Dead Watch Read online

  Matthew disappeared a year later, and it was only through some of the boys on the football team that Harrison found out he was living in a squat in Manchester. How they found out, he had no idea. He should have gone up there and dragged him home kicking and screaming, if necessary, anything to prevent what was inevitably going to happen, but he didn’t. Despite Janet’s pleas, he didn’t get involved. Matthew was a grown man now, Harrison would tell her, it was up to him to realise his mistakes and rectify them. But that was the problem with drugs, as Harrison soon found out. They didn’t allow you to take a step back from the mess of a situation you were in and decide the best remedy. They dragged you in and ate you up until there was nothing left of you.

  The police had found Matthew’s body in another squat nearly a year after he’d left home. They said he had probably been there for at least a fortnight before anyone discovered him. Neither Harrison nor Janet could bring themselves to identify his body; his poor aunty Bev was given that task. Losing a child was the worst thing that could happen to any parent, and even though a part of Harrison died along with his son, he knew he had to keep going for the sake of his wife. He also threw himself into his union work with more vigour than ever. His guilt wouldn’t allow him to stop fighting.

  Janet hadn’t managed to move on quite so well. She was devastated by what had happened and had never got over it. The depression that took over the once happy-go-lucky woman was paralysing. Some days, she could still resemble her old self, but more often than not, it was an achievement just to drag herself out of bed. She was lucky if she made it out of the house once a week. Harrison blamed himself for everything that had happened, and Janet had made it clear she blamed him too. If he were a real man, she had told him many times, he would have done everything in his power to stop his boy from dying. There was nothing he could say to that; he agreed with every word she said.

  As he thought about his son, Harrison became aware of the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs. It was almost one o’clock when she peered into the living room, which was not bad going for her. Some days, she wouldn’t surface until four.

  ‘Hi, love,’ he said. ‘You hungry?’

  The woman was attractive but looked like she’d had all the colour and life sucked out of her. Her skin was pale, and her eyes had sunken into her darkened sockets. Janet’s grey hair was bedraggled like she’d just got out of bed, which she had, and the dressing gown she was wearing looked like it hadn’t been washed for a very long time. Despite his protests, she’d been off her meds for weeks, and when that happened, it was almost impossible to get her out of the downward spiral.

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll leave it ‘til later,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel like eating anything.’

  She looked as if she was trying to match the smile her husband was wearing but quickly gave up on it.

  ‘No problem,’ Harrison said. ‘How about a cup of tea?’

  She shook her head. ‘I think I’ll just go back upstairs.’

  Janet’s second attempt at a smile was even more pitiful, and as quickly as she appeared, she had vanished.

  He went back into the kitchen and stared at the vegetables sitting in their various saucepans. In his head, he did a basic calculation of how many meals it would make and how many he should consider freezing.

  Lenny

  ‘I’ve got to say, Mother,’ Lenny said as he pushed his empty plate into the centre of the table, ‘that was bloody lovely.’ He looked to his daughter sitting next to him. ‘Wasn’t it, Lexi?’

  ‘Yeah, lovely,’ she said. She had barely touched her food. ‘Can I leave the table now?’

  Lenny looked at her like she was crazy, ‘But we haven’t had desserts yet. Your nan has made your favourite. Treacle pudding and custard.

  The girl wrinkled her nose. ‘No, thanks. I’m not hungry.’

  Lenny shook his head. ‘Your mum’s been feeding you up again, hasn’t she?’ He turned his attention from his offspring to his mother. ‘She does this all the time. She knows we eat with you every Sunday. That woman’s such a–’

  ‘Go on, darling,’ his mother cut in, looking at her granddaughter. ‘You go and sit on the sofa. There’s probably a film you like on.’

  ‘Thanks, Nan,’ the girl said.

  By the time she was seated, she already had her phone out and was busy social networking or whatever it was eight-year-old girls did these days.

