A Long Time Dead (The Dead Trilogy) (18 page)

Roger could barely keep his eyes open. It was only the turbulence from buses and large lorries passing his parked van and rocking it, that kept him awake.

He had been here for two hours. Here was sixty yards away from Weston’s front door and about two hundred yards from the silhouetted ruins of Sandal Castle. The dashboard clock said it was 08:32. It was four degrees outside.

The meagre snowfall that littered crevices yesterday evening, that hung around in the corners between pavements and walls like a work in progress, had vanished overnight. Cloud was thick today, and even now the sky appeared in tumult, shoved around by the strengthening wind. It still wasn’t fully light, the earth had a bubbling ceiling and it appeared there had been a celestial power cut.

Roger had been on duty since six o’clock. He had rushed to work, dumped his sandwiches and his Adidas bag, and printed off the jobs for Jon and Helen who would arrive at eight. He made sure there was nothing urgent that required immediate attendance, left a brief note for Chris in case he showed up at the office, and then brought his van here, his mind rattling with Hobnail’s words and soothed by Yvonne’s compassion.

It began to rain as Weston’s BMW nosed out of the drive.

Roger’s eyes sprang wide and for a moment he didn’t know what to do, had forgotten everything he had rehearsed last night while he should have been sleeping. He buckled his seat belt and fell in behind Weston half a dozen cars behind. The rain grew heavier the further out of town they travelled. The windscreen misted up.

For twenty minutes, they travelled, with the cars between them leaving, others joining. The gap remained constant. The traffic lights at Durkar, where you could turn left towards Newmillerdam, caught Roger out. Weston scraped through on amber and Roger could only watch from behind a red light, as the BMW slipped out of sight around a corner. He panicked then, knowing this was the big chance, maybe his only chance to prove what a dirty bastard Weston really was. He felt the bulge of his compact camera in his coat pocket: no, not good enough evidence for a conviction in court, perhaps, but good enough to get the ACC or Mayers to sit up and really take notice this time.

When the lights changed, Roger craned his neck, brought the van over to the right and saw Weston’s car in the distance, stuck in a queue of traffic by a roundabout. He pulled up four cars back. And he swallowed, felt the sweat on his palms, and peered through the dirt streaked, misty windscreen at the man who dared call
him
the enemy. The BMW took off, Roger willed the cars in front onward, grimaced at their inability to pull out into the main flow of traffic, and that’s when his mobile phone rang.

Steering with one hand, he struggled to get the damned thing out of his other coat pocket and answered curtly. It was Jon, and through his continual splutter of bad jokes and awkward questions, Roger kept his attention on Weston. “I really have to go; speak to you later.” They were well out of town now, heading along the dual carriageway towards the M1.

Where the hell are we going? he thought.

“You heading somewhere?” asked Jon.

“I’m on a job.”

“What job? I don’t see your call-sign in—”

“It’s more of a personal job.” He passed beneath the motorway, which from down here looked like a sea wall with a barrier of spray running its full length. The wipers scraped across the windscreen, the road noise blotted out Roger’s loud breathing.

“Ah. I see.”

“I don’t think you—”

“The Bulldog?”

Roger paused. “Keep it to yourself, Jon.”

“Just be careful, you stupid man, and don’t turn your phone off. Where are you now?”

“Heading towards Bretton Country Park, looks like.”

“Okay, I have to go now, Helen’s coming back. Take care of yourself; I don’t want to trail out there to rescue your sorry arse.”

“Has Chris come in?”

The line went dead, and Roger turned on the phone’s silent function.

On a narrow road, hemmed in by naked black trees, and by hedges covered in grey road dirt, Roger peered through the spray, trying to sight Weston’s car. There it was, two cars separating them.

Suddenly, Weston turned right into the Bretton estate and Roger carried on, skidding the van into a narrow dirt lay-by thirty yards past the entrance. The van slid to within two feet of an overflowing concrete litterbin. He climbed from the warmth, out into a tearing wind that pulled at his coat, rippled his trousers against his long skinny legs, and nearly snatched his glasses from his face. The rain came heavier, almost horizontally. He squinted over the rough hedge to watch Weston’s car splashing through puddles towards a small gravel car park by the wooded hillside. Water ran down his neck and dripped from his glasses. Cars sped past him, throwing up clouds of dirty water and drowning thought with noise.

