TWENTY-TWO

LONDON. 23 JUNE 2011. 4 P.M.

Malcolm Gonal wasn’t answering his phone. At immigration, beside the baggage terminal, and during the wait for the train at Gatwick, Kyle left messages. They seemed to be in the airport for a week. Bright lights, endless announcements, the large loud faces of impatient crowds, drove him further to the point preceding a scream.

He wasn’t sure whether he’d made any sense on the phone either. Frantic breathless mentions of Max, The Temple of the Last Days, his role as director, came out quick enough to be garbled. His voice sounded odd: thickened by exhaustion, brittle with irritation, detached from his mind and from what he really wanted to say, or rant to anyone who would listen. Fast head, Novocaine tongue, numb jaw: never a good mix. The exhausted should just lie down.

There was no call back.

‘No joy?’ Dan asked.

Kyle shook his head; it was the first time his friend had attempted conversation since their argument in Seattle. Dan had slept noisily for most of the flight home, while Kyle fidgeted and chewed nicotine gum, harried, witless, and tormented in the seat beside him.

He’d felt safer on the plane through a refusal to believe that Sister Katherine’s old friends could appear on an aircraft. But he knew the frail sense of security would end the moment they touched down, and it provided no respite from the endless replays of the previous night’s intrusion onto the screen of his imagination, or the shards of the entire living nightmare the production had become, that fell behind his eyes for the duration of the flight: tatty fragments of Normandy, bony faces grinning through walls, the sunlit desolation of Arizona, the jowly detective’s face talking of blood-spatter patterns, the monochrome hopelessness of that Seattle house and Martha Lake’s cigarette-damaged face, the thin hands in her attic clawing for the world. And all framed by a morbid belief in his own imminent destruction.

Yet his thoughts would still change direction, suddenly, and the endless inner debate against the impossibility of it all made him writhe in his seat. Other passengers had turned their faces when he muttered to himself, like a man come undone. Because he had. He’d wanted to walk up and down the aisle of the aircraft and clutch his weary head in bloodless hands. Anything to ease the indigestion of fear, disbelief, rage and panic.

‘Call him another time. Just . . .’ Dan didn’t finish; didn’t need to. Kyle knew what he would suggest; that he should go home and rest, should sleep for days, and forget about the film for a while, if not for ever, so he would stop acting like a crazy man. But sleep could not be risked.

‘I’m going out there.’

‘New Cross. What, now?’

Kyle nodded. It’s all right for you, mate, he wanted to say. You slept last night. And for eight hours on the plane. Because nothing impossible came through the closed door of your room and tore the shit out of your still warm bed!

Kyle tried Max again. Received his voicemail. ‘Shit!’

Dan shook his head. ‘If I take the files to Finger Mouse tomorrow, will Max be OK with that?’

‘No. Take them there now. See if he can pull another all-nighter. We’ll pay. I need to see it all again. Sod Max. I need it asap. And Gabriel must be back in the UK now. I need to speak with him too. He knows shit that we don’t! I’ve had enough of this crap!’ People paused to stare at Kyle, then moved on. Kyle whizzed through his phone contacts menu and called Gabriel’s home number. A generic BT answering service asked him to leave a message. He did. ‘Need to see you. It’s urgent, Call me on . . .’

Dan fidgeted. Because Dan hadn’t believed him back in Seattle. Was incredulous with disbelief, and what looked like pity, after learning that Kyle had spent hours huddled under cardboard, wedged between the soda and ice machines. His friend had looked at him in shock and a lack of recognition while Kyle stood outside their rooms with no shoes on his feet and jabbered like a schizophrenic drug addict.

Dan’s eyes had implied collusion with the suspicions of the motel staff too; that Kyle had trashed his room and inflicted the figure upon the door. In fact, Dan’s nervous, disapproving silence as Kyle repeatedly recounted his story, appeared to him as proof of Dan’s suspicion that Kyle had faked everything thus far in the production: the arm in the kitchen of his flat, the figures in the Normandy barn while Dan was trying to get Gabriel’s smashed leg out of the rusty trap, and the figure in the old penthouse of Clarendon Road: all of it. Did Dan think he was so desperate for money and recognition, that he’d fake evidence of the paranormal? Like Gonal had once done with such vigour. Or was he just so tired and paranoid Kyle was willing to believe anything of his best friend? Probably. Dan was in the fortunate position of not being hunted. Scepticism was a luxury for the unaffected.

