Nothing Sacred E-Book

David Thorne

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: Daniel Connell Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 454

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

A mother's nightmare: her children taken from her because of unexplained injuries all over their bodies. Who will believe her story? When lawyer Daniel Connell receives a visit from his trouble-making old flame Victoria pleading for his help, he looks for any excuse not to get involved. But no one else believes her pleas of innocence and Daniel can see she is terrified. As he enters Victoria's life once more, Daniel's search for truth leads from the dark heart of Essex to the mountains of Afghanistan, and a terrifying world where monsters are real - and nothing is sacred.

Leseprobe

NOTHING SACRED

David Thorne has worked as a writer for the last 15 years, originally in advertising, then in television and radio comedy. He has written material for many comedians, including Jimmy Carr, Alan Carr, David Mitchell and Bob Mortimer. He was a major contributor to the BAFTA-winning Armstrong and Miller Show, and has worked on shows including Facejacker, Harry and Paul and Alan Carr: Chatty Man. Nothing Sacred is his second novel in the Daniel Connell series.

Also by David Thorne

East of Innocence

First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2015 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © David Cadji-Newby, 2015

The moral right of David Cadji-Newby to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 363 4E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 364 1

Printed in Great Britain.

CorvusAn imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

CONTENTS

Nothing Sacred

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Acknowledgements

NOTHING SACRED

1

GABE AND I are coming back from the coast, Gabe driving too fast through flat country under a low blank grey sky, heading for the arterial road that will take us home. Gabe is telling me once again about the size of the shark he pulled out of the North Sea three hours ago, the shark writhing and bucking, Gabe managing to control it in both arms on the rocking deck long enough to give a proud predatory grin to the photographer, which was me. I let him boast as the road rushes past, branches slapping the wing mirror next to me as he cheats blind bends; it is good to see him happy, living in the moment, relishing a battle that he can still fight.

We have been out on the boat of Harry Rafferty, a man who I have known for years, ever since I was a child. Our fathers had been friends, both of them part-time villains and full-time drinkers; we had been their neglected sons. Together we spent hours half-heartedly kicking a football around weed-ridden pub car parks, waiting for our fathers to emerge, desultorily participating in the fiction that this was normal, that this was what all children did on Saturday nights; that we were in no way different.

For a while Harry went the same way as his father, running with a neighbourhood crew and nearly going down for the firebombing of a local nightclub in which a young woman was terribly burned. But, like me, he eventually managed to escape the gravitational pull of his suburban Essex upbringing and connections, moving to the coast where he now runs an apparently legitimate charter fishing business.

He has one of the fastest boats coming off the Thames Estuary, with twin 400 horsepower diesels which he did not waste time pointing out; he told us that they were for reaching the fishing grounds faster, no point fucking about getting to where the sharks were.

‘More time for the punters to get their lines wet,’ he said.

‘That right?’ I said. Harry wore a battered cotton skipper’s cap and a sweatshirt that read My Boat, My Rules and a smile that was far harder to read.

‘Why else, Danny?’

‘Never taken it to Spain? Over to Holland?’

‘Why’d I do that?’ As he said this his eyes crinkled and I could not help but smile back, Gabe chuckling behind me. The man is a rascal. I do not believe for one moment that his boat has never taken on illicit cargo, that it stays in harbour every night there is no moon. But his history is, to some extent, my history and I cannot moralise, even if I am a lawyer by trade. What he does is his business, not mine.

‘So, what are we fishing for?’ Gabe asked him.

‘Smooth hounds, tope, skate. Bass on lighter tackle. Be a good day out. Trust me.’

‘Think we’ll catch anything?’ I said.

‘Your mate, definitely. What I remember of you, Danny son, you couldn’t catch fucking clap.’

Going on a fishing trip had been my idea, a way to reconnect with Gabe, my best friend but a man who has not been the same since he was invalided out of Afghanistan, a captain of the Royal Tank Regiment who would never command a platoon again. Some men never find their calling in life; for Gabe, being in the army was the only thing he ever wanted to do and, once in it, I believe that he loved it ardently and unquestioningly. To lose it has been his undoing, a grief he cannot come to terms with.

‘Fishing?’

‘Be fun. Day out.’

He frowned, like fun was a dirty word, frivolous, nothing that he would willingly entertain. He looked at me, then shrugged. ‘Sure, all right. Fishing. Whatever, Danny.’

But it was not long after Harry had opened up the engines and the boat was bouncing over grey waves like a pebble thrown by some delinquent giant that Gabe was smiling into the spray, holding tight to the guardrail as we left the Thames Estuary and headed out into the North Sea. Adrenalin is adrenalin, even if it is not being supplied by the British Army, and when he got his first bite, his reel shrieking as a big fish took thirty metres of line on a vicious run, I do not doubt that he was having fun.

It was the last cast of the day that landed Gabe his shark; even Harry, who cultivated a careful air of seen-it-all weariness, could not help but let out an agitated ‘Fuck me’ as he watched the dark outline of the shark arrowing beneath the boat. What Gabe lacks in my blunt strength he makes up for in determination; even fishing off the one leg he didn’t leave in Afghanistan, there was no doubt about the eventual winner of the fight. I do not imagine that Gabe has ever given up on anything in his life. And as he held the shark in his arms, I knew with a relieved elation that he was not a lost cause, that he still held the capacity for joy.

