by David Mark
*
Even now, even at the last, I don’t know what I intend. I don’t know what I want to happen. I don’t know how far I’m willing to go. I’ve done terrible things but I still don’t know if I’m a bad man. I just know I’m not a good one, and that there are people so very much worse.
Through the trees comes a charcoal figure: skinny and small, as if made of twists of tarred, knotted rope. He’s hunched up inside a dirty, camel-coloured raincoat and the thin cigar at his lips is unlit. He sucks on it anyway, turning the stub into a mulch of tobacco, brown paper and spit.
“Fucking hell, Owen,” shouts Tony, as his feet slurp at the path. “This is bloody horrible. Where you planning for the summer? Self-catering in Helmand?”
I look at him as if seeing him for the first time.
Tony has never been attractive. He’s a rat in a raincoat; all bad skin and yellow teeth. His whole being seems to have taken on the hue of a chain-smoker’s fingers. Here, now, I finally see the truth of him. Tony is more than ugly. He has a feral quality to him. His movements are those of a half-mad animal, a thing raised on violence and nourished on scraps of rotten meat.
And I’m thinking: Do it now! Grab him. Smash your fist into his nasty little face. Make it make sense…
I smile. Wave.
Tony comes closer, seemingly a little unsure whether to stick out his hand. He settles on a smile and a gesture at the heavens.
“Lovely day for it,” he says.
“You alone?” I ask, quietly.
“Who the hell else would be out on a day like today?”
“All quiet again, eh? You’d never know it had happened, would you? Never know there were two bodies laid out over there a couple of days ago.”
He shrugs, sucking spit and raindrops through his teeth. “The world keeps turning, lad. There’ll be flowers, soon enough. Your sister will probably bring a wreath.”
I shake my head. “She won’t. Dead. OD’d.”
He looks genuinely sad to hear it. “Bad week you’re having, innit?” he says, trying to lighten the mood. “Got a trick up your sleeve to put things right?”
I nod and feel the rain run down my face.
I force myself to meet his eyes. Stare into him. Through him. Through Tony H. Through the man who killed her. Ella. Who killed them all. For a moment it feels that if I just stare hard enough, I’ll see it playing out in the little man’s eyes. See his confession. His fantasies. His memories of what he did.
I shiver. Feel myself coming apart inside my skin.
“We gonna get under a tree or something?” Tony asks. “Got a few questions for you. Weird place to meet. I’d have chosen somewhere with fewer memories.”
“I’ll bet,” I say, and I can barely hear the words.
“You’re not looking well,” Tony adds. “You OK?”
Then I begin. I say the thing that I need to say – to make the accusation so at least he knows what he has done to deserve all that is about to happen.
“You killed Ella Butterworth,” I say, in a spray of mist. Then, more forcefully: “I know, Tone. I know what you’ve been doing.”
“What?”
“How many more?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your old number. It was in her phone. Messages about watching her. Liking what she was wearing. You killed her. How many more?”
Tony’s face, so practiced in deception, twists into a mask of confusion. He looks baffled. Hurt.
The words come spilling out now. I can’t stop myself. Don’t even try to.
“Was it because she wouldn’t go near you? She looked at you and saw a dirty ugly bastard and decided not to let you near her? You were freelancing in every city where they died. You couldn’t resist it. I’ve seen the aliases you used for the by-lines. I’ve seen the addresses where the cheques were sent. It was you, you fuck. She was beautiful, Tony. But you couldn’t just look, could you. You had to have her. And when she said no you started hating her, like so many others. You stalked her. You sent her anonymous messages from a phone that only a few people know you own. And you hunted her down. You never thought I’d put the pieces together. But I know. That copper – the big one, McAvoy – he showed me her mobile phone history. He doesn’t believe Cadbury killed her any more than I do. I recognised the number, you prick!”
I’m grinding my teeth, now. Pressing my nails into my palms so deeply that I score through the skin: crimson trickles over my fingers and wrist as stigmata.
“She’d done nothing,” I spit. “Nothing!”
