Crusher

by Niall Leonard

  “Have you been in touch with your friend Mr. McGovern?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “And I told you, he’s not a friend.”

  Now Eccles looked right at me, and saw how much I meant it. “Do you have any idea what you might be getting into?” he said.

  “Not so far,” I said. “Do you?”

  Eccles tapped his teeth with his specs for a moment. “Tell you what,” he said, pulling out his wallet, “take as much time as you need.” He flicked out a wad of twenties and offered them to me. “Your services are no longer required.”

  Damn it, I thought. Now he’s fired me, I can’t tell him to shove his job. It wouldn’t sound half as good.

  “Keep it.” I was going to add, “You need it more than I do,” but it would have been hot air—even now Eccles had far more money than I did. But walking out of his office leaving him holding a wad of cash would rattle him more than anything I could have said. So that’s what I did.

  As I grabbed my coat from the staffroom and left I felt a bit sorry for Eccles—having lent the Guvnor that van, he was in far deeper shit than me—but that was the second time in a fortnight I’d been fired, and even if they were rubbish jobs, it still stung. I’d honestly performed them to the best of my ability, done the work as well as I could—better than most—and I’d still got canned. Earlier that morning I had worried about how what I planned to do might affect Eccles, but now I was too pissed off to give a toss. There was an Internet café near the tube station. I went in and paid for a two-hour session, a cup of weak tea and a red apple that tasted of nothing whatsoever. Taking a seat in a dim little cubicle in front of a bulky old-fashioned monitor, I fired up the browser, logged into the RTTracker website and dug in my back pocket for the bit of paper that I’d written Eccles’s log-in details on.

  fourteen

  It had taken me ninety minutes to get there, the last twenty on foot from a deserted, dirty tube station, and I wondered if I’d come to the right place.

  In the Internet café I’d sat sipping tea and watching the red blip of the van’s tracking device circle London on the motorway until it was directly north of the city, then turn south and slow down as it hit the city streets. Zooming in, I’d followed it down past Hendon to a spot just inside the North Circular, where it turned off a dual carriageway into a blank area marked “Goods Yard,” and finally halted in the north-eastern corner next to a railway line.

  Now I’d got there the “goods yard” turned out to be an industrial estate so new it hadn’t been detailed on the maps. Massive units of yellow brick with tall roller doors rose from a sea of rippled concrete floodlit with sodium arc-lights, and as I entered through the main gates and headed east I felt as exposed and vulnerable as a rat on a skating rink. Huge articulated trucks rumbled past as I headed for the eastern perimeter, where a four-metre fence capped with razor wire discouraged suicidal strollers from exploring the railway, and turned north. I tried to creep along in the little shadow I could find, wondering if I was being observed on CCTV, and if I was, whether that was good or bad. None of the passing truck drivers had appeared to notice my presence, and if I disappeared tonight, no one would ever know what had happened to me, apart from the people who made it happen. And I longed to show Zoe this castle in Spain. See her act all cool and offhand then.

  At the north-east corner of the estate stood a unit identical to all the rest. There was no sign that it had ever been leased out to a business. There were no cars on the forecourt, and the customer reception area to the right of the main door was unfurnished, apart from its virginal white service counter. No mail on the desk or the doormat, no lights from inside. I couldn’t slide under that roller door without losing some serious weight, and I wouldn’t get through the reception door without a sledgehammer. I went round the side instead, along the side of the unit that faced the razor-wire fence, and peeked around the corner at the end. Even here it wasn’t dark—the yellow light of the sodium lamps bled everywhere like dye from a cheap T-shirt. Right on the corner, next to me, was a fire exit door—a slab of wood with no handle, just the usual “Keep Clear” sign. I looked more closely; the door wasn’t properly closed. The edge protruded from its jamb about the length of a fingertip. I’d come all this way, I thought I might as well give it a try. The door rattled when I pulled at it, but refused to open. I pushed it shut in frustration and it popped out again—this time a little further. There was obviously something wrong with the latch. I pulled and pushed and pulled and pushed, and the door opened enough for me to just reach the push-down bar on the inside. Stretching my fingers to their utmost I managed to touch it, and get just enough leverage to push it down. The door popped open.

