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Overture
Chapter 9
McLennan’s attention was divided between the glistening rain on the windowsill, and the object in the evidence bag that dangled between his finger and thumb.
He took a cursory glance around the ugly, depressing, spartan room, saw no chair, and elected to sink down onto the bed itself. The ancient mattress sagged and bowed, and the slats beneath it complained, but the whole took his weight, and he drew a careful breath as he eyed the contents of the bag.
The mask had been folded out of necessity, in order to fit it inside. This drew sharp, disconcerting ridges and furrows in an otherwise handsome visage, all laughter lines, neat black beard and seductive smile. McLennan turned his head to one side as he studied it; something about that cut-out, eyeless gaze was curiously difficult to meet.
He gave in, and turned his stare back to the open window, and to the dying rain that was still speckling and prickling the peeling wooden sill. Something in his brain, as tired and overworked as it was, felt as if it were in dire need of a click at the sight of this but, for the moment, that epiphany eluded him. He simply sat, one hand wrapped around the mask in its sterile bag, and watched the dull play of light on the small puddles of water.
The bedroom door inched back, and a young WPC inserted herself through the gap. McLennan struggled to remember her name, but he was battling against the fact of too many hours without carbohydrates and coffee and too many nights without unbroken sleep, and eventually conceded. He settled for a taciturn nod of recognition, and hoped that it would suffice.
“Are you all right, sir?” she asked, cocking her head to one side, quizzical, like a small bird. “You look a bit...”
“I’m fine,” McLennan interrupted, as gently as he could muster. “What is it?”
“Detective Sergeant Finch is here, sir,” said the constable, after a pause to reorient herself. “He’s just arrived. Shall I send him up?”
McLennan grunted heavily, heaved himself up from the bed and brushed the creases from his overcoat, somewhat irritably. He was horribly aware, from the apprehensive expression on the constable’s face, that right now he probably resembled less a calm, incisive police detective than he did a surly, cave-dwelling troll on the attack, but there was little to be done about that. He simply forced a smile of sorts, and shook his head.
“No, no need,” he said, and then cleared his throat noisily to shift the tepid coat of dust that appeared to have lined it while he’d been in the room. “I’ll come down in a minute. Thank you,” he added, after a pause. The constable nodded, and backed out of the room, relief suffusing her movements.
Alone once more, McLennan turned back to the window, and this time took several slow steps towards it. Shielding his eyes against the drizzle, he leaned out a little and scrutinised the drop to the patio beneath. He paused, the rain shining on his hair and the back of his neck, and tried once more to force through the impending mental connection that he could feel, scuttling like an irritable ant at the back of his brain.
It wouldn’t cooperate. He snorted in frustration, and pulled his head back into the room, remembering to duck along the way, not wanting to add the risk of concussion to his already towering problems.
Remembering the mask in his right hand, he lifted it once more and studied that empty gaze. There was something mockingly familiar about it, but he was halfway down the stairs before he took a moment to stand still and analyse that teasing flicker of recognition.
His thoughts, though not particularly fluid, were dammed completely by the sound of the front door opening. The feeble glow from the streetlights flooded the hall, and an amorphous shadow entered, followed closely by its owner: Finch. The sergeant ran one hand halfway up the banister, regarded his superior with eyes that looked, even in the half-light, to be as pink as a rabbit’s, and coughed very gently.
“Anything interesting, sir?” he said, and then shot a brief glance over his shoulder to check that they weren’t overhead. McLennan sighed, descended the last half dozen steps, and handed the evidence bag to Finch, who took it as if it might explode.
“It looks like we’ve found our masked train robber, anyway,” said McLennan, by way of explanation. He stopped, waiting for a reaction, but nothing flowed back into his ears besides a heady silence, as Finch continued to scrutinise the mask through the plastic, his eyes wandering to and fro like foraging beetles.
“Anything else?” asked Finch, still without tearing his gaze from the bag.
“Plenty, since you mention it,” said McLennan, folding his
arms. “Some heavy weaponry; a Browning
nine millimetre, Desert Eagle, Uzi SMG and a Walther P99, all plus ammo. Serious drugs, as well. There’s enough coke up there to bankrupt the
whole of
This, the inspector observed with some dark, exhausted amusement, seemed to get a reaction at last.