He laughed as he struggled to hold the big fish and Harry told him to fuck off, how he’d caught one twice the size off the coast of Ireland, at least twice the size. Then I took his photograph and things, for that one instant, were blameless and entirely good.

Now we are back in his car and Gabe is mocking me for the fish I did manage to catch: several runt-like smooth hounds, like miniature sharks, and a skate which, as Harry told me, broke all kinds of records; unfortunately the wrong kinds. But it is good to see Gabe laugh, good to see him take pleasure in an ordinary day, and I do not mind his ridicule. Anything is better than the cloud he has been under for so many months. My phone rings and I check the number. It is a client, one of my only clients, and I cannot afford to not give him my full professional attention. But I am out of the office and the man calling is Aatif, a Pakistani national whose visa application I am trying to push through. I do not feel like pointing out to him that having an unexplained Somali entrance stamp on his passport is always going to set alarm bells ringing, particularly when there is no exit stamp, and that his application is, essentially, dead in the water. I swear softly, cancel his call.

Gabe looks across at me, amused. ‘Work?’

‘Some guy, wants a visa to stay in the UK. Got a dodgy Somali stamp on his passport.’

Gabe nods. ‘Home Office aren’t having any of it.’

‘They think everyone’s an insurgent. Everything’s got to be spotless or there’s no chance.’

Gabe doesn’t answer. His leg was blown off below the knee by an IED as he led his company on patrol through an area infamous for sheltering insurgents, many of who came from across the border from Pakistan. I speak quickly, fill the silence.

‘Anyway, looks like he’ll be on his way back home soon.’

‘That what you’re doing now? Visas?’

‘Got to make money somehow.’

‘Christ, Danny, you used to be better than that.’

‘It’s a living.’

Gabe raises an eyebrow. ‘If you say so.’

But I have to admit, Gabe has a point. This kind of work is a world away from the cases I used to take on, back when I worked at one of the City’s most respected firms. Still, I cannot help but resent his contempt for the work that I am now doing; at least I am working. Since Gabe left the army he has done, as far as I can tell, nothing at all. Yet he has just bought himself a new car, is having renovations done to the house his parents left him that I could never afford. I wonder what he is living on, where the money is coming from.

I know what Gabe is capable of, and I know that he has a need for adrenalin. One of the reasons that he loved the army so much, I believe, is the buzz that killing, or the possibility of killing, gave him. It is a hard thing to accept of a friend that I grew up with, but he has become something harder and far less civilised than he once was. Now he has money and no visible means of support. Not something noteworthy in Essex, where the origin of people’s money is so often murky, the subject of rumour and speculation; but worrying in Gabe, who has always been straight up, honest. What is he involved in? I know that I need to confront him about it, get to the truth; but confronting Gabe about anything is not an act I take lightly.

Gabe shifts in his seat and winces. After a cold day on a boat, fighting a shark, I imagine that his leg must be troubling him and feel a brief stab of guilt for expecting him to cope without consequences.

‘How’s the leg?’

‘Still missing in action,’ says Gabe, eyes front, his tone closing down the discussion before it has even begun. Still, I cannot help myself; I have been excluded from this part of Gabe’s life for too long.

‘Just…’

Gabe turns to face me, his cold clear eyes locked on mine, evaluating, challenging, their blue as icy as an Arctic wolf’s. ‘Yes, Danny?’

‘Just worry. You know. About—’

‘Hell’s this wanker doing?’ says Gabe, interrupting, looking in his rear-view mirror. I turn in the passenger seat, see the rear window filled with the grille of a Range Rover, huge and black. It is so close that I cannot see the windscreen above, or who is driving. Gabe speeds up, a surly snarl coming from the exhaust, the Range Rover quickly receding. This car he has bought clearly has a big engine. It cannot have been cheap.

‘You were saying,’ says Gabe, nothing but challenge in his voice, daring me to keep going. But Gabe knows me as well as I know myself; I have never backed away from a challenge, regardless of who throws it down.

‘Nice car,’ I say. ‘Cost much?’

‘Fair bit,’ says Gabe. His voice is tight, clipped. Now we are into it. No going back.

‘Getting that work done on your house.’

‘Noticed that?’

‘Wish I could afford work like that.’

‘Yes? Maybe you stopped messing about with visas, got some decent cases.’

This is no good; I do not want this conversation to descend into bickering, or worse. I am talking to Gabe because I care, not because I am after a pissing competition.

‘Listen, Gabe, I just wonder where you’re getting the money.’

‘You what?’

I take a breath, watch the road in front, choose my words. ‘You’ve got no job. Your army pension’s what, ten per cent of fuck all? And you’re spending it like water. Where’s it coming from?’

Gabe smiles, a baring of his teeth. ‘Oh yeah, now I get it, Danny. Someone you know gets hold of some cash, you think they’re, what? On the rob? Selling drugs? No, women? Fuck you. I’m not your old man.’

That is not fair and I can feel my pulse quickening, a dangerous sign. I know all too well where my temper can lead.

