by Steve Voake
‘So that car was driven by Mr McIntyre, the man who owns this taxi firm and also a local garage. But then I guess you knew that already, didn’t you?’
‘Why would I?’
‘Because, according to the driver, the first place he dropped you was McIntyre’s Motors.’
‘So I was looking to buy a car. Doesn’t make me his best buddy, does it?’
‘You ain’t old enough to drive a car,’ said Bullet.
Kier squinted up at him.
‘Who said anything about driving it?’
‘Why else would you want one?’
‘It was a present for my girlfriend. Listen, when you’ve got money, you can buy anything you want. But then you probably wouldn’t know about that, would you?’
‘I’ll tell you what I do know, rich boy,’ said Stubble Face, leaning in so close that Kier could smell the sweat and cheap aftershave. ‘I know you ain’t buying your way out of this one. See, when he was driving home, Mr McIntyre got a phone call telling him how two of his guys got turned over at a hotel by a couple of kids.’
Kier was taken aback by this. Who could have told him that?
His surprise must have shown, because Stubble Face grinned.
‘Yeah, that’s right. And then the weirdest thing happens. He gets another phone call from one of his drivers saying some girl has climbed into his cab and wants to follow his car. Then Mr McIntyre starts getting paranoid. You know what paranoid means?’
‘Yeah. It means he thinks people are out to get him.’ Kier glanced at Bullet’s trigger finger. ‘I’m starting to know how that feels.’
‘Oh, you ain’t felt nothing yet,’ said Stubble Face, squeezing his knuckles until they cracked.
Kier didn’t much like the sound of that. He also didn’t like the fact that he was stuck in here when he should be out trying to help Saskia. This was a mess, no doubt about it.
‘Now here’s how things are going to work,’ said Stubble Face, turning around and locking the door. ‘Either you tell us what you and your little friend are up to, or me and my little friend are going to break every bone in your body.’
‘That’s a lot of bones,’ said Kier, staring at a spot on Bullet’s forehead and trying to remember the finger dislocation thing Chiang had shown him. ‘Two hundred and six to be precise.’
He straightened the forefinger on his right hand, slid his thumb underneath and wrapped the other fingers around it. Then he squeezed hard until it clicked.
‘In that case,’ said Bullet, unfolding the stock of his machine pistol, ‘maybe we should get started.’
Kier nodded. ‘Maybe we should,’ he said.
Then he moved his hands silently through the rope around his wrists, fell forward and brought the chair hard and fast over his head. Although it was an old chair, it had been well put together and didn’t actually break until the struts hit the middle of Bullet’s forehead. At which point it splintered into several pieces, all of which hit the floor about half a second before Bullet did.
Stubble Face stared at the space where Bullet had been standing, mouth open like a fairground clown waiting for the next ping-pong ball to pop up.
Kier smiled. ‘Two hundred and six, remember?’ he said. ‘Where do you want me to start?’
Stubble Face had been in a lot of fights in his time and knew a lucky strike when he saw one. Now it was time to teach this kid a lesson. Pulling out a telescopic baton, he flicked his wrist and half a metre of hardened steel extended from the palm of his hand. Swiping the air in front of him, he beckoned to Kier and smiled.
‘Come on then, rich boy,’ he said. Swish, swish, swish. ‘Let’s see what you’re made of.’
Kier knew he was made of blood and bones, same as Stubble Face. But while Stubble Face had spent years feeding his body with smoke and junk food, Kier had been learning to make his dance – the kind of dance that Stubble Face could never even begin to imagine. Which was why, when he swung the baton at Kier’s head, there was only a swish of air, followed by the crack of plaster as the baton struck the wall where Kier had been standing a second before.
When Stubble Face swung the baton again, Kier ducked, thinking of the hours he had spent standing in the centre of the monastery hall, eyes closed, waiting for the air pressure to change around him. He had been knocked over more times than he cared to remember as Chiang swung the ropes with thick wooden logs tied to the end. Sometimes there were five or six of them, all criss-crossing the monastery floor at the same time. But as Chiang was fond of saying, Pain is the fastest teacher.
