To Kill For Page 9

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  She’d stopped stirring the gin, now, and just watched it, like she was looking at something she’d lost and could never have again. After a minute, she looked up and around at the other people in the pub. Finally she looked at me and forced a shrug.

  ‘A film.’

  She’d made films before for Marriot.

  ‘What about it?’ I said.

  ‘It’s a special.’

  That was how she said it. ‘A special.’

  Something inside me went cold.

  I didn’t push it. I suppose I should have. I didn’t have the words. I didn’t have whatever I should have had. I was just a lump.

  I don’t know what I would have done anyway. I don’t know if I could’ve changed anything. I might have done nothing, I might have done everything. I would have tried to help her, maybe, for what that was worth. I’d tried to get her to leave the business before but she’d fought me. I hadn’t understood it at the time.

  I suppose I might have saved her. I might have killed her, like I later killed Kid. I touch something, it dies.

  I think, then, sitting there in the Winston Churchill, Brenda was caught between telling me the whole of it, spilling everything, wondering, probably, if I could help her. Maybe she knew better than me what my reaction would’ve been. Maybe that’s why she didn’t say anything. Or maybe she wanted me to ask her, take the responsibility out of her hands.

  Anyway, we sat there and listened to the crackling music and the tar-filled laughter and throaty chatter of the people around, and at the silence of our thoughts. We smelled the crisps and the beer and the mildew and the furniture polish and the dankness that came with it all. We looked at faded prints on faded walls and at the people, the old, young, empty, faded people, clinging to this moment of escape, more real for them than all that bollocks up the West End. We looked at all that and, sometimes, we would look at each other.

  We walked back to her block of flats. The lift was working for once, so we took it up. She pushed herself close to me. It was warm in that metal box. She shivered and I put my arm around her.

  ‘I feel safe with you,’ she said.

  ‘Good.’

  When we got into her flat, she didn’t bother turning on the light. She kicked her shoes off and turned the fan on and fell onto the sofa. She hugged the Liberty’s bag and closed her eyes. I went and made us a coffee. When I brought it back, she hadn’t moved, and her eyes were shut. I put her mug down by her foot and took mine over to the window and looked out over North London. It was dark now and from Brenda’s place you could see the reservoirs up by Chingford and Edmonton, lights reflected in them. You could see Ally Pally up high and White Hart Lane and all the roads with bright insects crawling along them. It wasn’t something for the tourists, it wasn’t for those dusty old birds in Liberty’s or the young thin ones who’d be dusty in thirty years or the fat white men with fat white bank accounts who these women wanted to please. It wasn’t anything you could care about, but in the dark you could forget all the concrete and crowds and endless exhaust fumes and for a moment, if you were with your bird in a flat up high, you could think it wasn’t so bad.

  I felt Brenda’s arm curl around my waist.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For everything.’

  She held me. We looked at the view.

  Later, we were sitting in front of the TV. She was curled up next to me, holding me. The smoke from her cigarette was floating like a cloud in the middle of the room, just hanging there, as if time had stopped.

  She said, ‘Tell me something, Joe.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Anything. Tell me something about you. Tell me something nobody else knows.’

  ‘Why?’

  She let her cigarette burn. The sound of the TV muttered into the silence.

  ‘I don’t know why,’ she said finally. ‘I just want you to tell me something.’

  I started to tell her about my time in the Paras, about the slog of the Falklands, tabbing in that ankle-breaking terrain, the weight of the packs. I was going to tell her about the Argentine conscript, about how he still came to me, all these years later, in dreams or in dark moments, but she stopped me.

  ‘Not that,’ she said. ‘Tell me something else. Tell me a story.’

  I thought about that a while. I said, ‘There was this fight once—’

  She put a hand on my stomach.

  ‘No.’

  She looked up and put her hand onto my cheek and turned my face to her so that she could look at me in the eyes. She said, ‘Not that.’

