The Enemy Within, page 24
There was still no response at the front door. I supposed I could always come back this evening, and as many times as was necessary after that, but now I had screwed up my courage I wasn’t prepared to leave without just one more go. I walked forward again and rapped on the soot-dusted paintwork of the door, so hard that it actually hurt my knuckles.
Immediately there was movement from inside, and I watched a shadow forming and growing on the frosted glass panels cut into the door. The lock clicked, and the door swung narrowly open to reveal first a baby in a t-shirt and nappy, and then the young woman who was clutching it on her hip. She kept the other hand, which had a lit cigarette in it, on the edge of the door, ready to push it shut again if she didn’t like the look of me. I could see grey marks on the baby’s grubby top, and I had a horrible feeling they might be cigarette ash.
I was just opening my mouth to speak when she beat me to it. ‘You here for Liam Delaney’s stuff, yeah?’
I was so taken aback all I did was nod. She took a long drag on her cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke over the top of her child’s head as she drew the door open wide and stepped aside to reveal several boxes piled up in the narrow hallway behind her. ‘It’s all here, mate. Help yourself.’
NINE
I know I should have explained why I was really there. But something – call it gut instinct – just made me go with the flow. I stepped over the threshold and took a closer look at the boxes. They had all sorts of stuff piled up in them: a duvet and pillows with a pattern of bright diagonal lines had been roughly bundled into the nearest one, there were books and newspapers crammed into others, and what looked like an electric typewriter was poking up out of the one furthest to the back of the hall, next to a portable TV, its aerials retracted and lolling drunkenly to one side.
‘This is all of it,’ the woman said defensively, as if I’d suggested otherwise. ‘Mum cleared it all out last night because she’s got someone else interested in the room. She had to go to work. I said we’d come over and wait in for you. You’re earlier than I was expectin’.’ She certainly wasn’t Irish: that was a London drawl if ever I’d heard one. She took another deep drag on the cigarette as the baby goggled at me with saucer eyes.
‘Yeah. You know, traffic,’ I said vaguely, because I had to say something. I found myself automatically scanning the spines of the books that were visible in the nearest box. Couple of Sidney Sheldons, a Robert Ludlum. Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan. The Price of My Soul by Bernadette Devlin. The Writings of Bobby Sands. If that wasn’t enough to convince me this was Liam’s stuff, I recognised my copy of Tales of the City that I’d lent him. There was a bookmark sticking out from about a quarter of the way through. So at least he’d made a start on it.
‘I was ’alf-opin’ you wouldn’t turn up. I quite fancied having that for his big brother.’ She jerked her head towards the the furthest box. ‘You can get loads of games and that on them, can’t you?’
I followed her gaze, realising that what I had taken to be a typewriter was actually a computer: I recognised the brown keyboard with its row of red keys along the top from TV, but I’d never actually seen one in real life. I did know they cost a fortune though: yet more evidence that Liam had been living beyond his means.
‘Sorry.’ I gave her an apologetic grin.
‘Never mind. He’d only have broken it. He breaks anything expensive. You got a van or wha’?’
She was squinting through the door to the street outside. ‘Er…yeah,’ I said, committing in that moment to definitely going through with this. ‘It’s just round the corner… I couldn’t find anywhere else to park.’
She was holding her cigarette awkwardly upright, trying to stop the lengthening tower of ash from falling onto the hall carpet. ‘Orright, I’ll leave you to it, then. I would help, but,’ and she nodded to the baby, who seemed fascinated by every awkward word that passed between us. ‘Mum says to give ’im her best, and she’s sorry to lose him. ’E was a good tenant.’ Before I could ask anything else, or think through what I feasibly could ask in the circumstances, she had withdrawn behind a door that thunked closed with the emphatic clunk of a Yale. I guessed her mother lived in the ground floor of the house and let out the rooms upstairs: while the hall was nicely carpeted with a clear plastic mat laid down to stop it getting dirty, the runner on the stairs looked considerably more threadbare, and the light switches out there were those round ones that turn themselves off after a certain number of seconds that’s never quite long enough.
Right. If I was doing this, I had to move quickly. Presumably whoever was really on their way to pick up Liam’s stuff could arrive any minute. The sensible thing to do would be to retire out of sight until I was certain it wasn’t either of the men I had met yesterday – in which case I would run away very fast indeed – and if it turned out to be someone else, move back in and demand to know exactly where Liam had gone and why. But it would be madness not to use this opportunity to have a look through the boxes first to see if they offered any clues: an address in Malta, or in Belfast, or anywhere else in the world I could go to and find Liam and tell him I loved him, and that however bad the situation seemed right now we could still make things OK.