  There was a bad smell from somewhere, like cheap bleach, that caught in the back of the throat. The fire door opened onto a narrow breeze-block corridor, and now I could see a light—a faint yellow glow from where the loading bay must be, spilling from a door that hung ajar at the end of the corridor. I tiptoed up to the far door and held my breath as I pulled it open, but it was still new and freshly oiled, and barely made a sound.

  There were two vehicles parked in the loading bay. One was a big four-wheel-drive, the other a high-sided white van with a refrigeration unit mounted on top and The Iron Bridge, Pimlico in blue lettering on the side panels. I looked around, but the rest of the loading bay was empty and bare, apart from what looked like a wooden lockup in the corner. The smell seemed to be coming from the van itself, and under the stink of cheap bleach I picked up the sharp tang of urine. The rear doors were locked, but checking the ignition I found the keys still hanging there. I took them round to the back, unlocked the van’s rear door, took a deep breath and turned the handle.

  The rear interior light had been left on, I noticed; wouldn’t that drain the battery? When I looked down and saw a pair of wide, frightened eyes staring at me I forgot about the battery.

  The floor was covered with crumpled, stained newspaper and piled haphazardly with cheap sleeping bags. When I looked more closely I saw that each bag held a huddled child, and some held two. There were about ten altogether, all girls as far as I could see, and the oldest must have been twelve. They all stared at me, faces grubby, eyes wide, too fatigued and frightened to speak or even cry. There were chewed heels of bread scattered about, and discarded skins of coarse sausage; I caught the faint whiff of garlic but it was overwhelmed by the stink from a chemical toilet in the far corner that must have been slopping and splashing all the way from Dover. I had just opened my mouth to tell them, “It’s OK,” when my head slammed into what felt like a manhole cover and I sank to my knees, stunned.

  I stayed conscious long enough to realize my head hadn’t slammed into anything—something had slammed into it. But now more blows were raining down and I could feel boots hammering the small of my back. It was all I could do to curl up into a foetal position, and pull my forearms up to guard my face before they started laying into me with kicks and lumps of wood and what must have been a bike chain. I could hear high-pitched screeching and thought it must be me. Then I realized the little girls were screaming because they were watching a man being beaten to death. Someone must have got fed up with the noise because the last thing I heard before I passed out was the van doors being slammed shut.

  Zoe was sitting up in my bed, her arms folded. She was smoking. Smoking in bed’s very dangerous, I tried to tell her, but she couldn’t hear me over the pounding dub step, and my mouth was full of blood, where I lay across the foot of the bed. She leaned forward and she looked at me like I was a slug on her pizza and she screwed her cigarette out on my face.

  The pain of it woke me up. Blood was running from a cut to my cheek. I was curled up in a moving metal and plastic box and I could smell petrol and cigarette smoke. The lid of the box was a rippling grey plastic sheet and around the edges yellow light flickered and pulsed. My ears were filled with the roaring of tyres on a road, mingled with a teeth-rattling thump of drum’n’bass played at maximum volum
e on a top-of-the-range car sound system.

  I was in the rear of the four-wheel-drive and the plastic sheet stretched over it was just a roller-blind affair to stop people peeking into the boot. I could have pushed through it, I supposed, and got a fist in the face from one of the guys I could hear and feel inches away from me in the back seat, hooting and laughing and boasting about kicking someone’s teeth out. I checked mine with my tongue. A few had moved about, and two were chipped, but they were still all there. Maybe that treat was yet to come.

  The music was pounding out so loudly, either because the passengers liked that sort of thing, or to cover the sound of me screaming and kicking the sides of the car when it stopped at lights. Not that I could have kicked very hard—I could barely move for the pain. It felt like every inch of my skin, every bone in my body, and every internal organ had been flayed, battered and mashed. My hands were tied in front of me but my feet were free. I wondered why they’d left them that way. Maybe they wanted me to walk somewhere and it would save them the bother of lugging me.