I glare into his eyes: inkwells filled with a darkness that doesn’t just swallow the light but seems to deny its very existence. I see myself, staring back. See the swaying trees and the warring branches and the tumbling, tumbling rain…
“Owen, wait…”
“You dirty, dirty bastard.”
“Easy now…”
“You didn’t deserve to touch her. To breathe the same air. For you to be the last thing she saw…”
And then Tony unleashes the killer within. Drops of red explode like dying stars in his eyes, as blood vessels burst with the enormity of his fury.
He thuds into my bruised ribs with a strength that he does not look as though he possesses. Tony’s body is a pestilent, fragile thing; all tissue and twigs. But there is a venom inside him that makes him strong. The breath escapes from my lungs in a rush. My hands fly up. I bite my tongue and taste old coins. The gun lands wetly on the sodden path as we thump onto the ground, my head smacking back with a dizzying thud.
Tony is astride me, forearm beneath my chin, pushing down on my windpipe, staring into me.
Then deeper.
A more terrible aspect to his face than anything my mind has ever conjured.
Spitting poison, spraying rage.
“You’re right, you soft cunt! I didn’t deserve to touch her. Didn’t deserve to touch any of them. Not like you. Not like a handsome bastard who doesn’t know what he’s got. Not worth fucking trying because I can already see it in their eyes. That knowledge that they’re better than me. They think it’s a game. Winding me up. Getting me going. Slagging around in their short skirts with their tits out, begging the world to look at them. Well, I looked. I fell for it, time and again. And then I ended it. Became something more important than a fuck. Whatever happens, the most important thing anybody will remember about these pretty girls is the way they died. And every time their deaths are spoken of, they’ll be talking about me. Nobody else can ever have that. Nobody!”
Spit froths from Tony’s purplish, blubbery lips and lands among the raindrops on my face as hands tighten around my throat and squeeze the breath from my body and the thoughts from my mind. Thunder roars in my skull.
My vision dwindles to a point, like an old TV being switched off; everything spiralling down into one tiny blob of colour.
Desperately, I reach around on the forest floor, fingers scrabbling for a branch. For something solid.
Tony slams his spare hand down on my forehead.
Again.
Again.
It seems as though my own tongue is halfway down my throat, as though my eyes are going to explode. I desperately try to get an arm free but there’s nothing to hit. Tony’s all bony elbows and sharp fists, wet clothes and loose skin. It’s like fighting a long-dead corpse.
There is a solid meaty thump, and then the pressure is gone; the figure on my chest suddenly absent; the pain dissipating like blood beneath rain.
And I’m on my knees, retching, massaging my throat. Through blurred, watery eyes, I see him. See Tony pulling himself to his feet. He’s reaching inside his dirty, sodden coat.
Pulling out the murder weapon.
It’s a kukri: a curved blade used by the Gurkhas of the Nepalese Armed Forces. Pictures of it have been appearing in the Hull Mail for months. Tony wrote most of the articles.
I stare. Glassy-eyed at the weapon. See Ella Butterworth’s blood on the blade.
&nbs
p; I turn at the sound behind me.
He’s sprawled out like a fallen statue, trying to find his feet on the sloping, slippery surface, a look of panic on his broad face…
McAvoy.
For a second, Tony seems unsure which direction to advance, whether to finish off the copper who pulled him from his prey, or gut me, his best friend, before I can get my breath.
McAvoy finds his feet and hauls himself up, emerging from the puddles and the dirt and the leaves. He’s big enough to snap Tony in two. Seems almost big enough to pull one of the oaks from the ground and smash it on the murderer’s ratty head.
“Stop,” he shouts.
He’s holding the gun in a massive white fist. The barrel shakes and trembles. There is absolute terror in his eyes.
I drink him in. Focus my whole being on the vision of the earnest policeman, with his red hair and his cheap suit and the look of willingness in his eyes. Among the pain and the hate, I feel compassion. Sorrow, for what it must be like to tread the path of righteousness when darkness and light are such imposters. He doesn’t belong here in the blood and filth where people like Tony and me wade.
And I know, to my very bones, that it is not in McAvoy’s nature to pull the trigger.
