Contents
About the Author
Also by Howard Marks
Title Page
Copyright Page
Prologue: In the City February 1998
September 1998
Part One: 2010
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two: The Country
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Some Months Later
Acknowledgements
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
During the mid-1980s Howard Marks had forty-three aliases, eighty-nine phone lines and owned twenty-five companies trading throughout the world. At the height of his career he was smuggling consignments of up to thirty tons of marijuana, and had contact with organisations as diverse as MI6, the CIA, the IRA and the Mafia. Following a worldwide operation by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, he was busted and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison at United States Federal Penitentiary, Terre Haute, Indiana. He was released in April 1995 after serving seven years of his sentence. His autobiography, Mr Nice, was first published in 1996, and has been published in nine languages. The film of Mr Nice, starring Rhys Ifans, Chloe Sevigny and David Thewliss, was released in 2010.
ALSO BY HOWARD MARKS
Mr Nice
Howard Marks’ Book of Dope Stories
Senor Nice: Straight Life from Wales to South America
SYMPATHY FOR
THE DEVIL
Howard Marks
VINTAGE BOOKS
London
This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Epub ISBN: 9781409027928
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www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Vintage 2011
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Copyright © Howard Marks 2011
Howard Marks has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is a work of fiction.
Although loosely inspired by the disappearance of Richey Edwards from the Manic Street Preachers, all characters and events described in this book are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Vintage
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
www.vintage-books.co.uk
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099532736
Wrth fargeinio gyda’r hen ŵr,
Nid oes diben cynnig dy enaid,
Fe piau hwnnw eisoes,
Rhaid I ti roi’r hyn sy’n agosach i’th galon.
To bargain with the old gentleman,
No point in offering your soul,
He already owns that,
You must give him what’s closer to your heart.
A Book of Witches. Anonymous. Welsh, 19th century
They are at the door.
The two men again.
She can hear the slapping of their palms on the walls, out in the passage she has never seen.
This is her sign. She must kneel now, put her face to the wall. Close her eyes, not look back as they enter the room.
For one bright moment, as the door opens, she can smell the mildew of long-abandoned houses by the sea.
On the wall over her head – their silhouettes, the vague shapes of the bundles under their arms.
From the cupboard in the corner where they leave the school books, the taller one takes out her mask again.
He is putting on the buckles at the back of her shorn head. He pulls the straps tight.
Their hands are moving on her gently. They must feel she is broken now.
She knows what is coming, she tries to feel nothing.
No anger, no fear, this is her resistance, not to feel.
They guide her again to the reclining chair, to the leg straps on either side.
In the shuttered half-light she sees their perching shapes, shifting, spreading. Over their eyes are mirrors. She tries to close her eyes, but she cannot. They are taped open.
One is beneath her, the other above and over the walls run shadows of her twisting in their hands. She tries to turn her head away, but she cannot.
The first one’s skin is calloused, knotted with muscles, the other’s younger, soft almost as her own. She sees the staff again, thick with ancient carvings.
She waits for the pain. She tries not to make a sound, not to cry. This is her resistance. It makes the pain worse, not making a sound, but still she does not.
She knows she’s always been here, it was the before that was unreal.
She waits for it to end, for it to begin, for it to end. This is the only clock she knows. One is beneath her, the other above and light shimmers in the mirrors over their eyes – an old light, like a deep winter dawn – and by it she sees everything that is done, and she remembers.
PROLOGUE
IN THE CITY FEBRUARY 1998
Of all the moments in her life, this was the one Catrin would most like to have back.
It was the night when news of the rock star’s suicide at the bridge broke. Not that she thought that had anything to do with it; nothing, not at first. Like the rest of the city, she was huddled over a television, watching the shocking events unfold live. In her arms was her man Rhys who meant more to her than the rest of her meagre life put together. More than life itself, it felt like. But for once her eyes were not on him, but trained on the flickering screen.
It had been a bitter, fog-bound February, the first winter Catrin had made detective: a suit, not that she ever wore one. That night she was in her old joggers, Rhys sprawled naked over her. The room was dark, the furniture barely visible. But they hadn’t switched on the lights, hadn’t even gone to get their smokes. They weren’t moving from in front of the set.
On the screen the stage was lit by a single spotlight beam. In and out of it a lone figure was swaying in silhouette, his narrow shoulders hunched. The light created a pale halo around his head. It was the last song of the set, the torch song, and creeping into the darkness came a faint glow from thousands of flickering lighter flames.
The spotlight found the singer again, his shirt ripped open now over his chest. It was narrow and lined with horizontal cuts, the stains darkening it. The rest of the group were behind him in the shadows. His face was soft, dreamy, his eyes half closed behind dark smudges of make-up, and all around him pulsed a strange, low trance-like beat.
