Eoin Miller 02 - Old Gold (19 page)

“Who?” I already knew the answer, but I asked anyway.

“Jellyfish.”

Motherfucker. I needed a new reputation, one that didn’t get me mixed up in shit like this.

“Even so,” I said, “what made you think I wouldn’t just turn you over? If you’ve heard about me, then you’ve heard more reasons not to trust me than to think I’m any kind of hero.”

“I’ve heard about them, yes. But you seem different, and it’s not as if we had many options. It was you or Robson, and he’s nasty.”

“Robson?”

That was the second time I’d been given that name.

“Yeah, he also works for Gav Mann, but he’s mean, always threatening people with knives. But you, I don’t know, I just trusted you. You were like—” She stopped and bit back on the words, but a nod from me made her carry on. “Like a wounded little puppy. Show you some love and you’ll do anything, you know?”

I didn’t know whether to be offended or complimented, so I just ignored it. “What was I supposed to do? Was your plan that I would get whoever was after Mary to leave her alone? Was I meant to defend her against all comers?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking that far. I just wanted her to get to you and—” She stopped.

“And what?” I said.

Tears formed in her eyes again, pooling on either side of her nose and running down. “I wanted her away from me,” she said in a strangled voice. “She was my friend, and all I wanted to do was get her away from me.”

She rested her head on my shoulder and sobbed.

I almost felt like crying myself. A woman I had never met had decided to trust me with her life, and she was dead. And I’d dumped the body to prevent anyone from finding out. Rachel’s hair fell across her face and I reached my arm
round to brush it away, but that just reminded me more of Mary.

“The night you spent with me, what was that about? Did you plan that too?”

“I wanted to know what had happened. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know if Mary had found you. All I knew was that she left here in the rain and never came back.”

“You could have asked me. In fact, it would have saved a lot of time.”

“This week seems full of things I ‘should’ have done, things I didn’t do, like going to the police.”

“We can’t do that now.”

“Why not? I can just go and tell them everything I know. And you said you know for a fact that she’s been murdered. You can tell them.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Why not?” Her anger flashed then, a temper I didn’t want to see put to use on my freedom or health.

“Because I’ll go down with them,” I said.

She looked at me blankly. Her chest jumped as if she had hiccups, and she opened her mouth to form a question. I spoke before she could put it into words.

“When I said I know she’s dead, it’s because I saw her. She did make it to me that night. She came back to my house, and in the morning she was dead.”

I drew a breath and carried on. It felt good to be saying this out loud.

“I ran away. It’s what I’ve always done. Run from the scene or have a good reason to be there. Run from the crime or be a cop. Then I disposed of her body to save my own skin.”

There was a pause, the air in the room seeming heavy, like a gathering thunderstorm. Then Rachel slapped me, hard, across the face. The sting of the slap stayed imprinted
on my face when she took her hand away, and I had to blink away a tear.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she said.

Good question.

We sat in silence for a long time.

There didn’t seem any way to restart the conversation, and the ground never opens up to swallow you when you want it to. After a while I caught Rachel staring at the wine.

“You thinking of having some?” I asked.

“No. Well, yes. But I’ve been sober too long to mess all that up with a stupid drink. I just find it attractive. To look at, I mean.”

I understood. I can spend hours looking into whiskey or red wine or even a pint of stout as it settles.

“How long has it been? Sober, I mean.”

“Five years.”

“Does it get easier with time?”

“It’s all very simple. You just don’t drink. It’s never easy, but I hate it when people make it out to be hard.”

“Like people who fall off the wagon, you mean?”

“The people I know would rather chew off their hands than fall back into the bottle when problems start. But the characters on TV always start drinking again. The shorthand for a recovering alcoholic is failure.”

I was glad I’d held back on telling her about Mary’s drug relapse. I assumed she knew that Mary had been drinking with me, but I left that unsaid too. The silence settled
between us again as the music played. John Martyn was singing “Glory Box.” The anger that had flushed her face when she slapped me seemed to have gone now, and she was looking sheepish.

“Sorry, by the way,” she said, giving the look a voice. “I hate it when I see
that
on TV too.”

“I deserved it.”

“Why did you leave the force?” Rachel looked straight at me, over the top of her glass of Coke.

I opened my mouth, beginning to go into one of my standard speeches, one of the many variations I’d used in the last few years: Paperwork. Lifestyle. Tiredness. Family. I raised the wine to my lips and drank while John Martyn sang. For some reason, I just didn’t have the heart to give Rachel one of my bullshit stories.

“I didn’t leave the force,” I said. “I left everything. Everything I cared about. I just didn’t need any of it anymore. A friend was saying the other day that I’ve drifted out to the edge, and I guess he’s right. You know that phrase, ‘The straw that broke the camel’s back’?”

Rachel just nodded. I thought of all the confessions she must have heard in five years of AA meetings.

“I joined the force to fuck with my dad. I mean, why else would a Gypsy become a gavver, right? Sorry, that means cop. But then I went from hating my dad to hating everything, everything except Laura and music.”

“Football?”

“Oh, no, I hate the Wolves all the time, but that’s different, that’s how it works when it’s your team.”

