To Kill For (23 page)

I could hear Browne's raspy breathing. Every now and then he forced himself to swallow because his mouth had gone dry.

Another woman entered the picture then. She was slim and had long straight blonde hair. She had a long pale face, and her eyes were hooded, like she was on drugs. As soon as I saw her, I knew what a fucking idiot I'd been, and I knew why those children's toys had been there, planted for years in her front garden, small tombstones, reminders of dead childhoods.

Of course the fucking room looked familiar to me. I'd been there a couple of days before. And I'd met the woman, too. Christina Murray; Tina to her friends.

Brenda reached out to the girl, and took her free hand and squeezed it. Tina stood next to Brenda and started to peel off her clothes. She swayed as she did so and had to move a foot to keep her balance. They'd doped her up to the eyeballs.

I could see the man, then, more clearly, but it was only a profile shot. He was in his fifties, with thinning dark hair and lard around his torso. He wore suit trousers, black patent leather shoes and a white shirt. He wore a wedding ring. His hand moved over the girl's hair and he said something to her. I felt useless, watching this thing. I wanted to take a hold of that man's arm and wrench it out of its socket. I found myself clenching my fists, like I'd done in the church at Kid's funeral when that dog-collared fuck had garbled about God and salvation and all that bollocks. My muscles were tight and my heart thumped at my chest and I had to breathe through my mouth. The man's hand wandered down the back of the girl's head and stroked her neck. She clenched her shoulders.

Browne said, ‘Christ almighty.'

Brenda made an involuntary move forward, but stopped herself. She took a long deep drink of gin and hunched her shoulders as if she could feel those hands on her back, as if she was trying to put herself in the girl's place, trying to take it all onto herself. Tina had stripped now to her underwear, her clothes lying at her feet. Browne said, ‘That is her, isn't it? Your woman? Barbara.'

‘Brenda.'

‘What was she doing there?'

‘It doesn't matter.'

‘Of course it matters. After what I'm looking at, it bloody well matters.'

‘She knew about the cameras,' I said. ‘She wanted evidence against them. She had to be there to try and get it. She did get it and she hid it and then they killed her before she could do anything with it.'

Browne was quiet for a long time. The pictures continued to move on the TV, a man, two women and a small girl going through some motions that, without the sound, seemed a pantomime, a mockery of life in living rooms in England.

I glanced at Browne and saw that he was no longer looking at the screen. I would've been surprised if he had been. Instead, he was glaring at the ground and there was a fury in his eyes that I hadn't seen since Kid had been alive. I could feel the tension coming from him, anger soaking through him and out into the air between us. He knew I was looking at him, but he wouldn't meet my eyes and I thought his anger was probably aimed at me for bringing this thing into his house, for involving him. I knew, too, that he'd liked Brenda, and the idea that she could be a part of what he was seeing was a shock. His silence was because he was having to square all his feelings and his memories, and that now he had to fit a sullied, dirty Brenda back into the picture. Before, she'd been one of the victims, a poor murdered prostitute who'd somehow hooked up with a thug like me who, at least, wouldn't hurt her. Now, her position was murkier.

I'd told him why Brenda was there. There was no point in me explaining things further. When he nodded, finally, it was to himself, and I knew that he'd managed to understand, and that he was relieved, at least, that Brenda wasn't a willing part of all this. I think that if he'd thought she was, his remaining faith in human nature, what little there was, would've dissolved and left him hollow, and he would've collapsed inside himself, taking his bottle and locking the world out.

‘And she was there for the girl,' he said. ‘To make sure.'

He wasn't talking to me. He was talking to himself, making himself understand.

The man on the screen looked around the room and I hit the pause button when his face was in view. I studied him. He looked successful. His hair, thinning on top, was neatly cut, and he was tanned – a real tan, not the orange kind. His shirt had cufflinks and an emblem on the breast pocket. What I'd thought was fat around his torso seemed now more evenly spread so that he looked like a man who'd been slim in youth but had since become used to a life of rich meals and money. Mostly, what gave him the air of success was the expression on his face. He wasn't feeling pleasure so much as satisfaction, like he was used to having anything he wanted and this was just another small perk, just another reminder of his strength and power. He wasn't enjoying himself; he was indulging himself.

