by David Thorne
‘Kane? Fuck. Kane? Weren’t meant to do that.’
‘Shut up,’ says Kane. The camera is held steady on Rafiq Jahani’s still body. Then Kane hawks and spits on the boy he has just as good as killed.
33
I SLEEP AT Gabe’s house that night, send Maria a message to let her know. I need to face her, answer her questions, but first I need to deal with the footage I have found. That way, I rationalise to myself, I will at least be able to prove that all I have done is worth it. I sleep in the spare room, a room I slept in many times as a child, staying over at Gabe’s home on weekends. Again I think of Gabe’s father, his uncompromising notion of justice. What would he make of my version of the law? I wonder. I cannot believe that he would approve, and I have difficulty sleeping, troubled by guilt at what he would think, what Maria will think; by my moral failings.
The next morning I go back to the Iranian man who unlocked Kane’s phone for me. I tell him that I have found footage on it and that it is disturbing, and that I wish to make copies of it before I take it to the police. This time he does not smile or laugh, does not seem keen. I give him my card, explain to him that I am a lawyer and that this is part of a legal process. Just what legal process involves taking a phone to a back-street phone hacker I do not know, and he seems only half convinced. But he at last agrees. I show him which clip I need, ask him not to watch it. He nods, tells me there is no need, he just needs to copy it across to a memory drive.
Doolan and Akram are corrupt policemen in the pay of Vincent Halliday. Hicklin is not returning my calls; I imagine he is still seething over my forcing him to dig up the Goves’ estate. There is nobody in the police I can trust. I could bypass them and go straight to the CPS with the recording of Rafiq Jahani’s fatal stabbing, but I have other plans. I once again put a call through to Jack, my friend on the local paper.
‘Daniel.’
‘Hey, Jack. Got a favour to ask.’
I explain what has happened, tell him he can have the exclusive if he agrees to look after a copy of the footage for me.
‘Like the gift that keeps on giving, you know that?’ he says, after he has heard me out.
‘You’ll do it?’
‘Happy to,’ he says. ‘Now. What’s the situation with the Goves? Any bodies turned up?’
‘It was a washout,’ I say. ‘Dug up half the estate, only found the family pets.’
‘Still think something’s going on?’
I think of Saskia Gove, waking up in her flat. ‘Something’s going on, yeah. I’ll keep you posted.’
I hang up, then download the footage to my computer and send it by email to Jack’s address at the paper. He pings me back to tell me that he has got it. I sit back in my office chair and, for the first time in weeks, feel that a weight has been lifted off my shoulders, the guilt for what has been happening to Gabe dissipating, the relief of letting out a long-held breath. He is off the hook.
‘Gabe?’
‘Danny.’
‘Where are you?’
‘You hear that?’ I listen to silence, then the sound of waves hitting rocks, the roar and suck.
‘It’s over,’ I tell him.
‘Say again?’
‘Over. Done. You can come home.’
Again there is silence on the other end, then Gabe comes back. ‘What did you do?’
I explain about the footage, about Kane filming both myself and my father as we were brutalised. Told him how I’d stolen Kane’s mobile. Gabe listens, laughs.
‘Least you could do.’
‘I’m sorry, Gabe. For everything.’
‘No drama. Might stay over here a couple of days more anyway. Surf’s awesome.’
I do not tell him what I have planned for Kane and Halliday. He would want to help, put himself in the line of fire. But he has been through enough because of me. It was not his fight to begin with. I will do the rest on my own. I pick up my phone once again, and punch in Halliday’s number.
Although it is still only morning I will not get any work done today, and so I put Kane’s mobile in my office and lock up, head home. It is time that I faced Maria, told her what has been happening. I made her a promise which I could not keep, told her that I would keep away from violence, avoid the kind of men who bring it to our door. I have not only failed to keep that promise, I have broken it spectacularly and I do not believe that she will be able to forgive me. I might have found redemption for Gabe but I suspect that, in doing so, I have also destroyed my relationship with Maria. As I stop at a red light the thought of my future, alone, causes me to pound my palms against the steering wheel of my car repeatedly. I look across to the car next to me and see a young woman watching me with her mouth open. When she catches my gaze she looks straight ahead, rigid with fear.
Maria is at home when I arrive; she has been waiting for me. She watches me from the kitchen table as I walk in and it is as if she hasn’t moved since the last time we spoke, when CJ asked me whether I was going to raise my hand against her.
‘Maria.’
‘Hello, Daniel.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I need to speak to you. I need to be honest.’
‘She’s gone,’ Maria says.
‘Sorry?’
‘CJ. She’s gone.’
I take a seat opposite Maria. She is sitting quietly, but I can sense a huge anger barely held in check. She is too still.
‘Where?’
‘How the hell would I know?’ Maria says levelly. ‘Clearly felt that this house couldn’t make her happy.’
‘This is my fault,’ I say. Maria does not reply, which tells me everything I need to know.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say again. It is not enough; not nearly enough.
‘I’m not sure this house can make me happy either,’ says Maria.
I reach my hand across the table and put it over hers. She does not take it off. Does not react.
