To Kill For (16 page)

He disappeared for a while. When he came back, he had a syringe in his hand. He stuck me with it, pressing the plunger quickly. I don't know what it was he shot in me. He told me, but I didn't take it in.

‘Need a clear head,' I said, stupidly.

‘Well you're out of luck there, aren't you? You haven't had a clear head since I've known you. We in the profession call it being bloody stupid. It's a form of brain damage. There.'

He pulled the syringe out and unscrewed the needle.

‘Now, no exertions, understand? Don't even sneeze for the next twelve hours.'

I sat there and felt my head fall and dip and whirl, like those black crows. Browne went and sat in his chair and watched me.

‘Bad, huh? Well, you were almost killed a couple of weeks back. I'm not surprised your body's reacting like this. You need to be hospitalized. But then you know that. You should at least go and rest.'

‘Can't.'

‘No. Of course. Places to go, people to kill. Right?' He smiled darkly. ‘That's what it's all about. Aye, that's it. I patch you up so you can go out and slaughter. Is it revenge, Joe? Is that what you're after? Don't you understand that doesn't work? That's like trying to cut out a cancer with a meat cleaver. You destroy yourself as much as the thing you want to destroy. Revenge isn't about getting justice or closure or anything. It's about satisfying your lusts, your base desires. It's ego, man. Bloody ego.'

I saw his lips move. I heard the words a minute later. I just kept staring at him.

‘It doesn't matter,' I heard myself say.

‘Och, what's the bloody use.'

He got up and left the room. I thought he was gone for good, but he came back straight away with a glass of Scotch. He grabbed the TV remote and took it and the drink over to his chair. He sat down and flicked the TV on. He made an effort to watch whatever they were churning out. To me, it was all noise and blur. He took some gulps of his drink and switched channels. He was angry with me. I didn't know why.

I opened my eyes. The light from the sky had gone. I must have passed out. There must've been something in that brew Browne gave me. There were no lights on, but I could see Browne by the glow of the TV. He was in the chair still, but he wasn't solid like he'd been. Now he was a lump of clothes. A bony hand at the end of a sticklike arm gripped a drink. The few grey hairs he had left were a mess. He was staring at some programme about sea birds. They dived into the sea and swam around under the water. I thought again of those crows, their screeching, mocking cries. A murder of crows. Wasn't that what they called them?

Murder. Damn right.

I moved. Browne looked over at me. He looked a dozen years older than he had a few hours ago. I saw the bottle of Scotch by his foot.

‘Decided to carry on living, did you? Well, let us rejoice.'

He turned his head back in the direction of the TV.

‘Not that you care,' he said, ‘but I've decided on something. I'm going home.'

My head was still fuggy. Wasn't this his home?

‘Home?'

‘To Scotland, I mean. North of London a bit. You know where that is, don't you?'

Did I? I wasn't sure.

‘Why?' I managed to say.

‘Why? I can't take it any more, that's bloody why. I can't live here, be amongst these people. You have a system for coping; you just bull your way through, go after what you want and if someone gets in your way you smash them. Maybe that's the way the world is these days; take what you want and damn everyone else. It's Darwinian, I suppose. Fundamentally. Anyway, it's not my world. Probably never was.'

I didn't have it in me to tell him to shut up so I just sat and waited for him to prattle on some more. He didn't. Instead, he took some of his drink and watched the birds. We both watched the birds. Seagulls were gathering in gangs and swooping down on fish. They were murdering them. Maybe Browne was right; everything murdered everything else.

Time crawled. My head floated to the ceiling and came back slowly. Browne got drunker. The day got older. The sky got darker.

‘I miss her,' Browne said. ‘Stupid, I know. After all, she was only here a few days, wasn't she? And she hardly spoke. But I miss her. I suppose because she was so…'

He sighed and ran a hand over his hair. I didn't understand what he was talking about.

I said, ‘Brenda.'

