To Fight For (20 page)

‘Why don't you go, son,' Browne was saying, ‘take that stuff to the police? Let them sort it out.'

‘What?' I said.

‘The police?' Marriot said.

‘You seem like a decent man,' Browne was telling him. ‘Don't get yourself involved any further. Just take it all to the police, make a clean breast of it.'

I tried to stand up, but went dizzy half way and fell back again. It wasn't the usual kind of dizziness. I looked at Browne, understanding what he'd done.

‘What were those pills?' I said.

‘Sedatives. They'll wear off. In a while.'

I swear there was a smile on his face.

‘You planned this.'

Browne ignored that. He turned back to Marriot who was looking at us both with his mouth open.

‘I don't understand,' Marriot said.

‘This world,' Browne was saying, ‘these people, Joe, here, look at him, you don't belong in this, doing what they do. Go live your life. Be good.'

Browne had done me properly. Him and his bloody morality. The boy was unsure now.

‘And you?' he said. ‘What about you? Why are you here? It doesn't make sense.'

‘I've learned too late.'

‘Well …'

I shook my head.

‘Give it to the law and they'll be all over you,' I told Marriot. ‘And your mum. Glazer's one of them. They protect their own. You know that.' His eyes flickered from me to Browne and back again. ‘And if they do investigate it, your dad's name will be shit. Your mum's too. Browne may go for that innocent line, but the law won't.'

Browne stared daggers at me.

‘My mum didn't know what my dad did.'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘She didn't know.'

‘Maybe, but it'll take a lot to convince the law about that, even if you found ones who weren't going to grass you to Glazer. You want to protect her, don't you?'

I expected a fight with Browne, but he sighed and said nothing. We all said nothing, then Marriot got up and left.

Browne watched him go, then dropped his head. He thought Marriot would be back. I wasn't so sure.

Silence filled the air between Browne and me. I was angry. Browne knew I would be, of course, which is why he'd doped me.

‘What was all that about?' I said.

‘You don't get it, do you? You just don't understand.'

‘No. I don't.'

He sighed, shrugged. Another failure. Another one to chalk up.

‘He phoned when you were asleep, told me who he was. He said he wanted to talk to you, to help you. It occurred to me that he might have something to lead you to Glazer.'

‘So?'

‘What would you have me do? Help you kill a man? You don't really think I'd go that far, do you?'

He was right, of course. I hadn't thought about it. Browne was a fuck-up in a lot of ways, but he'd never hurt anyone so far as I knew, even the ones who deserved it. And he would never let someone be hurt if he could avoid it.

So, he saw an opportunity to prevent me doing harm. All he had to do was give me some sedatives and try to convince Marriot's son to walk away.

‘What else can I do?' I said.

‘The police, Joe. Let them handle it.'

‘Police? What police? Glazer is a policeman. Compton is. You think you can trust them?'

‘They can't all be bad.'

‘Tell me the ones that aren't. Christ, Brenda went to the fucking police, and they murdered her for it.'

‘I know, son,' he said, quietly. ‘I know.'

We heard the front door close. The boy must've put the latch on.

He walked into the room holding a shoebox. He held it out to me, but kept his eyes down.

‘I don't care about anything,' he said, ‘except my mum. Leave her alone, that's all.'

I opened the box and started to go through the stuff inside. Browne watched in silence. He filled his glass.

There was a ledger. Names, numbers, amounts, credits, debits. I saw Glazer's name there. He was getting a grand a month from Marriot. There were other names, some I knew, most I didn't. That ledger would send a lot of people down, if the law got it. The right law, that was. But it was no use to me. I tossed it aside.

There were papers, deeds, documents relating to this and that. Marriot owned a lot of stuff; properties around London, Scotland, Spain. There were memorandums of association, articles of association. Marriot had companies doing all sorts of shit – on paper, at least. Paget's name was on a few of them, listed as a director. So were a few other people, most of them dead. None of these helped me.

It was the address book that did it. As soon as I saw it, I grabbed it, opened it up, went straight to G:

Glazer, M.