“Bloody ‘ell,” breathed Finch, his accent slipping several notches further back into an angular Lancastrian twang in the midst of his shock. He dropped his hand, the mask forgotten for the moment. “Any sign that anyone’s been here lately?”
“Well, the place is a tip, there’s dust everywhere and I saw at least one coffee cup with a rainforest in it,” said McLennan, thoughtfully, “but that’s no indicator. I went to university. I know what blokes can be like when they live alone,” he finished, snorting gently as he did so, and not quite believing that he could possibly be tired enough, and under enough strain, to be making contemptibly weak jokes in a time and a place like this.
If Finch found anything about his inspector’s manner inappropriate, he didn’t register it nor allow any fragment of change to cross his features. He simply craned his gaze up into the gloom at the top of the stairs, and rubbed at his chin for a second.
“Everything still up there?” he asked, still staring the darkness down. McLennan nodded firmly.
“I had the lads leave it all in place until you got here. I thought you’d want to have a poke round while everything was still as is.” McLennan wound down, suffered a tentative afterthought, and added: “I’ve probably missed one or two obvious clues, so I could use the help.”
In an instant, he wasn’t at all sure why he’d said that. It was certainly tantamount to admitting to some serious flaws in his capacity as a police officer, and not something that, under any other circumstance, he’d have even contemplated saying to any other copper, let alone one he’d only known for a few weeks. He backed up one mental step, and wondered why on earth he’d trusted this confession of humanity to, in particular, Eric Finch.
He stared across the small space between himself and the younger man, and found no hint there. Finch turned, almost as if he’d felt McLennan’s eyes on the back of his neck, and frowned softly.
“Everything all right, sir?” he asked, one foot already upon the bottom stair. McLennan shook off the clinging fronds of uncertainty, slipped both hands into his pockets, and nodded.
“Everything’s fine, sergeant,” he said, trying to work enough reassurance into his tenor for the both of them. “Let’s get upstairs and see what you make of it, yes?”
As they mounted the threadbare stairs, McLennan heard the bustle of activity outside the front door growing fainter behind them, the fizz of police radios and murmur of voices falling prey to an insectile, velvet silence that appeared to be leaching out of the darkness itself. He took one last glance back down at the light of what passed for civilisation and then, folding his coat around himself to hold back a chill, continued to climb.
Gordon sat back in the armchair and rubbed at his eyes. It was approaching dawn, and he knew for a fact that he’d be paying for his sleeplessness at some point in the afternoon, but in the meantime he was subsisting on stewed black tea and chocolate biscuits.
He and Edward were seated opposite one another, but they were both watching Nelson, who was trotting to and fro, circling the coffee table, crinkled damp nose pressed industriously to the rug. There was a contagious restlessness to the dog’s manner and, though it could have passed without saying, Edward nevertheless spoke up.
“He can smell V around here,” he observed, quietly, as the dog brushed past his ankles once more, still snuffling. Gordon nodded soberly and went back to gazing at the surface of his tea as if he were scrying. After what felt like an hour, he raised his eyes from the limpid glaze on the liquid and coughed gently.
“Dad?”
“What’s that?” asked Edward, somewhat distantly, his eyes still tracking Nelson’s ceaseless path around the living room.
“I was wondering what made you drive all this way in the dark,” said Gordon. At this, Edward snapped his head up, but to give him his due for self-control, he paused for as long as it took to click his fingers at the agitated dog.
Nelson glanced around, one corner of his lip lifted, but he eventually acquiesced and, sighing mournfully, slumped down at his master’s feet. He continued to flick his eyebrows around the room, however, and his muzzle would periodically twitch and wrinkle as he inhaled the drifting scents on the air. Edward patted the animal’s smooth head vaguely, and then fixed his son with a beady glare.
“I was worried about you,” he said, sharply. “Don’t you think I had a right to be, after what’s gone on?” Gordon sighed lightly, set his cup aside, and sat forward.
“I get the impression that there’s a bit more to it than that,” he said, softly. He saw his father’s eyebrows dip, but pressed on. “Why not call? Why all this way in the middle of the night?”
“I had a dream,” replied Edward, his eyes unfocused, and Gordon experienced a sudden muscular spasm at these words. He dredged up several vignettes of his earlier nightmare, although not quite of his own free will and not without a tainted, acidic burning deep in his guts as he recalled his unconscious and curiously masochistic reaction to it.
