Bad Sons (Booker & Cash Book 1) (33 page)

Gaston’s tongue played nervously around his lips. ‘No, papa. It was not like that. It was the Englishman, Flashman, the pump engineer. He killed them.’

I decided to join in: ‘And who killed him?’

‘It was an accident. Poor Julien, he cannot control his emotions sometimes. Flashman made fun of him, they fought and Julien broke his neck.’

I didn’t believe a word of it and I could see his father had heard it all before: the excuses, the worming, the blaming his brother.

‘Remove their ties.’

I looked at Gaston but he did not move.

‘Did you hear me, boy?’

‘Listen to me, Papa. If we release them they will be free to come back in numbers with more police. They will take Julien and lock him away. He will hate that. It will drive him mad. Think of his condition. He cannot control himself, you know that. He will end up being restrained and confined in some mental institution. Could you live with that on your conscience?’

‘If he is truly mentally incapable of being held responsible for his own actions the courts will take that into consideration,’ said Jo. ‘If, indeed, he did any killing.’

Gaston shot her a look that spoke for what he’d like to do to her for that.

‘I said release them.’

Fear and anger played around Gaston’s features. His face burned with his humiliation and the frustration of his position. He was deeply in the shit and his eyes said he knew his lies weren’t going to help him out of it. He tried again: ‘We cannot, Papa. For Julien, we cannot. You must see that. I’m only thinking of Julien.’

‘You have never thought about anyone but yourself. Do not talk to me of conscience. You are my shame. If your mother were still alive the burden of having you for a son would have destroyed her. It is the only good thing about her death that she cannot see what you have become and what you have done to Julien. Now, release them.’

Gaston’s pretence and artificiality fell away from him. His face became hard again like it had been when he had been in control.

‘No, papa. I will not. And I will not allow you to either. They cannot leave here alive. If you care anything for your son you will understand that.’

Jo wasn’t finished either: ‘Don’t listen to him. If Julien is guilty of anything he will be helped, not punished.’

The old man barked out a harsh laugh. ‘I do not believe we are talking of Julien any longer. Eh, mon garcon?’ He spat the final two words out of his mouth like broken teeth.

Gaston did not answer. He looked crestfallen, defeated. He took a weary step to me and lifted his knife. I turned so that he might cut my tie and he whipped an arm around my neck and pulled me to him. I felt the cold steel against my throat. He turned me so I was between him, his father and the exit.

‘Now, you will listen to me, Papa. Why should I not think about myself? It has always been
poor Julien
this and
poor Julien
that. Julien, Julien, Julien.
Look after your brother. Play with your brother. Stay inside with your brother. Include your brother.
I have a life too.’

‘He is your brother. He is special and he needed you.’

‘Well, now I need him and you had better listen to me. These two cannot leave here. If they leave I will go to prison. I am not going to prison for something I didn’t do. I swear, it was Flashman killed the two in England and it was Julien who killed Flashman. That is the truth. I am not going to prison for them, or for you. I haven’t killed anyone, but I will kill these two to preserve my freedom and Julien’s and you will keep quiet about it, if not for my sake then for Julien’s.

‘If I am taken by the police I will see Julien is implicated and you will have to live with what happens to him for the rest of your life. Do you hear me, old man?’ He was bordering on hysterical. His screeching bared his fear and his uncertainty.

The edge of the blade was pushed hard up against my windpipe and he had me on my heels. To fight would have risked him slitting my throat, deliberately or otherwise. He’d been sure to give me a good look at that knife and I had no desire to risk the fragile plumbing in my neck.

‘Tu est un idiot. Sometimes you are more stupid than your poor idiot brother.’

‘Arrêter! Don’t compare me to him. Don’t
poor Julien
me. Enough.’

The blade’s pressure was increased and I pushed myself back against him, trying to ease it.

I don’t remember where I was looking. I don’t know what I was seeing. But for the second time that night I heard a gunshot. Without Julien’s arms protecting my ears it was a deafening report in the enclosed space.

I felt the searing heat of the bullet’s trace on my cheek and then my release as my captor fell backwards. I fell with him. The blade sliced across my throat and immediately I felt the blood warm, wet and sticky on my neck. But I could breathe.

I rolled off him and knelt on the floor watching my blood drip and pool on the oil-stained concrete beneath me. It was bad, but it wasn’t my artery.

The patriarch had shot his son in the shoulder. An audacious act, not without great risk to me. But I doubted my welfare was then uppermost in his mind.

I was aware of the father hurrying to cover the distance between us. I looked up to see him kneel at his son’s side.

Jo was pulling me up. Her hands were free. I hadn’t seen her manage that. She tore a sleeve from her cotton shirt and held it against my throat.

She was pulling me away from them when I saw the blade flash up and into the father’s stomach. He let out a great moan and collapsed on to his prostrate son.

The pistol fell from the old man’s grip to clatter on the concrete between us. Jo reached across and snatched it up. It looked old and heavy. Something out of their museum, perhaps, and I had to wonder at either the father’s superb marksmanship or my good fortune that he hadn’t shot me in the face. She had it in her grasp when Julien’s stupid, enormous form once again squeezed through the little opening.

I heard his roar of emotion. I saw him look from his injured family members to me to Jo. I registered the dumb confusion and the panic and the anguish and the terror on his idiot’s face. And then I saw his rage, the rage that had probably swamped him to break Flashman’s neck, if Gaston were to be believed.

Jo pointed the weapon at him, both arms extended, feet planted a yard apart. Text book small arms positioning. She looked like she’d done it before.

‘Stay where you are. Get down on the floor.’

Some of my schoolboy French came back to me:
Arrêter. Descendre.
He couldn’t understand her. He was panicked and losing what pathetic grasp he had of his self-control. I saw him look around wildly and then he made his last mistake. He picked up a length of metal tubing and advanced.

