A Killer Came Knocking

by S. B. Caves

  ‘Like you said, I had my doubts about him.’ She pushed her chair back. ‘Go to the police if you want. I don’t really care. Tell them that you think I was sleeping with Craig Morley and I’ll deny it. I’ve never even met him.’ She stood up and watched his face sour. ‘Enjoy your lunch.’

  ‘I wasn’t planning on telling them that you were sleeping with him,’ he said. ‘I was going to tell them that you know who kidnapped him.’

  ‘Good luck with that.’

  ‘You think I’m bluffing, don’t you?’ He stared at her and then pointed to her seat. ‘Sit down.’

  Her eyes fixed on the exit, desperate to be away from him, to be outside in the cool air.

  ‘Sit down, Emily.’

  Reluctantly she obeyed his command, but continued to regard the exit like a missed opportunity.

  ‘Here’s what I’m going to do,’ he began. ‘I’ll go to my sergeant on my night shift tonight and ask if I can have a word with him. Then I’ll say that a friend of mine – namely you – had been seeing Craig Morley as recently as a week ago. I’ll also add that in our little date today, you gave me reason to believe you know who took him.’

  ‘But I don’t,’ she hissed.

  ‘Maybe you don’t, but it’ll still be enough for them to interview you. And believe me, with the heat that Morley’s got on him at the moment, they will put every aspect of your life under the microscope. They’ll grill you so intensely that if you do have something to hide, they’ll get it out of you, trust me on that.’

  ‘They can do what they want because I don’t have anything to hide.’ She tried to make the statement sound concrete, but the words sounded shaky when she delivered them.

  ‘That may be true, and if the police don’t find anything, then maybe the newspapers will.’

  There it was. Checkmate. He leaned back in the chair, satisfied with his work.

  ‘It’s the hottest story of the year so far,’ he said. ‘I’d bet people are phoning in their stories right now, everybody from Craig Morley’s primary school teachers to his barber to the newsagent he gets his milk from. Now imagine a nice juicy story about the “other” woman in his life, someone who could offer some intimate insight into what it’s like to fuck a high-profile heroin dealer.’

  A waitress came to the table and presented their food. ‘Oh, this looks delicious,’ Bernard said, and immediately cut into his steak. Bloody juice ran out of the meat and filled his plate, turning Emily’s stomach.

  Her eyes drifted down to her cassoulet. It might as well have been a bowl of vomit. She felt an oncoming avalanche of self-pity threatening to descend. How had her life become such a mess in such a short amount of time? Perhaps it was better to let him go to the police, she thought. Maybe it would be better to just own up to what she had done and face the consequences.

  You’d go to jail for a very long time. They’d make an example out of you.

  Would that be such a bad thing? She didn’t have anywhere to live, she no longer had a job or a boyfriend, or a future. What did she have? The memory of her dead sister that visited her in gruesome nightmares?

  ‘Why would you want to do that to me, Bernard?’ she asked as he emphatically chewed his steak. ‘You’re talking about ruining my life. Why would you want to do it?’

  ‘I don’t want to do it,’ he said, in an obvious attempt at sincerity, a shred of beef between his two front teeth. ‘But let’s face it. If I can help end these awful events, then surely it’s my duty. I mean, I can’t have something like this on my conscience, can I? Unless…’ He trailed off and resumed work on the steak.

  ‘Unless?’

  ‘We work something out. You and I.’

  ‘Work something out,’ she repeated slowly, as though he had spoken in some foreign tongue. ‘What did you have in mind?’

  ‘I think you know the answer to that already.’ He continued to eat as he spoke, dipping the steak in the peppercorn sauce. ‘You and me, one night. If you treated me nicely I’m sure I’d forget this whole thing.’

  She had never felt such revulsion in her entire life. Even Morley didn’t disgust her as much as Bernard did right now.

  ‘You want me to sleep with you?’ She almost gagged on the sentence.

