Bleeding London

by Geoff Nicholson

  The street was not empty. There were quite a few people going to work, a builder’s van was arriving at a house across the street, a postman was making his round. The day was sweetly ordinary, and Mick realized just how tired he was.

  They say you never hear the bullet that hits you, and certainly the car that ran down Mick Wilton was on him before he was even aware of the engine noise. All he felt was a metallic scything of his legs from under him, as though someone had clubbed him behind the knees. The big bulk of the car had caught him only glancingly but it was more than enough to put him on the deck, and then a number of men were crowding around him, each one scrambling for the chance to grab him or kick him. He fought back and reckoned that he landed a couple of good kicks of his own, but there was no way he could win. In the end numbers meant everything. He wasn’t even sure his gun would have been any use to him.

  Then something short and metallic landed behind his left ear and he saw lights and stars that were no part of the London landscape. He was dazed, close to passing out, but he fought to stop himself. Hurriedly, inexpertly, a bag was put over his head and then he was being stowed into the boot of the car that had run him down. Somebody tried to hit him again but missed, and even as the boot lid slammed shut above him, something told Mick that he was dealing with amateurs.

  He could tell by the engine noise that the car was a Mercedes, a much classier job than the one he had back in Sheffield, and not some tarted-up, spoilered, pimp’s car either, something more executive, more of a director’s wagon. It was driven smoothly, unhurriedly, but from the way it hung on the suspension he could tell it had a full load, five or six men inside and, of course, one in the boot.

  The journey seemed endless. Then the ride got rough. They were no longer on tarmac, but driving over mud and grass, and Mick heard the tyres crunch on gravel. The car stopped, he heard voices and he was fished out of the boot and made to walk a short distance through the open air to a doorway into some sort of building. The air inside wasn’t as warm as it would have been in a house or office, and he sensed that he was in a large space – a shed or workshop, perhaps another of Robin Lawton’s property developments.

  He heard doors closing behind him and he was led across a wide empty floor to a corner of the building, and made to step up into a smaller, more confined space. Once inside, his hands and feet were tied. Again he could tell that whoever was doing the tying up was new to the job and when the ropes were in place he was pushed down on to a small upholstered seat and the bag was removed from his head. He blinked at six faces that were moderately familiar. They were the faces of his six victims, Gabby’s six attackers, but before he could look any of them in the eye one of them punched him in the mouth. It was Philip Masterson, the man Mick had forced to jump off London Bridge. Mick saw Masterson’s left hand, the one with the broken finger, was still strapped up. The right hand, however, as Mick had discovered, was perfectly usable.

  ‘I’ve been looking forward to that,’ Masterson said.

  A voice behind him, one that Mick didn’t recognize at first, said, ‘Don’t get too carried away. We don’t want him unconscious.’

  ‘Don’t we?’ asked Masterson.

  ‘No, we don’t.’

  Masterson resisted the temptation to hit Mick again, but it was a struggle for him.

  Mick had a moment to become aware of his surroundings and saw that they were in the carriage of a tube train. Clearly the train was not in service. The seats were ripped and most of the windows were smashed, and perhaps the carriage had been brought to this place to be repaired and renovated. The automatic doors were jammed open and the lights weren’t working. There were some fluorescent tubes far away in the roof of the building, but little illumination seeped down to the interior of the carriage.

  Even though it was not a real train, even though it wasn’t crowded, even though it wasn’t in a tunnel beneath the ground, Mick felt a familiar claustrophobia closing in on him, although he was still smart enough to realize that claustrophobia might be the least of his problems. He caught the eye of Robin Lawton, the man whose backside he’d slapped only a few hours earlier.

  ‘I don’t think we should have taken the bag from over his head,’ Lawton said. ‘Now he knows who we all are.’

  ‘That’s right. I want him to know.’

  It was Jonathan Sands who spoke, the marine insurance man and boat owner. He had taken on the role of leader, something for which he apparently thought he had a gift.

