There’s this thing called the Dead Cat Bounce. It’s a stock market term, I believe. What it’s talking about is the fact that even a stock that is essentially worthless and really going nowhere but down for ever can register a slight upward movement, just for a bit, because there is generally a floor for almost everything. The comparison rests on the fact that even when a cat hits the pavement from forty storeys high and dies instantly, it’ll still bounce back up a little.
Now may be a good time to think of something happy, inside here.
When I first came to London in ’94 it wasn’t as a DJ. I’d lost my job with StrathClyde Sound after a series of disputes (the last straw, absurdly, had been a campaign I’d called Don’t Rubbish Our Stations, to bring back litter bins to Scottish railway stations, because the IRA had never carried out any terrorist attacks anywhere in Scotland and so there was no need to ape the English safety precaution of removing bins because they were potential places to leave a bomb). So I decided to make the move down south to the big smoke, like generations of Scots before me. In London, I’d got nowhere with the few contacts I had and the dozens of demo tapes I’d sent off, so I got a job as a bike courier, whizzing through the crowded streets on an already well-used Bandit that had cost me the last of my savings, weaving in and out between the cars and trucks and buses and going the wrong way round the occasional traffic island to get documents and disks and drawings from one office to another as quickly as possible.
Then I got a job with a firm of Motorcycle Chauffeurs, somehow convincing the manager that I was a good, responsible, and above all smooth driver (miraculously, I’d held on to a clean licence in all the mayhem of London dispatch biking, though I had been knocked down twice). The idea was that the London traffic had become so congested there was an almost literal gap in the market for getting people from one bit of the capital to the other quicker than a taxi or a limo could. A big bike was the answer; a Honda Pan European or a 1200 BMW tourer, complete with panniers to carry an extra helmet and an over-suit for the client and a tall enough screen so that the worst of any weather was kept off them (providing you were moving, though of course being on a bike, you should be able to, even in a serious jam).
The company did well enough but then ran into cashflow problems and was taken over by a limo firm; they lost half the drivers but I was one of the lucky ones.
One late spring morning, at the start of an early shift, I was called to an emergency job taking somebody from Islington to Langham Place. A car hadn’t shown and I was nearest. I pulled up at a nice, semi-posh terraced house in Cloudesley Square, one of the district’s leafier bits, and this elfin blonde in jeans and a rumpled T-shirt appeared, running down the steps pulling on a pretend biker’s jacket and waving goodbye to a sleepy-looking guy standing in the doorway, wearing what looked like a very small woman’s dressing-gown.
‘Hi!’ she said, pulling on the helmet I had held out to her.
She had a small, friendly looking face, profoundly unkempt short, curly hair and crinkly eyes that were about as wide-set as they could be in such a thin face. Cheeky-looking, somehow. I was sure I recognised her. Come to think of it, the guy in the too-small dressing-gown had rung a bell or two as well.
‘Morning,’ I said, helping her with the buckle under her chin. This wasn’t as easy as it ought to have been because she was bouncing from one foot to the other all the time. ‘You’ll have to stop jumping up and down,’ I told her gently.
‘Sorry!’ She waggled her eyebrows. The helmet was a bit big for her, but I did the strap up as tight as I could.
I got the buckle fastened and she swung her leg over and jumped on behind me. ‘Broadcasting House! Langham Place!’ she yelled, helmet banging against mine. ‘Fast as you can! If that’s okay.’
I nodded and we set off. It was about ten to six. We didn’t quite make it in time but her producer filled for her and played a couple of records back to back and – parked up by a wee café on Cavendish Street and listening on my FM earpiece – I heard her start her show, and smiled when – breathless, giggling, apologising – she said thanks to the bike guy who’d helped her get there almost on time. ‘Sorry I forgot to ask your name,’ she said. ‘But if you’re listening, mate, well done. Right…’
Samantha Coghlan was something very close to being the nation’s darling at the time. Sam had presented various shows on children’s TV, been a big hit there, tried some more serious TV without any great success – one of those deals where they keep adding zeros to the money on offer until the talent has to say yes, then the execs stand around scratching their heads, wondering what exactly to do with the star they’ve bought – and then made the move to national radio in what at first looked like an act of desperation by both her and Radio One.
As it turned out, though, she was perfect for the Breakfast Show. Well, perfect apart from sleeping in all too often with her celeb film-star boyfriend after showbiz parties and general late nights with their famous friends. Breezy and pally, but sharp and funny too, Sam added a million and a half listeners to the show and reinvigorated a career that might just have been starting to stutter. Within a year she was winning awards, fronting a TV rock and pop show to even more acclaim and helping a couple of major retailers lift their profile with a generation of customers they’d been losing touch with.
I became Biker Ken, her preferred mode of transport for most of that summer. I’d made a decision right at the start to keep quiet about my own dormant radio career. Sam started to mention me on air more often, and over a couple of months I became one of the disparate cloud of friends, acquaintances, hangers-on and, well, parasites she would mention – always funnily, never bitterly – during the course of her show; a cast of characters she built up apparently without thinking about it until we became part of a sort of real-life soap opera the listening public followed avidly five mornings out of seven.
After a while – once the bike hire company equipped us with two-way intercoms so that we could, if the client wanted to, communicate with each other – she started asking me, en route, about what I’d done before I’d become a bike chauffeur. Finally I couldn’t keep my old career quiet without either being rude or lying, so I confessed all.
‘Brilliant! Really?’
‘Really.’
‘Great! Come on the show!’
‘Look,’ I told her, ‘I’m not going to say no, Sam, but you may want to recon-’
‘Na; come on! It’ll be fun!’
So I did. And found I hadn’t lost my radio voice or my touch, and was suitably, humbly funny for a five-minute spot with her one morning when I was off duty. That afternoon, I got a call from one of the stations I’d sent a demo tape to a year earlier; would I like to come in and do an audition? So, Sam gave me my big break.
