DEATHLOOP (13 page)

Zack needed some fresh air and a packet of Marlboro. He’d given up a year ago but he could feel that longing return with a vengeance. He didn’t want to ask for cigarettes here though amongst the enemy, it would make him look weak - wanting something always did. He said he didn’t feel too good and so the interview was terminated. Zack noted that Detective Brian Smith had suddenly started to look smug, as though he would have all this in the bag by lunch time.

Zack was angry with himself at getting so flustered and not beating this finicky little bastard at his own game, but clearly Susan had done a good job. After all, there was no telling what she had come up with. Zack had wanted to say, ‘look at me, mate, do I look like a guy who has trouble with that kind of thing?’ but he couldn’t of course he couldn’t. It would not have gone down too well with
Ms
Tracy Bright, either. Also, Zack had been told by Clarissa not that long ago that rape had nothing to do with sex really, and everything to do with control.

Zack was led out into a small yard at the back of the police station, there was a bench there that he sat on. There was no escape from this yard with its high walls, so why a young policeman stood across from him he could not fathom. Tracy and Zack had managed to share a few words before she said that she had to shoot off somewhere, but she would be back, and not to let them start without her. He decided that he would revert to the coward’s way next and say “no comment” until he could look at all the evidence in his own time. He would get bail, he knew that - that was a given. Allegations of rape are notoriously difficult to prove, and he took some comfort in that. Tracy told Zack that the pills would take some time to be analysed so at least a drugs charge was on hold for the time being.

Zack was desperate to see Sam. On the phone, he had asked him to bring a packet of fags, and despite Sam managing to register his disapproval in the few seconds of silence that followed the request, with a bit of luck, considering the circumstances, Zack was hoping that Sam might just turn up trumps.

Two hours later Brian Smith and Josiah Cornfield presided over another brief interview and everyone knew what would happen. Zack said “no comment” in response to every question, and after ten minutes or so Brian Smith became so irritated that he called a halt to the proceedings. Zack was granted bail, but his passport was confiscated as was his mobile phone, but he would at least now have time to consider Susan’s allegation at his leisure. He could barely remember their encounter and that was a serious problem. He was only guessing when he’d said he got back at twelve, it could have been earlier, in fact it had to be earlier, because the only way a message had gone from his phone to Susan’s was if she had sent the message herself.

As Zack started down a cheerless corridor he could see Sam looking anxious in the reception area, perched on the edge of an old plastic chair. This was nothing new for Sam, he always looked anxious these days, but Zack knew Sam’s varying degrees of anxiety and this was business class. Sam saw Zack heading towards him and stood at his approach. He patted him awkwardly on the back, then set off through double glass doors and down steps to the street outside, both of them desperate to be free of the place and to be together again.

“They wouldn’t let me see you, I tried, mate, I’ve been here for hours,” said Sam, passing Zack a pack of Marlboro and a cheap, see through lighter. Zack snatched at the neat little bundle and attacked it, frantic to get a bolt of nicotine into his lungs.

“I thought you were through with those things,” said Sam, trying hard not to sound too judgemental.

“Yeah, so did I,” said Zack, inhaling deeply and giddy now from the rush.

Sam led Zack to Clarissa’s Karmann Ghia, parked up over the street. Zack hated the thing. It was noisy and so low to the ground it felt like a dragster, but he’d have been happy on a tandem this morning, anything to get him back home. They got inside and closed the doors behind them. Sam started the engine and the car pulled off.

An emergency repair service had been called to provide Zack with a new front door, (at Zack’s expense), but they were still working on it, and Zack decided it was probably best to leave them to it, so Zack and Sam remained sitting in the Volkswagen outside. Zack had told Sam the basics on the short journey from the police station and Sam had listened intently to every word.

“If you didn’t have sex with her you’re in the clear,” said Sam, “without samples, she’s sunk.”

Zack didn’t look so sure. “You reckon?”

“Rapists don’t wear condoms, mate, but how the hell did she get in?”

“A gave her a set of keys I suppose.”

“You suppose?”

Zack shrugged.

“And did they find this other set of keys, the cops.”

