Crusaders (53 page)

‘Steve, are you listening to us?’

Yes and no. He heard her, mostly. But it was an effort of will, and there was a limit to what he could usefully contribute. By his reckoning they had already spoken enough tonight of this
difficult
juncture in Ally’s career.

‘I’ve gotta know what you think, but.’

‘About what?’

‘Well, should I try it with this other band? Or do I stick with this lot? Or, I dunno, do I just pack it in?’

Stevie saw no doubt – her singing wasn’t to the standard of her dancing, and the showband she had been fronting for a few months had clearly told her as much that afternoon. His own afternoon had been spent still drinking down the spoils of a Saturday passed at Newcastle Racecourse, the first meeting of the jumps, where a risky fifty quid at twelves on Take No Prisoners had paid off in spades. He had been on Johnny Walker and Carlsberg ever since, burning through a rare elation rather than slaking any special thirst. Now his tandoori mixed grill was being set down before him, and he realised that his eyes had been a good deal bigger than his stomach.

‘Steve. I’m asking you, please. Have you got a view?’

‘Aw, have I not fucking said?’

‘Don’t be so
irritable
, God.’

‘I’m
not
, man, I’ve
said
. There’s only way to gan about it – you’ve just gotta decide what you wanna do and set yer’sel to it. Y’knaa? See where you want to be in the end, do what you need to get there. It doesn’t
matter
what any other bugger thinks.’

‘Do you not like wuh voice, then?’

‘I like everything about you, pet.’

It was no lie. When they first met, when Mickey Ash had
started
squiring her to Zeus – then she had the same twee
powder-pink
prettiness, the same flesh-baring compulsion he’d seen in a million Geordie blondes. Now her skin seemed airbrushed, there was copper in her variegated coiffure, her wardrobe was cutaway but classy. She was pure sleek. He had thought her dim, too, in those early days – thought that a fact when she took up with Dougie. But she had shown herself shrewd and attentive, had chose her moment well to tell him she had always been shy of him. There was, he had decided, a certain grace in their being together now, after all this time. She was adaptable, too, fazed by next to nothing, certainly not by his now making camp at her little walk-up flat on Fenkle Street, commandeering her tidy bedroom with several crates of his rough gear.

Something, though, had changed. This night alone had begun all wrong, he saw as much in her face when he pitched up in his pub suit of leather and jeans. He had thought it a night to relax. She had a definite agenda.

‘If it’s gonna work for me I’ve got to do it now or not at all. That’s if you and me are serious, like.’

‘What’s not serious about you and me?’

‘You know what.’

Decidedness – that was the quality in her he had never
expected
, just the thing for a nice untaxing evening. He nearly laughed. ‘Ally, just – think about it a minute, eh? Do you
want
a kid? Really? Or is it just the idea you’ve started fancying? Cos of what’s-
her-face
?’

‘Don’t be bloody rotten. What do you take us for?’ She poked at her plate. ‘I’ll tell you this for nowt, if we’d a child you might give us half the thought you give them others.’

‘What you talkin’ ’bout?’

‘You
know
, man – Karen and Lindy.’

‘Ally, divvint go down that owld road. It’s just – it’s a fact, right, I divvint
need
another bairn.’

‘Well, I think you do. Cos it’s not like you’ve got the ones you’ve
got
.’

‘
Bollocks
, man. They’re my kids, I see ’em when I want to, and that’s all – it’s all squared and agreed with the mothers. What?’

‘You. “The mothers”, like. Is that what they were? Just the little baby-ovens for you? Incubators?’

‘Nah. Wasn’t a bit like that. It’s just how things turned out. Didn’t turn out like I was meant to be with ’em. Neither of ’em.’

‘Cramped your style, did it? Couldn’t live with ’em once they got a bit broody?’

‘It were nowt like that. Bloody hell. Tell you what –
you
but,
you’re
gannin’ the right way about it.’

It was a try at levity, buttressed by a version of the Sharky smile. But she had taken offence and, so decided, would not be shifting. Her fork sifted her plate as if food itself had been the slightest
pretext
, now indigestible.