“It wasn’t about...rats, was it?” he asked, tentatively, and watched his father’s brow furrow at this peculiar question.
“No, no,” Edward said, bewildered. “What makes you ask that?”
“I...” Gordon began, then shifted uncomfortably, toyed with the sleeve of his robe, and decided that he had no way forward from this point unless he wanted to raise doubts about his sanity as well as introducing some very difficult topics. He surrendered. “It’s nothing,” he continued, exhaling. “Doesn’t matter. What were you dreaming about?”
“I was dreaming about your mum.”
“Oh, Dad,” Gordon started to say, but he was restrained, by both Edward’s raised hand and by the comprehension that he had no idea how to finish the sentence.
“It’s all right,” muttered Edward. “It was about the time you got beaten up by Joe Etheridge’s boy. D’you remember?”
Gordon was unlikely to have forgotten; that was the day he’d lost his first baby tooth. The Etheridges lived on the far side of the valley from the Deitrich farmstead, and Gordon had been playing in the quarry one summer Sunday with their youngest son, David, who was two years older and, more significantly, just that bit taller and heavier.
In truth, and though Gordon had been too shell-shocked to correct the implied version of events at that point in time, it hadn’t been anything as drastic as the “beating up” that his distraught mother had assumed. The two boys had gleefully scaled the sycamore on the far side of the quarry and then, in the way of boys, become embroiled in a heated debate over who had made it to the top first.
This had naturally descended into a half-hearted shoving match, but Gordon, replacing strength with enthusiasm, had lost his grip on his own branch and tumbled from the tree. David, after a perfunctory check to see whether or not his playmate was dead, had run for home. Gordon, meanwhile, had limped back to the farm, palms and knees grazed and full of black grit, eyes and nose streaming, bloodied tooth in his shirt pocket.
When Edward had returned from the farmer’s market, he’d discovered Yvonne in floods of hot, silent and indignant tears, plucking gravel from Gordon’s skin with a pair of tweezers and mopping up the blood with damp cotton wool as she went.
Later that afternoon, when Gordon had been sent to bed to rest and recuperate, he’d heard his mother’s distant, raised voice, demanding that Edward have a word with Joe Etheridge about the vicious behaviour of his son.
Gordon dragged himself out of this broth of remembrance and, in some fractured moment of physical memory, probed his tongue at the spot where that long-ago milk tooth had been knocked out by a limb of the tree on his way down to the ground.
“I remember,” he said, feeling that this was somewhat lame in the light of that vivid, fast-forward memory flash. Edward hesitated, his eye suggesting that he was taking some time and care in composing his next statement. In the ringing silence, Nelson lumbered over to Gordon and sprang up onto the sofa beside him, grunting softly with the effort of it all.
“That was the first time your mum ever cried over you,” said Edward, haltingly. Gordon blinked twice, and shifted to allow the dog to lay his head in his lap.
“Is there something you’re trying to tell me?” he asked, rubbing a soft black ear.
“There’s a point,” replied Edward, still picking his way through his words as if they were eggshells. “I’m getting to the point. What I’m saying is that you were hardly any trouble to us when you were a lad, which is why that stuck in my mind. Weren’t many other times when you gave us grief like that.
“I suppose...” said Edward, lowering his head until he seemed to be addressing his own lap, “...I’d thought that we got lucky. Your mum wasn’t supposed to be able to have kids, you know.”
“I know, Dad,” said Gordon, slightly plaintively, but he otherwise waited in silence for his father to reveal the meaning behind the words with which he was spilling over.
“It shook me, dreaming about that after all this time,” said Edward, at length. “I took it as some kind of sign that you were in trouble. And you were, weren’t you?” he finished, studying his son with such intensity that Gordon felt as if he were under an electron microscope.
“I still am,” Gordon told him, though he waved a languid, helpless hand in the air, contriving to indicate by this that there seemed to be little that anyone could now do about it. “I still don’t know exactly what I’ve...what we’ve got ourselves into here, and that’s a fact. I didn’t ask V to steal for me,” he added, mournfully.
“I never said you did,” Edward sighed, and he now dragged himself out of his seat, beginning to pace the room with slow, calculated steps. “But he’s impetuous. Of course he is; he’s just a boy.”
