A Sinner's Prayer

  ALSO BY M. P. WRIGHT in the JT Ellington series

  Heartman

  All Through the Night

  Restless Coffins

  First published 2019

  by Black & White Publishing Ltd

  Nautical House, 104 Commercial Street

  Edinburgh, EH6 6NF

  www.blackandwhitepublishing.com

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 273 2 in EPub format

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 229 9 in paperback format

  Copyright © M. P. Wright 2019

  The right of M. P. Wright to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Ebook compilation by Iolaire, Newtonmore

  In memory of Richard ‘Dickie’ Dexter

  and dedicated to Jack Peberdy.

  Two hombres who have kindly blessed me

  with their friendship.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  39.

  40.

  41.

  42.

  43.

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  Carnell Harris was dead.

  In the six years since he’d been murdered, those words had gone through my mind almost every day. Carnell Harris was dead because of me.

  Most nights, my old friend waited for me in my dreams, haunting my sleep, always emerging from the same cold world of Cimmerian shade. His restless spirit would return to inhabit my nocturnal reveries; his wraith-like figure standing motionless at the end of the bed, watching me with unblinking eyes; his dark-skinned face waxy and gaunt, his hair a tangle of snakes, tombstone teeth yellowing and wideset, his sagging cheeks patinaed with grey whiskers that looked as stiff as emery-wheel filings.

  Carnell’s cruel visitations played out the same way each night. I’d hear the faint sound of a music box mechanism click and whirr, followed by a tinkling, distant chime. A familiar tune I remember from the Barbadian home where I grew up. Then, as always, the same words are spoken to me. A command to stir, woken by a voice from my past, a voice of the dead.

  ‘JT, wake up, brutha.’

  I feel a hand shake my shoulder. I’m still a slave to sleep, my body craving rest. I hear a scratchy striking sound and then a brief susurration before smelling the sharp sulfuric odour of a struck match, and then a few moments later the delicious scent of mild floral incense and burning tobacco. I feel the hand touch my shoulder, again followed by a sharp, burning pain awakening inside of me, running through my upper torso and down my shoulder.

  It is always this pain that forces me to open my eyes.

  I can see after a fashion, but my vision isn’t proper yet. I know I’m in my own bedroom but everything around me is hung in a dense white gauze. A hazy, slow-swirling mist of reefer smoke that impairs my sight and continues to confuse my sluggish mind. Carnell’s unwelcome chimera at the foot of my bed is always as clear and present as a Catholic priest preparing to give last rites. The cannabis smoke from the joint he’s holding between yellow-stained fingers begins to waft around him, his face becoming blurred by the thick vapour, his once playful features seeming to move with ugly, sinuous wisps.

  Despite a strong reluctance, I always call out to the all-too-familiar apparition.

  ‘Carnell?’ My voice is hoarse and congested, cracking hard enough that I think my throat will bleed.

  ‘Yeah, JT?’

  I try to rise from the bed but a heavy weight across my chest pins me down against the mattress. I fight against the crushing sense of paralysis and slowly lift my arm a few inches off the bedclothes, finally reaching my unsteady hand out towards my friend. ‘I’m sorry, man. Sorry I let you down.’

  The thick musky stench of marijuana strikes my face like a fist. Carnell leans forward and shakes his head, the whites of his eyes filled with ruptured blood veins. ‘Nah, you din’t let me down, JT. You ain’t sorry either. You let me die. Die out in dat damn cold gutter on ma own.’

  I hear myself begin to plead my innocence but cannot feel my lips moving. ‘I . . . I . . . I didn’t know . . . Please, it’s not my fault. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.’

  The air around me is breathless, so humid and still and devoid of movement that every line of sweat running down my skin underneath the sheets is like the paths of insects scurrying across my hide. Carnell’s mannequinlike head remains perfectly still as he watches me. He puffs on his joint and lets smoke drift from his lips. I feel a pain in my chest like jagged iron twisting its way through tendon and bone. Carnell flips the butt in an arc out into the smog-filled room. ‘Sooner or later, everyone round you dies, JT. They all in hell, everyone you evah loved, all either burnt up or here rotting wid me.’

  My eyes are now fully open, but I still cannot focus on anything other than my dead friend. I feel as if the bed under me is beginning to shake and fall. I begin to panic, struggling against the paralysis that forces me to remain motionless. I turn my face towards Carnell and watch in horror as a wet, crimson stain begins to soak through the middle of his shirt, the cotton fabric gluing to his wet skin. Carnell looks up at me, shock etched across his face; his mouth opens and closes and he cries out, his hand snatching at his shirt, tearing the thin cotton fabric open to reveal a gaping wound in the middle of his stomach. Dark rivulets, the colour of burnt coffee grounds, run through his unsteady fingers, the flow of blood quickening. As I lay inert, I hear it splattering on to the floorboards at the foot of the bed frame.

