Twist of Fate, page 3
‘…pedes vermes, vermitudo interet…’
He comes towards me in brisk, unhesitant strides, raising his arm, his coat flapping open to reveal the red, scarred tissue of his chest…
Jethro pulls him back. Puts his hand upon his shoulder and turns him around.
I cover my face as it happens. Fold in on myself as the man sticks the blade into my brother’s belly. Slide down onto the cold ground as he carves upwards to his neck. Slashes across his chest.
I don’t see what happens next. Don’t see him stick the blade in the security guard’s neck. Don’t see him slip and tumble in the great treacly ocean of fresh blood. Don’t see him run back out into the road, stumbling his way through the cars that can’t part to let the fleet of police vehicles through. Don’t see him stick one last victim: a young man jogging along the embankment, pausing to film the commotion on his mobile phone. He’s stabbed twice in the chest and once in the side of the head. And then the attacker is up on the railings of the bridge, staring down into the waters, and police gunmen are telling him to drop the knife, drop the knife.
From the floor, I hear the shots. Hear the screams. I think, faintly, I even hear the splash.
When I finally open my eyes it’s because the blood is lapping at my cheek.
2
La Forchetta, Bethnal Green Road, London
His name’s Billy Dean. William on the birth certificate, but he’s been Billy since he was a lad. He looks a Billy, too. Bright eyes, strong jaw, bit of a twinkle about him when he’s in a good mood. Likes a pint, likes his football, knows which boxer would win in a pound-for-pound clash between the greats. He’s heard all the jokes. Knows how to laugh at himself, though nobody pushes him too far. He’s got a temper, has Billy.
It was Billy that she fell in love with; Billy who made Francesca Steadman giggle and squirm. Billy who made her eyes gleam with his romantic gestures and his silly sayings and his absolute belief that she would become all that she wanted to be. Billy who bent so far backwards to accommodate what she wanted that he very nearly broke in two.
It’s William who’s going to have to sign the divorce papers. William Michael Dean. And he’ll do it, too. He’ll definitely sign them. Just not now. Not here, in the moment, when she’s sitting there looking so bloody perfect and cool and insisting he make both of their lives ‘easier’ by simply ripping out his heart and placing it, still bloodily pumping, upon the piece of paper in front of her. Here, as she tells him that he’s got one last opportunity to make her happy; to give her what she wants – to free her from something that has come to feel like a cage. To let her go.
He’s willing to give her his whole life. He’s willing to love her and walk by her side until the day he dies. But she doesn’t want that. Doesn’t want him as Billy, or as bloody William. Instead she wants a graphic designer called Adrien. Adrien, with a fucking ‘e’.
Detective Sergeant Billy Dean chews on this thought. Chews on it like a wad of tobacco and forces himself not to spit. His stomach’s sour and grumbling, hot acid rising up his oesophagus and burning his throat. The smells wafting through from the kitchen of the quiet little Italian restaurant are making him salivate, but he feels too sick to risk putting anything in his mouth. He can’t seem to keep anything down these days. Nothing tastes right. His mouth always seems to be full of the taste of blood. He has to keep his hands in fists or they’ll start to shake, but holding them so tightly leads to stiffness in his shoulders, which climbs up into his neck and across his head and across his broad, lined brow.
By early evening he always has a headache and is gasping for a drink that will numb the pain. But if he takes a drink, she wins. If he bristles at her use of his full name, she wins. If he threatens to harm Adrien, she wins. If he signs the divorce papers, she wins. He hasn’t worked out a way in which he can avoid losing.
She’s sitting across the table, looking so effortlessly beautiful that it fills his chest with a hot, tight pain. She’s got a sparkling water with a wedge of lime and four ice cubes neatly balanced on top of one another. She looks slim and elegant in a cream suit over a silky, deep-blue blouse. She drank cider and blackcurrant in pint glasses when they met. Wore flared cords and little crop tops, dyed the tips of her hair purple and smoked Silk Cut. She preferred Blur to Oasis but liked Pulp best of all. She played bass guitar and used to Tipp-Ex little patterns onto her leather coat.
