Last Rites Read online

  First impression: 2016

  © John Humphries & Y Lolfa Cyf., 2016

  This book is subject to copyright and may not be reproduced

  by any means except for review purposes without the

  prior written consent of the publishers.

  Cover design: Sion Ilar

  ISBN: 978 1 78461 253 5

  EISBN: 978 1 78461 342 6

  Published and printed in Wales by

  Y Lolfa Cyf., Talybont, Ceredigion SY24 5HE

  e-mail [email protected]

  website www.ylolfa.com

  tel 01970 832 304

  fax 832 782

  Chapter 1

  Jack Flynt eased himself off the bed, hesitating before answering the phone after midnight. INS weren’t about to send him off to cover another war, not since his demotion to raking through the ashes of almost forgotten ones. He was deadwood, the agency burying him under crap assignments, hoping he’d get the message and quit.

  The call would be from the kid left watching the News Desk overnight and wanting help.

  ‘Jack?’ The voice was vaguely familiar, not the kid on the desk, much further back.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ Flynt asked cautiously.

  ‘Jack, it’s your brother Dafydd.’

  ‘You know the time?’ snapped Flynt, his mobile blinking 3 a.m. ‘Couldn’t it wait?’

  ‘No, Jack. Mam’s dead.’

  Flynt picked pensively at the stubble on his chin, his emotions uncertain. The umbilical cord was severed long ago, Flynt never looking back except for funerals – the last, a younger sister who’d drunk herself to death. Having so far dodged that bullet, funerals reminded him of war zones, about wasted lives, a Press flak-jacket and tin hat no match for what warring sides threw at each other.

  ‘When did she die?’ he asked, retreating from his younger brother’s grief.

  ‘Last night… I’ve been trying to get you all day. The office said you were in Brittany… that it would pass on the message.’

  ‘I will be later today… in Brittany… the anniversary of the sinking of the last U-boat. A cuttings job but they want me out of the office, permanently.’ The News Desk hadn’t mentioned Dafydd’s call. It didn’t do personal stuff, only news.

  His mother must have been sixty-five – barely fifteen when he first saw the light of day in that dreary terrace clinging to the side of the mountain. Never a day passed without Mam complaining bitterly about ‘not having a life’, blaming everyone but herself for the six siblings who followed Flynt in quick succession. Mam eventually got sterilised, by which time it was too late for a life.

  The world was forever knocking at Number 62 Quarry Hill, seven different fathers leading the charge, and never paying a penny for the pleasure. His mother was too kind and warm-hearted, laughing and singing under circumstances that would cause others to throw themselves off the mountain. She drank too much but so did most on Quarry Hill, Flynt tipsy for the first time when only eight after stealing sips from his mother’s gin and tonic. But she was always loving and protective, not allowing any of her partners to lay into him. And so it was until he got the old bunk-up over the wall and was away.

  Quarry Hill was a veritable traffic jam of single parent pushchairs, Mam’s greatest asset leading their owners to the state handouts under every cradle. But it was always so – the grim inevitability of lives and aspirations never to be fulfilled, frustrated by a rusting, corrugated iron roof. The doyen of Quarry Hill, Mam’s last ‘partner’ until he was deported was a bull-necked Estonian seaman called Boris.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Flynt, remembering how his mother had fed and watered Dafydd and the others after he cleared off.

  ‘Massive heart attack they say. She was exhausted… never gave up, even after Boris left.’

  ‘And when’s the funeral?’ asked Flynt, ignoring the snide reference to their mother’s indiscretions.

  ‘Friday next week… can you make it?’

  ‘Don’t see why not. The Brittany job won’t take long. Can I help with expenses?’

  ‘No need… the social will pay. If we don’t get a grant Mam always said to wrap her body in clingfilm and dump it at the back door of the crematorium.’

  ‘Where can I stay?’

  ‘There’s no room here. The place is awash. I don’t know half of them. Mam’s genes are all over Quarry Hill. How about yours? Still keeping the stopper in the bottle?’

