Blood Guilt (40 page)

Harlan quickly got to
know Jones’s routine. At eleven PM Jones’s bedroom light came on and stayed on all
night. At nine AM Jones opened his upstairs curtains, but never the downstairs
ones. Every two days at noon, when the street was quietest, Jones visited the
shop. If he encountered anyone in the street, they would often cross to the
opposite pavement, shooting him wary glances. Some stared at him with open
hostility. Whichever, he would quicken his pace, gaze fixed on the ground.
Harlan spent some time watching the backyard gate, but Jones never left the
house that way, probably because he was afraid of being jumped in the alley. He
never left the house after dark either. Which was just as well because gangs of
hoodie-wearing teenagers often bombarded it with bricks and bottles, until the
police arrived and sent them scattering in all directions. One night Harlan was
awoken from another thin, troubled sleep by the sound of two drunken men trying
to kick their way into Jones’s house. After five minutes of vainly pounding
away, they satisfied themselves with pissing on the front door, then staggered
off, laughing. 

After several weeks, a
man wearing what looked like a medical uniform visited Jones. The next time
Jones showed his face, his plaster-casts had been removed. His fingers were
still too swollen to fully curl around the trolley’s handle. But from then on,
the man, whom Harlan assumed was a physio, visited every three or four days.
And with each visit Jones’s fingers grew a little more flexible, until finally
they could curl into fists. Harlan saw them do so one afternoon when a couple
of boys, maybe thirteen-years old, abused Jones in the street. “Fuckin’
pervert!” yelled one of them. “Peado!” added the other, flinging a bottle that
popped on the pavement next to Jones. He threw back an angry glance, hands
balled at his sides. The boys sneered at the warning in his eyes, but didn’t
approach him.

After that a change
came over Jones. His posture became more upright, less shuffling. He stopped
lowering his gaze from the people he saw in the street. He began to venture
further afield, visiting other shops. One time, he lingered outside a toy shop,
pretending to read a newspaper. Harlan’s blood burned as he watched Jones
watching the children play in the aisles, the more so because the store had
been a favourite of Tom’s. The thought that Jones might’ve sneaked yearning
peeks at his son made him palpitate with the urge to violence. That afternoon,
Jones visited an art supplies shop. Harlan’s heart dropped as he watched Jones
browse its aisles. If Jones started painting again, his urges would be kept in
check for a time, maybe for a very long time. Jones picked up a brush and
practiced moving it up and down a canvas. With every stroke, Harlan could feel
his chance at being the father he so desperately wanted to be slipping further
away. Jones’s fingers fumbled the brush. He retrieved it and tried again. The
same thing happened. Shaking his head in pained frustration, he stormed from
the shop. Harlan released a breath of relief.

Now another change came
over Jones. When he next left the house, a new haggardness had come into his
face. His piggish eyes shone with a repulsive light – a light of hunger that,
day by day, grew until it was feverishly bright. He often took to muttering to
himself, occasionally nodding or shaking his head in response to some internal
dialogue. One day the head shaking grew more agitated, until it seemed there
was a full scale row going on between Jones and his mind’s voice. He looked
more crazed than dangerous. Someone to be pitied rather than feared. But Harlan
felt no pity. He simply hoped something was coming to a head within Jones, so
that he could get far away from here and start living.

That night Jones’s
bedroom light came on at the usual time, but after half an hour or so it went
off. Harlan frowned up at the window, wondering what was going on. Had Jones
worked up the courage to sleep in the dark? He doubted it. More likely the
light-bulb needed changing. Several minutes passed. The window remained dark.
Another thought came: what if Jones had switched the light off because he was leaving
the house. He waited a couple more minutes. Still no light. No sign of Jones
either.
Maybe he’s sneaking out the backdoor
. The thought prompted
Harlan to jump out of his car and sprint to the end of the street. He peered
cautiously into the alley, which was patchily illuminated by house lights.
Jones’s house was unlit at the rear too. Harlan squinted, straining to
penetrate the darkness. He thought he could see something by Jones’s gate.
Something moving. An arm. On the edge of his hearing, he caught the sound of a
lock clicking. A figure moved away from the gate, back turned to Harlan,
hurrying. It was Jones! Harlan couldn’t see his face, but he recognised his
thin, scruffy hair and hunch-shouldered gait.

