The dark confides, p.15
The Dark Confides, page 15
‘She’s pregnant. She’s pregnant, Anton. Think of the baby. Show some compassion.’
‘The baby? The same baby whose skull you’ll split before it’s even named. Such compassion. No wonder the price is high on your head.’
‘It’s on your head too. Don’t forget that.’
‘I won’t be anyone’s lackey any more, Aileen. Least of all a fucking copper’s.’
She frowned, confused.
‘Carney was police,’ he said. ‘For sixteen years.’
‘Bollocks. It was a rumour.’
‘I’ve read their reports on him. They didn’t bury them deep enough. I’ve studied him. I know how he did it all and I’ll be his undoing. I’ll be the death of him.’ He smiled. ‘You’re a copper’s lapdog. His doting bitch. And now he’s having you put down.’
‘You piece of shit. You ungrateful fucking—’
‘There’s something else, something I’d hate for you not to know before you’re shovelled into your grave.’
She waited, eyebrows raised.
‘I killed Christopher,’ he said.
She locked up. Then her jaw flexed, muscles jumped in her throat. She studied his face. ‘You … killed Christopher.’
‘He was weak and venal. Like you, Mammon was his god.’
She looked at the desk, through it, her mind at war with itself. ‘Why?’
‘I just told you.’
She pounded the desk. ‘Fuck you. That wasn’t an answer. Why? Fucking answer me.’ She pounded the desk again. ‘Why? Why?’
‘To watch him die.’
‘To watch him die.’
‘And to see if I could.’
She leaned forward and then back and touched her forehead, unable to find a position that could securely hold the inferno of her emotions. ‘Why are you doing this? Money?’
‘Money. Fuck off.’
‘Then why?’
‘Because I don’t care. Can you understand that? I do not care. About Christopher, about you, or about Marcus. I’m glad he got a bullet in the eye. One less coward in the world.’
‘What about your sister?’
He looked away. Something in his eyes, a hard, bitter ache. The phone rang on the desk and he blinked and came back. Neither looked at it. Only when it had stopped ringing did she find her voice.
‘Let me tell you something, lad. A little fact for you to take away and chew on. It’s something I’d hate for you not to know before you’re shovelled into your grave.’
Anton, that oddly cloaked reaper, took a hammer from the kitbag.
‘I want to tell you where your nightmares came from,’ she said, her eyes on the hammer. ‘I want you to know why you haunt this rock with a space-black disposition. You’re gonna start remembering some seriously fucked up shit once I’ve told you, and believe me, the flashbacks will break a person quicker than any hammer ever could. When you were little—’
‘You sure you want to finish that sentence?’
She smiled and looked at the hammer gripped in her son’s fist.
Then she finished that sentence.
Bale had been watching the place from his car for the past twenty minutes while trying Margot’s phone. She finally answered on the fourth attempt.
‘You’re lucky I answered,’ she said. ‘I didn’t recognise the number.’
‘It’s a new phone. Something you need to get. Where are you?’
‘Not hanging round is where.’
Traffic in the background, blowing horns, a loudspeaker voice. Maybe a train station or an airport.
‘Have you spoken to Waters or Erskin?’ he said.
‘No and we’re not going to. I told you that. You need to forget them. They’re gone.’
‘This is a nightmare.’
‘No. The real nightmares are to come.’
‘You always knew how to set my mind at rest.’
He shut his eyes for a moment and then opened them.
‘I’m not giving up on this, Margot.’
‘What does that mean, not giving up? You talk like you still have options.’
‘I’ve got two years of solid evidence on these pricks and I’m not letting it go to waste because of some fuckup.’
‘Some fuckup. Is that what this is? You need to run, Sean. Why the fuck aren’t you running?’
‘I will once everything’s safe.’
‘Safe isn’t a word we can use with straight faces any more, is it? Only the privileged can use the word with sincerity. Do you feel privileged?’
‘I’m dropping off the last of the evidence in case anything happens to me, okay? USB drives, SD cards, receipts. They have everything on them. It’s all there. Audio, videos, contacts, transcripts. Everything.’
