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Copyright
AVON
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Luca Veste 2014
Cover image © Alamy 2014
Cover design © ClarkevanMeurs Design
Luca Veste asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007525584
Ebook Edition © October 2014 ISBN: 9780007525560
Version: 2015-07-27
Dedication
For Angelina ‘Angie’ Veste
11/04/1936 – 07/05/2014
My nana. My nonna.
She loved her family and her family loved her.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Now
Before
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
The Farm: Six Months Ago
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
The Farm: Five Months Ago
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
The Farm: Three Months Ago
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
The Youth Club
Chapter 14
The Farm: Three Days Ago
Part Two
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
The Farm: Two Days Ago
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
The Farm: Two Days Ago
Chapter 19
The Farm: Yesterday
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Home
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
The Youth Club
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Part Three
Home: Six Months Ago
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Toxteth: Liverpool 8
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Bootle
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Peter
Chapter 36
Epilogue
In Conversation with Luca Veste
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the Same Author
About the Publisher
Now
No one believes you. Nothing you say is the truth. They know it every time you open your mouth and start speaking, hoping to be believed. Everything is just a lie in disguise, dressed up nice, trying to be something it’s not.
Mutton dressed as lamb.
That’s just how it is. You go down the social – or the jobcentre as they call it now, although that’ll probably change to something else soon enough – and try to explain why you’re still worth sixty quid a week of taxpayers’ hard-earned money. Trying to justify yourself even though you haven’t worked in years. Get that look which seeps into you after a little while.
I’ve heard it all before, love.
There’s no let-up. Being judged at every turn. Lucky enough to have more than one kid? Unlucky enough to lose your part-time job working the till at some shitty shop? For your fella to piss off with some slag from around the corner? Doesn’t matter, shouldn’t have had more kids than you can afford. Doesn’t matter that you’re a single parent – I’m paying your benefits.
You live on a council estate, on benefits, and that’s it. You’re scum. Do not pass go, here’s a few hundred quid to pay some dickhead landlord who thinks five ton isn’t too much for a terraced house that’s overrun with damp. Mould growing on the walls if you dare put any furniture too close to it.
Your kids then become scum as well. Shit schools, shit kids. Bored with life, constantly pissed off because you can’t afford the latest frigging gadget that Sony or Apple put out. Every six months without fail, something new that every other kid in the school has, that they can’t be without.
You try. You really do. But it’s never enough. Sixteen hours working in a supermarket, a few hours doing cleaning. Bits of crap here and there. Never enough.
No one believes you.
Your kids get older. Get in trouble. Bizzies knocking on your door at two in the morning, hand on the back of your fifteen-year-old son.
He’s had too much to drink. Could have got himself into a lot more trouble. Should keep an eye on him more, love.
That judgement again. Always there, surrounding you.
You try and explain. Tell them he’d said he was staying at his mate’s, or staying at his uncle’s house. With his cousins.
Get that look back.
I’ve heard it all before, love.
You want to scream. You want to pull the little bastard into the house by his stupid frigging head and beat the shit out of him. Like your dad would do to your brothers if they ever got caught doing stupid shit.
You try your best. Every day. It’s never enough. The crap wages you get for working two, three, different jobs barely matches what you were getting on benefits. So you think, what’s the point? You’re tired. You want to be lazy. Exhausted by the sheer weight of being alive. Everyone else around you seems to be doing sod all. You want to do that for a while.
The kids get worse. All boys, so the house is either deathly quiet whilst they’re all out, getting up to God knows what. Or, it’s a cacophony of noise. The moaning, the groaning. The smells of teenagers on the cusp of manhood, burning into your nostrils, hanging in the air.
No one believes you.
When one of them doesn’t come home for days, you shout and scream as much as you possibly can, but no one cares.
They think he’s just done a bunk. Gone to see a girl. Gone to get pissed, stoned, off his face somewhere. He’ll turn up eventually. They always do.
Your kind always does.
You try and tell them it’s different. That your lads have always been good at letting you know where they are, or if they’re going to be away for any time at all. That they wouldn’t just leave without saying anything.
They give you that look.
I’ve heard it all before, love.
You try and get people interested, but no one cares. The papers aren’t interested. Thousands of people go missing every year. No one cares about your eighteen-year-old son, missing for weeks … months.
