by John Barlow
“I’m fine, thanks,” he says, running the tips of his fingers over the side of his face and finding the bruises tender but not too swollen, the cut above the eye crusty.
“Ah, Único. You know it?” he says, losing himself for a moment in the wine.
“Of course I do,” she says, already halfway down her glass. “One of the best wines in Spain.”
“In the world!” he says. “Here’s to Vega Sicilia.”
From inside the apartment comes the voice of Sade.
“You’ve put this on for my benefit, have you?”
“Smooth Operator? What, you think you’re smooth or something, do you?”
“No, no, I mean the eighties. As it happens, I’ve just had a couple of fairly awkward encounters with the past.”
“Smooth operator…” she says, smirking as she drinks her wine.
They look at the black water directly beneath them.
“Do you think Freddy persuaded her to give up working as an escort?” he says. “He sees her with those Ukrainians, hates it, kind of tries to rescue her? And she agrees? Does that make sense?”
“Go on…”
“She’d dropped all her other clients, and the Ukrainians were about to leave. Do you think she was just waiting to get paid, then start over with Freddy?”
“Yeah, it makes sense. It does. Freddy’s got a big heart. It’s the kind of thing he’d do. But that’s not the question, is it?”
She polishes off her wine in two medium sized gulps, then disappears inside.
“Here,” she says, reappearing with the bottle. She looks at his swollen cheek and forehead. “Are you gonna tell me how you got that?”
“Nope.”
“Okay. You need more of this,” she says, refilling his glass like a nurse administering medicine.
“What is the question then? About Freddy?”
She looks up the river as far as the bridge, where a bus is making its way slowly into town.
“What was Freddy doing with the Ukrainians in the first place?” she says. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
He studies the wine, as if the answer might be there.
Minutes pass. The calm of the evening is punctuated by a car horn, the shouts of kids messing about on the bridge, the hiss of a bus’s brakes… For Donna Macken, growing up in a tower block not far from here, these would have been the sounds she knew. The sounds of her life. And now she’s dead.
He takes another gulp of Único, amused at how fast they’re getting through a hundred fifty quid’s worth of wine. Knocking it back like cheap Cabernet feels about right. Money is less important now, the struggle for it, the spending of it. Sod it. Everything is less important. He spoke to Henry Moran half an hour ago and there’s nothing new from Freddy, a toss-up between him getting his detention extended and a charge.
“There’s a handgun down there,” he says, letting her pour what remains of the wine into their glasses.
“Really?”
“Years ago, I heard Joe and Lanny Bride talking at the showroom one morning. The gun had gone off by accident during a job. Left a bullet in the woodwork. They had to get rid of the gun.” He takes a ten quid slurp. “Dad never used guns, but Joe did. What about your uncle Henrique?”
“That’s what he was in for.”
“In prison?”
“Armed robbery. 1974. He was young. After Franco died there was a general amnesty. He was out by ’77.”
“Lucky.”
“He never touched guns again.”
“Straight into the ceramic tile business?”
She laughs. “He was into all sorts of stuff. Construction mainly. Half the flats in Spain are built with stolen materials. Then there was illegal copying, cassettes, videos. I went to work for him after I graduated.”
“You graduated?”
“What, you think you’re the only one with an education? Madrid Business School.”
“Degree in business studies, then straight to work for a criminal…”
“Yep. The ceramics thing was a cover, like your dad’s place. But when I looked at the books, it was making him money.”
“Even better cover.”
“Just like you did with the showroom.”
“Well, it’s never gonna make me a millionaire.”
“No, because you don’t let it. Freddy makes good sales, but you let costs get out of hand. You’re sloppy.”
“I’m Used Car Dealer of the Year!”
“And all that goodwill costs money. The place could be a lot more profitable if you took it seriously.”
She stops, aware that she’s said too much. “Come on, let’s eat.”
“Hold on,” John says. “Today, at the showroom, were you looking at the books?”
She shrugs. “I got bored. Want my opinion?”
“No.”
“Freddy’s good, but you don’t give a fuck.”
“You can say that again. Although, please don’t.”
“Okay, food.”
He lets her go in, and stays out on the balcony alone.
Beneath him the flow of the black river is flecked with yellow lights from the flats on both sides. The bullet hardly makes a sound as it drops into the water.
***
“Perfection,” he whispers with delight.
A leg of black-leg ham is mounted in a carving frame and set on a glass coffee table in the middle of the room. Falling to his knees, he sniffs it like a horny dog checking out the rear end of a bitch. Some hard-cured goat milk cheese and a French stick sit next to it. Plus a second bottle of Único.
Connie sits on the carpet next to him and they take turns cutting wafer-thin slices of ham, dangling each paper-thin piece in front of their noses and inhaling before popping it into their mouths, eyes closed, groaning with pleasure. There’s no attempt at anything like coherent conversation, and to the cool, evocative sound of Sade they add only the murmuring of two people eating and drinking the very best that the world has to offer.
By the time the music has finished, the ham is halfway down to the bone on the top side, and the wine is almost done.