‘What are you out talking about? You were told in the beginning you wouldn’t be asked to collect evidence. We write-up the transcripts for our personal records, to keep our lies straight. They were never meant to be seen in a courtroom.’
‘I’m putting everything I have in storage and then I’m gone.’
‘Tell me you’re posting it. At least tell me that.’
‘Can’t risk it going on walkabout.’
‘You’re dropping it off in person? Have you lost your fucking mind?’
He looked at a high-altitude plane glancing stratospheric light above the clouds. It looked like a white-hot cross navigating the sky.
‘Probably,’ he said. ‘I’m here now.’
He was sitting parked in the loading bay area of a storage facility near John Lennon Airport. Two young men were hauling ratty-looking furniture from one of the facility’s shuttered openings into the back of a rental van. Toiling staff members wheeled pallet trucks and forklifts about the site with the pale and washed-out expressions of the terminally depressed. This was not how life was supposed to turn out.
‘Christ, don’t tell me where you are,’ she said. The background hushed as if she’d entered a dead place where sound waves instantly decayed. Then her voice came back quiet and grave. ‘I won’t be answering this phone again.’
The line died.
Over the airport another plane rose into the sky while another plane circled, ready to come down. He grabbed his backpack and got out the car. A cold wind streaming across the car park passed straight through his clothes and painfully tautened his flesh. He went through the reception and walked down the wide and bright corridors. Polished concrete floors wetly reflecting the overhead striplights. Door after door after door, all locked, each identical to the last and individually alarmed. Like some abandoned high-security prison.
At his locker he entered his code and opened up. A young man with an awful complexion wearing a polo shirt in the company’s garish yellow shuffled by with terrible self-consciousness. Bale closed the door over and waited for him to pass before stowing the laptop, the storage devices, the receipts, the notebooks and the thirty grand in cash to go with the fifteen grand already in there. Over ten grand of the cash wrapped in rubber bands in euros. He was keeping only a small amount to avoid declaring it at the airport—he wanted no delays. He was about to lock up when he hesitated, considering something, then he took out a pen and a notebook from his backpack and sat on the cold floor, reclining against the locker.
He wrote a note. In the note he gave his names, his collar number, his UCO codename and details of Rainbird, indicating which notebooks and storage devices to refer to regarding names and ranks of everyone involved, from lowest to highest, police and criminal alike. It was a cold list of facts, which he ended with the words: This is everything I managed to collect. My cover was blown. I tried my best. I’m sorry to everyone I failed, on both sides of the tracks. He tore the note from the pad, set it on top of the evidence and locked up.
The two men who’d been loading the van outside were now talking to a woman on reception, their voices raised. She seemed to be having a hard time dealing with them and had resorted to just folding her arms and taking the harangue. He was passing by and looking out through the glass double doors into the car park when he stopped dead.
Parked beside his car was a black Lexus saloon with tinted windows. Identical to the Lexus parked outside his apartment an hour ago. It hadn’t been there when he’d come in. He watched frozen as two men wearing baggy low-slung jeans and black hoodies with the hoods up walked around his car, holding their faces to the glass, trying the door handles. He turned and walked quickly back into the maze of corridors.
He passed his storage locker, fled to the end of the corridor, turned right. Voices from reception ringing towards him from behind. He reached the end and heard the electronic beep of the reception doors opening, the sound of the outside world rushing in to obscure the voices. He stopped and looked around, already lost. The doors must have then closed as the raised voices again dominated. He tried the handle of three of the storage doors. All locked. He went back the way he’d come, trying not to run for fear of alerting security. Surveillance cameras stared down every corridor with lidless tenacity.
Over the loudspeaker came a hollow pop and a squeal and then a voice, foreign, male.
‘Dead copper, Sean Alcott, please come to reception. Dead copper, Sean Alcott, please come to reception.’
