Another door opened and Dunham came in, walked slowly over and sat behind his desk.
‘Got anything?’ he said to me.
‘No.’
He looked at Eddie, but it took Eddie a while before he turned away from the garden, as if he had to do something he didn’t want to do, and was delaying it.
But he ignored whatever it was and said, ‘You’ve been gone awhile, Joe. Where’ve you been?’
‘Around.’
‘Around where?’
‘Here and there.’
‘And you didn’t find Paget?’
‘No.’
Eddie nodded.
‘What did you find?’
‘Nothing.’
Dunham smiled.
‘You just had a short break?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Can he read, Eddie? Coz we don’t seem to be on the same fucking page.’
That crack smelled like a routine, like I was being treated to an act. I’d felt that since the first time I’d met Dunham.
‘We just want to find Paget, Joe,’ Eddie said.
‘I’ll find him.’
‘And hand him over to us?’
‘You can have what’s left of him. There won’t be much.’
‘I thought we had a deal,’ Dunham said. ‘You let us know what you get, we fix Paget, get the junk back to Cole, he pays the Albanians their money. Everything’s settled.’
‘And what do you get out of all this?’
‘We get peace,’ Eddie said.
‘Since when are you interested in peace?’
‘It’s just strategic. We let the Albanians calm down for a while, then we get rid of them, Cole and us.’
‘Why would you care about the Albanians? They don’t stray on your turf. Unless you’ve moved into prostitution and people trafficking.’
Dunham leaned forward. I could see a vein throbbing in his forehead.
‘It would be a mistake to fuck with me. I’m not some cunt like Cole.’
‘What kind of cunt are you?’
He wasn’t smiling now, but he hadn’t exploded either. That was interesting. I was still getting the treatment, then.
Eddie said, ‘Take it easy, Joe. We’re on the same side.’
‘I’m on my side.’
‘Not if the Albanians come for you. Then you’ll want to be on the strongest side. Which is us.’
‘They won’t come for me. They’ve got problems of their own.’
I caught something then, a flicker of a look between Dunham and Eddie.
‘You didn’t hear about Cole, then?’ Eddie said.
‘What?’
Even as I said it, I felt a tug in my guts that said, Yes, I know.
‘He got hit last night.’
‘While you were on your short break,’ Dunham said.
It came back to me like the taste of bile. I was in the bar in that hotel in Birmingham. I was watching the news on TV. They mentioned a shooting in East London. They showed a house riddled with bullet holes. It was Cole’s house. My head had been so fucked up with pills and booze I’d watched the pictures and listened to the voice and seen right through all of it.
Dunham was smiling grimly. He was enjoying himself. I was wrong and he was right and he loved it, the power of it.
‘Is Cole dead?’ I asked Eddie.
‘No. Nobody was home.’
‘They’re not quite the finished mob you seem to think, are they?’ Dunham said. ‘Maybe now you’ll start trusting us.’
There was nothing I could say to that. They’d scored a point off me and I was on the back foot. Now they wanted me to block up and go to the ropes. Instead, I thought I’d try and land a punch of my own. I said, ‘What do you know about Glazer?’
Eddie’s eyes narrowed and glistened with that amused expression he sometimes had. He smiled thinly. Dunham didn’t look so happy now. I thought I’d hit him on a sore point, but now he looked like he didn’t give a shit. Or tried to, anyway. That was interesting.
‘What do you know about him?’ he said.
‘Fuck your games.’
‘You’re in over your head, Joe,’ Eddie said. ‘If you’ve got a lead on Paget, tell me what it is.’
‘Why?’
‘What does Cole know?’ Dunham said.
That was a mistake. I could see it in Eddie’s eyes. He was still smiling, but the glint had gone. Dunham had split with the script. We were supposed to be making plans for Paget and the Albanians and all that shit, and suddenly Dunham’s forgotten all about them and wants to know about Cole. That was strange. That mention of Glazer had hit home.
I was sure I was right – they were playing some kind of game – but the more I saw Dunham, the more I knew of him, the less I thought he was the type to play games. He was a knot of power, a man with a mission, serious and vicious. People like that didn’t fuck about. No, the more I watched them both, the more I knew they were playing Eddie’s game. Dunham had gone along with it for a while, but I’d hit him with the fact that I knew about Glazer and he’d dropped his guard a moment and let me see that I’d hurt him, if only a bit.
Whoever Glazer was, then, they didn’t want me to know about him.
Dunham was tired of games now. His face seemed to cloud over, his eyes became hooded and dangerous. He was becoming himself, creeping out of the daylight and back into the slimy dark pool.
‘How would I know what Cole knows?’ I said.
‘Now you listen to me,’ he said, his voice thick as mud, ‘you’re gonna forget about Paget.’
‘We need you and Cole to concentrate on the Albanian threat,’ Eddie said, still trying to make like the Albanians were dangerous. I kept my eyes on Dunham.
‘Paget’s mine,’ I said. ‘I want to watch him bleed for what he did.’
Dunham said, ‘I don’t give a fuck what he did.’
Eddie turned to him.
‘He killed a woman, Vic. Cut her up.’