Roger locked the van, tucked the keys safely away, and pulled his collar up, making a dash for the far side of the road and the entrance to Bretton. The gullies at either side of the tarmac road bubbled with storm water, and overhead, power lines hummed and phone lines whistled.

The tarmac road became a potholed gravel track after thirty or forty yards. Another hundred yards after that, it divided left towards the house and gardens, or right towards the woodland, the lake and stone built boathouse further down the valley, and the picnic areas and sightseeing trails. A generous car park, also gravelled, accommodated only three cars; one of which was a black BMW. Empty.

Hurrying, Roger left the harsh noise of traffic on the wet road, and swapped it for harsh winds tearing through trees, barging into them until they sang like perpetual thunder. Cold wind-blown rain stung his face until the skin was numb and blotchy red; eyes screwed up, coat fastened to the neck, hands rammed into pockets and wrapped around the disfigured Mars bars.

 He turned into the woods, hurrying silently among the turmoil, through towering trees, shiny with rain, through mounds of slippery leaves, navigating minefields of snagging bracken and fallen trees, and over tributaries whose banks were a mire of clinging mud. He looked down at his shoes, and merely tutted at the muddy water soaking into his socks.

Whipping branches plucked at his coat and trousers, attempted to steal his glasses, and made grabs for his hair. Still the rain pierced the naked canopy, and still Roger headed deeper into the woods, well away from the marked nature trail, lower into the valley and closer to Weston.

And the truth of it was, the closer he came to Weston, the more his footing slipped, the more his hands came out of his pockets to regain balance, the harsher his breathing was and the more unsure of his quest he became.

Not for a moment did he consider that this time Weston was going fishing in the lake, or was taking a walk in the woods for no more sinister a reason than to work off some of his weight and enjoy a minor struggle with nature. He wasn’t in this for the pleasure, wasn’t Weston: he didn’t look up at the trees, didn’t admire them or the knee-high foliage or the bracken, or the fungi growing on dead wood, or the squirrels that darted into places of greater safety every time their tree shook.

He was here for a specific purpose. Such as digging up some guns, or
a
gun, and he was going to take it back to his car, and he was going to meet someone at twelve o’clock, and he was going to sell them that gun at a place called Harvey’s Table. And then in the months to follow, that gun would kill people, maim people; and the money would buy Weston more cigars and beer, and would fund the deposit for a two-week holiday in Spain in April. How nice.

That’s what he was doing.

The noise was incredible. It was like standing next to a Boeing as it prepared for take-off, and even in here, covered by the woods, he was violently whipped about, found walking difficult, found it a real effort one moment and then a real effort to keep from falling flat on his nose the next. Mud seemed to grow up his trouser legs. His fingertips were numb, his nose was leaking, eyes streaming.

Roger thought of Hobnail, how he’d finally met him outside the station, and he thought of what Hobnail had told him, how he said he’d seen Weston enter The Joker – “couldn’t bleedin’ miss him,” he said. “I’d recognise the fella who nearly mowed me down a few days ago, no problem. And he walks the same as he drives: aggressive.”

 And Roger had been enthralled by Hobnail’s tale, eyes had never moved from the tramp’s, nose completely ignorant of the smell, ears hearing nothing except the old man’s coarse accent and his regurgitation of the words he had heard, about how Weston “Was meeting a beaver at noon, Thursday. So he was gonna dig up the metal before then.”

“He said that? He used those exact words?”

Hobnail had looked worried, as though maybe they weren’t those precise exact definite words, and he’d made a right balls up. His eyes had moved away from Roger as he dug around in his memory. At last, he’d stared back and nodded. “Oh aye, mentioned metal, he did.”

“Thanks Hobnail, but you can’t remember where—”

His hair had blown about his dirty pate in thin wisps. “No, no idea. All I know is the man what I couldn’t see says to Weston, ‘Final, Harvey’s table’. Now, maybe it’s in a restaurant or…” he shook his head, “I don’t rightly know.” He’d shrugged. “But I remembered you sayin’ he was bent, this Weston, that I should steer well clear of ‘im—”

“You should, he’s dangerous.” He had thanked Hobnail and paid for another liquid lunch.

