Smoke and Mirrors

by Denver Murphy

  Chapter Seven

  Brandt hurriedly read the newspaper for the second time. His break was nearly over but he wanted to check that he hadn’t missed anything. Not that the article offered much detail, merely confirmation that the hearing into the events at Johnson’s house had taken place, and that she was free to return to work. Brandt was pleased by this and hoped that she would be able to move on in the same way he had managed. He remembered reading once about the power of forgiveness and merely saw it as a load of Christian crap. However, the decision not to kill Johnson had marked a total change in his attitude towards her. He felt somewhat benevolent, and there was no point granting her life, if she couldn’t now go on to use it. McNeil wasn’t meant to die. He hadn’t been chosen, and his death was not part of what Brandt had set out to do, he was just a stupid cop on a glory mission. Albeit inadvertently, McNeil had fucked up his plans and ruined everything. Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe Johnson was always meant to live, despite her vicious attacks on him in the paper.

  Given what she had been through, Brandt wondered whether she would take the opportunity to go back into the police. Able to view things dispassionately now, he acknowledged that Johnson had all the qualities needed for a successful detective, even if her determination to win in his case had led her down a dark path. But he also knew there was a fair chance she would turn her back on her career, in much the same way Brandt had done. It still might only be a matter of months since he retired, but the truth was he had given up caring about what he had been doing years before. He didn’t like to think it either coincided with or was a contributing factor in the breakup of his marriage, instead choosing to focus on how he felt society had become so fractured that the people he had sworn to protect were no longer worth saving.

  ‘Gregori, we’ve had a coach load of people arrive and we need you back at the counter.’

  It had been weeks since Brandt assumed his new identity, one that had allowed him to fit in with the rest of the Eastern Europeans who, despite Brexit, still seemed to be arriving to find work. His employers had been more fastidious than expected and asked for his documents, but when he spun a tale about fleeing his native country of Georgia to escape oppression, they hadn’t bothered to chase them up. Moreover, it provided him with a useful cover story when asked about his background. He would feign great sadness and give the impression that to speak about it, even only a little, would be a source of great pain. He knew his fellow co-workers suspected something, especially because he had done everything he could to avoid them. However, nothing had been said, and he reasoned that quite a few of them had their own past they were trying to keep hidden.

  Things moved on quickly for Brandt. The orchard where he worked was owned by a man called Samuel Jones, who made a fair proportion of his money running a Welsh food market just north of Betws-y-Coed. Unlike Rhyl and the other nearby coastal towns that seemed exclusively frequented by Scousers, this region was very middle class, appealing to hikers in their expensive gear. An unexpected absence among Jones’ staff had led to him recruiting one of his fruit pickers to make up for the shortfall. With Brandt’s English being the best, he was selected.

  Brandt had enjoyed his day there and impressed sufficiently to be offered a switch from his former occupation. He had jumped at the chance, not only because it would be easier work than the exhausting manual labour he was still struggling to get used to, but he genuinely enjoyed being there. Throughout his life, Brandt had reserved a fair proportion of his contempt for a particular brand of wealthy: the nouveau riche. Working in the cities, he tended to have little contact with the landed classes but had plenty of experience with this group. The source of their newfound wealth had changed over the years, with the 1980s seeing many of them emerge as a result of the stock market boom and thankfully slink away again after Black Monday. Today it all seemed to do with the internet. Brandt was certainly no Luddite and had made effective use of computers both in the police and his exploits post-retirement, but he had no idea how people in their 20s and 30s could make the sums of money he read about.

  And it was these people he enjoyed serving the least in the large tearoom housed in the food hall. The older clients he saw merely as lonely people who used their visit as a chance to get out of the house and be sociable. They tended to make a pot of tea last an hour and view the purchase of any of the various cakes and pastries as a particular treat. However, the young breezed in and bought far more than they ever intended consuming; as long as it was local and/or organic they hoovered up the stuff, and it seemed like the more expensive it was, the better they liked it. Brandt knew how much the case of blueberry granola muffins cost Mr Jones and the sale of just one of the cakes covered it.

  The children of the nouveau riche offended him the most. They would bowl in noisily, demanding all sorts of food, only to then just sit there and pick at it, whilst complaining that they wanted to go outside and play on the swings. Yet he reserved a special kind of hatred for their mothers. Desperately trying to hold on to a physique that was proving challenging since childbirth, they would ask for all manner of hot beverages. It turns out that good old tea and coffee isn’t sufficient for them. They want skinny lattes, frappuccinos, macchiatos or whatever new complicated beverage they can think of.

  ‘Gregori is coming!’ he called in response to the request to get back to work. He knew that the endless supply of contemptibles would dry up once the holidays were over, but he hoped that, unlike the fruit picking which was most definitely seasonal, he could convince Mr Jones to keep him on through the winter. It wasn’t as though there weren’t plenty of opportunities to make the most of the produce available in the different months. Halloween was big here, but he supposed that as soon as that was over they could concentrate on Christmas. If the shop that sold expensive tat was anything to go by, a line of supposedly handmade decorations was likely to go down a storm.