  ‘No, I want to fuck you.’ His features hardened, and his eyes blazed darkly. His lips curled back over his plaque-lined teeth. ‘You walk around thinking that you’re something special, that you can just play with people, lead them on, manipulate them. I know your type, Emily, you’re nothing but a user. But maybe if I fucked you like an animal, treated you like a filthy whore, you’d know what it is to really feel used by someone.’ He looked away from her, his mouth tightening into a line, his knuckles whitening as his hands clenched the cutlery.

  She could not quite believe that she was still sitting there, listening to such a lurid proposition. But it was too late now, she’d played this whole thing wrong. She should never have even agreed to come to lunch, let alone listen to his disgusting fantasy, and yet she had blundered right into his hands.

  ‘And you expect me to go along with this, do you?’

  ‘If you want to avoid going to prison until you’re old enough to ride the bus for free, then yes, I do.’

  ‘How do I know you’d keep your word?’

  ‘Don’t you trust me?’ he asked, suddenly amiable, pouring more wine, topping her up. ‘I could put it in writing, a contract signed by both of us. That way, if I went to the papers or spoke to the police, you could show that I… well, blackmailed is quite a strong word, but for lack of a better one, you could say that I blackmailed you. That’d be my career over and I’d be open to just as much media scrutiny as you. Then again, if you tried to go to the police after the act, you’d be implicating yourself in the crime by showing them the contract.’

  Frustration and resentment stole her voice. She opened her lips to speak but could not find any words that would adequately portray how she felt. Bernard saw her struggling and decided to help her out.

  ‘Don’t give me an answer now,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the napkin and rising from the table. ‘You can let me know by tomorrow evening. Oh, and by the way’ – he signalled to the waiter and pointed down at their table, before looking back to Emily – ‘thanks for lunch.’

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Dillon couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept. He had endured the marathon by knuckling cocaine into his nose. He had two twisted knots of tissue wedged into his nostrils to stem the bleeding, and his face was so numb it felt like his skin had turned to cotton wool. He didn’t care. He just had to keep moving in the hope that inspiration would strike again, because right now he was all out of ideas.

  The night wrapped around the car in a blur of lights. He was so wired that he was losing basic motor functions, cranking the gears and burning the clutch. He’d thrashed the arse off the car and now it was almost toast. It had been running on fumes for the last hour or so. (Was it an hour? It felt longer and shorter at the same time, not that he had any concept of time any more. All he knew were the lights.) The engine was starting to complain. He burned through a red light, narrowly escaped a collision with an oncoming car, and took a right turn so violently that he thought his car might tip over. Tara screamed, both hands pressed against the dashboard, begging him to slow down. The tyres screeched and the car began to swerve. He wrestled the wheel in an effort to stop the car from fishtailing, and floored the accelerator.

  In his rear-view mirror, he thought he saw an ocean of flashing blue lights. He weaved down the carriageway, zipping dangerously close to the other cars as he changed lanes. When he checked the rear-view mirror again, there were no blue lights at all. Paranoid, you’re being paranoid. He knew this, and yet couldn’t shake the feeling that there were plain-clothes police officers in all the cars along the motorway. He remembered Craig’s words of wisdom just then like a fleeting déjà vu – Just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, dummy.
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  ‘I know, I know,’ he said aloud before cranking the gears and threading through a narrow gap between the middle and far right lane.

  ‘Wh-what?’ Tara asked, her face the colour of curdled milk. He had smacked her a few times earlier, and now her upper lip looked like a leech, bloated on blood.

  ‘We’re going to find them,’ he rasped, the inside of his nose itching like crazy. ‘We’re going to find who took him and you’re going to point them out.’

  He saw the sign for the exit about a mile up the stretch and a spark jumped inside him; it was not quite relief, nor was it a reprieve from the madness he had endured since all this began. His hands were slippery on the wheel and his feet danced across the pedals with a leaden heaviness.

