Resolution (The CRIME series), page 9
They don’t match the tunnel. But Cardingworth could be lying. He has to be sure. How can he be sure?
As Angela tops up the grateful Cardingworth’s drink, Lennox gets on his phone to check the Hearts score. Then he notes they have a Wednesday-night fixture at Livingston.
Days Six and Seven
17
Livingston 5, Heart of Midlothian 0
— JESUS. FUCKING. CUNTYBAWS. CHRIST … a mouth opens wide in a salt-and-pepper buzz cut granite skull, fastened on broad shoulders by thick, corded cables of neck. Others in the soulless, sparsely populated, new-build Lego-style stadium glance to the barrel-chested, bow-legged man; chronically underdressed in a black Harrington. Probably thinking, like the recipient of Les Brodie’s anguished moan, Ray Lennox, still benumbed in overcoat and scarf, that you could punch that head all night long, only pulping your own knuckles. In the freezing cold at this Livingston arena, name-changed so many times that nobody cares what it’s called, if they ever did in the first place, within a fleeting fifteen-minute meltdown for the away side, the home team’s fifth goal has gone in, further deadening the visiting Hearts fans. A sending-off had changed the game, but this bizarre capitulation is something else for a club universally known as short on footballing skill but seldom lacking in application. — Makin they cunts look like fuckin Real Madrid!
Lennox sees that Les’s status as a leading member of the old Hearts mob means his aggressive utterances can still occasion ripples of anxiety among his own support. Two anoraks recoil, while a father with his young son smiles tightly in nervous indulgence. Of course, Les’s fighting days are long gone, and a few sneering curses aside, he is a man at peace with himself.
Even as cooling grease from his fatty pie congeals on his fingers, lips, chin and cheeks, Lennox draws a perverse delight from proceedings. It feels great not to be a cop, freed from the burden of judging petty misdemeanours. Inhabiting a normal world of engagement and friendship with civilians. Always circumspect about his police background, Lennox is aware that in working-class Scotland ‘ex-cop’ often sounds like ‘ex-paedophile’. The subtext: these cunts never change. His rebonding with Les, however, is about more than his altered employment status.
Both men were resistant to discourse on the trauma of their childhood. Les had let it be known that he had moved on from the tunnel, and that his wife and family had long supplanted it as the defining force in his life. Lennox had taken a more protracted journey to get to that vantage point where he could trust himself around his boyhood friend, to retain the vow of silence on this matter. Leaving the force has been good for him. The remorseless hunting of sex offenders, abetted by copious alcohol and cocaine usage, had a hugely depolarising effect on his brain. Since then, Ray Lennox has been healing. Everything about him was getting better.
Now this truce with himself and the world at large has been shattered by the presence of the monster.
But it can’t be Cardingworth.
He considers his recent discussion with Elaine Rodman. Has his memory, always tenuous and distorted through poring over thousands of Sex Offenders Register mugshots down the years, now become a tool rendered useless? Were its filters so hopelessly eroded that continued indulgence of this fixation would only propel him into madness? His track record of intoxicant-fuelled obsession leading to mental breakdown is well established. He can’t go there again.
But he still has to be sure.
Les has to know.
A twinge insinuates itself in his knee, his long leg pressing against the seat in front of him. Plenty of space in the stadium, but Les had opted to go to a zone stuffed with bodies. Lennox wishes he’d sat by a gangway instead of penned in like this. Such confinement oppresses him. The cold air seems to thicken and gather mass, stiffening his lungs. He turns to Les: — How do you fancy a trip to Brighton? They’ve got Liverpool at home this weekend.
— I’d love tae, mate, Les shivers in his thin jacket, — but wi this redundancy pish ah’m a self-employed contractor these days. The shekels are gaunny be tight till ah get some work oan the books.
— Ah ken how that yin feels, Lennox nods in support. — But ah’m daein okay now. Let me treat ye tae an easyJet cheapo down tae Gatwick. Stay at mine and I’ll get the match tickets buckshee fae a ma— he hesitates, — a gadge ah know. All you’ll need is beer money. You’d spend that up here in Luckies anyway!
