She didn’t need to turn around to know that she was still being followed. Her nerves still jangled, but she felt a determined peace start to flow through her.
Clutching the manila envelope closer to her chest so the wind couldn’t rip it from her grasp, she strode towards the middle of the bridge. From her beige overcoat, she took out her mobile phone and dialled the number of Gibbs’s message service.
‘Hello, my darling. I am being followed by two men but have made sure that you get all the evidence you need for your appeal. My ex informed me that John Mountford has recently been killed in the city so is clearly out of the picture. It probably means that someone higher up in the Club is tying up loose ends. I did manage to get the home address for David Kirkwood, which you have been so desperate to get. It’s Morrison House, 32 Somerset Road, Wimbledon. Hopefully, I will see you soon. Oh…and I like you too.’
Sharon looked down at the silent phone. Would she ever see Gibbs again? Wiping away the tears with her sleeve, she turned to face the men who stopped abruptly in their tracks at the beginning of the bridge. She smiled at them then showed them the phone before placing it in the envelope that contained an old newspaper. Sealing it, she threw the precious cargo over the bridge with all her might, and then stood watching it frisbee out into the middle of the rampant, muddy Thames River.
With a deep breath, she walked as fast as she could, past dishevelled beggars and street dwellers who were all hanging over the bridge railing and staring at the disappearing envelope.
One drunken man with long tatty hair and a dirty tweed overcoat moved in front of her. ‘Hello, lovely, why don’t you and I have a little fun?’ he said and waved a bottle of alcohol in a brown paper bag in her face.
‘Not today, sweet cheeks,’ she said and kicked out at the man’s knee. He screamed as the tendon popped and buckled him into a heap onto the cold pavement. Sharon stepped over him and carried on walking, wrapping the jacket tightly around her.
With her high heels making a clicking sound on the paving stones, she turned right onto Chelsea Embankment road and caught a glimpse of her pursuers, who were both on their phones to someone.
Putting their phones away, they started after her again, and cold fear washed over her when it became obvious that they weren’t interested in the documents she had been carrying. She had always been the target.
‘Let see just see how fit you are,’ she said out loud and started to run along the riverfront. They both broke into a run and soon reached the end of the bridge. She carried on running for a few hundred meters before turning left up into Chelsea Manor Road, heading away from the river. Great day to wear heels, Sharon.
With bursting lungs and aching legs, she ran onto the pavement and four small stairs to try and gain access to an apartment block along the affluent road. She yanked on the brass door handle a few times, aware that her pursuers were gaining on her with every second she was stationary. Running her fingers down all the buttons on the brass numbered panel, she activated all the intercom buzzers at the main entrance, and various people answered. ’Can someone please help me, some men are trying to kill me!’ she screamed.
The main door didn’t buzz open.
Sharon reached down and took her heels off, then ran across to the adjacent apartment block and tried the same trick. Nobody was going to chance letting a screaming woman into the front door. She had to find another place to hide.
Five minutes later as she zig-zagged her way through the urban streets towards South Kensington, she turned to see that the two men had gained on her. A small whimper slipped out, a heightened panic filtering through her.
The sun had disappeared behind the tall buildings, and she was running out of time to find a place to hide. Maybe she could wait them out somewhere. Running along a thick leafy hedge that concealed an open area behind it, she stopped at what looked like a small opening low to the ground and then she crawled in on her hands and knees. Her heart sank as she crawled up to a wire mesh fence and looked despondently across the small well-tended private park. The open white gate at the opposite end of the park taunted her.
Shouts from the street behind her roused her spirits again, and she cursed herself for feeling self-pity. Turning around in the narrow crawl space, she faced the pavement again, cringing as she felt a large spider’s web drape across her right ear.
The two men ran past the hole in the hedge and ran up to a T-junction, stopping to look in either direction. Sharon Matthews smiled as she heard one of them rasping for breath.
She waited and listened.
