To Die For (30 page)

“I lost.”

I didn’t know if he was talking about his betting. I didn’t think so.

“You know why I’m here?”

“Paget.”

“Yeah.”

“Had no choice, Joe. You know that. Paget was after you and if he knew I’d seen you and not told him, he’d’ve sliced me up. I had to call him.”

So, there it was. He thought I wanted him because he’d grassed me up to Paget. He thought he could sob his way out of that. He didn’t know I knew about Brenda. If he’d known that, he would’ve run like a bastard.

“I want him,” I said.

“Can’t help you. I don’t know where he’s gone, do I?”

“You can contact him.”

“How?”

“You called him up when you set him onto me.”

“I called him at Marriot’s place.”

“You must have had another number.”

He took too long to answer me, and he knew it.

“I got a mobile number.”

“Call it. Tell him I want to meet you tonight, 2.00am, in the car park, back of the cinema, Lee Valley leisure centre.”

“What?”

“Do it. Tell him I’m looking for him. Tell him I’m meeting you because I think you might know where he is.”

“But...”

“Do it.”

“He’ll come for you.”

“That’s right.”

“Fuck.”

He was in a spot. If he set up Paget, he was dead. If he set up me, he was dead.

“Fuck,” he said again. “I can’t do that. Cross Paget? Fuck that.”

“You crossed me.”

“I had to.”

“Right. And now you have to cross him.”

“Christ, Joe. He’ll skin me.”

“He won’t live long enough.”

“You think he’ll come alone? He’ll come with a fucking army.”

“Do it.”

“I ain’t got a phone.”

I took a mobile from my jacket pocket and gave it to him. He looked at the phone like he’d never seen one before. Then he looked left and right, trying to find a way out of the jam he was in. He pulled another cigarette from his pack and lit it with shaking hands. He puffed on the fag for a moment, trying to think his way out. He had no chance of that. After he’d done his thinking, he fished a small black book from his jacket pocket and flicked through it. He found the number he wanted and dialled. I leaned in close so I could hear what was said. A voice came over the line. A man answered and Bowker asked for Paget. There was a pause and finally I heard Paget’s voice. Bowker told Paget what I’d told him to say. Paget said,

“Really? That’s very interesting.”

The line went dead. I took the phone from Bowker. Paget’s mobile number was now in the memory. I put a hand on Bowker’s chest.

“Now,” I said, “tell me about Brenda.”

He stopped breathing for an instant. He said,

“Who?”

I put a fist in his diaphragm. It was only a poke, really. I wanted him to be able to talk. He doubled-up and threw up, his vomit splashing by my feet. He crumpled to the ground. I let him stay there until he could breathe again. Then I prodded him with my foot and told him to get up. He climbed back to his feet. His greasy quiff had fallen over his eyes.

A man came out of the pub. He looked us over.

“What’s going on?”

A few people were peering at us through the window. I told the man to fuck off.

“This is my fucking pub, mate.”

I told him to fuck off again. He went back inside.

Bowker was shaking, rubbing his gut. Yellow spittle hung down from his lip and he wiped it off with a trembling hand. He couldn’t look at me.

“You remember Brenda,” I said. “Tall lady, black, worked for Marriot. She smiled a lot. They found her in an alley, carved up.”

“Please,” he said to the ground.

“Tell me.”

“I didn’t know what he was going to do, Joe. Honest.”

“Tell me.”

“I owed a lot to Jimmy Richardson. I mean, Christ, I owed a lot, twelve grand. Richardson wanted my bollocks in a sling. Paget told me he’d straighten it out if I did a small job. I had to do it. What could I do? And Paget said he just wanted a word with her.”

“You believed him?”

“No. No, I didn’t. But I thought he was just going to put the frighteners on her. Maybe rough her up a bit. That’s all.”

“You knew I was seeing her?”

“Course. Everyone knew. But I never thought you were a grass.”

“So you knew she was grassing Marriot up to the law, and you thought Paget was just going to rough her up?”

