gloved finger up Riley’s nostril, and tugs down, putting fresh pressure on his throat.
‘I know you made each other money. I know you put contracts the way of companies he had an interest in. I know you got rich from his name, and the things I did for him.’
A pause.
‘I don’t know why Mr Jardine used his last breath to send you to your grave. I don’t know what you did to Pamela, but I know you brought somebody into her life that ended it.’
A foot in Riley’s gut, pushing him back, slackening the rope.
‘If I asked you to tell me where to find The Wop, what would you say?’
A pause.
‘You think you’re going to get a statue after I’m finished?’
A snarl. A glimpse into a bright red mouth and a blackened gullet.
‘Talk to me …’
The soft trilling of a phone inside his coat. Irons growls to himself, pissed off at the intrusion. He was just starting to enjoy himself. He glances at the screen and decides it’s worth the delay. Listens
to the voice of PC Goodwin, nervous, breathless, in his ear.
‘… we’re done, yeah? This has to be the end of it. It’s going to come crashing down. The partial – they ran it through juvenile records. It’s his fucking grandson, do you hear me? Timothy Francis Jardine. The DCI’s putting an operation together and they’re going to be going through the family business with a fucking microscope. You know the boy better than me but I swear they’ll offer a deal and he doesn’t seem the type to stay loyal, no matter what he’s done to get in his grandad’s good books. Fuck, it’s all going to come out. I need triple what I’m getting. More. You’ll take care of me, yeah? The stuff I know, you don’t want to be thinking I’m a risk, I’m not, but still …’
Irons ends the call. He shakes his head, his disappointment in the police force absolute. He cannot fathom why it took them so long to work out what he’d known himself the moment he looked into the lad’s eyes and saw something far uglier than himself staring back. Mr Jardine had given him a going-away present. Had allowed him to do something useful for the family, and to take a life that didn’t matter. He’d let him kill Larry Paris with the same grandfatherly largesse that other people might allow a teenager to drive their car.
‘Please … I didn’t …’
Irons returns his gaze to Riley. Looks at things he has done to him while his mind has been elsewhere. It is a long time since anything has turned his stomach, but the thing he has transformed Riley into is enough to make his guts heave.
Irons concentrates on breathing. He slows his heart. Soothes the vibrato in his limbs. His anger buzzes inside his skin like a swarm of bluebottles, but he holds it in. He knows how to use it. Where to send it. Where to go.
Later, he watches Riley die. Sees his tongue slide from his mouth and flop onto his chin, slug-like and ugly.
Irons goes about his decoration of the body with the sound of his own blood rushing in his skull. Occasionally he stops, removes a glove, and reaches inside his shirt to stroke the scarring upon his skin.
He thinks of the big old hotel where they’d had the party. Franco had brought in Riley’s favourite cash-in-hand builders to tart the place up.