“WHO WERE THEY?” Sean asked again. He couldn’t see out of his left eye. It felt as though somebody had inserted one of those needle adapters for footballs into his forehead and inflated the flesh. It ought to sting like a bastard, but he couldn’t feel any pain.
He felt drained and sick. His body was tight, as though his skin had been cinched around the muscles. Adrenaline drained away, lactic acid in the meat of his arms and legs conspiring to make him feel as shitty as one of old May’s stockings.
Vernon glanced at him again. There was affection and awe in the way he favoured him. His voice was cowed: “The way you moved,” he said.
“It wasn’t a Fred and Ginger moment in there, Vernon. It was down and dirty. I’ve never seen fighting like it. They were fucking evil.”
Vernon nodded. “I’ve not seen fighting like it either,” he said. “You didn’t give them a chance.”
Apart from the crack to his eye, an anonymous elbow early on in the skirmish, Sean hadn’t received any other injury. He remembered little of the scrap, apart from the way it started
(Sean: Who are you?
Bucket-faced ape: Chin that fucker. Deck him now.)
and the way it finished, with him slamming one head repeatedly into another while the third goon tried to breathe around the splintered newel post that had been rammed into his neck. All through it, Mrs Moulder had been whining like a puppy: “I haven’t finished paying for this carpet! I haven’t finished paying for this carpet!” Bizarrely it had helped him keep his focus. Vernon had stood there with the bat limp in his hand, drying his tongue out. When it had finished, he had been comically polite to Mrs Moulder, telling her that he would be back next month and thank you very much.
“Well? Who were they?”
As they bypassed it on their right, the cooling towers of Fiddlers Ferry power station belched white plumes towards Widnes. As a child, Sean had been able to see the towers from his bedroom window. Red lights punched into the towers gleamed like demonic eyes.
“I don’t know. You saw her pulling on that emergency cord like she was at bell-ringing practice.”
“They looked pretty tough for people who come round to plonk you back on your commode.”
“Estate security then, who knows? Who cares?”
They drove in silence until they reached the general hospital, where Sean told Vernon to drop him.
“A quick nip of something warm back at yours?” Vernon tried.
“Don’t think so, Vernon. I’m knackered. I’ll see you at work tomorrow?”
Vernon shook his head. “Got business out in the sticks tomorrow.”
“You don’t need me?”
Another shake. “Salty’s coming with me.”
Sean tried hard to seem nonplussed. “What’s this? I mean, why do you need me sometimes, and Salty others?”
“What if I do?”
Sean made a dismissive gesture. He was hungry. And he was sick of Vernon. “Whatever you say, boss.” He was about to walk away when Vernon tooted him on the horn.
“Thanks for back there,” he said. “You did well. There’ll be forward motion for you soon. I promise. Be patient.”
“Better than being a patient.”
Vernon chuckled. “You’re right there.”
BACK IN HIS bedsit, having walked once around the block to make sure that Vernon wasn’t tailing him, he withdrew the bottle of Absolut from the freezer compartment and sat by the window in darkness, refilling a cracked shot glass until the vodka had lost its syrupy chill and night clogged the streets.
Sean fought the urge to bang the rest of the bottle back and get started on another. Getting pissed wasn’t going to help matters; it would only make his confusion more cloudy. Already it resembled some congested storm-anvil of black thoughts, questions and possibilities, reaching up into his head. He sipped his drink and felt the air change outside, as if it were mirroring his emotions. A gust of wind staggered through the badly fitting window, drunk on exhaust fumes and the smell of dog shit drifting over from the park.
Sean couldn’t understand why he felt so instantly linked to Emma, but her ghost clung to his waking hours. He decided he was going to take another drink after all, as the rain started spanking down on the slates. The weather had made up its mind that it liked the taste of this town and bit deep. Wind howled at the weak spots of the house. Sean felt constantly as though he were trying to escape. Sometimes his skin felt too tight for the anger that moved within him. He felt directionless and wild. Emma had been like a magnetic field, drawing all of his focuses, taming the chaos. Swallowing the sour residue of his fourth, fifth shot glass of vodka and rising for a refill, he felt cheated. He had saved her, despite her protests, from a rape at least, murder at worst. Yet what would she be doing now if not what she had been paid to do before he helped her escape from those men?
In an effort to distract himself, he thought of Tim Enever, crapulous, coughing Tim Enever moving through the rooms of the de Fleche building as slowly as a sloth in lead boots. How he caressed the walls. What had he been up to? Was it enough that he was just weird? Sean didn’t think so. Maybe he should go back there. Later tonight. Check those walls, see if there was something behind them. Something hidden.
On the back of an envelope, without trying to think too much, he wrote the name de Fleche. He couldn’t understand why it might be important, but it wouldn’t hurt to check it out. Suicide, Rapler had said before Ronnie came in to shut him up. Suicide.
Had he ever considered, even obliquely, the easy way out in the days following Naomi’s death? Watching the creep of cold across his pane and the ice spreading through the puddles on the street, he couldn’t force his mind to find a region of similar cold. In the extremities of his despair, he had thought about a communion of thoughts with Naomi, but had he meant that to be as literal as it now appeared? He could never entertain such thoughts while her killer remained at large, but privately, he feared that he was not strong enough to stem the tide of such thinking for too long. The exertions of violence had wearied him, but the violence was nothing. It did not take a strong man to inflict pain on another, or to shed blood. The strongest people were the Emmas of the world. And yes, the Mrs Moulders. Sean took another drink and thought, yes, he would check himself out pretty soon if he ever found himself in a spot similar to the old woman. Outwardly he might appear strong. Inwardly he was as brittle as the icing on a stale cake.
Sometime around midnight, the empty bottle slipped through his fingers, skidded and slithered on the floor, coming to a stop with the mouth pointing his way. When the glass followed it and shattered a few seconds later, the sound was not sufficient to wake him. Foggy street-lighting caught in viscous dregs smeared across the fragments and reflected his slumped form in a thousand different ways.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: BROCKEN SPECTRE
SADIE AND ELISABETH were in the back of the Campervan, playing with Eiger the dog. Up front, Will shared his seat with about a hundred Ordnance Survey maps as well as half a tonne of karabiners and buckles and straps. Flint, the mountaineer, drove with one hand while the other searched his Berghaus waterproof for a tube of mints.
“Where was it you said you were going?” Flint asked. Will couldn’t see his mouth through the tangle of red beard. His eyes were dark, sharp and turned nasty by a ridge of black brows that reared away from his head. The hair was long and straggly, held back in a pony tail by an elastic band. It was a hard, north Wales voice, barely softened by years of travel.