Authors: Jessie Keane
The Make (27 page)
Lorcan got back to the casino very late, much later than he’d expected. They’d been working overtime to get the thing just right, and he’d paid through the nose for the damned thing, but now he had it, and she was going to be so pleased. Delighted. It could be his last Christmas present to her – or the first to cement their new relationship.
He went up to the flat. The first thing he noticed was that the man he’d left guarding the door was gone. Off to take a piss or something, fair enough. He let himself into the flat. All was normal, quiet, warm and cosy.
‘Gracie?’ he said quietly, switching on the low, ambient lighting in the sitting room.
He crossed the room, slipping off his coat. She was probably in bed by now, asleep. He thought of her curled up there, her brilliant mane of hair spread out across the pillows, and smiled. He walked into the bedroom, moving quietly so as not to wake her.
From the light spilling into the bedroom from the sitting room, he could see that the bed was empty.
He felt his guts tighten in alarm.
He put on the light. ‘Gracie?’
Lorcan crossed quickly to the en suite, pushed the door open. It was empty.
He got out his mobile. It was switched off. He often did that; he hated the damned thing. He switched it on, checked his messages. Nothing from Gracie. He didn’t have Paul – the heavy’s – number. He phoned hers instead. It rang and rang. He could
hear
it ringing. He drew closer to the bed. Gracie’s mobile was on the bedside table, flashing, vibrating and ringing. She didn’t even have it with her.
He went back outside the door. Looked again at the empty chair there in the hall. Wherever she’d gone, it looked like she’d taken some backup with her. He hoped so, he really did. He went to the bedside table, grabbed a pen and paper, scrawled a note.
Gracie, if you come back and read this, STAY HERE.
He tucked it under her phone. Then he switched on his own mobile, praying for her to contact him any way she could and say she was okay. He snatched up his coat, and went out again.
The first thing the police did was call the pathologist and SOCOs to establish a crime scene right outside their own front door. The next was contact the DVLA and place the wrecked car’s registration number. It gave them Mona Thomson’s name and address. They got straight over there, and found Mona just coming out of her front door with her grizzling daughter clutched in her arms and her mother following on with bags and a suitcase.
‘Mona Thomson?’ asked the police. There were two of them, a man and a woman. Luminous jackets. Scary.
‘No,’ said Mona, gulping, eyes wide and frantic. ‘She used to live here, she moved out.’
The police stood there and looked at Mona, at her daughter still in a thin nightdress, at the bags, the suitcase, her mother’s anxious face.
‘Only there’s been an incident with a car, and its owner is Miss Mona Thomson, listed at this address,’ said the male police officer.
‘She ain’t here,’ said Mona, raising her chin, lips trembling.
‘Are you Mona Thomson?’ asked the female police officer.
‘
Shit
,’ wailed Mona, and crumpled. The little girl caught her mother’s distress and started crying too.
‘She ain’t Mona Thomson, she don’t even
know
that girl,’ piped up the mother, quivering with indignation.
Mona sent her a look. ‘It’s all right Mum. It’s okay.’
‘No,’ said her mother, and now she was on the verge of tears too. ‘It’s
Christmas
,’ she said desperately.
And I’m Santa Claus
, thought the male policeman. He’d heard it all before. The denials, the threats, the pleas and the weasel words.
‘Miss Mona Thomson?’ asked the female police officer.
Mona nodded slowly. ‘Yeah. That’s me,’ she said.
‘If you could accompany us to the station . . .’
And so it began.
Her mum took Josie back to her house and Mona sat in the interview room at the station late into the night. She’d seen the furore at the front of the station, the tent, the police tape all around it; inside was her car, with Lefty’s head jammed in the window. She wasn’t sorry about
that
, anyway. She told the police that in no uncertain terms.
‘Lefty Umbabwe was a bastard,’ she said, clutching her hands around the Styrofoam cup of coffee they’d provided for her.
‘Tell us about it,’ said the hard-eyed detective. He had straight mud-blond hair, a long, lugubrious face and narrow, deep-set conker-brown eyes. He looked tired and fed up as he sat opposite her. His female assistant, a skinny, hawk-nosed and spotty brunette, watched Mona with a stony face.
Mona scarcely knew where to start, but eventually she did. She told them about Lefty being a heavy butane user and about him being a procurer of young male meat for Deano Drax.
The female plain-clothes officer was writing it all down. She asked Mona for Deano Drax’s details, and Mona said she worked in Deano’s club and that was how she had become embroiled in Lefty’s concerns.
