Crusaders (52 page)

‘Fuck off with that shite, if you know summat tell us now,
I’ll
talk to them.’

‘No, no, you have to understand. These are people who trust me. Vulnerable people. I can’t violate that. I have to protect them.’

‘You? Get away, man. Protect how? Now I’ve sat here with you and you owe us for that, so divvint make us lose wor patience.’

There was an irate finger jabbing toward his face. And yet he had seen this quandary coming, was not deterred. ‘I want to help, if I’m going to then it has to be done right. We have to agree, you and I. I have to know these people will be protected. Fine, if not by me then you.’

‘This isn’t for your benefit, man. You carry on like this and I’ll drag you in.’

‘You’ll be wasting your time.’

He couldn’t be sure, but there seemed a new level of interest in the look he was receiving, whatever its boiling disgruntlement.

‘Okay. Alright. You give us summat proper, and I’ll tell you what we can do about it.’

‘No, that’s not good enough.’

‘Listen, you, I’ve got a control and a senior officer to deal with, it’s not down to me. If it stands up –
if
, I say, whatever the fuck you’re talking about – then I’ll not ask you anything that doesn’t need asking. Alright? Now that’s a promise. Divvint you tell me what’s fucking good enough. That’s my word to you.’

Gore weighed the deal, tersely put and wanting, but from behind his back-seat cordon he saw no further room for manouevre in these talks.

‘In a day or so then. I’ll be in touch. How do I reach you?’

Robbie started reeling off numbers.

‘Hang on, I need to write it.’

‘No you don’t. Remember it.’ He nodded, winced. ‘Right. This is where you hop out.’

‘How am I supposed –’

‘There’s a taxi firm owa there.’

No sooner had he found his feet on the gravel than Chisholm was tearing out and away. Gore found the pen in his inner pocket, hurriedly etched the phone number on his palm. As he turned to the cab office, he saw the lights in the small premises blink out. He reached the door to see a shutter wrenched down behind the glass.

I have walked a crooked mile
, he told himself, as he had been telling himself mindlessly for hours. He was wet with rain and there was nothing left in his legs, his level of fatigue surreal, near laughable. He had seen the sun struggle up over Dunston and Team Valley, the day break upon Gateshead. He had vied with early traffic across the Redheugh Bridge. Oakwell had slept without him. Now his front door was in his sights.

Shoving the key in the lock, he found it unmoving. Uncomprehending, his hand found the handle, turned it cleanly.
Not
possible
. Heat rushed into his face. He stumbled over the threshold, down the hall, looked about the still living room, then made for the stairs.

‘You needn’t bother.’

He spun and saw Jack Ridley, emerging from the kitchen with a mug of tea. Saw, too, and recognised the particular smoker’s apparel arrayed on the sitting-room table.

‘God, Jack, you gave me a start.’

‘Aye well, sorry. I’ve had one and all. He’s gan off. The lad.’

His step unsteady, Gore returned slowly to the foot of the stairs.

‘Gone? Did he say where?’

Ridley threw him a chastening look. ‘What do you think?’

‘How did you find him?’

‘How? Whey, your door were open, so I just assumed, and then – y’knaa. He got a shock and all. Not as bad as what I did. He was putting some stuff in a bag, see, I could tell it were one of yours.’

Ridley sat down at the table. Gore could see his shirt cuffs were damp, as though he had been washing up at the sink. Gore, too, lowered himself into a chair. ‘What did you do?’

‘I asked him who he was, he telt us he’d been stoppin’ wi’ you but he was headed off now. I says to him, “Howay, I wasn’t born last night.”’

‘No, he was. Staying over.’

‘Aye, well, right enough, he seemed quite sure of hi’sel. I just stood and watched him and he didn’t panic or owt. Then he says, “Tell Gore he’s gotta keep his promise.” I says, “Oh aye, am I your messenger?” I let him gan, but. Seemed to know what he was
talking
about.’ Ridley took up his tobacco pouch. ‘Mind you, you’ll still want to check all your drawers.’

