by Tom Trott
I was now closer to forty than thirty. I was getting old. I was getting fat. And at the same time my face was getting gaunt. I wasn’t yet getting bald, but lone grey hairs dotted my eyebrows and stubble. My eyes were red, the bags beneath grey. I felt an overwhelming sadness wash over me, I clung onto the sink to stop my knees buckling. I felt each of my scars. That took some time. I continued to stare at my hollow face. I used to be attractive. I used to be young. I used to sleep well. I used to cry a lot less. I used to understand things. Or think I did. In five minutes the sadness passed and was replaced by the same numbness that I felt most of the time.
I helped myself to some of Darren’s luxury grooming products, it was like staying in a posh hotel. Finally I dressed in the clothes and stepped out of the bathroom.
Down the hallway Andy was standing in the living room, shoes and coat still on, soaking wet, briefcase in his hand. He looked haggard, but had a smile on his face, he was relieved to be home. Then he glanced up at the sound of the bathroom door and the relief drained away when he saw me. He was pale, scared.
He disappeared out of sight, talking to Darren. Then Darren marched down the hallway without looking at me, into the bedroom, and shut the door hard. I stepped into the living room. Andy was in the kitchen now, I could see his back through the old-fashioned serving hatch that was a feature of these Art Deco apartments.
I sat down in the same chair as always and waited. A minute later he sat down opposite with a cup of tea, cradling it between his hands. His long hair was soaked, his thick beard glistening.
I raised my eyebrows at him. He didn’t respond, just blew on his tea and slurped at it as though he had got home and I wasn’t there. I half-expected him to pick up a newspaper.
‘I didn’t kill him,’ I said, ‘if you were thinking of asking.’
He sighed. ‘Do I want to know?’
‘I was hoping you might.’
We exchanged a glance at last. I put nothing special in it, just honest expectation.
‘Everyone is looking for you,’ he almost whispered, ‘they woke us all up. They didn’t tell us everything, but I found out of course. They’re going to go public in the morning. Let me bring you in.’
‘And give them exactly what they want?’
He frowned. ‘Give who?’
‘The person who framed me.’
He sighed again, although he managed to cover up the sound. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know, I was unconscious. I only saw it five minutes before your lot did. I saw enough, but I don’t know what else they put in there.’
‘You don’t remember?’
‘I was drugged.’
‘Do you remember being drugged?’
‘No.’
‘Not exactly a great defence.’
‘Now you see why I didn’t leave it up to your colleagues.’ I smiled.
‘Nothing about this is funny,’ he scolded me.
I knew I had put him in an impossible position. His loyalties to me as a friend and to the police had never been put in direct competition like this before. But I didn’t have a choice.
‘Running makes you look guilty,’ he hissed.
‘No, the staged crime scene made me look guilty. Who’s on the case?’
‘Price, of course. And this is personal now, not only has the body of a city councillor been found in your flat, but Price will be facing serious questions about why she let you go before when a previous body was found in the boot of your car. You’re a double-murderer, as far as everyone is concerned, and they have to catch you before you kill again. At the very least you’re an accessory to something terrible.’
‘What’s the motive?’ I countered.
‘They don’t need a motive, they just need evidence, and whether you did it or not I’m sure there’s plenty of it.’
He had raised his voice quite a bit.
‘We both know that you can’t run forever,’ he stated calmly, ‘I’ve worked on this kind of manhunt before, so have you in your own way. The longer it takes the worse it looks for them, so they’ll throw everything at you. And the bigger it is the better for them as it means they can squeeze some extra budget, emergency funds and the like. It will be all over the papers, local news; with a councillor killed, probably even national.’
He was twisting his mug in his hands.
‘They’ll go through your flat, your office, they’ll speak to Thalia, those two associates of yours; reporters will too, and they’ll all have to decide whether to lie for you. And the papers will pull the clippings for every old case of yours and check them for lice.’
He scratched his forehead.
‘They’ll have helicopters, dogs...’ He sighed. ‘You’re not planning to leave the country, not that you could; I doubt you’ll even leave the city, so you will have to face the police at some point. You better have something good to give them when they find you. Even if you lay low you won’t be able to hide for more than a few days, no more than a week, not once they offer a reward. And here you are, in my flat, wearing my partner’s clothes, making him an accessory, and I have to decide whether or not to pick up the phone and dial 999 whilst it’s still plausible that Darren didn’t know what he was doing! So...’ He calmed down, taking a sip of his tea. ‘...who framed you?’
‘Max.’
He scowled. ‘Taking the piss out me now, are you?’ He sounded hurt.
‘I’m not joking.’
He tilted his head, like you would when patiently humouring a child. ‘I thought you said he was a myth? That we had wasted ten years of our lives.’
‘I was wrong. I met him, Andy.’
He smiled sympathetically. ‘I know.’
‘No, I met him tonight.’
He blinked. All anger and fear was lost in confusion. ‘What?’
‘Less than an hour ago.’
He looked around as though someone else might explain, but there was only me there. ‘You’re sure?’
I nodded.
‘How?’
‘That’s quite a long story.’
