by Nick Laird
‘Chicken went to the living room to unplug the telly and video and Budgie went up the stairs. I was looking through drawers in the kitchen and there was a thump. Hughes must have been sleeping or something. It was hot–middle of July wasn’t it?–and all I heard was a thump, really loud and heavy, like a big sack of spuds dropped from a lorry. I went out into the hall and there was Hughes lying all twisted. No blood or anything though. Chicken was just stood there looking down at him and then up at the landing and then back down to Hughes. I looked up then too and Budgie was peering over the banister and looking half-scared with himself and half-pleased. You’d have thought he’d brought down a tiger or something.’
‘Just tell it straight.’
‘I’m not joking. This is what I remember…We were just frozen. Budgie started to come down the stairs then and that unstuck us. Chicken starts talking. He was going You stupid fucking cunt, you stupid fucking cunt and I thought he was talking to Hughes so I said something like Well, it’s hardly his fault but he was talking to Budgie and he started shouting then: Of course it’s his fucking fault, he shoved him over the banister, he pushed him over the fucking banister. And then Chicken gets down on his knees and starts listening to Hughes’s mouth and I thought Hughes was speaking to him so I said What’s he saying? What’s he saying? but Chicken was trying to hear if he was breathing. Then Budgie was in the hall with us and he pulls Chicken up away from Hughes and says Let’s go. Just like that. Let’s go.’
Geordie stopped. His face was lit with an unusual emotion. Danny identified it as excitement.
‘And what? And then what?’
‘And then we went.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I reckon he must have been sleeping and came out of the room suddenly. Just appeared on the landing and freaked Budgie out.’
‘But I don’t understand why we went back there. Why’d you bring me into it? It was nothing to do with me.’
Geordie shrugged again. The gesture angered Danny. Geordie would never square up to things. He would never shoulder responsibility.
‘I don’t know really. I wanted…I wanted to see if he was dead. And I couldn’t get in without someone to help me up to the window…We’d picked a corner house. It weren’t overlooked by anyone else’s so I knew we’d be safe enough to get back in, and if we were caught…well, I think I thought everyone would believe what you said–that we’d done nothing, that you wanted to use the phone, that you were running away from some boys chasing you, all that.’
Danny lifted the bottle of Bushmills and poured another dose into his glass. He hadn’t killed anyone. None of this had anything to do with him.
‘Jesus Christ…You should have told me this.’
‘Aye. Sorry.’
‘I’ve got to go to bed.’ Danny didn’t want to look at him any more. He was a moron, an idiot, a dangerous lunatic who pulled people into vehicles that were moving too fast and had no seat belts or brakes. He was trouble wrapped up in a wink and a pint and a cloud of smoke.
‘Not yet. Wait up a bit. Sure you’ve no work to go to.’
Danny stared at the kitchen window. It was dark and shadowy as a photographic negative. He felt like Geordie had broken into his flat. This man wearing his clothes and sitting at his table and drinking his whiskey was an intruder, a liar and a thief. He was a stranger.
‘I didn’t get you to come to the house ’cause I wanted to get you in trouble you know.’
‘No?’ Danny was too tired to do this any more.
‘If I’d met someone else that day I mightn’t have gone back at all…When we were younger you were always the good one, the kid who did everything right…I mind the time you stopped Davy Thom from making me drink that piss in the Top Deck can. Hammy’d already drank it. Do you remember? He said I knew it was piss because it was warm.’
Despite himself, Danny smiled.
‘And maybe I wanted to be good too, or something, when I saw you…though you’d just smacked some cub in the balls.’
‘Slim.’
‘Aye, Slim, that’s right. He was a real fucker.’
‘They’re everywhere.’
‘They are…I am sorry about it.’
‘So am I.’
‘Apologies mate…Really.’
They sat in silence. Danny stubbed out his fag and said, ‘You remember his eye? The way it was watching the wall? How fucking scared it looked?’
‘He was all mashed up.’
‘Yeah.’
Silence again. He hadn’t murdered anyone. Danny solemnly topped up Geordie’s drink, lifted his glass and whispered, ‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers.’
