The dark confides, p.12
The Dark Confides, page 12
‘My God,’ Rydell said. ‘Is that a rib-spreader? That’s a fucking rib-spreader.’
The trinity was professional and exact in how to keep the cop there on the edge of darkness, teetering the terminator between the blink of life and the sleep of death. It was at it this point that Anton began his questioning. He knew from experience that men close to death told no lies. After such harrowing physical sorrow, the cop revealed the location of the tanker and Anton made a phone call. Then he took the hammer off the embalming table, tapped its face twice in the centre of the cop’s forehead for aim and raised the hammer. He was set to bring it crashing down when a lopsided smile twisted the cop’s blue, peeled-back lips. Strands of blood swagged across the funnel web of his mouth.
‘Something amusing?’ Anton said.
The cop spoke but what he said was inaudible. Anton leaned his ear close to his mouth. On a moribund breath, the cop said it again. Anton listened. Then he rose and walked slowly across the room, still gripping the hammer. He leaned on a cold and greasy cast-iron radiator and looked out through a gap in the window. A plane emitting bursting strobes of high-intensity light drifted by up there above the neighbouring flats, passing in and out of snow clouds. Then he turned and asked for paper, a pen and a nail.
Within two hours of Anton’s phone call, an eight-man team, chosen specifically owing to their nautical backgrounds, had fallen on the tranquil Cumbrian coast some one hundred fifty miles northwest of where Anton and Rydell were positioning the butchered corpse of the biker cop. The men who arrived in the two black Range Rovers used roof-mounted aluminium extension ladders to get aboard the tanker. They ran the ladders up against the gunwale and carefully ascended. They broke into the tanker itself via the bridge and rushed along the unlit passageways, flashlights dancing, searching for the on-board transponder emitting the tanker’s location. Those who arrived in the tugboat some forty-five minutes later yoked themselves to the tanker with the hawser rope and the bribed pilot of the tyre-hung tug switched on the power-driven winch and took up the slack. A crackle on the walkie-talkie. He picked up. A voice from the tanker said they were ready to go. The tug pilot asked if the transponder had been disabled. The voice from the tanker said he wouldn’t be telling him to go if it hadn’t. Men descended the ladders and then the ladders were retracted into the tanker by those staying aboard. The men on the jetty got back into the Range Rovers and waited, watching. The tug pilot rotated the tug and fired the engines. The tug’s low-slung heavy displacement hull, already sagging under the massive weight of the engines, sank farther into the black water, digging into the trough of its own wake in search of more friction for pulling power. Then the tug began to creep forward and the tanker gradually veered out into the depths. A great creaking, like the talk of trees, the rending of mountains. The tanker trailed behind the tug looking like a blow-up in a manual created for closer study. When tug and tanker were wholly offshore, the Range Rovers vanished into the hills and vales inland and all was again tranquil.
It was the night of his seventieth birthday. In a huge, dimly lit room, Søren and two young black women collapsed naked and sweaty on a Shetland wool mattress wrapped in plastic. Fat black candles stood about the room, guttering and veined, grey wax dribbling into copper plates. Motionless amid a ring of salt in a bare corner of the room stood a small hunchback robed in bloodstained papal regalia. Above the figure, slathered on the wall in what looked like dried blood or faeces, were the words A VOID, the A directly above the V forming a rhombus. Søren was lighting a thinly rolled joint with a match when his phone vibrated on a nightstand cluttered with hypodermic needles and pills, DMT crystals and a glass pipe, thumbscrews, wedding rings, a pair of forceps. He licked the face of the woman he was leaning over as he got the phone, accidentally knocking a planchette off the bed. His grin faded when he saw he’d been sent an untitled video. He sat up and pressed Play and watched the torture-murder of his biker cop set to the song “The Laughing Policeman”.
