Justice for the Damned (2 page)

Jim Monahan felt tired right down to the core of his being, as if he’d been awake for days and days. Merely lifting the plastic cup of water to his lips and swallowing the rainbow of tablets lined up in front of him took an immense effort. There was aspirin to prevent blood-clotting, thrombolytics to clear the blockage in his artery, and other drugs to dilate his blood vessels, improve his heart’s functioning, prevent life-threatening arrhythmias and numb the pain. He lay half listening to the doctor at his bedside, half thinking about the events that had led up to his heart attack.
Had Bryan Reynolds done it? Was Edward Forester dead?

‘The good news is, Mr Monahan, your heart attack was relatively minor,’ said Doctor Advani, a softly spoken Indian woman with bobbed black hair and glasses. ‘Only a small artery is blocked, so only a small area of muscle has been damaged. Provided you respond well to medication, you should make a full recovery in six to eight weeks. There’s no need for surgery at this time.’ The doctor put particular emphasis on the words ‘at this time’, making them sound like a warning. ‘The bad news is, even with proper treatment you could suffer another heart attack. However, there are steps you can take to lessen the risk of this happening. For the next couple of weeks you should avoid all heavy lifting, exercise that causes sweating or shortness of breath, and stressful situations. In the longer term you’ll need to make some lifestyle changes. You’ll have to quit smoking and drinking, change your diet, follow an exercise plan…’

The doctor’s voice grew fainter, while Jim’s thoughts grew more intrusive.
What if Forester isn’t dead? What if Reynolds has bottled it? You should have hung around, made sure the bastard got the job done. Or better still you should have done it yourself. You were a coward not to. A fucking coward!

Even through all the drugs, a needle of pain pricked Jim’s chest. ‘Are you in any discomfort?’ enquired Doctor Advani, scrutinising the heart monitor.

‘Just a little twinge.’

‘I think we’ve gone through everything we need to for now. Tomorrow morning we’ll discuss your rehabilitation programme in more detail. Try to get some rest.’

‘How long do I have to stay in hospital, Doctor?’

‘We’d like to keep you in for at least three or four days to monitor your condition.’

As the doctor turned to leave, a nurse entered the room. ‘Mr Monahan’s wife is here to see him,’ she said.

Upon hearing the word ‘wife’, all thoughts of Reynolds and Forester were momentarily pushed from Jim’s mind. Doctor Advani motioned for the nurse to take her to Jim’s wife.
It has to be Margaret
, thought Jim.
Who else would call herself my wife?
The sound of the doctor in conversation with a familiar voice in the hallway confirmed his suspicion. A contradictory mixture of feelings swelled inside him. He wanted to see Margaret almost as much as he wanted to know whether Forester was alive or dead. And yet he didn’t want her to see him. She could read him better than anybody. One look in his eyes and she would know. She would see what he wasn’t and what he was. He wasn’t the man she’d married. He wasn’t even the man she’d divorced. He was someone who’d betrayed everything he’d once believed in. He was someone who’d tried to manipulate one man into murdering another. Irrespective of the intended victim’s sickening crimes, that made him as good as a murderer, both in his own mind and in the eyes of the law.

Margaret appeared at the doorway. She approached Jim’s bedside slowly, almost cautiously, as if she wasn’t sure she should be there. She touched her hand to her mouth, lines spreading from the corners of her eyes as she took in the grey, haggard face of her ex-husband. Jim didn’t want to look at her, but couldn’t stop himself from doing so. Bare of makeup, her face showed its age, yet he couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful as she said, ‘Oh Jim, what have you done to yourself?’

Jim managed a faint smile. His voice came in a breathy whisper. ‘Hello, wife.’

Margaret sat down at his bedside. ‘I only called myself that because I was afraid they wouldn’t let me in to see you.’

‘I know, but it feels good to say it anyway.’

A different unease creased Margaret’s forehead. ‘I don’t want there to be any misunderstandings about why I’m here. I care about you, Jim, but that doesn’t mean I want us—’

‘I know that too,’ interjected Jim. ‘Don’t worry, Margaret, I realise there’s no chance we could try again. I’m just happy you’re here.’ He turned his hand palm upwards, and somewhat hesitantly, Margaret rested the tips of her fingers on his. The warmth of her touch almost caused him to close his eyes.