The lovely Samantha parted company with her listeners one tearful morning that autumn, leaving to go off and have babies in LA with her actor fiancé, whose career had taken off in serious style. We all missed her, but by then I had my own late-night show on a new commercial London station called M25. I sent her flowers; she sent a gracious, funny, affectionate note that I still had. She was a happily married mother of twin girls and a big hit on the Hollywood social scene, last I’d heard, but what I remembered most was not her leaving, or those five generous minutes on her show that kick-started my own stalled career, or even that morning when I first met her; what I remembered most, what I remembered now, was charging down the sleepy streets in the light of a new summer’s morning, heading south for Langham Place through the sparse five-thirty traffic with the big bike humming beneath us. She held onto the grab handles at first, then, after a couple of weeks, asked if it would be okay to put her arms round my waist.
I’d said, Of course, and so, about three mornings out of five, and usually by the time we got to Caledonian Road, she’d clasp her gloved hands in front of my belly and put her helmet against mine and then fall comfortably asleep for the rest of the journey.
When we started wearing the intercom units, I could hear her snoring sometimes, ever so gently, as we thrummed smoothly down the quiet, side-lit streets towards the heart of the slowly waking city.
In all my life to that point, I had never been happier.
Since then, only when I’d been with Ceel.
And I’m thinking about her now, because now I’m in a box, all trussed, bound up, blind in the darkness and petrified that something gruesome is going to happen to me, because all that I did earlier, all the business with the getting into and getting out of Merrial’s house was somehow not enough, and the bad men have come for me and taken me away and I’m terrified for myself and for Celia, because I have the awful, gut-churning, bowel-chilling feeling that when they take me out of here I’m going to see her and she’ll be in just as much trouble as I am.
They came in the depths of night and the bottom of the tide, when the whole ship was tilted, out of true and out of kilter, sloping away to one side on the dark slope of ancient mud where the smell of cold death rises from.
I woke up panicking again, but this time because I thought I’d heard something. I lay there across the bed in the darkness, not daring to move. Had I heard something? Sometimes I used to be sure I heard a great banging noise the instant before I woke, but Jo would always say that I must have been dreaming. Had that happened this time? I heard another noise, somewhere above me. I started to move my hand towards the head of the bed, where the big black Mag-Lite torch/club lay. Maybe I was dreaming. Or maybe it was Jo come back, shame-faced, unable to live without me. Maybe, better, it was Ceel; I’d left the door unlocked or she’d learned how to pick a lock from her husband’s crim pals.
Another noise. Oh, sweet Jesus. Forget the Mag-Lite. Activate the fucking Breitling’s emergency satellite signalling gizmo, dickhead. I started to bring my hands together.
The light clicked on. My eyes hurt. I spun round, turning over in the bed in time to see a tall, well-built white guy I didn’t recognise standing above me; another big guy stood at the door to the bedroom, some sort of large box just behind him. They looked like I had; overalls and baseball caps. My right hand moved to my left wrist, where the big Breitling was, but it was all happening too slowly. The first guy punched me hard in the belly and the wind whooshed out of my lungs. He grabbed my wrist and tore the watch off my hand.
Released, I curled up, gasping and mewling, bunched round the pain and the wheezing vacuum formed by the punch, and they bound me in that position before I could do anything about it, quickly and efficiently sticking silver gaffer tape over my mouth and tying my hands and ankles all together with the same plastic ties the cops use. They both wore latex gloves, like surgeons. They frisked me quickly, efficiently, taking everything out of my pockets. Then they roped my neck to the same four-way knot securing my wrists and ankles so that I was trussed into a fetal position. That way I fitted into the foam-lined metal shell of a washing machine in the big cardboard box I’d glimpsed earlier, which they must have lifted down the stairs. They lowered me into it, sitting me on my buttocks and feet, and then secured the lid, cutting out all light. I heard the cardboard flaps slap down above me and the tearing noise of more gaffer tape being applied, then I felt myself being lifted up the steps.
I was on my side now, lying on and surrounded by what felt like thick expanded polystyrene. I tried to move, tried to scream down my nose, tried to kick or punch or do anything, but all that happened was I produced a pathetic keening noise through my snotty nostrils and got myself all hot in the tiny, insulated space. I felt myself carried up the gangway, along the pontoon, up the slope to the car park, and then heard the faint noise of what sounded like a pair of van rear doors opening. I was placed down, the doors closed with a muffled thud and a few seconds later the van, engine unheard within all the foam padding around me, started off, swinging into the main road and accelerating away.
Oh God, oh fuck, oh shit. The very, very best I could hope for now was that this was still something to do with that wanker and his dangerous driving case. Mark whatever he was called. Maybe he was still trying to get away with a functioning driving licence; maybe he had persuaded my new pal Mr Glatz that, after all – and despite our little word outside the Imperial War Museum – I still needed to be leaned upon. Maybe he’d found new crim pals willing to do the job for him. Maybe he had more villainous resources of his own than Mr Glatz had credited him with. Maybe all this was just to get me utterly fucking petrified – if so; hey, mission accomplished, guys! – so I’d agree to change my witness statement.
Except I didn’t think so.
It was all so fucking easy and efficient and well thought-out, somehow. Too practised. These fuckers had done this before. It was Merrial.
But maybe not. Maybe when we got to wherever we were going – and it was always possible we were going somewhere really terminally and immediately god-awful, like a crusher or an incinerator, or just the edge of an old dock – maybe I’d see this guy Southorne, not John Merrial. Maybe.
I started to cry. The pain in my abdomen was receding now, but I started to cry.
The van swung smoothly through the city’s night-time streets, this way and that.
All the things I’ll never get to say. All the rants I’ll never get to rant. There was one shaping up about context, about blindness, about selectivity, about racism and our intense sucker-hood when it came to reacting to images and symbols, and our blank, glazed inability to accept and comprehend reality in the form of statistics.
It’s because there was a reliable-sources statistic Phil discovered the other day; that every twenty-four hours about thirty-four thousand children die in the world from the effects of poverty; from malnutrition and disease, basically. Thirty-four thousand, from a world, a world-society, that could feed and clothe and treat them all, with a workably different allocation of resources. Meanwhile, the latest estimate is that two thousand eight hundred people died in the Twin Towers, so it’s like that image, that ghastly, grey-billowing, double-barrelled fall, repeated twelve times every single fucking day; twenty-four towers, one per hour, throughout each day and night. Full of children.
We feel for the people in the towers, we agree with almost any measure to stop it ever happening again, and so we should. But for the thirty-four thousand, each day? Given our behaviour, and despite the idea we’re supposed to love our children, you could be forgiven for thinking that most of us just don’t give a damn.
