Romeo's Tune (1990)

by Timlin, Mark

  The cut on Terry’s face had healed nicely. As he got closer I saw him eyeing me up and down like Coyote studying Road Runner. If he’d caught me on my own with the Armalite semi that he clutched in his right hand I would have been dead meat.

  Stevie came up to me and stuck a tiny pocket automatic up under my chin. ‘We meet again,’ he said. It was almost laughable, except for the hard metal bruising my flesh and his bloodless finger trembling on the trigger. I tried to lighten up the atmosphere.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘Let me guess. Zorro’s been on the box again.’

  ‘Fuck you, you bastard,’ he almost screamed, drawing the little gun back six inches or so and clipping me round the left ear. The blow knocked my head back and I winced. I didn’t know if I was going to get dead or deaf in all this carry-on. But I was sure it was going to be one or the other.

  ‘Yes, Stevie,’ I said, ‘and this time I’m the one with the wet trousers.’

  He hit me again and again until merciful blackness engulfed me like a crow’s wing.

  38

  I came to inside the house. I was lying on a sofa in front of a roaring fire which burned hungrily inside the confines of an Adam fireplace. The room I found myself in was as big as a barn and furnished like a show room at Harrods.

  I was impressed.

  I was also handcuffed, arms behind my back and getting swimming-pool muck and gore all over the upholstery. I guessed they could afford the cleaning bills.

  Stevie was sitting in one floral-patterned armchair by the fire and Terry was sitting opposite. Stevie had stashed the toy pistol but Terry had his Armalite resting on his thigh pointing in my direction.

  ‘Penis substitute,’ I said. ‘You want to be careful about that.’

  ‘He’s back, boss,’ said Terry. He totally ignored my comment. I’d have to get a new script-writer.

  Stevie got up and boogied across the carpet towards me. He knelt down and held my jaw in his fist.

  ‘I’m glad you’re alive, Sharman,’ he said. ‘I had a bad moment there. I thought I’d killed you. By the time I’m finished you’ll wish I had.’

  ‘Zorro again,’ I said.

  I think perhaps I was asking to be killed.

  He slammed me back onto the cushions.

  By this time my head was ringing like a cheap alarm clock in a bathroom, echoing and watery as if I was drowning. I started to hallucinate the smell of chlorine and I thought I remembered reading somewhere that smelling chlorine was the prelude to having a fit. Or was it burning feathers? But then, who the hell knew what burning feathers smelled like anyway? Then I realised the smell was coming from my clothes drying in the warmth.

  Stevie’s mouth was moving silently and I had to swallow hard to hear him. The clicking in my ears made me wonder how much punishment my head could take before brain damage set in. I ground my teeth together and my jaw felt like it belonged to someone else, but at least I could hear again.

  ‘So everyone’s dead,’ I said. ‘Everyone but me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Stevie Diva proudly.

  I looked over at Terry who just sat there chewing at the inside of his cheek like a cow at the cud.

  ‘Ironic, really,’ Stevie went on.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because the Yank only did it to get you killed, and here you are the only one left.’

  ‘Very amusing,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you just call the police and let them take care of it?’

  ‘We have no use for the police,’ he replied almost prissily.

  ‘Is your father here?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course. He wants to see you. Terry,’ he turned to the big man. ‘Get him up and into the study.’

  Terry propped his rifle against the wall behind his chair, out of sight, then clambered to his feet and came over to me. He lifted me onto my feet as easily as he would a baby and I realised that I had been very lucky to take him out that day at Mogul Towers. Perhaps he’d been feeling a bit off-colour. I staggered and he supported me. When I’d regained my balance he gripped me firmly by my upper arm and propelled me towards the double doors.

  ‘Take it easy,’ I said, but he only pushed me harder so I shut up.

  Outside the doors was the main entrance hall. It could have housed a DC10. The decor was straight out of the Ponderosa. There were Mexican blankets and buffalo horns and lots of pine and red leather. It was perfectly hideous. The floor was made of brilliantly polished wood, covered with scatter rugs, and our footsteps echoed up the main staircase.