‘He had to find the boy, Alfie,’ she said, cupping her hands around the cup to keep warm, to stop the shivering that was part cold, part fear. ‘Deano was frantic to get him back after Alfie managed to give Lefty the slip. Lefty knew that Deano would rip him an extra arsehole if he failed. He was hopping mad about it, so Lefty was desperate. He said I had to help him, make it look like I was Alfie’s mum or some fucking thing, out on the streets searching for him. We looked and looked. Couldn’t find him. I didn’t
want
to help, but he forced me to. I was glad the boy got away. I’ve seen others hanging around with Deano, and it’s horrible.’
‘What then?’ asked the weary-looking cop when Mona halted, drank a little.
Mona shuddered.
‘It got worse and worse. He got more desperate. He was shit-scared of Deano, he
had
to get a result. Then one night . . .’ Mona’s voice tailed away. Her eyes were suddenly blank, lost in memory.
‘Go on.’
‘There was a cab driver. He was young.’ Mona swallowed hard. ‘Lefty was talking to him, asking if he’d seen this boy, this teenage blond, pretty as an angel, you couldn’t mistake Alfie for anyone else, he’s so beautiful. He was talking to the driver, and . . . all of a sudden, I don’t know how it happened, but Lefty just lost it. Completely lost it. I was just standing there beside him and suddenly he starts stabbing this poor guy in the throat, and then . . .’
Mona stopped again. A tear slipped down her cheek. They said nothing, but sat there watching her, allowing her time to gather herself together. Eventually, Mona took a shuddering breath and went on.
‘He forced me to help him. I didn’t want to. He told me to get in the cab. Then he pushed the dead man to one side and drove over to some old docks, near London Bridge. He pushed the cab into the river. I helped him; I had to. But I didn’t want to. You got to believe that. I was sick and I was afraid of him. He’d just killed a man in cold blood; I couldn’t believe it. I was
afraid
.’
More tears poured down Mona’s face. The police sat there, watched her.
Mona swiped at her face with a shaking hand and ploughed on.
‘Then, a while after that, he wanted me to go out with him again. I tried to refuse, but he wouldn’t let me. He told me we’d use my car. We were at the club, Deano’s club, and . . . oh fuck . . .’
‘Take your time,’ said the female police officer.
Mona ran a trembling hand through her hair. ‘It was horrible.
Horrible.
He brought this thing out to the alley where I’d parked the car. It was wrapped in a sheet, tarpaulin, that stuff, you know?’
They nodded. The female officer was taking brisk notes.
‘And I thought, what the hell is that? I didn’t have a clue. But Lefty told me to drive, so I did. We went out to the forest and . . . he dug a hole. He dug a
grave.
’
Mona gave a sob. ‘There was a body in there, but it was light, I knew it was light because Lefty lifted it so easily, and he wasn’t Rambo. And I started to think . . .
shit
, I’ve been thinking about it ever since, I haven’t been able to sleep for thinking . . . I started to think that it was one of Deano’s boys, that they’d overdosed a kid and Lefty was disposing of the evidence for him.’
‘What happened then?’ asked the male officer.
‘He dug the grave . . .’
‘Can you remember where it was?’
Mona shook her head tiredly. ‘No. Well, maybe. It was dark, I was scared, I wasn’t thinking about anything except the fact that he was burying a body and I was involved, I knew about it, so would he kill me too, tip me in there with it? I didn’t know
what
he was going to do.’
‘Go on.’
Mona stopped, plucking at a hangnail.
‘Mona?’ prompted the female officer.
‘It was awful,’ said Mona, looking up at them both with tears in her eyes. ‘This . . .
body
.
. .
it started moaning. It
wasn’t dead.
And it was like when he knifed the driver, it was just like that. He just acted really quickly. Really . . . quick. You know?’
They nodded.
‘He hit it with a shovel. It . . . the kid in there, I could tell it was a kid because of the voice, the sound, the scream . . .’
‘It’s all right, Mona, take your time.’
‘The kid screamed,’ said Mona, and now she was sobbing brokenly, trying to get the words out in between gasping breaths. ‘The kid screamed, but he just went on hitting him until he didn’t scream any more. I can’t forget it. Every night I go to sleep, and I see it over and over again . . .’
‘Go on.’
‘And then he found Alfie. He found the poor little cunt.’ Mona looked up at them. ‘I prayed to God he wouldn’t find him, but he did. And I tried . . . I had Alfie in the car, and I thought, I can’t do this, I thought about the taxi driver and the murdered boy and I thought, enough, I can’t do this any more, if he kills me then he kills me, I just can’t go on with this. I’m a
mother
,’ she cried in anguish. ‘That boy he hit with a shovel,
he
had a mother too. That woman’s never going to see her son again because of Deano and what Lefty did. I couldn’t go on with it, do you see that?’
