The Dark Master of Dogs

by Chris Ward

  ‘Tommy, wait—’

  ‘What, Claude?’

  ‘How about we double it? Triple? Come on, for an old friend.’

  A younger Tommy might have made the mistake of letting the other man bargain, but he had been around too long. Claude trafficked runaways for prostitution gangs in the big cities. He didn’t possess a single emphatic bone. Had it not been for the cash helping to run Tommy’s own underground ventures, Tommy would have put a bullet through Claude’s skull years ago. It was just a sad fact that money talked louder than actions.

  ‘Okay, Claude, I’ll make you a deal. You write me down a code to triple your payments, and I’ll let you live.’

  ‘You’re a kind man, Tommy,’ Claude said, smiling with what was left of his mouth.

  Nevin had been vomiting in a corner. Tommy called him forward and instructed him on loading up Claude’s computer system and working the injured man through setting up a tripled payment code. The whole while Tommy stood back and watched, the gun held firmly in his hand.

  ‘There,’ Claude said, when it was done. ‘See? I’d never let you down, Tommy. It was a simple mistake, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s much appreciated,’ Tommy said, going to the door. He opened it and leaned out, whistling as Kurou had taught him. The Huntsmen appeared, their lips glistening with blood. Tommy shivered as he waved them forward.

  ‘Got more for your master,’ he said.

  ‘Wait!’ Claude shouted. ‘You said—’

  Tommy smiled. ‘Oh, I’ll let you live. I’m a man of my promises, Claude. In a few days you’ll be better than you ever were.’

  Claude screamed as one Huntsman cut him free then helped the other throw Claude over his shoulder. Claude was still screaming as the creature ran out, carrying him with no more difficulty than it might a bundle of sticks.

  Nevin Reynolds was vomiting again. Tommy looked at him, then glanced at the two Huntsmen still standing in the doorway, wondering how much longer he could trust his old associate. The DCA were closing in. Moose was dead, Saj had disappeared. Dave Green was also dead, caught by Kurou’s Huntsmen leaving the offices of Urla Wynne. What Dave had said, Tommy didn’t know, but he wondered if it wasn’t about time to get himself out of Britain while he still could. He had money overseas, in Ireland and France; he could start over. It wouldn’t be so hard.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said to Nevin, and they headed for the stairs. The Huntsmen had gone ahead, taking the stairs in two bounds, rushing out into the street.

  Tommy hurried after, Nevin at his shoulder.

  As he burst out on to the street, he didn’t hear the gunshot that caught Nevin in the neck, but he felt the hot spatter of blood as it hit his face, blinding him momentarily before the spotlights that came on did.

  He was still on his knees, wiping Nevin’s blood out of his eyes, when strong hands grabbed his, forcing them behind his back. Cuffs went over his wrists, and someone slammed a fist into his face for good measure.

  As he lay on the pavement, his eyes filled with a red-washed glare, he wondered who had shopped him; whether it had been Kurou, Nevin, Dave Green, Claude, or someone else.

  ‘Hello, Tommy,’ came a woman’s voice. ‘I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for some time.’

  In a cell on a basement floor of the town’s main DCA office, three DCA agents chained him to the bars and then kicked him around for a while, a beating that made him feel like a piece of meat being tenderised. Their blows were lazy and lacklustre, but by the time they were done he was a mess of blood and bruises, and a couple of his back teeth lay among splashes of blood at his feet.

  They used a few buckets of cold water to clean him off, then chained him, battered, bruised, and shivering, to a metal table fixed to the floor.

  Urla Wynne looked dressed for a night at the opera when she showed up and allowed the guards to let her inside.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, taking a seat opposite.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Tommy answered. ‘Just string me up and get it over with.’

  Urla laughed. ‘You think you’re a big fish, do you? That I should be happy to have landed you, and treat you with the kind of public send-off you deserve? Come on, Tommy, you’re a nobody. You’re a nobody caught red-handed. We found four bodies inside that building.’

  ‘I didn’t kill them. I didn’t know they were there. I saw the doors were open so I went in for a bit of gentle thievery, casual like. Opportunistic.’

