A Traitor to His Blood Read online

  Also by M.P. Wright

  Heartman

  All Through the Night

  Restless Coffins

  A Sinner’s Prayer

  First published in 2021

  by Black & White Publishing Ltd

  Nautical House, 104 Commercial Street

  Edinburgh, EH6 6NF

  www.blackandwhitepublishing.com

  This electronic edition published in 2021

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 339 5

  eISBN: 978 1 78530 347 0

  Copyright © M.P. Wright 2021

  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

  For Jen, Enya and Neve.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Epilogue

  Thank You

  PROLOGUE

  Every night, as the curtain of dusk mantles the hours of light, I tell myself that I’ll have a quiet evening at home. It’s a tacit incantation, which is as much habit and superstition as it is a silent utterance of intention.

  Home these days is 44 Banner Road in the heart of St Pauls, Bristol, an inner suburb of the city that I’ve been part of, on and off, for the better part of fifteen years. A red-brick, two-up, two-down Victorian-built tenement is where the peace is. The house, once the rented abode of my late aunt Pearl and uncle Gabe, offers the kind of tranquillity and peace of mind that in the past has long eluded me.

  Most evenings, after I’ve fixed supper, I draw the curtains, kick off my shoes, perhaps pour myself a couple of fingers of rum and allow Otis Redding’s sweet crooning to mask the brawl and chatter of the outside world. But the sanctuary found behind four walls, with its joyous music and the intoxicating properties of strong spirits, can only slake the troubles of the outside world and a man’s inner demons for so long. Sooner or later bad news or some kind of vexation breaches the strongest, most impenetrable of citadels, no matter how high or formidable you build your fortifications; and deep down, I’ve always known my home to be no different.

  I have spent most of my life in rooms like the one I sit in now; modest and unassuming. In my youth I’d moved around like a hermit crab, only settling down after I found the love of a fine woman back on the island of my birth. My first wife, Ellie, created an idyllic home, a beachfront chattel dwelling where we lived with our beautiful daughter, Amelia. But personal tragedy had forced me to leave Barbados long ago.

  I’d made the miserable ten-day journey across the Atlantic Ocean to Southampton in the winter of 1964. I’d set foot on English soil, a disgraced former police officer and widower; my beloved kin murdered; the men responsible for their horrific demise unpunished; my own future far from certain. For years afterwards, other people’s misdeeds and adversities mapped out my own pending fate. I became an unwilling survivor, desolate in a hostile new realm, dealing in the detritus of my fellow man while still burdened with my own sorrow.

  Lost in those dark days, I mourned behind closed doors and worked for every wretch or miscreant that crossed my path.

  In the passing of time, my own grief slowly abated its grip and I found myself lucky enough to be blessed again with the gift of love and the comfort of a warm home. For eight years, my partner Ruth Castle and I shared our lives happily together along with my adoptive niece, Chloe. I gave up the shady world of private investigation and held down a job with the Bristol Bus Company while Ruth continued teaching at the city polytechnic. We lived a quiet and contented life, tucked away in the Gloucestershire countryside. Those halcyon days seem almost ethereal and illusive to me now. As if I had cruelly dreamed them.

  Ruth was taken from me almost eighteen months ago, pancreatic cancer doing its very worst in the blink of an eye. Our previously serene moment in time quickly replaced with sackcloth and ashes. The familiar, unwelcome lament I had carried in my mind for so long after Ellie’s death returned on the day we buried Ruth, a funeral song that still dwells in both daydream and nightmare. Mine to know and grieve upon.

  All the people I met, helped or hurt, all those faces and voices, real or imagined, had remained cloaked and unspeaking while Ruth was alive. When Chloe slept, and I felt alone in the house, the whispers of my past, the beat of sorrow and regret in my blood, the haphazard apprehensions that made me the man I once was, slowly returned. The ‘Duppies’ were out there in the darkness once again, all of them standing at the barricades in my mind waiting for me to join them in their foul perdition. My strong resolve held such miserable entities at bay for most of the time, but on occasion, when I was at my lowest ebb, I believed I may have succumbed to their inhuman desires.

  For the sakes of Chloe’s future happiness and my own sanity we packed our bags, hitched up the wagon and returned to where I knew deep down my niece wanted to be. St Pauls is where she belongs. Where she feels safe. Where she is not ridiculed or mocked because of the colour of her skin or how she speaks, or the way she dresses and braids her hair. It is the place her family have lived, where their memory remains and where her friends still reside.

  It is home.

  It’s also my old haunt.

  I still own the small cottage in Hambrook and I rent it out to a family, whose happiness and wellbeing appears to mirror our own when we inhabited the place. Some of my new neighbours in St Pauls still have their misgivings about the kind of man I once was. Folk with long, unforgiving memories who still like to keep me at arm’s length, the shadow of the Heartman, an unwelcome presence.

