His heavy lids opened and he smiled back. ‘I see you. I see you… one of us.’
‘Do you now.’
He dipped his head at the syringe. ‘Do I get a choice?’
Bang-Bang laughed mirthlessly. ‘Actually, yes, you do. It’s either this or I take that fire extinguisher off the wall there and beat your skull into a canoe and splatter your brains out onto the floor.’
He nodded slowly. She knelt beside him. She rolled up his left arm sleeve and tapped at a vein. ‘Shouldn’t take long. Better than you did for your victims. Or for my friend.’
She readied the syringe in the dim light and gazed at the mix. And then without any further ado, she struck it down into his vein and depressed the plunger.
His eyes were shut. He slumped, and took long, slow breaths. The breaths grew slower and slower. Shallower.
We listened to the traffic and the sirens outside for what seemed like an hour. Maybe it was. The sirens grew quieter, less in number. The pitter-patter of rain outside faded, and stopped.
Bang-Bang came back to my end of the wall, sat down and inspected her nails in the light. Black and red. She nodded to herself approvingly.
And, finally, it was all over. I moved forward and checked the Mayor’s wrist for a pulse. Nothing. The body was already cooling. He sat there like an obscene Buddha, waxy in the lights. Bang-Bang went forward and kicked the body down to the ground with one white Go-Go boot. The body slumped to the concrete, an empty shell. She picked up the empty syringe and rubber tube, turned them in the light with a look of distaste, placed them inside the Mayor's shirt and rebuttoned it. She patted his face. She sang in a sing-song. ‘OK he’s dead.’
I went forward and stood down and looked over the body. I placed both pieces of his broken knife inside his shirt. I ran the flashlight over the body. I stopped. There was a small hole in his shirt hem. I felt it and looked. Wiped my finger on it. Lead bullet wipe residue in the flashlight beam. A round had gone straight through his untucked shirt.
I pointed it out to Bang-Bang. ‘You were right babe – you did clip him. Just.’
She shook her head and spoke to herself. ‘Not good enough.’
I dialled Lennie. The line clicked open to the washing rush of helicopter noise and a radio. ‘Riz. You all OK?’
‘Me and Bang-Bang are OK.’
‘Did you get him?’
‘We got him.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Lennie... you don’t wanna know.’
I could hear the cogs turning and finally he understood. ‘Holy shit!’
‘Yeah. This never happened, Lennie.’
‘Christ. Yeah. I mean no, I mean, holy fuck. You're going to make this problem “go away”, I take it?’
‘We don’t really have a choice. Right, listen in. This has been approved. You get me? Approved. Lennie, we’re going to need to borrow a police van for a bit.’
Silence. ‘Ah. Alright Riz, what street are you on?’
I went outside and looked. ‘Assam Street E1. Back it into the building site.’
‘I’ll send one down.’
‘Thanks. Can you get them to turn off the tracker?’
‘You don’t ask for much, do ya? OK.’
‘You’re a star mate. We’ll see you in the canteen tomorrow morning.’
A grim laugh came down the phone. ‘Yeah, give my regards to Freddie Foreman.’ He knew what we were planning.
I made my way back outside through the parked equipment. Very distantly, to our north, I could hear the snaps and cracks of rifle fire starting up. I glanced at Bang-Bang. She looked up from the glow of the screen she was engrossed in. ‘Yeah. That’s our lot, shooting all the kids in the estate, or shooting each other. What did you expect?’
‘I didn’t expect anything other than chaos, babe.’
My next job was to ring Teacher. While my phone was ringing I began looking outside for something to wrap the body in. There was a green tarpaulin on a skip nearby. That’d do. I came back, hauling the tarp, and I finally noticed the trainers the corpse was wearing. I leant in to take a closer look. Yep. Reebok DMX Ride Cruisers. I pointed at them and Bang-Bang nodded her head, gravely and slowly.
A boxy silver Mercedes Sprinter riot van pulled up outside and reversed into the yard, its brake lights flaring. The driver, a TSG Sergeant, got out, slapped the bonnet twice, and walked away without even a glance in our direction, the fluorescent markings on his riot helmet bobbing brightly in the streetlights. Good drills. The engine was running and the keys were in the ignition. We looked back at the tarpaulin-wrapped body. We mentally braced ourselves then walked back, picked up an end each, and wrestled it into the rear of the van. I did a last check for anything left lying on the ground. Nothing. Dust and building debris.
