The dark confides, p.23
The Dark Confides, page 23
‘What about my record?’ Scanlon asked Anton. ‘You taken care of it?’
Crowley looked between the two men.
‘I said I would,’ Anton said.
In a locked, windowless room enamelled in fluorescent light, a room buried deep within an immense toroid-shaped office complex in Cheltenham, Chief Constable Sutch was standing behind a government-employed hacker, who was sitting at a laptop. Onscreen were numerous documents and photos of Carney, Scanlon and Alcott.
‘Once I hit Delete there’s no getting this back,’ the hacker said. ‘They won’t even be history. They’ll never have existed.’
Sutch said, ‘Do it.’
Rain wept down the restaurant windows. A waiter set fresh drinks on the table. All reached for their glass save Crowley.
‘Can I ask you something?’ He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘It’s somewhat delicate but I can’t imagine there’ll ever be a good time to talk about it.’
‘Say it,’ Anton said.
‘Rumours, Anton.’ He put on his glasses and slowly shook his head. ‘Terrible rumours.’
‘Say it.’
‘Is it true Carney had half the copper and your sister stapled together and delivered to you?’
Anton drank his water and slowly set down the glass. He held the water in his mouth, looking at Crowley, and then swallowed. ‘It’s true he sawed them apart and stapled them together.’
‘And the last part?’
Anton swirled his glass, rattling the ice. ‘He never really got the chance.’
Almost a month ago, in the evening of New Year’s Day, Carney had woken coughing and choking in a blood-filled oxygen mask. He pulled off the mask and swung his feet out the bed, knocking over an IV rack standing beside the bed. Half his face and pillow soaked in pulmonary blood. He lumbered through the house to the backdoor facing that purgatorial bight of Atlantic coast to catch his breath. Rollers beyond the black sand rearing high and violent, their spray washing out the stars. He’d regained some semblance of control over his vast failing form when he saw it, though it took him a moment to realise exactly what it was he was seeing. Stacked in the sand were the savaged bodies of his haruspex and the haruspex’s two men. Sitting on the corpses licking its front paw was the black and white cat. He was moving slowly towards the macabre tableau when he heard movement behind him. He turned and saw Anton and Scanlon in the doorway. Anton coppered scalp to sole in blood, his teeth and eyes dementedly bright in the mess, in his fist a dripping hammer. Scanlon was shooting the scene on a phone. The black cat walked figure eights through Anton’s legs. Carney smiled and extended his great spidery arms as if to gather up his dark visitors and embrace them. With arms held out he went forward proclaiming, Death is God.
‘How did you find him?’ Crowley said.
Anton looked at Scanlon. ‘Blondie here.’
Scanlon tipped back his head and pulled down his blood-rimmed lower lids, blinked in a few eyedrops from a glass pipette. Crowley watched him with the dispassion of a spider.
‘I wondered who the cinematographer was,’ he said. ‘Very colourful. Grand Guignol. So, what now?’
‘The Chinese deal,’ Anton said.
‘I wasn’t aware that was still going ahead.’
‘Neither are they, but they will be.’
Otilia was waving her empty whisky glass at a barman when two men appeared and joined the table.
‘Ah, the lords cometh,’ Crowley said. ‘Gaspar, Rattigan, meet Anton, the King Killer himself. If you’re lucky, he may regale you with wild tales of regicide … among other things.’ His disdain was profound.
Anton shook the lords’ hands.
‘Where’s Zampanò?’ he said.
‘She’s on her way,’ Gaspar said.
Rattigan seized the elbow of a passing waiter and pointed at the glass Otilia was holding.
‘Get me one of those,’ he said.
‘Bring the bottle,’ Otilia said.
Anton looked at her watch again. ‘Fuck it, let’s order. I’m starving.’
On April Fool’s Day, three months after the unexpected New Year’s Eve phone call, Sergeant Weston kept the promise he’d made to his friend.
‘If you don’t get a call from me on the morning of April first, that afternoon you do it,’ Alcott had said. ‘You go in there, you enter that code and you blow this whole thing wide open.’
Weston’s phone didn’t ring on that cold and blustery Sunday morning. In the afternoon he went to the storage facility, entered the code and opened the locker.
The names Alcott and Bale would be spoken for years on end.
Steven Maxwell, The Dark Confides