So, maybe not such a terrific world to be contemplating leaving, then (a straw caught in the undertow, heading downwards into the darkness, to clutch at). At least I said I loved Ceel. I told her, in the conventional three words. That’s something. Not much, perhaps, and she never did return the sentiment, but it’s something that I got to say, maybe the last unforced thing I’ll ever say.
It seems like a long time before the van stops. Then it starts again, moving slowly. It jiggles over what feels like some roughish ground or badly pitted roadway, then angles down. One left corner, taken slowly, then a series of them, as though we’re on a spiral ramp, heading downwards. Then we stop.
It feels like my heart is thrashing against my ribcage, desperate to escape; a rat in an already humming microwave. Sweat pours off me in the tightly insulated confines of the box. Then I’m lifted, set down, and there’s the sound of tape being ripped from the cardboard above me. The lid comes off and a little light seeps in. I’m hoisted out easily by the two overalled guys who had put me into the box. They undo the rope holding my neck down to my ankles and wrists, then cut a plastic tie holding my wrists and ankles together. I’m opened out like a penknife and stand precariously between them, ankles still tied to each other and wrists the same. I’m in a big rectangular concrete tunnel. It’s quite dark, lit only by a couple of armoured glass ceiling fixtures.
The van we came in was a white Astramax and a little part of my brain that doesn’t believe all this is really happening to me thinks, Ah! Of course it’s an Astramax; what else? Ahead there are two wire mesh gates and distant ceiling lights forming a grid in a larger space beyond. The air smells dank and filthy like rain-diluted sewage; it feels cold on my sweat-beaded skin.
They drag me to the mesh gates and push them open. We’re on a slight slope. Beyond, the slope disappears into darkness black as night, the darkness of an infinite pit.
Lights come on across the black gulf. The mainbeams of a car, blinding. The blackness is water. We splash into it, raising a smell of something dead and rotten into the air. The water is only a couple of centimetres deep, barely more than a film. The toes of my shoes are dragged through the thin covering over old but still smooth concrete. About fifteen metres in from the shallow ramp we entered from, we get to the place where the car is. It’s a big, dark, modern Bentley. By its offside there is a little island of pallets; about two dozen squares of anaemic yellow-white undressed wood arranged to provide a sort of crude pontoon above the shallow sheet of dark water. The Bentley sits beside the pallet island for all the world like a liner tied up to a quayside.
In the centre of the pallets, a single metal column comes down from the roof. There are two piles of bricks on each side of the column, about sixty centimetres high, bound to the black iron column with thick black insulating tape. A metre away, facing this, there is a single big plain wooden seat, sturdy and armless, the sort of thing you might find at the head of a farmhouse table.
When I see it I try to struggle, but it’s almost comically ineffective. I suspect the two guys holding me don’t even notice. They put me in front of the seat. When I resist being sat in it the one who hit me before whacks me with one fist, crunching into my cheek. I lose it for a moment and when I’m fully aware again I’m already tied and taped into the seat and they’re just finishing taping my feet to the iron column. My heels are resting on the piles of bricks, one on either side of the metal post.
I can’t believe this. My head feels like it’s revolving and somersaulting and vibrating, like it’s a fairground waltzer and my brain’s the single hapless, helpless passenger. When I’m quite secure and unable to move much beyond a twitch – my head is the only part of me I can really control at all – the driver’s door of the Bentley opens and John Merrial gets out. He’s dressed in a black three-piece suit with a high-necked waistcoat. Black gloves. The two guys, one to each side of me, straighten fractionally.
So there goes my last hope. It is him and not Mark Southorne. I am here because of yesterday, because of the message, because of Ceel, and not because of some idiotic points-dodging scam.
Mr Merrial looks small and dark and regretful, as though he isn’t going to enjoy any of this either.
I lose control of my bowels and shit myself. I really can’t help it. I’m a passenger in my own body now and I just sit there and listen and feel and then smell it all happen and I’m astonished how quickly and easily it takes place. Mr Merrial wrinkles his nose. The shit fills my underpants.
Nothing, I think. I’m to be spared nothing.
The guy who hasn’t hit me goes to Merrial and offers him the stuff they’ve taken off me. Merrial takes a large pair of latex gloves from one pocket, puts them on over his black leather gloves and then accepts the big Breitling, hefting it. He smiles. ‘Nice watch.’ He hands it back to the guy. He tries to turn my phone on but of course it’s dead. Then he looks in my wallet, taking out my various credit cards and bits and pieces and inspecting them. He pauses at his own white calling card, the one I’d written on.
From here, because I’m sitting down and so looking from a lower perspective, I can see the back of the card, where I wrote down the code Celia told me over the phone, the code that turns off the burglar alarm in the Merrials’ house. I’ve been sitting here desperately trying to work out what to say and I do have an idea, but it all depends on the fucker not looking at the back of that little white card. If he does, there’s nothing I can think of that might save Celia, let alone me. If he doesn’t, then the slenderest of chances remains.
The moment seems to freeze. In that instant I’m suddenly with Ceel and her absurd entanglement theory. In one universe, Merrial flips the card over in his fingers and sees the alarm code written there. In the other, he just looks at the one already printed side and that’s all.
Maybe I deserve what might happen here. I know I’m not a particularly good person; I’ve lied and I’ve cheated and it’s no consolation that little of it was illegal. It’s not illegal to lie to your best friend, to fuck his wife, to lie to your partner, to cheat on her. Smashing car windows, hitting somebody in the face, smoking dope, burglary; that sort of thing’s illegal and I’ve done all that too, but none of that means very much compared to betraying the people you’re closest to; that’s the stuff really to be ashamed of. So maybe I’d have no real cause to complain if I’m made to suffer here.
But nothing I’ve done deserves the death penalty, or even having my legs broken, does it? I’ve told lies on a small scale but I’ve tried to tell the truth on a larger scale. I’ve tried to be true to what I believe in rather than make as much money as I could have. Doesn’t that count for something? And who the fuck are these people to judge me anyway? I’m a liar and I’m weak and I’m certainly no hero because I’ve filled my fucking pants, but – even sitting here in my own stench, in greasy, sweat-stained two-hard-days’-living clothes – I’m a fucking better man than these vindictive shitheads, for all their crisply ironed shirts.
