Father and Son (28 page)

“Friends, Romans,
countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him…”

John pauses and looks up from the lectern, ignoring the pain that
shoots halfway down his back.

There are only six men in the chapel, and that includes him and the
one in the coffin. The other four do not appear to be listening. What had he
expected? A sharp intake of breath? A smirk of approval?

No one else was going to give the reading, so he reckoned he’d pick
something he liked.
Julius Caesar
isn’t the obvious choice for a
funeral. Then again, this isn’t what you’d call a normal funeral. Sod it.

“…The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred
with their bones.”

He takes his time with the reading, measuring Shakespeare’s words
carefully, letting them sound out with clarity around the chapel.

Sitting behind him on a chair is a minister in a dark lounge suit. Denomination?
Who cares. He was the only one who’d come. Outside a handful of reporters are
waiting with cameras. Sod them too. Sod the bloody lot of ’em.

His voice rises until he’s almost shouting, his eyes fixed on the
far wall of the room: “You all did love him once, not without cause. What cause
withholds you then, to mourn for him? O judgment!”

Again he pauses, and finds that his hands and arms are trembling
visibly. He looks down at the paper in front of him, can’t bring himself to read
the last lines:
Bear with me. My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
and I must pause till it come back to me
.

He slips the paper into his jacket pocket, then makes his way slowly
from the alter, back to his seat next to Freddy, who is staring directly at Roberto’s
coffin and looks as if he hasn’t heard a word of it.

John had to organise the service himself. Roberto Swales had no
family, and if there were any old friends lurking in the shadows, they haven’t
seen fit to dignify the big fella’s death with their presence. Lanny Bride sent
a wreath of white carnations.

The heating inside the crematorium chapel is a little higher than it
needs to be, and Freddy is achingly uncomfortable, almost gagging in a collar
and tie that he’s got way too tight, as if to make sure no emotions escape. Big
men don’t cry? This one’s been crying for a fortnight. First Roberto, then Tony
Ray. Two old criminals, and Freddy loved them both, a cockeyed, boyish kind of
love for a couple of larger-than-life characters. It turns out that both of
them were involved in one of the most heinous crimes the city had ever
witnessed. Now they’re gone, and something inside Freddy has gone with them.

The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with
their bones.

Three rows back is Andrew Holt, alone, head bowed in contemplation.
When they found him in the back of the van he was unconscious, the masking tape
intended to stop him crying out for help having almost cut off his air supply.
With his legs and arms bound, and his neck yoked to a side panel close to the
floor of the van, he’d twisted and turned, straining wildly for air, his body
convulsed in panic; then he was overcome by a drowning sensation and he blacked
out.

The last thing that went through his mind, eyes full of tears and
the dust from the floor of the van heavy in his nose, was that he was about to
die. He’d been dragged into the very world his father had fought so fearlessly
against; held at gunpoint, gagged and tied up; Graeme Thornton had used him, manipulated
him, then cast him aside like a piece of low-life scum. And now he was going to
die, as if to play out the pitiful failure of everything his father had stood
for.

But he didn’t die. As the building exploded, bringing the walls down
and throwing a mass of flames and debris high into the sky, police officers
were racing up York Road, close enough to feel the deep sonic rumble of the
blast in the air as Carr’s Dry Cleaners was torn apart.

They got to Holt just in time. He was taken to Leeds General
Infirmary, where he spent a couple of days in an observation ward before being
allowed home, rattling with Xanax and in the company of a police counsellor…

The minister leading the service now takes the lectern. He’s been
asked to keep the address short. He clears his throat, looks with studied
sympathy across the rows of empty chairs, and speaks with well-practiced
candour about the sadness of death, of the sudden loss of a friend, and the gap
that it leaves behind.

He sidesteps all mention of morality, never once using the words ‘good’
or ‘bad’. He also steers clear of repentance, of sin and God’s judgment. In
fact he avoids everything but the broadest of platitudes, relying on the kind
of undeniable human verities that we all need when death comes close to us. It
is, all things considered, a very fitting funeral address for a violent
criminal.

RIP Roberto Swales.

Human verities? Death brings its own. Two weeks ago John had faced death.
Looking straight at Graeme Thornton’s gun, he’d been ready to accept the truth,
knowing that he, however unwittingly, had played a part in the death of
Thornton’s child. Standing there, arms raised and waiting for the bullet, he
had felt for the first time in his life the true meaning of unwavering moral
courage.

He had not wished for death, even then, with the terrible knowledge
of what he’d been a part of. Yet he had been willing to accept it, to take Thornton’s
retribution, a father still mourning his baby boy after all these years, the
pain raw and unhealed, as if he’d just emerged from the devastation of the
blast, the infant body in his arms.

Then Den had shot him dead.

John senses that Freddy is fighting to hold back the tears. Not just
for Roberto, perhaps; for everything, for the way that humanity turns on
humanity, stripping away all that is human, until only death remains. John shifts
in his seat, tries to look at Freddy. But his neck and shoulder brace makes it
difficult to rotate his torso, and turning his head a full ninety degrees to
the side is too painful even to consider, despite a hearty breakfast of coffee
and codeine.

“You all right?” he whispers.

“Yeah,” says Freddy. “You?”

“Yep.”

But he wishes he wasn’t here. Roberto wouldn’t have wanted this.
John realises that now. Rob would have wanted a booze-up down at the Park Lane,
reminiscing about the old days, cigars, bottles of brandy, laughs all round.
He’d have wanted to play the part even in death. Because that’s how he died,
trapped in a life he couldn’t escape, playing a part he didn’t want.

