Until Death (8 page)

Kelly felt a vein twitch behind her eye. ‘I’m astonished that he did such a thing,’ she began, but Mrs Weaver was already talking over her.

‘As I’m sure you’re aware, Mrs Malamatos, I’ve had a long chat with your husband and I think we can put some things in place that might help Yannis with his behaviour.’

‘Chat with my husband?’

Mrs Weaver smiled. ‘I understand things have been a bit … challenging at home, and in those situations a strong sense of routine can really help children to feel more, adjusted shall we say.’

Kelly felt the temperature in the room drop ten degrees. ‘I don’t know what you mean. What issues at home?’

‘Yannis and I had a conversation and he was talking about how much he loves animals, horses in particular.’

Kelly looked at her son’s sad and confused face.

‘And I and your husband hit upon an idea that I think it might be useful to try. There are horse-riding lessons in Hyde Park, not far from the school here. The children also have to learn the discipline of mucking out the stables and caring for an animal. A long-term project such as that can have a really positive effect on a child.’

‘You spoke to Christos about this earlier?’

‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘He was enthusiastic.’

Kelly knew she needed to be careful here. She couldn’t be seen not to be at least considering the idea. ‘It seems to me that you’re rewarding bad behaviour. That would send the wrong message, surely.’

‘This would be after two days’ detention.’ Mrs Weaver’s smile hadn’t wavered. Kelly wondered if she could keep it up for an entire term. ‘And then we could start the morning horse-riding. Working in a stables is not for the faint-hearted.’

Something about that sentence struck Kelly as wrong. ‘This would be once a week, right?’ Kelly asked.

The headmaster took over. ‘It would be every morning—’

Kelly shook her head. ‘It’s a nice idea, but I’m afraid it just isn’t practical. I have my daughter to get to school and that’s in north London.’

‘Mr Malamatos had a very good suggestion. Sylvie Lockhart, his PA, can take Yannis in the mornings – she’s a great horse-rider, apparently – and then drop him here at school before going to work.’

Kelly felt like she had been slapped. ‘No, I don’t think that would work at all.’

The headmaster raised his hands. ‘Why don’t we try it for a month or so? Because the purpose is to improve your behaviour, young man,’ he said, turning to Yannis.

Kelly felt the anger mushrooming. They had decided all this without her. Christos hadn’t even bothered to mention it to her. And suddenly here was Sylvie, presumptuous enough to think she could slide from her husband’s bed into their family routines – take her son to school. Well, it wasn’t happening. ‘This is all very well, but no. Sylvie doesn’t need the distraction from her job. I will deal with it at home and make sure that Yannis doesn’t do something like this again.’

The headmaster looked unconvinced, but he turned to Yannis. ‘What do you say, young man? Are you going to make sure your mother and father don’t have to come into the school again? Are you going to follow their good example and never hit anyone again?’

For the first time in the meeting, all eyes were on her son. He looked up at them, his bottom lip jutting forward in a little pout, a frown of confusion on his face. ‘But—’

‘Don’t start a sentence with “but”, Yannis,’ interrupted the headmaster.

Yannis swallowed and Kelly thought he might cry. ‘When Daddy gets angry … When Daddy and Mummy …’

Kelly stood, reached over and grabbed Yannis’s hand, yanking him to his feet. She saw Mrs Weaver start back and fold her arms over her big breasts. Kelly’s fear at what Yannis might unwittingly reveal about what Christos did, here, in Christos’s old school … it didn’t bear thinking about. She had to cut this conversation dead at all costs. ‘I’ve changed my mind. We’ll try it for a month, if that’s what everyone wants.’

‘I think it’s worth a try,’ Mrs Weaver said carefully.

Kelly was too ashamed to argue or to answer back. She needed to get out of this claustrophobic office as quickly as possible; she was losing the ability to breathe, feared she might have a panic attack.

She marched Yannis along the vaulted corridors to the exit. The swing doors sucked closed behind them. She bundled him into the car, mute. She sat gripping the steering wheel so hard she felt she would pass out with fury. Her son had seen. At some point, he had watched what Daddy did to Mummy. She had to save him from what he saw. Shame at how she was aiding and abetting what Christos did almost crushed her. Parents shaped their offspring as surely as a modeller shaped clay. Yet Yannis was being moulded into something foreign to her – picking up and absorbing the worst traits of her situation, and she was letting it happen. If she didn’t get him out he would become an image of his father and all that brought with it.

