Lynch

by Merrigan, Peter J

  ‘But it’s not a lie,’ Clark said.

  ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘Kane Rider doesn’t exist any more. Scott Lynch is real; he’s as real as Jesse. Scott may be no more than a year and a half old, but look at where he is now. He has a good job, a lovely home, a new mother and, let’s face it, the potential for a fantastic relationship. The past is gone, it’s finished. Jesse doesn’t need to know the ins and outs of what happened before they met. All they need to concentrate on is a future.’

  ‘But it’s still a lie,’ Katherine said. ‘Withholding that sort of information can eat away at Scott and it could ruin things for him.’ She picked up her glass, put it down again. ‘I mean, if you had this deep, dark secret, wouldn’t you want to share it with the one you love? Don’t you think that if they love you they’d be there for you, no matter what? Isn’t that what love is all about?’

  Clark said, ‘I think you’re jumping the gun a little bit. They’ve only just met. They’re still at that getting-to-know-you stage. I don’t think anyone should be talking about love yet.’

  ‘But there’s something special there,’ Katherine said. ‘I can sense it. Kane—Scott—he might not even see it yet, but I can. Haven’t you seen the way Jesse looks at him? I recognise it from the way Ryan looked at him. And Scott’s looking back at Jesse the same way.’

  ‘Are you worried that Scott’s not ready to move on?’ Clark asked. ‘Or that you’re not ready to let him.’

  Katherine’s stare was cold, but she wilted back into the armchair and shook her head. ‘You’re probably right. I’m pushing him forward into the arms of Jesse, but I’m also trying to hold him back because he’s my only link to Ryan.’ She stood up. ‘Look at me, I’m supposed to be the strong one.’

  Clark’s laugh was mirthless. ‘You are the strong one. How you’ve coped with everything you’ve been through, I’ll never know.’ She shrugged. ‘You just have to separate the present from the past. You know if Scott does fall in love with Jesse, he’s never going to forget about Ryan.’

  Katherine nodded. ‘I know.’ And when the front door opened and Scott came in, she smiled and said to Clark, ‘You can give me a hand with dinner, if you like.’

  Scott said, ‘None for me, thanks, I’m going out. I’m just home to shower and change.’

  ‘How was work?’ Katherine asked, kissing his cheek.

  ‘Busy. I’ve been running around like a blue-arsed fly all day. I’m sweating.’ He dropped his bag and kicked off his shoes.

  Clark said, ‘If you’re going out with Jesse again, you’d better scrub up pretty good. You don’t want him catching a whiff of you and turning the other way.’

  ‘You look like you need a shower, too,’ Scott laughed. ‘Want to join me?’

  ‘Water conservation,’ Clark said. ‘Very thoughtful of you.’

  ‘No, dear,’ he said, camping his voice and his pose, ‘rampant sex, please.’

  Clark screwed her face up in mock disgust. ‘Not if you were the last man on earth, sweetheart.’

  His laughter carried with him as he went upstairs.

  In the silence that ensued, Katherine flapped her arms in defeat. ‘Just another day in the life of a woman on the run.’

  The restaurant, on the south side of Harrogate towards Otley, was a small and elegant affair. Called Buttercups by the proprietor, it was generally known as Butterface by the locals, who had taken to Aleksandra’s welcoming greetings as they entered and her constant fussing over the clientele to ensure their meals were just perfect and their glasses were never empty. She was a lovely woman, they would say—but her face.

  Aleksandra had come to England from Croatia over thirty years ago when she was in her mid-twenties, she would tell anyone who listened long enough, with not a single penny to her name—not even a purse to store a penny if she had one. Although her accent had softened greatly over the years as she pushed her way off the streets and through college, it seemed reluctant to collapse entirely, and diners could sometimes here the occasional Croatian swear word from the kitchen that was always followed by a cacophony of tumbling pots or smashing crockery. Rumour had it every chef between Newcastle and Nottingham had felt the back of her hand at one point or another, although she was nothing but pleasant towards her klijentela.