Her skin begun to crawl as she could feel something moving in her hair, and then something else crawled across her cheek. She quickly sat back on her heels and flicked at the cobwebs with both hands, ruffling her hair and doing all she could to kill the creatures that she imagined were crawling all over her.
She held her breath and listened for any movement along the road. All was quiet as far as she could tell, and she sighed with relief.
A large hand with a gold signet ring on the little finger reached in and grabbed a handful of her jacket. She screamed. The man dragged her out of the hole as she tried to bite down on his arm, the thick brown tweed fabric of his jacket shielding him from any injury.
‘Got you, you bitch,’ he shouted and dragged her up to her feet, his other hand grabbing a handful of her blonde hair. ‘Stop all this running shit will you? Our boss only wants to have a word with you.’
Sharon spun herself towards him and raised her knee into his groin. The man’s eyes forced shut with tears of pain as he fell to his knees.
Pulling herself loose from the weakening grip, she looked up to see his partner accompanied by a third man come around the corner. ‘Hey, stop right there,’ one of them shouted as they started towards her again. She turned and ran back in the direction of the Thames River.
Crossing another road, she saw a large construction site with an eight foot, black-painted hoarding around it. Running along the length of it, she passed a big double gate with a large chain and lock on it, positioned in the middle of the long wooden wall. As she pushed hard on both sides of the gate, a narrow sliver of a gap appeared, large enough for her to squeeze through.
Once inside, she scanned the abandoned site. Her heart sank. There was nowhere to hide other than two large mounds of builder’s rubble that were covered in weeds and a few small bushes growing out of them.
‘Arrrgh!’ she screamed and was about to slip out of the site again when she heard the footsteps and panting of the men chasing her.
She simply had to chance hiding behind one of the piles of rubble. One of the men said to his partner, ‘You head around the other side of the site and make sure she doesn’t slip away.’
Sharon sat down on the dusty ground and hid from the view of the main gate, trying not to burst into tears. She knew what they would do with her when they caught her, but she forced that thought from her mind. This is all for Gibbs, and our future together.
The two men patrolled around the site for about twenty minutes, occasionally giving away their position by the odd cough as they recovered from their chase. Vapour from her warm breath started to show in the evening air, so Sharon pulled her jacket tighter around herself. How was she going to get out of this?
The squeaking brakes of a car pulling up at the main gate made her jump to her feet again. Men’s voices outside the gate grew more vocal as they argued. She would not be captured without a fight, and she reached into her handbag to pull out her house keys. She would need to let her attackers get close.
The blast of a shotgun ripped her back to reality as the links on the chain securing the gate gave way. One of the men kicked both gates open. ‘Miss Mathews this is really stupid, we only want to talk to you.’
The brawny figure of one of the men remained in the open gateway while the other two walked towards the mounds she was hiding behind. She watched them intently as they split up, the bigger man walked to the left, and the slim man took
the right. She fancied her chances against the smaller man.
Crouching down as the silhouetted shape of the man slowly appeared around the pile of rubble, she exploded forward with all her might, running straight at him screaming at the top of her lungs, her house keys sticking out between her fingers. She swung at his face but he feigned to the left at the last minute, and she collided into him. He dropped slightly and hoisted her over his shoulder and flipped her onto her back, the wind driven out of her lungs with the brutal force.
‘Now, just calm down, Sharon,’ the effeminate voice said. ‘I just want to ask you a few questions.’
‘You!’ she whispered, recognising the face from photographs she had just seen.
‘Please get up,’ he said.
Sharon slowly stood up, her lungs burning for breath. ‘You conniving little bastard. I have nothing to say to you.’
The man briefly switched his focus to the larger man stalking up behind her, and she took her chance to strike out at him again, driving her fist towards his slim pale face. He dodged at the last second, but one of the keys from her key-encrusted fist slit his cheek to the bone as he screamed in pain. He managed to grab hold of her by the shoulders as she kicked out and screamed.
The larger man grabbed her from behind in a vice-like grip that stopped all movement, his cigarette-laced breath against her neck, causing her to gag.