He can’t remember when she became the person who sits across the table looking a proper grown-up. They’re only forty-seven, for God’s sake. He’d thought she was just pretending; just doing what she had to in order to fit in and give herself the best chance of advancement. But somewhere down the line she stopped being who she was and became who she is.
She makes him feel like a vagrant in comparison. His suit’s a three-piece but the buttons strain a little over his stomach. There’s a blob of something unidentifiable on his tie. The collar of his shirt is slightly folded in on itself, like the ear of a spaniel. He shaved this morning but it was a half-hearted affair, and there’s a distinct shadow on his cheeks and neck. He got wet on the walk from the Tube and his thinning hair has dried flat. He’s drinking a non-alcoholic beer. It frothed up when he took his first sip from the bottle, spilling over his hairy knuckles and creating a little pool of syrupy liquid. She mopped it up with a coaster. Didn’t say a word.
‘I know this is hard for you,’ she says, in the detached way she’s adopted since she stopped loving him. ‘This is the last little power you can assert over me. But, William, you have to ask yourself, is this really the way you want the final chapter of our story to go? You have an opportunity here to be a real adult. To do something that hurts, okay, but which is the right thing for all involved. You have the chance to walk away from this with dignity and a genuinely fair settlement of our finances. I don’t understand why you want this last little bout of petulance to be the legacy of our relationship.’
Billy screws up his eyes. Rubs his forehead. Pushes his hand through his hair. He’s never been very good at finding the right words, but he’s never had any trouble making himself understood. He just doesn’t know how to turn all the hurt and rage and sorrow that’s thudding inside his brain into a sentence that does it justice.
‘I don’t want a divorce,’ he says, his teeth clamped together. ‘I don’t want it to be over. I don’t want half of the equity in the house or a settlement of our joint assets. I want you, home. I want to wake up in our bed, roll over and see you there, smiling at me.’
‘That hasn’t been our life for a very long time,’ she says, with a little shake of her head. ‘You’re remembering a life that died years ago.’
‘And whose fault was that?’ he asks, sitting forward on the uncomfortable chair. ‘I tried! I never once stopped trying to make you feel like you used to…’
‘Please,’ she says, words wrapped around a sigh. ‘Let’s not go through this again. We grew apart. We had good times but what was there has gone. There’s nothing to be gained by delaying the inevitable.’
‘Life is about delaying the inevitable.’ He scowls, biting down so hard that he hears something pop in his jaw. He lowers his head, feeling the heat behind his eyes. Even now, even after all that’s happened over the past few months, he wants nothing more than to hold her. He wants to reach across the table, take her hand and make her look at him properly. He needs to look into those blue eyes and see if she’s still in there, to try and connect with the last vestiges of the woman who loved him and loved him and loved him and then didn’t even like him any more.
She shakes her head, exhausted by his stubbornness. She removes one of her pretty little gold earrings and rubs at her earlobe, pulling it, elongating it. She closes her eyes. He hopes that when she opens them again there will be a sheen upon her lenses: something that suggests this pains her, something he can cling to, some whiff of hope. There’s nothing. She just stares at him, icy and detached.
‘Please, Fran,’ he says, sitting forward and trying to take her hand. ‘Please, I can try harder. I can be whatever it is that you need me to be. I’ve tried so hard, you know that. All the galleries, the plays, the exhibitions, the dinner parties – I took up golf just because your mate’s husband plays. I’m in a Hugo Boss suit, for God’s sake. Brown-and-white brogues, even though I keep slipping over and they make me feel like I should be at a bowling alley. I love us enough for both of us. Just come home, please, Fran. Don’t do this, don’t do this…’
The tears start to fall. He starts jiggling both legs up and down against the table. He feels ashamed of himself, disgusted by the sight he must present. And the shame becomes anger as quick as it did when he was still drinking. He feels himself about to smash his fists down on the table, to scream in her face through locked teeth, to tell her that she’s a whore and a bitch and a slut and froth a great spray of venom in her perfect face.
