by Jake Cross
It didn’t. Naked, wearing blood from Monocle across her legs, oozing all the confidence ever created, she stormed into the kitchen and right up behind the cook, and paused, as if thinking how to do this. In the end she dropped the knife and grabbed his head and slammed into onto the stove, sending pots and pans clattering and water and chopped vegetables flying. He thrust backwards, screaming, and she stepped aside and left her leg there, tripping him. He had no sooner landed on his back than she had grabbed a hot pan and slammed it hard into his head, three times. When he was out, she held the hot base against his face. Nate heard flesh sizzle.
‘We’re not exactly sneaking about here,’ he said, shocked.
She was holding her bad arm. The swinging motion must have irritated it. ‘Take a look out the window if you think we’re making too much noise.’
‘Thought I told you no baseball with that arm,’ he said. He entered the kitchen. There were French doors leading into a garden. Beyond the hedges, he saw fields and trees.
Behind him, he heard the scrape of her picking up the knife from the tiled floor, and three seconds later heard her say, ‘That’s for Damar.’
He did not want to look round.
‘We’re in a cottage in the Essex countryside,’ she said. ‘No-one around for miles.’
He turned to look at her, but kept his eyes high. She had a fresh coating of blood now. Legs and hips and waist, and a line like a gash running up to her shoulder. She looked like some maniac from a slasher movie. She turned and opened a set of double doors into a lounge with a spiral staircase.
‘You know where he is?’ he whispered. He followed her and tried not to look at the body as he passed it, but he saw a pool of red out of the corner of his eye.
‘They gave me a guided tour, sort of,’ she said as she mounted the staircase. Not a whisper. ‘Don’t worry. Number three said he needed to wash my juices away not long before you got here. He heard nothing.’
Have they raped her? he wondered. He didn’t want to think about it. He followed her up the stairs. There was steam coming past an ajar door off the first-floor landing. Bathroom. More music playing. She pushed into the bathroom nonchalantly, as if she lived here.
Nate heard water splash as someone in a full bath jerked in shock. Nothing said for a few seconds, as if the guy’s brain couldn’t understand why his naked captive was standing in the doorway. Seeing the knife probably got him going:
‘What the fuck? Danny!’
‘Reach for it and I’ll cut off those balls.’ Nate heard in reply.
‘Danny!’
‘Go search the house, Nate.’ Then the door slammed shut. Nate didn’t hang around. He had no doubt that Toni would be okay, and he didn’t want to hear any of what was about to happen. He went back down the stairs.
He knew it would make hearing the approach of a vehicle or pedestrian harder, but Nate turned up the music in the kitchen while he searched the house. Even so, the thumping bass of rap music didn’t drown every scream. He didn’t like to imagine what was going on upstairs.
The kitchen had a rack on the wall full of paperwork, but it was mostly junk mail and old magazines. Nothing of use, but he did note the names on the mail: either Joan or James Ryback. So this cottage was probably the Rybacks’ private retreat. But where was the man himself?
As he passed out of the kitchen and into the lounge, he heard Toni laughing, and guy number three moaning.
The lounge was old-fashioned, but by design in order to give a bit of character. He got it. Technological sophistication didn’t gel with what the countryside was all about.
There was a bookcase with the top shelf dedicated to paperwork, some of it in plastic zip-lock folders. He pulled one out. It seemed full of utility bills. Another held insurance documents.
The music stopped as a track ended. Upstairs, he heard the shower running. The next track started.
There was a library, and here, slumped in a chair, he found Ryback. The man himself. The kingpin. The guy who had orchestrated all this. The fellow Nate needed to get hold of in order to clear his name. Only it was clear now that Ryback hadn’t been the top dog after all. Or he wouldn’t have been sitting there, dead.
Arms lashed to the arms of the chair, feet tied to the legs, stab wounds to the chest and groin, and blood everywhere. Tortured and killed. Nate had waited what seemed like a long time to stand in front of this guy, but it wasn’t Ryback’s body that drew his shocked attention. It was the coffee table in front of him.
