To Die For (12 page)

They were dead. All of them. I was killing corpses. Beckett stared at me, his face slack, white, a black hole in his forehead. I lowered the gun. My heart banged in my chest and something crawled up my spine.

I stood and listened, every part of me ready to spring. I waited for a creak, a knock, anything that would tell me someone else was here. I gripped the Makarov, strangled it. Its heat travelled through my hand.

I heard nothing but the television, facing Beckett, which muttered away quietly.

I still waited, rigid, listening. My breathing was shallow, my neck, shoulders, arms tight. I was an animal in the night startled by some unknown sound, some dangerous smell. I waited, feeling the dread rise, feeling the horror.

Finally, I let my body relax.

There was no way into this room except from the door I’d just burst through. Maybe I should’ve gone over the rest of the house, but I wanted to check the bodies first, see what I could find out. I kept my gun up, and one eye on the door.

From the spread of the powder burns on Beckett’s skin I reckoned he’d been shot from near point-blank range, probably a couple of feet away. Someone had stood above him and fired into his face. The blood and brain and shattered bone spread out behind him, over the back of the chair.

He’d been dead about twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, wiped out minutes before I’d arrived. The other two had been killed in the same way, both with wounds in the head and upper torso, both shot where they sat.

I stood in front of Beckett and lifted my gun level with his head. I aimed, then turned and aimed at Jenson and Walsh. I followed the trajectory that any rounds from my gun would take. I went over to Jenson and Walsh and examined the wounds and bullet holes. They were consistent with shots fired from four or so feet in front of them and not from where I’d stood, which was five feet to their right side.

I had a look around their corpses. Walsh’s jacket, on the floor next to him, carried a small automatic in the jacket pocket, easily within reach. Jenson’s left hand held a can of beer that had half toppled over. They hadn’t been bound. They hadn’t been otherwise injured.

All three of them had been killed within a second or so of each other. There had been no reaction from any of them, which there would’ve been had one been killed before the others. The trajectories the bullets took and the speed of execution meant that there had been more than one killer. Probably two. I guessed that at least one of the three dead men had known the killers, and maybe trusted them. They’d been sitting watching television when they were killed. They hadn’t been on their guard. They hadn’t expected to die.

The killers must have used silencers. The bullet that had killed Beckett looked like a .32, and fired at point-blank range, but it was still embedded in the back of the chair, which meant that its velocity had been reduced. A silencer would do that. The fact that there weren’t coppers all over the place meant that nobody had reported hearing gunshots.

If the killers had used silencers, then they must have had them already attached. That all meant one thing: they’d come here to kill. This hadn’t been the result of an argument. This hadn’t been impulsive. This had been a hit.

I went through to the back and looked at the kitchen door. It was locked: no sign of forced entry there, or through the kitchen window. The same went for the rear lounge windows.

I went back to the front door, which was still partly open. I pushed it to and studied the lock. It was a mess, smashed to pieces. But the chain and the dead bolts were untouched. They hadn’t been used when the door had been closed. That meant Beckett hadn’t been expecting trouble. Probably, too, he’d let his killers in.

Beckett should’ve been on his guard. He would’ve known that Cole would be after him.

I didn’t have much time to search the place thoroughly. Maybe nobody along the road had taken any notice of my entrance. It had been loud, but not so loud that anyone would think murder was taking place. Still, I didn’t want be found around three dead bodies.

But I wanted that money. It could have been that Beckett had put the money somewhere off-site. More likely, it had been here and was now gone, taken by whoever had killed Beckett. I had to check anyway. I sectioned the rooms into quadrants and searched rapidly, looking through drawers, cupboards, anywhere that a million in cash could be stored. There was nothing downstairs. I went up.

There were two bedrooms and a bathroom on the first floor. I tried the bathroom first, opening the cistern, the cabinet. I ripped off the side of the plastic bath and tried the floorboards. Nothing. I tried the smaller bedroom. Someone had slept there and left clothes and things around. I pulled the place apart, tearing at the clothes, looking for a key, an address, anything. I was sweating when I finished, and I’d still found fuck all.

The larger bedroom, at the end of the hallway, had probably been Beckett’s. From the state of the double bed, I guessed he’d had a girl there. I saw a canvas bag by the side of the bed and made a grab for it. It was empty. I found another empty bag underneath the bed. The money, probably, had been in these bags. I threw them away. Then I made a mistake – I decided to be thorough. I went over to the large wardrobe and threw open the door.

