Nicholas Dane

  ‘Having a drink, I’d say.’

  Stella looked at their faces. ‘Who’s Creal?’ she asked. ‘What’s the problem, Ben?’

  Jones ignored her. He sat a while tapping his finger on the table.

  ‘Who’s Creal?’ repeated Stella, but Jones shot her such a glance she decided it was best to shut up.

  ‘Want another one?’ said Manley in a moment.

  ‘Do you?’

  Manley thought about it. ‘Will he remember us?’

  ‘I’d a thought so, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘But will he recognise us?’

  ‘Long time ago, wanit?’

  ‘Aye.’

  There was another pause. ‘Come to think about it,’ said Manley, ‘Meadow Hill ain’t so far from here.’

  ‘You reckon,’ said Jones. The two of them sat for a while, overcome with a sense of oddness that somewhere like Meadow Hill could be so near a place of celebration and pleasure.

  ‘He’s still there, then,’ said Manley.

  ‘He’s got a lad with him right now,’ said Jones. He thought about it a moment and then added, ‘All those years.’

  There was another short pause, before Manley made up his mind.

  ‘I've had enough,’ he said. ‘It’s time we got back.’

  Without a word, the two men rose to their feet and made their way over to the door, with a very puzzled Stella following after them. At the door, Jones ordered Stella to go to the car, before slippping round the side behind the porch, with Manley close behind him.

  Jones indicated the bench where Creal sat.

  ‘It’s him all right,’ said Manley.

  ‘Look at him,’ said Jones mildly, ‘sitting there enjoying his pint without a care in the world.’

  ‘He must have come in to get the beers, what do you think?’

  ‘If he saw us?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Jones thought about it. ‘Would he be sitting there if he did?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘I should hope not. Anyhow, what does it matter if he saw us,’ snarled Jones suddenly rounding on Manley. ‘We haven’t done anything. He’s the one who should be worried.’

  ‘Worried about what?’ sneered Manley. ‘Worried about the police? You know as well as I do, he doesn’t have a worry in the world.’

  They peered around the porch once more at Creal and his friend, and considered how unfair it was that Creal should be so much without a care, when he caused so much.

  ‘The fucking nonce,’ said Jones. ‘The dirty, shitty little nonce. Look at that lad. That could be your son or my son. Someone’s son. The dirty, shitty nonce.’

  ‘Death’s too good for him,’ agreed Manley. They waited there a little longer, then got up and made their way in a circular route to the car, avoiding any means by which Mr Creal might see their faces. Even now, years later, when they had nothing to fear from him, they feared him. In the car, they both became very quiet. They set off in silence for about ten minutes, before Stella plucked up the courage to speak again.

  ‘Who was that man?’ she asked, leaning forward in the car. ‘What’s he done?’

  Without any warning, Jones went mad. He shouted in surprise as if she’d slapped him.

  ‘You stupid bitch!’ he yelled. He shoved Stella back in her seat with the palm of his hand.

  ‘I only...’ she began. But Jones was beyond any control. He began hitting out at her, leaning right over into the back where she sat and punching hard as she dodged and screamed and tried to fend him off. Her attempts to avoid the blows seemed to drive him madder than ever, until he was almost climbing into the back of the car in order to get at her.

  Manley reached back with one hand, the other on the steering wheel, shouting, ‘I’m trying to drive, you twat!’ But Jones had lost his temper totally. If anyone driving the other way had had time to look, they would have seen Jones, leaning over the back and beating, beating, beating something that cowered out of sight in the back seat, as if he were fighting off a visitor from hell.

  If by some magic, Jones had been able to tell Stella what had happened to him as a child in care, and if Stella had somehow been able to understand the effect it had had on him, she would have held in her hand the key to all his troubles and hers. It might be difficult to believe now, with that scowl branded into his face, with his teeth knocked out, and the terrible ugliness of his violence hanging over everything he did, but like Nick, Jones had once been a pretty boy. Like Nick, he had been to Meadow Hill; like Nick he had come across Tony Creal. Like Nick, he had a damaged heart. Unlike Nick, his was beyond all repair.

