by Andy Maslen
“Shut up, you fucking Paki bitch!”
Then another voice. Hard. Unforgiving. A woman this time.
“Yeah, shut the fuck up, bitch. You can’t come over here and start giving us white people lip. We live here, don’t we? Who the fuck do you think you are?”
There was the sharp, flat crack of a punch, then crying, low and whimpery.
Gabriel rounded the stand of bamboo. In front of him, grouped like an awkward composition of models for a painting, three people froze as they saw him.
In the centre of the group was a slim, brown-skinned woman in a black business suit. Her burgundy leather briefcase lay behind her on the ground. Pinioning her arms by her sides was, no other word for him, a skinhead. A real old-school thug with shaved head, tight jeans, red braces over white T-shirt and tall, oxblood Doctor Martens. In front of her, hand clamped across her face to stifle her screams, was a woman of maybe thirty, hair scraped back revealing a high, shining forehead and huge, gold hoops dangling from her ears.
The businesswoman widened her eyes as she saw Gabriel and began bucking against her captor’s grip.
“Let her go,” Gabriel said, quietly.
“Or what, fuckface?” the woman said, turning to speak but leaving her palm muffling the woman’s renewed efforts to sound the alarm.
“Yeah,” the skinhead said. “Fuck off back there with the others. This ain’t got nothing to do with you.”
Maybe inspired by the arrival of a witness or better yet a rescuer, the businesswoman kicked out, then back, and managed to rake the side of one high-heeled shoe down the skinhead’s left shin, before jamming the point of her heel into the top of his foot.
“Fuck, you broke my fucking toe!” he yelled. But he stepped back all the same, releasing his grip to clutch his leg before tripping over a tussock of grass and falling into the pond, splashing through the skim of duckweed on the surface.
Gabriel had closed in on the woman while this was happening. Grabbing her by both wrists, he pulled her off her captive, maintaining a vice-like grip so she couldn’t hit out.
“Go,” he said to the businesswoman. “Call the police. Get the manager of this place. You’ll need witnesses.”
She looked at him, mouth downturned.
“I’m sorry. Thanks for helping but I have a meeting to go to. Massive new client. I can’t afford to be late. Thanks. Thanks so much.”
She swept her long hair back behind her ears, stooped to pick up her briefcase then ran back towards the seating area.
The skinhead had got to his feet and waded out of the shallow water, dripping with pond slime.
“You’re going to pay for that, you cunt.”
He lunged for Gabriel, who was still holding the skinhead’s girlfriend, swinging a fist weighted with wide, silver rings.
It was too easy, dealing with untrained sluggers like these. In one quick movement, Gabriel tripped the woman onto her back, sidestepped the incoming punch and elbowed the man hard in the throat. As he went down, coughing and clutching his windpipe, Gabriel punched him on the back of the neck, speeding his fall so his head hit the turf fast enough to disorientate him. The woman was struggling to her feet but Gabriel just pointed at her and looked her straight in the eye.
“Stay down,” he said. “Or I’ll put you down.”
Without turning away from her, he stretched out his left hand and grabbed her companion by the front of his T-shirt, hauling him over so the two of them were lying head to head and looking up at him. Their expressions had changed from naked aggression – all bared, bad teeth and wrinkled snouts – to panting, wide-eyed fear.
Gabriel leaned over them until he could smell them: a mixture of bad breath and muddy pond water from the man and heavy perfume from the woman. He was deliberately breathing slowly, and spoke in a quiet voice, forcing them to crane upwards to catch his words.
“What gives you the right to treat a stranger like that?”
The man glared at Gabriel as he spoke, cords standing out in his neck as he drew his lips back from his teeth once more.
“She pushed in front of me, didn’t she? In the queue. Told her to get back in line where she belonged and the bitch just ignored me. Me! A white man. What’s been here, like, for ever. And she’s just a fuckin Paki immigrant.”
Gabriel backhanded the man across the face. Not hard. Not enough to produce a sound that would carry. But hard enough to shut him up.
