Decay Inevitable (35 page)

The MC backed off into the wings, his arm outstretched. From the other side of the stage, struggling with her balance thanks to the embryo that was hanging in a sac from her waist, Sadie emerged.

Will watched, spellbound, as she prowled around the stage in a slashed, tight black dress, filleted to allow the watery sac and its hideous progeny to depend comfortably from her abdomen. The foetus within turned slowly in the fluid, its ill-formed face and hands bumping against the membrane, dimpling it. Sadie sang a seductress’s song, baring plenty of flesh, pouting and winking at the shadowed heads dusted with a corona of soft, violet light at the front tables. She swung the umbilical cord that joined her to her baby as if it were a microphone cord. She bumped her hips against it provocatively. When the song ended she bowed and motioned to the bouncers at the back of the bar. Will saw them close the doors from outside and heard the heavy clunk of locks being slid into the place. He eyed the bartenders nervously. They were backing out of the bar and closing doors behind them. Joanna had passed out, her head resting against the chrome handrail.

Sadie walked to the edge of the stage and put her foot up against the highlight deck. Calmly, in the same velvety voice in which she had sung the song, she said: “Every man jack of you get on your knees now and worship your queen.” She whispered, “I want satisfaction. I want a show of loyalty. I want a sacrifice. And I want it
now
.”

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-
S
IX:
K
EV

T
HE ALLOTMENTS ON
Longshaw Street were a sad sight in late winter. Some of the rows had not been raked over since the cold snap; the dregs of last year’s crops lay like severed tongues on the soil, withered and brown amid the frigid lines of white. Some hardy vegetables were clinging on: sprouts, chard, leeks, but the majority had given up to the hard frost that had attacked the town in recent weeks.

Most of the plots were in some kind of disarray, except for one. Sean and Emma trudged along the tamped soil pathways towards it. A brief smell of peppery soup laced the chill afternoon air. To the west, over the dead airbase at Burtonwood, the sun was being teased into bloody ribbons by a thin raft of cloud. An upturned wheelbarrow rested against a compost heap enclosed by discoloured sheets of corrugated metal; off-cuts of carpet prevented the rotting matter from drying out. An old plastic bath was being used for water storage. Old window frames, complete with their thin glass squares, were a pauper’s greenhouse making the best of whatever sunshine was available. Halved plastic bottles improvised as cloches. Rolls of chicken wire and endless lengths of cane leaned against scruffy old sheds.

Restive eyes glared out from these retreats. The coals of cigarettes showed when the gloom within proved too great. Wirelesses played bland music or muttered dully. A man in a deckchair with deeply pitted, leathery skin sipped tea from a flask and turned the pages of a newspaper, refusing to acknowledge Sean and Emma as they walked by him. Somebody was leaning into a distant bonfire, feeding it with sticks and paper. Its smoke drifted across the allotments, making them insubstantial, enhancing their wasted appearance. It was hard to believe that this no-man’s land, this demilitarised zone, could cultivate anything so fancy as life. A slumped scarecrow stood sentinel, watching over a strip of ground choked with weed.

Plot number twenty-seven was a tidy strip of land tucked into the centre of the allotments, an exception to the utilitarian rule. The soil here had been cared for; it had been raked over and sieved for stones. Trimmed lengths from black binbags had been weighed down with bricks to protect something growing in one corner. A metal box contained non-biodegradable waste: packaging for organic slug pellets, tomato fertiliser, discarded seed trays, emptied cartons of Murphy’s tumble bug.

The shed was brightly painted and its window possessed a pair of curtains. A weathervane in the shape of a chicken rotated slowly on the roof. From within came a cough, a painful, damaged sound.

Sean called out. “Kev?” The name was brittle in the cold, a non-name, a pointless sound. Nevertheless, it drew a figure from the shed. Clad in a heavy blue greatcoat, a man of around sixty emerged, the bottom half of his cadaverous face swathed in a thick, bottle-green scarf. He looked at Sean first, then Emma, before casting a look further afield, at the allotment that was deserted but for the refugees from fracturing, loveless homes. The eyes came back to them, shadowed and hangdog.

“Who are you?” he asked, his voice little more than a shifting of tortured air over dead or mangled vocal cords.

“I’m Sean Redman. This is Emma Lavery. Are you Kev?”

“Yes.”

Sean stepped a little closer. “It’s just that I was expecting someone younger.”