Chapter Six
SATURDAY, 30 DECEMBER
The snow stopped falling in the early hours of Saturday morning and everywhere was still and quiet. The sky looked airless it was so clear. Planets and stars and transient bolides sprent across the void with glaring brilliance, hurtling through nothing at depths and distances unimaginable, unbearable. Earthbound below, people who found the cold light of day too much to take visited all-night supermarkets and went for slow drives and lamplit walks to stretch their limbs without the judging eyes of the diurnal crawling them. Foxes loped the glazed ground of that rapidly forming icescape and nosed in fallen bins. Cobby cats perched on walls like owls watched the foxes with unblinking curiosity, the reflective tapetum of their slit-pupiled eyes borrowing the ambient light and setting them aglow.
And somewhere behind it all a phone was ringing.
In the dawn or maybe dusk a bony girl in a rowboat with a stethoscope hanging from her neck came sculling through polluted waterways. Sun haunting the edges of a sky dimmed by fleeing birds and countless gas flares, which spouted from the ground like columns from hell, rising to lay topside the foundations and footings of a burning new red region. Firelight flickered inside bulging clouds of caustic black smoke. Lifeless tributaries suffused with crude’s hydrocarbons. Frog-green vegetation succulent, primeval. Swamp forests charred derelict. Breaths of methane. Psychedelic rainbows aswirl in the filmy surfaces of dark liquid. The miscarrying cropland an unending midden of scorched drums and corroded pipes and abandoned tanks. Tape wrapped about severed wellheads twisted in warm sulphurous winds that tilted and whooshed the flames of wooden boats that drifted the channels afire. She sculled by thatched delta shacks and under colossal green tentacles that lifted out of the onyx-coloured water, runged and caged like scaffolded sea beasts. She leaned over the gunwale and trailed her hand through the crude. Cool and slick. Great fish floating belly-up, gills clogged. She took back her hand and the crude stained her skin to the wrist like a glossy black glove. The silence was interrupted by a gunshot, a sudden burn of light, the shouting of petro-thieves. The sky there blackened as the ocean blued out towards the edge of the world where the tankers voyaged after gorging. She passed her hand across her face, anointing her skin four vertical stripes like the shadows of prison bars, and in the dull light her teeth flashed white and she whispered his birth name and he wondered how she knew it. Men in rowboats lopped pumps and pipelines and shouted and fired guns. She now wore the stethoscope and she skimmed the chestpiece across the surface of the dark water auscultating her heart which beat all around. She told him that the silence between beats were glimpses of the before and the after and then she turned away from that pandemoniac land of fire and fear and looked on the stern of a steel leviathan creeping outward, fully glutted, red-yellow scalloped seashell markings blazoning its hull, and the pealing of a great bell came down from the sky and Bale reached for the phone and picked up the wrong one and then found the right one and answered.
‘We got problems.’ Margot said.
He sat up and switched on the bedside lamp, reality shimmering as it merged with his disintegrating dreams. ‘What kind of problem?’
‘Problems with an S, plural.’
‘Oh shit.’
‘Yeah. I take it you’re not dressed.’
‘It’s the middle of the night.’
‘It’s dawn. You’ve got five minutes. I’ll text you where we’re meeting.’
She hung up.
He lay there propped on his elbow looking into the dark. Dreamland fragmenting, reality compressing. Eventually he swung his feet to the floor. He dressed in clothes he’d taken off the night before and five minutes later was sitting shaking in his car with the engine running, watching first light contour the rooftops, describing them against the retreating night. Margot’s text appeared. An address, nothing more. He didn’t text back.
Margot was sitting in a booth at the back of a coffee shop somewhere near Delamere Forest. He felt he’d been there before but he didn’t really know where he was, he’d just followed the GPS. None of the rushing blue-white landscape beyond the car had pierced his dread. He wasn’t thinking straight. Margot never sent him to the same place twice, but with a plurality of problems, maybe she wasn’t thinking straight either. He ordered a coffee as he passed the counter and slid into the booth opposite her. The windows leaden with condensation.
‘I hope you slept well because you won’t again,’ she said.
‘Just say it.’
