by Tony Parsons
And through my tiny window on the world, I saw the security guard coming up the drive.
He rang the doorbell.
Nawkins leaned close to me.
‘I was going to do you quick,’ he whispered. ‘But now you’re going to be done as slow as I can make it.’
I lashed out with my foot and connected with something hard and human. His fingers dug into my neck like claws, forcing my head down, and I could feel the cold air from the open door and the murmur of civilised conversation.
‘Thank you so much,’ Gatling was saying. ‘Yes, the police released the house … I’ll be staying here tonight, but thank you for your concern.’
‘Sir,’ said the Ghurkha, and he went away.
The front door closed.
Footsteps on the driveway.
The door of the guard’s car door, opening and closing. The car driving away.
I could have wept.
And then we were all alone in the big house at the top of the highest hill in the city, and there was a silence that sounded like the end of the world.
The blind, I thought.
Peter Nawkins was the blind.
Peter Nawkins was Maisy Dawes.
And he was perfect for the role.
‘Wait until the guard knocks off,’ Gatling said. ‘Then we can take this one out the back.’ He patted me on the head. My heart pounded in my chest. The air wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough.
I was suffocating.
‘I know just the right place to bury him,’ Gatling said.
The wall at the back of The Garden was covered with ivy.
At a certain spot it could be pulled back to reveal a sally port – a secret double doorway whose original purpose could only be remembered by men who had been dust for a hundred years.
But when the ivy was pulled aside the hidden sally port provided entry to The Garden, just as it had on the night that Nawkins came to annihilate a family, just as it gave them passage into Highgate Cemetery on the night they carried me to the place of the dead.
They carried me deep into the Victorian jungle. I tried to keep a map in my head. Through the wall. Down the steps to Egyptian Avenue. A right to – where? – Dickens’ Path. And then left and downhill to Comforts Corner.
But my mind was still weak and dizzy with the Rohypnol, I was in the middle of the drugged fog now, and by the time they dropped me hard on the ground, I was lost.
I could see nothing. There was only the blackness.
But I could hear the sound of earth being dug up, and then the sound of ancient wood, rotten with the ages, creaking and cracking as it was prised open.
There was the smell of the grave and strong arms were lifting me.
‘You want to sleep with a whore?’ Nils Gatling said, close to my ear. ‘Here’s one you can sleep with forever.’
Then I felt the rustle and crack of human bones beneath me as they lowered me into the coffin.
33
Enough.
Sleep now.
Close your eyes.
Think of nothing.
Slip into the darkness that is total and unbroken and all you will ever know.
Let your breath do the work.
Let it be over.
Embrace the blackness and end all of your suffering.
End it. End it. End it.
The pain revived me.
I had no idea how long they had waited for the security guard to end his shift but I guessed it was hours rather than minutes because the pain sliced right through the Rohypnol fog inside my head.
They had knocked me about quite a bit, but the pain that woke me was from the single cut high on my cheekbone where Nawkins had caught me with the claw of the hammer.
The pain – the fierce sting of a fresh, deep cut on top of a bruise – was enough to lift the mist just enough to make me realise that they had buried me alive.
I screamed.
I thrashed like a dog with a dying rat in its mouth, the ancient bones cracking and snapping and breaking beneath me, sticking into my flesh, the tape that held my arms loosening, as if it had no dominion in this terrible place. I tore at it with my fingers, my teeth, pulling it away from me, wanting it gone.
There was so much of it but I knew that I was reaching the end of it when it began to tear away hair and skin. Then I lay there panting, and the roof of the universe was damp, rotten wood just a few inches above my face.
I lay there breathing, the blackness around me unbroken and absolute.
Then I began to punch.
‘Scout!’
I thought of her and I drew another breath. I thought of her and she gave me strength. I thought of her and I said her name aloud and the sound of my daughter’s name was full of the rage to live.
And I punched the way I had been taught to punch for month after month, and year after year, wasting nothing, no room to waste anything, lifting my fists the few inches to the wooden ceiling, slamming them home – left – right – left – right – banging away, a small animal gasp escaping my lips with every blow, left – right – left right – ah! – ah! – ah! – ah! – my elbows tucked into my ribs, as if protecting myself from the body shots that robbed your breath and were worse than anything that anyone could do to your face – left – right – left – right – ah! – ah! – ah! – ah! – until my knuckles were torn raw and bleeding and I had to stop to master the pain and to find my breath again.
While I was resting I wrapped thick scraps of discarded duct tape around my hands, makeshift gloves to let me hit harder. Later – it felt like an hour but it could have been seconds – I began again.
And the wood cracked. A tearing sound, like sudden thunder, and it made me lash more wildly, which did no good at all, because the wood cracked no more and yet my energy seemed to be seeping from me, and I lay in the grave with the sweat pouring and the tears streaming and the salty sting in my eyes.
And I noticed the air.
There was not so much air.
The air was being used up.
I turned on my side, feeling the panic surge, trying to fight it down with slower breathing. But I found I could not lie on my side. There was no room when I was sideways. The coffin would not counter such movement. It wanted me to rest on my back and to rest like that until the end of time.