  Carnell stares back at me, then raises his blood-soaked hands in front of him, his palms upright, his eyes boring into mine before pointing a thick, callused finger down towards my face. ‘This is the suffering you gone an’ caused me, brutha.’

  Carnell grunts then staggers forward through the smoke. I watch him cough and sniff then spit a thick wad of crimson-stained phlegm down on to my bedclothes. His head falls to one side, his mouth snapped shut; I watch his body judder as one hand drops towards his stomach. His face distorts in agony as he clenches at the rolls of dense fat below his belly button with his fingers, kneading at the blood-caked skin around the exit of a huge stab wound. Carnell’s hand reaches into the gaping hole in his guts, his fingers forcing their way inside his bloated abdomen. I try to scream for him to stop, but my muted outcry is lost in the gathering abyss that envelops me. My friend snatches and tears at his insides with frenzied jerks, wrenching at his intestines. Sp
ittle and blood pour from his mouth. Carnell lets out a deep-throated scream as he finally heaves out steaming lengths of his own decaying, grey-tangled bowels. The stink of boiling offal and faecal matter fills my nostrils; I gag and wretch, warm vomit lodged deep inside my gullet. Carnell’s huge body lunges forward, his head sinking to his waist, his frame gripped in a wave of violent fits and spasms. The sound of his wet innards unspooling down on to the floor fills my ears.

  Carnell’s body remains motionless for what seems like an eternity. Powerless to do anything, I await the torment to continue. When he finally raises himself up, I again see the sucking wound, and the torn, soaked cloth of his undershirt, which flutters in the cavity from the release of air and viscera. When he tries to speak, he sounds like a man strangling in his own saliva.

  ‘Dis . . . Dis is fo’ you, bastard!’

  Carnell’s arms spring forward. I see the glistening underbelly of a black serpent curled up among the remains of his guts, which are cradled in his hands. My friend’s fingers splay apart as he throws the snake and steaming entrails on to my chest. Helpless to defend myself, my feet immediately try and kick underneath the sheets, but they feel as if they have been wired together. One of my hands remains locked at my side, the other held up in front of my face like a meaningless, outstretched claw.

  The snake remains still, eyeing me before slithering backwards. I feel the warmth of its coiling body through the sheets. I watch as it sinks down between my legs, its lower half nestling close to my groin. Its bulbous head then rises, its grey tongue darting in and out of its mouth as it savours the scent of my fear. The serpent’s mouth opens to reveal huge fangs, its head and neck barely moving. I can hear my heart beating savagely inside my head as the creature lunges towards my face.

  Before the viper strikes, the room becomes as bright and shattering to my eyes as a phosphorous shell exploding. Carnell and the snake both burst into flame like huge candles. Their bodies glow with the cool white brilliance of a pistol’s flare. A huge fire erupts, the sound like the whistle of super-heated air cracking through brick, metal and wood, followed by the resinous popping of everything around me. It scorches all it touches – skin, organ, bone and soul.

  In the glare of the maelstrom, for the briefest of moments, I see the faint images of the people I have loved standing in the enraged heat shimmer. Their quivering voices call out to me to join them in their everlasting perdition. Their arms outstretched, blistered hands open, their charred fingers spread wide, awaiting my body to cradle.

  I reach out my own hand to join them. Closing my eyes, I feel myself being dragged from my bed and lifted across the flaming room towards them. As I am drawn closer, I feel my skin welt, sear and pustule as the blaze wraps itself around me. I submit to the inevitable, open my mouth, suck in the tinder, sparks and smoke then stretch out my arms and feel myself drawn into the hellfire. As the heat pierces every part of my body, I am forced to open my eyes, but as I do, the burning and the pain subside. I stand in a realm of pitch darkness, the howling conflagration no more. As the veil of blackness slowly rescinds, I find myself greeted by the fragile, unearthly forms of my deceased wife, children and sister. I begin to sob uncontrollably, the relief and joy immeasurable. But as we embrace, my family are violently torn from my arms, and I watch as they disappear into an unknown ether as quickly as they appeared.

  I bellow out their names as I fall to my knees and claw at the charred earth with my fingers. I look up and, through tear-soaked eyes, I face a tenebrous void, a chasm of misery, one I know is of my own making.

  1

  Friday, 13 August 1971

  I woke with a jolt, the sheets twisted across my chest, in almost complete darkness. My breath was ballooning in my chest, my naked body sweating. At first, I didn’t know where I was. I reached over and turned on the lamp on the bedside table, picked up my watch and brought it close to my face. I snapped my eyes shut briefly then opened them and waited for the world to come back into focus before I looked at the time.

  A strip of dawn light showed through a crack in the curtains. I sat up slowly, my head bent down, my jaw clenched tight to keep it from shaking. I threw off the damp sheets and swung my clammy legs out of bed, staring down at the floorboards before getting to my feet. Dragging my ass off the mattress and getting upright felt worse than swimming to the surface in a cesspool full of pus. The effort made my stomach lurch. I got my balance then staggered out of the bedroom and down the hall to the bathroom, where I splashed my face with water, hoping to clear my head. It was like I’d been poisoned. I avoided the mirror, my eyes locked on the edges of the white porcelain washbasin and waited until the grisly nightmare dissolved from inside my head.