‘I believe that you meant to keep your promise,’ she says, and I can see a tear in her eye. ‘But that’s not enough. Not for me.’
‘I’ll find her,’ I say. ‘She’ll come back.’
‘When you break things, Daniel, they often can’t be put back together.’ She sighs and takes her hand from underneath mine, wipes her eye, turns away from me. I stand up.
‘I’ll find her,’ I say again. But even as I say it I have the feeling that whatever I can do will be too little, too late. Maria is right: what I have broken, for both her and CJ, is trust. And that, I know, is as difficult to recapture as putting smoke back in a bottle.
CJ is not answering her phone and I imagine that it is because she sees my number, does not want to speak to me. I will have to go and look for her. I do not have many ideas and so I drive back to the condemned tower block where I first rescued her. I park a few streets away and walk to it. It is surrounded by high wire fencing and there are signs on the fencing telling me that it is protected by Alpha Security, 24/7. The fencing is made up of squares of wire mesh sunk into rubber bases and I pull two sections apart, walk through. There are boards on the ground-floor windows of the block and a shipping container which I guess holds demolition equipment.
I open the door to the tower block, but as I do a voice behind me says, ‘Hey.’ I turn and see a large man with unintelligent, doughy features in the cheap uniform of a private security guard. ‘Who are you?’
‘Looking for somebody,’ I say.
‘Yeah? Well, ain’t nobody here except me.’ He frowns, tries a threatening expression. ‘I’ve got a dog,’ he adds unconvincingly.
‘Kids use this place,’ I say. ‘Up the top.’
‘Used to,’ the man says. ‘Don’t come back no more.’
‘You sure?’
‘Lift doesn’t work. Staircase has been taken out. What, you think they fly up there?’ He smiles, pleased with what he has said.
‘Not seen anybody?’
‘No. Except you.’
I turn and walk back the way I have come. I do not
know any of CJ’s friends, do not know where they might have moved to, what abandoned space they have decided to pretend is home for the next few months of their lives. But I remember the man who first told me about this place, the man who ran the shelter for homeless adolescents at St Basil’s Court. I try to think of his name. Roy. No, Rob. I try CJ’s phone once more, listen to it ring through to voicemail, and get back in my car.
Outside St Basil’s Court the same two young men are sitting in the same place up against the wall, wearing the same running bottoms and vests. I assume that they are smoking a different joint, but apart from that detail I might as well have last been here five minutes ago, rather than a couple of weeks. They glance up at me as I approach and from the look of their eyes, glassy and red and stupid, this isn’t their first joint of the day.
‘Rob around?’ I say.
‘Nah, bruv,’ one of them answers. ‘He’s out.’ For some unaccountable reason he finds this funny and giggles, slaps the man next to him on the arm. He giggles too.
‘Know where he is?’
The first young man thinks for some time. ‘He never said. Maybe he went…’ he is holding back infantile laughter, trying to keep it in, ‘to the zoo.’ He giggles long and hard at this and the other guy joins in, jostling his friend with his shoulder and calling him a cunt, a stupid cunt.
But I have not come here to have a nineteen-year-old mock me and I kick him hard in the kneecap, which gets his attention.
‘Fuck you do that for, bruv?’
‘I’m looking for CJ.’
‘CJ?’
‘CJ Millar. You know her, right?’
‘Ain’t seen her, bruv. Fucking knee, man. Fucking hurts.’
His friend laughs at this, but the man whose knee I kicked has lost his sense of humour.
‘Got a number for her?’
‘What?’
I sigh. ‘A number. For CJ. Have you got one.’
‘Yeah, course. Fucking…’ His sentence trails off as he stretches out a leg, lifts a buttock and digs out his mobile. ‘CJ?’
‘That’s right.’
‘He ain’t seen her,’ his friend says. This costs him effort and he closes his eyes, disappears into his own head.
‘CJ. Yeah, man, got it.’
‘Call her for me.’
‘The fuck, man,’ he says, but he hits her number, puts his phone to his ear. ‘Fucking knee,’ he mutters as he listens to it ring and ring. He takes the phone away, looks up at me. ‘Gone to voicemail,’ he says.
‘Where can I find her?’
‘I dunno.’
‘That tower block, where she used to go. She can’t go there now. Know where she might be?’
‘I don’t fucking know, bruv. Ain’t seen her in weeks.’
As I walk away I hear him say to his friend, ‘Should’ve fucking stabbed him,’ and his friend giggles stupidly. I drive off and wonder whether if I came back in a month’s time they would still be there.
34
I HAVE NO more leads, no place else to look for CJ. But nor do I wish to go home; I doubt Maria is still there but if she is, I have nothing to tell her, nothing to reassure her with. Instead I head out into the countryside, taking blind bends at speeds which allow no margin for error, some subliminal self-destruct instinct at play, leaving my fate to the gods. I have not been in control of events surrounding me for what seems like weeks. Perhaps I have reached a point where I no longer care.