  Those I care about believe that I am no longer cheek-by-jowl with the dark side. Trouble is not my business and as the passing years attest, it’s been a long time since I last undertook the kind of favour that would bring me to the attention of the local law or into the clutches of the criminal underworld.

  Occasionally, I ponder on the fact that I have come a long way from my journeyman days operating in a corner of society where life was fought for as much as it was lived.
Such fleeting reveries feel hubristic and mythical. High-hat reminiscences that are undeserving of my previously questionable deeds and actions.

  As twilight slips ever closer, here in this familiar room, in this brooding moment before a crueller world returns in a rush and bears me back into it, I will tell you what I know to be true:

  It is still not yet dark.

  At night I sleep with my old service revolver tucked underneath my pillow.

  And old ghosts return to haunt my sleep and torment my waking days.

  1

  Friday, 14 March 1980

  I was sprawled out on a deep curve of the corner couch, reading my battered copy of King Lear and trying to work up enough enthusiasm and energy to get up off my ass and go make myself something to eat. It was a little after ten and I’d been wrestling with the bard’s blank verse since getting in from work. My day job nowadays finds me sat behind a desk, plying my trade part-time for the Bristol West Indian Friends Association. We’re a kind of Caribbean Citizens Advice Bureau, a free, confidential information group that helps out local folk in dealing with their troubles. Four days a week, you’ll find me sweating blood at the bureau’s office on Wilder Street, up to my neck dealing with the rest of mankind’s woes. Right now, my own personal headache was whether or not I could be bothered to pad into the kitchen to heat up some of yesterday’s brown down chicken stew I’d made the night before. While I’d been lost in Lear’s treacherous world, I’d managed to down a quart bottle of hooch without breaking a sweat and by Act IV my barren insides were starting to rumble for something other than seventy-five per cent proof Barbadian gut rot.

  Chloe had gone out for the evening, sleeping over at my old friend Loretta Harris’s house. It was Mother’s Day weekend, and in many ways, Loretta had become the maternal rock that Chloe needed to cling to after Ruth’s death. My niece had barely known her own mother. My sister, Bernice, had been murdered when Chloe was only six. In the winter of ’67 I’d returned home to Bim to settle an old score as well as conclude my sister’s affairs. In doing so, her orphaned infant daughter became my ward. Over time, as Chloe grew and learned, I became ‘Uncle Joseph’; by the time she was ten or so, she was calling me ‘JT’ like everyone else did; now a few months shy of her sixteenth birthday, she simply refers to me as ‘Pa’.

  The ticking of the wind-up clock and the crackle of the fire’s dying embers were the only sounds in the room. The clock, a much-treasured possession of my aunt Pearl’s, had been sat on the chimneypiece for as long as I could remember. Encased in fine dark wood, its numerals wrought in pale pink metal – copper and tin most probably.

  As I stared at the black hands on the dial, I heard the sound of a car slow down and pull up outside, its tyres squealing against the kerb at the front of the house. The vehicle’s engine died, quickly followed by a car door opening and slamming shut. None of that meant anything to me, but the unmistakable din of heel and toe caps tapping up the path towards my front door quickly got my attention. The brass horsetail knocker had already cracked three times by the time I’d got to my feet, the metallic kickback reverberating into the hall and through the closed door of the living room. By the time I had my hand on the front door handle whoever was on the other side had hammered at it again twice more for good measure.

  One of the things the street teaches you is that if you bend over, you’re bound to get kicked. Whoever was outside wasn’t just passing by. This was no courtesy call. There was serious intent in their hammering, and I muttered something under my breath about an ill wind and immediately regretted doing so. Nothing seems to tempt fate more than mentioning the possibility of something bad happening. I heard myself curse as I put on my meanest expression and yanked open the door.

  A face out of the past, from a long-forgotten era, stared back at me from the porch step. Evison Foster smiled nervously, his arm dropping like a stone at his side. Foster was a tubby, serious-looking guy with deep eyes set under shaggy brows. His broken nose and heavy jaw gave off a vibe of an old-time prize-fighter, but in truth, Evison, who was originally from Antigua, was considered in the community at large to be one of the most devout and gentle souls around.

  He was a slow, lazy-moving fella, whose age I guessed to be around sixty. He had a reputation for being a good, uncomplicated and kind man. But I wouldn’t have called Evison a friend, so his unexpected appearance at such a late hour immediately set me on edge.

  ‘How you doin’, T?’ Evison spoke the ‘J’ in an unvoiced breath. I could never tell if he had an impediment or if the ‘J’ was just too much effort for him.

  ‘Good, Evison. Been a while.’ I stepped onto my front porch, stuck my head five inches or so out into the street and saw he was alone. I edged back inside and set my gaze back on Foster. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Hoping I could get a moment of your time?’ Evison stood awkwardly, his smile revealed crooked, gappy teeth. But they looked strong, like brown and white tree stumps that you’d need dynamite to remove. ‘That’s if it wouldn’t be too much trouble?’

