The Age of Scorpio (7 page)

‘I lost men to—’

Du Bois grabbed him, pulling his face closer.

‘Listen to me, you seeping cock-sore. You didn’t fucking lose them; you killed them. You killed them because you are a moron, because you are too fucking stupid and greedy to sit back and think,
Hmm, perhaps this position of power and responsibility is too much for my tiny mind to handle. Perhaps I won’t risk murdering people because I’m a simpering lightweight vastly out of my depth and lacking the common sense that God gave shrubbery!
’

Du Bois felt a degree of pride as he saw tears form in Appleby’s eyes. He worried that people like Appleby would find ways to rationalise what they had done. Du Bois wanted to drive home the man’s culpability, hopefully help break him so he would not manoeuvre himself into a position of responsibility and influence again. In du Bois’s mind, Appleby’s stupidity made him dangerous. Surrounded by nervous police officers, du Bois stared at the man with cold blue eyes. He wanted to see the breaking point.

Beth knew she was ugly. She knew because the cell-block mums had not tried to rape her. She stared at the hated reflection in the small mirror. She knew she was too squat, too brutish, had too little femininity for the rest of the world. No matter how much you try and get away from other people’s expectations, reject them utterly, you still ended up feeling their looks, judging yourself through their eyes. Still, she had broken enough mirrors and going down for manslaughter had been her seven years of bad luck, let out early for good behaviour. The only thing she did like was the Celtic tattoo creeping up from her neck. That and, mannish or not, she had kept in good shape. Though she wondered if they would let her work on the doors again with her record. She had been working that night after all.

The slamming of a cell door echoed through the prison. She hated that sound. It had become the soundtrack of her life. The first time she had heard it was when she had known that her whole wide world had been shrunk to four ugly institutional walls. Soon she would not have to listen to it any more.

Not very much money, an old-fashioned cassette Walkman – she was almost touched that they had removed the batteries, though she doubted they would have much charge – charity-shop shirt and tie, the para-boots and her pride and joy, her leather jacket. The interlocking knotwork pattern painted on the back. It was a copy of the cover of her favourite album from her favourite band. It was the outside world.

The sound of the outside door closing behind her for the last time. Beth knew that the long inhalation was a cliché. It didn’t matter. Out here the air didn’t smell of hundreds of dangerous women in close proximity.

She had known they would not be there, but some part of her had still hoped. She was pleasantly surprised that the batteries still had some charge and tinny music came out of the cheap headphones. Beth zipped up her jacket and started walking. It was going to be a long walk.

‘Hello?’ Beth called as she entered the house. Beth often knew whether or not someone was in a house when she entered it. This house, nominally her family home, felt empty though the smoke hanging in the air suggested otherwise.

The house had not been redecorated in more than twenty years. It looked like it had not been cleaned in almost as long. In some ways the cramped little house on the Undercliff Road was a microcosm of Bradford. The city had been dealt a death blow in the 80s that it had not managed to recover from.

Beth found her father in the lounge in his chair, smoking, the ashtray next to him overflowing. He had the pipe from the oxygen tank next to the chair up his nose but Beth hoped that it was turned off. She watched the cherry glow as he inhaled shallowly. The resulting cough sounded wet.

‘Dad? It’s me.’

‘Talia?’ It was the sound of pathetic hope in his voice that hurt the most.

‘No, Dad, it’s Beth.’ She moved through the smoke. The curtains were closed in the filthy room. He was living in darkness. The little band of pale sunlight that shone through a gap in the curtains illuminated her father like a corpse. He looked awful and he looked disappointed.

‘When did you get out?’ he asked. Despite the wheezing he still managed to sound disappointed too.

‘Yesterday.’ She had slept in a hedgerow last night. It had been a very long walk. She had taken a bus when she had got to the outskirts of Leeds.

‘Are you staying long?’ he asked.

‘I was hoping to stay until I can get some work and afford a place of my own,’ she said.

‘Not much work for a jailbird. Not much work . . .’

‘I’ll get something.’

