Promises of Blood Read online

  ‘Your mum?’

  ‘All I’ve got of her.’

  ‘You’ve got her eyes.’

  CJ seems surprised at this, then embarrassed. She does not look at me, puts the photo back in her wallet carefully. I imagine that it is the most precious thing she possesses, her only link back to a past that had the potential to be happy.

  ‘She was older than me, my sister. Like, I was a total mistake, never meant to have me. Fourteen years apart. And then she’s gone. Don’t even remember her. Here,’ she says, puts her mug down, regards me sternly. ‘You don’t look much like a lawyer.’

  I nod. ‘It’s been said before. So. It’s just you.’

  ‘Just me.’ She almost sings it, wistful.

  ‘It’s a lot of money,’ I say. ‘Over a quarter of a million.’

  CJ does not answer immediately, looks at me with her big grey eyes, wider for a split second as I mention the amount. ‘A quarter of a million pounds.’

  ‘It could change your life.’

  She nods. ‘Go on then. What do I have to do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say, thinking back to Karen Reenie, the nurse who asked the same question. ‘It’s yours.’

  CJ does not understand, cannot understand, and I explain about William Gove, tell her not to worry about the details, just think of it like winning the lottery. As I speak she watches me in fascination, her lips slightly open, as if I am a prophet delivering news of a never-imagined future. In a way, I guess I am. She is so young that I cannot help but feel protective of her; sitting opposite her I think of a young bird that has fallen out of its nest.

  ‘So when’d I get it?’

  ‘Soon as the paperwork is sorted out. A few weeks, probably. Could be months.’

  ‘Right.’ CJ looks out of the window. It is getting late, the sun dropping lower, shadows lengthening. ‘That long?’

  ‘I’ll get it done as soon as I can.’

  ‘Can’t have it no faster?’

  ‘No.’

  CJ nods, but she is no longer listening, thinking of other things, more immediate realities than the promise of a sum of money she can barely imagine. I wonder where she will go after this, what she will do. Wonder if she will go back to the tower block. I hope she does not.

  ‘Will you be all right?’ I say. ‘Here.’ I take twenty pounds from my pocket, put it on the table.

  ‘What do you want?’ she says.

  I don’t understand. ‘Want?’

  ‘What do you think that’ll get you?’ She nods at the money I have put down.

  ‘It’s for you,’ I say. ‘Food. Whatever.’

  She nods absently and takes the money and I get up and leave her, the only remaining customer. I look back after I have crossed the street and she is sitting in the window, looking very young and very alone.

  11

  DRIVING HOME I am troubled by what I have seen and what I have done, or rather what I have not; I cannot shake the feeling that I am guilty of a sin of omission. I think back to the apartment, the young people’s indifference to my presence despite the fact that I was dressed in a suit, shirt, was twenty years older than them. Why did they not find me out of place? I think of CJ’s grave eyes and inevitably my thoughts turn to my own childhood, my father, the violence and neglect that I grew up with. I share a bond with CJ that I felt but did not acknowledge at the time, only fully realise now.

  At home Maria is preparing a lesson in the kitchen and I tell her about my day. I describe beating Luke Gove, winning ten thousand pounds, and although to begin with she is shocked she begins to laugh and when I get to the final set she claps her hands, stamps her feet in delight. But then I describe my encounter with CJ, tell Maria the promise I made to Ms Armstrong, that I would keep an eye on her, the further promise I made to Rob at the homeless hostel. I describe the apartment I found CJ in and my troubled feelings, leaving her alone in a café which would shortly be closed.

  ‘You left her.’ Maria is no longer laughing, and my feelings of unease immediately coalesce into a realisation that I have been too careful, too aware of the potential impropriety of caring for a young lady, a girl; that I have made a moral mistake.

  ‘Well?’ says Maria, standing up. She turns around, arms out, describing the kitchen we are in, the house we share. ‘The size of this place. Daniel, what were you thinking?’