‘Who is he?' said Browne.

‘Important.'

‘You know him?'

‘No.'

‘How do you know he's important?'

‘Because of this, because of the cameras, the set-up. They wanted him.'

‘Who? Who wanted him? Who…' his voice cracked. ‘Who would do that, Joe? Who in God's name could do something like that to that poor lass?'

I turned to him then, and when I spoke it was even and without emotion, because I wanted him to understand what I was going to do, and who I was going to do it to.

‘It was Paget,' I said.

He looked at me and his face was white. He nodded slowly. It sickened him, but at least he understood it all. It was like I'd just told him he had terminal cancer; he would die, but at least now he understood why he had these pains. He stood up unsteadily and walked stiffly from the room. When he came back, he had two glasses, full to the brim of his cheap throat-burning Scotch. He held one out to me. I hated the stuff. I took it. I drank it in two gulps and it hit me like a brick and I had to grit my teeth to stop from throwing up. Browne took his drink and went and sat on the armchair, so that he could look at me. He took a moment before speaking and I thought he was trying to gather his thoughts, trying to keep from breaking up.

‘This is what they did to Kid, isn't it? This is what traumatized her?'

‘Yeah.'

‘The same people? Paget?'

‘Yeah.'

Neither of us said anything. The world stopped moving.

I thought again, as I had thought so often, how similar Kid and Brenda had been. So similar, in fact, that I had trouble separating them in my mind. They merged and became one. It was something to do with their characters, and their histories. They'd both suffered; they'd both had guts, refusing to let the cunts who hurt them win. But they'd both died, in spite of their courage.

‘I was brought up a Christian,' Browne said, breaking the silence with his deafening whisper. ‘I was told there was a reason for suffering, that it was part of God's plan, that he wouldn't abandon his children, that the innocent would be rewarded, one day. In heaven, I suppose.'

‘Now you know better.'

‘Do I? I don't know. I don't know anything any more. I try, Joe. I try not to hate. I don't want to end up like… like…'

‘Like me.'

He put the glass to his lips. His hand trembled. It was an effort. He emptied the glass. He dropped his arm and let the glass slide out of his hand.

‘Yes,' he said, watching the glass fall to the floor. ‘Like you. Mechanical, like you. Cold.'

‘You think I'm cold?'

‘I think you try to be. Can't blame you, though. Not when I see that stuff. Can't blame you at all.'

Cold. Was I? The Machine. That's what they'd called me in the ring. The Killing Machine, as some had said.

‘Maybe I should've been colder,' I said. ‘Maybe they'd be alive then.'

‘Perhaps, but then they wouldn't have felt what they did for you.'

Felt for me? What did that mean? What had they felt for me?

‘They just wanted protection from me,' I said.

I suppose, if you looked at it, that was the thing they had most in common.

‘They'd both needed me, and I'd failed them.'

I said that aloud for some reason. I hadn't meant to. I thought I was only thinking it. Or had I wanted to explain to someone? To Browne?

‘Ah,' said Browne. ‘So that's it.'

I looked at him.

‘What?'

‘That's why you do this; you're trying to redeem yourself, in the only way you know. You're still trying to save them.'

Maybe I was. I didn't care.

‘I'm trying to avenge them,' I said, not knowing, really, if that was true.

‘So you tell yourself.'

He didn't say anything for a while. He looked at the glass.

‘But there's something else,' he said to the glass. ‘You're punishing yourself. You're killing yourself to get your redemption, but you don't care, because that's all mixed up in it. It's redemption and punishment at the same time.'

‘You sound like a vicar,' I said.

‘Yes, well… once I would've said that wasn't such a bad thing. Now I'm not so sure. I don't know what to believe any more. I'll tell you one thing, though,' he looked up at me, and there was coldness in his eyes, as if he'd taken it away from me, soaked it up. ‘If there is a god, he's a vicious bastard.'

