Chasing the Dead

34

Lochlanark was a small town halfway between Oban and Lochgilphead. It looked out over the islands of Scarba, Luing and Shuna, to the Firth of Lorn, and to the misty, grey Atlantic beyond. It took seven hours to drive up from London, and I stopped only twice the whole way. Once to fill up the car, and once to call in at a petrol station to make sure I was on the right track. They told me Old Tay was a one-street village about seven miles north, right on the edge of the sea.

When I got there, I found five cottages and a sloping village green that dropped all the way down to the ocean. Inland, there were woods. The rising peaks of Beinn Dubh were beyond, streaked black and green, small streams of snow in every fold.

And right at the end of the village was the entrance to the farm.

I parked in a frozen field, about a hundred yards from the entrance. The sun clawed its way up past the mountains behind me just before eight o’clock, and an hour later no one had come and no one had gone. The place — the farm, its surroundings — were deserted; as quiet and still as if the bomb had dropped.

Wire-mesh fencing circled the property and the main gate was locked. A CCTV camera was positioned to see who came and went. Next to it was a keypad. Using binoculars, I could pick out two main buildings. One, the smallest, was close to the road, about twenty yards from the entrance. A path, footprints frozen in the mud, led down an incline and around to the back of it. There was another CCTV camera on the front, pointing up towards the gated entrance to the farm.

The second building, the farmhouse, was large enough to incorporate at least five bedrooms, and was much further down an uneven gravel track. Its windows were blacked out. The walls were peeling. If snow hadn’t been brushed into neat piles either side of the front door, it would have looked as if it had never been lived in. A third CCTV camera was bolted to the roof, pointed towards the front door.

The approach to the second, bigger building was untidy. Old, disused barns littered the path, full of frozen hay bales and rusting chunks of machinery. Beyond the farmhouse was the sea, crashing on to sand scattered with sheets of ice. Every time a wave reached for the shore, it pushed the smell of the place towards me on the back of a bitter Arctic wind.

I leaned over and flipped the glove compartment. Inside was a pair of wire cutters. I’d go in through the fence at the furthest end to the property, where the CCTV cameras weren’t trained, and then head into the first, smaller building.

From there, I’d figure out my next move.

I removed the wire cutters, checked them over, and looked back into the glove compartment. It was empty now, except for a box of .22 bullets.

And the gun.

It was a fully loaded Beretta 92. The same series as the fake one Dad had got mail order. The same series as the one I’d found in a South African war zone, and from which I’d taken the bullet I always kept on me.

I undid my black jacket and took out the bullet from the inside pocket. Let it roll around in my hands. I remembered that day in the township: the gunfire; the fear; the sun melting the tarmac beneath our feet. Then I remembered my dad shadowing me, moving behind me as I headed into the forest. As a kid, I’d fired the Beretta to please him. Never with any passion, any commitment, any intention of taking it beyond the boundaries of the woodland we’d hunted in. Now I held a real one in my hands.

I’d fired a gun two days before and taken a life. And I still felt nothing for Zack. Nothing for Jason either, as he lay there with his brains leaking out of his head, his blood spattered across my clothes and my skin. A realization, a flutter maybe, but nothing more. It was why I couldn’t call the police. The reason I had to do this alone.

I’d killed twice already.

And I’d have to do it again.

35

The smaller building had an old cottage-style look to it: pale red windowsills and frames; trays of dead flowers; a nameplate next to the door that said BETHANY. I came in diagonally from the hole I cut in the fence, using the empty barns as cover. There was a second door at the back, blistered and old. I slid the gun into my belt, and pushed at it. The door shuddered and slowly creaked open.

Immediately inside was a kitchen. The sink was missing taps and parts of its plumbing. Some of the cupboards had been dismantled. A table had been chopped into pieces and left in the centre of the room. Off the kitchen were two doors: one to a pantry, the second to a living room without any furniture. A door in the living room led to the stairs.

I headed up.

There were three doors on the landing but no carpet. The first was for a bedroom. An ‘A’ was carved into the door. Inside, about halfway along, a square chimney flue ran from floor to ceiling, coming out of the wall about three feet. At the windows, there were no curtains, just sheets. They moved in the breeze as I stepped up to the door. No beds. No cupboards. Water trails ran down one of the walls, coming from holes in the ceiling.

I looked into the second bedroom, a ‘B’ in the centre of its door. This one was different. It was bigger, and the crumbling stone walls had thick cast-iron rings nailed into them, spaced out at intervals of three or four feet. From each of the rings, a set of handcuffs hung down. I moved forward, into the room. It was about twenty feet long and smelt repellent. Exposed wooden floorboards, scarred and dirty, ran the length of it, and there were four windows, all covered by sheets. I turned and looked down at one of the rings closest to me, half-hidden behind the door. Above it, someone had gouged out a message: help me. I leaned in closer. In the grooves of the letters were pieces of fingernail.

I backed out, and turned to face the third door.

The bathroom.

It had most of its fixtures, and a basin, toilet and bath. The bath was filthy — full of hair and broken pieces of tile — but the basin was clean, used recently, droplets of water next to the plughole. There was a mirror on the wall above. I moved to it. The bruises on my cheeks, and at the side of my head, had faded a little. But my eye was still full of blood. I leaned into the mirror to take a closer look.

Then, behind me, I spotted something.

The bath panelling didn’t fit properly. I knelt down and pushed. It popped and wobbled, then regained its shape. I pushed again. This time the corners of the panel came away. The edges were slightly serrated, all the way around, like they’d been cut using a saw. I pulled the panelling out, fed a couple of fingers in through the gap and pulled at it. It came away completely.

Inside the bath, stacked around the half-oval shape of the tub, were hundreds of glass vials. They climbed as tall and as wide as the bath allowed, dark brown, opaque and identically labelled. Instructions for use were printed at the bottom of each vial in barely visible type, underneath the message Caution: for veterinary use only. At the top, printed in thick black lettering: KETAMINE.

I reached in and took one out.

Snap.

A noise from outside. Stones scattering.

I went to the window of the bathroom. Someone was approaching. A woman. She was young, probably nineteen or twenty. Dark brown hair in a ponytail. Pale, creamy skin. Tight denims, a red top and a white and pink ski jacket. On her feet was a pair of chunky, fur-lined boots. She crunched along in the snow, kicking loose pieces of gravel into the fields.

I didn’t have time to get out — didn’t even have time to get down to the pantry — so I put the bath panel back and moved into Room B, the room with the rings. Behind the door, I took out the Beretta and flipped the safety off. My hands were clammy despite the cold.

Then I remembered the extra bullets.

Still in the car, buried in the glove compartment.

Shit.