Gordon’s hand, which had been smoothing Nelson’s head while the dog mumbled contentedly, stopped dead in mid-stroke as these last few words filtered down to his hindbrain. He turned them over, tried a few alternative meanings, found that none fitted to his satisfaction, and gave up in bewilderment. After this very brief struggle, he angled his head up, very slowly.
“He’s what?” he asked, soaked in confusion. Edward paused, then brought himself up short in front of the sofa and ran a hand through his hair.
“You hadn’t noticed?” he said, though rhetorically. “Maybe he’s different now. He was changing when he left me, I know that. But he’s only a kid, all the same. Twenty, maybe twenty-one. No more’n that.”
“That’s all?” asked Gordon, rigid with incredulity.
“I’d say so, yes.”
“That’s not possible. He’s...what I mean is...” Gordon stuttered, ground to a halt, and then sank back into the sofa as he tried to absorb this development. What am I trying to say, he thought.
He realised, very quickly, that he was attempting to communicate this: that in spite of his confusion, whenever V was present he’d studied him as a man might study a cobra, appreciating both the imminent threat and the breathtaking fluidity of the animal. That he’d watched V move, and had never seen so much as one hint of extraneous motion or awkwardness; he moved like a twist of smoke in a summer breeze. That in every word, gesture, turn and expression, V carried himself with impeccable composure, and wore the indisputable air of a man much older and wiser than Gordon himself.
Do you want to tell your own father that you find this man hauntingly beautiful, he asked himself, and knew that the answer was no. Some things did not need to be brought up in such close quarters and under such fraught circumstances. He coughed, and turned his gaze downward.
“What’s the matter?” said Edward, softly. He sat down on the far end of the sofa, and for several seconds the three formed a curious, frozen tableau: father and son with the dog between them, none of them regarding the others, all apparently rendered breathless in a moment of heightened sensitivity. It was Nelson who first broke the silence with a muffled sigh, but it was Gordon who followed this with words.
“I can’t get him out of my mind,” he said, simply, and then let his voice rest, knowing that Edward would either understand everything from this brief statement, or he wouldn’t. It was the only way that Gordon could possibly convey the twisted and unutterably complicated truth of the matter.
“I know what you mean,” Edward replied, knotting his fingers around one another and staring at them. “He’s compelling, isn’t he?”
This turn of phrase startled Gordon into looking up again. Though he was a fine father and a decent, intelligent man, Gordon had never known Edward to be overly articulate, and for him to describe something or someone as ‘compelling’ was so unusual as to be immediately noticeable.
“That’s as good a word as any,” Gordon agreed, “but I can’t be a part of this any more. I simply can’t. It’s too dangerous. That’s why I asked him to stay away.”
“You think you’re the only one who’s got problems?” asked Edward, still staring at some random point in space.
“I didn’t say that,” Gordon muttered. “I know what he put you through.”
“I wasn’t talking about myself, lad,” said Edward, and he now turned to look Gordon straight in the eye. “You’ve no idea what’s going to become of this country, do you?”
“Well...” Gordon began, and then paused to regroup, “I know that things are a little strained right now, of course, but with all the attacks we’ve been subjected to, it’s only to be expected...”
“You didn’t listen, did you?” said Edward, standing up abruptly and starting to pace the room once more, one hand clamped to his forehead as if he were in vague pain. “Neither did I, once upon a time. No, you be quiet and this time listen to me, lad,” he commanded, as Gordon opened his mouth to form some objection or interruption.
“I grew up without a dad. A
lot of my generation did, o’ course.
Your granddad got shot and died on a beach in
“As I got older, I started to understand,” said Edward, his voice
dropping and dwindling now, until it became a parched whisper that Gordon
struggled to hear. “I heard the stories,
I saw the pictures...Auschwitz,
Gordon found that he could no longer look at his father. He blinked several times to battle a sudden, curious sting in his eyes, and then glanced down at Nelson, who had since fallen into an easy, dreamless sleep, his chin rested lovingly on Gordon’s thigh. Gordon stopped, found a moment to envy the dog his untouched serenity, and continued to listen as Edward went on speaking.
“People forget this kind of thing so easily, you know,” said Edward, apparently addressing the ceiling, one hand rubbing distractedly at his own elbow. “I did, too. When something doesn’t seem that relevant to you, you eventually put it away. I’d a farm to run, and after a while I’d a wife and baby to think about too. I stopped thinking about other things.”