The injured man took out a white handkerchief from his jacket pocket and held it against his cheek. ‘Well, I can see why Gibbs is so taken by you. You suit each other quite nicely, what with both of you being such feral creatures. I’ll only ask you this once, Sharon. What was in the envelope you disposed of and who did you call?’
‘Get lost, little man.’
‘Okay then,’ David Kirkwood said.
He walked away, and in a loud voice said, ‘Shoot her then dump her body in the Thames.’
Chapter 33
HM Prison, Wandsworth, London, UK - 2019
Gibbs picked at dirt beneath his fingernails with a piece of cardboard, feeling like he really needed a shower. Killey dozed on a bench on the other side of the cell while Shredder sat on the edge of a table reading the remnants of an old newspaper.
‘Any idea who has decided to visit us today?’ Shredder broke the silence.
‘Nope, my lawyer was here yesterday so it can’t be him, damn useless bastard,’ Gibbs muttered.
‘Ours is no better, she barely looks eighteen and is as skittish as a mouse in a pet kennel,’ Shredder smirked.
‘She’s not bad looking though. I’d give her one,’ Killey piped up.
‘You’d fuck a cereal box if you had the chance, mate,’ Shredder said to the smiling Killey.
‘I guess it must be someone that we all know, I mean who else would request the three of us together in one cell?’ Gibbs remarked.
The rattling sound of the cell door being unlocked interrupted their banter, and two wardens walked in and went about handcuffing them one by one. They were escorted from the large communal holding cell, out of the cellblock and across a fenced-in walkway to the main building. The wardens instructed them to sit at a large table in the centre of the interrogation room then handcuffed each of them to a large chain that was bolted down across the centre of the table top.
‘Okay, this just got interesting,’ Shredder said. ‘Since when do they restrain us in these rooms?’
‘No idea, mate,’ Gibbs replied.
They all sat in silence and fifteen minutes later another side door opened. David Kirkwood walked through, a grin on his face. He closed the door behind him and leant his slim figure back against it. Two black rings under his swollen eyes from the broken nose that Gibbs had given him by smashing his face into the ground were only made worse by the bandage stuck to his cheek with blood seeping through.
‘Now we know why they cuffed us, Shredder. They knew I would rip this weasel’s arms off and feed them to him,’ Gibbs said.
‘And I would get his legs, boss.’
‘No need for all of that, gentleman. Can we all at least try to have a civil conversation?’ Kirkwood said, taking a seat across from them.
‘Shut up, you snivelling little rat. You told me in court that you are the reason we are all locked up here. Are you openly admitting that you set me up for Mason’s murder? You know bloody well I didn’t do it.’
‘Well now, Gibbs, I am afraid all the evidence against you refutes your claim. The case against you was quite overwhelming, you know,’ Kirkwood said with a grim smile. ‘But I am sure that your barrister pointed that out to you before the trial. He took some persuading, your barrister. You should have paid for better representation.’
‘I would have, you thieving rat, but you stole the balance of our money. Mason said that he had paid you in full just after the coup in Angola.’
David Kirkwood looked down at the long chain they were handcuffed to then moved across to a side table to make sure all the installed recording devices were turned off. The metal chair screeched on the ground as he pulled it a little further from them.
‘I hope you have all been sitting in your cells wondering why this was happening to you,’ he said. 'Wondering what you had done to deserve this.’
‘Spare us the bloody amateur dramatics, Kirkwood,’ Gibbs said.
‘Do you three morons recall someone by the name of Terry Mercer?’ David asked.
‘Terry “Tracer” Mercer?’ Shredder asked.
‘One and the same,’ Kirkwood replied.
‘Of course, we bloody knew him. Terry used to be part of our unit. What does he have to do with Mason?’ Gibbs asked.
‘My real surname is not Kirkwood, it’s Mercer. David Mercer to be precise,’ he said. ‘And the man you left for dead was my twin brother.’
Visibly shocked, the three prisoners looked at one another.