Evidence, evidence, evidence, a whole host of it, like a table of exhibits in a murder trial.
A bloody bayonet. Nate’s. He knew it. Part of his army uniform, which he’d kept locked in a cupboard. Until he decided to bring it out to kill Ryback before hanging himself in the cellar, or so the cops would believe.
A Polaroid photo of Achala Kaushal. On her front in wild grass, hair bloody, face in lakeside mud, one arm in the lake itself, skirt hiked up to reveal red knickers. Soon to be taking an eternal swim. If he’d had doubts about the hitman’s story, ‘had’ was the important word now.
A Polaroid photograph of Carl Webber. Puzzle over. Carl lay gored and dead in an unknown living room with one leg up on a sofa. That explained that.
A Polaroid photo of Pete. Laying in a living room that Nate knew well. His very own, pre-fire. Pete was on his back, blood all over his chest and throat, eyes closed. One arm was up over his head. The other, the left, was down by his side, the forearm slightly raised, fist resting on his hip. Nate knelt on the floor and stared at the photo, which shivered in his shaking hands. The bastards had taken a photo after killing Pete, maybe laughing while they did so. While another of their number got the petrol can and the matches. While yet others stuffed Nate into the boot of his own car.
He heard Toni call out from upstairs.
He went up, slowly, still in a daze. He tried to clear his mind. As he passed a bedroom, he glanced in through the ajar door and saw a leg on the bed, surrounded by blood. Blood and death everywhere. Too much. An unforgettable amount. He had a future of nightmares ahead, however long his future lasted.
She called out again. Bathroom. Come in.
Guy number three was gone, of course. Three baddies in the cottage, and that meant number three was the guy on the bed. Just Toni here. She was in the shower, wet and clean. The glass of the shower door was frosted, but he could see her wet tan colour, and, amazingly, he felt a little turned on. A far cry from his emotional state downstairs, when she had been dirty and angry and they had faced death. The sudden onset of lust appalled him.
She saw him and put up a hand, as if telling him to wait. So he waited, just inside the doorway. Staring at the floor and the walls, and noting that there was no blood. None at all. She hadn’t killed the guy in here after all.
She stepped out of the shower and remained naked before him, clean and sexy, everything animal and maniacal about her gone. Even the facial bruises and the laceration seemed somehow innocent now, like nothing more than the result of walking into a door. She pointed at a towel and he threw her one. But he did it slowly.
‘Your turn. You stink,’ she said.
He took his eyes away from her glistening body. ‘Ryback’s dead downstairs.’
She stopped towelling herself. He had her attention.
‘I also found proof that Carl Webber’s dead. Ryback was killed by a weapon the cops can link to me, and I bet when the cops find whatever was used to kill Kaushal and Webber, well, guess fucking what.’ He did not mention the photograph of his brother.
She continued towelling, as if his news hadn’t been news to her at all. Then she said, ‘That’s good.’
‘Good? Ryback’s sitting dead downstairs. Someone killed him. That means this isn’t about Ryback getting revenge. We were on a wild goose chase. Don’t you understand? We’re back at square one. There’s someone else out there who was behind all this, and we have no idea who.’
She put the towel around her hair, looked at him,
and said, ‘Get in the shower and it might wake you up. You’re not thinking straight.’
Like a robot under programming, he stripped naked and got in the shower, hoping hot water would… he didn’t know what. He could see her pixelated form standing where he had stood.
‘Now think,’ she said. ‘We were on “square one” until you found Ryback’s body. Someone else was behind this, and we never knew that. But now we know that, don’t we? So we’ve made forward progress, haven’t we? So it’s a good thing, isn’t it? You understand?’
He did. She was right – again. And he had been cloudy-headed – again.
‘Did you get any information?’ he said, turning away from her to hide his genitals.
He heard the shower door slide open, but did not turn. She touched his back. He heard her step in, and the door shut.