Jo shot him four times. This was followed by two more dry clicks as the firing pin fell harmlessly on empty chambers. I don’t know what he had done to her in the room at the back, but there seemed something personal in it. She grouped the bullets around the centre of his chest. At least one of them pierced his heart. He pitched forwards, fast and hard. The noise his face made as it connected with the concrete was unlike anything I had ever heard or wanted to hear again.

She dwelt on it for only a second and then she was back with me, using some tool she’d found to saw through my bonds.

With my hands free I was able to hold the cloth to my own neck. It had been white. It was now crimson and sodden with my blood. But I could breathe. He’d cut me. It wasn’t going to look nice for a while, but I wasn’t going to die from it.

‘You need an ambulance. I’m going to find a telephone. Do not move. Keep that pressed tightly to your neck. Keep your chin down.’

I nodded, clutching the blood-soaked rag to my throat and she ran from the building without stopping to inspect her handiwork.

I was feeling light-headed and cold and, if the truth be known, I was frightened for myself. I concentrated on keeping still, keeping awake and keeping alive.

The rain had eased to a light patter and I was suddenly glad of its efforts. With the beating on the roof I didn’t feel so alone.

Julien lay like a slaughtered horse and the blood had begun to seep out from under him to form a border around his head and shoulders. I couldn’t look at him for long, the poor bastard. I switched my attention to the other two and heard one of them groan. It sounded like Gaston.

He was trying to extricate himself from under his inert father. I watched on helplessly as he finally managed to push the old man off him and roll up on to his knees. Gaston stood up, clutching his shoulder. Blood soaked through his clothing around the entry wound. He looked very pale and in pain. He had a right to.

He saw me sitting on the floor propped up against the workbench, hanging on to the cloth at my neck like I was hanging on to life, and his wickedness returned to settle on his features like crows returning to their roost after a good scare.

‘It’s not over till it’s over, Mr Booker. I see that you have killed my brother, which will be useful as mitigating circumstances in my defence. Where is your little whore?’

The room was darkening for me. I was finding unconsciousness hard to battle against. I just wanted to close my eyes and rest. In the failing light I watched him bend to retrieve something. I caught a sucking noise and then something reflected dully in his hand. I forced my eyes to open and focus. He shuffled over and squatted down in front of me with a grimace. The grotesque hunting knife was back in his grip and pointing at me. His father’s blood dripped from it on to the floor.

‘Look at me. I want you to watch me take your life like I took your uncle’s and your aunt’s. I like to see the light die in the eyes. It is a remarkable thing to take a life. I believe it makes one stronger.’

There was movement behind him; a shadowy presence moving slowly across the room. My blurring vision couldn’t distinguish the form and then it was gone and it could have been a figment of my imagination, or the Reaper come to claim me.

‘What was it all for?’

He laughed a sick little laugh. The perspiration stood out on his forehead. ‘What is it always for?’

He opened his mouth to speak again, but he had already used up all his words on Earth. Jo had sneaked back into the building and picked her way silently across the distance between the door and us. She had soundlessly collected something metal and heavy on her way, which she brought down on Gaston’s head with enough force to send fragments of his skull deep into his brain and kill him outright, which according to the subsequent medical reports is exactly what happened.

***

Epilogue

Compared with the fortnight before, it’s been an uneventful few days. Lying in a hospital bed in France with little to read other than a few tatty, dated paperback thrillers and a laminated sign saying, Nil-pas-la bouche, which I understand to be the French version of our Nil-by-mouth.. No one to talk to either, apart from the occasional visiting police officers – a miserable bunch on the whole. Still, at least I’ve had plenty of time to think and record my recollections of this colourful episode in my life.

I understand that when I return to the UK, recovered enough, if not totally fit and well – French hospitals don’t want foreigners cluttering up their beds any more than their British counterparts – I’ll be receiving visits from people in authority there. And they will have their questions and they will require answers. But it’s not so much to account for my actions, or for posterity, that I’ve taken the decision to document what I can remember of events, although it’s been an interesting exercise. I have done this for Jo.

She is accountable to people and organisations in ways I am not. Recent events have brought her a lot of grief. She’s responsible for the position I currently find myself in – hooked up to drips and machines, lying between starched white sheets in the lap of mediocrity instead of dead. I owe her. I owe my life to her, probably twice over. Now that’s a debt.

When Jo landed the blow with the wrench that shattered Gaston’s skull like a cheap ceramic pot at a Greek wedding he was pitched forward on top of me, instantly dead. That was the good news. The bad news was that the knife he had been pointing at my chest was still between us and the impetus of his body slumping on the hilt drove a couple of inches of it through my ribcage and into a lung, nicking some important blood vessels – aren’t they all? – on the way.

They said that if there hadn’t been an ambulance not far off I would have been the fourth fatality at the scene. That experience has turned my already-healthy fear of hunting knives into something of a phobia. I think that is understandable when one has experienced the sight, sound and feel of such a knife slashing one’s throat and penetrating one’s chest cavity. At least I will now have some decent scars to show off next time I find myself sitting around the table with Dreyfuss and co.

Jo is currently on what I believe is euphemistically referred to as ‘gardening leave’. If she had a family, she would have the opportunity to be spending a lot more time with them. It could have been that fatal blow of questionable force that has led to her suspension; it could have been the four bullets she put into the giant’s chest, or it could have been the fact that she had gone off the procedural piste with me and ended up causing an international incident. More than likely it is a combination of all of it. Mavericks, I understand, are not to be tolerated in the British police service. She has not visited. I understand her distance is a necessary condition of the enquiry she is embroiled in and it is something I must accept.