She smiled and nodded for me to continue. Again she brushed the hair away and again I felt a slight kick in my chest.

“When the riots kicked off in London, well, we knew something would happen up here, but nobody knew where
or how. When it started, we all went out, tried to stop it just by being there, by talking to people. Later on, the brass wised up, sent people out to actually deal with it as a riot, but not at first. But it seemed like the more I was shouted at, the more I saw anger and violence. I don’t know, I just switched off, like I started tuning out on a radio. That make sense?”

“Like static?”

“Yeah, like background noise would get more interesting than whatever was going on, and the angrier the kids on the street got, the more I tuned out. Then I was off duty, and it was raining, really heavy August rain. I was driving home.” I emptied the dregs of the bottle into my wineglass. “There was this old man in the road. He was just walking around, in the rain. He had pajamas on and a robe, but he didn’t have a coat or anything on his feet. I got out of the car and asked him where he was going, and he just looked at me.”

I looked into Rachel’s eyes, looking for something.

“Have you ever looked into the eyes of someone who’s not there anymore?”

“You mean, not there in the head?”

“Yeah. He didn’t know who he was or where he was. The best way I can describe the look is
confused
. He mumbled a few things, but he didn’t know what he was saying, there was something missing up there. And he was soaked to the skin.”

“Maybe he lived in a house in that street?”

“No. We checked. See, I took him to the hospital, and they dried him off and put him in clean robes, but the doctors said he had real bad pneumonia. They didn’t give him long.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, we checked every house in the street. Nothing. The hospital couldn’t find records on him, and he didn’t know his own name. Imagine that. No name. We tried everything.”

“Where was his family?”

“By the end, I’d realized that whoever they were, they didn’t want to be found. Nobody ever came looking for him. Maybe it was the riots, or maybe someone just couldn’t cope with looking after him anymore. I mean, it must be hard, looking after that. You can’t expect everyone to do it.”

“I suppose not.”

“And the DCI couldn’t give me any time or manpower. The whole world was watching the riots build up and break loose, and it was all hands to the pump, chasing kids who wanted to steal TVs and boil-in-the bag rice.”

“What happened to the old man?”

“I stayed with him as he faded, sat beside him and watched buildings burning on TV. He never remembered who he was. He died with nobody. He died with no name. Can you believe that? A week he hung on, in that damned bed, with nobody.”

I realized I was crying. Rachel put her hand on my arm.

“That’s awful.”

“And when he went, I guess he took me with him. I just couldn’t stay in the world, and listening to that static was better than actually caring about something, you know? The force got me a doctor, a shrink. I think Laura pulled some strings to keep me on his list even after I left, because he won’t stop pestering me.”

“You ever spoken to him?”

“Once, the same day I quit. We sat in a quiet room and he asked me a lot of quiet questions. I kept wishing he would shout over the clock, its ticking was louder to me than his voice. But I told him the same thing I told Laura. Nothing is important. Nothing we do matters.”

She opened her mouth as if to protest, but I kept going.

“Don’t. You know it. As an adult, you know it. We live in a world where nothing we do matters.”

“So what does that mean?” she said. “What does that mean we should do?”

“Nothing. We may as well do nothing. That’s what I’ve been trying to do.”

She shook her head slightly, and I knew she wanted to argue. She wanted to come up with a better philosophy, but she couldn’t find the words.

“So that’s why you left your wife?”

“I left her or she left me, I don’t know. It’s all part of the same fog. I didn’t really pay attention.”

I thought again of the photographs on my mum’s wall. Of how I hadn’t felt connected to any of them. Another time, another person, another me.

“You’re wrong,” she said. “You’re wrong about all of that. I’ve gone too long sober to think there’s no point to it all.”

“What else makes sense? Give me a better answer.”

“I’ll think of one. You keep doing whatever it is you need to, and I’ll think of something.”

I smiled weakly. “Deal.”

After a few more minutes she said she was tired. She fetched me a blanket and folded out the futon. She kissed me on the forehead, like a mother kissing her son, and then she went to bed.

I lay down on the futon, staring at the ceiling, and didn’t sleep. There was no sound but the occasional noise of an early-morning drunk walking past outside, and soon I heard the slow, rhythmic breathing of Rachel as she slept. After a couple of hours I dressed and quietly left.

I needed to finish the thing with Chris, get it off my back. Becker wouldn’t give me the information I’d asked for until I cleared this case, and my conscience wasn’t going to let me sleep until I’d cleared both. I tossed and turned until dawn, then fought with the bedsheets longer until I heard the world come to life outside. I shaved and showered and ate breakfast in my shiny new kitchen. Bobby had done a great job, but he’d also made the place feel like a hotel.

I called Becker’s number, and he sounded distracted when he answered. He must have had something important on, because he didn’t give me a hard time.

“Listen, have you heard any rumors about Perry?”

The silence on the line was loud and clear.

“Beck, what is it?”

“It’s…ahhh...” He exhaled. “Fuck it. I think he’s dirty.”

“Go on.”

“After you asked me about enemies? Well, I asked around a bit. Trying to be subtle about it, but you know, these things always get out. So I got pulled into a meeting—it was like, you know the spy movies? Some guy talks to you in a car park and tells you to forget everything you know?”