Shining Lights Page 8

  Wet clothes bagged up, I dress in clean ones. I draw a line at sitting in my pyjamas, since I feel stupid enough already. When I knock on the door of Flat 3, Nina eyes me up and down and sniffs.

  ‘That’s better. You can come in. Shoes off at the door. Now, what’s all this about Tillerman?’

  I recount my adventures.

  ‘He levelled one guy from the first car, then a second car pulled up, and a guy with a gun hopped out. They bundled him in the back seat and took off, initially south along the promenade.’

  ‘A gun, you say…’

  ‘Yes. He fired a warning shot.’

  ‘Two different groups.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Black cars.’

  ‘Everything looked black in that light, but yes, I think so.’

  ‘And the men were dressed how?’

  ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t studying their couture, but they had clothes on, if that helps. The first group was foreign, maybe Eastern European. The second I’m not sure, but they spoke English. Everything happened so quickly. I was looking back from about thirty metres away.’

  ‘Was this your fault? Have you disobeyed orders?’ She turns fiercely sharp eyes on me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then that was careless of Tillerman.’

  Nina’s words seem to be directed more to herself than to me, so I don’t respond.

  Then she adds, ‘Unless, of course… One can never tell with Tillerman. Anything is possible.’

  She stands up and walks across to a cupboard from which she withdraws a bottle of single malt, a jug of water and two glasses. ‘Well, well. We must wait and see.’ She pours the drinks. ‘Two separate groups in separate vehicles, you say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One group foreign, you think?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hmm. For a perfect whisky, add just a small amount of water.’ She carefully adds a little to each glass. ‘Just sufficient to release the flavour. My husband taught me that. He was a connoisseur. Don’t even dream of asking for any ghastly fizzy liquid to add to it. I have killed people for less.’

  She hands me the glass. I decide this isn’t the moment to tell Nina that, for my unrefined palate, the choice between whisky and lighter fuel is close, regardless of added water. I take the glass with as much gratitude as I can muster and repress a shudder.

  ‘Is it possible that the occupants of the second car might have come to his rescue when he was attacked?’ she asks.

  ‘They might. It was hard to tell. He didn’t try to fight them off. But the gun probably convinced him not to resist.’

  ‘Hmm. For the moment, from what you’ve told me, I will assume that these Robin Hood types were following the Sheriff of Nottingham team, and, when the Sheriff boys attacked Tillerman, they intervened to rescue him. Just in time. The alternative scenarios suggest rival gangs. We’ll keep that possibility on the back burner.’

  ‘Who are they?’ I ask.

  ‘That’s a good question.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I don’t know.’

  ‘They followed me round the streets for ages, hence the cat shit. What do they want from us?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I take a sip of whisky and my eyes water. To mask my discomfort, I mumble something distracting about Mossbank Lodge, the name Isaac conveniently dropped.

  Nina strides over to a small bookshelf from which she withdraws an Ordnance Survey map. She lays it on the tabletop and pores over it, tracing the Fylde coastline with a finger.

  ‘Ha!’ she exclaims, stabbing the map. ‘There it is. Mossbank Lodge. The name Tillerman whispered to you. My god, that’s a remote spot for around here.’

  ‘You think that’s where they took him?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s possible, I suppose, but a muttered name hardly justifies us wading in without better evidence. Let’s see what else we can find out about the place. Are you any good with these damned things?’ She waves a hand towards the computer. ‘Normally I have a battalion of experts to turn to, but Tillerman was adamant I shouldn’t involve anyone else. Damn! There are times I hate all this cloak and dagger stuff.’ She turns to me like a ricochet. ‘Well? Have you nothing to say?’

  ‘Give me space to slip a word in and I might.’ I risk a grin. ‘I know someone who might help.’

  ‘Trustworthy?’

  ‘Completely.’

  ‘Phone him,’ she orders.

  ‘Now? It’s late. He’ll be in bed.’

  ‘Well, wake him up then. He’ll understand.’

