Keep Me Alive (22 page)

 

Will rolled over and lay on his back, gazing at the ceiling. Mandy kissed his shoulder. He breathed in the heady mixture of sex and clean sheets and the little herby pillow she kept tucked under the real ones. He slid his arm under her and pulled her right up against his side, twisting his head so that he could kiss her hair.

‘You’re lovely,’ he said.

‘And you’re the first man that’s ever talked to me after.’

‘D’you mind?’

‘Don’t be daft. I love it. But you’re allowed to go to sleep, too. You must be knackered after getting the early train like that.’

‘Oh, Mandy, you’re a woman in a million.’ His eyelids did feel a bit heavy. And his mind was working at half its usual speed. It turned up a memory he’d meant to deal with sooner. ‘Did they make any trouble for you at work?’

‘No. I made it sound as if I was really ill. They didn’t question it for a second. I’m a really good actress, you know.’

‘I’ll bet you are.’ He kissed her again, then let her go, to give himself up to the rolling waves of sleep he could feel rushing towards him. Something held it up for an instant, some faint worry, but it wasn’t enough to keep it back for long.

 

Liz left eventually, but the miasma of her distress and Ferdy’s malice hung over the flat. So did the memory of the fun Trish and Antony had had flirting. Trish flung the last of the coffee
down the sink and put the cups into the dishwasher, noticing the thick smear of Liz’s lipstick on one.

Trish had to get out of the flat. Outside, she hailed the first free cab she saw and asked the driver to take her to the Black Eagle in Vauxhall. He looked a bit doubtful, but she assured him she knew what she was doing.

The pub was closed after the lunchtime rush, but there were all the sounds of cleaning she’d expected when she reached its front door. No one answered her knock there, and she wasn’t going to try to summon anyone through the double cover of the pavement hatch that must lead down to the cellars. There had to be a back door somewhere for the kitchen staff and supplies. She walked round the sides of the big brick building until she found it. There were a couple of bells beside the newly painted door. She pressed the top one. There was no answer to that either, so she tried the one below.

A young woman, barely out of her teens, opened the door. She was wearing a neat mesh hairnet, the female equivalent of the Smithfield meat porters’ hats, and a clean white overall.

‘Yes?’

‘Hi. My name’s Trish Maguire. I was wondering if I could speak to someone.’

‘What about?’

‘I was in the pub yesterday and there was a bit of a barney. One of the barmen came to my rescue, and I’d like to thank him. I’ve got a couple of questions for him, too.’

‘A barman?’ She sounded half-witted.

‘What is it, Jo?’ asked a male voice from the darkness behind her.

Trish recognized the man she wanted. She smiled and held out her right hand, saying her name again, and went on, ‘I’d very much like to talk to you.’

‘This is the landlord,’ Jo said, ‘not one of the barmen.’

‘All the better. Great. Might I come in?’

‘I’ll deal with this, Jo. You go back to the kitchen. Sure,’ he said, turning to Trish. ‘Come on through.’

He led her through the pool room and on into the big bar at the front. Two fit young men were busy with vacuum cleaners and a third was polishing the bar. All the windows were open. Even so, the air was heavy with old cigarettes, hard to breathe and thoroughly unpleasant. Trish made sure she wasn’t wrinkling her nose.

‘Can I get you something?’ he asked.

‘That’s kind. Umm, tomato juice?’

‘Sure.’ He was back a moment later with a glass and a small bottle of juice for her. He had a Coke for himself. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I wanted to ask you about Daniel Crossman. That’s the man you saved me from last night.’

‘I know who he is. But who are you? Last night you said you weren’t the police. You don’t look like any social worker I’ve ever met. So what’s your interest in this?’

‘I’m a barrister. I used to work in family law. I’ve been a kind of consultant in the case.’

‘Been?’

‘Yes.’ Liking the look of this man, and still grateful for last night’s intervention, she wasn’t going to lie to him. ‘Any formal involvement is over now.’

‘So you’re just poking your nose in?’

Trish smiled. ‘That’s right. But if a few more people poked their noses into this sort of thing, fewer children would be killed by their stepfathers. You must know that.’

