Gun For Hire

by Thomas Waugh

  “No, I want to stay and be served here.”

  “Just give us one drink and we’ll get out of your hair. It’s Christmas. We’ve got plenty of money. It looks like you could use a few extra quid, from the state of this place,” the third young trader in the group, Hector Baring, said. He eyes devoured the bottle of Jägermeister behind the bar. He fingered the small plastic bag of cocaine in his pocket again, paranoid that someone might have stolen it.

  The landlord stared with trepidation at the three young men and then at Devlin. His mouth was agape but no words issued forth. He was tempted to call the police but he feared that doing so would stoke rather than put out any fires. He knew from experience that if he served the drunken and belligerent youths one drink then they would ask for one more – and one more after that. They had the devil in them – or just too many units of alcohol.

  “You’ve been asked to leave,” Devlin said, evenly, as he got up from his stool next to the bar and walked towards the three men. The landlord edged around the bar and locked the till. Devlin’s arms hung down by his side, like a gunslinger ready to draw. But, like a town sheriff, Devlin preferred to end things peaceably. “I can give you the number for a local cab firm if you like.”

  As much as one might have imagined the former soldier being similar to a coiled spring he appeared tired, or even bored, by proceedings. His brow was creased, as hard as corrugated iron. He scrutinised the trio, making a risk assessment of the situation. He’d had a fair few drinks but a para who was unable to fight drunk was no para at all. All three could pack a punch – but Devlin had no intention of allowing any of them to land a punch. Their unofficial leader, Rupert, looked like he had some conditioning. Perhaps he boxercised or practised a martial art – or more likely he took Zumba classes, Devlin fancied. Ultimately they were amateurs and he was a professional.

  “And who the fuck are you?” Rupert asked, raising his voice – incredulous and insulting. The derivatives trader equated volume with authority.

  “I’m nobody,” Devlin replied.

  “Why don’t you mind your own business old man and sit back down. Or fuck off altogether,” Justin Dalton advised, walking towards Devlin and puffing out his barrel chest.

  The former soldier smiled to himself. It was the first time that anyone had ever called him “old”.

  Perhaps I’m not long for this world after all.

  “What do you think you’re going to do? Throw us out?” Rupert said, part laughing and part snorting in derision. “There’s three of us and one of you. Do you have a death wish?”

  Devlin could smell the curry and lager on the young man’s breath. He recoiled more from the trader’s liberal use of cologne though. The stench was nearly as pronounced as his arrogance and sense of entitlement, the soldier considered. He had encountered more than one Rupert during his time in the army.

  “Something like that. You can always call up a few more friends to be on your side if you want to make it a fairer fight.”

  Devlin stared at the young man with thinly veiled contempt. Goading him. If the would-be alpha male threw the first punch then Devlin could claim self-defence, if the police got involved. Violence doesn’t solve everything, but it does resolve some situations.

  Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards.

  Devlin subtly altered his stance, so his feet were apart, in order to be better prepared to attack or retreat backwards to avoid any initial blow. His opponent would probably look to swing his arm in a right hook. He would have plenty of time to move inside and strike first, if that was the case. Instead, however, Rupert Spence merely tried to force Devlin backwards, out of his space, by shoving him in the shoulder. The former paratrooper stood statue-like. He sighed, in relief, that finally he was justified in drawing blood – and wiping the self-satisfied grin off his antagonist’s face.

  Devlin whipped his forearm around so that his elbow smashed into the young man’s fine, aquiline nose. The sound was somewhere in between a crunch and a crack. Rupert Spence was immediately disorientated. His vision was blurred and his natural reaction was to bring his hands up to his wounded face. He would have lost his feet but Devlin held him up by the lapels of his coat, so that he could whip his right forearm around again and break his nose a second time. Elbows, knees and foreheads were far more useful in a fight than making a fist and throwing a movie-style punch. All too often Devlin had seen men break their hands. The harder they hit the worse it was for them. Amateurs. Blood and cartilage glistened, as the bridge of Rupert’s nose opened up. This time the city trader fell to the floor, groaning.

  Hector Baring let out a curse and squared up to Devlin. He raised his hands, like a boxer, but couldn’t then decide whether to attack or back off. There was nothing he had learned on his business course which applied to his situation. Devlin experienced no such moment of indecision. His arm shot out like a ballista bolt and the hard base of his palm connected with the young man’s throat, just beneath his chin. Hector made a slight choking noise. Fear gripped him and the gargling sound he was making turned into a whimper. Hector Baring wished he could be back at the club, with the Estonian dancer whispering sweet nothings and flicking her tongue out, swirling it around his ear. The young man performed his own version of a table dance however as he stumbled backwards and fell in between the gap of one of the pub’s booths.

  Justin Dalton’s eyes bulged in rage. The fearless fly-half lowered his square head, thick neck and rounded shoulders and charged Devlin as if he were a bull. But Devlin moved with the swiftness of a matador. Devlin grabbed the top of the back of the chair nearest too him and swung it round, smashing it against the shins of his powerfully built assailant. The chair broke, falling apart like Lego, but it did its job. Dalton fell to the floor, snarling in pain. He slowly rolled over on his back, to witness a stoical looking Devlin standing over him. The impassive soldier stamped on his opponent’s groin – twice. Dalton writhed in agony, twice, before turning his head and retching, ruining the carpet even more.