I cursed out loud, lashing out with one foot and felt it smash through rotten wood and into the cold earth. It took a while to pull my foot back. I knew then that the wood was ready to fall apart. I just had to hit it the right way. And I had to do it before the air was gone.
But I was so tired.
I closed my eyes, although nothing changed when my eyes were open or when my eyes were closed. I rested for as long as I could. Then when I felt the darkness pulling me down, telling me to sleep, telling me that I had done my best and now it was time to rest, I steeled myself for one final effort.
I could no longer punch because my knuckles were a bloody mush. So I used the weapons of the dirty fighter.
Elbows. Knees. Forehead. Hit them with anything. Hit them with everything. Getting into a mad rhythm.
‘Scout! Scout! Scout!’
Grunting with each impact. Left elbow into wood – right elbow into wood – lashing up with right knee – then the left knee – and finally raising myself off the ground, in a stunted little sit-up, the bones beneath me pressing into my back, then breaking as I smashed my forehead hard against the wooden sky.
And it did no good. The wood creaked and cracked and even split. But I remained in the tomb that I would rest in forever, exhausted now, and finally giving in to the hot, bitter tears.
I said one word out loud.
‘Scout.’
And I would have wept.
But then I felt the rat.
It came into my little wooden world through the hole that I had kicked with my foot. It slid between my legs and – responding to my cry of pure horror – slid across one thigh, its long tail like a diseased snake sliding
across on my bare flesh, and I heard its teeth chatter close to my head as it paused to smell and savour the bloody meat of my face.
I kicked and screamed and thrashed, lashing out like a dying animal that finally understood he was fighting for his life.
The coffin lid split, and cracked, and fell apart.
And the sky caved in. Cold, hard dirt pouring down, hitting my chest and then my face, and then everywhere, a sky full of dirt chilled by winter, all at once in my mouth and in my eyes and clogging my nostrils.
I tore at the earth with broken fingernails. I scratched and I clawed and I dug. It tried to bury me. I refused to let it bury me. But the weight of the world pressed down on me, a world of dirt that was suffocating me. And I fought against it, knowing that when I stopped fighting it would be time to die, trying to lift myself up and yet held down hard, truly fighting more than digging now, the way a desperate man fights, with a kind of helpless and terrified ferocity, the earth so cold and so hard with the winter, and I realised that I was no longer breathing, I was drowning, a man drowning in dirt, gagging on a mouthful of the stuff, my throat closing down as my lungs and heart made ready to burst.
Then I was half-sitting up, the weight of the dirt world still pressing me down on me but unable to hold me, and I felt one hand break through the ground, the air sweet and cold, and then I was pulling, crushing bones to dust beneath my feet.
Fingers in the night air, then one hand, then one arm flailing above ground, pulling myself up, the top of my head and then my face, retching dirt and sucking air, vomiting dirt, sucking it back in, feeling it clinging to tongue and teeth and throat, gasping like a drowning man breaking the surface with the last of his strength, and suddenly I was lying there, panting and gagging, half-buried and half-free, the pain everywhere, still with the dirt of the grave in my throat and eyes and nose.
Alive.
A pair of fierce yellow eyes bored into me. The scarred old fox and I stared at each other in disbelief. Then the fox ran. And I slept. Or I fainted. Or there was still enough of the Rohypnol in my bloodstream to make me cling to the darkness as if it was my lover.
I did not move until I shuddered with cold and suddenly knew that I would freeze to death if I did not move.
Watched by all the angels with no faces, I pulled myself from the grave and found that I could not even begin to stand. Nowhere near it. Forget standing. So I crawled. Dragging myself slowly, feeling the rough ground beneath my knees and elbows and forearms and shins and feet, the pain without respite, glad for the remains of the duct tape that still clung to my limbs and gave me some protection.
I crawled hoping that the night would end and that help would come. But the night was without end and no help came. When I could crawl no more I lay down and trembled with the cold, whimpering like a wounded animal.
The last thing I remember was looking up at the monument where I had stopped. Rising out of the undergrowth was a statue of a sleeping dog. It was a massive thing, more the size of a car than a dog, and I wondered if it was really there or just inside my dreams. It didn’t matter now.
Beyond the dog there was a stone plinth with words that shone in the last full moon of winter.
TOM SAYERS
PUGILIST
CHAMPION OF ENGLAND
BORN 1826
PIMLICO, BRIGHTON, SUSSEX.
‘IT’S A MAN’S GAME.
IT TAKES A GAME MAN
TO PLAY IT.’
I closed my eyes and passed out with one hand on Tom Sayers’ dog.
34
‘Oh, God Almighty,’ Rocky said. ‘What have they done to you?’
It was freezing cold in Highgate Cemetery. The hour before dawn. He came jogging out of the freezing mist, for it was the time that boxers do their lonely running, the insurance against the catastrophe of total physical exhaustion when there is still fighting to be done.
I was lifted by hands that felt both strong and gentle, and I stared at faceless angels in the undergrowth as the remains of the duct tape were pulled from my body and he began to dress me in his tracksuit, zipping up the top to my chin, easing me to the ground and struggling to pull up the bottoms. He helped me to my feet and I held on to him for support as we slowly walked downhill to the gates where his elderly white van was waiting.