You believe he’s okay. You make yourself believe it.
You know though. As a parent, you know.
Something has happened to him.
It’s not until you’re watching his coffin go behind the curtain – fire destroying everything that made him your son and turning it into ash – that they start to believe you.
It’s too late now, of course.
Sorry, love.
Before
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
The plan hadn’t been for him to be in this position. Not yet, anyway. He was supposed to be there to see it through. It was his idea, his design. None of them would have thought of doing it without him. He was the catalyst, the spark that brought them all together.
That’s the problem with making plans … the master in the sky laughs.
Flat on his back in the street outside his own home, a ghost of a smile playing across his face. Clutching his chest as his heart threatened to beat its way out, his vision going blurry. Not being able to see if there really was an elephant sitting on him, which was how it felt – crushing weight bearing down, strangling him, cutting off his breath.
He should have known he was too old for it. Not that it would have made a difference. As soon as they’d come around to his plan, he wasn’t going to hide away whilst all the fun went down without him. He should have just stayed inside with a small whisky and some shite on the TV. Relaxed. Then maybe he would have had a few more years.
They’d come back again. Laughter and voices penetrating the walls from outside. No respect for people’s private property. Just sitting on the wall outside his house, throwing their empty cans into his little front garden.
He’d checked the time on the clock that took pride of place on his mantelpiece, a beautiful old-fashioned gold carriage clock which had been a retirement gift from a client.
Half past midnight. Way past his usual turning-in time. Early to bed, early to rise. An old motto, but one he stuck to usually.
Something that lot out there wouldn’t have a clue about.
He had noticed the area changing around him for a while. What used to be a nice area of West Derby was being overrun with those yobs. Complete with their strange bastardisation of the Scouse accent. Couldn’t understand them most of the time, which was probably just as well. Couldn’t imagine they’d have anything of value to say.
Back in his day, if you left school with no qualifications – as was the norm, to be fair – you took whatever job you could get, and got on with it. He’d left school at fourteen and went straight to work, doing odd jobs here and there. Joined the army a few years later, ended up in Korea. Got back home and worked for over forty years painting and decorating. Set himself up with a nice little business with enough customers to always have a bit of work on the go. Put a bit of money aside for the retirement years with the missus. They could have lived quite well for a good while.
And then he was alone.
Those lads wouldn’t know the meaning of work. Not employed, in education or training, as they say. A million of them apparently now, according to the papers. No jobs, you see. Whole world has gone the same way. It seemed like he’d blinked and the next minute everyone was saying it was better to live in China than anywhere else. Who’d have thought that would ever happen?
She was ten days off sixty-five when they got to her. Walking back from the post office. Doctors told him it was probably a coincidence. Didn’t matter that she was left in the street for dead, she could have gone at any moment. He never believed them.
He would go for a walk every day, tried to keep fit. Walked up to the village, into the county park. Past the red church sign he always stopped to read.
Church of England
St Mary The Virgin
West Derby
St Mary the Virgin. Odd name to give to a church. But then, he found most things about churches odd.
He’d walk up the lane which ran alongside it, trees crowding in on each side. He’d find his bench, have a nice sit down and watch the world go by. Chat to people every now and again. Most people just walking on by, or smiling politely whilst thinking about their quickest escape route.
The first time they’d showed up outside his house, he thought a quick word would do the trick. Not a chance. He’d given them an hour, until the shouting had become too much. So loud he couldn’t even hear the TV properly. Just a quiet word, he thought, let them know someone lived here, that he wasn’t going to let them take over his front. As soon as he’d walked out he could tell it wasn’t going to have any effect. The attitude of them … Christ. They hadn’t listened to a word he’d said. Just laughed at each other, whispering and turning their backs to him. He’d given up with a shrug of his shoulders and a hope that they wouldn’t be back anytime soon. That they’d find someone else to bother.
He’d been wrong.
The plan was supposed to change that.
Forty years he’d worked. Up and down ladders nine hours a day. Hard work, but going home to Nancy and the kids made it worthwhile. He’d met Nancy when he was getting into his mid-thirties, her fifteen years younger. The mother-in-law had hated him from the start. Taking her little girl away. They’d had the last laugh on that one. Happily married for almost fifty years. Three children, two of them boys. When they grew up and had their own, they would have some of the grandkids over for tea once a week. Then they grew up as well.
