Father and Son (3 page)

He cleans up the
coffee as best he can and leaves a note for Connie and Freddy.
Probably
won’t be in today
. It won’t make much difference. They run the place pretty
much on their own anyway.

By the time he’s driven back to the High School the morning is
already in full swing. The curtains are open in most of the flats and the car
park is almost empty. He normally manages a wry smile as he walks in through the
main entrance, recalling the musty smell of the old school, now replaced by one
of new carpets and contract cleaners. He moved in here a few years ago, one of
the large penthouses at the back. Everyone should live where they used to go to
school, he likes to tell people. It keeps you grounded, reminds you who you
really are.

Today, though, the building only reminds him of Roberto, and of a
past he can’t escape. He moved back to Leeds after Joe was killed. A mistake?
Yes. The flat in the old school, the gleaming new showroom, all one huge
mistake. Now this.

He looks at his watch as the wooden doors of the building’s main
entrance slam shut behind him. The messed up body of Roberto will already be in
the ground somewhere or other, unidentified and unmourned.

He’s going to find out who did it.

Then he’s done.

“Hi,” says Jeanette without looking up, “where’ve you been?”

She’s on one of the two leather sofas in the middle of the living
room, bathed in the bright white light that streams in from the windows. On her
lap rests a silver MacBook.

“Out and about,” he says, grabbing a mug and filling it from a large
cafetière on the kitchen island. He’s jumpy, trying to keep his hands busy. Doesn’t
really want anybody in the flat right now.

Jeanette seems not to notice. To her John looks the same as he has on
the two previous mornings she’s woken up in his flat, a loose black suit, shirt
open at the neck, and a cigarette in his mouth. He has the permanent air of
someone who’s just walked out of a casino in time for breakfast.

“What’s that on your shirt?” she says, her eyes having already
returned to the screen.

“I had a fight with a coffee machine.”

He hears the beginning of a news report from the speakers of her laptop.
She fumbles with the touchpad, turns the sound off. But it’s too late.

“That about Bernard Sheenan?” he says, walking across and looking
over her shoulder.

Paused on the screen is the image of a white cottage, a police
cordon outside.

She says nothing.

“He’s dead, then?” he asks. “Sheenan?”

“Yes. Been dead over a week, apparently.”

“You don’t sound very happy about it.”

“Should I be?”

She lets the report play, the sound muted. They watch in silence as
the career of Bernard Sheenan is summarised in thirty seconds of news clips. Swift
rise through the ranks of the IRA, five years in the Maze, prominent role in
the Peace Process…

John knows the story well enough. Sheenan was convicted of arms
offences in the early 90s. He was also suspected of having planned the Leeds
supermarket bombing, the one that killed a baby.

“Let him rot in hell.”

“How about not speaking ill of the dead, eh?”

“I’ll call a murderer what I like. Look.” He leans over her, jabbing
a finger at the laptop as the footage of the Leeds bombing is played. “You seen
this before?”

“Of course I have.”

John realises he’s trembling, heart going fast.

“Can you turn that off?” he says, unable to take his eyes off the
image of the young man, behind him the ruins of a building in flames. All these
years later, and still he can’t look away.

She closes the Mac.

“Want one?” he says, lighting himself a cigarette as he sits
opposite her on the other sofa, a long, narrow coffee table between them, piled
high with yachting magazines.

“I only smoke when I’m drinking.”

“There’s a bottle of vodka in the fridge.”

She smiles, brushes big handfuls of auburn hair from her face.

“I
knew
him, all right?” she says. “That’s all. I knew him.”

“You knew Sheenan?”

Investigative journalist? She probably knows half the criminals in
the country. He’s not going to tell her about Roberto, though. Lanny was dead right
about that.

“Work, y’know,” she says. “I interviewed him a couple of times.”

He’s only marginally interested, but he’s got to say something,
anything to avoid the thought of Roberto.

“Trying to get a confession out of him?”

