Lynch (13 page)

Fernandez pulled the car right into the driveway of the small block of flats, brazen and shameless. From this vantage point, he could see through the windows of the ground-floor flats. In one, a young girl was dancing around in front of the TV. Through the other window, he saw an elderly couple, sitting on the sofa, flicking through a magazine together. It was clear to Fernandez that Kane lived in one of the upstairs apartments. Which one, he could not tell. But it was time to act.

He got out of the car and closed the door behind him, leaving it unlocked for a quick escape once he had accomplished his task. He ensured his silenced gun was tucked into the waistband of his trousers and went to the front door. It had a simple Yale lock that, with his small tools, he was able to pick quickly and precisely, allowing him access to the communal hallway.

The ground-floor flats had entry doors directly opposite each other, with a staircase abutting the rear of the hall. At the top of the stairs, the upper flats appeared to be laid out exactly the same, their thin wooden doors an obstruction hardly worth bothering with.

He stood between the doors, drew his gun and looked from one to the other. Eliminating both downstairs flats meant he had a fifty-fifty chance at getting to Kane. He listened. The sound of a television emanated from one flat, silence from the other, but he could see under the doors that there were lights on in both. The occupants were home.

Fernandez closed his eyes, took a breath, and moved towards the door on the left. His action was swift, his shoulder strong. The door cracked against his weight but didn’t give. He had to hurry now; whoever was inside would be alerted to his presence. He struck the door with his shoulder again and it split from its frame, swinging open in a shower of splinters.

A man had risen from the sofa, a book tumbling from his lap to the floor, and Fernandez raised his gun.

‘Where the fuck’s Kane Rider?’ he said.

As Fernandez’s gun arm rose, he heard the door behind him open and a voice—‘What the fuck?’—drew his attention. He spun round and fired his gun twice.

When his front door had crashed in, Jesse jumped to his feet in fear. The book he’d been reading dropped to the floor and a man glowered at him, something in his hand, raising it. A gun.

‘Where the fuck’s Kane Rider?’ the man had said, and then Mark Stanton came out of his flat and the man turned and shot him.

Perhaps his reaction times had been honed by years of working with skittish horses, perhaps it was just adrenalin or the overwhelming desire for self-preservation, but Jesse jumped, picked up a marble paperweight from his coffee table, and swung it down on the man’s head as he was turning back.

The stranger dropped to his knees and Jesse swung the ornament again. He didn’t wait around to see if he would get up. He stumbled over the man on his floor, took one look at Mark Stanton, bleeding and gurgling in the corridor, and fell blindly down the stairs.

The young mother from Flat 1 had opened her door. He hadn’t yet learned her name; she and her daughter had only moved in a few weeks ago. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked, panic in her eyes.

He barely stopped. ‘Call the police. Get the hell out of here now!’

She glanced upstairs and quickly shut her door.

Jesse barrelled out through the main door into the small communal garden area and realised he didn’t have his car keys with him. He kept running, one name turning over and over in his head.

Kane Rider.

He had heard it before, from the drag queen in the show bar.

He ran towards the central streets of
Harrogate
, stopping for nothing until he was sure he hadn’t been followed, and the streetlights shone yellow pools of molten gold on the tarmac. He ducked into a narrow alleyway for cover and stopped to catch his breath.

With shaking hands, he withdrew his mobile phone from the hip pocket of his jeans and speed-dialled Scott.

‘Hey, Jesse,’ Scott said when he answered.

‘What the fucking hell is going on, Scott?’

‘What’s up?’

‘You are.’ Jesse paused, then added, ‘Kane Rider.’

The silence on the other end of the line was all the truth he needed.

Chapter 16

Scott panicked.

When he put his phone down on the table and watched the screen dim, John said, ‘What’s wrong?’

Scott picked up his Coke and placed it down again. His voice quivered when he spoke. ‘Jesse knows who I am. I’ve just ruined his life.’

‘What’d he say?’

