No Good Deed

Book by Scott Manda

CHAPTER ONE

SUMMER

In the long list of early prisoner releases, his was one of the least remarked; ostensibly a gift to both sides, in practice welcomed by neither. He walked out of the gates at nine o’clock on the morning of the thirteenth of June, twenty-one years and three months to the day since they had first locked him up. The world lay in the grip of a heat wave so that the air shimmered above the tarmac and it was cooler by far inside than out.

He hung around for a while, as if testing the heat and humidity of the air, an act that did nothing to endear him to those watching. In time, he stooped at the driver’s door of the car waiting at the curbside and then the one inside got out and he took over the wheel. There was a moment when it seemed he might have left his companion standing on the pavement outside the gates but he relented and the younger man, whose face was already on file and who was hardly an easy touch, was invited into the passenger side.

He counted three of them following, in varying rotations, in front or behind, as the car passed east toward the ferry at Larne. Two passengers and a very striking red-headed cabin assistant kept their eyes on him on the crossing to Stranraer. At the terminal, they handed him over to their Scottish counterparts and a different three watched him wave good-bye to his escort and rent a car. They followed in two cars on the road up to Glasgow. He took the tunnel and then the switchback and led them out to the pine forests at the southern tip of Loch Lomond, where he let himself into a self-catering cabin on the shores of the loch. The school holidays not yet being under way, half of the remaining six cabins in the group were conveniently empty and the watchers, with some gratitude, took up position in those on either side of the mark.

An hour after the man’s arrival, he had a visitor. One of the city’s more expensive whores, a woman with well-tapped connections in Ulster, drove up to the door, knocked twice and was granted admission. The watchers, all of whom were young and male, rigged up a microphone and directed it at the bedroom window, recording the results for later posterity. It was thus added to the file that the mark was not fluent in gutter Glaswegian but that his appetites were as diverse as might be expected in any man who has spent his third and fourth decades locked in a cell. The woman left in the early evening and the watchers had no more entertainment than the sound of a man breathing heavily in his sleep.

It was a newer, less seasoned watcher who recognized, around five o’clock the following morning, that she had heard the same pattern of breathing repeated three times in the space of two hours. No one likes to be woken before dawn for the sake of it and so she took the time to play the tape into a portable computer and compare the exact shape of the wave forms before she rang through to her superiors and asked for backup and permission to break in. At six-thirty, the combat team found a dead woman lying on the single bed beside a tape recorder that played a continuous loop of a man’s breathing.

The received wisdom from those on the scene was that the dead woman had been strangled. The pathologist’s report later in the day suggested instead that the ring of purpled bruises on the neck occurred at least twenty-four hours ante-mortem and that the cause of death was, in fact, a simple fracture of the vertebral column between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. Bruising on the left lower chin and the upper right parietal region showed where the heels of both hands had been applied to achieve the twist. Later examination of the records found this to be the cause of death in at least one previous recorded killing by the same target.

A watch was put on all known associates but was called off on the grounds of wasted expense after a month with no result. A full case report was lodged with Interpol to the effect that the suspect was loose, whereabouts and intentions unknown. It is an unfortunate testament to the technological age that all those involved felt a computer flag to be a sufficient warning to the local police forces and no one deemed it necessary, or even useful, to pick up the phone and tell the one person who might really have needed to know that Colm Connaught O’Neil was out and looking for trouble.

SPRING / FRIDAY / 14 MARCH

“Jamie?”

The child opened his eyes. It was dark in the room, darker than it had been, and there was snow feathering down the outside of the window. They had promised it for Christmas and it came instead for Easter, a gift from the god to make the world a cleaner, purer place. Large flakes flared orange in the sodium glare of the streetlight and piled in drifts against the lower sill, tinged to yellow by the years of filth and tobacco smoke staining the glass.