They drank and after a pause Geordie said, ‘Would you ever credit that whole thing about Ian? I couldn’t believe it.’
‘Unbelievable.’
‘He was immensely strong,’ Geordie said respectfully.
‘Immensely?’
‘Yeah, immensely.’ Geordie looked serious and Danny smirked.
‘That’s a funny word. Immensely…How’re your immense wounds?’
‘You laugh but I swear he gave my head a serious smack with the door. You can feel the bump…here.’
He pulled Danny’s fingers across the table and held them just above the hairline on his forehead. How odd it was to touch his head, the hair baby-soft and thin. There was a protrusion, curved as an egg, as seemingly delicate.
‘Did he break anything in the flat?’
‘Nope. Took all the cash though.’
‘Thank fuck. You’re best out of all that…Budgie Johnson. I can’t believe he killed Hughes.’
‘I’m not sure he did, to be honest. Something happened. I know that…’ More silence. Then Geordie started again, ‘What do you reckon Ian’s going to spend all that money on?’
‘I dunno. Not on a present for us anyway…Maybe he’s buying a load of something to take back home and sell. Pirated DVDs or smuggled cigarettes.’
‘Or drugs. It might be drugs.’
‘Could be drugs…Do you know where he said he was taking the cash?’
‘Naw. He mentioned…now what did he mention? He was staying in Kilburn, or at least he said he was, at some place called…the Gregory, the Lord Gregory. And he said “Anything the IRA can do we can do better” or something. It probably is drugs.’
‘We could try and stop it. Try and dob him in to fuck up his and Budgie’s plans.’
Geordie nodded. Danny was on a high, winched up by Geordie’s revelation and the whiskey. He hadn’t made Geordie break into Hughes’s house. They hadn’t caused Hughes’s death, although Budgie Fucking Johnson had. And he’d been wrong about Ellen. What did it matter what she’d done with whom? And besides, now they’d both fucked Vyse. He would love to see him explain this one to Freeman, Tom Howard and the rest of the Litigation partners. Ulster Water wasn’t about to be bought and hacked up. He might have saved thousands of jobs. He felt a new looseness in himself, like he was oiled and running properly. He could change things. He could fix things. He looked at Geordie, who pulled Rizlas and a lump of hash from the cigarette packet and began deftly skinning up, and he was reminded of being in a gang again, a team. He said, ‘You know we should try and see where he is maybe. Follow him. Nothing stupid obviously. But see where he is and then make an anonymous call or something.’
‘You serious?’
Danny nodded.
‘We could I suppose. Get up early and drive to his hotel.’
‘And wait for him to come out. Just follow him.’
‘You’re not going to work then?’
‘Nope,’ Danny looked at his diving watch, ‘and it’s already gone four. We might as well stay up and wait.’
They are the Lords and owners of their faces.
William Shakespeare
MONDAY, 12 JULY 2004
‘Here…Check it out.’ Geordie was nodding through the windscreen. A voluptuous white girl was walking down the pavement towards them. She wore tight jeans
and a pink cropped top that was trying and failing to control her breasts. They’d parked outside the Kingston Shamrock Bed & Breakfast (which, surprisingly perhaps, had NO VACANCIES, according to a handwritten page blu-tacked to its front window). The Lord Gregory was opposite, several times larger, with upper parts that faced onto the High Road. Its blue front door, on this side street, was for now firmly shut.
‘Okay but wait…wait…wait…There…Minging.’
‘Yeah, not a great puss on her.’
‘Albert would term your problem the eternal optimism of the hopelessly short-sighted.’
On the train to a departmental conference in Brighton, Danny and Albert had sat facing forward and across the aisle from each other. They’d spent the hour and a half watching women walk down the carriage towards them. Danny hadn’t his glasses on and Albert had accordingly diagnosed his misjudgements as the eternal etc. Geordie ignored Danny’s comment: he didn’t seem to like Albert. After a lengthy pause he said, ‘I keep thinking I can see Ian’s big baldy head popping out the door. I’m on tentative hooks with this waiting.’
‘Tenterhooks,’ Danny murmured reflexively.
‘Tender hooks.’
‘Tenterhooks.’