  ‘Mrs Hardcastle,’ he called in the Georgian accent he was slowly allowing to drop, as soon as he emerged from the back. ‘If you were wanting on having the second pots, I should be now getting that for you,’ he continued, gesturing towards the window at the steady line of elderly people making a beeline for the tearoom.

  ‘Oh, thank you Greggy,’ she called in reply. It seemed that few people beyond the age of 55 could cope with pronouncing a foreign name correctly, especially if it was similar to the English version. But Mrs Hardcastle was still one of Brandt’s favourites. She was fairly typical of their regulars, albeit one of the younger ones, but managed to tread the fine line between using her visit to strike up the sort of conversation that largely eluded her since her husband died, and attempting to monopolise the staff’s time when they were busy serving other customers. Brandt always ensured she got the largest slice of whatever cake she was going for that day and she would wait until he was the one clearing tables before leaving her standard tip of a £2 coin. ‘Besides,’ she added. ‘I’m always pleased when people like them arrive because it makes me seem so much younger.’

  Brandt’s good-natured laughter wasn’t entirely false.

  Chapter Eight

  Jack knew this wasn’t going to go well and it wasn’t as if he could share with them the reason why he was far less disappointed than they were going to be. Emerging from his bedroom, he found them waiting expectantly on the landing.

  ‘I didn’t get in,’ he stated flatly.

  ‘I… I don’t understand,’ replied his father.

  Much as Jack found his apparent incomprehension an irritation, he knew that his father had struggled with the concept that the university application process was different to his day. At some point early in the morning of A Level results day, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service updated with whether your universities had accepted you.

  Jack knew that being rejected by both his firm and insurance offers was a bad thing in terms of what he could expect for his exam results, but he wasn’t despondent, having regretted the university choices he had made sin
ce his trip to Nottingham.

  ‘I suppose there’s always Clearing,’ his mother said hopefully.

  ‘That’s the spirit!’ Jack responded cheerfully. ‘We knew that both offers were high and with there no longer being a cap on the number of places that universities can provide, there should be some good courses and decent places still available.’

  ‘Just hurry up getting ready so we can get to school early and see what the bloody damage is.’ Jack knew the subtext to the snappy order. Whilst it made sense to find out as quickly as possible what his grades were, what his father really wanted was to get this over and done with before suffering the ignominy of seeing the delight on the other parents’ faces as their children revealed how well they had done.

  An hour later they were back home again. Jack’s Head of Sixth Form had clearly already known what his results were, because he was only too willing to open the study area early and give him the envelope. He had suggested Jack stay so he could receive advice as he trawled through the various courses still available, but Jack had politely declined, claiming he didn’t want to get distracted when all the other students arrived. That Mr Gower did little to try and convince him otherwise, showed he shared a similar view to his father; a view evidenced by the fact that the speed at which he had been driven to school wasn’t matched in their return journey.

  Not that Jack had needed any advice. He knew exactly what he was looking for when he logged back on to UCAS. He didn’t know what everyone was so disappointed about anyway, three Bs and a C was a perfectly acceptable haul and one that should make him an attractive applicant in the Clearing process. Within a few minutes, he had found what he had been looking for, even if it left him with an awkward dilemma: Nottingham has two universities. In his father’s language, there was the proper one and the ex-polytechnic. Jack had known that he would be able to find courses still available at Nottingham Trent, and indeed a few of them were science related – what he had been looking for. However, despite being high-ranking and as good as the institutions that had rejected him, the University of Nottingham also had a couple of places available. There was nothing for Science or Maths, but Jack could go for the one in Politics and International Relations off the back of his B in History. That Jack had never really enjoyed history, much less the political aspects of the topics he’d been made to study, wasn’t an issue for him at that point. The fact of the matter was that this could provide the perfect compromise between going to the city of his dreams and ensuring his parents were happy with the outcome. He was sure they would be sufficiently delighted that he was going somewhere prestigious and similarly fail to see the implication of signing up to three years of studying something he had little interest in.

  A phone call to the admissions area, followed by a quick chat with the head of the department guaranteed his place and it wasn’t long before Jack was confronting his parents once more. Whilst his father slumped on his kitchen bar stool in relief, his mother couldn’t contain her excitement.

  ‘Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. Did you hear that, Malcolm?’ she said, turning to her husband. ‘Jack might go into the United Nations or NATO when he’s finished.’

  The proposed job opportunity seemed to rouse his father. ‘Yes, son, you could become a diplomat, perhaps even work in a foreign embassy. You could be the ambassador!’ He paused, looking at his wife. ‘What are you doing, Gwen?’

  ‘Oh, I’m posting the good news on the family WhatsApp group.’

  Jack allowed a satisfied smile to escape him. There was nothing like the fear of something awful happening to make something acceptable seem great. He left them to bask in their collective glory and went back upstairs to start researching where he was going to live.

  Chapter Nine

  He knew he shouldn’t, but Brandt couldn’t help checking from time to time whether there was any further news about DCI Johnson. There had been nothing in the papers but that wasn’t to say she had not returned to work on something not high profile enough to trouble the press. The temptation became so strong that he considered seeing if he could break into her social media, but the discovery of someone hacking her accounts may raise unnecessary suspicion.

