Dead Centre

by Andy McNab

  ‘I can help you, Nick. But you have to help me to stop those crazy people from hurting your loved ones. Go home and call me tomorrow at midday. I will have some good news, I promise.’

  19

  I FOUND THE number for a minicab firm outside the railway station. Fifty minutes later I was rattling round the ring road in the 911, following signs for the bridge. I hit the Bluetooth and synched up the iPhone, checking the occasional set of headlights in the rear-view.

  I rehearsed tomorrow’s speech to Nadif in my head. I’d be phoning with good news. I could raise maybe thirty thousand dollars within the next couple of days. How was that for good faith? Very soon, my very small flat would go on the market, even though I’d only just bought it.

  I’d be able to make some money, I’d tell him, but I had a mortgage of just over £100K to repay. I should be able to clear another £45K, but the way the market was, it would take time. Maybe I could try to remortgage. Janet and Justin’s families were working hard to raise money. I was showing trust; I was showing commitment. I would get the money together, come what may.

  In the meantime, I really needed Nadif to keep them alive. I needed him to let me speak to them. A man with his influence must be able to help me do those things.

  My Breitling had me coming out of the city and onto the motorway at just past five a.m. I dialled Frank, expecting him to be engaged. Ant and Dec would be phoning about now to say I was heading back towards Hereford.

  I had to carry on managing his expectations. Apart from anything else, I didn’t want him to go his own way. He was already following my every move. What else might he be up to? When people start fucking about with the system, hostages get killed.

  It rang just twice before a voice barked from the speakers: ‘Yes?’

  ‘All indications are that they’re still breathing. I’ve made contact with someone I think can broker the deal.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Have you spoken to them? Arrange the exchange. I can have the money ready in—’

  ‘Stop. It doesn’t work like that. Where are you? We must meet. I need to tell you what’s happening, and what to do next. I’m not going to do that on an open line.’

  There was another pause.

  ‘How good are the indications? Are you able to get them back?’

  Either he hadn’t heard or he wasn’t listening.

  ‘I’m not talking on the mobile. We need to meet.’

  ‘I am in France. I will send my jet to London.’

  ‘Can’t you come to me? It’ll be quicker. The clock’s ticking.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘There is something happening here that I cannot cancel. How long until you can get to the airport?’

  ‘Three hours, maybe. Less if I get picked up at Bristol airport.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘B-R-I-S-T-O-L. It’s in the south-west.’

  ‘Someone will call to arrange this.’

  ‘One more thing …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Call off your guys. You don’t need to check up on me. I’m only letting them stay with me because they’re yours. It’d be a lot easier for me if you lose them. I’m not going to let you down, because I’m not going to let her down. I’m not going to leave them in the shit. So just call them off, yeah? They’ll only fuck things up.’

  It took him a moment to digest this too.

  ‘I have no one following you, Nick. Why would I? Why do you think I chose you? You say you can lose them, so do it. Whatever it takes. I do not want any of my enemies to interfere with this.’

  He ended the call.

  I pulled off the motorway at the next exit and headed back the way I’d come. I rang Nadif. His phone was turned off. At least, I hoped it was.

  Frank’s enemies were now my enemies. He probably wasn’t short of them, but the only ones I knew about came from Tbilisi.

  20

  Saturday, 19 March

  06.40 hrs

  IT WAS LIGHT by the time the taxi dropped me off. This time I got the driver to take me to the other end of Barratt, so I could walk the last three blocks. As we drove past the turning, I looked to my left. A couple of people in work clothes were getting into their cars.

  ‘Just here, mate. This’ll do.’

  I paid him off and headed back towards Ali’s place. I could soon see the shop front about thirty metres down on the left. What little sunlight there was glinted on the display window and the roof of a car parked beside it. There was no sign of any shiny rental C-class Merc.

  I got out my iPhone and tried Nadif one more time as I turned in towards the blue door.

  I grabbed the lion’s head knocker to give it a couple of bangs, just to let him know I was there. The door opened towards me a couple of centimetres.