In what now seemed like another lifetime, separated by an ocean and the long flight alone with his tortured thoughts, Dan had talked the motel clerk out of calling the police. Had quickly provided Max’s credit card details for the repairs to the door, the destruction of the bedlinen and mattress, and for the broken circuit breaker that was ‘wet and took out the whole block’.

But once they were inside the rental car, Dan had seized Kyle’s shoulders and stared right into his eyes from close range. ‘Mate! No bullshitting me now. But what the fuck, yeah? I know this stuff is upsetting and crazy, but help me out here. I’m struggling with this. You taking drugs or something?’

Annoyed and desperately disappointed in each other, though trying not to show it, they travelled back to London in silence.

Kyle headed out of Victoria Station with the address on Malcolm Gonal’s business card burned into his mind. And felt like he was walking through seawater. His skin was unnaturally hot, he was breathless and his limbs uncoordinated. Regardless of the irrational things he was beginning to comprehend, if not accept, he believed he was now entirely unhinged from exhaustion and sleep deprivation. He would have to sleep soon, but sleep somewhere safe. Where?

He found himself having to read the tube map endlessly. And on realizing that changing from the District Line to the Jubilee Line, and then again to the Docklands Light Railway, was going to be unsurprisingly problematic as two lines were suffering a disrupted service, he gave up at London Bridge and dragged himself and his heavy rucksack up from the underground. In the rain, outside the station, he shivered and waved at the passing Hackney cabs.

Malcolm Gonal didn’t appear to be home. Perhaps he had fled the country and gone into hiding. Who could blame him? In frustration, using the palm of his hand, Kyle indented all of the plastic buzzers on the intercom panel.

Gonal’s place was on the third floor of an old Victorian, the entry and front yard bulging with rubbish bags and sprouting weeds; his flat was the only one with a name card inserted under the grimy plastic buzzers, suggesting he was the sole occupant in the miserable building, forgotten in its deprived pockmark of South London.

The windows of the ground floor had blankets nailed to the insides of the sash frames. Popular nineties tabloid television director and notorious faker of hauntings falls on hard times. Pity that. But why would Max hire such a feckless charlatan? Because a screening of the proposed film was never an aim; Malcolm Gonal was tenacious, unscrupulous, unethical, greedy and hard up. And would do anything to expose sensational mystical secrets of an infamous cult in a straight-to-DVD carve-up. Murder, assault, rape, sodomy, child abuse, embezzlement, kidnapping; Gonal would have had a Viagra-stroke at the prospect of it all. He’d bankrupted Allegra Films in a defamation suit from the Church of England, for claiming that widespread black masses were a regular occurrence in their churches. It had finished him in mainstream television.

Get out of the eighties, Max. Kyle was insulted; he knew he was second choice of director, but second to Gonal! And yet, if a theatrical release or television broadcast was not an aim, Kyle was clueless as to what Max wanted to achieve with the documentary from within the safety of his world of light up in Marylebone.

Stepping back, Kyle looked up at the discoloured brick facade of the building. And saw a curtain sway on the largest street-facing window of the top floor. The suggestion of a pale bulbous face moved back from a gap in the curtains, momentarily revealing a room so brightly lit, the illumination shot straight up and into space. Gonal was inside.

Kyle jogged back down the stone steps to the front path, turned and held up his phone. ‘I just need to talk!’ The curtain stayed closed. Kyle waited and he waited until his hope went cold. Then bent over, closed his eyes and exhaled the dregs of his energy.

‘Piss off!’ a buzzing voice crackled out of the intercom. Kyle went back to the front door, let his rucksack slide to the greening cement of the porch floor. ‘Mr Gonal. I desperately need to talk to you. My name is Kyle Freeman. I’ve been calling all day. It sounds insane, but it might be a matter of life and death.’

‘Not mine it ain’t. Now fuck off!’

It was a long way back to West Hampstead from New Cross. His vision swam hot and red. Enough is enough. He punched the intercom button. ‘Just might be, mate.’ You fat fraud. ‘Hear me out!’

‘You make me come down there you talentless little wanker, and you’ll be using the disabled seat on the bus to get home.’

‘Can you hear me pissing myself, Malcolm, all over your welcome mat?’