“She didn’t sound Pakistani. She sounded like she came from London. I want you to listen to me. And you,” he said, eyeing the woman who had subsided into a kind of trance. “I don’t have the time to call the police, but I really don’t like people like you.”
“Please,” the man said, eyes pleading, perhaps realising just how far out of his depth he was. “Don’t do nothing else. You can’t. You’re white, like us.”
“Give me your car keys. I assume you drove here.” Gabriel sat back on his heels and held out his right hand, palm upwards.
“Why? What you going to do with them?” the woman said. “Don’t stab him or nothing.”
Gabriel twitched his flattened fingers upwards impatiently.
With a scowl, the man stuck his hand down into the front pocket of his water-tightened jeans and pulled out a set of house and car keys. The black plastic fob, for a BMW, was clipped onto a split-ring alongside a rectangle of thin rubber printed with the flag of St George. He dropped them into Gabriel’s palm.
Gabriel stood, pushing up from his heels in one smooth, fast movement that caused the two supine bullies to flatten themselves back into the grass. With an easy underhand action, he lobbed the jingling keys into the centre of the pond, where they disappeared between the sword-like leaves of the irises, making the barest of splashes as they found the water.
He marched off, back to his table, listening for the sounds of onrushing feet, ready to turn and strike. But none came. Just the sound of muted swearing and more splashing, heavier this time, as the man and woman waded around among the flowers.
If he’d been expecting applause, or admiration, he was to be disappointed. Displaying a mixture of British reserve, caution and an engrossing interest in their phones and tablets, the people at the café tables barely looked up as he emerged from the vegetation shielding them from the scene of his most recent encounter with wickedness. Not even a video? Nobody wanted to put that little fracas on Facebook? Wonders will never cease. He reached his table and, still standing, took a swig of the coffee. Stone-cold. He grimaced. Not the relaxing rest stop he’d planned.
Chapter 21
By the time Gabriel climbed out of the car and squeezed the little green button on his garage door closer, he’d made a decision. Yes, he would call the psychiatrist. He’d also spent the last twenty minutes of the drive, as he thrashed along an arrow-straight three-mile stretch of the A30, drafting a letter in his head that he would type up, edit and send to the CEO of Dreyer Pharma, James Bryant. Asked to form an impression of the man from his name alone, Gabriel would have guessed white, forty-five, nice suit, good grooming, well spoken, could be an army brat, private schools and a decent redbrick university. Plus an MBA from somewhere in the US. Harvard Business School or maybe Stanford.
He went inside and headed upstairs for a shower.
As the scalding water beat down on his shoulders, he stood, eyes closed, reviewing the intelligence he’d gathered. One: Tom Ainsley, the pilot, had told him he suspected there was something up with the experimental drug they were developing at Dreyer Pharma. Two: it was fine on the ground and even on low-altitude flights, but take your plane up higher, and something happened to cause hallucinations and blindness. Three: there’d been some sort of internal investigation, and they claimed to have fixed the problem. This was either a lie or a mistake – Tom’s accident had happened the day after the two-week MOD investigation concluded. Four: all along, some shadowy Government department headed by his old commanding officer was already investigating Dreyer and wanted him to help. Five:
to complete the recipe for chaos, add in a dash of Chechen separatists, and a big pinch of skullduggery involving a Russian oligarch, and some international under-the-table drug-dealing. Should be interesting, he thought as he towelled himself dry. He dressed in an old pair of Levi’s and a white T-shirt, slipped on a pair of beaten up navy-blue boat shoes and went downstairs. He was hungry.
Sometimes you want to fiddle around with vegetables, slicing and dicing. And sometimes what you really want is a thick slice of red meat. Today was the second kind of time. He wanted a steak, rare, with chips; and a decent bottle of wine. Something hefty. A Barolo, perhaps, or an Aussie Shiraz. Both were to hand, in the village pub: The Angel Inn. He pulled on a soft, caramel-coloured leather jacket and headed out.