We are approaching a bend, the road broadening, and Gabe looks over at me, his eyes fractionally wider than usual so that I can see almost the entire iris, pale blue ringed with a blue slightly darker, their wideness the only sign that he is angry. He opens his mouth to speak and I sense rather than see a dark shadow fall over the car. There is a violent jolt and Gabe struggles with the steering wheel. I think he has it under control when there is another huge impact from behind and the world is a blur past the windscreen, my head whipped back as the car spins around. Gabe is still trying to get control but it is as if we have been picked up, spun by some unseen force. We stop suddenly, another impact, this time the trunk of a tree slamming against Gabe’s side of the car. Leaves cover the windows, darkness. I am completely disorientated. I do not know where we are, what has happened. The car is suddenly silent. I look across at Gabe who is turning the key in the ignition because the car has stalled. He looks intent, methodical, glances up into the rear-view mirror as he puts the car in gear. I look ahead again and see a man in a balaclava pointing a pistol at us, legs apart, gun held in two hands. The balaclava is black, everything he is wearing is black, he has black gloves on. I look across at Gabe, who is watching the man without expression, and then my door opens and a hand reaches across, unclips my seat belt and pulls me out with an arm around my neck. I am too confused to fight back, and as I am pulled back. I choke and my vision begins to dim but I can see a man smash Gabe’s window and Gabe take his hands from the steering wheel in a gesture of surrender which, for some reason, makes me unutterably sad.

I am face down on dirt and I turn my head to see Gabe lying next to me. His face is towards me and I can look directly into his eyes. There is a foot on my back. I see a hand put a gun to Gabe’s head and feel a pressure on the side of mine, just above my ear. Gabe’s eyes do not react; I can read nothing in them. No fear or anger or confusion. They seem calm. I hear a metallic sound from the gun against my head, a slight jolt. The hand holding the gun against Gabe’s head pulls back the slide and it makes the same sound. Gabe blinks at it. There is a momentary silence.

‘Ready?’ says a voice. ‘

Let’s do it.’

‘Sweet dreams.’

The hand holding the gun against the side of Gabe’s head pulls the trigger. He blinks again but there is only a click. For the first time Gabe’s eyes react. He looks surprised. The gun against my head makes another click as I feel it jump against my skin. The foot lifts off my back. I hear footsteps walk away, a car door slam, another.

I think that everyone has gone when a voice directly above us says: ‘Last chance. That’s the message. We won’t ask again.’

I hear his footsteps walk off, then an engine start up and a car pull away. Gabe and I just lie there for five, ten seconds, not moving, as if there is somebody still standing above us and if we look he will kill us. Perhaps there is. But eventually Gabe shakes his head against the dirt and pushes himself up with both hands onto his good knee and then onto one foot, the prosthetic foot following. He is as clumsy and awkward as a new-born foal getting to its feet for the first time. I turn over and sit up, hands around my knees.

‘Well,’ says Gabe.

‘Yeah,’ I say. I cannot say anything else. I have no idea what just happened.

‘Just to be sure,’ Gabe said. ‘We are still alive, right?’

We are in Gabe’s kitchen, sitting opposite one another with a bottle of Scotch in between, drunk down to the top of the label. It is all he has to offer, though right now it is exactly what I need.

I have been in this kitchen so many times in my life, from a young teenager upwards, and still I miss the presence of Gabe’s mother fussing about us, offering us cake, biscuits, the smell, and the feeling of warmth and care. But she has been dead five years now, Gabe’s father following soon after.

‘Feeling better?’ he asks.

‘Blinding,’ I say. The Scotch is doing its work, a warm tingle from my heart through to my arms and legs, up the back of my neck into my head. Already what happened is losing its menace. I survived it, I am alive, thus it cannot have been so serious. Except that, of course, it was. Gabe is gazing at me with professional concern and I know that I have to put my hands up, confess what I know. I owe it to him.

‘Gabe…’ I hesitate.

Gabe picks up the bottle, carefully pours us both a top-up, nods me to go on. How is it that his hands are not shaking?

‘What just happened.’ I smile, comes out more of a culpable grimace. ‘Listen, it was me they were warning off. Shouldn’t have been you there. Involved. I’m sorry.’

‘After you, were they?’

‘I’m into something. Something pretty big.’

Gabe nods slowly. Frowns. ‘Anything to do with the military?’

‘Military? No, nothing like that. Something… It’s complicated.’

Gabe holds up his drink, looks at me through the glass. ‘That was a military manoeuvre. The way they took us off the road. Couldn’t have been anyone else.’

‘Gabe, this thing I’m involved in… It’s serious.’

‘Not saying it isn’t. Just saying. They were military. Or ex-military. One of the two.’

I shrug, take a drink. ‘Maybe they’re hiring out. I don’t know. Listen, Gabe, I’m sorry.’

Gabe puts his glass down on the table, rests on his elbows, fixes me with his eyes. ‘Danny, you’re not the only one with troubles. I’ll give you a hundred to one those jokers were after me.’

I am about to take a drink, stop, frown. ‘Yeah? Why?’

‘Seems we’ve both got problems.’

‘It’d have to be a pretty fucking big one for them to do that. I mean, shit, Gabe, those guns.’

Gabe nods seriously, looks down at the table, back at me. ‘Pretty fucking big.’

‘So what is it?’

Gabe shakes his head, smiles, takes a drink. ‘No, go on, Dan. You first. From the beginning.’

