Lynch (7 page)

‘Likewise,’ Jesse had said. ‘I’m a good listener, but I’m not going to push you into telling me everything. You can tell me when, or if, you want.’

‘I will,’ Scott said. ‘One day, I promise.’ He had squeezed Jesse’s hand and leaned over the centre console and kissed his cheek.

When he pulled up the drive in front of Scott’s house, Jesse cut the engine and shuffled in his seat to face him. ‘I’ve had a fantastic day. Thank you.’

Scott smiled. ‘Me too.’ They were still holding hands and Scott was the first to lean in for another kiss. His free hand sought Jesse’s leg and cupped his thigh as his tongue pushed forward.

When the kiss ended, Scott sat back in the passenger seat and looked up at the house. ‘I’d invite you in, but…’

‘Your mum and Ann are there,’ Jesse said. ‘It’s fine. If I come in, I might not want to leave.’

‘I might not want you to, either.’

‘Maybe next time,’ Jesse said. He didn’t want to come across like the sort of person who hopped into bed with anyone, but their words were clear on intent.

‘That’d be nice,’ Scott said, and they kissed again.

Jesse drove home with a smile on his face and another in his jeans.

And now, sitting down on the sofa in his living room, spinning emotions over in his head, he tried desperately to remember the feel of Scott’s lips against his own, of his hand on his leg, but all he could see when he closed his eyes was an image of Prabha looming over him in the dark, in his bedroom, as he woke to the sound of her coming at him.

He shuddered and shook his head as if the action would rid him of the feeling of being watched. He rose and checked the lock on the door, double-checked the windows, and pushed the coffee table in front of the door just for good measure.

For extra security, he slid the barrel bolt on his bedroom door into place, and he got into bed. As sleep finally dragged him down into the recesses of his consciousness, from within the fathomless cavern of a nightmare he could hear the whisper of her voice, the last words she ever spoke to him.

‘I will find you,’ she had said. ‘I will find you, and you’ll regret it.’

Chapter 9

Miguel Fernandez jogged through
Hyde Park
and felt the cool touch of the steel blade under the hip of his boxers. He had no immediate intent in using it, but there was a pleasure in knowing it was there.

He had had sex last night. It was good. It was verging on violent. Sex was a pleasure that derived from necessity, not the other way around. He was able to focus his thoughts during intercourse in a way that he couldn’t at any other time. The rhythmic action became a turning cog that allowed his brain to self-analyse and scrutinise the minutia of detail that would otherwise escape him.

Last night, sex evoked one thought: killing Kane Rider and Margaret Bernhard. Neither the old woman nor the young faggot would be a match for him, and he had no issue with dispatching either of them.

The woman last night was not a prostitute, though he had made her feel like one. He had picked her up in a bar and took her back to his hotel room, and he pushed his fingers into her mouth as he drove brutally inside her. He stared at her large areolas as her breasts jiggled and he felt her clamp down on him and try to match his rhythm with her bucking hips. He rolled her nipples between thumb and forefinger and admired his penis as it disappeared and reappeared and disappeared and reappeared. He licked the sweat from between her breasts and then he turned her over and held tight to her hips. Sensing what was coming, she struggled against him. He forced his way inside her anus, one foot on the floor, one knee on the bed for better leverage.

Before he climaxed, he withdrew, removed the condom and fed her every inch until she choked and swallowed his lot. And when he was done, he slumped on top of her, allowed his full weight to burden her, and then he rolled onto the bed beside her and whispered the words every girl loves to hear. ‘You can go now.’

‘I haven’t finished,’ she whined, reaching to touch herself.

‘I have. Get out.’

‘Fuck you,’ she said.

He wrapped his hand around her slender neck. ‘Get out before I fucking kill you.’

She went to slap him and he twisted her hair in his hand and pulled her from the bed, spitting in her face as she said, ‘Okay, okay, let me go.’ She left in tears and Fernandez went naked to the balcony and lit a cigarette, feeling the cool night air drying the sweat on his hair-matted torso as the city of smog moved languidly below him.

