In reality, you knew there would be no awakening, so you always held out that hope, right up to the end, that it was going to be all right. That there was something you didn’t know — like, in this case, that Callard had an ex- husband or an estranged partner, and what was happening here was some overblown domestic incident, loud and emotional but just between the two of them, and that when they saw you standing there they’d just be embarrassed as hell.
The kitchen door was opened. Not flung open; it was done without hurry, real casual.
Two men came in with the yellow light.
For a moment, they were standing together in the doorway, looking at her in silence. And these two men, they were wearing kind of army camouflage trousers and dark green army jerseys and their hands were in these tight, black leather gloves and their heads in these dark woollen hoods with eyeholes.
Grayle was frozen to the wall, the final hope shrivelling like a burst balloon in her stomach. She couldn’t speak.
When one of the men moved into the parlour, she could see Persephone Callard on her knees, on the kitchen floor, and she was bleeding, great gouts of bright red blood splashed all over her long white nightdress.
‘
Callard’s hands were taped up behind her back. A strip of black, shiny tape across her mouth reminded Grayle of Justin’s big black moustache.
‘What …’ Grayle’s jaw trembling. ‘What have you …?’
And stopped. The big red blotches were not blood, just the pattern on the nightdress.
But the tape was still tape, Callard still trussed and gagged.
‘Jus … Justin?’
Because, one of these guys, she hadn’t heard him talk, and so — the final,
Neither of them spoke. Callard stared up at Grayle, her eyes hot and wild.
Why?
Why were they here? There was nothing of value to take, anybody could see that. Maybe in the big house there was plenty, but they hadn’t broken into the big house. These were not small-time local felons come to steal your TV and your VCR for drug money. These were men with no faces. Men with no fingerprints. Fit-looking men in army clothes. Serious men.
They didn’t even ask who she was.
Because it didn’t matter. She was here and she’d walked into what they were doing, and that was enough.
‘OK,’ Grayle said, ‘you get out of here. You get …’ her voice rising higher and higher ‘… the fuck out of here. You hear me?’
They glanced at one another just once and then they both looked back at Grayle and began to move slowly towards her, their arms hanging away from their bodies. One of them … his fingers in the black, tight gloves … his fingers were beginning to flex.
The thing was, she had no recollection of taking it down, only finding it was there in her right hand: the hedging tool that was like a butcher’s knife. The hacker.
It was even heavier than it looked. Finally she had to lift it with both hands, stepping away from the rural museum wall, the rustic armoury wall, and swinging it hard back.
And it must still have been real sharp because when it went into the guy’s face it was like slicing a green pepper. Until it made it through to the bone.
Part Two
From Bang to Wrongs: A Bad Boy’s Book,
by GARY SEWARD
The night my mum died I went out and trashed a church.
Some schoolmates and I, we done a newsagent’s that day and had to hurt the geezer when he was stupid enough to ‘have a go’.
But my mum, she was a Christian her whole life and never really hurt nobody, and He let this happen. It even happened almost in front of a church, St Mark’s. The driver was pissed and so it was his fault, obviously, and I heard he himself had an unfortunate accident some years later, but that was nothing to do with me as I was fifty miles away at the time, which I was able to prove to the police. But it was the Big Geezer I was after that night because He had let it happen and that was inexcusable, so I took a Stanley knife to His altar cloth and then I carved some choice words on the side of His pulpit and smashed some other stuff; I was in a real bitter frenzy.
I realize now that what happened to my mum was a profound lesson for me, in relation to the meek inheriting the earth and all that old toffee, but I was too young for philosophy then. I just did not want to believe my old mum was truly gone, and that was when I started to see spiritualists and mediums and such. I did not see why God should be able to get away with taking people out so that you lose contact for good. It was a liberty I could not tolerate.
IX
He was driving down through darkened cheshire in a state verging on real fear.
He drove along the old A49, over the river — or was it the canal? — with all those iron bridges, towards the southern suburbs of Warrington, which went on for ever.
It was as if the old man was still in the car. Sitting up in the passenger seat, straight as a lamp post, glaring out suspiciously at the desultory night traffic. Noting the speeders and the ones with a brake light not working. Eyeing sullen youths outside an off-licence.
Yes, Dad.
In the mornings Maiden had taken to looking carefully in the bathroom mirror for signs of his eyes hardening and growing closer together, his lips tightening between deep, disciplinary radials.
Couldn’t see it. Could he?
Every six weeks or so, usually on a Wednesday night if he wasn’t working, Maiden would drive north and take his dad for a meal. Tonight they’d been to this new Beefeater, out towards Irlam.
‘I like a good steak, me,’ Norman Plod had declared, as he always did. ‘Nowt beats a good steak, done rare, for keeping your eyes sharp and your gut tight.’
Then he was staring at his son’s plate with a look of blatant dismay not dissimilar to the one which had bloomed on his hard face that night, many years ago, when Bobby had expressed a wish to go to some nancyfied art college.
‘What the bloody hell’s
‘I had a big lunch, Dad.’
‘Watching our weight, are we? By Christ, policemen eating
