Father and Son (19 page)

Jeanette’s Toyota
is outside when he gets there. It’s not really a village, just a couple of rows
of old weavers’ cottages looking out across what he supposes is a rolling
swathe of farmland, although in the darkness it is almost uniformly black, with
the occasional pin-prick of yellow light. In the distance Leeds is a smudge of
ethereal grey, its modern high-rise towers majestic but packed tight together, as
if for protection.

He can imagine Jeanette up here looking out towards the city,
knowing that the truth lies somewhere within, that everything she’s looking for
is there, and she simply has to walk down the right streets and talk to the
right people. Perhaps she knew all along, and she was only here to confirm what
Sheenan had told her. Then something had scared her. She’ll be in there now,
packing her bags, ready to move on, another story, another city with its own
strata of filth to dig down into.

He turns, reads the numbers on the doors. The cottages on both sides
have lights on, Jeanette’s place too. Everyone’s at home tonight.

He rings her cellphone first: unavailable.

The front garden is tiny, little more than a yard. He opens the gate
as noisily as he can, not wanting to unnerve her. Knocks hard, three times,
calling out her name. Nothing. Tries the door. It isn’t locked.

He opens it, still knocking, saying her name again as he enters. There’s
no hall, and he find himself in a living room, decked out in the tasteful but
bland furnishings of a rental property, polished wooden floor, brown sofa,
russet curtains.

The smell isn’t right, though. Dull and acrid. Two paces and he’s in
the middle of the room. The smell isn’t strong, but it’s not right. There’s a
metallic edge to it, and it’s setting something off in his head. It only takes
a second.

His body reacts before his brain, the bile rising in his throat,
hands beginning to shake. He grabs the edge of the sofa, his legs almost giving
way, the sudden thump of blood in his ears sending him dizzy.

She’s behind the sofa, her body flat out on the floor, hair forming
a cushion for her head. Her eyes are wide open, staring up at the ceiling, dumb
and expressionless.

Dropping to his knees he cups her face in his hands, tears already dripping
down onto her cheeks. She’s cold, but her flesh is soft, that dusty smoothness
to her skin, and her angular beauty now like a mask. He lifts her head a
fraction, snot and tears dribbling from him as he tries to say something. But he
can’t hear his own voice, his ears full of a drumming, incessant noise.

He kisses her on the forehead, his body shaking so hard that his
mouth bangs into her. He pulls her closer, running his hands around her head, his
fingers digging deep into her hair.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry…” he cries, pushing his face onto hers. He
wants to bite her, to eat into her and stay here, sharing the pain, to leave
this behind and go with her.

Because this is his fault.

And then, as he collapses down onto her, his forearms resting on the
floor, he feels the wetness soaking through his sleeves. He struggles up until
he’s kneeling beside her again, gasping for breath, his eyes stinging with
tears, almost blinding him.

Wiping a hand across his eyes he realises he’s covered in blood,
sticky and cold. It’s on his face, jacket, trousers, everywhere. She’s been
shot in the chest and lies in a sump of her own blood that extends from both
sides of her torso, perfectly symmetrical, like narrow wings on the floor
beneath her.

He pushes himself away until his back is against the wall, and
starts to bang his head against his knees, sobbing through his mouth, feeling
his kneecaps pummelling his face, again and again. Tries to catch his breath,
hardly able to look at her body. Then he’s pawing at the wall behind him, trying
to get up. His hands find the door frame. A lamp crashes down. He sees it fall,
hears nothing. When he finally makes it to his feet, he sees the gunshot in her
shin, centred, clean, accurate. And at her side, lying in the blood, is a champagne
cork.

Staggering to the door. Then somehow he’s outside, car key in his
hand. There’s blood all over the keys. His hands are shaking so much he needs to
hold the key with both hands to get it in the ignition. Great cries of anguish
are coming from his mouth. He can feel the sound, his neck straining with the
effort, the ringing in his ears.

First gear, foot to the floor. The car shudders violently then shoots
forwards, side-tailing into a dry stone wall with a thud.

Speed takes over. Instinct and fear, second, third, fourth… His
mind is leaping forward, starting to think.

Just drive.

First light. The
time of day when nobody should be awake, the indigo sky hauling itself out of a
deep, satisfying sleep, and you like a voyeur watching it.

Baron’s been here plenty of times. As a young, ambitious detective
he’d be out at all hours, arriving home at four, five, six in the morning, not
a chance of sleep. He’d wait for the dawn to come, mugs of coffee and the TV on
low, hoping the boys’d be up nice and early, staggering down, puffy eyed, arses
hanging out of their pyjamas. And as the sun came up over the Vale of York he’d
watch the sky mutate from black to pink, knowing that only the coffee was
stopping him from grinding to a slack-jawed halt, his brain fuzzy and useless,
but unable to switch off.

He’s not at home today, though. Not that home, at least. He’s in
town, less than a mile away from the Ikea-stuffed studio flat where he’s been living
for the past couple of years, twenty-fifth floor of a new tower block, glass
lifts, potted plants in the corridors, laundry service. A crippling second
mortgage for the privilege of a posh Leeds bachelor pad that he hates.

