Crusher (27 page)

The fresh stitches in my cheek and scalp were just starting to throb when Nicola Hale was shown into my interrogation room. I started with that morning’s events and worked backwards, leaving out everything about McGovern and James Gravett. They’d had nothing to do with my dad’s death, and I didn’t want Hale thinking she might have to spend the rest of her career bailing me out of police stations. She had got the gist of the story when there was a gentle knock on the door.

The man who entered was a big scruffy Glaswegian with unruly fair hair who introduced himself as DI Jones. He seemed cheerful and relaxed as he took a seat in the regulation-issue office chair on the other side of the desk, while a uniformed policewoman took a seat in the corner.

“We’ve checked out your story, Mr. Maguire,” said Jones. “And I spoke to my colleague DS Amobi, from
your local nick. He didn’t exactly vouch for your sterling character, but he thinks you’re one of the good guys.”

“He doesn’t know me that well,” I said.

“I’m inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt myself,” said Jones. “I just got off the phone to the FBI. Your friend—I mean, your mother’s friend—Romero is wanted on a fresh charge of murder in the States. After he got out of prison he made a load of money from those paintings of his, but blew most of it on gambling and crack. Seems he fell out with his agent over his commission, stabbed him through the eye with a paintbrush and did a runner.”

“How did Romero get into the UK?” asked Hale.

“We’re looking into that,” said Jones. “But it seems he should never have been freed in the first place. The FBI can’t prove anything, but they think he used the money from the sale of his first painting to buy himself an alibi. He paid another criminal to confess to the crime he was jailed for. That’s how he got off Death Row.”

“He hired a man to kill my father too,” I said.

“So I understand,” said Jones. “Your mother has indicated she’s willing to make a full statement.”

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t her fault. She was being coerced by Romero. That’s why Ms. Hale’s here—I want her to represent my mother.”

Jones frowned. “Your mother already has legal representation,” he said.

“Not one of those useless duty hacks,” I said. “Someone who knows what they’re doing. I’ll pay.”

“Sorry, Mr. Maguire—” Jones looked genuinely confused. “The solicitor you hired is already here. They’re in conference now.”

“I haven’t hired anyone,” I said.

As we sat looking at each other, a bell rang outside in the corridor, and went on ringing. Moments later we heard running feet and shouting. Jones registered the racket at the same time as I did, and in a moment he was out of his chair, through the door and running down the corridor, with me right on his heels. At the far end of the passageway was another interview room, and a uniform cop with scarlet hands burst out of the doorway, shouting for the medic.

Beyond Jones, in the interview room, stood Elsa Kendrick, cornered by two officers in stab vests. In her fist she held a long, gleaming butcher’s knife running with blood. Her face and her arms were splashed with it, and she was smiling like she was in a blissful dream. When one of the officers reached out she offered him the knife as if he was going to cut her a slice of cake.

Kendrick’s big leather satchel lay open on the interview table, and the chair beyond it was lying on its side
on the floor, and beside it lay my mother, twitching in a massive pool of blood that was slowly spreading, fed by the deep gashes in her face and her hands and her throat.

I heard the suck of my shoes in her blood as I knelt beside her, and felt its warm sticky wetness on my hands as I took her in my arms and hugged her and lifted her head. The fear and confusion on her face seemed to vanish when she looked at me. She raised her delicate hand to touch my face, and two of its fingers were missing, but she caressed my cheek, and there was no pain in her eyes, just an infinite sadness.

“Finn,” she mouthed, and blood spilled down her chin. Her lips went on moving, but she had no breath left.

“Please, Mum, don’t talk, don’t say anything,” I said. “Just hang on. Please don’t leave me. Please, Mum. Please.”

She smiled at me, and coughed, and her hand fell from my cheek, and her eyes were empty.