The little intercom speaker nearly blew out of the wall. ‘I’m known! You hear me? I’m known round here! Headcase Stratham! You heard of him, yeah? He’ll be payin’ you a visit very soon. I know where you live, you little ponce. West Hampstead is it? Goldhurst fucking Terrace? You’ll do more than piss yourself when your door comes in!’

Unfortunately Kyle had heard of Headcase Stratham; a notorious East End type, implicated in gangland killings and maimings, with a signature of biting off his victims’ noses. He’d even been apprehended at an illegal boxing match with part of a rival’s nostril still under his tongue; had been too eager to see the next fight to wash his mouth out. A man somehow not inside prison for ever. How was that even possible? Kyle had seen his scarred blockhead gurning from at least two lurid red covers of true-crime books in the airport bookshop, in between tomes of football hooligan folklore. Uncertain ground. Gonal could be bluffing, but Headcase Stratham was just the sort of feral psychopath that Gonal would knock around with. They had form; Gonal had deified him as a local hero in a terrible DVD that Kyle remembered being given away with a Sunday tabloid.

Nausea added itself to the pressure cooker already set to exhaustion. He had to think fast, and in a mind with currents as slow as a brackish stream.

‘Can’t hear you no more!’ Gonal shrieked through the speaker. ‘Eh? You prick!’ He went on and on. Loved the sound of his own bellicose Cockney voice, issuing threats, glutted with the power of one who has the keys to a violence so irrational and savage only the foolhardy would ignore the merest insinuation of it.

But had he been able to see his reflection in Gonal’s intercom panel, Kyle would have watched the spread of the most malevolent grin his own face had ever produced. ‘Wouldn’t give a shit if the Krays were triplets, mate, and you were the last one still with us. There are far greater things to worry about than losing a nose at this point in time. And I think you know what I am talking about. Sister Katherine has more old friends than you can shake a stick at, Malcolm. They don’t seem too happy with those of us who have been poking our beaks in. So now is not the time to be making threats to a man, I am guessing, who is going through what you are, mate. You must be sick to death of redecorating your bloody walls.’

The metallic voice at the other end of the intercom stayed silent. Kyle smiled. After a few seconds the lock mechanism inside the door disengaged.

And Kyle entered the dark house.

Malcolm Gonal was drunk. Malcolm Gonal was witless with fear. Malcolm Gonal was mad. Anyone could see that.

Malcolm Gonal was also a shut-in. Black sacks and the thin greenish carrier bags from local grocery stores, packed taut with rubbish and piled up the walls of the cramped hallway, prevented a full opening of the front door. Kyle stared at them. ‘Council on strike?’

Gonal looked like a shaven mole, enlarged to human dimensions with steroids by a Doctor Moreau figure somewhere in Eastern Europe. His hairless head was as colourless as new putty, save for the streak of what looked like undetected soup on his chin. The pudgy flesh was scaly with eczema. Tiny watery eyes of an indeterminate colour peered through square spectacle frames that must have once been very media. But his days as an Armani-suited, gruff-voiced talking head on cable television about football violence were over; Malcolm Gonal was wearing a kilt, what appeared to be a frilled shirt that once belonged under a tuxedo jacket, and a bath robe stolen from a hotel. On his feet were a pair of socks with cartoon characters embroidered upon the ankles.

The round face moved towards Kyle so quickly, he stepped back. ‘Don’t you laff. Don’t you fuckin’ laff. These are all the threads I’ve got left that’s clean.’

They weren’t even that; the robe was so filthy only the most desperate tramp would have paraded about the local park within its fetid confines. This was a man who had reached the very end of his wardrobe. The rest of it was thrown in a pile on the lino of the murky kitchen. They passed it on the way down the hallway to a door at the far end. The one that failed to contain the phosphorescent glow within four walls; the light leaked from all around the cheap, unpainted hardboard door that resembled a temporary repair after a house party in a squat.

‘That crack-head bitch downstairs answer the intercom?’ the mole creature said over its shoulder, as he led the way through the dim flat in a quick shuffle.

‘No.’

The figure glanced at Kyle, its eyes haunted. ‘Even she’s fucked off then.’

He wasn’t sure what Gonal meant; he didn’t pause to explain. Eager to be out of the unlit hallway, the little hunched figure threw open the living-room door and jumped inside.

Stepping around beer cans, silver takeaway trays, Chicken Village cartons patterned with grease, and empty pizza boxes, Kyle shielded his eyes from the blast of bright white light and followed his reluctant host inside the cluttered living room.