But the entry had been crossed out.

I called the number anyway. A child's voice answered, said he'd get his mummy.

‘Hello,' the woman said.

‘Is Mike there?'

‘Oh, no, sorry. You've got the wrong number.'

So, that was that. Another dead end.

I looked through it anyway, from the start. A, B, C, on and on.

And then I got to S.

Sutton, Mary

I was about to turn to the next page when I remembered what Marriot's wife had said. Glazer had a girlfriend, she said. Mary something.

‘What's this?' I said to young Marriot.

I held the book out. He looked at it, shrugged.

‘Dunno.'

I called the number. A woman answered. I said, ‘Is Mike Glazer there?'

‘He's not here at the moment. Can I ask who's calling?'

It took me a moment to register what she'd said. After all this time, I'd found him. It didn't seem real. I said, ‘Do you know when he'll be back?'

‘No. Who's calling?'

I killed the phone.

‘Got him.'

‘What are you gonna do?' the boy said, his face suddenly white.

Even Browne raised an eyebrow. If the boy had only just realized I was going to kill Glazer, he was a fucking idiot. Maybe he'd just wanted to pretend that I was bluffing.

‘Bush Hill,' I said, ‘where's that?'

‘That's only a couple of miles away,' Browne said, shaking his head, staring, perhaps, at the stupidity of it all.

A couple of miles away. Christ. I could've walked there in half an hour.

‘What are you gonna do?' the boy said again.

‘Go home,' I told him. ‘Go back to your mum.'

‘Find him, then,' Browne said to me. ‘But if you kill him, you'll betray her. You damned well remember that.'

I was going to have to be careful I wasn't followed. No one must know I was going to Glazer. I decided I'd use public transport, hit the city, mix it up a bit. It's hard to follow someone when they can jump on a bus, hail a cab and head off through London traffic.

There was a young family at the bus stop. The woman had long blonde hair and huge blue eyes. She was rocking a pram. Inside were two small babies, both wrapped in rainbow coloured blankets, both staring up at her with blank open faces as she looked back down at them, smiling. The bloke next to her wore an Aston Villa shirt. He saw me come near and stepped closer to the woman.

The woman turned, then, and watched me as I took a seat. The bloke relaxed a bit when I did that. I don't know what he expected me to do. Kidnap the babies, probably. On the girl's T-shirt were the words ‘Help … Twins'. She turned back to the children. Her husband looked up the road, waiting for the bus, his eyes flicking over to me every now and then.

I found myself looking at the two babies. They both had wisps of blonde hair falling below woollen hats. On one hat was the word ‘Imogen', on the other, ‘Jessica'. They moved lazily, one lifting its arm up out from below the blanket, reaching for something in the air, the other stretching its mouth. I sniffed, and that brought their attention to me. They stared, mouths open, eyes wide, as if they were looking at something new, something that didn't fit.

I saw that the woman was looking at me again, her large eyes soft. I thought, clocking me looking at her babies, she'd move away, pull her children nearer. Parents protected their young as a matter of instinct, and people always looked at me as a threat.

She didn't move away or pull the pram closer. Instead, she carried on rocking it. A bus came up the road and the bloke said something to her. They lifted the babies out of the pram, the woman and the bloke each holding one of them. Then the bloke collapsed the pram. The bus pulled up. The door opened. The bloke got on, but the woman paused and turned and looked back towards me. She didn't seem scared or horrified or sickened. She seemed interested.

Then she did something odd. She smiled. I didn't know how to respond to that. I think I smiled back. The bloke was eyeing me up from the bus. Maybe he saw something in me that she didn't. Maybe it was the other way round; she seeing something that he didn't, or couldn't.

Then they were gone.

I sat there for a while, watching the world wander past. I was supposed to be scoping the scene for tails, but my mind kept going blank, and out of the blankness I'd think about that woman smiling. Then I'd think about Brenda smiling and the two would become one and I'd see Brenda with a pram, rocking it gently, letting the babies see her face, her smile, her wide open eyes.

When a bus came, I got on it, not bothering where it was going, not checking for tails.