  His brother didn’t need to spell it out. Too close to fifty and having spread himself around so far unsuccessfully, Flynt was tiring of the effort. ‘Obsessional, that’s what the quack told me.’ By morning everyone on Quarry Hill would think the Fleet Street bigshot at Number 62 fired blanks.

  ‘Obsessed with what?’ Dafydd pounced on any chink in Flynt’s armour to drag him back to street level. ‘You’re seeing a quack because you can’t have kids? That’s not like a Flynt.’ Dafydd pressed the dagger home.

  ‘I’m OK… OK,’ said Flynt hurriedly. ‘Stress… seems I’ve been working too hard.’

  ‘And Emilie… nothing wrong there, surely… Better get cracking, Jack, before the ammo runs out.’

  Flynt changed the subject. ‘If I can’t stay at Quarry Hill then fix me a hotel.’

  ‘You got to be joking! I’ll ask Irene to put you up.’ A teacher, Irene never taught after Mam sat her down and explained about welfare dependency: how she was better off on the ‘social’ than prodding a bunch of dullards into life. Irene called it the Poverty Trap.

  ‘OK, fix it… better ring-off, Dafydd… this is costing you a packet. Pick me up at the station midday Friday…’

  ‘No car… just a bike. Get a taxi. See you soon.’

  Taxi! Flynt choked on the chances of finding one. Hoofing it up that bloody mountain was no joke, Quarry Hill climbing out of the valley bottom like the index finger on an upraised hand, Number 62 the nail.

  Flynt was dozing in an armchair, first light bleeding through a crack in the curtains, his subconscience struggling to square the rights with the wrongs when for the second time that night a ringing telephone crashed in upon his dreams. Flynt’s eyes went straight to his collection of antique telephones in a glass display cabinet before crossing to the heavy, black Bakelite rotary-dial ringing on a small table beneath the window of his third floor Paris apartment. Not to answer was tantamount to a dereliction of duty for a hack whose life was ruled by ringing telephones. On the other hand, picking up the receiver was madness. The rotary-dial couldn’t ring. Like all the others in Flynt’s collection it wasn’t connected, hadn’t been for many years. Best ignore it until the hallucination faded. Callers, real or imaginary always hung up if kept waiting long enough. Didn’t he? Christ, they’d inscribe it on his tombstone: ‘Jack Rang Off!’ The telephone was an extension to his body, a protuberance, not natural like fingers and toes but grafted later. It was hardly surprising he dreamed about the bloody things. But why didn’t this one go away when he woke up?

  Shaking himself, Flynt watched his hand move instinctively towards the heavy black receiver. ‘Yes,’ he snarled, ‘what the fuck do you want?’ Not getting a reply, Flynt lurched forward, pressing the receiver harder against his ear until a woman whispered through a burst of static, ‘Help! He’s trying to kill me.’

  Banging the receiver angrily in the palm of his hand to shake out any bugs, he listened again. The line was dead, not even a dial tone. Why should there be? Flynt felt a little crazy staring angrily at the cable hanging lifelessly from the Bakelite’s casing. Real fear he could handle – ducking bullets in Iraq, expecting to be dumped by INS – but this was different. Having traded too much moral fibre for headlines, Flynt had precious little to lean on when the inexplicable challenged reality. Nor was there anyone to turn to after jettison
ing help and understanding when he parted from Emilie. If your mantra was ‘nothing given only taken’, Flynt should have expected something would start fucking with his mind.

  He’d always rationalised his way out of tight corners. Was answering a phone that couldn’t ring a sign of mental instability or a bad case of hallucination? That’s how he’d write it. Flynt’s instinct was to question everything. The bizarre he spiked, at most cut it to a paragraph on an inside page as a health warning for readers.

  Like his other antique telephones, the Bakelite reminded Flynt of stories he’d covered, the most interesting in the collection one with an ornate ebony handle and mouthpiece. Flynt was in Israel covering another blow-up on the Gaza Strip and being bawled at down the line by a particularly objectionable news editor called Higgins for missing a deadline. Suddenly there was a clatter at the other end, Flynt assuming an Israeli shell had taken out the line. In fact, Higgins had dropped the receiver when he dropped dead. A large dollar note bought Flynt the phone from the Palestinian café owner, a must-have to delight his poker-playing pals who’d also suffered verbal lashings from Higgins.