Footsteps sounded at the staircase. I had a narrow view between the door and the frame. Enough to see the woman get to the top of the stairs, move across the landing and into the bathroom.

I heard the squeak of the bath panel being removed. Vials clinking together. Then she started humming to herself. I moved out from behind the door, took a big stride from the door of the bedroom to the door of the bathroom and placed the gun at the back of her head.

‘Don’t move.’

She jolted, as if a current had just cut her in two. Her eyes swivelled into the corners of her skull. She looked back over her shoulder at me without moving.

‘Get up.’

She stood slowly, three vials clasped in one hand, her other outstretched to tell me she wasn’t going to be any trouble.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Sarah,’ she said quietly.

‘Okay, Sarah. Now tell me: what the fuck is going on here?’

She didn’t reply, so I lowered the gun and grabbed her by the back of the neck. The sudden movement made her drop the vials. They smashed against the bathroom floor. She winced, as if I was about to hit her, and did so again when I turned her around and pushed her into Room B. I forced her downwards, so she was almost doubled over. Her face was right in front of the help me message.

‘Can you read that?’

She nodded. Her breathing was short and sharp. Scared.

‘Good. So you speak English. Someone carved that message in the wall and left half their fingernails in there. You can see their fingernails, can’t you?’

She nodded again.

‘Speak up, I can’t hear you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. You any idea how painful that is? You any idea how desperate someone has to be to carve a message in a wall with their own fingernails?’

She didn’t move.

‘Sarah?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes what?’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Good. Which is why you’re going to start answering some questions for me. Because if you don’t, you’re going to scratch a new message in the door next to it, with your fingernails. Got it?’

She nodded.

I pulled her up and guided her out of the room. I couldn’t stand the smell any longer.

On the landing, I forced her to kneel down facing one of the walls. For a moment, I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror, and didn’t like the person I was seeing. But things had changed now. I had changed. There was no going back to the man I’d been before. Not now. They’d made certain of that.

‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ I said. She was kneeling down, one of her hands on the wall in front of her. ‘But I will hurt you if you don’t give me what I want.’

I paused, let her take it in. She nodded.

‘Okay. First. What is the room with the rings used for?’

A little hesitation, then: ‘Acclimatization.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘We bring them here to dry them out.’

‘Dry them out?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are they — drug addicts?’

She nodded again.

‘We’re not doing sign language any more. Yes or no?’

‘Some, yes.’

‘Some, but not all?’

‘Not all. But most.’

‘You’re running a drug programme?’

‘Kind of.’

‘You are or you aren’t?’

‘We are. But it’s not…’

‘Not what?’

‘Not like a normal programme.’

I glanced into the room with the rings. Saw the handcuffs, the blood spatters. Smelt the decay and the sickness.

‘No kidding,’ I said. ‘So, what is it then?’

‘It’s a way to help people forget.’

‘Forget what?’

‘The things they’ve seen, and the things they’ve done.’

‘Like what?’

She paused, finally dropped her hand away from the wall, and turned her head slightly so she could look at me.

‘I’m not sure you’d understand.’

‘I guess we’ll see.’

Another pause. She turned back to the wall.

‘They’ve all suffered traumas,’ she said.

‘Like what?’

‘Life-affecting traumas.’

‘Specifics,’ I said.

She turned her head again, and this time her eyes fixed on mine. They moved across my face, flashing. In her expression, I could see the fear I’d glimpsed after I’d surprised her. But now, somehow, it looked less convincing… as if she might be playing me. As if all of this — the scared little girl, the soft voice — might be how she turned the game on its head.

‘Life-affecting traumas like what?’ I said.

She smiled a little, sadly. ‘Like Derryn.’

I grabbed her by the neck and pressed her head into the wall. A puff of plaster spat out at her face, forcing her to close her eyes. She coughed.

I leaned into her ear.

‘Don’t try to get inside my head. Don’t mention her name. Don’t ever try to use her as a way to get at me. I hear you say her name again, I’ll fucking kill you.’

She nodded.

I released the pressure on her neck and she opened her eyes again.

‘Keep your eyes closed.’

She frowned, as if she didn’t understand.

‘Keep your eyes closed.’

She shut them.

‘Specifics,’ I repeated. ‘Give me specifi—’

‘Sarah?’

A man’s voice at the front of the house. The crunch of snow underfoot. It sounded like he was coming around towards the back door. I leaned in close to her.

‘Don’t make a sound, got it?’

Those eyes snapped open again and she looked at me. She wasn’t beautiful, but her face had a hypnotic quality. It lured you in, and forced you to lose precious seconds.

‘Sarah?’

He was inside the house. I covered her mouth and hauled her to her feet, then slowly backed up, with her in front of me, into Room A.

‘Sarah?’

A creak on the stairs.

I pushed her into the centre of the room, and moved back, behind the door. She looked at me and saw what I was telling her: don’t do anything stupid.

‘Sarah?’

She faced the door. ‘I’m up here.’

I looked through the gap in the door, to the stairs. A head appeared, but slowly, as if he knew something was up.

‘You okay?’ he said.

‘Yeah, fine.’

‘What are you doing?’

Eastern European accent.

He stopped short of the top of the stairs and looked around. I could see snatches of his face between the bars on the staircase. His eyes were darting between the doors.

‘Just getting the supplies.’

He took another step.

‘What’s taking so long?’

She paused. Looked at me.

I could see the man’s face now. It was Stephen Myzwik. Older than in the mugshots, but leaner and more focused. He had a hand placed at the back of his trousers as he stepped up on to the landing. Reaching for a gun.

‘It’s warm in here.’

I shot a look at Sarah. What the hell are you talking about? She just stared back at me. Didn’t move. Didn’t say anything else. When I glanced back in Myzwik’s direction, I could see his gun was up in front of him, aimed in the direction of the bedrooms. His eyes flicked left to the smashed vials on the bathroom floor as he moved across the landing almost silently.

‘Where?’

‘Room A,’ she said.

They were speaking in code.

I gripped the gun, and watched as Myzwik moved to the door, then stopped. He looked in at Sarah. And without her saying anything, he seemed to immediately know where I was.

I ducked as he fired twice through the door.

The noise shattered the silence, piercing the walls of the building and cracking across the fields outside. Wood splintered above me as bullets passed through the door. A shower of plaster rained down into my hair and face.

I kicked the door closed. It slammed shut, rattling in its frame. Sarah glanced at me, then at the door, trying to work out if she could get there before I got to her. But she didn’t move for it. Instead, she turned, her hands up again, backing away. I raised the gun and pointed it at her, then darted across the room, grabbed her by the arm and brought her into me.

‘Myzwik!’ I shouted through the door.

Nothing. No noise from outside.

