‘Why would anyone do that?’
Bannerman shrugged. ‘You tell me. Maybe he hates his dad.’
‘He’s still his dad though.’
‘Maybe he got the money doing something he shouldn’t. Maybe he knows he’ll get in a lot of trouble if he hands the money over. What would you say about someone like that?’
Omar looked up into a corner of the room, considering the scenario, and brought a steady gaze down to Bannerman. ‘I’d say he was a total bastard,’ he said simply.
29
They both knew it. Of all the grim fucking nights they had spent together in the past ten years, this would be the longest.
Pat couldn’t bring himself to ask about the birthday Eddy had forgotten, or nod that it was the wife’s fault because she didn’t remind Eddy in time. That he hadn’t asked about it meant that a fight was brewing. They’d had fights before, when they were drunk, over money, but they were both angry those times. Only Eddy was angry now. Without discussion, without warning, Pat had shifted away.
Eddy ground his teeth as he drove, his nostrils flared, a distant look on his face, as if he was daydreaming about hurting someone. Pat wondered if Eddy had his gun with him. His own was still down the back of the bin in Shugie’s kitchen.
The Lexus pulled slowly through the moat of gravel around Breslin’s, crossed a grassy bank and onto the concrete runway. Eddy stopped in front of the loading bay entrance. It was open, big enough for three lorries to back up for loading at the same time. Eddy pulled on the handbrake, leaned over the wheel, snorted at the dark mouth of the door, and looked at Pat expectantly.
Pat blinked. The plastic bag on his lap was burning the skin on his thighs. It was a Chinese takeaway. Oil had leaked out of a bag of spring rolls and puddled in a corner of the blue plastic, burning into his lap. Even though they hadn’t eaten since their morning roll and the cabin was saturated with the delicious aroma, Pat didn’t want to eat. He stared hard at the door, blinked, looked out of the passenger window. He wanted to throw the passenger door open and run, to run away across the dark fields, run through the knee-deep marshes, away to the fast road and hitch a lift back to the city.
‘Malki’ll be hungry,’ said Pat, blinking faster now, as if he could wipe the night away. Eddy opened his door and Pat did the same. They stepped out into the dark.
Breslin’s had been shut down twenty or so years ago and the building was disintegrating. The cantilevered lintel above the loading bay door had snapped off and now barred the doorway, the metal struts sticking out of the concrete, twisted and rotted orange. The whole of the building had been colonised by defiant vegetation, bursting through the cracks, easing the slabs apart in geological time.
Leading the way ahead of Eddy Pat carried the takeaway reverentially, as if he was leading an offertory procession. He ducked under the collapsed lintel, stepping into the wall of blackness inside. His footsteps sounded dead as he took the stairs up to the loading platform, and through the door into the packing hall. He stopped, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark, but it was too thick.
Eddy stepped in front of him, holding up his mobile phone high for the light from its face. The blue gleam barely made a dent in the dark, the phone was old, so he supplemented it with a pen torch he kept on his keyring.
Holding the mobile high and the pen torch low, they picked their steps into the room. Pat followed Eddy, clutching the takeaway to his chest for warmth. It seemed very quiet. They expected Malki to have a wee radio on or something, to have a wee light on, they’d left him a couple of candles and knew he’d be off his nuts anyway. Junkies were like cats or foxes, they could make themselves comfortable anywhere.
Silently, Pat and Eddy made excuses to themselves all the way through the packing bay, but at the mouth of the works room they could see that there was no light on, no whispery radio, no bed made of newspaper, no snoring. Pat stuck his face through the doorway, into the absolute dark, listening.
The works room had a metal floor, metal tables bolted to it, some of the legs bent where someone had tried to lever them off the ground but failed. Metal steps at the back led up to the big circular boiler where they had left the pillowcase. The whole room was metal, a leaf couldn’t pass through without making a noise. But they heard nothing.
Malki wasn’t sitting where they’d left him. The candles weren’t lit, there wasn’t even a sound of him hiding from them, if he thought they were the police or something. Malki had fucked off. It was going to make everything worse.
Pat whispered before he even realised he was going to, ‘Malki?’
Eddy muscled in the doorway next to him, held the torch up. The pinpoint pierced the room, dimming twenty feet away, casting a narrow canal of glow, helping hardly at all.
‘Malki?’ Pat spoke louder, telling himself he’d feel foolish when Malki walked in at the back of him. ‘Where are ye?’
Holding the mobile and torch in one hand Eddy reached into his pocket and took out a bag of five tea light candles, bursting the plastic with his teeth, taking out a lighter and bending down, emptying the candles on the floor. He set them up right, lit the lighter but it was draughty. The first couple of times he tried the wind blew the flame out. Purposefully he crab-walked into the room, his feet clanking on the metal floor, the sound booming around the empty space. He set the candles up at the base of the wall inside, in a line, each dropping to the ground with a little ‘pup’ that echoed around the metal room. His lighter took, successfully catching the wicks with the flame.
Pat watched Eddy crouching, rolling forward rhythmically over and back, over and back, like a man up to his waist in rough seas, and he knew then that Eddy was so angry he was on the brink of going absolutely fucking mental.
Pat put the takeaway down on the floor and looked around. The candles tried but failed, their poor light struggling against the blackness, seeping into it and being swallowed, deepening the shadows. Pat looked up to the boiler. The steps were empty, the platform at the top of the ladder beyond the thin reach of the light, a black void. He stepped towards it, calling softly for his wee cousin, pleading with him to come out, hoping to Christ that Eddy didn’t have a gun in his pocket, certain that he would be looking for an excuse to use it. Pat couldn’t let Eddy shoot him. Malki wouldn‘t fight back. Like his long gone father Malki was a rogue, but a gent. He wasn’t even a fast runner.
‘I’m going to look outside,’ snarled Eddy, the glow from his mobile phone lighting his chin, making him resemble a Halloween ghoul.
‘No!’ Pat’s voice snapped back from the cold metal floor. ‘Just,’ he held a hand up, ‘just wait a minute. Give us the fucking pen torch.’
He took the keys from Eddy, holding the torch steady, not looking at his hurried hands as he fitted the spokes of the keys on it through his fingers to make a weapon in case Eddy went for Malki.
He headed to the ladder, hoping to find warm foil or a burnt spoon on the landing. Maybe Malki was outside pissing; he was like that, had nice manners, ideas about how to do things, keeping things clean. He put his foot on the first step and pulled himself up.
The narrow beam of torchlight spilled over the landing step to the boiler door and Pat saw that it was open. Thinking Malki had let the pillowcase go and had run off himself, he took the next step and the light swept into the round belly of the boiler. A white leg, a blue cap, squinty, a blue stripe, wet. Red.
Pat dropped his hands to the dusty step, scrambling up the remaining steps, across the landing, into the black dark of the boiler.
Still as a waxwork. Malki was lying flat on his back, arms outstretched like Jesus, one knee pulled up to his side, a dancer in mid flight. Pat reached forward and took his hand as if he was going to shake it. Rigid, skin cold. The mouth was open, lips pulled tight across his teeth. Dry. The teeth were dry.