THE DOMINO BOYS (a psychological thriller) (4 page)

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‘Here they are, punctual as clockwork,’ said the landlord. Usual, is it?’

The three men went to the bar, exchanged fleeting greetings with the landlord. ‘Need you ask, Pete? I’ll get these,’ said Duncan Winslade to his friends, fishing in his pocket for his wallet.

Alfie Parker and Barry Stocker peeled off and went to a small back room that they’d booked for the night. It was a tradition carried on from the days of their fathers, who had also used this same room, sitting at the same table and playing with the same set of dominoes. For one reason or another – ill-health and getting old basically – their fathers were all dead. It had been Duncan, when he came up North seven years ago to bury his father – the old man being the last of the original Domino Boys – and set up house in Overthorpe again, as he was staring at his father’s old set of dominoes after the funeral, that he suggested on a whim they extend the tradition in memory of the three lifelong friends. After all, Alfie, Barry and he had been friends for a long time, in spite of Duncan’s long absence in the Met, and of course their gang had been called the Domino Boys. Sure, Alfie and Barry agreed, sounds like a good idea, they said. Fitting, somehow.

It was only ever intended as a one-off, but Friday night became domino night. Maybe it was because each of them needed the others, in some small way. Or perhaps habits are just too hard to kick. It had been going on for so long that no one questioned it anymore.

Alfie and Barry sat down at the table.

‘How’re things?’ said Barry absently.

Alfie shrugged. ‘So-so.’

‘Carpet cleaning doing OK?’

‘Could be better, but can’t complain. How’s the job market?’

‘Crap.’

Alfie noticed how his friend had his hand down by the pocket of his jeans, counting loose change. ‘Look, here…’ he said, pulling out his wallet and opening it.

‘What’re you doing?’ said Barry, quickly putting the change away.

He handed over a banknote. ‘For when it’s your round…’

‘I don’t need your money,’ said Barry sullenly, looking up to the door. ‘Put it away.’

‘Christ, come on, Barry, I know you haven’t got anything. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Take it.’

‘You need it.’

‘I’ve got enough. C’mon, mate, I owe you.’

‘For what?’

‘I dunno. Plenty.’

Barry Stocker sighed heavily, reluctantly took the note and put it into his pocket. ‘I’ll pay you back.’

‘No need.’

Duncan Winslade breezed into the room bearing a tray laden with their drinks. ‘Here we are,’ he said, setting it down on the table. He sat down, scraped a chair up to the table. He raised a glass of beer. ‘Here’s to the early though much anticipated death of Mickey Craddick!’ he said brightly.

The other two grabbed a glass each and they brought them together with a sharp tinkle over the centre of the table.

‘God rot you, Mickey,’ said Alfie, grinning.

‘Goodbye to bad rubbish,’ joined Barry.

Silence descended as they drank down half their beers, another ritual, before plonking down the glasses, almost in unison, on the scarred and dented table. Duncan took the box of dominoes out of his coat pocket and started laying them out ready for their game.

The click of the dominoes against the wood was somehow comforting. It was a calm, quiet, age-old game, hardly played by the younger generation. Not like it used to be. The Coach and Horses had been noted for its hotly-contested competitions, drawing eager men from all over the county, whose position on the league table was viewed as vitally important. There were photographs of the proud winners of the trophy hung in the room where they now played, the very room that hosted the finals, year after year. The last one was played in 1989, the year the mine eventually folded and people had more pressing things on their minds. And anyhow, fashions began to change. It was considered an old man’s game. Duncan, Alfie and Barry were the last of them regularly playing dominoes in the Coach and Horses.

‘The funeral must have cost a fortune,’ said Alfie. ‘I dropped by the graveyard to check it out this morning, before I went down to the allotment. You should have seen it; he had a hearse pulled by four black horses, with these great black feathers on their heads. And the headstone… I heard it was still being made. Marble exported from Italy, nearly ten feet high.’