‘But you look nothing like the fighting brute who was our friend,’ Gibbs replied.
‘Ever heard of non-identical twins, you idiot?’ David said.
‘What does this have to do with us?’ Gibbs asked.
‘Do you always leave your friends for dead, Gibbs, like you left my brother?’
‘What?’ Gibbs said. ‘Kirkwood, clearly you don’t have all the facts. He wasn’t left for dead. An Improvised Explosive Devise or IED explosion killed him while we were out on patrol.’
‘Don’t feed me standard military bullshit, Gibbs!’ David said, slamming his hand down on the table. ‘You forget that Mason Waterfield asked me to do multiple reference checks on all of you bastards before he would consider hiring you. He gave me a lot of cash to grease the palms of a few of my contacts in the Ministry of Defence. I was given copies of all of your files going back fifteen years.’
‘Don’t talk crap, mate, those documents are all classified,’ Shredder said.
‘I’m not your bloody mate!’
‘Okay then. Don't talk crap, you little turd.’
‘You three are clueless, aren't you? I was simply doing what I was paid to do,’ David said. ‘And to my utter disbelief, I found out that my brother was part of your team on your first ever mission in command, Gibbs. He didn’t die patrolling dust roads in Iraq, as my family and the press, were told, but taking part in a covert reconnaissance mission in Ahvaz, Iran. Isn’t that true?’
‘It’s not that simple, David, we were…’ Gibbs started.
‘You left him there to die, Gibbs,’ David shouted. ‘Try to deny it. It was all in the debriefing notes, and you signed off on those, did you not?’
‘He was mortally wounded and chose to stay and fight, thereby buying us valuable time to make our getaway. It was his decision, David, not ours. Terry knew that we couldn’t carry him all the way to safety. None of us would have gotten out of there if it weren't for his bravery,’ Gibbs said and looked at his hands, remembering the first man he ever had to leave behind.
David swallowed hard before he replied, ‘You left him there to die, Gibbs, he died alone and now all of you w
ill pay.’
‘So let me get this straight. You think we are responsible for your brother’s death so to get your revenge, you kill an innocent man and set me up for murder.’
‘I don’t waste my time killing people, Gibbs. I arrange for others to do my dirty work for me, usually simple-minded people like you,’ David said, a smug look on his face.
‘So who the hell did you con into killing Mason for you, then?’ Gibbs hissed.
‘Quite a few events led up to the day you went to the meet with Mason if you must know. The Angolan trip was never about a genuine coup as you are now well aware. Nevertheless, it allowed me the chance to tip off the Angolan government that you were leading the whole damn thing. I had hoped that it would result in your team either being killed or at least jailed out there, but unfortunately, you disappeared before that could happen.’
‘I guess we were a little too clever for you, then,’ Shredder smirked.
‘So clever that it’s you who are going to prison for murder, not me. Why don’t you just shut your mouth, you bloody idiot, and don’t interrupt me again,’ David snapped.
‘Listen, you little runt, I will tear you apart like toilet paper,’ Shredder said, yanking his cuffs against the chain on the table.
‘Not from a prison cell you won’t,’ David said, and then turned back to Gibbs. ‘You should never have trusted the document forger, Gibbs. He might have given you a second set of false papers, but he owed me so many favours that he came running back to me as soon as he had taken your money. My contacts notified me the very minute you all set foot on UK soil again.’
‘When your dear friend, John Warren, was stupid enough to let you get away and then returned from Africa with his tail between his legs like a mangy pup, he was more than happy to discuss a plan to eliminate you right here in the UK. We started off with your South African friend in London, which was surprisingly easy, I might add. I knew you would react and expected your call to see what I knew of the incident. It was simple after that. I happily admit that I originally wanted you dead, Gibbs, but this is so much more satisfying, don’t you agree? I now have the satisfaction of knowing that you will rot in a dark prison cell for the rest of your life.’
Celt_The Journey of Kyle Gibbs Page 18
