The Baby And The Brandy (Ben Bracken 1) (8 page)

It’s as grand and beautiful a home I could ever hope for, and I know that, thanks to my actions and choices, I will never live in such luxury. No, I have made my bed, and I must lie in it. I suppose I could take my money, and flee overseas. Find a sunny little country where my English money will go a long way, with a nice little nook I can call my own (with a favorable anti-extradition policy for good measure), and leave Great Britain to her own devices. God knows she deserves it.

But I’d only fidget, and frustrate myself. I have reached an uneasy agreement with myself, that the past is the past and it can stay where it is, within reason. No time for guilt anymore. Do good in the name of the memory of what I did, but that’s as far backwards I’ll glance. No paralysis by over-analysis. Progress is now. And my attention lies with that beauteous glass lair across the sloshing murk of the Manchester Ship Canal, and what serpents lie in her belly.

9

Behind the wheel once more, my foot gleefully reunited with that Lexus gas pedal, I weave my way back to the city centre, looking for a new base for at least the next few hours. I feel my immediate future features a combination of research and waiting.

I know of an old haunt that could do with some work, but will be fine for the immediate future. I’m not proud, I’m not picky, and the Campanile on the edge of town doesn’t ask for ID. It’s only a couple of minutes away. I’ll aim for that and ask what they’ve got.

My mind floats off and around to Jack, and where he went with those blokes. I’m guessing they are something to do with the Berg, and his father. He recognized them, and they appeared non-threatening - well, as non-threatening as you can when you pretty much demand someone come with you.

In the military world, when you needed some info on a certain subject, directive or tactic, you couldn’t just hit the world wide web and get an answer within seconds. I’m not used to intel on tap, and I’m keen to get started. Google might yield nothing, or it might be fit to spill the beans all over the show. I might be able to get more assistance from an hour on the laptop than 24 hours hours stomping the streets shaking down as much of the city as I can. But in the era of social media and it’s narcissistic lure, I’m willing to bet that something has slipped somewhere, and from what I’ve seen and heard, I think I can at least get things rumbling.

I remember, as I pull into the hotel car park, that there is something else I could do with finding on the internet, and it is something I’m not sure I will be able to find with a quick search engine foray. I need to find someone that can fake me an identity. Someone trustworthy, reputable and experienced. Someone who will forget me as soon as they create the new me.

It troubles me that I will need, in reinventing myself in terms of civil identification, to brush shoulders with the very social bacteria that I’m trying to scrub away. But it’s a necessary evil. Nietzsche said that ‘when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you’. To get close to the evils of this world, I must come into irrefutable contact with evil. It will impact me, of that there is no doubt - such is the price of my intended endeavors. My hands are forever dirty, in any case - as long as my conscience is clear, the reasons for rubbing shoulders justified, then I can deal with a little more dirt under my fingernails. As always, as long as the end justifies the means. I hope I manage to keep track of all the excuses and leeway I’m giving myself.

And there I go again. Maudlin. Self-destructive. Doubtful. What point is there in being afforded a shot at redemption if I’m too wet to take it? Us Brits, we pride ourselves on a stiff upper lip, if nothing else. Stoicism in the face of adversity. If all around me is crumbling, I will keep my head high and accept it with grace, making the best out of the hand I am dealt. If I’m to achieve anything with this second chance, I need to follow the necessities laid out by my instincts. No compromises. Compromises eke the cracks of failure.

I park up and head for the entrance. The lobby is very small and empty, but I spot the bar through the double doors, looking equally deserted. Within minutes, having paid in cash and signed the register as a Mr Sean Miller, I am ensconced in a booth, laptop open, logging into the complimentary hotel wifi. I place my phone on the table next to it, ready to eye updates.

Once in the network, I start with Google. Glancing around, making sure I wasn’t followed, in the search box I type ‘the berg manchester’. Within a second, the search results blink up and I’m faced with pages dominated by an ad agency in Manchester called Berg Advertising, and ex-Manchester United defender Henning Berg. Page 2 of the results is about the same. Page 3, same again. By page 7, I’m losing hope, but there is one result slightly amiss. It’s a newspaper report, from the Manchester Evening News website, and the date of the result is 8 years old. I bring up the article. The headline reads:

POLICE OFFICER WAKES FROM COMA

I read on, trying to soak in as much as possible.