I started by telling him about the off-shore owned properties, the work Thalia and Stephanie had done, then about Thornsdale, and flat 37.
‘What has it got to do with Clarence and McCready?’ was his only question.
I told him about the test-drilling, about Tessafrak: ‘McCready knew something was up, so he hired Clarence to look into it. Max had them both killed, I assume Mr X did the deed. Planting the bodies on me was nothing more than a good way to tie me up.’
‘Tell me everything he said.’
I looked at him earnestly, I could sense the old Andy coming back, if just visiting. The years since his father’s death and Daye’s retirement and diagnosis had turned Andy’s personal summer to autumn, his once boundless smile now always constrained.
‘I will,’ I told him, ‘but first we need to go back through everything. We have to get it clear for when I do turn myself in, or...’ I smiled wryly, ‘...if I’m the next body. I’ve tried to forget it. You remember everything. Take me through it. From the beginning.’
‘Take you through what?’
‘Max. The last thirteen years. All of it.’
‘But it’s your story.’
I smiled. ‘I might not be here to tell it.’
He sighed, then finished his tea. ‘Well...’ he started tentatively, ‘thirteen years ago you investigated the disappearance of Mahnoor Jilani. This led you to a meeting of five people, four men and a woman, who claimed to be “The Society of the Twelve”, or at least part of it.’ He settled into his police-briefing style. ‘You escaped, and over the following couple of years, using your memory and some mobile telephone data we had gathered, we were able to identify four of the five. Alan Douglas, accountant to a number of known organised crime fronts; Lakeema Solomon, a businesswoman known for her various charitable activities, she also sat on the board of the Chamber of Commerce; Brian Smiley, Detective Chief Superintendent, and—’ there wa
s a momentary hesitation, ‘Robert Coward, a known drug kingpin. The fifth man you never saw properly, so we couldn’t identify him. We nicknamed him Max because we knew his name began with an M, and it was what Mahnoor had scrawled on the wall of her... cell. Over the next few years we heard more talk of the Society, mostly whispered rumours, most often from low-level drug pushers and other wannabe gangsters, those too stupid to be afraid of them. Most thought the Society was a détente between various criminals, the body that carved up the city and decided and regulated the territories. And most assumed there were corrupt police involved, there always are. It was just a theatrical name for what happens in big cities, why shouldn’t it happen in a little one? Especially one so close to London. A millennium ago The Society of the Twelve supposedly ran the city, and these lot took their inspiration from that. But really they were just a load of people who liked power and took the opportunity to exercise it. And they liked money too. So we did the best we could to thwart them, but we never knew who else was in it. And over time it took care of itself.’
I didn’t know what he meant, and he could see as much in my face.
‘Max killed Alan Douglas that first night,’ he explained, ‘thirteen years ago. Solomon moved back to Kenya. Smiley died in a traffic collision six years later. And Coward,’ there was another momentary hesitation, ‘disappeared a couple of years ago. We haven’t seen, or heard, anything of Max since then. Except from our own lips.’
He put his mug down on a nearby table.
‘It seemed that the Society was comprised of members from different sectors of the city: business, police, organised crime, and an accountant to manage their funds, and Max as a sort of chairman of the board. If that’s true, it appears the Society’s criminal activities died with—disappeared with,’ he corrected himself, ‘Robert Coward.’
‘Surely there were others in the group,’ I mused, ‘it was called The Society of the Twelve.’
‘Maybe, but it could just be the name, they stole it don’t forget. We know they had an associate, a kind of troubleshooter, one you didn’t meet on the night; Jilani’s dad, the taxi driver, was recruited by him. As for Society members, we did suspect Roy Parker for a while, he might have replaced Smiley as the police representative. Or they might have been on it together, they knew each other of course, but I don’t know if they were friends. Looking back, it could have been George, but I doubt it.’
‘I think we were wrong about Parker. And I have reason to believe it was Raymond Burke.’
He looked incredulous for a moment, then intrigued, then shrugged. ‘And there was that councillor, Mary Taft, she was high on our list. There had to be someone with council influence at least.’
I looked him in the eyes. ‘What happened to them?’
‘You know what happened to Parker, that scandal over the water cannon, he had to retire. Taft moved away after she lost her seat.’
‘Are you sure?’
His eyebrows climbed up his forehead. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Remember eleven years ago, how they cleaned up the taxi drivers?’
‘Of course.’
‘I saw Max kill Douglas, but everyone said he moved to Australia. Maybe Solomon didn’t move back to Kenya, and maybe Taft didn’t move away either.’
‘So you think...?’
‘Everyone who was part of the Society, or who we even suspected, has either died or “moved away”.’
‘Parker didn’t.’
‘I think we were wrong about Parker.’
‘Fine, neither did George or Burke.’
‘No...’ I shook my head slowly, thinking, ‘but Merton did.’
‘Robert Merton?’
I nodded. ‘They were a team: Burke, Merton, and George.’
I stopped talking for a couple of minutes, lost in possibilities.
‘What did he say to you?’ Andy asked.
I told him everything I could remember from tonight’s conversation. Even the strange pop-philosophy he had spewed. Andy listened with a growing frown.
