by Rob Sinclair
My eyes followed her across the room to the exit. But when she opened the door, I was quickly brought back to the reality of the situation. There, standing on the other side, was the giant. Elvis.
CHAPTER 18
‘This way,’ Elvis snapped, indicating off to his right with his head.
I didn’t wait to be told twice. I scuttled out of the room and past Elvis, who stood holding out his barrel chest giving me barely enough room to get by.
‘Down the end of the corridor,’ he said. ‘Last door on your right.’
As I walked I looked behind me twice to see whether Elvis was following. He was. My heart was now in my throat. My head was a spinning mess. I cursed myself for getting into such a dangerous position. I thought fleetingly I might not even make it out of there alive.
Was O’Brady capable of murder?
There was little I could do to stop it happening by that point. Even if I turned and fled, would I really get away? I reached the door and Elvis squeezed past me and pushed it open.
Inside the room I immediately spotted O’Brady. He was behind a long and extravagant mahogany desk, casually sitting in an oversized, black leather chair with a tumbler of whisky in his hand. To his left stood another burly man; his name, I would later know, was Mickey Egan. A truly repulsive excuse for a human being.
‘Come and sit down,’ O’Brady said, indicating the chair in front of his desk.
As I moved over to the chair I felt like a condemned man being marched to his fate. I could feel all six eyes in the room bearing down on me, scrutinising my every move.
‘You have my wallet?’ I piped up, unsure where else to take the conversation.
‘Yeah,’ O’Brady said. He took it out of a drawer and held it up for me to see.
‘Where did you find it?’ I asked.
‘Outside,’ he said.
He tossed it over to me. I caught it, opened it up and gave the inside a cursory glance. I couldn’t remember exactly how much money had been there the night before – maybe as much as a hundred pounds – but there was no cash now. All my cards appeared to be in place.
‘It’s how it was when I was given it,’ O’Brady said, shrugging. I assumed he was referring to the missing cash, which had no doubt been pilfered by whichever one of his men had knocked me out.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Why what?’
‘Why did you take my wallet?’
‘I didn’t take your wallet, pal,’ O’Brady said tersely. ‘I’m doing you a favour here.’
‘Sure. Thanks.’
I knew he was lying but there was no point in pushing him. I assumed whatever checks O’Brady had been able to perform on my background from the ID in my wallet had satisfied him; otherwise I wouldn’t have been sitting there in his office.
‘So what’s this proposition you have for me?’ O’Brady asked.
I felt my cheeks flush. The fact was the proposition now seemed absurd. Childish. It was an idea born of anger and frustration and alcohol and not even an iota of rational thinking. But I was stuck between a rock and hard place. If I told O’Brady it was nothing, a mistake, that there was no proposition, what would he do to me? At the very least I had to assume I would take something of a pummelling from the giant or his other men. And yet if I went through with it and made the proposition to him, as embarrassing and ludicrous as the prospect by that point seemed to me, I was potentially getting myself into a whole new predicament.
It had to be the better option, though, I thought. I tried my hardest to take my head and my heart back to the previous night. To the anger and hatred I had felt when Alice opened up to me about her infidelity. To the countless scenarios that had played through my mind on an endless loop of her with Craig Fletcher. I had to be able to feel that mad again. It was the only way to make sense of what I was doing.
‘There’s someone I need you to take care of,’ I said.
O’Brady’s expression turned to disgust. ‘There’s what?’
I looked around the room. At Egan stationed off to my right, his cold, menacing eyes staring right through me. At Elvis on the other side, his glare unyielding.
‘Take care of someone?’ O’Brady said. ‘What do you think I am – a nanny?’
‘No, that’s not what I mean. You know, there’s someone I want you to … sort out for me. Beat up.’
O’Brady slammed down his whisky glass. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ he blasted. ‘Do you think I’m some sort of lowlife chump who goes around giving people a slap or two to make a living? You little –’
He nodded over to Elvis. I squirmed away but he grabbed me and hauled me to my feet. He twisted my right arm painfully behind my back, pushing it to the point of dislocation. Elvis’s other thick arm wrapped around my neck, pinning me in place.
I was a mess. I could barely breathe I was so terrified. I tried not to look at O’Brady, as though that would make him go away, but it was impossible not to look.
My head was bowed but my eyes darted up and down as I waited for whatever was to come next.
O’Brady sat fuming, his face creased with annoyance. I began to seriously doubt that I’d make it out of that room on my feet. A bag seemed more likely.
After a few moments, though, O’Brady managed to wind himself down from his outburst and his face softened somewhat.
‘You’re a lucky man, Stephens,’ he said.
His more placid tone did nothing to alleviate the tension coursing through me, nor did it induce Elvis to relax his grip on me at all. If anything, it seemed to get tighter still.
‘It’s just as well you have something that interests me,’ O’Brady continued. ‘Or you’d be out that door already.’
‘What do you mean?’ I choked out as confusion swept through me.
Elvis’s arm around my neck tightened further at my decision to speak up, causing me to cough and splutter and gasp for breath.