  As nonchalantly as I could, I let go of the knocker and stepped aside so I could see through the gap. I eased it further open with my finger. The D-bar was locked. I could see a little way up the stairs, as far as I needed to. A Burberry-slippered foot was just visible at the top. I hoped the rest of him was still attached.

  I eased the blue door towards me until it looked like it was shut. A couple of brightly dressed African women came out of the shop laden with milk, bread and papers. They passed me, jabbering away in a dialect I didn’t recognize. I stayed where I was, as if Nadif was just about to answer the door. A couple of trains passed each other at the other end of the street. Traffic whipped along the elevated section a couple of hundred metres away.

  Once the women had disappeared, I stepped back onto the pavement and went into Ali’s emporium. It was full of plastic stuff I hadn’t known I needed: cans of dodgy-sounding fizzy drinks and cat food; plastic flowers and bottles of cleaning fluid with Greek labels. I went straight to the kids’ section. For a quid, I picked up a twelve pack of felt-tip pens, a bit thicker than ordinary biros, in a plastic case with a picture of Shrek on the front. I grabbed some rubber gloves on the way to the till.

  The woman behind the counter was deep in conversation on the phone about the trouble in Libya as she marked up front pages full of it for the paper rounds. Her brother-in-law’s family lived in Benghazi and she was worried sick. I didn’t interrupt. I put a two-pound coin on the counter with a sympathetic smile and loaded the stuff into a carrier myself.

  As soon as I was outside, I ripped Shrek’s head off with my teeth and pulled out a pen. By the time I got to Nadif’s door, I’d also pulled off the cap at the end opposite the nib. I didn’t look around for Ant and Dec, or anyone else. I had to look natural. I had my back to passers-by. They wouldn’t be able to describe anything about me except my height, hair colour and clothes.

  I eased the door open far enough to expose the bike lock. There was no point mincing about. I jammed the open end of the pen into the circular key well. Gripping the bar with my left hand, I pushed the pen and twisted. Two turns and the lock fell apart.

  I pushed the grille open and slipped inside. I closed the main door behind me. I looked up at the little I could see of Nadif as I put on the rubber gloves. The one contact I had was now history. I dropped the packaging into the carrier bag and shoved it down my sweatshirt.

  Nadif’s body, what was left of it, came into view as I moved up the stairs. He lay sprawled across the small landing. There wasn’t that much blood on the carpet but his sweatshirt was covered with it. A tea-towel had been rammed into his gaping mouth, probably to stop him being heard as one of his steel ballpoint pens was forced through his right eardrum and driven into his brain.

  The rooms had been ripped apart. My bundle of cash was scattered across the carpet, along with the papers, books and Mac screen. They’d been after something more important.

  I checked Nadif’s pockets for the keys and his mobile. Nothing. The rubber gloves were now wet and red as I lifted his right arm and turned him over. He had been punctured seven or eight times with a narrow blade into the lower stomach. Some of his gut had spilt out. Ant and Dec we
ren’t fucking about. They knew exactly how to inflict maximum pain.

  The second steel pen was embedded in his left eye. The eyeball was still in place but the vitreous fluid had drained out.

  Why hadn’t Ant and Dec locked the door? The keys were in his jeans pocket, in a thick pool of blood. They must have thought the door was on a latch instead of lever locks, and only realized once they had closed the D-lock. Or maybe they just didn’t give a fuck.

  I went and locked both doors. Because of the shitty double-glazing I didn’t have any other way of escaping now, but if Ant and Dec decided to come back at least I’d buy myself a few minutes to reflect on how badly I’d fucked up.

  Avoiding the blood, I climbed over Nadif. He didn’t smell yet. But that wouldn’t take long.

  First things first. I checked the kitchen. The teapot wasn’t on the tray, but the glasses were. They, too, went into the bag inside my sweatshirt. One of them carried my DNA.