  I cannot come up with a response. I recall the number of times as a child that I looked at adults, friends of my father, wondered how they could let what was happening to me pass unchallenged. I do not answer, am too ashamed. I pick up my keys and head back out. I only have one place to look. I hope she is still there.

  When I get to the tower block, I can hear the music before I finish climbing the stairs, feel the bass humming through the concrete walls. It is loud now and I guess that the party must have started. There are people hanging around on the landing outside the apartment’s door but as before they do not pay any attention to me. I walk through the door and the big guy is still there. This time he puts an arm across my chest when I try to pass, steps towards me.

  ‘Back again?’

  ‘Looking for CJ.’

  ‘Think this place is, man? Come and go, think you fucking live here?’ He has a smile on his face but he is not laughing, an edge to his question.

  ‘She here?’ I do not have the patience for this.

  ‘Asking me for? I look like her fucking daddy?’

  I put my hand on his wrist, push his arm away. He looks at me but does not react and I walk past him. The living room is off the right-hand side of the hall. It is full of people now but in the surreal UV light it is hard to see much: flash of teeth, bright collars, Nike logos on trainers. I do not see CJ, do not see anybody her height and I go back to the hall, try the door opposite. Walk into a kitchen where three people are smoking meth from a glass tube. I back out into the hall again. It turns at right angles and I follow it around. There are three doors. Two are open and I do not see CJ inside the rooms. The one at the end is closed. I open it; looks like a bedroom, bed, fitted wardrobes. I think it is empty but then I see two people, two men. Even in the darkness they seem older than the others.

  ‘What you want, man?’ I cannot place his accent.

  ‘Looking for someone.’

  The man who spoke smiles. His teeth shine in the UV lighting. ‘Yeah? Who?’

  ‘CJ.’

  ‘Don’t know her.’

  A door that I thought was a wardrobe opens and a man in a suit walks out. The way it opens seems surreal, revealing a gateway to some nightmare Narnia. It closes behind him and he walks past me, seems in a hurry.

  I walk to the door the suited man came through. The man who has not yet spoken heads me off, blocks my way.

  ‘No,’ he says.

  I push him to one side and open the door, have to duck my head to get through. Behind it somebody has knocked a hole through the concrete wall separating this apartment from the next. The concrete is jagged and crumbling where it has been demolished. I am in a room which is a mirror image of the one I have come from. It is dark too, and empty. I walk out into the corridor. There are doorways covered with blankets. I push one aside, look into a room. It has a bed in it and a girl is sitting on the bed, her chin resting on her knee. She does not have much on and does not look very old. She glances up and I back out. I look into another room where a man and a girl are sitting on a bed. She is unbuttoning his shirt. She is not CJ. The music is loud. Makes it hard to think straight. In a third room four girls are sitting in armchairs around a low table, smoking. At the end of the corridor is another blanket and behind it is another hole broken through the concrete. I wonder how big this place is, how many apartments have been knocked through. More rooms, more girls. I find CJ slumped in an armchair in an otherwise bare room. I think she is asleep but her eyes are slightly open. I kneel down next to her.

  ‘CJ? We’re leaving. Get up.’

  She does not move. Her skin seems so pale in the dim light, as pale a
s porcelain, cold.

  ‘Man, how many times you got to be told?’

  I look around. The big guy from the entrance hall is in the doorway. I stand up.

  ‘I’m taking her with me.’

  He laughs, a short sound. ‘Please.’

  I walk towards him. ‘Move out of the way.’

  I can see the other two men I met, the older men, behind him, and suddenly I do not like these odds. ‘She’s dead,’ I say.

  He stiffens at this. ‘Say what?’

  I do not say anything more, step back against the wall of the room. He hesitates, then passes me. He walks towards CJ slowly, as if she might somehow come alive, seek some monstrous retribution. He bends down to her. As he does I push myself from the wall and kick him as hard as I can in the face. He is bending down and my foot is travelling upwards. He grunts quietly and falls sideways to the floor.