‘He wants to meet. For an explanation.’ He pushed his chair back from the table and stood up on trembling legs. He was glad he had stuck to soft drinks; if his head was this fogged from fear, he had no idea what he’d be like if he’d been drunk. He fished in his pocket for his car keys.

‘I’ll come with you,’ John said.

‘I should do this alone,’ Scott said. ‘It was bound to come out at some point. I couldn’t keep lying to him. It wasn’t right.’

‘You’re in no state to drive,’ John said. ‘I insist. Just tell me where we’re going.’

‘He said the old Mason Lodge in
Harrogate
. He’s on foot.’

John took Scott’s car keys from him and as they left the bar, he said, ‘That means nothing to me. Is Harrogate any closer than
Timbuktu
?’

Scott didn’t laugh.

They drove in silence, Scott’s mind a thick confusion of self-loathing and dread. He only spoke to point out directions, his hands trembling as he did. It struck him that sitting in the passenger seat of his own car felt unusual.

The night was clear, with a halo around the full moon, and the roads weren’t busy, but Scott longed for a traffic jam or torrential rain, anything to slow down the inevitable barrage of questions.

The colour drained from his face when they pulled into the empty car park in front of the Lodge and he saw Jesse sitting on the steps outside the large front door.

As Jesse stood up, John said, ‘Is that him?’

Scott fumbled with the door handle and got out on unsure legs.

Jesse barrelled towards him. ‘Who the fuck are you, Scott?’ He pushed him in the chest and Scott raised his hands to placate him. ‘Who wants you dead?
Why
do they want you dead?’

‘What?’ Scott said.

John stepped out of the driver’s seat and said, ‘Hold on a minute, mate.’

Jesse kept a hand on Scott’s chest, anger in his eyes, and said to John, ‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘Who the fuck is anyone?’ John said. ‘Just calm down.’

Jesse turned back to Scott. ‘Some man just broke into my flat and tried to kill me.
Kill me
. He had a gun. He was going to shoot me. What the hell is going on here? I don’t have a clue who you are.’

‘Back off,’ John said, coming round the car.

‘I can explain,’ Scott said.

John said, ‘You don’t need to explain.’

‘Shut up,’ Jesse said. He pushed Scott again, pressing his back into the car.

In his thick
Belfast
accent, John said, ‘Hang on a minute, mate.’

‘Back off, John,’ Scott said.

‘Are you sleeping with him?’

‘Please,’ Scott said. He took Jesse’s forearms and looked straight into his eyes. ‘Please, Jesse. Let me explain. Are you okay?’

‘Do I look okay?’

‘Did he hurt you?’

‘Who was he?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who’s Kane Rider?’

‘Please. Let me explain.’

They left John in the car and Scott and Jesse walked across the car park and along the front of the Lodge. It was a large sandstone building with a pillared porch and ground lights that cast the façade in a ghostly sheen of the past. As a listed building, it was no longer used by the Masons, who had moved to a larger premise, and it was now a heritage site.

‘Where is he now?’ Scott asked.

‘I left him on the floor,’ Jesse said. ‘I’ve no idea if he was dead or unconscious when I ran, but I wasn’t prepared to stick around to find out.’

‘And your neighbour?’

‘Dead, as far as I could tell. He shot him twice, Scott. Or Kane. Whatever you’re called.’

‘I don’t know what my name is any more,’ Scott said. ‘Legally, it’s Scott Lynch.’

Jesse stopped walking and folded his arms. ‘Who are you, really?’

Scott turned to him. ‘You have to believe me; I never wanted to lie to you. To anyone.’ He pointed to a bench beside the building that looked out over the unkempt gardens. When Jesse refused to move, Scott sat down anyway. ‘This is going to sound so fucked up. But every word is the truth.’

Still standing, Jesse said, ‘I’m listening.’

‘Are you?’ Scott asked. ‘You’ll hear what I say, but will you really listen? Will you understand? I know I probably wouldn’t.’

As though relenting, Jesse sat next to him. ‘Try me.’

Scott closed his eyes, knit his fingers together, and took a deep breath. ‘Back in
Northern Ireland
, I was Kane Rider. Katherine was Margaret Bernhard—not my mother, but the mother of my partner. We were in love, Ryan and I.’