  Could I kick my way out of this, or just seize a moment and run for it? My feet and legs hurt like hell, but I didn’t think anything was actually broken, and if it came to running adrenaline would take care of the pain. They might not bother chasing me—they might just shoot me. But if they had a gun wouldn’t they have shot me already? Whys and hows and what-ifs crowded into my mind and I tried to push them down, to breathe deep and think clearly. They’d known I was coming, that much was obvious. The faulty fire door and the keys in the ignition had all been part of a setup, and I’d walked right into it like a chicken pecking feed off a chopping block. That prick Eccles must have panicked. He could have gone to the cops and reported his van stolen, but obviously he was more scared of the Guvnor, and he’d tipped McGovern off. Lying in the back of that four-wheel-drive, swallowing mouthfuls of spit mixed with blood, I couldn’t blame him.

  The rumble of the tyres on tarmac faded and I felt the car turn sharply to the left. Now it was bouncing and rocking on its springs and I could hear the tyres splashing through mud and puddles. The jolting went on and on, every impact jarring my bruises and sending fresh jolts of pain shooting up my spine and down my legs. At long last the car slowed and stopped, the driver killed the engine, and the thumping music was silenced. I felt the car’s suspension rise a little as the passengers got out and slammed their doors. Three of them, not four as I’d thought. A diesel engine chugged idly somewhere nearby—an excavator, maybe?

  The tailgate opened with a hiss and I squinted out at the three figures standing there. At the back was James, lighting another roll-up. The other two were lumps of rough I’d never seen before, in leather jackets and jeans. The one who’d opened the tailgate had long greasy hair. He leaned over and slapped my face, not that hard, just enough to wake me up. “You get out,” he grunted. Was that a Polish accent?

  I crawled and shuffled towards the lip of the boot, sat up and lowered my feet to the ground. It was a sea of oily mud, dotted with black puddles, and around us were walls of wrecked cars. A breaker’s yard, I thought. A big one. Greasy Hair took my arm and dragged me towards James, who had just opened the boot of an ancient battered Jaguar saloon with no wheels.

  “I knew you were a fucking pain in the prick, Maguire,” he said. “From the moment you turned up. I told the Guvnor you probably pushed his kid into the pool yourself, but he wouldn’t listen. So I sent someone to find out what you were really after.” He picked a shred of tobacco off his tongue and smiled. “She’s lovely, isn’t she, Zoe? Amazing tits. Mind you, I wouldn’t, not any more. That girl’s had more cock than a chicken farmer. Hope you wore a condom.”

  Zoe? Zoe had shopped me?

  I hesitated, and that’s what gave me away. James saw he had driven a skewer into my belly, and he grinned.

  “You’re a fucking liar,” I said.

  He just grinned some more. “You know it’s true. I can see it in your face. You’re crying inside. You’re crushed. Well, not crushed exactly. Not yet.”

  He wiggled his eyebrows like a cheap Groucho Marx impersonator, and his two chimpanzees sniggered, and I wondered if even with my hands bound I could finish strangling him before they split my head open. I didn’t even see James’s fist move before it hit me in the mouth, and I felt my upper lip split against my teeth.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t look at me like that. You’re done. You screwed up. You’re fucked.”

  I gobbed blood that splashed into a puddle and floated as black foam, and tried not to think about Zoe being the one who’d shopped me. “Did you kill my dad?” I said.

  James grinned and nodded at the gaping trunk of the Jag. “Get in,” he said.

  I looked around. What I had thought was another wall of cars was a vast steel crusher, and the ticking diesel engine was its power plant. Looming over them all was a crane with a grabber hook, four steel talons clenched, like one of those funfair games no one ever wins.

  James slapped me in the face, making sure to hit the open wound. “The sooner you get in,” he said, “the sooner this will all be over.” When I turned to run he kicked my legs from under me and I tumbled into the rancid mud, rolling till I was caked in it.

  “Put him in there,” James snapped at his minders. They hauled me to my feet, dragged me back and heaved me face first into the boot of the Jag. “I was thinking of cutting your throat before you went in the crusher,” said James. “But you’ve pissed me off now, so I’m not going to bother. Cheer up, this is going to be fun. You know, like a theme-park ride. Keep your hands and legs inside the car at all times. I’ll tell Benny to go extra slow, so you can really enjoy it.”

  And he slammed the boot lid shut.