It was the sound of a door closing that woke me. It took me a moment to remember where I was, and what had happened. I was still in the lounge, still facing the TV. The thing was dead now, but the images I'd seen haunted it still.

I got up to see where the noise had come from. I couldn't find Browne. His bedroom door was open, his bed had been slept in but he wasn't in there. The bathroom was empty, he wasn't anywhere downstairs.

I found him in the back garden, lit by the kitchen light; a dark shabby figure standing at the edge of the dark shabby lawn. He was wearing his pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers. He had a trowel in one hand and a mug in the other. I thought he must've been drunk, but when I got to him, I saw he was clear-eyed and sober. There was only steaming tea in his mug. I looked down at the ground and saw a patch of earth he'd dug up.

He glanced around at me, took a sip of tea.

‘I've been gardening.'

I think he wanted me to congratulate him. He must've had a skinful, gone upstairs to sleep the booze off and then woken up with a brilliant idea; it's winter, the world is falling apart around me, I'll do some gardening.

‘Right,' I said, not knowing what else to say.

He pointed to the ground with his trowel.

‘I found it,' he said.

I looked and couldn't see anything.

‘Right.'

‘I think it's a violet, but I don't know.'

Then I saw what he was pointing at. In the shadows, surrounded by dirt was a small flower, barely the size of my thumbnail, on the end of a thin stem. He'd cleared most of the ground all around it so that the flower was by itself.

‘Early for flowers, isn't it?' he said.

‘Is it?'

‘Must be the mild weather.'

He handed me the mug and trowel, bent over and grabbed a rock and heaved. The rock didn't move

‘Need to give it some light,' he said. ‘Need to give it some room.'

He nudged me. I handed his stuff back to him, bent over, lifted the rock and threw it away. When I did that, I saw some old geezer in the house next door peering at us from an upstairs window, his face lit by his bedroom lamp. All these houses were detached, so he was a long way off, but I thought I saw him saying something. Browne saw him too.

‘What's he staring at?' he said.

‘He's probably wondering why you're gardening in your pyjamas in the middle of the night.'

Browne looked down at what he was wearing.

‘Yes, well, if I want to go into my own garden in my pyjamas, that's my affair.'

He waved at the bloke, smiled.

‘Stupid old duffer,' he said. ‘Probably thinks I've lost it properly this time.'

I was starting to think that myself.

‘Do I water it?' he said, turning back to the flower.

‘What for?'

He looked annoyed then, as if I'd insulted his plant. He threw the trowel into the grass, blade first.

‘I don't know why I'm asking you, anyway. You're the opposite of a horticulturist. They bring things out of the earth. They touch things and make them live, a little like us of the medical profession. You… you're some kind of anti-horticulturalist. You put things in the earth, people mostly. You touch something and bring death.'

I had no idea what he was on about. I waited, though, until he was finished. I'd learned it was easier that way. But then he turned to me, laid a hand on my arm.

‘Sorry, son,' he said. ‘I know you cared for her.'

For a moment, I thought he'd really lost it. But then I clocked the way he was gazing at the flower, the pain in his face and I realized he wasn't talking about a plant at all, but about Kid. He must've come out here with a mug of tea for some fresh air, seen the plant and made some sort of connection with it, small and alone as it was, surrounded by weeds, rocks.

‘We'll get some fertilizer,' I said, not knowing anything about gardening but figuring that that was the sort of thing gardeners did.

We stood there for a while, as if we were standing over her grave, which, I suppose, we were.

‘I don't think I fully understood,' Browne said. ‘Earlier, I mean. Watching that DVD with Barbara, I was shocked. I'm a bit stupid these days, I admit, and not always with it, but I'm not easily shocked.'

A breeze had picked up and Browne put a hand to his hair and tried to push it down.

‘It must've been a terrible thing,' he was saying. ‘For Barbara, I mean. To have to do that, to be brave enough to do that.'