All the Empty Places

by Mark Timlin

  ‘This has been one of the saddest days of my life,’ Finbarr said as we drank, and I almost believed him.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ said Lucy.

  ‘I could hardly not,’ he replied. ‘We’d known each other for years.’

  Or maybe you just had to make sure she’s dead, I thought.

  ‘Any progress?’ he asked.

  ‘On catching whoever did it?’ said Lucy.

  He nodded.

  ‘Not so far.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Do we have to?’

  ‘Sorry, Nick,’ said Finbarr. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’

  I put my head in my hands and Lucy touched my shoulder.

  ‘Anyone for another drink?’ asked Finbarr.

  He bought another round and stayed for about an hour, before he told us he had to get back to the office. ‘More clients to see,’ he said as he stood to leave. ‘I’ll catch up with you later,’ and he solemnly shook both our hands.

  ‘More crims to let back on the street more like,’ said Lucy, as he walked across the grass away from us.

  ‘That’s showbiz,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know how you can stand having him around.’

  ‘You get used to it.’

  ‘I never could.’

  ‘You’d be amazed what you can get used to.’

  ‘Tell me about it. I thought Brum was bad, but this place.’

  ‘But you were brought up round here.’

  ‘But it’s changed since I left. And not for the better.’

  ‘I won’t argue about that.’

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, both staring into our drinks. ‘So what now, Nick?’ she asked.

  ‘What, today? Or all the todays to come?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Today I intend to get righteously loaded.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then I suppose I’ll just get on with my little life. What about you?’

  ‘Back to Birmingham tomorrow, and the same I imagine.’

  ‘And today?’

  ‘Maybe I’ll join you, if you’ll let me.’

  ‘A wake, huh?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Sounds acceptable,’ I said.

  ‘I think Sheila would’ve liked that.’

  ‘Me too,’ I agreed.

  ‘So shall we?’

  ‘I’d be honoured.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘Listen, before we start, I just want to say that I’m really sorry about the other night. I was bang out of order.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘I can’t. I said some shit and I poked my nose into things that weren’t my business, and I made a fool of myself. Your life is your life. Christ knows I’m the last person who should be judging others. And you’ve gone through as bad a time as me over the last week or so. I should’ve been supportive, but instead 1 trampled all over your feelings like a mad bull. We buried your sister today. We buried someone you loved and someone I loved. We should stick together.’

  ‘Nick. You were drunk and you were hurting. You needed some comfort and I could’ve given it to you. Instead I got on my high horse and took out a lot of things on you that I should save for the men who’ve given me a hard time at work. It’s just that you reminded me of them.’

  I went to speak but she held up her hand.

  ‘No. Listen. I know you’re not like them. I know that you were just hitting out at whoever was closest. Sheila told me things about you I imagine you wouldn’t want anyone else to know, and I’ll respect that. She loved you, Nick, and I know you loved her. I think you two might have stuck together for a long time. Maybe forever. In fact you did. Her forever. Unfortunately yours has to go on. I’m just so sorry that you’ve lost her.’ She looked at me and smiled, although her eyes were full. ‘And that’s the end of the speech. Sheila wouldn’t want us to be like this. She’d want us to have a day to remember. Not for what we just did up at the cemetery. But for what we’re going to do. So let’s get some more drinks in and liven up this party.’

  ‘Seems like a good idea,’ I said. ‘In fact I’ll drink to it.’

  ‘And I’ll drink to you.’

  We raised our glasses to each other like old friends.

  ‘So did you have a good time in Birmingham?’ I asked.

  ‘Does anyone ever have a good time in Birmingham? It was OK. I had a few things at work to clear up and I saw my…’ She stopped embarrassed.

  ‘Your partner,’ I added for her. ‘Come on, I thought we’d been through all that.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  ‘What’s her name?’ I asked.

  ‘Georgina. She’s a nurse.’

  I couldn’t resist it. ‘Sister George,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t push it.’

  So I left it at that.

  ‘Do you believe in God?’ she asked me after a minute.

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘At least not a benevolent old boy with a long white beard.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I don’t really know.’

  ‘What do you think happens?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When you die.’

  ‘Do I believe you go in front of Saint Peter with his big old book that lists all your credits and debits do you mean?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I hope not,’ I said. ‘Or I’ll go straight to hell.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘You don’t know.’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘So what do you think happens?’

  ‘I think you just go to sleep.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Not if you dream it isn’t,’ I said.

  And on that happy note we had one more drink there, then took her car back to my place and got a cab up west. I didn’t want to spend the day round Tulse Hill, and there were places that Sheila had told Lucy we went to and she wanted to see some of them.

