Black Hearts Rising (Wardens of the Black Heart Book 2)

by Rob Campbell

  “Are you sure you want to go in now?” Monkey asked, eyeing the bikers warily.

  “What? They putting you off?” I whispered.

  “No, but—”

  “Then we’re going in.”

  I was about to push through the double doors when my attention was drawn to a man standing on the pavement that ran around the edge of the car park. He looked more out of place than we did, dressed as he was in smart blue trousers and a matching waistcoat that looked as if it was struggling to hold in his girth. A large pink bow-tie nestled under the generous folds of his chin that rounded off an infeasibly round face. It was almost as if somebody had deposited a bowling ball on top of a giant Easter egg. In front of his face, he held a long-lensed camera, which he was currently pointing towards The Lamb and Shepherd. I don’t know whether he’d spotted me gawping at him, because he lowered the camera slowly and offered a nervous smile.

  “Nice building, this,” he shouted cheerfully, drawing curious stares from the assembled bikers.

  Given that he was looking at me, I felt compelled to step back from the door and wait as he ambled past the bikers. One of them passed a sarcastic comment about his waistcoat, which he ignored, pretending to be interested in the grubby guttering that ran around the front of the building. He quickly raised the camera again, taking a snapshot of the large sign outside the pub.

  “Yes. It has a certain charm,” he added, stopping beside Monkey and me.

  “If you say so. It looks a bit grotty to me,” I commented.

  “Nonsense! A bit weathered, maybe. But this place is most agreeable.”

  “Maybe he’s the owner,” Monkey chipped in.

  “Oh no. Not at all. Just a keen observer. Harold Larkin, at your service.” He held out his hand to Monkey.

  “Do I know you?” asked Monkey suspiciously.

  “I doubt it, but I know you,” Harold replied, leaning towards Monkey conspiratorially. I suddenly had a very bad feeling, like coming to the pub tonight was a bad idea after all.

  “You’re the lad who climbed the church tower last year, aren’t you?”

  “Is there anybody who doesn’t know about that?” I said with a heavy sigh.

  “Read about it in the paper in London,” he said, seemingly answering a different question to the one that I’d posed. “Yes, strange times in Culverton Beck.”

  “Wait. You read about him in a paper in London?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was his picture in the paper?” I had to ask, even though I was pretty sure that if this was the case, Mick would have mentioned it when he sacked Neil for leaking info to his contact in London.

  “No.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. For some reason that I couldn’t explain, I’d have felt uncomfortable if either of our pictures had appeared in the national press.

  “Then how do you know that it’s him?” I asked, jabbing my thumb towards Monkey.

  “I have my sources,” Harold Larkin replied, tapping a finger against his nose. With that, he angled his camera towards the front of the pub, snapping a couple of quickfire shots of the front door.

  “You’re not with the press, are you?” I felt a creeping sense of dread take root in the pit of my stomach. This chance meeting with an unusual man armed with a camera made me uneasy, recent events having left me hypersensitive to coincidences.

  “Oh God, no!” he replied indignantly. “I wouldn’t work for those sewer rats if you paid me!” Either he was a good actor, or he felt genuinely affronted by my remark.

  “Then what’s with the camera?”

  “It’s a hobby of mine. I like to take photos of beautiful or unusual buildings, or even those that have seen better days.”

  I took a few seconds to look at The Lamb and Shepherd again, deciding that in this case, it was probably the latter that had drawn him here.

  “Well, it was nice meeting you, Mr Larkin,” I said with no real enthusiasm. “But right now, we’re pretty busy.” I grabbed a startled Monkey by the collar and yanked him through the main doors after me. I could just about hear Harold Larkin’s voice questioning whether we were old enough to drink in this establishment as the large oak doors closed behind us.

  When we were through, I let go of Monkey’s collar. We must have looked like a right pair of lemons, because when I turned my attention to the interior, I was aware that several people at tables near the door were staring at us.

  “What do we do now?” Monkey asked nervously.

  “We get a drink,” I replied, approaching the bar whilst trying to give the impression that this was a perfectly normal Friday night for us.

  “I can’t serve you,” the barman said gruffly before pointing at Monkey. “How old’s he? Twelve?”

  “I’m nearly fifteen!” Monkey said hotly.

  “Give over!” the barman guffawed. “Even so, I still can’t serve you.”

  “We only want two lemonades,” I said, trying to defuse the situation. For some reason, an old guy standing at the bar thought this was funny. He picked up some peanuts from a bowl on the bar and crunched them noisily, looking over his shoulder at us.

  The barman looked put out as if by asking for something non-alcoholic, he’d been denied the pleasure of throwing us out. He pushed a couple of glasses under the drinks dispenser, filling them with lemonade. I paid for the drinks, and we made our way over to a free table near the window.

  Now that I had a chance to look around, I had to admit that it looked a lot cosier on the inside. The chairs on which we were sitting were comfortably padded, and the tables were all supported by some impressive ironwork. No cheap imitation furniture in here. The bar was similarly well-appointed, with some nice sporting photographs high on the wall behind the barman. The brasswork that ran around the foot of the bar positively gleamed, suggesting that it had been polished recently, and I couldn’t help but feel that if Harold Larkin were to enter the pub, he’d find a lot more scenes worthy of committing to photograph.