‘I’ve got her and I’ll k—’

A mobile phone started ringing on the other side of the door. It was Myzwik’s. Slowly, the door handle started turning. I squeezed Sarah in closer to me, one arm locked around her neck, the other out over her shoulder, aiming the gun at the door.

It opened.

Myzwik stood with his gun down by his side and his mobile phone at his ear. His eyes were pale, almost the colour of his skin, and he was growing a beard — jet black — which gave him an odd, alien appearance. A face cut through with light and dark. He didn’t take his eyes off me, even as his mobile phone started up again.

He answered it.

I could hear the faint murmur of someone else on the line, but it was impossible to make out words. Myzwik just listened, staring at me. It was an obvious play: him standing in the doorway, blocking my exit, telling me he didn’t believe I would shoot him. In front of me, Sarah could probably feel my heart thumping against her spine. Maybe I fell short of the man I needed to be. Because the man I needed to be was the one who aimed his gun at Myzwik and put a bullet in his skull before things spiralled even further out of control.

Myzwik nodded at the voice. ‘Yes, he has her.’

‘Put the phone down,’ I said.

He didn’t. The voice continued, a constant barrage of instructions.

‘Are you sure?’ he said.

‘Put the phone down.’

This time I spat the words at him with venom, and in Myzwik’s face I saw a flitter of surprise. As if he hadn’t expected it, even from a man determined enough to come right into their nest.

Finally, the voice stopped.

Myzwik flipped the phone shut.

‘What do you want, David?’

‘I want to know what the fuck’s going on here.’

‘Why?’

‘No. You’ve had your turn asking questions. Now it’s my turn.’

‘Turn? We don’t take turns.’

‘Wrong. You’ll answer my questions — and you know why? Because I will kill her if you don’t. If it’s kill or be killed, you better believe I will do it.’

Myzwik glanced at Sarah for the first time, and then back at me. Something was up. A movement in his eyes betrayed him. For a moment, I swore I saw some sadness in his face.

Then he shot Sarah in the chest.

The bullet entered high up, just above her left breast. She jerked back, her blood spitting into my face, and then fell away. In an automatic response, I tried to prevent her hitting the floor, tried to yank her back up towards me, but she folded completely. The transfer of weight was too much and too fast for me to cling on to. I laid her down. When I looked up, Myzwik was almost on top of me, his gun aimed at my head.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’

‘Get up,’ he said.

I glanced at Sarah. She was at my feet, clutching her chest, blood pumping out between her fingers. In her eyes some of the light had already disappeared.

‘She’s going to die.’

‘Get to your feet or you’re next.’

I stood. Sarah’s eyes followed mine, but then she seemed to lose focus and her gaze drifted off. I wiped some of her blood from my face.

‘She’ll die here, Stephen,’ I said, trying to reason with him, using his first name as a way to get at his humanity.

But it didn’t work.

‘Then she dies,’ he replied quietly.

I looked down at her. Her life — maybe only twenty years of it — was running out over her hands, down her shirt and into the floorboards. Collecting with all the other blood that had been spilled in this room.

36

We headed down the track, towards the second building. It was an old slate farmhouse with an extension on the back. At the front was a veranda, like the one in the Polaroid of Alex, and a wooden sign, nailed to the inside of the railings. It said LAZARUS. Beyond, grass dropped away to the sea, heather scattered across it, spreading in all directions. Either side, more fields ran like squares on a quilt. A few had been dug up. Spades, pickaxes and garden forks had been left on the hard ground.

A hush settled across the farm as we approached. The only sound came from a set of wind chimes, swinging gently in the breeze coming off the water, and, at the side of the house, the grinding sound of metal against metal as a weathervane turned in the wind. As the wind died down, I looked up to the top of the roof and saw what the weathervane was: an angel.

I stepped up on to the veranda and looked in through the front window. Alex had been in there once to have his picture taken. Frozen for a moment in time. Framed by the window, the wooden railings of the veranda and the blue of the sea and sky. The picture must have been taken right back at the start, when he’d first arrived on the farm. Before the programme. Before whatever came after.

Myzwik pushed me along the veranda.

‘Open the door and go inside,’ he said.

I tried the door. Like Bethany, Lazarus opened into a kitchen. It was small, dark, with all three windows covered in black plastic sheeting. Two doors led from the kitchen. One was closed. The other was open, and I could see into a stark living room with a table in the centre and a single chair pushed underneath. On the walls of the kitchen were picture frames and shelves full of food. Above the cooker was a newspaper cutting. BOY, 10, FOUND FLOATING IN THE THAMES.

The same one I’d seen in the flat in Brixton.

Myzwik flicked the lights on and closed the door. He grabbed my shoulder, pressed his gun into my spine and sat me in a chair at the kitchen table. Behind me I heard him open and close a drawer. The tear of duct tape. He started to wrap it around my chest and legs, securing me to the chair. When he was finished, he threw the duct tape on to the table and stood in front of me. Looked down at me. Touched a finger to one of the bruises on my face. As I jolted away from him, avoiding him, he grabbed my face and moved in.

‘You’re going to die,’ he whispered.

I wriggled free from his grip and stared at him. He held my gaze for a moment, then turned away, removing his mobile phone. He flipped it open and speed-dialled a number.

‘Yeah, it’s me. He’s here.’

He killed the call.

He looked at me. ‘You’re not here to hurt people, David, is that right? You’re here to — what? — liberate?’

I didn’t reply.

He shook his head. ‘You believed you were doing something good. On some kind of crusade. But all you were doing was pissing in the wind.’

‘You know that’s not true.’

‘Do I?’

‘If I was pissing in the wind, two of your friends wouldn’t have driven me to the middle of a forest to execute me.’

His eyes narrowed. Then he moved around to the other side of the table and his expression changed. Softened. I realized why: he could say what he wanted now, because when I left the farm, it would be in a body bag.

‘I don’t think we ever really clicked, Alex and I. A lot of us here tried to help him, but you’ve got to meet in the middle. He didn’t want to do that.’

‘So, where is he?’

Myzwik shrugged. ‘Not here.’

He pulled out a chair and sat down.

‘I’m sure his mother painted a beautiful picture for you. But Alex is a killer. He made mistakes.’ He glanced at the newspaper cutting on the wall, and back at me. ‘When he had nowhere else to turn, we were there for him. Just like we’ve been there for everybody else in this place.’

I turned away from him. Said nothing.

Dismissing him.

‘What does that look mean?’

He leaned towards me.

‘Huh? ’

‘You don’t care about anyone.’

‘We do.’

‘By giving them more drugs?’

‘Yes.’

‘By taking out their teeth?’

He shoved the table towards me. It juddered against the lino, sticking. Rocking back and forth.

‘Don’t sit there and judge what you don’t understand!’ he screamed. ‘You don’t know the programme, you piece of shit! We give them a chance!’