  It turned into a massive pub, club and restaurant crawl. We wandered through Mayfair and Soho, dropping into this bar here and that bar there. We ate at an Italian trattoria that probably hadn’t changed since the fifties, dining on spaghetti vongole and cassata with brandied figs, and drank in clubs that thought they were so out there that the new millennium hadn’t happened yet. We drank beer and gin and tequila and brandy and red wine and white wine and cocktails of every colour of the rainbow, and we toasted Sheila with every round. At some point we fell in with a couple of actors who Lucy recognised from one of the soaps, and who seemed to have cornered the London market in cocaine, and Detective Sergeant Lucille Madden of the Birmingham CID snorted her fair share in a chrome and mirrored gentlemen’s toilet in a hotel where the Queen Mother had stayed. Afterwards she showed them her warrant card and they went as white as the Charlie, and she laughed and I joined in and eventually they did too. But they split pretty quickly after that. I don’t blame them.

  Finally at around two in the morning we landed up in Gerry’s club under Shaftesbury Avenue. We danced together to Dean Martin’s greatest hits under the gaze of a hundred or more reprobate actors and writers whose photographs covered the walls. Then we called another cab and headed back to south London before the boss threw us out.

  ‘I haven’t always batted for the other side,’ she told me through kisses that tasted of Rémy Martin and Marlboro Lites in the back of the cab.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said.

  ‘I want to come home with you.’

  ‘That’s where the man’s taking us.’

  Once inside my flat we undressed each other and crawled under my duvet. But it wasn’t right. She wasn’t Sheila and I wasn’t Georgina. As the sun came up she asked me one questi
on over and over again as she tried to make a man of me with little success. ‘What do you know?’ she asked me. ‘What do you know about who killed Sheila?’

  But I had as little answer as I had desire and eventually I fell asleep.

  When I woke up she was gone.

  No goodbye kiss, no note, no nothing.

  31

  Not that I’d really expected any acknowledgment of what we’d done, because, frankly we’d done nothing. It had just been like my first night with Sheila. But some recognition of who I was would’ve been nice. But I have found in my life that that is often what women are like.

  I lay in bed the whole day, nursing the hangover from hell and working out what I was going to do next.

  It was simple really. I was going to wait until the bank holiday, which was just a few days away, and go into the sewer and tunnel system under the depository and find Johnny Tufnell, Morris and whoever else was with them, and kill them. And before or after that I was going to sort Finbarr.

  Then I was going to come home and take a bunch of roses up to Sheila’s grave.

  Blood red ones this time. For revenge.

  But it wasn’t going to be easy.

  I’d been running the plan through my mind for days, surviving on just a few hours’ sleep a night.

  The main problem was that I didn’t know what went on underground.

  Sure, I had the maps and plans, but I’d never been in a sewer system in my life and I didn’t know what I’d find down there.

  Or who exactly.

  Surely, if the security forces were so much in evidence above ground, they must send patrols down below. And what about the engineers who kept the sewers running? From time to time they must sweep through for a look see. For all I knew there might be armies down there.

  Or on the other hand it might be deserted.

  I was tempted to go down myself before the weekend, but if something went wrong and I was spotted by either the good guys or the bad guys, I might blow the whole thing.

  It was a quandary. Another bloody conundrum.

  But in the end I decided to wait until the weekend and take my chances by going down blind.

  Hell, it wouldn’t be the first time, or probably the last.

  But before I did anything, just in case I didn’t come out of that maze of tunnels under the city alive, I went down to the cemetery in Greenwich to visit my late wife Dawn, my unborn child Daisy, as she would have been christened, and Dawn’s best friend and latterly mine, Tracey.

  I drove down in the Mustang, parked outside, bought flowers at the gate as was my habit and walked up to their gravesides overlooking the Thames and east London beyond.

  Flowers. It always seemed to come down to flowers. And graves. And memories best forgotten that just wouldn’t go away.

  As I climbed the hill through the silence of a weekday, except for the sound of children playing somewhere beyond the walls of the graveyard, it seemed to me that instead of the empty space I’d expected, it was crowded with people standing close together on top of the burial mounds and on the grass verges and paths between them.

  As I got closer I felt the air grow cold, and when I peered through slitted eyes I saw that I knew all these people, standing mute before me.

  Dawn was there, with Daisy on her hip – Daisy, who had been so cruelly cut out of her body at the post-mortem. Next to them was Trace. Behind them my late friend Charlie dressed in his usual sheepskin jacket. At his side was my first wife Laura, her husband and son who had died in a plane crash over the frozen north of America.

  My father, mother and brother were there, mere shades against the tree line. And people I also knew were dead, although often I didn’t remember, or had never known their names. I knew they were dead because I had killed them myself, sometimes with a gun, sometimes with my bare hands.

  I stopped in mid-stride, my hands shaking so much that I dropped the flowers.

  What were they telling me? I wondered.

  Was it my turn to join them on that long journey from the living to the dead?

  I sank to my knees then, not sure if I was mad or sane, awake or asleep, and slowly the ghosts turned and vanished one by one without a backward glance until only Dawn and the baby were left, and then she too turned and left and I was alone.

  My eyes were full of tears, and when I looked up again there was a small boy I didn’t know regarding me with a bemused look on his face.