  He had been all over the city in search of Craig, dragging Tara into just about every drug den he knew. Reality melted and dissolved, leaving only a warped mirage of places and things he barely recognised.

  Tara had complained that she was hungry, but when he bought her a Snickers bar, she moaned that she couldn’t eat it, mumbling something about a broken tooth. She whined about needing the toilet, and when he refused to pull over anywhere, she eventually wet herself, crying into her hands. Let her sit in it, he thought. If I have to wade through all this shit, she can sit in a bit of piss.

  Dillon knew of only one woman that moved in the same circles as he and Craig. In East London was Bertha, a heavyset Jamaican with an accent so thick he only ever managed to decipher about one in every ten words she said. She moved ‘hard food’ – crack cocaine mostly, but occasionally heroin. Dillon relayed this to Tara, more to get things straight in his own head than for her benefit.

  ‘The woman I saw take Jerome… Craig, wasn’t black,’ Tara said, as Dillon dragged her up to Bertha’s front door. The stink of urine was very obvious; it had settled into her clothes throughout the course of the journey.

  Bertha came to the door wearing a bright red velour tracksuit. She was scowling at the unannounced house visit, her hard features accentuated by a deep scar that ran from the corner of her eye down to her chin.

  Dillon began by apologising, before asking whether she knew anything about the pair that took Craig. Was she aware of any white woman with dark hair that might have been looking to go into business for herself?

  In an angry burst of patois, Bertha explained that she didn’t know anything about it, and said something about Dillon moving away from her front yard before she lost her temper, or at least that’s what he took from the exchange. She slammed the door in their faces, and he had better sense than to knock again, especially without any backup. She wasn’t as dumb as Craig to keep any guns or drugs where she lived, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t grab a machete and try and take his head off.

  He was running out of options as he marched Tara back to the car, shoving her inside before climbing into the driver’s side and roaring off. Where else could he go?

  ‘Please, I just want to go home,’ Tara croaked miserably. Her mouth had pulled down into an inverted horseshoe, and her voice had taken on a childish timbre. ‘Please, I won’t say anything to anyone, I j-j-just—’ She broke off, choking on her sobs.

  ‘Just shut up!’ he yelled. ‘Real tough bitch, weren’t you? You wanna fuck around with drug dealers? Now look at you, crying like a baby. Well, this is what happens! This is what happens!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he mimicked, punching the steering wheel, causing the car to drift. ‘You’re the only one that saw them. So where am I supposed to go now? Shall I just start putting up flyers? What the fuck do I do now?’

  He was screaming. Spit flew from his mouth in foamy gobs. His heart kicked in his chest.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she yipped.

  ‘That’s right, you don’t know anything. You’re going to get me killed, you stupid little bitch. You’re going to get my family killed! Do you understand that? Do you?’

  ‘Please slow down… please, you’re going too—’

  He took the exit and roared past a Mitsubishi as he emerged onto a large roundabout. He was going too quickly to follow the bend and felt the car pulling away from him. He drifted close to a lorry, narrowly missing it. His hands struggled with the steering wheel in an effort to regain control. He pulled too hard and the wheels locked. Tara’s terrified scream filled the car, piercing Dillon’s eardrums. A hand clenched around his madly beating heart as the roundabout became a whirlpool around them.

  Their car slammed into a metal barrier, crunching the bonnet into an accordion. His head smacked into the steering wheel, and he thought suddenly how weird it was that the airbag hadn’t deployed. Then he thought that he really needed something to drink because not only was he extremely thirsty, he was sweating like a bastard. It was only when he touched his face and saw that his palm came away red that he realised it was blood.

  ‘Craig, you nearly killed me,’ he mumbled through a numb jaw, wondering why Craig wasn’t laughing or calling him names. ‘You… talk about my driving? You nearly… killed me.’

  He turned his head, his neck stiff as a rusted lock, and looked at the passenger seat.