  Ben Jones had gone into care at the age of four and been in and out of it all his life. There had been not one but over half a dozen Creals in that time, and what had happened to Nick in the Secure Unit had happened to Jones over and over again. Over his years of growing, fear had become a part of every aspect of his life - fear with pain, fear with pleasure, fear with home, fear with care, fear with friendship, fear with love, fear with everything, until fear had taken root and blossomed in his heart. The root of his fear was pain, and the fruit of his fear was anger. At the centre of him, buried beyond reach, locked tight into the black night of Jones’s heart, was a four-year-old boy who had been crying for help for twenty-five long years.

  Back at the house, Stella stumbled into the living room and Jones followed her. She tried to make it upstairs, but he was in the grip of an insurmountable fury. He pulled her backwards off the stairs by her hair and the beating began all over again, so violent, that Stella feared for her life. She wasn’t the only one. Manley stood behind crying, ‘Leave her, Jones, it’s enough, it’s enough!’ but Jones was deaf to any pity. There could never be enough. So, for the first time in his life, Manley stepped in between Jones and his victim.

  ‘Not that I care for the girl, but you’re going to kill her like this,’ he begged. ‘And face it, Jones, it ain’t her you want to kill, is it?’

  Jones, panting in panic and rage, stood there with his hands in fists, glaring at his friend, unable to speak.

  ‘It’s not her you want to kill. Is it?' demanded Manley again.

  Jones looked away, unable to meet Manley’s eyes. He glanced fiercely back up in a moment, and Manley nodded at him.

  ‘It’s not her,’ he said.

  ‘No, not her,’ repeated Jones.

  Stella ran up the stairs, her face and scalp covered with blood, clutching her side. He had re-broken the rib he had cracked a couple of weeks earlier. Jones turned away and walked to the fridge for a beer.

  A few minutes later, sitting in the front room, still out of breath, he looked up. ‘We could do it,’ he said to Manley.

  ‘Maybe we could,’ said Manley. ‘If we could find a way.’

  ‘We wouldn't have to do it on our own,’ said Jones. ‘How many men do you know who’d help us finish off dear Tony Creal?’

  ‘A dozen or so, I reckon,’ said Manley. ‘I’m thinking... if there’s enough suspects, it’s difficult to find a culprit.’

  Jones stood there a while and then said one word in a quiet voice.

  ‘Murder.’

  ‘Murder,’ said Manley with a nod.

  So the idea was born.

  For a while longer, the two men talked. Names were suggested, characters discussed. Were they good men or bad men, strong men, or weak men, singers or silent? The next day, they agreed, they’d start to make contact and feel a few of the most trustworthy out. At this point, neither was sure that this would ever be discussed further, or even that the sighting of Creal would ever be brought up again. Perhaps in the end it would be easier to do what they’d both done for twenty-odd years, and just forget all about it.

  Half an hour later, Jones went upstairs to see Stella, who lay bruised and bleeding on the bed. When he opened the door and stood there, framed for a minute in dull light from the hall downstairs, she couldn’t tell his mood. But he came to her very gently and took her in his arms as if she was a c
hild, laid her curled-up limbs out straight, kissed her bruises and then, burying his head in her lap, began to weep. They were little tears at first, but they quickly turned into big, heart-shaking sobs. Full of wonder at the change in her lover, Stella laid her hand carefully on his head, and as he nuzzled it and kissed it and shed tears upon it, began to cry herself. She stroked him, murmuring to him that it didn’t matter, it was all right, that nothing mattered except that she loved him and he loved her.

  This was how he kept her heart - by breaking his own into pieces, and hers with it, time after time.

  31

  The Jack of Diamonds

  After he had wept like a baby in her arms, Jones and Stella made love, then fell asleep wrapped up in each other’s arms like children. But Jones didn’t sleep for long. He woke out of a nightmare within the hour and lay awake, tormented by flashbacks, ravaged by feelings of betrayal and guilt that turned to rage as soon as he reached out to touch them. No wonder he turned to his little bottles of calm.