Gore nodded, weighing the damage, his inner calculations in ruins.

‘Was that your problem, then? What you wanted to talk about?’

‘You might say.’

‘Well then, it’s gone. You got lucky.’

Gore shook his head. ‘No, that was – that was just the start of it.’

‘He’s in bother, is he? The lad? With Coulson?’

Gore nodded.

‘Then he’s better off away. Your luck’s still in.’

‘Is that your answer to everything, Jack?’

Ridley’s expression was such as to imply that the folly of Gore’s remark carried its own punishment, with no need for rebuttal.

‘I’m sorry. I suppose … you can say you told me so.’

‘I try not to say things that are no bloody use when it’s all past helping.’

Gore lowered his head toward his crossed arms on the table. ‘What am I going to do?’

‘I’d be surprised if there were owt you could. If there’s one thing I know, John, it’s not to get mixed up in other people’s
problems
.’

Gore jerked up his head, ready with a glaringly obvious rejoinder, and was gripped at the same moment by its glaring redundance.

‘I mean, you’ve got enough to manage, haven’t you?’ Ridley added in afterthought, and to Gore’s mind, needlessly.

They were good clean people, Barlow’s lot, no doubt about it, but for all the general efficiency of the set-striking operation certain detritus from the night before lingered in corners. From behind a curtain Gore turned up several piles of Shield Society pamphlets, and tossed them into a black plastic bin-liner. Shifting the chairs from stores, he proposed to Rod Moncur that they make the usual seating grid a good deal smaller, perhaps six rows of six. As it transpired, they could not fill even these.

As advised by Monica, Gore announced that the Saturday dance had raised a sum of four hundred and seventeen pounds for St Luke’s coffers. The news seemed to impress a good many of the old folk. There ought to be a party just for them, he decided – a farewell party, the sooner the better.

He felt his own exhaustion turning a touch slap-happy. For his reading he decided, for his own delectation, to preach a little fire and brimstone – just for the sport of it, to read the words as if he had written them. What would it mean, after all, to give oneself such power to judge? He turned to a long-favourite passage from Ephesians.

‘Finally my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.’

He had, at least, decided what had to be done. One door closed but another opened, and once one dragged one’s feet forward by one step, so many more became obvious, beholden, irreversible.

‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world. Against spiritual wickedness in high places …’

He paused and stared out intently at the drooping and the infirm, their weathered scalps and greying heads, some nodding, turning over in their hearts, perhaps, their own definition of the wicked in the world.

‘Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.’

Afterward the old lady from Old Benwell whose name he thankfully remembered as Lillian took his hand to assure him he was ‘doing very well’. In his nonchalance he suggested she take the lectern for the following week and read a lesson of her choice. She blinked agitatedly behind her heavy lenses, grew shy and flustered.

‘No, please, next week. So long as there is a next week, eh?’

And then she looked a little startled, wounded even, and he instantly rued both his restive mood and his thoughtless
phrasing
. Had they but the time and she the interest, he would have taken her aside and outlined the whole nature of his
preoccupation
.

He was ready to keel over by the time dusk drew in. But he
girded
himself and dialled her number. Very soon he had some cause for regret.

‘Can I call on you tonight?’

‘No you can’t. I’m working anyhow.’

‘Where?’

‘In town. It’s not your business.’

‘Lindy, I need to see you.’

‘I don’t want to see you.’

‘Lindy, don’t – please.’

She replaced the receiver and left him with no choice. He slumped toward the kitchen, intending to brew strong black
coffee
, something sour and sharp enough to slap his face into the right-facing vantage of what remained to do with this day.

Was this, then, a customer? He answered all too many
descriptions
– a pudding of a man in work suit and anorak, bespectacled, briefcase in hand, a shaggy skirt of hair round his bald monkish crown. Even from twenty yards, through the fallen dark, past the traffic lights and across the road, Gore could make out a
womanish
bulge of white-shirted gut over belt.

