Father and Son (18 page)

“She told me she
never committed anything to digital,” he says, staring at the screen of the MacBook
as Den takes it steady out of town.

“What did she need a laptop for, then?”

“There’s loads of background on the bomb, Connie said. Articles and
what have you. I assume it’s the important stuff she doesn’t save. Shit,” he
says, screwing his face up, holding the Mac up close, “I can’t find Internet
Explorer.”

“It’s a Mac, thicko. Try Safari.”

“Done a course on computers as well, have you?” he says, clicking
open Safari.

“No. That’s common knowledge, Mr Stone Age. Thing I don’t get,” she
says as they follow a bus up Roundhay Road, “where’s all the pressure coming
from? Your journalist friend turns up in Leeds. Then Reid. Someone kills Roberto,
and a day later Reid’s giving your dad a scare. Why? And why now?”

“Bernard Sheenan,” he says. “The Leeds bombing. It’s the same deal.
Got to be.”

“And she got the last interview with Sheenan, right before he was
murdered?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps she didn’t get the full story from him. Just enough to know
where to start looking for answers. You think she led the killer to Roberto?”

“And who would that be? Dennis Reid?”

“That’s what I’d be thinking. Bloke like Reid arrives on the scene, and
someone dies? He’s gonna be your main suspect, whatever motive you can come up
with. You really should tell Baron that he went to see your dad.”

“Yeah, right, and implicate Dad in something he can’t defend himself
against.”

“Reid goes there to tell your dad to keep quiet? That’s the beginnings
of a motive.”

“Dad can’t answer for himself,” he says, hardly listening, squinting
at the screen of the laptop. “Connie was right, it’s all yachts.”

“You’ve got internet?”

“No. But I can see the names of the websites. She’s got a list of
favourites, and they’re all yachting sites. What does that mean?”

“You’re the expert. Are they well known?”

“The sites? Yeah. All the popular ones.”

“So, she likes yachts. Bingo for you, sailor boy.” The bus pulls in,
and off they go, the Astra straining up the hill in third, past the dark red
brick monster of St Aidan’s Church and next to it the Shezan Kebab House. “What
was it Freddy told you? That Roberto had killed a baby?”

“Yeah. Something about a character in
The Godfather
.”

“It’s the Leeds bombing again. Little baby died in the blast.”

“But that was the IRA.”

“It wasn’t, John. They never claimed it.”

“But I remember, on the news…”

“I was a copper here for ten years, you think I’ve never heard about
that bomb? No one ever claimed it. Not officially.”

“Perhaps Jeanette knows? Perhaps she got the whole story out of
Sheenan before he died?”

“Perhaps she
didn’t
, which would explain why she’s here,
looking for answers. Face facts, John. This is either about Lanny Bride or your
dad.”

“I’m not trying to avoid the truth. It’s just…”

He fiddles with the touchpad of the Mac, holding the laptop at different
angles against the sun that streams in through the windscreen.

“Veuve Clicquot,” he says.

“A yacht?”

“No. It’s champagne.”

“Mean anything to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll take that as a maybe. Right-click on all the links. It tells
you the date and time they were added.”

He goes through the first five. Then jumps to the last one, the
website for Veuve Clicquot.

“Yesterday morning,” he says.

“All of them?”

He checks several more at random.

“Yes. The lot, within ten minutes of each other.”

“She didn’t even have time to look at them. Not a yachting fan,
then?”

“Apparently not.”

A sudden wave of thunder hits them as a pack of bikers file past,
each one slaloming back into the lane as they glide smoothly around the Astra.

“You should have got into motorbikes, instead,” she says. “My
uncle’s a massive bike nut, three vintage BSAs in his garage. Whereas you’re
still drooling after those bloody yachts in magazines and dreaming of a
windfall.”

And getting involved in counterfeit money
, she decides not to add.

He closes the laptop and lets it rest on his thighs.

