DEATHLOOP (24 page)

“Me neither, but it’s worth a shot. You never know… there might even be a self-help group somewhere.”

They shared a grim smile, then a text appeared on Zack’s mobile from Tracy reminding him that he had more immediate problems.

Tracy Bright lived over shops on a main road in Dalston and a less prepossessing building you would struggle to find Zack decided as he pushed open the front door, crossed a litter strewn hall and climbed a dirty, rickety staircase to the second floor. Tracy was waiting for him on the top landing, leaning over the banister like a child. Zack was surprised to see her like this, wearing make-up and jewellery, her hair brushed and shining, looking like she’d made an effort for once. What was all this about he thought.

He followed her into a small lobby area crammed with old coats, carrier bags, and a collection of rather sad shoes, then continued into a very small living room which was sparsely furnished but piled high with towers of books and papers and bundles. Despite their distance from the road, they had to pitch their voices over the roar of traffic from below.

“I’ve got a bottle of plonk on the go if you’re interested,” she said, cheerfully.

“A small one, I’ve got the car outside.”

Tracy filled a glass and handed it to him. “Cheers,” she said.

“Cheers,” he replied. “So how long have you lived here?” asked Zack, thinking a couple of hours would be enough for him.

“Oh, forever… I couldn’t contemplate moving now, although it’s cramped, as you can see. Just the thought of it…” she said with a shrug, glancing round the room, “to be honest, it does me, it’s dirt cheap, and any money over goes into the escape fund.”

“Don’t tell me you’re thinking of dropping out.”

“Does that surprise you?”

“Well yes, I suppose it does. You’ve always struck me as quite driven, but maybe I got that wrong.”

“When I started out I was.”

“But not anymore?”

“Not really, the chip on my shoulder has worn off.”

God, what was it like originally, thought Zack. “So tell me,” he said, “what do you do with your time off?”

“I don’t have any time off.”

“And is that deliberate?”

“Oh, I expect so.”

The Dambusters march burst out from Zack’s top pocket making Tracy smile.

“Excuse me,” he said, heading to the kitchen to take the call.

Immediately Tracy knew it was a girl, a girl he was sleeping with too and she could not believe how much the information deflated her.

“Only the seven,” she heard Zack say, “so I wouldn’t worry about it… well there we are, that’s the Eurozone for you… lousy phone reception. And our sculptor friend, how is he? Well good for him. Yes, I am with someone so I’ll catch you later if that’s okay… thanks for calling… yeah, me too.”

Zack rang off, walked back into the living room a little awkwardly and sat down, throwing Tracy a swift smile.

“The girlfriend?”

“The girlfriend,” said Zack, then after a jagged pause, “who just so happens to be swanning around Venice as we speak with some Italian sculptor guy.”

“And how do you feel about that?” asked Tracy, sitting on the couch next to him, but still managing to sound like she was cross examining him in court.

“Pissed off, actually, thanks for asking.”

“Well, we’d better show willing I suppose,” said Tracy, hauling a mound of papers onto her lap.

“By the way, I’m not a rapist, Tracy, I was a bastard to Susan, like I was a bastard to a lot of women, but I didn’t rape her, or give her a black eye. I was witness to all that throughout my childhood with my mother and believe me when I say that I would never inflict that on anyone.”

Tracy was completely thrown by this and unsure how to respond. All she could think of was diversionary tactics. “Right, so let’s start with Russell Garrity, shall we?”

A couple of hours later as Zack drove home he thought about Tracy. He had clocked her disappointment when he’d turned down her invitation to join her in another bottle of wine and get a taxi home. The bleakness of her existence in her grim flat surrounded by those stacks of legal bundles was disconcerting. But she was human to him now, and not just a humourless harpy spouting legalese and ready to jump down his throat if he so much as threatened to say the wrong thing. And as he had warmed to her, Zack got the impression that Tracy had allowed herself to see past the handsome man’s veneer, giving herself permission actually to like him too. Nothing would come of it of course, but he found it reassuring that even the formidable
Ms
Tracy Bright was not immune to his charms. All in all, if nothing else, he felt he could cross one battle off his list.