  I look to the door but the men are no longer there and I bend down and pick CJ up. She does not weigh much. She sighs like a child woken from its sleep, taken out of a car after a long journey. I put her over my shoulder. This apartment must have a front door. I head down the corridor, turn. The door has been sealed, a steel plate bolted over it from the inside. I will have to go back the way I came. I pass through the first hole in the wall. There is nobody in this corridor. CJ is amazingly light; I barely feel her as I carry her. I push open the door into the final apartment. The two men are waiting for me there. I turn around and take CJ back to the room where the girls are sitting around the table. They look at me.

  ‘Up,’ I say to one of them. She stands and I sit CJ in her chair. I pick up the low table. The drugs paraphernalia on it falls to the floor. I lift the table into the air, bring it down and it breaks, smash it again and tear off one of the legs, which is wood, square, thick.

  ‘Hey,’ says one of the girls but I walk out, run down the corridor with the leg in my hand and into the room where the two men are. One of them has a weapon, a sword of some kind, but I hit him before he has a chance to raise it, a clean contact to his temple. The other man catches me with a shot to the back of my head. I turn and hit him once, twice, three times around the head with the table leg. He falls and I kneel down, hit him in the middle of the face with my other fist. As I make contact my broken knuckle explodes with pain and my vision wavers and I think I might be sick.

  I get up, go back to CJ who is still sitting in the chair I put her in.

  ‘Fucking broke our table,’ says one of the girls. I ignore her, scoop CJ up. Head back to the first apartment, step over the two men, into the corridor. The front door is still open and I head out, make for the stairs.

  CJ begins to become heavy around the fourth floor but I do not slow down. I do not think anybody is after us but I cannot get to my car fast enough. The streets are quiet on our way back and I drive carefully, do not want to attract attention; I am nearly forty years old, with an unconscious drugged teenager wearing only a T-shirt in the seat next to me. I know how it must look.

  My knuckle hurts from the man I punched and for the second time today my body is flushed with adrenalin. I am honest enough to acknowledge that the rush which violence gives me surpasses anything I can find on a tennis court. I am euphoric, buzzing. My drug of choice.

  CJ is still unconscious when we get back. Maria is waiting, has been watching for me, and she comes out as I lift CJ out of my car. She takes her from me, carries her gently up the path to our home.

  Maria puts CJ to bed in one of my spare rooms. I call the police, tell them that there are young people in danger on the top floor of Merceron Tower. I place the call anonymously; I do not think I killed the first man, but I kicked him hard, put everything into it. What does it take to kill a man? I honestly have no idea.

  Maria comes into the kitchen as I am making the call. She is holding a bottle of Scotch, two glasses. She sits down at the table and I hang up, sit opposite her. She looks at me, into my eyes, concerned.

  ‘How bad was it?’ she says.

  I pour for both of us before I answer, take a drink. Remember the promise I made her, to avoid violence. She does not need to hear the details. ‘How many places like that do you think exist? Maria, it was like a factory. Sealed the doors up, knocked through walls.’ I take another drink, close my eyes briefly at the memory. ‘One way in, one way out. Full of people. Drugs.’

  ‘Did you get hurt?’

  I shake my head. ‘But CJ… They’ll be looking for her. Going to have to take care of her.’

  ‘Thought that was the point of going looking for her,’ says Maria.

  ‘I’ve put her in danger.’

  ‘She was in danger already.’

  I nod. Maria is right. ‘You okay with her staying?’

  ‘She’s still just a girl,’ says Maria. I take her answer as a yes. She reaches across the table, puts her hand over mine. ‘You did the right thing.’

  And again, Maria is right. Despite my acts of violence, I have nothing to regret. I did the right thing. But whether it will work out right for CJ is a question I cannot answer.

