Eoin Miller 02 - Old Gold (23 page)

“Rachel, was this meant to be the great new philosophy for me to adopt?”

“Well, it was just an idea.”

“The motto that was going to get my life back on track?”

“I can see it was maybe flawed.”

“To enjoy every sandwich?”

“Well, sandwiches are nice.”

“Oh, I know. I already enjoy every sandwich, but my skills at eating two slices of bread hasn’t stopped me from—” I stopped dead. I was far more comfortable with admitting I had a problem than I was with finding a name for it. “You know, the whole ‘not caring’ thing.”

“OK, so quoting dead musicians probably isn’t going to help you.”

“No, it really won’t. Although it won’t make things any worse. Unless you start quoting Kurt Cobain.”

“OK, I guess I’ll go back to square one.”

Boom.

“What did you say?”

“I’ll start again, go back to square one. You know, think it all through from the beginning.”

A huge grin must have hit me, because then Rachel smiled as well. The beginning. There was one place Janas wouldn’t know to look, and I should have known it straightaway.

I leaned over and kissed Rachel on the cheek.

“You are brilliant,” I said.

“Pretty much, yes. But why?”

“Tell you later.” I grabbed my car keys and jacket and stood to leave. “Make yourself at home.”

I left and headed for Posada.

Where it had all started.

I pushed through the front door, barely responding to the greetings. Now I knew where the book had to be. Anybody following Mary would have known to search the bar area, just as anybody following us would have known to
search my house. But there was a place they didn’t know to search, a place the two of us had sat that night after the pub closed.

I walked through to the back, to the corner table where we had sat. Most of the match goers had already started making their way down to the stadium, so Posada was quiet enough for the table to be unoccupied. Ignoring the sniggers and questions of the people at the bar, I got down on my knees. Being this close to the carpet in a pub is not a nice experience; you can smell every drunken night, every weak stomach or spilled pint. I pushed that aside and focused on what I was down there for. The seat she had sat on was a booth seat, fixed to the wall, with a space underneath where heating pipes ran along the skirting board. I reached my hand under and felt around. It took me a minute, a minute of touching old beer mats and a crisp packet that the cleaner had missed, but my hand closed around something.

The notebook.

It looked a lot like mine, but bigger. It was battered and well thumbed. I sat at the table and flipped through it.

It contained a mix of names, dates, phone numbers written in scrawling handwriting, someone who wasn’t comfortable with the English version of the alphabet. I saw phone codes for Newcastle, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Glasgow, and London. There were foreign numbers, area codes that I didn’t recognize, and postal details as varied as Poland, Ireland, and Afghanistan. There were pages full of numbers, like a coded version of an accounts ledger, and names of local pushers, some with ticks next to their names and some with crosses. My name and address was on there with a question mark next to it.

In the right hands, this was a business empire; either Gaines or the brothers could use this to take over the routes. The police could use this to cripple an industry. This was like rocket fuel in my hands, waiting for someone to supply a match.

And it was going to find me a killer.

The question now was how long it would take.

Janas surely had someone keeping an eye on me, and word that I’d found the book would reach him soon enough. I needed to speed things up, though. It was time to start pissing people off again, to start setting the pace instead of chasing the game.

I held the book in my hand for all to see as I left the pub. I crossed over to the churchyard and found Matt wrapped in a tattered Wolves scarf to complement his army jacket.

“I’ve found it,” I said.

“Found what?”

“It. Just spread the word. Tell everyone you see.”

I left him to it and started talking to the same street dealers I’d spoken to when this all started. I dropped Janas’s name to them and made sure they saw I was carrying a notebook. I called in to the local radio station to speak on its football phone-in. The presenter welcomed me on air and asked me to predict today’s score. I said one-nil and then announced that I’d found the notebook. He was asking me what I meant by that as I hung up.

I walked round to the post office and bought a pack of A4 paper, a marker pen, and cello tape. Then I drove back to my house. With Rachel watching, I stuck together enough
sheets of paper to make a banner. Using the marker pen I wrote a message.

I’VE GOT THE BOOK.

Big and bold.

I taped the banner to my front window from the inside, then locked up and left after telling Rachel to stay out of sight upstairs for a few hours.

That should be enough. Now I could settle into Posada with a comfortable pint and wait for Janas to come and find me. The football game had just kicked off, so traffic was light. It would have taken a couple of minutes to drive into the city center and find a parking space, but I decided to walk instead. As I passed Molineux, I could hear the songs and the chants of the crowd at the game. After a minute, I heard a loud cheer, followed by goal music over the tannoy. My heart skipped for the first time in a long time at the thought of the Wolves scoring. It felt important again.

I was waiting at the traffic lights on the ring road as a familiar figure hobbled toward me. It was Lee Owen, his arm in a cast and his left knee buckling as he walked. As he drew near I saw the swelling around his right eye and stitches along his hairline. The fingers of his broken arm stuck out from the end of the cast, but I only counted three.

We stared at each other as he passed me.

“Fucking cunt,” he said over his shoulder as he shuffled along the road in the direction I’d just come.

I’d earned that, I supposed, so I let it go.