  Devlin grabbed Rupert Spence by his hair and half-dragged him out of the door. The soldier ordered his two friends to follow him. Devlin gave the three men directions to the nearest main road, in order to flag down a taxi. The defeated young men, our brightest and best, were too ashamed and too hurt to fully take in what the brutal stranger said however.

  Devlin went back into the pub. The landlord’s mouth was agape. He recalled something the former soldier once said to him: “Train hard, fight easy.” Robertson was taken aback by his friend’s ferocity and efficiency in dealing with the youths. At no point had Devlin appeared to lose control of himself during the fight.

  “I’m sorry about the chair. I’ll be happy to pay for it.”

  “No, laddie, it’s fine. Thank you,” the landlord uttered, his voice somewhat croaky. He needed a drink.

  Devlin’s brow was still furrowed, in annoyance rather than sorrow. His “work self” had crossed over into the domain of his personal life.

  “Please don’t tell anyone about what just occurred, especially Emma,” Devlin said, with a pained expression on his face.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t,” Michael Robertson promised, out of loyalty to his regular or, perhaps more so, out of fear.

  Later that evening, as Devlin lay in bed, he wondered if he had performed one of his small acts of kindness by ejecting the unpleasant trio from the pub (God knows what might have happened if he hadn’t been there) or had he committed an act of violence — a sin — which he would need to atone for by another thousand acts of kindness? Had he turned his moral switch on or off?

  Chapter 9

  Morning.

  A sterile sun hung in the air, its watery light seeping in between dreary clouds. The view of the back garden was an island of calm compared to the throng of reporters and photographers at the front of the house. Virginia Pound sat in her Victoria Plum kitchen and stared at a photograph of her husband. The photo was of him and their eldest daughter, Beatrice.
She was dressed in her graduation gown. It had been a special day for the whole family. Yet still he smiled in the same fake way whenever a camera was in front of him. The same expression on his face could be found in a thousand photographs of him with his constituents. When Virginia had first met Martin Pound, whilst campaigning for a seat on his local council, she had been impressed by his energy and conviction. She fell for him, they got engaged and she proudly composed the copy for some of his campaign literature. He was handsome, eloquent and genuinely wanted to make a difference. Martin Pound was a caring Conservative, a catch. Her friends envied her. She sacrificed a burgeoning career in journalism to play the loyal wife and devoted mother. If only he had been so loyal and devoted, she mused. The higher he climbed politically the more of his principles fell by the wayside. In the end he never even tried to reach a compromise with his beliefs. Compromise turned into capitulation. His first affair was with a constituent and his second was with an intern. Virginia lost track of his infidelities after that. She lost track of the money he squandered through bad investments and gambling as well. But still she played the loving wife (having no other role open to her). Virginia hosted dinner parties, pounded the pavement in painful heels on the campaign trail and was a patron of a number of charities which meant little or nothing to her. She was “Mrs Martin Pound”. Most of her days were spent shopping and being a domestic goddess. In the evenings she helped her children with their homework and then worked her way through a season of Desperate Housewives and a bottle of mid-priced Rioja. Few of her friends envied her life now. She loved her children dearly, but they were growing up fast and would eventually fly the nest. Virginia Pound wasn’t celebrating that her husband was dead – but she realised that she now had the opportunity for a second chance in life.

  Virginia looked good – and not even just for her age. Friends said that she looked like Sophie Raworth. She thanked God, and her genes, each month that her long blonde hair was still free from any streaks of grey. A tan from her recent trip to Cyprus had given her complexion a healthy glow and concealed some of the wrinkles lining her forehead and eyes (perhaps she would have Botox, when the life assurance payment came through). Spin classes helped maintain a naturally elegant figure. She still turned the heads of plenty of men her age – but she would now turn the heads of younger men, she vowed to herself. She had taken a younger lover, her daughter’s tennis coach, out of revenge for her husband’s first affair many years ago. She would take another.

  Virginia sat by the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a half-eaten bran muffin in front of her. The news was on the television and her laptop was open. Worried that it might seem inappropriate for a widow to be out shopping so soon after her husband’s death, Virginia had bought a number of new outfits online, in which to appear in front of the cameras. She wanted to look glamorous, yet solemn, like a female news anchor. Thankfully her local salon would send someone around to the house do her hair and nails.

  The ex-Daily Express journalist had spent the morning going through articles relating to her husband’s death. She needed to know the facts – and fiction – that were being disseminated. The court of public opinion was the highest in the land, for good or ill.

  Virginia had also called her lawyer again. She needed to know how she should manage the evidence in her possession, which could expose or compromise a number of people (lobbyists, fellow politicians, property developers etc). She had yet to trawl through all of the documents and emails on the memory stick but her husband had saved everything. Among other things there was a series of emails exposing how a windfarm company had paid her husband to promote the “green” argument for sustaining the massive subsidies and tax exemptions the industry received. She wondered how, such were the frequent payments her husband gleaned for “consultancy” work, he could still be mired in so much debt. But the gambling debts, payment to escorts and keeping his mistresses in clover added up. Why couldn’t he just have kept on screwing his interns? Then we wouldn’t be in this financial mess.