  ‘He’ll think someone’s died. That’s what I’d think. Late-night phone calls are always bad, unless it’s some drunk trying to order a curry. That used to happen to my mum and dad. Their phone number was only a couple of digits different from a Chinese restaurant in town.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Nina says. ‘Phone him.’

  It takes a while to stir Jon from the depths of his slumber and even longer for him to gain the power of coherent speech. Nina reaches across and turns the phone to loudspeaker.

  In the background, I hear a sleepy female voice. ‘Who is it, Jon? Is everything alright?’

  It’s his wife Vanessa; Wendy’s best friend in Sefton.

  ‘It’s okay, Jon,’ I hasten to say. ‘No-one’s died. It’s just me. I wouldn’t bother you, but it can’t wait.’

  ‘It’s Phil,’ I hear him say to Vanessa.

  ‘I should have guessed. Hi, Phil.’

  ‘Hi, Vanessa. Sorry to disturb you so late.’

  Nina is growing increasingly impatient with all this chatter.

  ‘For god’s sake, get a move on. We haven’t got time for all this nonsense. Tell him what he has to do.’

  There’s a moment’s silence, then Vanessa’s voice. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘It’s probably the ninja,’ Jon whispers back.

  ‘Who?’

  Time to interrupt.

  ‘You’re on loudspeaker, Jon,’ I inform him.

  ‘Ah.’

  I quickly explain the events of the evening without making further eye contact with Nina. ‘I need you to find out everything you can about a place called Mossbank Lodge.’

  ‘Now?’ he asks. There’s a note of desperation in his voice. ‘Can’t it wait until morning? I’ll have to go down to the office for this.’

  ‘Do you think we’d be phoning you in the middle of the night if it could wait?’ says Nina.

  Jon exhales the longest sigh I think I’ve ever heard. ‘Okay. But you seriously owe me, Phil. The next twenty times we need babysitters, okay?’

  ‘Agreed,’ I nod. ‘I’ll get Nina’s number for you.’

  ‘She’d scare the kids.’

  I decide to hang up before the repartee turns aggressive.

  Nina looks at me.

  ‘Ninja?’ she asks.

  I allow an embarrassed smile to shuffle across my face and take another sip of lighter fuel. It’s time to tell Nina about Forrester and Mather. Diversionary tactics.

  When I finish, she just stares at me and says nothing, while I fumble about for a plausible reason for the inexcusable delay in briefing her.

  ‘They’re Tillerman’s colleagues,’ she says at last. ‘In so far as people in this line of business ever have colleagues. But don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security. They’re all bastards. Every single one of them. I work with them, so I know.’

  ‘Even Tillerman?’ I ask, risking an embarrassed smile.

  She relaxes momentarily. ‘I have a soft spot for Tillerman. I like to think he’s an exception.’

  ‘What do we do now?’

  It might be the whisky or the events of the evening taking their toll, but I’m suddenly close to sleep.

  ‘We’ll not hear from your friend for a few hours, so we might as well get some rest. She stands up and walks to the door. Good night, Philip. Wake me if he calls before morning.’ She hesitates. ‘On second thoughts, don’t. A few hours won’t make much difference.’

  ‘I think Jon would have appreciated that knowledge,’ I suggest.

  She smiles; actually smiles.

  ‘We need the information at hand first thing tomorrow. We have some planning to do.’ She’s about to close the door when she pauses. ‘You did well not to trust me until you had to,’ she says. ‘Remember what you were told. Trust no-one.’

  The smile disappears and I struggle back to my flat, where I collapse, fully clothed on the bed, utterly exhausted. I’m certain the next sound I hear will be Jon on the phone, or my alarm clock.

  In the event, sleep doesn’t come as quickly as I’d hoped. As soon as I close my eyes, a multitude of thoughts flap around my head like demonic birds, and it takes an hour for me to fall into a deep sleep, where I spin restlessly through more anxiety dreams than the average person endures in a lifetime.