— That’s true enough, Les concedes. — Looks like you’ve just made ays an offer ah cannae refuse. Thanks, Raymie, lookin forward tae it. Les’s smile changes him from grizzly to teddy bear, and he sings a few appreciative bars of ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’.
They head back into Edinburgh in Les’s rusty old van, which grates and wheezes at every gear change. Dropping Lennox outside his sister Jackie’s house, his friend asks, — Everything okay wi you, mate?
— Sound. Ray Lennox forces a smile. He’s just thinking of Carmel when she rings. He nods to Les with a shrug and hits the green.
— Ray, I owe you an apology. Ange and I got a little folie à deux about this swinging nonsense.
— Sound … Can’t really talk as I’m with my mate Les, up in Edinburgh. He’s coming down next weekend.
— Excellent … be nice to meet him. We should all have dinner. No talk of swinging, honestly!
— That’s a relief … sounds good.
— Yes, you helped me dodge a bullet. On level-headed reflection it would have been massively inappropriate to get involved in that sort of thing with someone I’m in a business relationship with. Mathew, she stresses, as if there was doubt. — Incredibly compromising for us both. Ange and I got very childish. Anyway, I appreciate your experienced head on this matter.
— No worries.
— Like I want your experienced head on other matters, she says in her low yawn of a voice. — Get back south, bold Lennox!
— Will do, and he looks at Les. Fancies that if he hadn’t been in the van he might have said: I love you. What a mistake that would have been, with everything that’s going on. — See you soon.
— Look forward to it, honey, she says, and rings off.
He turns to Les, a little coy. — Got a new bird down there. I’m sure you’ll meet her.
— Ride?
Lennox feels his lips tighten. — Fit as a butcher’s dug, he gleefully concedes.
— Young thing?
— Younger than us: that’s for sure. But a professional woman, and he slides open the vehicle’s door.
— What, a hooker?
— Fuck off, there’s other professions women find themselves in!
— No the yins ah meet for some reason, Les laughs.
Lennox grins, shakes his head and steps out into the cold air. — I’ll be in touch aboot the weekend, and he slams the van door shut, watching Les silently mouth sound.
Getting indoors to the welcome blast of central heating, he finds Jackie and Avril sitting up, enjoying a glass of wine. Refusing his sister’s offer of a drink, Lennox contemplates his mother, instantly swamped by a familiar, bitter sense of betrayal. How she never comforted him, that time he came back, wheeling his bike, his knees and cheek scraped from being impacted into that dirt in the tunnel.
Because your mother was distracted by the neighbour she was fucking.
The thought seems to intrude, as if placed there by someone else. He raises his hand to brush a pulse in his cheek. Just a nervous tic. How it wounded him to learn of the long-standing infidelity. Quiet and introverted John Lennox, tall and handsome, matching the lovely Avril Pettigrew in looks, but never her outgoing and vivacious temperament. Emasculated by his heart condition: the blood-thinning pills that kept him alive.
Catching her son’s gaze, Avril glimpses the judging appraisal that’s haunted her for years. Ray Lennox, in turn, tries to fathom his stinging antipathy to his mother.
You don’t hate her. She just disappointed you. She knows what she’s done.
To his scathing glance, his mother’s militant lack of concession to the ravages of age has rendered her grotesque; red warpaint adorns cat’s-arsehole lips, mascara highlights baggy eyes riven with tension at the rapidly changing world unfolding in front of them, thick foundation makes a crumpled skin look blistered like cheap paint on a park bench, and a tight dress highlights a body long sagged into shapelessness. — You’ll have a wee drink wi your auld mother, Avril requests in snide, manipulative plea.
— No, I’m fine, thanks. Early flight the morn for work.
Avril seems to frame then discard a sentence in favour of, — So, how’s my wee Stuart getting on down there?
He’s shagging some dipstick.
— Seems to be okay.
— It’ll be a good move for him, Jackie declares, as Lennox crumbles internally. All parties now seem to assume that Stuart’s current residential status is to be a permanent arrangement.