If only deserving something was all there was to it.
Actually it doesn’t matter a damn. I am in the realm of pure luck here, even if Ceel’s crazy ideas are true (which they just damn well aren’t). So roll the dice; let the universe do the fucking maths.
Merrial slips the card back into my wallet, without looking at the other side. He hands everything back to the man in the overalls, then slowly removes his latex gloves and gives those to the guy, who comes and stands behind my shoulder again.
Merrial says, ‘Take the tape off his mouth, would you, Alex?’
The guy who’s hit me twice so far does that, tearing it off casually. It hurts a bit. I swallow. Cold sweat trickles down my face and into my mouth.
‘Good evening, Kenneth,’ Merrial says.
For a while I just breathe, unwilling to trust myself to come out with anything coherent.
Merrial hoists himself a little and sits on the wing of the Bentley. ‘Well,’ he says with a hint of a smile. ‘Thank you for coming. I expect you’re wondering why I’ve invited you here this evening.’
This is probably meant to be funny. I keep on breathing, not willing to say anything. I stare into his eyes, dark under his brows and the shadows of the small overhead lights. I keep swallowing, trying to get some saliva into my mouth. I look about the place, squint into the Bentley. At least there’s no sign of Celia. Maybe she got away in time. Maybe she’s not been linked to this. Oh, Lord, a straw to grasp at; a still-floating one.
‘Do you like being underground, Kenneth?’ Merrial asks. I don’t think he really wants an answer so I don’t give him one. ‘I do,’ he says, smiling, looking around at the darkness. ‘I don’t know… just makes me feel…’ He stares up. ‘Safe, I suppose.’
I’m a single nerve-firing away from hysterical laughter at this point, at that particular word, but I don’t think that laughing in Mr Merrial’s face right now would be a very good idea at all, and sense prevails. A series of small, horrible, bubbly farts announce my bowels have completed their evolutionary duty and prepared me for fight or flight by getting rid of the excess matter they’d been holding inside my body. Very helpful, I think, sat here, immobile and helpless.
‘Yes,’ Merrial says, looking round too. ‘I like it here. Useful old place, this.’ He gestures down at the floor, where the water has already stopped rippling and gone back to its impression of pure blackness again. ‘Flooding, now.’ He shakes his head, lips pursed. ‘Won’t be able to use it in a year or two.’ He looks at me. ‘Water table, you see, Kenneth. Water table of the whole of London is rising again. It was going down for years; centuries, apparently, while they were taking water out for industry; tanning, breweries, that sort of thing. Now it’s rising again. They have to keep pumps going all the time in the deep tube lines and some multi-storey underground car parks.’ He smiles thinly. ‘You’d think they could use some of it as drinking water instead of flooding nice valleys in the Home Counties, but apparently it’s too polluted. Shame, really, don’t you think?’
‘Mr Merrial,’ I say, voice quivering, ‘I honestly don’t know why-’
Merrial raises one hand to me and looks towards the ramp I was brought down. Lights, and the sound of a big car engine. A Range Rover trundles down the slope. It edges between the opened V of the wire mesh gates and into the water. It comes hissing slowly towards us on small, inky bow-waves, then loops away into the darkness and curves back in again, stopping on the other side of the little pallet-island from the Bentley, a series of miniature wakes rippling and gurgling against the wood beneath us. The Range Rover kills its lights. The air smells of exhaust.
On the far side, the driver’s door opens and Kaj gets out. He comes splashing round, steps up onto the pallets and puts one hand to the passenger door’s handle.
I know it might be her. I know who’s probably going to be there behind the smoked glass. Merrial is watching me intently; I can feel it. I stare at the Range Rover’s door. For as long as I can, I’m going to do what I can to protect her. That might not be very long, but it’s all I can do, the only control over anything I have here. When the door opens and I see it’s Celia, I look surprised, no more. I stare at her, then look round briefly at Merrial.
Ceel appears uninjured. She looks at Merrial, then Kaj, still holding the door open for her. She steps out, wrinkling her nose at the smell. She’s dressed in blue jeans, a thick red shirt and a yellow and black hiking jacket. Hair down, spread. Hiking boots. She looks calmly angry.
‘What do you think-?’ she starts to ask Merrial, then she seems to see me properly for the first time. Oh, Jesus, don’t blow it so soon, kid. She frowns at me. ‘That’s… that’s Ken Nott. The DJ.’ She glares accusingly at Merrial. ‘What the hell’s he supposed to have done?’ The question ends on what is almost a laugh.
Merrial stays where he is, sitting on the wing of the Bentley. Kaj quietly closes the door of the Range Rover and stands beside Celia with his hands folded over his crotch, bouncer style, eyes flicking about the scene. The two guys who kidnapped me stand still, one at each of my shoulders.
‘Let’s ask him, shall we?’ Merrial said pleasantly. He looks at me. ‘So, Ken, why do you think you’re here?’
‘Mr Merrial,’ I say, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what you think I’ve done, but-’
Merrial shakes his head. ‘Ah, no, Ken. You see you’ve started lying already now, haven’t you?’ He looks genuinely disappointed in me. ‘I thought you were always saying on your show how people had to be truthful, how they had to be truthful even when it hurt, but there you go, you see, the first proper answer we’ve had from you so far and it’s a flat lie, isn’t it?’
‘If, if, if,’ I stammer, for the first time since I was four. I suck in a deep breath. ‘If I’ve done something you don’t like, I’m sorry, Mr Merrial. I really am.’
Merrial shrugs, raising his eyebrows and making a pouting motion with his lower lip. ‘Well, everybody’s sorry when they get caught, Kenneth,’ he says reasonably. ‘But I think you do know why you’re here.’ His voice is quite soft.
Nothing useful I can say at this point, I suspect. I stick to swallowing. The shit is starting to go cold around my backside on the front of the seat I’m tied to. Jesus, I stink. Oh, Celia, I wish you didn’t have to see, smell, experience all this. I wish you’d run, got away, just kept on heading north or anywhere as long as it was away from this man.
‘Kaj?’ Merrial says. ‘You have exhibit A, do you?’
Kaj nods and opens the Range Rover’s rear door.
