Cleaning Up
Page 31
Keegan absorbed it with a slight widening of his eyes and a pulling back, by at least an inch, of the big heavy head, his smile slipping from his face like a landslide.
Sarge Thomas called out from the desk, ‘move your arse PC May - now like!’
Keegan stood to one side to give him access the lift - Darrin stepped in and hit the button for the top floor.
Keegan turned and looked at him. The mask was gone now, all those years of corruption and the accumulation of barely hidden contempt in plain sight on that big hard face. Darrin held the look, his own mouth pulling back into a carnivorous smile.
Keegan leaned back slightly and hooked his thumbs in his pant’s pockets.
‘You be careful out there son - it’s a dangerous world we live in.’
Darrin winked mockingly at him. ‘Good advice that and back at yer Keegan, you too. Unfinished business.’ He took his finger off the open button and the lift doors came noisily together.
Bournemouth eh! Darrin thought, as the lift started to climb. Maybe the prick wasn’t out of reach yet. After all, time was on his fucking side.
WINTER
DECEMBER
Sonny had called him with confirmation of an end of January kick off date for a local version of the gangs’ initiative. Tommy had been silently grateful that Sonny had decided not to let what had happened with Donna and Pasquale fuck that up for him. Boy did he owe him one.
The rear of the building had been rebuilt at the Centre and business would be back to normal by the end of the month. He’d reduce his hours and that would go a little way to give Pauline and her strained finances some breathing space.
Tommy had taken time out in order to stuff Mick’s clothes into half a dozen or so plastic bags and had taken the drive over to couple of charity shops. He donated Mick’s last lot of winnings to Mick’s favourite charity, Save the Children. He’d picked up the clog and the encyclopaedias and a bag of photos which showed Mick as a boy with his mum, dad and brothers. All of them having fun at a family holiday on the beach at Filey - the photos, old and slightly faded, had been taken just a couple of years before the start of the Second World War.
He’d wait to put the house on the market, maybe do it early in the New Year, there was no rush. In the early evening that he’d picked up Mick’s gear he’d stood in the back yard for a while. The yard was a suntrap, south-west facing and away from the noise of the traffic. In the warm afternoons and evenings Mick used to love to sit out there with his paper, his brew and a fag chewing over politics and the current affairs, lightening up the experience with the sports and his picks for the next day’s racing.
He had heard a rustle in the big tree that loomed over Linda’s backyard wall. He’d looked up and saw a big white barn owl sitting up there in the bald branches. It was looking down towards him, occasionally turning its head to the left and to the right. Tommy stood there for at least twenty minutes and watched the silent bird, thinking of Mick as he did so. He had the realisation that Mick was now a gap in his life that would never be filled.
Finally the owl took off, on over his head and flying east towards the low moor. He immediately went back inside the kitchen, locked the house up and drove back home.
On his return Tommy fired up the computer and had a look at this dating website that he’d joined just a couple of weeks ago. He’d taken a gander at the gals down in Brighton and had added as one of his new ‘friends’ an attractive African woman who was living down there, somewhere in Hove. He’d had a strange instant moment of recognition when he’d seen one of her additional photos, he was certain that they’d crossed paths, although, despite racking his memory, he couldn’t remember when. Anyway, she’d reciprocated his interest and added him as a ‘friend’ too, which meant that they could now correspond directly with each other. He looked again at the oddly affecting picture. He still had no memory of where they might have met - strange.
Ah well, Tommy thought, ‘friends!’ Maybe that was something he could build upon.
About the Author
Paul Connor-Kearns was born in Oldham and spent his formative years travelling and working in Europe and the Middle East. He has lived in Australia for twenty years and for ten of those lived with Aboriginal people. Paul returned to the UK in 2005 and it was this ‘coming home’ that led to Cleaning Up, his first novel.
Copyright
First published in 2013
by Muswell Press Ltd, London N10 2LD
This ebook edition first published in 2013
All rights reserved
© Paul Connor-Kearns 2013
The right of Paul Connor-Kearns to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 978-0-9575568-0-5