  ‘Why on earth do you want him to know?’ Lawton asked weakly.

  Sands said, ‘Because we have to show people like this that they can’t just attack us, that we aren’t scared of them, that we’re brave enough and strong enough to fight back.’

  Lawton looked around him as though checking for possible exits, getting ready to make a quick escape. He said, ‘Look, this really isn’t my argument. He didn’t do anything to me. He hardly touched me. The worst he did was make a phonecall without paying for it.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Lawton,’ Sands said with disgust. ‘Don’t be such a wimp. You were lucky, that’s all. He might just as easily have beaten you up, humiliated you, destroyed your property, the things you’ve worked for and care about.’

  From the way Sands talked it seemed that the damage to his boat had been far more painful to him than the damage to his body.

  ‘But the point is, he didn’t,’ Lawton insisted.

  ‘Oh give it a rest, Lawton.’

  It was Justin Carr who interrupted this time. He was looking

  far more self-possessed than when Mick had last seen him, not naked, not singing ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner’. He had found a small area of the carriage where he could pace and look good. He smoked a cigarette elegantly and languidly, his manner conveying just the right blend of toughness and sensitivity to win over an imagined audience.

  ‘However, much as I hate to admit it, Lawton has got a point, actually,’ Carr went on. ‘He does know who we are. And those of us with a public profile have rather more to lose than certain others.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Sands. ‘That’s why we have to teach him a lesson in such a way that it makes an absolute end to this business.’

  ‘Like what?’ Carr said. ‘Pulling his eyes out?’ ‘Don’t be facetious,’ Sands replied.

  ‘Let’s get on with it then,’ Masterson said, and he braced himself to start hitting Mick in earnest.

  ‘I’m not sure about this either,’ said another voice. It was a light, fluting voice that belonged to Kerry Slater, the plump, masturbatory food critic. He was looking tense and flushed and miserable. He was a long way out of his natural environment and he wasn’t at all happy about it.

  ‘You talked about getting our own back, and I agreed to that,’ he said. ‘But what I had in mind was forcing him to eat some raw offal or perhaps a couple of pounds of laxative chocolate.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Masterson and he belted Mick in the face for the sheer hell of it. It was clear that he would just as willingly have hit Slater.

  ‘Wait a minute!’ Sands yelled. ‘Wait a minute, can’t you? You’ll get your chance to hit him. But first of all I want him to answer some questions for me. I want to know why.’ ‘Why what?’ Masterson demanded.

  ‘Why this little piece of slime got it into his head to attack us.’

  ‘Because he’s a little piece of slime,’ Masterson countered. ‘Because he gets pleasure from it.’

  ‘Are you really as stupid as you pretend?’ Sands said. ‘A piece of slime wouldn’t have known who we were, wouldn’t have come all the way to London from Yorkshire, wouldn’t have tracked each of us down to our homes. He wouldn’t have spied on us. He wouldn’t have learned so much about us, found our weaknesses, wouldn’t have inflicted such specific punishments.’

  ‘What exactly do you mean?’ Masterson said dumbly.

  ‘All I mean is that before you get your revenge, let’s find out what his motives were.’

>   A new figure stepped forward from the darkness of the carriage It was Dr Graham Pryce, his face bruised but his suit immaculate.

  ‘I tend to agree with Philip,’ he said. ‘I think you can overdo this motive business. This chap is very sick. What he did to me was appalling. What he did to my wife was worse. Of course, being sick doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t be punished but I think it does mean that motivation might be rather thin on the ground.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Masterson said. ‘He’s just rubbish, the kind of thing that you find littering the street, like dog turds or McDonald’s wrappers. We should clear him up.’

  ‘I think you’re being incredibly naive,’ Sands insisted. ‘Do you really think he’s a one-man band? Do you think he woke up one morning and thought it would be fun to beat us up? Do you think he’s the prime mover, the Mr Big? Don’t be ridiculous. He’s just the muscle. I want to know who the brains are.’

