Wronged Sons, The (26 page)

Meanwhile, he was glad it hadn’t worked out with her fancy man. He couldn’t remember his name and he didn’t like the sound of him. No one is that perfect; she’d have found that out eventually. She should have thanked him for saving her the heartache.

“Are you aware you’re dead?” she asked out of the blue. “I mean, legally dead. You have to wait seven years before you can declare a missing person deceased. So on your seventh anniversary, I hired a solicitor and eight months later, I held your death certificate in my hand.”

“But you knew I was alive?” he replied, unsettled by her sudden conceit.

“That’s true. But if you didn’t value your life with us, then why should it have mattered to me?”

He understood her motives yet her nonchalance made him uncomfortable. She enjoyed playing with him.

“It wasn’t easy; either legally or morally,” she continued, “and I had to keep up the pretence you were dead to the children and the authorities. Then I had to prove I’d exhausted all avenues in looking for you. But that was the easy part because as Roger and our friends testified, I’d already been very thorough. And after a High Court hearing, you weren’t just dead to us, but in the eyes of the law as well.”

“Why go to all that effort? To get your own back?”

“Yes, partly,” she admitted, “but also because had you decided to rise like Lazarus - like you have - I wasn’t going to make it easy for you. Your insurance money helped to put Emily and Robbie through university, so the legalities of your death benefited us all.”

She’d knocked a little of the wind from his sails, as he realised once again he’d underestimated her strength of character. He’d never considered it might be a course of action she’d take once she discovered it was a lie. And he wasn’t sure how it made him feel.

“Did I have a funeral?” he asked hopefully.

“Yes, but only for the kids’ sake. In fact they were delighted to draw a line under you because having a dad who vanished into thin air was a millstone around their necks. So it helped them move on. They rarely spoke about you as they got older anyway.”

That last part was untrue, but he didn’t need to know that. In truth, she’d learned to bite her tongue when they brought his name up, and particularly when they talked of him with longing.

He also knew it was a lie. Despite the devious nature of Karma, he remembered word for word what he’d read on that website about James.

“Could you tell me a little about my funeral?” he asked, still wounded by her frosty relish.

“What else is there to say? You have an empty grave and a headstone in the village cemetery. I don’t really remember much about it other than it came as a relief.”

Again, she was not being honest, and he saw through her inconsistencies.

“You buried your husband and you don’t remember much about it? I don’t believe you.”

“And what makes you think I care what you believe?” She laughed as people do when talking about something that’s not actually funny.

“Because if you cared so little, why did you bother with a gravestone?”

“Like I said, for the kids’ sake.”

“But you said they never spoke about me, so why would they want me to have a grave?”

She looked away and didn’t reply. Every few months one of the children still took flowers to the churchyard, and arranged them in a vase Emily had made in pottery class when she was eight. At Christmas, they all still made an annual pilgrimage there together - even her. It was the only time of year she allowed herself to think about him.

He pleaded to her better nature.

“Catherine, I promise you after today, this will be the last you see of me. So please. Let’s be honest with each other.”

“What do you know about honesty, Simon?” she replied flatly.

“I’ve learned it’s what people need before they can move on. There is so much we should have said to each other back then. But I’m here to explain everything, even though a lot of it will hurt you.”

‘You’re right there,’ she thought. He had hurt her many times already that day and she had a gut feeling it might only be the tip of the iceberg. She inhaled sharply.

“The kids begged me to organise a funeral because they felt robbed of a proper goodbye as there was no body to bury,” she explained reluctantly. “Is that what you want to hear? Everyone you’d ever known turned up for it. I even ordered a maple coffin – your favourite wood - for people to place reminders of you inside, like your pub beer tankard and football medals. And after the service, we had a party at the house where they celebrated your life.”

He listened intently and smiled; touched by the effort she’d gone to despite what she knew.

“I didn’t do it for you,” she added sharply. “I felt sick every second you forced me to play the grieving widow. You made me complicit in your lie, and I hate you for that. Had it been my choice, I’d have cremated everything you’d ever touched.”