He’s shagging some dipstick and he’s back on the pish.
— He’s no drinking again, is he, Raymond? Avril asks. — You’ve got to keep him in check.
Fuck you. You’re his mother, not me.
— He’s a big boy. He can do what he wants.
Jackie nods in agreement. — It doesn’t work that way, Mum. Stuart has to take responsibility for his own recovery. Is he drinking again, Ray?
— Fuck knows, Lennox snaps irritably, as Jackie recoils, while Avril bristles in a strange vindication. — Look, he comes and goes. I have a life of my own, and he shakes his head emphatically. — I’m not babysitting him. He does seem to have a girlfriend already.
— Who’s this then? Hope it’s no some slut, Avril scorns. It seems as if she knows nothing of Stuart’s homosexual past, or at least doesn’t care to acknowledge it.
That’s your way. Denial. And YOU are the fucking slut! You were banging that cunt Jock Allardyce for years when your husband was sick and dying!
— Seems a nice person, Lennox says. — Right, ladies, I’m going to hit the hay, and he rises and pecks both women on the cheek.
Avril suddenly stands up and wraps her thin arms around him. She is surprisingly strong. — C’mere till ah git a hug oot ay ma laddie …
This was what you wanted when you came back from the tunnel. How could she not have been like that back then?
She holds him for a full eight seconds before relinquishing her grip. Only the last four are mortifying.
And he still can’t bring himself to ask her about the picture.
Day Eight
18
Seven Dials
Ray Lennox returns to Brighton via the early flight and the now normally functioning Gatwick Express. Instead of going directly to his Horsham Security Solutions offices in Seven Dials, Lennox opts to take a circuitous route, meandering to better acquaint himself with a part of town he’s only sparse experience of. Hastily cutting through the rickety maze of bland construction at the back end of the station, he descends a set of steps, enjoying the blue sky and a defiant sun’s lick on his face through the gelid air.
The giant railway bridge looms ahead. Passes under it. Immediately bereft of illumination and heat. Plunged into dark, wet gloom. Surrounded by damp, weeping stone. Filthy rubbish and teeming vermin. A familiar pressure insinuates on his chest. His breathing ragged.
Lennox pushes his lungs open, focuses on the light ahead, mouths a silent fuck you as he steps once more into radiance. Pressing on up the hill, he lets the small triumph invigorate him. On arriving at his workplace, he jauntily mounts the steps from street level, using his key to open the heavy front door.
From the hallway, he notes the ceiling light bulb is missing; it dims things somewhat, though he sees the entrance to the company offices is ajar. This is not the usual practice.
He stops, listens for sounds.
Nothing.
He doesn’t touch the door, but steps tentatively inside. There’s no sign of Ria in the reception area, but he immediately senses another presence.
The soft screech of a metal filing cabinet sliding shut.
From behind the support pillar, a shadow spills out across the carpet tiles.
Lennox feels his fists ball as he shouts, — Hello!
A young man, the one he saw outside before, steps out and issues a surly nod. Lennox fights every instinct to ask: who the fuck are you and what the fuck are you doing in here? Instead, settles for an official, — Can I help you?
On closer scrutiny the man is older than he first thought, perhaps pushing thirty. Piercing cobalt-blue eyes and dark good looks support his cocky assurance. Something in his face offers Lennox recognition: not in the obvious way of Cardingworth, but still inciting a disconcerting burn. The intruder is about to find his voice when Ria comes in, following him, nervously pushing her hair back, face flushed in embarrassment. — Oh, Ray, this is Chris. He just came round to drop something off for me.
— Hi, Lennox manages to cough out.
— Alright, Chris nods, evaluating him with a gap-toothed grin. — I’d uhm … best be going, and as he slowly walks out the door, he trains a glare on Ria. It’s tyrannous enough to make her turn away, rapidly blinking.
Lennox senses that she wants to say something, but has registered his anger at the presence of the young man in their workplace. Aware his patience is depleted by his own dramas swimming through his head, he’s disinclined to lose his temper at her for admitting this guy. Sucks down his disquiet. Heads into his office, pulling the door shut behind him.