  Despite the passing of the years, most mornings I found myself locked in the past, reflecting on Carnell’s brutal demise and feeling like hell. It wasn’t a great way to start the day. My nightmares were a product of guilt and conscience. The guilt refused to release me from its ugly grip, hanging invisibly over my head like a perverse crown of thorns. I secretly lived with my inner tormentors, only allowing them to besiege me while I slept.

  I threw off my ugly thoughts and went back to the bedroom, pulled on a pair of trousers and my vest, then made my way down to the kitchen. I filled the battered kettle, lit the gas, heaped three full spoons of Nescafé Blend 37 into my mug and waited for the water to boil. I couldn’t start my working day without at least two cups of strong coffee inside of me. The caffeine fired me up to face another day at work and helped settle my frayed nerves.

  I sat down next to the kitchen window and looked out on the poky rear garden at the back of the terraced house I now rented on Morgan Street in St Pauls. It was my fourth summer living in the two-up two-down, which was situated right in the heart of our tight-knit black community, and much had changed in my life. Four years ago, I’d been living like a hermit on a narrow beam Dutch barge on Cumberland Basin, close to the port and Bristol city centre. I’d been eking out a meagre living as an off-the-books private detective. That dangerous life was long behind me now, though in truth, part of me regretted giving up such an unusual profession. Although I’d never admitted it to anyone, I’d secretly enjoyed trouble knocking on my door. Living in the shadows and playing the devil at his own game.

  There’d never been a cat in hell’s chance of returning to my job as a police officer once I’d settled here in Britain. The lofty position I once held so proudly back home on Barbados was denied me from the day I stepped off the boat in 1964. Now in the second year of a new decade, and at the age of forty-eight, I was too damn old to join up again and walk the beat. That and the colour of my skin had prohibited me from getting a foot in the front door at Trinity Road police station to apply for the force when I’d first arrived.

  Nowadays, the menial job I held down working as an assistant school caretaker put a roof over my head and food on the table.

  Four years ago, I made the decision to trade in the world of lies and deceit, and since then I’d moved from one dead-end job to another – unsettled, unsatisfied, unhappy. I’d been on the payroll at Parson Street Primary School in Bedminster, on the other side of the city, this past eighteen months. The long hours of graft that I put in were in no way comparable to the detective work I’d once undertaken. Sticking my nose into other folks’ dirty business had never been a barrel of laughs, but neither was sticking my arm down the U-bend of a boys’ toilet to unblock it, or tipping out the ashtrays in the teachers’ staff room at the end of the day. On the plus side, I was keeping my head above water financially and my name out of trouble with the law. My caretaker life brought forth little excitement, few mysteries and certainly no dead bodies. It was a safe form of occupation, but one that, in truth, I hated doing and that at times made me feel little better than a sharecropper.

  I sank the last of my coffee, raised myself up out of my seat and, with little enthusiasm to face another day sweeping floors, walked over to the sink and refilled the kettle. While it stoked it
self up, I went to get myself ready, washing and shaving before I dressed in a blue flannel shirt, navy necktie and my denim overalls. While I was tying my shoes, I heard my six-year-old adopted niece, Chloe, waking noisily in the tiny box room adjacent to my own. I listened as she clambered out of bed, her little feet plodding along the bare boards outside in the hall. I waited for her to stick her head around the door frame and beam her usual wide smile at me. It was a tradition she’d kept up each morning for as long as I could remember. A rhythm to our lives, more satisfying than good music.

  ‘I dreamed, Joseph,’ Chloe said, then she stared off into space, lost for a moment as she slowly began to walk towards me. I sat back on my bed, held out my arms and caught her by the waist, lifting her on to my knee.

  ‘You did. What about, kidda?’

  ‘I dreamed there was a scary man in the house last night.’

  A burning sensation struck at my belly and my brow creased. ‘What kind of man?’

  Chloe raised the palms of her hands and opened her eyes wide to say she didn’t know. ‘I didn’t see him, just heard him.’

  ‘What’d he sound like?’

  ‘Like he was screaming.’

  ‘Screaming? I didn’t hear no screaming last night,’ I lied.

  I could feel Chloe’s eyes on the side of my face. She reached out and touched my cheek with her palm.

  ‘Joseph?’

  ‘Yeah?’ I lowered my head and smiled at her.

  ‘There ain’t no ghosts in this house, is there?’

  I shook my head and listened as her stomach rumbled against my chest. ‘Only strange noises in this old place come from your empty belly, child.’

  Chloe laughed and I pressed her against me tightly. She was the daughter of my late sister, Bernice, but still I loved her as if she were my own, so much so that at times it hurt. I looked down at my watch over the top of her head.