Sam, however, could not. Clarissa and he were barely speaking since Zack’s visit and now news of this guy’s death in Derbyshire had left Sam unable to sleep. Whichever way you looked at it Zack’s life was in crisis and consequently, Sam did not know what to worry about first.

Zack had had various problems with women over the years but nothing like Susan and her enterprising saga of revenge. Clarissa had said that Zack had had it coming and Sam knew there was some truth in that. Sam had glossed over Zack’s darker side more times than he cared to remember because he refused to think ill of a guy who had been nothing but rock solid since the day they’d first met, but how long could Sam keep picking him up from his assorted mires? And more to the point, when would Zack Fortune start dragging Sam down into these mires with him?

The city had been decimated by the recession that had hit the British Isles with a vengeance earlier in the year and showed no sign of letting up. Some companies had been culling their workforce to such an extent that no one in the Square Mile felt safe. At Nyman’s, Sam had always tagged along in the wake of Zack’s success, but the way things were going there was a danger that his involvement with Zack Fortune would turn out to be a liability rather than a smart career move. Unlike Zack, Sam loved everything about his job and he was beginning to worry that if Geoff even so much as got a sniff of what had been going on, Sam would be putting his own future in jeopardy.

As for the continuing problem with the dead and the dying, Sam was convinced that the answer lay in Zack’s mental health, probably connected to his years of drug abuse and sparked off by Clarissa’s ham fisted attempt at hypnosis. Sam refused to accept theories of spiritual mischief or past lives resurfacing, or of Zack being caught up in some kind of hallucinatory purgatory, that was just bollocks of the first order. No, Sam was convinced that it was Zack’s own colourful past catching up with him – a belated, acid induced kick in the teeth.

Standing at the window, gazing down to the stream of traffic on the Marylebone Road that never let up even at 2am, he heard Clarissa come into the room and stop. He knew she was looking at him, unsure what to say or do. Even with his back to her he could hear her mind churning. Finally, she came over, took his hand, and led him to the Chesterfield where they sat beside each other like strangers.

“You blame me for everything, don’t you?” said Clarissa, quietly.

“Of course I do… the diminishing population of polar bears, the abolition of local post offices, the continuing mystery of Lord Lucan…”

“I’ve made a few phone calls,” said Clarissa, cautiously.

“Oh God, here we go…”

“Sam, listen, there is only one way Zack can ever be free of this and that is to take this stuff back where it belongs…”

“And how do you propose he does that, Clarissa?” said Sam, “have Virgin started packages by any chance?”

“I’m being serious, Sam.”

“Yes, that’s what’s so sad,” he said, up on his feet again and agitated, “that you and all the other misguided twerps you hang round with give this trash the time of day.”

“Zack came to me and asked me for help…”

“Yes, because whatever you did has set something off in his drug addled brain. I
told
you he was easily broken… but he doesn’t actually
believe
he knew all these dying people in a previous life and neither do I, and neither would you if you took your bloody blinkers off.”

“I’m trying to help here,” said Clarissa, “that’s all.”

“
And that’s your idea of help is it?
Christ almighty! He’ll be jumping off a roof himself soon with me right behind him at this rate.”

Clarissa was close to tears but she fought them. She didn’t want Sam to think she was playing for sympathy because she wasn’t. Clarissa knew that Sam thought either she had caused all this trouble deliberately as a way of getting back at his best friend, or that she was a complete incompetent, peddling dangerous practices that she knew nothing about. Either way she hated how Sam had turned against her because of it.

Not that long ago Clarissa would have said that the three of them could triumph over just about anything, but clearly they were struggling to triumph over this. And it wasn’t just blame for the regression Clarissa had to contend with, but an overriding responsibility that she knew Sam had lain at her door, for taking the very special relationship the three of them had enjoyed for twenty odd years and beating it unceremoniously to death.