2

AT ONE STAGE in my life Victoria Lowrie had been a vision of beauty so rare that it was as if she possessed magical powers. Often, men would not even dare to look at her, and everything came so easily to her that she treated life like a game that she could never lose at. I remembered once she told me that she had spent a week in Marbella and had never bought a single drink; that she could not remember the last time anybody had said no to her. Back then, I imagined that she was charmed, that there were perhaps only a handful of women like her in the world. But we believe many things when we are young, when we have not yet learned that there is nothing inviolate, nothing which life cannot beat down and destroy.

As I looked at her across my desk and wished that I kept a box of tissues on it, it was hard to imagine she could be the same person. I had no claims on beauty or elegance; people, friends of mine, said that in a suit I looked like I belonged outside the door of a nightclub. But compared to Vick I was not doing badly. She looked ten years older than her true age: her face puffed and mottled and strained and, if I was to be honest, unlovely; her once sumptuous blonde hair dirty and limp. But given what had just happened to her, I could not be surprised. She had had a difficult life but nothing, I suspected, that approached this.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Okay, listen, take it easy. Start at the beginning. Slowly.’

She looked at me, her face collapsed in absolute despair, her misshapen mouth moist and sagging and trembling, and nodded and sobbed again. I sat there trying not to look uncomfortable and waited for her to finish. These moments were what boxes of tissues were for.

‘It’s… Oh, Danny, it’s going to sound so stupid.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘From the beginning.’

‘I don’t even know… Oh, Jesus, you’ll think I’m mental.’

‘Just tell me.’

‘You know how I used to be… But I ain’t like that any more, I ain’t. Really. So whatever you think of me, of what I was like…’ She leaned forward, made sure that I was looking directly at her, into her eyes. ‘I ain’t like that any more.’

Vick was, if not my first girlfriend, then the first girlfriend I had who gave me such an intensity of feeling that I believed I was in love. In truth, that feeling may just as well have been jealousy to the point of insanity. I never for one second thought that I was in her league, and spent our entire relationship waiting for her to realise this, find someone better. I did not truly know what kept us going for the year or so we survived; there was nothing good going on between us.

It is said that the ideal relationship is one in which both people complement each other and bring out their positive qualities. With Vick, she brought out nothing in me but jealousy and anger. For her part, she treated me like a lunatic plaything, winding me up and pointing me in any direction she chose, generally with regrettable consequences. Vick was a heavy drinker; understandably, I supposed, given that she never had to pay for them. But when she drank she also became spiteful, like a bored child who wants to know how far she can push things. Talking to other men, inventing outrages, bringing them to me. Me, drunk and as insecure as any twenty-year-old out with a heart-stoppingly beautiful woman would be.

We split up after she claimed a man had offered her two hundred pounds and a gram of coke for a blowjob in a nightclub toilet. After I had been pulled off him, it turned out that he was a flight attendant so camp that for the first few minutes of talking to him I thought he was putting me on. Vick thought it was hilarious, shrieking with laughter as the poor man dabbed aggrievedly at his split lip, asking what the fuck I’d hit him for. Even the barman handing out the napkins could not help but snigger. The guy I’d hit, though, did not see the funny side and threatened to call the police. I’d had to spend all the money I had buying him cocktails before he was mollified. That was enough for me, for us.

But that was then, and I could see no trace of the spoilt, carefree girl of twenty years ago in Vick today. None at all.

‘It started with little things,’ she said. ‘Things that weren’t right. Silly things, really.’

‘Like?’

‘Like…’ She took a deep breath, dabbed at her eyes with what was left of her tissue, a sodden ball peeping out of her fist. ‘Like furniture moving about.’

‘Furniture.’

‘Yeah, probably only a couple of times.’

‘Like what? How had it moved?’

‘Like the sofa’s on the other side of the room, that was one time. I’ve come downstairs…’ She paused. ‘Come downstairs, and the sofa’s…’ Her voice rose, a keening wail. ‘It’s on the other side of the room.’

‘All right, okay. Calm. What else?’

She took a couple of shaky breaths, composed herself, shut her eyes. ‘The other time, the dining room table…’ But it was too much and she broke into a sob. ‘It’s upside down.’ Now she sobbed uncontrollably. ‘Why’s it upside down?’

I tried to look concerned, leaned forward, picked up a pen, made a note. This was not what I trained as a lawyer for.

‘Not the kids?’

‘They’re three and five. Lifting a table?’

‘And nobody had broken in?’

‘No.’ She sniffed, exhaled deeply. ‘See, that’s the thing. I’m one of them people – you’ll laugh ’cos I never was, but nowadays, it’s the chain on the door, double-check all the locks. And nothing was unlocked, damaged, nothing like that. And…’ She stopped and closed her eyes, thinking back to something she did not want to say.

‘What? Vick?’

‘On my bedroom floor, in the morning, was this bird. A crow. I stepped on it. When I got out of bed.’

‘A crow?’

‘On its back. I stepped on it, Danny. How’d it get there?’

I imagined its stiff claws, dull gleaming eyes; imagined its sleek brittle feel as it gave underfoot, its broken-backed untidy posture. Could not help but feel a cold echo of the terror Vick must have felt.

‘You tell the police?’

‘Course I did. They come over, had a poke round. You know what they’re like, couldn’t have given a toss. One of them’s trying not to laugh, little wanker.’

‘What do you think it was?’

