Thomson turned her head and smiled sarcastically. ‘Well he seemed pretty fucking sure when he rang and called me an absolute bitch.’
‘I think it might be better if we sit down and talk about this calmly.’
‘Well I don’t. I’m happy talking about it right here. Why did he think I’d told you?’
Narey wasn’t for giving the woman much room or sympathy. ‘Perhaps because you did tell me. I refused to tell him where my information had come from. I didn’t tell him if it was a man or a woman. He leaped to that conclusion all by himself.’
Thomson simmered, trying to decide whether to believe her. ‘Well he called me a few choice names, including a whore. Said that I’d encouraged Jen to sleep around because that’s what I was doing myself. He demanded to know who it was that she was fucking. His words, not mine.’
‘And what did you tell him?’
‘Well I told him that it wasn’t me who gave you the information. Although I’d have been as well saving my breath. I told him I didn’t know who she was seeing. Which of course he jumped on as confirmation that I knew she was seeing someone. I hung up on him but he called back about five minutes later.’
‘What did he say that time?’
‘He was shouting. I think he’d been drinking. He said something along the lines of how he’d known all along. He called Jen some vile names too. I told him to shut up and get off the phone. He went on and on, asking me who it was. He started asking if it was the car salesman. He kept saying, “Was it the fucking car salesman again? I’ll kill him if it was.” So he must have known about Phil Traynor.’
‘He said he’d kill him?’
She shrugged. ‘Figure of speech, I guess, but yes, he did.’
‘Did you tell him anything?’
‘No. Nothing. I told him to sober up and that I was hanging up and taking the phone off the hook. Which I did.’
‘Okay. Well I’m going to ask you some of the same questions. We’ve spoken to Phil Traynor and we’re satisfied that he hadn’t seen Jen in over a year. Do you have any idea of who it was she was seeing?’
Thomson looked somewhere between fury and tears. ‘We’ve been through this! I’ve told you all that I know. She only ever called him The Man. It was this big secret. She shut me out of it for whatever reason. Believe me, I’ve wracked my brains and there’s nothing I can tell you or Douglas.’
Narey nodded, believing her. ‘Okay, but if you do think of something, please tell me before you tell Mr Cairns. Okay?’
‘Okay. I’ll be happy if I never have to speak to Douglas again.’
She then threw Narey a look which left no doubt that the same thing applied to her too.
Chapter 45
Even from the other side of Stanley Street, in the industrial warren of Kinning Park, Winter could hear traffic roaring by on the M8. Only the ruins of the biscuit factory stood between him and fifteen lanes of motorway. It felt strange, the silence of redundancy all around him in complete contrast to what was beyond the building.
He knew a bit about the place even though he’d never been inside. There had been a biscuit factory on this site since the mid-1800s. It was eventually taken over by Rowntree’s and they churned out millions of Blue Ribands, caramel wafers and custard creams until the company went bust in 2001. The place had been shut since then and he’d heard it was in a sorry state. He’d soon find out.
He’d taken the subway to Kinning Park and made his way through the industrial estate on foot. There were one or two people about but he kept his head down and avoided eye contact with anyone. Ten minutes later, he could see the motorway elevated on the horizon and a big building on his left. A succession of arched windows on the ground floor were boarded up and the frontage was fenced off. Danger Keep Out, read the sign on the fencing. Sure thing. He lifted, moved, breathed in and squeezed through.
He was inside and half an hour early. He wanted to scout the building out, maybe find a good place to stand where he could watch Remy come in. See before he was seen.
Immediately, he saw that was going to be easier said than done. The factory was enormous, six storeys high, a desolate labyrinth of a place that would have made a good set for a post-apocalyptic movie. It was graffiti central too. Every wall seemed to have been scrawled over with names or drawings. It was a huge, tangled mess.