Tony laughs. Gives me a glance and a wink, as if we’re still old pals in the press room making fun of the new boy. Then he runs at McAvoy.
He slashes down with the kukri. McAvoy raises his hands in a boxer’s stance and the blade hits the metal of the gun. It falls from his hand. He steps back and loses his footing as Tony hacks at him. The blade digs into his collarbone like an axe into firewood. Tony has to yank it hard to get it free. McAvoy is falling onto on his back, a look of broken-hearted bewilderment upon his big, trusting face. Tony chops down again.
McAvoy jerks like a dying fish as the rainbow of thick blood arcs upwards and patters onto the earth.
I feel the fight run out of me. Feel nothing but an overwhelming sadness as I watch the dying, gulping breaths of the only good man I’ve ever known.
Tony turns back to me, his face crimson, eyes wide and terrible.
He picks up the gun.
He points it at my chest.
Gives a shrug that could almost be apology.
Pulls the trigger.
The bullet thuds into the tree trunk and Tony yells as he totters off balance. McAvoy’s shove in the back of the knees has cost him his shot.
I watch the gun as it pinwheels through the rain and bounces off a branch to nestle on a pillow of sycamore leaves. I sprint forward, planting my feet in the blood and rain and earth and dive for the weapon, my damp hands clutching at the metal. I turn, triumphant. Focus on the man who has taken everything from me.
Tony stands, motionless. Slowly, he looks down at McAvoy. Changes his grip on the kukri. Something flickers in his gaze: a flash of teeth and tail, shadows and blood. He lurches forward, ready to plunge the blade into McAvoy’s heart as if planting a flag in hard earth.
I pull the trigger.
Tony’s mouth opens as his eyes turn black and for a moment he has the look of a shark, crashing upwards through sea and spray to close his jaws around something fragile. Then his knees give way.
He collapses amid the mulch of the clearing, a dark stain spreading outwards from the ruination beneath his belly, as he clutches himself and hisses on the forest floor. Blood seeps through his fingers through the ragged, hanging wound between his legs.
For a moment, there is just the sound of pain, and running blood, and the savage swish of the branches overhead.
Then I’m crawling to where McAvoy kneels, one hand pressed to the gash at his collarbone. His face is a mess: more meat than skin.
“Is he dead?” McAvoy asks, and the effort seems to lighten his skin tone by several shades. He is the colour of dirty chalk.
“No,” I say, trying to work out which wound to press my hands to. “Not yet.”
“You didn’t kill him?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t think I’m a killer. Not really.”
McAvoy’s breathing begins to sound unnatural. He blinks, furiously, as the rain hits his staring eyes. I wonder what the big man can see, here in this place between life and death.
“You’ll be OK,” I say, and hope that it’s true. “Where’s your phone? Your radio?”
McAvoy says nothing, and I realise I’m scrabbling through his pockets, like a battlefield magpie searching the pockets of the dead. I find his phone in the inside pocket of his jacket. Pull it out with fingers dripping blood. I dial 999. Look down at the dying policeman and wonder if Doug Roper will give a damn.
We sit in the rain, wind tearing at our skin, our wounds, listening to Tony’s sobs.
After a while, I hold up McAvoy’s phone. The picture on the screensaver is a beautiful, dark-haired girl with hooped earrings and too much lip gloss. If I knew her name I would call her.
I press my hand to the ugly trench of ruptured skin on McAvoy’s front. Feel splintered bone. A thought, quick as a whip. A sudden, selfish, disloyal question: what will happen to me? Only McAvoy believed me. Only McAvoy could help me clear my name. But McAvoy is dying. And Doug Roper wants me in the ground.
I take a moment for myself. Think of all the lives taken, the broken bones, the grief-weighted tears, the good people corrupted by the bad and the bad people masquerading as agents of justice. And I realise it’s all lies. All pretence. All fiction. There’s just us. Just people. And we’re fucking awful.
I feel a hand gripping my arm. There’s strength there. Immense strength. I look down and he’s glaring up at me, his face all blood and beard and desperate, tear-filled eyes.