‘John,’ Celia says. ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t want to be part of it. I want to go home. Now.’ She sounds composed, unflustered, but still distinctly pissed off.
‘I’d like you to stay a while yet, Celia,’ Merrial says.
‘I don’t want to stay,’ she says through clenched teeth.
‘I’m sure you don’t,’ Merrial tells her. He swings one foot a couple of times, gently tapping the flank of the Bentley with his heel. ‘But I insist.’
Kaj is holding an opened laptop computer.
Celia narrows her eyes. She takes a breath. ‘There had better,’ she says slowly, ‘be a very good reason for this, John.’ She looks about the place, sparing me a brief, pitying, slightly disgusted look. ‘You’ve kept me away from… this sort of thing until now. I always assumed that was because you knew how I might react if I was brought into contact with it.’ Her gaze snaps back to Merrial. ‘This changes things between us, John,’ she tells him. ‘You can’t go back from this. I hope you realise what you’re doing.’
Merrial just smiles. ‘Show Kenneth the evidence, would you, Kaj?’
The big blond guy holds the laptop open a metre away from me. From this angle, Celia can see the screen too. Kaj presses Return and a big grey-blue window already open on the desktop flickers into life.
Oh shit. If I hadn’t already crapped myself, I would now.
It’s the interior of the Merrials’ house; one of the landings. Daylight. First floor; I can see down the stairwell to the front door and the loo I hid in later. Only the first quarter metre of each door is visible. The alarm controls aren’t visible. There’s me, coming up the stairs in jerky every-few-seconds lo-fi slomo, the sort of thing you see on TV real-life crime programmes when they’re showing a recording of a raid on a bank or building society or a sub-post office. No sound. Looks like the shot is taken from the ceiling.
‘The cameras are inside smoke sensors,’ Merrial tells me casually. ‘In case you were wondering.’ He glances at his wife. Celia takes in a deep breath, puffing herself up. ‘I had, ah,’ Merrial says quickly, ‘one or two suspicions about things; this was a way of-’
‘You put surveillance in my home?’ Celia says, rage overflowing. ‘You didn’t even think to ask me, tell me?’
Merrial looks almost awkward. ‘Security is my concern, Celia, not yours,’ he says, not looking at her but at me. ‘It’s only in the hall and landings, not anywhere else.’
‘Have you lost your senses, man?’ Celia breathes, almost more to herself than to her husband. ‘How could you? How could you?’
Merrial doesn’t answer.
Meanwhile, on screen, in living grainy Rubbish Colour, I try various doors then disappear upstairs. The clip switches to the next floor up, and me ascending the stairs. I go into the bedroom across from Celia’s. Not exactly good portrait-quality pictures, but good enough; easily sufficient to convince a jury that that was me, all right. Especially as I’m still wearing the same fucking clothes now as I was then.
‘Okay, Kaj,’ Merrial says softly. Kaj closes the laptop and puts it back in the Range Rover. ‘So, Kenneth,’ Merrial says. ‘What were you doing in my house?’
I look at him. Swallow. I say, ‘I was wiping the tape on your answering machine.’
He tips his head. He looks mildly surprised. ‘Were you, now? And why would you want to do that?’
‘Because I left a message on it that I regretted the instant I woke up the next morning, a message I thought would get me into trouble if you heard it.’ I look around at the two gleaming cars, the pallet island, the black, unseen waters. I gulp. ‘This sort of trouble.’
Merrial nods for a moment. ‘What did the message say, Kenneth?’
‘It was insulting to you, Mr Merrial.’
‘What exactly did it say, Kenneth?’
‘I honestly can’t remember the exact words,’ I say, closing my eyes for a few seconds. ‘I swear I can’t. I was… I was very drunk when I made the call. Very drunk indeed. I’d had a bit of an emotional sort of day, to be honest.’ I attempt a hopefully infectious smile, but it seems Mr M’s empathic immune system is proof against this. ‘A friend found out that I’d been, ah, seeing his estranged wife,’ I tell him, struggling manfully on. ‘But I also discovered I’d just got out of a court case I hadn’t exactly been looking forward to. So there was, ah, a sorrow to be drowned and something to be celebrated as well. I did both, and got very drunk indeed. Obviously I wouldn’t have been stupid enough to have made the call if I hadn’t been extremely drunk. But I was, ah…’ I lick my cold, dry lips. I clear my throat. ‘Listen,’ I say, trying to look appealing. ‘I don’t suppose I could have some water, could I?’
Mr Merrial nods his head. ‘You suppose correctly, Kenneth. Go on.’
I swallow on my dry throat, grimacing. ‘What happened was that I’d found out from another of my friends what you… what you were involved in,’ I tell Merrial. ‘What your, ah, profession was, what it involved.’ I shrug, look away. ‘I felt angry that I’d played you, your wife a record. I felt, um, complicit, dirtied up, you might say. I called you to tell you this and got, ah, a little carried away, you might say. I called you things I would not call you to your face now, Mr Merrial. I, ah, I’m sure you can fill in the blanks yourself.’
Mr Merrial nods slowly. ‘And my wife?’
I let my brows tremble. I glance at Celia, who is looking aghast at her husband. In a small voice I say, ‘I, ah, may have referred to her as… a gangster’s moll, or something.’
I have half a hope this might get a laugh, or at least a smile, but Merrial looks quite serious. ‘And so you thought you’d burgle my house?’ he says, not sounding completely convinced. Not sounding at all convinced, in fact.
‘I realised what I’d done when I woke up,’ I tell him. ‘So I called your house again. The answering machine was still on so I guessed you were away for the weekend. I drove to your place, climbed into the garden from the roof of my Land Rover, found a key to the back door in one of those artificial stone things, realised the alarm wasn’t switched on and thought, Hey, the Gods are with me here.’ I shift in my seat. This is a mistake. The shit feels like some disgusting jelly inside my pants and jeans, and is already seeping through to my overalls. ‘Then I really, really needed to take a dump, so I started looking for a toilet. I finally found one. Then I went back down to the study, wiped the tape and-’
‘You’re leaving my wife’s bedroom out of all this,’ Merrial said. He glanced at Celia, then smiled. ‘I can’t help noticing.’
Celia glared at me and crossed her arms.