My heart in my mouth, I squatted down in front of the box full of books and papers. I’d have Tales of the City back for a start: that went straight into my haversack. The newspapers were all editions of yet another one I hadn’t seen before, An Phoblacht, which was obviously Irish, but everything other than the masthead was in English. There looked to be several months’ worth of them in there. I flicked through the top few, but almost immediately I saw something that made me pause. It was an enormous headline: ‘BALLOTS AND BOMBS’, and next to it was a photo of a man in a balaclava crouched in a field holding a rifle. ‘IRA volunteers register their patriotism through their continual sacrifice,’ read the caption underneath the photo. Glancing nervously at the open front door, I skimmed the rest of the article:
ELECTORAL TACTICS COMPLEMENT ARMED STRUGGLE
… It is – particularly – the different political conditions north and south of the border which make it necessary, without apology, to go forward with an Armalite in one hand and a ballot paper in the other. Republican success through the ballot box is not necessary to validate the use of force, no more than defeat in an election is to order the end of the armed struggle.
That sick feeling was back in my stomach, threatening to overwhelm me. What was one of the very first things that Liam had said to me, after I had spun him some guff about no longer believing in parliamentary politics to excuse my no longer going to Labour party meetings? Direct action? I hear you. Only it was one of the many things I’d chosen not to really hear.
There was a noise from behind the doorway in the hall. I shoved the newspaper into my haversack. Pulling it out of the pile dislodged an exercise book that had been shoved in with the newspapers: on impulse I snatched that up and shoved it into the bag too, yanking on the straps to close it as I straightened up. But the door remained closed, so I moved quickly on to squat in front of the next box, the one with the computer sticking out of it. There were other electrical items in there too: a toaster, an electric kettle, a few other bits and pieces. Some kitchen utensils bunged in with them. And there was also a little glossy black box in there. At first I thought it must be another bit of the computer, but when I touched it it didn’t feel like the metal I was expecting. I pulled it out – it was small enough to sit in my hand, but surprisingly heavy – and realised it was cardboard wrapped in thick black gaffer tape, the sort I had become familiar with during my brief period backstage at the Poly theatre. When I shook it, it rattled.
I glanced up at the door again, but there was no sign of movement now. Without giving myself time to change my mind I searched out the tip of the tape with a fingernail and started to peel, turning the box over and over in my hand as it unfurled like the bandages from an Egyptian mummy, the contents shifting noisily inside as it went. Round and round it went, seemingly never-ending, and then at the last moment the whole thing got away from me and the flimsy carton beneath it all gave way, and left me holding just a handful of cardboard and gummy material as the contents spilled out and rattled down all over the contents of the box in front of me, clanging noisily off the toaster and kettle and the casing of the computer and making enough noise to wake the dead.
Only that was the exact opposite of what these did. I only glimpsed them as they rained down and disappeared into the depths of the box, but it was horribly obvious what they were. Bullets. Shiny brass cases rising to a sharp point; longer than I would have expected but unmistakeable nonetheless. I recoiled instinctively from them in terror that the impact might be enough set them off. Then, as I heard footsteps approaching on the other side of the flat door, reacted just as impulsively to grab at the few that had fallen wide of the edges of the cardboard box and were rolling across the carpet and cram them away into my palm as the door opened. And at the same time I could feel all the excuses I had been making for Liam, and making for myself, falling apart just like that package – all my certainties thundering down and scattering just as chaotically beyond my reach.
‘Everyfink all right? What was that racket?’ The woman had put the baby down somewhere, and lit another cigarette.
‘Yeah, fine, fine,’ I overcompensated. ‘Just dropped…some of this kitchen stuff.’ Before she could look in the box I straightened up, lifting it with me and tilting it away from her gaze, praying that there were no holes in the bottom and that I had managed to catch all the stray bullets and not left any lying incriminatingly on the hallway carpet. I moved so fast it made my head swim, and I was afraid I was going to faint.
She showed no sign of noticing or caring. ‘All right. There’s a parking space across the road now if you wanna move your van. Someone’s just driven off.’
‘Oh – great!’ That put a spoke in my non-existent wheels. But I had no choice but to bluff on through. I tipped the box further towards me, and the computer keyboard shifted treacherously inside it. ‘I’ll take one of these on round, save myself a journey!’
The woman shrugged, uninterested. ‘You wanna be quick.’
‘Yep.’ The box was heavy and awkwardly-packed, things shifting inside as I walked quickly towards the front door. I was hoping the woman would go back inside, but she showed no sign of moving. And anyway, she’d already made it clear she was keeping an eye on the street from the window: if – when – I didn’t reappear with a van, the game would be up pretty swiftly. Just keep walking, my gut told me. You don’t want to talk to whoever is turning up to collect this stuff. You’re not going to find out anything you want to know. Just keep walking.
I glanced down into the box. There was a bullet caught up in the wires of a whisk and another nestling in between the rows of keys on the computer, their shiny gold surfaces practically glowing. It could only be thanks to the dinginess of the hallway that the woman hadn’t spotted them. There was no guarantee I would be so lucky again. Right on the threshold of the house I paused, shifted the box awkwardly to balance on one arm and reached down to pick up one of the pillows from the bundled-up bedding. ‘Stop it all shifting around in the van,’ I explained, stuffing it one-handed to cover the computer and everything else in the box and ensure no one would be able to see anything that was inside. ‘Don’t want it to get damaged.’
