Lessons In Blood

by Quentin Black

  “I am joking Jan, it looks great,” he said as he gave the old woman a kiss. “Anything you need don’t hesitate to ask me. And get a shave eh.”

  Jan laughed and said to Ciara, “Nice to meet you Love—what’s your name?”

  “Ciara.”

  “Great to meet you, Ciara,” Jan said before tottering inside her flat.

  Connor and Ciara climbed another set of stairs, before entering the flat.

  “Your bedroom is in there if you want to whack your things in.”

  “Where’s your room?”

  “The sofa is a pull-out.”

  She dumped her things in the surprisingly spacious bedroom.

  Upon coming back out, he asked her, “Do you want a coffee, tea, or anything?”

  “Yes, I’ll have coffee, please. Black, no sugar.”

  She looked around the room. The countertop separating the kitchen from the main living room reminded her of a bar. A large television sat in front of the charcoal sofa, and a huge oatmeal bean bag lay in the corner.

  “You play?” asked Ciara, noticing the chess board.

  “A little bit. Picked it up last year. Here,” he said handing over the coffee.

  “You not having one?”

  “Not at this time of night.”

  Ciara sipped the coffee and hummed approvingly,” Nice. What is this?”

  “It’s a French Roast by Equal Exchange. They work with small farmers. Besides, there are two things you should never go cheap on—coffee and sausages.”

  “Indeed.” Ciara then asked, “Who taught you to play chess?”

  “A roofer from Bedford. Taught me while I was in Colchester.”

  “What were you doing in Colchester?”

  Connor ignored the question, asking, “Do you play?”

  “A little bit. You fancy it?”

  “Suppose so. Be better having the awkward silences over a game of chess than over Coronation Street.”

  “I’ll have you know that I don’t watch soaps.”

  “Well I do,” he said, and then indicating to the board. “Shall we?”

  “What happened?” asked the voice over the phone. A voice edged with menace.

  Waseem answered, “My man was vexed. He went after our friend with a few of his boys.”

  “Where I get confused is the part where he ends up with his own machete stuck in his back!” the voice barked.

  “There was a girl who stuck a gun in his face. Then my man and our friend ‘ad a fight. After the northerner won, he paralysed ‘im.”

  “A blade through the spine would do that,” said the voice. “I told you that I didn’t want this apple cart to be rocked.”

  This was the part of the conversation that Waseem was dreading. He had to play this right. Too meek and he would be seen as too weak. Too aggressive and it could be perceived as disrespect.

  “I wasn’t to know that Rashid would seek revenge this quickly. Nor did I think he’d be able to locate the geezer in Brum.”

  The silence echoed over the line before the voice broke it, “Be that as it may, your man put his vendetta above yours, and my, business interests. An example will have to be made.”

  “He won’t walk again?”

  “I do not care if it’s him or one of his friends. A situation has come about where one of your underlings has gone over your head. Now you’ll address it, or I’ll address it for you.”

  “Alright, what about our friend?”

  “I’ll deal with that.”

  10

  The doctor stood in his theatre scrubs next to a towering man in a black leather jacket. He had seen how the man with blond hair had to angle himself a little to pass through doorways, such were the width of his shoulders. They were behind a pane of glass watching an unconscious man being sprayed by a hose.

  “Where did this one come from?” asked the doctor.

  “Off the streets in Brighton and Hove,” replied the South African. “Been watching him for a few weeks.”

  “Drug user? The last one had HIV. Complete waste,” said the doctor with an edge of derision in his voice.

  “Haven’t seen any evidence of that with this one, just an alcoholic. Not sure what state his liver or kidneys will be in, but I guess that’s what they pay you for.”

  “And they pay you to ensure that any investigation in their disappearance leads nowhere. We had a lucky escape with the O’Reilly girl.”

  The man snorted. “A lucky escape? You mean I handled it so her death led to a corpse of an immigrant. You just worry that these bodies won’t go to waste.”

  “I do worry about that, and other things. We’re barely two years into this thing, and it’s not exactly watertight, and—,”

  “Why don’t you relax? There are too many powerful people benefitting out of this enterprise. Not only the people whose lives are saved by this but the government must be happy that there are less homeless people littering the streets, yah? Homeless charities reports of people attending their shelters have dropped in the last two years. Believe me, there’ll be blind eyes turned if an accident happens.”

  “But if the police or—”

  “I think you need to take that big brain of yours and maybe do some research on how the world works. The government, media, and police are all intrinsically linked at the very top. So unless there’s some group of guardian angels with resources outside the government, then we are safe. So stop panicking and do your job yah.”

  Connor walked through the local woods around half a mile from the apartment. He was enjoying the eerie quiet. It was now just after six o’clock in the morning. The rising sun had lit the darkness a lighter shade of blue. He usually rose early to train either by running or strength training—‘to get after it’ as a motivational Navy Seal would say.

  Last night’s training session and the subsequent fight with Rashid had taken a lot out of him, so he opted for a walk instead. After that, he’d take his breakfast in a nearby Café and give Ciara some space—he had stocked the fridge and cupboards before her arrival.

