But as sometimes happens when you’ve been through a night like that, your mind like a computer that’s hung in the act of shutting down, you wake up with fragments of the recent past stuck in the forefront of your consciousness. For me, the fragments included Matt’s first sermon at Our Lady of Zion. The text was from Numbers 23: ‘Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my end be like his.’ A pretty downbeat choice for your first Mass at your first ministry, I thought at the time. But I never asked him why, and I realised now what a shitty thing it was I’d done to him. Yeah, I came along to wave the flag and mark the occasion. But Matty was hurting: he’d told me so as clearly as he knew how. And I’d walked away without saying a word.
Later for that. Business is business.
The Liver Building is the iconic face of Liverpool: pure white stone, golden at sunset like an emperor’s palace floating on the muddy Mersey, and guarded by those two mythical cormorants with their well-chronicled fondness for honest men and virtuous women. The Cunard is the big ugly bread box right alongside: as squat as a stool and as elegant as the stump of a limb. I worked there myself in the summer before I went off to college, as an office assistant for the Regis Shipping and Forwarding Company. I’d almost died, but that was mainly the systemic shock of having to get up at half past six in the morning and put in a full day’s work. I was pretty sure that my destiny lay elsewhere: God couldn’t be that cruel.
That was eighteen years ago, but the place hasn’t changed much. The war memorial with its winged Victory is still standing in the forecourt. The foyer is as imposing and unwelcoming as ever, with its massive Doric columns designed to put generations of junior clerks firmly in their place. And the elevators still play Dvorak’s
A single phone call to Nicky from the Orrell Park had established the fact that Steven Seddon, MSSP, worked as a law clerk for Sedgewick & Stacey, a firm of solicitors specialising in contract law, with three partners on permanent retainer to half a dozen Liverpool-based shipping lines. ‘Clean, as far as that goes,’ Nicky had said. ‘No obvious bad smells, anyway. Seddon. Any relation to the late Kenneth Seddon?’
‘Brother,’ I confirmed.
‘He’s been there three years and a month. Should have been promoted last year when he got his paralegal diploma, but he squeaked in with the lowest pass grade you can get. It was a skin-of-the-teeth kind of thing, and they decided to bump him a year.’
‘You got all that from their website, Nicky?’
‘Nope. I’m in their personnel files. It’s all up on the office intranet. Restricted log-in, but what’s a password between friends? I’m currently one of the senior partners, a Mister John Loose. As in “fast and . . .” Oh, and by the way, guess which demon-haunted estate in South London made the news last night?’
I felt a prickling on my scalp and the back of my neck. ‘What happened?’ I demanded.
‘There was a fight. Couple of gangs met up by prior arrangement and had a bit of an altercation. Nobody dead, but lots of blood spilled. Cops came in to break it up, and here’s the bizarre part. The good citizens sided with the gang-bangers. Cops were pelted with all kinds of shit from up on the walkways. Bricks. Bottles. A widescreen TV. It got kind of intense. And while I’m watching this on the nine o’clock news, what do I see but the other bastard walking right past the camera.’
‘What other bastard?’
‘Good old Tom Gwillam. The Pope’s plausibly deniable leg-breaker.’
‘So he’s still there,’ I mused. ‘Well, he can’t have too many illusions about what’s happening now. And maybe he can do some good.’
‘What, with the power of prayer?’
‘Something like that.’ Actually, Gwillam was an exorcist, and a pretty damn powerful one. He got the drop on Juliet once, which was more than I’d ever managed. ‘Thanks, Nicky. I owe you, man.’
‘Oh, indubitably.’
So here I now was, sitting in Sedgewick & Stacey’s reception area, which was about the size of Lime Street station but had considerably more potted palms, waiting for Steve to put in an appearance. He seemed to be in no hurry at all to do that, but I was prepared to be patient. That was my main bargaining chip. I was comfortably dressed in my jeans and greatcoat, and I had a good greasy breakfast under my belt, so I just sat reading the magazines while other clients came and went, and while the receptionist, shooting the occasional frosty glare in my direction, called Steve on the intercom at ten-minute intervals — which I timed by the clock above her desk.
Steve broke before I did, which is where my money would have been if I’d been making book on this. He came out of the inner office after barely an hour, looking harassed and hunted. I knew him at once, even though his complexion had cleared and he didn’t have the words LOVE and HATE written on his knuckles in red biro, as he had when I’d seen him last. He’d grown up without filling out, so he was basically just an attenuated version of his childhood self with a line of bum-fluff on his upper lip. He was wearing a suit, and it looked like a pretty good one except that it was brown. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a brown suit, but I was nearly certain that Norman Wisdom had been wearing it.
Steve nodded a begrudging acknowledgement to the receptionist to show that he was taking care of this, then crossed to me as I folded my magazine and stood up.
‘Hey, Steve,’ I said.
‘Hey, yourself,’ he growled back at me, if you can growl while you’re keeping your voice half a hair above a whisper. He gave me a look of the up-and-then-back-down-again variety, his lip curling. ‘Christ, it really
‘Fucker?’ I queried.
‘Don’t play thick. Your frigging loser of a brother.’
‘Wow,’ I reflected. ‘Free legal advice! Do the partners know you give it out for nothing, Stevie? Or are you planning to hit me with a bill on my way out?’
‘I’ll hit you with the toe of my frigging boot,’ Steve hissed, with another panicky glance towards the receptionist, who was still watching us with undisguised interest. ‘Piss off, Castor. I mean it. Do you want me to tell the prosecutors you came here to offer me a bribe?’
‘I don’t want you to do anything that would niggle at your conscience, Steve,’ I said. ‘Children and lawyers should get a completely free ride, in my opinion. Karmically, I mean. But then you’re not actually a lawyer yet, are you? You’re still slogging your way up the ziggurat, and it’s got slippery sides. All the more so when you barely scrape a pass in your tests and your kid brother is up Beddie Road doing time for drugs. So I’m hoping we can have a civilised conversation here and not make a scene. Because a scene would be ugly and demeaning and it might mean you miss out on your promotion for the second year running. In fact,’ I added, poking him lightly in the stomach, ‘if we make it just ugly and demeaning enough, you could be out of a job altogether. What do you think?’
Steve stared at me, nonplussed. ‘Fuck you,’ he said at last, shaking his head in wonder at my impudence.
‘Fuck me,’ I agreed. ‘But quietly and discreetly, yeah? So as not to wake the neighbours. Sit down and let’s talk. Or I will, I promise you, blot your copybook here beyond any chance of unblotting.’
Steve laughed indignantly. ‘I’ll just have you thrown out.’
‘Then I’ll go out screaming that you raped my teenaged sister after I refused to sell you any more drugs.’ I shot him an affable smile. ‘Sit down,’ I said again. ‘Last time of asking.’
A heroic psychomachia played itself out in his face. To my chagrin, it looked as though he’d decided on the ‘publish and be damned’ option, but the receptionist, who had left her desk and crossed the room to join us, intervened at the tipping point by pure chance.
‘Is everything all right, Mister Seddon?’ she asked, with heavy emphasis.
‘It’s fine, Karen,’ Steve said, instinctively shrinking back from the edge of the abyss. ‘I might have double- booked an appointment time, but I’m sorting it out. Thanks.’
He stared at her, a stiff smile on his face, until she retreated again, with a begrudging nod. She knew something wasn’t kosher, but she couldn’t push it any further in the face of Steve’s stonewalling. And Steve, as soon as she was out of earshot again, gave up the unequal struggle. He sat down opposite me, giving me a venomous look.