‘Nah. Expensive,’ she repeated as she watched me go.
I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do once I was out on the street, and I wavered for a second before swerving left, away from the woman’s window and back towards the main road. My armpits were prickling; it took all my effort to walk normally, just keep on putting one foot in front of the other.
To quell the panic that was threatening to overtake me I buried my face in the pillow sticking out of the top of the box, and inhaled deeply the sweet, musky smell of Liam imprinted in every inch of it. A Pavlovian spurt of happiness rushed through me, followed closely by a gut-punch of regret that brought tears to my eyes. But I could still see clearly enough to make out a white van that was crawling towards me down the street, its driver peering out of the wound-down window to look at the numbers on the doors of the houses. There was someone in the passenger seat too. I was keeping my head down because the last thing I wanted to do was make eye contact, but I got the impression the driver was quite big and burly, in a dark coat, and his companion wearing something in a much lighter colour. I couldn’t make out if he had curly hair or not.
I sped up, going as fast as I could with my heavy burden. Not far to the end of the street now. From behind me I could hear the sound of brakes, and then what sounded like a vehicle reversing. I hoped to God it was just backing into the vacant parking space opposite number 34, and not heading all the way back up towards me.
Just a few yards to go now, and I would be back on the bustling High Road. But that would still leave me with a long way to go: it had taken me a good quarter of an hour to walk here from the Tube, and from what I remembered of the page in my A-Z, Brondesbury station was just as far in the other direction. I didn’t know this area at all. And I was carrying a heavy box that was already making my arms ache, and that would make me stand out like a sore thumb to anyone who came driving up or down the street looking for me.
Should I just dump it and make a run for it? No, there were people all around, and I couldn’t risk one of them looking in the box and challenging me on why I was trying to abandon it. One look at what was in there, and the police would certainly be called. And even if I managed to get away before they arrived, it wouldn’t be hard to trace the contents to me – I must have left fingerprints all over everything – and even easier to link them to Liam. Even now, confronted by cold, hard evidence that he was far from the man I had thought he was, I wasn’t prepared to give him up like that. And there was another part of me that, now I’d actually got hold something of Liam’s, was absolutely not going to let it go. At the back of my mind, in the part where the reality of who he was hadn’t fully sunk in yet, was the thought that he might still come looking for the contents, especially something as valuable as a computer or incriminating as ammunition. At which point, obviously, I would have some awkward explaining to do – but not nearly as much as he would.
I’d turned right, retracing my steps from earlier, but it was no good, I still had a handful of loose bullets digging painfully into my palm and I was going to have to put the box down somewhere even if just to stash them inside and get a proper grip on the box. Not here: I had reached the Irish pub with its aggressive display of flags, the very last place I wanted to stop. I staggered on another twenty yards or so before I had no choice but to squat down and lay the box carefully on the pavement, pushing it up against the wall of a bookie’s so it would be out of the way of everyone else as I pushed my lethal handful deep inside beneath the folds of the pillow. Nervously I peered behind me. No sign of the van. Yet. How long would it take the woman with the baby to explain, for the three of them to work out what must have happened, to come looking? A couple of minutes? Less? What the hell was I going to do?
The answer was on the other side of the road. A1 Minicabs, read the garish orange sign above the window of an empty shopfront. There was a row of chairs up against the wall inside but no one waiting on them. And there were two cars parked directly outside, their drivers sitting in them. Thanking my lucky stars, I bent and picked up the box again, waited for a gap in the traffic and hurried across the road.
Inside, a bored-looking fat bloke in a short-sleeved shirt was sitting behind a plastic screen. ‘Can I get one of those cabs?’ I gasped breathlessly.
‘Where to?’ he asked me, unperturbed.
I gabbled out my address and, rather than speaking into the microphone in front of him, he just raised a hand to wave through the window. The door of one of the cars outside opened and an Asian guy got out, unhurriedly.
‘Thanks!’ Shifting the weight of the box in my arms, I practically ran back out of the office, glancing back up the road towards Woodvine Street. To my horror, I saw a white van waiting to pull out onto the main road, its indicator flashing to turn in our direction.
‘You want in boot?’ the driver asked, pointing at the box.
‘No, back seat’s fine.’ He’d barely got the door open before I’d shoved the box through and scrambled in behind it. The interior smelled cloyingly of pine air freshener. At the junction by the pub a bus stopped and flashed its lights: the white van pulled out ahead of it and into the flow of traffic. I threw myself sideways so my head and shoulders would be obscured by the passenger seat. The scent was even thicker down here, mixed with something else: it smelled like someone had thrown up in here quite recently.
‘You OK?’ asked the driver, once he had made his leisurely way back round to his side, got himself comfortable on his beaded seat-cover, and looked around in surprise to find me lying across his back seat.
‘I’m fine,’ I said, and rattled out my address without straightening up. It was only once we were safely underway, and I had felt the vehicle turn off the high road, that I finally dared sit up and look out of the back window. There was no sign of the van.
‘What you got in there then?’ the driver asked conversationally, looking back at me in his rear-view mirror.