He slowed as he reached the end of the presentable Victorian terrace, where the lights glowed homely just as in every other window, and he bent and pushed open the gate, plodded up the steps, buzzed at the door. Within moments he was admitted and out of the cold.

My double, my brother,
Gore chided himself.

And then:
No. He knows what he’s doing and he just does it, goes about it normally, as if it were normal.

And perhaps it was – more so than this watching and waiting, this queer and questionable compulsion into which he had lapsed.

Enviable, even. He strolls right on in without a qualm.

At this moment Gore would sooner have walked into freezing waters until they closed over his head. But he had seen her go in, and so he had to follow. Had seen Yvonne go in and her go out of her front door. Had trailed her up the Hoxheath Road, onto the Westgate, a little heartbroken by the unenthused slump in her gait. She was wearing her long skirt and short red jacket, just like their first long afternoon together, save for a knitted scarf at her neck. He was in his seaman’s coat and jeans, just like their first tryst, save that he had shoved a claw-hammer down into the deep inner pocket before leaving his door – a lunatic’s notion, one over
which his conscience still glared at him in disbelief. And yet it seemed the night for such, a night when all fond reason seemed to have fled the house.

His back to the wall, he heard church bells chime. Could it be seven? From this same cold spot he had seen boys tramping home from Sunday sport, seen bored men and women through the
windows
of cars and buses, hastening home from work. And her, only just arriving for the start of same. All the world was industrious but he. He needed to move his feet.

But it seemed a hard threshold to cross. He couldn’t conjure a picture of what lay beyond, knew only that his expectations were at rock-bottom. And still a traitor in his head was poking him with the notion that he didn’t have to do what he had told himself he must – that he could yet melt away.

It was true, he could have begun to question his corporeal
existence
, to doubt he even cast a shadow, were it not for the knot in his stomach, the dragging wreck in his mind that was the pile-up of days, weeks, months of ruined judgement. There was, he knew, nothing left for him, no alternate reality other than the need to finally see what he so long feared – see it under lights with his own two eyes – the evil spirit in the corner.

The choice was made for him, the door opening before he could prod the buzzer, opened by a gentleman making haste and
seeking
no eye contact. Gore wiped his feet on a bristly mat and mounted the stairs, each of them groaning beneath the poor
carpet
, a white-gloss door gaining ahead of him. It was ajar and,
gingerly
, he pushed it open, to be confronted by an unpeopled tableau of modest domesticity.

A small cubby of a white kitchen, deserted, the breakfast bar strewn with papers. Low fluorescent light, modest accoutrements, an aluminium wall clock ticking along, the
Sunday Sun
spread open, kettle on the boil and microwave oven shuddering on full power. Somewhere else in this flat, he knew, a television was on, and a man was expressing himself behind a closed door. He looked to his left, saw a pair of tubular nesting chairs around a
low table strewn with pornographic magazines, their corners flipped and frayed. Save for this wrinkle, he could have claimed to have waited for doctors in some less salubrious receptions. But never alone, never so full of foreboding.

He looked over the kitchen counter – drawers half open, an open ring-bound book, names over columns on a ruled page. LEANNE, KIRSTY, SUNEE, LANA, BARBRA.

‘You getting seen to, pet?’

He turned as if stung and saw a woman – fixed his eyes
instinctively
to her face rather than her babydoll nightie and briefs of matching black. Her eyes were small and close around a
prominent
nose, lacquer making a starched gable-hood of her long black hair. She had the manner of one cosily at home for the evening, but none too bothered by intrusion.

‘Is Claire seein’ to you, pet?’

In the silence the microwave oven began to ping.

‘Aw, bugger.’

The dark woman moved swiftly past him, took up oven gloves, was calling through another archway to this Claire of hers. Then the telephone on the counter was ringing too. Gore sidled into the long corridor from whence the woman had emerged. He was
confronted
by an open door through which were framed a glum assortment of women, all bare shoulders and pale legs, slumped into a tatty once-plush settee, curtains drawn, television glowing. Heads and eyes slowly revolved to him, sluggish smiles in tow.