  Brandt had accepted that the faking of his death could easily be uncovered. It would only have taken a checking of the dental records to confirm it wasn’t him. He had hoped that Johnson’s testimony would be enough to avoid such steps being followed but, if he were in charge, he would have taken every opportunity to ensure he had the right man. But that was because Brandt had never been interested in the political side of the job. He had never seen the distinction between the right result and the correct one. He supposed, especially since he had gone on to murder again after the authorities had allowed him to escape the country, it was simply too convenient to want to believe that he had killed himself in Johnson’s house fire.

  With it now being well into September, the body would have long been buried in an unmarked grave. He knew enough about these matters to be able to fathom the whereabouts, and it would give him a perverse sort of pleasure to go and visit the place where he had supposedly been laid to rest. But he wouldn’t, because that would be like admitting that he hadn’t moved on. Life wasn’t exactly rosy and, with the temperatures already starting to dip significantly in time with the tourism tailing off, his caravan wasn’t quite as cosy as it had once been. Yet Brandt felt an inner peace that had escaped him for so many years. At night time when he had trouble sleeping, thanks to the rain drumming on the metal roof above him, he found himself wondering whether his peace had something to do with Susan no longer being alive. She had been killed as a punishment for her collusion with Johnson to spread more lies about him. In some respects, he believed she had it coming for choosing to abandon him in the first place. Not that he regretted the death of any of his victims, but perhaps if she had stayed she could have worked to convince him that he needn’t take such drastic action. What was most interesting about his arrival at her place, was that she hadn’t seemed entirely surprised to see him. If that was meant to somehow convince him to spare her, it spectacularly backfired because she knew what the consequence of her actions would be, and yet she went on and did it anyway. Susan had no one else to blame but herself. At least in Johnson’s case, when she had the first newspaper article, in which it was suggested he was bi-curious and potentially impotent, she hadn’t anticipated that his next step would be to track her down. Similarly, as misguided as Johnson’s dealings with Susan had been, again she had underestimated the result of her interference, much as she had done with her arrival in Benidorm.

  But the main reason why Brandt never regretted his decision to allow Johnson to live, whilst Susan had needed to die, was because Johnson hadn’t owed him any degree of loyalty. Not only could Brandt understand her desire for retribution, but she had never sworn to love, honour and obey him. Even if they were no longer together, Susan should have honoured the years they had spent living with each other by refusing to throw him to the wolves. He hadn’t expected her to understand the reasons behind his actions, but she should never have abused her unique position to cause him harm. At least in Susan’s case her pain was fleeting and long since over, whereas Brandt would have to continue with those cruel words in the newspaper article still etched on his mind.

  The main difference between Brandt and Gregori was that everyone seemed to like his new persona. On some days, the subservience he needed to maintain in his job grated, but it was nice to be genuinely popular. Brandt had always commanded a great deal of respect whilst he was in the force, but that was more in spite of the way he came across rather than because of it. With little more to offer people than a slightly larger than normal slice of cake, and a warning to get their order in before the next coach load of thirsty punters walked through the door, he had needed to rely on charm. It was alien at first and merely there to make himself seem indispensable to Mr Jones, but it soon came more naturally. Brandt even started
looking forward to certain customers popping in and they, along with the work in general, provided a routine that kept him occupied; so much so that his least favourite days were those when he didn’t have a shift.

  With the summer holidays finished, there was no suggestion of overtime and, although Brandt still enjoyed his walks along the beach to mark the start and end to each day, he found the intervening hours harder to fill. He hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol since he had returned from Spain. Initially, it had been so that he could keep his wits with his cover story, but the longer he went without drinking, the more it felt that he was transforming into a different man to who he had been before. That’s not to say he didn’t often think about alcohol; especially on those long, boring days stuck in his caravan with nothing to do except watch daytime television. He supposed he would drink again at some point, but he was anxious to leave it until he felt sufficiently settled in his new life that it wouldn’t provoke his demons to return.

  Chapter Ten

  Jack’s ability to put to one side the thoughts of death and killing that had occupied his teenage years had only been temporary. His desire to honour Brandt would go far beyond just visiting the place of some of his murders. He would kill again and this time he would do it, not for himself as he had done in Whitstable, but to carry on Brandt’s great work. From the absence of any further news since the days after his death, it had seemed to Jack that people had been quick to forget about the man. He would ensure that Brandt’s name would live on in the minds of the people of Nottingham.

  With all of them having now turned eighteen, Jack and his peers were free to go where they chose. The evening of their last day in Canterbury before heading off to university began with most of them boasting about their exploits that summer.

  With nothing worth sharing on any of the topics for discussion, and not sufficiently competitive to bother making anything up, Jack concentrated on nodding in the right places and drinking his lager. However much of their stories might have been made up, it would seem that many of them had spent a proportion of their summer increasing their tolerance to alcohol because, as they made their way to the third bar, Jack felt considerably further along the line to drunkenness than his merely raucous companions.