by Jake Cross
‘Where’s my partner?’ she said. Now her words were clear, her accent unmistakably foreign but her English good. She was still trying to free her glued hand, but was forced to use her bad arm and couldn’t work the fingers very well or generate much power.
He tried to stand and smacked his head again. This time he caught the rear-view mirror. He slapped it in anger and by chance it flicked into a position that allowed him to see his face. Normal eyes now. Pupils no longer like dinner plates. Fully charged body. Back to normal, it seemed. Apart from his smashed teeth, of course. There was a spot of blood on his lower lip, maybe from catching it on his own teeth. He took mouthfuls of water from one of the bottles he’d bought and spat until the water was no longer tinted pink with blood. It took six. He felt happy enough to swallow numbers seven, eight, and nine.
‘Hey! Where is he?’ the girl shouted at his back.
Nate knelt on the seat and faced her. There was no sympathy in him. Just anger. ‘The imbecile called Damar, you mean? He left you. Left you to rot and ran away.’
‘Sure he did. I can’t wait until we get to bury you again.’
‘Again? You messed that up the first time. And you should forget him and worry about what’s going to happen to you. Because you’re the only one who will.’
Now, only now, did he notice the bright world beyond the windows. Morning, at last. Hello, my old friend. Something he hadn’t expected to see ever again. But there it was. Lovely daylight. The world was always a less scary place while the sun shone. Most of the bad people in the world had slunk into dark recesses like insects.
He fished the knife from his jacket and showed her. ‘I kept you alive for a reason. Time for you to earn it. Time to give me some answers.’
He thought he looked all menacing with the knife, and did not expect her response.
She laughed.
‘My God, was this why you kidnapped me? Your big plan was to get me to spill all the beans, so you could then go to the police and have them sort it out and you could go back to your life? You idiot.’
Clearly she did not fear the knife, or at least did not fear the man holding it. ‘Okay, fool, I’ll talk. I’ll tell you everything. Ready?’
He didn’t speak. Was she serious? Was this a lark? Stalling for time? His head spun.
‘Damar, the guy who’s going to kill you, asked me to do him a favour. Here’s a postcode and a house number. Be there at this time exactly. Sneak into the back of the property without any neighbours seeing. There will be a car with a drugged dickhead in the boot. Drive that car quickly away and bring it to our meeting point, a warehouse in Enfield. I’ll meet you there and we’ll kill the dickhead and bury him, and go spend £5,000, which was what we were being paid. Then we thought it would be a bit of funny irony to drive you all the way back and bury you five minutes from your house. But first we, er, carefully removed your distinguishing features. And you know the rest. And that’s it. That’s all I know. I don’t know who paid Damar to do the job, which means I don’t know who torched your house or killed your brother. Sorry, I don’t have the kingpin’s name and address for you. So that’s your great plan out the window. So, what’s your next move, cowboy?’
Nate’s head throbbed. His assumption that he’d been out driving when he got snatched – wrong. If she was to be believed – and he believed her – then her job had been only disposal. Unknown others, maybe including Blondie and his biker friends, had performed the actual kidnapping and drugging part.
At his home.
It made sense. His last memories before waking naked and tied up had been of being in the house, not out driving. And those memories had been warped. Instead of shouting at Pete, he must have shouted at the intruders who burst in. He must have thrown the glass, not at Pete, but at those guys. They must have tackled him, which had seen the kitchen table knocked over. And as for the memories of driving away: nothing more than the groggy sensation of movement as he rode in the boot of his own BMW.
‘You don’t have any clue how to proceed from this point, do you? Now your dream is shattered. You’re a damn novice. What are you going to do now?’ And that damned grin was still there. Before he could stop himself, he was across the van, grabbing her throat. He slammed her head hard into the floor. But even as it connected, her foot came up, heel cracking into his knee, staggering him. He stumbled away and she tried to launch herself at him like an angry pit bull, but her glued hand locked her in place like a leash. Nate leaned against the back of the driver’s seat, breathing heavy, ignoring his knee in order to pretend that it didn’t hurt. If she thought he was injured, she might try another attack. He didn’t think the blow had caused any damage, but it damned well hurt.