London
was no less alien a city to him than the deep, unexplored corners of the oceans. There were so few places in the world where you could find a line of tramps in the doorways of expensive department stores. The problem with
England
was that it was not Spanish. The Spaniards would bring some backbone to the men and some class to the ladies. You don’t fuck Spanish girls. You make her your woman, if only for half an hour. You treat her with respect and she knows how to please you. English girls were a tool for release and nothing more. They were dirty and deserved only dirty things.

When he had jogged twice around
Hyde Park
and sprinted his way back to the hotel, he showered, dressed, and checked in with Thomas Walter. All contact was by telephone and they would not meet unless necessity dictated it.

‘My boys,’ Walter said, as though he was the master of all, ‘are working around the clock. We’ll find them, don’t worry.’

‘I have no worry in finding the target,’ Fernandez told him, ‘only in your competence.’

Fernandez had been drafted in by Ramirez and Herrera not just for his killer instinct and the professional manner in which he conducted his business, from planning, execution, and clean up, but also for his technical abilities in the art of espionage. His background had been comms interception and surveillance. In order not to tread on delicate toes, his role here would be to advise and assist, not to assume command, although the very idea was a thorn.

Later today he would make a visit to the operations centre—a normal garage in a normal house in a normal suburban area of London, controlled by an acne-riddled teenager with a degree in game design and a list of sexual conquests that failed to extend outside of
World of Warcraft
. But first, he had another appointment to keep, one that he wasn’t particularly looking forward to attending.

The prison walls felt like they were folding in around him. Miguel Fernandez hated prisons. They were the same the world over, a cesspit of life’s degenerates grouped together not by a common cause, but by the government’s inability to do anything useful with them. Some of the men he met in the Spanish prison could have been trained and utilised by the government or the military, men whose insatiable desire for wealth or greed or power could be harnessed for a greater cause.

Fernandez himself had been one such lucky candidate. Ramirez had taken him on board some years ago and now he was not just killing, but he was making a killing in doing so.

He walked into the visitors’ room and took a seat opposite Jim Dixon. Without preamble, he said, ‘I need information.’

‘What happened to the pretty lady?’
Dixon
asked.

‘The last time she looked at you, you made her sick. You’ve got me now.’

‘She was going to get me transferred.’

Fernandez grinned. ‘You actually believed this?’

The weasel said, ‘She promised.’

‘The only transfer you’d get would be to the morgue.’

‘I only—’

‘Enough!’ Fernandez demanded. He glanced around the room; no one came to visit him when he was inside. His conversation was limited to drug addicts and rapists. ‘I need a way in to Interpol,’ he told
Dixon
.

‘I’m guessing you don’t want to walk in the front door.’

‘Don’t get clever, Mr Dixon. I don’t like faux-clever men. You were the insider, and now we need a new one.’

He could almost hear the slamming of cell doors and the sobs of lesser men. Miguel Fernandez hated prisons.

He had been incarcerated twice and the second time, whilst it had been a shorter stint, had been no less taxing. You either rule or be ruled. He learned that on his first day in prison five years ago. He had been brought in with two other greens—new inmates never before exposed to the system. Fernandez was already a hard and fast criminal, but the experience hardened him further. When three skinheads swaggered into his cell and started rooting through his few possessions, Fernandez assumed it wouldn’t be long before one of them asked him to bend over, a fate he would never accept.

His first attempt at reasoning with the gang of petty thieves was met with tempered violence. He would not make a second attempt. He broke the nose of one, broke the arm of another, and almost tore the ear from the third. He stepped out of his cell and looked around at the pack of prisoners. He shouted, ‘Any of you pussies need your arses wiping, you come to me now.’ He still had the man’s skin under his fingernails when a guard pressed a Taser against the back of his neck and threw him in solitary.

‘There will be someone inside Interpol that we can speak with, yes?’ he asked
Dixon
. He kept his voice level, his brown eyes hard on
Dixon
’s face.

