Rider (2 page)

‘Hi, Kane,’ she beamed when he had identified himself. They had met once or twice but he’d always found her a little false, her personality straight out of the same bottle as her hair. ‘They’re off in
Spain
, lucky them. Is there something you need?’

‘I, ah,’ he stammered. ‘Can you maybe give me their number over there?’

‘Yeah, is everything all right? Where’s the love of my life today?’

‘Please, Kathy. There’s been an accident.’

‘Oh, God, is everything all right?’

‘The number?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I understand.’ She gave him the number, wished him well, and he put the receiver down.

He took a deep breath before dialling their hotel.

‘
Hola
.
Hotel Melia Sancti Petri
,’ the concierge said.

‘
Señora Bernhard, por favor
,
’ he attempted in his limited Spanish.

‘
Señora Bernhard?
’

‘Yes.
Si
. It’s very important.’

‘One moment, please, sir.’

He heard the click of the phone as he was transferred. After two quiet rings, Margaret’s voice filled his head. ‘Hello?’

‘Margaret,’ he said. Tears were already clouding his vision.

Immediately, as though she already knew, her voice changed. ‘Kane? Is something wrong? What’s happened?’

He sighed. He sucked his lower lip into his mouth. There was music playing somewhere behind Margaret, a flirty Spanish number. He blinked away the tears, blinked again. A sob caught in his throat like an ulcer.

‘Kane?’ Margaret repeated. ‘Where’s Ryan?’

He broke down, a man beaten to a pulp. He could not say it; didn’t need to.

The silence on the other end of the line was wholly tangible. It felt like the air had been sucked out of the room and he was in a vacuum, his chest tight, heart thumping.

‘No. Please, no,’ she whispered. And her tears mimicked his.

* * *

‘We’re appealing for anyone with information to come forward,’ Detective Thorpe said as he sat across from Kane in the living room of his empty flat, Bette Davis shining down on them like the Divine Judge. ‘But due to the suddenness of the attack, no one saw the guy’s face. CCTV didn’t even catch it.’

‘So he gets off scot-free?’ Kane asked. He could see clearly, every time he closed his eyes, the knife wound on Ryan’s chest.

‘We’re doing all we can to find out who it was. Is there anyone Mr Cassidy might not have seen eye-to-eye with?’

‘No,’ Kane said. ‘No, everyone loved him.’

He wove his fingers together in his lap and looked at the man. Thorpe was unshaven and his shirt was wrinkled, a thick shag of ginger hair falling down over his forehead.

Thorpe eyed the Bette Davis picture on the wall and looked back at Kane. ‘Work colleagues?’ he suggested. ‘Maybe a friend he fell out with?’

Kane shook his head. ‘He was everyone’s best friend.’ When he noticed Thorpe’s unease, the glances at the canvas, he said, ‘Bette Davis. She was an actress.’

Thorpe nodded. ‘Not quite Audrey Hepburn, is she?’ He smiled and stood. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you think of anything that might help us, let me know. The coroner’s interim report is due in later today. Are you going to be all right?’

Kane closed his eyes. ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said and he showed him to the door.

He went to the kitchen, poured a coffee and watched it go cold. Sitting there, staring vacantly at the microwave, the room grew dark and close around him.

Finally, pulling out of his reverie, he locked the door and checked the windows, then draped his jeans over the back of a chair and went to bed, blinking in the dark, tired but unable to sleep, his mind thick with fragments of useless memories, useless thoughts.

If they had stayed for one more drink, one more dance…

He closed his eyes, listened to his breathing, short and heavy, and bit his lip.

It was only in the morning, as the phone invaded his broken dreams, that he realised he must have fallen asleep. He awoke from the foetal position he had curled into around a pillow and stared dumbly at the phone for a minute before awkwardly grasping the receiver.

‘Hello?’

‘Mr Rider. This is Detective Thorpe. We spoke yesterday? The interim report is in on your friend, Mr Cassidy. I think you should come down to the station if you don’t mind.’

‘The station?’ Kane asked, still groggy from sleep.

Detective Thorpe paused for the slightest hesitation. ‘There’s a few things we’d like to discuss.’

Detective James Thorpe showed Kane into his office at the police station on
Antrim Road
and he took a seat. When Thorpe sat down opposite him, behind his messy desk, he smiled.

Kane looked at him. ‘You said there was a problem?’

‘I said there are a few things we’d like to discuss.’

‘Is something wrong?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

He drank from a disgusting-looking mug of tea. ‘I’m sorry, would you like a drink? The tea’s like tar and the water cooler is warm, but you’re welcome to it.’