“Jamie? Can you hear me?” The child was entranced by the snow. He watched the patterns of it grow before his eyes and let the voice wash over him. “Jamie? Please? I need your help.” The voice was smooth, like the glass, but warmer. It flowed around him, easing the pain. He curled tighter in his chair and turned his face to the dark. The snow had deadened all the other sounds as the evening gave way to night: the noise of cars in the street, the kick-out from the pubs, the smash of a bottle dropping from the top of a neighboring tenement down onto the street below, the lacerating give-and-take of a beating taking place somewhere far away but not quite out of earshot. That pain was not his. In these small things, life was kind.

Inside the room the quality of the quiet was different. His mother and her friend had been silent long since but there was no surprise in that. He had seen the needles and the small ritual of injection. He knew the pattern of this and the time it would last and he knew he was safe, from that quarter at least, for most of the darkness. The other sound, the voice, was new and uncomfortable. Usually nobody spoke and if they did, it was simplest often not to listen. He had a lot of practice in not listening. Watch the things that move beyond the window and don’t listen. That way is safe.

“Jamie? Jamie, listen. The men will come back soon and when they do, they will hurt you again. You know that. If you help me, I can stop them.” The voice was soft and low, and the accent strange, like the ones on the news, entirely unlike the flat vowels and guttural glottal stops of his world. He couldn’t place the voice and that worried him. He hunched his shoulders, pulling himself smaller, blocking out the noise. It came through all the same. “Jamie? It’s me, Sandra. Trust me. I can get us out of here. But you have to help me first.”

Sandra. He struggled to fit a face to the name. An image came into focus of flashing amber eyes with black stripes flaring outward, like a tiger. The thought made him smile. He turned into the dark of the room. “Jamie?” She sounded more hopeful. “Over here. Under the sofa.” Under the sofa? Now that really was strange. With regret, he watched one last layer of snow build on the sill and then left the safety of his chair.

The sulfured glow of the streetlights pushed in a semicircle as far as the television but beyond it the room was as black as the night outside. The stench of stale cigarette smoke, cheap scent and congealing chow mein hung, waiting, in the darkness. By the window, the air was cold and clean and welcoming. He nearly turned back but the voice drew him on. “Jamie? Not much farther now.” So he went on, feeling his way forward, past the bottles and the needles, the remains of the takeaway and the debris of clothing, to the inert bulk of his mother’s body. She lay across the sofa, locked in a sleeping embrace with one of the other two women. He searched among the tangle of limbs and heads for the flash of light from the eyes.

“Underneath,” said the voice. He crouched down on the floor. She was right. There was, indeed, a woman lying underneath the sofa. His eyes were adjusting slowly to the absence of light but even in the gloom he could see the pale skin on the undersides of her arms, with the flat white planes of the old scars and the fresh patterns around them of handprints and bruises. Her hair was crushed and matted, a scarecrow’s nest in bottle blonde with the streaks of scarlet through it that matched the fake suede of her skirt. A glimmer of gold pulsed at her navel, rising and falling with the steady rhythm of her breathing. With difficulty, because the space from the base of the sofa to the floor was not great and the weight of his mother made it less than it might have been, she turned her head to look at him. That wasn’t good. Her face was a mess ...more of a mess than usual and only partly because her makeup was gone. He had watched her in the mornings as she sat on the edge of the bath, using the only mirror in the house to help her paint her face, and he knew the care she took to hide the things she didn’t want the world to see.

Now the world could see what it liked, and more. A fresh bruise, bleeding at the center, ran across one cheekbone and up to the inside corner of her eye. On the other side, the stark white snake-line of an old scar bisected one eyebrow and ran on down the side of her nose to make a notch on the edge of her upper lip. On her temple, a palm’s breadth of smooth white burn tissue pulled the skin tight, angling up the edge of one eye so that it seemed as if she were forever doubting what he said. Then she blinked and the eyes gathered him in and he was lost. He was entranced by her eyes. He knelt down and put his head level with hers and peered into them. She smiled for him then and it was a new smile, crooked and conspiratorial and really very warm. He chewed his lip for a moment, thinking, then he lay flat on his stomach and put his head on one side, looked into ...