‘It’s like you don’t ever think about the future …’

He rubbed at his temple, disbelieving. Truly she had picked a strange moment to turn slow-witted. ‘Ally, the future’s all I
ever
think about. It’s just there are times you’ve just got to get from day to day, nowt else. Deal with what’s right in front of you. Can you not see that?’

‘Whey, that’s what
I’m
having to do – cos of you. I don’t know where I am, Steve. You use me flat like a lodging, you don’t tell us owt why. If you’re thinking of packing in what you’re doing,
I’ve
got to do something, we’ve got to think where we’re –’

‘Have I not said? How many times? I’m
not
fuckin’ packing in. They’re not
real
problems, these, none of ’em. All it needs is time and we’ll sort them, man. So will you give it a fuckin’
rest
?’

He was leaking adrenalin, he knew, burning off aggressive
carbohydrates
, and it was wrong that she suffer the force of this pent-up feeling, the price he was paying for being in a kind of hiding,
permanently
switched off and shy of attack mode. The fury reared up in him suddenly, he saw himself doing it and still couldn’t arrest it.

They ate, then, in silence, until Stevie’s phone pulsed in his coat pocket, and he rummaged for it thankfully.

‘Do you have to? Answer that?’

‘I do.’

The hubbub of the restaurant was hopeless, so he rose and stalked toward the door, only to find a pint-sized waiter darting to his side.

‘Sir, excuse me, where do you go?’

‘You’re kidding, aren’t you pal? I just got me
plate
, man. That’s wuh lass owa there.’

Outside he paced about the stoop, glancing back through a porthole in the door at Ally, who still wasn’t eating.

‘Aye, what?’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m at a mate’s, where are you,
Brian
?’

‘The Damask. We’ve had some bother. Lindy’s pissed off, there’s
neebody
on.’

‘Eh? Pissed off where?’

‘Off home. It was Gore, see. He come round, started –’

‘Gore? The fuck was
he
doing?’

‘I divvint knaa, do I? He just showed up. It was him talked her into it, like, pissing off, looked like to me.’

‘What, and you just let ’em off, the pair of ’em?’

‘Whey, what was I s’posed to do? Give her a smack? Or him, like?’

‘You’re supposed to use a bit of judgement, man. Jesus, you coulda given fuckin’ Gore a clout, that would’na taken owt.’

‘Well, see, I didn’t know that was your view on things, Steve.’

‘Aw, fuck me. So what? What are you doin’?’

‘What do you think I’m doing? I’m gunna lock up, send the girls home.’

‘Like fuck y’are. Divvint you fuckin’ move your arse, Shack, I’m gunna gan fetch her back.’

Silence from the subordinate.
‘Aye, well …’

‘Aye
right
. You hear us?’

‘Aye, I do. Whatever you say, boss …’

Some valve in his head had come clean off its thread. Every association in his life now a source of disorder in his house, a cause of calamity. She, perhaps, had been overdue her little revolt.
He? Stevie could not have foreseen the aggravation that was John Gore, not if he’d been given a million years.

Back at table he sat only to spoon up some hasty mouthfuls and swig from the three-quarter pint.

‘Listen, I’ve gotta do a quick bit business, but you stay –’

‘Aw
what
, Steve?’

‘You stay and finish, here’s the money. I’ll see you back at yours.’

‘Who was it? Was it Shackleton?’

Old Shack – nobody liked him, he didn’t care. Stevie thought it almost enviable. He tossed his chin in the affirmative.

‘Just leave it, man. Can you not just?’

‘Don’t tell us to fuckin’ leave it. I’ll be an hour. Hour tops.’

He threw on his leather and stomped out, cleaving the air, his boots hardly touching the ground en route to the car park off the Gallowgate. There as he left it, the heap-of-shit cut-and-shut Corsa that Shack had secured him from his mate in Shiremoor, where the Lexus was garaged. A joke vehicle, but functional, negligible, permitting him to feel he had slipped into sweet anonymity round town. For that much service, he supposed, he had
Brian
to thank, since
Brian
always had a sharp eye for a deal.

He sat on the faux-leather sofa beside his subdued beloved, perched on a knife edge of his own forging, quietly going mad. By their abrupt return they had disturbed Yvonne from her planned viewing. Now she slurped at a mug of tea intended to send her kindly on her way. But she seemed reluctant to quit the
faux-leather
armchair, burbling in her clotted accent of how the boy was no bother but was surely a bit spoiled. Lindy nodded at the news that Jake had been safely abed since eight-thirty, though his toys were all rudely upturned around the laminate floor as though he had been abducted.