The last call was to the Colonel. The secure line bleeped… blipped… ‘Riz. All sorted?’
‘Yep. Package complete with us. Boss, I need you to flag this vehicle, area code Alpha Juliet November, reg is – hang on.’
I leant out of the window and shouted at Bang-Bang. ‘Babe! What’s this van’s reg?’
She looked up from her phone where she’d been busy texting away, or running the internet, who knew. She squinted into the glare of the headlights and called out. ‘BX58 OYP!’
I got back on the phone. ‘Bravo X-Ray five eight Oscar Yankee Papa, and can you put in an operational dead zone east out of town from our locstat. We are at…’ I tapped the dashboard satnav and read off the lat and long, ‘… and we’ll be heading down the A13. You’ll also need to find his car and disappear that too. Yes, he was using his car the whole time. It’ll be in the area.’
‘Got that Riz. Leave the vehicle stuff with us, it’ll be on the databases. Wait one.’
There was a moment as he conferred offline to a busy control room. He came back. ‘Riz. You’re flagged and dead-spotted. You’ll be good to go in five minutes. Happy sailing.’
I smiled. Just like he used to do in Northern Ireland with FRU and their UVF assets. They’d put in what was known as a restriction order, a security forces black hole, within which they could operate with temporary impunity. And now we’d have the same.
Bang-Bang climbed into the passenger side, took the battery out of her mobile, and gazed enquiringly at me. I held up five fingers and she nodded.
50.
We’d driven all the way from Whitechapel to Eastbourne, stopping only at Swanley BP Services, where Toots had been waiting for us with a holdall containing £100,000 in used notes. This was for Teacher and his uncle, and this got us deniable sea travel for the evening and a willing crew. ‘Make sure they burn the rubber bands holding the wads together’, said Toots. She turned on her heel and departed for her office car.
The drive to the coast was uneventful. I kept the van at 50mph. Bang-Bang messed about with the radios, listened for a while to police despatch, then got bored and tuned it to Sunrise. We drove under a clear, starry sky, into Eastbourne and down to the docks.
Our boat was the Jessica Ann, moored at Sovereign Harbour Marina. Its lights were blazing. I pulled the police van in on the jetty as close as I could manage. Teacher and his uncle came to assist us in getting the tarpaulined bundle from the back and onto the deck. I recognised his uncle, a half-cast Jamaican feller, from previous odd jobs for our outfit.
The crew, dressed in their yellow oilskins, looked lively and the boat came awake. Teacher returned to the van with a bag containing all of their mobile phones, and placed it under some seats in the rear of the van.
We got aboard, into the smell of fish and diesel, and Teacher handed us sets of paint-spattered overalls. Bang-Bang’s set was slightly too big for her and we laughed as she fumbled to roll up the sleeves. She grinned sheepishly and went to look for some wellies for us. She rooted through the equipment buckets and found some. The Jessica Ann was a shellfish trawler, and the cluttered decks were slippery and filled with ropes and yellow pots.
We helped cast off. Ropes were unt
ied. The anchor rattled up. The engines were tested, VHF sets switched on, and we watched the white spume of our wake grow. After a while we made our way out of the marina’s inner harbour locks, traversed the outer harbour past the Martello Tower, and out into the black, open sea, the ships’ radar antennae spinning above us. I looked back the lights of Eastbourne. Ahead, to our starboard, the Royal Sovereign Lighthouse blinked. We had a little way to go but Teacher’s crew knew what they were doing. This wasn’t their first time.
Teacher’s uncle peered out into the darkness, his opposite number watching the radar and a laptop with a live ship tracker screen. We were going to cross two lanes of ship traffic so we had to be careful.
51.
1.13am. The engines were winding down. We slowed to three knots. We were twelve miles off the French coast according to the radar, and two miles east of the ferry lane.
We assembled, the foredeck rising and falling under our feet. They unwrapped the tarpaulin and there was our serial killer, pale and still. We gathered around him and looked down. Bang-Bang inspected his face. I nodded down. ‘Seems silly, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘He looks like he’s sleeping.’
She laughed. ‘What d’ya want to do, Riz, give him a prayer?’
I thought about it. ‘Bin Laden got one.’
She was thinking too. She stood up. ‘Well, fuck it, you can do it ‘cause I ain’t gonna.’
Teacher brought over a jar of Vick’s. ‘Smear a dollop under your noses. Trust me, it’ll help.’