At first, I didn’t know what I was looking at. It came to me in pieces. Eyes, large, scared. A smooth dark face. A young face. A girl’s face. A small body crouched in the corner of the cupboard.

She was twelve or so. She was thin. She had hair braided in what they call cornrows. She didn’t move. She stared out with such a look of fear, with such terror in her eyes that it paralysed me. She lifted a hand upwards. And then she shot me.

I was sitting at her table one morning, drinking coffee, eating an omelette, reading some book about John Hawkwood, the fourteenth-century English merc, who was smart enough to make himself rich in a plague-infested, war-ridden, fearful, religiously insane Europe. I’d been up an hour and had had a long cold shower and my head had only just about cleared. It was a day off for me and I was going to spend it doing nothing except reading, if I could keep my eyes focused that long.

Brenda was out, had been out all night. Every now and then Marriot had her do some kind of hostessing gig, usually for Middle Eastern types. She’d given me a kiss on the cheek late the night before and told me she’d be back in the morning, told me not to wait up, told me she’d miss me. I didn’t sleep too well that night. Already I was getting used to her body next to mine, and when I woke and found myself alone in the bed I’d wonder if I’d been dreaming or remembering something from long ago. It got like that, sometimes, my mind, wandering back and forth so that I didn’t know when I was, or where, or who.

So I was sitting at her table, reading the book, my torso bare and still damp from the shower, my head clearing. I had the window open and a cool breeze brushed over me, soothed my aching muscles. I didn’t hear the door, but I heard her steps. She came up behind me and I felt her hand stroke my neck.

‘Miss me?’ she said.

‘Sure. You want coffee?’

I could smell stale cigarette smoke on her clothes, and alcohol on her breath.

‘Why, Joe,’ she said, ‘you old romantic.’

I could tell, now, by the tone of her voice, when she was taking the piss out of me.

I made to stand up but she pushed me back down. I waited for her to say something, but instead she traced a line down my back with the tip of her finger. She did it softly, so that it felt like a teardrop slipping slowly away. I felt her finger move left, then right, zig-zagging. I knew what she was doing. I knew what was coming.

‘Where did you get these?’ she said.

‘An old job.’

‘An old job? An old job. Just that? That simple? An old job.’

‘Yeah. That simple.’

Her hand dropped away and she put her handbag on the table and walked to the kitchen.

‘Shall I do you a coffee?’ I said.

‘Forget it.’

She spent a few minutes bashing things about and then I heard the kettle boil. After that, she was quieter and I figured she wasn’t so pissed off with me. When she came back, she carried her mug and a plate of biscuits, which she put down on the table. She took a seat opposite me and sipped her coffee and watched me.

‘For someone so smart, you’re bloody stupid at times,’ she said.

‘I know.’

‘Tell me, Joe,’ she said. ‘Tell me your story. How did you end up with those scars?’

I finished eating the omelette, mopped up the juice with a piece of bread, and pushed the plate away.

‘What does it matter?’

‘It matters to me. Surely that’s all you need to know. Tell me, from the beginning. Tell me a story. Tell me about the first scar you got. It was that one on your thigh, wasn’t it? The one I touch at night. Start with that. Start from the beginning.’

She reached behind her for an ashtray, then leaned back in her seat and lit a cigarette and sipped her coffee and waited. I shifted a bit in my seat, not knowing what to say or how to say it. And then I thought, fuck it.

‘When I was seventeen,’ I said, ‘I worked in Wembley, on a large building site next to the North Circular.’

It was a lousy job, I told her, hod-carrying, cement-mixing, all that shit. I’d wanted to be a carpenter but the site boss wouldn’t let me give it a go. He’d taken over from some other bloke who’d been sacked for taking backhanders to employ illegals. That other bloke was all right. When he’d been site manager, he’d let me watch the chippies, let me try it out. He’d given me a chance, at least. The new geezer didn’t like me, wouldn’t let me near the wood.

‘That’s a shame,’ she said.

‘Yeah. So I’d just about had it with the building trade. I sure as fuck wasn’t going to carry bricks for the rest of my life.’

Anyway, I told her, one night, as I walked back to my rented bedsit, I passed an Army Recruitment Office. It might have been a Navy Recruitment Office in Portsmouth, or an unemployment office in Romford. I might have been a fireman or a gardener.

