decent simplicity of her crockery.
He said, as she held her cup and saucer, that his business was Malachy Kitchen, and saw defiance settle on her face. He hurried to assure her that he intended no harm to her former neighbour but had come to learn.
Of course, he had an image of a vigilante: a swollen beer belly and shaven head, a vocabulary of obscenities and a muscular arm chucking broken bricks at the windows of a suspected pervert's home.
With reedy determination in her voice, the sparrow-sized woman contradicted the image.
She said, 'No one else ever did what he done.
Nobody ever stood up to them the way he did. I thought it was because of me. I was attacked for my bag, I was put in hospital – yes, I'm rid of the sling, but the arm's not right, not yet – and what he did was after that. Not that he told me it was because of what had happened to me, one old lady who is forgotten and's lived too long. There was no boast in him, wasn't trophies he went after… I know it was him. When you live too long you get that sense – and there wasn't any one else on the Amersham who'd have done it. I told him to his face that I had not given myself such importance, and I asked him to kiss me, and he did. Then he was gone. I'm alone too much, and alone I think. Cheeky of me, really, to believe it was for me. There was what happened here, and then my friend
– that's Dawn – saw something in the paper about the house of a big drug man being burned. The last time Malachy came, when he kissed me, he had scars on him like he'd been beaten. Only after he'd gone did I know it wasn't for me. I had that conceit, but I've ditched i t
… It was about the past. Something hideous happened to him in his past, and I haven't an idea what.
His past gave him strength, so much of it, and more guts than any other man on the Amersham… Are you going to tell me what he's done now, where he is?'
Gravely, Freddie Gaunt shook his head. He did not think she expected an answer. Her cup was as full as when he had poured it. Pieces had fallen into place; confirmations had been given.
She said, 'Each thing he did was harder than the last. Down at our Pensioners' Association they have gym machines, and there's that gear you walk on and you can make it go faster. You with me? It's like each time he did something he made the machine go quicker… You've come to see me, which tells me he's not given up on it, and so I'm thinking he must be running now… '
Running rather fast, Gaunt thought, but did not tell her.
'If you ever see him, you give him my love. Give him Millie Johnson's love, please. Don't let it go too fast, that machine.'
He heard a hiss of passion in her voice, but it subsided.
'I get tired. I'm sorry.'
He took the cups, saucers and plates back into the kitchen, returned the biscuits to the tin and washed up
– as her one-time neighbour would have – leaving the crockery to dry on the draining-board. When he left, her eyes were closed and she might have been asleep.
He closed the front door quietly, pulled the barricade shut and heard the click of its lock.
The boy, his grandson, screamed.
Not letting go of the wheel, Harry Rogers swung his shoulders. The plate arced up and the sandwiches flew towards the ceiling. The kid was pitched sideways and his shoulder cannoned against the rail under the windows. He saw young Paul slide down.
God… God… Only a bloody sandwich that he'd asked for, and the lashed bucket was already well filled with his vomit and his legs had been weak when he'd gone down to the galley to make them. Couldn't have asked his son, not Billy, to make him sandwiches because Billy was below, nursing the engines.
'You all right?' To be heard, even in the confines of the wheel-house, Harry had to shout. The kid moaned back at him. The noises, deafening, were of the engines' race when the bows went down in a trough and the propeller blades were tilted clear of water, and the thud of waves against the hull. When the big gusts hit and tilted them, the boat groaned as if she were either stretched or crushed. 'You all right, young 'un?'
'I'm sorry… sorry… '
'You got nothing to be sorry for.'
He saw the pain on the kid's face. The face, so pale.
If Annie ever knew the conditions out on the North Sea into which he had taken their grandson, she might just lift a kitchen knife against him, or she might pack up and quit. No choice. Had to have the third pair of hands, and no one else he could have trusted. Men enough in harbour who yearned for a good pay-day, who didn't care about weather, but they were not family.
The whimper came through the noise belting him.
'I'm sorry for your sandwiches.'
'You broke anything?'
'I don't think so.'
'Forget the goddamn sandwiches.'
'How long is it? Is it long?'
There was pleading in the kid's eyes. He was seventeen. Back in the old days, sail days, the trawlers like the one he coveted took kids to sea, fourteen and younger, in the same storms and paid them less in a month than they needed to buy a pair of sea boots.
Harry Rogers could not tell his grandson that from this sea journey, and from two more years and from the ones already done, a chest of cash was accumu-lating. The alternative to the chest was gaol – for the kid, for Billy, for him. Harry thought the truth cruel.
He shouted back, and tried to put a smile on his face:
'I reckon we're through the worst of i t… How long?
The rest of today and a bit of tonight.'
Then, and he didn't tell the kid, there would be the coming back and maybe more of the same.
The reference to Harry Rogers, brother of Sharon (nee Rogers) Capel, had been a note buried in a long- neglected file. He was described, in a report on the extended family of Mikey Capel, as a freelance skipper with a master's ticket for taking out deep-sea trawlers.
Going deeper, digging with the computer bank available to him, Tony Johnson had tapped into back numbers of Fishing Monthly and had failed to find a match for Harry Rogers, but had hit gold with the weekly Fishing News. There, two paragraphs described the purchase in the Channel Islands of a beam trawler by Rogers, and its renaming as Anneliese Royal, and its registration in the Devon port of Dartmouth.
From a phone call to the harbourmaster at
Dartmouth, the detective sergeant had learned that the Anneliese Royal was never seen in West Country waters. 'Harry lives here, and I can give you his address and number, but he works the North Sea out of the east coast… Not in bother, is he? He's a very good guy.' Oh, no, not in any bother – only has the bloody spooks sniffing at his backside.
He had checked with harbourmasters from
Immingham to Harwich. Back on his familiar workload, human-trafficking (Vice), he had revelled in the extreme secrecy, imposed by Frederick Gaunt, and had done his checks late in the evening and early that morning before the pace of the National Criminal Intelligence Service had resurfaced. A laconic answer from Lowestoft had lifted him, the last call he made before the open-plan office area filled around him.
'The Anneliese Royal was here and now is not. Hold on a second, friend, and I'll give you timings from our log… Pretty rotten weather when she sailed, and not much sign of it changing. God knows why they went because there's no way they'll have the nets down.
Rather them than me… Here we are. I can be quite exact. It's thirty-six hours, and about fifteen minutes, since she went. Don't get me wrong, beam trawlers rarely sink, but it won't be any sort of comfort cruise.'
He had waited for the coffee trolley to come round, because that was when people went out on to the front pavement for a smoke.
He left the building and walked fast, didn't use the nearest public telephones. They'd break his legs if they knew that, without sanction and authorization, he was moonlighting for the spooks. Why did he do it, risk himself? Because he had entrapped Malachy Kitchen and because Ricky Capel walked top of the shit-heap and believed himself untouchable. Two reasons, each good enough.