He drank some Coke, then put down the glass. ‘I’m Mick Thompson by the way.’

‘Hi. How long have you had the pub?’

‘A while now.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘I’m one of the lucky ones. I have work that’s worth doing, an income, and a wife who isn’t afraid of me.’

‘Unlike Crossman?’

He confirmed it with a crisp nod.

‘What’s his problem?’ Trish asked. ‘In particular, I mean.’

‘He lost everything when he lost the army. Most of the blokes who come here did.’ He wasn’t looking at her.

‘The job and income, you mean?’ she asked, remembering her own views of how hard Crossman must have found the real world after he’d been pushed out of the army.

‘More than that. Don’t you see? Everything about you that’s valued in the service is wrong when you come out. You’ve learned to be tough. You’ve worked for self-discipline and the right to discipline other people. You’re trained to fight and endure. And to kill. Then you find yourself in a few poky little rooms, penned up with kids yowling and a woman who nags on at you to talk about bits of yourself you don’t even want to know you’ve got. And your only exercise is shopping – which you always get wrong – or changing the kids’ nappies. And woe betide you if you lay a finger on anyone, or even slam your fist into the wall.’

‘So, you’re not talking about post-traumatic stress or anything like that?’

‘No.’ He did look up then. There was a faint smile around his lips. ‘There’s plenty of that, too, of course. We’ve blokes come in here who’ve been in Afghanistan, which was an almighty fuck-up; Bosnia; the Gulf. And Ireland, of course – always Ireland. Most of us have done several tours there. We even get some from the Falklands. None of them have forgotten. But in most cases that’s not it.’

‘So what is, apart from what you’ve already said?’

‘Isn’t it enough?’

‘You look like a man with more to say,’ she said, and was relieved to hear him laugh, even though there wasn’t much pleasure in the sound.

‘It took me a long time to understand, but you get used to
having an enemy,’ he said at last, his gaze now on one of his helpers, neatly coiling the long flex of the cleaner with as much care as though it was the fuse of an incendiary device. ‘Losing that leaves a big empty space in your life.’

Trish didn’t take long to decode Thompson’s last comment. ‘Are you saying the families get put there?’

‘Yup. And it takes a strong woman to get you out of the habit. My wife did it for me, but she’s exceptional. I went through all the usual stuff: you know, silence, anger, non-cooperation; violence, even. She didn’t let me get away with any of it. We’ve made it this far because of her.’

‘And Crossman hasn’t got anyone like that?’ As she spoke, Trish thought of Will, and the wife who’d left him.

‘Doesn’t seem like it.’

‘You’ve never met his wife?’

‘Nope. Not many of the women come in here. Not the young ones, anyway. They don’t like it. And the lads need to be with their own kind once in a while to sit quiet or talk about things like the AK47 so they don’t have to think about the mess inside their heads. Otherwise, they blow.’

‘I can see how it must help, but it’s tough on the families.’

‘The whole thing’s tough on them.’

‘What about Crossman’s stepdaughter?’ Trish asked, which was what she’d come to do. ‘You obviously know what’s going on in his household – the police suspicions and so on. Have you any idea what he could have been doing to her?’

‘No.’ Thompson’s voice deepened. ‘But he wouldn’t be the first to put a child in the space he keeps for his enemy.’

He cares, Trish thought, he really cares. Aloud she said, ‘A fragile, six-year-old girl? Are you sure?’

‘Anyone can get put there if they threaten something you need.’ His expression hardened into something much more like the faces she’d seen last night. ‘You don’t have to look at me like that. It’s not only blokes who do it. Haven’t you ever seen a
young mother trying to feed a child who won’t eat? Mouth clamped shut, spoon pushed away, mess all over the bib, bowl on the floor. That baby’s the woman’s enemy and they both know it. It may not often be a fight to the death, but it’s always a trial of strength.’

Trish considered some of her friends who’d had children. Then she thought of Estella Welldon’s terrifying book
Madonna, Mother, Whore,
which she’d turned to for enlightenment when she’d had a case in which it had been the mother who’d abused her child.

‘What do you think Kim threatened in Crossman’s life?’ she asked, trying to forget.