That name, it pounded against his eardrums, a name he’d come to realise some time ago that he now considered the alias. He wasn’t sure if this way of thinking meant he was good at his job or terrible at it, if he was fully committed to the transposition or simply uncommitted to his own reality. To the high-command it would undoubtedly be the former, to Elms the latter, but what was it to him? He recognised that it didn’t matter, that whatever he saw himself as, that’s what he was, for better or worse.
He passed the corridor where his locker stood and saw one of the men lurking at the far end. The man saw him and called out to the other. The other appeared and they came towards him. At the next corridor he saw the green doors of an emergency exit. The only other colour in that monochrome maze. He crashed into the panic bars and the doors swung open on to a narrow passage at the rear of the facility blocked with snow and bordered by a brick wall too high to climb surmounted with galvanised steel spikes, beyond which lay a railway track. He loped down the weedy path to the end of the building, stumbling as he lunged over wet cardboard boxes. He looked around the corner and saw his car out there beside the Lexus. He looked back the way he’d come. Then he ran.
His breath locked cold and tight in his chest. He thumbed out the blade of his keyring knife and stabbed it through the front passenger tyre of the Lexus. The tyre blew out and a young couple carrying deep plastic tubs overflowing with household junk dropped the tubs. The girl screamed out and the boy threw up his hands, crouching like Atlas with the world on his shoulders. The Lexus slumped as it sighed a compressed hiss. Bale looked back and saw the hooded men coming at him, fast. Long ranging strides. One from the rear, the other from reception.
He jumped in his car and started the engine. One of the men reached into his hoodie’s pouch pocket. Bale ducked down behind the wheel, floored the accelerator and spun the car around, the tyres shrieking on the wet tarmac. He was fishtailing towards the exit when he heard a gunshot and a long streak of light crossed the bonnet as the bullet struck at a shallow angle. By now he’d pushed the car out into the main road, still without looking, causing a single-decker bus to swerve across the lanes to avoid colliding with him, its horn blowing. He careered between two cars and jolted across a speed bump, smacking his head into the ceiling, and again when he mounted a grass verge, his car bouncing over the curb with a spine-jarring impact, only just missing a telephone pole. He stopped for only a few seconds, everything outside the glass a dull blur of sliding shapes and huge pink faces, and then he stepped on the accelerator and dragged the car back into the road.
The Corvette tore through the Clwydian Range on a horseshoe-shaped mountain pass in north Wales. For one alarming moment, its wheels hit the grass verge at the valley’s edge and the boom of its engine rolled out over the fifteen hundred-foot drop. Dead silence. Then the car straightened and Rydell stepped on the accelerator. The teenage boy sitting beside him, blond, rawboned, screamed out and told him to slow the fuck down. Rydell laughed and snorted coke from the wrap in his lap.
‘Look at you,’ he said, grinning. ‘You’re shaking like a shitting dog.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Okay, okay, okay.’ Rydell slowed down, slightly. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You forgive me? Hey, you forgive me?’ He squeezed the boy’s cock through his skinny jeans and the boy flinched and threw his hand off as if it were a great pink spider.
The daytime sky soared dark and stony as the slate walls of the quarry scarps towering beside them. Rydell swerved into a steep bend on their climbing ascent into the low clouds when a herd of filthy and ragged sheep appeared in the road. He braked hard and the car slid to a stop before the dim grey ruminants. The animals looked at them with dull understanding through the horizontal pill-shaped pupils of their goatish eyes, jaws working frozen grass, dag tails hanging filthy and tangled between fly-struck hindlimbs.
‘Hey, that one looks like you,’ Rydell said.
The boy folded his arms and looked out the window beyond the verge posts reflectors, into the snowbound valley below. Rydell laughed and pulled the handbrake and sat there snorting coke, watching the sheep and the road beyond climbing into the clouds. Everywhere grey and hazy, the air frangible with frost. Rags of snow draped the grass verges and the jagged outcrops.
He was checking his nose for coke dust in the rearview when he saw a pickup truck sat behind. A big silver-blue Ford F-150 with roof lights and a bull bar and wearing tyre chains and foreign plates. Two men in the windscreen sitting low down and far back. The driver wore a heavy beard. The passenger wore aviator sunglasses.
