Father and Son (2 page)

“Take your time,”
the oldest one says, standing in the doorway as John gets to his feet, hawking the
last traces of vomit from his throat.

“Is there a back door?”

“Through there. It’s open.”

He washes his face, letting the ice-cold water
run down his neck and soak into his shirt, more and more of it until he senses
that he’s alone.

By the time he’s out the back, lighting a cigarette, the shaking is
under control and his mind has started to work again. The yard is small,
crowded with crates of bottles and wheelie bins. The smell of old grease and
spices is both sickening and welcome.

Roberto. Didn’t even know his last name. Roberto Duran, they used to
call him. A boxer from London. Brilliant amateur, but he got done for armed robbery.
Couldn’t turn pro after that, so he came up north and worked for Tony Ray. Now
he’s dead.

John watches the tiny curls of smoke rise from the tip of his
cigarette. He’ll have to go back inside. When he’s finished this, he’ll have to
look at that head again. He takes a drag, not too deep, not too much. How long
can he make it last?

Roberto, big strong fella, always dressed in a black shirt and
trousers, that ridiculous medallion on his hairy chest. The only decent one
among ’em. How many men had worked for Dad over the years? Down at the old
showroom there were always a few hanging about, thugs and chancers stinking of
booze and diesel. Nasty bastards, the kind that pick fights in pubs just to
prove a point, kick some lippy kid’s teeth out, or threaten blokes in front of
their wives for a laugh. They were all wary of Roberto, though. He could’ve
taken any of them, and they knew it. That easy way he had, never more than the
wag of a finger, a raised eyebrow.
Somebody
wasn’t wary of him, though. Last
night they took his face off with a bottle. God knows what else they did to
him.

He sucks on the cigarette. Thinks about lighting another, but it’d
only make him throw up. Any case, he’s got no choice. He’ll have to go inside again
sooner or later.

“Right,” he says, steadying his voice, trying not to look at the chair
as he walks back into the dimly lit bar. “What’s Lanny said?”

The older guy holds up his hand, a cellphone pressed to his ear.

“Yeah, he’s here,” he says into the phone, then passes it to John.

“John?” says Lanny.

“Yep.”

“What d’you think?”

“I just got here. Why you ask me to come, anyway?”

“Who else am I gonna ask?”

Lanny sounds nervous. This is the last thing he needs.

“I assume you’re not getting the police in?” John asks.

Stupid question. An hour from now, Roberto’ll be dumped in an
incinerator, or a landfill, whatever it is Lanny Bride does with unwanted
bodies these days.

“Not a word, to anyone.”

“So what have I got to go on?”

“Just do your best. A name, a whisper. Anything.”

John thinks about it, looks across at Roberto, at the horrific
squalor of how his life ended. Uncle Rob, they used to call him when they were
kids. He’d carry you on his shoulders all day long, scoop you up in his arms
and throw you so high in the air you’d scream with fear, choking on your own giddiness,
begging him to do it again. At the showroom he’d be the first person you’d look
for. You could hide behind his legs. You were safe with Uncle Rob.

“I’ll do what I can,” he says, reaching for his cigarettes.

“One more thing,” Lanny says. “Who’s the redhead?”

“A friend.”

“Journalist, I heard. Don’t like the sound of that.”

“No one’s asking you to.” He lights a cigarette. “Any road, it’s
only been four days.”

“She’s been asking questions.”

“You’re the man of the moment, Lanny. You think you can keep
yourself out of the news forever? Anyway, it’s not about you. She wants to
write Dad’s biography.”

“You’re joking.”

“Wish I was.”

“Make sure no one starts reminiscing about me, John.”

“Like I said, I’ll do my best.”

He hands the phone back, sick of Lanny’s voice. Sick of his own for
that matter.

He smokes in silence, lets the ash fall onto the carpet.
Roberto
.
The name reminds him of his childhood, of growing up in Leeds and knowing he
was Tony Ray’s son.
Poor kid
, he’d hear people say behind his back, friends’
parents, teachers, neighbours. It was as if being born with that surname was a
handicap, an inescapable life sentence. But John had escaped. He’d made a clean
break, the white sheep.

Look at him now, taking orders from Lanny Bride.

He swallows hard as he moves towards the dead man in the chair. I’ll
do my best, he tells himself. But not for you, Lanny.

He looks down at the mashed remains of Roberto’s head, the hair
sticky where the blood and champagne is beginning to congeal. Then he picks up
a cork from the floor in front of Rob’s feet, a fat champagne cork, spattered
with blood.

I’ll do my best, he tells himself. For Rob. And for me.

Because after this, I’m finished with being John Ray.

This is going to stop.

He’s back in the
Saab. They’d been keen to get rid of the body, and it wasn’t as if there was a
forensics team waiting to take over. So he’d taken Rob’s keys and wallet, had a
quick look round, and said goodbye to the big man for the last time.