  I got to my knees and started pulling out the shit from under the sink that Ant and Dec hadn’t already pulled out during their search. It hadn’t taken Nadif long to retrieve that phone last night. It had to be close to hand.

  I pushed at the panels round the sides and the back of the unit, then lifted the once-white Formica sheet at its base. I was rewarded with a Tupperware box containing three small grey mobiles and a charger. There were also five Lebara SIM cards, still embedded in their credit-card-sized plastic mounts. They’re cheap. Immigrants use them to phone their families back home – or to call their clan leaders.

  I hit the power button on each one in turn. They were SIMed up and had a bar or two of signal. I checked my iPhone and got ready with the numbers.

  I called Crazy Dave on one of the phones. It rang several times before transferring to his messaging service. I cut away. I rang again. Still no answer.

  I tried Jan next. That went straight to voicemail too. I cancelled.

  Then I keyed in Jules’s number.

  It rang three times.

  ‘Anything on those names yet, mate?’

  He was even more hesitant than yesterday. ‘Not yet, but I’m checking every day.’

  ‘OK, can you keep on it? Got to go. Just thought I’d check.’

  No point getting him sparked up for nothing. Ant and Dec didn’t know about him. They hadn’t been in-country in time to cover our meet at Cheapside. But they had been with me in Hereford. Even if they hadn’t seen me with Jan, they would now have her number. It had to be on the mobile that was missing. They wouldn’t have mine. It was a blocked number. But had they followed me to Crazy Dave’s? They must have.

  I hoped Jan was waking up in someone else’s bed on the other side of town, and Crazy Dave was rattling down an autoroute in his Popemobile.

  I pressed the tools on all three machines until I found Calls Made. They’d all registered international calls, and to one area. The code was 252. It had to be Somalia. I’d know soon enough, but right now I was looking for a call made at about two o’clock this morning. I scrolled down on the third and finally found it. 252 again.

  I switched it off and slid it into my jeans, then fished out the carrier bag and added the other two to the Shrek and rubber-glove packaging. I had to tuck my sweatshirt into my jeans to take the weight.

  A baby screamed in one of the nearby houses and a mother screamed back just as loudly.

  I took a badly stained, almost stiff tea-towel and wiped down the bike lock and the grille door. I felt sorry for Nadif. We’d only had one brew together, but I’d quite liked the poor fucker.

  Ant and Dec wanted what I had. They appeared to be the only things of value in this shit-heap, now that the Mac had bitten the dust. I certainly wasn’t hanging around to see if there was anything more. That phone number was all I needed.

  I unfastened the security gate and unlocked the front door. I stood for a moment inside the threshold, listening for voices or footsteps.

  Nothing.

  It was fuck-it time.

  I opened the door just enough to slip through, relocked both barriers and wiped the outside as best I could. The tea-towel and washing-up gloves went into the carrier bag too.

  Head down, hands in pockets, I walked back the way I’d come. I didn’t know or care where I was going. I just wanted to be lost in the maze of terraces and alleyways.

  21

  BACK IN THE 911, I headed across the Severn Bridge into Wales. A service station had fitted me out with a thin green fleece and a blue acrylic jumper.

  The bag of goodies was on the seat next to me. The car was in Tiptronic mode so I could focus on sorting out the mobiles. I turned them both on, to identify which one I’d used to call Jan and Crazy Dave. I kept the one with the Somali number in my pocket.

  I was soon through Chepstow and on the Pontralis road. The car swung from side to side. I needed to make distance but only had one hand on the wheel.

  I rang Crazy Dave.

  Still nothing.

  I tuned in to Radio Wyvern. Hereford was now about nine miles away. I caught the nine a.m. news. No doleful announcements of the violent murder of a Hereford woman or a disabled man in the early hours of this morning.

  I tried Crazy Dave once more. This time I got a dial tone. Non-UK.

  ‘What?’

  Simon and Garfunkel wailed in the background. Something about Cecilia breaking their hearts.

  ‘Dave, it’s Nick.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I fucking told you, didn’t I? What do you want?’

  ‘Nothing, mate.’