‘I’d thought earlier that if there was any sign I’d – anybody had – been in then I should try to make it look like a robbery,’ I tell him. ‘So I took a couple of rings from Mrs Merrial’s dressing table. Then, after I’d got the tape cleared, I realised taking the rings would just draw attention to the fact that somebody had been in the house, so I went back to her room and put them back where I’d found them.’ I look at Merrial. He looks sceptical. I shrug as best I can. ‘I’d never done this sort of thing before, Mr Merrial. I’d talked to people; I knew about artificial stones and fake Campbell ’s Soup tins and pretend mains sockets for hiding valuables in and stuff like that, but I didn’t think I’d get in and out without an alarm going. But it didn’t matter. I was going to get in no matter what it took; smash a window, break down a door; anything, because even if I was caught by the cops, whatever sentence I got, whatever fine I was hit with or time I had to serve, it had to be less… less unpleasant than what would happen to me if you heard that answering machine tape.’
‘And if my friends in the Met had caught you, what were you going to claim was your purpose in breaking into my house?’
I shrug again. ‘My, ah, first thought was to claim that I’d become obsessed with your wife, but then I thought you’d probably be pretty upset about that, too, so I decided I’d claim that I’d become a… vigilante or something, that I was looking for evidence of your criminality, or just wanted to give you a taste of your own medicine, subjecting you to crime. It didn’t matter how stupid it sounded, how lame, as long as I got that tape wiped.’
‘But the study was locked, Kenneth,’ Merrial says reasonably. ‘How did you get in there?’
I frown. Just lie, I think. Deny the video, the recorded evidence. Pretend it’s Lawson Brierley we’re dealing with here. Trust to the graininess of the image, the awkward angle the camera has of that door and the big gloves I was wearing to obscure the fact I used a key. ‘No it wasn’t,’ I tell him. ‘The study was open.’
‘Kenneth,’ Merrial says gently. He nods at the Range Rover where Kaj put the laptop. ‘We can see it was locked.’
‘It wasn’t!’ I protest. ‘I stuck my head in, saw it wasn’t a bedroom, caught a glimpse of the answering machine and kept going!’ I look at Kaj. ‘I did! It took about two seconds; I was desperate. I was about to…’ I let my voice fall away and look down at my lap. ‘I was about to do what I’ve just done, for Christ’s sake. I took a very quick look, closed the door and kept on going.’ I’m breathing deep and hard. There are tears in my eyes. I look at Merrial. ‘God, man, what I’m telling you is bad enough; what more could make it worse?’
Merrial looks slowly from me to Celia. He looks thoughtful. ‘That’s what I’ve been asking myself, Kenneth.’ He switches his gaze to Kaj. ‘That possible? What he just said?’ he asks.
Kaj shrugs massively. ‘Perhaps,’ he says. His voice is deep but not as Swedish as I’d been expecting. ‘The frame capture rate is about one per three seconds. He might have had time to open and close the door between frames.’
Merrial looks at me. ‘The study was locked when I got back yesterday,’ he says.
I shrug again. ‘Well, I don’t know!’ I say, almost wailing. ‘Maybe I put the sneck down.’
Merrial looks puzzled. ‘The what?’
‘Scottish word,’ I say desperately. ‘The, the, the catch thing down, on the lock inside the door. Anyway, I was about to leave when you came back, so I hid in the cupboard in the gym. I heard you on the phone to your wife saying you were calling somebody called Sky or Kyle or something. Then when you were showering I almost made it to the front door when, when -’ I gesture at Kaj ‘- when he came in, so I hid in the cloakroom by the front door. Once he’d gone upstairs I just walked out.’ I let out a deep, juddering breath. ‘That’s it. Whole truth. Nothing but.’
Mr Merrial purses his lips. He looks at me for a few moments, and I grit my teeth and return his stare. He nods.
And I realise then that there is – just – the hint of a chance. There’s a hint of a chance because, complicit in the conspiracy Ceel and I are involved in here, attempting to deceive Mr Merrial, there is, surprisingly, a third person, and that third person is Merrial himself.
The man doesn’t really want to find out he’s been cuckolded. He knows he has to be suspicious – suspicion is sensible, suspicion is safe, suspicion is how he lives his entire professional life – but, ultimately, he’d rather not discover his wife and another man have made a fool of him. He will go so far to make sure it looks like nothing’s happened – as far as is reasonable, as far as he must to establish the truth beyond something like reasonable doubt – but he won’t pursue the matter as doggedly and as determinedly as he might a debt, or an insult from another crook.
His own pride puts him on the same side as Ceel and me; none of us wants him to know the truth.
Merrial makes a sort of huffing noise that might be a laugh and gets down from the Bentley, walking slowly over to me, his hands raised in front of his chin as though in prayer. He stops and looks at Celia. ‘Maria was last out, apparently,’ he says. ‘I think we need a new maid.’ Celia’s frown deepens. Merrial comes up to me. He sits down, gently, on my right knee. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Totally fucking wrong about all the above. Oh fuck. Here it comes.
He smiles at me. ‘This is on account, Kenneth,’ he says easily, in a pleasant voice. ‘Nothing compared to what’ll follow, I should think, but this is personal, from me, for invading my privacy.’
He takes a good back swing and punches me hard in the balls.
I’d forgotten how much it hurt. School playground, last time this happened. I’d forgotten the lights, the nausea, the waves and waves of subtly differing types of pain that course through your body when this is done to you. Not being able to double up properly just makes it worse. It was as though your brain had stored up all the orgasms you’d ever had in your whole life to that point, then paid them back, all in one go, with the polarity reversed so that what had been ecstasy became agony and what had been over in seconds each day was lumped together over five or ten consecutive minutes of pure, grisly, pulsating pain.
I screamed, loud and high and shrill, then sucked and wheezed and gasped in the slowly, slowly ebbing aftermath.
Merrial had gone back to the Bentley.
‘How fucking dare you,’ Celia said. Her voice sounded more menacing and cold than Merrial’s had at any point so far. I blinked through the tears and looked at her. She was looking levelly, gravely at Merrial.
Merrial looked back. ‘Yes, dear?’ he said. But it already sounded weak. Something in the way Ceel had spoken had given her the initiative here.