‘I was the best asset you guys had in there,’
Dixon
said.

‘We’ll take the second best,’ Fernandez said and it seemed
Dixon
took this as a compliment when it was actually smeared in sarcasm. He needed to get a handle on this mocking language of the English.

‘No one is going to invite you in for a champagne breakfast willingly.’

‘You got into bed with Bernhard fairly easily.’

‘I’m a different kettle of fish.’

‘How many fish are in the Interpol kettle?’ Fernandez asked.

‘Have you found Bernhard’s bitch of a wife yet?’

Fernandez folded the fingers of his left hand over the fist of his right. ‘If someone could access sealed Interpol files, we would have done. This is why we need your information.’

‘You mean you want a favour.’

‘I mean I want your information or you die. It is simple.’

In the Spanish prison, Fernandez had survived at the top of the food chain, ruling the cons with fear. Fear was what modern country leaders were lacking. Without it, you do not have the complete support of your people. Without fear, you get uprisings and revolution. Pol Pot knew it; Hitler knew it. Their downfall—which would never happen to Fernandez—was their hotheadedness. When anger clouds your actions, you mess things up. And that was exactly what got Jim Dixon locked up.

‘How long did it take before they found out you were a bent cop?’ Fernandez asked him, knowing that you can’t keep secrets like that behind bars, that cops were every prisoner’s plaything.

Dixon
looked down at the table. ‘Half an hour. When they put you in High Risk, you’re either a nonce, a wife beater or a cop.’

‘Who can we trust inside Interpol?’

‘No one,’
Dixon
said.

Fernandez was getting impatient now. ‘That’s not very helpful, Mr Dixon. I need a name.’

‘There was a girl,’
Dixon
said. ‘Lucy. She’s a bit stuck up, but she’s got clearance. If you treat her right, she might be the one.’

Chapter 10

Katherine came in from the kitchen as
Clark
was saying goodbye to someone on the phone. ‘Work?’ she asked when
Clark
put her phone away.

‘Hardly,’
Clark
said. ‘It was
Wilson
. He’s as angry about the suspension as my own father would be.’ She sat down on the sofa and picked up her weeping glass of iced tea. Even with the windows open, the old farmhouse was a sweatbox in this summer heat. The light cotton shirt she wore was sticking to her back and she was conscious of the darker patches spreading under her arms. Her forehead and the backs of her knees were damp. Even her hair seemed to be sweating from the roots.

Katherine sat down opposite her and twirled the ice around in her glass with her finger. ‘Jesse’s lovely,’ she said.

Clark
smiled. It wasn’t difficult to see where this conversation would go but she let Katherine get there in her own time. ‘He is. He’ll be good for Scott.’

‘He’s great with horses.’

‘He’s great with Scott, too.’

Katherine closed her eyes. ‘Yes. He needs someone like that in his life. Ever since Ryan died, I’ve been worried about him. About how he was coping.’ She sat back and looked at
Clark
. ‘You didn’t see how he was when we moved here. He was…a wreck.’

‘He never said,’
Clark
told her.

‘He doesn’t like to talk about it. Things got pretty dark for a time. I thought I was going to lose him, too.’

‘He means a lot to you,’
Clark
said.

Katherine nodded slowly. ‘It was tough, watching him go down that route—the alcohol, the darkness; I was terrified he’d do something silly.’

She stared into her glass of tea and remembered a time when she woke to the sound of Scott crying in the kitchen. The hoarse, heart-wrenching sobs that bubbled up from the pit of his stomach sent shudders of sadness and panic through her.

She didn’t even stop to put on her dressing gown and she hobbled, without her cane, down the stairs and crossed into the kitchen. She knelt beside him as he sat on the floor, repeatedly thumping the back of his head into the fridge, and she took his shoulders and pleaded with him to stop it, to stop hurting himself.

He cried into her arms and rocked himself as he clung to the dregs of a bottle of vodka and she hushed him and kissed his hair and wiped away his tears as they continued to fall.