“Dad,” said Gordon, his voice infinitesimally cracked and his eyes now feeling as if they were lined with sand, “You don’t have to apologise for that. You had your priorities and, from where I’m sitting, you got things right.”
“No, I didn’t,” Edward retorted. “Yes, you were my first priority, and that was fair enough. But I forgot the way the world works. When everyone’s only out for themselves and their own comfort, that’s when evil gets a foothold. I should have been fighting back. I should’ve said something, anything. How’d things get so out of hand that our government were able to set up a concentration camp on my bloody doorstep?”
Gordon shied back at these last few words, delivered as they were not in a shout or a scream, which would have been shocking enough, but in a jagged, serpentine hiss that contrived to be far worse. Nelson, too, jerked his head up and regarded his master through wide, dark eyes that were ringed with white. Gordon, with his hand resting light on Nelson’s ribcage, felt rather than heard the soft whimper in the dog’s chest.
“I’m sorry,” he said, stunning himself with the composure in his own voice. “It’s just that some people have more reason to be afraid than others. You think I haven’t seen what’s coming? I have, Dad. I’ve seen it better than most people, and I’m dreadfully afraid. I...there’s something you should know about me. This might not be the best time, but then again maybe it is. I don’t really know up from down any more, to be frank.”
Edward turned, walked back to his son and sat down on the arm of the sofa. Reaching out, he laid one rough hand on Gordon’s shoulder and squeezed.
“What’s that?” he said, with profound gentility.
“I’m gay,” said Gordon, using a desperate exhalation to form those two difficult words.
“I know.”
“I didn’t want to lay a burden on you, and I didn’t want to be a disappointment, but...”
“I said, I know,” Edward repeated, kindly, and his hand moved, ruffling Gordon’s hair in a way that he hadn’t done for more than twenty years. “I’ve known for a long time. I believe I knew before you did, and that’s the truth of it.”
“You did?” said Gordon, faintly. “How?”
“I’m not sure about the ‘how’ of it, lad,” Edward told him. “I just did. Don’t ask yourself why I didn’t say anything. Would you’ve wanted me to, at the time? You had t’work it out all on your own. Didn’t matter one whit to me as long as you were happy with your life. But listen to me, now...” he went on, and waited until Gordon raised his head, questioning, “...if you do know where things are headed, then you’ll know that nobody’s going to be safe, not in the end.
“I did a lot of thinking after V walked out of my door,” he said, looking away for a second. “Digging graves gives you a lot of thinking time, it does. I tried to remember what’d gone through my mind when I found him in the river. That took quite some while, ‘cause I was still shaken up. But in the end I knew that I’d thought of you, and I saw V there in the water and I thought to myself, that’s someone’s son too. It might’ve been a small thing, but it changed me on the spot. After that, I couldn’t turn my back.”
Unable to contain himself any further, Gordon felt a warm, acrid tear tumble from the corner of his eye. He swiped at it, hoping against hope that his father hadn’t noticed, but he felt Edward’s hand pat gently at the back of his neck, and understood that for the time being, he was as transparent as glass with no way of concealing any of his inner workings from anyone at all.
“I’m sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean to...” Gordon began, but Edward waved him into silence.
“Don’t matter,” he responded. “You’re tired, it’s been a long hard night for both of us. I know you didn’t sleep last night because I didn’t either, but I’m the one who’s used to that. You get on up to bed, and no arguments from you, either. I’ll wake you up for some tea later. Okay?”
Gordon hesitated, but knew that it would be of no benefit to himself were he to refuse the suggestion. Lifting Nelson’s forepaws from his lap, he stood up, wavered a little unsteadily, and then trudged out of the living room door.
Edward waited, still sat upon the arm of the sofa, and looked for quite some time into the eyes of his attentive dog. He heard Gordon’s footsteps mounting the stairs as if he were marking each one very carefully. He heard the soft squeak of the landing, and then the click of the door to the master bedroom. Finally, Edward counted to ten, sotto voce, to be sure that his son wouldn’t return.
Only then did he pull a letter from his pocket and unfold it, studying the light, flowing script at very close quarters, a frown developing and drawing in as he did so.
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