‘A Greater Manchester Police Officer, beaten and left for dead in Salford, has recovered consciousness after an 11 day coma. Officer Jeremiah Salix, 27, was found in the Ordsall area, unconscious with multiple injuries. He was placed in a medically-induced coma, and operated upon by surgeons at St Mary’s Royal Infirmary. He has been in intensive care ever since.

Last night, he spoke. Staff Nurse Mary Robertson describes the moment he came around. “It started with twitching in his right foot, then blinking. He soon became lucid and asked for his girlfriend. We are so happy to see him come back, as we were very concerned.”

The investigation into what happened to Officer Salix continues, but rumors that it was anything to do with an organized crime gang known as the Berg are unconfirmed.’

Bingo.

I feel my once empty info-pantry increasing in stock. I feel more equipped, more confident, more comfortable. I’m not quite so blind now. I still haven’t the faintest idea who killed Royston Brooker, but I now have much more of a handle on what I’m dealing with with these enigmatic characters. Elusive and rare, like UFO’s sightings. Nearly a decade since they featured in the media and popular culture.

I reroute my thought process to the names I do know, and what details I can garner through their carelessness.

One of the men who picked up Jack was called Michael. I know his surname to be Davison, so I type in Michael Davison. I was hoping for a Facebook profile, littered with information, but all I see is a solitary photo tag. The owner of the photo is a Leonard Freund. On opening the picture, I make a positive ID straight away. The picture itself is a standard nightclub snap - bright flash, pitch-black background, all the glamour and excitement of the moment itself stripped away leaving the bare facts. Just two men at a table, by a mostly-empty club dance-floor. With champagne. And that’s it. Neither look too pissed, neither look too happy, neither look too bothered. They look bored to tears. I notice the pupils. Saucers. Pills? Possibly. One of the men in it is clearly Michael Davison, the man from before. Michael Davison is clearly a man who is not shy of the odd excess. His name is written at the bottom, along with Leonard’s. Hovering the cursor over the names I see that Leonard’s is clickable, and Michael’s is not. Michael has no Facebook profile. I click on Leonard’s and it quickly becomes obvious that this man is a social media obsessive and a consummate narcissist.

For starters, his profile picture looks like a homemade modeling shot. Black and white, high contrast, shades. An odd pencil mustache kind of completes the look. I scroll down into this bemusing catalogue. Is this what makes this Leonard man tick, or what he thinks people want to see? Either answer is a strange one. There are meals as photo updates, just pictures of plates of food. And cars - a few nice sports models. There’s a fancy watch called a Breitling. A flew cliche’s of a stereotypical high-life, like jacuzzis, first class air travel, gadgets. It’s like a ten year old boy in 1985, with a penchant for boasting and telling porky pies, had a Facebook profile. From looking at him, Leonard could well have been ten in 1985, and has just never managed to grow up, now living out his fantasies and making sure everyone unlucky enough to stumble on his internet persona knows it.

I’m lost in my thoughts, eyes glazed right over, and I realize I have been staring into space for the last few minutes. Something has snapped me out of it, and while I pour my consciousness back into the present, I notice it is my phone, buzzing on the table. Caller ID lets me know it is Jack, and I grab it without delay.

‘Yes?’ I answer.

‘I’ve got it.’ Jack says hurriedly. He sounds a little out of breath.

‘You got...?’

‘A name. They gave me a name.’

Jack’s meeting clearly went well. I am desperate to question Jack further, but I imagine there will be time for that later. Jack won’t want to sit inert for long. ‘Do you recognize it?’

‘Kind of. Anyway, I know where we are going.’

‘You want to get started right away, I take it?’

‘No. We’ll wait till tonight.’

‘Can you give me any info?’

‘The Floating Far East. That’s where we are headed.’

I have no idea what that is, or where it might be found. ‘Anything else?’ I enquire.

‘Not now. Meet me at 8.30, at the ice rink in Spinningfields. It’s not far from there.’