‘He knew nothing. He was told by his boss to come here and watch a woman they brought in. Me. Then go collect a guy. You. His boss, unfortunately, is the guy in the cellar. That’s all he knew, and he gave that up before the pain got too bad.’
‘Then we have nothing.’
She turned him. He was still rotating when she kissed him.
‘This is bizarre,’ he said, pulling away. ‘You just killed people, and now you want…?’
‘Yes.’ She kissed him again, and this time he didn’t pull away. ‘You’ve seen what I’m capable of, so are you really going to try to stop me?’
Afterwards, they moved to an empty bedroom and lay on the bed, side by side, staring up at the ceiling. There were packed suitcases near one wall.
‘That was to unstick your mind,’ she said. ‘Did it work?’
He looked at her. ‘What? You didn’t want that, it was some trick?’
‘Not a trick. A theory. I wanted to try to fill your mind with other emotions. I get the impression women aren’t plentiful in your life.’
‘I don’t miss a woman’s company or need it, if that’s what you think. I work a lot, so there’s not much time spare. And I’ve had relationships. Four long-term relationships and a bunch of short ones. I don’t miss it.’
‘Must be true. You said it twice. No wife in the past?’
‘No wife in the past. I was army from seventeen until I was twenty-eight. Since then I’ve been kind of with Pete most of the time, and we were working hard on the security business, and Pete was gay, so it wasn’t as if we could go out and pull together.’
‘But you don’t want to die a lonely old man, do you?’
‘Half of that, yes. I want to die as an old man. But I’m not thinking that far ahead. And at the minute, women are the last thing on my mind. More pressing worries.’
‘And yet with all those pressing worries, you found time to have sex.’
He laughed. ‘And you did that so easily. Makes me think you’re quite experienced with men.’
‘You’re only the second man I’ve ever had sex with. The first was as a teenager, so quite a long time ago.’
‘But you’ve been married?’
She laughed. ‘No.’
He touched the ring finger of her left hand, where there was an indentation. ‘Doing a Sherlock Holmes.’
‘That was a ring Damar gave me, for luck. Not marriage. He took it off me so I wouldn’t lose it when we…’
‘Were burying me. Fair enough.’
‘Besides, like you, I never had time for relationships.’
‘Too busy killing people, eh?’
‘I don’t do relationships.’
‘Yet you hate being alone.’
She looked at him. She tried to look puzzled, but he saw guilt there. And she didn’t meet his eyes.
He said, ‘You need people with you, even if they aren’t really friends, and even if you don’t care about them. I think that’s part of the reason you teamed up with me. Once Damar was gone, you needed someone to replace him. Even if the only guy left was the one you’d just tried to kill.’
‘Don’t mention Damar like that,’ she said, hard. ‘Don’t compare yourself to him, because I don’t want to insult you. Let’s just say no-one will replace Damar.’ She got up to emphasise her annoyance.
He tried some damage control: ‘How come you and Damar never became a couple?’
She had been walking towards the window, but now she stopped and glared at him as if offended at the mere prospect. ‘He never showed an interest, which I liked.’
‘How do you know him?’
She approached the window and stared out. He watched water slowly drip from her wet hair and stain the towel around her waist. ‘I don’t want to get into my history. Let’s just say I was forced to leave home at sixteen. I liked the sound of England, so I came. I ended up sleeping rough and Damar found me and took me under his wing, and he never once tried it on. So yes, Sherlock, I want people around me. Since sixteen, I’ve been surrounded by people and I’ve never been lonely. I don’t want to be. But I don’t need people around me. I choose it. The people I surrounded myself with were not what you’d call friends, but they’d smash your skull in if you looked at me wrong. But Damar was a friend. My best ever.’
He didn’t buy her claim that it was a choice rather than a need, but didn’t say so. ‘So, Damar got you into crime?’
‘Don’t say that like he did something wrong. Damar was on the streets from about twelve and he was nineteen when I met him. Like me, he stowed away on a boat to get here from Turkey, so he was here illegally and had no prospects for a normal job, and he had this rather silly idea that he didn’t want to starve to death. So, taking what he couldn’t buy with money he didn’t have was the only way to survive. And it was the same for me. He didn’t push me into anything. I made a willing choice. We stole cars and robbed houses and sold stolen items, but we didn’t hurt anybody.’
