Eoin Miller 02 - Old Gold

by Stringer, Jay

It wasn’t a question. I turned to smile at the chairman. He looked a few years older up close, lines around his eyes that hadn’t shown up from a distance, a few faint acne pockmarks on his cheeks.

  More like a geography teacher, I decided.

  “Dave.” He offered me his hand in a firm shake.

  “Eoin,” I said. “I, uh, just found out about this group.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Yeah, I just want to keep a low profile though, no fuss.”

  “Oh sure, of course.” He smiled. “We all know what it’s like that first time. So how long have you been sober?”

  I thought back. When had I had my last drink? Was it yesterday? Was I forgetting one I’d had today?

  “Just a day,” I said. More like hours, I thought.

  If he was surprised by the short duration of my sobriety, he didn’t show it. They probably got liars in here all the time, looking for free food or warmth.

  “Well, that’s great,” he said.

  Very earnest. Everybody here was very earnest.

  “Well, I know it’s not much.”

  “No, no, it’s always just a day. Yesterday, today, maybe tomorrow, never think beyond that.”

  I nodded, hoping I looked like I was taking in his advice.

  “How did you find us?”

  “A friend of mine told me. Chris. You know him?”

  All I got was a blank look; the name meant nothing.

  “Young guy, twentyish, blond?”

  He shook his head. “We get more and more young people coming in.”

  This wasn’t getting me anywhere. I was going to need another meeting with Lucas. I’d have to go the old-fashioned route and push him hard. I turned and saw another face I recognized, and the synapses in my brain started fizzing.

  The prostitute I’d spent a night with. I recognized her dark hair, that nose that looked like it had been broken. I watched her in profile, waiting for her to turn and notice me. I remembered our night together, when she ordered a Coke at the bar and nursed a coffee back at the flat.

  Coffee, like the one she was drinking now.

  Click.

  I remembered that she had reminded me in so many ways of Mary, except that Mary had been drinking as if it was going out of style or as if she had a taste for it.

  Click.

  My brain fired off in a hundred different directions, making leaps of logic. I didn’t have facts to back them up, but I knew they were true all the same.

  Click.

  I touched her on the shoulder, and she turned to face me, recognition burning into her face then being replaced by sadness.

  “Tell me about Mary,” I said.

  She began to cry.

  I ushered her out of the meeting and to my car.

  She stayed quiet at first, speaking only to give directions. Then the CD player kicked back into life with Bob Dylan and “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” and this was enough to get her talking.

  “I love this one.”

  “Yeah, me too. Love how free and easy he sounds in it.” I peered sideways at her. “Did I get your real name the other night?”

  She smiled and seemed to think for a moment.

  “Rachel.”

  “Nice to meet you, Rachel.”

  “Oh, you’ve already met me. That night at the flat, it wasn’t my act. That was me. All the things we talked about, that was a real conversation.”

  Rachel offered to cook me a pasta meal as payback for the fry-up I’d done on our first night. She said the sauce was a family recipe and something I’d be amazed by. My stomach began a slow rumble at the mention of food. It had been another long day, and I just kept forgetting to eat. I stopped off on the way and ducked into an off license, not noticing my error until I was back at the car.

  “Oh god, I’m sorry,” I said as she opened the door for me. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  She looked down at the wine in my hand.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m all grown up. I can be around wine.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Only if I have some,” she said with a smile.

  Her flat was a modest ground-floor council property in the heart of Heath Town. The area was like a social experiment that threw the poor, the working class, the immigrants, and drugs into a hole to see what would happen if they were ignored. Urban redevelopment schemes kept trying to find a foothold, but knocking down the high-rise flats had just spread the problem out further. The Mann brothers owned the territory product-wise, but the streets were owned by a gang known as the Demolition Crew.

  Rachel’s flat was sandwiched between an abandoned building with doors and windows covered in metal plates, and a twenty-four-hour shop that was closed. All I saw on the way in was the hallway and the cramped living room, which was dominated by a futon sofa bed. The walls were decorated with film posters, just like mine. While she cooked, I hid among her record collection. It was in no order that I could work out with CDs piled one atop the other next to her stereo. Current chart music and nineties pop mixed in with old-school rhythm and blues albums. I pulled out an album I really liked, The Church with One Bell by John Martyn. It seemed out of place with the rest. I put it on, set the volume low, and sat on the sofa.

  The meal was great, and the sauce gave her reason to be proud. It had a nice tomato tang and a spice that I couldn’t identify. She drank a glass of Coke very slowly. I drank the wine a lot quicker.

  “Tell me about Mary,” I said again.

  “What happened to her?” she said.

  “She’s dead,” I said, before adding, “sorry.”

  “Who killed her?”

  “I think it was her boyfriend.”

  “I suppose I already knew she was dead. I mean, she had to be, really. You never admit it to yourself, though, do you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You’re really sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She softened now. She appeared finally to let go of something heavy that she had been carrying around.

  “Was she…,” I said, not finishing the question.