His only regret with the children was that they weren’t closer. Brothers and sisters should be there for each other, but there was always a distance between them.
It would have been okay though. Whiling away their later years together. They would’ve had little trips here and there. Bingo once a week at the social club. Visits to see the offspring.
The end of Nancy’s story began and finished with two boys, barely in their teens, wearing hooded tops and balaclavas. They’d grabbed her bag, but she’d held on. They’d found bruises up her wrists and arms where they’d tried to prise her hands off it. A broken nose, which the CCTV showed happened when the taller of the two delivered a straight fist to her face. She’d died weeks later, but even if they’d found the yobs who did it, they wouldn’t have been charged with murder. She’d died due to other complications, they’d told him.
He knew they were to blame though.
He checked outside again, looking through the curtains. Four of the little buggers. No older than sixteen or seventeen, he reckoned. He could feel the anger coursing through him, wishing he was a few years younger. Back in his army days he would have taken the four of them on and had them running home for their mothers. He wasn’t one of those old guys who believed everything was better back in the day, like the moaning gits at the pub, but he also couldn’t remember sitting outside someone’s house drinking cans of lager, shouting and swearing. Life moves on. Things change. Not always for the better.
The fireworks were the last straw.
It had been late. Gone midnight. Explosions ripped through the silence which had accompanied his sleep. Downstairs, the direction of the noise made no sense in his confused half-asleep state. Korea. It was sixty years ago, but the slightest thing could send him back. He wasn’t to know some little bastards had thought it would be funny to stick a few fireworks through his letter box. Sweat dripped from his forehead, down onto the wisps of grey hair on his chest. His chest. Constricting. Tight. Everything pulling inwards. Choking him. The phone was in reach, which probably saved him that night. Couple of days in the Royal. Told to take it easy for a few days, but he should be fine. Simon, his youngest son, had gone mad, wanting to protect his supposedly frail father. Called the police, but they couldn’t do anything without evidence. Said they’d look into it, but everyone knew what that meant.
A week later, the plan had begun to be formed.
The faces of war. The noise … explosions, gunshots, cries of anguish. The forgotten war is what they call Korea. He’d never forget it. Waking up silently screaming has that effect. It’d been a long time since he’d had the nightmares, but they had come back since the firework incident.
He wanted to get back at them. Not just that though. To show them the error of their ways.
Brazen as you like, sat on his wall, chucking their empties into the front garden Nancy used to spend hours tending to.
He lifted the phone. Dialled and said a few words.
He opened the front door and they didn’t even turn around. Reached his front gate and stepped onto the pavement next to where they were gathered. They started laughing amongst themselves as he tried to get their attention.
It happened faster than he’d expected. He gave them another chance, tried being cordial with them, asked them to move on, but they weren’t having any of it. He tried explaining about the garden. They responded by laughing. Like a pack of hyenas, spotting the easy prey. He could feel his heart racing – bang, bang, bang. Beating harder than it had done in years.
He wasn’t going to back down. Not this time. Things were different.
Two of them walked off behind him, sniggering under their black hoods as he held his hands out wide, palms to the darkened sky. He heard the distant sound of a car towards the end of his road and turned towards it. A shuffling sound to his left made him turn back.
Thunk.
The sound reverberated around his head. The clatter of tin on concrete brought him back to his senses, just as another beer can pinged off his head.
‘What the …’
The laughing had grown louder. Surrounding him, constricting his breathing.
‘You little shits …’
They were grouped together, pointing at him, nudging each other hard as their laughter grew and grew.
‘Come ’ead lads’, the tallest one said between fits of laughter, ‘let’s get down to Crocky Park. See if the girls are about.’
He stared after them as they left, mouth hanging open as they sauntered off, hands down the front of their tracksuit bottoms. Looked around at the mess they’d made of his garden and the pavement in front of his house, before reaching up to his head – damp where dregs of beer had splattered onto his hair.
The van parked up his street shifted into gear and coasted towards him. He felt as if his chest was stuck in a vice, his breathing becoming shallower. He staggered backwards and sat on the small brick wall.
