Ascension Day (69 page)

‘What car have you got?’

‘Uuuh… Blue Chevy Metro.’

Ayliss starting up, looking around, pulling out.

And Nel-M spotted her then: Blue Metro, brown-haired woman at the wheel with a cell-phone in her hand.

‘He’s just pulled out!’ Nel-M screamed. ‘Grey Buick Century… heading your way.’

‘What? Where…
where
?’

The woman frantically scanning the road ahead as she assimilated the information, Ayliss’s car twenty-five yards away at that point, starting to pick up speed.

And at only ten yards away, she finally spotted him, her eyes locking fully on the car and Ayliss inside as they came alongside. Her eyes went wide for a second, and then she did something foolish – although nothing would have surprised Nel-M about her by that stage. She braked.
Hard
.

The car behind, a Dodge Dakota, didn’t have a chance, crushing most of the back of the Metro into a concertina. Nel-M closed his eyes and cringed; and when he opened them again, it wasn’t pretty. Though she still looked alive.
Just
.

Ayliss had kept going, might not have even noticed the conflagration twenty yards behind him. Quick decision to make: head into Truelle’s office and pull out fingernails until he found out what had happened, or keep tailing Ayliss? The sound of a distant siren made his mind up: there’d be a scene here now, police cars arriving at any second. He could catch up with Truelle later and, besides, he’d need Ayliss’s whereabouts for when his ex got out of the hospital.

Nel-M swung out to follow Ayliss, but at that moment the man driving ahead decided to stop to assist the accident victims, his car blocking the road.

‘Out the fucking way!’ Nel-M screamed, his head out the window. ‘You fucking numb-brained mor–’ Nel-M’s voice trailed off as he saw a squad car ahead turn into the road.

Nel-M looked over his shoulder, one arm across the passenger seat as he did a hasty three-point turn, praying that he was able to get around the block quick enough not to lose Ayliss.

The perfect set-up.

Over a couple of shots of Jim Beam, which rapidly became three, four, five and more, Leonard Truelle pondered whether Darrell Ayliss’s claim might be right.

In the very beginning, he’d had strong doubts, but he’d had little choice then: Raoul Ferrer’s hefty street debt one side, which they offered to clear, his drink problem and the threat of exposure and getting struck off, the other; then the final sweetener on top: $250,000. On one side crushing problems, on the other all the decks cleared and a hefty chunk of cash on top.

But when they’d still sensed some reluctance from him, they’d started piling it on about Durrant being guilty in any case. Adelay Roche had put feelers out on the criminal network, and Durrant’s name was the main one to come back as having killed his wife. But the coma and selective memory situation had conveniently blotted it out. The police couldn’t even apply standard question and interrogation tactics in such a situation, and in any case simply didn’t have enough evidence to haul him in.

Truelle had offered to get the information out of Durrant conventionally, but they’d said no. Too risky. If he’d blotted out the recall, or his memory of it was sketchy, the police still wouldn’t have enough to nail him. And with taped sessions, they couldn’t later go back and add or embellish; then it
would
look suspicious, as if the memory had been falsely embedded.

No,
all
the details had to be there, so there was no possible error or come-back. That’s what they were paying for: over $400,000 with Ferrer’s debt.

He should have pulled out right then, but the money and all his problems cleared at the same time was just too tempting.

And so he’d gone along with it, used the next session to condition Durrant: ‘
You went to a house that night on Coliseum Street, Lawrence… large antebellum mansion in the Garden District with grand white columns on its front portico. You know the type. It was a planned house robbery, Lawrence, and you felt guilty about it because you’d promised your wife not to commit any more robberies. And unfortunately, while you were there a woman was still in the house that you didn’t know about…. and it all went wrong… terribly wrong…
’

A masterful mix of what he’d been fed from Roche and Nel-M, along with what he knew himself about Durrant’s background.

He shifted the previous session tapes to cover, and the next session dropped the right prompts to tease it all back out of Durrant’s memory as the tape ran. Then two days later he phoned the police.

Telling himself all along that he could pull back from the brink later, when he had Ferrer off his back and had worked out how to cover for his drink problem so that he didn’t get struck off and…
and then
, as the police investigation gathered steam, the DNA evidence on Durrant came in!

Eighty per cent of that doubt and guilt suddenly lifted from his shoulders. They’d been telling the truth all along! Durrant
was
guilty.

And that’s pretty much how the years since had rolled on: guilty about what he’d done, but consoling himself all along that the end justified the means… though always with that twenty per cent of nagging doubt. That percentage swung back and forth at times: higher with the first news of Durrant’s execution date, thirty or forty per cent, maybe even…

Truelle suddenly jolted in his seat. Nel-M!

He relaxed again as he managed to focus through the haze of the five Jim Beams swimming around in his head – just a black man of similar height and build. Truelle knocked back the rest of his drink, lifted a hand towards the barman for another.

A minute after Ayliss had left his office, there’d been an almighty bang outside, and as he looked down at the accident he saw the police car swing in and Nel-M backing up and doing a three-point turn. Nel-M had been watching outside as Ayliss paid him a visit!