A moment of silence passed, then Jim said, ‘How did you know I was here?’

‘I called your phone back. John Garrett answered. He told me what had happened.’

Jim’s mind turned to the man Margaret had left him for. ‘Does Ian know where you are?’

‘No.’

‘What did you tell him?’

A trace of awkwardness came into Margaret’s voice. ‘A friend of mine’s going through a divorce. I told Ian I was going to see her.’

Jim’s smile broadened. The fact that Margaret had lied suggested she felt guilty about seeing him. And why would she feel guilty unless she still had feelings for him? Almost in the same instant, like a blow to the solar plexus, it hit him that he was a selfish fool to hope a flicker of the love she’d once felt for him remained. It would be better for both of them if it didn’t. That way it would hurt her less when the truth came out about what he’d done.

Margaret laughed softly through her nose. ‘Always the copper. Even half dead, you can still get whatever you want to know out of me.’

Jim resisted an urge to shake his head. If he was still a copper, it was in name only. He reached for his water, not because he was thirsty, but because it gave him an excuse to look somewhere other than at Margaret.

‘Now it’s my turn to ask a question,’ she continued. ‘Earlier, on the phone, you said something had happened, that I’d find out what soon enough. What did you mean by that?’

‘I’m not sure. That whole conversation’s a blur. Like… like something from a dream.’ Jim didn’t want to lie, but he had to. He couldn’t risk letting anyone in on the truth until he was certain Forester was dead.

‘What about the other things you said, did you mean them?’

Fixing Margaret’s hazel-green eyes with his dark brown ones, Jim answered without hesitation, ‘Yes, I’m sorry and I do still love you.’

Now it was Margaret’s turn to look away. The certainty of his words exposed his lie. He remembered their phone conversation perfectly well. He was simply being selective about what he did and what he didn’t tell her. The same as he’d been most of their married life. When they’d first got together, he used to talk about his job. But over the years he’d grown more and more silent about the things he saw every day – the murder victims whose lives had been snuffed out by fists, knives, bullets and countless other causes; the junkies dead with needles hanging out of their arms; the abused and neglected children. At first she’d thought his silence was to protect her. Later she’d come to realise that wasn’t the case. He’d shut her out not to protect her, but because he needed to hold on to his anger, his frustration, even his fear. Those were the things that fuelled him, that kept him sharp. They’d also eaten away at him, gradually shaping him into a man she barely recognised, a man she could no longer love. When she’d heard his voice on the phone, the barriers he’d built around himself were down. She’d felt his love and pain, and it had awoken something within her she’d thought no longer existed. It had made her wonder – even hope – that maybe the man she loved had returned. She saw now that he hadn’t.

Jim entwined his fingers with Margaret’s but she drew her hand away. ‘I should get going. The doctor says you need to rest, and Ian will be getting worried.’

To hell with Ian. Stay with me, please!
Jim thought the words but didn’t say them. ‘Thanks for coming to see me.’

Margaret smiled thinly. ‘I’m just glad you’re alright, Jim. Your phone call nearly gave me a heart attack too.’

‘Sorry about that.’

Margaret shook her head in a way that said,
Don’t apologise.
‘Just promise me you’ll listen to the doctors and do what they say.’

‘I’ll try, but you know me.’

‘Yeah. Stubborn as they make them.’ Margaret hesitated as if unsure whether to say anything else, but then she continued, ‘Have you got your phone? I’ll give you my mobile number in case… well, in case you need it. It would be best if you didn’t call my home phone again.’

Jim opened his bedside cabinet and took his phone out of his jacket. Margaret told him her number and he entered it into his phone’s memory. He looked at Margaret with a hesitancy that matched hers. He knew he shouldn’t ask the question in his mind, but he couldn’t hold it back. ‘Will you come see me again?’

Margaret gazed at him uncertainly. Then, with a quick nod, she stood and left.

