by Nick Oldham
First, to witness the deliberate, ultra-violent act that wiped Ellis Clanfield off the face of the earth and then be abducted off the street himself, bundled at gunpoint into the back of the offending vehicle, a hood put over his head.
Perhaps if he was thirty-five years younger, he might have been on his toes more and been able to do something about it.
But he wasn’t and he hadn’t.
And then to come face to face with Julie Clarke, which only confirmed his suspicions about her involvement in so many awful things over a long period of time.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ Henry asked through the thick, harsh material of the hood.
No reply.
‘All the time – you.’
Still nothing.
‘You were the one behind me in the alley. You were the one who clobbered me, put me down. I saw it in that lad’s eyes – saw your reflection,’ he said, although he was doing a bit of embellishment. ‘You must have hit me very hard.’
The guy sitting on Henry’s right jabbed the barrel of his gun against Henry’s head and warned him, ‘Shut the fuck up or I’ll blow your head off.’
It sounded corny, but also believable. Even so, Henry couldn’t resist riling him a little and, dangerously, calling his bluff. ‘What? In this car? Interior’s far too nice for that, surely … oh, by the way, is this the car you chased Debbie Blackstone with? It’s too nice for my blood and brains to decorate the interior, surely?’ He knew he was babbling.
‘Don’t fucking tempt me.’ The man tapped the muzzle hard against his head.
Then there was silence for a while and Henry briefly tried to work out the direction of travel, but gave up.
‘Was that lad your boyfriend, Julie?’ Henry probed. Frightened though he was, something inside him made him want to annoy criminals. ‘He was just about the right age, wasn’t he? Twenty, maybe? And what did poor little Tommy Benemy do to you? What happened to him, Julie? What was his fate? Because I’m bloody sure he didn’t end up in Manchester, did he?’
Nothing.
‘Can I keep asking questions? Hope you don’t mind because I’m full of them, bursting for knowledge.’
Again, Clarke said nothing.
‘I really do think you need to shut it,’ the man said.
Henry ignored him. ‘Funny how, even now, I can re-run things through my head from all those years ago. Not that I see things differently; just that I see the truth in what I saw – not what I wanted to believe back then. And Debbie Blackstone … some things don’t necessarily add up there either, do they?’
For some reason that, or a culmination of what he was saying, brought a reaction from his captors.
This time it came from the side on which Julie Clarke was sitting, and although he couldn’t see it coming because of the hood, he knew it must have been her who smashed him on the head with her small revolver, a blow which sent sparklers through his brain like fireworks on a dark night, making him swoon, although it didn’t quite knock him out.
It did, however, make him realize it might be better to keep his mouth shut. At least for the time being.
He slumped forwards between the two people either side of him. His brain cleared quickly, but he thought it might be useful to keep up the pretence of being stunned in case there was any chance of doing a runner. He groaned and moaned, hoping he wasn’t overdoing it.
Finally, the car slowed and stopped after a journey, Henry estimated, of about fifteen minutes at most.
He hadn’t been able to keep track of it but he was sure they hadn’t been on a motorway and, in fact, not long after being taken, despite the bang to the head, he was sure they were travelling on country roads as the car raced around tight bends before eventually slowing down almost to a stop and then taking a tight turn on to a track of some sort. He wondered if they were going to a farm.
After about a hundred metres of slow travel, the car stopped and the engine turned off.
He heard car doors open.
‘Out,’ he was ordered.
The man on his right dragged him along the seat and Henry stumbled as he misjudged the distance from the car to the ground.
They let him crash down on one knee, then heaved him back up to his feet.
He heard another car drive up and stop, recognized the sound of the engine or at least thought he did: it was his Audi and he’d come to love the noise it made in the few months he’d owned it.
Despite his predicament, underneath the hood, his lips quivered with a smile: his Audi.
But the smile was wiped off his face when his right arm was jacked painfully up his back between his shoulder blades and he was walked on tiptoe across gravelly ground and up some steps.