Hugging the shadows,
Harlan followed Jones. After ten or fifteen minutes, they came to Lewis Gunn’s
church, and the thought flashed through Harlan’s mind,
is the preacher in on
this
? But Jones headed past the church. He crossed the road and descended
some steps at the side of a canal bridge. His pace slowed as he made his way
along a towpath illuminated by the moon and the ambient glow of the city, which
seeped through the hollowed-out hulks of derelict steel-mills – mills where,
Harlan recalled, Jones had once worked. A tall wall overgrown with vines and
other creeping plants ran alongside the path. As the hum of the unsleeping city
receded, Harlan became hyper-aware of every sound he made – the faint crunch of
his shoes on the hard-packed pebbles, the rustle of his clothes, the murmur of
his breath, the thud of his heart. He allowed the distance between himself and
Jones to grow, until Jones was little more than a faint outline against the
darkness. Then suddenly, as if the ground had opened up and swallowed him,
Jones disappeared.

Heart lurching, Harlan
rushed forward as quietly as he could. He almost missed the door. It was set
into the wall at the bottom of several worn stone steps. A straggly beard of
foliage overhung it. He could just about make out the words ‘DANGER! KEEP OUT!’
daubed in white paint. Brushing aside the foliage, he looked for a handle.
There was only a keyhole. Feeling around the edge of the door, he found a gap
he could slide his fingers into. The paint crackled and the hinges squeaked as
he pulled the door open a couple of feet. The noise reverberated almost
painfully in his ears. He slid through the gap and found himself in a
cavernous, dank building, its floor strewn with the debris of its partially
collapsed in roof. The mill had long since been stripped of its blast furnaces and
other machinery, but the smell of coal and smelted iron still hung faintly in
the air. His attention was attracted by the rattle of metal against metal
overhead. Craning his neck, he made out the dim shape of a walkway suspended
thirty or so feet above the factory floor. There was no sign of Jones, but it
had to be him up there. Who the hell else would it be?

Harlan scanned the
moonlight-mottled walls for a way to reach the walkway. There was no stairway.
To his right a metal ladder was bolted to the wall. He picked his way through
the rubble to it and grasped a rusty rung. ‘BEWARE! DANGER OF DEATH!’ was
painted in foot tall letters on the wall. Harlan reflected that whatever was up
there Jones had to be desperate to see it if he was prepared to risk hauling
himself up this death-trap. The ladder rattled against its bolts as he climbed.
He emerged through the walkway, which was about five feet wide and attached to
the roof beams by metal rods. The walkway traversed the right-hand wall of the
foundry. As Harlan edged out onto the metal grating, it swayed a little, but
held. At its far end was a door. Cautiously opening it, he saw it led to
another walkway that bridged a narrow gap between the mill and a door to the
uppermost floor of a neighbouring building. A sickly, yellowish light glimmered
through the cobwebby, cracked panes of windows to either side of the door.

Hunching low, Harlan
crossed the walkway and peeped through a window into an attic room maybe twenty
feet wide by thirty feet long. Jones was stood with his back to him at its far
end. In one hand he held what appeared to be some kind of oil lamp. With his
other hand he removed bricks from the wall. He reached inside the hole and
withdrew a black plastic sack. He put down the sack and took a cardboard tube
from it. Very carefully, he slid a bunch of rolled up canvases out of the tube.

I’ve got you
,
thought Harlan.
I’ve fucking got you
! With a look of twisted glee, he
burst into the room. Jones barely had time to turn, before Harlan was on him. He
knocked Jones to the floorboards with enough force to wind a bull. Thrusting a
knee into Jones’s back, he twisted the canvases out of his grasp and unfurled
them. His triumph dissolved into sick rage. There were three paintings. Two of
them were of young boys he didn’t recognise. The third was of Jamie Sutton. The
artist had captured perfectly the benumbed horror in their eyes, the agonising
vulnerability of their naked bodies, the destruction of their innocence.