The sheep finally moved on, trampling through the loose road scree to climb the sheer rocky mounts beside them. Rydell stayed where he was, staring hard into the rearview. He put down his window and waved for the pickup to overtake. The men didn’t respond, the pickup didn’t move. He waved again. Nothing.
‘Shit.’
‘What? Just go,’ the boy said.
‘I don’t want them behind me.’
‘Who, the sheep?’
‘What? No, you fucking retard. Them.’
The boy turned to see what he was pointing at. ‘What do they want?’
‘Nothing good.’
A surreal stalemate occurred between the Corvette and the F-150 out there on the steep incline of that frozen mountain chain.
‘Fuck this.’ Rydell reached across the boy and opened the glovebox.
The pickup revved and its roof lights burst on.
‘Just go,’ the boy said.
Rydell squinted in the rearview and put his foot down. The rear tyres spun on the glassy ground, unable to find a grip. He slammed the wheel and was about to try a different tack when the pickup lurched forward, shunting them so hard their seatbelts locked. Coke dusted his legs and the engine stalled. He was starting it up when the pickup shunted them again but this time didn’t stop. It pushed them high up the pass, into the clouds, gathering speed all the time. The boy was screaming. The front end of the Corvette gradually turned and kept turning until it was sideways, straddling both lanes, the boy leaning into Rydell, pawing at him, trying to get away from the pickup’s menacing grille and bull bar that had filled his window. The Corvette’s tyres were coming loose of their chrome aluminium rims and tearing apart on the ground, leaving black rubber trails, and sparks began screeching from the bare rims. In a final show of strength, the pickup slammed the Corvette side-on into a verge post so hard the Corvette ground up the post and mounted it. The car came to rest at a sharp angle on the edge of the valley.
The passenger of the pickup opened his door and dropped out, walked slowly around the Corvette carrying an MP7 machine pistol pointed at the ground. He looked through his aviator sunglasses at the side window and saw the boy. He was still screaming. The passenger raised the MP7 and fired a short spray of bullets. The windows granulated and the screaming stopped. He was looking for Rydell through the Corvette’s rear window when the rear window exploded, along with his own lower jaw. He was dead before he hit the ground.
The driver of the pickup leaned out and aimed a Beretta though the Corvette’s driver window, shut one eye. He blew Rydell’s brain out across the dash and windscreen. Dead silence. He leaned over the steering wheel and looked down at his fallen associate dead on the road. The face behind the sunglasses a circus of bone and blood and teeth. He reversed back and then accelerated forward, inadvertently driving over the dead man as he vanished into the clouds.
When Bale finally stopped driving, down a small cul-de-sac of council bungalows, he sat with his hands flat on of his head, elbows out front, staring at the silver-blue logo at the centre of the steering wheel. After feeling jumpy for so long, a great fatigue pulled through him. He weighed a thousand pounds. He needed sleep. Lightproof, unfathomable sleep. But sleep was a luxury he’d no time for. He shook himself awake and sat up, drew in a long breath and blew it out slowly through pale lips, breath misting the windscreen. He got out of the car and walked around the front, inspecting the bullet damage to the bonnet, touching the crude shooting star logo scoured through the paintwork. He was sinking back down into his fear when something occurred to him.
He looked up and turned on the spot, looking about himself. Like a homing bird he’d found himself parked just off the street from where he’d grown up. He was unsure how to feel about this, not as if knowing would make any difference—he’d never been master over any aspect of his life. He walked in to his old street without fully realising he was even doing it, his legs just taking him, as if by muscle memory alone. He looked along the rows of cars parked bumper to bumper outside the two-up two-down terraced houses, the pavement just wide enough for two people to walk beside each other. The houses painted in every shade of cream and wine and green, corroded satellite dishes bolted to almost every front, telephone wires swagged between the rooftops, the church looming at the end, a patch of vacant land beside it where his old school once stood, now a wasteland. He couldn’t believe how narrow the street was, how low the houses were. Here lay the origins of his claustrophobia.