It was 7.13 a.m. and they were sitting in Danny’s musty red Polo on Butler Street in Kilburn. He hadn’t driven it for over a month and each time he’d spotted the parked car out the living room window he had felt vaguely guilty, like it was an unwalked dog. Despite this neglect the car had started first time and the traffic through London had been pretty light.
Geordie was wearing a red baseball cap that was too big for his head and gave him the look of a child with leukaemia. Danny, his partner on the stakeout, the sensible one, had put on his glasses and a floppy navy sunhat. Geordie said it was like a reconstruction from Crimewatch. Danny had wound the window down a few inches to let in some air: Geordie was jubilantly farting. Although their hangovers were not yet biting, they were both knackered, and their initial enthusiasm for the big adventure had quickly dried up. After smoking a couple of spliffs at the kitchen table they had adjourned to the sofa and watched In the Heat of the Night. Sitting in the car Danny tried to keep focused. He was Sidney Poitier as Mr Tibbs: maligned and mistreated, but dignified, handsome and coolly determined to bring wrongdoers to justice.
Around six, after Mr Tibbs had overcome the racism, apprehended the killer, and the final credits had rolled, Danny had grilled some bacon while Geordie made two mugs of coffee. There was no blind in the kitchen and the pale dawn gave the white work surfaces the ghostly sheen of milk. They sat at the kitchen table again, in the same seats as before, eating the sandwiches in silence and staring at nothing. Then they’d sloped off to get dressed and organized. When Geordie gently opened the door of the boxroom Danny caught a glimpse of Janice’s silver-blonde hair fanned over a pillow. He hadn’t seen it down before. She looked like a nineteen-forties movie star.
He rang directory enquiries and wrote down the Lord Gregory’s address, then found an A to Z on the windowsill in his bedroom. Geordie had washed and was now pottering around the kitchen filling a plastic bag with supplies: a full two-litre carton of milk, the fat yellow claw of a bunch of bananas, and an unopened packet of Jaffa Cakes. They were ready.
At half-seven Geordie stated for the fourth time that he could murder another bacon bap and started peeling a second banana. The smell of Geordie’s bananas and flatulence was advancing the cause of Danny’s nausea. He wound the window down further and opened the biscuits. His stomach was burbling, bewildered at all the abuse it was getting. A street cleaner slowly crossed by the lights at the junction, pushing his cart like a barrow boy heading to market. Danny slid a whole Jaffa Cake into his mouth. This was quite a nice road, although the trees that speckled the pavement with shadow were inconsistently spaced, and so near to the terraced houses that Danny found himself thinking about subsidence insurance. He was trying to worry about what had happened at work, about what he had done to work, but found that he couldn’t concentrate. They would probably sack him. That was true and it was serious. But he had some savings. Maybe he would go travelling. Or move back home. Or get another job. There must be other jobs. All of the people who lived in these houses must make enough money to live on.
By eight o’clock Geordie had fallen asleep and was snoring, but very faintly, as if miles away someone was using a chainsaw. Danny had finished cleaning his nails with a paperclip he’d found in the ashtray. He noticed a fleck of something in the vitreous humour of his right eye and played ping pong with it for a moment, flicking and skiffling it from the treetop to the lamppost and back.
By seventeen minutes past eight Danny had nodded off and Geordie’d woken up. His head had slipped down off the edge of the car seat and knocked into the window. He was restless and opened the glove compartment where there was a road atlas of the United Kingdom and a thick black marker. He started flicking through the atlas. Who knew Birmingham was there? Or that London was so far south? The satellite picture of the British Isles on the cover made it look as if Britain was trying to hug Ireland. Or eat it. He uncapped the marker. Danny shifted around in his seat, still asleep. Geordie leaned over and carefully daubed a Hitler moustache across Danny’s philtrum. Danny stirred and Geordie withdrew, rocking about in his seat in excitement.
At 8.32 Danny was woken when a kid on a skateboard went past, clack-clacking over the slabs of the pavement. Geordie was grinning and chuckling softly to himself.
‘What’s funny?’ Danny said, irritated.
‘Nothing,’ Geordie ventured.
‘You wouldn’t think so.’
