Authors: Neil Cross
Lenny promised. Weatherell deflated. He jammed a floppy sunhat on his head and stomped from the lobby.
Later, while they were illegally parked opposite the hotel, Lenny was convinced of the familiarity of a Subaru hatchback that pulled out of the Sheraton car park.
That was a moment.
He turned to Shepherd.
They looked at each other.
Lenny said: ‘Fuck me. I think it’s actually him.’
He was so excited he stalled the car three times and pulled into the traffic with a banshee shriek that made it feel like a real pursuit. They caught sight of the Subaru three blocks ahead. As Lenny had predicted, it seemed to be tailing Weatherell’s 4 x 4.
Without talking, they followed the Subaru to the edge of town. Under his breath, Lenny sang songs from the Clash’s first album. They followed the man who might be William Holloway through the turnstile into Whakawerawera thermal park and Maori cultural centre and Lenny, who was marginally the less conspicuous of the pair, shadowed him through the souvenir shop and cafeteria.
He rejoined Shepherd outside the souvenir shop. Shepherd was pretending to select postcards from a wire spinner that threatened to topple each time he so much as brushed it.
Still they doubted it could actually be him.
In a way, they both hoped it wasn’t.
Later, after Lenny had led the Weatherells away, Shepherd leaned on the railing and told Holloway his name. It was a curiously flat moment.
He had not cried for many years, not even when his father died, so he couldn’t guess at the source of the sudden, unexpected grief that made him grip the railing as if he were on the deck of a liner. The sadness seemed unconnected to the stranger before him, the little man in the baseball cap to whom he felt no bond or affiliation, no relationship of any kind. He was just a stranger in a Hawaiian shirt, at the first sight of whom the William Holloway in Shepherd’s mind tapered and dissolved, like the picture on an old TV screen. It left an absence whose parameters he could not, already, quite recall.
II
On a wet November afternoon, they touched down at Manchester airport.
At the passport control desk, Holloway couldn’t feel his legs. He was certain that customs would search him. If they did, they could hardly miss in excess of £100,000, in various currencies, taped up in a bin-liner in his capacious hand luggage. But the passport officer waved him past and he moved unhindered through the Nothing to Declare channel.
Shepherd experienced a similar anxiety. He was travelling on Andrew Taylor’s passport. But nobody was interested in him either.
Of the three of them, only Lenny arrived in the UK with a passport that might stand up to full and close scrutiny. But the sight of uniforms made him nervous. He walked past Manchester customs and excise like a man trying hard to look casual and unconcerned. So they singled him out and went through his luggage. Because this always happened to Lenny, he refused to carry the most innocuous contraband through customs. He had incinerated his fake IDs in New Zealand.
About twenty minutes later, he joined Holloway and Shepherd in Arrivals.
Holloway had never thought to see England again. While they waited for Lenny, he went to buy a newspaper. Everything he saw spoke of the whole: the lettering on the W. H. Smith sign:
The Times
, the
Daily Mirror
. Werther’s Originals. Mars bars. Walker’s cheese-and-onion crisps. The near-identical accent of the staff, despite the variety of their ethnicity. The old couple who stood together in the queue to buy a pack of mints.
When Lenny arrived, glad at least to have been spared what he cheerfully called
the old rubber glove
, they went to the Avis desk and hired a car.
Outside, the air was cold and wet and smelled of aviation fuel. Whining planes broke the low cloud, encased in shafts of light. Holloway shivered in his summer clothing as they struggled to locate and identify the right vehicle in the hire compound. Then he threw his bag into the boot and huddled, quivering, on the back seat. Lenny took his place at the wheel and familiarized himself with the dashboard layout. Shepherd slid back the passenger seat as far as it would go. None of them spoke. They were too tired and it was too cold.
Concerned that her phone or indeed her person might be bugged, Lenny hadn’t spoken to Eloise for nearly three weeks. Holloway assured him this probably wasn’t necessary, but it didn’t seem to matter. Neither did the fact that Holloway was still technically a serving British police officer. You couldn’t be too careful where possible surveillance was concerned, Lenny told him. What with one thing and another, Holloway was inclined to agree.
Lenny was not a good driver; he was erratic and impulsive and he weaved between lanes like a speeding bumblebee, but he made good time and he got them there alive. He was eager to get home. He slowed down only when they hit a snarl of traffic on the North Circular.