  ‘What is it, love?' asked Stella. Jones didn’t answer. He got out of bed, went to the wardrobe, rattled with the key and began to root inside.

  ‘No, Jonesy, not tonight,’ begged Stella. She meant, not to obliterate himself tonight after they had been so close. She couldn’t know it but the closeness was already gone. It wasn’t her that Jones wanted to wipe out. It was the hatred inside himself that he couldn’t bear. He was trying to spare her the storm that was to follow.

  Jones flung a handful of pills down his throat, and went back to bed, turning his back on her as he lay down. Stella stared at him, unable to understand, but moved by him as always. She laid a hand on his shoulder but he shrugged it off, so she wriggled as close to him as she dared so that she could at least feel his heat and like this, unable to touch, the two lovers fell asleep.

  Jones spent a couple of days like that, full of pills and peace. The next day, he went to lie in the bath and stared at the ceiling, not thinking, not feeling much either, as clean as a freshly-washed sheet, newly pressed. He got up and sat with Stella that evening, eating the food she’d cooked him. It was a chicken roasted with potatoes, carrots and peas, one of his favourites, and he ate with the first appetite he’d had all week.

  Later that day, he called round to see Manley, and found that his friend had been spending quite some time thinking about the matter of Tony Creal. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought about that subject, and over the years he’d come up with what he thought was a pretty good plan for seeing it through, although he’d never told anyone about it. It was a bold plan, that meant facing down the police, and the company of a number of men with hearts like iron...if Jones was genuinely interested...

  Jones was. Calmly now, and with mounting conviction, they began to plot the murder of Tony Creal.

  As foretold, there were a great many men who dearly wished to have Tony Creal taken out of the world, and not gently, either; but not so many willing to do it. Over the next couple of weeks Jones and Manley sounded them out.

  Such meetings began casually. There would be a certain amount of idle chitchat about things in the world in general, and its wicked ways, before one of the two plotters would drop into the conversation that they had seen guess who, wetting his whistle down at the Old Folks at Home the other week.

  ‘Only that nonce Creal.’

  ‘Don’t ever mention him to me, I never even want to think about him again,’ was one reaction common enough, which ended the conversation in its tracks there and then.

  But... ‘I’d kill him if I could,’ was another; in which case Jones widened his eyes innocently and wondered aloud if such a thing were possible.

  ‘And if it was,’ Manley might remark, ‘and if someone had a way of polishing off dear Tony without any visible culprits, with a certainty of getting his death for free ... you’d be there, then, would you?’

  And the eyes would meet.

  ‘Would you?’ repeated Jones.

  Sometimes they'd look away. Sometimes there’d be a laugh dismissing such a silly idea, or the subject might be changed. But sometimes - six times to be precise - the exchange was followed with agreement.

  ‘I’d be the first one there with a knife at his throat,’ said one man, ‘so long as I could be sure I’d never get caught.’

  No more was said, no suggestions or confidences exchanged. Not every nod was taken up. But some nods would get another visit, where there’d be more chitchat, a drink perhaps, and a theory presented. Neither Jones nor Manley ever suggested that the theory was anything more than a theory, a thought, never to be put into action. Only if the nodder suggested themselves that the theory was good enough to try, would more nods be made. Then and only then, would discussion move into actual practicalities.

  By the end of a fortnight, Jones and Manley had found three more to join them. Five men. More than enough for murder.

  Stella, of course, was kept completely in the dark, and Jones became increasingly distant. He began to spend long periods locked away downstairs with Manley, deeply immersed in intense conversations from which she was barred. When they were on their own he stayed away from her, snapped at her to leave him alone and stop following him about. There were long conversations on the telephone when she was ordered out of the room, and journeys out on his own or with Manley, from which she was also barred.