Vick’s eyes widened and she shrugged. ‘I dunno. How do things move around on their own? How do birds get in my bedroom? You tell me.’

‘I’m a lawyer,’ I said. ‘It’s not really my thing.’

‘I didn’t imagine it.’ Her voice was rising; she was close to losing it, at the ragged edge of what she could stand.

I held my hands up. ‘Hey, Vick. It’s okay. Listen, take five, yes? I’ll get you a coffee.’

My office was one room and a corridor, on a busy street between a betting shop and an estate agents specialising in renting shitholes out to people who could not afford any better; just another shabby street in the ugly, tawdry brick and concrete sprawl of Essex commuter towns. Coffee was made in the corridor, on a small table. I filled the kettle up with mineral water of a strange brand that I bought from the Turkish shop opposite. This was where I made my living; where I had landed.

Four years ago I had an office in a leading law firm, my own secretary who made me coffee, and I could drink it looking out over the City. My last big case had been a piece of dispute resolution worth upwards of forty million pounds, on behalf of one of the country’s biggest construction firms; a West End hotel had been built using materials that would have been outlawed in Honduras, never mind Knightsbridge, and it had been my job to mitigate the losses. Now I was making coffee for a ghost from my past who was asking me to look into a case that not only was worth no money, but was not even within my remit. Furniture that moved by itself, dead birds materialising out of nowhere: it was no business of mine. But for the fact that we had history, I would have shown her the door already. I wondered how I could let her down gently.

‘What’s Ryan have to say about it?’ I asked her. ‘Doesn’t have a clue.’

‘He still got keys to the house?’

‘No. He weren’t even around second time it happened, was away.’

‘Might be trying to get at you.’ Her ex-husband was the obvious culprit for something like this, still harbouring pain and anger, looking for ways to get her back. He knew her. Knew how to push her buttons.

But Vick shook her head. ‘He ain’t like that. And he weren’t there. Even if he was, he ain’t got a key.’

‘Okay. So.’ I breathed in. What was I getting involved in? ‘Your furniture’s moving around. This dead bird. What happens next?’

Vick picked up her mug, took a trial sip. Hot. ‘Next, might be a week later, I’m getting ready to go upstairs for bed, kids are already sleeping, and that’s the last thing I remember. I wake up next day on the lawn. Outside. How’d I get there?’

‘On the lawn?’

‘Had to get little Ollie to let me in. Danny, the chain was still on the door. How’d I get out the house?’

‘Can’t remember anything?’

‘Nothing.’

For the first time I saw fear in her eyes, as well as despair.

‘And you weren’t…?’

‘No, Danny, fucking hell, no. I weren’t. Honest.’

Perhaps it was a consequence of all of those free drinks that Vick had enjoyed, but by her early twenties she had become a full-blown alcoholic, with a reputation around town and a bitter hardness developed to counteract the whispers. Her father was also an alcoholic who had long ago lost everything and lived on the charity of his friends or, if not, rough on the streets. So perhaps, too, she had a genetic predisposition to alcohol addiction. Whatever, drink was her downfall. After we split up she had become a model, at first with a promising future but later, as the drink took hold, she moved into the glamour side of the industry, sub-Page Three top-shelf titillation, before she became effectively unemployable.

But I had to give Vick credit: unlike her father, she’d managed to turn things around. She left modelling, married a soldier in the Royal Engineers and now, single again, was working as a teacher’s assistant at a local college. She had been sober for years, eking out an unglamorous living a million miles away from where she had once been, the golden girl with the world at her feet. She smiled frailly at me from across the desk, huddled with two hands over her coffee, and I felt a sudden wave of affection for her. We were not so dissimilar, she and I.

One day in my blue-chip, gilt-edged City law firm, I had threatened to break the spine of a senior partner after he had humiliated my secretary, had meted out sexual abuse simply because he could because he was the one in the eight-hundred-pound suit and not her. I believed at the time that I was justified, still believe it now; but word soon got around that I was more thug than gentleman, not the right kind of person for a profession as respectable as the law. My days at the top table were over.

Now we were both in my office, drinking coffee from chipped mugs, two hard-luck stories with only ourselves to blame. Vick sighed, took another swallow of my dreadful coffee, and continued.

‘So anyway, that’s happened and I’m thinking… I dunno what I’m thinking. I’m thinking something ain’t right.’

She was telling me. Furniture moving, now she’s teleporting through walls. ‘Vick, this just sounds…’

‘I know. I told you. Mental.’

‘Strange.’

‘Yeah, but then, Danny, what happened this week…’

This was what Vick’s story had been leading up to, what had caused her to sob without shame or control for so long. It was hard to watch a woman who had lost everything that meant anything to her, hard to witness her grief and confusion.

‘My kids, Ollie and little Gwynn, my kids, Danny… I get up in the morning and they’ve got these bruises, these fucking bruises, all over them. My babies. On their arms, their legs, Ollie’s eye. Bruises all over them, and like, I dunno, like marks, like lines, like they’ve been tied up or something.’ She put her head in her hands, shook her head into them.

‘You didn’t hear anything?’

‘No,’ she said, muffled through her palms.

‘All night.’

She looked up, defiant. ‘I’m a mother, Danny. I hear everything. Everything. And I didn’t hear nothing.’

‘What did they say?’

‘Didn’t say nothing. I asked them, they didn’t know. Just… Come out of nowhere.’