‘I don’t know. But whatever it was will be why he went for her – if he did. They say no one’s ever found a mark on her.’

Always that same phrase, Trish thought, as though the only cruelty that mattered was the kind that left physical marks on the body. And this time it had come from a man who must know all about modern techniques of breaking the will of a captured enemy. No one needed ropes and electrodes these days to get information out of anyone; not when they had sleep deprivation and drugs and all sorts of other ways of disorientating their victims.

Will shook the blood out of his eyes and tried to make them work better. He could hear that Mandy was still breathing, but he wanted to see her. The gurgling sound told him her throat and lungs had to be full of blood. It wouldn’t be long now.

He had his hands round the slaughterman’s throat and thought for a bare second that he was winning. Then the man somehow got his hands up between Will’s arms and forced them apart with such speed and power that he lost his grip. A fist like a hammer crashed into the side of his head. He tried to hit back. Seconds later something happened to his legs. They started to quiver. His balance was going and his vision with it. His knees buckled and he was down.

‘Come on then.’ A taunting voice broke through the dizziness and pain. ‘On your feet, arsehole. Or have you had enough?’

Will fought himself and his fury and his knowledge that the gurgling from Mandy’s throat had stopped. He dared not look towards her, for fear of what the man would do to him. He got as far as his knees. Now he could see the bastard’s feet, never still for a moment. He thought of launching himself in a kind of rugby tackle. Then the man danced sideways. Will knew he’d be flat on his face if he tried. Blinking the last blur from his eyes and feeling blood pouring over his face, he pushed himself up. He could see again, even though a cut near one of his eyes was leaking blood into it.

The slaughterman was silhouetted against the white muslin curtains. His fists were up. Will couldn’t make out his expression because of the dazzle.

‘Come on, then. You think you’re so tough you can mess about with a girl like Mandy, but you’re nothing.’ He wasn’t even panting, in spite of the non-stop movement. ‘A tosser who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow or what you’re meant to do with either. Come on then. It’s different when you’re facing a real man, i’n’t it?’

He danced again from side to side. Then the miracle happened. One dancing sidestep took him into a puddle of Mandy’s blood. His foot skidded and he fell. As he went down, his head caught on the open drawer of Mandy’s dressing table. The crack was like a pistol shot in the little room and it galvanized Will.

An instant later he was sitting on the man’s chest, ready to ride him like a bucking horse if he came round again. At last Will could look at Mandy, lying in a pool of her own blood under the window.

Her face was a pulpy red mass. Only her eyes were untouched. There was no light in them, no movement, no hint of anything happening in the brain behind them. But they seemed to be staring at him in accusation. He had to look away.

The pretty dressing gown was rucked up around her knees. He couldn’t tell which red blobs were the roses printed on it and which the blood splatters. Her ghastly head was bent at a terrible angle.

She had to be dead. Even from where he sat, Will could tell that. You didn’t grow up on a farm without recognizing death when you saw it. Not from this close anyway.

Had she known the man from the slaughterhouse was coming? Had she been involved in the whole scam all along? Was that why he’d found it so easy to get into her bed? And to make her tell him about the farm at Sainte Marie?

He groaned. What was it Mandy had said this morning? ‘I’m a really good actress, you know.’

Had she set him up?

A siren whooped nearby. Then another. Someone must have called the police. No surprise really. They’d been making enough noise to worry a whole neighbourhood, what with him roaring like a bull, the man from the slaughterhouse shouting obscenities and Mandy screaming.

They were both quiet now. There was no urgency left anywhere in Will any longer. Not with Mandy dead and the man out cold between his thighs. Will eased himself off the man’s chest.

Will struggled to his feet, and limped towards the door, heading for the stairs. His left arm dangled in a weird way, and the hand wouldn’t do what he wanted. He tried to waggle the wrist and the grating of bone against bone told him he’d broken the arm. His head wasn’t right either. There was a kind of swooping sensation in it and a buzzing in his ears.

The siren had stopped. Men were shouting and running up the pavement outside the house. Will was halfway downstairs, ready to let them in, forgetting the lock had already been burst open. A blur of blue and silver erupted towards him, bellowing. He couldn’t tell if they were shouting questions or orders. The noise came in barks, sounding like the dogs in France. He leaned against the wall and let it support most of his weight as he slid down into a crouch at the side of the stairs.