  Urla laughed. ‘Oh, come on. You expect me to believe that?’ The DCA chief rubbed her chin. ‘Actually, I know part of what you say is true. You didn’t kill those three men. Well, you might have done, but you certainly didn’t … eat them.’ She laughed, but Tommy sensed a little nervousness behind it. ‘Not a well-fed man like you.’

  ‘Go take a running jump. I’ve done more for the people of this town than you and your scumfuck army of enforcers has ever done. Call yourself a policing force? You’re a fucking disgrace. It’s because of people like you that people like me exist.’

  Urla laughed again. ‘Oh, so noble. Like it or not, Tommy, you’re not in control. I am. And above me, soon Maxim Cale will be.’

  ‘Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse—’

  ‘And little people like you are causing me too many problems. At the moment, as it stands, you’re a dead man, Tommy. But that can be changed. There are ways.’

  ‘Who shopped me? Who tipped you off to where I’d be tonight?’

  ‘Ah, now we come down to it. The bottom line. Do you really want to know?’ Urla took a deep breath as though excited by the big reveal. ‘Our servers received an anonymous message, but we traced the IP address back to a computer at Carmichael Industries.’

  Tommy said nothing. He had thought it more likely Kurou would shop him to the devil than to Urla Wynne. It was true then that you could trust no one, even the least trustworthy person of all.

  ‘Now, we know what’s going on up there,’ Urla said. ‘And we’re going to shut it down. Here’s the moment you get to let yourself out of the cage. I want to know exactly what this Doctor Crow is doing in there. I want to know what those dog things are, how many he has, what they are capable of. When we go up there to close him down, I want every possible situation covered. If Crow is taken into custody—dead or alive—you’re a free man. Do we understand each other?’

  Tommy stared at her. There was no way Kurou would have just shopped him for no reason. The only agenda Kurou worked to was his own, but he must have known how Tommy would react, how he would try to save his own skin. It was all part of one big plan, the reason for which only Kurou knew.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘What do you want to know?’

  33

  Suzanne

  Sun was streaming through the windscreen when Suzanne woke. She shivered at the morning chill, sat up, and began rubbing her arms to get a bit of heat into them. She had given Kelly the best of the blankets found in the boot, taking only an oil-smelling old towel for herself.

  Beside her, Kelly was still breathing. Suzanne nudged her, and Kelly opened her eyes.

  ‘Where are we?’ Kelly said, her eyes sagging.

  ‘The coast,’ Suzanne replied, keeping her voice steady, but inside feeling ecstatic that Kelly looked better. It had been the first time Kelly had spoken in two days without slurring her words. As Kelly blinked sleep out of her eyes, Suzanne reached across and touched her forehead.

  The fever, while still there, had eased. No more the throbbing heat it had been, it was a gentle warmth.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Like I’m going to die,’ Kelly muttered. ‘But less like I’m going to die than before.’

  ‘Stay here where it’s warm,’ Suzanne said. ‘I’ll find you something to eat.’

  What had felt like a lot of cans jostling about in her bag was only a couple of days’ supply, but she would worry about that later. Wishing she had some way to make heat, she selected a can of soup with a pull-tab cap, opened it and ga
ve it a stir with a plastic spoon. It didn’t look particularly appetising, but it would keep Kelly’s strength up. Her own belly was starting to look skinny, and she wished she’d eaten more at the cabin while she had a chance.

  She gave Kelly the soup and then helped her over to the nearest bushes to take care of her bodily functions. Back in the car, Suzanne sat Kelly up in the seat and covered her over with the blanket.

  ‘I found someone who will help us,’ Suzanne said.

  ‘Where’s Patrick?’

  Suzanne looked down. ‘I don’t know. He went to get help, but he didn’t come back.’

  Kelly sniffed. ‘Perhaps he got caught and taken to the same place as Mum and Dad.’

  Suzanne didn’t want to think about it, even though it was as likely as anything else. ‘I hope not,’ she said. ‘I hope he just got sidetracked, got caught up in something else.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Kelly asked.