I didn’t reply.

He came around the table, teeth gritted, hand reaching for my hair. I turned in the chair and ducked beneath his grasp — but the binds stopped me from moving any further. He clamped a hand around my throat and pushed me back so I was looking up at him. He was out of breath. Rage boiling. But as we stared at each other his eyes narrowed again, and he saw everything clearly. He saw I’d got to him.

He let go of me.

‘You’re clever, David.’

‘If I was clever, I would have put a bullet in your head before you murdered a teenaged girl in cold blood.’

‘You mean Sarah?’ He shook his head. ‘You murdered her by turning up here.’

‘I didn’t pull the trigger.’

He didn’t answer, and walked back around to the other side of the table.

‘There’s a cause greater than her,’ he said.

‘She was one of your own.’

‘She was your bargaining chip. You’d use her against us until you got what you wanted. Without her, you had nothing.’

I stared at him. ‘So, you just do what your boss says?’

‘What?’

‘Whoever phoned you before you killed Sarah. He just gives you the orders and you do what he tells you. Even if it means killing an innocent girl?’

He didn’t reply.

‘Don’t you value life?’

He shot a look at me. ‘I value it greatly,’ he said. ‘I value it more than you can possibly imagine.’

He leaned over and removed a wallet from the pocket of his trousers. Inside the wallet was a driver’s licence. He held it up to me. There was a photograph of him on it.

‘I’m sure you’ve already read about me. I served ten years for stabbing an old man with a piece of glass. You know why?’

‘You were a drug addict.’

‘Right. I needed saving. That’s what redemption is. Digging up a bad seed and planting a good one in its place.’

‘And you’ve redeemed yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your idea of redemption is different from mine.’

‘Not so different, David,’ he said, smiling. ‘You’re also a killer.’

Click.

A noise from behind me. The door opening. Myzwik looked over my shoulder. Suddenly, his expression changed completely: everything fell away, all control.

He was scared.

In front of me, in one of the picture frames, I saw a reflection. A shape standing close to my shoulder. A silhouette. I couldn’t see his face. Couldn’t see whether he was looking at me, or looking at Myzwik. But I could smell something.

A smell like decay.

I glanced at Myzwik. His eyes flicked between me and the man behind me, and then he edged away slightly, clearing his throat, as if he couldn’t stand the smell. He slid away, along the kitchen counter, back towards the corner of the room.

When I looked at the picture frame again, I saw why.

In the reflection was Legion, his mask half-hidden in darkness, a needle in his hands. And before I had a chance to do anything, he came at me and plunged the needle into my neck.

Everything went black.

37

When I came round, I was sitting in the middle of a disused industrial fridge. There were no windows, and it was lit by the dull glow from a single strip light above me. Meat hooks hung from a long metal tube to my left. There were two doors, both of them closed: one seemed to be the entrance, dotted brown and orange with rust; the second was some sort of side door, painted the same cream colour as the walls. Speckles of blood ran across its surface.

I was sitting in an old wooden chair, but they hadn’t tied me to it. My shoeless feet were flat to the floor, exactly parallel to one another, my arms flat to the sides of the seat. My fingers had been spread out, equally spaced, and my wedding ring had been removed and placed on the top of my hand. They’d taken off my shirt and trousers. All I had on were my boxer shorts.

And I couldn’t move.

My head could turn from side to side — but the rest of me was paralysed. I couldn’t shift a single muscle. Couldn’t even wriggle a finger. I knew what I wanted to do, begged my body to do it, but nothing happened. I was dead from the neck down.

I yelled out. A huge, guttural noise, fed by anger, which echoed around the fridge. When it faded out, I yelled for a second time, louder and longer.

The noise died again.

‘What have you done to me?’

Nothing. The only sound was the dripping.

I swallowed.

Inside I could feel everything. The saliva sliding down my throat. The pounding of my heart against my ribs. A sharp, acidic burn, like fire in my lungs. The freezer was cold but I could feel a bead of sweat pop from a pore on my forehead and run down my face. Past my eyes, my nose, my mouth and down towards my neck. As soon as it passed the middle of my throat, the sensation disappeared. On the surface of my skin, from the neck down, there was no feeling at all. I was dead. It was like my organs and muscles were no longer connected to my blood vessels and nerves.

Clunk.

The entrance door started opening. A slow, grinding rumble as it forced its way out from the door frame. A man filled the doorway. Not Legion. Another. He was massive: probably six foot four and eighteen stone. His blond hair was closely cropped, and he was dressed head to toe in black. He watched me for a moment. Tilted his head slightly. Seemed vaguely amused by what he was seeing. And then he stepped forward and brought his arms out from behind his back. There was something in his hands. At first I thought it was a belt. Then I realized it was something worse: a multi-thonged whip, twelve tassles dangling from the end. It looked like a medieval scourge.

‘What the hell have you done to me?’

The man didn’t reply. Just stepped further inside the freezer and pushed the door shut behind him. It made another immense wheeze. He walked over to the side door next to the meat hooks and opened it. Beyond, it was dark. He looked back at me once, and disappeared inside.

‘What the hell have you done to me?’ I shouted after him.

Silence.

I looked down at myself again, tried desperately to move my fingers, my hands, my legs. All I got in return was the sensation of it happening. My wedding ring remained perched on top of my hand. Perfectly still.

The man stepped back out of the darkness. He was still carrying the scourge, but in his other hand he held a chair. He walked over to me, placed the seat down opposite, so our feet were almost touching, and sat and watched me.

‘My name is Andrew,’ he said eventually.

‘What have you done to me?’

‘It’s good to finally meet you, David.’

‘What have you don—’

‘In a lot of ways I admire you,’ he cut in, holding a finger up for me to be quiet. ‘A lot of ways. My organization has managed to protect itself against people like you. On the rare occasions outsiders have got close to us before, we’ve thrown them off the scent. But not you, David. You’re special. Until you came along, no one ever found out about what we have here. We made some mistakes, I suppose. But I think we underestimated you too.’

I glanced at the scourge, then back at him. He hadn’t taken his eyes away from me. Hadn’t even blinked.

‘Everyone here has made mistakes, some bigger than others, but we give people a chance to start again. In exchange, we require certain things. We require them to give themselves up to the programme. Completely.’

He paused, studied me.

‘And we require secrecy.’

He stopped again, this time for longer. Breathing in and out. Just staring at me, as if trying to decide whether I was capable of understanding.

‘Are you listening to me? We’ve worked too hard on this. Gone too far. This isn’t going to unravel because some no-note kid is lost in the ether.’

He meant Alex.

We looked at each other, his eyes deep and powerful. Staring each other out. Eventually he blinked and turned his gaze away, down to the wedding ring on top of my hand.