  I saw an ornate front door and two more pairs of double doors to match the ones we’d come through. One set was standing open and inside I could see the dining-room with a huge dark wooden table set for a banquet. The second set was closed and Terry pushed me in their direction. He knocked once and pushed them open without waiting for a reply. He grabbed my arm again and dragged me in. Stevie followed us into a dimly-lit study. It was like another film set and I wondered if the Divas bought their furniture in job lots. If the hall was the old west, the study was Sherlock Holmes’s consulting room.

  It was full of plush sofas and huge sideboards covered in tiny Victorian antiques. The lamps were trying to kid me that they were gas and thick chintz curtains were drawn across the huge windows. The wallpaper was dark and covered with vague watercolours of nineteenth-century England. There was even a chaise-longue in one corner. The only incongruous items were a big screen TV and high-tech video system parked together on a mahogany chiffonier.

  Old man Diva was standing by the window. It looked as if he’d been peeking and just dropped the edge of the curtain. He walked towards us and Stevie closed the doors behind him. The old man looked a little green but otherwise pretty chipper. Before we got into any more clichéd dialogue, I said, ‘Ill-met by moonlight.’

  The old man looked puzzled and Stevie dug me in the kidneys. They felt as tender as raw hamburger and I flinched.

  ‘What’s he mean?’ asked Diva senior.

  ‘He means if he gets his hands on you he’ll rip your lungs out,’ I said by way of explanation.

  Stevie hit me again and I leant against Terry who threw me into an armchair facing the TV.

  ‘Big talk, Sharman, always big talk,’ said Stevie. I showed him my teeth in a grimace and he said, ‘You’ll laugh on the other side of your face in a minute.’

  ‘Why don’t you just kill me?’ I asked. ‘I’m getting bored with this shit.’

  Stevie kicked me on my left leg just below the knee. It was one of the places I hadn’t been punished recently and it almost felt good to hurt somewhere else for a change.

  ‘This should capture your interest, then,’ he said, and went over to the chiffonier. He selected a cassette from the stack beside the VCR and inserted it into the jaws of the player. He fiddled with some buttons and the tube glowed. The TV showed some vertical interference and then the screen cleared.

  It was a poorly-shot video, filmed through the side window of a car. The camera moved and jumped from time to time as if the cameraman had been nervous, which I guess he had. There was no sound-track. I recognised Tulse Hill Station and my office and the pub opposite. The picture was dark but clear enough. By the quality of the light it was either dusk or just before dawn. But I knew. I looked at the three men in the room with me and their faces were like stone. I turned back to the TV screen just in time to see Jo and me come through the office door. I turned and locked the door behind us. Then we walked together, arm in arm up the slight incline towards the station entrance and the cars parked in front of it. I saw Jo’s animation as she talked to me and tears pricked at the back of my eyelids. I wanted to ask the Divas to stop but I knew it would be futile. And yet I didn’t want to stop watching. I needed the fuel to keep my anger and myself alive.

  I saw myself unlock the VW’s passenger door and Jo climb in, then I watched as I walked round to the driver’s side and let myself in. I could see us talking as I tried to start the car, then I got out again and lean
ed in to say the last words she would ever hear. Through my tears I saw my gesticulation as she begged me to let her try to get the car started, then I walked in the direction of the newsagent’s shop to get her cigarettes. Pete, the car cleaner, swung down on his skateboard narrowly avoiding the old couple who were soon to be injured in the blast. I saw us speaking silently, then me turning with a look of pure horror on my face and the car exploding. It was savage and sudden. The camera jumped, then steadied and the last image I remember was me being thrown to the ground. Then the film finished.

  ‘You are fucking scum,’ I whispered. ‘I promise I’ll see you all dead for that.’

  The two Divas and Terry were unmoved.

  ‘How could you film that?’ I asked with a moan.

  ‘It was supposed to be you,’ said Stevie. ‘Terry was well sick. Good-looking cunt too, wasn’t she Terry?’

  Terry nodded in agreement.

  ‘Good film, though,’ Stevie went on. ‘Better than the telly.’