‘I’ll be there.’

The line goes dead, and my mind transforms instantly. My senses tighten, my resolve fortifies, and my mind clears. I am back on the frontline, adopting the familiar mental state that immediately precedes a mission. It’s a battening down of the hatches, the calm, the pause, the reflection - before the unavoidable descent into harm’s way.

10

I get to Spinningfields early, my nervous energy too much for the hotel room to handle, prompting me to head out into the cooling, prickly, pre-evening air. It’s a crisp evening, the spots of rain from the afternoon having drifted off somewhere else, and the atmosphere retains that post-downpour clarity. If Manchester wasn’t so alive, I’m sure I’d hear a pin drop. I make the short walk along the backstreets from my hotel, keeping fixed in my eye line the upper floors of Manchester Civil Justice Centre - a huge, preposterously balanced, filing cabinet of a building that stands in the centre of Spinningfields, commanding tall in its new post-modern shell.

It’s not long before I am there, having passed the old, disused Granada Studios, previous home of TV greats such as Coronation Street. This city has transformed, the tired old in many ways making way for a brave new, with eager youth paving the way for ever-increasing steps to modernity. Business has flocked to Manchester, and I remember as I step into the plushness of the pedestrianized Spinningfields site, that within these smart tower blocks sit 64 of The Sunday Times Top 100 Companies, in a list they put together last year some time. I had read it in prison - I had always enjoyed keeping tabs on the outside world, unwilling to let Great Britain and its progress slip me by while I was working out what to do next.

The site is probably a square of 5 blocks, cut off from cars apart from service vehicles, adorned with plush bars and restaurants punctuating big business premises, like a Christmas tree of commerce, the former sparkling the latter, providing watering holes for the eager and the tired. In another lifetime, I may have enjoyed getting a nice easy nine to five, safe in the cushion of a regular income, and might even have had friends I could meet for a drink after work. So it’s with a little tug of jealousy that I watch the groups of bright young(ish) things cavort in their loosened ties and pretty dresses, as they mill about from bar to bar with ever-slackening tongues.

The firearm pressing against the outside of my right hip pulls me back to the present. I’m not one of those people. I don’t know whether I ever will be. At least not tonight.

I had struggled to work out how best to carry the silenced weapon, but I was damned if I was going to leave the hotel room without it. I had resorted to popping it down my waistband directly next to my right hand at standing rest, by my side. I feel a little like a wild west gunslinger, but I’ve never had to carry a weapon in public before, or carry one without permission. I have used them without permission, sure, but whenever it’s come to storing them on my person, I’ve always been in fatigues with a purpose-built pocket or a holster. So, for now, my waistband will have to do.

Coming into possession of it is a great piece of luck, and saves me a great deal of effort. It will come in very handy for my selected future, and would have been a real ball-ache to organize. If you want a firearm in this country, there aren’t a great many avenues to hand that don’t have the same effect as strapping a neon sign to your head announcing that you have bad intentions. You either have to steal it yourself, or cut a deal with an organized crime figure with a good connection, and considering I’m on the cusp of a tiff with Manchester’s organized crime, I hardly want to announce my possession of a tool of their destruction. No, the firearm is a great piece of luck, and I best look after it - and ammunition is so much easier to get your hands on than a piece itself.

The only other things on me, are my Swiss army knife, wallet and phone, the latter two of which are wrapped in sandwich bags I had borrowed from the hotel kitchen, to keep them safe and dry. I check them routinely.

The ice rink is ahead, framed in twinkling halogen, and it glassily cements the lavishness. In this quarter, Manchester is clearly thriving - but there are darker corners out there, and the man leaning against the ice rink railings on the left hand side looks like he has his head, heart and soul firmly preoccupied with one.

I approach Jack and take a position next to him. He looks transfixed, and charged with a crackling galvanism. He looks about ready to detonate.

‘Tell me about today,’ I instruct, without looking at him, pleasantries seeming pointless.

‘It was fine. Felix is a mess, it seems all the guys are,’ Jack replies, unblinking. He seems a man on a cliff-edge, a precipice he wanted but on arrival cannot fathom.