‘What you’ve never understood, David, is that our old lives don’t exist any more. We don’t have a space we can fit back into. We remove ourselves from society and we don’t go back. If you took one of these kids out of the programme because you thought you were saving them —’ he looked at me again ‘— where do you think they’d go?’

I glanced around the fridge. ‘Somewhere better than here.’

He studied me, as if waiting for me to correct myself. Then, when I refused to turn away from him, refused to say anything else, he started nodding his head.

‘Better than here,’ he repeated quietly.

Suddenly — just a blur of movement — he thrashed the scourge against my left leg. The tassles wrapped around my thigh. Circling it. Clinging to it. As they dropped away again, I looked down. A series of thin red marks were carved across my skin, tiny pricks of blood emerging inside them.

But I felt nothing.

‘It must be nice not feeling any pain,’ he said, looking down at my leg, then at the rest of my body. ‘Can you imagine going the rest of your life without pain?’

I felt a twitch in one of my toes. An odd sensation, like the nerve endings had finally fired up.

He tilted his head again, a half-smile on his face.

‘Is the feeling coming back?’

I glanced at him.

‘It will do. First your toes, then your feet, then your legs. You’ll start to feel normal again as it passes through your groin, up into your abdomen…’ He paused. Leaned forward. Pressed a finger against my chest, just below the ribcage. ‘It’s when it gets to here that you’ll wish you were dead.’

‘What the fuck have you done?’

He smiled. He’d clearly got the reaction he wanted.

‘We’ve drugged you, David. Well, actually, technically, we’ve partially paralysed you. Don’t worry, it won’t last for ever. But I should probably warn you that side effects can include sweating, salivation, rashes and vomiting. You shouldn’t suffer cardiac arrest… but, as with everything, you can never be sure.’

He pulled one of the thongs out from the scourge, and held it up to me. My blood was on it. Other blood too: darker, drier, stained on the leather. He studied it, turned it. There was more. The scourge was awash in it.

‘You know, I think some of this blood is Alex’s.’

He smiled again, a flash of darkness in his face for the first time.

‘The only way you can change someone is by removing temptation from their life,’ he continued, his expression softening — that same unblinking look. ‘The kids we bring here, especially the addicts, if we dried them out and sent them back, the temptation would still be there.’

I got a feeling in my toes again, stronger this time. A shooting sensation.

He leaned into me.

‘We promise them shelter. Food. Support. A family. But most of all, we help them forget. Forget about their addiction. Forget about their past. Do you honestly think any of them want to remember what they’ve done? What they’ve been through? One of the girls here stabbed a man in the chest after he raped her. Do you think she wants to remember what it feels like to have him forcing himself inside her?’

I didn’t reply. There was sensation at the top of my feet now. It lasted longer, like it was drifting across the surface of the skin.

‘So, we help them trade one life for another.’

He was still leaning in to me, his head at an angle.

‘Did you know that ketamine is the closest you’ll ever get to dying without your heart actually stopping? Users call it the ‘k-hole’. We mix it with a little dimethyltryptamine… and call it a resurrection.’

‘You’re crazy.’

‘When we resurrect them,’ he continued, ignoring me, ‘some of the people on our programme find they come out of their bodies. Some see their lives played back at them. Some see bright lights in the darkness. It’s a symbolic rebirth. A resurrection into a new existence. A way to separate what’s been done in the past with what’s to come in the future.’

‘You’re fucking crazy.’

He laughed, and ran his fingers through the thongs. ‘No, David. The only crazy thing is that you think you’re doing good by stopping us.’

38

Andrew stared at me, his fingers running through the scourge. I looked back, conscious of the fact that they were trying to make me feel weak. They’d paralysed me. They’d taken my clothes. But they weren’t going to watch me crumble. His head tilted back again — a quirk of his — and then he broke out into a smile, as if he’d guessed what I was thinking.

‘I’ve spent a long time building this place, David. I’ve spent a long time getting the right people into position to help me. Surely you understand the need for me to protect what is important.’ He glanced at the wedding band on the top of my hand. ‘You’d protect what was important to you, wouldn’t you?’

‘The right people?’

He nodded.

‘Like that fucking freak in the mask?’

He didn’t move. Didn’t reply.

‘What’s right about him?’

‘He does what is necessary to secure our survival. We had problems at the beginning. He helped us with those problems. In return, we helped him.’

‘Was he helping you when he came for me in my home?’

More sensation in my feet. Both of them now.

‘He was ensuring—’

‘He’s not helping anybody. You’re not helping anybody.’

‘We’re taking away their pain.’

‘You’re erasing their memories.’

‘What memories do you think a heroin addict has, David?’ he said, his voice raised for the first time. ‘What about the girl we have here whose father molested her for eleven years?’

‘This isn’t right.’

He grunted. ‘How would you know what’s right?’

‘You’re forcing them.’

‘We ease their pain.’

‘You’re forcing drugs into them!’

‘We’re helping them build a new life!’ he shouted back. ‘We give them food and shelter. We give them company. They start again. They live again.’

Now I could feel the nerves igniting in my ankles and the balls of my feet. I looked down and saw my toes wriggling. Twitching. Moving.

When I looked up he was watching me.

‘You’re pushing it out of your system impressively fast,’ he said.

My ankles shifted position on the floor.

‘You’re a fighter, David. I like that.’

‘You’ve lost control here.’

He laughed. ‘Oh, no. We’re in total control.’

‘You’ve lost control!’ I said again, forcing the anger up through my throat. I gritted my teeth and willed myself to move. Just an inch. Anything at all.

All I felt was one of my calf muscles twitch.

‘Where’s Alex?’

He laughed. ‘Don’t you know when to give up?’

‘Where is he?’

He flicked the scourge again, the thongs brushing his leg.

‘Alex was different. He came to me just over a year ago after a long time in the wilderness. I didn’t go out and find him. He was given to me.’ A pause. ‘He was different.’

Another twitch — this time in my knee.

‘Different?’

‘When I first started the farm, I suppose I expected every kid I took in to respond to what we were doing. They had problems. We were offering them a way out. And for a while it all worked beautifully. The first two became wonderful, clean-living people. People I could use. I got Zack off drugs, and he became a recruiter for me. Then I gave Jade her dignity back after years of abuse and she contributed to our operations down in London.’

He leaned back in his chair. It creaked under his weight.

‘But then things got more difficult. Zack found this heroin addict down in Bristol. She’d been beaten by her dealer and raped by her pimp. He found her in an alleyway in the middle of winter, left for dead. So we started her on a detox programme.’

He paused, breathed out.

‘But then one night she told me she didn’t want to be here any more. I told her she had made her choice and now she had to stick to it.’ His body sank a little. ‘So, she pulled out a pair of scissors — and stabbed one of my people in the chest.’

