David Peace - 1974

“Fuck off. This is serious.”

“Of course it’s fucking serious, Eddie. What did you think it was? Barry’s fucking dead and I couldn’t even go to his funeral cos I’m too fucking frightened.”

“You’re a lying little prick,” I hissed and hung up.

Paula Garland was still staring at me.

Me, the circles in my head.

“Eddie?”

I stood up, the leather sofa stinging the backs of my bare legs.

“Who was that?”

“No-one,” I said, pushing past her up the stairs.

“You can’t keep doing this to me,” she shouted after me.

I went into the bedroom and took a painkiller from my jacket pocket.

“You can’t keep cutting me out like this,” she said, coming up the stairs.

I picked up my trousers and put them on.

Paula Garland was standing in the bedroom doorway. “It’s my little girl that’s dead, my husband that killed himself, my brother that’s gone.”

I was struggling with the buttons of my shirt.

“You chose to get involved with this whole fucking bloody mess,” she whispered, tears falling on to the bedroom carpet.

My shirt buttons still undone, I put on my jacket.

“No-one made you.”

I pushed a dirty grey bandaged fist into her face and said, “What about this? What do you think this is?”

“The best thing that ever happened to you.”

“You shouldn’t have said that.”

“Why? What you going to do?”

We were stood in the doorway at the top of the stairs, sur rounded by silence and night, staring at each other.

“But you don’t care, do you Eddie?”

“Fuck off,” I cursed, down the stairs and out the door.

“You don’t really fucking care, do you?”

Dawn on Friday 20 December 1974.

Hate Week.

Awake on the floor of Room 27, covered in the ripped-up snow of a hundred sheets of red penned lists.

Lists, I’d been writing lists since I’d left Paula’s. A big fat red felt-tip pen in my left hand, circles in my head, scrawling illegible lists across the backs of sheets of wallpaper.

Lists of names.

Lists of dates.

Lists of places.

Lists of girls.

Lists of boys.

Lists of the corrupt, the corrupted, and the corruptible.

Lists of the police.

Lists of the witnesses.

Lists of the families.

Lists of the missing.

Lists of the accused.

Lists of the dead.

I was drowning in lists, drowning in information.

About to write a list of journalists, but tearing the whole fucking lot into confetti, cutting my left hand and numbing my right.

DON’T TELL ME I DON’T FUCKING CARE.

On my back, thinking of lists of the women I’d fucked.

Dawn on Friday 20 December 1974.

Hate Week.

Bringing the pain.

· AM in the long-stay car park, Westgate Station, Wakefield.

I sat frozen in the Viva, watching a dark purple Rover 2000 pull into the car park, a single black and white photograph in a manila envelope beside me.

The Rover parked in the furthest space from the entrance.

I sat and let him wait through the radio news, through the IRA ceasefire, through Michael John Myshkin’s continuing efforts to help the police with their enquiries, through sightings of Mr John Stonehouse MP in Cuba, and through Reggie Bosan-quet’s failing marriage.

No-one moved inside the Rover.

I lit another fucking cigarette and, just to show him who was the fucking boss, I sat through Petula’s Little Drummer Boy .

The Rover’s engine started up.

I stuffed the photograph inside my jacket pocket, pressed record on the Philips Pocket Memo, and opened the door.

The Rover’s engine went dead as I approached through the grey light.

I tapped on the glass of the passenger door and opened it.

I glanced at the empty back seat and got in, shutting the door.

“Just look straight ahead, Councillor.”

The car was warm and expensive and smelt of dogs.

“What do you want?” William Shaw sounded neither angry nor afraid, just resigned.

I was staring straight ahead too, trying not to look at the thin grey figure of respectability, his driving gloves limply clutching the steering wheel of a parked car.

“I asked you what you want,” he said, glancing at me.

“Keep looking straight ahead, Councillor,” I said, taking the creased photograph out of my pocket and putting it on the dash board in front of him.

With one glove Councillor William Shaw picked up the photograph of BJ sucking his cock.

“I’m sorry, it’s a bit bent,” I smiled.

Shaw tossed the photograph on to the floor by my feet. “This doesn’t prove anything.”

“Who says I’m trying to prove anything?” I said and picked up the photograph.

“It could be anyone.”

“It could be. But it’s not, is it?”

“So what do you want?”

I leant forward and pushed in the cigarette lighter below the car radio.

“ Thai man in the photograph, how many times have you met him?”

“Why? Why do you want to know that?”

“How many times?” I repeated.

Shaw tightened his gloves around the steering wheel. “Three or four times.”

The lighter popped out and Shaw flinched.

“Ten times. Maybe more.”

I put a cigarette to my lips and lit it, thanking God again for helping out a one-armed man.

“How did you meet him?”

The Councillor closed his eyes and said, “He introduced himself.”

“Where? When?”

“At some bar in London.”

“London?”

“Some Local Government conference in August.”

They set you up, I was thinking, they fucking set you up Councillor.

“And then you met him again up here?”

Councillor William Shaw nodded.

“And he’s been blackmailing you?”

Another nod.

“How much?”

“Who are you?”

I stared out across the long-stay car park, the station announcements echoing over the empty cars.

“How much have you given him?”

“A couple of thousand.”

“What did he say?”

Shaw sighed, “He said it was for an operation.”

I stubbed out the cigarette. “Did he mention anyone else?”

“He said there were men who wanted to hurt me and he could protect me.”

I looked at the black dashboard, afraid to look at Shaw again.

“Who?”

“No names.”

“He say why they wanted to hurt you?”

“He didn’t have to.”

“Tell me.”

The Councillor let go of the steering wheel, looking round. “First you tell me who the bloody hell you are.”

I turned quickly, pushing the photograph hard into his face, forcing his right cheek against the glass of the driver’s door.

I didn’t let go, pressing the photograph harder into his face, whispering into the Councillor’s ear, “I’m a man who can hurt you very fucking quickly and very fucking now, if you don’t stop whining and start answering my fucking questions.”

Councillor William Shaw was banging his hands against the tops of his thighs in surrender.

“Now you tell me, you fucking puff.”

I let the photograph fall and sat back.

Shaw leant forward over the steering wheel, rubbing both sides of his face between his gloves, tears and veins in his eyes.

After almost a minute, he said, “What do you want to know?”

Far away on the other side of the car park I could see a small local train crawl into Westgate Station, dumping its tiny passengers on the cold platform.

I closed my eyes and said, “I need to know why they want to blackmail you.”

“You know,” sniffed Shaw, sitting back in his seat.

I turned sharply, slapping him once across the cheek. “Just fucking say it!”