His eyes sank to the floor like a scolded dog.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Los Telaros, Mexico, Twenty-Years Earlier

May 13, 2.10pm

No matter where in the world I went, death was sure to follow.

It was commonplace for the sounds of grown men, bawling and shrieking from ecstasy and pain, to seep under bedroom doors and echo around the corridors of the bordello. But the scream I heard that afternoon was female and born out of distress, not pleasure. And noises rarely carried from Luciana’s room.

I dropped my paint pot and brush and bolted up the staircase, across the corridor and banged on her door with my fists.

“Are you alright?” I yelled anxiously. “Luciana!”

Inside, a male voice shouted something as he suppressed her muffled cries. I turned the handle but it didn’t budge, so I panicked, raised my leg and kicked as the scuffle inside continued.

Finally the door split from its frame and I ran in, but before I could focus on anything or anyone, something weighty collided with the side of my head. My body hit the wall and I dropped to the floor like a bag of rocks. Disorientated, I began to lift myself up until the second blow stopped me in my tracks.

This time my reaction was instinctive and I grabbed the bare ankle of my assailant and twisted it hard. Its owner was felled like a tree in a storm, but then unleashed a flurry of fists upon my head and neck. I tried to shelter myself and as they attacked in a pounding, furious flurry; my head becoming increasingly numb to the pain. A lucky jab to his bare genitals left him temporarily disabled and I’d almost reached my feet before his knee broke my nose.

As his face moved towards mine, I grabbed both sides of his head but he took advantage of my exposed torso and hit me in both kidneys. Dazed and winded, I landed two clumsy whacks somewhere around his ears but they only riled him further.

For the first time, I took in his appearance. At six foot five and at least twenty stone of sculpted muscle, I questioned whether the naked, hairy creature before me was a man or a beast. I erred towards the latter.

Then he picked up a blurred ornament, raised it above his head and spat as he laughed. I expected his black, widened pupils and salivating mouth to be the last things I’d ever see and accepted the inevitable.

Suddenly, a metal lamp base appeared from nowhere and smashed against his crown. He fell to his knees; his face contorted by shock and misunderstanding. The lamp swung backwards then staved him over and over again. His eyes rolled to the back of his head leaving shiny white ovals before he slumped face down into the wet carpet, convulsing.

It was only then I noticed Luciana; her face smeared in murky redness hiding behind matted hair. Her underwear was in shreds, and the lamp base shook in her trembling hands. I crawled towards the floored titan and rolled him over, face up, to steady his spasming body.

The first words she ever spoke to me were devoid of all emotion.

“Leave him.”

“We should call an ambulance.”

“We do nothing. When I refused to let him force objects inside me, he said his daughter bites her lip and stays quiet when he does it to her. Let the animal die in the way he deserves.”

I had no case to offer for the defence. Instead, I fixated on the pulp of a man biting so deeply into his tongue, it had begun to sever at the root. Together we watched as his mouth effervesced with delicate pink bubbles until the convulsions petered out into nothing. Finally, his brain stopped fighting and his soul began its journey from whence it came, into the arms of the devil.

*

Madam Lola slipped into autopilot as she relayed orders to a crowd of horrified girls, gawping at the remains by the door. They scuttled in numerous directions like stray fireworks.

From the moment I’d limped downstairs and alerted her to the battle in Luciana’s room, she’d responded with military precision to remove any trace of the man or his rage. She gave every impression it wasn’t the first time she’d been forced to clean up an unexpected mess.

“Miguel – is there enough gasoline in the truck to reach the ravines?”

“Yes.”

“Bueno. Take it round back. The rest of you, go back downstairs and see to your guests.”

“Who did this to him?” she asked, looking directly at Luciana. But I was unwilling to place her in the firing line.

“I did,” I replied and Madam Lola nodded her head approvingly.

“Good. No man here would touch her again if they learned of this. People lucky enough not to be haunted by sadness can see it in others.”