I looked up at him.

‘I hit her,’ he said, stamping a foot on the ground. ‘And then I hit her again and again and again. And when I finished, she wasn’t moving any more.’

He stopped, glanced at me.

‘She pleaded with us to help her, so we brought her here with the promise of a new life. And she repaid us, repaid me, by murdering one of my best friends.’

Regret passed across his eyes.

‘But I had an epiphany after that. A watershed moment. When others fought us like she did, threw everything we offered them back in our faces, I realized we had to deal with them. We’d taken them out of society, given them a roof over their head. We’d made sacrifices for them. So, they’d make a sacrifice for us. They’d become martyrs.’

‘That’s why you brought in Legion.’

‘Yes,’ he said matter-of-factly, and got to his feet. ‘We’d been in the army together. He had some unique skills. You see how a man values life when you’re on a battlefield, David. You see how quickly he is prepared to turn life into death. Most soldiers, most people, don’t want to have to kill. They have a line that they don’t ever want to cross.’ I followed him as he moved around to my side, the scourge dangling from his hand. ‘But, for him, there was no line.’

‘I thought this was a mission from God?’

‘It is.’

‘You ever read the Ten Commandments?’

He smiled. ‘I was protecting the project.’

‘You brought in a murdering psychopath.’

‘You will never understand, David. You’ve never had a cause to fight for.’ He looked briefly at the wedding band. ‘Other than the memory of your dead wife. And what sort of cause is that?’

He smiled again as he saw the anger burning in me, and then disappeared behind me, out of sight.

‘So, he just killed the ones that didn’t work out?’ I said.

Andrew didn’t reply.

And then it came to me.

‘Oh, shit — you used their bodies…’

‘Yes,’ he replied from behind me. ‘We used the bodies of the ones that didn’t respond to the programme. We have people in useful places; a net cast wider than you can possibly imagine. In the hospital system. In the police. Do you know how to remove evidence from a police database, David? I think you’d be surprised at how easy it is.’

I heard him move again.

‘You don’t have to work your way up the tree. You can get someone trained in HOLMES in a very short space of time and from there… well, it’s amazing what you can do just by sitting at someone else’s computer and using their login details.’

‘You’re framing people.’

He reappeared on my other side, looking down at me. There was a frown on his face, as if he couldn’t comprehend my simplicity.

‘It’s a bigger win. Our men and women on the inside, they’ve experienced redemption. They’re like Zack and Jade were. Once broken, now repaired. They give others that same chance by protecting what we have.’

The first pang of something flickered inside my body, close to my groin. A dull ache. The sensation was moving through my body like an oil spill.

He smiled and pressed a finger against my forehead.

‘Feel something?’

I wriggled my head, and his finger fell away.

I closed my eyes. Tried to use the darkness to refocus myself. When I reopened them, he was staring at me, the smile still there.

‘Whose body did you use for Alex?’

He shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’

‘It matters to the people who love him.’

He watched me for a moment. ‘You don’t know anything, David. Most of their families don’t care if they’re dead or alive.’

‘You think Mary cares whether Alex is alive?’

‘She does now she’s seen him.’

‘She did anyway!’

He paused for a moment.

‘Like I said, I didn’t have a choice with Alex. My hand was forced.’

Then I lost my train of thought. The dull ache came again, but this time it was stronger. It flared in my groin. In my lower back.

I sucked in some air.

‘This thing is out of control,’ I said.

The sound of my voice amused him. He leaned in a little closer to me, stooping slightly, looking up at me. ‘Oooooh, ouch,’ he mocked quietly. ‘Does it hurt?’

My mouth was filling with saliva. And I was sweating. Trails of it were coming off my hairline and running down my face. Deep inside — in my stomach, at the bottom of my throat — vomit bubbled, burning in the middle of my breastplate. Worse was the feeling emerging from the base of my back, in my groin, crawling up my spine. As every nerve end started to fire, my back tightened, the skin stretching across my muscles. The pain was focused there. Whatever they’d done to me was in my back.

Andrew stood again, staring down at me with a mixture of amusement and disgust in his face. Picking up the chair, he moved back towards the door and disappeared inside. He slammed it shut behind him — and I could feel the vibrations pass across the floor. Pain suddenly burst its way out from my back and into the centre of my chest.

‘Fuck!’

I yelled out again.

It felt like someone was squeezing the life out of my heart. When I tried to shift my weight from one side to another, it was torture. My whole body spasmed. And, finally, my wedding ring fell, pinging against the floor of the fridge and rolling away.

The door opened again, and Andrew emerged from the darkness without the chair. The scourge was hanging from his belt now. Clasped in his hands was a long mirror. There were marks all over it — greasy drag marks, as if fingers had clawed across the glass.

He stood in front of me, the mirror turned away, and pulled the scourge from his belt. He held it up by its handle, so the tassles dropped down in front of me.

‘After I left the army, I got into some trouble,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t find work. I missed the routine the military had brought to my life. The discipline. So, I resorted to stealing, and I hurt some people. And after that, I deservedly went to prison.’

He glanced behind me, and then back.

‘But after I got out, I found God. I really found Him. Eventually, I even managed to get to the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. I saw the path Jesus walked on his way to the crucifixion. You gain an appreciation of what he had to endure when you visit those places.’ He paused. Dropped the scourge to his side. ‘And afterwards, you look at people differently. You look at yourself differently. You realize, if people could experience even a little of what he had to go through, they might have a greater appreciation of what they’ve been given in this life.’

I couldn’t think of anything but the pain now. Couldn’t force up any more anger. Couldn’t concentrate on his face. It felt like the skin was slipping away from my back. I lifted a hand, shaky like an old man, and touched my back. There was blood on my fingers.

‘Legion brought an idea to me one day. At first I thought it was a little… medieval. But then when I considered it some more I realized the kids we took in were exactly the sort of people I was thinking about when I visited Israel. Like me, they never appreciated what they’d been given in their first lives. The opportunity. But if they could get a taste of what Jesus went through, if they could carry around with them a reminder of that, maybe they’d appreciate life more the second time round.’

And then he turned the mirror.

I looked into the reflection.

Legion was standing in a double doorway behind me, dressed in black, like Andrew, but with a white butcher’s apron on.

I swallowed. Coughed. Hacked up saliva.

When I looked in the mirror again, Legion was a step closer, his mask up on the top of his head. He was the same man who had come up to me in the pub in Cornwall, except now he looked more manic. More frantic. As if on the cusp of something exciting. Something he had been desperate to do for a long time.

He glanced at Andrew and back to me and smiled, his tongue breaking through between a flat, lipless mouth.

His tongue.