‘My heart bleeds.’
‘The woman was Joe’s bird.’
‘I know it. She was grassing Marriot to the filth, wasn’t she?’
I’d hit him with Glazer and he’d staggered. Now he was hitting me back. He sank into his seat and watched me from behind his large desk and smiled at me.
I turned and walked out of the room and past the woman with coldness in her eyes and past the kid who stared at me. I walked through the hall with its antiques and paintings that made the place taste more sour, more rank. I walked out into the dark day and looked at the gloomy sky and felt the cold air blast me in the face. I watched the crows above whirl and fall and screech their murderous cries.
Eddie had followed me out. He put a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t try to break it off. I had a grip on myself.
‘Don’t take it personally. He gets carried away sometimes, likes to stick the knife in a bit too much. He didn’t mean what he said in there, about your bird. He has a wife. Has a daughter too. You saw them, in there. He loves the girl, always talks about her. That must tell you something.’
‘Sure.’
He was trying too hard to make like Dunham was a saint, which, I thought, might mean that whatever Dunham had going on, Eddie didn’t like it.
Whatever it was, it was bad.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
By the time they dropped me off outside Browne’s, I felt like I’d done ten rounds. My body weighed a hundred tons. My arm throbbed but it was a dull and distant pain. My head was fuggy.
On top of all that, I felt an emptiness that was more than hunger, it seemed to start in my gut and work its way through to my fingers.
I told myself I just needed a change of clothes and a shower and a shave. I told myself to shut up and get on with it. I told myself to find Paget and kill him.
The car stopped and Eddie’s boys waited, keeping their eyes ahead. It took all I had to open the door and climb out.
I
stumbled into Browne’s house. He heard me and came out of the lounge and grabbed me by the arm. I almost pulled the both of us down, but he held on. He pushed me into the lounge and steered me to the couch. I fell onto it. He disappeared. When he came back, he was carrying a tray of food and a cup of tea. He put the tray on my lap. My hands shook with the effort of picking up the knife and fork. Browne took them from me and cut the food up and fed it to me. I didn’t know what he was shovelling in my mouth. I couldn’t taste it. I could feel the blood pulsing around my head, though, and the emptiness swelling and sucking me in.
‘You can’t go on like this,’ Browne was saying. ‘You know that, don’t you? It’ll kill you.’
‘No choice.’
He was right. I was right. It didn’t matter.
He disappeared for a while. When he came back, he had a syringe in his hand. He stuck me with it, pressing the plunger quickly. I don’t know what it was he shot in me. He told me, but I didn’t take it in.
‘Need a clear head,’ I said, stupidly.
‘Well you’re out of luck there, aren’t you? You haven’t had a clear head since I’ve known you. We in the profession call it being bloody stupid. It’s a form of brain damage. There.’
He pulled the syringe out and unscrewed the needle.
‘Now, no exertions, understand? Don’t even sneeze for the next twelve hours.’
I sat there and felt my head fall and dip and whirl, like those black crows. Browne went and sat in his chair and watched me.
‘Bad, huh? Well, you were almost killed a couple of weeks back. I’m not surprised your body’s reacting like this. You need to be hospitalized. But then you know that. You should at least go and rest.’
‘Can’t.’
‘No. Of course. Places to go, people to kill. Right?’ He smiled darkly. ‘That’s what it’s all about. Aye, that’s it. I patch you up so you can go out and slaughter. Is it revenge, Joe? Is that what you’re after? Don’t you understand that doesn’t work? That’s like trying to cut out a cancer with a meat cleaver. You destroy yourself as much as the thing you want to destroy. Revenge isn’t about getting justice or closure or anything. It’s about satisfying your lusts, your base desires. It’s ego, man. Bloody ego.’
I saw his lips move. I heard the words a minute later. I just kept staring at him.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I heard myself say.
‘Och, what’s the bloody use.’
He got up and left the room. I thought he was gone for good, but he came back straight away with a glass of Scotch. He grabbed the TV remote and took it and the drink over to his chair. He sat down and flicked the TV on. He made an effort to watch whatever they were churning out. To me, it was all noise and blur. He took some gulps of his drink and switched channels. He was angry with me. I didn’t know why.
I opened my eyes. The light from the sky had gone. I must have passed out. There must’ve been something in that brew Browne gave me. There were no lights on, but I could see Browne by the glow of the TV. He was in the chair still, but he wasn’t solid like he’d been. Now he was a lump of clothes. A bony hand at the end of a sticklike arm gripped a drink. The few grey hairs he had left were a mess. He was staring at some programme about sea birds. They dived into the sea and swam around under the water. I thought again of those crows, their screeching, mocking cries. A murder of crows. Wasn’t that what they called them?
Murder. Damn right.
I moved. Browne looked over at me. He looked a dozen years older than he had a few hours ago. I saw the bottle of Scotch by his foot.
‘Decided to carry on living, did you? Well, let us rejoice.’
He turned his head back in the direction of the TV.
‘Not that you care,’ he said, ‘but I’ve decided on something. I’m going home.’
My head was still fuggy. Wasn’t this his home?
‘Home?’