  With grim determination Flynt walked slowly around the apartment, examining everything from the faded blue-patterned wallpaper to the white liquor stains on the poker table. It was just the sort of shitty trick his poker pals would play… hide a mobile in the Bakelite.

  Rifling through a kitchen drawer for a screwdriver, Flynt had the phone on the table and the base plate off. The mechanism, the bunch of coloured wires and the usual bits and bobs was no different from others in his collection. No matter what their age or appearance, his trophies had a common feature – none was connected. How could they be? There was no junction box, no landline to the apartment. A mobile was all he needed. Flynt shook his head several times. Ringing in the ear, he thought… a touch of tinnitus, or had his drinking finally shaken something loose?

  Flynt closed his eyes wearily. ‘I’ve done it now… I’ve blown it this time… must give up,’ he muttered. Every morning, staring at the worn edges in the mirror, he promised himself a booze-free day. His Sunday school teacher had warned him: unless he signed the pledge the demon drink would get him. Oddly, he felt no pain, only weariness, the more desperate the hurt, the less he seemed to feel it.

  Crossing the apartment and bolting the door against whatever he imagined was outside, Flynt went to the window and threw it open. The day was early but the air already heavy, the hum of traffic faint, the only sign of life a woman standing alone on the corner below. After watching her climb into a radio-cab and drive away, Flynt sank into his armchair to snatch an hour’s sleep.

  The Bakelite on the table beneath the window woke him a second time with ‘Help! He’s trying to kill me’ struggling to break free from the static. It was like a cancer diagnosis, not for broadcasting, certainly not to anyone at the office. For them, the cranky telephone was Jack Flynt’s pink elephant at the bottom of the bed. Jack had to be different; couldn’t settle for what normal drunks wrestled with in the middle of the night. Lay off the booze, Jack, and the phantom caller will hang up.

  A few hours later Flynt was lugging the Bakelite in a plastic Carrefour carrier bag along the platform at Paris Gare du Nord to the train for Brittany and Lorient, the phone not leaving his side until he had an explanation, or the caller stopped ringing.

  Brittany was an anniversary story, an easy peg. The Paris desk of INS was no different to those the world over – the seventieth anniversary of the last U-boat a gift for the schedule, a cuttings job easily written off the desk. But INS couldn’t claim to be an international news service unless its stories carried datelines and a few local quotes to freshen-up old facts. The train was packed and the roads traffic-clogged with Parisiens leaving for les vacances, the city abandoned to sweaty tourists and shuttered restaurants. Departing punctually, lemming-like on the first Saturday of August, they returned in one vast, tanned traffic jam on the last.

  The chunky black Bakelite, circa Ericsson 1940, sat with Flynt in the restaurant car between a bottle of Beaujolais and his ‘War in Lorient’ cuttings file. Smiling with the uneasy resignation of a man for whom peace of mind was always just out of reach, Flynt closed his eyes, his fellow passengers intrigued by the balding Brit picking at his food and slurping red wine while waiting for a phone call.

  ‘I’m a collector,’ he explained to the puzzled young Frenchman sitting opposite after the TGV screeching to a halt shook him awake. The man half-smiled at the Bakelite before twisting his head against the window, searching for the reason for the hold-up. They’d hit a cow, according to the inspector, and would be delayed until an engineer inspected the damage. There was none, the express slicing and dicing the poor beast at 160mph. Squinting through the window at the mangled corpse, smoke pirouetting from a field of stubble beside the track, Flynt mused, ‘Cow cooked by train’. Try that on INS and they’d bury him with the remains of the cow. To make the wire, bodies had to be human, and preferably piled high.

  Flynt had counted lots of bodies, but no longer. Left with only memories of the news frontline, he waited for the chop which was sure to come once INS found how to avoid messy consequences. Denied column inches on nothing-stories, Flynt knew he’d probably go in the next round of cuts unless boredom drove him out sooner. No wife, no kids, no house, most assumed he had a cushion stashed away off-shore.