  The good doctor shrugged. He knew that in the end Sands would do what he liked.

  ‘Why not ask him?’ Pryce said.

  It was a novel idea. Till then they had been talking about Mick as though they thought he wasn’t there, or as though he was too stupid to be able to follow their conversation.

  ‘All right, I will,’ Sands said.

  The six men gathered close, stood around Mick, waiting eagerly to hear what was coming next.

  Sands said to Mick, ‘I want you to answer some very simple questions. Why have you been doing this to us? Why this? Why us? And on whose instructions?’

  Mick considered shouting obscene defiance but rejected the idea and said, ‘Nobody’s instructing me.’ He said it under his breath, and as he said it, it finally struck him that these men really didn’t seem to know what they’d done. Could a gang-rape really mean so little to them? Could they have blanked it out so easily and completely? Were they really that callous? Could it never have crossed their minds that someone might want revenge?

  They were not happy with his simple, straightforward answer. Masterson hit him again, punching him twice in the face and neck.

  ‘Why?’ Sands repeated.

  There was a long silence as Mick appeared to struggle with himself, appeared to be considering whether or not to make a clean breast of it.

  At last he said, ‘I’ll tell you something that pisses me off about London: Cup Finals. Now let’s say the Cup Final is Liverpool against Chelsea, well, they hold it down in London, don’t they, which gives Chelsea an unfair advantage for a start. They’re playing in their home town, their fans don’t have to come such a long way, they don’t have all that expense, they don’t have any trouble finding Wembley Stadium, whereas northern fans have all that hassle, having to hire a coach, having to pay fancy London prices for food and drink. It’s not fair.

  ‘But then let’s say the Cup Final is Liverpool against Man. United, they still have it in London so that it’s unfair to twice as many people. It can’t be right, can it?’

  ‘Hit him again, would you, Philip?’ Sands said, and Masterson did as he was asked.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Mick wearily. ‘Stop this crap. Don’t tell me you don’t remember. Don’t tell me you don’t know. A stag night. A stripper. A gang-rape …’

  As he spoke he looked into their faces and the blankness there confirmed something that perhaps he had known all along. They surely had no reason now to keep up a pretence, but talk of rape really seemed to mean nothing to them.

  For their part, they continued to think he was simply telling lies, simply trying to provoke them, and he was succeeding. Masterson hit him once again, a good blow this time that rocked him back in his seat. Mick was hurting and it showed, but even Masterson began to see that Mick’s ability to take punishment might be more than equal to his own taste for dishing it out. Perhaps he also realized that, insane as it appeared, Mick was actually telling the truth as he knew it.

  ‘This is stupid,’ said Pryce. ‘He’s hurt, he’s bleeding. He’s not going to tell us anything. We’ve had our revenge. Let’s just end this here.’

  A couple of voices mumbled agreement but Justin Carr, perhaps having seen more movies than the others, was alive to other possibilities. He said, ‘And how exactly do we end it, eh, Graham? He’s rather effectively demonstrated that he knows where we all live …’

  He let that hang in the air for a while, aware that it wasn’t a bad line, and slowly everyone turned towards Sands, who was looking much less like a leader now.

  When nobody else said anything, Mick, sweating and in pain, experiencing a sickening sense of metal walls closing in on him, took the opportunity to speak.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘it seems to me you lads have landed yourselves in a bit of a predicament. OK, you’ve got me here, you’ve slapped me about a bit, you’ve got as much sense out of me as you’re going to get, so what are you going to do next? Let me go, and call that an end of it? I don’t think so. I really don’t. I mean, I might agree to it now, but why would I keep my word, eh? I don’t think the matter’s going to end here, do you? Justin’s right. I do know where you all live. I’ve tracked you all down once, and the moment you let me go I think you know I’m going to do it all over again. All you’ve done this morning is earn yourself another dose of the same. It’s the same game but you’ve raised the stakes. And I thought you were such smart lads.’