Her grin was gone, at least. Anger had taken its place: ‘That silliness got you no closer to your brother’s killer, did it? Do something productive. Not just trying to attack incapacitated women. Make a move. Don’t just stand there looking dumb. Your brother’s dead; you are supposed to be; and whoever set it up is going to get away with it because you don’t have a brain or any balls. Do something!’
Just words, he told himself. Words couldn’t hurt unless you let them. So, he wouldn’t. Unfortunately, he couldn’t ignore the content. Had he really expected her to give him the kingpin’s name and address, so he could send the cops wailing round there? She was right: he had no idea what his next move should be.
‘Unfortunately for you, I used satnav and paid no attention to street names, so I don’t remember where the warehouse where we left your car is,’ she said. And then she started laughing, her face smug.
He didn’t care. She had just unwittingly given him a way forward. His car. It could hold clues. He raised the knife and stepped towards her.
‘Don’t try anything this time.’
He grabbed her jacket from the floor. She watched like an inquisitive child as he patted it down. Just like Damar, she carried no ID of any kind, but she did have a phone. Of course she did. She and Damar would need to keep in touch. He was thinking how daft he had been to not have already searched for one. She could have called for help. Damned drug addling his brain.
‘That’s mine,’ she hissed as he extracted her mobile.
‘I know: it was in your coat.’ He pocketed the phone and bent forward to check her hand was still firmly fixed to the wheel arch. The heel of her palm and two fingers had come loose. He took out the vial of glue, bent close carefully, watching her, and dribbled the fluid around the edges of her hand. She didn’t try to stop this, or even object. He didn’t like that. Did she have an escape plan?
He emptied the last of the glue onto the floor. She watched in puzzlement. While she was in this docile moment, he quickly grabbed her head and twisted it down, slamming it into the floor. Second time. And for the second time, she hit back. This time her bad arm snaked out and her fist got him in the balls. He staggered back again.
‘You fucker,’ she yelled as she tried to sit up and couldn’t. Her hair was caught in the glue. She tried to look at it, and he stepped forward and planted a foot on her wrist, crushing it into the cold metal. Pinned at three points.
His other foot stamped onto her hair, squashing it into the glue. He pulled his foot back before it could become stuck, then bent and placed a palm over her ear and pushed, and kept her head there. She tried to thrash, but her awkward position, with her outstretched left arm bent back because of the height of the wheel arch, didn’t allow her to generate much leverage. He held her there until he was sure the glue was dry, then stepped back. She tried to drag her head free, but it clearly hurt too much.
She didn’t stop cursing him for a full ninety seconds after he’d retaken his seat. And then only because he said, ‘I’ll glue those bloody lips together if you don’t stop right now.’
She glared at him. He turned sideways on in his seat, feet on the passenger seat. This way he couldn’t see her, but would see movement if she got free and came closer. Now, more than ever, he expected her to try to come
at him.
‘Now sit quietly,’ he said, grinning. The grin was false. He was shaken inside. He wasn’t used to hurting people, and this was the first woman that he’d been violent towards. It helped to picture a naked and tied-up moment from history. To picture this woman with a spade in her hands.
‘You are so dead,’ she said, already calmer.
‘Looks that way.’
He focused on her phone. Brand new, cheap, and with a spare battery glued to the back. No numbers or addresses stored, and cheap, so just a temporary thing, probably designed to be used last night and then discarded. But a call had been made, just the one. None in, but just that one out. A mobile number with no name. Made a few hours ago.
While he’d been sleeping.
Damar, he figured. She had tried to call Damar, but of course his phone was broken. Why hadn’t she called anyone else? She had had a fine opportunity to escape, yet had seemingly given up after failing to reach her friend.
But he put that thought aside. Checking for contacts in the phone wasn’t his reason for wanting the device.