I crossed the road when the lights changed, and it wasn’t until I reached the other side that I realized what I’d just seen and why it mattered.

I still had the keys to the low-rise flat on Junction Road. I let myself in to the building and climbed the stairs to the level I’d been staying on a few nights before. The first door
I came to was where I’d met Bobby when he’d given me the keys, where I’d interrupted him as he worked.

I put my ear to the door and listened. No sounds came from inside. I stepped back from the door and looked around me. I leaned over the balcony to look down at the car park. Nobody was around.

I fumbled with my keys until I found the one for the flat I’d been using and tried it in the lock. It slid in but wouldn’t turn. No good. Time for another trick of the trade. Another key on my key ring was a filed-down Yale; all of the tips had been smoothed over with a penknife’s metal file until they were of the same low height. I pushed the key three-quarters of the way into the lock. After taking another look around, I took off my shoe and used it as a hammer, hitting the end of the key so that it surged into the lock with force. The door clicked open.

They actually taught me that on the force. Preparing me for a life of crime, one way or another.

I replaced my shoe and pushed the door the rest of the way open. In the hallway, I was hit by the smell and a now-familiar feeling. Now I knew how a building felt when it had a dead body in it.

The living room and kitchenette were decorated the same as the flat I’d used. The bedroom had been used recently—the bed was rumpled, and the smell of sweat and deodorant was in the air—but there was nothing in it of interest to me. It was in the bathroom that I found the corpse.

Dumped in the bath, a thick layer of congealed blood in the bottom, was the broken body of a man. Blades and tools were arrayed on the floor, and in the corner was a bucket filled with lime and a roll of bin liners. Somebody would be coming back to clear away the remains.

I didn’t think the man had been dead for very long. His skin still felt human to the touch, not hard and rigid like
Mary’s when I’d found her in the boot. I didn’t touch him more than once, though, for fear of leaving evidence. Had I not known better, I would have believed he had been mauled by a bear. The fingers were missing from his right hand. His left hand was tucked out of sight beneath him. His right leg twisted in unnatural ways, and his teeth were lying in the blood in the bottom of the bath. His face was puckered and swollen, and his jaw didn’t line up correctly with the rest of his head. He’d been tortured more than my stomach could handle, and I backed out of the room and crouched in the hallway until I could breathe again.

When I’d met Bobby here, he’d said he was feeding someone with a broken jaw. I’d heard the whimpers myself and made the assumption it was Lee Owen in there. Because in my head the whole world revolves around me. But I’d just seen Owen, and his jaw wasn’t broken.

The name I’d heard twice in the last few days, Mr. Robson, fizzed in my mind. In a town obsessed with football, there would be an obvious nickname for someone with that surname.

Bobby.

Bobby fucking Robson.

Every football fan in England would make that connection it seemed, except for me. But then, I’d never supported the English national team. I pretended that gave me an excuse for missing the obvious. I spent about ten seconds wondering what his real first name was, but some mysteries don’t matter even to me. It was his surname that had done me. It was all so silly that I couldn’t help but sit and giggle for a while. Bobby was involved. Slow Bobby. Fast Bobby. Quiet Bobby. Quiet enough to have sneaked into my house and killed Mary without waking me, quiet enough to have stood behind me taking pictures. He’d been at my house when it was trashed, and he could have used decorating it as
an excuse to take a further look. The reason I’d always found him so useful was that people underestimated him, but it had been me doing that all along.

I felt the buzzing at the base of my skull. The world felt distant again and the world’s background noise started to sweep in over me. I fought it back. Not now.

Bobby was the killer.

And the man in the bathtub, even broken and swollen, was recognizable from his passport picture as Thomasz Janas.

I counted to ten.

Then I counted to ten again, but all the counting in the world wasn’t going to make things better, no matter what the marriage counselors might say.

I crouched in the hallway, breathing through my mouth and trying not to smell the corpse. Bobby would have to come back soon to deal with it. He could have dealt with Mary too, but he’d dropped her in my lap. I’d thought I’d just about gotten a handle on things earlier this day. I’d been bracing myself to find out that my wife was involved and that the Mann brothers could bail me out.

Now it seemed, one way or another, everyone I knew was involved. And the sick joke of it was the question I’d asked Gav outside The Robin the night this had all started: “Business close by?” Sure enough. He’d been here when I’d called him. If I had to make a guess at what he’d been up to, torturing Janas was probably a good bet. The Robin was only a couple minutes away, which was why he’d turned up so fast.

The walls closed in around me for a second.

My father’s voice was in my head again, telling me to run. Telling me this was a situation I couldn’t win. Well, the voice was right. I was in way over my head. But I never do
the right thing at the right time. Running had gotten me nothing so far, and I had to do something to get Mary out of my dreams.

I checked that I’d not left any traces of my visit and let myself out of the flat, making sure the door locked firmly as I pulled it shut. I called Gav Mann, and the phone didn’t ring for long.

“I think we need to talk,” I said when he answered.

“Do we?”

“Nobody been talking to you today? You not listened to the radio?”

He paused long enough for me to know he knew exactly what I was talking about.