  He had come dangerously close to being torn apart in that carpark. Providence had sent Ciara, and for that he was grateful. And he was especially thankful that now he knew he could rely on her in a tight situation.

  Last night playing chess, he had somehow managed to stalemate her after she had surged to a lead. He had let himself become distracted by her gorgeous face and the outline of her tits through the white collared shirt. After her bishop took his queen, he kept his attention firmly on the board. He thought of last night’s game as a shot across the bows from the Gods. The inference being to keep one’s focus on the objective. Despite a film he had seen recently suggesting otherwise, he knew that luck was not a superpower.

  The objective here was to identify the human trafficking network in its entirety. To protect vulnerable people from these ogres. Fiends were still fiends, even the ones with white collars and medical degrees.

  Bruce didn’t like him gratuitously hurting these beasts. The old man—who could be plenty ruthless himself—constantly warned Connor that he was running up a ‘karmic debt’ by unnecessarily hurting people, even bad ones.

  Connor had attributed his mentor’s attitude to Bruce being captured and tortured for days by the London Bratva eighteen months ago. Before that had happened, Bruce had facilitated Connor’s setting fire to a paedophile. And when they had discovered that the MI5 chief betrayed them, he had allowed Connor to cut off the traitor’s legs with a chainsaw. Tourniquets had been applied beforehand, but Roger Stanton had died from an acute stress reaction anyway.

  He thought that Bruce’s words of wisdom regarding not causing unnecessary pain to their adversaries stemmed from his processing what had happened to him. The old man’s knee had been shot out, and he’d had to retire from active field duties.

  Connor knew that his pleasure in making bad people suffer physically was not normal. That didn’t mean he wasn’t justified though. What was the point in merely killing a
person who had taken pieces of a vulnerable person’s body for money? People die every day; he had scanned the news that morning and discovered a suspected member of a Republican separatist group had been killed from a faulty shower head. He’d allegedly been involved at the sharp end of IRA operations for two decades when it was active, and this was how he died. Not in prison, not in a shootout with the RUC, British military or loyalist paramilitaries—no—electrocuted from the faulty plumbing of his own shower.

  Connor had been questioned by more than one person regarding this need to hurt or humiliate malevolent people. The only time he had felt conflicted about it was when, as a ten-year-old, he had fought a lad on the estate who had been protecting his upper teeth with his tongue in a way that appeared gumshield-like. Connor deliberately hit him with an uppercut causing his childhood opponent to be taken wailing to the hospital in a barely successful bid to save his tongue. Even then, the guilt didn’t arrive until adulthood. Other than that, he had never felt guilty about the people he hurt. He knew that it wasn’t normal to feel the hilarity he did when doing so and also that retribution was for God alone—what if I am the manifestation of that will? Fucksake—you sound like Kevin Spacey in ‘Seven’.

  Connor respected Bruce more than any man since his own father; but if the opportunity arose, he was going to try his hand at a little surgery on these evil people himself.

  Ciara had clicked off her pre-paid phone, after speaking to Bruce. He’d told her that when using any transmission to communicate that it was always best policy to keep the conversation vague, ambiguous and in code rather than scrambling the signals. Scrambled digital signals, he told her, would attract the attention of GCHQ and the NSA like ‘a Fijian to a barfight’.

  She had been amazed that last night’s events, had reached his ears so soon. It wasn’t yet seven in the morning.

  She had never known the Scot to show any flash of anger. However, when she got to the part where Connor had hammered the machete into the back of the already defeated gangster, she thought she detected ire in his voice. She had felt vaguely guilty then for telling Bruce, but he was not a man to lie to.

  She found a note on the counter—‘Gone for a walk, having breakfast out. The fridge and cupboards are stocked. Back before eight’.

  They had played chess last night, and it irked her that he had managed to force a stalemate. She also admired that he had been able to do so. She had sacrificed a knight to take his queen with a bishop. Instead of taking the wind out of his sails, it seemed to focus him for the rest of the game.

  She found eggs and some Ezekiel bread with a post-it note on it saying ‘tastes less like cardboard when toasted’. She smiled— he’s quite thoughtful for a person who likes to paralyse his victims.

  She wore a silk, black Japanese Kimono with a floral pattern, and grey fur slippers on her feet. She thought about her remit within this mission—to assist Connor professionally. The vagueness of it bothered her. They had yet to thoroughly discuss their cover story. Was she to act as his girlfriend or partner in crime or both?

  Despite all the male attention she received, Ciara remained single. Her professions—this and her being a journalist—did not lend well to a relationship. She had been a member of the Chameleon Project for over three years now.

  Her taskings had been sparse over the last eighteen months. Her four-year degree in Investigative Journalism drew to a close, and she had graduated after falling just short of a 1:1. This had rankled her, knowing a first would have been comfortably achievable if not for the extra-curricular training and assignments she’d had to carry out for the Chameleon Project. She soothed her seared ego with the knowledge that if it hadn’t been for McQuillan, she wouldn’t have had the opportunity to pursue the degree in the first place—she would have been in prison.