  Chapter 16

  Perhaps now is a good time to take a breather while I tell you a little more about Isaac and our early friendship. For that, however, you need to understand more about the Sefton Grammar School culture and the place of competitive sport within it.

  Within a few weeks of beginning the school at the tender age of eleven, they classified pupils according to one overriding criterion: might you, with the right training, rise over the years to the ranks of the best rugby first fifteen within the county? If you were one of the selected thirty hopefuls, they segregated you into the best fifteen and the second fifteen. The second fifteen were the cannon fodder who got hammered by the first team week after week in practice sessions. If you were sufficiently successful in the second fifteen and showed a resilience which enabled you to recover rapidly from this weekly bout of concussion, they might elevate you at the expense of someone else to the holy orders.


  If you were unfortunate enough to lack the skills necessary to belong to the top thirty, the implication was clear.

  Piss off and play somewhere else. We’ll get a teacher to put you into teams and then he’ll watch you from his car in case anyone has the impertinence to get hurt.

  We played in all weathers. The ground could be hard enough to carve an ice statue and the air cold enough to freeze your eyelids, but you still had to take part. And you still had to walk through those delightful hot showers, and then—as long as the pipes were sufficiently thawed—the cold ones, and get changed publicly while the members of the first fifteen scrum flicked towels at your meagre genitals.

  When you reached the sixth form, if you were a regular member of the first fifteen, you might reach a height only surpassed by God Almighty and the headmaster, and become head boy.

  I spent four years among the ranks of the cannon fodder in the second team, largely because I had learnt young the value of being able to run quickly when some lumbering oaf was chasing me. I was on the wing, which was handy because on the few occasions that the ball reached me, I just had to run like an idiot and I always had the option of carelessly stepping over the line and hoping the referee would be good enough to notice before I got hit by someone built like a sack of potatoes.

  I hated it.

  Isaac was an Olympian. He bestrode the world like a colossus as the Bard put it. He was the first name on any team list and, in all the years of grammar school education, it was a permanent fixture. That was why, in the Upper Sixth, the grammar school gods descended and bestowed upon him the ultimate honour. They anointed him head boy.

  Not that it impressed Isaac. He accepted it as he might have accepted a chocolate tea cake on a silver platter. Yes, he was pleased enough, but he wouldn’t get carried away. He did what he needed, and he did it in an exemplary manner and was, with only one or two exceptions, universally admired. But it never mattered to him as it would, for example, have mattered to Eric Redmayne or as much as it mattered to the head girl, who was…

  Yes, you guessed it. Sandra Buchan.

  As the year went on, Isaac found the role more and more tiresome and more and more meaningless, but he stuck it out until the end of the year's Speech Day.

  This was a tradition dating back to the foundation of the boys’ grammar school and was sacrosanct, even after we joined with the girls’ grammar school to create a whole new school. The pupils and teachers gathered ceremoniously in the great hall and subjected us to an hour and a half of self-congratulatory nonsense followed by half an hour of prize-giving to those who had excelled and brought glory on the school, usually by being in the first fifteen.

  When that half-hour was over and we sensed freedom was almost within reach, there were four more speeches to endure, delivered by the head girl, the head boy, The head teacher and some awful guest speaker whose sole responsibility was to drone on until everyone from the humblest first year to the oldest sixth former had completely lost all will to live.

  Sandra went first, then Isaac.

  I can still picture it today and, if I want to cheer myself up, I try to recapture the moment in all its glory. Isaac rose to his feet, ascended the stage where the entire staff of the school sat on hard backed upright chairs, and adopted a characteristic pose at the podium, as if preparing to annihilate the opposition in a debate.

  The first sign that something was wrong was the absence of a neatly written speech on a pristine piece of A4 paper. The second was when he rested his hands on the sides of the podium and lowered his head towards the microphone with a loud groan. When he eventually raised his head, he carefully looked around the gathered throng and smiled. Then he chuckled.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I just can’t. It’s too absurd.’