  “A prostitute?” She didn’t seem to hide from the word. “No, she wasn’t. She used to be, but she’d given it up a few months ago.”

  I remembered what Mary had said that night about trying to live the life she wanted, about looking for a chance.

  “What was her real name?”

  “Mary. She gave you her real name. She must have trusted you.”

  That made me feel a whole lot worse.

  Mary and Rachel had met in a strip club, the “classy one out by the Desi Junction” in West Bromwich. I pretended not to know the place. Mary had come over from Ireland to work as a nurse and had started dancing to help cover the rent.

  “Were you already working this night shift by then?”

  “I was. I’ve been a prostitute pretty much my whole adult life, on and off, but Mary hadn’t started it yet. She was fascinated by what I did.”

  “And the manager at the club didn’t mind?”

  “Oh, he did. He won’t have hookers in his club. As soon as he found out, I was asked to leave.”

  “Asked?”

  “Yes, he was nice enough about it. Let me work a night for free as a going-away gift, waived the stage rental.”

  “So when did Mary start working your job as well?”

  “After she left the club. She followed me to work at Legs. The illegal place in town?”

  Legs. Another Gaines connection.

  “She saw me making good money on my own terms and enjoying myself every night.”

  “Every night?”

  “Of course. I’m not going to fuck a guy I don’t like the look of.”

  “OK.”

  “I gave her one of my regulars for a night, someone I trusted to be nice and friendly, and she really enjoyed it. She seemed to get off on the power of it, having a guy pay to spend time with her. That was part of the thrill of dancing, of course, but this takes
it further. It was a rush for her.”

  “Is that what you get out of it?”

  “No, I get money out of it. I think I felt the rush at first. I don’t really remember.”

  “Did she stick with your regular guys?”

  “No, she got out on her own very quick. We’re very different, and guys saw different things in us.”

  “OK, so bring it forward a bit. You’re both set up full time, and things are working, but then she stopped?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did it affect you or upset you that this life wasn’t good enough for her?”

  “No, if I got upset every time a friend of mine told me they hated what I did, I’d never stop crying. And it was the right move for her. She was following me into AA, and for Mary the real battle was drugs. In this game? That’s a tough fight.”

  “But you stayed in the business.”

  “I’d been at it longer, so I knew how to avoid those situations. But when someone in my line is fresh to recovery? I’d say getting out of the business is the best choice. Then she met Tommy.”

  The same name Bauser had given me. The same Polish guy I’d been looking for.

  “Tommy?”

  “Yes. He moved in quick. She said he had this smile that drove her crazy. And she loved his accent.”

  “Polish?”

  “That sounds about right. I mean, I never asked him the details, but the accent could have been Polish, and he had that look, a bit like you.”

  I got taken for Polish sometimes; that came with my darker skin. White folk might not know what a Gypsy really is, but they do a great job of reminding us what we’re not. Every once in a while, I thought about trying to educate people. Tell them about our Indian roots and the slow migration north. Slavery. Genocide. But I’d learned not to bother.

  I’d noticed she frowned a little at the mention of his name, and I pushed. “You didn’t like him?”

  “No, I didn’t. He was volatile. He’d lose his temper and shout at her, make empty threats. I guess after a while in my job you get a sense of guys, you can read them, and I didn’t trust Tommy. He asked too many questions about the way the town worked.”

  “But Mary couldn’t read him?”

  “I think maybe she hadn’t worked the job long enough or she really loved him. Who knows.”

  “So did Tommy make you and Mary drift apart?”

  “We stopped talking for a while, yes. We never fell out. We just stopped being company for each other. Until afterward.”

  “Afterward?”

  “She came to me a few weeks ago, really upset. Said she was in a tough spot.”

  “What was wrong?”

  “Well, Tommy was into something. He’d been trying to set something up in town, drugs or something, and he’d pissed off the wrong people. Mary was getting dragged into it all, because she knew all the same people from her time working.”

  “OK, what did you say to her?”

  “Get shot of it all. Go on a holiday or something. Let it all blow over.”

  “But she wasn’t going to do that.”

  “No. I knew when she left here that night that she wasn’t going to do what I’d said.”

  I told her what I knew about the business Tommy had gotten mixed up in. I held back on mentioning the needle marks I’d seen on Mary’s arm. Whatever memory Rachel had of her friend, I decided to let it be the best one.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” I said.

  “Last weekend. She turned up here in tears. She told me she’d stolen something from Tommy and he was going to kill her.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Well, at first I shouted at her, shouted at her for coming here, for putting me in the way of whoever was looking for her.”

  “She had whatever it was they were after with her? Did you see it?”

  “Oh, yes, it was a book.”

  “A book?”

  “Yes, a black book, like an address book or a notebook.”

  A notebook. So that’s what they had torn my house apart looking for, something that could have been hidden in my mattress or in the toilet cistern. That made sense.

  “And after you’d shouted at her?”

  “I tried to help. She wouldn’t go to the police. I tried to tell her, but she wouldn’t go, said she was in too deep.”