“No, and they made a thing about that. Plus there was a text message sent from my phone to Susan’s at 11.30 last night, asking her to come over,” said Zack, who was clearly still bugged by this.

“But you didn’t make it?”

“Of course I didn’t, she must have made it from the flat once she got in, but to be honest… I thought I’d got home later than that.”

Sam looked straight at him, his suspicions aroused now by Zack’s vagueness.

“I was out of it. I’d been drinking, I’d smoked some lethal weed, a few downers… I can’t even remember getting back at all, but I told the cops that it was after twelve. Big mistake.”

Yes and not the only mistake by the sounds of it, thought Sam. “And where did you get these pills exactly?” he said, knowing full well where Zack got them, knowing that the question was redundant.

Zack was going to lie, but he decided against it, there was no point, not when Sam was on red alert like this.

“Don’t tell me you were in Westbourne Grove?”

Zack did his little boy shrug which Sam loathed. It had got him out of endless trouble in his life, but Sam knew Zack too well for it to work its magic with him, and he was furious. He had pulled out all the stops to get Zack back in Geoff’s good books after he had made a complete arse of himself with the Wahlbergs, he’d even wangled him two week’s leave. So what does Peter Pan do next? He goes gadding around west London with Bob Marley’s grandad.

“You’ll end up on the scrap heap, mate, hanging out with him. How many times do I need to say this?”

Zack found it amusing this idea of Sam’s that the whole of London was on the lookout for Zack Fortune to come a cropper, then trumpets would sound, the sea would part and the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would whisk him off to Hades and eternal torment. It was bollocks and both of them knew it but Sam like to pretend otherwise because it kept Zack under his thumb.

“Yeah, well you’ve got a thing about Sid.”

“No I haven’t,” said Sam indignantly, annoyed that Zack had actually voiced this when it had been an unspoken truth between them for years. “I can see through him, that’s all. He’s a leach, and you’re the deluded sop who pays his bar bills and forks out exorbitant amounts for his crappy contraband, the same junk he picks up for coppers on the street.”

Actually, thought Zack, that was a pretty fair appraisal. Zack had often wondered what Sid really thought of him. In the same way that it boosted Zack’s bad boy image to hang out with Mr Dangerous, he wondered if it was just that Sid got off on the idea of skidding round West London in a Mercedes convertible with a flashy Cambridge educated lawyer by his side. Probably, thought Zack, probably it did.

Initially Zack was not going to mention the pills, but somehow he felt Sam should know, so after a few awkward moments, he owned up. “They found my stash, Sam.”

“What stash?”

“The pills I got from Sid.”

Sam turned to him alarmed. “Shit, how many?”

“Forty, fifty, I’m not sure. They were a present, so we didn’t count them out,” said Zack pointedly, trying to improve Sid’s lowly standing in some small way.

“Christ that is seriously bad news.”

“I’ll have to say they were Susan’s”

“Are you mad? You can’t do that.”

“Why can’t I? No worse than what she’s done to me”.

There was a tension between them now that neither welcomed but it hung there disappointing them both. Zack hated incurring Sam’s disapproval, but he knew Sam would forgive him, he knew that in the end Sam would forgive him just about anything. Sam told Zack to go back up to his flat and this time to keep a low profile. He stopped short of recommending bed again as Zack seemed capable of getting into trouble even when asleep.

On his drive back home Sam sifted through the events of the last couple of days assessing the damage. With a bit of luck, Susan’s attempt to frame Zack would fail. To set up a completely fabricated scenario of this nature required an attention to detail that he felt Susan just did not possess.

Sam refused to believe Zack was a rapist. Zack had been a heel to all his women over the years, but he wasn’t violent, Sam would stake his life on that. In fact, he had seen Zack get knocked around on numerous occasions by disgruntled girlfriends, Amber included, and he had never once raised a hand in anger or to defend himself. But there was another possibility, and that was that Zack was lying and that he and Susan did have sex, consensual sex, and his DNA was all over her.

Sam was pissed off with Zack big time. Twelve hours out of his sight and he ends up in clink. While Zack could not be entirely blamed for Susan’s allegation, Sam had counselled against him getting involved with the woman in the first place. She was loopy and everyone knew she was loopy, but then Zack had a real weakness for loopy women. He had told Sam once that he just could not abide the mundane, the ploddingly reliable, so perhaps the attraction of his monstrous regiment was an attempt to keep mundane at bay.