Henry spurted to life when he was pinned against a wall and felt his jacket being torn from him and then fingers grabbing his shirt and ripping it off, making him naked from the waist up. It was only then he decided to throw his weight around, even though he did it with blind hope because the hood was still over his head, the drawstring tight around his neck.
‘Fuck you think you’re doing?’ he screamed, squirming and lashing out. He connected with someone, heard a man swear and say, ‘You bastard!’ But then he was thrown back against the wall and his shirt was fully pulled off him, as two men – he guessed – held him and then another punched him in the stomach. Hard. Driving all the breath out of him like a set of wheezy old bellows.
Then a hand went to his throat, his head was whacked twice against the wall and the fingers squeezed tightly around his windpipe until he gagged for breath.
‘No hitting, OK?’ he was warned gruffly.
Henry said nothing because that wasn’t a promise he was going to make.
Unfortunately, the lack of response elicited another tightening of the fingers around his throat and another smack of his head on the wall.
‘Understand?’ the voice growled.
‘Yuh,’ Henry managed to gasp.
Things then began to get even worse for him.
He was pulled away from the wall and shoved along, and then a huge blow to the back of his head sank him to his knees. He reached out with his hands to break his fall, but his arms were kicked away and he went face down to the floor. This time he passed out properly.
He came sluggishly back to consciousness, struggling to comprehend his predicament. The hood had been removed and he was lying on his back, face up, but when he tried to move, he couldn’t. His arms were trapped tight by his sides and his legs seemed to be strapped together. He could raise his head a few inches, although the pain shooting around his brain was intense.
But as his senses returned, he forced himself to raise his head to such an angle that he could see down his body and he realized he was laid out in some kind of trench, with boards either side of him. He had been tightly wrapped from just below his bare shoulders, right down to his ankles in something similar to cling film, a clear, plastic wrap that stuck to him and had been wound around him repeatedly, tight, completely constricting, like an Egyptian mummy in a sarcophagus. He realized that when he’d been unconscious, his captors must have removed the hood, rolled him in the film and laid him in this trench, or whatever it was – he could not quite work it out. He looked upwards as his senses continued to return and his vision cleared; he could see a vaulted roof high above him and realized he was actually in a building of some sort, and that he was lying between two floor joists. Maybe he was going to be covered by floorboards.
‘Help me!’ he said. Then shouted, ‘Help!’
He started to struggle against the wrap, but it hugged tight and seemed to grip him remorselessly as he moved.
Eventually his efforts subsided as he became exhausted, and he gave up, knowing he had neither the strength nor technique to break free from the wrap. Instead, he focused to control his breathing, his heart rate and his fear, while listening hard.
He heard the scuffling of feet, low whispers, almost inaudible.
Finally, he said, ‘OK, Julie,
where are we?’ His voice was croaky, his throat dry, and there was more than a note of trepidation in his tone.
And then he went still, because he was suddenly aware that someone was very close to him. He saw someone on their haunches looking over him – a man wearing a mask and holding something in his hands. Henry could not make out what it was at first.
Then a tiny clinking noise. Like tapping. Glass on glass.
Tap, tap.
Henry saw that the man was holding in one hand a small, brown glass medicine bottle and in the other a pipette. The man inserted the pipette into the bottle, used the plunger to draw out some of the liquid from the brown bottle, then tapped a drip off the end of the pipette.
The man held the pipette over Henry’s right shoulder. Henry contorted his head as he tried to watch what was happening and saw a drop of clear liquid appear at the end of the slender tube, hang there a tantalizing moment and then drop on to his bare skin.
It was ice-cold, like a drop of water from a mountain stream.
But the chill only lasted a microsecond.
Then whatever it was started to itch ferociously, making Henry squirm. Again, that sensation lasted only a few seconds.
Because the drip then became a bubbling, burning fury, as if he’d been prodded with the tip of a hot, soldering iron.