He found himself standing in a central courtyard area with the building rising high above and around him on three sides; a one-storey building behind him let the rush-hour sounds of the motorway flood in. It was like standing in the worst council housing estate imaginable; somewhere no cop would be crazy enough to come no matter how much trouble was reported. Rubbish and rubble were strewn everywhere, so much so that he could hardly find a spot to stand. There was brick and concrete, broken chairs, twisted metal frames and discarded trolleys. Above him in the darkness, the building glowered down like it was ready to eat him.
Daylight had slipped away but he could still see that almost all the windows on the floors above had been smashed. An army of people could have been standing behind the broken panes and he’d have been none the wiser. He felt small and vulnerable standing down there. He needed to get up higher and out of sight.
The concrete stairs corkscrewed up, past flaking walls painted in battleship grey. He got off on the first level and wandered into a vast, cavernous room with bare concrete floors, a forest of support pillars as far as the eye could see. The floor was damp and cracked in places and nothing seemed particularly safe.
The ceiling felt low even though it wasn’t, dirty white-painted girders over his head squeezing down on him and reducing the feeling of space. He followed the beam of his torch as the room stretched on forever, dotted with empty aerosol cans, broken glass and pieces of wood. He came across an old wooden writing desk and he counted three large Avery weighing machines, two of them tipped onto their sides.
Finally, the level came to an end and he climbed once more, skipping the second floor and making for the top. On the way up, he passed a couple of open lift shafts and couldn’t help but stare down into the gloom. The brick walls dropped straight down away from him, rusting metal rungs descending to the bottom.
The top floor was the same dark concrete that had presumably once been covered in linoleum or carpet. Now cabling snaked across it and loose stones made an untidy line down the middle. Girders ran above his head here too but there was no ceiling and the room rose up past them to the underside of the roof. Further on, a white computer workstation and chair sat isolated in the middle of the room, a monitor perched precariously on the top shelf.
He turned a corner and picked his way through a minefield of half-bricks, his way barely lit by his torch. Stepping in water, he stopped and strobed the area in front of him and saw it was flooded, dotted with discarded metal and planks of wood. He shone the beam on the wall ahead and stepped back. What the hell?
Inching warily forward into the puddle, he cast his torch across the wall and a vicious alien face with sharp teeth appeared out of the gloom. It had large green eyes, pointed ears, dark green scaly skin and drooling jaws. As graffiti went, it was pretty scary in the dark. Scarier than he needed right now.
He moved away from it, eager to get onto the roof and find himself a viewing spot. He breathed what he realized was a sigh of relief when he got into the open air again and stood facing out with his back flat to the wall, the brick shrouding him in darkness and the M8 in front of him. It was stirring to see so many cars rush past, so near and yet no one aware that he was there.
A long-forgotten feeling came back to him. The notion that if he was still enough for long enough then he could become part of the structure. Building and bones and bricks and blood. The factory was part of the city and so was he. It wasn’t easy to separate the people from the place.
It was like the thundering motorway before him. It ran through the city like an artery, pulsing night and day, cutting east to west on the northern fringes then plunging south like a dagg
er into its heart. The motorway was a stranger to the old factory, a stranger it saw every day. That’s the way it was when a city constantly reinvented itself without moral planning permission.
He shook himself out of it and stepped away from the wall, walking round until he could look down from the roof into the central courtyard. It was pitch black and he couldn’t see the ground below, reluctant to use his torch for fear of giving himself away just yet.
Was that something or someone moving down there? A darker shadow from the left corner. It was under the eaves now and he couldn’t be sure what he’d seen. There was a crash of metal and the noise made him jump. He stood still and listened but could hear nothing.
Another crash. Like metal being thrown onto the concrete. Or the other way round. It was harsh and reverberated through the darkness, even cutting through the noise from the M8. This noise was further to the right, near the stairs. And closer. Then another noise, quieter but way to the left. Two people? Or one moving very quickly?
Suddenly, it all seemed like a bad idea. He didn’t even know where exactly in the vast building he was going to meet Remy, even if he was really sure that’s who the message had come from. Shit, this was stupid. The building seemed even more claustrophobic than it was just a few moments before. He had to make a decision, to stay or go.