‘Born in a barn? Close the bloody door!’

Kyle complied and then stood still on the sticky carpet to stare, open-mouthed, at the walls. The walls completely covered with newspaper. Even the ceiling was spattered with pages from back issues of the Auto Trader. Masking tape held it all in place, layer upon layer. The powerful illumination was coming from a dozen of Max’s dawn simulator wands, connected to new car batteries.

‘They ’ad all the wires out two weeks back. Chewed ’em.’ Gonal’s little eyes swivelled behind the dandruff-encrusted lenses of his spectacles. ‘They was in the bedroom last night. Bastards!’

Kyle flinched. Open packets of caffeine pills littered the coffee table, as well as blister packs of medicine from a pharmacist. Diazepam, Xanax: Valium. The ashtray was loaded with Benson and Hedges butts and joints with roaches fashioned from Rizla packets.

Now Kyle was inside the flat, his mind went momentarily blank and he wasn’t sure why he had even come here. Perhaps all of his questions had been answered by the state of the room. Someone was making a last stand. And his sinuses were so filled with the stench of sweat, damp newspaper, stale beer, cigarette smoke, and decomposing chicken wings, he almost wished Headcase Stratham would come out from behind the telly and bite the nose off his face. The next image to enter the traumatized space between his ears was an imagined recreation of this same desperate and squalid defence built inside his own studio flat. ‘You should go for the Turner Prize, Malcolm. You’d be a shoe-in.’

‘You’s come to take the piss, then you’s can fuck off!’

‘I’ve just seen something in Seattle that I bet matches whatever is under the Sunday Mirror up there.’ Kyle nodded at the wall behind the huge leather sofa.

‘Marfa! You bin to see Marfa?’

Kyle nodded. ‘Yesterday. Landed today.’

Gonal grinned unpleasantly. ‘That’s why you come ’ere. Poor bitch.’ Then he seemed genuinely sad, which Kyle thought such an uncharacteristic reaction he wondered if he’d underestimated the man who was far more loathsome in the flesh than on television; he’d been hoping it was all an act.

Kyle raised the business card between two fingers. ‘She gave me your card. I didn’t even know Max hired you for the same job. I found out from her.’

‘Yeah, started wiv the quality then worked ’is way down. Man’s evil. Evil, I say. He bloody started it. You know that? Back in the sixties. Max!’

Kyle smarted at Gonal’s interpretation of Max’s hierarchy, but didn’t have the strength to argue. ‘When did this start? The . . . visits?’

‘Day before I quit. Which was about a mumf ago. There’s nuffin’ you can do about it. Nuffin’ but use Max’s lights. And daylight. They don’t like it.’ Gonal looked at the ceiling and shouted. ‘You bastards!’

‘I worked that much out, Malcolm.’

He seized the lapels of Kyle’s jacket with his plump fingers. ‘They’s followin’ me at night now. Outside. You can’t escape ’em.’

Outside at night? That was not something he’d experienced, and he immediately wanted to believe it was only the imagining of a paranoid and terrified man. But then . . .

‘You see her, Marfa? When she went? You film it?’

‘Sorry?’

Gonal seemed confused for a moment, then began to smile. ‘You don’t know, do ya? Eh? ’Cus you was on the plane.’

‘What?’

‘Fuckin’ gone, ain’t she. Dead. Saw it on the internet this mornin’.’

Kyle dropped more than sat amongst the rubbish on the sofa, and stared at the TV listings for the previous week taped to the living-room wall.

‘Careful! Me rushes is on there.’

Kyle looked under his backside, muttered ‘Sorry.’

‘Look, ’ere.’ Gonal scurried across the room to where his laptop glowed on a table under the window. The screen currently featured Kyle’s page on Wikipedia. Gonal had been checking him out, no doubt since he left the phone messages. But Gonal quickly closed the page to reveal a desktop image of himself with his arm around the shoulders of Trevor Brooking on the pitch at Upton Park. ‘It’s wireless. Is picking up the signal from the neighbours. I can only turn it on for a few minutes, else the battery will run down. I bin chargin’ it in the library. And me phone.’ He glared at Kyle. ‘Nuffin’ else works in ’ere. Feckin’ landlord won’t fix the wires. Says them squatters on the ground floor done it. He ain’t got a clue.’ He turned back to his laptop and dropped down his favourites menu, clicked the last item.