Inside, the pub was busy with midweek drinkers, and families having dinner together. The noise was cheerful, rather than oppressive. Over a quiet lunchtime pint one day, the landlady had confessed to Gabriel that she didn’t really go for all that “bloody mood music the bosses insist we play”, preferring instead either the chat of contented customers or the occasional raucous gig from a bunch of middle-aged, middle-class rockers who called themselves The Deadbeat Dads and played blues, rock and roll, and the odd funk cover. “They’re about as rock and roll as I am,” she cawed as she pulled pints. “The singer’s a bloody management consultant, and the guitarist works for an insurance company.”
The landlady was working tonight and flashed him a smile as he approached the bar.
“All right, my lovely?” she said, tucking her hair behind her ears with both hands, a gesture that lifted her considerable breasts and pushed them out towards him.
“Can I order some food please, Steph? Rib-eye, rare, chips and a bottle of the Barolo.”
“Building yourself up are you?” she said, squeezing his right bicep across the bar. “Not that you need to.”
He grinned at her. “You think? You’d have me on the ground in seconds if we were fighting.”
Her eyes were twinkling in the light from the soft lamps above the bar. “Chance would be a fine thing. Now, leave me alone so I can get chef onto your dinner. I need to serve these other poor sods who’ve been waiting for their drinks while you’ve been flirting with me.”
With that unanswerable rejoinder floating between them, she flounced away with a twitch of her hips.
There was a small table free in a corner where the light wasn’t so bright. Gabriel settled in to wait for his steak and thanked the young waitress who brought him the wine a few moments later, registering six separate pieces of decorative metal inserted into her otherwise satin-smooth face. As he took an appreciative mouthful of the full-bodied red, he started reworking the letter to Bryant in his head.
His thought process was interrupted by the waitress returning with a circular white platter dominated by a slab of steak that was virtually falling off the rim. The bottoms of the thick-cut chips, which smelt deliciously of hot goose fat, were turning pink as they soaked up the juices that were oozing out from underneath the steak. Gabriel thanked the young woman and bent to his meal. The steak fell apart under the swift slices of his razor-sharp serrated knife, and for a few minutes, his questioning inner self fell silent. Then it piped up again with one final thought. Maybe this is what you can talk to Fariyah Crace about. Now shut up and eat your dinner. That sounded like the best advice he’d heard in a long while, so he took it.
The combination of the wine, the massive chunk of beef, and his eight hours of driving, not to mention the altercation at the motorway services, overwhelmed him in a sudden rush of fatigue. He shook his head and leant back in his chair. Felt his eyes closing again. A voice close to his ear startled him. He realised he’d been on the point of sleep.
“Everything all right, my love?” It was Steph.
Gabriel got to his feet, swaying a little as his balance deserted him momentarily.
“I need to go, Steph. Sorry, not feeling myself tonight.”
The cool evening air partially revived him as he stepped out from the pub’s warm interior. It was only a ten-minute walk to his cottage, but each step seemed to drag energy from him that he couldn’t replace. He made it to his front door and was asleep fifteen minutes later.
*
Shooting. Lots of it. The gunfire was coming from his back garden. This was no countryman’s shotgun, either. The rate of fire alone marked it out as an automatic weapon, and the noise was deafening. Had to be an assault rifle at least. An AK? Maybe. Could be an LMG. No. Light machine guns didn’t sound angry like this one. This one was shouting with each round that exploded in the breech. “Gotcha! Gotcha! Gotcha! Gotcha! GOTCHA!”
Gabriel leapt out of bed and rushed to the window. Shit! He was still in his dress uniform, medals and all. They’d see him a mile off. And his weapon was missing. Where was his M16? He pulled the curtain back to make a viewing slit and crouched before peering through. The garden was full of dark-skinned fighters. Lean men with ropy muscles, wearing gold-framed Ray-Ban Aviators and Adidas T-shirts. All bombed-up with Kalashnikovs, Glocks, Uzis, grenades, machetes and, yes, there at the back, a wild-eyed dude with two-foot-long dreadlocks tied back with a skull and crossbones bandanna, swinging a Heckler & Koch MG4 light machinegun from side to side, his finger crooked round tight on the trigger, spraying 5.56mm rounds that were decapitating the blooms in Gabriel’s flower beds. No. Not blooms. Those were bodies. British soldiers: Guards, Royal Engineers, SAS – buried up to their waists in the sludgy red soil. Their heads leapt upwards in welters of blood as the explosive rounds blew their necks apart. They were calling out to him as they rose in arcs before thumping down into the grass. “Don’t leave us, Boss. We want to get back for Nathalie’s birthday.” All the heads had the same face. A deep brown face with a shattered jaw.
