One Night (28 page)

Harry was silent. He felt like the connection between his brain and his mouth had been severed somehow. He couldn’t form any words, not the ones she was telling him to say or the ones he actually wanted to. 

“Tell her what you did, Harry. Tell your niece. Tell your brother’s daughter what you did to him.”

Harry shook his head, it was all he could do. The only means of communication left to him.

Eve watched her uncle. In her heart she knew what he was going to say. What it was her mother needed him to tell her. She’d suspected for a very long time. Known it somehow in a part of her so deep inside that it never saw the light of day.

He sat there on the floor with the water Joel had thrown dripping off his face and despite the fact that her face still throbbed from the beating he’d given her she felt sorry for him. She could barely see out of her left eye but still she couldn’t help but feel some sympathy for the sad man on the floor in front of her. He’d always played the hard man but inside he was nothing. A child behind all that violence and bluster.

He wasn’t saying anything so she did. “You killed him, didn’t you? My dad. It wasn’t someone who owed you money. It was you.”

She felt her mother’s hand on one shoulder and Joel’s on the other and she knew that no matter what happened she would be okay. Because she was loved.

Harry didn’t speak but he did move. He ran a hand through his hair and stared down at the carpet in front of him. That was enough for Eve to know she was right.  

“I saw the two of you though, not long before. Drinking together. Happy. When he came to work for you.”

Harry looked up at her. He remembered again that day he’d held her as a baby and he needed her to understand. To know why he’d done it. To know what he’d become and why.

“I remember that night. Remember it well. He never worked for me though, Eve. Us toasting that day was because I’d lent him to the money to get himself out of the hole he’d gotten himself into. He didn’t have the stomach to work for me but he was happy to take my money.”

Eve frowned. “Why then? Why did you do it?”

“It was business. Just business. It’s always business, that’s all there is. I told him. I told him all along but he didn’t believe me. He was always like that as a kid. He never took anything seriously. He came to me the night he died and I thought it was to pay me what he owed me but it wasn’t. He didn’t have it, he said. Couldn’t afford it. My own brother didn’t have the respect to pay me back. How would that have looked? Every fucker would have thought they could get a free ride. So I told him he needed to work it off. That he could pay the interest on it by helping me out. I took him with me to see some other twat who thought he didn’t have to pay. I didn’t need him along, I just wanted him to see what I did to people who didn’t give me back what was mine. Max stood there and watched while I put the frighteners on this guy and even then he didn’t get it. When we were driving back he didn’t say a word, just looked at me like I was beneath him.”

He stopped then. The words drying up again. He’d told Kathy earlier almost by accident. He was so furious at Eve it had just come out but at the time it had felt right, like a form of psychological warfare. “I killed my own brother,” he had said to her, “so don’t think I won’t kill you.”

Now it was harder because he needed them to understand why it had happened. He needed them to see his side. 

“I stopped the car and told him not to look down his nose at me. That he owed me. He started making excuses again and I told him how it was. That it was business. He started to get out of the car and I stopped him. Pulled him back in and then I hit him.  It was only one punch but sometimes that’s all it takes
. I didn’t mean it, I swear to God.”

Eve didn’t know what to say. She looked at her mum and then down at the gun in her hand and all she wanted was to see her finger pull the trigger. She didn’t have it in her to do it but she wanted it to happen.

Harry started speaking again and this time the words wouldn’t stop. It was the first time he had ever said these things aloud.

“I don’t remember a time when he didn’t hit her. Did Max tell you that, Kathy? Did he tell you how we’d lie awake at night and listen to mum crying and him shouting and the sound of his fists landing on her body. He never hit her face so no-one else ever saw it, but I did. If I walked in on her when she was changing or when she was in the bath. Saw the bruises and the marks and the shape of his belt buckle on her. She always tried to hide them, would shout at me to get out. But I saw. The other kid’s mums used to take them swimming but not ours, she couldn’t get changed in front of anyone you see. Couldn’t risk anyone else seeing her. I don’t know if that was from shame or because she knew what he’d do to her if he found out anyone else knew.

I don’t know how long she lived that way. A day would be too long. I don’t know when it started, if it was before I was born or after but she stayed with him and put up with it. Maybe she loved him. Maybe it was for me and Max.

“
But then when Max was about five he started hitting him too. And she couldn’t put up with that.

He never did it to me and I don’t know why. Maybe it was because I was the first, or maybe there was something about Max that reminded him of her. By the end I wanted him to just so they got less of it. He only had so much violence in him and a third of it would have been better than half for them, wouldn’t it?

“It went on for about a year, maybe less, and then one night she had enough. I don’t think he even touched Max that night but he did her. I heard it all. After a while it went quiet. I must have fallen asleep and I guess he did too.

“
It was the sound of his feet that woke me up, a terrible banging sound as they drummed against the foot of their bed. I thought it was a dream at first, I was half asleep I suppose. I got up and I walked to their room and pushed the door open and saw it. She had a pillow over his face. She wasn’t just holding it down she was sitting on it. Her hands were underneath her holding it steady and then all her weight was on top of them. His feet were banging on the wood at the bottom of the bed like he was tap dancing. His heels kept hitting it again and again as he tried to get away.