‘There he is,’ she says, scorn curling her lip. ‘There’s my Billy Dean. That little flicker, that flash of who’s underneath. That’s why all the things you tried to change never made any difference. It’s because it was all pretend. It made no difference to who’s underneath. You’re the same person you were twenty years ago. God, Billy, you could have been a detective superintendent by now.’
He sits back, throat dry. ‘How could I, Fran? If we’d put my career first, then you wouldn’t have had the opportunities you’ve had. We made a choice. You’re the career animal – you’re the one with those ambitions. I want to catch villains. That’s what matters to me most. I achieved all my dreams when I married you!’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Billy…’
There’s a moment when something flickers in her face, as if a petal has landed upon the surface of a still pond. There’s a flicker of something he recognises, the merest whiff of true emotion. And then she’s shaking it away, distracted and irritated with herself. He becomes aware of the sound of buzzing: her phone, in the expensive handbag on the back of her chair. He feels his own phone, damp in the pocket of his clammy, itchy trousers. Feels it vibrate against his leg.
She holds up her hand in the faintest gesture of apology. Pulls out the phone.
‘Detective Superintendent Cesca Steadman,’ she says, her voice sounding clear, clipped and professional.
Billy scowls into the neck of his beer. He didn’t mind that she kept her name when they got married. But she used to be Fran. She started calling herself ‘Cesca’ around the same time she took up Pilates and started thinking of hummus and edamame beans as an actual lunch. That was when she first began introducing him to her friends as ‘my husband, William’. He’d played along, thinking they were both enjoying the same joke. By the time he realised she was serious, she was three rungs above him on the career ladder and had come to the conclusion, quite independently, that they weren’t ever going to have children. He’d been willing to accept those terms, provided she continued to love him. To be his Fran, like he was ‘her Billy’.
He pulls his own phone from his pocket, irritated at the interruption. As he does so he gives a quick glance in the direction of the handful of other diners. Have they seen him make a show of himself? There’s a couple at the nearest table, ploughing through a pizza and a carafe of house red. She’s eating with a knife and fork – he’s folding the slices with his fingers and eating them by hand. They’re talking about stair carpets, talking about seagrass and hessian and whether or not the kids could be trusted with a lighter shade. Billy feels a surge of jealousy.
He turns his attention back to his soon-to-be-ex-wife. Her face is inscrutable as ever but there’s a tension in her voice that he knows of old. This is important.
‘…and how many injured?’ she’s asking, tucking the phone under her chin and retrieving a pen from her jacket. She starts to scribble on the pristine white napkin. ‘Situation still live, yes? Yes, I know the building. The underwater search unit… right, no… and it was a foreign accent, you’re certain… well, yes, of course. No, pays to be careful… sensitivities, of course… I’ve got a good relationship with the counter-terrorism lead, yes… yes, sir, of course…’
Billy stares at his phone. There are little icons on the screen, capital letters screaming headlines under the banner ‘BREAKING NEWS’.
He answers the call. It’s DCI Jim Mosley, his friend and boss.
‘Billy, mate, it’s Jimbo. Suspected terrorist attack down by the river, embankment way. Multiple dead. Borough commander is pushing for us to take it, but we might be underneath the wife, as it were. You cool with that before I confirm?’
He looks across the table. At Fran. At Cesca. At the divorce papers lying unsigned on the beery tabletop.
‘I’m in,’ he says.
*
THREE DEAD AFTER ATTACK BY MASKED MANIAC SHOUTING ‘IN FOREIGN TONGUE’
Live report by Chief Crime Reporter Lis-Jayne Bingham and London Echo staff
TERROR returned to the streets of London today when a masked attacker stabbed three people dead and left an unknown number of others fighting for life.
Armed response officers are understood to have opened fire on the suspect as he attempted to flee the scene of the slaughter.
Confusion now surrounds the fate of the suspected attacker, who was seen to plunge from Blackfriars Bridge into the Thames just moments after specialist firearms officers ordered him to drop his weapon. Witnesses report hearing four gunshots.