Switching on his computer, Lennox checks his emails. Nothing yet from Notman, so he fires up a search engine and types in ‘Mathew Cardingworth’.
A forest of links immediately manifests on the screen. On opening them, it’s the photographs, particularly one, which skewer him. The young Cardingworth looks out at him, hair slicked back, a piercing stare and smug, full lips, as he sits in a chair, chin resting on his fist.
Ray Lennox still can’t breathe for a full five seconds.
It’s him. He was there.
His fingers exert pressure on the mouse in his hand. He hears it start to crack.
Which one was he?
Takes a snatched gulp of air.
Stares at the picture, the gleaming hair, the self-satisfied, arrogant stare. Feels his neck burn red. Thinks of the killers he’s studied down the years, men guilty of far more heinous crimes than Cardingworth. Permits the cop in him to surface. Detaching. Abstracting. His hand relaxing on the mouse as it squeaks in gratitude.
He’s just a man. Down you must take them; then you can break them.
As Lennox diligently works through the magazine profiles and articles from trade journals, a composite of Cardingworth slowly emerges. The early days yield scant internet information; he needs to rely on sycophantic business depictions, where Cardingworth, like many of that ilk, presents as a self-aggrandising unreliable narrator.
‘I suppose I was always different, perhaps marked out by this burning desire to succeed,’ says Mathew Cardingworth. He may be a council estate lad, but projecting an endearing serenity, Cardingworth is no bustling barrow boy on the make. But in this underlying air of calm, one senses something of the swan about him, gliding imperiously on the surface, but paddling frantically just out of sight. ‘As they say, you have to keep on keeping on.’
The story unfolds of a bright scholarship boy from a working-class home on Brighton’s notorious Whitehawk estate, who broke from the feral pack of his street peers to head up to London and study chemical engineering. A tough transition for many: but not so Mathew Cardingworth, dynamic and entrepreneurial from the start. Injured in a Tube train derailment, which resulted in a double fracture of his wrist, the Imperial College undergraduate successfully turned setback into opportunity, pursuing a compensation claim with London Transport. With the £3,000 he was awarded, Cardingworth made a deposit on a flat in Camden Town.
‘I shouldn’t have qualified for a mortgage as a student on a full grant and scholarship, but I told a little white lie about my employment status and claimed that my part-time job as a bookmaker’s claim settler was in fact full-time and permanent. So, stick me in the naughty corner, but it was the best fib I ever told. I was off,’ Mathew Cardingworth beams, though appearing rather scandalised at his own transgression.
He went on to sell the flat eighteen months later, turning a handsome profit. Cardingworth, though, was never interested in the quick buck. Investing in bars and nightclubs, he rebranded tired establishments into the stylish emporiums that enabled him to slip comfortably into the Blairite Cool Britannia zeitgeist. The land and property development deals increased in scale, but in an era littered with casualties who kept gambling till they lost, Cardingworth, restrained, intelligent and strategic in his investments, seems to have written a neoliberal-era playbook for social mobility and sustained success.
The first thing Lennox notices in those profiles, apart from the fact that he detests their authors, is that Cardingworth, as effusive as he is about everything else, ensures that relationships and romance are a closed book.
‘The whole purpose of having a private life is to have a private life.’
The second big takeaway, as the clock runs down and Ria enters with a mug of tea and a sandwich, placing them gingerly beside him before vanishing, is that absolutely nothing ties Cardingworth to the tunnel in Colinton Dell in the summer of 1981. What would an undergraduate chemical engineering student from Imperial College be doing there, with those two shadowy, older men? Were they older? Some sense of them, opaque, ethereal, flitting in and out of his consciousness, tells him that it’s so. If this is the case, Cardingworth’s connection with them makes absolutely no sense.
The business portfolio outliers catch Lennox’s attention. An investment in Carmel’s research establishment is understandable, given Cardingworth’s own science background: a way of keeping a toehold in a world he seemed destined for before his moneymaking drive took over.
