Shredder

by Niall Leonard

  “He’s coming,” I said.

  “I still can’t believe you can speak Basque,” she giggled.

  “Don’t go to sleep,” I said. “Stay with me.”

  “I just want to rest for a bit,” she said. “It’s so beautiful here.” She laid her head on my shoulder.

  “Wait till you see it in the summer.”

  “I’d love to. But I don’t think I can.”

  “No, Zoe, stay with me—”

  “I love being here with you, Finn. I never want to leave.”

  “Then don’t. Stay with me, OK? Please. I love you.”

  She smiled. “Must be bad. You never told me that before.”

  “I’m sorry. I hoped I didn’t have to, I hoped you knew.”

  “I knew. But it’s nice to hear you say it.”

  “Stay awake, Zoe. Stay with me.”

  “Love you too,” she whispered.

  —

  I took Zoe back to England six weeks later. She’d loved the farmhouse and so did I, but I couldn’t stay there without her, even when the place had been hosed down and the bodies carted away. That had taken a while: first two Guardia Civil turned up, then a hundred; they’d taped off the farm while their forensics people had scoured it for evidence, trying to piece together what had happened. After them came an army of suits in unmarked cars from unnamed security agencies eager to confirm that this time Karakurt actually was dead. Txaparro, the local IT geek, had told me all about it when he visited me in the hospital in Barcelona where they’d been rebuilding my knee.

  It was Txaparro who’d come roaring up the track in his battered old Subaru twenty minutes after I’d called him. He’d carried Zoe to the backseat, then helped me limp over to get in with her and rest her head on my lap as he drove us to the nearest emergency unit. I remembered clutching her hand and talking to her as the car jumped and jolted down the track; I didn’t remember much about the later part of that journey, because I had lost so much blood I was semiconscious by the time we arrived. Everything that had happened afterwards seemed like fragments of a dream: being heaved onto a gurney, lights gleaming in my eyes, frantic doctors and nurses cutting my clothes off, barking orders and readings to each other in lightning-fast Spanish. I didn’t recall asking about Zoe, but I must have, because I remembered someone telling me, “We are doing all we can do. Relax now, let us help you.”

  When I came round twelve hours later they told me they might be able to save my knee, but they were sorry, because they hadn’t been able to save Zoe.

  —

  The spring we had seen reborn in Spain was stillborn here in England. Gaudy daffodils under bare birch trees shivered in the bitter east wind, and glowering gray clouds rolled overhead. Reaching down, I grasped a handful of heavy crumbling clay from the heap and tossed it into the grave; it burst with a rattle across the lid of the glossy wooden coffin. I hadn’t wanted to bury Zoe on the farm in Spain; when I’d gone back there it seemed to me the whole place smelled of death. But weeks later in England, as I stood in that freezing breeze and felt rain spit on my face, I realized it was me—that I smelled of death, and that I’d never be able to escape it.

  I’d arranged for Zoe to be interred in the same plot as her mother and father. I knew how little love there’d been between them towards the end, but what did that matter now that they were all dead? I wasn’t going to perpetuate their family quarrels. They must all have loved each other once, if only briefly, and that was as much as any of us could hope for.

  Besides, having the funeral here in London gave Zoe’s friends and what was left of her family a chance to say goodbye. There were a few fellow pupils from her girls’ school, but most of the mourners were students and tutors who’d come down from York. From the stories Zoe had told me of her time at uni I knew how much she’d liked it. I’d never admitted it, but I’d envied her the fun she’d had there, and I’d never understood why she’d chosen to spend so much time with me instead. None of them had ever put her in danger the way I had—except Patrick maybe, but he’d had the decency to run. When Zoe’s other friends queued up to shake my hand and tell me how sorry they were I nodded and mumbled my thanks and I hated myself for being a hypocrite. They pitied me, and I didn’t deserve any of it.

  Zoe was dead because I’d loved her. I would never make that mistake again.

  A few of her relatives had turned up too, but more out of duty than affection. That heavyset man with the nervy, stick-thin wife—he must be an uncle, on her father’s side, I guessed. I’d seen those heavy jowls before, and those stubbly cheeks red with broken veins. He didn’t come over, but merely gave me a nod from the far side of the grave before he turned and stumped away after his wispy wife, who didn’t seem able to get out of there quickly enough. Two distant cousins of hers had come down from the Midlands. In their midtwenties, they had some of Zoe’s beauty—the bright green eyes, the flawless skin—but none of her fire; where she’d looked sulky and sultry, they looked sullen. As soon as the service ended they were wandering through the graveyard texting on their smartphones. I wondered if they were going to catch a West End show while they were in town.