He didn't hear me. I don't know if I even spoke. I saw a shadow out of the corner of my eye. I tried to turn my head, but I couldn't make it. I thought it was Brenda, and then I remembered the girl, Kid, and I thought it might have been her.

I realized that was who Browne had been talking about. A small girl, thin, alone.

‘There was that time,' he said. And then nothing more.

There was that time.

Yes, there was that time we'd gone to the market. Or was that Brenda? Yes, it was Brenda. I'd bought her a dress. The dress was too small. She took it off and put it somewhere.

Where? Did it matter? For some reason it did.

And I thought about the market, too. There were lots of people there, and she was nervous, looking around her. When I asked if she was okay, she told me that she didn't like crowds. But she'd been the one who'd wanted to go there, to the market.

It played in my head, that stuff. Lots of things did. My life was on some kind of loop, bringing the past back around every now and then. But sometimes the past had changed or was unclear and I couldn't work out what was real and what was in my head, what was memory, what was dream.

Anyway, Brenda, Kid – they'd both gone. They were both dead, both victims of the world that bore them and mutilated them and tried to destroy their hearts. Now they've got a lot more in common. Now they're just memories. Browne remembers them, most of the time. But he's old, and when he's gone, there'll be three of them, living as only the dead can live, in memories, And who'll remember them? I will, while my mind holds out. And what then? Then nothing. Not a fucking thing.

But even in my head, they would become confused and I'd see Brenda as Kid and Kid as Brenda so that the girl was trying on the shoes in the market and the woman was staring in wonder at the shiny trinket.

They were born decades apart on different sides of the world, but they shared things, as if they'd lived one life, split into parts, broken, like that mirror, like my memory. But, in death, in my head, they became one again.

I opened my eyes. Had I been dreaming? I didn't know.

‘There was that time,' Browne was saying, ‘do you remember? When we couldn't find her and she'd hid in the cupboard. Christ, I was terrified we'd lost her. Do you remember?'

He was talking about Kid, about the time she'd had a flashback, been traumatized and had hidden in the wardrobe upstairs, taking shelter there in the same way she'd hidden at the house where I'd found her.

I remembered. Of course I did.

She'd shot me with a gun she'd found. When she realized I hadn't been there to hurt her, she helped me out. I wouldn't have made it out of there without her.

After that she got it in her head that I'd gone there to save her. I hadn't. I'd gone there looking for Cole's money. But she wouldn't leave me. She was like some small animal that was afraid to come closer to the dangerous thing, but afraid to be alone.

I knew what Browne was doing. It was what I did with Brenda; it was torture, self-inflicted.

‘Do you miss anyone, Joe? No, I don't suppose you do. Well, I'm not like you. I can't shrug off all this insanity, all this… this hopelessness. So, I'm going back to where I came from. More or less, anyway. My sister's up there. Elgin. Nice place. I thought I might go and stay with her for a while. I haven't got much, but I've still got this house. That must be worth something.'

They were both shadows now, Brenda and Kid. I could only see them from the corner of my eye.

I was about to say something to Browne, but when I looked at him, his chin was down and his eyes were closed and I thought he was asleep. Then I saw that his chest was heaving and I realized he was sobbing. He got a hold of himself and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his shirt.

He carried on drinking, staring at some cookery programme that was now on the box, sinking lower into his seat. After a while, his head bolted up.

‘I know you,' he said, throwing his arm towards me, spilling his drink. ‘You think I don't, but I bloody well do.'

He was slurring his words now and his accent was stronger. That happened when he got drunk. The more Scotch he poured into himself, the more Scottish he became. He wiped some dribble from his chin.

‘You think nobody knows you,' he was saying. ‘But I saw what you did for her. Almost bloody killed yourself going up against Merriot, Marriot, whatever his bloody name was. Oh, I know you claimed it was for your reputation and all that maloney, baloney. But I know you. I know there's something there, Joe. I know it.'

He put the glass to his lips and tilted it up. There was only a drop left, but he didn't seem to notice.