‘Can you tell me what’s going on?’ Kane pressed.

‘Mr Rider—Kane—how well did you know the deceased?’

‘Eight years. Why?’

‘And you’ve been…partners—is that right?—for eight years also.’

‘Yes.’

‘You had a good relationship?’

‘I loved him.’

‘Yes, and you shared a flat?’ He consulted a sheet of paper from a file on his desk. ‘Six years, you told my colleagues.’

‘Yeah, about six years.’ Kane looked at the paper but couldn’t make out what it said, then looked back at Thorpe. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Mr Rider,’ Thorpe said. ‘There’s no easy way to say this. Some routine blood-work on the deceased, Ryan Cassidy, showed up a few anomalies.’

‘What sort of anomalies?’

‘Were you aware of Mr Cassidy’s use to heroin?’

He couldn’t think. His head felt light and his fingers went numb.

When Thorpe spoke again, his voice was only a vague whisper in Kane’s ear. ‘We need a blood sample from you. It’s in your best interest to submit one voluntarily.’

* * *

Kane scratched uselessly at the corner of the plaster on his arm, the mark of Thorpe’s blood-sample request, and stared at the blank TV screen. The remote control was in his hand but he hadn’t turned it on.

Heroin. How had he missed it? Why didn’t he see the signs? But then, he had to admit he didn’t know what the signs
were
. Had Ryan’s mood ever changed? Were those big wide eyes natural or induced?

Thorpe had told him where Ryan had injected himself, had said it was only traces of the substance, but enough to suggest semi-regular use. There weren’t many needle-marks, but he should have spotted them if he’d been looking properly.

His mind was listless, wandering from one splinter of thought to another. He thought back to two nights ago. He and Ryan had just come out of the nightclub. Ryan had been trying to talk him into going to a party at someone’s house. He forgot who.

Ryan had taken his hand and they walked along the street towards the nearest taxi rank. That was when a man bumped into him. The guy could have been their age, could have even been a teenager or someone in his forties; his hoodie hid his face.

It was a split-second affair. ‘Sorry, mate,’ the guy had said. And he kept walking. And then Ryan was on the ground, a gaping knife wound in his chest and fear in his eyes. Kane had given no more thought to that man until much later when he told Thorpe.

The phone rang and pulled him from sinister thoughts. He scratched the edge of the plaster again and rose to pick up the receiver. ‘Hello?’

But there was no one there.

* * *

Two years ago, he had sat between Ryan’s legs facing out onto the
Atlantic
from a quiet corner of Portstewart where they often spent the weekends in the summer months. Ryan’s chin was resting on Kane’s neck, his arms around his shoulders, his breath warm and sensual on his cheek. Their skin was still wet from a recent swim, where he had caught Kane in the water, held him tight, and kissed him. The sun was going down, melting into the ocean, its liquid-gold rays reaching out to them like the spreading fingers of
Neptune
, shimmering, inviting.

Ryan had kissed his neck. ‘Don’t you wish it could be like this forever? Just us, with the world at our feet?’

‘Why can’t it?’ Kane asked, stifling a sleepy yawn. He collected some sand in his hand and let it trickle through his fingers.

‘Because things happen,’ Ryan said wistfully. He hugged Kane tighter. ‘Because people are always changing. Because nothing ever stays the same.’

‘The song remains the same,’ Kane joked.

Ryan’s fingers trailed along Kane’s collarbone. ‘No matter how hard you try, it’s all going to be different. You can’t keep a bird in a cage and expect it to sing like it did when it was free. The world is a nightmare place and we’re all too fucked up to care.’

‘Stop going all Baby Jane on me,’ Kane said, collecting more sand.

‘But don’t you feel sometimes that things would be better if nothing ever changed? Because once it changes, you’ll never get it back. Once it’s gone…’ His voice drifted away, his grip around Kane’s body loosening.

‘That’s a bit deep,’ Kane laughed, his back pressing against Ryan’s chest.

‘I’m serious,’ Ryan said. When Kane dusted his hands off and turned to face him, he noticed the tears in his eyes. ‘Would you still love me if something changed you? Or me?’

* * *

Against his boss’ express wishes, Kane went back to work at Kestrel Solutions that afternoon. He had taken on a three-week temp contract in telesales with them over two years ago but loved the job so much they let him stay. He could sell redemption to the devil, Ryan had told him and he was doubling his earnings on commission from that first week. They were a telecoms solutions company that prided themselves on
UK
call centres and both their incoming and outgoing sales calls were routed through local centres. Kane’s base in
Belfast
served the whole of
Northern Ireland
.