  Anger buzzed in the air. The six men were angry because they knew he was right. They had considered themselves clever to have captured him, to have given themselves the means of taking revenge. But now the realization of their stupidity was setting over them like a plaster mould.

  ‘So what do you do next?’ Mick asked them. ‘Well, you can talk among yourselves, kick ideas around, if you like, but believe me, I know, save yourself some time. Sooner or later you’re going to come to the conclusion that the only sure way out of this is to kill me.

  ‘Then two questions remain. Who’s going to do it and how? You don’t have guns as far as I can see, so which one of you is going to kill me with his bare hands? You, Masterson?’

  ‘Killing was never part of the plan,’ said Masterson.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Lawton agreed.

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t,’ Carr agreed, ‘but he’s right. He’s given us no choice.’

  ‘I’m a doctor, for Christ’s sake,’ Pryce bleated. ‘I’m supposed to save lives.’

  ‘You’re a clever bastard, aren’t you?’ Sands said to Mick.

  ‘No, I’m just the muscle.’

  ‘This is a disaster,’ said Carr.

  ‘It’s not the best,’ Mick agreed.

  ‘There must be a way out of this,’ Slater said. ‘We’re reasonable men. We can negotiate. We can come to an agreement.’

  Mick sat up in his seat, stared at each of his tormentors in turn, and did not look at all reasonable.

  ‘This is a nightmare,’ said Carr. ‘We either kill him, which we don’t want to do, or we release him, in which case we just set the whole thing in motion again.’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s a nightmare,’ Mick said, ‘but it certainly looks like a stalemate.’

  However he was wrong. There had been no sound of a car, no footsteps on the gravel or on the floor of the workshop, but suddenly there was someone outside the carriage. The six men turned, furtively, guiltily, peered out through the dark, broken windows as Judy Tanaka strode in through the central set of carriage doors. She was screaming at the top of her lungs, sounding dangerously deranged, and shakily holding a gun out in front of her. Mick recognized it as his own. Her body was quaking and she extended her right hand, closed her eyes and let off half a dozen or so shots into the carriage.

  The six men, as though obeying a strict, well-rehearsed choreography, flattened themselves on the floor. The shots had drilled harmless holes in the carriage’s walls and ceiling and upholstery. But when there are eight people in a severely confined space, a woman who doesn’t know how to use a gun, who doesn’t even look where she’s shooting, is every bit
as dangerous and terrifying as a fully trained marksman.

  ‘Untie him,’ she said, her voice loud but trembling, and Sands got up, cautiously, with infinite care and began untying Mick.

  Carr said, ‘She’s had six shots. I think the gun’s empty.’ ‘It’s an automatic, you twat,’ said Mick, but it didn’t really matter. He knew there wasn’t going to be any fighting, any wrestling for the gun.

  ‘We wouldn’t have killed you,’ Sands said. ‘You realize that, I hope.’

  Mick considered the statement but didn’t reply. He suspected it was probably true. Once untied, he took the gun from Judy’s shaking hand. He fired one last shot into the floor of the carriage. It lodged in the boards just a yard from Sands’ foot, a yard from Masterson’s head, and a yard from Carr’s hands.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ he said. ‘Don’t even think about moving till we’ve been gone at least half an hour.’

  He knew they’d get their nerve back much sooner than that, so he shot holes in two of the Mercedes’ tyres. It was a shame. He’d have loved to steal the car, but Judy’s Datsun made a much less conspicuous getaway car.

  ‘I saw it all,’ Judy gushed as she drove. ‘I was coming to see you, to have breakfast with you maybe. I was driving around looking for somewhere to park when I saw you come out of your front door. Then I saw the six of them arrive and attack you and put you in the boot of the car. But what was I supposed to do? Call the police? So I followed them instead. They had no idea I was tailing them but they drove for miles and miles to this workshop place. I’m not very sure where we are, but I saw where they took you and I guessed what they must be doing to you. So I drove back to the Dickens, got the gun from your room, returned to the workshop, and you know the rest.’