‘How fucking dare you do that to him and make me watch it,’ she breathed. She walked across the pallets towards Merrial. Kaj followed a step behind, looking wary. Celia stopped a metre from her husband. ‘You have no right to do that,’ she said. Her voice was shaking with controlled fury. ‘You have no right to make me witness it, no right to make me part of it, no right to make yourself the law and me no better than one of your fucking thugs.’ She spat the last word out like a broken tooth.
Merrial looked down briefly. ‘You know I don’t like you using that sort of language, Celia,’ he said calmly.
‘I am not one of your fucking gang!’ she shouted at him.
He looked up, blinking. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ he yelled back. ‘What do you think buys your jewellery, your dresses, the holidays?’
‘I’m not stupid!’ Celia exploded. ‘I’m not a fool! I know damn well! Mon dieu! I thought, I stupidly thought until tonight that I didn’t get involved in this sort of thing -’ she gestured behind, towards me ‘- in return for me staying with you, even though I know what you do, what you’ve become!’
Merrial shook his head and pulled down his cuffs, looking awkward but recovering his composure. ‘It was always like this, Ceel.’
(And, as some further little part of me died along with hope, I thought, Oh, no. Oh, no; he calls her Ceel, he uses the same name for her that I do.)
She clenched her fists in front of her, shaking her head. ‘I did not marry this!’ she said, a sort of tumultuous control infecting her voice. ‘I married you. I married a man who took me from a bad place and bad people and a bad thing inside myself, a man who made me feel protected as well as desired.’ She stood back and straightened up. She looked down at him. ‘I will not stand for this, John.’
He looked down again. ‘You’ve been having an affair,’ he told her quietly.
‘What?’ she said, and, with that one word, somehow, and for only about the third or fourth time since I’d met her, sounded like a French-speaker speaking English.
‘We have photographs, more video,’ he said, looking down again. He glanced to me, then Kaj.
She stared at him. She shook her head slowly. ‘You have nothing,’ she said quietly. A silence followed. I realised that somewhere in the black, hollow distance, somewhere through the ambient smell of decay, there was a slow drip-drip-drip noise. ‘Nothing,’ she repeated. ‘Except paranoia.’
He looked up at her. She shook her head again. ‘My girlfriends, ’ she said slowly, ‘have boyfriends, husbands, brothers; sometimes when we meet up one of them will get there just before or just after me, before the others do. Don’t think that a photograph of me sitting in Harvey Nics with a man you don’t know constitutes an affair. Leave those people out of your sordid imaginings.’
Merrial looked from her to me.
Celia frowned, then glanced back at me. ‘With him?’ she said, and laughed. She turned to look at me, and stopped laughing, looked serious. ‘Mr Nott; no offence, but I could do better.’
‘None taken,’ I managed to wheeze round the pain.
Celia whirled round to face her husband again. ‘Show me, then. Show me what this evidence is!’
Merrial just smiled at her, but the smile was strained, and by then even I could see what she’d sensed instantly; he really didn’t have any evidence on her, he’d been hoping to force a confession out of her with the accusation alone, if a confession had been due.
Celia fixed her gaze upon her husband then and took on a frosty look. Actually, frosty didn’t even start to cover it; it was more of a shaving-of-a-degree-above-absolute-zero look. It put the fear of God into me and I was only caught in the backwash of its baleful focus. Merrial withstood it somehow – must have built up some sort of immunity over the years they’d been married, I supposed – but you could see he was affected. Some fuckwit part of me, patently not in any way connected to my horribly bruised and still jangling testes, almost felt sorry for the bastard.
‘I have been a faithful wife to you,’ Celia said in a measured, contained, utterly sure and certain voice. ‘I have always been faithful to you!’ she said, her voice breaking.
And sitting there, right then, goddammit, even I believed her. I’d have stood up in court or on any field of honour to insist with my last breath that this woman had been an utterly faithful wife and was being sorely, grievously wronged and defamed by being accused of being anything else.
Part of me found the time to wonder how the hell she was doing this, and that was when it occurred to me that – just possibly – Ceel’s patently lunatic ideas about entanglement were making a real and crucial difference here. Maybe at this moment she genuinely believed that she had been a faithful wife, because, in that other reality she claimed to be linked to, she actually was. She was speaking not so much for herself but for the Celia on the other side of that divide; the Celia who was a perfectly, unimpeachably good wife who had never cheated; the Celia who could rightly claim, as she just had, that she had always been faithful to her husband.
‘Can you say the same to me, John?’ Her voice was hollow as a vast canyon, and as sad as the sound of earth hitting a tiny coffin.
Merrial met her gaze.
Drip, drip, drip, in the distance. I was breathing hard, swallowing on a dry, parched throat. The smell of death and shit didn’t seem quite so bad in the air around us now, but maybe it was just something you got used to. Eventually Merrial said, ‘Of course I can say it, Celia.’
That last shaving above Zero Kelvin vanished with a whimper into the darkness surrounding us.
‘Do not treat me like a fool, John,’ Celia said, and her voice was like the voice a glacier would have if it could speak, the voice of the oldest, steepest, widest, most powerful mountain-grinding-up glacier in all the fucking world, after it had thought good and hard in glacier terms about precisely what it wanted to articulate.
Merrial cleared his throat. I didn’t realise he must have looked away until he brought his gaze up to meet hers again with what looked like an appalling, abysmally draining amount of effort. ‘You-’
‘I want a divorce, John,’ she said.
Fucking bombshell. Just like that. Merrial blinked. The two of them stayed that way for a few moments, him swinging one foot without realising it, thunking against the trailing edge of the Bentley’s wheel arch, her glaring down at him, perfectly, savagely still.
Merrial glanced at Kaj, me and the other two guys before looking back to her. ‘I don’t think here is really-’
‘We talk about it here, now,’ Celia said quickly. ‘You brought me here to see this, you changed our rules. You put cameras in my home.’ Her voice almost broke, and she took a quick, controlling breath. ‘So business and marriage are the same, now,’ she told him. ‘They are in the same arena. I said: I want a divorce.’
Merrial ground his teeth. ‘No,’ he said.
She didn’t react. Dear God, this woman had perfected threatening stillness to a high art indeed. Merrial might be good, but Ceel would have made a brilliant crime boss.
Merrial cleared his throat and lifted his head up to her again. ‘Actually, I want a divorce, Celia.’