  When Scott and Jesse stepped over the threshold, they were immediately greeted as though they had dined there every night for the last five years. ‘Lovely to see you both,’ Aleksandra said, her arms raised as if to embrace them as she strode forward. ‘You are just in time for the lobster; this is in season now.’

  Jesse whispered to Scott as they followed Aleksandra across the restaurant to their table, ‘At least we’re on time. Wouldn’t want to be late for lobster season.’

  ‘There’s a season?’ Scott asked.

  When they were seated and Aleksandra had fussed with their tableware to ensure everything was exactly right, she handed them a menu each and said, ‘I think a Château Barreyres to start, and you agree?’ She was already waving at a waiter.

  They were allowed some minutes to study the menu and to taste the red wine which, to their amusement, was actually quite pleasing. ‘She recommends a different bottle for each table,’ Jesse explained. ‘It’s like she knows what suits a person from the moment they come in.’

  When they had ordered, Aleksandra ushered the waiter off to the kitchen with a few Croatian words before turning to greet the next couple to walk through the door.

  ‘Lovely to see you both.’

  Scott considered his date for a moment, staring when Jesse wasn’t looking, stealing sideways glances when their eyes met briefly each time. Jesse was so unlike Ryan that they couldn’t have been more different. Where Ryan had been tall and slender, dark-haired and green-eyed, Jesse was of average height but well defined, blond with brown eyes. Their only resemblance, Scott thought, was their shared sense of humour, something that he now decided had attributed to his initial attraction of him. Neither had been particularly camp or effeminate but Jesse—even though he broke horses for a living—could never be considered a true cowboy.

  When Jesse caught him staring, he smiled and Scott lowered his eyes, suppressing a smile of his own.

  Halfway through the entrée, Scott cleared his throat and said, ‘I need to tell you about Ryan.’

  Jesse looked up, placed his cutlery on the plate, and said, ‘Need to, or want to?’

  ‘Both,’ Scott shrugged.

  ‘You don’t—’

  ‘Let me say it in one go or I might never say it,’ Scott said.

  Jesse nodded, took a sip of his wine, and gave Scott his full attention.

  ‘He was stabbed,’ Scott began, ‘right in front of me, outside a club in Belfast.’ He told Jesse about the events leading up to that critical point, the drinks and the dancing, the laughter and the normality of life. And he told him of the events that immediately followed, how Ryan’s weight had felt dead in his arms before he even drew his last breath, how he had watched him being zipped into a black rubber body bag. He spoke of his night in hospital with a policeman outside his room, wasn’t sure if they thought he would kill himself or if they were protecting him from some unknown entity. He told him about the funeral, how he could even remember that it had been raining that afternoon, remembered feeling so empty inside, and he told him about the months of black depression that followed.

  But he never mentioned David Bernhard, never spoke of Interpol or drugs or arms dealing. He never told him about having a bomb strapped to his chest or about his real name or that Katherine was in fact Ryan’s mother, not his own. He stuck to the facts that were necessary, giving Jesse enough to acknowledge the reticence with which he now treated relationships but not enough to scare him away.

  They were presented with dessert by the time he had finished and Jesse flattened his lips for a moment and said nothing. At length, he said, ‘Thank you. I owe you a story.’

  ‘Later,’ Scott said. ‘This butterscotch
pie is amazing and it wouldn’t be fair to divide my attention between you and it.’

  ‘Second best to a pie,’ Jesse laughed. ‘At least I know where I stand.’ Their shared laughter was perfectly unperfect together.

  After dinner, they took a walk through Chevin Forest Park in the dwindling summer sunlight, casually ambling along the path between rows of trees and megalithic stone boundaries, neither of them in a hurry to be anywhere else. The branches of the maple trees overhung the path in places to create a tunnel effect that succeeded in adding to the beauty of the trail.

  Scott put his arm over Jesse’s shoulders and bumped heads. ‘I’ve had a great time,’ he said.

  Jesse smiled. ‘Do you want to hear about my stalker now?’

  Scott nodded, remained quiet, and they continued to walk.