My expression must have given away my scepticism because I saw a spark of anger in her eyes briefly get the better of her grief. ‘What?’

‘Vick. They didn’t say anything? How does that work?’

‘Not you and all, Danny.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Okay, Vick. So then what?’

‘Then I take them to the doctor and he phones up social services and they fucking take them away.’

Despite Vick’s history, despite all that I knew about her, I believed what she told me; believed that she had nothing to do with what happened to her children. Nobody was that good an actor. But this did not change the fact that there was very little I could do for her. I was a lawyer but I had no experience in family cases; I would not know where to begin.

Then I looked over at her, her eyes fixed on me like a child’s after they have asked their parents for a Christmas present they know is beyond their means. I thought back on our years, our shared history, and I knew that I could not simply walk away from her. Besides, it was not as if I was weighed down by my caseload. I had time on my hands.

‘Listen, Vick, I’ll do what I can.’

‘I just want to see them, Danny. They won’t let me see them. Four days I ain’t seen them. Imagine…’ She choked back a sob. ‘Imagine what they’re thinking. Wondering where I am. Who’s looking after them?’ This last said with a sharp desperation.

‘I know it must be hard.’

Vick shook her head at the floor, shoulders slumped. ‘I didn’t do anything, Danny. I didn’t do anything.’ And then, quietly, heartbreakingly, a despairing murmur, ‘What are they having to eat?’

I stepped from around my desk, squatted next to her, put a hand on her shoulder and felt her warmth for the first time in decades. Took a deep breath, wondering what I was getting myself into.

Said: ‘I’ll do what I can.’

3

MARIA WAS SITTING looking at me with a satisfied expression on her face; she had just leaned across my kitchen table and hit me on the top of my head with the spoon from her coffee, hard, and it was more painful than I would have imagined, although I tried not to show it. Her expression proved her intent: she had meant to hurt me. This was a new experience for me. I was not used to being hit without retaliating.

‘Hell was that for?’

‘Everybody celebrates their birthday, you big ape. Unless they’re psychopaths.’

‘I don’t.’

Maria looked at me critically, head to one side. She crossed her eyes stupidly, though it made her no less beautiful. ‘Psycho.’

‘Childish.’

She got up from the table, picked up her mug, went to the sink. ‘Come on, Daniel Connell. I’ve booked.’

‘I don’t do birthdays.’

Maria had her back to me and she put both hands on the edge of the sink and sighed. I felt bad but it was true: I could not remember the last time I had done something to celebrate. When I was eight or nine my father left me alone for the weekend of my birthday, went to Brighton or Blackpool or some other garish coastal town for forty-eight hours of drinking and fighting, putting the fear of God into the locals. I remembered eating cold beans in the blue light thrown out by the TV, wondering what lay beyond its weak illumination, certain that some malign presence lurked in the corner of the living room. I did not leave the relative safety of the sofa for hours, shivering because I would not dare fetch a blanket. When my father returned in the early hours of Monday I was still there. He claimed that he had asked a friend to stop in, check on me. He never mentioned my birthday. And I had never paid it any heed since.

Maria, though, was not a lady who willingly took no for an answer.

‘If you don’t come,’ she said, turning from the sink, a vegetable knife in her hand, ‘I’ll cut your throat as you sleep.’

I could not think of a decent answer to that.

Earlier, Maria had given me a card and a watch, looked on with trepidation as I unwrapped the paper, opened the padded leather box, tried it on. I had not expected anything, was for a moment stuck for anything to say. What do people say?

‘Thanks,’ said Maria, breaking the silence, eyebrows raised, nodding encouragement. ‘That’s traditional.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘Like it?’

‘I love it,’ I said, and although it sounded simple and trite it was true. This was enough, just this, to be here with Maria right now.

‘How’d you know it was my birthday?’

‘Looked in your passport.’

‘How did you find that?’

‘With difficulty. Had to look everywhere. Who keeps it in the kitchen?’

I had no answer to that either, but smiled at Maria’s easy assumption that she could look where she liked in my home, do as she pleased. I did not know anybody, had never known anybody, who treated me with such nonchalance, showed such casual disregard for boundaries. I put the card on the mantelpiece in my living room, where I had to admit it looked a little lonely.

‘Wow, Mr Popular,’ said Maria. ‘Not even one from Gabe?’

‘Not a card person, Gabe.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, you may have a point there. How is he, anyway?’

‘Honestly? No idea.’

It was a good question, and one I wished that I could answer. For a man who’d had, for the last twenty years, a clear mission, I worried that Gabe was left bereft now, marooned in civilian life entirely without direction or goal. Since he had been released from Selly Oak hospital, his ragged leg wound patched up and healed and his prosthetic limb fitted, he had spent most of his time at home, alone. He was used to army routine, surrounded by his men, giving and following orders. Now he had no job, no income, nothing to lend him pride or dignity. I knew that it could not be easy.

But recently, in the sporadic times that I had seen him, I had noticed a change in him; an air of purpose, a contained stillness he used to wear like an aura when he came home on leave, still in uniform, fresh from Bosnia or Iraq or Sierra Leone. I had not asked him what he had going on, did not consider it my business. Yet I could not help but worry, and I hoped that whatever he was now involved in, it was not destructive. Turning trained killers loose in society without job or role after decades of fighting could have, I knew, dangerous consequences. I promised myself that I would visit him, check on him, do it soon.