  And he walked across the platform, down the steps at the side of the stage and along the aisle between the seated audience. Total silence followed him. As he passed me at the end of my row, I could see a huge grin on his face and, for a moment, our eyes met. His hand grasped my shoulder.

  ‘See you around, Phil.’

  He walked out of the door and I didn’t see him again.

  Until yesterday.

  The head teacher, to his credit, rose to his feet and continued as if absolutely nothing untoward had happened but there was no doubting which memory that audience of kids would carry away with them, and it wasn’t the encouraging and moralising epilogue.

  Perhaps they should have known better than to place Isaac in a position as a representative of the establishment. He was never cut out for that sort of role; it surprised me he accepted. But I suppose the status might have swayed even Isaac, especially when he pictured the unalloyed joy it would give his parents. He stuck it out, and did the very best he could, but finally, on that last day, like Zorro, he had to pull away the mask and reveal himself as he truly was.

  It was magnificent.

  At least, I thought so. Though I doubt the establishment figures on the platform felt the same way. Their collective response would have been one of almost universal condemnation. I like to think a few of the younger and more radical members of the teaching staff would have met in a bar later that night and laughed themselves silly. I hope so.

  I’ll admit now that I wouldn’t have wanted Isaac’s abilities. Yeah, sure, I envied him occasionally and I wouldn’t have minded just one or two of his talents. But all of them? No. Sometimes it’s nice to sink back into the crowd, suffer a little envy, be obliged to develop humility, struggle for what you want.

  I reckon that’s what Isaac always needed.

  It was, perhaps, his greatest gift, that he recognised it.

  Chapter 17

  I wake up just as the sun pulls back the curtain to peep into the room. My phone is ringing.

  Jon.

  ‘I’ve been here half the bloody night on this Mossbank Lodge thing,’ he says, ‘and all I’ve found is some alternative therapy centre out in the sticks. Real hippie shit, if you ask me. It looks like some super-select, invitation-only commune. Interesting, though, if you like mysteries.’

  He pauses, I assume, for dramatic effect.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Think of all the things you need to run a successful retreat nowadays. List them.’

  ‘A cure for Covid,’ I yawn. ‘At the very least.’

  ‘Be serious. I’m not in the mood for frivolity.’

  ‘A public profile,’ I suggest. ‘Facebook, Twitter and the rest.’

  ‘It has none of them. I can’t find a single link. Go on. What else?’

  ‘Brochures? Conventional advertising. Newspapers, magazines.’

  ‘Nope. Not a bit. Not so much as a circular or a poster. Keep going.’

  ‘Has it got a phone?’

  Jon doesn’t laugh.

  ‘Not listed,’ he says.

  I struggle to think of any more, my limited understanding of marketing having exhausted itself. Jon obviously reads the runes and helps me out.

  ‘It might as well not exist. It isn’t even registered as a charity. It’s just a privately owned place, to which the owners invite those deemed worthy of therapeutic excellence. Think of it as a select members-only club for the obsessively private.’

  ‘Who owns it?’ I ask.

  ‘It was derelict for over a decade before someone bought it out of the blue four years ago. A woman whose name should ring a bell or two. Your old school friend, Sandra Buchan.’

  It rings as many bells as the 1812 Overture, with added cannons.

  ‘I knew her parents left her a stack of cash, but a place that size?’

  ‘It was more than a stack. The parents inherited a shedload of money from the paternal grandfather. They bought the big house of her childhood, made some excellent investments, and her father, Jack Buchan, used the rest to fund his acting and directing career. Your friend Sandra is extremely well off. At least, well off by Sefton standards, before you think Jeff Bezos.’

  I can hear Jon’s self-congratulatory tone ripple through the phone.

  ‘She got quite an inheritance for a fifteen-year-old,’ he says. ‘The benefit of being an only child, I suppose. Personally, I’ll get a quarter share in a three-bed semi, but I mustn’t sound envious. Most of the time, I prefer my parents around, and too much money goes against the socialist grain. It must’ve been tough on someone her age, though. Losing both parents like that.’