*

Luciana’s face had been occupied by an observant silence for much of the journey; the hush only peppered by her directions.

She sat with her knees protectively pointed inwards as she gazed at the passing fields from the passenger window. I longed to talk to her but the circumstances were hardly appropriate considering the body of the man she’d just killed lay wrapped up behind us in the flatbed truck.

I drove along dirt track lanes away from the main roads and wondered how much rage must have been bottled up inside her to watch without pity as the man dissolved into nothing. I understood it completely. I had once been where she was now.

“Over there,” she pointed with a torn fingernail.

I pulled the truck over to the side of road between fields of scorched corn. We removed two shovels and began to dig a grave. The ground was arid and stubborn, so it took us an age to burrow a ditch deep enough for spring’s flash floods not to send his body sailing down the valley in a polythene raft.

The man’s features were indistinguishable under the tightly wound plastic. I used all my strength to pull his hulking frame by his ankles from the truck to the ground below. His broken skull bounced back and forth along the rough terrain before I rolled him into his hole.

Suddenly, Luciana pulled out a silver pistol from the back of her jeans. I froze and without hesitation, she pulled the trigger twice, shooting him first in the left eye and then in the right. I stumbled backwards as my ears rang.

“It’s a calling card of the gangs,” she explained. “A bullet in each eye means he’s seen something he shouldn’t have and has been punished. If his body’s ever found, the police will think he was executed by one of his own.”

I gave an agitated nod and threw the shovels back inside the truck. When I turned around, she was stood inches away from me. Then she pushed my aching shoulders against the door, pulled my mouth towards hers and kissed me with a passion my body had never experienced.

She loosened my belt buckle; I removed her T-shirt and we winced as our cuts, swelling skin and emerging kaleidoscope of blue, yellow and purple bruises collided against each other’s. And when we had finished, we drove back to the bordello as silently as we’d left.

October 23, 1.10am

Each night she crept into my bed and we’d make love with weightless magnitude. It was always a slow and sensual experience, unlike our first time with the bitter taste of death and lust in our throats. Then, when she decided we were done, she’d slip back into her clothes and vanish like nothing had happened.

Luciana and I never spoke of the day she killed a man. In fact we never spoke at all. I wondered if she made love to me out of gratitude, or whether it was a way of controlling me. Her profession meant surrendering herself to men for their money; so by dictating to me when we had sex, there was no doubt who was in charge.

Her reasoning didn’t matter. If sex was the only means by which I could breathe her air and feel her skin against mine then I was grateful for anything she offered me. And as the days progressed to weeks, she remained in my room a little longer with each visit.

My deepest fear had always been discovering the one I loved was finding love from another. But because Luciana’s profession was to have sex with other men for money, it wasn’t adultery. It was business. I didn’t doubt for a moment I was her only extra curricular activity. And it was the perfect partnership and most monogamous relationship I’d ever had.

November 14, 11.40am

I rolled on to my side and faced the door when I heard the handle turn. I smiled and pulled back the bed sheet to invite her in, but she chose to sit in an armchair by the window opposite my bed. She lit a cigarette and began to blow smoke rings.

Finally, following six months of nocturnal liaisons, Luciana cast her die and waited cautiously to see where it might land.

“My name is Luciana Florentino Marcanio,” she began carefully, “and I was born and raised in Italy.”

I propped myself up against the headboard and listened closely.

“I came to Mexico with my mother after my father tried to have us killed. He was a wealthy but vicious man who abused her; convinced she was having affairs with any man who paid her attention. He was her only love, but his paranoia and insecurities wouldn’t allow him to believe that. My mother was not strong enough to leave him. She tried her best to please him and win his trust but when you accuse someone so often, eventually, they will give in and prove you right. He drove her into the arms of one of his business colleagues. And eventually my father found out. He paid for her lover to be killed, but not until he’d had him castrated. The first my mother knew of it was when she found his genitals in a gift-wrapped box on her dressing room table.”