He screamed instantly, writhed upwards, straining against the film he was wrapped in, and almost felt the strength to break free.
He knew that acid had been dripped on to him and, Jesus, fuck, shit, it hurt so much – like nothing he’d ever experienced before. The surprise of it and the process – the chill, the itch, then the incredible heat – took his breath away and he could still feel his skin fizzling, burning, then smouldering and reeking of his own burned flesh.
‘What the hell! What the hell!’ he uttered through his teeth, rocking against the film, but the only response he got from the man bending over him was raucous laughter.
Gritting his teeth, Henry watched the figure as he dipped the pipette back into the bottle, extracted the plunger, pulled it out and then tap-tap-tapped it on the neck of the bottle. Henry waited in terrible anticipation as the man moved the instrument across and held it above Henry’s left shoulder. Henry’s eyes grew wide, terrified, as once more a tiny blob of clear liquid formed at the end of the tube as the plunger was slowly depressed. This next chilled blob of acid dropped on to his shoulder, followed by the intense agony – like a nail being hammered home as the burning started again after the chill and itch.
And Henry screamed.
Henry hissed through his teeth at this new point of pain. Under the cling film, his fingers were bunched into tight fists and his toes were curled as he tried to deal with this intense, pinpointed torture.
‘Bastards, bastards, bastards!’ he said, grinding his teeth, the sound of which echoed through his cranium.
Then the man who had done this to Henry removed the mask that covered his face. He smirked as he said, ‘Recognize me, Henry – the reflection in a woman’s eyes?’
While still trying to deal with the intensifying pain from the acid drops on his shoulders, Henry tried to focus on the face of the man above him, sneering.
‘Should I?’ Henry snarled in reply to the question.
The man rocked back on his haunches and cocked his head smugly. ‘Oh, come on, Henry, surely you know who I am?’
Henry squinted up at him. The face meant nothing. A man, maybe mid-fifties, jowled, grey-haired.
‘Older, maybe not wiser,’ the man said.
‘Still nothing,’ Henry said.
The man leaned over again, his face perhaps a foot away from Henry’s. ‘Last time I looked at you was thirty-five years ago.’
Henry squinted and blinked even more, still fighting the agony from the acid. It felt as if it was fizzing through him.
The man moved the pipette over Henry’s left nipple and slowly depressed the plunger with his thumb.
Henry braced himself, still struggling to get free, but could not do anything against the wrap. He watched in horror again as a tiny blob of liquid formed at the end of the instrument and hung there, going nowhere.
Then it fell on to his delicate nipple. Cold. Then the itch.
Then agonizingly hot, and Henry screamed and his writhing became manic as the man stood up, watched and laughed uproariously as Henry’s nipple fizzed.
Henry glared at him just as someone else stepped into his line of sight.
Julie Clarke came alongside the man who was torturing Henry and placed her arm around his shoulder. The man turned to her and kissed her fully on the lips – a long, slobbering snog that churned Henry’s stomach. The man broke away from the kiss and said to Henry, ‘Come on, you must know who I am now.’
‘David Hindle,’ Henry said as it all seemed to slot into place.
Henry peered at the face again. In his mind’s eye, he still held – perfectly – the face of the young man who had been with Tommy Benemy all those years before. A face he had never knowingly seen since, and although this man may well have been that lad once, if Henry had passed him in the street, he would never have made the connection.
Henry looked at Julie Clarke. ‘Boyfriend, I assume?’
She smiled indulgently. ‘Brother.’
The couple looked lovingly at each other again. Their lips mashed together passionately, sickeningly. Then they broke apart.
Henry said, ‘Give me another shot of the acid, please, because that’s really sickening me. I mean, hell – your brother? You sick pair of fuckers.’
‘You know, Henry,’ Hindle said, ‘I really enjoyed kicking the shit out of you and half strangling you.’
‘If I hadn’t stopped him, you’d have been dead,’ Julie said.