‘He keeps telling himself it doesn't matter,' he said to the cooks on the TV, ‘because that's how he survives, by not caring. But I've heard him scream at night. I know what haunts him. I know what he did. He can fight the whole bloody world, but he can't fight what's inside him.'

He shook his head from side to side.

‘No, he can't fight that.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I miss her.'

‘Ah,' he said. ‘I see.'

He didn't say anything else.

I stayed there a while longer, letting my head clear some more. Browne drank and we watched whatever it was on the TV. At some point I looked over and saw that he was asleep, the empty glass in his lap.

I hauled myself up. I put his glass on the coffee table and left him to his hangover. I had things to do. Places to go, people to kill.

It took me a while to find Cole. I tried his mobile and got no answer. I got through to his club and someone there passed me on to someone else and they wanted to know who I was and what I wanted. All this time, I was in Browne's car, driving towards Cole's house. I wanted to get a look at the damage.

I called some other places and some other people and got nowhere. I turned into his road in Chigwell. The place was quiet enough. There didn't seem to be any patrol cars around. I cruised along slowly. Lights were on in Cole's house. I saw a few cars in his driveway. I parked at the kerb and walked towards the front of the house. Before I'd gone a few yards, I could see the front door open. A man came out and looked towards me. He spoke to someone behind him then disappeared back inside. I must've had a dozen eyes on me.

After my trip to Dunham's country place, Cole's house looked like a doll's house. Maybe that was why Dunham had dragged me out there.

There wasn't as much damage as I thought there might have been. There were a few dozen bullet holes in the brickwork, and the holes weren't big. Not large calibre, anyway. I guessed the holes had been made from a couple of bursts from assault rifles. The holes were scattered over the whole front of the house and one of the large bay windows was boarded over. The double garage, separate from the rest of the house, had an area of charred brickwork, more so at the bottom.

I went up to the front door. It opened without me knocking and the same small bald gammy-legged man who'd let me in before stood and peered up at me.

‘Cole?'

‘Upstairs.'

He moved aside to let me in. Men were scattered around the place. They glanced at me. The last time I'd seen those men, they'd been sitting with drinks in their hands, watching Cole do his chief boss act. Then they'd seemed uneasy. Now they held guns, not martinis, and they didn't have to pretend they were enjoying themselves. Now they looked like they belonged.

I went upstairs. The landing was as plush as his lounge, and as fake. The white carpet was two inches thick, and on the walls hung more of those splurges of colour that he thought were art. From there, a half-dozen doors led to the bedrooms. From the furthest, at the back of the house, I could hear Cole snapping instructions to someone. I moved that way.

Cole was throwing things into a suitcase with one hand and holding a mobile to his ear with the other.

‘I don't give a flying fuck how much they get,' he was saying to the phone. ‘Just sell them.'

He looked tired. There was thick stubble around his chin and dark circles beneath his eyes. He was feeling the strain.

When he'd finished with the phone, he tossed it onto the bed. It was only then I noticed that Cole's wife was in the room. She sat with her back against the headboard of the bed and her feet out in front of her, and I thought she had the look of someone who had taken Valium. She didn't seem to know where she was or why.

‘Where the fuck have you been?' Cole said to me.

He was striding around the room, collecting underwear from the chest of drawers, shirts from the wardrobe, chucking everything into the suitcases.

‘Trying to find Paget.'

‘You still bothered about that cunt. Fuck him. We got other problems.'

At this, his wife let out a short laugh. Cole glanced at her.

‘Whyn't you help?' he said to her. She shrugged her reply.

‘Who did it?' I said.

‘Who d'ya think? Fucking Albanian cunts.'

‘Why aren't the law here?'

‘Them wankers? They questioned me for hours. I told them I didn't know nothing.'

‘They believe you?'

‘Course they fucking didn't. What can they do? I told them nobody was home. That bit was true, as it happens. The wife and I were up in the West End. So, no witnesses. I swore blind I didn't have an enemy in the world. So they took some statements and made some measurements. Then they fucked off. In the end, if I want to live here, they can't stop me.'