  ‘Like I think I said, she moved into the flat above me when I lived in York. Her name was Prabha. The day we met she invited me to her baptism so I knew immediately that she was a bit clingy. I don’t think she had any friends, so showing her some friendliness was probably all it took. When her baptism occurred, I almost felt obliged to drive her there and when we arrived, she introduced me to these church elders or whatever they were called. One of them even prayed with me, her hand on my shoulder, saying, “I thank you, Jesus, for bringing Jesse into Prabha’s life,” and things like that. I think she had told them I was her boyfriend.’

  Scott let his arm fall down Jesse’s back and he clasped his hand.

  Jesse continued, ‘She would come down to visit me every evening, asking if I had ten minutes to discuss this or that. But her ten minutes would become three or four hours. Did you know there’s a limit on how long you can pause live TV? After so long, it drops out and goes back to normal. That’s how long she would stay.

  ‘She was constantly telling me about how much she prays to Jesus for things, and how she always gets what she asks for if she really means it. And she was quite tactile, touching my leg while she laughed. I guess at first I was a bit naïve—I just didn’t pick up on the signals that she was so obviously sending out. It took me some time to realise that she liked me as more than a friend or neighbour. And at that point, I’d never mentioned my sexuality. I didn’t have a boyfriend at the time and because of her religion, I didn’t want to upset her. But when I realised what she was looking for, I casually dropped it into conversation.’

  Scott raised an eyebrow. ‘You mean like, “Jesus loves you, and by the way I’m a big homo. Would you like more tea?”’

  Jesse laughed. ‘No, not quite. But I did mention an ex-boyfriend. I dropped it in so carefully, placed it where I figured she’d register it but wouldn’t comment. But her jaw dropped and she said, “You’re gay?” like she was gobsmacked, and when I said yes, she said, “You’re going to hell.”’

  ‘Jesus,’ Scott said.

  ‘Jesus wouldn’t have me, according to her.’

  They sat on a patch of grass in the lowering sunlight, side by side, shoulder to shoulder.

  ‘Anyway, she said that I should repent, and that if only I would come to her prayer meetings at the Baptist church, they could help me. Eventually, I asked her to leave, but she continued to knock on my door every evening. In the end, I stopped answering. Every time I heard her footsteps on the stairs I’d mute the TV and stay still until the knocking stopped and I heard her go back upstairs. This was all a few months after we met, so it wasn’t just a sudden infatuation she’d had. It developed over the months. Sometimes at night I’d hear her crying from the flat upstairs.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘A while after that, she got into my flat one night. She had her own key—God knows how she got it; she must have copied mine somehow. I was asleep. I knew nothing until I woke up and found her kneeling over me on the bed. It all happened so fast. “You can’t be gay,” she said, “I love you.” And there was a glint in the darkness, something in her hand. I didn’t have a clue what it was. I was so startled to find her in my room, leaning over me, that I didn’t even think about weapons or anything. She brought her arm up and I saw a knife in her hand; one of my own knives, actually.

  ‘She swung and I realised what she was doing, and I grappled with her wrists and we tumbled on the floor and she stabbed me, here, under my arm.’ Jesse lifted his T-shirt to show the white scar to Scott, a gash of over two inches long. Scott reached out, touched it lightly. ‘She actually left the knife in me,’ Jesse said. ‘She stood up and she was crying and I remember thinking, Why are you crying? I should be crying, not you. And then she left.’

  Jesse lowered his T-shirt and Scott’s fingers were still on his skin.

  ‘Did they lock her up?’

  It took a few seconds before Jesse replied. ‘I didn’t report her. I just wanted to get on with things.’ He looked at Scott. ‘But I wish now I had, because I still have some sleepless nights. Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped in this nightmare of window locks and moving furniture in front of doors. It makes me feel like an idiot sometimes.’

  ‘You’re not an idiot,’ Scott said. He hugged him tight. ‘That was in York. You’re here now. Forget about her.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ Jesse said. ‘I’m really trying. I saw her once more when I was moving out. She said she’d find me. And that I’d regret it.’

  Chapter 11

  Only a fool would walk in through the front door of the Interpol building in Central London with a gun and Fernandez was not about to be foolish. But with the description given to him by Jim Dixon—blonde, five foot six, glasses, always a copper bracelet on her left wrist, and a massive rack—and Dixon’s knowledge of her routine habits, as though he’d been spying on her for months, all Fernandez had to do was stand outside on the street and wait for Lucy Devonshaw to come to him.