Kev allowed himself a dry little chuckle. “I
was
younger,” he said.

Sean said, “We wondered if we could talk to you.”

“About?”

Sean was about to answer when Emma stepped in front of him. “Is that a bird’s nest up there, mister...?”

“Blackbird,” Kev rasped.

“Mister Blackbird?”

Sean thought he saw a slight crinkling of the other man’s eyes, but if there was any humour there, it wasn’t reflected in his voice. “Mister Lovesey,” he corrected, briskly. “
That
is a blackbird’s nest.”

“I see,” Emma said. “Sorry.”

“No need to apologise. Now, what is it you want? How did you know I was Kev?”

“A friend of yours told me about you. Guy called Preece. Nicky Preece.”

“Nicky. Oh yes?” None of the suspicion was leaving his words, or his posture. He hovered at the doorway to the shed, cupping a plantpot in his hands. “What else did he tell you?”

“He told me how you used to work for Vernon Lord.”

The mention of the name made Kev step back into the shadow of the shed door, which obscured Sean’s view of him. “Oh? What of it?”

Emma touched Sean’s arm. “Mr. Lovesey, can we buy you breakfast? We understand you’re a bit of a connoisseur of English breakfasts.”

Kev moved out of the shadow of the door once more. He appeared even more pale and diminished. “It’s nice of you to offer, but I don’t eat much these days. No doubt you know why.” He moved the scarf around his neck, so that it sat more comfortably. “You’d better come in,” he said, “seeing as you’ve come all this way to talk to me.”

Sean and Emma stepped over the corrugated iron fence into the well-manicured plot. They followed Kev into the shed, which was frugally furnished: a wooden stool, a fold-away table, a camping stove. The remains of a game of patience were spread out on the table. Garden tools made a homely jumble in the corner, a fresh, edaphic aroma rising off them. A sleeping bag was tightly rolled up and stored on a shelf over the door. A broken shotgun hung from a large hook beneath the window. A box of shells sat on the sill, open, ready.

“Sorry I don’t have more chairs,” Kev said, in a voice that was anything but. “The floor’s clean though, if you want to park yourselves.”

Kev went on with his game of cards. At close quarters, they could hear the wheeze of air in his throat as he took breaths.

Emma said, “How come you don’t have a scarecrow, Mr. Lovesey? Aren’t you worried the birds will take your crops?”

“None of us here has a scarecrow. Bloody worthless things. And it’s not crop-sowing time anyway. Nothing to take.”

“But there’s a scarecrow out there. Someone’s stealing a march on you.”

Kev grunted and shook his head. “No scarecrows here.”

Emma stepped outside and pointed. As soon as her arm was outstretched, she dropped it. “Oh,” she said. “I’m sure I saw one in that plot over there.”

“Nicky was fond of you,” Sean said, giving Emma an irritated look. “I think all of the lads were.”

“How do you know ’em?”

Sean spoke of the softstripping contract and the time he had spent with the crew. He stopped short of divulging that his relationship with the others had ceased, that any friends he had made during his time there were enemies now.

“And Lord?” Kev asked, his hands now still on the deck of cards.

“I went with Vernon on a few jobs,” Sean explained.

“A few jobs,” Kev said, and this time his blasted voice managed to carry a trace of sarcasm.

“You know what I’m here for,” Sean said.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“People are dying. You were nearly killed for what’s going on.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Sean persisted. “It’s still happening, what Vernon is doing. He’s still collecting. Sometimes he takes... sometimes it’s unborn babies. Did you know that?”

Now Kev swivelled on the stool. His eyes were raw and flat: oysters on the half-shell. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“He needs to be stopped. I think he killed a girl I used to know. Or someone working with him did. I want you to help me.”

“How?”

“You know all about him. You’ll have seen things. You know his weaknesses.”

Kev shook his head. “It isn’t Vernon you should be worried about.”

“Oh really?”

“Why don’t you just leave me alone? I don’t want to get back into that nonsense. I’ve got too much to do.”

Sean hitched around on his seat to get a view of the allotment. “Yeah. You’ve got a hole in your wheelbarrow needs mending and a rake to clean.”

“It suits me,” Kev said, quickly.

“I heard you were a good guy for Vernon. He rated you, I heard.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care any more.”