He lifted his head up as the van came to a stop a little before his house, squinting into the bright lights on the front of it. The passenger side door opened and he looked at the figure which got out.
‘You okay auld fella?’
‘Fine,’ he replied between pants of breath, ‘the tall one. That’s who we want.’
‘You sure?’
The old man swallowed and made a go ahead motion with his hands. ‘It’s time, son. One isn’t enough. We’re going to teach them a lesson. We’re going to teach them all a lesson.’
Goldie felt buzzed – a bit light-headed even – but not properly pissed, which annoyed him. Even worse, that little slag Shelley hadn’t let him do anything more than have a feel of her tits before pushing him away. Not that there was much there to feel. Now all he wanted to do was get home, smoke a bit – just to zone him out, like – and then have a good kip.
He smiled to himself as he remembered the auld fella from earlier on in the night. Probably a fuckin’ paedo or something, so he didn’t feel bad. Not like there were any laws against sitting on someone’s wall anyway. Next few weeks, he planned on making sure that auld bastard realised who Goldie was.
Lost in his half-pissed thoughts, he didn’t hear the van slowing behind him. Didn’t hear it come to a stop, the side doors opening. The first he realised something was wrong was when he was pushed hard in the back, his balance not what it would have been earlier in the day. It happened so quickly, he couldn’t free his hands to stop the fall.
He remembered thinking the pavement was fuckin’ hard, smashing into his face with nothing to brace against it – harder than even his dad had hit him that one time, before he fucked off for good. He turned around on the floor, using his tongue to feel around his mouth. One of his front teeth jutted forwards into his top lip. His left eye was going blurry as something wet dripped down his face. Blood, he guessed.
He tried to regain his senses, determined not to go down without a fight. Probably some Strand fuckers, hoping to put him out of action. He turned onto his back, raising his hands to cover himself, waiting for the kicking to start.
He looked up, confused in an instant as he saw the men standing over him.
They were old. Forties, fifties. He could tell from the greying hair, rather than facial features. All of them wearing masks.
Shite …
‘You’re coming with us, kid. Gonna teach you some respect.’
Goldie began kicking out, but rough, hard hands grabbed at his legs. Strength he wasn’t used to from the other lads his own age. Fingers dug into his flesh as they pulled him along the concrete.
‘Get the fuck off me you fuckin’ twats. I’ll fuck you all up. Do you know who I am? I’m gonna fuckin’ kill all o’ yers.’
Then the world went black as something was forced over his head, pulled tight across his face, no amount of thrashing around making it come off. Hard metal slammed into his stomach, taking the wind out of him completely. He felt a weight on his legs as he realised he was now in the back of the van, hands holding his head to the floor as they began to move. The hood over his face was loosened a little so he could breathe.
‘Duct tape.’
The voice was hardened, Scouse. Proper old school, like his dad’s.
‘No. Don’t you fuckin’ dare …’ Goldie tried to shout, the hood muffling the sound.
The hood was lifted to his nose, before tape went across his mouth. Shouting behind it had no effect. He tried kicking out again, but the hands holding his legs and arms down barely shifted.
‘Stop messing about, or we’ll just dump you in the Mersey now. Relax. Nothing is going to happen to you. We’re going to help you.’
Goldie tried answering back, but it was useless.
One leg got free.
Goldie didn’t think twice. Just swung it back and aimed for anything he could. The satisfying clunk as his foot found flesh made him redouble his efforts.
Shouts, cries, as he struggled free, the hood over his face keeping him in darkness.
‘Stop the van.’
The same voice as before, still calm, still low.
Goldie tried to stand, but the van pulling to a stop made him rock forward, off balance.
‘I told you to relax.’
Goldie spun, but wasn’t quick enough. His hands caught in mid-air as he tried to remove his hood. Strong grip on his wrist. Starting to twist.
Explosion in the side of his head as something smacked against it.
Then, as he fell to the floor, he wished for the complete darkness of unconsciousness – not just the vision of it. As the punches landed, the kicks and boots flew into his stomach, his ribs cracking one by one.
That tight grip on his wrist. Still there. Twisting, turning.
He cried out behind the duct tape sealing his mouth. No use.
The crack as his wrist snapped.
‘That’s enough. All of you.’