‘Mummy? I’m sorry, Mummy.’

She turned to look at Yannis sitting in the back of the car, saw his attention caught by something on the seat next to him. He picked up one of his favourite toys, a model of a container ship. He began bouncing it along the seat, tossing it as if it were in a storm. ‘Daddy says this ship will be mine when I grow up.’

T
he Wolf glanced once at the stopwatch and then yanked hard on the chainsaw’s starter cord. The noise of a powerful motor bursting into life assaulted his eardrums and he held firm as the saw juddered to attention in his sinewy arms. He bent low and began a slicing action at the top end of the great mahogany trunk, stripping the one-hundred-foot tree of its branches with firm, aggressive strokes. They thumped dully to the forest floor as he worked his way along the tree to its base. He wasn’t wearing ear muffs, he liked to be surrounded by the noise of the chainsaw and he wanted to be able to hear the man’s screams when they reached a pitch that was higher than the motor.

The man was tied to the length of the trunk, ten feet away from him now. Out of the corner of his eye the Wolf could see him writhing as the chainsaw’s teeth moved closer.

Five branches away from the man’s head the Wolf glanced up at the stopwatch, forcing the whirring blade through the thick branches, forcing it back upwards as the yellow dust of the trunk flew around. The resiny smell of freshly cut wood hung in the air. All the branches were off now, lying like felled soldiers at his feet. He started on the massive trunk, pitting the teeth against the densest and heaviest part of the tree. He bent his knees low, the strain spreading across his back as he pushed down on the blade. The adrenalin was pumping through his body, driving him to work faster. It was hard, physical work, the humidity high and bugs the size of dessert spoons buzzing. He had to keep the correct angles; always working away from himself. He had seen what those machines could do to a human body. A chainsaw didn’t cut flesh, it shredded it. Each of the many teeth cut its own path, flesh exploding from the wound like streamers from a party popper. Sweat was running from his pores under his safety shirt, heavy with layer upon layer of string to tangle in those vicious teeth and save your limbs. The man was screaming fully now, his mouth a dark hole in the cloud of wood dust, his eyes dark pricks of terror. He cut the trunk a few inches above the guy’s head and jumped across him to chop the last, biggest and heaviest slice below the prone man’s feet.

He turned off the machine and silence slammed against him, underpinned by the sobbing and gasping of the man on the tree trunk. He looked at his stopwatch. Four minutes, twenty-seven seconds. He was panting hard as he unhooked the heavy machine from the harness hanging at his side and pulled his goggles on to his forehead. He yelled something incoherent, the adrenalin and the smell of the tree fuelling a cocktail of mad joy in him. There was something else, tangy and salty. He looked down at the quivering man, a dark stain of urine spreading across his trousers. A sense of freedom and power overwhelmed him. A lumberjack used to working in the Amazon could fell and chop a giant rosewood or mahogany tree in less than two minutes. He had been used to it once, but he was out of practice now. He wasn’t going to be too hard on himself.

The Wolf leaned close to the man. ‘Which ship is it on?’

The man was trying to say something through his sobs, words tumbling too fast from his dry mouth. It sounded like ‘I don’t know’.

The Wolf picked up the chainsaw again and the man screamed, tears carving a pale line in his wood-dust face. ‘It’s on the
Saracen
. I heard that—’

‘Be more specific. Where on the
Saracen
? There are hundreds of containers on that ship.’

The man started moaning again, begging for his life. The Wolf looked across the hillside at where the brush had been cleared, the smoke from the burning blocking out the sun. The big trees were still left here, a line of fifteen hardwood trees a hundred feet high, bursting up through the forest canopy. The third tree in towered at least twenty feet above all the others. Its trunk was thicker, its branches higher, its reach wider. An exceptional specimen: a wolf tree.