‘Twenty-seven Savile Row,’ I said, repeating it when he did not react. ‘Twenty-seven Savile Row. West End Central.’
‘No,’ he said.
Then we were heading south, the traffic already building around Archway, and I may have slept because we were around the Angel when I glanced at his face and saw it set in hard lines as we turned east for the City and the East End and Essex. And I knew that the last place in the world Rocky would ever take me was a police station.
I cursed him once. For not taking me where I wanted to go. For all the things he had not told me. He smiled grimly at me and shook his head, and I closed my eyes knowing that he had saved my life.
Then I slept.
I awoke to the sound of skipping.
The leather rope whipping through the air, faster and faster as thin-soled boxing boots lightly touched the ground. I flexed my body, feeling where it hurt, and tried to stretch my arms and legs. My hands touched the wall. The bed was tiny, and so was the room. I was in a small caravan. There was a baseball bat in one corner. My hand reached out for it.
‘You’re safe here,’ Echo said.
She was standing in the doorway. As always she was dressed for summer and courting. White shorts. A T-shirt that didn’t quite reach the jewel in her navel. High, clunky heels. But she seemed older now, and her pregnancy was unmistakable.
‘You don’t need a baseball bat,’ she said, unsmiling. ‘Rocky’s not going to let them hurt you any more.’
I lay back on the bed, reflecting that baseball bats are a vastly overrated form of personal protection.
‘What happened to you?’ Echo said.
I took a breath. From the fading light outside, it looked like I had slept for most of the day. The remains of the Rohypnol felt like the worst hangover in the world. But I could remember everything. And I could think clearly.
‘Your father and Nils Gatling,’ I said. ‘They happened to me. They know each other, don’t they?’
She shrugged. ‘My dad’s done work for him for years. Gatling’s got property all over London. It’s been a steady earner for my old man.’
I almost laughed.
‘And you didn’t tell me?’ I said. ‘And Rocky didn’t tell me?’
Her gaze never wavered.
‘You’re the law,’ she said. ‘We try not to tell you anything.’ Then a flicker of the old anger. ‘But I did try to tell you about my uncle, didn’t I? I told you my uncle was innocent. But you wouldn’t listen.’
‘You don’t want to talk to us but you want us to listen,’ I said. ‘You can see how that might cause problems, right?’
She took a breath and let it go.
‘My father and Nils Gatling,’ she said. ‘What have they done?’
‘They did each other a favour. That’s what they did. Gatling wanted to silence his sister. And your father wanted to punish his brother.’
I saw the shock on her face. Her hand protectively rubbed her belly and the baby that was growing inside her.
I sat up and looked out of the window. Rocky was skipping, stripped to the waist, He radiated supreme fitness, and I wondered when his first professional fight was happening. It had to be soon.
‘Why would Nils Gatling want to kill his sister?’ Echo said.
‘He wanted to stop her from going to the police about historic sex abuse. Horrible things, revealed at last. Her family – they were collateral damage.’
She did not ask me why her father had wanted to punish his brother. She didn’t need to.
‘You knew Peter Nawkins didn’t kill them because on New Year’s Eve he was with you,’ I said. ‘I should have believed you. And I think I would have – if you had told me.’ I
thought of Sergeant Ross Sallis of Tottenham Hale, and the way he had looked after having a shotgun fired near his face at close range. And I thought of the Burns family, the father and his three grown-up sons, and what Peter Nawkins had done to them after they tried to castrate him.
‘Your uncle didn’t kill Mary Wood and her family,’ I said. ‘But it’s a bit of a stretch to call him innocent.’
She laughed bitterly.
‘So it’s never over then?’ she said. ‘My uncle did his time but it’s never forgotten by you people?’
‘Not if it makes enough headlines,’ I said. ‘Fame comes and goes. Infamy last forever.’
I noticed she had a fresh black eye and I knew her father must be close by. I looked again at the baseball bat. Vastly overrated, but better than nothing.
‘When’s your baby due?’ I said.
‘The end of the summer,’ she said.
‘Who’s the father?’ I asked.
She shook her head quickly as the caravan door opened and Rocky appeared in the doorway. He slipped an arm around Echo’s waist and placed a kiss on her lips.
‘They’re back,’ he said. ‘Outside the wire. One of them chucked a bottle at me so I’ve come inside. It’s been bad since your Uncle Peter died.’
I looked out the window and I saw a large group of locals gathering on the far side of the wire. A solitary female police officer was among them, her hands raised, pleading for calm.
‘What do they want?’ I said.
He grinned. ‘Same as always,’ he said. ‘They want us out. Are you all right?’
I nodded. ‘Thanks,’ I said. Then I shook my head. ‘You should have talked to me, Rocky. You should have told me that you worked at The Garden. You should have told me everything. You ever see Nils Gatling around Sean Nawkins?’
He shrugged and looked away, even now reluctant to give up what he knew.
‘You really should have told me that,’ I said. ‘You should have told me what you knew about Echo’s father.’
‘I don’t know anything about her old man,’ he said. ‘Apart from the fact that he’s a fucking psycho.’