What is right
?
The thought tolled in Harlan’s mind like a death knell. He savagely dismissed
it. In that instant, he didn’t care what was right. He only knew that he wanted
to kill Jones so badly it gave him the shakes. He snatched up a brick and
raised it over Jones’s head. Jones struggled weakly, whimpering, “Please,
please don’t…”

Harlan’s shaking
intensified. Tremors contorted his face, as if he was torn between two
directions, two warring identities. A wild voice – a voice he barely recognised
– burst from him. “Do it!”

In reply, Garrett’s
accusing voice rose into his thoughts,
you’re a menace to society
.

“Kill him!”

Garrett’s voice came
back,
a madman
.

There was a sudden
splitting, dislocating sensation in Harlan’s head. “No,” he cried, silencing
both voices. He slammed the brick against the floorboards an inch from Jones’s
skull.

Jones’s screamed, then
realising he was unhurt, gasped out, “Thank you, thank you.”

Harlan ground his knee
into Jones’s spine. “Shut the fuck up or I’ll change my mind.” He returned the
canvases to the plastic sack. There were other things in there too – pencil
sketches, bundles of Polaroids. He jerked Jones to his feet. As he did so,
Jones grabbed the lantern and swung it at him. The lantern shattered, splashing
burning oil over Harlan and the sack. He dropped the sack, and frantically
patted out the flames on his arms and chest. Scooping up the burning sack,
Jones ran for the door. Harlan pursued him, catching him up as he reached the
walkway. Jones flung the sack over the railings, before pitching forward onto
his face. Harlan watched it sail through the darkness and hit the concrete
thirty feet below, bursting and scattering its contents like burning coals. He
watched any chance of connecting Jones to Jamie Sutton go up in flames.

“Help me,” groaned
Jones, holding up his hands, which were coated with smoking, melted plastic.

The wild voice stirred
inside Harlan again. And this time no other voice rose up in opposition. He
looked down at Jones, his eyes blank as the night that surrounded him. He
stooped to haul him upright. “I don’t think I can make it down the ladder,”
said Jones, his voice grating with pain.

“Is there another way
down?”

Jones shook his head.
“You’ll have to call a fire engine or something.”

“There’s no need.”

“But how else am I
going to–” Jones broke off as Harlan reached down, grabbed his legs and flipped
him over the railing. For an instant, his shrill scream raked across the
derelict steel-mill’s courtyard. There was a dull, crunching thud as he hit the
floor head first. Harlan stood for a moment, listening to the silence outside
and inside. Then he crossed to the opposite doorway. Holding onto the
doorframe, he stamped on the walkway and felt it give a little. He drove his
heel into the metal grating again and again, until all of a sudden the bolts
came loose and it collapsed, swinging against the opposite wall, dangling there
for a few seconds, then clanging to the ground. Even before the echoes had died
away, Harlan was making his way quickly but carefully to the ladder.

Keeping his head down,
sticking to side streets and unlit back alleys, Harlan returned to his car. He
drove through the empty city night, keeping well under the speed limit. He kept
expecting to feel something – relief, guilt, satisfaction, fear – but he
didn’t. It was as though the part of his brain’s circuitry that controlled his
emotions had burned out. He pulled over outside Eve’s flat, got out of the car
and pressed the intercom button. After a long moment, she answered, her voice
sleepy but concerned, “Harlan, is that you?”

Still nothing. Not even
a flicker of feeling.
What’s wrong with me
? Harlan asked himself
detachedly.
Am I in shock
?
Or did my emotions die along with Jones
?
A kind of numb panic closed his throat. He heard his voice come out tight,
choked. “Yes.” Eve buzzed him in, and he climbed the stairs, moving like a man
unsure of what would happen next. She was waiting for him at the door to her
flat. When he saw her face, when he saw the slight swelling of her belly, all
he felt for her, all he’d once felt for Tom, came rushing back. He stopped a
few paces short of her, tears welling into his eyes, stammering, “I…I’ve
done…something…I had no…” He trailed off.
I had no choice
, he’d been
about to say. But he realised that wasn’t true. There was always a choice.