There were two grey funeral urns on my mantelpiece now, and they bugged me. I had tried standing them at opposite ends, but it looked like my mum and dad were ignoring each other, and when I stood them together they looked like targets in a coconut shy. I didn’t know why I was displaying them anyway—they weren’t pretty, and they weren’t exactly conversation pieces. On the other hand I couldn’t just stick them in the attic. I was going to have the house redecorated, and it did occur to me to have them painted white, like the walls, so they would be there, but invisible. And then I could grow old and die here and be placed in a white pot between them, and we’d be a family again, until someone bought the house and threw us all into a skip.

It was an early Sunday morning in late May. The sun
was shining and innocent fluffy clouds were tumbling slowly across the bright blue London sky when I slipped both urns into a backpack, stepped out of the house and pulled the door shut behind me. I was getting ready to run when I noticed her coming down the street towards me, in a short skirt that would have flaunted her thighs if they weren’t clad in black leggings. Her hands were fisted in the pockets of her denim jacket and her head was bowed.

When Zoe heard my door close she looked up, and paused, and I could see she’d been trying to think of what she might say to me, and hadn’t come up with anything, and now it was too late.

“Hey,” she said instead.

“Hey,” I said. I hoiked my bag up my shoulder and strode past her.

“Can I walk with you?” she called after me.

“It’s a free country,” I said. “Mostly.” I couldn’t start running now. I didn’t want her thinking I was afraid of her or trying to avoid her. I didn’t particularly want to talk to her, but then I couldn’t stop her talking to me.

“How have you been?” she said.

I shrugged.

“I heard about your mum,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“What did you hear?” I said.

“That she was the woman killed in a police station by some loony with a machete,” said Zoe.

“It was a butcher’s knife,” I said.

“If I’d known about the funeral I would have come, but I didn’t know about it, so I …” She sighed, aware she’d started blethering. I was glad. Maybe if she got bored or embarrassed enough she’d go away and I wouldn’t have to tell her to piss off. “That’s if you’d wanted me to come,” she added.

“It’s a free country. Mostly,” I said, and cursed inwardly. Now she had me repeating myself. I walked a bit faster but she didn’t even seem to notice, tailing after me like a bad smell.

“I know how you feel, Finn,” she said. I snorted at that, but she ignored me. “There were hundreds of people at my dad’s funeral, most of them cops, and they all wanted to shake my hand and tell me what a wonderful man my dad was and how proud I must be.”

“No one came to my mother’s funeral, except me,” I said. “Stop pretending you know how I feel.”

“I’m sorry,” Zoe said.

“Yeah. You said.”

“I wished no one had come to my dad’s funeral, if they were all going to spout bullshit,” said Zoe. “He didn’t die a hero in a shoot-out with some child-trafficker after an anonymous tip-off.”

“How do you know?” I said.

“I just do,” she said.

“Who have you been talking to?”

“Sergeant Amobi.”

I stopped and turned. “And what did Amobi tell you exactly?”

“He said I should talk to you.”

“Sounds like he was trying to get rid of you,” I said.

I walked on down towards the main road that runs alongside the river, and paused at the junction outside Max Snax. It had just opened for breakfast and I noticed the spherical customer was back again, squeezed into the corner table filling his face with a triple-decker, while my replacement at the counter picked at a zit on his chin. As I waited on the kerb for a lorry to pass Zoe re-appeared at my elbow. She didn’t look like she was going to give up any time soon.

I ignored her, crossing the road and turning right, and she followed, though I could tell she was wondering if I was actually heading somewhere or just trying to shake her off. In fact it was both. She slowed and stopped, and I thought she’d given up at last, until she called after me.

“You were there when my dad was killed, weren’t you?”

That halted me in my tracks. I’d just stepped off the main road into the new waterside park from where a shiny glass and steel footbridge arched over to an island in the river. The council had only just finished laying the park turf, but it was already dotted with petals from the cherry saplings, and the breeze off the water sent more drifting around me like shining snowflakes.

Zoe caught up with me. “Dad was working for McGovern, wasn’t he?” she said. “They’d been blackmailing him with that video, and once that got out he was no use to them any more, so they killed him.”

“I’ve no idea,” I said. “I wasn’t there.” Her face fell. “But I’ll tell you what I think happened,” I said. “I think your dad was ashamed of himself, and what he’d done. I think he went there to kill McGovern but he wasn’t fast enough.”