Roberto was the manager of the Park Lane. He would have been the
last one there, early hours of the morning, ready to lock up. The metallic
stink of the blood was still fresh. Couldn’t have been more than a few hours
since he’d died. Three bullet wounds. A shot through the left shin, and one
through each of his arms, just above the elbow.

Rob was about sixty. But he was still strong. And big. You go up
against someone like that, you make sure he’s injured first. That’s how they’d
got him to the chair, must have been. Good shots, too. No stray bullets. They
shot him, taped him to the chair, and beat him to death with a bottle. But why slash
his face like that, as well as caving in his skull? It doesn’t make sense, if
you want to kill someone.

He pulls away, trying not to gag at the thought of it, taking long,
deep breaths. Turns onto Vicar Lane and heads towards the markets. Three shots,
but not fatal. Whoever it was could’ve killed him any time they wanted. They
had a gun. So why the bottle to the head? And why douse him in champagne?

Down by the markets he finds a place and pulls in. Gets out his
iPhone.
No police
. Bollocks to that. Den’s number is still on fast dial,
a year after they last spoke. Should he call her? Explain all this over the
phone, after twelve months of silent regret, after he ruined both their lives?
Not much of a peace offering, after a year thinking about her every night as he
gets slowly and methodically drunk.

He turns the phone in his fingers. Thinks: they taped Roberto up
because they wanted him
alive
. Trying to make him speak? The gunshots,
calculated, accurate. And the tape? They’d come prepared. They knew what they
wanted. But what happened once they got him into the chair? Did he refuse to
talk? They get angry, look around for something, grab a bottle? They start
beating him with it. The bottle breaks – or they smash it – and they use it to slash
his face until it’s unrecognisable. The pain would be too much. He’d be unconscious.
If he hadn’t talked by then, why not just kill him? Or leave him?

They don’t leave him, though. With his face beyond recognition, they
get another bottle and smash his skull with it. Two, three blows perhaps, and
he’d dead. Gotta be, head bowed, body slumped forwards. Yet still they go on, pummelling
his head again and again, until it’s half its original size. Anger? Frustration?
Something doesn’t sound right. They come prepared, calculated, but it ends in a
frenzy.

Even then it doesn’t stop. They go back to the bar, get more champagne,
emptying whole bottles of the stuff over his mashed up head, the fizzy wine
mixing with his blood. Pink champagne. He must have been dead by then. Dear god,
he must have been. Please.

He tries to imagine what must have gone through Rob’s mind as he sat
there, strapped to the chair and knowing he was about to die. What do you feel
when your life flashes past you, and it’s been nothing but blokes like Lanny
Bride and their violent, joyless world? What can Rob possibly have thought
about himself as he realised his life was worth less than a shipment of heroine
or whatever pointless, ephemeral shit he was about to get killed for?

A delivery van revs behind him, edging up onto the pavement. John realises
there are tears streaming down his face, dripping off his chin. He drives on,
hardly able to focus on the road, smearing the tears around his face, tasting
the salt. The traffic is heavy now, lines of buses pulling into the station, disgorging
their cargo of reluctant workers, who juggle phones and tablets, white
headphones plugged into their ears as if the sound of the city is the last
thing they want to hear.

He passes the huge ugly red brick monster of Millgarth Police
Station, knows he should be in there now, reporting Rob’s death, handing over
the keys and making a statement. But he’s not. He wipes his face dry with the
sleeve of his jacket and pulls out onto the roundabout.

A minute later he’s driving down a series of shabby backstreets. Just
half a mile from the soaring, high-rise glamour of twenty-first century Leeds;
a few blocks that the city seems to have forgotten about, or can’t be bothered
to demolish. There are old Victorian workshops, many of them boarded up, curls
of rusted barbed wire along the walls; plus squat, pre-war warehouses, their
concrete stained and rotting. And at the centre of it all is Hope Road, as
shabby and nondescript as the rest, a street so visibly at odds with its own
name that it might be a civic joke.

Apart from one building: a curved, futuristic structure of glass and
brushed steel, so out of place it almost fits: Tony Ray’s Motors.

He parks in the forecourt. Stares at his iPhone. No, he can’t
stomach the thought of speaking to Den now. Not about this. A text is better.

Hi
, he writes, the trembling almost gone
from his hands,
I need help.

The sound of his
size ten Doc Martens on the floor echoes off the glass walls and the high-sheen
bodywork of a dozen cars. Tony Ray’s Motors has been the family firm since the
60s, when his dad arrived in the city, a young immigrant from Franco’s Spain
with no prospects and no friends.

John wanders between a silver Porsche and a six-year-old Subaru Impreza
that they’ve managed to buff up pretty well. For forty-odd years the showroom
had been nothing more than a couple of prefabs and a rough tarmac forecourt,
home base for Tony Ray’s many business interests. Cars? They used to sell the odd
one or two, and they’d always put enough cash through the books to stop the
Revenue complaining. “Don’t let ’em get you on taxes!” his dad used to say.