“Henrique?” he says, hacking at the cheese incompetently with the long, sword-like ham knife. “Bit of a lad, was he?”
“You could say that.”
“And he was, what, my half-uncle of something?”
She leans over him, grabbing the bottle of Único. The scent of her body hits him hard, but all he can see is Sandy Greg, circa 1982.
“Henrique was my mum’s brother. Remember?”
She pours the dregs of the wine into their glasses.
“No relation. Mum re-married into your family, okay?”
“So you were born into one dodgy family, then your mum married into another?”
“Yeah, we try to keep the blood pure. Like royalty,” she giggles. “Or gypsies. Me and you are half-step-cousins, remember?”
“Right.”
“And meanwhile,” she adds, taking the knife from him and managing to complete the task of carving two slivers of cheese, “over here in Leeds you were learning how to pass off counterfeit money.”
“Hey, I told you that in confidence! No one else knows. Anyway, it was just a teenage thing. I left all that behind when I went to university.”
She grins. “It is fun, though, isn’t it? Fake money.”
He can’t deny it. Passing off those tenners as a kid was more than a hobby, it was an obsession. And it wasn’t about the money. It was about doing it right. Leaving no tracks.
“The perfect crime!”
No such thing, John.
“The real problem,” he says, although he doesn’t know why on earth he’s telling her this, “I mean, if you’re gonna do it big time, is storing the notes.”
“And spending them, no?”
“That’s normally done by changers, y’know, low-level people, in bars and pubs. But it’s messy, too many people involved. What you really need is some clever way of passing off the notes. P
lus safe storage, someone to act as a banker.”
“Is that right? Do you know what I think?”
“No,” he says, as a hundred thoughts spin out of control in his mind and he begins to regret the direction the conversation is taking.
“I think we need coffee.”
He closes his eyes and tries to ignore the aroma of Coco that drifts over him as she gets up from the floor.
“You want more music?” she says.
He hears her voice as an echo. Before he has summonsed the energy to reply, Miles Davis is playing Summertime. It soaks into him like some creamy-smooth drug, relaxing and exciting, edging him towards resplendent, drunken contentment.
“Here,” she says.
He opens his eyes a fraction and pulls himself up to a sitting position. She sits down next to him, her back against the sofa.
“This is too much to deal with on your own,” she says as they sip from tiny cups of ferociously strong espresso.
“You mean Freddy?” he says, blinking as the coffee hits him hard.
“That, and everything else.”
“Eh?”
She leans forward, and her T-shirt rides up at the back, revealing a strip of perfect flesh.
This is ridiculous. She’s what, sixteen, seventeen years younger than me…
Something drops into his lap.
He looks down. Four video cassettes.
She pours a little brandy into her coffee.
“You want?” she says, holding a bottle of Carlos I over his cup.
He nods, confused.
“The security cameras,” she says, the tiniest of slurs pulling her English out of joint. “They record what you want, and don’t record the things you don’t, right?”
“Old trick,” he says through the fug of confusion and alcohol. “You can stop the tape, or turn off the cameras. At the Eurolodge the one outside doesn’t work, never has, not since…”
“No, your cameras.”
He drains his cup.
“Give me another shot of that.”
She obliges, and pours another for herself at the same time.
“Old-tech,” she says, spilling a little coffee-coloured brandy as she brings the cup to her lips. “More man-ageable,” although the word comes out more like man-gerbil.
“The insurance for the showroom costs me the same,” he says, his head lolling dangerously to one side, “so why spend on expensive kit?”
“Look,” and now she’s having difficulty with even the simplest of words, although not, it seems, with her thoughts. “Every day this week you pause the video for two minutes in the afternoon.”
He grunts, as if this is irrelevant. But she isn’t done.
“I wouldn’t have noticed. But the thing is, John, in those two minutes, every afternoon, you go out to that red Mondeo and open the boot.”
“Spying on me?”
She grabs a video from his lap. “The police’ll notice, eventually. Every day, the same. They’ll see the pause.”
“So?” he asks, sitting up a bit straighter, and feeling the warmth of her arm against his as she struggles to keep upright.
“So!” she says, smiling idiotically. “The car?”
“What about it?”
She sighs, refilling their cups with brandy. “Things taste better if you tell the truth, you know?”
“Is that a Spanish saying?”
“It should be. Look, you get the car on Monday. You hardly mention it to anybody. It’s there all week, but you don’t add it to the computer, so it’s not on the records…”
As she talks she takes the videos one at a time, scowling with concentration, and stacks them on the coffee table.
“…every day, Monday to Friday, you turn off the cameras, go out to the car and open up the boot. Then you turn the cameras back on and say you’re going somewhere. I don’t see you til the next day.”
“So? I’m checking the car out, seeing…”
She puts a finger to his lips then takes a sip from his cup.
“Tastes nicer if you don’t lie, remember?”
She leans into him, her eyes unstable but earnest.