  ‘Well, fuck off, then.’

  Jan’s phone went straight to voicemail again. Perhaps she was doing what Cecilia had done.

  I crossed the bridge towards Ross-on-Wye and parked up at Asda by the river. It was a five-minute walk to the flats. I’d done it a million times before the old camp at Stirling Lines had made way for an executive housing estate.

  I redialled Jan a couple more times on Nadif’s mobile, with the same result. If she wasn’t at home, I was going to have to start searching.

  St Martin’s Church stood at about the halfway mark. Many of my friends were buried there. I always thought about them when I passed, but not today. I needed another word with Crazy Dave.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dave, it’s me again.’

  Bob Dylan had taken over from Simon and Garfunkel.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Jan? You know, Tracy’s sister? You know where she works, or where she might be today?’

  Dave didn’t miss a beat. ‘Who the fuck do you think I am? The fucking Yellow Pages?’

  ‘What about her mates – do you know any of them?’

  ‘I’m trying to have a new life here. Remember what I said?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  The flats, a collection of three-storey rectangular blocks, were on an uphill stretch to my right. The grass around them was neatly trimmed. The cream rendering looked in much better condition than I remembered.

  Jan lived on the ground floor, far right, at the back. There was no C-class Merc in sight. I wasn’t surprised. It would have stuck out like a sore thumb.

  A couple of kids kicked a ball between them as their mum tried to open the main security door. She was laden with shopping and a pushchair, and had to use a knee. She called over her shoulder, ‘You staying out?’

  They didn’t answer, just kept on kicking the ball. She got the message.

  I quickened my pace but stayed out of her line of sight. A stranger entering the block would register.

  I grabbed the steel handle as the door closed behind her and held it open a second or two to give Mum time to move out of the hallway.

  I turned right down the corridor. I wanted the last door on the left.

  The place had definitely had a facelift. Bright strip-lights showed off the newly painted walls. The 1960s doors with frosted panels had been replaced by solid wooden ones with on-trend steel
furniture.

  I gave Jan’s a gentle knock. There was no bell. The intercom at the front entrance did that job. There was no letter-box either.

  I knocked again, this time a little harder and with my ear to the wood. The loudest thing I heard was a muffled shout from the two kids outside.

  One more knock. Still nothing.

  I walked outside. The footballers were sitting on the grass with the ball between them. I glanced around. There was nowhere out here she could have hidden a set of keys.

  I followed the block round to the back. Her curtains were closed. There was no sign of life. Maybe she really had played away last night.

  22

  AMONG THE FOREST of Sky dishes that had sprouted along the wall there were two small bird boxes. One was by her bedroom – or what I remembered as her bedroom.

  I pushed my hand inside the hole, felt around inside and heard a metallic clink. Old habits die hard. One was a plastic fob to enter the security door, the other an ordinary pin tumbler.

  The footballers looked ready to take an early bath. I walked past and pressed the fob. The door opened. I opened the flat door slowly. I didn’t call out. As soon as I saw the state of the place I knew I didn’t need to. The hallway was strewn with coats and newspapers. Every drawer of the sideboard she used to keep the kids’ clothes in – the ones that didn’t fit in the bedroom – had been tipped out.

  I closed the door with an elbow and headed for the bedroom.

  Her dress and underwear were on the floor, alongside her shoes. Next to them was a pair of jeans and a blue-striped shirt. Their owner was still in bed. The duvet he was lying on was covered with blood. He had puncture wounds in his neck and chest.

  I moved on to the living room. It had been ripped apart. Jan was sitting naked on the floor, her top half slumped over the sofa. She hadn’t been as beautiful as her sister for a good few years. Now she looked a whole lot worse. Her back was a riot of stab wounds and bruises. The carpet was soaked with blood. Like Nadif, she had been gagged with a tea-towel. Her face was black and swollen. There were splits in the skin above and beside her eyes. Part of an ear lay on the cushion beside her. The blood that had run down her neck and shoulders was dry.