  I lay there in the darkness, trying to think fast, trying desperately not to focus on Zoe and what she’d done to me. But if James had kicked me in the nuts before throwing me in here I couldn’t have felt sicker or more winded. Of course, that’s what he wanted—me to die in pain, knowing I’d been betrayed, still unsure who’d sent Hans to kill my dad and why. I heard a mobile phone ring and James answering it. I lay still and tried to listen.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, no problem. Twenty minutes.”

  That was all I heard before the Jag I was locked into shuddered, rocked and sank, rattling me about so my head cracked off the metalwork. The sound of breaking glass and screaming steel was deafening, but underneath the roar I could just make out the diesel engine revving up. I could guess the grabber hook had seized the Jag, shattering the windows and crumpling the roof, pushing it down into the mud under its weight; now it rose and jolted the Jag free of the mud’s suck, and I felt the car rise into the air and wheel slowly round, rocking like a pendulum.

  I squirmed round to face the front and fumbled in the darkness ahead, trying to feel what was there. I stubbed my fingers on pressed steel struts running vertically and diagonally between the boot and the passenger compartment. Between the struts were panels of rough fibre, plastic or hardboard maybe. I scrabbled at them with my fingernails as the Jag rocked and swung.

  Abruptly the car dropped, and I rose into the air a fraction before being slammed into the floor again as it landed. Ignoring the pain, I swivelled my body backwards, pulled up my knees and kicked at the fibre panels, trying to avoid the unyielding metal braces that framed them. I felt one panel bulge and burst outwards.

  Now the car was rising into the air again, swaying, but not so wildly this time. Whoever was controlling the crane must have been lining the car up with the crusher’s jaws. I pulled my foot back, squirmed round and dived towards the hole I’d kicked. Writhing and twisting, I pushed my bound fists forward through the gap until they touched spring and wire and damp foam padding. I shoved hard, snaking my body round and forward and praying my shoulders would fit through the gap between the braces.

  I felt weightless again for an instant, then the car landed again, hard, and my nose slammed into smooth metal, making my eyes water. The Jag mus
t have been dropped right into the maw of the crusher. I braced my feet behind me and pushed, towards the sound of rending of metal and tinkling of glass, as ahead of me in the passenger compartment the grabber claws opened to release the Jag’s roof. I could hear the whine of the motor hauling it free and clear as inside the car’s shell I wrenched my right shoulder, then my left, through the cobweb of metal struts, pushing the rear passenger seat cushion forward. Now I could feel cool night air on my face, though it stank of diesel fumes and machine oil, but through the shattered windows, left and right, ahead and behind, I could see nothing but smooth, rust-coloured steel slabs. As I fought my way through, my head now level with the rear windows, there was a shuddering bang and the steel jaws to the right and left started to move in. My hips snagged on the diagonal brace, and I must have cursed aloud, but I could hear nothing over the scream of the crusher’s engines and the hideous wrinkling noise as the moving slabs touched the Jag’s doors and kept going. I writhed and flexed free of the struts, driving myself forward, not knowing where I was hoping to end up, just heading on and upwards, kicking my legs and feet free of the boot at last, as I felt and heard the car’s metal skeleton grow rigid, then scream and fight back hopelessly against the pressure. Twisting round I scrabbled at the padded ceiling, dragging myself backwards over the passenger seats, until one hand grabbed empty air. The sunroof was a gaping hole, its glass panel long since gone.

  The rusting metal bit into my palms as I gripped the rim of the sunroof with both hands and made one last desperate heave, and around and under me the car imploded, screeching and spitting shards of metal like shrapnel and showering me with crumbs of glass. Even as I scrambled through the shrinking gap and scrabbled for a foothold on the lip of the sunroof the whole car roof bent upward, and my foot fell back into the boiling, screeching maelstrom of tortured metal and plastic and leather. It landed on what felt like a headrest that trembled and bulged and burst just as I pushed off as hard as I could, up into the night and the dark and the clouds of diesel fumes, hopping up to teeter on the lip of the jaws as they closed to only a shoulder width apart, my ears filled with the crusher engine’s roar, the dying grind of the Jaguar’s chassis, and the sad tinkle of glass fragments falling like tears. The jaws stopped moving, but the engine roared on.