Kier watched Stubble Face swing the baton a third time and then – deciding that enough was enough – he ran up the wall and flipped back on to the man’s shoulders with just enough force to unbalance him and send him crashing into the door. As the baton spun away across the floor, Kier picked up the machine pistol and pointed it at the now terrified Stubble Face.
‘I need an address,’ he said, ‘and I need it now.’
‘T-twenty-six The Beeches,’ stammered Stubble Face. ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’
‘Postcode?’
‘I don’t—’
Kier lowered the gun a fraction.
‘Postcode?’
‘NW3! It’s NW3!’
Kier unlocked the door and opened it.
‘Sweet dreams,’ he said.
Then, as Stubble Face cowered in the corner, he shot out the light, locked the door again and took a set of keys from behind the counter.
‘NW3 please,’ he said, unlocking the door of the taxi parked in the yard. ‘Certainly, sir,’ he told himself. ‘We’ll have you there in no time.’
Then he slotted the key into the ignition, fired up the engine and accelerated away beneath the dark and bloodshot sky.
TWENTY-FIVE
The Beeches was a smart, well-lit cul-de-sac lined, unsurprisingly, with beech trees. Kier could tell by the high walls and the size of the houses that this was an expensive area. Unless garages and taxi firms were suddenly doing incredibly well, McIntyre was obviously making his money from other, more lucrative interests.
Kier parked the car behind some roadworks, stood next to a canvas workmen’s shelter and checked his phone for messages. There was only one, a text from Jackson which read: Update required.
He deleted it and tried Saskia’s number again, but there was still no reply. Slipping the phone back into his pocket, he jogged along the street and checked out the house numbers: 18, 20, 22 …
Number 26 stood right at the end of the cul-de-sac and was, by some margin, the grandest house of them all. Spanning the width of the street, it was fronted by a pair of wrought-iron gates and surrounded by three-metre-high walls topped off with razor wire and broken glass. Through the gates, Kier could see a gravel drive bisecting neatly cut lawns and sweeping up to the stone pillars of a mock-Tudor mansion. On either side of the house he could just make out several figures dressed in dark clothing. They stood in the shadows, scanning the grounds and making sure that everything was as it should be.
McIntyre, it seemed, was not a man who liked visitors.
Kier moved away from the gates and looked around. He could see the old stumps of trees that had been deliberately removed from this part of the street and knew he wasn’t getting in that way. He stared up at the wire and glass on top of the wall, then ran his fingers over the brickwork searching for some grip. But the surface was too smooth, even for him.
Kier hammered his fist against the wall in frustration. Saskia was here, she had to be. And if McIntyre’s employees were anything like the ones at the taxi firm, she was in serious trouble. But there was no way he was getting over that wall any time soon. And he guessed they wouldn’t be in a rush to open the gates for him either.
Kier took the phone from his pocket, finger hovering over the 9. If he called the police now, she might still have a chance. But then he remembered Jackson saying, Best not to involve them, and guessed he had his reasons. Besides, a call from some kid on a Pay As You Go would hardly b
e enough to have them storming the place. Particularly when they found out it was the same kid who’d knocked out one of their officers and stolen one of their police cars.
Kier leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.
What would Chiang do?
The answer was obvious, of course. Chiang would never have got himself into this mess in the first place.
But as he looked down the street and listened to the breeze rustling the leaves, it reminded him of the sea. He thought of a sun-baked gorge, a silent monastery and the sweetest water he had ever tasted.
We should not let unexpected hardships remove us from the path. If we learn to be patient, to endure, then the things we seek will be sweeter in the end …
Kier opened his eyes.
He took a slow, deep breath.
Then he began to run.