“I heard you were loyal and wouldn’t ever lie down for anyone. Hundred per center. Hundred and ten per center.” Sean leaned over and picked at the dried mud on a trowel. “Will you at least tell me what you know? And tell me why you bailed out? It wasn’t the gunshot wound, was it? At least tell us what happened with that.”

Kev sat across from him, staring at the younger man while Emma stood by the doorway, looking out at the pockets of mist in the rowans and the hawthorn. Chickens in a coop squabbled among themselves for a few seconds. The smell of the bonfire drifted through the open door. Kev’s stony face broke open to reveal a smile.

“Have a drink,” he said, pulling open a drawer and removing a half-bottle of whisky. “A nip, to keep out the cold.”

He poured three measures into three mugs and passed them around. They took sips. They nodded at the agreeable flavour, the migration of warmth through their bodies. A robin landed six feet away from the door and eyed them coolly.

Kev said:

I first met Vernon while I was working on the docks. I was doing anything I could for money back then. Seventy hours a week I’d be breaking my back loading or unloading ships. Fruit, textiles, meat, sometimes arms, although that was often midnight stuff. And never at the docks. Very naughty. Vernon was on one of the boats bringing in an illegal shipment of pistols from the Americas to sell on to Europe one night when I was helping out. I didn’t know much about his operations but I’d heard he was just about the best smuggler there was. I’d heard about him long before I met him. He was a bit of a legend.

We went down to a boathouse on the river and helped take the boxes off this boat while Vernon sat on a chair smoking cheroots and watching us working. When we’d finished, he called me back and thanked me, told me I put my back into it more than any other dogsbody that he’d seen. He was looking at me strange, like I had something green on my face. The others were in the boathouse by this time, divvying up the booty and loading it into the backs of stolen cars for delivery. They gave me filthy looks as they walked back and to.

Vernon never blinked when he talked. First time I ever saw his eyelids was when I caught him asleep one time. And even then I had to look twice because it was as though they were so thin they were almost translucent, like he was watching you while he kipped. He gave me a chunky little glass filled with rum and told me to down it. After the drink he asked me straight if I wanted to come and work with him. He needed someone he could trust, he said. He needed another set of eyes. Another set of hands. It was getting too dangerous, he said, this line of work he was in. He was getting too old. He pinched my cheek and laughed when he said this. He said that the rewards for helping him out would be great. Unimaginable.

I didn’t like it, the work he was offering. But I stuck at it and developed a tough skin. The boat work tailed off anyway. We lost our gills and went inland. I took beatings for Vernon. I took a knife once. I got harder. The beatings didn’t happen so often. I started doling the beatings out more than I was taking them. Vernon and me put the frighteners on this part of the country. We had the Northwest in our pockets. We got word of the rich pickings and went round to collect. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t money that Vernon was picking up. I thought he was a debt collector pure and simple. I never asked who for and I never asked why. I just matched him pace for pace and stood behind him in the shadows, cracking my knuckles while he pleased and thank you’d and scraped shit off his heels on the steps of all those sorry little houses.

It was seven or eight years before I twigged. A long time, I know. But if I’d been known for the quality of meat between my ears I’d never have been in this game in the first place, would I now? There’s me, picking up my grey hairs and getting a bit of lard round the guts and Vernon, my elder and better, looking as thin as a stiletto and twice as sharp. I never saw him exercising. He ate like a gannet and drank as if to chase off the Devil’s thirst.

We were friends by now. Fast and firm. We talked a lot, but he pretty much clammed up when the chat turned on him, his family, his loves. He got a cloud in his eyes when I asked him about his loves. Because I never saw him once with a lady on his arm. He had no tattoos proclaiming his desire for a Mavis or a Maude, or a Malcolm come to that. But we talked. One night he had had a bit too much to drink and the shakes were on him. I thought he was fearless, but this night he shook so much I could hear his bones rattling. He told me he was never going to be able to stop working. He was scared to stop working because he didn’t know what would happen to him. It wasn’t the poor bastards we visited that put the willies up him, nor was it the people he delivered the money to – what I thought was money. He said he was scared of himself. He had terrible dreams, he said. Dreams in which he walked through a corridor of mirrors and was terrified to turn to his left or right to see what kind of reflection walked with him. Ask him how he was feeling and he’d tell you that he didn’t feel himself today. Then he’d cackle to himself darkly for a bit. The drinking got worse. I drove him everywhere. But he got on top of it. Beat it, I suppose. Wrestled his demons to the ground like the hard bastard he is.