Then he saw Weston, and gasped. He froze, didn’t know what to do.

He remembered the last time Weston caught him. He’d snarled at Roger and said next time he would pull his innards out through his arsehole. Roger swallowed hard, fingertips trembled.

Weston was fifty yards further into the woods, striding unheard ever inwards, wading through the undergrowth as though struggling through a deep snowfall. The wind tugged at his hair and pulled his coat out behind him and then threw it back at him; the wind came from everywhere all at once, and its noise in the dense trees was massive. Roger moved to his right, slipping down a shallow, muddy embankment and lost sight of Weston. He stood, craned his neck and then scrambled back up, mud and wet foliage slick between his cold fingers. He took a couple of strides closer, and Weston’s fawn coloured coat came back into view.

His heart raced, and he tried desperately to close the gap between them down to something the camera could comfortably handle. Oh, for a telephoto lens. Weston had stopped in a small clearing, the wind making him squint, as was Roger, against the onslaught of spinning leaves and twigs. His gold bracelet looked bright against the darkness of the trees behind him.

He seemed to be looking for something.

Roger continued to move closer; he took out the camera, turned the power on and felt, but could not hear, the lens motor working. He was forty yards away, and he almost cried out as Weston spun a full 360, quick as a gyroscope, scanning the woods for… well, for spies, Roger guessed.

He panted. Had Weston seen him?

There he was standing out in the open for all to see; might as well staple a neon sign to his head that flashed on and off:
I’m here! I’m here!
Even so, Weston hadn’t stopped to scrutinise; he carried on turning, didn’t flinch. So maybe he hadn’t seen him.

But Weston
had
seen him.

And now Roger crouched breathless behind a wide oak, his back to the wet bark, and waited, taking the opportunity to clean smears and specks of mud from his glasses. Roger needed to catch his composure. It was nothing to do with fear, he told himself, he wasn’t the least bit worried about Weston, possibly armed, finding him in the same stretch of woodland. No, not worried at all. But he might have been holding his breath. And his fingers may have trembled slightly.

Roger was about to pull the camera up to shooting position. But he didn’t get the chance.

She had been right; the pain
was
like someone hitting her knee with a lump hammer. Yvonne screamed and flopped onto the hallway floor with a sickening crunch. She screamed even harder and beat at the carpet with feeble fists as her eyes screwed shut against the pain.

Agony ruptured the bubble that Yvonne had created to hold her breath in. Another scream exploded into the hallway. This one caused by a torture as bad as she could remember, and suddenly her head hit the carpet and her fingers dug in.

Five minutes later, or it could have been fifty-five minutes later, Yvonne held her breath again and pulled herself into the lounge with fingers the nails of which lay in tatters in her wake. Her makeup had run in great black streaks down her face, the trace of blue mascara looked like a four-year-old had applied it with a pasting brush. Her lipstick was on the hall floor, though a streak of it remained in the cleft of her chin.

Dignity, Roger. That’s why. “Couldn’t you
see
it?” It didn’t matter. What mattered was the phone. And there it was, on Roger’s table next to his easy chair. It was close, only a few yards away. Another few minutes…

He pressed ok.

“Yvonne?” It was a shout, but in this wind he supposed it was more like a whisper. His wet hair whipped about his head, and his coat collar was like a very small boat’s sail, how it flapped against his neck as he crouched behind the oak, exposed knees tucked up, rain dancing on their shiny sodden surface.

“I need you,” she said.

He buried his finger in his spare ear, and said, “Speak up, what did you say?”

She told him that she had fallen. Yes, she said, it was serious, how the knee seemed to grind as she hit the bottom stair, and how “I’ve never felt pain like it, Roger. I’m in agony!”

“I’ll call an ambulance.”

“No!” she shouted. “I’ve freed a seized joint, Roger, that’s all. Hurts like a bitch, but it’s not worth getting them and hospitals involved.”

“You sure, sweet?”