  I understood then. I nodded. I tried to think what to tell her. I couldn’t think of anything. I felt clumsy, my mind breaking down, words not coming to me. I looked around her flat. I saw the print she had of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire. I said, ‘When I was fifteen I made a boat. Out of wood. I stole some bits of pine from the woodwork class and I whittled a hull and sanded it. I made the masts out of a wooden coat hanger I found in a skip. This old bloke lived in a flat near us and he used to say hello to me when he saw me. I gave it to him.’

  When I finished, she nodded.

  ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘That’s a good story. Now I’m gonna open my present.’

  She sat up and grabbed the package and ripped the wrapping off.

  ‘Blimey. This musta cost a bloody fortune.’

  She took the lid off and picked out the bottles and tubes. She looked at them and read the labels. Then she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She got up and went to a corner of the room, near the drinks cabinet. There she knelt and lifted a corner of the carpet away from the skirting board. She turned to me.

  ‘My secret hideaway.’

  She fiddled about a bit and prised up a large white tile. There was a hole underneath, chiselled out of the concrete. She put the box I’d given her in there, then she peeled off the dress and folded that up and put it in. Her skin was like the night, endlessly dark, the darkness lighting the white strap of her bra. Her ribs rippled, her spine pushed at her skin. She looked so thin, so breakable.

  She put the tile back and laid the carpet back on top. She made a drink then came back and curled herself up on the sofa, folding into me.

  ‘Only you know about that place,’ she said into my chest.

  ‘What do you keep in there?’

  ‘Oh, this and that. Stuff. You know. Nothing worth much to anyone else but worth a lot to me.’

  ‘So why hide it?’

  She thought about that for a while.

  ‘That story you told me, about making that ship and giving it to that old man, you never told anyone else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But it’s not something you should be ashamed of, is it? I mean, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t tell anyone.’

  ‘No. No reason.’

  ‘I think it’s like that, Joe. I think I need to keep something secret from everyone, something away from everything else. In a way, I think it’s something I need to keep away from me. If you see what I mean. But I want you to know where I keep it.’

  She turned her eyes up to me so that when I looked down at her, she looked like she was pleading with me.

  ‘You understand,’ she said, ‘don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

  But I didn’t. Not really. Not then.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  By the time I woke up, it was almost 4 p.m. and getting dark. I crawled out of bed. My head was better, but I felt dopey. I forced myself to do a few sets of press-ups and sit-ups and followed those with a long shower, switching the water from hot to cold.

  Browne had some food ready for me in the kitchen. He sat at the table and watched me eat. My head was clearer now, but the fear was there, lingering, twisting my guts slowly.

  ‘Are you alright?’ he said.

  �
��Yeah.’

  ‘Your brain still there, is it? Still working?’

  ‘Yeah. I need to find someone. He was injured, probably taken to a hospital.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Somewhere near Epping Forest.’

  He thought about that for a moment, wiping a hand over his head.

  ‘What kind of injury?’

  ‘Gunshot.’

  He muttered something, probably cursing me. Then he sighed and said, ‘It’ll be Whipps Cross or the Alex in Harlow. Too far for Middlesex.’

  ‘What about private hospitals, clinics, that sort of thing?’

  ‘If he had a gunshot wound, they’d take him to an A and E. Private hospitals won’t deal with something like that.’

  ‘Some doctor, then.’

  Browne shrugged.

  ‘An honest one would call an ambulance. And then call the police.’

  I knew he was right. I wondered if Glazer or Paget had picked Hayward up and taken him to some bent quack. But they wouldn’t have known where to find him; Cole’s men had dumped him in the middle of nowhere and I had Hayward’s phone. It was possible he’d managed to get to the road and flag a car. But Carl said he was bleeding badly. He surely would’ve phoned for an ambulance.

  All that meant I was a long way from finding him. And I was nowhere near finding Paget or Glazer.

  ‘Have you tried the ambulance stations?’ Browne said. ‘They have logs of all calls.’

