He gave me a hard look and then held out a fist.
Inside it was the scrunched-up piece of paper.
He dropped it into my lap. ‘The boys think this is careless,’ he said. ‘Use it or don’t, but I wouldn’t leave anything of value in that place.’ He nodded back towards the house and when I looked into the rear-view mirror I could see flames drifting out of the windows and doors, reaching for the sky. ‘It was just a pair of gloves, by the way,’ he said.
‘Sorry?’
‘In that bag you stole. They were my dad’s. Hidden away cus Trace hated boxing. There was never any cash here. I just told your old man about it cus it was all I could think of …’
‘He wasn’t my old man,’ I said.
Fisk squinted. ‘There’s a certain resemblance, but my eyesight’s not what it was …’
He walked, laboriously, back to the van and climbed inside. They started up again, signalled for a turn and went right. I followed for a few miles, with Donny driving close behind. Then I pulled over and let him pass. He didn’t look at me.
I killed the engine and sat a while, watching the light change.
I jumped at the first tap on the glass, and saw with relief that it was just a fat spot of rain. There was another, then another, until the weather seemed to break all around me, pelting the windscreen and enveloping the car. It sounded like a hundred thousand voices, screaming in the distance.
XII
Kill For Love
1
It was late by the time I got back into the city. I’d spent something like ten hours behind the wheel of a car. My eyes burned and my skin smelt salty, and I drove around for a while deciding what to do. Helplessly, I opened the ball of paper and looked at my sister’s address.
I was nervous when I parked up, two streets over from her house. I imagined knocking on the door and introducing myself to her, for the first time in over two decades. I ran through what I might say, how she might see me. How she might react. I forced myself out of the car, dropped my keys trying to lock it and had to laugh at myself.
The house was a terrace that it looked like she shared. There were a couple of lights on inside, the muted sound of a television. I checked the time and saw that it was just after 10 p.m. Just about respectable. Walking up the path I saw a haze of sunspots wash in front of my eyes. For a moment I thought I might start to lift, effortlessly, from my body and watch this as though it were happening to someone else.
I didn’t, though.
When I got to the door and raised my hand to knock I saw my own reflection. The dark, lived-in suit. The bags under my eyes that I could never quite sleep off. The deep cuts and bruises from my fight with Bateman, like he’d reached out from inside my head and made the mental scars physical. I waited for my face to warp and alter in the glass but it didn’t change. It had finally settled on a look and, after months of doubt and confusion, I suddenly recognized myself so well.
I was my father’s son. The violent man I thought I was pretending to be.
I waited a moment, feeling the electricity leave me, and took an unconscious step back. Then a conscious one. Then I was walking down the path, away from myself.
Two young women passed me when I was out on the street. They’d been talking, laughing. I kept my head low but felt my breath catch as I went by. One of them had looked familiar. Untameable, curled hair and big, thinker’s eyes which I felt pass over my face. I thought I’d seen her expression change.
I kept on walking.
Oliver Cartwright and Guy Russell were each handed life sentences for attempting to smuggle drugs into the United Arab Emirates. As far as I knew, they were still waiting to hear if they could appeal. Russell’s daughter, Alicia, took ownership of Incognito. She relaunched the club as Russell’s, shaking its existing clientele as she did so and forging her own path. When I returned to St Mary’s to speak to Amy Burroughs, I was told that she’d handed in her notice and left. Late one night I called her former lover, Ross Browne, to find out if he’d heard from her. When a familiar voice answered the phone I smiled to myself and hung up. I only saw Sophie and Earl again once more. They were walking through the city centre, talking, holding hands, smiling. They looked young again. Anthony Blick maintained that Freddie Coyle had died of natural causes right up until the day when remains were discovered, buried in the back garden of Blick’s former home. Coyle’s skull had been caved in. Natasha Reeve decided to take the Palace off the market, reopening it under a new name as the sole owner.
And Nia gave birth to Zain Carver’s daughter.
They named her Catherine. Nia couldn’t have known what that name meant, and even I wondered at Carver’s motive. Was it remorse or revenge? Or another long-game piece of manipulation? I wondered if he planned on replacing every girl who’d vanished from his life.
I returned to the night shift with my superior officer, Detective Inspector Peter Sutcliffe. It was a few weeks later when I saw a request from Cumbrian police cross our desk. A dead man had been found in the cellar of a burned-out farmhouse. He’d been kneecapped by a high-calibre handgun and then left to burn alive. They were looking for any information that could help identify him but there wasn’t much to go on. I was reading the request when Sutty tore it out of my hand, balled it up and dropped it in the bin. He said he only wanted to investigate people with full names from now on. So Bateman became the stuff of legend. Joined those other enduring mysteries. The lady in the Afghan coat. The smiling man.
The missing missing.
When I got to the corner I stopped and looked back. The two young women I’d passed were standing beneath a streetlight, twenty feet away, and I could see them both perfectly. They’d also stopped, turned to look at me. My sister was frozen, pale, her mouth open, her eyes wide with recognition.
She was unbelievable.
Her friend was looking between us, trying to work out what was happening. We stayed like that for a moment until I nodded, minimally, and she nodded back. Started to smile. I raised a hand. Saw the criss-crossing scars embedded into my knuckles and took an unconscious step back. Then a conscious one. In a perfect universe perhaps we’re still on that street corner, staring into each other. Perhaps there we get no closer, perhaps we get no further apart.
About the Author
Joseph Knox was born and raised in and around Stoke and Manchester, where he worked in bars and bookshops before moving to London. He runs, writes and reads compulsively. His debut novel Sirens was a bestseller.
The Smiling Man is the second in the Detective Aidan Waits series.