*
Ten metres from the car, Kier pulled the keys from his pocket and unlocked the doors, still running. When he reached the car, he wrenched the driver’s door open, jumped inside and started the engine. Noticing a book of matches stashed in the cup holder, he hurriedly picked them up and put them in his pocket. If the petrol tank burst, he certainly didn’t want them flying around.
Revving the engine, he threw his arm over the seat and reversed back up the road, narrowly missing a small dog that came yapping from the shadows.
When he reached the far end of the road, he stopped and tapped the gear lever into neutral. He wiped his forehead and checked that the pavements were empty.
This was it.
It was now or never.
A sudden knock on the side window made his heart skip a beat and he turned to see an old man waving at him.
‘What?’ mouthed Kier, exasperated.
The man was signalling for him to roll down the window. As the glass slid away he asked, ‘Can you take me to Cromwell Street?’
Kier shook his head.
‘Not right now, I’m afraid.’
‘Why not?’
Kier thought for a second.
‘Because this car’s going in for repair.’
The old man frowned.
‘It looks all right to me.’
‘Give it a couple minutes,’ said Kier.
Then he wound up the window, slotted the gear lever into place and floored the accelerator.
The car leapt forward in a squeal of burning rubber and Kier let the revs build up just the way Frankie had shown him, allowing them to howl all the way to the limit before changing gear and repeating the process. Halfway down the street, with tyres and motor protesting, he changed up again and watched the speedometer hit fifty. As trees and houses shot past in a blur, he kept his foot planted firmly on the accelerator, gripping the steering wheel tightly in both fists and keeping his eyes fixed on the pair of wrought-iron gates ahead.
‘Keep going,’ he told himself as the gates rushed towards him. ‘You’ll be fine.’
Then the front wheels hit the pavement, the tyres burst and sparks flew from the rims before the front bumper smashed into the gates and the bonnet crumpled, the windscreen splintering in a screech of metal and broken glass. For a moment the world seemed shocked into silence, punctuated only by the hiss of steam from the cracked radiator. Then Kier noticed some white rubber draped across the steering wheel and realised he had just been punched in the face by an airbag.
Staring through the shattered windscreen he saw that he had not, as he had hoped, broken through the gates. Instead they had buckled inwards and the front of the car was now wedged firmly between them. As if that wasn’t bad enough, dark figures were running at full pelt towards him and his plan of creating a diversion while he escaped into the shadows of the garden was in definite need of a rethink.
Kier thumped his shoulder against the buckled driver’s door and tumbled out on to the pavement. For a moment he looked at the gap between the gates and thought about trying to squeeze through. Then a big-muscled guy with a baseball bat arrived on the other side and Kier decided against it.
‘Hey!’ shouted the man, pointing the bat at Kier. ‘Stay where you are.’
As the man tried to force his way through the gates, Kier struggled to his feet and saw the neighbourhood curtains starting to twitch. He felt bruised and battered, as if he’d been through a tumble-drier full of boulders.
‘I said stay where you are!’
‘Yeah, I heard you,’ said Kier, limping away.
Two more men approached the gates and Kier knew he’d blown it. The crash had hurt a lot more than he’d expected and he knew he didn’t have the strength to take all three of them on. As the man with the baseball bat squeezed through the gate, he considered just giving in to it all; just letting the world come and do whatever it was going to do.
‘Wait a minute,’ said the man. ‘You’re that kid, aren’t you? The one who’s been causing all the trouble.’
Kier shrugged.
‘Probably,’ he said, walking further along the wall.
The man thumped the baseball bat into the palm of his hand.
‘Well, how about that? We were just gonna start teaching your little friend a lesson, and then you go and turn up.’
Through his pain, Kier felt a spark of anger crackle in his veins.
‘What little friend?’
‘Oh, don’t tell me you don’t know. I’m talking about your little girlfriend. She’s real pretty, ain’t she? But she don’t say much.’ The man smiled. ‘I guess that’ll change once me and the boys get started.’