‘Sorry …’

He ducked out, saw nowhere to go but the end of the corridor – took hesitant steps further, past a closed door, past a doorway into a bathroom that exuded a dank odour not quite masked by the sickly deodorant smell he realised he had been smelling since he came through the door. Now he was staring into a gaudy
pink-painted
bedroom – a bed-and-breakfast option for a teenage female runaway.

‘’Scuse me?’

Behind him another jaded woman was now filling the corridor, bottle-blonde, sunken-eyed and ballooningly plump in a jumper
and sweatpants. She seemed familiar, was giving him a close look in turn.

‘Hiya, sorry, I was on the lav. Can I help?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Well, why don’t you step back into the lounge there, have a bit shufty? I’m off now, see, but me colleague’ll assist you. Lindy?’

‘What?’ Behind him, that voice, issuing from the final doorway down the hall. No, he realised with a sickening plummet of heart into gut – this part he had simply not braced himself for.

He turned and it was Shackleton who loitered on the threshold, the familiar look of enmity mutating into one of hard amusement.

‘Eh, what the fuck are
yee
deeing? Jesus, man. How, Lind, look who’s here.’

Gore stepped forward, since there was no turning back. For a moment he believed Shackleton would bar the door with a swell of his chest. But he stepped aside.

There in the midst of some ghastly black-walled room, lit solely by candles, she was down on her knees, a paisley do-rag tied round her head, a wadded J-cloth in her hand, a spreading stain on the crimson tufted carpet and some spray-gun ammonia close at hand.

Was she seeing him as she stared? What was within? He
couldn’t
hazard.

‘Dear me. I’ll let you’s two alone a minute, shall I?’

He heard Shackleton but did not see him. Heard the door close. And he had to look aside, at the black gloss on the walls, the black satin curtains, the black-sheeted bed with its black vinyl
headboard
– all a dirty sort of a black, fit for a black mass on a wet
afternoon
. The ammonia odour was mingling with some foul undercurrent.

And she? She was rubbing her hands on the knees of her denim skirt, studying them as she did so.

‘Looking for me, were you?’

‘Yes. I came to find you.’

He made to help her to her feet but she was launching herself upward, and he saw at once that she was boiling, swelling with temper.

‘Look, don’t –’

‘Why?’ She shoved with both hands at his sternum and he was painfully jarred, flung up both his own hands in defence, which she tried to flail her way through still. ‘Come
on
, say. Why? Why the
fuck
, man?’

‘I had to know. The truth.’

‘Happy now, then, are you? Seeing us like this?’

‘No, but I understand now. I know I’ve been wrong.’

‘Oh, wrong?
You
, wrong?’

‘Yes, wrong, but it’s okay now.’

‘It’s not okay for me. Not for
me
, John.’

His toneless responses seemed to have sapped at her. She rubbed her face, paced away to the darkened window, turned, then thought better, then turned again, her arms crossed in
defiance
. ‘Big kick for you, is it? Slipping around, fucking
spying
on us?’

‘No, Lindy, of course not, it’s the opposite.’

‘Then why do it?’

‘Because I care for you. Because you can’t go on doing this.’

‘I don’t
do
this, you know? I don’t
fuck
anybody. If that’s what you’re thinking. Or I dunno, is that maybe a letdown for you?’

‘No, God no, you don’t understand …’ He had to lower himself down to sit on the edge of the odious black bed, for it all seemed hopeless, insupportable, unremitting. He could see the livid hurt in her, could feel it under his own skin, wanted so badly to
transmit
to her how he had lived with the same despondency and still found this path through it.

‘What don’t I understand?’

‘That you can’t stay like this. I don’t just mean this …’ He waved a hand. ‘I mean this
mire
you’re in, Lindy. Because of him. When you only need to take a step out of it. Cut the link. You can. Leave it, just walk away.’

‘I can’t.’ Her voice was flat. ‘I’ve not got a choice. You’re a fool if you think that.’