“You think he knew about the video of me?” Her voice was harsh, as if she was trying to torture herself.

“Yeah. But your dad never told you, because then you wouldn’t have been his little girl any more. I think he wanted to protect you, because he was your dad, and in his own way he loved you, in spite of everything. And that was the only way left he could show it.”

She shut her eyes and shuddered in pain, but forced herself to go on. “Why didn’t you tell the cops all that? Are you scared of the Guvnor?”

“Not particularly,” I said.

“Scared of what he might do to you, or to someone you care about?” She’d opened her eyes now and was looking straight at me, but I knew a leading question when I heard one.

“There’s nobody left I care about,” I said. I turned and walked on towards the bridge.

“Then why not tell the truth?” she called after me.

I paused on the bridge and turned again, irritated. “You’re right, I am scared of the Guvnor,” I said. “Now will you piss off and leave me alone?”

“Or what? That’s an island you’re heading to, Finn. What are you going to do, swim for it?”

“If I have to,” I said.

She came close and looked at me under her lashes. I wasn’t going to fall for that again.

“I think I know why,” she said. “If you had told the cops all that, it would all have come out, about my dad, and me, and the video. And the tabloids and the bloggers and the Internet would have gone mad, and that footage would have been everywhere, and the whole world would have seen me doing those things,
and known it was me, and I’d never ever have been allowed to forget it.”

“Just think,” I said. “You could have had your own reality TV series.” She actually laughed. “Look, don’t kid yourself,” I said. “It’s probably all over the Net already.”

“Yeah, but there’s millions of dirty videos out there, mine’s just one more, and if no one knows it’s me, no one’s going to care. That’s why you kept it quiet. To protect me.”

“If that’s what you want to believe, go ahead,” I said. “Now I was kind of hoping for some privacy, so will you get lost?”

The island had been derelict and overgrown until last year, when the footbridge had been built. Since then its old boatyard had been tidied up and its sheds repainted, the wild butterfly bushes hacked back, and wooden benches—as yet uncarved with any declarations of love for a football team—planted facing south and east along the river. At low tide the benches overlooked a pungent greeny-black expanse of Thames mud strewn with flotsam, but at high tide, like now, they looked out over silvery grey water that lapped and swirled eastwards to the City, under London’s bridges and out to the sea.

The early-morning mist was still rising off the river like a cloud, fading into the blue sky, as I slipped the bag from my shoulder at the water’s edge and took out the two urns. I hadn’t figured out in advance how to take the lids off, but they were only thin metal, and a coin worked under one rim lifted enough of the tin for me to get a hold on the lip and bend the lid back in half. I did the same with the other, and stood there for a while, wondering if I should say a few words, or if there were any words to say.

For a few years, when I was little, my mother and father had been happy together. I knew that because I had lived with them, and there were a thousand moments that now only I remembered—the three of us together in Spain, here in the local playground, in their bed where they used to pin me between them and kiss me, chanting, “Finny sandwich!” That’s how I wanted to remember them, and that’s how I wanted them to be—together always, back where they’d first found each other, back when they’d loved each other. The song my dad used to sing to my mother echoed in my head, and I thought if I tried that as I poured their ashes, maybe they wouldn’t mind that I couldn’t sing a note. Maybe if I hummed it. Just the last verse.

I tipped the urns upside down and the dust poured out, caught and mingled in the breeze, blew east and spread out across the water, mingled and swirled and sank into the dark depths, swept away downriver.

I didn’t make it to the end of the verse. All the numbness I’d felt after I’d found Dad murdered, the numbness I’d clenched onto so hard when my mother died in my arms—in that moment, all of it crumbled and was swept away, dissolving like dust on the river, and I couldn’t breathe. I wept, not caring if I was feeling sorry for them or sorry for myself or sorry for this whole mess I’d helped to make; but now Zoe was beside me, wrapping her arms around my neck and pulling me close, and I let her hold me until I could breathe again.