He just nodded. Beth waited, looking for something more – anything. They let the awkward silence grow, then she headed for the door. She turned back.

‘When’s Talia back?’ she asked. It was like watching his face crumple. Tears appeared on his cheek.

‘She’s gone. Left me,’ he said, his voice a wailing rasp.

Beth was by his side, reaching for his hand, but he flinched away from her.

‘You! You did this. You drove her away when you killed her man. What were you thinking?’

Beth stood up slowly.
I was thinking that maybe if I left it this time he would beat her so hard he’d finally kill her
, Beth thought. Talia, the pretty one, Talia the popular one, Talia the feminine one, Talia the fucking trouble-magnet. Beth took after her dad and Talia took after some lost dark beauty from their family’s genetic past. They had never got on, but Talia was her younger sister so she had looked out for her. Not the easiest of jobs for someone that self-destructive. Beth had lost count of the number of times that someone had come to find her to peel Talia, messed up on drugs or alcohol, off the floor and take her home, or pull her out of some other scrape. Not that she had ever been thanked.

Talia had found Davey with her unerring ability to get involved with the worst guy possible. He was a minor-league dealer with a history of violence against his partners. None of this had mattered to Talia. It had been true love through the bruises. Beth had been pretty sure that Davey was going to kill her that final time. That said, she knew she had lost control. She had not needed to go as far as she did. Even then it had still hurt to see Talia in court testifying against her. Had it not been for that, the sentence might have been suspended.

‘How long?’ Beth asked.

‘Six months.’

‘Where?’

‘Down south somewhere, where they all go.’

This was the way it went in this house, Beth thought: Talia broke her parents’ hearts, back when her mum was alive, and Beth got blamed for it.

‘She was going to leave home eventually anyway,’ she told the old man. She left it unsaid that Talia had never had anything but contempt for them all anyway. She could not wait to get out of there. Talia had just been waiting for a way to sustain her lifestyle with the minimum of actual effort on her behalf.

Beth stood and headed up the stairs.

Beth had the music on too loud. She knew that, but what was he going to do? He couldn’t even shout at her after all. She was doing press-ups, carefully so she didn’t make the needle jump on the old vinyl. She was exercising out of sheer boredom. She had done a lot of this in prison.

Beth heard him making his agonising way up the stairs but she did not go to help and did not turn the music down. Eventually the door to her room opened, and her father, coated in sweat, stood gasping for breath in the doorway. His look expressed what he thought of her activity. This was clearly another thing that good girls were not supposed to do. Like beating her younger sister’s boyfriend to death, she guessed.

He made his way to her bed and sat down. He used the time he needed to recover the ability to speak to gaze around her bedroom disapprovingly at the posters of the various bands she liked on the walls.

‘Go and find her for me,’ he finally rasped.

‘Dad, she’s just moved out. A lot of people do it.’ She had known he wanted her to do this downstairs.

‘No word, nothing,’ he told her.
That’s because she doesn’t give a shit about any of us
, Beth thought but said nothing. ‘She would have phoned – she’s a good girl.’ He might as well have added ‘and you’re not’, Beth thought. She had heard it anyway.

‘Have you tried phoning her?’ Beth asked.

He shook his head. ‘No number,’ he managed. ‘She said she would call when she got a phone.’

Beth knew for a fact that Talia couldn’t live without her phone. There was no chance she didn’t have one. It just wasn’t important for her to call her father. After all, what use was a poor, broken-down, dying old man?

‘Look, Dad. London’s a big place. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.’

Beth was surprised when her father reached forward and grabbed her arm. It felt like a skeleton had grabbed her, but for all that his grip was still strong.

‘What is it with you? Why can you only hurt this family? And believe me, you have no idea how true that is!’ Beth closed her eyes, wondering if this was when her father was going to blame her for her mother’s death, but he let go. She opened her eyes and he was struggling to his feet. He brushed away her attempts at help.

‘Look, I’m not going to London but I’ll phone a few people, okay?’ she told him. He just nodded as he made his way towards the door.