In shock, Kyle continued to gape at the wall above the gas fire, at week-old headlines, and advertisements for double divan beds. Martha was dead. Was it suicide? Had she followed Bridgette Clover? He tried to swallow, but his mouth was so dry and the bolus of panic in his throat so great, he couldn’t manage it. Martha was anticipating her own end the whole time he was there. Caught her in the nick of time, a little voice too similar to Gonal’s said inside his mind until he banished it. Maybe the interview pushed her over the edge?

‘’Ere. Look. Look.’

Kyle moved on unsteady legs to where Gonal was hunched over his laptop. Kyle’s vision swam around the screen, trying to fix on everything, but failing to fix on anything. Until his eyes paused on the black-and-white press photo of Martha Lake striding through Phoenix airport in 1975. Above it was the headline: LAST DAY OF DESERT CULT VICTIM. It was the homepage of the Seattle Bugle newspaper.

‘Feckin’ savaged by an intruder, it says. Almost unrecognizable. Shots fired it says. Shots! Eh? At them, before they did her. Weren’t no knife, we know that. I knew she was in the shit when I was over there, but feck’s sake. Shoulda topped herself. Froo the brain, like. Like the other one. Bridgette. So they wouldn’t get in. Fink of that. Fink.’

Kyle covered his mouth with a hand. He and Dan may have been the last people to see her alive. But the interview, their footage: would it be subpoenaed by the police? He immediately chided himself again for his selfishness. Turned his face to Gonal. ‘Max used us both.’

‘No shit.’

‘Did you go to Clarendon Road? The farm?’

‘Nah. Only the Holland Park place from outside. Max ’adn’t got permission. Didn’t get round to France. That was next. So I did Marfa in Seattle. The mine wiv a medium—’

‘A medium! What you do, Malcolm, throw a bloody séance?’

‘Tried to. Max wanted me to go out there with the filth. Some old boy who was a cop. But after I spoke to Marfa, I wanted somfin’ wiv a bit more juice, like. That’s what you need, mediums, else you won’t get it on the telly these days.’

‘And did you get any “juice”?’

It shouldn’t have been possible for Gonal to go any paler than he already was, but he did. He hurried across to the sofa and sifted through papers and DVDs. ‘I can’t look at it again. I’ll ’ave to go out the room. It all went tits up. Don’t know what ’appened to Magenta, the medium. She just run off. Into the desert. There was summat in there wiv us. You see it on a few frames.’ He looked at Kyle, his lips trembled, as did the words that came between them. ‘It was up in the air. Over us.’

Kyle’s mouth dried out. ‘Did anything touch you?’

‘Eh?’ He stepped away from Kyle, looking at him as if he were contagious, as if his question were proof of contact. ‘Nah. Not me. You?’

Kyle nodded.

‘They . . . touched you?’ his voice was barely audible.

‘I think so. In Normandy. In the temple. Not sure. I thought that was how they . . . follow you.’

Gonal looked about himself, absorbed with some new idea. ‘You found nuffin’ in your gear?’

‘What?’

‘When I got back from Seattle, I found something in the camera bag. A bone.’

‘Bone?’

Gonal nodded. ‘Little one. Like from a finger. Black. Burnt. Tiny joint, like.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Froo that filthy fing away, didn’t I. Disgustin’. But I reckoned that’s how they tracked me back ’ere. Else how would they know. You fink that’s how they know?’

‘Heavenly letters.’

‘Eh?’

‘That’s what Katherine called them. The artefacts. The police had them tested at a university. They were five hundred years old. Belial said they came from “old friends”. How is that possible?’

Gonal began to shake. Kyle thought he might start crying.

‘Malcolm. Dreams. The dreams. You been seeing things? Visions.’

Malcolm scowled in defiance at the suggestion, but then his face suddenly fell. Saliva stretched between his small lips as his mouth dropped. He took his glasses off and wiped the grubby sleeve of the robe against his wet eyes. Sniffed and nodded. ‘Don’t sleep no more. Can’t.’ He looked up at Kyle, his little eyes red and moist, blinking. ‘That’s ’ow they get in. They get inside your ’ead.’

Kyle turned away from Gonal, stumbled over a pair of discarded slip-on shoes beside the coffee table. Stood by the window, hoping for some fresher air, while blood thumped inside his head; he felt unnaturally warm, almost buoyant, weightless.