He had been crying so hard he was struggling for breath, his mouth wide, tears and saliva and vodka on his lips, his temple veins throbbing.

‘It’s okay, honey,’ she told him. ‘I’m here, my love. It’s okay.’

‘Make it stop,’ he cried. ‘Please make it stop.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘I want it to be over, Margaret.’

‘It’ll get better, Kane,’ she said as she smoothed his hair.

‘I couldn’t do it,’ he said. ‘I can’t do it.’

‘It’s okay, honey.’

And he continued rocking himself in her arms and crying and hugging the bottle of vodka and pleading with her to make it be over. ‘I can’t do it,’ he kept saying. ‘I want it to be over but it won’t be.’

She held him tight and hummed to him and they sat that way for over an hour, long after he had stopped crying, long after he had stopped mumbling wretched sorrow and she was sure he had fallen asleep. She prised the vodka bottle from his arms and she took a cushion from a chair and helped him lie down and she noticed, deliberately placed in the middle of the table, the block of knives that normally sat on the countertop by the oven, and beside the wooden block, the only framed photograph of Ryan that he had slipped under the radar from Clark and Wilson when they’d gone into protection. She had begged him to get rid of it but he hadn’t.

She put the knife block into a cupboard out of sight and sat down beside Scott, running the backs of her fingers along his cheek and holding the image of Ryan to her chest until the sun broke in shards through the blinds onto the floor.

She looked back at
Clark
.

‘He’s come a long way,’
Clark
said.

She nodded. ‘He’s all I have now. I’m just worried about him.’

‘But he’s happy,’
Clark
told her. ‘Certainly happier than I’ve ever seen him.’

‘But at what cost?’ Katherine asked. ‘Now all he has is a lie.’

‘He has you. And Jesse, and me.’

‘You and I know his past. Can he ever really have Jesse? Truly? If this develops into something bigger, Jesse will never know Scott’s truth, he’ll never know the Kane we love. Everything will be a lie, and you can’t base a relationship on lies—look where that got David and me.’

‘But it’s not a lie,’
Clark
said.

‘How can you say that?’

‘Kane Rider doesn’t exist any more. Scott Lynch is real; he’s as real as Jesse. Scott may be no more than a year and a half old, but look at where he is now. He has a good job, a lovely home, a new mother and, let’s face it, the potential for a fantastic relationship. The past is gone, it’s finished. Jesse doesn’t need to know the ins and outs of what happened before they met. All they need to concentrate on is a future.’

‘But it’s still a lie,’ Katherine said. ‘Withholding that sort of information can eat away at Scott and it could ruin things for him.’ She picked up her glass, put it down again. ‘I mean, if you had this deep, dark secret, wouldn’t you want to share it with the one you love? Don’t you think that if they love you they’d be there for you, no matter what? Isn’t that what love is all about?’

Clark
said, ‘I think you’re jumping the gun a little bit. They’ve only just met. They’re still at that getting-to-know-you stage. I don’t think anyone should be talking about love yet.’

‘But there’s something special there,’ Katherine said. ‘I can sense it. Kane—Scott—he might not even see it yet, but I can. Haven’t you seen the way Jesse looks at him? I recognise it from the way Ryan looked at him. And Scott’s looking back at Jesse the same way.’

‘Are you worried that Scott’s not ready to move on?’
Clark
asked. ‘Or that you’re not ready to let him.’

Katherine’s stare was cold, but she wilted back into the armchair and shook her head. ‘You’re probably right. I’m pushing him forward into the arms of Jesse, but I’m also trying to hold him back because he’s my only link to Ryan.’ She stood up. ‘Look at me, I’m supposed to be the strong one.’

Clark
’s laugh was mirthless. ‘You are the strong one. How you’ve coped with everything you’ve been through, I’ll never know.’ She shrugged. ‘You just have to separate the present from the past. You know if Scott does fall in love with Jesse, he’s never going to forget about Ryan.’