She tilted her head a little. ‘You do, do you?’ Her voice was neutral now, but sounded ready to slip into menace or accusation at any moment.
‘Yes, I need a divorce.’ Merrial gave an unhealthy looking little smile. ‘I don’t like the term “widower”, Celia, so I hope you’ll be as accommodating as I require you to be.’
She laughed a quick, convulsive laugh. ‘And what does that mean?’
Merrial looked just plain nasty now. ‘It means don’t expect any money.’
She gasped. Really gasped, genuinely astonished. ‘I don’t want your money, John,’ she told him. There was a hint in her tone as though she had just realised she had been dealing with a child all along. ‘I didn’t marry you for money. I didn’t want it then and I don’t now. Keep the money. Have your divorce.’ She was breathing hard now, shoulders rising and falling in the yellow and black jacket. Her voice had quivered over the last few sentences, barely under control. ‘So,’ she said, shaking her head once, regaining command. ‘Has one of them insisted you make an honest woman of her?’
‘You might say that,’ Merrial said. You could see he was having to force himself to keep looking at her, battling against the pressure of that remorselessly self-possessed gaze.
‘The one in Amsterdam?’ she asked evenly.
‘The one in Amsterdam.’ There was a strange sort of defiance in his tone.
‘And is she younger than I am, John?’ Celia asked quietly. ‘Is she more beautiful? Is she as young as I was when you met me? Or younger? Is she as exotic, is she as foreign? Is she better connected? Has she a famous name? Has she money? Is she fertile?’
Merrial’s gaze might have flickered a little.
Ceel relaxed her stance. She stood back, her weight went more on one foot than the other as she nodded. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘She is pregnant, is she?’
Merrial’s eyes went wide just for a moment, then he gave a small laugh. ‘You always were good like that, weren’t you, Celia?’ He looked past his wife to the big blond guy. ‘Isn’t she, Kaj?’
Kaj just looked awkward, and nodded.
‘Well, congratulations,’ Celia said bitterly.
She seemed suddenly to collapse inside then, looking quickly away and putting one hand up to her eyes. Silently, her shoulders – wide inside the thick yellow and black hiking jacket – shook; spasming once, twice, three times. Merrial looked even more awkward and uncertain. He seemed to be about to go to her and hug her, but he didn’t. He tried to find something to do with his hands and then folded his arms and looked at Kaj and did a sort of pathetic, Women, eh? look and gesture at the bigger man. Kaj sort of twitched, which was probably as close as he was going to come to waxing eloquent on the matter.
You beautiful, brave, intelligent, fabulous woman, I thought, staring at her with tears in my eyes. I had to look away, in case Merrial saw the way I was gazing at his wife. I was still having to remind myself that the extraordinary, exquisite, immaculately righteous ire she was displaying here was all in fact a complete fake, that she was lying through her perfect, delicious teeth when she told Merrial she’d been a faithful wife, but she had successfully, so far, anyway, shifted the focus of all that was going on here away from me and onto herself, onto her marriage. She’d gone nuclear with the big D word and duly been nuked in return, but it looked like she was actually getting away with it.
This was a woman fighting for her own life and that of her lover, but she wasn’t settling for just the result, she seemed determined to accomplish the task with audacity, bravura and style. I didn’t think I’d seen a more resourceful and courageous piece of acting in all my life, in person, on stage or on screen. Even if it still all went horribly, painfully, lethally wrong from here on in, at least I could suffer and die knowing I had been in the presence of genius.
Celia dried her eyes with one hand, then fetched a handkerchief from one of the pockets in her jeans and dabbed at her nose and cheeks. She sniffed and put the hanky away again. She drew herself up. ‘I don’t want any money. And I won’t say anything, to the press, the police, to anybody. I never have, I never will. But I want to be left alone, afterwards. I want to live my own life. You live yours. I live mine. And nothing must happen to any of my family, any of my loved ones.’ She raised her chin to him after she said this, as though defying him to object to any of it.
Merrial nodded, then said softly, ‘Fair enough.’ He made a small gesture with his hands. ‘I’m sorry it had to end like this, Celia.’
‘I’m sorry it had to be so bloody undignified, in front of Kaj and these guys and -’ she gestured vaguely in my direction ‘- this poor clown.’
Merrial looked at me like he’d forgotten I was there. He sighed. ‘I thought…’ he began. Then he shrugged. He fixed me with a stare I shrank back from. ‘One word on your show about this, Mr Nott, one word to anybody at all; friends or family or police or public, and I’ll make sure you die slowly, do you understand?’
I swallowed, nodded. I didn’t trust myself to say anything sensible. The fuckwit bit of me with its thumb seemingly super-glued to my personal Self-Destruct button wanted to say something like, Yeah yeah yeah, fucking omertà or I die in drawn-out agony, yada yada yada big man, but your wife’s just worked you over and we both fucking know it and this compensatory macho threat stuff isn’t convincing anybody… Eventually, though, under that gaze, I had to give way and croak, ‘Yeah. Yes, I understand. Nothing. Nobody.’
Merrial kept looking at me for a moment longer, then nodded to the two guys standing at my shoulders. ‘Give him back his stuff and take him back to where you found him.’
‘In the box, Mr M?’ said the guy who’d hit me.
Merrial looked upset. ‘No, not in the fucking box. In the back of the van; put some tape over his eyes, that’ll do.’
I thought, Yes!… but just a tad too soon. Kaj stepped past Celia, lowered his mouth to his boss’s ear and muttered something. Merrial smiled that thin, thin smile of his and quietly said, ‘All right. One little one.’ Then, as I thought, No, no, no! We got away with it! This isn’t supposed to happen! Please, no! Merrial looked at Celia and sighed and said, ‘Maybe you’d best look away.’ Celia rolled her eyes and did so.
Kaj stood in front of me.
‘This is for crapping in my loo,’ he said.
I had just enough time to think, Now the cunt sounds vaguely Swedish, then he punched me so hard across the face I didn’t wake up until I was in the back of the Astramax again, eyes taped over and hands tied together but otherwise unrestricted. My head and my balls hurt like fuck, blood was bubbling from my nose, my pants were full of chilled shit and I was very cold indeed; a bitter winter breeze was whipping through the van from the open front windows.
I didn’t blame the guys; it was reeking in here.