‘Don’t touch her,’ said Kier, imagining the other men would already be climbing through the twisted gates. ‘Don’t you dare touch her.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said the man, ‘are you threatening me? Cos if you are, we can start this right now. How would you like that, huh?’
Kier glanced at the wall and took off his jacket.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘I would like that a lot.’
*
The moment he swung the bat, the man knew something was wrong. The problem was, his mind had become used to the way the world worked. It had become used to the idea of cause and effect, which said that when you swung a baseball bat at a fourteen-year-old kid, the kid went down faster than a henhouse in a hurricane. But in a sudden movement which he couldn’t follow or understand, all his ideas got ripped up and blown away; there was a blur, a sharp pain and then he couldn’t remember his name or how his legs worked.
As the man fell against the wall, Kier ran up his back and – using his head as a step – threw his jacket over the razor wire and pulled himself up. He watched while the other men squeezed through the gates, then retrieved his jacket and leapt down into the darkness.
TWENTY-SIX
Kier could hear the men on the other side of the wall slapping the guy’s face and asking him where in hell the boy had gone.
‘I don’t know,’ the man kept saying. ‘I just don’t know.’
Pulling on his jacket and keeping to the shadows, Kier crouched low and ran around the side of the house. He reached a courtyard with a large van parked in it. On the side of the van were the words: Exotic Entrances Ltd – Doors with a Difference. The back had been left open and, as he peered inside, Kier could see piles of wooden doors stacked across the width of the van. Each door was decorated with brightly coloured paintings of parrots, vines and exotic flowers.
Weird, thought Kier.
McIntyre was obviously a man with his fingers in many pies.
Behind him he could hear movement inside the house and shouts from the front garden. On the far side of the courtyard there was a long brick building with a flat roof. There were blinds on the windows and the place was in darkness. Kier guessed it was a reasonable place to start. But he didn’t have much time.
Running across the courtyard, he tried the door but it was locked. Towards the far end, however, he could see a small window that had been left open for ventilation. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.
He took off his shoes and
socks and felt the cool stone against his feet.
It was good to be barefoot again.
It reminded him of Chiang.
Pulling out the laces, he tied them together and made a loop with a slipknot at one end. Then he climbed on to the ledge, slid his arm through the open window and let the shoelace drop until it was level with the main window catch.
Behind him the voices were getting closer, but Kier took a deep breath and concentrated on allowing his heart rate to slow, calmly moving his hand until the shoelace hooked over the catch and he was able to pull it sharply upwards.
The main window opened inwards and Kier heard something fall and shatter in the darkness. As he lowered himself into the room he became aware of a sweet, chemical smell which caught the back of his throat, reminding him of the pear drops he used to buy from the corner shop when he was younger.
Reaching into his pocket, Kier pulled out his phone and switched on the torch. The shattered remains of a glass jar glistened in the light and a pool of liquid was spreading out across the floor. Wooden doors lay on top of benches draped in dustsheets, like some kind of ghostly art installation.
As Kier moved closer, he saw that the sheets were covered with tiny curls of wood shavings. A number of aluminium cheese graters were lying around, apparently having been used to scrape the top layers of paint and wood from the doors. Kier stared at the nearest door, which had had most of its top surface removed, leaving only a few painted leaves and a rainbow in the top left-hand corner.
Kier frowned. It didn’t make any sense. Why would someone buy a whole load of exotically painted doors only to scrape the surface off again?
He picked up a handful of wood shavings and put them in his pocket. Then he swept the torch around the room and saw that, at the far end, a long bench had been set up with an electric heating plate, on top of which was a large glass flask and a series of tubes leading to a smaller flask in a bath of cold water. It reminded Kier of an experiment they had done at school to separate salt from seawater.
But Kier guessed McIntyre wasn’t studying for his GCSEs.
So what kind of experiments was he carrying out here?