She shrugs.

“You
were
!” He stops. Thinks. “Hey, didn’t they say he had
cancer. Death bed confession?”

She drinks from a mug, her hair falling down as her head dips,
shrouding the mug and her hand. She’s in her late thirties and it suits her, one
of those women who’ll look just as good when she’s sixty.

“Sort of. He had cancer. Don’t you read the papers?”

“Hardly ever. They’re full of bad news.”

“He announced he had cancer about a month ago,” she says, lifting her
head and pushing all that hair back off her face again. “I think he was going
to admit to the bombing before he died. A final act of contrition. Lay the past
to rest.”

John nods.
Lay the past to rest
. He nods, but he
doesn’t agree. The past doesn’t rest, it just finds new ways of coming back at
you. What kind of rest is Roberto going to get? And that young man, walking out
of the rubble with a dead baby?

“Was Sheenan going to give you the exclusive?”

“I tried. I’ve got to get my stories from somewhere. Anyway, he’s
dead now.”

She leans forward and helps herself to a cigarette, lighting it and
blowing several long plumes of smoke up above her head before settling back
down on her sofa.

“How did he go? Softly into the night? Peacefully in his bed?”

She stops, confused. “You really haven’t seen the news this morning?
He was murdered.”

He tries to summons up an emotion. But he feels nothing. “Can’t say
I’m heartbroken. What comes round, y’know.”

She smiles as she shakes her head. “No. He wasn’t like that. He was
born in the wrong place and got involved in a war.”

“Great defence for baby killing.”

“Y’know, he had this line, about regretting every death in every
armed conflict, every one of them. And he meant it. He carried a shitload of
guilt.”

“And you believe that? I mean, when you see that young bloke coming
out of the rubble, and he’s holding his own dead baby? Is there enough guilt in
the world for that?”

She says nothing, purses her lips.

“An eye for an eye,” he says, almost involuntarily. “That’s fair, isn’t
it, in this case?”

“You don’t strike me as the hang ’em type.”

He senses the shift in her voice. Suddenly she’s in interview mode,
her tone unprejudiced, unopinionated. Journalist. Probably can’t help herself.
Lanny was right. Not a word.

“It just puzzles me,” he says, holding his mug in both hands,
staring down into it, a burning cigarette still between his fingers. “People get
killed all the time, war, random murders, traffic accidents, food poisoning for
christsake… We accept it as part of life. But when it comes to the bloke who
set a bomb that killed a newborn baby we can’t bring ourselves to pull the
trigger. It’s a strange trait of our civilised society, don’t you think? Is
there nothing that deserves death? No act evil enough?”

He stops, sees the cigarette ash on his trousers, realises he’s been
talking to himself, tears in his eyes. When he looks up, she’s standing behind
the sofa.

“Well, somebody must’ve thought he deserved it,” she says, almost a
whisper. “I’m gonna have a shower.”

She moves away without another word.

John watches her go. She’s only wearing a white t-shirt and skimpy
black pants. Until now he hadn’t noticed.

He grabs her MacBook,
running his fingers along its cold edges. Only Apple could make a computer sexy
to touch. He Googles Sheenan. The obituaries have already started.

Bernard Sheenan, born 1965 in West Belfast, was a product of the
troubles in Ulster, but also an architect of the Peace that followed…

A halo is already being hoisted above his head. An architect of
peace? He killed a baby boy.

… Academically gifted, Sheenan left school at sixteen and became
an apprentice electrician. He had no background in republicanism. His father,
also an electrician, had worked as a contractor for the British army and at
various government installations in Ulster. Whilst still an apprentice, Sheenan
found himself drawn to left-wing politics, and began attending meetings of
various socialist groups. On leaving one of these meetings he was caught up in
the shooting of Terry Forlex, a member of the Provisional IRA, who had also
attended the meeting. Forlex survived, but the incident led to Sheenan’s
radicalisation within the republican movement. In his book about the troubles,
written whilst still in the Maze, Sheenan would refer to this as his ‘whiff of
grapeshot’.