  Stella wasn’t stupid. Something was going on, that much was obvious. But what? Her efforts to break through were met either with a casual dismissal or a flurry of rage. As the days turned to weeks, she became secretive herself, lingering on the stairs, coming down from the bedroom quietly and pausing outside the kitchen door to see if she could hear what was being said. She soon put a stop to that game, when Jones caught her at it and beat her so furiously she had to take her injuries down to the hospital, despite her shame. After that he took to sending her out, telling her with a sneer to visit Shiner and those kids she liked so much.

  That had never happened before. Jones had always guarded her like a treasure and would have broken her jaw rather than let her round at Shiner’s out of his sight. She wept bitter tears, to no avail. By now, she was convinced that whatever it was that Jones was planning, it was deep and it was dark. This was no common robbery that was being planned. It stank of violence. She had not yet allowed herself to think of death, but it was there already, on the tip of her tongue.

  One month after Jones and Manley had first seen Creal in the beer garden, the five men assembled at Jones’s house to discuss their final plans. This time it wasn't enough for Stella for stay up in the bedroom - she was sent out of the house. Jones gave her a little money, told her to go and get some shopping in.

  He took her to the door himself. As he stood framed in the entrance, she turned to look at him, full of questions she didn't dare ask.

  ‘Don’t hurry back,’ said Jones, and he closed the door.

  She stood there a moment, looking back at the closed curtains to the front room. What was it? What was he planning with these men that was so bad she wasn’t allowed so much as a hint of it? As if his normal games weren’t scary enough.

  Stella was petrified, but it wasn’t for herself she was scared; it was for Jones. Despite everything, there was something fearfully helpless about her lover. He was prepared to die as easily as he might catch a cold. She couldn’t bear the thought that he would come to harm. His distance from her was breaking her heart.

  She was certain something terrible was about to happen.

  As Stella made her sad way into Manchester, Jones, Manley and the three other men were opening a can and drinking not to health, but to death - to the death of Tony Creal. They’d been keeping a watch on the Northenden pub and knew that he was in the habit of coming out there most Mondays. The friend Nick had seen him with was a police officer on Manchester’s serious fraud squad who shared his taste for boys. He’d been there two weeks in a row, but left after a few drinks while it was still light, which didn’t help their plans.

/>   A better chance was a more regular date he had at a watering hole closer to the Home, a small pub called the Fox and Hounds where he often went for a few pints, and sometimes more than a few pints on a Thursday night, and walked back late, and alone. If someone watched regularly, and if someone was willing to make a phone call when he turned up and another when he left the pub, and if a group of determined men were to wait in the roads between the pub and Meadow Hill, they might very well catch Mr Creal on his own, or with a friend or two at the most, who could easily be scared off. Once they had their hands on him, the murder could be carried out easily enough, and the escape managed, no doubt. But the difficult part comes later on. How do you elude capture and stay innocent in the eyes of the law? People would see the new drinkers coming to the pub on a Thursday night. They might notice them leaving after Mr Creal, perhaps. And what about those who waited on the streets? Could they lurk and not be seen? Our five heroes understood very well the slow painstaking patience the police show in a murder investigation, carefully building up a picture of a victim’s movements on the day of their murder. Glimpses, even only half remembered, might help build up a trail that sooner or later leads to the guilty door.

  ‘But that doesn’t matter,’ said Manley. ‘So long as they can’t prove it, who cares?’

  They would come upon Creal, all five of them, and escort him away to a waiting car, and then on to one of their homes, where he would be kept prisoner until the very dark of night. From there he would be taken to a place of execution, a small car park in a quiet part of town. The gagged Creal would be tethered to a fence and soaked with petrol. The five men would stand round him and each one would take from his pocket a box of matches. Each man would take out a match and place it head down on the box, holding box and match with one hand, thumb pressed down on the end of the match. Then, one man and one man only would flick the match, the match would ignite, followed shortly after by Tony Creal. They would all be witness to his deserved fate, that most horrible of deaths, to be burned alive.