I could see it now. Dark, almost crimson. Forked. His arms twitched and his legs spasmed, as if electricity was pumping through him.

‘Wait,’ I said quietly.

And then he stepped aside and I saw what was behind him.

Through the double doors was a small room, probably fifteen foot square, with very high ceilings. It was another fridge, but the walls were painted black. In the centre of the room, under a spotlight, almost touching the ceiling, was a huge wooden crucifix made from railway sleepers. At each end of the horizontal sleeper were handcuffs. Midway down the vertical sleeper was a footrest.

Legion stepped in closer again and grabbed the back of my chair, pouncing on it like the closing jaws of a bear trap. Then, slowly, he started to turn me around. The chair scraped across the floor, the legs catching, until I was side on to the mirror.

I turned my head and looked at my reflection.

‘What the fuck have you done to me?’

My back had been whipped with the scourge while I was knocked out, leaving thin slivers of pink skin, running in lines across my back, from the base of my neck to three-quarters of the way down my spine. The rest was just flesh.

‘He seems worried,’ Legion said, smiling.

Andrew nodded. ‘We all get like that at the end.’

Then Legion reached for the mask on top of his head and pulled it down over his face. And — as I desperately tried to move, tried to will myself to fight back — I felt a needle enter my neck again.

39

I felt the pain before anything else. From my neck, all the way down through my chest, into my groin and the top of my thighs. It felt like I’d been dropped into boiling hot water. My skin was on fire. Every movement of my chest, every expansion of my lungs, made it worse.

In the darkness, I could hear someone moving around. Footsteps, barely audible. And a squeak, rhythmic and soft, like the wheels of a trolley.

I opened my eyes.

My head was forward, against my chest. Gravity had forced it there. When I tried to straighten, to look around, agonizing prickles spread across my neck and back.

I breathed in.

I was handcuffed to the cross, five feet off the floor. The ceiling in the room was about three times as high. The soles of my feet were flat to the footrest and my arms outstretched either side of me. I was still only dressed in boxer shorts.

The room was cold. I wriggled the fingers on both hands, trying to get my circulation going. But the movement of the tendons sent a ripple all the way up my arms and into my shoulders. I sucked in as much air as I could for a second time, and closed my eyes.

Darkness. Solitude.

Then the squeak came again.

I opened my eyes. To my left, a metal trolley — the type used in operating theatres — moved into view. Legion’s fingers were wrapped around the handle. On top, in individual metal plates, a scalpel and a hammer sat next to two pencil-sized nails. Next to that was a third nail: bigger, thicker, longer — like a rusting iron tube. It must have come from the sleeper itself.

As the trolley came to a stop, he spent a moment making minuscule adjustments to the position of the instruments on the plates, before slowly turning his head towards me. A long drawn-out movement, his eyes never blinking inside the mask.

He disappeared from view again. I tried raising my head, forcing back the pain, and could see the double doors into the next room, where I’d been sitting before. But now the doors were closed.

I looked left.

There was an aluminium stepladder leaning against the wall. Legion came back into view, picked up the stepladder and looked up at me. His eyes moved again, back and forth across my body, his tongue making a scratching sound against the inside of the mask. And then he placed the ladder underneath my left arm.

‘Why are you doing this?’ I said, looking down at him.

He didn’t respond. Instead, he picked up the scalpel and climbed to the second step of the ladder. As he leaned towards me, the mask stopping about a foot from my face, his odour started to fill the air, pouring off his body. Suddenly, he seemed more threatening. I looked down at the scalpel and back up to his eyes. The more dangerous a man, the more difficult it was for him to suppress the darkness in him. His smell was like an animal scent: a warning not to come close unless you were looking to get hurt.

‘Why are you doi—’

Lightning fast, he swiped the scalpel across my hip. I cried out, automatically trying to reach for the wound. My arm, tightly handcuffed, locked into place on the sleeper.

Legion descended the ladder again, his eyes dancing with enjoyment now. When he got down, he tossed the scalpel on to the trolley and looked up. Watched me for a moment. Enjoyed the sight of my face wincing. The pain started to spread out from the cut, across my skin, under it, into my muscles and bones.

He scooped up the hammer and the thinner nails, leaving the third, larger one on the tray. Then he started to climb the ladder again.

‘It’s amazing how much punishment the human body can take,’ he said, his voice short and sharp. More clipped than I remembered, like his mouth was full of glass. ‘The lengths it will go to in order to survive.’

At the top of the ladder, he glanced at me, lowering his head slightly. I imagined, behind the plastic, he was smiling. Enjoying this. Feeding off my pain. And I imagined his face — in that moment — wasn’t all that different to the one on the mask.

‘Stop,’ I said.

He ignored me, selected one of the nails and pressed the point against my index finger. It was razor sharp, immediately piercing the skin.

‘They tell me you’re right-handed,’ he said.

‘Stop.’

‘So, we’ll have some fun with the left first.’

‘Stop.’

He smashed the hammer against the head of the nail. I felt it carve through my finger, out through the fingernail, and split the sleeper beneath — then, seconds later, I felt the pain. Immense waves of it, crackling down my arms and into my hand like a lightning strike. I yelled out, the noise bouncing off the walls and coming back at me.

‘The hand’s a very complex piece of anatomy,’ Legion continued, his voice even and serious, talking over my cries of pain. He placed the tip of the second nail against my middle finger. ‘Twenty-seven bones, including eight in the wrist alone. Muscles, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, veins, arteries, nerves… You’ve got to make sure you don’t hit anything important.’

My hand started twitching, like a dying animal left in the road. He watched it for a moment. Tilted his head. Studied me, like I was on the other side of the glass in a zoo.

Then he hammered the nail through the second finger.

I screamed out.

‘We’re going to kill you, David,’ he said.

I screamed again, even longer and louder, trying to force some of the pain out through my throat and drown out the sound of his voice. But he just waited for me to quieten. And once I did, he reached into the front pocket of his apron and brought out a syringe.

‘But first you’re going to feel…’

He raised the needle.

‘… what it’s like to be resurrected.’

I died quickly.

All sound was swallowed up. Light turned to darkness. Then the darkness changed and suddenly I was looking down at myself. My near-naked body frozen on the cross. The handcuffs on my wrists. Legion watching me from below. I could see everything: the top of my head, the nails, the scourge marks on my back. I still felt conscious. I could still feel the wood of the cross against the back of my arms, and my inner voice telling me, over and over, that I wasn’t dead yet.

But then something shifted.

A feeling washed over me, like the little control I’d had left was slipping away. And — as that went — scenes from my life began to play out. In the forest with my dad. Sitting beside his bed when he’d died. Meeting Derryn for the first time. The day I asked her to marry me. The day we got told we couldn’t have kids. The day she told me to find the first missing girl.