  Of Zoe’s aunt, the one who owned the mews cottage on Richmond Hill, there was no sign, but I had heard from her, or from her solicitors anyway. They’d written to tell me I was being sued for the damage caused to the house when the cops kicked the door down and turned the place over. Also for the rent we hadn’t paid. It had taken me half a morning to decode the legal jargon, and half a second to screw the letter up and throw it in the trash.

  I realized I’d been staring down at the coffin so long most of the mourners had drifted away, and the gravediggers were hovering in the background, fiddling with their shovels, waiting for me to go too. They looked incongruous in their muddy jeans and bright orange jackets, but of course this was just another morning’s work to them; it was the rest of us, with our best suits and black ties and shiny shoes, who were in fancy dress. All the same, I was curious to know why gravediggers needed to wear hi-viz jackets. Had any of them ever been run over by a hearse? Even council employees didn’t move that slowly.

  I turned from the grave to let them get on with it, and almost immediately stopped again, and took a deep breath and counted to ten, trying to ride out the jolt of pain from my leg. I’d been standing still for so long, it had nearly seized up. The Spanish physio had ordered me to stay in a wheelchair for six weeks and use crutches for two months after that, but I’d given up on the wheelchair after seven days and dumped the crutches a fortnight later. Screw Karakurt, and Dean; I might never run again, but I was never going to be a cripple on account of them.

  Not everyone had left, I noticed, as I limped towards the tarmac path that led down between the rows of graves. Two men in suits and long raincoats were observing from a distance, one of them wiry and pale with rimless specs and thinning ginger hair, the other black, with skin so dark it shone. I didn’t know whether Amobi and his colleague had come to pay their respects to Zoe or to ask me more questions about Karakurt, but I wasn’t interested either way. I owed the cops nothing—the only favors Amobi and his people had done me had been grudging and halfhearted, to save themselves from some bad PR.

  I walked straight past them, heading for the cemetery gates. I’d organized a reception at a riverside pub, because that’s what you did after funerals. Zoe’s friends from York were headed there, and I was going to join them. Not to swap stories about Zoe, but to find out if my dad had been right when he’d told me that booze might not be the answer, but it did help you forget the question.

  “Finn, wait.”

  There was no point in trying to outrun Amobi: my knee felt like it was on fire. I’d left my painkillers in my hotel room, and now I cursed the macho pride and stupidity that had led to this—to me standing in the rain, forced to listen to Amobi spouting clichés about sorrow and loss, and to Zoe lying in a dank London graveyard, fading away into the clay.

  “I am very sorry for your lo
ss, Finn,” said Amobi.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I am sorry for everything that happened. You must not blame yourself. None of this is your fault.”

  “Right,” I said, because I couldn’t punch him in the face, not in a cemetery.

  “I know this is not a good time, but we would like to talk to you, before you go back to Spain.”

  “I told Interpol everything I know,” I said. “Ask them.”

  “Not about Karakurt.”

  “What, then?” I don’t know why I asked that, because right at that moment I didn’t give a shit.

  Amobi bowed his head briefly; his hair had gone properly gray, I noticed, almost silver, and now it glinted with tiny beads of rain. When he looked up again his eyes were full of pain and shame, and for a moment I forgot how much I hated him, and how I’d once thought of him as a man too decent to ever succeed as a copper. He sighed, as if it was too late to turn back, and he had to get this over with. For a moment I thought he was going to arrest me.

  “I wanted to know if you might be interested in working for us,” he said.

  I stared at him, then at his red-haired friend standing wordlessly behind him, then back at Amobi.

  “You must be out of your fucking mind,” I answered.

  And I turned and hobbled away.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Niall Leonard is a drama and comedy screenwriter, born in Northern Ireland and currently living in West London with his wife, bestselling author E L James, and their two children. Among his many television credits, he has created episodes of Wire in the Blood, Silent Witness, Ballykissangel, and Hornblower. He has also led seminars and workshops on screenwriting and script editing for the BBC, the Northern Ireland Film Council, and the Irish Screenwriters’ Guild, and has lectured on the creative process at the University of Reading. Shredder is the companion novel to Incinerator and Crusher.