  I got the number for the Essex Ambulance Service and made a call to the main station. I told the woman who answered that I was calling from Whipps Cross Hospital, and that we’d been told that a man with a gunshot wound was being brought to us by ambulance. She asked who I was and why I wanted to know. Browne had told me what kind of thing to say. I gave the woman a load of bollocks and she checked with her log and told me that I’d got it all wrong, a man had been picked up from the side of the Epping New Road, near the Wake Arms roundabout at 3.18 a.m. with a probable gunshot wound to the right shoulder, broken collarbone, hypovolemic shock. He’d been taken to Princess Alexandra.

  I had the bastard.

  ‘Oh, hold on,’ she said. ‘No, not Princess Alexandra. Addenbrooke’s.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He was taken to Addenbrooke’s. There’s a note here.’

  I told Browne what the woman had told me.

  ‘Addenbrooke’s? What the bloody hell is he doing there?’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Cambridge. Bloody NHS.’

  I grabbed my coat.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Browne said as I left.

  It took me an hour to get to the hospital, which sprawled on the south edge of Cambridge. It was like an industrial complex mixed with a council estate, all concrete blocks and chimneys. I took my time and drove slowly around the hospital, through the car parks and along the roadways, looking for police cars. If he’d been admitted with a gunshot wound the hospital would have made a report. He would’ve had emergency treatment and then, when he was able to talk, the law would’ve been waiting. Cole’s men dumped him about 3 a.m. By now, the law might’ve left, or they might still be waiting to speak to him. After a couple of circuits, I saw no sign of them.

  I stowed the car in the car park, near to the exit. I got out, pulled on my woollen hat and my large coat and headed towards the main lobby. I stopped at the help desk. A bald man sat there and stared at his computer screen and clicked his mouse. His name-tag read ‘Bryan’. A mug of coffee rested on the desk. He kept his eyes on the computer screen and held up a finger up.

  ‘With you in a minute,’ he said.

  He threw the mouse around a bit, then picked up his mug of coffee and sipped from it. When he was happy he’d kept me waiting long enough, he looked up at me.

  ‘What can I do for you today?’ he said, trying hard to look like he cared.

  ‘I’m looking for a friend of mine. Derek Hayward.’

  ‘Hayward. When was he admitted?’

  ‘This morning.’

  He clicked and typed and slid the mouse around. While he was doing that, he sipped more coffee. Then he reached a hand into a desk drawer and pulled a biscuit from a packet. It was when he put the biscuit back that I knew something was wrong.

  ‘Um. Now, Hayward, you said. No. Nobody here called that. Sorry.’

  He wouldn’t look at me, but started to glance through some of the papers to his side, like they were suddenly important. I turned and walked away, back out to the car. I tried not to run. It had been a mistake, coming here. I’d let myself become careless. My fucking head again, all fuzzy and clogged with the desire for blood. Like I’d said to Eddie, it was a mug’s game. Stupid.

  I hadn’t seen a closed-circuit system in the lobby, but I’d seen enough of them outside to know they’d have a rough idea of my face. In the car park, I scanned for cameras and saw one a dozen yards from me, aimed at the entrance. I’d have to ditch the car. I opened it up, wiped down the steering wheel, handbrake, gearstick and the few other parts I would’ve touched. I grabbed my Makarov from the glove compartment, gave the car a last once over, locked it and threw the keys into a hedge.

  Over in the distance, a woman was getting into her car. It would take her a few minutes to get out of the parking space and then out of the car park. I scanned the road she’d have to take. I walked out of the car park and along the road. I stopped by the corner of a large building, which looked like the generator station. I waited. There were no cameras here, no witnesses.

  I heard her car get near and then, as she rounded the corner, I moved into the middle of the road. She braked slowly, a puzzled look on her face. I held out my hand like I was an official of some kind. She stopped, put on her handbrake and opened the window. I walked towards the open window and leaned down.