  ‘Come on, Lee,’ his mother said quietly, but with an edge to her tone. ‘What have I told you about slagging that woman off in front of Lexi? All that’s going to do is make you the bad guy, and that’s just what she wants. The woman may be a…’ She looked to her granddaughter, who was focusing on nothing but her phone, then spelt the word out in a whisper, ‘t-w-a-t, but Lexi doesn’t need to know that.’

  ‘I know, Mum, you’re right, but the girl has been a pain in the arse all day, and it’s that idiot’s fault.’

  After he had picked her up that morning, Lexi had promptly announced that she didn’t want to go to Nanny’s house anymore. Her house was too scruffy, and she didn’t like the area she lived in. It was too common. Moulsecombe might not have been the most prestigious part of Brighton, by any means, and it might have had its share of scumbags, but most of the people who lived there were good, decent folk. And as for calling the house scruffy, that was plain out of order. Old fashion, yes, but not scruffy. His mother kept the place immaculate.

  What a cheek that bitch had, he thought, to poison her daughter’s mind with such bullshit. The woman had no right to judge anyone. She may have forgotten when they met, she was pole-dancing at the club he was bouncing in, but he hadn’t. After she dumped him, she hooked up with the manager of the club and moved into his swanky pad overlooking Hove Park. Since then, she had turned into a first class snob, but living in a posh apartment didn’t change who she was on the inside.

  ‘Lexi’s only eight,’ his mother reminded him. ‘You and your brother were far worse than she’ll ever be when you were that age.’

  ‘Fair point.’

  ‘And speaking of your brother,’ she went on, ‘when are the two of you finally going to sit down together for lunch? I’m fed up with this two-sitting nonsense.’

  For the past ten years, Sunday afternoons had followed the same routine in the Johnson home. Lenny’s brother Paul would turn up at noon with his wife and son. They’d eat lunch, make small talk, do the dishes, then leave at quarter-to-two. Lenny would turn up fifteen minutes later and carry out the exact procedure. His mother would take it in turns to eat with each of her boys. It was Paul’s turn to dine with her on this occasion, and so, she had sat at the table with her cup of tea and watched Lenny devour his dinner and Lexi stare at hers. The sons hadn’t spoken to each other for nearly twice that time due to Paul’s extended stay in prison, and even though they lived in the same town and often saw each other around, they never acknowledged the other’s existence.

  ‘Come on, Mum,’ Lenny said. ‘Let’s not get into all that again. You know it’s never going to happen.’

  ‘Don’t “come on, Mum” me,’ she snapped back at him. ‘Stop thinking about yourselves and think of me for once. You’re both my boys, and I love you so much it hurts. What the two of you are doing is breaking my heart… One day, I won’t be around anymore, and then, you can hate each other as much as you like. But while I’m still alive, I want to see the two of you sitting around this table like you used to when you were kids. Is that really too much to ask?’

  Lenny pulled his chair towards hers and placed his hand on his mother’s shoulder. ‘What’s wrong, Mum? You’re not ill, are you?’

  She placed her hand on his and squeezed it. ‘No, Lee, I’m not ill. I’m just getting old.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Lenny said. ‘You’re not old…not even seventy yet, are you?’

  ‘I will be next year, and when you get to my age, you realise you’ve got far more years behind you than you have in front. Honestly, son, life is too short
for what’s going on between you and Paul, and I tell you something, if anything does drive me to an early grave, it’ll be all the worrying I do about the pair of you.’

  The thought of losing his mother, the only person in his life who didn’t consider him to be a full-time fuck-up, had a profound effect on Lenny. He didn’t like what she was asking him to do, but if meant a stress-free existence for her, then maybe it was worth considering.

  ‘Have you spoken to Paul about it?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And what did he say?’

  The breath she exhaled seemed to deflate her. ‘He said he wasn’t interested.’

  Lenny shrugged. ‘So, there’s your answer.’

  For a second, there was anger in the woman’s eyes, but it soon gave way to a smile. ‘You know something, son, you’re impossible.’