‘You might have been a carpenter,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ I said. I hadn’t thought of it before. ‘I might’ve been. Who knows? That’s the way things happen. As it was, I walked in and that was that. I joined the fucking army.’

She looked angry, her eyebrows angling in.

‘That’s not how to tell it,’ she said, flicking ash into the ashtray.

‘What?’

‘Don’t just say, “I walked in and joined the army.” Tell me what happened.’

‘Fine.’

The sergeant behind the desk asked me some questions, I told her, and then he looked at me carefully. At that age, I was big, but still fresh-looking, still clear-eyed. The sergeant hesitated. He listened to the answers I gave him, weighed me up, my size, my ability to fight and take hardship. ‘I won’t lie to you,’ he said, ‘we could do with men like you. Have you thought it through?’

‘He asked me what my girlfriend thought,’ I said to Brenda. ‘I told him I didn’t have one.’

‘You didn’t?’

‘No.’

‘Never?’

‘No.’

The sergeant asked about my parents. I shrugged. He struggled on, asked me what I saw myself doing in five years’ time, if I thought I’d stay in the army. I didn’t know the answer to that. It seemed a stupid question. How did I know what I’d be doing in five years? I might be dead. But I played along and said I’d like to have a career in the army. ‘It’s a good life,’ he told me, ‘if you’re prepared to work. I’m a Para, myself,’ he said. I told him I’d always wanted to be a Para, not caring one way or the other. He brightened up. ‘Smart man,’ he said. ‘The Paras can give a lot to someone like you.’

‘I didn’t know what he meant by “someone like you”,’ I said to Brenda, ‘and I didn’t give a shit what the army could give me. I just wanted something else. The army was something else.’

Just to make it look good, this sergeant asked me what I thought I could do for the army, what I could offer. I looked at him, bright and smart, ribbons and stripes and all. I looked at the posters of neat uniformed soldiers. What could I do for the army? What could I offer?

‘What did you say?’ Brenda said.

‘I told him I could kill people.’

The sergeant’s face lost its smiliness and I saw him for what he was. ‘Perfect,’ he said.

Brenda took a biscuit from the plate and looked at it and put it back. She took a drag of her cigarette and watched the smoke coil.

‘Did you mean it?’ she said. ‘About killing people?’

‘I told him what he wanted to hear. That’s all.’

She nodded, but I don’t know if she believed me.

Anyway, I told Brenda, I was a good recruit. I did what they told me and I was tough. Obedient and hard, that’s what they wanted. They bumped me up to lance corporal in my first year. Then corporal. It was extra money.

Eighteen months later, my company was spread out on a place called Mount Longdon. I was with a couple of men from my platoon and we were taking cover in a ditch while dug-in Argentinian conscripts and regulars sprayed the area with Browning M2s. It was dark and icy cold, and the damp grass and mud had made my clothes wet and heavy, and the smell of stale sweat was mixed with a musty earthy smell. My body ached with fatigue, but there were too many threats of death, too much adrenalin, too much fear to feel anything but a kind of edgy, tingling aliveness.

The bloke next to me stuck his head up and a round pinged off his helmet. The man said, ‘Fuck was that?’

And I felt a burning in my hip, as if someone had pushed the tip of a cigarette into it. I knew I’d been hit. It was unmistakable. I couldn’t do much about it.

‘And that’s the scar,’ Brenda said.

‘That’s it.’

‘Okay, so what happened next?’

‘I left.’ Brenda sighed. ‘Okay. If you want to know – ’

‘You were a good soldier, I bet,’ Brenda said, taking a biscuit from the plate and pushing it into her mouth.

‘I was okay. I even liked it. But then people were trying hard to kill me and I didn’t like it any more.’

‘Don’t blame you,’ she said around her biscuit.

Of course, I’d never been fooled by the reasons they gave me for fighting: for Queen and country, or for honour, or for your regimental colours, or for your comrades or your family or your way of life or whatever. I knew that was all bollocks. I knew the reason I was there: I was a tool of my government. I was paid to destroy the tools of other governments because those governments disagreed about something and they sure as fuck weren’t going to be destroyed themselves. But as I ran forward into the night in a painful limping motion and with tracer rounds zipping past me and getting closer, I realized another thing: I was being paid to be shot at. You can’t have a war if the enemy hasn’t got anyone to shoot at.