Information received by this publication suggest that the mayhem began in Victoria Embankment Gardens – an area of Victorian parkland popular with London’s large homeless community. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police was unable to confirm or deny reports that the victims of the atrocity were congregating in the area waiting for their daily meal to be served up at the nearby soup kitchen.
Police received their first report of violence at 4.31 p.m. The final shot was fired at 4.46 p.m.
It is understood that the second wave of violence took place in the reception area of Mount Carmel House, a large office building on the Thames Embankment, which is home to a large publishing house and a communications agency. Police have yet to rule out a terrorist connection and witnesses report that the attacker was shouting in a foreign language as he lashed out at passers-by.
Lawyer Devon Subramanian, whose office overlooks the area where the bloodshed began, told this publication: ‘It will stay with me forever. There are always lots of homeless people in that little area. They don’t do any harm and there’s never any real trouble. It just flared up out of nothing. One moment there were half a dozen of them just sitting around and trying to stay out of the rain, and the next this madman is sticking a knife into people. I heard the shouting and looked out of the window, and he was on top of this poor guy who was just laid out on his back with his arms out and the attacker was pushing the knife into him. When he looked up it was like something out of a film. He had a mask on, I think, but it was getting dark and with the rain and the blood it was impossible to say. I know what he was shouting sounded like it was in some foreign tongue.
‘Somebody tried to grab him and he stuck the knife in them without a word. People started running. Screaming. There was blood everywhere. A couple of workmen looked like they were trying to get near enough to grab him, but he was swiping with his knife, screaming something I couldn’t understand. Then he just sprinted off. We all heard the shots a little later. What we didn’t know was that he’d dashed in at the big building by the bridge and gone for the first people he saw. It was genuinely horrific.’
Among the injured is security guard Kenzie Hamilton, 31, who used his body as a human shield to protect bystanders caught up in the slaughter. He is being treated for life-threatening injuries. A 52-year-old, believed to have been sheltering within Mount Carmel House, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Politicians are already under fire for their perceived failure to come down harder on suspected terrorists after a string of high-profile attacks in London and across the UK.
Reports just in suggest that the attacker slashed a passer-by across the throat while attempting to flee the police and that the deadly incident was streamed live on the victim’s mobile phone. A spokesman for the mayor’s office said…
3
Sixty-eight hours later. I think I’ve slept for three. The rest of it has been statements and interviews, hospitals and police stations; showers and endlessly trilling phones.
It was a madman, they say. A random. A nutter off the street. He killed three others before he made his way into our building: a moth heading for the brightest light. Committed acts of unspeakable violence because the voices in his head told him to. Snatched away lives because he forgot to take his medication, and his local mental health team hadn’t had enough phone operators to talk him out of bloodshed. Unsullied by facts, the story’s writing itself. There’ll be answers, in the end. There’ll be an explanation. There’ll be lessons learned. But Jethro will still be dead.
Jethro.
My big brother.
My hero, once upon a time.
The last person to love me.
Is there a name for somebody orphaned of tenderness? They’re all gone, now. Mum, Dad. Two ex-partners, long since married to better people than me. You – the daughter who never took a breath. I called you Esmerelda, though nobody else ever will. Six pounds seven ounces of perfectly inanimate child. Blue and pink and fair in your stillness: exquisite in my immaculate failure.
Jethro too, now. The last to love me. The last to wish me well. Dead on a slab, empty and grey: a Y-shaped incision in his flimsy chest and absolutely nothing inside the raw red fist of his static heart.
There was a newspaper on the table on the train. It looked odd, sitting there: an anachronism – something from a different time. Who still buys newspapers? Magazines? Books? I hadn’t been able to help myself from picking it up and rubbing the pages between finger and thumb. Jethro’s picture was on page five. Another tribute piece. This one from Reverend Struan Talbot. Said Jethro was a ‘brilliant, kind and troubled soul’ who could have become anything he wished had he not suffered with such ill health.