  Suzanne shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We can’t go back, can we?’

  ‘No. Not right now. Perhaps, when things settle down a little.’

  Even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. Things would never settle down. Things would never settle down ever again.

  With little else to do, they talked idly for a while, catching up as sisters, with Suzanne talking a little about Patrick and her father, Kelly about school, her friends, and her mother and Don. Suzanne checked Kelly’s wound, and while it still looked bad, a little of the swelling had gone down. She had brought the medical kit from Don’s cabin, but the supplies in that too would only last a couple of days.

  She tried to stay positive for Kelly, tell her that things would be all right, but inevitably the time came when the euphoria of her fever passing was replaced by the vacancy of her mother and father, and the likelihood that Kelly would never see them again, that she was as much a fugitive now as Suzanne.

  ‘I’ll never leave you,’ Suzanne said. ‘We’ll stay together, and we’ll get through this together. I promise.’

  With a sullen expression, Kelly shook her head. ‘Mum used to say the same thing every time Dad went off on a trip. She never let me see how worried she was that he wouldn’t come back, but I could tell just from the way she acted. And she’d tell me not to worry, that even if Dad had to go away, she would take care of me.’

  Suzanne wasn’t sure what to say. She took Kelly’s hand and gave it a squeeze, wishing she could say something to offer Kelly more comfort.

  After another cold can of soup for lunch and the second pill, Kelly slept for a while. Suzanne walked back along the lane, checked out the forest around them, and made sure they were safe. Then she gathered some twigs and managed to make a small fire using a cigarette lighter found in the car’s dashboard compartment to ignite some dry grass. Setting the fire among rocks back near the tree line where the rising smoke would be disguised by the tree branches overhead, she made a little platform and attempted to heat a can of soup for their dinner.

  Twilight was already falling. Suzanne wondered for the thousandth time what had happened to Patrick, then forced herself to shut images of him being tortured in a DCA cell out of her mind.

  ‘I’ll be back soon,’ she told Kelly, then headed for Porlock.

  She went around the back of Frank’s surgery and found a light on in the little kitchen. Frank looked surprised to see her, as if he had expected her never to return. Appearing delighted to have some kind of project, he set the pace as they headed back up the hill to the car.

  Kelly was sitting up when they arrived. The girl was alarmed to see Frank, but calmed down when Suzanne explained that he was a doctor and wanted to help. He had brought a doctor’s bag with him and spent some minutes examining Kelly’s wound.

  After dressing the wound again, he instructed Kelly to wrap up warm and stay in the car, then took Suzanne aside.

  ‘She needs proper hospital care,’ he said. ‘I’ve cleaned and dressed her wound, and I have some more antibiotics I can give you, but I can’t promise the infection will stay away. She’s been a lucky girl. First, because the wound wasn’t deeper, and second, because she has a sister like you to help her out. But the only real cure for any sickness is to get out.’

  ‘Get out?’

  ‘Of Britain.’ Frank took Suzanne’s arm. ‘I come across runaways like you from time to time. Most of them have no money and have no choice: they go inward instead of out, into the cities, where they can hide like rats in the sewers. But you, you have something you can sell.’

  Suzanne instinctively took a step back. She stared at Frank in the gloom, no longer seeing him but seeing the man in the cabin, his grinning face above hers as he rutted between her legs; before him the laughing faces of the DCA agents, one as he held her arms, the other as he violated her body.

  In Frank’s face, though, she saw only regret, as though he had seen girls such as Suzanne a thousand times before.

  ‘I was referring to the vehicle,’ he said, offering her a kind smile. ‘You couldn’t sell it as it is, because it’d be found. But parts … they’re in great demand.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ Suzanne said.

  ‘That’s where I can help you. I’ve done favours for a lot of people, made a lot of contacts. I know people who run boats over to Ireland, getting people out whom the DCA are after. They don’t care what you might have done, you just have to pay what they ask to get onboard.’

  ‘How much?’