For a while Den concentrates on driving, giving him time to think.
Know when to shut up: the most useful skill an investigating officer can have.

By the time they’re up at the home, he still hasn’t said anything.
She pulls off the road on the edge of Soldiers Field and kills the engine.

“Sutcliffe did one of his victims up here,” he says.

She snorts. “Think I don’t know that? I know what clothes they were all
wearing. I know their middle names. I was a copper at Millgarth. The Ripper’s
in my bloody DNA.”

“Got an fags?”

“I’ve stopped,” she says.

“What, even when you’re working? I thought you needed one, y’know,
if you had a bad job?”

“Funny, dead Lancastrians don’t make me as queasy.”

“You’ve changed!”

“A lot of things have changed.”

They look out across the open space. Time is ticking by, the day
drawing to a close, and she wonders what Steve’s doing down at Millgarth now.
Tick-tock. First full day of a murder investigation. He’ll be busy. Tick-tock.

There’s no time for this.

“You’re not gonna tell me, are you?” she says, pulling herself
upright, ready to drive off.

“That obvious, is it?”

“I lived with you for a year, John. You only shave once a week. You
rub a clove of garlic on the bread when you make a sandwich. You love gin but
hate rum. Oh, and when you’re lying you open your eyes wide like a kid.”

She chuckles to herself, suddenly back in his flat, the nights in
front of the telly watching Tarantino, or just getting drunk on the floor, arm
wrestling on the coffee table, messing about. She’d loved being with him,
everything about it, the security of his embrace, but also the way he could
hold off, quiet, pensive, those golden eyes following her as if she was the
most beautiful woman on the planet. She’d loved everything about him.

“I want to be sure,” he says. “That’s all.”

“Reid came to see your dad. Left him petrified. I saw it, John. It’s
evidence, and I’m sitting on it.”

“So, tell Baron.”

“It’d be better coming from you.”

“Let me talk to Dad first.”

“And if it was him? The Leeds bombing? Jesus Christ, John!”

He shakes his head.

“Twenty minutes,” she says. “I’m ringing Steve in twenty.”

“Okay.”

Then he’s out of the car, his back to the road as she drives off.

There he stands, on Soldiers Field, and wonders who he’s going to find
when he looks into his father’s eyes.

Tony Ray is asleep
in his chair. His breathing is light and regular, his face peaceful and composed,
head slightly to one side.

John creeps across the room and sits in one of the chairs against the
back wall. He’d never seen his dad asleep before he came to live up here. Not a
single time. Dad was always the first up in the morning, there at the kitchen
table devouring the paper, every inch of it, a little cup of horrendously strong
coffee in his hand. He’d look up when you appeared in your pyjamas, grinning,
as if he’d just found treasure.

“Look at this, kid!” he’d say, jabbing his finger down onto the
newspaper.

It didn’t matter what the news was, a new president in Peru, world
land speed record, the dollar hits an all-time high against the yen… He’d
gather you up, kissing the crown of your head, arms right around you, that
easy, unashamed Spanish tactility that set him apart from everyone else’s dad. He
smelled of Old Spice and Brylcreem and shoe polish. It was as if he’d jumped
straight out of the fifties, this weirdly loveable man who seemed never to have
got the hang of being modern, for whom rock music was some quaint and incomprehensible
diversion for children. Who loved life.

And there you’d be, before breakfast, listening to him explain the
intricacies of Peruvian politics or exchange rates as if he was telling you the
plot of
Jason and the Argonauts
, making it all real, the personalities,
the high drama of it all. He’d explain how whole economies rose and fell and collided,
like tectonic plates (which he would also describe in scintillating detail
whenever an earthquake was reported in the
Yorkshire Post
). He spoke in
a haphazard mixture of quick-fire Spanish and colloquial English, full of
expressions that didn’t quite fit,
toe-ragged
this and
godsforsakeme
that, a private language for him and his son, a language of wonder and discovery
and faulty grammar.