He looked up at me, then, and I could see that he knew he was edging closer to his own murder. He held my jacket loosely in his hands. I knocked them off.

“I don’t believe you, Bowker. I think you knew what was going to happen to her.”

The pub’s owner came out again, this time with a couple of other men, one carrying a snooker cue. I told them all to fuck off. They looked at me and then at Bowker. The owner dithered and said something to the others. He turned to me and said,

“I don’t want no trouble.”

They turned slowly and went back inside. I didn’t think they’d call the law.

Bowker was sweating now, and his hands kept coming up and holding onto my jacket and tugging it. He was looking up at me and what he saw made him hold on tighter.

I was tired of his hands on me. They were dirty and sweating and gnarled and they’d touched Brenda up. They clung to me and tugged weakly and I didn’t want those hands to ever touch me again. I swiped them away and he staggered and I straightened him up.

“You killed Brenda.”

“You can’t hurt me, Joe, there are witnesses. They’ve seen you. You’re not that stupid.”

My hand was around his throat before I knew it. He gasped and struggled, but there was nothing in him, no leverage, no strength. I raised him off the ground and pushed my face into his so that I could watch his eyes as he tried to hang onto life. His face was red, his eyes bulging, his mouth twisted. His hands scrambled against my arm. There was a crackling sound coming from him. I wanted to crush his throat. I wanted to destroy him.

I didn’t kill him. I should have done, but he was right, there’d been too many witnesses. And I had other things to do. I could kill Bowker later. Maybe it was a greater punishment to let him live, to let him go back to his prison flat, and to a fat wife with swollen legs who didn’t care if some thug was out to get her husband, and to his lifelong losing streak.

“You grass me up to Paget about tonight and I’ll know, and I’ll come back for you.”

I dropped him and left him on the ground, his face in his own vomit.

I’d thought about holding onto him, using him as bait for when Paget showed up, but it was too long to wait and I didn’t want him jamming up the works or delaying me. I wasn’t thinking straight, I suppose. My head hurt, as it did all the time these days, a throbbing in the back of my skull that stretched through to my forehead and into the backs of my eyes.

I drove back to Browne’s. When he saw me, he said,

“Your head again?”

“Yeah.”

He went to the kitchen and came back with a couple of pills. I wouldn’t have bothered, but I had to be alert that night. I knocked them back and they wiped me out and I had to go lie down for a while.

I woke once. At least, I thought I’d woken. The girl was standing by my bed, her arms by her side and her hair hanging down in plaits. She didn’t move, but stared with those large eyes. I reached out for her and touched Brenda.

One time, about three weeks before she was killed, Brenda said,

“Have you got any ambition, Joe?”

We’d been in her flat, sitting at that small formica table she had, eating Chinese. It was late and she’d finished work. There was some kind of soft classical music on. It wasn’t my thing, but I think she thought it added to the atmosphere, so I let it go.

“To do what?”

“I don’t know. Anything.”

“Anything else, you mean.”

She smiled and her eyes sparked to life and her face lit up. She looked a hundred years younger.

“You got me,” she said. “Well, have you?”

“No.”

She nodded and carried on eating for a while.

“I have,” she said. “Did I tell you? I’m saving up.”

She had told me, but she’d forgotten. I knew she wanted me to ask her about it, so I did.

“I want to be a beautician. I want to own me own place. A beauty parlour. They call them parlours. I wonder why. Isn’t that what they called a lounge in posh places?”

I shrugged.

“I like the sound of that,” she was saying. “What should I call it? I was thinking Brenda’s Parlour, but that’s got no ring, you know? I can’t think of anything that rhymes with Brenda. Or parlour.”

“Big spender,” I said.

She laughed, but she was forcing it. Something was bothering her. She was trying too hard to be bright and happy.

“If you want money,” I said, “I can let you have some.”

She touched my arm.

“No, Joe. No. I don’t want any money.”

“I’ve got plenty. You might as well do something with it.”