She had said she’d used a satnav to find the warehouse. Nate’s BMW had satnav. But she had also said that Damar had given her Nate’s postcode, which meant she had used a route-planning device before getting hold of the BMW. Either she had carried a satnav between vehicles, which he doubted, or…
He clicked on a route-planner app in her phone called Traveller and accessed the history. Only two destinations. Nate’s postcode was there. But the most recent entry was the one he stared at: Saturn Printworks Ltd. Riverside Street, Ponders End, Enfield. Jackpot. He showed her and said, ‘Let’s go for a drive.’
‘Go to hell,’ she said as he clicked on ‘revisit’.
‘In one hundred yards, turn right,’ said the app’s female voice.
‘That’s how ladies should talk,’ Nate said to the girl, and she cursed at him again.
In Enfield, ten minutes out from the destination, Nate came across a McDonald’s and used the drive-thru to buy two burgers and two teas. Cash, of course, because a favourite trick of cops hunting fugitives was tracking their bank cards. He had planned to hide his face from the people at the serving windows, but didn’t need to bother because they didn’t even look at him. Not even when he asked for the free wifi code.
He parked in a far corner of the car park, facing a billboard with a negative photo of a cornflakes box. He stared for a few seconds, then looked down at his phone. Surprisingly, an after-image of the cereal floated across the phone and his legs. A neat advertising trick. When the ghostly cornflakes box was gone, he logged on to the Internet. He typed his own name into the search bar. While the results loaded, he tossed a burger to the girl. It landed near her face.
‘How am I supposed to eat like this?’ she said.
News items were listed above web pages, and impatiently he clicked the top one. A local Wandsworth paper’s online edition. He threw a glance her way and saw she was unwrapping the burger with her free hand.
There was a picture of his burning house, and below the story, bottom of the page, a news ticker crawled along repetitively:
–ire deemed deliberate, body found inside home, police hunting missing local man. Cause of Wandsworth mansion fire deemed del–
A play icon in the picture denoted a video. Nate pressed it. The paused fire came alive.
A video seemingly taken from someone’s mobile phone, given the shaky picture and bad sound. One of his sweet neighbours thinking about YouTube hits, maybe. A voiceover: some guy explaining when and what. Then the picture changed as time leaped forward. The voice’s owner was at the scene with a microphone. Facing the camera, with the house in the background. The street looked serene now, the crowds gone, the fire gone, but a few emergency services vehicles were still in place, and he could see a large plastic tent across his front door so the crime officers could come and go in peace. Crime scene tape was strung between the driveway gateposts like a giant yellow spiderweb.
The reporter was a pasty-faced young man with a glow in his eyes that said he loved the big-time, now that he was reporting on major stories, not just dogs that could sing or funny-shaped cucumbers. There was a slight grin on his face as he recited the facts: the cops looked with suspicion upon the fact that, of the two people registered as owning the house, one was possibly dead and burned and the other was nowhere to be found.
Nate couldn’t deny it now, could he? Before, just rumour. Now, the charge was there in all but official paper. The police thought Nate had killed his own brother, if indeed that body was Pete’s. The girl was watching him intently. He couldn’t help but glance at her. She had clearly heard the video.
‘That’s a bit of a pickle,’ she said with a grin he wanted to smash off her face.
The reporter introduced someone and the cameraman panned to a cop who had been standing just out of shot, waiting for his moment on TV. The reporter asked him the score. The cop looked nervous, as if knowing his bosses were watching. This guy added little more to the revelations of the news ticker below him. Then the reporter asked what the cops were doing to find Nathan Barke, and the cop said they were trying to locate people who knew Mr Barke, in the hope that someone might know where he was – in other words, We think this guy’s shacked up with a pal, and we’re going to search all their houses to find the bastard. Known friends and employees at Acorn Security, the firm run by Nathan and his brother, were being sought.