‘I heard that, too,’ said Barry. ‘He came across a lot of opposition to it, not least because he was a bent bastard and people objected to it, but that the thing was going to be one of the tallest structures in the graveyard, like he was taunting everyone even after his death. But he was on the council, and he got his way like he always did; they allowed it.’

Duncan was turning the dominoes face-down. ‘The amount of people he had in his pockets made sure he would always get his way,’ he said. He thumbed over his shoulder. ‘You know, even Pete was paying some kind of protection money to him.’

‘Get away!’ said Alfie. ‘Pete? Surely the brewery would have had something to say about that.’

‘They didn’t know. Mickey had blokes regularly coming in and causing trouble, starting fights, smashing the place up. You remember what it was like. Either Pete scraped a bit off the takings to stop them or he’d lose the pub.’

‘Why didn’t he go to the police?’ asked Barry.

Duncan looked up at him. ‘Why did nobody else ever think to go to the police?’ he said.

Barry averted his eyes. ‘Bastard,’ he muttered, taking up his drink again. ‘He thought he owned this town.’

‘Anyhow, that’s what I heard,’ said Duncan. ‘But nobody had any proof, and Pete refused to do anything about it, even when I asked him whether it was true or not. He was scared not only for the pub and his job, but for his wife and kids. You’d think he’d have moved away, started up somewhere better away from Craddick, but he never did. My guess is Mickey had some other hold over him. That was his
modus operandi
, something Mickey Craddick was a dab-hand at, blackmail and intimidation. So like a lot of folks hereabouts Pete just went along with it.’

‘Thought he looked a bit more cheerful,’ said Alfie. ‘Now I know why.’

‘Let’s not let that son-of-a-bitch spoil our game,’ said Duncan, sharing out the pieces. ‘I’ve put my house up for sale…’

‘What?’ said Alfie. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Moving abroad.’

‘To that villa of yours in Spain? The one you go to every year on holiday?’

‘That’s the one,’ he replied. ‘This place – this country – it’s got nothing to offer. I’ve nothing left to stay here for. Not since Sophie died…’ He paused with the flat of his hand on the dominoes. ‘Now I’ve finally retired, got my pension, I can sell the house and do something different with my life.’

‘That was Sophie’s house, too,’ said Barry dully. ‘She loved that house.’

‘I know,’ he said quietly. ‘I realise the house is all that’s really left of your sister, but she was my wife, too, and I know she wouldn’t have wanted me to spend the rest of my days moping about the place unhappy.’

Barry Stocker grunted. Nobody in the Stocker household had been keen on the idea of one of their girls marrying a copper. That was back in 1979. Had it been a few years later, in the aftermath of the miners’ strike, it would never have happened. There had been clashes, inevitably intense and ugly, often turning violent, between striking miners picketing the colliery gates and the police, the two primary careers suggested to decades of kids leaving Overthorpe secondary school. The two professions had been sitting together, if not easily then in begrudging toleration, for decades, but finally came together in a tragic, hate-fuelled cocktail of politics, brute force and mutual loathing during the bitter strike. It split the community and the wound had never really healed. In parts of Overthorpe, the police were hated almost as much as the blacklegs, most of them eventually forced to leave town by an unrelenting, uncomfortable heat wave of contempt.

But Duncan Winslade hadn’t been living in Overthorpe then. Just before the strike he left the town to go to work for the Met in London. So he was mostly immune to the contempt felt for the police in Overthorpe. The disease of fulmination that still permeated the dead shops, empty back alleys, the rundown streets had infected, by turn, the younger generation who in these tough times were also looking for something to rail against. The fact the town turned out a thousand-strong on the day of Maggie Thatcher’s funeral burning a crude effigy of her outside the Job Centre and singing, ‘
Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead…
’ showed that it would be a while yet before any wounds were likely to heal. And it never would, thought Barry Stocker, unless something was done about the fact that the North was being sidelined.