  Of course, what we’d really come to look at were the Abram paintings that Henry Bannister-Reeves insisted hung on the walls. “Can you see ‘em?” Monkey asked excitedly.

  I scanned the wood-panelled walls slowly, starting next to the window where we sat, my gaze moving slowly and methodically around each panel. Now that we’d settled down, the other patrons had lost interest in us, keen as they were to make the most of their time with their precious drinks. Raucous laughter could occasionally be heard from one table or another, and I tried to keep my focus on what we’d come here for. The bar area was large, and by the sounds echoing around the insides, it seemed that there were plenty more tables out of sight, around the right-hand side of the room.

  I was about ready to admit defeat and accept that we’d have to pop a polite question to the world’s grumpiest barman when I saw them. Halfway up the wall, just before the wood panelling disappeared around the corner to the left to provide access to the toilets, hung two paintings side by side.

  “Monkey,” I said, nudging his arm and pointing towards them.

  Without further words, we rose from the table simultaneously and made our way towards the toilets. There were no tables here, so we were able to stand directly in front of the paintings. Each of the oil paintings showed a similar view, the only difference being that the one on the left depicted the scene in full sunlight, whereas the sky in the one on the right was clearly rendered to show a sunset, a beautiful melange of purple clouds in a burnt orange sky.

  “Morning Tower,” Monkey said reverently. He scratched at his arm, and I wondered whether this was a subconscious movement, the image of the Morning Tower reminding him of that day at the reservoir when Goofy Muldoon had burned his arms with a cigarette.

  “I suppose if you were a local artist, you’d struggle to find a more impressive site to sit down and paint,” I offered by way of explanation.

  “Especially if you were born in the nineteenth century,” Monkey added.

  I nodded in agreement
, no further words necessary, my eyes drawn to the skill with which the Morning Tower had been painted. Abram had truly captured the stunning beauty of the tower and its surroundings. Maybe I could appreciate true art after all. For a moment, I could lose myself, forget that I was in a pub. Is this how art lovers felt when they wandered the halls and galleries of famous museums around the world?

  A middle-aged man apologised as he pushed past us on his way to the toilets, his passage temporarily interrupting my view of the paintings. It irritated me that one moment I was staring into the impressive effect that Abram had achieved where the top of the tower touched the clouds, and the next I was staring at the man’s grey jacket. It was as if a sense of calm washed over me when the view cleared, and I was once again able to lose myself in the swirling patterns on the canvas.

  Something clicked into place in my brain, and I took a sharp intake of breath.

  “Lorna, are you okay?” I heard Monkey ask, his voice sounding distant as if he was calling me from down a long tunnel.

  The mind’s a funny thing. Deep down, I had suddenly become aware of some important detail, the depths of my subconscious mind crying out with some revelation that the rest of my brain needed to know. But at that moment, I was lost in the beauty of Abram’s genius.

  Or was that Abernathy’s genius?

  “Lorna?” Monkey asked again, this time with more concern.

  “Abram and Abernathy,” I said in a monotone, my brain suddenly catching up, enabling me to voice the revelation.

  Monkey sounded confused. “What about them?”

  “Abram is Abernathy. Abernathy is Abram.” My speech quickened with my breathing.

  Monkey turned back to look at the paintings. The one on the left, then the one on the right, then finally back at me. By this time, he was open-mouthed.

  “You saw the paintings at Lester’s the other night. Tell me that they’re not by the same artist,” I demanded. Monkey dutifully looked at the paintings once again.

  “I don’t know… they could be, I suppose… I’m not being funny, Lorna, but you’re no Henry Bannister-Reeves.”

  It was a fair comment, but I wasn’t about to throw in the towel just yet. I grabbed my friend’s shoulders, turned him towards me and said, “Abernathy disappears without a trace and not long after Abram turns up here. Abram hangs around town and tells the local vicar that he’s suffering from disturbing visions – just like Abernathy did. Then Abernathy’s painting turns up here in the care of Abram.”

  Monkey thought about it for a second. “It would be an extraordinary coincidence,” he admitted.

  Before he had a chance to say anything else, I had my mobile phone out of my pocket and was taking photos of Abram’s – Abernathy’s? – paintings. “I’ll need to compare them to the ones that Lester owns to be sure,” I babbled, “but it makes sense!”

  “He hasn’t signed them D.A.A.,” Monkey pointed out.

  “Of course he hasn’t! He wouldn’t do that, would he? He was on the run from the Wardens of the Black Heart. He’d changed his name and wanted to disappear!”

  “Makes sense. Sort of.”

  It made sense to me. Abram and Abernathy being one and the same was a far more logical explanation than one involving a group of artists hiding works of art from the Wardens of the Black Heart. Sometimes the obvious answer is the correct answer.

  I was in the process of taking a final photo of the two paintings when I was aware of a woman approaching Monkey. She laid a hand on his arm.

  “Excuse me,” she said politely. “I'm terribly sorry.” Her voice had a soft, apologetic tone. Monkey looked at her, confused. “You don’t know me, and I’m afraid I don’t know your full name because my son always refers to you as Arkwright.”