As his arm began windmilling over his guitar, his forearm appeared to be painted in bright red letters. The camera panned in closer. Owen Face the letters read. They looked as if they had been freshly carved into his flesh with a knife.
As they saw this, people in the crowd tried to run towards him. But the black-shirted security men were already closing
in, holding them back. From the front a fan in a velvet cloak reached out his arms, shouting something, his words lost in the wail of feedback. The singer was staggering back now out of the spot to the back of the stage.
‘It’s so they know who I am.’ The singer’s words came out in a single, slurred rasping sound. He seemed about to lose his footing, more men in black shirts were rushing in around him and he disappeared from view.
‘This is the last show, folks.’ From behind the row of bulked-up figures his words came whispered, like a prayer, the mike only just catching them. ‘See you all in a better world.’ If he said anything further it was lost in the sound now filling the hall, a sound that seemed almost biblical, the sound of thousands gasping and weeping, and mingling with it came the whine of approaching sirens. The stage was dark again, the only lights tracking the bodies of those who’d fainted over the heads of the crowd back towards the exit doors.
The round-the-hour news coverage flicked back to the live-time shot at the top of the screen. Out of the fog loomed the outlines of towers and arched span of the old Severn Bridge, the country’s favourite suicide spot. Overhead choppers were still circling, their beams crossing the surface of the waters below. The channel was using night-vision cameras to try to penetrate the banks of fog, the scene bathed in an eerie greenish light. At the edge of the water Catrin could just make out police barricades, the crowd a heaving mass of black leather and spiky Goth cuts. In the strobing lights she glimpsed white mask-like faces running with make-up, others bleary with shock and tears.
The windows shook with the thrum of a chopper passing low overhead. She pushed the volume right up, but they could no longer hear the set.
‘Search and Rescue must be looking for his body down on the mudflats. That’s where the jumpers usually wash up.’ Catrin glanced down at Rhys, his cheek nestling between her small breasts. His eyes were fixed on the screen, the light from it running over his gaunt face.
‘The tides are still up.’ Rhys was almost shouting, something he very rarely did, so she could hear over the roar of the chopper. ‘So these must all be press choppers – it could be the biggest rock ’n’ roll suicide since Cobain.’
‘Sure, Face was rock royalty. But what do you mean could be? Face said his goodbyes at the gig, drove to the bridge and jumped. It’s a done deal.’
‘No body yet though. They found his car at the jumpers’ bridge, but no body.’ Rhys slipped his head into the toned hollow of her belly, his hand resting on her thigh. ‘On the way here I could hardly get past the three-hut circus at the docks. There were BBC, Sky OB units along with a crowd of ghouls and rubberneckers. Even saw foreign units down there, CNN, Fox, RTL.’
‘But it looked like all the action was at the bridge. Why the party at the docks?’
‘There was a body sighting there. Turned out to be a shop dummy dressed up like Face in leathers and a black wig. Some sicko’s idea of a joke.’
‘Right,’ she said, ‘events like these always bring out the artists.’ She let her fingers drift down the side of Rhys’s hair, to rest on his small, elfin ear. Overhead the sound of the chopper was fading. She turned back to the screen.
One half was still showing the spotlights and the fog and the dark, choppy waters under the bridge. The other half, a montage of recent clippings from the tabloids. A pack of paparazzi, standing on ladders with long-lenses outside the wrought-iron gates of a private rehab clinic. Cutting to Face in striped pyjamas, sitting on a sofa for a photo shoot, his head shaved, his forearm lined with tidy horizontal scars, his cheekbones sharp enough to poke through the skin.
‘I’m surprised no one tried to stop him.’ Catrin was pointing at the scars on Face’s arm. ‘Self-harming. In and out of clinics for depression, starving himself. The classic tells of a suicide plastered over the red-tops for months, but no one tries to stop the bloke going for the exit.’
She saw Rhys was pointing at the image of the press outside the private clinic. ‘They may be barking up the wrong tree there. That wasn’t one of the clinics he attended. Face was always a very private man.’
She glanced down at Rhys but he wasn’t looking up at her. ‘Maybe Face should have gone to a clinic. Maybe that would have saved him. Looks like the bloke was completely out of control,’ she said.
‘You’re wrong, Face was never out of control. Everything he did was planned.’ Rhys was staring intently at the carpet, his fingers slowly moving over its blank surface. ‘This could’ve been some kind of stunt, maybe one that went wrong.’
‘But stunts weren’t Face’s style.’
‘No, you’re right, they weren’t. Face had the balls to cut himself on stage, why not finish it there. Instead he drives down to the bridge.’
