And at that moment, directly above Ernie's head, the door chimes played their daft little tune and there was a banging on the glass panels and, 'Mr Dawber! Ernie!'
Shaw jerked from the waist, as if the electric doorbell had been connected to his testicles. 'Ger-go away!'
Ernie grabbed a breath and raised his voice. 'It's Willie Wagstaff, Shaw. Let him in, eh?'
'Mr Dawber!'
'Come on, Shaw!' Ernie shouted. 'You know Willie!'
Across the hall, the front door shuddered as a boot went into it, flat, under the lock. Shaw leapt across the hall and threw himself against the back of the door as the foot went in again, and then he sprang back, lurched towards Ernie, face full of blood and glass, terror, confusion and fury. He turned, tore open a white-panelled door on the other side of the room and flung himself into the passage beyond as the front door heaved and splintered open.
Willie was alone. His eyes flickered under his mousy fringe in the bright lights. 'Ernie.'
'Give us a hand, Willie. Done me ankle, I think.'
'Where's the lad?'
'Let him go, eh? He's got a lot to think about. We need to get to the brewery, if it's not too late.'
'Never mind that.' Willie got a hand under Ernie's arm 'Can you… that's fine. That's excellent, Mr Dawber. Hang on to me. The brewery… Moira's seeing to that.'
'That lass? By 'eck, Willie, you're…'
'She's not just 'that lass', Mr Dawber, take my word. Anyroad, Mungo's with her, the Yank. He give me his car keys; we need to get you back. You're our last hope, Mr Dawber. Come on. I'll tell you.' The body was up against a huge metal tub. There was the smell of beer, the smell of vomit and a smell Macbeth would soon recognise again as the smell of blood.
'I don't know him,' Moira said. 'I've never seen him before.'
Macbeth covered his mouth with his hand. This was it. The final proof he'd half-imagined he was never going to get, that this affair was real, life and death. Bad death.
'This is crazy, Moira.' He grabbed hold of the iron railing, for the coldness of it. Only it was slick with something and he jerked his hand away. 'I never saw a stiff before. Never saw a dead relative. Never went to a funeral with an open coffin.'
Moira had nothing to say to this. She turned her lamp on man's face. His whole head was a weird shape, like it had been remoulded. Violently. There was blood over the face and down from the rim of the big tank. Macbeth felt his gut lurch. He leaned over the side of the huge beer vat and he threw up, shamed by the way it echoed around the scrubbed metal.
He turned back to Moira, wiped his mouth. She was kind enough to direct the beam of her lamp away from him. Real macho stuff, huh? Either I'm in this with the rest of you or I'll go solo, start kicking asses.
Or maybe I'll just throw up the shitburger I had near Carlisle.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'That was unavoidable. Thing is, I do recognise him. His name is Frank. He was in the pub earlier, was pretty smashed.'
He certainly looks pretty smashed now,' Moira said, sounding harder than he liked to hear. He was shocked.
'He fell?' Looking up the steps, all slimy with something that stank.
'You could convince yourself of anything, Macbeth. OK, after you.'
'Up there?'
'Well, we're no' going back now.'
Oh, shit. Please. Get me outa here.
'OK. You stay down here, then. Wait for me.'
'No! Jesus. But, like, I mean, what if they're waiting for us?'
'There's nobody here, Macbeth.'
'How'd you know that?'
'I was… listening. And watching. And… you know.'
No, he didn't fucking know. But he wasn't going to make an issue of it. He went slowly up the metal steps. She stayed at the bottom, lighting his way, until he reached a blank wooden door.
He hesitated, looked back down the stairs at where the beam bounced off the white walls and cast a soft light on her. She looked smaller than he remembered inside this bulky duffel coat, too big for her by a couple of sizes. And yet she seemed strangely younger, without most of her hair.
Well, shit, of course he'd seen that, soon as he'd walked in out of the rain. It was the most awful mutilation, like slashing the Mona Lisa, taking the legs off of the Venus de Milo. It was a goddamn offence against civilization.
But was it self-mutilation? Was it like a novice nun cuts off, all her hair to give herself to Christ?
And this was why he'd never even mentioned it. This was why, Willie being in the car too, all he'd said to her by way of explanation for him being here was, 'The Duchess asked me to lookout for you.'
To which she'd made no reply.
Moira's face creased sympathetically now in the white light. 'Look, Mungo… fact is, if the sight of this poor guy made you chuck your lunch, you're not gonny find it too pleasant in there. There's no shame in that. Willie's pretty squeamish, too, which is why he was glad to go off in search the old schoolmaster guy. So… if you… what I'm saying is, this isn't your problem. You really don't have to put yourself through this.'
'And you do?'
'Yeah,' she said. 'I'm afraid I do. Me more than anybody.'
He just stared down at her.
'Goes back nearly twenty years. This is the consequences of getting involved with Matt Castle.'
'He's dead.'
'Yeah,' Moira said.
Macbeth said, 'People here keep seeing his ghost. That's what they say. You believe that?'
'Yeah,' Moira said.
'What am I gonna find behind that door?'
'You don't ever have to know, Mungo. That's what I'm trying to tell you.'
'Aw, shit,' Macbeth said. 'The hell with this.' He scraped the hair out of his eyes, opened them wide and pushed open the door with his right foot.
CHAPTER IV
Willie's youngest sister was in her dressing gown, making tea. 'Sleep through this weather? Not a chance. Our Benjie's messing about up there, too, with that dog. I've told him, I'll have um both in t'shed, he doesn't settle down.'
'Where's Martin?'
'Working up Bolton again. Takes what he can. Bloody Gannons.'
'Right,' Willie said. 'Well, if you can get dressed, our Sal. You've been re-co-opted onto t'Mothers.'
'Get lost, Willie. I told Ma years ago, I said I'll take a back seat from now on, if you don't mind, it's not my sort of thing.'
Aye, well, no arguing with that. Certainly wasn't her sort of thing these days. Sal's kitchen was half the downstairs now. Knocked through from the dining room and a posh conservatory at the back. Antique pine units, hi-tech cooker, extractor fan. All from when Horridges had made Martin sales manager, about a year before Gannons sacked him.
'Anyroad,' Sal said. 'Can't leave our Benjie. God knows what he'd get up to, little monkey.'
'Well, actually,' Willie said, 'I wouldn't mind getting the lad in as well. We're going to need a new Autumn Cross, a bit sharpish.'
'Be realistic. How can a child of his age go out collecting bits of twigs and stuff on a night like this?'