  ‘So your dog did your dirty work for you again,’ I said in a voice that I hardly recognised as my own. ‘Why didn’t you do it yourself, Stevie? Couldn’t handle it, I suppose. You gutless little shit. You’d have pissed your pants again I expect.’

  That did it. Stevie had been pretty close since I’d first seen him out at the swimming-pool. Keeping on about his incontinence finally sent him over the edge. He hustled me out of the study, across the hall and back into the sitting-room. He was almost drooling and I knew something bad was going to happen.

  Terry followed us at a gallop. Stevie took the long brass poker from the fireside set and stuck it deep into the fire that had settled down to a mere inferno behind the grate. He found some keys in his trouser pocket and unlocked the cuffs from my wrists. Terry rescued the rifle from behind his chair and stood with it pointed in my direction.

  Stevie tugged off the bandage on my right hand and exposed the messy, suppurating burn.

  ‘I promise you Diva,’ I said. ‘Somehow I’ll find a way.’

  ‘Shut it,’ said Stevie. ‘You’re history.’ By that time he really was foaming at the mouth and there was no point in talking to him.

  He pulled the poker from the fire. Already the end was glowing redly. It began to cool immediately but not quickly enough for me.

  ‘Hold him,’ he said to Terry, who grabbed my wrist in one meaty paw. The barrel of the rifle was all over the place and I made one desperate lunge but only received a swift dig in the ribs for my trouble. The blunt point of the poker was pinkish grey as Stevie pulled it across my palm.

  The pain was so intense that I screamed and felt tears literally flood my eyes before I passed out again.

  39

  The next time I came round I knew exactly where I was. My mouth was full of carpet and my nose was full of the smell of burnt meat again. My right hand felt as if it was twenty times its right size and being slowly massaged with powdered glass. Although it hurt like hell I tried not to move, just lay there leaking sweat into the wreckage of my clothes.

  I heard the sound of Stevie Diva’s voice and concentrated hard on his words through the veil of pain that kept ebbing and flowing behind my eyes, making the conversation sound like a badly-tuned radio. I moved my head round slowly and the room swam into focus.

  The five heavies were standing in a semi-circle in front of the fireplace and Stevie was addressing them like a general reviewing the troops.

  ‘You two,’ he said to the pair I hadn’t seen before. ‘Take Sharman up to Euston and keep him there overnight. That’ll give me a chance to get my old man away for a nice quiet holiday. He could use one. All this excitement is no good for him. He’ll be on a plane to, well never mind where, by ten. Then I’ll come up and finish this garbage off.’

  ‘Why not top him now, boss?’ asked Terry.

  ‘I haven’t given him a hot hand for fun. I want the cunt to suffer a bit before I let him out of his misery.’

  And there was me thinking I had a likeable personality.

  He went back to his orders. ‘So get a car and get him out of here, and take great care of him.’

  One of the two I didn’t know went out of the room and the other came over to me.

  ‘Is he still out?’ asked Stevie.

  ‘Yes, or pretending to be.’

  ‘I’ll wake him up,’ said Stevie. I heard him clattering about and next thing I got a faceful of cold liquid. It went straight up my nose and I started spluttering and coughing. Diva and his little firm had a good laugh about that and it convinced them I’d been snatching forty winks whilst they discussed my early demise. I got picked up again and then dumped down in a chair. To be honest, I was past caring what they did to me. It’s demoralizing being pushed around and beaten and talked about as if you don’t exist. You start to take on a prisoner mentality and in the end you actually start to want to please your captors. The prison system wouldn’t work without it. It was dangerous for me to fall into the trap but I did. I knew they were going to murder me but I couldn’t see what I could do about it. All I wanted was for them to stop hurting me.

  I was hustled out to an anonymous Granada saloon and slung in the back. My hand was giving me some real gyp, but all they did was give me back the filthy old bandage I’d been wearing and I had to wrap it round the wound as best I could. I had one of those exquisite headaches that felt as if someone had my eyes in the jaws of a pair of pliers and was trying to drag them out of their sockets. Each step sent a shock of agony into my head and beat a mean tattoo around my skull. I kept losing and gaining consciousness during the drive back to town and the street lights stabbed my eyelids like little sharp knives.