She leaned over and kissed my cheek.

“That’s sweet,” she said.

It wasn’t sweet. My money wasn’t doing anything. I just saved it up for the sake of it. I’d never known what to do with it. I’d never wanted a fast car or an expensive watch or any of that shit.

“It’s not much to ask, is it?” she said. “To be a beautician? That’s not much.”

She wasn’t telling me, she was telling herself. Or trying to. I don’t think she was getting through.

“You wanted to be a carpenter, didn’t you?” she said. “I remember you told me.”

That was true, as far as it went. It was something I’d once enjoyed, when I was young, when I still thought there was a choice. Then, I’d thought I could use my hands to make something. Turned out I could use them better to pull things apart.

“Sometimes I don’t think I’m going to make it,” she was saying. “You know? I mean, I think ‘Who are you kidding? Who do you think you are?’ I mean, look at me, Joe. Just some over the hill black tart. Who the bloody hell would want me to make them beautiful?”

I said,

“You’re not so bad.”

When I looked at her, she was resting her fork on her plate and looking off into some middle-ground. She hadn’t heard me. She had that look, the one Kid had had sometimes. It made Brenda look like a child, lost, scared, trying not to show it. Kid had been a child, she had been lost and scared and hammered by the world. I suppose Brenda was a child too, in a way. She still had the sort of stupid dreams that children had, like wanting to be a beautician.

I finished eating and went to make a cup of tea. When I came back, she’d given up with the meal and had gone to sit on the sofa. She had the window open, the curtains pulled back. A weak cold breeze wafted into the place and carried a far-off smell of wet air and diesel, and the sound of droning traffic. She was smoking and gazing at the darkness outside. In her hand was a glass of gin. It was a big glass and it was mostly full. I saw the bottle on the floor. I didn’t see any tonic.

There was a glaze to her eyes, and I thought she’d been crying. I put the mugs of tea down on the table. She kept her eyes on the window. In a low, distant voice, she said,

“I can’t stand it, Joe. Sometimes, I just can’t stand it. What they do.”

I knew what she was talking about. Marriot did things with kids.

“Get out, then. I've told you, do something else. Fuck Marriot. He gives you any grief, I’ll rip him apart.”

She smiled vaguely, like she was humouring a child. But the smile wore away from her face, and her gaze was back into that middle distance again, between here and nowhere, between what she was and what she knew she could never be. I don't know why she did that to herself. I’d told her enough times that life was a piece of shit. If she'd got used to that, she wouldn't have been endlessly disappointed. But when I would say that to her, she would look at me with her thin smile and it would be like she was sorry for me, like I was the one suffering, and she was here to make everything all right. So she carried on with her suffering, and with her life, and with me. She was a romantic, I suppose, or an idealist or whatever. You can't do much with people like that.

Whatever she saw there, in that middle-land, she didn’t want me in on it. I think she thought she was protecting me. Maybe she was.

It’s funny; Brenda thought she could protect me. Kid thought so too. And Browne. None of them could do anything for themselves except be victims, but they all thought they could protect a violent, war-torn monster like me. I say it’s funny. It’s not. It’s about as far from funny as you can get.

“We could go somewhere,” I said. “We can start again. Somewhere.”

“You don’t understand, Joe. I can’t explain it. I have to carry on. Not for me, but…”

There were tears coming down her face. She stubbed her cigarette out and took a long drink from the glass. She shook her head and wiped away the tears. She looked at me and forced a smile.

“I’m being stupid,” she said. “Come on, let’s go and get some fresh air.”

I should have listened to her. Things would have been different. She might have had six years more life, for one thing. We might still be together. Who knows, she might have got her beauty parlour.

Anyway, I should have listened to her. I should have understood what she was telling me. I should have done lots of things. I should have killed Marriot and Paget back then, before they’d killed her, before they’d used Kid, before anything.

I should have done those things.

But I hadn’t, and people were going to pay for that.

REVENGE AND THE MACHINE

Coming in 2014