  ‘I paid,’ she said. ‘At the machine.’

  She was in her late middle-age, maybe mid-fifties, and neat, but dully dressed, as if she’d left the house in a rush to run a quick errand. When I held the Makarov up, she looked at it, not quite understanding. When she got it, she said, ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m going to get in the passenger side,’ I told her. ‘You’re going to drive me out of here.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. As an afterthought, she said, ‘Don’t hurt me.’

  They came in as we left: two patrol cars with sirens screeching, both Cambridgeshire police. So Hayward was there, then, and they’d been waiting to see if someone would try to see him. Probably, the man on the desk had hit his name into the computer and some flag had come up. The woman shrank from the sound of the cars, and I could see her hand shake as she made the gear change. As we came to the roundabout, she said, ‘Which way?’

  I had an idea. Risky, though.

  ‘Which way?’ she said again, looking left and right, as if the direction she should take was all she had to worry about.

  ‘Go all the way round.’

  ‘We’ll go back into the hospital.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She hesitated, looking to see if any traffic had right of way. Now she was all nerves, and the shock of having a thug with a gun in her car was getting through to her.

  A van came up behind us and started hooting. That made her more nervous, and she stalled the car. I waited while she got it started. The van overtook and the driver gave us the finger.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said. ‘I’m not very good at driving. My husband…’

  She burst into tears and I had to wait a few seconds before she could get a grip.

  ‘I’m sorry. He’s ill and I have to drive, there’s no buses where I am.’

  She babbled a bit – a reaction to the shock – but she managed to get the car started and drove us back to the hospital. I directed her, and we passed a patrol car parked outside the main reception. Through the glass doors, I saw uniforms talking to the bald man at the desk. I looked for the other patrol car and saw it for a moment ahead of us, turning slowly, cruising around the hospital grounds, looking for
me. I told the woman to park up the road from the first patrol car. I moved the rear-view mirror so that I could watch them.

  If Hayward had talked, they’d know he was in with serious people, and they’d want to grab those people. If he hadn’t talked, they’d wonder if he was still a target. Either way, they’d have to go and check on him.

  The uniforms came out, and spoke to each other. Then one of them keyed his radio and spoke into that. They got into their car and pulled out and came past us slowly. I kept my face down, like I was texting someone on a mobile. When the patrol car was fifty yards ahead, I told the woman to follow it slowly. She did and in a minute I saw the car stop at a smaller two-storey building. The uniforms got out of their car and walked in. We passed the building. It was called the Gardenia Wing.

  I got the woman to drive us out of the hospital then. We stopped in a quiet residential street, a quarter mile away. The street was wide, with grass verges and thick-trunked trees. A few cars passed us, followed by a couple of people trundling by on bikes. I told the woman to give me her purse. She did and I fished through it for some ID. I looked at her name and address and handed the stuff back to her. I forgot it all the second I gave it back.

  ‘Now I know where you live,’ I told her. ‘Don’t tell anyone about this.’

  After she’d driven off, I walked into town. I’d have to give it a while before I went back. Visiting time was until 8 p.m., which gave me a couple of hours.

  I found a small dark pub, and a small dark corner to hide myself in.

  What Browne had said was plaguing me. He was right to wonder why Hayward had been taken to Cambridge when there were hospitals closer to Epping Forest. Maybe they’d decided he wasn’t that badly hurt. Maybe all the other Accident and Emergency places were busy or closed or on holiday. It seemed wrong, and I didn’t like it.

  I bought some flowers and, at half past seven, I waved down a cab. It was dark and drizzly, the rain floating in the air. The night helped me, and the rain gave me a reason to turn up my collar and bury my face. I told the driver to take me to the hospital. As we neared, he asked where I needed to go. I told him the Gardenia Wing. He dropped me off. I had twenty minutes till visiting hours were over. I told the driver to wait for me. He wanted money up front, so I bunged him a tenner. He turned off the engine and sat back to read his paper.