‘No. No, that’s wrong, you
do
. I’ve thought that way, but it’s wrong, you say it’s your life but it doesn’t
have
to be. There’s
another life.’ He realised that some part of what was coming from his mouth had been foreign to him until this very moment. ‘This one, it’s a poison to you.’

‘What do you care?’

‘I love you. I want to take care of you.’

This seemed the gravest outrage yet.

‘Aw look, I just want you to
go
, man. Now. I mean it, really. Before I –’ And a stifled shriek came out of her, a painful
compound
of hurt and frustration.

‘I’ll go, I’m going. But you’re coming with me.’

‘I’m fucking
not
.’

‘You are, you have to, Lindy I need you to.’

‘Don’t be
stupid
.’

‘I’m not going without you.’

‘You’re an
idiot
. They were right. I thought you knew better.’

‘Who’s “they”?’

She almost laughed. ‘Whey, everyone, man.’

‘I can protect you from them. I can, I promise you. I know what to do now. I love you, and I’ll protect you.’

She stared at him as if each word, each phrase, worsened the injury – to her face, to her shaking head, her wounded eyes and sorry mouth, the thumbnail now being worried between her front teeth.

There was a thud at the door and it was thrust open, Shackleton sweating displeasure. ‘Lindy,
howay
for fuck’s sake, there’s a fella, you’re wanted.’

‘A
minute
, man.’

The door swung to. Gore came forward, got his hands around her arms, and though she flinched and writhed it lacked
conviction
, for he wrested her into him. His plans had dwindled to
nothing
, lacking all substance. Feeling had surged up in their stead.

‘Lindy, are you hearing me? I love you.’

‘Shut up, man, you don’t, you just don’t.’

He took hold of her head, kissed her brow, took her hands in his and kissed them, laid a hand on her throat. ‘I’ve said, I was wrong, I treated you wrongly. I want to make good. I have to. Because
you’re everything to me. You are. You’re all I have, nothing is anything without you.’

He had said it and, with a force that ran the length of him, he believed it. Then he released her in fright as Shackleton charged back in.

‘Right, fuckin’
shift
yourself – you and all, Gore.’

Gore’s chest was so drum-taut with feeling he feared he had nothing left for this new assault, this hard-faced bruiser coming right at him. At the last he was redeemed.

‘Leave us be, man, we’re gannin’.’

Gore followed Shackleton’s glare in wonder, for this seemed a small marvel.

‘Whaddaya mean, “gannin’”?’

‘Home. Gannin’ home.’ She was untying her do-rag.

‘You’re fuckin’ not, Lindy. You canna.’

‘I’m sick, man, I can’t do this tonight.’

Shack’s bullet-head swung toward Gore. ‘This your doing? Eh? Eh, dickhead, I’m
talking
to you.’

He looked as if he could strike, and if this was a fight, Gore knew, he was already doomed: the hammer in his coat would be extracted and lodged in his skull.

‘Leave him, Shack man.’ Her amazing calm seemed that of
profound
weariness. ‘I’ll square it with Stevie, I’ll call him, it’ll all be on us. Alright? So now you can fuck off an’ all.’

Shack was looking from one to the other of them now. In the low candlelight his skull looked as though it had been carved from white stone. But he was blinking, brow tilted, his tongue working behind his teeth. The visible thought process was
spectacular
.

‘Alreet then. Alreet. Run along.’

Gore looked to Lindy. Whatever her self-command, she clearly had not expected this either.

‘Thank you,’ Gore heard himself say.

‘Thank
you
,’ came the sneering response, just a little menace exuded, as was this man’s wont. And yet their way was
unimpeded
.

So he walked behind her, legs a little shaky, passing a
slack-jawed
young man stood gormlessly by the reception. Her calm stunned him, but was a blessing of a sort. The next station could only be worse, probably bitter and ugly, calling for deeper reserves of resolve. She had put him on the spot again,
condemned
him to try to see it through.