I wondered what that blonde girl had seen. What had been on my face as I'd gazed at her and her babies? Had I let it slip for a moment? Had I seen Brenda? Had I seen something I'd lost, forgetting that I'd lost it and seeing it as if it was real?

I looked out the window. We were heading along the Mile End Road. I must've been sitting on that bus for half an hour, but it felt as if I'd only just got on. I had no idea now if I was being tailed.

I got out at the tube station, and took the Central line to Liverpool Street. There'd been too many people on the platform for me to see if I'd been followed onto the train. I stood in the middle of the carriage, having to bow my head. I held the hand grip tightly and looked up and down the carriage, trying to see if anyone was deliberately avoiding my gaze. As far as I could make out, everyone was doing that. In fact, everyone was avoiding everyone's gaze. Some were reading books or newspapers, some were texting, some sitting looking blankly into space while sounds went along the wires attached to their ears. It was like we were all part of a funeral cortege, only nobody knew the deceased or any of the other mourners.

The train driver did his best to break my neck, but somehow I made it to Liverpool Street in one piece. When I got out, I took a few seconds to straighten up and breathe air that wasn't full of heat and eye-stinging perfume and body odour and silence.

I went up to the mainline concourse and then through that and up the elevator to the gallery bit, which, at least, was open to the outside. The cold air seeped in and made me feel clean again, even if it was filled with grit and fumes.

I stood there a while, watching the grey shapes flow below me. It felt like I was in a different world; all these people moving around like parts in some great machine, each thinking they were their own person, each thinking they were important.

I saw men in suits and long coats, and women in suits and short coats, an endless line of people who didn't do anything for anyone except themselves and others like them – not unlike my kind, except those like me knew we weren't kidding ourselves. We took what we could, how we could, and fuck you. This lot did the same, but less honestly and without guns.

Except for a few teenage lads in black jeans and leather jackets, there were no kids, no old people either, no disabled or slow or poor people. I saw a few builders wander around, walking more lazily than the rest. I saw tourists and some single young people with backpacks and suitcases heading home, or back to college or wherever. Mostly, I saw a nameless, faceless grey-suited horde, swarming and buzzing, heading in a mass to one exit or another. I hated them all, the whole fucking lot, except maybe those kids in black or the single people with suitcases and backpacks. The rest I hated because they didn't know what they were.

And I wanted to be like them.

I didn't see anyone who stood out, though. I didn't see anyone who looked at me for more than a second. I didn't see anyone who didn't seem to be going somewhere or doing something.

There was a pub outside, next to the station. I went in there and stood at the bar and watched the entrance to see if anyone followed me in. Nobody did. I took a pint, went outside with the smokers and waited until everyone I saw hanging around had gone or met up with someone else.

After that, I hailed a cab and told the cabbie to take me to Piccadilly Circus. Anyone following me now would have a hard time.

I wasn't being paranoid, I told myself, I was just being careful. Dunham wanted Glazer as much as me, or, at least, he wanted what Glazer had. So did Compton, I thought. I'd have been stupid if I hadn't taken precautions.

When, finally, I was sure nobody had followed me, I told the cabbie to pull over. I paid him, then got another cab and told him to take me to Bush Hill. He twisted around and looked at me suspiciously.

‘That's gonna be a big fare, mate,' he said.

I gave him a score up front. After that, he was okay.

I kept a lookout through the rear window while the cabbie told me why United had fucked up this season and how the country was letting in too many immigrants and why his wife was a selfish cow.

After a few years, we pulled up outside a detached house on a quiet suburban road. I paid the cabbie and got out. I waited until the taxi had turned a corner, then I waited some more. Nothing moved. There were no people around, no cars rolling by.

The house was smart, without being posh. Still, in this area, it was probably the top end of a million. The place was about a hundred years old, one of those red-bricked things with large bay windows and high chimneys. In front of it was a large lawn with a cherry tree. I could see Browne living in a place like this, if he'd been reasonably successful as a GP. Either Glazer had done well out of corruption or his girlfriend was loaded – or both.