‘You want a medal for that? You’re the one who put me down in the first place, aren’t you?’
‘Oh, yeah, those tiny girly truncheons could pack a punch if you used them properly,’ she gloated. ‘But I didn’t want you dead, just unconscious so David could escape and I, of course, would be a heroine. Which I was.’
‘But he still had to give me a good kicking?’
‘Like I said, I enjoyed it. Couldn’t resist.’
‘And what about Tommy Benemy?’
‘That cowering little shit? He never even gave you a kick, just watched on, petrified, crying, and then ran for his life, useless sod.’
‘And what was his fate?’ Henry asked.
‘He was going to blab it all to you,’ Clarke said. ‘About us, about what we were doing; he’d have blown it all apart before our life’s journey had even got started, and that was no good to us … despite my warning in his ear when you so generously let me take him home and search his house because you were working late.’
‘You killed him,’ Henry said flatly, suddenly not feeling the acid burn any more. Rage replaced pain.
The siblings shared a look, a smile.
Hindle said, ‘Eventually.’
‘In fact,’ Clarke said, ‘we did it shortly after we took that photograph you showed me. Incidentally, I knew Ellis Clanfield had thousands of them because he got them from us, so it was a big fat warning signal when you told me you’d only found that one. That meant you were on to something.’
‘I wasn’t really,’ Henry admitted. ‘I’m not that good.’
Clarke shrugged. ‘All academic now.’
Henry’s mind spun, trying to put all this together, but it didn’t help his thought process that he’d been smacked on the skull recently with a gun, been unconscious, wrapped in cling film, had acid dripped on to his tit and was lying between two floor joists.
He was woozy, but still hunting and looking for any advantage.
He tried to take it all back to the beginning – at least as far back as when he came into the picture.
‘What did you do with Tommy?’
‘Very bad things,’ Hindle said. ‘Then killed him. A few drops of acid for fun, just to hear the screams, then a plastic bag
over his head … while you watched on, darling.’ He looked fondly at Clarke. Brotherly love.
Henry realized he was in the presence of two extremely deranged psychopaths and paedophiles. Somehow he had to keep them talking – keep them glorying in their triumphs, reliving them. He guessed it probably wasn’t often they had a captive audience … or maybe he was wrong there.
‘And Tommy’s mum?’
Hindle shrugged sadly. ‘Silly, silly bitch. By sheer chance, she crashed out one night in the doorway of the office in Granville Street after a cider bender, woke up, saw the business logo and came knocking, making stupid allegations and shouting and bawling about Tommy’s tattoo.’
‘Ah, the tattoo,’ Henry said. ‘What’s all that about?’
Hindle pulled up his sleeve and showed Henry his inner forearm. Clarke did the same. Both had the ‘house’ tattoos: square box, triangle and a line slashed across the middle.
‘Actually, it’s based on the letter H,’ Hindle said, ‘so it’s quite clever, isn’t it? My initial and like a house – me being a builder and all that,’ he said proudly. ‘A badge of belonging, a badge of honour,’ he added.
‘Really?’
‘Yeah – to my – our – exclusive club. All my babies get it, all of them.’
‘And how many is that?’
Hindle glanced at Clarke and calculated, ‘A hundred, perhaps? We don’t really keep track.’
The number hit Henry like a gut punch. One hundred. And so fucking blasé about it.
Nevertheless, he kept them on track and, fighting his revulsion, said, ‘You were telling me about Mrs Benemy.’
‘Oh, yeah, I just followed her back to her shithole of a bedsit where I discovered that she’d actually been on the verge of committing suicide anyway. She’d already written the note to you, but when I got there, she was about to rip it up and go to the police again and make waves … I just assisted the suicide, shall we say?’
‘Except we knew it was murder,’ Henry countered, recalling how the bottom quarter of the suicide note Trish had written had been torn off – the first part of ripping it up. Now it made sense.