Even though he knew Duncan was a decent bloke, there was something that burned like acid inside Barry whenever he talked about his bloody villa in Spain. Or his damned pension. Christ, to be fifty-five and retired, that was a damn luxury these days. What the hell would my pension be worth when I get to retire in ten years? Barry’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Duncan.

And he never saved his sister Sophie from drowning. He said he tried, but who knows really? Had he played chicken, refused to swim out and drag her back as the current took her further away from the shore? And now he was planning on abandoning her altogether, abandoning them all and going to Spain. Live the good life on his police pension while he was going to be left with nothing…

Alfie glanced at Barry, understood that all was not right. He was up tight. It’s how he went – up and down like the weather. He thought he’d better lighten things up a bit. ‘Here you are…’ he said, tossing three bits of card onto the table.

‘What’s this?’ said Duncan, who was blissfully unaware of Barry’s edginess.

‘Tickets to our latest production,’ he said, beaming.

‘Thought you said you were giving up the amateur dramatics,’ said Barry, his attention duly diverted as he snatched up the ticket.

‘One each for you and the wife,’ said Alfie. ‘Treat yourself. Have a night out at the Town Hall on me. This is our production of
An Inspector Calls
. It’s going to be quite good, you know. We’ve attracted some good actors coming over from Sheffield for some of the parts, and not just older people either. Got some young kids looking to get involved.’

Duncan smiled. The Overthorpe Amateur Players – or OAPs for short. They used to rib Alfie about this, and that he secretly yearned to be a luvvie, but Alfie being Alfie he’d always shrug it off good-humouredly. ‘Thanks, Alfie,’ he said, popping the two tickets into his top pocket.

‘Final rehearsals and then we hit the stage!’ said Alfie. ‘Mind you, we’re struggling to keep going; we used to get a small arts grant from the council, but that’s been cut. Unless we can raise some cash the OAPs will have to fold. Shame, because it’s been going for thirty-five years now. No one cares about the arts these days and what it can do for a community.’

Barry nodded his thanks. He doubted whether his wife would be bothered with watching a bunch of am-dram queens. The OAP productions were notoriously corny, and she always said she preferred the telly anyway, but he smiled his gratitude all the same. Alfie meant well. He always did. The one person Barry could call a true friend. Didn’t make any judgements, accepted him for what he was. You don’t get nice guys like Alfie Parker anymore, he thought. It also bothered Barry that he’d once tried out for the OAPs, just for something different to do, and he secretly rather fancied himself as Clint Eastwood, but Alfie was the one that had to tell him he wasn’t cut out to be an actor, not even in amateur dramatics – they had a standard to maintain, after all – but he could help out with tickets and the like. Barry was real miffed about that, stormed off in a huff and never went back.

Sensing Barry was cooling down, the impending crisis averted, Alfie began to sift through his dominoes.

Then they heard a noise outside the door, a bit of an altercation at the bar. A barrage of eager voices. The door to their small room burst open. They all turned to look to see what the fuss was about.

And Mickey Craddick was standing in the doorway.

‘Christ Almighty!’ said Barry, his mouth dropping open.

‘Hello, boys,’ said the young man, sweeping confidently into the room.

Pete the landlord was close at his back. ‘I’m sorry, guys…’ he said

The man, aged about twenty-five, was the spitting image of Mickey Craddick as he was in his younger days, and waltzed up to their table with all his calm arrogance. He stood there, hands in his pockets, looking down at the three men. Two other men, about the same age, barged past Pete into the room. Their faces were red, eyes wide with mischief, betraying a previous consumption of alcohol.

‘The Domino Boys,’ said the young man. ‘I’ve heard so much about you.’

‘This room’s been booked,’ said Pete. ‘This is a private party.’

‘Private party?’ He laughed.

‘Who are you?’ asked Duncan. But he didn’t need telling.

‘Donnie Craddick.’

‘Are you Mickey’s son?’ said Alfie aghast. ‘We never knew Mickey had a boy.’