They unpacked the car. The luggage seemed heavy. The freezing drizzle had soaked to their joints.
Lenny put the key in the door.
He called out: ‘Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig. Anybody home?’
Eloise ran barefoot from the sitting room. She threw her arms round Lenny’s neck. She planted a kiss on his cheek. She said: ‘I missed you, John Dillinger.’
Lenny eased her away.
He said: ‘Elly. This is Will.’
She looked at Holloway.
‘Oh,’ she said.
Holloway could not smile. He shifted his position. Whatever he did, it looked like what a murderer would do. So he just stood there, on the cold doorstep in his summer clothes, while the house’s fragrant warmth radiated out to him.
‘Oh, God,’ said Eloise. ‘Right. OK.’
She nodded, vaguely, and stepped aside to let them enter. She pressed herself almost flat to the wall when Holloway passed her. Lenny took him to the sitting room. Shepherd hung back. He scuffed his shoes on the welcome mat, and closed the door behind him.
Eloise had not moved.
Shepherd set his bag down.
Quietly, he said: ‘How are you?’
She whispered: ‘How do you think I am? I’m like someone whose husband just brought home a murderer.’
‘He’s not a murderer,’ Shepherd hissed back. ‘That’s the point.’
By now, though, it hardly seemed to matter.
Eloise ran a hand through her hair. A few strands of her blunt fringe stood vertically. She looked at Shepherd as if she had never met him.
She said: ‘Right. This has gone too far.’
She ran upstairs. On the first landing, she leaned over the banister and called Lenny. The house froze.
Lenny went stomping upstairs like a loose-limbed teenager about to be berated.
Shepherd and Holloway sat silently in the sitting room while upstairs Lenny and Eloise argued.
After a few minutes, Shepherd said: ‘Fancy a cuppa?’
‘Yes,’ said Holloway. ‘Please.’
‘Milk?’
‘A bit. Just a dash.’
‘Sugar?’
‘Please. Four.’
‘Four?’
‘Please.’
Shepherd was gone a long time, far longer than it took to prepare two cups of tea and find some biscuits. But when he returned, Holloway had not changed his position and Eloise and Lenny were still screaming at one another.
Holloway took a chipped mug. He thanked Shepherd.
‘He should’ve called ahead,’ he said.
Shepherd dunked a stale digestive, then folded the crumbling, sodden disc into his mouth.
‘What can you do?’
‘You can’t blame her,’ said Holloway.
Shepherd agreed.
‘No,’ he said.
Eloise packed her suitcase and left that evening.
If they expected her departure to make Holloway anxious for his continued safety, it didn’t. Lenny insisted with some passion that Eloise would under no circumstances go to the police, or mention Holloway’s presence to anybody. He became tearful at the thought of her wounded but absolute loyalty.
Holloway told him he understood, that it was OK, that he appreciated the reassurance.
‘She’ll be all right,’ said Lenny, for his own benefit.
‘Of course,’ said Shepherd.
‘Of course she will,’ said Holloway. He might have been injected with Novocain.
‘Right,’ said Lenny. He clapped his hands and tried to look cheerful.
The room, the house, was suffused with a sense of unreality.
‘Anything else, before I get some sleep?’
‘There is one thing,’ said Holloway. ‘I’d like to see my aunt.’
They tried to talk him out of it, but it was no good. The next morning, Lenny drove Holloway to Bristol. Shepherd stayed at home. Holloway was pleased to be free of him, if only for a few hours. Shepherd’s dolorous presence made him uncomfortable. That discomfort made him feel grudging and at fault.
Holloway remembered little about his final days in New Zealand. He lay in his hotel bed, watching television and eating sporadically and badly. He rose only to write, then destroy letters of explanation and apology to Dan Weatherell.
Meanwhile, Lenny was co-ordinating a flight home for the three of them. Every three or four hours he checked up on Holloway, by phone or in person. And several times a day, he phoned Dan Weatherell, to assure him that Holloway remained safely locked away in his hotel room.
Shepherd took the opportunity to go and watch the test match.
Holloway didn’t see much of him. He thought that Shepherd seemed somewhat depressed. This suggested that he’d come as something of an anticlimax. Perhaps in this was rooted his guilty antipathy.
