‘Well?’ Boyle said.
Sweeney finished running his tongue around his teeth. ‘It’s good,’ he said.
‘Then we’re set,’ I said to Boyle.
‘Set?’
‘We’re done here.’
‘Oh, yes, we’re done.’
The man to Boyle’s left, the one I didn’t know, moved forward almost to his shoulder, letting his long coat fall open as he did so, and what light there was glinted dully off the barrels of the shotgun as he brought it to bear. It was almost level when a shot from the trees behind struck him high in the shoulder and spun him round so that the second shot tore through his neck and he fell to the ground as good as dead.
One of the Sweeneys cursed and started to run, while the other dropped to one knee and fumbled for the revolver inside his zip-up jacket.
With all the gunfire and the shouting I couldn’t hear the words from Boyle’s mouth, but I could lip-read well enough. ‘You’re dead,’ he said, and drew a pistol not much bigger than a child’s hand from his side pocket and raised it towards my head. It was either bravery or stupidity or maybe fear that made me charge at him, unarmed, hands outstretched as if in some way to ward off the bullet; it was the muddied turf that made my feet slide away under me and sent me sprawling headlong, two shots sailing over my head before one of the men I’d last seen minding Patrick in Soho stepped up neatly behind Boyle, put the muzzle of a 9mm Beretta hard behind his ear and squeezed the trigger.
Both the Sweeneys had gone down without me noticing; one was already dead and the other had blood gurgling out of his airway and was not long for this world.
Patrick was standing back on the path, scraping flecks of mud from the edges of his soft leather shoes with a piece of stick.
‘Look at the state of you,’ he said. ‘You look a fucking state. If I were you I should burn that lot when you get home, start again.’
I wiped the worst of the mess from the front of my coat and that was when I realised my hands were still shaking. ‘Thanks, Pat,’ I said.
‘What are friends for?’ he said.
Behind us his men were tidying up the scene a little, not too much. The later editions of the papers would be full of stories of how the Irish drug wars had come to London, the Celtic Tigers fighting it out on foreign soil.
‘You need a lift?’ Patrick asked, as we made our way back towards the road.
‘No, thanks. I’m fine.’
‘Thank Christ for that. Last thing I need, mud all over the inside of the fucking Merc.’
When I got back to the flat I put one of Val’s last recordings on the stereo, a session he’d made in Stockholm a few months before he died. Once or twice his fingers didn’t match his imagination, and his breathing seemed to be giving him trouble, but his mind was clear. Beeches, I’ll always remember that now, that part of the Heath. Beeches, not oaks.
MINOR KEY
It used to be there under ‘Birthdays’, some years at least. The daily listing in the paper, the Guardian, occasionally the Times. September eighteenth. ‘Valentine Collins, jazz musician.’ And then his age: twenty-seven, thirty-five, thirty-nine. Not forty. Val never reached forty.
He’d always look, Val, after the first time he was mentioned, made a point of it, checking to see if his name was there. ‘Never know,’ he’d say, with that soft smile of his. ‘Never know if I’m meant to be alive or dead.’
There were times when we all wondered; wondered what it was going to be. Times when he seemed to be chasing death so hard, he had to catch up. Times when he didn’t care.
Jimmy rang me this morning, not long after I’d got back from the shops. Bread, milk, eggs — the paper — gives me something to do, a little walk, reason to stretch my legs.
‘You all right?’ he says.
‘Of course I’m all right.’
‘You know what day it is?’
I hold my breath; there’s no point in shouting, losing my temper. ‘Yes, Jimmy, I know what day it is.’
There’s a silence and I can sense him reaching for the words, the thing to say — You don’t fancy meeting up later? A drink, maybe? Nice to have a chat. It’s been a while.
‘Okay, then, Anna,’ he says instead, and then he hangs up.
There was a time when we were inseparable, Jimmy, Val, Patrick and myself. Studio 51, the Downbeat Club, all-nighters at the Flamingo, coffee at the Bar Italia, spaghetti at the Amalfi. That place on Wardour Street where Patrick swore the cheese omelettes were the best he’d ever tasted and Val would always punch the same two buttons on the jukebox, B19 and 20, both sides of Ella Fitzgerald’s single, ‘Manhattan’ and ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’.
Val loved that song, especially.
He knew about goodbyes, Val.
Later, anyway.
Back then it was just another sad song, something to still the laughter. Which is what I remember most from those years, the laughter. The four of us marching arm in arm through the middle of Soho, carefree, laughing.
What do they call them? The fifties? The years of austerity? That’s not how I remember them, ’56, ’57, ’58. Dancing, music and fun, that’s what they were to me. But then, maybe I was too young, too unobservant, too — God! it seems impossible to believe or say — but, yes, too innocent to know what was already there, beneath the surface. Too stupid to read the signs.
Patrick, for instance, turning away from the rest of us to have quick, intense conversations in corners with strangers, men in sharp suits and sharp haircuts, Crombie overcoats. The time Patrick himself suddenly arrived one evening in a spanking new three-piece suit from Cecil Gee, white shirt with a rolled Mr B collar, soft Italian shoes, and when we asked him where the cash came from for all that, only winking and tapping the side of his nose with his index finger — mind yours.
Val, those moments when he’d go quiet and stare off into nowhere and you knew, without anyone saying, that you couldn’t speak to him, couldn’t touch him, just had to leave him be until he’d turn, almost shyly, and smile with his eyes.
And Jimmy, the way he’d look at me when he thought no one else was noticing; how he couldn’t bring himself to say the right words to me, even then.
And if I had seen them, the signs of our future, would it have made any difference, I wonder? Or would it all have turned out the same? Sometimes you only see what you want to until something presses your face so fast up against it there’s nothing else you can do.
But in the beginning it was the boys and myself and none of us with a care in the world. Patrick and Jimmy had known one another since they were little kids at primary school, altar boys together at St Pat’s; Val had met up with them later, the second year of the grammar school — and me, I’d been lucky enough to live in the same street, catch the same bus in the morning, lucky enough that Jimmy’s mother and mine should be friends. The boys were into jazz, jazz and football — though for Patrick it was the Arsenal and Jimmy, Spurs, and the rows they had about that down the years. Val now, in truth I don’t think Val ever cared too much about the football, just went along, White Hart Lane or Highbury, he didn’t mind.
When it came to jazz, though, it was Val who took the lead, and where the others would have been happy enough to listen to anything as long as it had rhythm, excitement, as long as it had swing, Val was the one who sat them down and made them listen to Gerry Mulligan with Chet Baker, Desmond with Brubeck, Charlie Parker, Lester Young.
With a few other kids they knew, they made themselves into a band: Patrick on trumpet, Jimmy on drums, Val with an ageing alto saxophone that had belonged to his dad. After the first couple of rehearsals it became clear
