Chapter 26
Monday 28th October, 2024
Dalton Hill Auto Repairs, Crockenhill, London
Faye: What crap do we have here then? A menu for a greasy new pizza place - urgh, like we need any more takeaways in Crockenhill. A flyer advertising a new window cleaner based in Swanley...good luck on finding a window that hasn't been put through... oh ... and something addressed to a 'Ms M Martucci?'
Faye holds out a white envelope to Angel and he squints, fixing his attention on the stamp.
Faye: It's from Bromley Solicitors.
Angel gulps, swiping it from her fingers, and he quickly stuffs it in the back pocket of his Boss jeans.
It's been nineteen bleak days since Norris died. It's been eleven bleaker days since the funeral. And it's been the bleakest ten days since Maura left - although, as Angel roams around the vacant garage, it looks as though she was never even here to begin with.
If only it felt like that, too, then maybe he could eat or sleep.
Faye: You don't have to pay the bill for the entire funeral service, you know. No one really blames you.
That lie tastes like cheap, chip-shop vinegar on her tongue, and Faye purses her lips as Angel takes a 320oz Amtech to Nancy's tallboy. The wood splits, waggling outstretched razor sharp splinter-fingers, but he doesn't even flinch for his safety - he's beyond wearing protective gear or drawing up a risk assessment at this point, because as far as he is concerned, he deserves every cut, bruise, slash and gash he gets. The emotional pain imprisoning him feels so unbelievably overwhelming, that Angel wonders if lacerations from a flying drawer-front might relieve some pressure, as if heartache could drain from a vein.
If only it could, then he would happily bleed out.
Angel unzips his jacket, feeling the heat. He knows as well as Faye does, that many people blame him - Maura, Gus, Kit, Otis, even himself; and rightly so.
Angel: If you're not going to help me by breaking shit, at least don't stand in here talking shit.
He continues to thrash and thwack at the mahogany with his mallet, so Faye retreats back into the house, in search of a perch, before the new tenant arrives to collect his keys.
Cleansing yet another property - another scene of a crime which he instigated - is not quite the therapy he wants; the sound of destruction reminds Angel of the time Maura beat the Bayerische out of a BMW in the Scrapyard. His legs give way as the memory of her becomes too raw to stand, and he collapses into the filth on the floor, picking wooden splinters out of his grey CloudPulse trainers; fuck, he misses her blue eyes, and her pear scent, and her raspy morning voice, and her sleepy morning smile. When did he last see someone smile? He can't even remember. When did he last make someone smile? Did he ever?
His mind is fried from too many thoughts and too little sleep - there's almost a thousand things keeping him up at night. When he isn't torturing himself with flashbacks of Maura wailing, or Kit buckling under the weight of carrying his first coffin, sometimes Angel listens to Harriet consoling Greta while she whimpers. She questions why Kit isn't in his bedroom, or why he can't take her for ice-cream, or read her a bedtime story.
'Is he not my best fwiend anymore?' she would cry, innocently, feeling abandoned by another father figure. But it wasn't poor judgement at the hands of a panicked teenage mother, or the deathly decline from the harsh wrath of a cancerous tumor in an old man's wilting prostate, which erased the man from her life this time.
No, this time it was Uncle Angel, the Monster, who sent Kit away.
The guilt of it all means he spends hours tossing and turning on the right side of the bed Maura left. Expectedly, the Martucci's didn't hang around for coffee and cuddles after the funeral - Maura couldn't bare to stay another minute in Angel's town and packed their bags as soon as she left the crematorium. Gus objected, fearful that change might kick-start a relapse, but Maura argued accurately that 'relapsing somewhere else was still better than dying here, like Norris.'
Kit didn't want to leave either, but Maura wasn't in the mood for negotiating with a thug's apprentice. She booked three train ticket's as far North as physically possible and told Kit he had a choice to make - he could take the ticket and join his sister and father in building a better life elsewhere - again. Or he could stay shackled to Angel, forever wiping his arse and pulling his trigger, but he couldn't have both.
YOU ARE READING
Trestle
Mystery / Thriller**SMUT warning** Following the death of his racketeer father, Angel is left to manage the O'Hare family's rugged affairs. He vows to worship his girls and protect them from the threat of poverty, sin, and dangerous men like himself. But when debts c...