He told Cynthia to cancel the rest of his day’s appointments, he had something urgent to attend to. ‘And if anyone calls for me,
anyone
… you don’t know where I’ve gone.’

He hastily left the office, past the policemen surveying the accident, heading for a bar or
anywhere
that Nel-M might not find him. For that reason, he avoided Ben’s or any of his regular haunts, went deep into the CBD before he felt he was on safe enough ground, a sprawling Irish-flavoured tavern on Julia Street.

Thirty per cent… forty per cent…
that doubt fluctuating wildly along with his own mood swings and shattered nerves, reaching more for the bottle each time it raised a notch.

But now this smooth-tongued Southern lawyer, Ayliss, had rocketed that doubt into the stratosphere. He seemed to be right about everything else – had pretty well worked it all out – then why not the DNA as well?

Truelle noticed that his hand was still shaking as he raised his fresh glass. Six stiff ones and he was still shaking like Jello in an earthquake. He doubted that he’d get calm and level this time, no matter how much he drank.

Some squeaky violin music scratched at the back of his brain. While a good bar in which to hide away, lots of dark corners – and better still as it started to fill with an after-office crowd – as it had become busier, they’d also turned up the frantic-fiddler
Riverdance
music.

But he still needed to kill more time. Okay, he’d sat it out beyond office hours, but now that his office was closed, Nel-M would probably be waiting at his apartment for him. He wouldn’t be able to go back there either!

Stay here and be driven mad by frantic Irish fiddlers? Or risk all out there with Nel-M: thrown from a rooftop or a quick bullet through the brain?

With the aid of three more Jim Beams, he managed to brave it out at the Irish bar for almost another two hours, smiling like an idiot and tapping his feet to the music at one point, as the drink finally made his senses swim and sway.

Then he went to a nearby restaurant, picking at a Chicken Royale, his stomach still too jumpy to swallow much. Though he did manage to wash down the five mouthfuls with a full-bodied bottle of Cote de Beaune.

He finished off the evening with four lingering night-cap brandies between two bars on Maple Street, by which time, spilling himself into a taxi at almost 1 p.m. – hopefully Nel-M would have given up waiting for him by then – everything was drifting and sailing around him so wonderfully that he hardly cared if Nel-M put a bullet through his head. He’d hardly feel it, and such a great moment to go out on: the lights of the city spinning and sparkling all around him like he’d never seen before. Everything so beeyootiful…
so fucking beeeyoootiful
…

Though he did snap to, sharpen his senses a bit as the taxi approached his apartment. If Nel-M’s car was anywhere nearby, he’d simply tell the driver to head-on, spend that night in a hotel. But it was nowhere to be seen.

He eased out a breath of relief as he told the driver to stop, paid, leapt out, and, taking the stairs two and three at a time, opened his door and slammed it behind him as quickly, sliding back the three deadbolts; then leant against the door for almost a full two minutes, breathless, eyes closed, the city lights still spinning all around him.

He went to the window. No sign of Nel-M’s car or anything else suspect. But still he didn’t put any lights on, except for a small back bathroom light which wouldn’t show through to the front.

He noticed the red light on his answer-phone flashing as he went back into the lounge. He played the message.

‘
Hi, Lenny… Chris here. Chris Tullington. You know I mentioned you coming up here one Christmas. Well, me and Brenda and little Giles – or not so little any more – we’re heading inland to Vernon for Christmas. It’s the ideal Christmas setting – fir trees, lots of snow and skiing and big log fires. You’d love it! We’d be real happy to see you, if you could make it. Give us a call here in Vancouver, if you think you’d be able to. We’re heading off there on the eighteenth for ten days.
’

Fir trees. Skiing. Warm Christmas fires and old friends
. Yeah, he’d love to be able to make it, but it felt a million miles from where he was at that moment.

He looked anxiously towards the front door. If the bell rang, he simply wouldn’t answer it, just phone the police straight away, say he had an intruder at the door.

Surely Nel-M wouldn’t be able to shoot or hack his way through all the dead-bolts before the police arrived? He wouldn’t even risk looking through the spy-hole if it rang, in case Nel-M tried to shoot him through the door. He’d immediately shut and lock every connecting door and barricade himself in a back bedroom.

And that’s where he lay as he finally put his head down to sleep, though with all the connecting doors open so that he could listen out for even the slightest sound from the corridor outside; and he was still in the same position over two hours later, eyes darting rapidly as he listened out for those small sounds that hadn’t yet come, the barrage of nerves again gripping him as the effects of the drink started to wear off, spinning city lights battling against dark demons, until his conscious mind finally gave up caring and he fell asleep.

38

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck…
fuck…. fuck
!

When Nel-M got round the block, Ayliss was nowhere to be seen. He trawled as far as ten blocks up and four or five each side before finally giving up with the thump of his palm against the steering wheel…
fuck
!

Twenty minutes already gone, he went to a coffee bar and gripped a steaming cappuccino so hard that he thought the cup might shatter, his eyes fixed steadily, stonily ahead, until he’d killed a further half-hour and was sure all the police and ambulances would have cleared from in front of Truelle’s building.