At the airport, Holloway remembered assuring the clerk that he had packed his own luggage. He remembered the low whine of the engines and the horrid, piss-and-shit-stink of the chrome lavatory several hours into the long flight. But most of all, he remembered the way Eloise had thrown herself at Lenny when he arrived home.
He saw in that moment that Eloise would never have left Lenny, had it not been for the
arrival at her door of William Holloway, surrounded by the flickering aura of his lost, imagined women.
Yet Lenny accepted her temporary absence with equanimity. He did not doubt her intentions or worry about what she might be doing. He did not construct imaginary betrayals. And so neither did Holloway. It had not occurred to him to examine or question the nature of this confidence in Eloise.
Lenny was as different from Holloway as it was possible for a man to be, who shared a mother culture. Even his unlimited paranoia was the fountainhead of an abnormal joy.
Holloway did not see himself in Lenny. Lenny was a mystery to him. Yet he found his company familiar and comfortable.
When Shepherd told Holloway about Dryden, about
It’s a Wonderful Life
and Joanne Grayling and Charles Manson and
Helter Skelter,
it sounded fractured and unconvincing. It left Holloway feeling galled to have been tracked down by an obsessive freak.
But in Lenny’s mouth it all made sense. Lenny was sane and articulate and animated and fervently evangelical. He illustrated each of his points by clapping or punching his hand. He gave Holloway pages of research materials. These included a five-page printed document whose first entry was dated 63 BC: ‘countless numbers of Jewish citizens deliberately jump to their death when Pompey captures the city’.
But it was the last page Holloway was interested in.
1978: Jonestown, Guyana. Jim Jones leads 913 members of the People’s Temple to their deaths, by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
1993: Vietnam. Believing they will go straight to Heaven, fifty-three villagers commit mass suicide with primitive weapons.
1993: America. Seventy members of the Branch Davidian cult die when fire ends a fifty-one-day siege by police and federal agents of the ATF.
1994: Switzerland. Forty-eight members of the Solar Temple are found burned to death in a farmhouse and three chalets. Five further bodies, including that of an infant, are found in Montreal.
1995: France. Sixteen members of the Solar Temple are found burned to death in a house in the French Alps.
1997: Canada. Five members of the Solar Temple are found burned to death in a house in Saint Casimir, Quebec.
1997: America. On the same day, thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult are found dead after committing mass suicide in shifts. Previously, many had genitally mutilated themselves.
1999: UK. Rex Dryden cons approximately 400 followers of his fake millennial cult, the Temple of Light, into drinking what he claims to be poisoned Lucozade.
2000: UK. Rex Dryden instructs unknown followers to enact the first of many millennial sacrifices, ordering the murder of prostitute Joanne Grayling. His reasons for choosing Joanne Grayling, if any, are currently unknown.
‘Dryden’s been dropping hints and clues,’ Lenny told him. ‘He’s been taking every opportunity to go on the record about his obsession with
It’s a Wonderful Life
. Obviously he’s instructed whoever was sent to kill Joanne to refer to it at every opportunity. Possibly he sees it as an allegory of death and redemption. Or the demise of capitalism. The extinction of global super corporations. Whatever. He’s using specific symbolism, but it’s peculiar to his own mythos and difficult to interpret. It might not even be consistent. It doesn’t need to be. These movements have a certain internal logic, a self-sustaining momentum. Once the adherents have chosen to believe, they believe no matter what.
‘Dryden’s the first modern celebrity to run a genuine death cult. And it was Dryden, or Dryden’s followers, who did this to you.
‘He thinks he’s a Lord of Misrule,’ said Lenny. ‘The Old Trickster. King of the World. Prince of the Air. Well, he’s not,’ he said. ‘He’s just a cunt.’
Lenny steered with his right hand and evangelized with his left. There was still a lot he wanted to tell Holloway about, not all of it connected with Rex Dryden. Holloway didn’t mind, any more than he minded Lenny shifting gears with teeth-grinding inefficiency and appearing to change lanes at random. His driving was accompanied by a discordant choir of outraged horns.
But Holloway grew tense when they entered Bristol’s city limits. He pulled the borrowed beanie hat over his ears and turned up the collar of his jacket. Then Lenny said: ‘You look like a car-thief,’ and he turned the collar down again.