Nothing Sacred (2 page)

‘Just…'

Gabe turns to face me, his cold clear eyes locked on mine, evaluating, challenging, their blue as icy as an Arctic wolf's. ‘Yes, Danny?'

‘Just worry. You know. About—'

‘Hell's this wanker doing?' says Gabe, interrupting, looking in his rear-view mirror. I turn in the passenger seat, see the rear window filled with the grille of a Range Rover, huge and black. It is so close that I cannot see the windscreen above, or who is driving. Gabe speeds up, a surly snarl coming from the exhaust, the Range Rover quickly receding. This car he has bought clearly has a big engine. It cannot have been cheap.

‘You were saying,' says Gabe, nothing but challenge in his voice, daring me to keep going. But Gabe knows me as well as I know myself; I have never backed away from a challenge, regardless of who throws it down.

‘Nice car,' I say. ‘Cost much?'

‘Fair bit,' says Gabe. His voice is tight, clipped. Now we are into it. No going back.

‘Getting that work done on your house.'

‘Noticed that?'

‘Wish I could afford work like that.'

‘Yes? Maybe you stopped messing about with visas, got some decent cases.'

This is no good; I do not want this conversation to descend into bickering, or worse. I am talking to Gabe because I care, not because I am after a pissing competition.

‘Listen, Gabe, I just wonder where you're getting the money.'

‘You what?'

I take a breath, watch the road in front, choose my words. ‘You've got no job. Your army pension's what, ten per cent of fuck all? And you're spending it like water. Where's it coming from?'

Gabe smiles, a baring of his teeth. ‘Oh yeah, now I get it, Danny. Someone you know gets hold of some cash, you think they're, what? On the rob? Selling drugs? No, women? Fuck you. I'm not your old man.'

That is not fair and I can feel my pulse quickening, a dangerous sign. I know all too well where my temper can lead.

We are approaching a bend, the road broadening, and Gabe looks over at me, his eyes fractionally wider than usual so that I can see almost the entire iris, pale blue ringed with a blue slightly darker, their wideness the only sign that he is angry. He opens his mouth to speak and I sense rather than see a dark shadow fall over the car. There is a violent jolt and Gabe struggles with the steering wheel. I think he has it under control when there is another huge impact from behind and the world is a blur past the windscreen, my head whipped back as the car spins around. Gabe is still trying to get control but it is as if we have been picked up, spun by some unseen force. We stop suddenly, another impact, this time the trunk of a tree slamming against Gabe's side of the car. Leaves cover the windows, darkness. I am completely disorientated. I do not know where we are, what has happened. The car is suddenly silent. I look across at Gabe who is turning the key in the ignition because the car has stalled. He looks intent, methodical, glances up into the rear-view mirror as he puts the car in gear. I look ahead again and see a man in a balaclava pointing a pistol at us, legs apart, gun held in two hands. The balaclava is black, everything he is wearing is black, he has black gloves on. I look across at Gabe, who is watching the man without expression, and then my door opens and a hand reaches across, unclips my seat belt and pulls me out with an arm around my neck. I am too confused to fight back, and as I am pulled back. I choke and my vision begins to dim but I can see a man smash Gabe's window and Gabe take his hands from the steering wheel in a gesture of surrender which, for some reason, makes me unutterably sad.

I am face down on dirt and I turn my head to see Gabe lying next to me. His face is towards me and I can look directly into his eyes. There is a foot on my back. I see a hand put a gun to Gabe's head and feel a pressure on the side of mine, just above my ear. Gabe's eyes do not react; I can read nothing in them. No fear or anger or confusion. They seem calm. I hear a metallic sound from the gun against my head, a slight jolt. The hand holding the gun against Gabe's head pulls back the slide and it makes the same sound. Gabe blinks at it. There is a momentary silence.

‘Ready?' says a voice. ‘

Let's do it.'

‘Sweet dreams.'

The hand holding the gun against the side of Gabe's head pulls the trigger. He blinks again but there is only a click. For the first time Gabe's eyes react. He looks surprised. The gun against my head makes another click as I feel it jump against my skin. The foot lifts off my back. I hear footsteps walk away, a car door slam, another.

I think that everyone has gone when a voice directly above us says: ‘Last chance. That's the message. We won't ask again.'

I hear his footsteps walk off, then an engine start up and a car pull away. Gabe and I just lie there for five, ten seconds, not moving, as if there is somebody still standing above us and if we look he will kill us. Perhaps there is. But eventually Gabe shakes his head against the dirt and pushes himself up with both hands onto his good knee and then onto one foot, the prosthetic foot following. He is as clumsy and awkward as a new-born foal getting to its feet for the first time. I turn over and sit up, hands around my knees.

‘Well,' says Gabe.

‘Yeah,' I say. I cannot say anything else. I have no idea what just happened.

‘Just to be sure,' Gabe said. ‘We are still alive, right?'

We are in Gabe's kitchen, sitting opposite one another with a bottle of Scotch in between, drunk down to the top of the label. It is all he has to offer, though right now it is exactly what I need.

I have been in this kitchen so many times in my life, from a young teenager upwards, and still I miss the presence of Gabe's mother fussing about us, offering us cake, biscuits, the smell, and the feeling of warmth and care. But she has been dead five years now, Gabe's father following soon after.

‘Feeling better?' he asks.

‘Blinding,' I say. The Scotch is doing its work, a warm tingle from my heart through to my arms and legs, up the back of my neck into my head. Already what happened is losing its menace. I survived it, I am alive, thus it cannot have been so serious. Except that, of course, it was. Gabe is gazing at me with professional concern and I know that I have to put my hands up, confess what I know. I owe it to him.

‘Gabe…' I hesitate.