Sheenan became active in the West Belfast Battalion, quickly gaining
a reputation for both intellectual rigor and physical bravery. He moved to the
British mainland where he worked as an electrician and joined an IRA cell,
providing technical support for the mainland bombing campaign of the late 1980s.
His natural talents as a strategist were soon recognised and by the early 90s
he had become an advisor to the IRA’s Army Council. He was convicted of arms
offences in 1993. From the Maze he became prominent in defining the policy of
the
Provos
in their final years of terrorist
activity…

John stops reading.
Natural talents
? What about the bombs in
pubs, the shootings, the disgusting cowardice of it all? And what about Leeds?
Semtex on a supermarket shelf and no warning given, a job botched so badly that
no one ever claimed responsibility. There’s evil in the world, but sometimes
evil makes mistakes. Your baby was murdered because of a mix-up. Sorry…

He clicks through several more obituaries, burning with a rage he
cannot understand or rationalise. What is it he’s looking for? Someone saying
that Sheenan was a murdering bastard, that nothing should be allowed to assuage
the guilt of a person who destroyed a life that was two weeks old, a life that had
hardly begun?

Whilst in the Maze, Sheenan was instrumental in shaping the Republicans’
approach to talks with the British government. He was said to be one of the few
men that Mo Molan, the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland,
genuinely respected. When the Good Friday Peace Agreement was signed in 1998,
Sheenan left prison and severed all ties to republicanism. He moved to a small
village in County Kerry and worked as a self-employed electrician, becoming involved
in a number of local charities. He never spoke about republicanism again.

John stops.
Good-bad-bad-good
. He knows all about moral
relativism. Tony Ray’s son? He’s spent his entire life thinking about good and
bad and what it means. But in all that time, through a difficult adolescence in
which he slowly came to understand that his father and brother were criminals,
he never saw them as evil. Robbing and counterfeiting? Dodgy, yes, but who had
his dad ever harmed? Chanel, Rolex, the Bank of England?

He clicks through more obituaries. They seem almost to be celebrating
Sheenan’s life, a glowing recommendation for terrorism as a career path. He
wonders what the obituaries for the fortnight-old baby were like? Or any of
Sheenan’s other victims for that matter. He knows the papers are right, that everyone
is a product of their environment, of the times they live in. Everything, every
act, should be judged in its context, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom
fighter…

He
knows
all that. But the sense of disgust won’t go away,
the feeling that some acts are so evil they should never be forgiven. A dead
baby, Roberto’s mashed-up skull… Is there nothing that deserves death in
return?

He hears the scratching of keys in the lock.

A moment later the door opens and Den is standing there, jeans,
trainers, her old brown leather jacket.

“I still have my set,” she says, squeezing out the thinnest of smiles
as she slips the keys back into the front pocket of her jeans.

He gets to his feet, the laptop still in his hands.

“Mmm, got yourself a Mac,” she says.

She looks around, quickly taking in every detail of John Ray’s huge
and annoyingly tasteful bachelor pad. It doesn’t seem to have changed one bit since
she was last here.

“You want coffee?” he says, putting the Mac down and starting towards
the kitchen area. Then, thinking better of it, he walks over and kisses her on
the cheek.

She smells just like she always used to, a faint hint of peaches.
And it was her skin, he used to tell her, not her perfume. Straight out of the
shower she smelled just the same.

He looms over her, six-two to her five-seven.

“You let your hair grow,” she says.

“Nah, I just haven’t cut it.”

“Or brushed it. The message?”

“Huh?”

“You texted me.”

“I… sorry, yes, I just didn’t expect to see you so quickly.”

“Staying with my sister for a few days. I had some leave due. And
no,” she smiles sarcastically, “I don’t have anywhere better to go.”