Katherine nodded. ‘I know.’ And when the front door opened and Scott came in, she smiled and said to
Clark
, ‘You can give me a hand with dinner, if you like.’

Scott said, ‘None for me, thanks, I’m going out. I’m just home to shower and change.’

‘How was work?’ Katherine asked, kissing his cheek.

‘Busy. I’ve been running around like a blue-arsed fly all day. I’m sweating.’ He dropped his bag and kicked off his shoes.

Clark
said, ‘If you’re going out with Jesse again, you’d better scrub up pretty good. You don’t want him catching a whiff of you and turning the other way.’

‘You look like you need a shower, too,’ Scott laughed. ‘Want to join me?’

‘Water conservation,’
Clark
said. ‘Very thoughtful of you.’

‘No, dear,’ he said, camping his voice and his pose, ‘rampant sex, please.’

Clark
screwed her face up in mock disgust. ‘Not if you were the last man on earth, sweetheart.’

His laughter carried with him as he went upstairs.

In the silence that ensued, Katherine flapped her arms in defeat. ‘Just another day in the life of a woman on the run.’

The restaurant, on the south side of
Harrogate
towards Otley, was a small and elegant affair. Called Buttercups by the proprietor, it was generally known as Butterface by the locals, who had taken to Aleksandra’s welcoming greetings as they entered and her constant fussing over the clientele to ensure their meals were just perfect and their glasses were never empty. She was a lovely woman, they would say—but her face.

Aleksandra had come to England from Croatia over thirty years ago when she was in her mid-twenties, she would tell anyone who listened long enough, with not a single penny to her name—not even a purse to store a penny if she had one. Although her accent had softened greatly over the years as she pushed her way off the streets and through college, it seemed reluctant to collapse entirely, and diners could sometimes here the occasional Croatian swear word from the kitchen that was always followed by a cacophony of tumbling pots or smashing crockery. Rumour had it every chef between
Newcastle
and
Nottingham
had felt the back of her hand at one point or another, although she was nothing but pleasant towards her
klijentela
.

When Scott and Jesse stepped over the threshold, they were immediately greeted as though they had dined there every night for the last five years. ‘Lovely to see you both,’ Aleksandra said, her arms raised as if to embrace them as she strode forward. ‘You are just in time for the lobster; this is in season now.’

Jesse whispered to Scott as they followed Aleksandra across the restaurant to their table, ‘At least we’re on time. Wouldn’t want to be late for lobster season.’

‘There’s a season?’ Scott asked.

When they were seated and Aleksandra had fussed with their tableware to ensure everything was exactly right, she handed them a menu each and said, ‘I think a
Château Barreyres
to start, and you agree?’ She was already waving at a waiter.

They were allowed some minutes to study the menu and to taste the red wine which, to their amusement, was actually quite pleasing. ‘She recommends a different bottle for each table,’ Jesse explained. ‘It’s like she knows what suits a person from the moment they come in.’

When they had ordered, Aleksandra ushered the waiter off to the kitchen with a few Croatian words before turning to greet the next couple to walk through the door.

‘Lovely to see you both.’

Scott considered his date for a moment, staring when Jesse wasn’t looking, stealing sideways glances when their eyes met briefly each time. Jesse was so unlike Ryan that they couldn’t have been more different. Where Ryan had been tall and slender, dark-haired and green-eyed, Jesse was of average height but well defined, blond with brown eyes. Their only resemblance, Scott thought, was their shared sense of humour, something that he now decided had attributed to his initial attraction of him. Neither had been particularly camp or effeminate but Jesse—even though he broke horses for a living—could never be considered a true cowboy.

When Jesse caught him staring, he smiled and Scott lowered his eyes, suppressing a smile of his own.

Halfway through the entrée, Scott cleared his throat and said, ‘I need to tell you about Ryan.’

Jesse looked up, placed his cutlery on the plate, and said, ‘Need to, or want to?’

‘Both,’ Scott shrugged.

‘You don’t—’

‘Let me say it in one go or I might never say it,’ Scott said.