Or perhaps there is another unconscious instinct guiding me as I drive, because soon I pass signs for a village which borders the Gove estate and I realise that I am not far away from it, only a few miles. I have nowhere else to go and so I head towards the estate, pick up that monumental brick wall and follow it for miles to the gates. As I drive I think of the Goves, of Saskia’s mocking eyes and bewitching presence, of Luke’s arrogance and belief in his own untouchability, as if the riches he was born into also bequeathed him different rules to play by. They are better than me and they know they are, and for the last weeks they have made me their fool. I realise for the first time, in a flash of clarity, that the prevailing emotion I feel in their presence is shame.
I reach the entrance to the estate and slow down but I have no plan and no reason to visit, and again I feel like a fool, some impotent supplicant at their gates. I am about to speed up when I see somebody leave, a young woman with dark skin, not Asian, perhaps Romanian or Albanian. I slow down, open my window as I pass.
‘Need a lift?’
‘Who are you?’ the woman asks. She looks at me with suspicion. Her eyes are nearly black and she is wearing jeans and a woollen jumper and carrying a backpack.
‘You work for the Goves?’
‘I did. I finish.’
‘Wondered if I could ask you some questions.’
‘Who are you?’ she asks again.
‘Somebody who doesn’t like them,’ I say. I figure that if she has been working for the Goves, she will have built up a healthy dislike for at least one of them.
She smiles. ‘Nobody likes them.’
‘You want a lift?’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Heading into town. Here.’ I take out one of my cards. ‘I’m a lawyer. Working on a case. Just want to ask some questions.’
The woman shrugs and walks around my car, opens the back door, throws her backpack in. She gets in after it. ‘I stay in the back.’
‘Fine.’ I pull away and watch her in the rear-view mirror. She is looking out of the windows, first one side, then the other. She is nervous and I cannot blame her. She should not be getting into strange men’s cars. Certainly not when they look like me.
‘What were you doing? For the Goves?’
‘Picking fruits.’
‘Pay well?’
She laughs. ‘No. Have to stay in that building, too. Never enough hot water. If you don’t get first in line, have cold shower.’
‘Tell me about Luke Gove.’
I take my eyes from the road, watch her again in the mirror. She makes an expression of distaste, as if trying a fruit which is not yet ripe, still bitter. ‘He thinks all women are his.’
‘He ever do anything to you?’
‘No. Not pretty enough.’
‘But to other girls?’
‘Nobody want to be alone with him. You know?’
‘I know.’
We drive in silence for some time and I think about Luke Gove on that estate, given free rein to treat his migrant workers any way he likes. I think of overseers on plantations, the power they wielded, the terror they instilled.
‘You think he would hurt anybody?’
‘Luke Gove? I don’t know. He isn’t nice man. He scares some girls.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Bulgaria.’
‘Been over here long?’
‘Couple months. I go back now.’
Again we drive in silence, through a wood where trees grow over the road and form a natural tunnel, dappled light playing off the windscreen like the sun seen from underwater.
‘Did you ever see anything unusual?’ I say. ‘Did Luke Gove ever do anything you thought was strange?’
‘No,’ says the woman. ‘Just put his hands here, and there. You know.’
‘I know. How about Saskia Gove?’
‘She strange lady. One day all nice, another day she shouts. Who knows?’
‘But you never saw anything? That made you think something bad was happening?’
‘No.’ She seems bored by the questions and gives the impression that working for the Goves was not something she enjoyed, but also that it was not anything sinister. Just a standard case of exploitation by people who were her social and economic superiors.
‘Nothing unusual at all?’
‘No. Except Saskia Gove, she take my blood.’
‘Your blood?’
‘Yes. When a person start working, she take their blood.’
‘Why?’
‘Disease
, she say. Getting sick. Because of the fruits. They have chemicals, can be bad.’
‘Really?’
‘Is what she tell me.’
She does not say anything more and we drive back to town in silence. I wonder why the chemicals the Goves use to treat their fruit could give people bad reactions. I know that genetic modification is a sensitive area and that farmers will do many things, bend many rules, to protect and strengthen their cash crops. But having to take blood tests for their workers seems extreme. What are the Goves using?
I drop the woman off in town, at the train station. She thanks me, gets out. I try CJ’s mobile one more time, and when it rings through to voicemail, I hang up and head home.
There is nobody at my house. It feels too large and empty and its silence seems a reproach, for what I have lost through my own carelessness and myriad defects of character. I open a bottle of wine and begin to watch a show where a man travels the world looking for fish which are larger than he is. But it seems a pointless and barbaric quest and I turn it off and walk upstairs, to CJ’s room.
I look in her wardrobe and drawers and although it feels like a violation, I justify it by my concern for her. She has left her clothes and at first I take this as a positive sign; if she has left them, she must be intending to come back. But then I open the drawer in the table next to her bed and the first thing I see is the photo of her mother, smiling up at me through the years. I remember when CJ first showed it to me, in the café next to the tower block she was living in. Remember how ineffably precious it was to her, a reminder of the one time in her life that had approached happiness and security. I sit down on the bed and for a moment I cannot think; a panicked inertia takes hold and I have the sensation that I no longer need to breathe, that the bed with me on it is rising into the air, weightless. I think back to Kane visiting me at my office. What he said after I ambushed him with coffee, knocked him to the ground. What he said smiling at me as blood lined the gaps in his teeth: