to do about it?”
“He needs to be stopped. I think he killed a girl I used to know. Or someone working with him did. I want you to help me.”
“How?”
“You know all about him. You’ll have seen things. You know his weaknesses.”
Kev shook his head. “It isn’t Vernon you should be worried about.”
“Oh really?”
“Why don’t you just leave me alone? I don’t want to get back into that nonsense. I’ve got too much to do.”
Sean hitched around on his seat to get a view of the allotment. “Yeah. You’ve got a hole in your wheelbarrow needs mending and a rake to clean.”
“It suits me,” Kev said, quickly.
“I heard you were a good guy for Vernon. He rated you, I heard.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care any more.”
“I heard you were loyal and wouldn’t ever lie down for anyone. Hundred per center. Hundred and ten per center.” Sean leaned over and picked at the dried mud on a trowel. “Will you at least tell me what you know? And tell me why you bailed out? It wasn’t the gunshot wound, was it? At least tell us what happened with that.”
Kev sat across from him, staring at the younger man while Emma stood by the doorway, looking out at the pockets of mist in the rowans and the hawthorn. Chickens in a coop squabbled among themselves for a few seconds. The smell of the bonfire drifted through the open door. Kev’s stony face broke open to reveal a smile.
“Have a drink,” he said, pulling open a drawer and removing a half-bottle of whisky. “A nip, to keep out the cold.”
He poured three measures into three mugs and passed them around. They took sips. They nodded at the agreeable flavour, the migration of warmth through their bodies. A robin landed six feet away from the door and eyed them coolly.
Kev said:
I first met Vernon while I was working on the docks. I was doing anything I could for money back then. Seventy hours a week I’d be breaking my back loading or unloading ships. Fruit, textiles, meat, sometimes arms, although that was often midnight stuff. And never at the docks. Very naughty. Vernon was on one of the boats bringing in an illegal shipment of pistols from the Americas to sell on to Europe one night when I was helping out. I didn’t know much about his operations but I’d heard he was just about the best smuggler there was. I’d heard about him long before I met him. He was a bit of a legend.
We went down to a boathouse on the river and helped take the boxes off this boat while Vernon sat on a chair smoking cheroots and watching us working. When we’d finished, he called me back and thanked me, told me I put my back into it more than any other dogsbody that he’d seen. He was looking at me strange, like I had something green on my face. The others were in the boathouse by this time, divvying up the booty and loading it into the backs of stolen cars for delivery. They gave me filthy looks as they walked back and to.
Vernon never blinked when he talked. First time I ever saw his eyelids was when I caught him asleep one time. And even then I had to look twice because it was as though they were so thin they were almost translucent, like he was watching you while he kipped. He gave me a chunky little glass filled with rum and told me to down it. After the drink he asked me straight if I wanted to come and work with him. He needed someone he could trust, he said. He needed another set of eyes. Another set of hands. It was getting too dangerous, he said, this line of work he was in. He was getting too old. He pinched my cheek and laughed when he said this. He said that the rewards for helping him out would be great. Unimaginable.
I didn’t like it, the work he was offering. But I stuck at it and developed a tough skin. The boat work tailed off anyway. We lost our gills and went inland. I took beatings for Vernon. I took a knife once. I got harder. The beatings didn’t happen so often. I started doling the beatings out more than I was taking them. Vernon and me put the frighteners on this part of the country. We had the Northwest in our pockets. We got word of the rich pickings and went round to collect. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t money that Vernon was picking up. I thought he was a debt collector pure and simple. I never asked who for and I never asked why. I just matched him pace for pace and stood behind him in the shadows, cracking my knuckles while he pleased and thank you’d and scraped shit off his heels on the steps of all those sorry little houses.
It was seven or eight years before I twigged. A long time, I know. But if I’d been known for the quality of meat between my ears I’d never have been in this game in the first place, would I now? There’s me, picking up my grey hairs and getting a bit of lard round the guts and Vernon, my elder and better, looking as thin as a stiletto and twice as sharp. I never saw him exercising. He ate like a gannet and drank as if to chase off the Devil’s thirst.
We were friends by now. Fast and firm. We talked a lot, but he pretty much clammed up when the chat turned on him, his family, his loves. He got a cloud in his eyes when I asked him about his loves. Because I never saw him once with a lady on his arm. He had no tattoos proclaiming his desire for a Mavis or a Maude, or a Malcolm come to that. But we talked. One night he had had a bit too much to drink and the shakes were on him. I thought he was fearless, but this night he shook so much I could hear his bones rattling. He told me he was never going to be able to stop working. He was scared to stop working because he didn’t know what would happen to him. It wasn’t the poor bastards we visited that put the willies up him, nor was it the people he delivered the money to – what I thought was money. He said he was scared of himself. He had terrible dreams, he said. Dreams in which he walked through a corridor of mirrors and was terrified to turn to his left or right to see what kind of reflection walked with him. Ask him how he was feeling and he’d tell you that he didn’t feel himself today. Then he’d cackle to himself darkly for a bit. The drinking got worse. I drove him everywhere. But he got on top of it. Beat it, I suppose. Wrestled his demons to the ground like the hard bastard he is.
Doesn’t matter any more, he told me, when I asked him if he was okay. He dreamed of his corridor of mirrors and walked along it, smashing every one down with a baseball bat. Dead if I do and dead if I don’t, he told me. I never let it rest. I asked him to tell me what was going on. I dogged him. I went after him about the true nature of his work like a hound after a fox. I threatened that I’d leave him. He came round after that.
He showed me, one night, what the fuss was all about. We went out on a collection. A little house in Widnes. Old couple. Desperate for cash. Well, they’d got their bit of cash and Vernon came to balance the books. Instead of leaving me outside, he took me in with him. I wish I’d had a drink beforehand, let me tell you. What I saw... what I saw...
Vernon lays his hand on the old girl’s shoulder. Myra, her name was. Her old man, Clive, he behaves like a good boy and buzzes off to the kitchen to make us all a cup of tea. There’s the three of us standing in the room. I blink. And there’s four of us. I didn’t hear the door open or close. No footsteps. He’s just there. And it takes me a moment or two for it to sink in because he’s so still. This tall doctor bloke with a paper mask. His eyes are crawling all over Myra. Insect eyes, he had. They didn’t stop bloody moving.
Vernon goes, This is Dr. Chater. His voice is cracking all over the place like a wafer, like a bloody choir boy at bollockdrop. I realise, despite the smile on Vernon’s face, that he is shitting himself.
Dr. Chater moved like nobody I had ever seen before. If you think of a film of someone moving, and then take away all the frames that contain the getting from one position to the next, it was like that. Like looking at photographs. One second he was looking at Myra, the next second his hand was full of knives and she was forced back over the arm of the settee, antimacassars all over the shop. Another second, her blouse is up around her ears and Dr. Chater’s hunched over her. I watched him cut her. I watched him take a lung. No blood. He moved too fast for her body to even realise it was open. Clive came in with tears in his eyes asking who took sugar. One look at her and he shut the kitchen door. A good boy, Clive. She was stitched up and in her armchair within seconds. She was dead. She’d had a heart attack.
Dr. Chater slipped the lung into a plastic bag and tossed it to Vernon before propping a Radio Times into Myra’s hands, the doctor’s bloody prints smeared all over it. I blinked. There was three of us again. We left before Clive came back. I wanted to ask Vernon all kinds of questions but I couldn’t talk. Spit had turned to glue in my mouth. We drove for an hour until we came to a house in the country. Nice house. Big. There was this bloody freak waiting for us. He looked as if he was in a state of constant drowning.