These days he prefers Millgarth’s ugly, functional spaces, its
plastic chairs and green-tinged corridors, watery soup and Kit Kats from the
vending machine. As the weeks and months of enforced separation from the boys had
become a year, then two, work kept him going. And the Super understood this. A
young, dedicated DI living on his own? He gets all the messy cases. What’s he
got to go home to?

DS Steele blows his nose. The two of them have been standing here a while
without speaking, and there’s nothing Steele hates more than long, meditative
silences. They make him jumpy, as if only bad things can come from silence.

“Should’ve gone through the side,” he says.

Baron makes no reply, lets the final remnants of the night disperse
around them. Then, as they stand looking at the wreckage outside Tony Ray’s
Motors, he realises just how quiet it is.
Too
quiet.

When he was still living up at the farmhouse, those early mornings
were deafening. It would start with a single bird. He used to wait there, out
in the garden, see if he could catch the very first note. Within a minute every
bird would be at full tilt, something manic about it, as if they were trying to
outdo each other, caught up in the pure joy of blasting the sky with their
juvenile song. It always amazed him that no one in the countryside ever woke up
during the dawn chorus. Perhaps real country folk did, nature’s alarm clock,
the rhythms of the land… But Stella and the boys? They never stirred. His
sons would never know that it is birdsong, not a Gruffalo alarm clock, that
heralds in each new day.

“Side?” he says, resigning himself to the fact that he’ll get no
more peace from Steele.

“If he wanted to wreck the place, why not aim for the glass walls?”
says Steele.

They’re looking at a silver Porsche, which has been driven straight
at the roll-down steel door of the showroom’s main entrance. The car rests at a
slight angle, both headlights smashed and the front end knocked out of shape.
The metal shutter, meanwhile, bears the full impression of the car’s front end,
and behind it the automatic glass doors that used to sweep open without a sound
have been reduced to a pile of fragments on the floor, the polished concrete
glinting with tiny specs of light.

“Perhaps the impact would have been too much,” Baron says, as they
move closer to the car. “That glass is pretty thick. He had it made specially.”

They’re waiting for forensics to arrive, and there’s nothing much to
do, apart from wonder where the hell John Ray has gone.

“He was thinking straight, then? Goes for the door? Deliberate?” Steele
says, moving forward and peering in through the car’s windscreen. “Any road, it
was bad enough. There’s blood everywhere, and some of it looks like it’s
dripped. Johnny boy’s smashed himself up bad.”

“If it was Johnny boy.”

Behind them a cab pulls up. Out steps Connie, stern-faced, her hair
a bit of a mess. She reminds Baron of the gypsies in Opera North’s
Carmen
,
which he’s seen several times, preferring random opera at The Grand to his Ikea
flat.

“
She’s
probably not been to bed,” Steele says under his
breath, “y’know what Spaniards are like.”

The only Spaniards that Baron knows are the Ray family. He hopes,
for the sake of the entire Iberian Peninsular, that they are not typical.

Connie is in tight black jeans and a flaming red mohair jumper which
she re-arranges on her shoulders as she approaches them. If she’s Carmen, she’s
a very pissed-off version.

“Sorry to get you out of bed,” Steele says, doing a terrible job of
hiding his fascination with her face, which is fresh and sculpted, and in the
delicate light of the vanishing night could be the face of a geisha.

“I’d only just got
in
,” she says, looking with mild disgust
at the Porsche as Steele takes a moment to digest this thought. “Is that John’s
blood?”

“Would you be surprised if it was?” Baron asks.

She blanks him, hunting for keys in the pockets of her jeans with
one hand, and fast dialling John with the other. But she’s been doing that for
the last ten minutes.

“He’s not picking up,” she says. “We can get in round the back.”

By the time forensics are crawling over the Porsche, Connie, Baron
and Steele are in the little office at the back of the showroom. She’s been
chain-smoking since they got inside the building, and they look at the screen
of the security video through a light blue haze.

“Cigarettes
and
Rizzlas?” Steele says, noticing the packet of
cigarette papers in Connie’s bag, which lies open beside the video.

“Yeah,” she says, closing the bag. “It’s to test the merchandise. I
run a drugs cartel on the side, didn’t you know?”

He narrows his eyes, plays hard-cop.

She likes him. Pity he’s
policía
…

Then they return to the screen. She fast-forwards through yesterday
evening as they watch the four quarters of the screen.

“There he is,” Steele says.

She stops, rewinds, plays.

2.10 a.m. The Porsche mounts the curb and drives headlong into the
showroom’s entrance. The footage is low quality and the car seems to jerk
forwards, Chaplin-style, before coming to an abrupt stop, its nose close up to
the steel shutters. On another quarter of the screen the big sliding doors turn
instantly into a wall of cascading crystal droplets, and a second later are a
mound of shattered glass on the floor.

John remains in the car. For a while he doesn’t move. Then the door
opens. His hands snake up onto the roof and he draws himself out in fitful,
energy-sapping movements. His face is dark, smeared with what might be blood.
And he’s drunk, mouth hanging open, eyes rolling, unfixed and unquestioning, as
if he’s already forgotten that he’s just crashed the car.