It hadn’t taken much to work it out: Lanny had not sold the bar to
Roberto, he’d forced him to take it. Rob knew too much, he’d been Lanny Bride’s
enforcer for too long, his trusted man in the city. Lanny needed to keep
Roberto close. He was never going to be allowed to walk away. The bar was a
life sentence.

Roberto: a sixty-year-old guy thinking about retirement, no strings,
no commitments. Suddenly Lanny decides he’s not going to retire. About the same
time, the Sheenan story resurfaces. If Roberto had needed a reminder of how rotten
and pointless his existence had been, that was it. So he looked for help, went
to see Andrew Holt. But it was too late. Lanny forced him to buy the bar. He
was trapped.

The minister concludes his address, delivered to a room of empty
chairs by a man who never knew the deceased, and who took quite a bit of
convincing to come at all. He’s done well to keep the distaste out of his
voice. There’s a short dedication, and he crosses himself. Then he turns and
mumbles something towards the coffin.

With that the service is over. The minister disappears through a
door behind the lectern and is gone. The pall-bearers and crematorium staff,
meanwhile, are all waiting outside at the front. They’ve read the papers, they
know who Roberto Swales was and what he did all those years ago. They didn’t
want to hear the service, and they will not be offering their condolences.

So, as a recording of Albinoni’s
Adagio
plays quietly in the
background, just four men are left in the chapel to watch the coffin as it
sinks slowly down.

The photographers are leaning on their cars outside. There can’t be
more than half a dozen of them. A couple of weeks after the explosion and most
of the press interest has dissipated.

Freddy puffs out his chest, his eyes red but dry. He looks across
the car park, sees the press pack waiting. The first one of them to come near
him is going to get his jaw knocked out of its socket.

“Go on,” John says, “wait for me in the car. I won’t be a second.”

Freddy doesn’t need telling twice. He rolls his shoulders and storms
over to the Porsche, its gleaming new front end freshly waxed. No one so much
as points a lens at him.

Andrew Holt is on his own, reading the inscriptions on the two
wreathes laid out for Roberto Swales.

“When did you get out?” he asks, watching as John approaches with
short, laboured steps.

“Week ago. Collar bone, ribs, nothing serious. “And you?”

Holt nods. “I’m fine.”

They look at the flowers, two modest wreathes on a plinth that could
take several dozen. Behind them the chapel doors close with a thud.
And stay
out!
the sound seems to say.

“Tell me,” says John, lighting a cigarette, “when I told you Roberto
had been killed, why didn’t you go to the police?”

Holt smiles. “I got a call. Just after I spoke to you. The bloke
told me he’d blow my head off if I told the coppers anything.”

“
Jesus
…”

“It was Dennis Reid. They traced his mobile, y’know, after.” Holt
exhales, shaking his head. “My father was brave. He lived with the threat of
criminals all his life. Me? I’m not so brave. I was scared, I was just so
incredibly scared…”

“You don’t have to be ashamed about that. He was a killer. He would
have done it.”

They’re still looking at the flowers.
Robert Swales
, it says
on the wreath from Lanny. He didn’t even make sure the florists got the name
right.

“In the van,” Holt says, “we were both tied up in the back. As
Thornton drove us he was shouting, like he was boasting. It was weird. He told
me how he’d started coming to see me at the ministry so he could get closer to
your dad.”

John nods. “Roberto too, no?”

“Yeah. He started drinking at the Park Lane to get pally with
Roberto. Told him about killing a man in the army, how he was full or
remorse…”

“It was true, apparently…”

“I know, it was in the paper.”

It had all been in the papers. How Graeme Thornton had set himself
up as a dry cleaner with the help of Alice Carr, the mother of his dead son.
How they’d planned to track down Sheenan, then every member of the crew that
brought the shipment of Semtex to Leeds, killing them one by one until someone
gave them the last name on the list.

Holt shakes his head in quiet disbelief.

“It was Graeme who gave my card to Roberto. And when Roberto turned
up and told me who he was, I thought it was really positive, someone like him
coming to see me. I did what I could, I listened. The poor bloke was hurting.
He knew what he’d done, and he was sorry for it. All of it. I’m convinced.”

“You were the only place Rob could turn, the only thing that might
possibly have made any sense to him.”

Holt nods. “He cried.”

“I bet.”

“The remorse, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“For what it’s worth,” John says, “I think your ministry makes a
difference, and I think you could have helped Rob. I mean, if I had nowhere to
go, no one to turn to, I’d appreciate someone like you being there.”

“I didn’t think I’d ever hear that from you. But, thanks.”

Holt watches as John blows a plume of smoke up into the air above
their heads.

“And you? What now?”

John runs a hand around the back of his neck, considers the question.

“Dunno. I suppose I could try doing something worthwhile for a
change. It’s a thought!” he says, glancing over at the Porsche. “Anyway, better
get going. Look, I’m sorry you got caught up in all this. You know, with my
father, everything.”

“It doesn’t matter. Take care, John,” Holt says, extending an arm.

For a second John looks at it.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” Holt says as they shake hands. “And,” he
adds, looking John in the eye, “the letter I wrote thirty years ago? I’m sorry
about that as well.”

John smiles. “I was going to give you it back.”

“Glad you didn’t. I’m ashamed of it.”

“Too late now,” John says, looking up at the roof of the crematorium
as thin white smoke curls out of a chimney. “Roberto did me a favour. I slipped
it into his pocket in the chapel of rest.”

“Goodbye, John.”

The press are getting into their cars now, show over. They’d only
really turned up to see if Lanny Bride was going to make an appearance. Rumour
was, a young Lanny had also been involved in the Leeds shipment. Impossible to
prove now, though. Everyone else is dead. Apart from one man.