Geordie immediately capitulated: there was no one else to appreciate the joke.
‘Stop being such a Nazi,’ he said, still grinning. Danny noticed Geordie glancing at his upper lip and leaned over to look in the mirror.
‘You stupid cunt.’ He tried to wipe it off but just managed to smudge one half of it into a Mexican’s droopy moustache. Geordie cackled. Danny grabbed the pen from Geordie’s hand and chucked it out the window. Immediately he regretted not keeping it, and not holding Geordie down to scrawl an obscenity with it on the plaque of the little shit’s forehead.
At a quarter to nine Danny removed his sunhat and eyed his reflection in the rearview mirror. He had rubbed his upper lip red and the moustache had still not come off. He was less Sidney Poitier now and more a Spanish game show host who had just learned his series was not being renewed. And who had been recently punched in the eye. It was not a good look. Danny pulled his hat back on. He was so tired that when he moved his head it took his eyes a moment to re-focus, and the street seemed to shift a little, airpocket and shudder. Geordie was describing the serious trials his bowels were currently undergoing, and the casual heroism he needed not to complain about them. Danny’s response was engaged and direct:
‘If you fart again, I will chuck you out of this car.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘I’m serious.’
‘Okay.’
‘You just farted, didn’t you?’
‘Fraid so.’
Just before nine the blue door of the Lord Gregory hotel (prop: N. Patel, rating: one star) opened, and Ian appeared, swinging a black sports bag. He was walking fast and away from them. Geordie needlessly exclaimed, ‘Fucking hell, there he is,’ and Danny started the car. Ian was smaller and broader than Danny remembered. His arms and legs were little pistons on an incredible engine that was gathering momentum. He vanished round the corner onto the High Road.
‘We’re going to fucking lose him,’ Geordie leaned across Danny and tried to chuck the banana skin he’d been absent-mindedly holding out of the window. It hit the glass and fell down the side of Danny’s car seat.
‘You twat.’ Danny pulled out and drove up to the junction. Geordie tugged his cap down even further–his ears were already inside its rim–and slinked an inch or two into his seat. Ian was within thirty metres of them but walking purposefully away. He wor
e blue jeans and a black shirt tightly tucked in. His back was an isosceles triangle, and so wide that his shaved head seemed tiny upon it, like an egg rolling around on a table.
‘He’s turning in.’ Geordie had leant forward and was holding onto the dashboard with one hand.
‘Mate, can you calm down a bit? He’ll see us. Check the A to Z.’
‘What for?’ Ian stepped out of sight again, back off the High Road and into a street called Wallace Row. Danny pulled up to the kerb and stuck his hazards on.
‘I don’t know. See if it’s a cul-de-sac or something.’
‘Well there’s no dead-end sign.’
‘True.’
Danny waited for a bus to go round him and then pulled back out. He indicated and turned into the street Ian had just thundered down.
‘I can’t see him.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Let’s pull up somewhere.’
Danny reverse-parked in front of someone’s stone-cladded home and turned the engine off.
‘Well what do we do now?’ Geordie sounded truculent.
‘I don’t know…Wait a minute, what shoes does Ian wear?’
‘What? Not sure. Brown leather?’
‘I can see his fucking foot. That’s his fucking foot.’
Across the road and three parked cars away sat a white transit van with its driver’s door ajar. Someone appeared to be lying halfway under the front bumper, working at the registration plate. Their foot poked out into the road, displaying a brown leather shoe and a band of white sock.
‘What’s he doing?’ Geordie asked, excited again.
‘I don’t know.’
A stubby hand moved into view and set a screwdriver onto the tarmac. It rolled for an inch or two before the hand reappeared and stopped it.
‘Can you read the reg? Is he taking the plate off or putting it on?’
‘I think it’s Northern Irish. I can only see the last three digits. Looks like he’s taking it off.’
‘What the fuck’s he doing that for?’
Ian was up on his feet–‘Watch out,’ Geordie whispered and scrunched lower–and then Ian crouched back down again, placing something into a black holdall. Just then Danny’s mobile rang. He gingerly took it out of his jeans and looked at the display. Number Withheld. That meant it was Monks. His stomach tightened with expectancy.