“There’s something Henrique’s men used to do. You buy an old secondhand car. Never fill out the documents. Car’s untraceable to you. If the police stop you, you say you just bought it. But the police don’t stop you. Why should they? Car’s not stolen. So, you use the car for whatever needs doing, then you lose it. Break it up, whatever. Doesn’t matter. Just get rid of it. There’s no connection back to you. We call it a blind drive.”
He can feel her breath on his cheek, warm and sweet. A trickle of brandy runs from the corner of her mouth.
This is not good.
“Whatever it is,” she says, “you shouldn’t be dealing with all this on your own.”
He returns the earnestness as best he can.
“I’m not gonna tell you.”
She shakes her head.
“You don’t understand.”
The room is spinning. He tries to turn, needs to put an arm out. His hand lands on her thigh and she doesn’t move it away.
He draws her to him. His mouth finds her neck and his lips follow the soft skin up until they find her ear.
“I’m not going to tell you!” he whispers.
He feels her fingers running through his hair. Gravity slips a notch, and they might be falling. It’s difficult to say.
“Tell Freddy, not me,” she says, pulling his head around until they are looking at each other.
“What?”
“Freddy knew. That’s why he used the Mondeo. He knew it was blind.”
They’re falling now.
Freddy?
He feels her full weight on top of him.
Freddy knew?
Freddy.
Thirty-three
The city glows sodium orange, and his footsteps are the only sound echoing off the buildings in the illuminated emptiness of the streets.
Back at the flat he’d draped a duvet over Connie, fast asleep on the sofa, gulped down five or six mugs of tap water, and left as quietly as he could. Now, as he makes his way down Lower Briggate, the stagger in his gait is gradually being replaced by the lurch of exhaustion.
He gets as far as the Templars. Lanny Bride’s bar is not far away. Will the Park Lane still be open? And Lanny? Forget Lanny. He’ll have to deal with him tomorrow. Lanny and the rest. He’ll have to deal with everything tomorrow.
He turns right. It’s darker here. Stops for a cigarette. And there it is, down at the bottom of the hill. Millgarth. Will she be on nights? He starts to walk, a cigarette in one hand, his phone in the other, going over the words, trying to make them sound right.
Down by the station there are still a few people about. One or two pissed lads on their own, lost or just not wanting to go home. A couple of tramps trying to sleep on benches. Rich pickings for old-school police bullies. But that kind of stuff doesn’t go on any more, does it? No, not with coppers like Baron around.
He sits on a metal bench and looks up at the big, ugly building. He knows the story. David Oluwale: homeless black immigrant, kicked and beaten to death by coppers from Millgarth. And Steve Baron’s dad, a young constable with a family to support, knew what had happened. He told the truth, informed on his colleagues. That takes balls. Courage in the line of duty? He spent the rest of his career as an outcast, never made it past sergeant.
Would I have done that? John asks himself. Would I have made a copper like that?
Courage, John? Come on, let’s see it.
He phones her.
“Are you at work?”
“What? John, is that you?”
“It’s just that…”
“It’s three in the morning. I’m in bed.”
A heavy sigh. He listens, says nothing, the phone pressed to his ear, his head unsteady.
“John? Are you there?”
“Yeah. Sorry, Den…”
“Are you drunk?”
“Look, I’m sorry you got involved in all this. It’s just…”
Courage in the line of duty? You’ve never had any, John.
“…I need to tell you something.”
“John, please…”
He can detect the wariness in her voice. Or is she looking for a pen?
Doesn’t matter.
“I wanted to join the police force. Can you believe that?”
“I know. It was one of the first things you told me, two years ago.”
“What I didn’t tell you was I got an interview with the Met. Just after I graduated. But I didn’t turn up. Didn’t have the balls. Went abroad instead.”
A pause.
“I suppose it sounds a bit odd, y’know, that I never told you…”
“John, this isn’t a good time…”
“I know, I know.” He takes a breath. “The money in the car. Fifty grand in fake notes?”
“Go on…”
“It had nothing to do with Donna Macken. Or Freddy.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it was mine. I was storing it in the car.”
Nothing.
“Den? Den, listen…”
“Right, I’m going to hang up now.”
“Tomorrow,” he says quickly. “Tomorrow, I’ll go to Baron.”
“Why not now? Give him a ring. You rang me, and I’m not even on the case.”
“Because I need some time. I think I know who killed Donna.”
“Why not ring the Super whilst you’re at it? She’ll be over the moon.”
“Will you give me a few hours? Then I’ll tell you everything. I’ll tell you everything tomorrow, I promise.”
He hates the shallow ring of the words, imagines her throwing her head back in derision, the tears welling in her eyes.
“Den? Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
Then she’s not there.
PART THREE—MONDAY
Thirty-four
Sweet tea, cigarettes, big doses of stomach-churning regret. Not the ideal way to start the day. But today’s not going to be ideal. His fingertips rest on the keyboard of the laptop. Next to it sits an old Nokia, secondhand from a market stall, untraceable, the fourth he’s had this year.
It’s nine o’clock. People’ll be wandering into their offices about now, grabbing a coffee, yawning away the weekend.