‘Okay, okay, big man. Just relax there,’ O’Brady said. With his words I was given the space to breathe once more, but Elvis’s grip on me stayed firm nonetheless. ‘Your job. Tell me what you do.’
‘I’m a consultant,’ was my feeble response.
‘Yeah, you told me that. So people pay you to give them crap advice they don’t need.’
‘Something like that,’ I said, managing a wry smile.
‘Oh, I know all about that game. I’m sure I could do it myself. Doesn’t exactly take much of the grey stuff now, does it?’ O’Brady tapped his skull for effect.
‘I’m sure many would argue against that,’ I rebutted.
‘I’m sure they would. But I’m right, aren’t I? You go into a business, tell them they’re top heavy, overstaffed, that their productivity and profitably is being hampered. The answer? You get them to fire a load of dopes and you take yourself a big, fat cheque in the process. Fecking genius. How people still fall for that bollocks is beyond me.’
I said nothing to O’Brady’s scathing comments. I didn’t agree with him – he was attacking my professionalism and integrity, after all – but I knew exactly what he meant. He wasn’t the first person to say such things, and truth be told, much of the advice I gave out in my role wasn’t exactly rocket science. But that’s what I was paid to do, and if clients happily bought that service and saw benefit in it then who was I to baulk at it?
‘But,’ O’Brady said, holding up a finger, ‘it’s not your advice I need. It’s access to your clients.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean. I’m a businessman, Stephens. And business is all about contacts. I’m looking to branch out. Diversify my interests. You help me, I help you.’
‘I’m not sure what you think I can do for you.’
‘You’ll do whatever I tell you to do,’ O’Brady snapped, his face creased with anger. ‘But let’s not go getting our knickers in a twist. I need information, that’s all. Information on your clients. A few introductions. The rest I can do myself.’
&n
bsp; ‘That’s it?’ I said.
I was surprised by O’Brady’s request. I knew that divulging anything other than publicly available data was against just about every privacy and confidentiality law that applied. It was professional suicide. But a few introductions? I could do that. Somehow I doubted that was really all O’Brady was after but stuck in the room with him, what choice did I have but to agree?
‘Okay,’ I said.
O’Brady nodded and Elvis finally released his grip on me. I slumped down a few inches and nursed my right arm, which was completely numb.
‘And that thing you wanted taken care of?’ O’Brady said. ‘You help me out and you can consider it done. A favour. Payment in advance, if you like.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, though I realised I had little to be thankful for.
I was about to open my mouth to speak again when something hard crashed into the back of my skull. A searing pain shot through me, stabbing at the front of my brain. I wobbled on my feet, took one lunging step forward and collapsed to the floor.
CHAPTER 19
‘Who was it you wanted O’Brady to sort out?’ she asked, her tone flinty.
However hard she tried to remain impassive as I told her my stories, every now and then I caught a glimpse of what she really thought of me.
‘Craig Fletcher,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Why? Because he screwed Alice!’
‘But she was the one who cheated, not him.’
‘Oh, come off it,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It’s not that simple and you know it. You’re married, right?’
I looked over at her left hand, placed on top of the desk. She had two rings on her second finger, one a plain yellow band, the other with a pea-sized, bright-white diamond sticking out of it. It was either a fake or she had a rich husband, as I doubted her own job paid well enough for her to afford such a stone.
She whipped her hand away, under the desk.
‘This isn’t about me,’ she said. ‘It’s about you.’
‘I know that. But you must have been in a situation before when your husband or boyfriend or whatever was being overly friendly with another woman. Or maybe you saw another woman approaching him, flirting with him. I bet you hated her, right? You probably went home that night and had a big bust-up with your husband, didn’t you? By the next day you were back on speaking terms again. But that woman? No, she was marked. You hated her. You’d always be wary of her from then on.’
She stared at me but didn’t say anything.
‘I’m right, aren’t I?’
Her lack of response gave the answer.
‘But why did you feel the need to go after Fletcher like that?’ she said.
‘I felt like I had to get my own back on him,’ I said. ‘I was angry. I needed a release. I had to punish him for what he’d done.’
‘What about Alice? Didn’t you feel the need to punish her too?’
‘Punish her? You mean beat her up? No. It never even crossed my mind.’
We both paused for a beat.
‘So you only blamed Fletcher for what happened?’ she said.
‘No. Alice wasn’t blameless,’ I said. ‘But I loved her. Fletcher knew she was a married woman. I couldn’t let him get away with what he’d done. He had it coming.’
‘Why O’Brady?’
‘I didn’t know anyone else like that. I didn’t even know him really. This was just some brainless, drunken idea. People do all sorts of crazy, irrational things when they’re drunk. Maybe I should have just gone around and punched Fletcher in the face myself. Got it over and done with.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘I went for what at the time seemed like an easier option. I didn’t want the police coming after me, and I really don’t think I’m a violent person. And what if I did find Fletcher to give him his just desserts, but he just walloped me back and I was the one scurrying away with my tail between my legs – how would that look? Can you imagine? The man who slept with my wife then later crushed me in a fight that I’d started? I wanted him to get a quick beating from someone he wouldn’t know, and that would be that.’