There were more noises below, more movement. Maybe the decision was being taken out of his hands. He just had to calm the fuck down. This was what he was here for, to meet the guy and get the information he needed.
Someone screamed. A floor or two below. It stopped almost as soon as it had started. He couldn’t be sure but . . . there it was again. Longer this time. The sound cut through the night like a samurai sword.
Decision made. He was going back down there. He was shaking, balling his left hand into a fist as he walked, the torch in his right. Breathing fast, almost as fast as his heart was pumping. He began down the stairs warily, no idea what was round the next bend, his left leg leading the way but ready to brace and either fight or flee.
There was another noise. Something heavy crashing. It sounded like . . . his mind told him it was like a body hitting a concrete floor but then that wasn’t a noise he’d ever heard before. He reached the second floor and passed one of the open lift shafts. He’d gone a full pace beyond the shaft when an inner voice told him to go back and look in it. Cursing himself, he turned.
He lowered the torch over the edge and sent a beam down the walls towards the bottom of the well. The circle of light began to lose its shape as it went but it still picked out the pale brick and then, finally, lit up the floor. There was a dark shape down there that was separate from the bits of rubbish he’d seen previously. Was it even the same shaft that he’d looked down before? He traced the outline of the object with the torchlight. It was square. Not body-shaped. He followed the outline again to be sure that it wasn’t just wishful thinking but no, it was a table top or a suitcase or a box. It was something, anything, that wasn’t a body. He breathed out hard and ran his free hand through his hair.
That’s when he felt the pain in his lower back. Air rushed out of him and he buckled at the knees, the torch dropping from his hand. The realization that he had been struck hard with something extremely solid dawned on him only as he was falling. The pain became a fire that spread across his back and he had no breath with which to douse it. His legs had gone too, turned into useless rubbery things that couldn’t hold him up.
He became aware, through the soup that clogged his brain, that someone was standing over him. Remy? Surely not. He saw the toe of a black boot just inches from his eyes and, beside it, something metallic scraped the ground. He’d got as far as working out that the metal object had been responsible for putting him on the ground when the thing disappeared from sight. Something inside told him to move and he curled and rolled, throwing an arm up for protection.
A split second later that arm caught a glancing blow that still managed to send pain shooting through him. It had probably saved him though and he rolled again, away from the black boots and the metal pole. There was a clang against the concrete that rang in his ears, missing him by inches. He could hear heavy breathing above him and a muttered ‘Fuck’ as his assailant regretted his failure.
Winter rolled as fast as he could, desperately trying to save himself. It wasn’t quite fast enough as another dull blow caught him on the side, pain flooding his bones and electrifying his senses. He rolled again and heard another miss. To his right he saw the top of the stairwell just a few feet away and made for it - no time to calculate whether it was a good idea or not. He spun across the floor until it fell away beneath him and the spiral of concrete steps took over. He dropped fast and awkwardly, painfully, every edge of step chastising him.
Footsteps sounded as the world tumbled, the noise coming at him as if filtered through a washing machine; it was impossible to tell if they were gaining on him or not. He worried more about tucking his head in and not bashing his brains out.
His initial spill had more or less run its own course but he forced it on, half falling, half jumping, further down the stairs until he hit the landing below. He immediately sprawled in the direction of some half-bricks that were strewn there and began hurling them one after the other at the foot of the stairwell. Not with any real hope of hitting anyone but more as a signal of intent, buying himself time to recover.
It seemed to have worked as no one appeared round the corner after him. Maybe the guy was less keen on a fight when Winter could see him coming. He stood there on shaking legs with an enormous pain in his lower back, his eyes at once on the stairs but also scouring the landing for a weapon. He saw a plank of wood and grabbed that in one hand and a fist of brick in the other.
He held firm, trying to shut out the pain, listening and waiting, ready to fight. Nothing came. No sound from above, none below. All he could hear was the background music of the motorway and the rush of blood in his ears. He waited and waited but his attacker, whoever he was, had either gone or was standing as still as Winter.