‘The body of a biker cop was dumped on the steps of his station this morning. He’d been tortured to death, mutilated. A list of current UCOs was written on a piece of paper nailed through his forehead. Guess whose name was on the list.’
‘Oh fuck.’ He shut his eyes and instantly opened them as if a horror awaiting him in the dark had just made its grinning presence known. ‘I told you about him, Margot. I told you he was watching me. I fucking said it. I said it. Why didn’t you look into him? What the fuck, Margot?’
‘I looked. I couldn’t find anything. I looked.’ She waited a moment before saying, ‘There’s more.’
‘How can there be more?’
‘How about footage of you killing a UCO?’
The volume in his head turned down. ‘What?’
‘It isn’t you in the video? Fucking naked.’
She tapped the screen and held it out to show him. Onscreen was a paused video of his raw form taken from behind where the two men had been. He looked beyond himself and saw the ruined UCO in the chair and Søren standing beside him gripping the black-bladed knife. Søren’s head was out of frame. He held the back of his head and tried to breathe, groggy at the sensory overload.
‘Should I press Play?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘What?’
‘No. Have you watched it?’
‘What do you think?’
He looked at the table. He should have run when Wren asked him in the bath on Halloween, before he’d killed, before he’d fathered, before this. He should have run. His coffee appeared and he jumped. The barista apologised and left.
‘Who sent it?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. The number was withheld.’
‘Is the biker cop in the video?’
‘No.’
He’d stayed in the doorway out of frame. He’d known it was being recorded.
‘I never knew you had it in you,’ she said.
Anger glassed over his eyes. ‘Don’t, Margot. I mean it. Don’t.’
She looked at the phone, slowly shaking her head. ‘I never knew you had it in you.’
‘I don’t have it in me.’
‘This video says otherwise.’
‘You watched the video, Margot. You saw. I had no choice.’
She scoffed. ‘Really?’
‘I had no choice,’ he shouted.
The barista looked over.
‘Only a matter of time before it turns up on the internet,’ she said. The atrociousness of the situation seemed to hit her afresh and she pounded the table so hard the cups jumped in their saucers. The barista looked again.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
He couldn’t look at her.
‘Do you know who he was?’ she said. ‘Do you know who he was working for?’
‘No.’
She appeared to calm.
‘You could maybe claim self-defence. Maybe. Like you said, you had no choice.’ She smiled but her eyes were flat and lifeless like eyes painted on eyes. ‘We’re finished. You do know that, don’t you? This wasn’t just a last chance for you.’
‘I know.’
‘I needed this too. I fucking needed this.’
She never talked about what had happened on her previous job and he’d never asked, but early in the operation he’d spoken to a colleague who’d heard whispers that she’d screwed up badly after scapegoating the wrong someone to save her own skin, someone you do not scapegoat, someone who, unbeknown to her, had many a powerful connection. This operation was both her punishment and last chance. And now that chance was gone.
‘So who did this?’ she said. ‘Who killed the biker cop? Søren? A third party? Someone trying to muscle in on their turf?’
But he wasn’t thinking of the biker cop. He was thinking how to run, how to disappear completely. First he needed to flatten this out before doing anything. He couldn’t run knowing he’d be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life. He had to sort this. Now.
‘There has to be a way,’ he said. ‘This can’t be it. I’ll… I’ll deny it. I’ll go and speak to Aileen and explain how they’ve got it wrong.’
She drank her tea. ‘Good plan. Let me know how that works out for you.’
The place had begun to fill up. People coming in out of the cold wearing heavy coats, hats, gloves.
‘The operation’s over,’ she said. ‘That’s it. Over.’
‘It’s not as easy as that.’
‘When a UCO stabs to death another UCO on video, it’s over. When a police officer turns up tortured to death with a list of UCOs hammered into his fucking skull, believe me, it’s over. That’s about as final as things get. You put into place an emergency escape plan, now, this morning, and you disappear. You hear me? By tonight, you’re a thousand miles from here and we never meet again. We starve this of oxygen and hope it dies and somehow blows over.’ She laughed at the absurdity of her words.