And as for Sid, well… Sam had always thought Zack naïve to assume Sid thought of him as anything other than a neophyte, and Sid adored neophytes because he could charge them what the hell he liked for his ropey old drugs. But he also knew that Zack was in thrall to Sid’s outlaw reputation, a reputation that Zack himself had enjoyed at one time, and something Sam knew he very much missed. While the majority of people would be more than satisfied with the lifestyle from which Zack benefited, it was never enough for Zack. It wasn’t exciting enough, it wasn’t challenging enough and it certainly wasn’t dangerous enough. The truth was Zack had a self-destruct button and Sam was beginning to get mighty weary of preventing him from pushing it.

To operate successfully as a lawyer required honesty, integrity and discretion, and Zack was all of those things, but occasionally, when they stood in the way of the hedonistic lifestyle he craved, he would dump them unceremoniously onto the back burner and to hell with the consequences. His hanging out with Sid and his involvement with Susan notwithstanding, planning to lie to the police about the pills was another example of Zack’s recklessness, and it made Sam uneasy, how could he condone something like that?

They had had their fair share of disagreements over the years and once or twice it had got silly. One particular occasion was memorable. Sam thought back to Cambridge, about six months after they’d met, an early crisis in their relationship that had threatened to smother it at birth.

Zack was forthcoming about most things, girls, drugs, money, but when it came to mothers, fathers and families, he would clam up. Sam was curious about this, especially as he had opened up his entire life to Zack’s scrutiny within days of their becoming friends. There was nothing Zack did not know about Sam. The business with Michael and his parents, also the fact that Sam was still a virgin at eighteen, all quite important stuff, and stuff Sam had admitted to no one else. But Zack stayed uncharacteristically quiet about his childhood which began to rankle with Sam. Why? What was behind it? Then Sam got to thinking that Zack’s reluctance to fill him in on his childhood diminished their friendship, and that bothered him, it really did. So finally, one night when Sam was falling down drunk, and they were alone, Sam blurted all this out. There was a moment when it seemed like Sam was actually giving Zack an ultimatum - it was like he was saying: ‘speak up or else’.

For Zack’s part, he suddenly felt obliged to provide information that he had no wish to provide. Yes, Sam had documented the most intimate details of his life with the candour of a dying man to a priest, but what right did that give him to demand the low down on Zack? Zack had not forced Sam to open up, he had done it himself, willingly, eager, or so it seemed, to get it off his chest. So in response, Zack filled Sam in on a dull upbringing with dreary parents in suburban Leicester, uneventful, tedious, a life that he was mighty glad to be shot of, it didn’t take any time at all.

For a week Sam avoided Zack. He knew the whole stupid story was complete crap and it angered him. It saddened him too. First he felt insulted that Zack thought him dim enough to believe the hastily constructed shallow fabrication, second, that deep down Zack clearly had so little regard for him he thought it acceptable to fob him off with any old rubbish just to keep him quiet. Consequently, Sam felt their friendship had absorbed a mortal blow, was now in Critical Care, and had very little hope of survival. Sam was well aware that Zack had been instrumental in him finding any acceptance at all at Cambridge, but he had his pride, and he found Zack’s behaviour intolerable.

For both of them that week felt like a year, and despite being involved in all sorts of madness with assorted others they missed each other, Zack missing Sam the most. Finally, Zack cracked and sought Sam out in his sad little bedsit, the smallest attic room in a pretty grim lodging house on the outskirts of town. Sam refused to open up when he realised who it was kicking off outside his door, yelling at Zack to bugger off out of it and to leave him in peace. So Zack took matters into his own hands, booting said door clean off its hinges, it was as simple as that. Once Zack had made his dramatic entrance, they just looked at each other in silence for almost two minutes, then Zack started to cry. Surprised and moved by Zack’s distress, and aware that he had been responsible for it entirely, Sam patted him on the arm, an action so male in nature, and so ineffectual, but it was the olive branch Zack had been seeking. Zack grabbed Sam and hugged him, and Sam hugged him back.