“
I stood there and watched. An eight year old kid watching his mother kill his father. The drumming slowed after a while and I thought that was it. I think he just tricked her though. Made her lift the weight a little and as soon as she did he managed to throw her off him. She was only a little woman and she went flying across the room. Landed against the chest of drawers and then he was up and on her. I ran. I ran from there as fast as I could. I don’t know why I didn’t just go back to bed. Maybe because I knew that night it might be worse. That she might not survive. So I didn’t go back to Max. I went to the kitchen instead. I found the biggest knife I could; it was the one he always used to carve the Sunday joint. I took it back upstairs and I walked into their bedroom. She saw me and her eyes said do it so I did. I walked up behind him where he was crouching over her and I stuck it in his neck.

“
So that was how it started. We buried him in the garden. The two of us, while Max slept. And when he woke up she told him Daddy had gone away.

“
I don’t know what happened next. How the police never got involved but they didn’t. Maybe because no-one could have imagined that a kid and a meek woman like her would kill a man.

After that she fell apart, because of what we’d done. She drank and she drank and she drank. I thought she’d drown in all the fucking gin and the tears but she never did.

“So that’s my confession. I killed my dad and I killed my brother. Maybe that’s why dad never hit me. Maybe it was because he could see just how much of him I had in me. So don’t you fucking tell me I can change or I can stop because I can’t. I didn’t choose this but it’s all I have, God help me.”

He stopped then and closed his eyes. His head was aching from Joel’s punches and he felt
more tired than he ever had in his life. He remembered sitting in the kitchen with his mum after they’d finished the burying, how exhausted he’d felt then. Emotionally and physically drained so that all he wanted was to sit in her lap and have her hold him until he fell asleep. But it hadn’t happened. She hadn’t touched him once after that day. Sometimes he’d catch her looking at him like she didn’t know him, like he was something to be despised rather loved. It was the same look he’d seen on Max’s face the night he’d killed him. Max who looked so much like her. Max who’d inherited her gentleness while he’d got their father’s anger. He didn’t tell Eve and Kathy. It was too much. The memory of that look he would take to his grave.

So tired, but relaxed too. It was like a burden had been taken from him. Like finally letting out the blackness he’d carried inside for so long had healed him somehow. He felt none of the tension or anger that he was so used to. None of that desperate need to be somebody that had driven him since the day he realised that if he didn’t find the money to feed the family they would all drown in his mother’s gin.

He felt like he was looking at himself from the outside for the first time and he realised that without that drive there really wasn’t much of a man left at all. He opened his eyes and looked at the three people in front of him. The mother and daughter who loved one another. This fucking kid on the run who really did seem to love his niece.

They had everything and he had nothing. He was empty, a shell. With nothing in his past except pain and nothing in his future except the relentless need to find ways to mask that pain.

“Give it to me,” he said to Eve. “Give me the gun.”

She looked at him not understanding and then realised what he was asking. Joel reached across and took the gun from her hand. He worked the slide to check there was a bullet in the chamber and then ejected the magazine and passed the gun to Harry.

“They’re coming from London, you know,” Harry said to him. “Coming for the money and for you. I’d be on my way if I were you.” Then he put the barrel of the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Part Three

Dawn

An hour later Joel sat in the driver’s seat of the van, the engine idling. Outside the sun was just starting to rise over the North Sea. He watched the first light glimmering off the tips of the waves and smiled. It had held off just long enough for him to do what he needed to, almost as if the heavens were on his side.

He just hoped he had enough strength in him to see out the rest of the plan.
Either way Eve and her mother were safe now. If he didn’t make it past the rising of the sun then at least he’d die with that knowledge in his heart.

He looked down at the phone in his hand. Harry’s phone. He’d just sent a text message from it. The same message going to five different numbers. The pressing of the send button had been the point of no return; this would either work or it wouldn’t. If it did he would have everything he wanted. If it didn’t he’d be too dead to care.

He climbed out of the van and quickly looked around to make sure there was no-one in sight. Satisfied he was alone he dropped the phone to the pavement and stamped on it, grinding his heel down onto the display until it was shattered and the phone was unusable. That done he climbed back into the van. He put it into gear and slowly drove it through the town and down to the seafront.

Joel was on the Thorpe Esplanade when he saw the car approaching in his wing mirror. It stood out from the other early morning traffic because the driver was driving at twice the speed of any of the other cars on the road. Joel accelerated as soon as he saw it, knowing straight away that the driver was looking for him. He’d been cruising up until that point, waiting for something to happen. Now that it had he felt his heart pumping like it wanted to break out of the prison of his chest. The adrenalin opened his eyes and set his skin tingling as the hairs on it rose.

The text message had worked.