‘I’m seeing Wren.’
She didn’t move. Then she opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. She rose and picked up her purse and left. He sat there staring wide-eyed into the table and then followed her. He was out the door when the coffee-wallah called out to him, saying they hadn’t paid. He went into his pockets and took out a twenty and threw it on the counter and left.
He looked about for her, saw she was across the road marching to her car. He ran out into traffic, calling her name, horns blaring. One car had to slam the brakes to avoid hitting him. He grabbed her arm as she was about to get in the car and she wheeled around and slapped him hard across the face. And again.
‘The activist bitch wasn’t enough for you?’ she said.
‘That was different. I was trying to protect her.’
‘That worked out great, didn’t it? And they say chivalry’s dead.’
‘Fuck you, Margot. Fuck you.’ He pointed in her face. ‘You know it wasn’t like that. You know. You better than anyone.’
A long slow procession of cars flowed by, tail lights glowing red in the dim air, smeared forms behind the glass watching them.
‘I love her, Margot. She loves me.’
‘That’s … that’s so romantic. I’m welling up here.’ She laughed without humour and opened the driver door. ‘How long?’
‘By any means. Aren’t we told that, Margot? By any means.’
She laughed again. A shrill and unpractised sound. As if she’d forgot how.
‘Does she know you’re police?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Of course not.’ She was smiling. ‘And you think they’ll believe her?’
He saw her point and fresh horror dripped into his thoughts. At the end of an unlit corridor that led nowhere, the grinning presence laughed.
‘How can you be with someone like that?’ she said. ‘You know what they do. She knows what they do.’
‘She’s not her fucking mother, Margot,’ he shouted. ‘She’s a good person. She doesn’t deserve this shit. She doesn’t deserve me.’ He pounded his chest. ‘What do we do? Tell me. You’re the handler here, fucking handle it.’
She threw her purse on to the passenger seat and leaned against the car. ‘Well, as you haven’t setup an escape plan, we’ll see if they’ll put us into protection, which they won’t. We’ll see if they’ll change our names and move us to a nice cottage somewhere by the sea, which they won’t. We’ll see if they’ll ignore the fact that you stabbed to death an unarmed UCO while on an operation that doesn’t officially exist, which they won’t. We’ll see if they’ll hold us tightly and say diddums, which—are you seeing a pattern here?—they won’t. Do you not understand the gravity of our fucking situation? The operation isn’t official, and if it isn’t official, then they’re not looking out for us, and if they’re not looking out for us, then we’re alone. Do you understand? We are alone.’
‘No. Bullshit. That can’t happen. What about Waters? What about Erskin? Where are they? Call them. Get them on the phone. Tell them what’s happened. Explain it to them. They’ve got to do something. They’ve … they’ve got to.’
‘Are you serious? They hire us so they don’t have to get their hands dirty. Do you really think they’re going come out of the woodwork to kiss us better when things go south? Stop acting thick in front of me, Sean. It’s undignified. They wanted us to get to Carney, we failed, and now this is where we are and we’re alone.’
‘Let me arrest them.’
‘Who?’ She raised her hands and looked about as if expecting rain.
‘The Molloys. Let me arrest them. If I arrest them they can’t hurt us.’
‘It’s not the Molloys I’m afraid of.’
‘Then let me bring this to light.’
‘We’re standing here alone because those who thrive in the dark want this kept in the dark.’
‘What more do they want the Molloys to do? They’re traffickers and thieves and murderers. What more do they fucking want?’
‘Carney. Carney and nothing else. This was never about the Molloys. You know this. It’s Carney they can’t abide. If his background was different they wouldn’t care, but he’s oil-trafficking after serving sixteen years as police. They trained him and he’s laughing at them. We were hired to stop the laughter. I can’t stress enough how isolated we are.’
He shut his eyes and lowered his head.
‘They sent me the video to let me know that they know who I am and that I can be got at, so I’m getting in my car right now and I’m going home and I’m packing and I’m gone. I suggest you do the same.’ She got in the car and started the engine.