Gabe picks up the bottle, carefully pours us both a top-up, nods me to go on. How is it that his hands are not shaking?

‘What just happened.' I smile, comes out more of a culpable grimace. ‘Listen, it was me they were warning off. Shouldn't have been you there. Involved. I'm sorry.'

‘After you, were they?'

‘I'm into something. Something pretty big.'

Gabe nods slowly. Frowns. ‘Anything to do with the military?'

‘Military? No, nothing like that. Something… It's complicated.'

Gabe holds up his drink, looks at me through the glass. ‘That was a military manoeuvre. The way they took us off the road. Couldn't have been anyone else.'

‘Gabe, this thing I'm involved in… It's serious.'

‘Not saying it isn't. Just saying. They were military. Or ex-military. One of the two.'

I shrug, take a drink. ‘Maybe they're hiring out. I don't know. Listen, Gabe, I'm sorry.'

Gabe puts his glass down on the table, rests on his elbows, fixes me with his eyes. ‘Danny, you're not the only one with troubles. I'll give you a hundred to one those jokers were after me.'

I am about to take a drink, stop, frown. ‘Yeah? Why?'

‘Seems we've both got problems.'

‘It'd have to be a pretty fucking big one for them to do that. I mean, shit, Gabe, those guns.'

Gabe nods seriously, looks down at the table, back at me. ‘Pretty fucking big.'

‘So what is it?'

Gabe shakes his head, smiles, takes a drink. ‘No, go on, Dan. You first. From the beginning.'

2

AT ONE STAGE
in my life Victoria Lowrie had been a vision of beauty so rare that it was as if she possessed magical powers. Often, men would not even dare to look at her, and everything came so easily to her that she treated life like a game that she could never lose at. I remembered once she told me that she had spent a week in Marbella and had never bought a single drink; that she could not remember the last time anybody had said no to her. Back then, I imagined that she was charmed, that there were perhaps only a handful of women like her in the world. But we believe many things when we are young, when we have not yet learned that there is nothing inviolate, nothing which life cannot beat down and destroy.

As I looked at her across my desk and wished that I kept a box of tissues on it, it was hard to imagine she could be the same person. I had no claims on beauty or elegance; people, friends of mine, said that in a suit I looked like I belonged outside the door of a nightclub. But compared to Vick I was not doing badly. She looked ten years older than her true age: her face puffed and mottled and strained and, if I was to be honest, unlovely; her once sumptuous blonde hair dirty and limp. But given what had just happened to her, I could not be surprised. She had had a difficult life but nothing, I suspected, that approached this.

‘All right,' I said. ‘Okay, listen, take it easy. Start at the beginning. Slowly.'

She looked at me, her face collapsed in absolute despair, her misshapen mouth moist and sagging and trembling, and nodded and sobbed again. I sat there trying not to look uncomfortable and waited for her to finish. These moments were what boxes of tissues were for.

‘It's… Oh, Danny, it's going to sound so stupid.'

‘Doesn't matter,' I said. ‘From the beginning.'

‘I don't even know… Oh, Jesus, you'll think I'm mental.'

‘Just tell me.'

‘You know how I used to be… But I ain't like that any more, I ain't. Really. So whatever you think of me, of what I was like…' She leaned forward, made sure that I was looking directly at her, into her eyes. ‘I ain't like that any more.'

Vick was, if not my first girlfriend, then the first girlfriend I had who gave me such an intensity of feeling that I believed I was in love. In truth, that feeling may just as well have been jealousy to the point of insanity. I never for one second thought that I was in her league, and spent our entire relationship waiting for her to realise this, find someone better. I did not truly know what kept us going for the year or so we survived; there was nothing good going on between us.

It is said that the ideal relationship is one in which both people complement each other and bring out their positive qualities. With Vick, she brought out nothing in me but jealousy and anger. For her part, she treated me like a lunatic plaything, winding me up and pointing me in any direction she chose, generally with regrettable consequences. Vick was a heavy drinker; understandably, I supposed, given that she never had to pay for them. But when she drank she also became spiteful, like a bored child who wants to know how far she can push things. Talking to other men, inventing outrages, bringing them to me. Me, drunk and as insecure as any twenty-year-old out with a heart-stoppingly beautiful woman would be.

We split up after she claimed a man had offered her two hundred pounds and a gram of coke for a blowjob in a nightclub toilet. After I had been pulled off him, it turned out that he was a flight attendant so camp that for the first few minutes of talking to him I thought he was putting me on. Vick thought it was hilarious, shrieking with laughter as the poor man dabbed aggrievedly at his split lip, asking what the fuck I'd hit him for. Even the barman handing out the napkins could not help but snigger. The guy I'd hit, though, did not see the funny side and threatened to call the police. I'd had to spend all the money I had buying him cocktails before he was mollified. That was enough for me, for us.

But that was then, and I could see no trace of the spoilt, carefree girl of twenty years ago in Vick today. None at all.

‘It started with little things,' she said. ‘Things that weren't right. Silly things, really.'

‘Like?'

‘Like…' She took a deep breath, dabbed at her eyes with what was left of her tissue, a sodden ball peeping out of her fist. ‘Like furniture moving about.'

‘Furniture.'

‘Yeah, probably only a couple of times.'

‘Like what? How had it moved?'

‘Like the sofa's on the other side of the room, that was one time. I've come downstairs…' She paused. ‘Come downstairs, and the sofa's…' Her voice rose, a keening wail. ‘It's on the other side of the
room
.'

‘All right, okay. Calm. What else?'

She took a couple of shaky breaths, composed herself, shut her eyes. ‘The other time, the dining room table…' But it was too much and she broke into a sob. ‘It's upside down.' Now she sobbed uncontrollably. ‘Why's it upside down?'