  Suddenly his mother appeared on the path, stopped dead, looked at me with fear in her eyes and shouted, ‘John. Come away this minute.’

  After a long moment he turned and walked to her. She gathered him up in her arms and fled.

  32

  I decided that Sunday was the best day to go. If what I’d heard on the tape was right, the gang would be inside the vault by then, and as it was the bank holiday weekend I assumed that any workers inside the sewers would be down to a bare minimum. Also, if the explosion to get inside the vault had alerted the bank security, presumably that would’ve been on Saturday, so all should be serene.

  Of course the whole damned thing could’ve fallen through and I could be left with my thumb up my arse wandering the sewers under the City looking for phantom robbers.

  But whether or not it was happening, I’d need a car, the Mustang being far too distinctive to be anywhere near a big robbery, or anywhere near CCTV cameras for that matter. And I knew exactly where to get one, or at least I hoped I did.

  And I had to find out where Finbarr was going to be.

  On Saturday morning, which dawned clear and hot again and boded well for the holiday, I took a cab over to Notting Hill Gate and got the cabbie to drop me off a couple of blocks short of my destination, which was a cafe/restaurant called Bunters, very ethnic and popular with the crustier kind of local trustafarians, all face furniture, joints of skunk and charge accounts at Harvey Nichols. I’d phoned ahead and arranged a meet.

  Of course it was carnival weekend and the place was packed out with punters ready to join in the festivities. All those good times to come meant nothing to me as I shouldered my way through the crowds, but somehow the mass of humanity made me feel more anonymous, and more certain that I would complete my task and get the clearance I needed.

  Sitting in his usual cushioned seat in the furthest, darkest corner between a pair of giant speakers pumping out Daddy Was A Rolling Stone by the Temptations, which by the look of some of the patrons was probably not far from the truth, was my little chum Cedric, known to his confidantes, of whom I was one, as Ricky. Next to him was a dreadlocked white girl whose slim neck seemed hardly strong enough to support the amount of metal stuck through her ears, nose, lips, cheeks and when she opened her mouth, I noticed, her tongue.

  I slipped into the painted kitchen chair opposite where Ricky and pal seemed to have taken up residence, choc-a-bloc as their perches were with cigarettes, Rizlas, rolling tobacco, a couple of mobiles, music and style magazines and newspapers, ancient articles of clothing and a very new looking laptop computer which seemed to be scrolling the price of marijuana on seven continents. ‘Handy, the Internet,’ I said as I helped myself to one of Ricky’s Marlboros.

  ‘A boon, Mr S,’ he replied, in an accent that ran the gamut from Surrey, to Stepney to Trenchtown, Jamaica.

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me?’ I asked, nodding in the direction of the young woman at Ricky’s side.

  ‘Sorry. Veronica Mr Sharman, Mr Sharman Veronica. She’s cool.’

  That meant I could speak in front of her.

  But first there were formalities to be observed. ‘Something to drink?’ I asked.

  Ricky nodded, considered and replied. ‘Nurishment. Banana flavour.’ Veronica nodded her agreement.

  I waved over the waitress, who was as heavily armoured as Ricky’s lady friend, and ordered two glasses of the West Indian milk drink
and a coffee for myself. ‘Something to eat?’ I inquired of the pair.

  ‘Cake,’ said Ricky and Veronica in tandem

  ‘Cake,’ I said to the waitress.

  She nodded, obviously aware of their confection of choice.

  ‘Got a bacon sandwich?’ I asked, which apparently was something similar to requesting ‘The Wearing of the Green’ at a Belfast apprentices march.

  ‘No meat,’ said the waitress curtly.

  ‘Cheese sandwich?’

  ‘Non dairy.’

  How the fuck can you have non dairy cheese? I wondered, but nodded anyway. I wasn’t even that hungry.

  ‘Any particular kind of bread?’ she asked.

  I just knew they wouldn’t have Mother’s Pride medium white sliced. ‘As it comes,’ I said. ‘And whatever cheese you’ve got.’ I wasn’t in the mood to be picky.

  The waitress went away and Veronica said, ‘How can you eat meat?’

  ‘Easy,’ I replied. ‘Stick it in my mouth and chew.’

  ‘Ron’s a vegan,’ said Ricky.

  I wasn’t surprised. ‘A bacon sandwich never hurt anyone,’ I said.

  ‘Except the pig it came from,’ said Veronica, which I suppose was fair comment.

  When the food and drinks arrived and they’d dipped their beaks into the Nurishment, and I’d examined my soft cheese sandwich on tomato and nut bread and declared it eatable, Ricky said, ‘So what can I do for you this morning?’

  ‘I need a motor,’ I said. ‘Something a doctor would drive. You know, unremarkable but shiny.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘Got any dough?’

  ‘Would I come without?’ I asked. ‘How much?’

  ‘Two hundred and fifty.’

  Seemed fair. ‘But I don’t want to have wires hanging down. I’d like a set of keys.’

  ‘Three hundred.’