‘Victimless crime, eh?’
‘I meant that we didn’t hurt innocent people to get what we needed.’
‘Something changed, though. Because you seem quite comfortable around violence, and you’re good at dishing it out.’
‘Yes, something happened.’
He waited, but she didn’t elaborate. He knew she wasn’t going to. But she did say, ‘I learned that danger is like cancer. Let it progress too far and you’re in too deep. Kill it early, that’s the way to survive. Put down a threat long before it becomes one, and don’t leave roots that can regrow.’ She’d admitted as much recently.
‘Damar teach you that?’
‘My people need to stay constantly defensive.’
‘Turkish people? Certainly all the ones we’ve come across have had attitude problems.’
She laughed. ‘You racist bastard. I meant street-dwellers. It’s a tough…’
She stopped, and he worried that he’d upset her. But she clutched her head and said, ‘I’ve been so stupid.’
‘What is it?’
She began to pace alongside the bed, worked up now. ‘You think all Turkish people are criminals?’
‘No, I didn’t mean–’
‘Get dressed and let’s find my clothes,’ she interrupted. ‘We just made another step forward.’
Edmonton, a street with a pub on the corner, just past six in the evening. She told him to stop the car outside the pub. He turned off the engine.
‘He lives in a pub?’
He was Puzzler, an Edmonton-based crime lord. Puzzler had often recruited Damar, and through him, Toni, to steal or break or threaten. And sometimes these jobs had required a large crew. And always the crew had been made up from the Edmonton criminal fraternity.
Turkish criminals.
‘I was so stupid,’ she had said as Nate unlocked a 2005 Nissan Almera parked alongside the stone cottage in Essex. ‘Damar never mentioned Puzzler, but I should have realised that Puzzler was the one who had sent us to kidnap you.’
Nate couldn’t help but picture a supervillain in a daft outfit. ‘So, you think this Puzzler’s the guy behind everything just because of all the Turkish people involved?’ he ha
d asked. ‘Doesn’t add up. Not everyone has been a Turk. Lazar for instance.’
‘Maybe Mr Big needed help and sub-contracted Puzzler to supply extra men. Damar and me, we were invisible people. For us to be part of this thing, it had to have come through Puzzler. Puzzler was the only guy Damar ever did jobs for. So Puzzler’s involved for sure.’
Now, Toni said, ‘I don’t know where Puzzler lives. I never met him. I just accompanied Damar on jobs that Puzzler gave him. The guy who lives here is called Olcay, and he’s Puzzler’s right-hand man.’
‘Okay, so Olcay lives in the pub? Or works there?’
She shook her head. ‘There’s a phone in there. You need to do something before we move on. Then we go to number 18a, just down there. Just open the door and walk in.’
‘What? None of that made sense.’
‘Then I’ll explain for your sleepy head.’
Five minutes later, against better judgement, Nate entered the pub, which was empty apart from four young guys in suits playing pool, their ties hanging loose after a tough day’s work holding a phone to the ear. They ignored him, and the cute bargirl ignored him, so obviously they weren’t big local news fans. He went to the payphone and slotted in a fifty pence piece and called a number.
‘Hello?’ said a gritty female voice with clear frustration, and he knew right then that she had been getting a lot of calls from people she didn’t want to speak to. Cranks and journalists and cops, probably.
‘Mum, it’s me.’
He was nervous, visibly shaking. The world’s press could label him a killer and berate him, but if his mother scolded him for his recent actions, he would probably burst into tears.
‘Nathan. Lord. You ran away and I understand. But don’t you dare ever ignore your mother again, understand?’
He was speechless. He had not expected that reaction. She sounded angry, not ashamed.
‘I had nothing to do with the fire,’ he said. He couldn’t bring himself to mention dead bodies. ‘Or anything else.’