  Virginia needed specialist legal advice on how much evidence she was obliged to pass on to the police, and how much she could hold onto, to sell to newspapers or utilise to secure a book deal. She wanted to take advantage of the situation, strike while the iron was hot before she became yesterday’s news. Virginia also made a call that morning to Phillip Simmonds, a publicist-cum-media agent. Simmonds had been described as a “young Max Clifford” — but in a good way, if it was humanly possible. Simmonds briefly offered his condolences before running through his terms of business. He agreed with his new client that she should put her story out there immediately (although she should make sure to sell that story to the highest bidder, but Simmonds would happily handle that, for a twenty-five percent commission). Virginia Pound was a wronged woman, a victim of a violent crime and a politician’s wife. There were numerous angles to play, he argued enthusiastically. Simmonds promised to make some calls. Virginia argued that she did not want to use any short-term exposure to leverage just one big pay-off however. She wanted the agent to use the tragedy to organise a regular column for her in the The Times, Evening Standard or Grazia. She had been a good, punchy journalist over a decade ago. She could be the same again, or more. The wife and mother had more life experience and could write upon a variety of topics. Her ultimate ambition was to appear as a semi-regular guest on Loose Women. Her friends would envy her again then. She would explain to her children how she needed to work more and couldn’t spend so much time looking after them. But she would hire a nanny. They would understand, Virginia reasoned. She was doing this for them, to provide for their future, after all.

  *

  The Parker brothers sat in the back of the blue Porsche Cayenne as it gunned its way towards the centre of town. Byron had just explained to his bleary-eyed sibling that it seemed the politician’s wife was indeed in possession of information on a memory stick about some of Pound’s business dealings. Byron’s contact in the police couldn’t be sure about the nature of the information however — or if it incriminated the brothers.

  George Parker held his large bald head in his hands — he resembled Marlon Brando’s Kurtz in Apocalypse Now — and let out a groan. “Fuckin’ Pound. We should have tortured the sly bastard to silence him before we had him killed. I’m not having his stupid bitch wife be responsible for me doing time. If it’s even just a rumour that this memory stick exists — and our names could be on it — then that’s enough to sign her death warrant. We should act quickly too, just in case the police decide to put some protection on her. We don’t know what other enemies Pound made. Plenty it seems. We’ll kill the wife and retrieve the memory stick. We might even be able to make a few quid out of the memory stick ourselves. She’s a looker — and I’d prefer to put something else in her mouth other than a gun barrel — but needs must. We should at least try and sort it so that her kids have no chance of witnessing anything though,” Gentleman George stated, in deference to his late father’s code of conduct that young children should never be harmed in the name of business.

  As George Parker spoke, his voice more guttural than usual, his brother raised an eyebrow and looked askance at the carpeted footwell of the vehicle. It was littered with cigarette butts, fast food packaging, some suspect-looking pills and a small transparent envelope of cocaine. Byron not only disapproved of the mess because of the chance of police pulling them over; he also disliked the fact that his brother’s young children used the car. He didn’t want his nephew and niece growing up with their father’s habits — and IQ.

  “I agree,” Byron replied, resigned to events. It was a shame to have the wife pay for her husband’s indiscretions – but it was also a necessity. The choice between whether he or Virginia Pound suffered was no choice at all. “I’ve also had an idea as to how we might kill two birds with one stone. I can contract the job out to Porter again. I will try and get the name of his operative out of him when I do so. Once the job is finished I’ll suggest that we pay hi
m in cash. When we meet we’ll dispose of him. And then catch up with his associate.” The asset of Porter had now become a liability for the accountant-criminal. Byron Parker was confident of finding another fixer who could second him for the Garrick.

  “If the prick doesn’t give up the name of his man I’ll get it out of him.”

  There was a gleam in his brother’s eye and verve in his tone which Byron found unattractive. He recalled the last time George had cause to be violent towards a woman. One of their call girls had been on the take. “Women – and their divorce lawyers – have been torturing me for years. I was due some payback,” the brutal, priapic enforcer had grimly joked to Jason and Leighton afterwards.

  “I’ll make the call to Porter and set things in motion.”

  “Good. Fingers crossed we won’t have to pay the prick any more money before we off ‘im. Any other things we need to discuss?” George Parker asked, his mind half-distracted by a ripe looking twenty year old walking along the pavement in stripper heels and a figure hugging dress. She reminded him of a friend of his eldest daughter who he wanted to fuck.

  “We’ve sold the three properties on the new development at Greenwich. We should net half million. A Canadian pension fund has bought the apartments. They may well rent them out, once finished, but they may just leave them empty and sell when the price is right.”

  George Parker pursed his lips, almost in a kiss, and nodded in appreciation. The thought of making money turned him on as much as the blonde in the stripper heels.