I took the jar, did as he said and handed it to Bang-Bang. She looked at Teacher and then took a swab and smeared it under her nose.
‘OK. Let’s do it.’
Teacher took a fish-gutting knife and cut away as much clothing as he could, bundled it and threw it onto the tarpaulin. The pieces of the killer’s knife, the syringe and all the debris went onto the tarpaulin too. He unclasped the watch on the corpse’s right wrist and handed it to Bang-Bang, then he handed me the knife. To Bang-Bang he gave a large set of pliers. ‘All yours.’
I went forward, steadied myself and gripped the mayor’s torso. Here we went. There was no need for us to wear gloves now, as seawater had a deleterious effect on DNA and fingerprints. The English Channel’s marine life was about to get an early morning snack.
Bang-Bang gripped the corpse’s head and began yanking various teeth out with the pliers, worrying at the head and cursing as she did so. Every now and again a tooth would fly up in the air and over the side. I stood over the torso. I took a deep breath. I leant down, stabbed and cut, roughly, transversely, across the corpse’s navel from right to left. There was an exhalation of gases and everyone stood back. I stood up. ‘Now what?’
Teacher spoke. ‘Chickenwire. Let’s roll him up.’
We rolled the body into the chickenwire, and then secured the wire with a chain and padlock. Teacher and a crewman heaved up what looked like a railway sleeper and wrapped the chain round that. After much toing and froing on the slippery deck, the railway sleeper was sitting on the chicken-wired body and we were good to go.
I stood over the wrapped corpse, and began Sura al-Fatiha. ‘Bismillahi rahmani rahim, al hamdu lillahi rabbi l-alamin, ar rahmani rahim…’ and then I stopped. ‘This is ridiculous. We’ve just mutilated him. Let’s get him over.’
Bang-Bang came to my side and hugged me with one arm. She looked down at the corpse. ‘That’s all.’ She waited, and then looked up at me. ‘Yeah? That’s all, Riz hun.’
I looked down, and gave a nod. ‘OK. That’s all.’
Teacher’s uncle leant from the wheelhouse and called out a sonar depth reading. Teacher nodded and we got ready, bracing our feet as the deck rose and fell gently in the swell. We lifted the weighted bundle with extreme effort, and I distantly wondered why dead bodies seemed to weigh more than live ones. It took all four of us to heave the package over the side, together with the chain, sleeper and all else. It splashed heavily into the dark channel below, and we all hung over the side and breathed sighs of relief.
The engines rumbled back into life. The boat started moving.
I waited a few minutes, then I took the tarpaulin we’d wrapped him in and threw all the clothes and other detritus in together with some fishing net weights. We tied it into a bundle. Over they went, into our wake. Then the knife. Finally I threw the mayor’s mobile phone and his watch into the sea. We looked down at the smaller splashes. There was something about throwing things into the sea, Lord knew what it was. You always looked. Probably because you knew it was a one-way trip.
Bang-Bang lit a cigarette. It took several sparks but finally she got it going and took a long drag. ‘Why did he do it, Riz?’
‘I really don’t know. Satanism. Blood. He might have been forming some mad temple of sacrifice. I doubt we’ll ever know. Maybe just because he loved it and couldn’t stop.’
She gazed wistfully south and smoke curled from her mouth as she exhaled on the cigarette. ‘Ohhh, the irony. Closest we got to Paris all month and it was in a fishing trawler. With a corpse.’
I looked towards the distant coastline. We were twelve miles out, just off the ferry channel. There was a glow on the southern horizon. Dieppe, maybe. ‘We’re heading back there as soon as we get back, luv. I’m gonna ring Stevie. Gonna book us a stay in a nice hotel in Paris.’
‘Oh cool!’ She jumped up and down. I could see her infectious grin in the darkness.
Teacher waved from the other side of the boat and called out. ‘Oi you two! I could smash one of your curries, you know.’
I laughed and shook my head. What a crew.
The engines growled and the boat slowly turned. Before us, dawn was breaking in the east.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to; Tom Cain; Roy Tyzack for the police procedural; Misbah for the recipes; Sabba Tariq for the Urdu; my ‘constant readers’ circle’; and the real-life Black-Eyed Girls for proofreading and correcting elementary errors. Any inaccuracies are purely authors’ own or artistic license.
Locked and Loaded: A Riz Sabir Thriller Omnibus Page 58