Joe was different. A couple of years older, by the time he reached
his teens he wasn’t interested in listening to Dad. All he wanted was to
be
Dad, to drop out of school and join the family business. And whenever he asked
if he could go down to the showroom, his father would shrug, his smile never
slipping, but the disappointment impossible to conceal.

Tony Ray didn’t want his sons to follow in his footsteps, dodgy electrical
goods and fake perfume, transit vans full of leather coats and a bloke waiting
for the five hundred quid you owed him… He wanted his boys to be lawyers or
doctors, like all immigrants do. When John got into Cambridge it was the
happiest day of Tony Ray’s life. And when Joe got his head blown off, in the old
showroom, it devastated him. But it didn’t surprise him; it crushed him with
its numbing inevitability. His spirit seemed to drain away, a life-long
fascination with all that the world had to offer replaced by the knowledge that
his son was dead because he’d wanted to be like his father.

John looks at his watch. Fifteen minutes and he has to tell Baron
about Reid coming up here to see Dad. Either he does or Den will. Quarter of an
hour and this is going to blow up, taking them all with it. He doesn’t even
know how, or why. Joe? Odds-on he was involved. Bringing a shipment of Semtex into
the country? Joe and Lanny were young and arrogant at the time. Explosives
wouldn’t have bothered them in the slightest. A mire, Joe used to say. The
world’s a mire, and we’re all knee-deep in shit.

But his dad? He never dealt in drugs, never got involved in
prostitution. His forte was counterfeiting, toys, electronics, perfume, money.
It was as if even his criminal career was infused with Old Spice, mild and
old-worldly, like an Ealing comedy. Dodgy? Of course he was. The sepia-tinged
image is bullshit. John knows that. He’s not stupid. But that doesn’t make Tony
Ray a terrorist. Semtex for the IRA? It doesn’t fit. He can’t make it fit.

Andrew Holt appears at the door. His step slows, both men looking first
at each other then across at Tony, as if to deflect their mutual embarrassment.

“Popular, you are today, Tony!” Holt says, as if the old man can
hear.

He goes over to the wardrobe and starts going through the suits,
ignoring John.

“I thought you were off duty,” John says.

“I am,” Holt says, taking a pinstriped two-piece out and dusting it
down. “I forgot this. He’s having it dry-cleaned. Graeme’s collecting it first
thing tomorrow, I said I’d leave it out ready.”

“Ah, Mr Thornton, the old soldier. You’ve been helping him, I hear.”

“Graeme’s a good bloke. And he’s good for your dad. His face lights
up every time Graeme walks through the door. I think your dad likes the fact
that he’s trying to make a fresh start, his own business, pick himself up.
People respect that. It shows character.”

“But it’s not his own business. He works for Carr’s Dry Cleaners,
doesn’t he?”

Holt is choosing shirts to send for pressing.

“I don’t know the details,” he says, delving deep into the wardrobe.
“But anything that puts your dad in a good frame of mind, I’m in favour of.”

John nods.

“That reminds me,” he says. “Dad had a visitor this morning. See
him, did you? Because he didn’t put Dad in a very good frame of mind.”

Holt starts fussing with the shirts, their wire hangers getting
tangled as he tries to count them.

“I would have asked you this morning,” John adds, “but you vanished
into thin air.”

Holt lays the shirts on the bed.

“What happened this morning,” he says, speaking low, something
hateful and contemptuous in his voice, “was that someone doesn’t want your
father to live out his life in peace. How many reasons might there be for that?”

“Reaping what you sow, eh? I thought you didn’t judge.”

“
He that sowest to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption
.
Take away the
eth
s and there’s a lot of common sense in the Bible.”

“Forget the Bible. What did the guy say?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do.”

“So,” Holt says, holding his arms wide, almost laughing with
derision, “beat it out of me. Isn’t that what your type do? That’s what it’s
all about, isn’t it? Violent men and how their lives end?
The sword shall
perish with the sword…’
”

“Do you practice biblical clichés at bedtime?”