He shifted the van up a gear, feeling the throb of the engine vibrating up to him through the gear stick. The machine felt alive and in tune with him and he liked that. He was going to need it to do just what he wanted for a few minutes.

He watched the car in his mirror, gaining on him rapidly, getting larger and larger until he could see the eager face of the driver and his passenger. There was no way he could outpace it for long in the van, he knew that, but he didn’t need too. He just needed to keep going long enough to get where he wanted to be.

He kept his eyes on the reflection, waiting for the car to draw right up to his bumper, he wanted it so close to him that he could feel it. When it was almost touching him he turned the steering wheel sharply to the right and slammed on the brakes, his foot mashing the pedal so hard he thought it might punch a hole in the floor of the van. The vehicle slewed round, its high centre of gravity leaning it slightly as it turned. For a heart stopping moment Joel thought he might tip it and then all four wheels touched down again. The road was wide but as he teased the van through the turn Joel wasn’t sure if it was wide enough. The opposite curb came at him fast and the passenger side front wheel bounced up it, rocking the steering wheel in his hands. He fought it, gripping the wheel so tightly his knuckles looked like they were trying to burst through his skin. He twisted it to get the van back on the road, shouting at it first in frustration and then in relief when he knew he’d made it. A lamp post clipped the wing mirror on the passenger side, snapping it off and sending it spinning down to the road. Joel got the van under control and pointed it back the way he’d come.  

As he headed west he passed the car that had been following him. The driver had braked and skidded to a halt his tyres smoking. He glared at Joel as he drove past, revving his engine and then turning his car in a tight one hundred and eighty degree turn and chasing the van back up the street.

Up ahead Joel saw another car driving fast at him. When it was ten yards from him it turned, sideways, skidding to a halt and partially blocking the road. Joel threw the van to the one side, passing behind the tail end of the car with less than a foot to spare. He checked it in the remaining wing mirror as he drove on, saw a passenger in the back seat open their door and step out. Their hands came up and Joel saw the flash of a gun. The shot went wide but not by much, the bullet whining past his window like a furious insect. He heard the gun bark a second time and this bullet hit the van somewhere behind him, the metallic clang echoing around in the empty rear compartment.

None of it mattered though because he was nearly there. Less than a minute and he’d be out of the van and onto the next stage of the plan. He accelerated, seeing his destination up ahead. The metal skeleton leading out to sea. The pier.

He’d been there less than an hour earlier with Eve, the darkness masking their activity. This was where the end of the story would be played out.

He glanced down at the buckle of his seat belt, checking it was still secure before he made his move. Sending the text message had been hard, this was tougher but he knew it had to be done. He didn’t want his pursuers to question for one moment where this sequence of events ended up. Not while they were happening and not after either. He looked up and saw that it was time, that he was just where he needed to be. The wheel turned easily in his hand as he span it to the left, mounting the pavement deliberately this time. The lamp post he was aiming at came up fast and hit the radiator dead centre. Joel was thrown forward towards the windscreen which suddenly shattered in front of him from the force of the collision. The seat belt cut into him, jerking him to a stop and preventing him from flying through the glass. He bounced back into the chair and felt for the release, pushing the button in and freeing himself. The door opened easily and he dropped to the floor, his feet moving straight away as he heard the sound of the two cars approaching. Pain shot up his leg from his ankle but he ignored it, closed it up in a room of its own in his brain and locked the door. As he ran to the pier entrance he saw that another car was approaching from the opposite direction. Maybe the text had worked too well. He was beginning to doubt he’d actually make it through this.

A thick metal shutter covered the pier entrance but Joel had unlocked it earlier and it now slid up easily. He could hear shouting behind him, a harsh voice telling someone to check the van.

They weren’t far behind, not far at all. When the shutter was three feet open he stooped and went under it, pulling it down behind him. Blocking off the sound of his pursuers,

He vaulted the turnstiles, one hand on the central post, his feet swinging up and over the gleaming metal. His ankle throbbed as his feet hit the boards but he ignored the pain. The pier lay ahead of him, a sign to one side proudly proclaiming that it was the longest in the world, extending one and a third miles out into the water. Joel’s feet slapped on the wooden boards as he heard the shutter rising again and the volume of the shouting rose again.

He looked back and saw them, Paulie was there, just as Joel had hoped he would be, along with a couple of faces he recognised from Adventure Island. There were unfamiliar faces too, the Londoners Harry had warned him of. He saw at least two guns but he wasn’t too worried about them. They’d taken a shot at the van earlier but he didn’t think they’d try to put a bullet in him when he was on foot. Not when they could see he didn’t have the money. They’d have seen by now that it wasn’t in the van and would know that they needed to keep him alive at least long enough to find out where it was.

The further he ran along the pier the colder it got, the chill wind from the North Sea wind whistling down the Thames Estuary and slicing through him. He looked back and could see that he had increased his lead. There was nowhere for him to go so why would they strain themselves? He could almost imagine their smug grins.

Up ahead he could see his target. This was it. The end was just minutes away now.