‘To Scotland, I mean. North of London a bit. You know where that is, don’t you?’
Did I? I wasn’t sure.
‘Why?’ I managed to say.
‘Why? I can’t take it any more, that’s bloody why. I can’t live here, be amongst these people. You have a system for coping; you just bull your way through, go after what you want and if someone gets in your way you smash them. Maybe that’s the way the world is these days; take what you want and damn everyone else. It’s Darwinian, I suppose. Fundamentally. Anyway, it’s not my world. Probably never was.’
I didn’t have it in me to tell him to shut up so I just sat and waited for him to prattle on some more. He didn’t. Instead, he took some of his drink and watched the birds. We both watched the birds. Seagulls were gathering in gangs and swooping down on fish. They were murdering them. Maybe Browne was right; everything murdered everything else.
Time crawled. My head floated to the ceiling and came back slowly. Browne got drunker. The day got older. The sky got darker.
‘I miss her,’ Browne said. ‘Stupid, I know. After all, she was only here a few days, wasn’t she? And she hardly spoke. But I miss her. I suppose because she was so…’
He sighed and ran a hand over his hair. I didn’t understand what he was talking about.
I said, ‘Brenda.’
He didn’t hear me. I don’t know if I even spoke. I saw a shadow out of the corner of my eye. I tried to turn my head, but I couldn’t make it. I thought it was Brenda, and then I remembered the girl, Kid, and I thought it might have been her.
I realized that was who Browne had been talking about. A small girl, thin, alone.
‘There was that time,’ he said. And then nothing more.
There was that time.
Yes, there was that time we’d gone to the market. Or was that Brenda? Yes, it was Brenda. I’d bought her a dress. The dress was too small. She took it off and put it somewhere.
Where? Did it matter? For some reason it did.
And I thought about the market, too. There were lots of people there, and she was nervous, looking around her. When I asked if she was okay, she told me that she didn’t like crowds. But she’d been the one who’d wanted to go there, to the market.
It played in my head, that stuff. Lots of things did. My life was on some kind of loop, bringing the past back around every now and then. But sometimes the past had changed or was unclear and I couldn’t work out what was real and what was in my head, what was memory, what was dream.
Anyway, Brenda, Kid – they’d both gone. They were both dead, both victims of the world that bore them and mutilated them and tried to destroy their hearts. Now they’ve got a lot more in common. Now they’re just memories. Browne remembers them, most of the time. But he’s old, and when he’s gone, there’ll be three of them, living as only the dead can live, in memories, And who’ll remember them? I will, while my mind holds out. And what then? Then nothing. Not a fucking thing.
But even in my head, they would become confused and I’d see Brenda as Kid and Kid as Brenda so that the girl was trying on the shoes in the market and the woman was staring in wonder at the shiny trinket.
They were born decades apart on different sides of the world, but they shared things, as if they’d lived one life, split into parts, broken, like that mirror, like my memory. But, in death, in my head, they became one again.
I opened my eyes. Had I been dreaming? I didn’t know.
‘There was that time,’ Browne was saying, ‘do you remember? When we couldn’t find her and she’d hid in the cupboard. Christ, I was terrified we’d lost her. Do you remember?’
He was talking about Kid, about the time she’d had a flashback, been traumatized and had hidden in the wardrobe upstairs, taking shelter there in the same way she’d hidden at the house where I’d found her.
I remembered. Of course I did.
She’d shot me with a gun she’d found. When she realized I hadn’t been there to hurt her, she helped me out. I wouldn’t have made it out of there without her.
After that she got it in her head that I
’d gone there to save her. I hadn’t. I’d gone there looking for Cole’s money. But she wouldn’t leave me. She was like some small animal that was afraid to come closer to the dangerous thing, but afraid to be alone.
I knew what Browne was doing. It was what I did with Brenda; it was torture, self-inflicted.
‘Do you miss anyone, Joe? No, I don’t suppose you do. Well, I’m not like you. I can’t shrug off all this insanity, all this… this hopelessness. So, I’m going back to where I came from. More or less, anyway. My sister’s up there. Elgin. Nice place. I thought I might go and stay with her for a while. I haven’t got much, but I’ve still got this house. That must be worth something.’
They were both shadows now, Brenda and Kid. I could only see them from the corner of my eye.
I was about to say something to Browne, but when I looked at him, his chin was down and his eyes were closed and I thought he was asleep. Then I saw that his chest was heaving and I realized he was sobbing. He got a hold of himself and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his shirt.
He carried on drinking, staring at some cookery programme that was now on the box, sinking lower into his seat. After a while, his head bolted up.
‘I know you,’ he said, throwing his arm towards me, spilling his drink. ‘You think I don’t, but I bloody well do.’
He was slurring his words now and his accent was stronger. That happened when he got drunk. The more Scotch he poured into himself, the more Scottish he became. He wiped some dribble from his chin.
‘You think nobody knows you,’ he was saying. ‘But I saw what you did for her. Almost bloody killed yourself going up against Merriot, Marriot, whatever his bloody name was. Oh, I know you claimed it was for your reputation and all that maloney, baloney. But I know you. I know there’s something there, Joe. I know it.’
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