  I knew the feeling.

  “So then I suggested the next best thing.”

  “Which was?”

  She looked directly at me.

  “You,” she said.

  The floor tilted, and I felt like I was about to fall off the edge of the world.

  “What?”

  “Well, after I finished shouting at her, when I climbed down off my bloody high horse, I knew we needed to find her help. I thought maybe she could still leave town. She’d always been talking about visiting her family in Ireland. I said that would be perfect.”

  “But she wouldn’t go?”

  “No. I think she had problems back home, too. So then I said we needed to find help, someone around here to look after her.”

  “Why me? Didn’t you get the memo?”

  “I saw you around when you were a cop. You always treated us with respect. We talk about things like that, you know?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t buy that. “A few nice smiles and cups of coffee when we’re rousting you doesn’t make me a nice guy.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But a friend of mine said we should find you, that you were in with the Mann brothers, that maybe you could talk to everyone and sort it out. Said you had a bit of a hero complex.”

  “Who?” I already knew the answer, but I asked anyway.

  “Jellyfish.”

  Motherfucker. I needed a new reputation, one that didn’t get me mixed up in shit like this.

  “Even so,” I said, “what made you think I wouldn’t just turn you over? If you’ve heard about me, then you’ve heard more reasons not to trust me than to think I’m any kind of hero.”

  “I’ve heard about them, yes. But you seem different, and it’s not as if we had many options. It was you or Robson, and he’s nasty.”

  “Robson?”

  That was the second time I’d been given that name.

  “Yeah, he also works for Gav Mann, but he’s mean, always threatening people with knives. But you, I don’t know, I just trusted you. You were like—” She stopped and bit back on the words, but a nod from me made her carry on. “Like a wounded little puppy. Show you some love and you’ll do anything, you know?”

  I didn’t know whether to be offended or complimented, so I just ignored it. “What was I supposed to do? Was your plan that I would get whoever was after Mary to leave her alone? Was I meant to defend her against all comers?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking that far. I just wanted her to get to you and—” She stopped.

  “And what?” I said.

  Tears formed in her eyes again, pooling on either side of her nose and running down. “I wanted her away from me,” she said in a strangled voice. “She was my friend, and all I wanted to do was get her away from me.”

  She rested her head on my shoulder and sobbed.

  I almost felt like crying myself. A woman I had never met had decided to trust me with her life, and she was dead. And I’d dumped the body to prevent anyone from finding out. Rachel’s hair fell across her face and I reached my arm round to brush it away, but that just reminded me more of Mary.

  “The night you spent with me, what was that about? Did you plan that too?”

  “I wanted to know what had happened. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know if Mary had found you. All I knew was that she left here in the rain and never came back.”

  “You could have asked me. In fact, it would have saved a lot of time.”

  “This week seems full of things I ‘should’ have done, things I didn’t do, like going to the police.”

  “We can’t do that now.”

  “Why not? I can j
ust go and tell them everything I know. And you said you know for a fact that she’s been murdered. You can tell them.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Why not?” Her anger flashed then, a temper I didn’t want to see put to use on my freedom or health.

  “Because I’ll go down with them,” I said.

  She looked at me blankly. Her chest jumped as if she had hiccups, and she opened her mouth to form a question. I spoke before she could put it into words.

  “When I said I know she’s dead, it’s because I saw her. She did make it to me that night. She came back to my house, and in the morning she was dead.”

  I drew a breath and carried on. It felt good to be saying this out loud.

  “I ran away. It’s what I’ve always done. Run from the scene or have a good reason to be there. Run from the crime or be a cop. Then I disposed of her body to save my own skin.”

  There was a pause, the air in the room seeming heavy, like a gathering thunderstorm. Then Rachel slapped me, hard, across the face. The sting of the slap stayed imprinted on my face when she took her hand away, and I had to blink away a tear.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” she said.

  Good question.

  We sat in silence for a long time.

  There didn’t seem any way to restart the conversation, and the ground never opens up to swallow you when you want it to. After a while I caught Rachel staring at the wine.

  “You thinking of having some?” I asked.

  “No. Well, yes. But I’ve been sober too long to mess all that up with a stupid drink. I just find it attractive. To look at, I mean.”

  I understood. I can spend hours looking into whiskey or red wine or even a pint of stout as it settles.

  “How long has it been? Sober, I mean.”

  “Five years.”

  “Does it get easier with time?”

  “It’s all very simple. You just don’t drink. It’s never easy, but I hate it when people make it out to be hard.”

  “Like people who fall off the wagon, you mean?”

  “The people I know would rather chew off their hands than fall back into the bottle when problems start. But the characters on TV always start drinking again. The shorthand for a recovering alcoholic is failure.”

  I was glad I’d held back on telling her about Mary’s drug relapse. I assumed she knew that Mary had been drinking with me, but I left that unsaid too. The silence settled between us again as the music played. John Martyn was singing “Glory Box.” The anger that had flushed her face when she slapped me seemed to have gone now, and she was looking sheepish.