For the first time since regaining consciousness, Jim allowed himself to close his eyes. With Margaret’s face fresh in his memory, he felt able to confront the void of sleep. But as he drifted off, another face rose up to blot hers out. Edward Forester’s features paraded across the screen of his mind like suspects in a line-up. Brown eyes set in deep sockets. Straight, sharp nose. Pearly white smiling teeth. Ruddy, clean-shaven cheeks. Bald crown fringed by a natural tonsure of neatly cut grey-flecked brown hair. And like an echo in a cave, three words kept reverberating through his thoughts.
Alive or dead, alive or dead…

From his driver’s seat, Reece Geary watched the woman get out of a car on the opposite side of the road. She was somewhere in her late twenties, almost painfully slim with shoulder length strawberry-blond hair. She was dressed in a white vest that provided scant protection against the chill night air, a barely there denim skirt and white stilettos that bumped her height up from five foot nothing to five foot seven. Her face was caked with makeup – already full lips made even fuller by glossy pink lipstick; matching blusher concealing the paleness of her high cheekbones; eyebrows pencilled in arching lines over intense green eyes. To her customers, the woman’s name was Ginger. To Reece, she was Staci.

Reece’s eyes flicked to the man in the car. Balding, glasses, scruffy beard. Just some middle-aged nobody. But some middle-aged nobody who minutes earlier had fucked the woman Reece loved. It tore him up to think about another man being inside Staci. To imagine hands other than his own groping her breasts, lips other than his own touching hers. He shook his head. The picture in his mind wasn’t true to life. Staci didn’t allow any of her punters to kiss her. Not even her regulars. That was one of her rules. Kissing was an act of love, of passion. Fucking, fellatio, hand jobs, for her these were mechanical acts, acts of necessity. But even so, the image remained in his brain, stuck there like some sharp-clawed animal trying to escape its cage. The car pulled away. Reece fought down the urge to pursue it, pull it over and pound his heavy-knuckled fists into the middle-aged nobody’s face.

Lighting a cigarette, Staci approached a man slouching in the shadows of a factory building locked up for the night. The man was dressed in black tracksuit bottoms and an oversized black leather jacket. His face was gaunt and skull-like. He had bad teeth, bad skin, tattoos of tears falling from the side of his right eye and a dark blue snake on his shaved scalp. His name, Reece knew, was Wayne Carson. He was a small-time pimp and drug dealer with maybe ten girls working for him. All of them were addicts whose need to work the streets was born out of a desperate craving for the next needleful of heroin. All of them, that is, except Staci. Reece had seen to that. He’d got her into a recovery programme. She’d been clean for nearly three months now. But the debt she’d worked up during the years of her addiction still needed to be paid off, and she’d never be free of Wayne until it was.

As Staci handed Wayne a thin wad of banknotes, Reece’s expression leapt from anger to hate. He wanted to hurt Wayne more than he’d ever wanted to hurt anyone before. Every time he saw the scag-faced bastard he found it harder and harder to resist the urges that clawed within him for release.

Staci teetered towards a nearby corner, where a couple of similarly dressed girls were leaning against railings that ran alongside Burton Weir. Behind them, palely illuminated by streetlights, the River Don cascaded in foamy brown torrents down the weir’s slope.

Reece got out of his car and approached Staci. He could feel Wayne’s gaze following him. He didn’t return the stare, fearing that if he looked into the pimp’s poisonous little eyes he might lose control. He knew the feeling between them was mutual. Staci was one of Wayne’s best earners. She supplied him with a steady flow of cash and he supplied her with scag. That was, or had been, the basis of their relationship. The balance of power had lain firmly with Wayne. Reece had come along and shifted that balance. The equation was simple – the longer Staci remained clean, the more she regained control of her life. Every penny she repaid Wayne brought her closer to her goal – to get out from under her debt and get on with starting a new life.
A new life.
Those weren’t Staci’s words, they were Reece’s. He wanted them to be together, to have everything other couples had – a house of their own, children. All the things he’d never given a shit about until he met her.

Staci frowned at the sight of Reece. ‘What are you doing here?’

Reece shrugged. ‘I just wanted to see you. Can’t I come see my girl?’

‘Yeah sure, but…’ Staci cast an uneasy glance at Wayne. ‘I’m working. You know how Wayne feels about you seeing me when I’m working.’

‘I know how he feels about me seeing you anytime. He’d have opened my head up like a tin can if I wasn’t who I am.’

‘And you’d have done the same to him if you weren’t who you are.’

Reece’s voice came in a low growl. ‘I’d have done much worse than that.’

Staci’s frown intensified. Catching hold of Reece’s arm, she drew him to a spot where the gushing of the weir allowed them to speak without being overheard. ‘You shouldn’t talk like that in front of the other girls. What you say might get back to Wayne.’