In the darkness he waited, his patience undeterred. He couldn’t bear to look upon Leanne’s features, twisted and torn, Frasier’s likewise.
He had failed them.
Where was he when his wife was being beaten and hogtied? Where was he when his son was being sold to some rich Arab for amusement?
He reached out again, could feel his outstretched arm plunging into the dense blackness, searching, groping, the feeling of solitude inching in again like slowly seeping cancer. Leanne was gone. Frasier was gone. And he was entirely alone.
*
Groggily his eyes peeled open and the blurry angles of the Dungeon edged into focus. Charles Kilroy was standing over him, peering down like a concerned father.
‘Welcome back, my boy,’ he said. ‘How are you feeling?’
Rubbing his eyes York pushed himself into a sitting position. He was on a transfer gurney tucked stealthily into the corner of the room. ‘Like I’ve been hit by a bus,’ he grunted, pinching the bridge of his nose.
‘Head clearing up?’
York coughed. ‘No, not really. Where’s Holly?’
‘She’s gone to the briefing. Something about another recording. She helped me load you up here first. Stronger than she looks, that one.’
‘Shit,’ York cursed and tried to push himself off the gurney.
‘Whoa, whoa.' Kilroy laid a gentle hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down. ‘Just a sec, Nicolas.’
‘I have work to do, Charles, I feel fine.’
For an infinitely long moment, he was penetrated so intensely by Kilroy’s gaze he didn’t know where to look. ‘How long?’
York frowned. ‘Come again?’
‘I’m not kidding, Nicolas. How long have you been using?’
York paused, a phantom itch breaking out in the crux of his arm. ‘Using what?’
Kilroy sighed. ‘You think I don’t know the signs, son? I was in this game before you were a twinkle in your mother's eye. The second you walked in here today I saw the jolts of pain, the shakes, the sweats. Want to tell me what’s going on?’
York looked down at his dangling feet. ‘Did you tell Holly?’
Kilroy shook his head slowly.
‘Thank you.’
‘Why are you using, Nicolas?’
York rolled up his sleeve and found a freshly wrapped bandage over the bruised puncture marks. Kilroy had administered a patch job while he was out. ‘Why do we do anything?’
Kilroy raised his eyebrows. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘What makes you think something’s wrong? I’m an addict, Charles, plain and simple.’
Kilroy watched him carefully. ‘Nope, you’re too smart for that. Try again.’
York didn’t know where to start. Lots of people knew about his family, but only Tank Henderson knew about his addiction. Until now. He scanned the room. Kilroy was not going to let him off the hook, that much was evident. ‘Do you remember Jack the Stripper?’
‘Jack the Stripper, should I?’
‘Not necessarily,’ York murmured. ‘Jack “The Stripper” Devlin. We were running surveillance on him a couple of years back. Owned two high-end strip clubs, one in Chelsea, one in Kensington. We got an anonymous tip that he was using the clubs as a front for dealing smack. It was an organised operation. Devlin never went near anything, his hands were clean, had a bunch of kids running for him.
‘Anyway, this local kid, Robbie Plank, supposedly one of Devlin’s runners, turns up dead one afternoon. Some poor bastard walking his dog came across him, two bullets in his heart.’
‘Robbie Plank,’ Kilroy cut in, ‘I do remember him. I took the fragments out of his chest.’
York nodded. ‘Once it was conclusively a murder, the drugs bust was no longer just a drugs bust. That’s when I was brought on board. I was to go in, become friends with Devlin over time, gain his trust. Hopefully if we became tight, he'd tell me all his dirty little secrets.’
‘And did he?’
‘Oh yeah, we got him, but it took seventeen months of staying undercover. He had a one-point-eight million quid a year business going off on the side of his clubs. Robbie Plank had been taking the stuff himself, with no means to pay off what was owed. That's what earned him the two bullets.’
‘So how do you end up with needle marks?’
‘As part of keeping up my cover and building Devlin’s trust, I had to hit it. I went in as a buyer, so there was no way around it. Like any buyer I had to test the authenticity of the product. I would have been transparent otherwise. I thought I had it under control, I did have it under control, but a week after the collar my family disappeared. That’s when the control slipped. I’ve been hitting it ever since.’
‘Jesus, Nicolas.’
‘Don’t judge me, Charles, you don’t know what it was like, what it’s still like. I’m living in a fucking nightmare.’
‘You think I don’t know?’ Kilroy pushed. ‘I had two daughters, now I have one. Julie was thirty-two when cancer took her. Hannah is battling it now, twenty-nine. We all have our ways of dealing with tragedy, Nicolas, no human goes unscathed.’
York shifted uncomfortably. ‘I didn’t know, Charles, I’m sorry.’
Kilroy glanced down to his shoes. ‘Yeah...’
‘So how do you cope?’ York detected an almost needy edge to his question. ‘What’s your way of dealing with it?’
‘I haven’t coped, my boy, I’m just a master at disguising it. But I do still find moments of alleviation. We just have to dig deep. It is within you, Nicolas, I promise. It’s within us all. Some of us just need more guidance than others. Opiates may offer you a temporary reprieve, but that’s exactly what it is: temporary. Real