  Did it really matter if his adrenalin rush of death and disaster was choked off? If he was honest, it did. What else did he have apart from collecting bloody telephones? News was all he’d ever known, the absence of domestic baggage propelling him into the top league. When other correspondents were agonising over missing junior’s debut in the school play, Flynt was packing a bag for the airport and the latest trouble-spot with crumby hotels and pox-ridden women. He told himself availability was not the reason – that he was the best man for the job, although by the time his copy reached the wire the by-line was the only bit he recognised after it had been hacked around by the desk.

  Flynt blamed no-one for his broken life, certainly not a broken home. How could he blame a mother too loving for this world, or a father he’d never known? Selfish and indifferent, he was the archetypal cynic with nothing to show but a drink problem, his only future the next story, only reward a by-line. Once there was the congratulatory telex, then email: ‘Well done. You made the lead on the evening schedule.’ Now correspondents were forgotten once the story was fired into the ether. With 24/7 news and the internet, few stories stayed in one place long enough for the hack on the ground to get any credit.

  Flynt always claimed he recalled the very moment the tide turned against the resident correspondent. Liverpool were playing the Italian football club Juventus at the Heysel Stadium on a warm spring evening in Brussels when a wall collapsed and dozens were buried by the rubble. Flynt and other hacks were door-stepping the match from a local bar a few hundred yards from the stadium when the ambulance sirens started wailing. ‘Nothing, it’s just the Belgians. Can’t go anywhere without making noise,’ said the man from Reuters taking another swallow of Stella Artois. But the sirens kept coming until, as one, they charged for the door and across the road to the stadium. Bodies were stacked like logs alongside piles of broken masonry, hacks climbing over each other to get the story on the wire. No mobiles then, nor public telephone kiosks in sight, only row upon row of anonymous apartment blocks, the queue for the telephone in the bar stretching through the door. Flynt looked to the heavens for salvation, an overhead cable connecting to an apartment. He struck lucky, finding not only a telephone but a jumbo-size television switched to the match commentator describing what was happening inside the stadium – and watched by an emaciated woman stretched on a chaise longue from which two black bull terriers had taken generous mouthfuls of upholstery. Picking his way across a filthy, threadbare carpet sprinkled with small heaps of disgusting dog food, Flynt snatched the phone and ad-libbed the story, not once hesitating. INS had it on the wire first but minut
es later the story moved to the UK, leaving Flynt to fight for the reimbursement of the ten dollars he’d pressed into the hand of the poor anorexic woman for the privilege of commandeering her home. Now, no-one went anywhere without at least two mobiles, better still a satellite phone for servicing the inexhaustible appetite of the electronic media and 24-hour news channels. The only correspondents to hold a big story for a full turn of the clock were the TV supermen who got to win wars single-handed with satellite communications. Flynt felt a dying breed but was still good at what he did, sharper after a drink than most hacks were stone-cold sober, although the bloody Bakelite was seriously distracting.

  Flynt was fishing through his cuttings file when the Frenchman sitting opposite on the train leaned across the table and asked, ‘Is that a picture of Lorient after the bombing?’

  ‘Yes, they say a good black and white is better than a movie. Look at the detail.’ The picture captured the drama of the morning after the RAF left Lorient in ruins having missed its target, the German U-boat pens on the Keroman Peninsula. The white gritty dust from dissolved masonry, naked walls lifting ragged smouldering arms towards the heavens after incendiaries had floated down like deadly sycamore seeds. The picture had everything. Flynt imagined the harsh, raw stench of burning, the footsteps echoing through the ruins.

  ‘See the black cat picking its way amongst the masonry, paw poised to avoid glass splinters. It’s a classic.’ Flynt had seen lots of collateral damage and broken bodies but never a dead cat.

  ‘They’ve got nine lives, cats,’ he said.

  The Frenchman said proudly, ‘My grandfather took the picture with a glass plate camera. If you want a copy the office still has the original.’

  Surprised, Flynt asked, ‘What office… you work for a newspaper?’ The young Frenchman was a reporter with Ouest-France returning from a job interview in Paris. Flynt knew Ouest-France as the most important regional in western France, covering everything that moved in southern Normandy, Brittany, and the Loire Valley.