‘The one who was killed,’ Jesse said.

‘Yes. We lived together, owned a nice little flat. I was going to propose but Margaret’s husband—Ryan’s stepdad—he…Well, it turned out he was some kind of gangster, involved in all kinds of shit. Smuggling drugs and guns and stuff. Ryan was’—he paused, clenched his eyes tighter, and swallowed a sick feeling—‘murdered in the street, right in front of me. It wasn’t a random stabbing, it was intentional.’ He could taste the bile in his mouth. In eighteen months, he had tried not to revisit those painful events.

‘David had him killed because he took some information to Interpol. After his death, I was kidnapped by some of David’s friends. Margaret and I killed them. If we hadn’t, they’d have killed us. David fled to
London
and—foolishly—I chased after him. I don’t know why. I wasn’t thinking straight, I suppose.

‘But I was picked up by Interpol who seemed to know everything about me, about Ryan. They knew all these things about him that even I didn’t know. And then David got to me again and, long story short, I had a bomb strapped to my chest, Interpol brought Margaret over from Ireland and…’ He couldn’t say it, didn’t have it in him any more. ‘Anyway, now we’re in Witness Protection. You’ve met Ann Clark. She’s the Interpol officer that got us to where we are now, living this lie, hiding from the past but not able to escape from it. I’ve legally been Scott Lynch for the last eighteen months.’

He stopped, breathed, waited.

Jesse was silent.

Finally, Scott opened his eyes and turned to look at him. Jesse was staring blankly across the garden, into the night.

‘Say something,’ Scott said.

Jesse said nothing.

‘Every word is the truth,’ Scott repeated. ‘But I’ll understand if you don’t believe me.’

At length, Jesse said, ‘Who was the guy in my flat?’

‘From the accent you mentioned, I’m guessing it’s a guy called Fernandez. I don’t recall his first name. He’s one of the reasons Ann came to visit us, to tell us about him.’

‘You knew he was coming here?’ There was a hardened edge to Jesse’s voice that Scott hadn’t heard before this evening.

‘Ann wasn’t sure, but it seemed likely.’ He rubbed a weariness from his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added, broken words from a brittle mouth.

Jesse sat back on the bench, kept his arms folded across his chest, and crossed his ankles.

‘If you don’t believe me…’ Scott said, but he didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

‘Look at me,’ Jesse said. Scott turned his face to him. ‘Look me in the eyes.’ He did. ‘I shouldn’t,’ Jesse said, ‘but I believe you.’

Scott swallowed, his ears crackling, his throat tight. He wanted to say thanks but the word felt so slight in his mouth that he couldn’t say it.

‘Where do we go from here?’ Jesse asked.

‘I dread to think. Do you reckon your downstairs neighbour called the police?’

Jesse shrugged. ‘I hope so. Or maybe they’re all dead. She had a young daughter.’

Scott said, ‘I’m going to have to tell Ann. I’m sorry I got you involved.’

‘Do you still love him?’

The question came without warning and smacked him in the face. ‘Honestly? Yes, part of me still does. Part of me always will. But…for what it’s worth, I really like you. I’m not saying I come without problems—’

‘You’re telling me!’

‘—but I know I can move beyond Ryan.’

Jesse nodded, brought his hands up to cover his face and yawned. ‘I can’t go home again,’ he said. ‘Let’s go tell Ann that instead of chocolates and flowers, you brought me a maniac with a gun.’

‘Sarcasm?’ Scott asked.

‘Deal with it,’ Jesse said and smiled.

They walked back to the car and they both got in the back seat. John turned to face them and said, ‘Are we all friends again, girls?’

‘You’re the drag queen,’ Jesse said. ‘It’s just hit me.’

Simultaneously, Scott and John said, ‘Drag
artiste
,’ and Scott laughed. He knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it would be the last time he laughed until either they could put this business behind them, or he was dead.

‘And how many people have you murdered?’ Jesse asked John.

‘Everyone that’s ever seen him perform,’ Scott said.