Amid the blather Lindy favoured him with half of a smile, a godsend of sorts, for in the taxi she had seemed remote. ‘Glakey’, wasn’t that her word? After a fruitless phone call to her friend Claire, she had slipped down the seat and into silence.

‘I’m proud of you,’ he said after a while.

‘I’m doing this for me, John. For me.’ There were pensive moments before she added, ‘So I hope you’ve got a plan, mister.’

Now, though, it was as if little of note had occurred that night, other than what she told her auntie – that she had developed a chill and planned to curl up. Nonetheless they were both smoking cigarettes, sharing the ashtray, the sliding door to the garden shoved aside. Perhaps she had attained some prized sense of relief. It was too bad he had to wreck it. She was putting off her phone call, but he could not delay his. Nor could he be sure of the size of disturbance he was liable to cause in her house. He had toyed with the notion of smuggling it out, and seen that for futile. It would have to be found in its place. She could be no party to his
process until it was done. So he would have to do it, then
persuade
her of its wisdom. He would have to vouch for the
integrity
of Robbie Chisholm, an unknown, perhaps unknowable quantity. It was a headlong leap into the dark, but the moment had come, was already past, nothing left but the fall.

He smiled, touched her arm. ‘I’m just for the bathroom,’ he murmured, and rose, went to the stairs, climbed them calmly, but turned right on the landing and proceeded by tiptoe into her
bedroom
. He crouched and with deft hands drew aside the clothes on the rail. There, he saw only the timeworn mounds of her pumps, heels and trainers.

He felt needles behind his eyes – stood, cheated, despairingly silent, wanting to kick things over, looked about him wildly. Everything seemed messily available to his futile inspection, no other nooks or crannies. He yanked uselessly at the drawers. Why now? When hid for so long in plain sight? Who was thwarting him, laughing at him? He dropped to the floor, on his knees and elbows – and there it was beneath the bed, amid fluff and hair, shoved onto its side. He wrenched it out, pulled the zip halfway, determined that the packing was as he had left it.

He sat down on the bed, by the bedside telephone – then,
indeterminate
, rose and went to the door, listened and heard still the aimless chatter below. And so he pulled the door closed, retrieved the scrap of paper from his wallet, took up the phone, dialled the number. It rang five times.

‘Hallo?’

His voice lurched out of him as a hiss. ‘Robbie, it’s John Gore. I –’

‘Can’t bloody hear you, man, speak up.’

He struggled up to a notch just below conversational. ‘It’s John Gore.’

‘Aw aye?’

‘I’ve got what I promised you.’

‘You what? What was that then?’

‘A gun. A gun, it’s Coulson’s but I’ve got it, how do I get it to you?’

There was a pause, a discordant crackle, a new hush.

‘A gun. You serious?’

‘Yes, it’s in front of me for Christ’s sake, how do I get it to you?’

‘Don’t you do a fucking thing, I’ll come to you. Jesus. Don’t touch owt neither, you hear? Where are you?’

The anticipated question, and yet still it loomed, a giant.

‘Where are you, John?’

He was waist-deep, neck-deep, sunk and drowned. No
compromise
.

‘The Oakwell Estate, Hoxheath. It’s number thirty-two.’

‘Whose place is it?’

‘Her name’s Lindy.’

‘Not Lindy who works at Teflon?’

‘Yes, but this is what I meant, she doesn’t know anything about this, she has to be kept out of it.’

‘We’ll sort that all out, she’ll be fine. She’s there with you?’

‘She’s in the house. But she doesn’t know, see.’

‘Thirty-two Oakwell. Right. I’ll be there in maybe twenty minutes. Just sit tight and keep your head on.’

Gore set down the phone, feeling the merest euphoric twinge through the knot of trepidation in his gut. He stood, stepped out onto the landing, heard nothing now. Edging to the top of the staircase, he craned over the banister and knew then that Yvonne was being shown to the door. He crept back to the bedroom, sat at the foot of the bed, pushed the Adidas bag to one side, and
waited
. Then he heard the footfalls on the stairs, and felt some
measure
of blood and vigour drain from him. She came through the door, and he met her jaded gaze.