Although we were in April, it was cold outside; we seemed locked in an eternal winter, spring attempting an entrance and then quickly retreating as if the flat frozen land was not ready, the low sullen skies unwilling to open up and let the blue in. Still, Maria, like any good Essex girl, did not wear a coat; she might have been a respectable primary school teacher but when she was going out, she was doing it right. She was wearing a short skirt, heels and a top that was, I suspected, created with clubbers in the Balearics in mind; her long dark hair was down, curling over her shoulders, and she looked fantastic.

‘Not cold?’

‘Idiot. Course I am. Can you walk faster?’

Maria had booked at a Mexican restaurant around the corner from my home, its authenticity only slightly marred by the fact that it was staffed almost exclusively by Eastern Europeans. But it was close and the food was good, the atmosphere friendly, and besides, I was out with Maria. I did not greatly care about anything else.

‘So, what’s going on?’ said Maria as we sat, a waiter pushing in her chair, Maria thanking him with a smile that I was willing to bet had made his night.

‘Going on?’ I picked up a menu. ‘Nothing much.’

‘Something’s up. Work?’

‘No.’

Maria pushed my menu down, looked at me sternly. ‘You lie. Come on, Daniel. You can talk to me. It’s kind of the point of this, you know? Of us.’

Us. The matter-of-fact way she used the word, as if it was natural that we were together rather than it being some lucky accident of fate I would never have believed had I not been sitting here, right now, opposite her. I could not accustom myself to it: us, we, a couple.

But perhaps she was right, it would help to talk through it with her; perhaps that was the point. So I told her about Vick, about what she had said to me in my office. Watching Maria’s face as I told the story was a lesson in the powers of empathy, her expression changing from intrigue to shock to horrified pity as Vick’s children were taken away from her. After I had finished, she sighed, shook her head.

‘What she must be going through.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Sounds… I don’t know what it sounds like. Gives me the creeps. Her, alone in that house.’

‘Never seen anyone so desperate.’

‘With all that happened. Things moving around, the way she woke up outside. Then the kids. What next?’

I had not thought of it like that, put down my glass. ‘How d’you mean?’

‘Well, like it’s escalating, isn’t it? Getting worse.’

‘You think?’

Maria took a long sip of wine, thought about what I had told her, her eyes unfocused as she put herself in the place of Vick, tried to feel what she must be feeling. She shook herself out of it.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Don’t know. Speak to social services. Apply pressure.’ I shrugged. ‘Christ knows.’

The truth was, I did not know where to begin with Vick’s story, did not have the first idea what horror had violated her life. I was not superstitious but what was happening to her sounded like it had more in common with the supernatural realm than the legal.

For a respectable primary school teacher, Maria could put away a lot of tequila; after we had left the restaurant, she insisted that we did not call it a night, that we went on to a bar. She pointed one out across the dark street, Karma glowing in purple neon. We were arm in arm and she tugged me along.

‘Not that one.’

‘Too classy?’

‘Really, Maria, not that one.’

‘Oh.’ She heard my tone, looked at me suspiciously, put on a deep voice. ‘Got a beef?’

‘Something like that. Let’s try somewhere else.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

The bar was owned by a local gangster called Vincent Halliday, a man who I had not seen or spoken to for months but with whom I had a history. To walk into his place would be a crazy provocation. There was no way I was going through those doors, not tonight. Aggravations, resentments, old scores; it sometimes seemed to me that my Essex home was built on these, as much as on hastily concreted marshland.

‘Okay, I won’t ask. Let’s try that… what’s it called? The new place.’

I must have looked unwilling, because Maria gave me another tug. ‘Come on. What’s the worst that can happen?’

I was coming back from the men’s, where four or five kids of school-leaving age had been crammed into a cubicle, giggling over their first lines of coke, swearing and snorting. The bar was dark, and the music was loud and there was an atmosphere of dormant aggression; the clientele was too young and too drunk and still had too much to prove, and I was too old to be in a place like this. Maria was at the bar and a man, no more than twenty-four or -five with a white t-shirt, fake tan and whitened teeth, was talking to her, laughing and leaning in too close to her ear as he shared whatever he imagined passed for wit. Maria noticed me as I approached, rolled her eyes at me, pulled away from him.

‘It’s all right, Daniel, this gentleman was just leaving,’ she said.

The man might have been young but he was taller than me. He looked me up and down, apparently unimpressed by what he saw.

‘This yours, is it?’ he said to Maria. I could only assume he was talking about me. He did not smile; clearly he saved his good humour for the ladies.

‘So go on then,’ I said. ‘Leave.’

He had gym muscles under his t-shirt, his triceps unnaturally pronounced. Behind him I noticed two other men taking an interest: his friends, back-up, one of who had the neck, shoulders and acne of a serial steroid user.

‘Think she prefers me,’ the man said, putting an arm around Maria’s shoulders. He was drunk and I suspect more besides, but this was too much, way too much. Before I could do anything, though, Maria shook his arm off, turned to him.

‘Don’t make me call your mother,’ she said with nothing but contempt in her voice. She turned to me, said firmly, ‘We’re going, Daniel.’