  I held out my hand. ‘You’d better come on in.’

  Evison wiped his feet on the hessian mat and stepped over the threshold into my domain, his eyes adjusting to the hall light as he eyed me up apprehensively. He wore a thick woollen black overcoat, grey slacks and a green cotton shirt with blue flowers on it that was open at the neck. His polished loafers were buffed military style, his polyester strides hitched up high on his portly waist to reveal bright white socks. This impressive, if odd-ball look was topped off with a battered gold Timex watch with a cracked face and a row of clip-on ballpoint pens sticking out of the top pocket of his coat. I noticed he was wearing his shirt outside his trousers to hide his massive paunch and love handles.

  We shook hands. His rough and scarred skin bleached in patches to a whitish, putty-like grey, elsewhere stained darker, by the cleansers and chemicals he used in his work. Evison restored old buildings and, occasionally, churches. One of the few times I’d had a proper conversation with him was around a year or so past when we’d sat in the bar of the Inkerman pub on Grosvenor Road sharing a pint and he began talking about the chapel he was working on: ‘You wouldn’t believe what-all these ole roosts have wrong with ’em. Every’ting on God’s earth looks to be out to destroy ’em. Death watch beetle, the size you’ve never seen. Mould and rot everywhere. Ground settles, trying to crack the walls open, an’ when that don’t work, it moves off someplace else and tries to tear ’em down anyway it can. Amazes me how these old piles manage to stay upright as long as they do. Only the good Lord keeping ’em up, I expect.’

  I knew that whatever Foster wanted with me, it sure as hell had nothing to do with old crypts or crumbling stonework. I gestured with my head towards the living room. ‘You wanna take a seat by the fire?’

  Evison shook his head politely. ‘No, I’ll be just fine here, thanks.’

  I rested against the passage wall and waited for my visitor to start up the conversation. After a few moments of awkward silence, I decided to shift matters on. ‘So, what is it I can do for you, Evison?’

  Evison’s rotund face suddenly tightened. ‘Somebody in need of your professional services, ’T.’

  ‘Then tell ’em to come down and see me at the bureau.’

  ‘Oh, they ain’t looking for that kinda advice.’ Evison hunched his shoulders then pulled out a white handkerchief and dabbed at his bow and lips. ‘This a matter that’s best not discussed in public, if you get my meaning. It’s a thing that’s gonna need some discretion.’

  ‘Been a long time since anyone came knockin’ at my gate door after dark talkin’ ’bout discretion, Evison.’

  Foster gave me a nervous grin, his gaze reluctant to meet my own. ‘Yeah, well like I said, this a kid gloves kinda thing. Needs a sensitive touch. Your name came to mind when I taking contemplation at my church.’

  ‘Huh-huh, is that rig
ht. Where you praising the Lord these days then, Evison?’

  ‘Old King Street Baptist Chapel.’

  I nodded my head. ‘Pastor Walker’s joint, right?’ Evison winced when I referred to his place of worship as a ‘joint’.

  ‘Yeah, me an’ my wife, Carmen, are members o’ Pastor Walker’s flock.’ Foster hesitated for a moment, clearing his throat before continuing. ‘It’s the minister that’s in need of your assistance, if truth be told. Folk say you and him go back a way.’ Evison dithered again, stared down at my linoleum before focusing back in on me ‘And he got the kinda problem only a brother could handle.’

  The ‘brother’ remark was enough to raise my hackles; I should have ushered Evison Foster back out into the street there and then. I knew nothing good was going to come from our conversation or his plea, and yet for some foolish damn reason that I can’t explain, I let the big man keep on standing in my hallway.

  ‘I’ve known Mervyn Walker ’bout as long a time as I’ve known anybody since I’ve been over here. Don’t recall him ever needing my guidance or, for that matter, me asking him for it.’

  Evison straightened, forcing his round shoulders back and his big belly out. He looked up towards the ceiling, his eyes closed. ‘“Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to act.”’ Then his pious bearing quickly evaporated and he opened his eyes and mumbled in hushed tones the words, ‘Proverbs, chapter three, verse twenty-seven.’ He flashed me a righteous beam.

  I pulled myself off the wall, the heat rising across the nape of my neck, my heart going like a bird in flight. ‘I know the scriptures, Evison. I don’t need it reciting to me in my own home if it’s all the same with you.’

  Foster bowed his head in embarrassment, a gesture that immediately made me regret voicing my snappy remark. He shuffled his size elevens from side to side like a scolded schoolboy. Rather than watch him squirm any longer I fired off another question. ‘If the pastor’s in need of my help, why ain’t he here asking for it himself?’