Breaking Spirits

  By Glenn McGoldrick

  Text Copyright @2017

  Glenn McGoldrick

  All Rights Reserved

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  A young burglar is surprised to be apprehended, and even more surprised to be assigned an extra task…

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  Breaking Spirits

  It was too good an opportunity to pass up. I’d been waiting a long time and here was my chance. Plus he was drunk, so it would be straightforward enough.

  I left The Eagle two minutes after him, a heavy glass ashtray in my coat pocket. The streets were empty. The night was cold and starless, and I was glad to be wearing gloves.

  I knew which way he’d walk, so it didn’t take me long to catch up to him; he stumbled along Allensway, oblivious to me ten metres behind him. He crossed the road and walked into the alley that runs by the Methodist church.

  That’s where I did it, putting him down with the ashtray. When it was over I placed the watch on the ground beside his head, careful not to stand in the pooling blood.

  Monday afternoon I sat across the table from my dad in McDonalds. He sipped coffee as I read the article in The Gazette.

  “Kenny Gordon?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “They found his body yesterday, near the Methodist church.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Beaten to death,” he said. “They’ll blame me for it, Martin.”

  “What? No, they won’t.”

  “They will,” he said. “I had a fight with him in The Eagle on Saturday. Everybody in there saw it.”

  “So? You didn’t kill him.”

  “Of course I didn’t. But I had a fight with him, and the whole bar heard me scream that I was gonna kill him.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “And the police will find out we were fighting over that little deal I had going on with him,” he said. He finished his coffee, and stared at the empty paper cup. “And, after what happened before…”

  “You mean in 2001?”

  “Yeah. And I did time for that.”

  “I know, dad,” I said, tapping my finger on the newspaper. “This is bad.”

  “Tell me about it,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m screwed.”

  “Well, maybe they’ll find the guy who did it.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, running his hand through his dark thinning hair. “Once they hear about my fight with Kenny, they won’t even bother looking for anybody else.”

  He checked his wrist for the time, then realised he wasn’t wearing his watch.

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “If I go back home, they could be waiting for me.”

  “That’s why we’re meeting here,” I said.

  Leaving McDonalds, I walked to The Roundel. I sat on a wooden picnic bench outside the pub, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette. I watched the traffic pass by the cemetery where my mum was buried.

  She died in 1998, when I was thirteen years old. Suicide. A lot of pills. An overdose they called it. That was the cause of death.

  My dad tried to explain it to me, on the day of her funeral. “She was just too soft,” he said.

  I was nineteen when he went to prison for manslaughter. He had a fistfight with a rival drug dealer, and the guy died from his injuries the next day.

  My aunt Susan lived in Stockton, and she arranged for me to move in with her. She told me all about my dad. The cheating, the drugs, the mental abuse; it all became too much for mum, and eventually broke her spirit.

  “If she’d never met that prick,” she said to me, “my sister would still be alive today.”

  It was one of the kinder things she said about him during the time that I lived with her.

  Leaving The Roundel after 6 p.m., I picked up some Szechuan chicken from the Chinese takeaway then walked home.

  I ate it in front of the TV, as I watched a documentary on big game hunting. I was thinking about getting a beer from the fridge when the phone rang.

  “Have you heard anything?” my dad asked.

  “What?”

  “From the police?”

  “No,” I said. “You?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Staying with a mate in Middlesbrough.”

  “Who?”

  “Best you don’t know,” he said.

  I could hear the tension in his voice.

  “OK,” I said. “When are you going back home?”

  “Shit, I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t.”

  After the call I got a beer from the fridge and took a large gulp. Things seemed to be working out as I’d hoped.

  I returned to work Wednesday, and my dad called me just as I was leaving the office.

  “I’m screwed,” he said.

  He’d went back to his house to pick up some clean clothes and money, and the police had been waiting for him. They took him to Stockton Police Station for questioning.

  “I’ve been here all afternoon,” he said. “Non-stop questions.”

  “About Kenny Gordon?”

  “Yeah. They’re gonna do me for it. I know it.”

  “Bloody hell,” I said.

  “And the thing is,” he said, “they found my watch on the ground beside his body.”

  “What? How’s that possible?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a set-up.”

  “Who the hell’s setting you up?”

  “I’ve no idea,” he said. “But the bastard who did it is still out there.”

  I clear some dirt from the top of the headstone and sit beside the plinth.

  “Today’s a good day, mum,” I say. “They found him guilty.”

  A light wind blows through the cemetery, spinning the plastic windmills.

  “You should have seen his face,” I say.

  I sat beside him as the verdict was read, watching his face crumble. I almost felt sorry for him.

  He’ll be sentenced next week. He’s going away for a long time. Plenty of time for him to think. Question. Wonder. Who’s setting him up? And why are they doing it? He’ll go crazy trying to figure it out.

  Then he’ll be puzzled and confused, thinking about it, searching in vain and never getting the answers. Then he’ll be broken.

  “And he’ll finally pay for what he did to you, mum,” I say.

  Thanks for reading!

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  Until next time.

  Glenn McGoldrick.

  If you enjoyed reading this story, then you might like to try a collection in the Dark Teesside series:

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  Glenn McGoldrick, Breaking Spirits

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