‘But you didn’t go through with it?’
‘No, I didn’t. I couldn’t. I mean, come on, it’s a hare-brained idea – I knew that. I phoned O’Brady the next day and asked him to call it off. He did.’
‘He was happy to do that?’
‘I think he was angry that I was messing him around, but it really wasn’t a big deal to him. One less thing for him to worry about. Beating up Craig Fletcher was never why he called me back to his club. It was his proposition that he was interested in.’
‘Your client contacts.’
‘Exactly. O’Brady had me right where he wanted. I could practically see the pound signs in his eyes when he first brought up the idea. And I couldn’t say no. I was terrified of him and he knew it.’
‘But you weren’t just giving him introductions, were you?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘From what I understand, you passed a lot of information to him. You went into business with him.’
‘That’s not how it was.’
‘But you ended up owing him a lot of money.’
‘Everyone who deals with O’Brady ends up owing him money. That’s just what he does. He’s sneaky and vindictive and quite brilliant at manipulation. Isn’t that the same as all good businessmen?’
‘I’m not so sure you should tarnish every businessperson so viciously.’
‘Yeah, well, I say what I see.’
She raised an eyebrow but didn’t push me further on the point.
‘But over the years, from your relationship with O’Brady you did end up owing him a lot of money. Which was why you took the decision to seek Gemma’s help that day when your sister reappeared?’
‘Yeah, I did,’ I said.
‘So tell me about how that worked out. What happened?’
‘Well, as you can probably imagine, with someone like O’Brady it really was something of a clusterfuck in the end.’
CHAPTER 20
It’s probably worth stating at this point that I hated my job with a passion. I hated the people I worked for and with, I hated the crappy office, I hated the open-plan cubicles with their monotonous grey colour scheme. I hated the clients who always expected the world, who didn’t understand their own business as well as I did and who never said thank you, and I hated the work I had to do – the same shit I’d been doing when I was twenty-one years old.
I hadn’t always felt like that. At one point I’d been ambitious and hungry for success. Having joined Ellis Associates directly from university, I’d worked up the corporate ladder to a respectable level by my late twenties. If I’d wanted it, if I’d really set my heart on it and given it my all, I would have been a partner in the firm and raking in hundreds of thousands a year for being nothing more than a glorified salesperson.
But just as with marriage my corporate career had encountered its setbacks. The biggest was Rottweiler. I was sure he had been sent to earth to make my life a misery. He was a classic egomaniac who’d been parachuted into the team in which I worked a rung higher than me. That fact alone had caused ire, not just from me but also a number of other project managers in the team who’d been setting their sights on the top.
To add to that, he was the most unpleasant person I’d ever had the misfortune of meeting. Plus he had zero talent. Unless you considered it a talent to be universally hated by those around you.
‘Stephens!’
I cringed at the disgusted way in which my name was spoken. His grating voice immediately shook me from my thoughts of the day before. Of Dani turning up out of the blue and questioning me about Alice’s murder, dripping vague information of a new killing, quizzing me about the statements I’d given to the police all those year ago. And of me having to come clean, but not quite fully clean, to Gemma about O’Brady and the money I owed him.
Out of the frying pan into
the fire, as they say.
I looked up at the snarling face of Rottweiler. ‘My office. Now,’ he barked.
One or two people at nearby desks glanced in my direction to see the latest victim of his wrath. They could have guessed it was me. Rottweiler had had it in for me ever since joining five years ago. He’d never known me at my best – in the days before Alice was killed, when I was seen as the future of the team. Back then everyone thought I would make it to the top. It was only a matter of time, it seemed. Then Alice was murdered. That threw everything in my life off the rails. I’d never truly recovered my appetite and ambition at work. Scratch that, I’d never truly recovered my appetite in many aspects of life.
When Rottweiler joined the team, my corporate downfall accelerated exponentially. My career wasn’t off the rails anymore, it was tied to the tracks and pulverised by train after train of shit and venom and was now left in severed pieces.
No, he had never seen me at my best. Maybe if he had I would have been able to wipe the floor with him and he would have been out the door as quickly as he’d been thrown in.
As it was, even at fifty per cent, even at less, I still outshone him on every project. That was why he hated me so much, I guessed. But over the years his constant barrage of abuse had worn me down to the point where I was entirely disenfranchised. I just didn’t care anymore. About the job at least. Him, on the other hand … I hated him with unabated passion.
I got up from my desk and strode confidently behind Rottweiler to his office door. I could tell half the office was following our moves. Some would be sympathetic toward me. Others would be rubbing their hands in glee, enjoying the possible drama that was to come. There were always plenty of sadists in any group of office workers who loved nothing more than to see a colleague suffer in the hope that it forwarded their position.
I ignored all the looks. Each day I was getting nearer to the point of no longer giving a shit about the latest tirade and the repercussions if I didn’t bow down to Rottweiler’s superiority.
He stormed into his office and plonked his ugly backside down on the chair behind his desk.