Tracy had informed Brian Smith that Zack was now prepared to make a statement. So at 10 am the following morning, they all sat as usual in the tiny interview room huddled round the old table. They were joined this time by a senior officer from Renfield, Detective Sergeant Malcolm Braithwaite, a bluff Derbyshire man, who knew Russell Garrity well. They had once both worshipped at St Frances of Xavier’s, and as any good Catholic will tell you, (even a lapsed Catholic for that matter), however tough life becomes, suicide is verboten.

The formalities over with, Zack gave his statement under caution. This is what he said:

“I met Russell Garrity at the spiritualist church in Renfield on the evening of June 13th. For some reason he was unhappy about me joining the meeting and asked me to leave. Later I phoned him and I asked him to explain his actions. He agreed to meet me on the bridge over Grey Pike Fell. I met him there at about 11.30 p.m. The bridge was unstable, and after our conversation when he turned to leave, he lost his footing and fell into the river. I jumped in to try and help him but Russell was swept away. As I was making my way back to Renfield along the river path, I saw him wedged between rocks. I called 999 from a phone box so that his body could be recovered.”

Zack stopped speaking and leaned back, fully aware that the three people on the other side of the table expected more, much more, they looked thrown by his brevity.

Brian Smith cleared his throat. “Is this yours, Mr Fortune, this gym membership card?” Brian continued to explain the card to the tape, evidence reference and history, while Zack looked at the small plastic card placed on the table between them.

“Well, it’s got my name on.”

“So it is yours?”

Tracy glanced at Zack, and he knew she was warning him, but how could he deny it?

“Take a wild guess,” said Zack, irritated by Brian’s pedantic questioning already.

“How many of these cards are in your possession?”

“God, I don’t know… I lost one, so there’s probably two kicking around.”

“So you had two to begin with did you?”

“Not to begin with no,” said Zack, wearily, “I lost one, then I got another one, then I found the first and lost the second.”

“Goodness, quite a saga,” said Brian, with a rather stupid grin. “And how did it come to be in Russell Garrity’s possession - any ideas?”

“I can only think I dropped it in the chapel or maybe on the steps when he threw me out.”

“Had you met Russell Garrity before that evening?”

“No.”

“So what happened exactly at the church?”

“He chased me outside and there was a bit of a scuffle.”

“Why did he do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you provoke him in any way?”

“No, I’d just turned up. There’s a bunch of people there who can verify this, you’ve only got to track them down.”

“So you continued the fight on the bridge, is that it?”

“No.”

“How did he fall? Did you push him?”

“No, I did not push him. The handrail had weathered, and was broken in places. The gale was at its worst, and there was debris on the bridge… branches broken off from trees… he either tripped over one or caught his foot in one… whatever, he fell hard against the rail and it snapped with his weight, he was quite a big man.“

The three policemen stared at him, searching for a crack in the armour they knew Zack had been busy constructing. The story was preposterous, they knew it and they knew he knew it as well.

“He tripped and fell, is that it?” asked Brian, with a withering look.

“Exactly,” said Zack.

“Why pick a place like that in a storm, what on earth for?” said Brian.

“It was his choice, not mine.”

“So you drove there, did you?” asked Brian, casually.

“No, my car had broken down a couple of miles out of town. I hired a cab, and got dropped by an old gate, walked down the hill and along the path.”

“Did you ask the cabbie to wait?”

“No, I told him to get back.”

“Why did you do that?” asked Brian, thinking he might have hit on something.

“Because I didn’t know how long I’d be.”

“Or was it that you didn’t want anyone to witness your meeting, maybe that was it.”

“He wouldn’t have witnessed it anyway from the gate to the bridge was quite a hike.”

“Weren’t you concerned about how you’d get back?”

“It wasn’t a priority, no…”

“No? Even in a storm, eight or nine miles out of town?”

“I intended to phone for a cab when I was through.”

“
When you were through?
” said Brian, interested in the turn of phrase.

“When our meeting was over,” said Zack, evenly.

“All right, so what was Russell Garrity’s explanation, why did he eject you from the meeting?”

“He didn’t have one,” he said, aware now that things were about to get sticky.

“So Russell Garrity, a complete stranger, arranged to meet you on a dangerous bridge in a storm to tell you precisely nothing is that it?”