‘It’s perfect for you, David.’

Her voice again. And after her voice, a different kind of darkness: devouring everything, consuming it, until all that was left were the echoes of voices I once loved.

And beyond that, waves crashing on top of one another.

Like the sound of the sea.

Family

There were four in a group, digging flowerbeds in the earth outside Bethany. Across from them, a man and a woman watched. He was forgetting so much now — dates, faces, conversations he’d vowed never to lose — but he remembered their names. The man was Stephen, the first person he’d met when he arrived on the farm. And the woman was Maggie. He didn’t remember much about her. He wasn’t sure he had ever spoken to her. But he knew her face. In the darkness at the back of his mind, where he stored what he was determined they wouldn’t take, he had a clear memory of her, leaning over him, clamping his mouth open and taking his teeth.

It was early spring. The earth was wet. He scooped up a pile of soil and tossed it to his side. Further down, he could see Rose, the girl who had been punished, like him, by being taken to the room with the rings. He’d got to know her quite well. They’d spent three days in that room together until she’d been taken away. She would talk to him a little, tell him things — as much as she could remember, anyway. And then she was moved on to the next part of the programme. She looked better now — less grey, more colour — but she also barely seemed to remember him. Sometimes he would pass her and he could see her big, bright eyes linger on him, her brain firing as she tried to remember where she’d seen him, or what they had talked about. But most times, she just looked right through him, as if he were a ghost passing across the fields of the farm.

He pounded the shovel down into the ground and felt it reverberate up the handle. The fingers of his hands throbbed for a moment, and then the pain faded into a dull ache. He turned his left hand over. At the fingertips, where once he’d traced creases and lifelines, were patches of smooth, white skin. Wounds. Half an inch across and vaguely circular in shape. When he turned his hand over, he could see the same wound, replicated beneath the veneer of the fingernail. Except, while the nail had grown back, the space around the wound hadn’t fully — and never would. It dipped, like a groove; a bloodless, colourless patch of skin.

The last stage of the programme.

The programme destroyed and rebuilt them, ready for their next life. A new life free from the memories of addiction, and rape, and violence. But free, as well, from the memories of anything else they’d once done. Any places they’d been. Any people they’d loved. By the time the programme was over, they had no recollection of their first life. And no past.

Except he did — and always would.

He slid a hand into his pocket and touched the top of the Polaroid. He didn’t need to take it out. He knew what it looked like. Every inch of it. And he knew what he was going to do with it if he ever got the chance. He’d fought the programme all the way through. And the memories he’d managed to cling on to, in his pocket and in his head, they would never get to find.

He pulls up to the kerb and kills the engine. There’s a crack in the windscreen, from left to right. In the corner, over the steering wheel, he can see blood. A lot of blood.

He gets out and locks the doors.

At the front of the car the grille is broken, one of the headlights has smashed and there’s blood across the bonnet. Splashed like paint. Running across and down, covering the badge and the lights, the bumper and the registration plate. He turns and looks up the path to the house.

Through the window, he can see his dad.

He moves quickly up the path, on to the porch and opens the front door. The house smells of fried food. In the kitchen he can see his dad, standing over a frying pan, moving the handle. His dad doesn’t notice him at first, then — as he turns — he jumps.

‘Oh, you frightened me,’ his dad says. He looks him up and down. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘I did it, Dad.’

‘Did what?’

‘Al.’

‘What about him?’

‘I took care of him.’

His dad smiles. ‘You talked to him?’

‘No. No. I mean I took care of him. Like we said.’

His dad frowns. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘We can keep the money.’

‘What?’

‘The money,’ he says, a little more desperate now. ‘We can keep it. We can do what we want with it. Al’s gone, Dad. I took care of him. He’s gone.’

‘What do you mean, gone?’

‘You know.’

‘No, I don’t know. What do you mean, gone?’

‘Gone,’ he says quietly. ‘Dead.’

His dad’s face drops. ‘You killed him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wha— why?’

He frowns. ‘The money.’

‘The money?’

‘Remember we talked about it. About keeping it.’

‘You killed him for the money?’

‘For us.’

‘Don’t bring me into this.’

‘Dad…’

‘Don’t you dare bring me into this.’

‘But you wanted to keep the money. To take care of Al.’

‘You offered to talk to him, not kill him.’

‘Dad, I thought that’s what you wanted.’

‘I wanted you to talk to him, to reason with him.’

‘But you told me—’

‘I told you to talk to him.’

‘You told me to kill him.’

‘What? Are you out of your mind?’

‘You told me to do it.’

‘What the hell were you thinking?’

‘I was the one who said I didn’t want him dead.’

‘What the fuck were you thinking?’

‘You wanted him dead, Dad. I did this because you wanted it done. I did this for you. And now you’re trying to deny you ever said it.’

‘I never told you to murder him.’

‘You di—’

‘No! Just shut up for a minute and think about what you’ve done. Have you any idea what you’ve done? You shouldn’t even be here. You should be running for the bloody hills.’

‘What?’

‘Where’s Al?’

‘You want me to run?’

‘Where’s Al?’

‘In the car park.’

‘At the strip club?’

‘You want me to run away?’

‘At the strip club?’

‘Yes.’

‘You just left him there?’

‘Of course I left him there.’

‘Bloody hell. What have you done?’

‘You want me to run?’

‘What do you suggest?’

He looks at his dad, then backs away, out of the kitchen and into the living room.

‘You’re just going to turn your back on me.’

‘Find a place to stay.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Lay low for a while.’

‘Lay low?’

‘Let it blow ov—’

‘Why should I lay low? You’re as much a part of this as me. You talked about wanting him dead. You talked about taking the money. Why do you think I did this? I did this to save you and Mum. I did this to save our family.’

‘What you did was wrong.’

‘You’re turning your back on me.’

‘What do you expect?’

‘What do I expect? I expect your protection.’

‘You killed someone.’

He still has the car keys in his hands. He feels for them, runs a finger along the ignition key, feels the grooves against his skin. Now he only has the car.

‘I won’t come back.’

‘Let it blow over.’

‘No, Dad. If I go, I don’t come back.’

His dad looks at him.

‘That’s it?’

‘What do you expect me to say, son?’

He turns and heads for the front door. Then he remembers something. He looks back over his shoulder at his dad, standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

‘Al told me something tonight.’

‘You need to go.’

‘Were you ever going to tell me?’

‘What?’

‘Were you ever going to tell me?’

‘Tell you what?’

‘About the brother I never knew I had.’

They stay like that for a while: Malcolm staring into space, his eyes glistening in the light from the kitchen; and Alex opposite him, a tear rolling down his face.

Then, finally, Alex turns and leaves.