  He did know it too. Over the years, Lenny had lost count of the people who had come to the same conclusion before giving up on him. He had spent much of his twenty-two years as a firefighter being bounced from one Watch station to another. The problem wasn’t his ability at doing the job, as despite what any of his previous managers would have said, the man was bloody good at it. Lenny’s problem, as he had been told on more occasions than he cared to remember, was that he was unmanageable. Only Bob, his previous Watch manager, whose authority he had happily worked under right up until the man retired, had been able to harness him. But now Bob was gone, and he had been dumped with Wesley, who didn’t even know where to begin when it came to Lenny.

  It wasn’t that he refused to follow orders, on the contrary, if he agreed with the instruction he was given, he was more than happy to carry them out. If, however, he felt his orders were preventing him from doing his job to his best ability and achieving the desired outcome, he would think nothing of disregarding them and doing what he felt needed to be done. And that was just the operational side of things. When it came to the mundane day-to-day tasks that needed to be completed around the fire station, he was even less accommodating.

  In Lenny’s mind, he didn’t go to work to suck up to his boss’ boss by making sure they did their quota of Home Safety Visits or keep the station squeaky clean. His job was to fight fires and save lives; all the rest of it was bollocks, and he was happy to point that out when his manager’s viewpoint differed from his own.

  Even though the fire service was regarded as a disciplined service, it was a very different animal from the army or navy, or even the police. While there was a clear rank structure and code of discipline that was expected to be adhered to, unlike the armed forces, it was far more difficult to enforce. It was the only one of the service you could refuse an order if you felt it put your safety in danger. If an over-zealous officer-in-charge tried to send a BA crew into a fire they believed it to be a lost cause and there was a risk of a ceiling collapse, the crew could refuse the order, and nothing could be done about it by management.

  This ability to challenge authority was rarely enforced as, generally, crews trusted their managers. Lenny however, took things to a whole new level. For example, if Lenny’s boss decided they were going to do a school visit during the Bullshit Hour, he had no right to refuse the request. He could, however, make things as awkward for the manager as possible by saying that he needed a shit before they went out, and would then spend the next twenty minutes reading the paper on the toilet as the rest of the crew waited on the appliance. If he was told he had to wear a shirt to an inspection they were carrying out, he would say, in that case, he would have to iron one, and spend the next half an hour fannying around before appearing in a shirt that looked like it had been ironed with a cold pebble.

  When he displayed these levels of dissent, Lenny’s managers had two options. Firstly, they could report him to the station manager, at which point, disciplinary procedures could be started against him. The problem with this was it made the manager look weak in front of the rest of the Watch and that they couldn’t keep their own house in order. So, more often than not, they took the second option and chose to deal with the situation themselves. Knowing they were dealing with an eighteen-stone powerlifting bouncer, they usually chose to let the offence slide.

  That’s not to say he always got his own way. In his time, Lenny had accrued more disciplinary investigations against him than anyone else in the brigade. His shoddy time-keeping, awful sick record and poor attitude towards his superiors had made him public enemy number one at headquarters. The big stumbling block that prevented them from firing him, and it was something that really drove them crazy, was that the only thing to rival the number of investigations Lenny had been involved in, was the number of commendations he had received.

  When he wasn’t being a royal pain in the arse, and when he felt like it, Lenny could be well and truly awesome – a one-man force of nature. He got his first commendation for kicking in the front door of a flat, and instead of waiting for the BA team to appear, he ran into the smoke-filled building and dragged out the elderly resident who had collapsed in the hallway. What he had done was against policy, and if it had gone wrong, he would have been hung out to dry. As it was a success, he was considered a hero and duly recognised by management.

  His second commendation came at a fire alarm activation when he saw a woman get her bag snatched. Rather than get on with his job, he chased the mugger down the street, rugby tackled him, then frog-marched him a mile and a half to the nearest police station while his bemused OIC looked on and wondered how he was going to explain losing one of his crew.

  The most infamous and widely recanted of his commendations also involved him earning himself a written warning at the same time. Red Watch had been called to a persons reported flat fire in Whitehawk, and he and Bodhi were the BA crew. When they got there, the screaming neighbours told them there were two kids inside, and so the pair of them had fought their way through the intense fire on the stairs and found the two of them hiding under the bed holding hands and barely conscious.