He shakes his head.
“No,” he growls. “Not here. Not like this. Not without her…”
And like a great wounded bear, he begins to haul himself to his feet. He drapes an arm around my shoulders and I stagger under the weight of him. He stands. Arches his back. Straightens his tie, even as the blood pours down his front.
He says it again. “No.”
He fumbles in his pocket. Hands me a small plastic recording device, and nods, meaningfully.
I press ‘Play’.
Roper’s voice.
Tinny, but unmistakable.
“Fuck truth, son. Fuck it all. Fuck you, and Owen Lee and fuck Ella Butterworth. Silly slag probably had it coming. Maybe Tony H stabbed her. Maybe he didn’t. I don’t care. There’s enough on Cadbury to make it stick, so that’ll do. And Owen? Armed and dangerous, isn’t he? He won’t see the morning. Done me a good turn and drowned the chap who was becoming a problem. Didn’t even use the gun, which is fucking ungrateful, given what a bitch it was to get him out of the station with in his grubby mitt. Tony’s my friendly face at the Hull Mail. He’s useful. He might have some demons, but haven’t we all? And as for you, laddo? You’re out of my department. You can go where you fucking like, but it’s not even funny watching you waste your time anymore.”
*
He stares past me. Whatever he sees, whatever image his mind is projecting, it brings a flash of smile to his face.
And I can do nothing but hold him, and feel his blood mingle with mine.
65
Lights flashing, sirens blaring, ambulance pulling up as close to the entrance to the woods as the driver can manage: its crew leaping out in green overalls, dragging equipment, barking instructions, questions, cursing the rain…
Police cars. Roper’s Jag in the lead, tyres screeching on the tarmac. A cameraman sitting in his passenger seat. Roper driving. Face stone.
The press. Satellite dishes on roofs. Reporters in fleet cars. Photographers. Journalists, tucking shirts into their trousers and pulling Wellingtons from car boots.
I turn away.
Watch the procession.
They see us, and run forward in a scrum. The uniformed officers try to marshal the press, but this one’s too big, and they’re gr
eeted with universal suggestions to fuck off.
The guns are on the table in front of us. Knife, too.
On the floor at our feet, Tony Halthwaite, grey with pain and loss of blood, rolling in the gutter, one arm handcuffed to the leg of the picnic table, red palm turned upwards, still spitting pink froth onto his chin, chewing at his face as he gutters the word “slags” over and over and over…
Elbowing his way to the front, young blonde copper bustling people out of the way, comes Roper.
“Owen Lee,” he begins, when he’s sure that his documentary crew are behind him. “I am arresting you…”
Me and McAvoy, pale and bloodied, turn to one another and give a smile, which turns into a laugh. “Well done,” I say. “You got me.”
He snarls, flustered. Begins again. “I am arresting you…”
“You’re not, pal,” I say. “McAvoy here’s already done it.”
“What?” Roper’s trying to stay calm, but a vein in his head is starting to pulse.
The faces in the crowd are starting to turn to him. One or two people I recognise are twitching into smiles.
“I’m going to come quietly,” I say. “Unlike your missus, who’s a real screamer.”
There are sniggers at that, and I fancy, for a moment, that the sun is starting to peek through a hole in the cloud. I wince in the unfamiliar wink of golden light, and just as suddenly, it’s gone.
“McAvoy,” he says, unsure which mask to wear. He smiles. Frowns. Plays along, gives up. “Sergeant, please explain…”
McAvoy gives a sigh through pursed lips, then peers through a space in the crowd. Another car has pulled up. A uniformed senior officer steps out. Chief constable material, by the look of him.
Heads turn.
We stand. McAvoy’s arm on mine, his grip just solid enough to make sure I don’t say anything smart. He needn’t. I’m out of ammo.
The man comes through the crowd, other uniforms on either side. I recognise the face. Long, haughty, and utterly joyless. Top cop. Head of Humberside Police.
Roper looks confused. Lost. The ground beneath his feet is splintering.
“Sergeant McAvoy,” says the senior officer, with a nod. He seems uncomfortable in the glare of the press.