  12

  THE CLOCK IN Rochelle Farrell’s living room does not work; it is stopped at just after a quarter past six. When I arrived, she opened the curtains and the sunlight coming through the windows picked up the cloud of dust they had created. It must have been a long time since she last drew them, let the day in. Here in her home I feel frozen in time, as if I have walked into a house which has been left abandoned for years, unloved for decades. There is a grand piano in the living room and its top is covered in framed photographs of a young girl. There are more photos on the bookshelves, hanging on the walls. It feels less a home than a mausoleum.

  ‘So you’re telling me he’s left me all this money when I didn’t even know him?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Rochelle Farrell is about fifty but she looks tired, her face drawn and defeated as if bad news long ago won against good. Finding out that she has inherited a huge sum of money does not seem to mean a great deal to her, does not excite her. But then, given the size of her home, it is perhaps not surprising; it is vast, a faux-Georgian mansion behind steel gates, a Range Rover in the drive, although it is an old model. The carpet in her living room is cream and there are two large porcelain lions guarding the double doors into the hallway.

  ‘Why’s he done that?’ She asks it wearily, as if what he has done is an imposition, an inconvenience.

  ‘He was a religious man. He wanted to help people.’

  ‘What’ll I spend it on?’ she says, as if I have not spoken. She does not appear interested in William Gove’s motivation. I do not know what to suggest. A cleaner? Every surface in the house is covered with a layer of dust. But she did not expect an answer, stands up.

  ‘I suppose you want tea?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll make tea.’ She walks out of the living room without inviting me to follow her and I remain sitting, wondering how quickly I can leave.

  When I left my house this morning, CJ had not woken up. Maria’s school is closed for the holidays and she told me that she would stay with her, said not to worry, they would have more fun without me. Already today I have told a suspicious librarian, a disbelieving teacher and a laughingly incredulous plasterer that they have each inherited over a quarter of a million pounds from a man they have never met, and never will. I lost count of the number of times the plasterer told me to fuck off before he accepted that I was telling him the truth, that for the first time in his life he would not have to wake up worrying about where next month’s rent would come from. If I am honest, I am beginning to enjoy this case. I have had little experience of changing people’s lives for the better. It is a fine feeling.

  While I wait for Rochelle Farrell to come back with tea I look around her living room. It is huge, could easily fit three snooker tables end to end. There are two chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. I think it must once have been a grand place but it looks as if it has been neglected
for years: wallpaper is peeling away around the door frame and there are damp patches on the ceiling, water stains on the carpet.

  The photographs on the walls all show the same girl, framed shots from childhood to adolescence. She is pretty, dark-haired, with eyes which, from the age of five to sixteen, retain the same delight at whatever or whoever she is looking at behind the camera.

  ‘Did you ever see a more beautiful girl?’

  I turn and Rochelle is in the entrance to the room, holding a tray. I cross, take it from her and set it down on a low table. But she does not follow me, instead goes to the piano, picks up photographs, sets them down again. I walk back to her.

  ‘Your daughter?’

  She nods. ‘Jessica.’

  ‘She’s pretty.’

  ‘Was.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  ‘Do you know any private detectives?’

  I am momentarily thrown by her question. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Spent all I had trying to find her. Harry left, didn’t hang around long after she went. Said I was mad.’

  I am trying to follow her but she is losing me. ‘Your daughter disappeared?’

  ‘Fourteen years ago. He said it was a waste, said no more. Said I had to let it go.’ She picks up a photograph. In it her daughter is standing next to a massive stone pillar, perhaps in Greece, frowning into the sun but smiling at the same time. ‘How can I let it go? Nobody ever found her.’

  She holds the photograph away from her at arm’s length, as if admiring a piece of jewellery. ‘Drugs. They get into drugs, then they’re not the same. Didn’t know her any more.’ She puts the photograph back on the piano, turns to me. ‘So we have a row. She runs away. Only seventeen.’ She puts her hand out to another photograph, stops, takes her hand back. ‘So it was my fault.’