‘Tell me now or I’ll shred you.’ The man had only strength to whisper. The Wolf leaned in and listened for a few moments, drew back and stared down at his captive. You could make a series of cuts in a trunk until it was so finely balanced that you could push over a 500-ton tree with a little finger. It would hit the ground with such force it would obliterate anything in its path. Trees spend centuries growing, and can be cut down in a couple of minutes. People were the same. Christos had been untouchable for nearly ten years, but now he finally had some information he could use. The Wolf just had to get everything into the right position, use his little finger and push.

He yanked on the starter cord of the chainsaw, the man writhing and screaming with a final desperate intensity. The party poppers of skin rose high in the air. The Wolf cut him right across the middle. It would have been kinder to cut off his head.

K
elly returned home with Yannis, but after being back for only a few minutes the doorbell rang on the service lift. She checked the video monitor and swore silently. Jason, a production manager who had commissioned her to make the masks and some of the props for his latest play, and Salvatore, his assistant, were downstairs on the garage level.

‘Kelly, you ready for us?’ asked Jason. ‘I’ve got the van here for the props.’

She had forgotten. They had left a message saying they would collect on Saturday, but she had not remembered to call them back and change it. Christos was at work and Flo at a friend’s house but Medea was sitting like a fat toad in the flat. She would tell Christos that two men had been here and that could be bad. ‘Hi, guys. Come up.’ She said it loudly as she pushed the raise button on the car park barrier so the deaf old witch would hear. She had nothing to hide, her voice suggested. She walked calmly down the long corridor into her bedroom, throwing a baggy old sweater with a glue stain on the front over her T-shirt. She walked into the bathroom, grabbed a flannel and scrubbed off her make-up. She was pleased to see her skin turn pink under the abuse. She came out into the corridor and saw Medea standing there waiting for her. ‘Collection,’ she said.

A few moments later, Jason and Salvatore came in. Jason was in his late thirties with a quiff of brown hair and glasses he kept pushing distractedly up his face. He was tall and rangy and had a very good smile, which, she had realised the last few times she had met him, he turned on her with increasing intensity. The silly idiot, didn’t he realise she was trying to put him off for his own good? Salvatore was in his twenties, exquisitely beautiful and gay and spoke with a strong Italian accent.

They followed her into the studio. ‘Skeletons for a Mexican Day of the Dead parade,’ said Kelly. ‘They’d be great props for Halloween.’ She gave Jason a look. ‘I haven’t let my children anywhere near them, I promise.’

‘It’s such a joy to come here,’ said Salvatore, eyes darting round. ‘You should
see
some of the hovels out east we have to go to, eh, Jason?’

Jason shrugged. ‘Yeah, like my flat.’ Jason looked to Kelly and they shared a smile. She couldn’t help it. She was nervous when work people came here, but she also treasured their meetings; it was a brief glimpse into a world that was fun and where she had her own identity.

‘It’s lovely to see you both.’ Kelly walked around a giant ghoul that was leaning against the wall near the door and over to the trestle table where three masks were sitting. ‘The masks are still not ready, you know,’ she began, but was interrupted by the door opening and Medea appearing. She introduced the two men to her mother-in-law and Medea went away to make tea.

‘Don’t worry, I know they’re not finished,’ Jason said. ‘I really would be too hard a taskmaster if I judged before they’re ready.’ But, unable to resist, that’s just what he did do, moving forward and picking up the first of the masks on the table. He turned it in his hands, nodding and assessing and gave the outer shell a hard rap with a knuckle. He gave her a knowing look. ‘Just testing.’

‘It’s as strong as wood, Jason,’ she answered, pride flaring inside her.

‘It has to be. Ninety performances minimum, assuming the critics don’t maul us.’ He paused. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘Say Day of the Dead!’ Salvatore held up his smartphone and took a photo.

‘Oh no, get rid of that,’ Kelly urged.

‘Why? You’re surrounded by skeletons and ghouls, it looks perfect.’

‘Still, I don’t like having my picture taken.’ She frowned as Salvatore shrugged and began fiddling with his phone. She watched Jason’s long fingers shaping and feeling the smooth outline of the mask. She came towards him and took the mask, held it up with her fist inside and turned one side to her visitors. ‘Smiling.’ She turned the far side towards them. ‘Scowling. I made the nose big so each side obscures the other.’

Jason nodded. ‘One side good, the other evil, each aspect present in every character.’ She could see that he liked it.