One of the shouting men paused long enough to say, ‘What’s upstairs?’

‘One dead girl and an unconscious man. At least, I left him unconscious.’ His eyelids drooped and he thought he was going to fall. He put out a hand to steady himself, and a leaden foot trod it into the wood beneath. He couldn’t help screaming as his knuckles cracked. Other hands pulled him upright and lugged him downstairs. Someone was talking about an ambulance.
Someone else was asking him questions about what he’d done. The voice rose until it was yelling like the rest, crashing into his head like the slaughterman’s fists. Will hadn’t the energy to answer anything. He didn’t know what to say. He just wanted to pass out. A moment later, he got his wish.

 

Trish walked into a huge supermarket, trying to decide what to give Will to eat. Everything she saw seemed to hold catastrophe under its neat plastic wrappings. Even the plastic wrappings themselves had been involved in one of the endless food-scare stories she’d read. Someone had written about them contaminating food with cancer-causing chemicals.

As she leaned down to pick up two corn cobs, she saw that the box was littered with small black mouse droppings. Revolted, she went in search of a member of staff. A uniformed man was unpacking fruit a little further along the display case. She told him what she’d seen and watched a pleased smile widen his mouth.

‘Is that what they are?’ he said. ‘I didn’t know. But it makes sense because when I opened the box last week, a mouse jumped out.’

Eventually she left the vast store with a corn-fed chicken she proposed to roast to death, which ought to deal with any microbes lurking in its flesh. There were also a couple of potatoes in her bag, which she would bake, and some purple-sprouting broccoli. That could swim in a bath of boiling water for long enough to deal with anything except rogue prions (which she assumed vegetables couldn’t have) or chemical contamination.

Thoughts of chemicals were still with her after she’d deposited her purchases in the fridge and sat down at her computer to make sense of Will’s outpourings from last night.

Obedient to his instructions, she watched Jamie Maxden’s video again. There were markings of some kind on the plane,
but the film wasn’t clear enough to distinguish them. Even when she used the enhancing programme, she couldn’t see more than a blur. And there were no obvious landmarks around either. The roofs and trees and grass she could make out might be anywhere.

She peered again at the screen, trying to see more of the wrapped packages the men carried. It was still hard to tell exactly how long they were, but it was true that they looked pretty much the same size as the split carcasses she’d seen on the shoulders of men walking through Smithfield. If they had been sacks of chemicals, wouldn’t the packages have flopped more than these? Maybe not, if they were packed tight enough. But then they wouldn’t have that little bounce at the end with each stride.

Looking wasn’t going to tell her any more, so she clicked off the video and brought up a screenful of Will’s hurried information. She smiled as she thought of their first meeting and his flood of anger and explanation of what Furbishers had done to him and the others. That diatribe had been a lot harder to deal with than this. Then she’d had to listen and remember in order to pick the story out of the unnecessary detail. Now all she had to do was highlight each piece of real information and copy it to a new file.

Coffee became necessary towards the end of the afternoon and she brewed herself a whole pot. Then she abandoned the computer in favour of pencil and paper. Doodling had always brought her thoughts to order in the past and usually led her on to the questions that would open up the still hidden facts she needed.

Little pictures of aeroplanes crossing the Channel made her wonder why Will had felt it necessary to go to France and how he’d landed on any particular place there. Looking again at the video, she couldn’t see anything to identify the field as belonging to any particular country, let alone a precise spot.
They’d assumed it had to be somewhere near the abattoir, where Jamie’s body had been discovered. How had Will found the derelict farm in France?

She drank more coffee and was momentarily distracted. This wasn’t just a hot wet drink with enough caffeine to make her brain cells jump. It was a rich, slightly powdery liquid with chocolate notes and just a hint of bitter caramel. Wonderful.

Refreshed, she remembered something about an aerial photographer in the notes she’d made of Will’s story. Her eyes were drying out and her head was dizzy before she found it: a tiny comment in his description of a conversation he’d had in the pub near Smarden Meats, where he’d gone for information on the knife-happy slaughterman. Her notes were full enough to bring back memories of what he’d said last night.