‘Oh please, don’t start with theories. He was hardly going to off himself jumping into the mosh pit. And nothing’s worse for the image than a suicide that goes idiot wrong.’ She watched as Rhys got up, a look of puzzlement on his face. He stepped into the bathroom. Through the door came the swish of the shower curtain, then the sound of water flowing. She stood, sensing Face’s gaze still flickering across the room as she went over to the window.
The outlines of the city had disappeared behind the fog. She looked out, seeing nothing, her heart thudding. The streets were silent. Everyone was huddled around their TVs or gone to join the crowds at the waterside. The only sound was the faint trickle of a radio somewhere playing one of Face’s old hits. It didn’t sound like music, more like someone moving something heavy around her head. Dropping it, dragging it, then dropping it again.
She closed the curtain, let her hand rest on the shelf. There were no books there, only the delicate origami birds Rhys made. Swans, owls, ravens, others she didn’t recognise. Imaginary creatures, perhaps. It was a habit he had, working with Japanese paper during long undercover stake-outs around the city, the ones she sometimes joined him on. When he was bored or just watching he made swans and owls and other birds; alone he only ever made ravens, the paper’s tip folded out into hooked beaks. The birds weren’t something he showed around: as soon as he made them he tore them up. She’d been the one to save them, display them in this neat line on the shelf. Made the place feel like a nest, he said; she wasn’t sure if this meant he liked it. Maybe it was just his way of saying he wasn’t ready for anything permanent yet, his way of telling her not to take anything about him for granted.
She was only trying to make their bare flat a little nicer, not just a place they crashed between shifts. Putting a few pretty things on shelves didn’t mean she was thinking of vows and wedding bells. She never thought that far ahead, took each day at a time. In the mirror over the shelf she caught a brief glimpse of herself, and quickly turned away. She didn’t like what she saw, her eyes too wide and staring like a child’s. She wondered again what Rhys had ever seen in her, someone to protect, a duty, a responsibility, or was it something more?
She heard him coming out of the bathroom, the clatter of the wardrobe as he pulled out some clothes. She didn’t have to turn to see him. He was there always scored behind her eyes. Like the afterglow of a too-strong light. His snake hips and narrow chest, pale as the sheets they’d lain in all weekend, his eyes like some damaged poet’s eyes and nothing like a fellow officer’s.
It was at moments like this she wondered why she needed him as much as air and water. There was what he had done for her in the woods of course, his saving her. But that was only the start of it. It was the sense of a pain in him, that he was keeping locked away, something she couldn’t reach. Whenever she thought she’d found the door to it, another closed in her face. To understand him she needed to open all those doors. But there was always a risk in that: to understand a man like this might be to lose him.
Whatever it was, it was eating him up. She felt it in the knotted muscles in his back when he should’ve been spent and empty in her arms. She saw it in that stoop he’d begun to walk with. It was like something loaded on his shoulders he couldn’t shake off. Sh
e heard it in his voice, the dryness in his throat. And it was there in his eyes. The way they didn’t lose themselves in hers any more, how tight they’d gone at the rims and the irises shrunk and pointed like pinpricks.
She went down the cold passage into the tiny kitchen. From the shelf she took down an onion, peppers, lemon grass, and laid them on the board. She took a knife, began chopping. When had they last had a proper meal together?
‘I’m not hungry.’ Rhys was standing by the door. ‘Late for my shift at that crack pitch in the docks.’
‘But the docks are overrun tonight, you said it yourself. Why go?’
He didn’t answer. She watched him take his keys from the bowl, a Marlboro soft pack from the carton next to it. She pushed the chopped food off the board, down into the sink. ‘I’m coming with you,’ she said softly.
Later she’d wonder why she went with him. Maybe things would have been different if she hadn’t gone. Maybe if you don’t see something in some way it never happens. Like trees falling in the woods. If no one was there to hear them falling maybe they never made a sound.
She glanced at Rhys, but he remained expressionless. She sensed he was thinking of a reason to go on his own. He was taking his time putting on his puffer jacket, his black wool cap.
If she didn’t know him, had just passed him in the street, she’d say he looked like a dealer, street, no different from the types he busted every week. He fitted in well among them, maybe too well. But behind the hardness she sensed a strange purity there, almost other-worldly, as if he were on a sacred mission he kept strictly to himself. He didn’t share his colleagues’ interests in sport or banter or drink with them. Very little out in the world ever seemed to interest him, only her and his work. When he ate he liked to eat in silence. When he listened to a track, he left half an hour of silence either side. If she put on music, he switched it off; scented candles, he snuffed them out. When he touched her he did just that: nothing else seemed to exist for him, just those simple moments between them. Everything he did as if for the first and last time. It was intense, as if he believed the time he had left was limited and he wanted to strip everything down to the essentials. But maybe that was just how he looked at things. If he’d believed he was in some sort of danger, he would have told her, wouldn’t he?