Gabriel tried to shout down to them. “I’m coming Smudge. I’m coming to get you.” But he could only croak out nonsense. “Your flight leaves in an hour. Please do not leave personal items behind you.”
The rebel soldiers had reached the back of the cottage and looked up at him. They knew he was there, cowering behind the curtain, and they laughed at him, showing rows of big, white teeth, filed to sharp points.
“We’re coming to get you, Boss,” the leading soldier whispered. Then he started walking up the wall, perpendicular to the old brickwork, his AK-47 pointed straight at Gabriel’s face. “Then it’s crucifixion time for you.”
Gabriel looked back to the lawn. There was Smudge, his old patrol number two in the Motorised Troop, a good soldier whose life he’d saved back on the last day of stage one training. Only now he was impaled through his palms by machetes, pinned to a cross-shaped tree. Smudge strained to release himself, but only succeeded in tearing deep gashes in his hands from which horizontal rivers of bright blood flowed outwards to each side of the garden.
“Look out, Boss!” he cried, sending teeth spinning from his broken mouth.
Gabriel looked down. An enemy fighter was standing on the wall just below the window. The muzzle of his AK was pointed straight at Gabriel’s face, separated by a few inches of air and a quarter-inch of glass. The man’s face was gone, replaced by a death’s head: a shining, white skull with blood-filled sockets and those hideous pointed teeth champing up and down. Gabriel tried to move out of the line of fire but couldn’t. His hands were pinioned to the wooden windowsill by his own cook’s knives, their stainless steel blades rocking back and forth, driving themselves deeper into in the wood under his bleeding flesh, which smelled of rare steak.
In front of him now, the soldier reached through the glass and opened the curtains all the way. “Fariyah Crace says you’ve been a very bad man,” he said. Then he pulled the trigger.
As the rounds slammed into his torso and head, Gabriel shrieked and fell back into a deep pool of his own blood, tumbling down through the murk and landing with a crash on his kitchen floor.
*
He staggered to his feet, clutching the back of a chair, and looked a
t the clock on the cooker.
03.00.
His pulse was drumming in his ears, and his whole body was slick with sweat.
Shaking, he lurched to the door and the downstairs cloakroom beyond. An acrid surge of red wine and half-digested meat raced into his throat and he threw up into the lavatory, gripping the cold, white sides of the commode as if to stop himself disappearing into the sewer below.
Fuck. You’re in deep trouble, Boss.
Chapter 22
Sitting in his office over the garage the following morning, he placed the NHS business card Don had given him on the desk in front of him and called the number.
“Dr Crace?” he blurted, as soon as the call was answered.
“No, this is Valerie Pearce. I am Professor Crace’s secretary. How may I help you?”
“Sorry. I need, I mean, if it’s possible to see Doc— Professor Crace? Talk I mean. Not about me. To find out more.” Aware he was gabbling, Gabriel took a deep breath, let it out again and started again. “My name is Gabriel Wolfe. Don Webster gave me Professor Crace’s card. He said she might be able to help me.”
At the mention of Don’s name, the secretary’s starchy manner softened.
“I’m sure she can. Now. Give me your name again and I’ll see if she’s free. She’s teaching today, but I know she has some gaps in her schedule.”
“Wolfe. Gabriel,” he said, and nearly added his rank and service number.
“Well, Wolfe Gabriel, just hold on for a sec while I track her down.”
He heard the phone at the other end click as Valerie put him on hold. No Vivaldi, thankfully. Or recorded message telling him about new NHS services for the psychologically disturbed.
A minute later, she came back on the line, her voice warm and friendly. He could picture a motherly type, smiling as she spoke.
