CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: NEW BLOOD

 

 

VERNON PICKED HIM up outside the newspaper shop on Lovely Lane. It was a cold morning. Mist saddled the railway bridge. Blocks of ochre light hung in the air where the hospital should have stood. The Shogun was the only traffic he had seen since leaving his room ten minutes earlier; he hadn’t wanted to reveal his address to Vernon.

It was as hot in the four-by-four as it was chilly in the street. A freshener hung from the rear-view mirror, filling the cab with the cloying smell of apricots. On the back seat lay Vernon’s leather coat. Peeking from beneath it was the polished tip of a baseball bat.

Vernon drove expertly through Bewsey and Dallam, flicking through the gears with fluid familiarity, never taking his eyes off the road. In his seat he leapt in and out of view as they passed beneath the orange sodium lights. Dallam recreation park was wadded with ghosts. The railway track that rose behind it was a wet, trembling line scored through the dawn sky.

“You had breakfast?” Vernon grunted.

“Yeah. Muesli.”

“Muesli. Like it. You don’t bow to convention, do you?”

“I wasn’t aware that a conventional breakfast existed.”

Vernon chuckled. He took the Shogun around the traffic island on the Winwick Road at fifty. Long Lane sucked them towards the dark streets of Orford. “Last guy helped me out was an egg and bacon man. All the time, not just for breakfast. Kev, his name was. He only ever ate egg and bacon and your usual trimmings. Thought cabbage was something you pushed around in a wheelchair.”

“Where are we going?”

“Sad case out in Grasmere Avenue. One of those little rabbit hutches with front doors filled with empty egg cartons. Tasteful, you know. Do you like Level 42?”

It was seven o’clock. Lights were going on in kitchens. Vernon swerved the Jeep around an electric milk float that bumbled into the road.

He continued: “Lynne and Gareth Morgan. They’ve got a son, Greg, who is blind. Severe learning disability, apparently. No shit, wouldn’t you?” He looked at Sean and Sean duly laughed. “Got another son, Billy. Billy the breadwinner. Dealer. Small-time. Bit of blow. Pills.

“Eighteen months ago, Lynne and Gareth had jobs. He was a taxi driver and she cleaned. They bought a car, a dishwasher, and a plasma TV on the never-never. Then they both lost their jobs. They owe fifteen grand. Hence me.”

He steered the jeep into Blackwood Crescent, killed the lights, and decelerated to a crawl.

“And the killer. The law centre they depended on for advice lost its funding and closed down. Lynne got another job but she was fired a couple days later. Fell asleep with her mop in her hand. That’s sloppy. That’s just not trying hard enough.”

“What are you going to do to them?” Sean asked, casually.

“I’m going to fuck them over with that bat and scream at them until the skin roasts off their fucking faces. That’s what I’m going to do. Whether they’ve got some money for me or not.”

“What am I here for? Moral support?”

Vernon laughed out loud. “You’re here to look out for the filth. And keep me covered. Not the man I used to be. People run, I can’t always catch them. You can though. You be my legs.”

Vernon braked sharply across the road from a series of flats with tiny windows. His eyes were fast upon them. To Sean, it seemed that Vernon was almost meditating, drinking in the shabby detail of the brickwork, the peeling paint on the window-frames, the gaps in the slates.

“Pass me my jacket please, Sean,” he said. His voice was level and business-like. “And wrap your mitts around that fucking bat.”

They walked across the road. Vernon pulled on a pair of black leather gloves and relieved Sean of the weapon.

Vernon said, “Round the back, son. Give us two whistles when you’re in position, then when you hear me bash the door in, close on the back door. Slippery as shitty eels, these bastards. Don’t let anyone out.”

Sean gave his signal when he had found the corresponding rear gate. The alleyway was filled with sagging sofas and bin bags. He gritted his teeth against the unpleasantness that must be about to ensue. As much as his instinct told him to back off, he knew he must not fail in this task, if he was to get close to Vernon and understand what lay behind the door of the house in the country and what, if any, link to Naomi these men had.

The sound of the door impacting was swiftly followed by the bark of a dog that ended almost as quickly with a shout and a series of pathetic whines. Vernon was quick. But evidently not quick enough. Sean watched a rear window swing open and a leg clamber out. The yelling inside the house diminished until it was Vernon’s voice that was dominant. Sean couldn’t tell what he was saying. The hooded figure hopped down off the kitchen extension and Sean said: “Hey.”

The kid took off without checking to see who had hailed him. Sean kept pace easily, even though this area was more familiar to his quarry. He thought he heard Vernon’s Shogun roar into life, but then they had rounded a corner and there was wind in his ears, and the grey, hooded figure was sprinting across a small square.

At a row of pebble-dashed garages, the kid jinked right and pounded over a narrow field. Progress for the both of them was hampered by hard furrows of soil. Ahead lay a thin wood. Around the wood sprawled building sites in various stages of development: new, cheap housing estates. The houses looked as though they had just been bombed.

Sean knew he must catch the kid before he reached the leading edge of trees or he would be lost, either to the undergrowth or the many hiding places available in the infant estate. He pushed himself to go faster over the awkward terrain, trying to measure his pace so that he could use the ridges to propel himself. He tried to imagine that the fleeing figure was responsible for something more than a missed payment. Maybe he was. He might be guilty of kicking cats or bullying kids on his estate. He might steal money from his grandmother’s purse. It helped.