  She was saying a lot of words without clarifying the situation, which explained the perplexed look on my friend’s face.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know you,” Monkey said.

  “I saw you at the hospital when you visited George. He talks about you a lot,” the woman said with a smile.

  “You’re George Muldoon’s mum?” I asked.

  “That’s right, love.”

  “How is he?”

  “A lot better now. He has his bad days, you know. The doctors say that he may return to school in a few months.” All I could think when I looked into the woman’s eyes was, does she know that people call her son ‘Goofy’? I tried to push the thought from my mind, lest I commit some hideous faux-pas. This poor woman had suffered enough.

  I still couldn’t fathom out what had happened that night in the old service tunnel below the reservoir. All I knew was that Goofy Muldoon had snatched the briefcase off Charles Gooch, and soon after, Monkey and I had fled in blind panic as the screams echoed around the tunnel. Goofy’s friends had said that he’d looked in the briefcase and had been screaming for a long time afterwards until the paramedics had arrived and administered a sedative. The last time we’d seen this woman’s son in the hospital, he’d been a dribbling imbecile – nothing like that nasty bully who had hassled Monkey.

  “You said he talks about me a lot?” Monkey said apprehensively.

  “I saw you leaving the hospital after you’d visited him. My George pointed at you and said, ‘he’s the one’. When I asked him what he meant, he says that you helped him out.”

  “He must be mistaken,” Monkey replied.

  “You should come and visit him,” Goofy’s mum said brightly. “It might cheer him up.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Monkey said.

  “We’d love to. It’d be nice to see how Goo—George is getting on,” I said with a smile.

  Goofy’s mum wrote down her address, and I promised that we’d visit soon.

  “What did you do that for?” Monkey hissed as soon as she was out of earshot.

  “Aren’t you interested in how he’s doing?”

  “Not really. I’m trying to forget him!”

  “I know. I just can’t help thinking that he might be important in some way.”

  “You’ve just told me that you think that Abram and Abernathy are the same person. Isn’t that enough for now? How could you think that Goofy might be important? The last time we saw him, he was a gibbering wreck!”

  Due to his altercation with Charles Gooch, Goofy had changed from psychotic bully to a prime candidate for a place in the asylum, but that was the very reason why I thought that we needed answers. We had to know what was in Gooch’s briefcase, and why it had had such a devastating effect on Goofy. Deep down inside me, I felt that the answer to that particular riddle could be crucial in unravelling the mystery that linked The Frenchman, The Truth, Lester, Charles Gooch and the Wardens of the Black Heart.

  Chapter 21

  Charles Gooch nursed a warm beer. He didn’t want or need the drink, but he had to do his best to blend in. After weeks of sitting in his apartment achieving nothing, he felt that he had to get out and be amongst people, and so he’d taken a walk down the high street and stepped into The Lamb and Shepherd.

  Anything was better than waiting for news of some progress from his contacts.

  In his own corner of the pub, he watched and listened to the casual conversations. It was the same everywhere he went – didn’t matter if it was a speakeasy in Chicago, a bar in New Orleans or a typical English pub in Culverton Beck. Some came in to kill a few hours after work – get some alcohol in the system to numb their minds after a tedious day in some factory. Others would gather in twos and threes, swapping stories and grumbling about the wives back home. Some felt compelled to tell their friends, in a loud voice of course, about how wonderful their wives and kids were, the irony of all the wasted hours slaved to the pint glass completely lost on them.

  A small part of Gooch wanted to go over, grab them by the scruff of the neck and shake them, tell them to go home and appreciate their family now, whilst they still could. But the larger part of him couldn’t be bothered. He knew only too well the cost of giving away the best part
of your life in pursuit of some worthless goal. He’d had years to count the cost.

  --- Charles Gooch, 1982 ---

  Fedora clutched in his good hand, Gooch stared down at the words on the freshly carved headstone.

  Where had all the years gone?

  He felt like saying sorry, but what good would it do now? Adele wouldn’t hear him, and even if she could, she’d probably have some choice words. Words that he deserved but would flinch from all the same.

  It all ended in death either way. It was the same for everyone. Man had mastered so many things, yet he hadn’t come up with a way to outrun the Grim Reaper. Everybody died; it was what you did in the years between birth and death that counted. What could a man do with the life that he’d been given?

  He fingered the lining of the Fedora in his hands as he turned the hat around. Big Sal’s lucky hat. Hadn’t been so lucky when the big man had been gunned down in West Chicago all those years ago. If somebody had asked him why he’d bent down to Sal’s bloody corpse, just to take the hat, he couldn’t have given a sane reason why he had done it. All he could say was that it had felt right at the time, and thirty-three years later, he was still wearing it.

  He’d like to have said that he and Sal had had some good times, but that wouldn’t have been true. They’d worked together, doing Daniel Turnbull’s business: collecting things from A, delivering them to B, not thinking too much about the consequences. It had started out as a way to save his business, but before too long, he’d admitted to himself that the business no longer mattered. There were competent people who could take care of that whilst he was out doing whatever needed doing for Turnbull.