His legs seem to give way and he catches himself, throwing his arms
out onto the roof. He remains there for some time, his body rising and falling
with fast, heavy breaths.

Then he’s rummaging in his jacket pockets. Pulls out a packet of
cigarettes, standing upright now as he lights a fag, the packet and lighter
both falling to the ground as he inhales. Then, for the first time, he looks at
the showroom. And even through the rough, pixilated images of the video they
can see, just for a second, a self-loathing so intense that all three of them,
crouched around the monitor, wonder how low a man like John Ray can go, and
whether it’s right that they are witnessing it.

Then he turns and staggers off down Hope Road, right in the middle
of the street, as if he owns it but is leaving for the last time. They continue
watching as he turns left past the White Horse and disappears.

Connie fast-forwards and they watch an accelerated summary of the
next couple of hours. It’s not really necessary. They all know that the prodigal
son is not coming back.

“Right,” she says, having slipped out the back and returning with a
crowbar in her hands. “They’re towing the Porsche away. Can I start to secure
the place?”

Baron nods, hardly blinking, and watches as she makes her way across
the sales floor, the holding crowbar like a baseball bat. She aims it at the
car-shaped bulge in the steel door, and swings. Since she arrived, Connie has
been restrained and to-the-point. But now, as she lays into the metal, the
showroom fills with the echoes of her anger, bare and undisguised, until it’s
clear that she doesn’t care what she’s hitting, or what shape the door ends up.

“She’ll frighten the birds off,” Baron says.

“Eh?”

“Nothing. Let’s go.”

“John Ray?” Baron says, as Steele drives the short distance back to
Millgarth. “Why was our investigative journalist interested in him? An easy way
in?”

“Well, she had no problem getting into his trousers,” says Steele,
turning left up a deserted Regent Street, the hefty brick bulk of police HQ already
visible in the dawn sky and looking particularly cruel and ugly in the orange
light.

“Someone like her doesn’t need an easy way in. She got into Lanny
Bride’s party yesterday. You think she was on the guest list?”

Baron winds down his window, lets the cold air blow into his face.
Jeanette Cormac had contacted him a week ago, said she wanted a chat about Tony
Ray and crime in the city. He sent her away with a flea in her ear. A mistake.
But what had she really wanted?

“She was on somebody’s hit list, is all we know. We’ve got two main
suspects and we can’t find either of them.”

Baron lets the cold wind inveigle its way into his eyeballs. They’ve
got Lanny Bride in the cells, dragged him in yesterday evening. But Dennis Reid
wasn’t up at the golf club when they arrived with arrest warrants. He’d given them
the slip. Then, before they had time to do anything about Lanny, Cormac’s dead
body was called in. They’d been up at her rented cottage until two in the
morning, after which the Super ordered them both to go home for a few hours’
sleep.

Baron hadn’t slept, though. He’d sat in a ridiculous armchair called
Bjørn and stared out at the sleeping city two hundred feet below, a pallid web
of empty streets that had cost him his marriage and his boys. How long would he
be able to stand it, pushing the filth around those streets, never really
changing anything, but knowing that without coppers the filth would become
unbearable? By the time the call had come ‒ a Porsche found smashed into Tony
Ray’s Motors, covered in blood ‒ he’d just about managed to get his eyes
shut, still thinking about John Ray, but making absolutely no sense of it all.

“So,” he says, feeling the rush of cold morning air on his face as
Steele pulls onto the roundabout at the bottom of the Headrow. “Friday morning,
Roberto is found dead at the Park Lane. Lanny sends John Ray to investigate.
But he also has this Reid guy come down, ex-IRA, heavy duty. Does Lanny already
know there’s a journalist hanging around asking questions? She’s interested in
the Leeds bombing, suspected IRA job. But does Lanny know that?”

“Google her,” Steele says, as if it’s obvious.

Baron, too tired to prickle at the idea of taking orders from Steele,
does as he’s told. Less than a minute on his phone and he has Jeanette Cormac’s
name linked with Sheenan’s.

“The Bookseller-dot-com,” he reads. “Contract signed late last year
to write a book about ex-IRA bomber Bernard Sheenan’s life.
The Reluctant
Bomber
.”

“If we can find out that easy, so can Lanny.”

“Look,” Baron says, holding the phone up. “Picture search as well.
There she is. Not difficult to recognise, is she?”

“Especially if she gatecrashes your golf party. I wonder what she
said to Lanny?”

“Dunno, but whoever killed her wants us to know he did it. Bullets
in the shin? The champagne cork? First Roberto, now her.”

“And you know what the Super’s gonna say?” Steele says, breaking
into a macabre grin as he turns into the car park behind Millgarth.

“Oh, I know,” Baron says, as the car comes to a halt. “One more and
it’s a serial killer.”

“Aren’t we forgetting Sheenan, in Ireland?” Steele says, tossing the
keys up into the air and catching them with a deft swipe of the hand. “If he
was the first, that’s three already.”