Holt grabs the shirts, lays them over a vacant chair along with the
suit.

“I don’t have to listen to this.”

“I read the letter again last night,” says John. “That was full of clichés
too, you smug, illiterate twat. You don’t care about good and bad. You care
about your own place in Heaven.
He that soweth to the Spirit shall of the
Spirit reap life everlasting
.”

A sudden rush of anger takes him by surprise. He forces himself to
stay sitting down, just in case he feels tempted to pay Holt back for that
letter. It was written more than quarter of a century ago, when Holt was just a
kid, but the effect on John Ray had been profound. In those three cruel, badly
written paragraphs was the suggestion that he’d never really be free of his dad
and his family. And now he knows it was true. Every word of it.

“You read the Bible, do you?” Holt says, sneering from the relative
safety of the doorway, the door itself wide open.

A moment’s respite. Both men remain there, staring at each other,
all pretence now gone. Their mutual loathing is out in the open, and it seems
to release something in Holt. The drop-in centre, all touchy-feely, the joss
sticks and cups of tea, it’s all a front. He’s worse than his father ever was,
blinded by his own self-righteousness. The question is, how far would he go?

“What did they say, you know, about Roberto?” John asks.

He watches the confusion spread across Holt’s face.

“Roberto?” John repeats, his tone reticent, as if trying to smooth
over of the unpleasantness between them. “He’d been coming to see you. So you went
to the police, right? Once you knew he’d been murdered?”

Holt turns and is gone.

“You never told ’em, Andrew!” John shouts. “You never went to the
bloody police, did you!” He springs to his feet, bawling down the corridor
after Holt. “Good and bad, eh? You fucking hypocrite!”

He closes the door, rests his head against it, smelling his own sour
breath.

“See that, Dad?” he says. “There walks a man of God.”

He senses movement behind him, his dad’s body shifting in the
armchair, the faint clack of his mouth opening. Tony Ray is awake.

“I’ve been talking to a redhead, a real beauty. She told me some
things that I didn’t like. But perhaps they’re true. Now I don’t know what to
believe.” He bangs his forehead against the door three times. “Dad?”

But when he turns and looks, his father’s eyes are closed.

John walks over to him, leans down and embraces him, lips brushing
the old man’s thin, close-cropped hair.

“I’m gonna to find out, once and for all. You hear me?” He holds him
closer, tighter. “I know you can hear me, Dad. I’m going to sort this out. And
they’re all gonna leave you in peace.”

He’s back in the car.

I don’t know what to believe.

It’s not true. Not quite.

He’s still hiding behind a wall of doubt, the same wall he’s hidden
behind for most of his life. But now it’s coming down. He’s got to be sure,
though. Absolutely sure.

Jeanette knows more than she told him. Ring her? No, this has to be
face to face.

His hands are on the steering wheel, and he’s gasping for breath,
trying to think, but nothing coming, only the thought of the bomb, that lad
walking out amid the devastation, a small bundle in his arms.

He feels the nausea overwhelm him, a sudden blood-rush of horror
that courses through his body. His hands are sweaty, slipping on the fat leather
steering wheel as he tries to remain upright. A Porsche! Flash motor from his flash
showroom, his business, his life… and all of it a sham, one that he didn’t even
know was a sham. No; he
did
know, but he had never admitted it to
himself, could never bring himself to make the connection.

There he remains, slumped at the wheel, shivering with cold. His
body is so heavy and lethargic that when he tries to raise an arm it feels like
he’s in chains.

Jeanette knows the truth. She must do. Whatever game she’s playing.

Finally he pulls himself up in the seat, staring straight ahead,
avoiding the mirror. He’s got to see her.

The silver Porsche pulls away from Oaklands Nursing Home with a low
growl. And as it goes, Andrew Holt watches from an upstairs window.