  She had secured work with one of the UK’s premier newspapers, waltzing into a position with such ease that she naively thought it on account of her looks. Only after the editor had said, ‘If you are called away for any reason and not in a position to complete an assignment then let me know in good time. There’ll always be a position for you here,’ that Ciara understood McQuillan had engineered her employment there. Although appreciative, she wanted to prove herself in journalism on her own merit.

  Exposing the evils of the world was the first step towards extinguishing them.

  Connor sat in the café making his way through a plate of scrambled eggs and Lorne sausage with a splotch of mustard on the side. Kathy, the Café owner, seemed a little perplexed when he first brought in the square sausage himself. After he had frequented the café a few times, she had begun to buy the Scottish breakfast staple and thanked him as they proved popular.

  He put down his phone. He had spent twenty minutes on a foreign language app learning Dutch before switching to a selected ten ‘high frequency’ words. Connor had been taught that the fastest way to fluency was master two thousand of the most commonly used words within the foreign dialect. These two thousand words would contribute to eighty percent of the writing and conversation—the Pareto Principle in action. He knew the very best way to learn was from conversing with native speakers, which was how he improved his Punjabi.

  Holland was a country he had spent a lot of his time in the past twelve months. He had been forming links with the underworld there. The Dutch Penose were the organised crime element formed by outlaws with Dutch descent. In working with them, he found the hierarchal system to be a lot looser than their British counterparts. The focus was more on making money for the collective than any one person.

  He preferred this way of business.

  When the remnants of his coffee washed down his throat, a gentleman walked in resembling a bank manager.

  Connor knew that he wasn’t.

  11

  “May I take a seat?” asked the man keeping his deep voice low. Connor couldn’t quite place the slight accent except that it was from around London way.

  The stranger was a touch under six feet tall with a medium frame. He sported a turquoise and white striped shirt under a blue suit.

  Connor replied, “By all means, after I have given you a cuddle.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” asked the man, who Connor guessed to be around his mid-forties, the short, dark hair beginning to crown above a lean face.

  “You know why.”

  The man smiled, opening his arms. They embraced, and Connor patted the man’s back and the sides as if he were a missed friend, aware of Kathy behind the counter. Finally, he reached the man’s collar as if adjusting it before sitting down.

  The man turned to Kathy and asked, “Can I get a pot of tea please?”

  She nodded and scurried.

  “What can I help you with?” asked Connor.

  “We have a mutual acquaintance.”

  “Waseem isn’t an acquaintance, he was a potential business partner.”

  “Interesting that you immediately knew whom I was referring to.”

  “There are only two types of strangers who would bother to track me for a chat in a café. One would be a plainclothes copper in an attempt to put the frighteners on me. The other would be a gangster camouflaging himself in what he reckons to be a cloak of respectability. The striped shirt is a touch flamboyant for a policeman.”

  The man’s eyebrows raised.

  “You describe Waseem as a potential partner, does that mean—”

  “Who are you and what do you want?”

  The two men stared at one another for a few moments. The tension was broken when Kathy laid down the pot, cups, milk and sugar. The man exchanged smiles with her before she left. Both poured themselves a cup, the man had milk and sugar. Connor had his tea black.

  “My name is Tris Dixon, and I am an associate of Mr Khan,” said the man.

  Connor purposely allowed his surprise to show, “Mr Dixon. I am surprised you’ve come down here to see little, old me. Even more surprised that you’d be an associate of a gentleman with such poor
judgement in hired help.”

  Tris laughed. “You have a point, Mr Reed. That said, you and I know that referring to him as an ‘associate’ is my way of being polite.”

  “So Mr Khan has told you the quality of the product I can provide.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because if you wanted to make an example out of me, then we wouldn’t be in conversation. You thought that only a personal appearance by yourself might salvage this business deal that your local ‘associates’ may have scuppered.”

  “Very analytical.”

  “I have been in this business a while, as well you know.”

  “Indeed,” replied Tris. “Why is it that you have broken away from your family’s operation? Disagreements?”

  “I’d rather start as a poor master than a rich slave. Greater autonomy and all that,” replied Connor taking a sip of his tea. “Apologies, autonomy means freedom from external control.”

  Connor thought he saw a hint of annoyance before Tris smiled. “Thanks…thank you for that lesson in English.”

  “You can forget about me supplying Waseem. The man’s own minions don’t respect him enough. And I don’t want to deal with insecure cunts who are in this business to a face, to be feared. This is about money.”

  “My sentiments exactly,” said Dixon, sipping his tea. “However, business is all about relationships.”

  “Look Mr Dixon. I am inclined to agree, but the answer is no. Now you and I know, that getting your hands on real MDMA is getting harder now the EU has tightened up on regulation. The manufacturer can supply a product with the MDMA content being a consistent ninety percent. But he has strict guidelines about how much it is cut up. He’s all about the experience you see—he’s like a hippy with fashion sense. Now there’s no way you can guarantee that the pakis in Birmingham aren’t going to do that.”

  Tris bobbed his head. “Drug dealers are drug dealers, they’ll try and squeeze a profit no matter the colour of their skin.”