  Tara’s skull had smashed through the side window. Blood painted her skin and dripped down her neck, which was bent at an awkward angle. Her blouse, which she had worn because it was see-through and would reveal her bra beneath, was drenched. Her chest was not moving.

  It took a few seconds for the image of her limp, crumpled body to calibrate in his mind, for he had temporarily taken leave of his senses.

  Dillon, surprised that he had actually been wearing a seatbelt, unclipped it, opened the door and fell out of the car. He stared up at the sky and allowed himself a few breaths, listening to a chorus of confusion as other cars began to stop. He began the painful climb to his feet. The stink of burnt rubber and petrol filled his nose. His legs and side hurt, but he was walking now so he guessed they couldn’t have been broken.

  That was good, because now he could hear sirens.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  In many ways, Morley was lucky. Had his head not been bandaged so thickly, the scalding would have been much worse. As it stood, he had only lost the skin on the bridge of his nose and some on his right cheek. His clothes had protected his body from any severe blistering, though the skin on his thick neck was bright red and blotchy. The scalding water had caused both his eyes to swell closed, and Jack was vaguely thankful that he didn’t have to look into them any longer.

  ‘Now maybe you’ll understand how serious I am,’ Jack said when he saw Morley stirring and mewling. ‘Does it hurt?’ Jack kicked Morley’s foot. ‘I thought you were a big tough guy. Doesn’t look like it from where I’m standing. A little bit of hot water and you’re crying like a fat little baby. Hey!’ He kicked Morley’s foot harder. ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re the one making me do this. You have the power to stop it at any moment. All you have to do is—’

  The buzzer rang shrilly through the warehouse. Jack stiffened. The buzzer rang again. He thought about going upstairs to check the security camera to see who it was, and then decided to ignore it completely. He stood completely still, his eyes fixed on Morley’s bloody, blistered lips. The buzzer droned in a long, continuous burr.

  He checked his watch. It was just after six in the evening. It could be someone from Greco calling. But they probably wouldn’t just turn up without arranging something with Jack first. Had they been trying to reach him? How long had he been away from the Dagenham warehouse for? Was it two or three days? Couldn’t have been longer than a week already, could it? He would have to sit and have a think about that. Couldn’t afford to start losing track of the little details. He supposed that he should probably check in with the other warehouse soon, to make sure the place hadn’t crumbled to the ground in his absence. Perhaps he’d make a quick visit there later this evening before closing, as soon as the person at the door stopped ringing that fucking buzzer.

  Ther
e was a long stretch of silence. Jack exhaled and was about to go back to work on Morley when he heard a familiar sound: the hinges of the warehouse door’s letterbox opening.

  ‘Jackie?’ May’s voice infiltrated the silence. ‘Jackie, I know you’re in there. The van is a bit of a giveaway.’ She paused and he could almost feel her eyes roaming around, looking for signs of life. ‘All right then, have it your way. I’ll wait out here.’

  The letterbox snapped shut. Jack closed his eyes and stroked his forehead. The sound of her voice, or maybe it had been hearing her call him Jackie, had re-ignited a stress headache. He looked down at Morley, wondered if he was faking it. A reedy whimper whistled out of his mouth and his eyes remained tightly closed. Jack was about to tape over Morley’s mouth but realised he would have to touch the field of bright red flesh on his cheek, which would probably snap him out of his stupor and send him into a fit of screaming. Then he remembered that the radio was broken, so he couldn’t even use that to drown him out.

  He inspected the knots around Morley’s feet and hands, and then left the oiling room, locking the door behind him. Then he padded to the warehouse door and opened it.

  May was sitting behind the wheel of her car with her head resting against the window when she spotted him. She sat up, smiled involuntarily, and then made a conscious effort to look stern. Jack offered her a sheepish wave, locked the warehouse door behind him, and walked over to her car. She made no signs of getting out.

  The window rolled down as he neared.

  ‘Hi May.’ He saw her eyes wandering over his face, and the look of mild shock at his appearance. ‘What are you doing here?’