‘What I think is happening is that the slaughterman is stealing carcasses, or maybe just hijacking the ones that have been condemned and are supposed to be destroyed, although I don’t know how he stops the Meat Hygiene Service people noticing they’ve gone from the condemned chiller. The pilot is flying them over to an illegal meat-processing plant in France, where they’re butchered in the French way—which is quite different from the way we cut up meat. I imagine some must be sold locally, but I’m convinced that a sizeable proportion is brought back into this country through the Channel tunnel, probably in apparently respectable meat lorries but with faked documents, to sell at premium prices.’

Trish grabbed her pen to scrawl in the middle of her doodles, ‘Why would anyone bother?’

At the beginning of her career at the Bar, she’d done a six-month pupillage with one of the criminal specialists in chambers. He’d become a judge years ago and she rarely saw him now. But he’d taught her that wherever there was money to be made legitimately, there was more to be made by criminals.

Even so, could transporting slabs of meat like this ever pay
enough to justify the risk? She wished she knew more about the economics of the legitimate trade. It would be something to ask Will this evening. She added to her short list of questions.

‘That’s why no one’s suspected them so far,’ she read in the notes she’d made of his long explanation last night. ‘Usually stolen or uncertified meat is flogged off very cheap in markets in little out-of-the-way towns, or sold at the back door of scruffy restaurants and takeaways. But if you make your stuff expensive enough and offer it through glamorous shops, people are much less likely to doubt it.’

But why does the meat have to go anywhere near France? If it’s having faked documentation anyway, why not just take it from the abattoir to Ivyleaf Packaging? And if it has to go to France, why isn’t it sold on there?

Maybe money wasn’t Flesker’s only motive, she thought, remembering Colin’s account of the episode that had closed the family slaughterhouse. It had been EU regulations that had started their difficulties and a French vet who had compounded them. Maybe Flesker was taking revenge on the authorities by flying dodgy British meat to France and bringing it back under their noses to sell at a huge premium. But could even the combination of some cash and the satisfaction gained from revenge make this kind of exercise worthwhile?

She couldn’t make sense of any of it, so she took herself off for a mind-clearing shower. As the water beat down on her head, she ran through her summing up of Will’s story, still looking for the profit. Surely the pilot and his mates would earn enough from whatever they were doing only if the plane brought something back from France, after they’d delivered the meat. She thought of the email that had accompanied the video. ‘I’ll send you the rest later,’ Jamie Maxden had promised.

Both she and Will had assumed that ‘the rest’ would be more shots of the men, their burdens and the plane. Or possibly something happening at Smarden Meats itself. What if it had been a
record of the return journey with a revelation of its cargo? Her teeth clamped around her lip and frustration made her bite.

 

The chicken wasn’t only cooked to death now; it was in danger of incineration. Trish turned down the oven. Where on earth was Will? She checked her watch for the fifth time, trying not to feel irritated. She told him to come at eight and he’d agreed. It was well after half past nine now. No wonder his sister had been so angry when her husband had been late home the other night. To have something cooked at an agreed time and then watch it spoil while you were left hanging, not able to eat yourself, or do anything else, because you didn’t know when you were going to be called upon to serve up the food! Exasperating. And insulting. The message that came over loud and clear was ‘your time is worth far less than mine’.

The phone rang. If this were Will, she thought, in a pub or caught up with a mate, she would be tempted to tell him to go straight home and then eat whatever remained edible beneath the charcoal on the chicken carcass by herself.

‘Trish?’ Antony’s voice was neither languorously seductive nor sharply irritated. He sounded concerned and brisk. She hoped he wasn’t going to say anything about Liz’s visit. ‘Sorry to interrupt your dinner.’

‘No problem. What’s up?’

‘Will Applewood has got himself in trouble.’

‘Oh, shit! What’s he done?’

‘No one’s quite sure. He’s in hospital in Kent after a fight. It’s bad. There’s a young woman dead, and another man with severe injuries. The fight took place in the woman’s bedroom. No one yet knows which man was the aggressor, but Will got off more lightly, so it looks like him.’