Nate was a popular guy with a busy social life. Monday was bowling day, Wednesday was pool night at his local pub, and every second Sunday he and Pete could be found at Filey’s restaurant in Whitechapel. A lot of people to chat to. A lot who would say Nate was a stand-up guy, decent, wouldn’t hurt a fly. But he wondered how many might give the him a bad review. How many might say, ‘Makes sense now, always thought that guy was dodgy, something cold in his eyes…’
He waited for the cop to mention clues given by Nate’s friends and employees, but the cop simply said this line of enquiry was in the early stages. Good political answer that answered nothing. Nate took it to mean that they hadn’t yet found these people, or that those they had questioned had unloaded nothing of use.
All fine and good and expected, of course. But then the reporter thanked the cop and stepped aside, and the camera panned to follow him, as if the cop could now fuck off, and that was when the bombshell was dropped.
The reporter mentioned that their office had received a call from the parents of one Achala Kaushal just before they came on air. Apparently Kaushal had not returned home from college yesterday evening, and that was very unlike her. No friends had seen her since she’d gotten in her car in the college car park. And her mobile was turned off.
The moment the family had heard about the fire, and heard Barke’s name, they became concerned about their daughter’s lateness. Because Nathan Barke had once caused her ‘mental anguish’ and ‘threatened her’.
Nate couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Achala Kaushal, a young Indian woman, had worked for him for nine months, four years ago. The ‘mental anguish’ had resulted from a security job she’d been on: the nightmare of HyperX. He had feared that one long-ago night would come back to haunt him. And here it came. The cops would now look into Achala Kaushal, and that meant focusing on Nate’s past, and HyperX was lurking back there, about to leap out at them. And when it did, no-one would doubt Nate’s guilt. Great.
He remembered Kaushal well. Good worker, but the HyperX thing had mentally battered her and she had soon quit the job. Her parents had blamed Nate and Pete, as her bosses, and threatened to ruin their business. And Nate had threatened them back. Not in the way the reporter had cleverly hinted at in order to captivate viewers and make Nate seem more dangerous. He had simply threatened to kill her job prospects if the family tried to blacken his company’s name. Tit for tat. Before last night, the cops would have laughed the Kaushals off the phone for such a complaint. Different now.
‘Look on the brigh
t side,’ the girl said. ‘At least I know you didn’t kill her. Take that as comfort.’
The police might think that Nate was two bodies into some kind of kill rampage, but he wasn’t concerned about that at the moment. Finally, he had a clue. Achala Kaushal. Missing and presumed hurt, according to the newspapers. Missing and involved in this up to her neck, according to Nate. Four years ago she had been a sweet young lady, innocent, wouldn’t hurt a fly, but the HyperX thing had messed her up. Maybe enough so to set her on a violent payback against Nate and Pete even years later. Arson and murder seemed beyond her, but Nate knew nothing about those in her circle. He doubted her family would be calling news stations if they’d had a hand in this lark, but what about someone else? Someone who was immensely protective and loyal and totally unhinged in the head. Someone who was told a plan of bloody revenge and said, ‘Sure, why not?’ Someone with the cash or clout to knit together a kill crew.
Achala Kaushal. Had to be involved. No way it was coincidence that someone he’d wronged had gone missing on the same night that hell washed like a tidal wave over Nate and Pete’s lives.
He now had something to go on. Things were looking up.
A minute later, they looked straight back down.
When he went back to the main page, it refreshed and a brand new news item appeared at the top, and the words:
Arson murder suspect’s car found abandoned
He clicked on the item with such ferocity that he almost knocked the phone out of his hand.
He listened in shock as a radio news jockey with a bored tone told the tale. The police had just released new information. Literally just. Nate’s car had been found, with the driver’s door wide open, in a long-term car park near Heathrow Airport’s Terminal four. Empty, clean, according to the police. Now the assumption was that he’d fled abroad. The police were checking the airport’s CCTV to see if they could spot him sneaking aboard a plane. Anyone with information was invited to call the police in confidence. And, of course, no approaching. Dangerous. The police were a hair’s breadth from pronouncing him a murderer, even though the headline of this report proved that the media already believed it.
