‘He was dead. Don’t forget, I saw him die, too.’
Flynn recalled the first time, not so very long ago, that he’d seen Michelle. It had been on the day he and Boone had returned from a day’s tarpon fishing. He had been stunned by her radiant, free beauty. He also remembered those moments before Boone had hurtled back with the devil on his tail, how Michelle had unashamedly leaned over him at the laptop, naked, her breasts nuzzling his shoulder blades. A vibrant, beautiful woman. Now completely changed by recent events. Her chocolate brown skin had lost its lustre, her face gaunt, bearing the faded marks of a brutal beating. Her eyes seeped terror. Her whole body seemed shrivelled and wasted. Everything had somehow been battered out of her.
‘Do you know what they did to me?’
Flynn shook his head, nostrils flaring, eyes flickering between the double-O barrel ends and Michelle’s face. A tear formed at the edge of her left eye. A perfect, glinting droplet that rolled down her cheek, leaving a track.
‘They beat me and they raped me,’ she whispered.
‘I’m sorry.’ Flynn swallowed. His voice croaked.
‘They beat me and they raped me… again and again.’
Flynn swallowed drily now, his mouth and throat like acid. Michelle’s forefinger jittered on the triggers.
‘But that didn’t matter.’ She removed her finger from the trigger and wiped away the tear with the back of her hand. ‘Rape doesn’t matter to me. I’ve been raped a thousand times. I was a prostitute, you see. A good one. Men have always had their way with me, and as far as I was concerned it was always rape. But I learned to live through it. I’ve been abused since I was seven. By men. Eventually it meant nothing. I have been beaten, too. Many, many times, by angry men.’ Another tear formed, trickled down. She wiped it away. ‘Beating means nothing, either, because no one could ever beat the spirit out of me.’ She lifted her chin challengingly.
‘Shell,’ Flynn started to say, and moved slightly.
She jerked the gun at him. He became rigid again.
‘Those men raped me. They did it on the jetty and in the houseboat. They held my face over the side of the jetty and fucked me from behind so I had to look at Boone’s body floating in the bloody water. His face was looking up at me, what was left of it. The fish had already started to eat him.’
‘Shell,’ Flynn said again.
‘What those men took from me was my hope. Boone was my future. He was my way out. He saved me and I loved him for it. They took him from me… and you — YOU — left me…’
‘Shell,’ Flynn said again for the third time. ‘I’m back. I couldn’t save Boone and I couldn’t have saved you.’
Her head began to shake from side to side, then her chin fell and her whole body sagged as though, this time, the spirit had left her. The gun fell out of her hands on to the deck.
Flynn swooped down and knelt in front of her, encircling his strong arms around her now frail body, which shook and juddered uncontrollably. He held on and her thin arms went around his neck, crushing him ferociously. She started to howl and Flynn kept a tight hold as she broke down completely, her head buried into his chest. He stroked her hair, now coarse and straggled and stale, cooing, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ softly, and other useless words into her ear. Such as, ‘I’m here now.’
As if that was any sort of reassurance to her.
‘I prayed you’d come back,’ she said, her voice muffled and broken. ‘Prayed hard, prayed to God you hadn’t truly deserted me.’
‘Tell me who these people are,’ Flynn whispered. ‘Tell me their names. Tell me where I can find them.’
‘Will you destroy them?’
‘Oh yes.’
The evenings were getting longer and on Shoreside the gangs had started to gather again. Henry drove on to the estate in the CID Focus and was instantly spotted and ID’d by the four youths on the first corner he drove past. They had been pushing and shoving each other, generally larking around. When they saw him, they ended their boisterous shenanigans and eyed him fiercely. Two of them fished out their mobile phones. One started to text, one took his photograph. Henry knew these guys were the sentinels for this entrance to the estate, a bit like lookouts for the Hole in the Wall gang — and this estate was pretty much as lawless as the Wild West. In fact a lot of cops referred to it as Dodge City.
Henry gave the hoodies a broad smile and drove on.
He was looking for Mark Carter, who lived on the far perimeter of the estate in a house once occupied by his mother, which, Henry had learned to his surprise, had been bought by her from the council and the outstanding debt on it had been paid by a mortgage insurance policy when she’d been murdered. Mark now lived there alone.
He drove past the fenced off remnants of a parade of shops that had been systematically razed to the ground by local vandals. Then past the house owned and occupied by the Costain family who presided over the estate like warlords, controlling most of the criminal activity therein. Henry was sure that his photo had been beamed to one of the Costains.
Then he was on the avenue on which Mark lived.
He drew up outside the house, which was in darkness. Didn’t seem like anyone was at home. Still, Henry never took anything for granted. He walked up to the front door, eyeing the windows all the time for signs of movement, then tapped on the front door and rattled the letterbox. The door opened slightly at Henry’s touch. He pushed it fully open and called out, ‘Mark? It’s me, Henry Christie,’ from the threshold.
Behind the door was a stack of unopened mail. Henry switched on the hall light and bent down to pick it up. Scanning through it he saw quite a few official looking envelopes that smacked of final demands, which made Henry wonder how Mark survived. The house might have been paid for, but bills still came in and a two-bit job at a fast food restaurant wouldn’t go far in paying for its upkeep. Could well be on benefits, too, Henry thought.
‘Mark,’ he called again.
He checked the downstairs rooms, found no sign of the lad.
He was upstairs on top of his bed. The bedroom floor was littered with beer cans and a couple of supermarket own-brand whiskey bottles. Henry stood on the crunchy crust of a half-eaten meat pie — hard, like stepping on a cockroach — and wafted away the aroma of exhaled booze, sweat, urine, farts and vomit, smells Henry readily associated with cell blocks.
Mark was fully clothed, lying in the recovery position, on his side, one knee drawn up, clasping a can of cheap lager. He was snoring and dribbling at the same time.
Henry walked across to him, raised his right foot and prodded him with his toe. No response. He prodded a little more firmly and said, ‘Mark.’ The lad groaned, rolled on to his back and quarter-opened his eyes, which seemed to be stuck together by some kind of mucus. He looked dreadful. ‘Jeez,’ Henry muttered and managed to step smartly back out of range.
It was the stomach heave that gave him the warning. Mark spun back on to his side and his projectile vomit splattered on the bedroom floor like a pan of thick vegetable soup being hurled across a kitchen.
Henry half-dragged Mark out of his room, sidestepping the reeking pile of vomit, and into the bathroom. He heaved him into the shower, fully clothed, then turned it on full blast. The icy rods of the water jets shook Mark, semi-conscious up to that point, into some sort of life, demonstrated by a scream and a scramble to get out of the cubicle with a lot of cursing and swearing. Despite getting his sleeve wet, Henry held him back easily as the water gradually lost its chill and warmed up, then became hot, and the struggling teen gave up the fight with a resigned but vicious glare at Henry, who he called a bastard repeatedly. Then he said, ‘OK, OK, let me get my stuff off.’ Henry released him and backed away.
‘Get your sorry arse showered and get into some new clobber.’
Henry reversed out, closing the shower door as he went.
Mark rubbed two round holes in the steamed-up glass door and looked balefully out through them.
Edina hadn’t actually said much, Donaldson mused as he walked back down Victoria Street after they’d finished dinner, but what she had revealed set the American’s mind chugging. He rewound back to the morning he had managed to prevent a suicide bomber causing death and destruction in the middle of Blackpool, and almost caught one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, whilst another suspected bomber had been shot dead on the motorway.
So there had been three of them.
Three would-be suicide bombers? Is that what Edina meant? Was that what she had heard in passing?