He wants to hug her, push his face down into her neck, feel her skin
against his.

But something’s wrong. The sarcasm is frozen on her face.

“Hello there!” says Jeanette as she emerges from the bathroom in a robe
that’s too small for her, the pre-Raphaelite richness of her hair at its burning
best against the white towelling.

“Traded down to an older model, John?” says Den.

“Ouch!” Jeanette laughs, makes her way to the kitchen. “
You
must be the ex.”

“Cropped up in the conversation, have I?” Den says, arms folded, as
if bolstering herself from the cold.

“No, actually,” Jeanette says as she gets herself a mug from the
cupboard. “But there are bits of you everywhere. Trashy paperbacks which I am
sure are not the property of Mr John Ray MA, hairdryer, tweezers, tampons, this
bathrobe… Then there are the pants he keeps in his sock drawer.”

“Feel free to borrow them, if they fit.”

“Ooh, double-ouch!” she says, hoisting herself up onto a high stool
by the kitchen island and pouring herself a coffee, doing a pretty good job of
showing no further interest in the two people standing awkwardly by the door;
making it look, indeed, as if they are the ones intruding on her morning
routine.

Den watches her for a moment, then turns her attention to John.

“The message?”

Her skin looks good, a little pale, perhaps, and her hair is a touch
shorter than it used to be, almost like a schoolboy’s.

“Have you lost weight?” he says. Doesn’t know why. Den was always
slim. Plus, she’d never cared much about whether there was a bit of fat on her.
Never cared about any of that stuff.

“The
text
?” she says.

She never cared about hiding her impatience either.

“It’s Dad,” he says, first thing that comes into his head. “He wants
to see you.”

His eyes are wide open, pleading for her to understand.

It takes her a second or two. She glances across at Jeanette.

“Okay. Okay, what time do you want to go?”

He rubs a hand across his face.

“You know his dad?” comes a voice from the kitchen area.

Jeanette slips down from the stool, moves over to the sofa and sits
there cross-legged, cradling her mug.

Den and John are still near the door, looking like guilty fools. Of
the two, Den is the more proficient liar, part of her job, an unavoidable
skill.

“I’ve met him once or twice,” she says. “He’s got a soft spot for
the police, hasn’t he, John?”

“Shit, you’re a copper!”

“None taken,” says Den, turning back to John. “You wanna go now? I’m
busy later.”

“I won’t be a minute,” he says. “Need a new shirt.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Den says as he disappears into the
bedroom, almost jogging across the room, as if he’s glad to be out of there.

“In town for long?” Den asks, once John has disappeared.

“A while, yeah. Renting a cottage in Bramthorpe. It’s a little
vill…”

“I know it. Very peaceful.”

Jeanette nods. “It’s a nice angle, that, isn’t it?” she says,
leaning back on the sofa until the bathrobe comes apart, revealing a deep
cleavage that she’s obviously not shy about.

“What, Bramthorpe?”

“No. That Tony Ray’s son was shacked up with a police officer. Rank?”

“Who me?”

“Just for the record. I’m writing Tony Ray’s biography, in case John
forgets to tell you. It’d be great to have a chat with you sometime.”

“I bet. Detective Sergeant, Greater Manchester CID. I used to work
here in Leeds.”

“Don’t tell me,” says Jeanette, looking down admiringly at her own
body before pulling the bathrobe together, “you moved to Manchester when things
fell apart with big bad John Ray? Getting in the way of promotion, was it,
living with criminals.”

“He’s not a criminal.”

“So let’s have a chat,” Jeanette says, smiling. “Tell me how good he
is.”

“Looks like you’ve been getting to know his good side pretty well
without my help.”

John reappears, brighter, stronger, the old John. Same baggy black
suit, fresh white shirt, no tie. A big man, and he’s ready for action. You
wouldn’t want to get in his way right now.

“What?” he says, the two women both looking at him.

But he doesn’t want to know what.

He needs to talk to Den.