Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [86]
‘Go on.’
‘Well, one number belongs to head of Gecko records, Ricky Wise. Only got a name, and a frothing: “Sell your bullshit to some other mug.” Nothing untoward about Roberts talking with Wise, following up with inquiries. But. And this is a big but. I also discover that Roberts sent him a text. And …’ She sits up now, reaches over and switches on the lamp, extinguishes the starlight. ‘Details of a bank account.’
‘Bank account?’ I repeat.
‘Two days ago, an hour after a ten-minute conversation dialled from Roberts to Wise, Roberts received a text from Wise saying, “Where do you want it?” The reply from Roberts is a series of numbers, followed by the instruction: “In $.”’
‘He tipped him off.’
‘What?’
I sit up. ‘The man who came to kill me.’
‘Came to kill you?’ Anna asks this angrily, betrayed by what I haven’t told her. ‘Jim, what the fuck is happening?’
I tell her about the tracker, the field and the man with the gun. How I throttled him an inch from death.
‘And where the hell is he now?’
‘Handcuffed to a radiator at my brother’s.’
‘Look, Jim, this has gone too far. This sounds ridiculous. But we need to call the police.’
I grab her hand and kiss the back. I throw off the bed covers and look out on to the starlit sea. A faint shade of blue pales the eastern sky. I put on my clothes while Anna asks what I’m doing, what the man said.
‘Where are you going?’
I tell her I have an appointment to keep, a rendezvous. I take the gun from the dresser.
‘Who the hell with?’
‘The man I’ve chased halfway around the world.’
The original rendezvous was under a railway bridge at the end of a disused canal, a lonely spot to have died. No grave to dig when a body hits water. I changed the meeting place to a location on my terms, texting a new address from the phone of an assassin. An abandoned house I know all too well.
The garden is overgrown and neglected. Grass grows over the path, moss greens the guttering. I still have the key, after all this time. I kept it in an envelope with some pictures of my mother. When I open the door I’m shaking, but more fearful of a ghost than another person. And that smell, my stepfather, a stale phantom of alcohol and cheap cigarettes. I pick up a wad of junk mail from the hallway floor, letters with his name on them. Then I close the door behind me. I search the ground floor, drawing the faded curtains as I move from lounge to kitchen, before heading upstairs.
I stand in my bedroom. Or what was my bedroom. So long now since I slept in this house. Twenty years. I’m a giant in a shoebox. Where I scratched Jimmy on to the windowsill with my pocketknife has been painted over. But through the layers of gloss, I can still read my name. The entire house has been redecorated, but he couldn’t paint that out.
Two months ago Gary and I came back. We paid a removal company to go in before we even looked. We gave instructions to burn anything that might belong to a man. To him. No name. When we speak about our stepfather we navigate around his name with the skill of sailors over treacherous reefs. Because if we speak of the devil he might come. This is nonsense, we know. But rather not ruin a conversation.
When his death arrived in my letterbox, a note from a solicitor, I felt loss. In the same way I imagine a cancer patient does after a tumour removal.
Twenty years. Twenty years he lived after the night I waited for him to roll out of the working men’s club, drunk.
I walk from room to room, and think about what a Pakistani man once told me in a car park. ‘People hold us like ghosts in their memories. We hold people like ghosts in our memories. We’re forever haunting or being haunted.’
I go downstairs. The house clearance company had done what they said they would. Nothing left, except a single folding chair in the pantry. I open it out and set it down in the middle of the dining-room