Maccabee did not trouble the cell with verbals or histrionics, but fell over dead, into the cage as it happened, catching the barred door with a hand so that it swung and clunked behind him. Very neat.
How this could be was not really an issue, as it clearly was. This strange Garrick was certainly ghostly, but no ghost. The fist that held Tom aloft was skin and bone, albeit the first the colour of the second.
The hand lifted Tom clear off the ground.
‘Family!’ Garrick screeched. ‘Family? Ain’t it?’
Riley could do nothing.
All his nightmares had come true and were standing before him, holding his dream by the neck. He was nine years old again, lying in a West End gutter with Garrick’s boot at his throat, waiting for the stamp that would crush his windpipe.
Chevie too was shaken to her core, but she was also trained, and she knew that a sudden attack while Garrick was focused on Riley and his vengeance could be their only chance.
She was wrong.
Chevie bent low and darted towards Garrick’s kidney area, hoping to put her knuckles deep in the spongy tissue. Her Quantico instructor, Cord Vallicose, who was to become a woman in this reality (don’t ask), had assured her that there is not a man alive who can shake off a ruptured kidney.
Perhaps Vallicose had been/would be right, but Chevie was not to confirm her instructor’s maxim on this day. Her attack was met with one of Garrick’s blacker-than-black boots, which whipped up and stopped her dead in her tracks, leaving her with an indent in her skull that any fool could see was a fatal wound. She fell to the cold floor like a tossed sack of coal and spasmed alarmingly.
‘Chevie!’ said Riley, and then: ‘Tom!’
‘ Chevie!’ mimicked Garrick mockingly. ‘ Tom!’
Riley wanted more than anything to weep. He wanted to fall to his knees and beg, but he knew from bitter experience that Garrick despised overt displays of weakness or emotion, and so he stood his ground and put together the most complex sentence he could in the circumstances.
‘What do you want?’
Garrick laughed, delighted. ‘What do I want? No, that ain’t it. That ain’t the question. The question is, my son: what do you want?’
The assassin grinned like a naughty child, relishing his moment of vengeance. ‘To know your name, is it?’ A curved Arabic blade appeared, curling round Tom’s neck like the coil of a snake. ‘This fella here. Perhaps he knows your true name. Why don’t you ask him?’
Riley did not, for he felt that to play Garrick’s game would mean death for Tom.
‘ ASK HIM!’ roared Garrick, hamming it up for the imaginary stalls, and the blade jittered at Tom’s neck, drawing a spurt of blood.
‘Wh-what is my name?’ Riley stammered, the choice taken from him.
But all Tom could say was, ‘Mercy. Mercy, please. I don’t understand. I never even played cards with these gentlemen. I ain’t no debtor. Being ginger ain’t no crime.’
Garrick was theatrically appalled. ‘You don’t know my friend’s name? Why, it’s like you ain’t even family. And if you ain’t family I don’t have a use for you.’
And without further ado he drew the curved Arabic blade crosswise, slicing his captive’s throat, then dropped him like a slaughtered animal.
‘Tom!’ cried Riley, sinking to the floor beside the dying man, whose blood issued from his neck in a broad rippling sheet, drenching Riley’s person in a second. Even as Riley tied one of his magician’s scarves round Tom’s neck he knew that it was futile. There was no help for Tom. The best thing for him with these injuries was a quick death, which would surely be granted.
‘Damn you!’ Riley swore. ‘Damn you to hell, Albert Garrick.’
Garrick’s face was serene. ‘You tried that, my boy. You sent me to hell and now I have returned.’
Chevie flailed on the floor, blood leaking from one ear. Garrick noticed and affected a sad face. ‘Oh, it don’t look good for the Injun maiden, does it now? No, not good at all. I would rather have dragged it out a bit, given her part in my – what shall we call it? – inconvenience. But Albert Garrick never did know his own strength, and I had forgotten the little vixen’s trademark bursts of speed. As a matter of fact, I had almost forgotten her entirely, believe it or not.’
Chatter and babble was all Riley heard and even that at the back of his mind. Nothing was making sense to the lad. Tom was dying, perhaps dead already, and Chevie, his dear Chevie, was surely breathing her last.
‘Oh,’ he said or perhaps sobbed. ‘Oh … oh.’
Garrick seemed not to care whether Riley paid attention or not, so wrapped up was he in his moment.
‘So, my plan in a nutshell,’ he continued, ‘was to subject your traitorous person to the same pain that poor, betrayed Albert Garrick was subjected to.’
Chatter and babble. Babble and chatter.
Tom spasmed on the cold floor and gave up the ghost entirely. Chevie was moaning with each breath.
‘I took you in like a son. But you denied me a family, and so I am denying you a brother. First, however, and this was the genius of it –’ Garrick twirled an imaginary moustache – ‘I made you beg for his life. I made you value it above your own. This made the killing all the sweeter, for you now realize, Riley, just how much this dead man meant to you.’
Garrick nudged Tom’s corpse with his toe. ‘And here’s the last nail in your coffin, my son. This bag of bones ain’t even Tom. You have doomed yourself for a stranger.’
Riley knew the meaning of each individual word but could not fathom their collective gist.
‘It ain’t even Tom? Not Tom, then?’
Tom or not, there was a dead man on the cold floor and Riley was drenched in his blood and the sour smell of it was in his nose.
And Chevie. Oh, poor Chevie.
Riley had seen an Irish tinker boy kicked by a donkey at the Islington market several years since. He had never forgotten the sight of the poor Gypsy lad all a-quiver in the mud with his eyes rolled back till they were mostly white and his body racked by convulsions.
She will die horribly, like Tom who ain’t Tom. Two dead on my account.
Garrick gloated on. ‘How you are feeling at this precise moment, Riley my boy, is unimaginable to most common folk. Lured to a foul pit by a master you had given up for dead. To have the gift of hope granted you, only to be snatched away just as sudden. And then for the awful realization that your dear kin ain’t nothing more than a patsy. A ringer, as it were. A common longshoreman stitched up on account of his ginger mop.’ Garrick smiled an uncommonly wide smile that was rarely seen but which, when fully extended, bisected his head like a zipper. His ivoried teeth were made all the more yellow by his unnatural pallor.
‘Ain’t you going to say anything?’ said Garrick, his grin gone. ‘Just moping, is it? I must say, after all this time, all these centuries, I had dreamed up such an amount of lively conversations we would have. And now all I get for my trouble is a weeping boy. I am quite the disappointed fellow. In truth, I cannot fathom how you outfoxed me on the first go-around. But I was younger then. Now I am the Forever Man.’
This was undeniably a decent villain’s monologue, but it was all blah and blabber to Riley. Garrick could have been a huffing gorilla for all the sense the boy could put to his words. And, as for Chevie, she was beyond attaching sense to anything. Her automatic functions would keep her alive for another minute or so, but it was already too late for her brain. Her skull was fractured and leaking fluid like a cracked gin jug.
So fast it had happened. One boot-heel crack in the forehead and she was a goner. After all the diverse scrapes and tumbles she had endured, to be done for almost casually was indeed cruel.
A thought formed in Riley’s mind: Chevie doesn’t know what’s happening. It’s for the best.
But he would not deal with this notion, would not even glance sideways at it, for that would mean admitting that Chevie was dying.
As will I be presently.
Another thought. This one did not seem so important now. There was only one door in this room and to leave through it meant passing Garrick and that was inconceivable.
Oh, Chevie. Oh, Tom.