They nodded.
Mona wiped at her eyes and gave a tired sigh. She paused, collecting herself.
‘So I thought, what the hell. I tried to get Alfie out of there, but Deano smashed in my car window and pulled him out. Then Lefty tried to grab me and I wound up the window, but he wouldn’t let go, he wouldn’t. I didn’t know what to do. If he’d got hold of me then he’d have killed me, I knew it. So I drove. I was terrified. I drove until I saw the police station, then I stopped, and it was then that I realized . . .’
‘That Lefty was dead,’ said the male police officer.
Mona nodded.
‘I just panicked. I ran for home, and we were going to go up North, hole up somewhere, I don’t know. We just knew we had to get out.’
The officer stood up. ‘Take a breather, Mona,’ he said, and beckoned his fellow officer to follow him out of the room.
Once they were outside in the corridor, he said: ‘Get her another coffee and get back in there and talk to her, get any more info you can. I’m going to get Deano Drax pulled in, see if we can’t get that boy back before . . .’
He didn’t finish the sentence. The female officer nodded. She didn’t want to
hear
that sentence finished, either. She understood. She went off to the coffee machine, thinking about the dross that was wandering around on the streets and wishing she knew a lot less about life than she did.
Harry was feeling very tired, and very cold. He was also in a lot of pain. And now the man was back, leering over him with his big head and his cruel eyes. And this time, as if it mattered,
this
time the man had a gun in his hand.
Oh just shoot me then you fucker and be done with it
, thought Harry.
Harry had heard about old people actually
wanting
to die, and he had never understood it. To Harry, life had always been sweet, to be savoured. But now, he understood those old people: infirm, filled with pain, just downright bloody
tired.
Life got thin, he could see that now. Life became too much. And then . . . well, was death so terrible, really?
An end to the pain.
An end to the torment and the fear.
No, not so terrible.
And now the git thought he could frighten Harry by pointing a gun at his head? What a laugh.
‘You ever played Russian roulette, Harry?’ the man was asking him.
It was an old gun, Harry could see that. This was no fancy Russian piece, no RK whatever. This was an old thing with a blued barrel and a six-cylinder. A revolver, his weary brain supplied. That was it.
Harry shook his head tiredly.
No.
The man had a box of bullets on top of the big chest freezer. He flicked open the six-cylinder chamber on the gun and he held up one gleaming bullet for Harry to look at. The man smiled broadly, and inserted the bullet into the gun. He snapped the chamber closed and pointed the gun at Harry’s head.
Em
, thought Harry.
He looked down the barrel of the gun.
But Em didn’t want him; she despised him. Em was lost to him forever. He was weary, filthy, beyond hungry, beyond anything but this tiny, cramped, crippling world of pain. He’d had enough. So what if this bastard shot him now. So
what?
‘It’s Christmas Day, Harry, and this is my gift to you. A little excitement to brighten your dull days. What do you think of that? You put one bullet in the chamber,’ the man was saying. ‘And then – guess what, Harry? – you just pull the trigger and you hope, Harry, that the bullet isn’t in that
particular
chamber, because it’ll blow your brains to fuck. That’s Russian roulette, Harry. What do you think of
that
?’
Harry shrugged.
Like I care.
The man’s smile faded. He liked his victims terrified, babbling, begging for mercy. He didn’t like them like this – beaten, beyond hope. This was no fun. No challenge. Angrily he placed the muzzle of the gun against Harry’s forehead, grinding the cold metal against Harry’s shrinking flesh.
‘Say goodbye, Harry,’ said Deano.
He pulled the trigger.
Harry flinched.
Nothing happened. Just a
click.
The chamber rotated. Was this new chamber empty or full? Harry slumped there, uncaring.
‘You’re a brave man, Harry Doyle,’ said Deano, almost admiringly. He put the gun aside on top of the freezer. ‘That’s the first, though, Harry, and there are five more spins of the wheel. You like this game?’
Harry nodded tiredly. Love it, hate it. Who gave a shit?
‘Back soon,’ said Deano, and left the garage.
Harry sat there, listening to the whir of the freezer motor, not even thinking any more about the food that must be in there. He was beyond hunger. Beyond thirst. Beyond the need for anything except for this to end. And end it would. Five more chances. One of them would be lethal. He didn’t care.
Not any more.
Em was lost to him anyway.