After fixing himself a coffee from the breakout area, he returned to his station and placed his next call, a follow-up on a recent sales prospect in Limavady. Behind him, at the water cooler, a couple of his colleagues stared at him behind his back. They had all heard the news about his boyfriend’s death—murder, they were calling it—and no one had expected him back so soon. But the office gossip would slither around him and nobody would dare mention it to him beyond asking him how he was.

‘Mr Campbell, please,’ Kane said into his headset when he spoke to a receptionist. ‘This is Kane Rider from Kestrel Solutions.’

He waited to be put through and stared at his computer screen. If he looked at any of his colleagues he would see the pity in their eyes and it would break him.

‘John?’ Kane said when Mr Campbell came on the line. ‘Kane Rider. How’ve you been? Have you had a chance to go over the quote I provided last week?’

He could feel their eyes boring into his back.

‘I have,’ John Campbell said. ‘And I just have a few questions, if that’s okay?’

‘Fire away,’ Kane said, positioning his fingers on his keyboard to take notes.

He could hear their whispered words all around him.

‘You said it was the latest model?’

‘Absolutely,’ Kane said. ‘I can guarantee it’s fresh off production and if you take the six-year warranty you won’t have any problems.’

He could sense their desperate need to find out the truth.

‘The twenty-five percent discount is a special limited-time offer, John. I’d hate for you to miss out.’

‘Can you leave it with me for another twenty-four hours?’ John asked.

Kane said, ‘Let me just see if I can hold the discount open for you, John. I’ll be two seconds.’ He put the call on hold, removed his headset and buried his face in his hands.

Breaking through the force field he had erected around himself, his boss came up and sat on the edge of his desk. Jill Ruthers was middle-aged but could still pass for twenty-something.

‘Kane,’ she said.

He kept his face in his hands, his elbows on the desk.

‘I just…We all wanted to say…’

He looked up at her, nodded, begged her with his eyes not to finish her sentence.

She saw his desk phone was on hold and said, ‘Finish the call and go home. I’ll pay you for the rest of the week. Call me on Friday afternoon and we’ll talk about next week, see if you need any extra time off.’

Jill had met Ryan on several occasions when he had stopped by after work to catch a ride home with Kane. They had got talking one day as they waited for Kane to finish a call and had managed to arrange a night out, but it had never happened.

Kane closed his eyes and Jill touched his shoulder. ‘Go home,’ she repeated.

He watched her as she walked away, called after her. When she turned back to him, he said, ‘Thanks.’ He put his headset back on and took the call off hold. ‘John, mate, good news. I’ve spoken to my manager and she’s agreed to extend the discount until tomorrow. Can we give you a call around noon?’

As he hung up, his mobile phone buzzed silently in his pocket. He took it out and answered it.

But the line went dead.

* * *

To take his mind off everything, Kane went to the gym. Margaret was due back from
Spain
in the early hours of tomorrow morning; it was the first available flight she could secure. He didn’t know how he could face her. Ryan was her only child and they had relied on each other through Ryan’s father’s descent into and eventual consumption by dementia praecox and a brain tumour that swiftly killed him in his early forties. They had nursed each other through the ensuing heartache while Ryan was nothing more than a child but suddenly the man of the house. When Margaret’s new husband came along, it was a welcome relief for all.

Only a couple of people worked the machines—a woman on a rowing machine, her short ponytail swinging behind her head, and a man, muscles straining beneath sweaty skin, puffing air in time as he bench-pressed.

Kane started up on a treadmill at the other side of the gym, his earphones in, iPod strapped to his arm, his feet slapping out a rhythm to match the music. He stared blank ahead, could feel sweat trickling down his back. It was total focus. When he ran, he felt nothing. His legs did all the hard work.

He wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead, running like he was going somewhere, running like he was
leaving
somewhere.

On the floor beside the treadmill, sitting on top of his sports bag and almost lost in the folds of a towel, his phone lit up from an incoming call. It caught his eye and he glanced at it, but he didn’t feel like talking to anyone. He looked straight ahead again, his feet punishing the treadmill, and he cranked up the speed on the display.

The phone kept flashing, ringing.

Kane kept running.

And the phone stopped, its screen dimming, a small light flashing to tell him he’d missed a call.

He ran faster. Going nowhere. Going anywhere.

When the phone started ringing again, he shook his head. He wouldn’t stop. But he did. He slowed the pace, looked at the phone, hopped off the treadmill and pulled his earphones out.

He picked up the phone and the towel, wiping sweat from his face before answering it. ‘Hello?’