Free Sins of the Fathers by James Craig

shot. ‘Don’t lie to me, Calvin. You lie to me, I get mad. I get mad, I lose my concentration.’
    Calvin felt the tears come again, hot and sticky, running down his cheeks and dripping off his chin. ‘Please.’
    The man stuck his tongue between his teeth, his eyes nothing more than two dark holes that had receded into the back of his skull. ‘I get this right, your head comes all the way off, first time. Minimizes any pain. You probably won’t even know what happened.’ The tongue disappeared back inside his mouth. ‘But if I don’t get a clean shot, need to hack at it a few times – well, I’m afraid that all bets are off.’
    Calvin tried to scream but all that came out was a shrivelled groan. Anyway, he knew it was pointless. He’d spent the last hour shouting his head off and no one had paid any notice. That was the thing about this damn city, someone could be committing a murder twenty feet away and everyone ignores it; nobody cares. Bastards.
    ‘Okay. Let’s see how this goes.’
    The blade disappeared from his line of vision. Closing his eyes as tightly as he could, Calvin Jacobs cried for his mother.
    Careful not to steal the whole duvet, Carlyle rolled over and squinted at the clock on the table by his side of the bed.
    2.12 a.m.
    He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this wide awake. The adrenaline was coursing round his body and he knew that sleep would not come before dawn. Beside him, Helen started softly snoring. He gave her a gentle dig in the ribs and the snoring stopped.
    2.13.
    In a situation like this, he would normally slip into the living room and watch Sky Sports News for a while until he felt his eyelids begin to droop. Tonight, however, with his father on the sofa, that was not an option. Scratching his head, he stared at the ceiling.
    2.14.
    He thought he could make out a scuffling noise. It sounded like the mice were back. A ubiquitous problem for Londoners, rodents were something that Carlyle had always happily ignored until one evening a fearless little creature had darted up onto the sofa to enjoy an episode of
The Killing
. Carlyle had jumped a foot into the air and immediately got on the phone to the council. A few days later a man came round with some traps and some poison and there had been no more sightings for a while. But, deep down, Carlyle knew that where there was one, there would always be more. And they would never be gone for good.
    2.15.
    Ignoring the scuffling, he tried to focus on the hum of traffic outside. If you concentrated, you could just about make out the steady stream of traffic that headed up and down Kingsway, despite the late hour. Should he get up? Or should he just lie here, still, hoping that sleep might eventually come?
    A memory of his mother drifted into his mind. He must have been fifteen or sixteen; they were standing in the kitchen of the family’s council flat in Fulham. Carlyle was wondering how he was going to scrape together the cash for a cassette of the new Clash album before it went off special offer at the Our Price record store on the Fulham Road. His mother, meanwhile, was wondering why he couldn’t grow up.
    Arms folded, scowling, Lorna Gordon adopted a familiar pose. She was wearing a truly horrible blue and white knitted sweater that his father had bought as a Christmas present. She hated the sweater but wore it anyway. Looking her son up and down, the annoyance on her face was obvious. ‘You’ll be leaving school before you know it.’ The last vestiges of the Glasgow accent mixed with the anger in her voice.
    Carlyle gripped a rolled-up copy of the
New Musical Express
tightly in his left hand, the ink seeping into his fingers. He had bought the NME earlier in the day. It looked good – Paul Weller, Richard Hell, Iggy Pop and Bruce Springsteen – and he wanted to head off to his bedroom to read it in peace. ‘I know.’ He knew that his parents wanted him to settle on a career as early as possible, but life wasn’t