  Lucy had signed the official secrets act and was entrusted with more information than most people saw in a lifetime. If anyone knew where Kane Rider and Margaret Bernhard were hiding, it was her; or she would certainly be able to find out.

  As he waited on the street for her, he called the tech guy to check on his progress. He was trying to locate Bernhard and Rider with cellular data as well as performing transactional checks and, in Ling Xu’s own words, ‘tapping into the national CCTV grid and running facial recognition on a forty-seven point protocol at a rate of six per second, running off four computers that are each accessing four other random internet-enabled computers to steal bandwidth and power and route IPs on four-minute bursts. Four’s my lucky number,’ Xu added.

  ‘Will it work?’ Fernandez asked the teenager.

  ‘Only if you’re prepared to wait six months,’ Xu said. ‘It’ll take forever to scan every face in the UK—and that’s assuming they’re still even in the UK. Do you know how many times your face is captured on CCTV in a day?’

  ‘Can you speed up the process?’

  Xu’s sigh on the end of the phone was heavy. ‘I’m not ramping up the access from four, it’ll only increase the chances of getting spotted as we poke around in someone else’s unsecure network. It’ll take as long as it takes. We’re pollinating flowers, here, mister. We have to tread carefully or we’ll get shit all over our shoes.’

  ‘Just keep trying,’ Fernandez said and he hung up without another word.

  At the sound of a nearby church bell pealing out twelve o’clock, Fernandez straightened up and pushed his hands into his jacket pockets. At twelve o’clock, Dixon had told him, Lucy Devonshaw would exit the building and walk to The Bagel Factory through the park, usually alone. She would return to the office with her lunch and wouldn’t reappear until six.

  He had a six-minute window in which to make an impression on her—one way or another.

  How Dixon knew all of this was a question Fernandez didn’t want to ask.

  Two minutes after the church bell tolled, a young blonde woman with, Fernandez had to admit, the decent rack Dixon had mentioned, came out of the building, waving over her shoulder at someone in the lobby. She strode down the steps and l
ooked both ways before crossing the busy road.

  Fernandez ducked back out of sight and slipped into the park. When Lucy Devonshaw came through the entrance, Fernandez took his watch off and twisted the winder. It was an old trick, one that probably wouldn’t work, but he was prepared to try.

  ‘Excuse me, miss, do you have the correct time?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t,’ Lucy said with barely a glance in his direction.

  ‘I have a gun,’ Fernandez said. He was already pulling back his jacket and reaching inside.

  ‘Excuse me?’ she said, turning to face him, still walking away from him.

  ‘Don’t run, Lucy. Don’t scream.’

  She stopped. The confusion on her face—the gun, her name—was evident. One quick step and he took her arm, pushed the barrel of the handgun under her ribs.

  ‘I’m sure you’re clever enough not to try anything foolish, Lucy, correct?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Sit down,’ he told her, and together they sat on the nearby bench. With other people in the park, he kept the gun hidden from view but made Lucy Devonshaw plainly aware of it.

  He smiled at her, waited to see if she’d say anything. She just looked at him, right in the eyes, pretending she wasn’t scared even though he could smell the fear on her like piss on a beggar.

  She really did have a nice pair of jugs. He wondered how soon before a CCTV camera picked them up and Ling Xu spotted her and took a screenshot for his wank bank.

  Eventually, Lucy said, ‘Who are you? Who put you up to this?’

  ‘I can be a friend,’ Fernandez said, ‘or an enemy. That depends on you. I need you to do something for me.’ Lucy glanced over his shoulder and Fernandez said, ‘Don’t look at anyone else, look at me.’

  She did. ‘This is about work,’ she said.

  ‘Very clever,’ Fernandez smiled. She still had the use of her brain with a gun in her side; that was a good sign. What she had meant was clear: if he had wanted to rape her, he wouldn’t have been so bold as to attempt it in broad daylight in a busy Central London park. ‘There are some people I need to locate,’ he told her. ‘Some very slippery people.’