‘What you doing up here? Were you on the phone?’

‘Yeah. Sorry. I just had to talk to a friend.’

‘Oh aye? Is this your house now?’ She came and sat beside him, gave him a look he thought plaintive – rueful, unimpressed and yet mildly indulgent. ‘I’m not just giving you the keys here, y’knaa. Just cos you love me.’

‘We have to talk, Lindy.’

She sighed, profoundly. ‘I dunno I can manage much more. Can
it keep for the morning?’

He laid a hand on hers. ‘We know each other now, don’t we? No more secrets?’

‘If you say so,’ she murmured.

With his free hand he hoisted up the hold-all between them. That flare in her he saw revive as if sparked.

‘The fuck you doin’ with that?’

‘Tell me what’s in it.’

‘What’s it
to
you, man?’

‘Because no more secrets, Lindy.’

His invocation of principle seemed an added annoyance. ‘John, I don’t
know
what’s in it. It’s Stevie’s, it’s his bloody … bag of tricks. I’ve always kept it for him when he’s asked us. Look, he used to sell them drugs for weightlifters, the steroids? He’d ask us to hang on to his stash sometimes, case he got raided. Alright? So that’s why. It’s not my
business
, but.’

‘Okay. That’s good.’

‘What’s good about it?’

‘Because we have to get our stories straight.’

She winced at him. He summoned his nerve. ‘The man I just spoke to – he’s a policeman. Northumbria CID. He’s coming here. So we can sort this out.’

‘You what?’

‘He’s a plainclothes man, undercover, he’s – you’ll see, you’ll know him.’

But she was clutching at her lolling head, face purpling. ‘Police? Coming here? Aw, what have you
done
, you stupid bastard?’

‘We’ve agreed, it has to stop, Lindy. Well this is how.’

She groped for the bag in his lap and he pushed it aside, to the floor. But she swung an open palm at his face, and he felt the smart of her ring finger on his cheek.

‘
Why
did you do that? Why? How can you be so –
stupid
?’

She punched and grabbed at him, and he tried to restrain her yet her vehemence defied him. They were struggling. She had her fingers on his face, her nails scoring.

Now the doorbell was being rung, insistently, angrily.

He managed to rise, aimed at the door, found her still snagged on him, yanking at him. ‘You mad? Where do you think you’re going?’

He resolved that he would yank her along with him if need be, but the drag was more cumbersome than he had supposed. They were tussling still down the stairs, she flapping and forcing herself in front of him, pummelling him. And then she must have
misstepped
, for she was tumbling down the last half-dozen steps, thumping and flailing into the facing wall at the foot of the
staircase
.

He hastened to her. She slapped at his hand – ‘Fuck off!’– and he felt himself let go of certain hopes that had lingered. He had not wanted it this way, but the door needed opening, and an amen put to affairs.

Instead he heard a key turning. They both did, and her face was stricken.

He turned and saw Coulson in the doorway – in his hard boots and his leather, his face a mask of rancour.

‘The fuck’s gannin on here?’

Gore felt all his resolve crash through the floor. Panic had hold of him now as Coulson shouldered his way into the space. Lindy was regaining her feet, very awkwardly.

‘Y’alright, Lind? You hurt?’

‘Steve, man, you’ve gotta get on. Get out, it’s for your own good.’

‘Aw, I’m not leaving. Naw, I’m taking you. Get your bloody –’

‘You’ve
gotta
, Steve. Police are coming.’ Gore shot a look at her, and she at him, and he saw her in the act of relinquishing some stake of her own. ‘He’s shopped you. Your bag, he’s shopped you for it.’

He saw it fully now – too late, he knew – her dread, conceivably worse than his own.

‘He has, ask him.’

Coulson’s dead eyes were trained hard at Lindy’s and he was breathing oddly. A bitter dragging cry came down from the top of the staircase.

‘Mam, what’s happenin’?’

Lindy was bounding up those stairs again. Gore felt Coulson’s dense, skin-crawling hostility turned solely upon him. The space was tight and this bull of a man filled it. No means of escape, no possible mitigation.