‘Jog on then,’ said the man, making a show of dismissing us. He turned back to his friends, muttered, ‘Slag anyway.’

Maria walked away but I did not follow, not immediately. My upbringing and, I had come to accept, my innate character made me incapable of ignoring such a disgraceful insult; I could not, like Maria, excuse the man’s casual disdain. I stood there and he must have felt my presence because he turned back around, said, ‘What?’

I put my left hand around his throat, worked my thumb into the space behind his jaw, underneath his ear. His eyes widened in shock at my strength. He put both hands on my forearm to push my hand away and for the first time realised my mass, what he had got himself involved with. It was almost as if I was squeezing the man out of the boy, his eyes looking around for help, for somebody to stop what the nasty man was doing. But his friends suddenly did not want to know. I looked over and they would not meet my eye, the steroid user peering intently at the ice cubes in what remained of his drink, prodding them carefully.

I did not say anything, did not need to. It was not often that I was grateful for the face I was born with, hard and forbidding as it was, but in situations like these it could be a useful deterrent. I saw pain and regret and fear in his eyes, and sensed tears weren’t far behind. There, I thought. See what happens?

I let go and the man took a shaky breath and looked down at the floor, tried to pretend he wasn’t there. I turned to leave and saw Maria watching me from three metres away, on the edge of a semicircle that had been created by people backing away from what was going on at the bar, from what I might have done. I’d thought that she had left, had not meant her to see this. I shrugged, hands out, palms up: what could I do? She did not react, just turned around and headed for the door. But I had seen her face and the look on it had been anger, and something else which was more like disgust.

*

Any given Friday night saw any number of couples walking along streets in my neighbourhood, one walking fast, the other trying to keep up, hands busy, explaining, apologising. Tonight, I was the one doing the explaining; Maria was not having any of it.

‘You hear what he called you?’ I said.

‘He started it,’ said Maria, contemptuously.

‘Well,’ I said, an attempt to sound moral, ‘he did.’

‘You were old enough to be his father.’

‘So? He thought you were old enough to be his girlfriend.’

‘Danny.’ She stopped, turned; she was infuriated. ‘Jesus.’

‘What?’

She looked at my face, examined it as if searching for something, some imperfection. ‘Do I need to be scared of you?’

‘Of me?’ I was surprised, shocked. ‘No, Maria. No. I’ll always protect you.’

‘Not exactly what I asked,’ said Maria, frowning.

‘Listen,’ I said, but I did not know what to say next, struggled to think of the right words, wondered how I had got things so wrong. Seeing my confusion seemed to touch something in Maria because her tight face relaxed, something gave in her eyes.

‘Don’t hit people for me, Daniel,’ she said. ‘I’m a big girl.’

‘Okay. All right.’ I could not go as far as to say sorry. I wasn’t, not really. Regardless of what Maria said, he’d had it coming. ‘Anyway, I didn’t hit him. Just…’ What had I done? I shrugged. ‘Squeezed a bit.’

‘Squeezed,’ said Maria sceptically, but her anger had gone and despite herself she smiled at my half-hearted justification, then laughed at what I suspected was my hapless expression, a warm, generous despairing chuckle.

Cars hissed past us, a chill drizzly rain sparking coldly through headlights. Maria shook her head at me then leaned over and kissed my cheek, took my hand and turned and led me, gently but with a purpose that I dared not question, back from where we had come, through the dark and the drunks and the dramas, back to the quiet street where I lived.

4

NEXT MORNING I woke up to find Maria gone and panicked for some seconds, imagining that she had left me, that what she had seen last night had caused her to change her mind about us. But then I heard her clattering about in the kitchen and soon after her feet on the stairs. She appeared in the doorway with a cup of coffee for me, wincing at her headache, blaming me, us, the world.

I arrived at my office to find a message from Vick on my answering machine, asking for any progress. She sounded, if anything, more desperate than she had when she visited my office. I wondered if she had had any sleep in the last few days. There was also a message from the social worker in charge of Vick’s case who said her name was Ms Armstrong, giving me a time to visit; clearly social workers started their days earlier than lawyers.

Looking about my office I realised that I did not have a great deal else to do: no pressing cases, nobody to chase, no clients to report back to. Just a meeting with a social worker about a case I did not want and could not influence. Force of habit had brought me in to work; I ought to have stayed in bed.

*

Ms Armstrong was middle-aged and white but had her hair piled on top of her head African style, wrapped in a brightly coloured cloth. She was enormous and wore a blue velvety dress that draped over her large breasts nearly to the ground, giving her the shape of a massive bell. Yet despite her bulk she had a brisk energy. She gave my hand a couple of tugs without smiling before turning with a curt ‘Follow me’, out of the reception and along a linoleum-squared corridor. I had to hurry to keep up with her.

‘Thank you for seeing me,’ I said to her back, a statement she did not bother to reply to. There were large windows along the corridor and through them I could see a large play area, like a children’s nursery, but the children in it ranged in age from two or three to early teens. Some were playing, some writing and drawing at tables, some watching a television attached to one of the walls, which was showing a cartoon I did not recognise. The walls in the play area were painted red and purple and pink, but despite the gaiety of the walls, the children did not seem happy, going through their activities in a desultory way as if through duty rather than pleasure. I wondered if Vick’s children, Ollie and Gwynn, were in there; wondered if they had any idea what was happening to them.