  When they got outside, the pissed-up father, who had left the kids at home alone, turned up and gave Bob a load of grief for not rescuing his kids quicker. In seconds, the man was up against the wall with his feet six inches off the ground as Lenny throttled the life out of him. It was only the rest of the crew dragging him off that prevented the man from being a statistic. That incident kind of summed up Lenny’s career in the fire service; acts of heroism sandwiched between moments of stupidity and ill-discipline, but when you considered the start the man had in life, it was a miracle he wasn’t in prison or dead.

  Every town had a rough neighbourhood, and every rough neighbourhood was in possession of a family whose name was enough to send panic into the residents’ hearts. In Brighton’s case, that family was the Johnsons. Lenny’s father, uncles and older cousins were responsible for eighty percent of petty crime in the area when he and his brother were growing up. They were involved in theft, the fencing of stolen goods, small time drug dealing and anything else illegal that made them a few quid. Their dad, Mick, was without doubt the worst of all of them. When the man wasn’t under arrest for one misdemeanour or another, he was either in the pub getting pissed, or at home beating the shit out of his wife. When Lenny and Paul were fourteen and eleven respectively, they foolishly stepped in and tried to stop the man from busting open their mother’s head. The beating they suffered was so severe, neither boy could get out of bed for a week.

  Luckily for them, the old man’s reign of terror came to an end a year later. Amazingly, it was not through his incarceration for the many crimes against society he had committed, but because the randy old fucker found some dumb barmaid at the King’s Head who bought into the bollocks he talked and ran off to Blackpool with him. They found out later that he owed a man even scarier than him an awful lot of money, and this was his solution to the problem.

  With the old man out of the way, life was good at the Johnson house. Lenny’s mother was free to be the mother she wanted to be to her darling boys without worrying ab
out the jealousy of a violent drunk. Paul became Lenny’s surrogate father over the next few years, fiercely guarding his brother from bullies like their old man. Not that he needed to worry; no one in their right mind would go near a Johnson if they valued their health. The old man may have been out of the picture, but there were plenty of other family members around to uphold their reputation.

  Eventually, you could say inevitably, Paul got sucked into the family business when he was reaching the end of his teen years. The boy had no qualifications and no friends in high places to find him a decent job, so knowing that the old “crime does not pay” adage was as phony as a soap opera, he plunged headfirst into the world of illegality. It started with thieving-to-order for his uncles, but before long, the boy was organising his own burglaries and quickly discovered he had a real knack for it.

  When things went up a level and he started breaking into shops and warehouses, he realised he needed a crew if the jobs were going to be profitable. His mate Deggsy was a shoe-in as his driver. The boy was something else when he got behind the wheel, and they’d stolen enough cars together to know he wouldn’t panic if things got heavy. What he really needed was some muscle to do the fetching and carrying of merchandise, once they were inside. The answer to Paul was a no-brainer. His younger brother may have only been sixteen, but the boy was already six-foot-three and as strong as they came, plus there was no one he trusted more. So, Lenny became the third man in the team, and for a while, they cleaned up. The boys were so good that, sometimes, they were pulling two or even three jobs in one night, and they stole anything and everything. Clothes, electrical goods, foodstuff; any-fucking-thing.

  As with all good things, it had to come to an end, and when the police turned up at their ram-raid of a popular clothing retailer, the bubble was well and truly burst. Deggsy hadn’t been available to do this particular job as he was fucked-up on the dodgy E he had taken the night before, so Paul and Lenny had done it on their own. When the police turned up, Lenny, who had been dumping a load of jeans into the back of the van, managed to get away but Paul, still inside, got caught and was dragged to the local cells. The police were able to connect him to at least a dozen other jobs, and due to the fact he was unprepared to reveal his accomplices, Paul went down for four years; the first of his three spells in prison over the next decade. Ever since that night, the two brothers had never spoken to each other.