The Subaru’s got a ridiculous mark-up on it. But it’ll sell.
Impreza’s always do. The Porsche? Great window candy, although it looks a bit out
of place, a top of the range 911 Turbo S. These days people come here for a
solid mid-range motor, second-hand, anything up to a Beemer or an Audi. You
don’t buy your Merc here, and certainly not a hundred and twenty grand Porsche.

He resists the urge to find a brick and smash its windscreen.
Tony Ray’s Motors
. This is where it had all started, and this is where it should
have ended. Three years ago his brother Joe was shot dead, right here, in front
of him. As a warning sign it couldn’t have been any clearer. But John didn’t
take the warning. Instead he took control and rebuilt the premises.

He goes over to a shining Gaggia machine at the back of the showroom
and switches it on. They’d met down here on a Friday night, him and Joe, to
decide what to do with the place. Dad was retiring, and it wasn’t as if they
could sell the business as a going concern, not back then. The shot came from
nowhere. By the time John saw what had happened, Joe had sunk to his knees,
half his head missing.

He jerks the arm out of the Gaggia. With Joe dead and his dad
retired, he should have sold up. All his life he’d been clean, never been
involved in anything dodgy. It should have been the end of the Ray family’s
association with Leeds. But he didn’t sell up. Instead, he came home and took
over the showroom. Bad decision, bad time to make it. Everything that’s gone
wrong in his life since then has come from that decision. And now he’s right back
where he started, down here in the showroom on Hope Road. And somebody else is
dead.

He tamps down the coffee and thrusts the arm back into the machine, his
movements fast and exaggerated. Lanny can have his pound of flesh this time.
Whoever did that to Roberto deserves to feel Lanny Bride’s wrath. An eye for an
eye. He stares at the coffee machine, shaking his head in disbelief. Never
thought he’d hear himself say that,
an eye for an eye
. He knows it’s
wrong, but it feels right. Whoever did that to Roberto’ll get what’s coming to
him. Then it’s over. This is the last favour you’ll do, John, he tells himself,
the last time you’ll have any contact with Lanny Bride, or any of ’em.

He presses the button for an espresso and looks around at the
showroom, quarter of a million pounds’ worth of steel and glass. He tries to
visualise exactly where it was his brother dropped to the floor.
I should
have left this all behind
…

Three years ago Lanny Bride was already in charge of the city, the
de facto successor to the Tony Ray crime empire. John knows he should have left
everything right then, made a clean break. Instead he built a gleaming new showroom
and filled it with cars.

He clicks a remote. Three plasma screens burst into life, each one
set high up where the glass walls of the showroom meet the sloping steel roof
beams. The news is on and he gets a sudden shot of déjà vu. He’s seen the
footage before, years ago, something he would never forget. It’s so heart-wrenching
you hate yourself for watching, but you can’t look away.

A young man emerges from the front entrance of a supermarket. Behind
him, yellow flames dance amongst the rubble-strewn remains of the building. The
man is gaunt, covered in dust from the blast. He seems lost, yet his expression
is also one of astonishment. In his arms is a baby, no bigger than a doll. He
looks down at it, as if the baby has just been born, still wet with blood, taking
its first breaths, and he is cradling it for the first time. He shuffles slowly
from the mess of bricks and broken glass, looking for someone, but knowing that
no one can help. People approach him. He turns from them, pulls the baby closer
to his chest. One of its limbs hangs loose. His face is now empty, as if none
of this is real. The child is cold in his arms. And nothing is real.

The year was 1990. John had been in New Zealand. He saw the report
of the Leeds bombing perhaps a dozen times, mainly on TVs in pubs and bars.
UK:
TERRORIST BOMBING
. Always the same few moments of film, that young man
emerging from the rubble, dead baby in his arms.

It was one of the indelible images of his youth, visual memories
spliced together and played on a loop: the Yorkshire Ripper, the Belgrano,
miners’ strike, Brighton bombing, his dad on the steps of the Old Bailey… Video
clips that will never fade from memory. Better than memory, more real. It’s as
if you haven’t lived through something unless you’ve seen it on screen. Who
doesn’t remember them arresting the Ripper? Or the police horses charging at
Orgreave, Tebbit in his pyjamas, a grinning Tony Ray on the steps outside the Bailey,
not guilty..
. This is England!

But none of these images is lodged so powerfully in John’s memory as
the young man stepping clear of the wreckage of that supermarket in Leeds; no scene
depicts with such simplicity the horror of death, of a life gone cold.

He’s still looking up at the TV screen when the Gaggia starts to splutter.
He turns the sound up. The suspected bomber is dead, had been suffering from cancer…
The newsreader’s intonation is flat and neutral.

“Shit!”

He jumps backwards as hot coffee and steam hiss and splutter from
the machine. He forgot to put a cup underneath. There’s espresso everywhere.