‘So it was all a con: Max used the Society, the power dreams of all those people, just to amass assets?’ he asked.
‘Assets he could liquidate when the time came, which it already has. Come and gone. It’s all sold except the flat and the farm.’
‘And you think this deal with Tessafrak is his endgame?’
‘Maybe just a last flourish.’
The frown grew deeper, digging into his forehead. ‘But he told you he has millions now, and that soon it will be billions. He must have something else planned.’
I shrugged. ‘Unless he’s delusional.’ I sat back in my chair. ‘But I don’t suppose he is, the Society was real enough.’
Andy sat back too, relaxed for a moment. ‘Real enough. As real as anything is.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘We always knew it was real, you met them. It’s like when people say Bigfoot is real and it’s a type of large ape; well, that means it’s not real, surely?’
‘Now you’ve confused me.’
‘All people mean when they say something is real, all we mean in this context, is that it is what we thought it was. But we thought it was that, so what’s the surprise?’
‘I guess I didn’t really think that it was what we thought it was. Even Max says Max isn’t real. I used to see us as Holmes and Moriarty, but he doesn’t see us that way. Or maybe he does, but the difference is he thinks he’s playing a part, that the Max in Joe-versus-Max isn’t really him. I spent a long time, a long time ago, imaging how a second conversation with him would go. Sometimes I’d wake up and I knew I’d been dreaming about it.’
‘And it didn’t go how you imagined?’
‘He said all the things I imagined: that we were locked in some desperately important struggle, that I was basically his nemesis.’
‘But...?’
‘He wasn’t supposed to be happy about it.’ I gave a tired smile. ‘What does that mean?’
‘I think you’re overtired, and overthinking it. It means one thing to you, it means something different to him. Neither is real, because meaning doesn’t really exist. Things have the meaning we give to them.’
I wished that were true.
He picked up his empty mug. ‘What are you going to do?’
I smiled mirthlessly. ‘Chucking me out already?’
He didn’t respond.
I nodded to myself, it was fair enough. ‘I don’t know,’ I told him honestly. ‘Find out what his endgame is and stop it. He has to answer for what he’s done. It’s my purpose.’
Andy was studying me. ‘What happened to the old cynical you? You’re starting to sound almost biblical.’
‘I suppose it’s the one good thing about meeting such unadulterated evil: it makes you certain what side you’re on. He thinks he can do terrible things and just walk away from them.’
Andy put the empty mug back on the table. ‘I’ll miss these long talks of ours,’ he joked.
It was only a joke, but it exposed an unspoken truth: we both knew things were coming to an end. Max was right, my survival of that night thirteen years ago had bound us together. It had defined my life in pursuit of his. I didn’t believe in fate, not in the way people mean it; pre-determined by some higher power. But there are people whose lives, because of their choices, are on a collision course. We had both made choices, and we both still had the option to walk away. But we both stuck by our choices. We answered for them. Enter those choices into some endlessly complex equation of the universe and it would give this result every time. The mathematics of life. If you could call that fate, then I believed in it.
Andy stayed silent in his chair. Naturally I wanted him to thank Darren for the clothes, but just as naturally I understood that we were never to speak of it again. Without a word I got up and moved toward the door.
By exiting the stage in different directions Max and I hadn’t defeated fate, just dodged it temporarily. Like a torpedo that had missed it
s target, fate was flung out into the darkness, had spent thirteen years in the void, but was always circling round on a return course and now it was back on the sonar screen, closing in. And I, for one, welcomed it.
21
Safe as Safe Houses
The dawn broke as I walked north-east from Andy’s flat in Hove toward the Seven Dials. It was going to be a cloudless, bitter cold day. As I crested the hill, the sun crept over the white pediments of Montpelier Crescent, running over the ammonite capitals and down the fluted columns turned golden by the dawn. Soon fingers of cold winter sun combed through the trees of the semi-circular green, thawing the frozen grass. At times like this, with the street empty, it was not difficult to imagine the splendour of Victorian Brighton, and easy to be lost in nostalgia for a time that never was. I snapped myself out of it. Nostalgia is the greatest enemy of progress, and I had work to do.
I headed down from Seven Dials under the rail bridge toward Preston Circus and my old flat. I had kept renting the place, just in case I needed it someday. Yes, that’s how much money I had. Not that the rent was high or anything, it was still a shithole.
I entered the circus from New England Road and cautiously approached the little courtyard/loading bay round the back of my flat, where all the flat rooves looked onto. There was no one odd hanging about. Traffic was light, considering the circus is one of Brighton’s busiest junctions. The bank and the pub weren’t open yet, many of the other shops on Preston Road were only just opening their shutters. Some showed no signs of life at all. The pavements were pretty empty. A few vans were unloading, including into the foreign food shop (or “international grocery”) that had replaced the hearing aid shop underneath my flat.
The coffee shop opposite the courtyard was open so I slipped in and used a few quid I’d stolen from Andy’s flat to buy myself a cappuccino. They even had an upstairs, so I took it there, sat by the window, and waited.
I made it last an hour, I don’t mind cold coffee. When you’ve been as poor as I have you don’t turn your nose up at cold anything. Or half-eaten anything.