  Frank sighed. ‘More than I could ever afford. But let me see if I can pull some strings. Come down to my surgery tomorrow night, after dark. Bring Kelly if you can.’

  Suzanne took his hand. ‘I can’t thank you enough,’ she said.

  Frank shook his head. ‘I’ve done little for you yet.’

  ‘You’ve taken a great risk in helping us. I wish there was something I could do in return.’

  Frank laughed. ‘All I want in return is to see you smile. Preferably from the deck of a boat heading for Ireland.’

  34

  Patrick

  The Huntsman would rarely stay still long enough for Patrick to get a good look under its hood. In order to pick up Suzanne’s trail, Patrick had tried to tell it to follow him back to the cabin, but after a few random diversions it had suddenly stopped in the middle of a road, dropped to its knees as sniffed the tarmac, before climbing back to its feet and racing off in a rough westward direction.

  Patrick had to run to catch up. By the time the Huntsman paused again, he was gasping for breath. It seemed to have realised it needed to wait for him, because as he approached it pointed down a lane heading off to the left and growled, ‘This … way,’ in a gravelly voice which made Patrick’s skin crawl.

  ‘How do you know?’ he gasped. ‘How can you track Suzanne in a car?’

  ‘Track … Suzanne,’ was the only answer, followed by a creepy rustle that might have been a laugh. Patrick remembered how his older brother had lusted after Suzanne, and wondered if that part of his brother’s personality had remained.

  ‘Race, if that’s really you, remember, she’s my girlfriend.’

  The only answer this time was another creepy laughter-rustle.

  Having waited for Patrick to sufficiently recover his breath, the Huntsman rushed off again, leaving Patrick in its wake. He jogged after it, wondering how it could move so quickly. Whenever they reached a bend, he feared losing it, but each time it would pause just long enough for him to catch up, before rushing on again.

  And so the day continued. Patrick had no idea how far he had run, but it felt like he had crossed half the country. When the Huntsman finally paused at the brow of a hill where a gateway looked down at the flat Somerset Levels, he was dismayed to find they were only a few miles out of town. Suzanne could be hundreds of miles away by now.

  ‘Rest,’ the Huntsman said, bounding over the broken gate. Patrick followed, and found the Huntsman racing away across the field, far faster than he had ever seen it mo
ve, its cloaked body a blur until it went out of sight over the brow of the hill. Patrick knew he could never keep up, and wondered if it had finally tired of waiting for him, when he saw it appear, walking slowly this time, something held in one of its hands.

  As it reached him, it threw the object down.

  A dead wild rabbit.

  ‘Eat,’ came the raspy voice again, although this time it was muffled. When the Huntsman lifted its head, Patrick saw another dead rabbit, this one held in the Huntsman’s doglike jaws.

  He felt faint, so he sat down.

  ‘I can’t eat it like that,’ he muttered, when he felt well enough to speak. ‘It’s … not cooked.’

  ‘Fresh,’ the Huntsman said.

  Patrick looked around. There were a few old twigs lying by the hedgerow, so he got up and gathered them together into a pile.

  ‘Do you have anything that makes fire?’ he asked, hoping the Huntsman might have a packet of matches hidden in its robes somewhere.

  A ripping sound came from under the hood, and the head of the rabbit flew away into the grass nearby. The Huntsman lifted a flap of its cloak, and for a moment Patrick caught a glimpse of an array of weapons and tools attached to its body.

  It held up what looked like a blowtorch.

  ‘Fire,’ it said.

  Patrick let the Huntsman do the honours, igniting the fire and skinning the rabbit with one swift jerk of its claws. Twilight had fallen, and as Patrick held the rabbit’s corpse on a stick over the fire—still wondering whether he was starving enough to eat it—the creature sat across from him, just a stooped bundle of shadows.

  ‘Are you really my brother?’ Patrick asked, more to break the uneasy silence than for any other reason.

  ‘Divan,’ the Huntsman said. At first Patrick didn’t understand, but it said again, ‘My name … Divan.’

  ‘Divan … that comes from Devan. That’s our family’s name. I know you’re my brother Race. Roger. Do you remember?’