  They drove into the underground car park at Mogul Towers and half-carried, half-dragged me into a service lift and up to the top floor.

  One of the heavies had a bunch of keys and kept opening and closing doors until he found a room that suited him. Finally they pushed me into a small office that was windowless except for two narrow, translucent sealed glass vents strengthened with chicken-wire. A plate with the words STORAGE 5 etched on it was screwed to the door. There was no furniture in the room except a drawerless desk and a half-dead rubber plant in a plastic tub. There was no telephone. In the opposite wall was another door.

  ‘Check that,’ said the first man to his companion who walked over and yanked the door open. It was just a cupboard full of redundant office machinery.

  ‘Junk.’

  ‘No phone?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Fine, this’ll do then,’ said the first man and they left me, locking the door behind them, but leaving the strip lights on.

  I stood with my right hand cradled in my left arm and looked around my prison. Nothing. I opened the cupboard door and squinted at the contents. There were some big old electric typewriters and a couple of adding machines out of the ark all piled on top of a grey metal box with a telephone dial and a typewriter keyboard. It was an old General Electric telex machine.

  I looked at it for maybe half a minute and had one last wild idea. I pulled my wallet from my hip pocket. The leather was wet and dark from its dousing in the swimming pool at the farm. I peeled it open and carefully pulled a wodge of damp paper from the document pocket. I spread them over the desk top and carefully separated them. It was still there. Written in faded, runny ink on a tatty scrap of almost transparent paper was McBain’s telex number that Algy had given me so long ago.

  I pushed the junk off the top of the telex machine and awkwardly pulled it out of the cupboard and gave it the once-over. There was no plug attached to the grey cable running from the back so I pushed the bare live and neutral wires into an electrical socket in the wainscoting and secured them with two matchstick-sized pieces of wood that I broke off with my teeth from a pencil I found under the desk. It was bloody murder doing it one handed. And left-handed at that. But eventually it was done.

  I crossed my fingers and pressed the switch on the socket from off to on. Nothing.

>   I’d never used a telex myself but I’d seen plenty being used when I was on the force and I looked for a power button on the machine itself. I found one by the keyboard and saw to my relief that it was turned off. I activated it with a prayer and a tiny red light appeared and the machine clicked at me.

  It was one of the sweetest sounds I’d ever heard. I propped McBain’s number on the top of the keyboard and dialled it in. The paper roll moved up a fraction and the golf-ball printer rattled as it typed the number onto the paper.

  I pressed the ANSABACK key and the machine kicked in again. It typed up the date and MCBAIN-LON-G. SO I was through. I thanked God and typed in the following:

  WE WERE SET UP. EVERYONE DEAD BUT ME. SEND HELP SOONEST. MOGUL TOWER. TOP FLOOR. STORAGE ROOM 5. I’M NEXT. SHARMAN

  I pressed the SEND function and the machine hummed and whirred for a few seconds and then went quiet. I hoped that McBain checked his machine on a regular basis as it was my last hope. I couldn’t risk the guards coming back and finding the machine had been used but I waited ten minutes or so without a reply before I pulled the wires out of the wall and pushed the machine back into the cupboard.

  I sat down with my back to the wall and made my hand as comfortable as I could. I didn’t dare look at the burn, I just hoped that it was in better shape than it felt. I leant my head back against the hard plaster, closed my eyes and tried to sleep. I remember dreaming hot visions of death from the barrel of a gun and treachery and double-cross and sadness at the loss of my Little Josephina.

  40

  The pain in my right hand woke me. I was lying on the carpeted floor curled up in a ball. My muscles were cramped and my bladder was achingly full. I checked my watch. Seven-thirty. Sunday. Light came through the small, translucent transoms close to the ceiling. It was morning at last. I stood up and stretched hard. I relieved myself into the pot containing the sad rubber plant. It would soon be even sadder. I wondered if McBain had got the telex. Probably not. I thought about sending another, but didn’t bother. It was too much hassle, and who’d be there at this hour to read it?