Gonal came after him, swift on his little feet inside the cartoon socks. ‘I bin places. They took me to places. ’Orrible places. All the birds is dead. Everyfin’ is on fire, like. Dogs are cryin’. People screamin’. Being burned. It’s hell, mate. They’s tryin’ to take me to hell wiv ’em. I can see it all the time now when I’m awake. It’s fuckin’ stuck in my ’ead!’ His voice dropped to a murmur. ‘I been up there.’ Gonal stared in horror at the ceiling. ‘They’s bin gettin’ me out of my body.’

Kyle slumped back on to the sofa and stared at his feet without really seeing them. Proof. This was all the proof he needed. Corroboration proved no one could call him crazy. But he soon would be, because Malcolm Gonal was the future. His future. The floor shimmered at the edges of his vision. He was past depletion now, right through his overdraft and in a hyper-real bright headspace in the void beyond full consciousness. ‘Sleep,’ is all he could say.

Gonal shook his head vigorously. ‘Nah. Nah, nah, nah. You don’t wanna sleep, mate. That’s when they come. Fink about it. Fink. Fink. They saw ’em first in Normandy in the trance. On acid in the mine. There’s places in our heads that can see ’em. So you gotta stay awake. Conscious. In the lights. You can’t even daydream, else they’ll get in.’ Gonal flapped his little arms about in the air. Started to shout. Spittle frothed at the corners of his mouth. ‘They want to get in ’ere, but they hate the light. They hate it!’

Kyle stood up, the rushes disc held in his hand. His thoughts fell over each other and vanished into vapour. If he didn’t get out of the reeking flat and away from the ridiculous crazed figure, hysteria would overcome him. But Gonal seized his arm with insistent fingers. ‘You know.’ He nodded his head. ‘You know. We’s got to stick togever. We can hold ’em off, in ’ere. Fink. Fink about it. Keep watch when the uvver one is asleep. Get food brought in till it blows over.’

Kyle shook his arm loose. ‘What if it doesn’t?’

Gonal’s eyes widened behind his glasses. ‘Then there’s another fing. Another way.’

Kyle could do nothing but stare at the little manic figure.

‘They want Max. Fink about it. He started it. What they want wiv us? I ain’t even making the film no more. Nor is you. You can’t. You walk away now. An’ if we help ’em out, like . . .’ His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. The moon-face drew in closer. Kyle recoiled from the breath that gusted across his mouth and nose; it was faecal. ‘We give Max to ’em. Eh? Eh? Fink about it. He got us into this. He lied to us. So we give ’em Max. That’s who they want. Gotta be.’

Kyle stumbled at the door. ‘No.’

‘We got to! Marfa, Bridgette. Them’s all survivors. Max is another one. She wants ’em all back. Not us. Not me. Not you.’

‘But we know. Don’t you see? We know.’ It’s enough. Knowing her secrets was enough of a transgression to guarantee a ghastly punishment. He didn’t know how he knew this; it was instinctive, it was not reason, but he now had to perceive the world without the assurance of natural law.

Gonal suddenly spotted the DVD in Kyle’s hand. His fat face twisted into a snarl. ‘I know your game. Cunt! You came ’ere to steal my film. Eh? Max sent you, did he?’

Kyle shook his head. ‘No—’

‘Gimme that. You know who I am, eh? You know who I am? What you ever fuckin’ done? You is nuffin’. Nuffin’! I been number one in the ratings. The ratings, you twat!’

Kyle threw the DVD like a frisbee into Gonal’s angry face. ‘I don’t want your shit. Keep it.’ He strode across the room and grabbed Gonal by the lapels of his robe, which felt wet and doughy in his fingers. ‘I came here to see if we could help each other. But you haven’t got a clue. Your bottle’s gone. You’ve lost it, Malcolm. Hiding inside this shithole, with the sport section Sellotaped to the bloody walls. Waiting for the end. Is that it? The best you can do? No thanks.’ He released the moist lapels. ‘And I couldn’t trust you for a moment. No one can. You’re rotten. No wonder they want you down there with them.’

Kyle turned away from him and headed for the door. Gonal followed, sobbing. ‘Don’t go. Don’t go.’ Then he was screaming, ‘You’ll pay. You’ll fuckin’ pay!’

‘I already am,’ Kyle said, and yanked the front door open so hard, a big bag exploded around his feet.

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