Beth was angry with herself. She was angry because she was concerned despite herself. When she had seen Talia’s pale, spite-filled pretty face from the dock, she had sworn she was never going to help her again. Let her die choking on her own blood and vomit face down in the street somewhere. But after calling around she was starting to share her father’s worries.

Talia had not gone to London; she had gone to Portsmouth. That was good. It was a smaller city and she should be easier to find. She had been in semi-regular contact with her remaining friends in Bradford, those she had not used up, until a few weeks ago. Talia had gone down to meet some goth, or whatever they were called now, a pretty boy called Clark who Beth vaguely knew. She had managed to get his number out of one of Talia’s friends and called him. He had given her a mouthful of abuse and hung up, refusing to answer any more of her calls.

However, another of Beth’s friends, Billy, who also worked the doors, had said that there had been some Internet porn clip doing the rounds recently. He was not alone in thinking that the girl in it looked a lot like Talia. He had not gone into details and Beth had not asked, but he had said awkwardly it was some pretty raw stuff. Billy had been one of those guys more than a little bit in love with her sister but was too nice for Talia to be interested. Billy had gone round to see some more of Talia’s friends in person. It sounded like he had been not quite so nice this time. Two hours later he had phoned Beth back with an address in Portsmouth.

‘I have some money saved from my disability,’ her dad said from the doorway to the living room. She had been sitting on the stairs talking to Billy on the phone.

‘This is it, Dad. This is the last time I try and help her.’

‘Just bring her back to me before I die.’

She doesn’t care!
Beth wanted to scream
. And you’ve always been dying, haven’t you, Dad? It’s a wonder that Mum beat you to it. The only thing Talia is interested in is using you in her ‘poor me’ stories.
Instead Beth just nodded.

In her room Beth packed. Clothes, soap, toothpaste, deodorant, ratty old towel, sleeping bag, all went into the army-surplus kitbag with the Celtic knotwork patterns drawn on it with marker pen. It was not much. Beth knelt in front of her bed staring at the kitbag, trying to make a decision. Finally she reached under the bed and pulled the box out. Opening it, she laid each item on the bed carefully. Brass knuckles, not the ones she had used on Mikey, her old ones that had lived in her pocket when she was working the doors. A pickaxe handle, one end with a bike chain wrapped tightly around it. A Balisong knife, often incorrectly called a butterfly knife. Beth had confiscated it from some kid when she had been working. She had kept it because she recognised a high-quality blade when she saw one. Finally she drew her great-grandfather’s First World War bayonet out of its sheath and looked at the old blade. She had stolen it years ago because nobody else cared about it, and she had not wanted Talia to sell it. The blade needed work, but that was okay – she would take her whetstone with her.

She packed all of them. If Talia had properly done it this time, was in real trouble, then she would have need of them. She was off to try and help her sister again. She was armed. This was how she had ended up in prison.

Beth put her leather jacket on, slung the kitbag over her shoulder and headed down the stairs. She did not even say goodbye.
Let him hear the door slam on another daughter
, she thought.

She walked out onto wet streets surrounded by grey stone.

McGurk leaned heavily on his cane and looked at the bloody and naked girl lying on top of the rubble, dust still settling on her. He was sure she was still alive: her tits were moving.

‘Well fuck,’ he said, his strong Portsmouth accent unmistakable. He could hear sirens in the distance. ‘Put her in the motor.’

‘Boss?’ Markus asked. A house blowing up was bound to draw the attraction of the police.

McGurk turned to look at Markus, who looked away from him, unable to meet his eyes.
Total obedience, that’s what it’s all about
, McGurk thought as Markus went to pick the girl up. Besides, it was his house and he wanted to know what had happened, and he thought that maybe she was the one Arbogast had told him about, the one he had come to see.

McGurk climbed into the back of the BMW and felt the boot slam.

‘Before the Old Bill shows up, Markus,’ he said, letting just enough impatience creep into his voice to worry the other man.

It took a long time to convince the
Black Swan
’s systems that the mating with the other ship/thing was safe enough to open the airlock. The docking system was too strange, too organic. Eventually Nulty had to override the system himself.