It was time to move. Down the stairs and out. The ache in his back was excruciating, dull and debilitating, but he had to get out of there.
He took the steps two at a time, reaching ground level to see the courtyard completely swallowed up by the dark. The walls loomed above and crowded in on him like prison guards. He stopped to listen, for screams, for movement, for sounds of metal. Still nothing.
He went to the middle of the courtyard, his feet stumbling on stone and wood. Then, abruptly, on something softer but still solid. He stopped immediately. Not daring to move. He cautiously put down the wood and the brick and wished that he still had the torch he’d dropped when he was hit. He reached into his back pocket, thankful to see that his mobile phone was still intact, and switched on the flashlight.
The beam of light was thin but strong and yet it trembled as he swung it round to his feet. At once he saw a hand, an arm, blood. He stepped back quickly, tripping over a brick and following it to the ground. The phone slipped from his grasp and he scrambled to pick it up.
On his knees, he could see the body stretched out unmoving. He shone the flashlight on it again and saw it was a man lying on his back, something long and thin driven through his chest. Winter’s mouth was hanging open and he could only stare, hardly believing the horror of what he was seeing. He got to his feet and inched closer, seeing the iron spike spearing the man just below the ribcage, seeing his eyes wide open, his head slumped to the side. He was so pale and skinny. So young.
Remy. Remy Feeks.
Chapter 46
Something stirred in Winter’s stomach and made a beeline for his throat and he had to cover his mouth and gag it down. He wanted to vomit, to cry, to scream, to run. He was the veteran of a couple of hundred dead bodies but this was different. Somehow, this was his fault.
He stared and saw the young guy, speared most probably with the same kind of railing that someone had used to strike Winter on the b
ack. The aborted scream he’d heard earlier: that had been Remy. He’d been murdered and Winter was to have been next. All he could do was stare.
Stare and think. He saw Remy but thought of Euan Hepburn’s decaying corpse in the Molendinar. It was his fault that Euan had been there on his own, his fault that Remy was lying dead. Winter was drowning in a pool of shock and guilt.
Maybe that’s why he didn’t hear the sirens at first. By the time he was aware of them, he knew they’d been in earshot for longer. His head came up and he took it in slowly, his feet still glued to the spot he stood on. Police cars. Coming closer.
He ran to the lower back building. Lower but still maybe thirty feet high. The words ACOS! And ALEK! were sprayed in large white lettering near the top and he knew someone had managed to get up there to do it. Past the wall there was a pile of scrap and above it a second wall that might just let him scramble to the top of the first. He leaped onto a long piece of wood propped against the wall, falling back and trying again, driven on by the now deafening sirens. Succeeding this time, and from there onto a mess of loose metal that just about bore his weight. He stretched and jumped and clawed to the top of the wall, hauling himself up.
He picked his way over the flat roof, then a corrugated ridge behind. There was only a wide grass verge and a drop into the dark separating him from the motorway, cars still streaming along it. The only way out was straight down but in this light he had no idea how far it was. He’d no option. He turned briefly to face the biscuit factory before kneeling on top of the wall and slipping over the side where he held on with both hands. Do it. He let go and fell, the side of his face just avoiding the brick wall as he dropped. Falling until landing on soft grass and rolling head over heels towards the sounds of cars.
The sirens and the factory were on one side of him, the M8 on the other. It made for an easy but crazy choice. He got to his feet, finding an ache in his right leg that almost matched the one in his back, and scanned the lanes in front of him. The traffic had thinned out a bit but was still scarily busy. He pulled up the hood on his fleece till it covered as much of his head and face as possible then waited, swallowed hard, and ran. He was halfway, still alive, still hurting, still scared. He halted then ran again. Into the middle and climbing over the barrier. Drivers were blasting their horns furiously but a gap came and he hurtled into the traffic once more, not daring to look until he made it across.
In Place of Death Page 23