‘She right? Did you, then? Shop us?’

‘You have to stop, Steve. They’re coming for you.’

‘Who’s coming? Eh? Who?’

The shove to Gore’s chest drove him against the wall and near off his feet. Coulson was shaping his body and Gore flung up his hands, but the flat hard heel of a palm flew out between them and rocked him on his feet, rattled his jaw. The speed and the static before his eyes dazzled him, and as he listed the right fist came at him squarely through his feeble guard.

The pain was as if a rail-spike had been hammered through the meat and bone of his face. His vision crumpled and
muddied
, his legs were giving way – he grasped a hold of the newel post of the banister, but felt himself lolling round it, hopelessly exposed. He wanted very badly to raise his groggy head, and yet he had the ghastly sensation of his face filling with blood like a wineskin. That, and the grim maddened monster, implacably over him.

‘Stop, Steve, please,’ he managed to groan, before he sensed the pivot in Coulson’s body and saw something of the boot hurtling at him, believing that his head was to be snapped clean off his neck in the fractional second before oblivion.

She had no choice but to try to contain the shrieking boy in her arms as she hurtled back down the stairs. She could risk but a hand to grab at Steve while he kicked the prone, inert Gore
repeatedly
in the stomach.

‘Stevie,
don’t,
man, you’ll
kill
him.’

‘Get
away
, he’ll fuckin’ –’

‘Why did you kick him in the
head
?’

‘Shut
up
, man. I oughta kick it the fuck
in
, the
cunt
.’

And he lifted one boot and crashed it down on Gore’s
collarbone. 
Jake, whose screams had become whimpers, broke into wails once more.

‘Steve, man, please, look, there’s blood coming out his
ears
.’

‘Shut
up
, you. That doesn’t mean owt.’ He wrenched Jake from her arms and swung the boy round, dumping him into the
armchair
. Then he seized the fabric of Lindy’s shirt and wrenched her toward him. She could smell the drink on him and her stomach turned, for she had watched him hurt people before but never with such fervour.

‘Fucking pull yourself together, woman,’ he spat. ‘Tell us what he done.’

‘He just said he called someone, they were coming.’

‘Where’s me bag? Upstairs? Your room?’

She nodded and he thrust her aside. She regained her balance, looked at her terrorised son, his livid streaming face, and then at Gore, unconscious, his nose grotesquely flattened amid bluish bruising and shocked laceration.
Don’t freeze
, she told herself, even as something heavy and frigid clogged her veins.

Noises carried through the hallway door, from the alley
outside
, and she turned to see through the frosted panel of the door – a human figure, first one then another, perhaps another. She ran to the door, fumbled out her keys, turned the lock, turned back to the staircase, her panic total. As she looked blindly this way and that, there was a grievous thump on the door that shook its frame, then another, a splintering, and the door swung wildly and battered the wall. Men were filling the hallway, men in black balaclavas and windcheaters. She gaped, turned and ran for the living room and her son.

‘Don’t hurt us, please.’

But she couldn’t reach him, and then there were hard hands over her eyes and mouth.

Stevie heard the unholy commotion and was stock-still for one moment, knowing himself trapped, aware too of a torpor round him like a cold fog. Impulse was his only guide. Instantly he unlatched the window, seized the hold-all and hurled it over the
neighbouring wall. In the same moment he resolved to follow, shoved the glass frame as wide as it would go, grasped on to the frame. But he was just too large to go through by any means other than a sickening plummet headlong to the paved patio below. Maddened by his brute plight, he wrenched himself back out in time to see the bedroom door smashed wide, and in that sight of hoods and balaclavas he was deluged by dreadful realisations – his own misreckonings, the nature of his betrayal, the shape of dread – for these were not policemen but soldiers, blades in their hands, two feet of long shining steel.

The first assailant was scrambling at him across the bed, and he threw the right and struck relenting flesh, but his other flank had been taken by a second man, a canister thrust in his face and he received the toxic jet full-on, felt the dire piercing chemical burn, his eyes gushing pain. He bellowed and choked, lumbered and lashed about him. His hands were still on his face when he felt the cleave through his leather arm, through his flesh and to the bone, sick and loathsome and disabling.