Sean caught up with him as he attempted to climb through the windowless frame of a partially finished wall, grabbing hold of the loose cloth of his top. The kid was trying to shrug his way out of the garment. Sean hooked his hand underneath his quarry’s arm and drove the limb up his back. In this way the kid was forced to the floor, swearing and screaming that he should be let loose.

Now Sean did hear the Shogun’s engine. He lifted his head and saw the four-by-four jouncing across the rutted field towards them.

“What does he want from you?” Sean asked quickly.

“You fucking what? You fucking know exactly–”

“How much?” Sean cut in, plying the arm with a little pressure. The kid’s face, now free of his hood, turned pale. He sucked in breath. Sean smelled weed on him, and chocolate. He sported a feeble moustache that seemed to be glued above lips that were too wet and pink to belong to a human being, especially as the rest of his skin was so white. His eye sockets were almost round and the lids made no appearance unless he was blinking, which he was doing now. A lot. He screwed his face up with incomprehension.

“You what? It’s not money... Who are you anyway?”

Sean said, “Talk to me. I might be able to help.”

“Seany. Seany-Sean. What have we here then?” Vernon slouched into the unformed room.

Sean straightened.

“Good running, mate.” Vernon swung the bat as though it were a golf club before holding it out and squinting along its length, checking the true. “It’s nice to have a bit of hard around. But not for you though, eh, Billy?”

“Fuck off, you wanker,” Billy said. “What did you do to my old girl?”

“If you mean your mother,” Vernon said, “I told her to put her teeth in if she was going to scream at me like that. Ugly specimen. I can see where you get it from.”

Billy laced his fingers behind his head and crouched low. “Look, just get it over with then, why don’t you? I’ll take my beating and then you can get lost.”

“It’s not quite as easy as that, Billy,” said Vernon. “We are going to do you over, make no mistake–”

Sean loved that we.

“–but where will that leave us? No progress, you see. No improvement in our relationship. The cold, brutal facts are that you owe me and I expect payment.”

Sean said, “I don’t think he’s got any money on him.”

Vernon gave him an indulgent smile. “Sean. Rule A: keep your mouth shut. I talk in these situations. You just stand around looking pretty. Now. It’s cold. I am starving. Let’s get this sorted. Sean. Hurt him. Then you can go. I’ll take things forward from there.”

“You’ve got the bat. You hurt him.”

“Sean...”

Sean pressed his teeth against his tongue. Vernon’s habit of prefacing every sentence with his name was getting up his nose.

“Sean... let’s say that I need you to do this. To prove something to me. It’s a test. Pass it, or fail it. If you fail, you will fail badly. And in more ways than one. So.”

Billy crouched on the ground between them, his face slack with bewilderment, watching them at it.

Is he on to me? Sean thought. And following that: If he is, he won’t be expecting this.

It helped to think of Naomi. It fuelled him. But not so much that he couldn’t rein it in when Billy coughed up a little blood. Vernon was making admiring noises but Sean wasn’t listening. He pushed by Vernon quickly before he became Sean’s target, and strode to the Shogun. He sat in the passenger seat, trying to calm himself, hissing over his raw knuckles. He watched Vernon as he spoke to Billy. It darkened a little, out there, as if a cloud had blocked the sun, but the sky was cloudy anyway.

Getting a headache, Sean thought, and rubbed his temples while punching at the radio buttons for something that might soothe him.

He wanted so much to return and mete out a little to Vernon, just a little, of what Billy had suffered. He wondered if Naomi had been alive when her killer had cut off her lips. Sean rubbed his bruised knuckles and tethered his rage. He thought: not yet... not yet.

He saw Vernon fiddle with his collar and lift something silver to his lips. If it was a whistle, it made no sound that Sean could hear. But when he blinked, there was another man in white standing next to Vernon. He wore a white skull-cap. His eyes were covered with dark glasses, and his mouth and nose were obscured by a green mask. Both men were looking down at the spot where, presumably, Billy lay.

“Christ,” Sean muttered, as Vernon shifted slightly to allow a view of the blood stains that swirled across what must have been a surgeon’s apron. “Christ.”

Nonchalantly, as if he were plucking a pen from his top pocket, the surgeon extracted something slender that glittered.

“Christ.”

He knelt out of sight. Vernon moved back across Sean’s line of vision and he didn’t see anything else until Vernon was striding back across the ploughed field, sliding a neatly wrapped parcel of white, greaseproof paper into his pocket. Neither the surgeon nor the boy were anywhere to be seen.

Vernon came towards the four-by-four bringing the collars of his coat up around his neck. The wind played with his pony tail. He threw the bat and the briefcase onto the back seat as he settled behind the wheel with a contented sigh.

“Is he all right?” Sean asked.

“Depends what you mean by ‘all right’. Actually, come to think of it, it doesn’t depend on anything. He’s not all right. He’s dead, but he hasn’t quite got the grip of it yet.”

“How do you mean?”

“Look at this place, Sean. Look at the people here. Staggering, blasted shells of people they are. This isn’t living. It’s not life. Is it?”

Yes it is, Sean wanted to say. It might not be what they hoped for, but it’s what they’re dealing with.

Vernon fired the engine. He switched on Radio 3. “I like classical music after a job like this. Calms you down.”

Sean persisted. “What did he give you? What was in that white parcel? Who was that fucking freak you were talking to? Where did he come from?”

Vernon selected first gear and took the Shogun on a slow, bumpy arc away from the field. “Ask me no questions,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper, “I’ll dig you no shallow grave.”