“Good”, said Terry. “And you’re planning to go and do it yourselves, are you?”
“Yes”, said Richard.
“I think I’ll come along and oversee, if it’s all right with you”, said Terry. “If you’d like that, that is. When can you get away to do it?”
The jubilation with which they greeted this announcement made him smile. “When?” he repeated.
“How about next weekend?” suggested Stephen. “No problem with getting out of school that way. I can cancel my cricket for the weekend — I’ll say my parents want to take me to see someone in London or something. Will you really come with us?” he asked excitedly.
Terry nodded, draining his glass. “Can you be sure of finding where this geezer hangs out?” he asked Stephen.
“I think so”, he said.
“Okay. We’ll meet in here at eight, Saturday night”, Terry said. “Now you boys get outa here. I gotta find some horses.” He picked up the paper he had fetched from the table at which he had been sitting when they had arrived, and ostentatiously stuck his nose in the racing page. The boys crept silently away, feeling slightly light-headed from a combination of elation, excitement, trepidation and too much lager, almost whispered their goodbyes as they went off to Richard’s house and each other.
* * *
“Sure you’ll recognize him?” asked Terry. Two seriously scared but determined faces turned whitely towards him and nodded in the faint glow from the nearest streetlamp.
“I’ve seen him in a photograph, and I don’t think I could forget that face”, muttered Stephen, fighting to suppress the fear that continuously made him want to leap out of the van and run into the nearest pub to drink a pint of lager, go to the lavatory, talk about cricket, do anything normal, mundane and unthreatening. He could feel his own heartbeat, racing wildly where his breast was pressed up against Richard in the passenger seat of Terry’s old Ford van. Richard was in a similar state, and he could feel him, too, trembling slightly — though whether it was from excitement or the same horrible, unmanning fear he didn’t know, and was afraid to ask.
“You kids all right?” asked Terry, sounding calm, almost bored. Two slightly tremulous voices assured him that they were fine. “Scared?” he asked casually.
“Y-yes, I am, a bit”, confessed Stephen, trying unsuccessfully not to let the chattering of his teeth be heard. “N-no”, said Richard at the same moment, making the same attempt, equally unsuccessfully. There was a chuckle in the darkness.
“That’s how I had it sorted”, he said. A match flared and fizzed suddenly. In the darkness and the silence and the heavy, crawling atmosphere in the van, pregnant with their combined fear, it sounded like an explosion, and both boys jumped out of their skins. Stephen felt his sphincter almost give way, and only just managed to repress a faint moan. Christ, he thought, that’s all I need. That’d really impress Terry boy, wouldn’t it now? What a way to win a reputation as a fighting man, shitting myself all over his front seat the first time I’m faced with action — and us three to one, at that.
“Well, you pass the first test”, said Terry quietly, and they could clearly detect the undercurrent of suppressed laughter in his tone. “If you’d both said you were scared, I’da called the whole thing off right then.” Stephen shrivelled internally at this public broadcasting of his cravenness. “And, by the same token”, went on Terry cheerfully, “if you’d both been too stubborn to admit it, I’da called the whole thing off right then, and there you have it. It panned out as I expected. You’ll be all right once it starts”, he added after a pause. “It’s always worse by far when you’re waiting for the action to start. Once you get moving you’ll find you’re too busy to think about more than one thing at a time. Don’t worry. And don’t worry about being scared. If you weren’t there’d be something wrong with you—and it’s the worst thing you can have wrong with you. I wouldn’t fight with someone who wasn’t scared.”
“You looked awfully scared in the pub with those two yobbos”, ventured Richard, a little piqued to realize how transparent a failure his attempts to conceal his fear had been.
Terry gave a short bark of a laugh, filling the cabin with the exhalation of smoke that accompanied it. “Those two? That wasn’t a fight, nor ever was gonna be one”, he said quietly. “First rule a fighting is, don’t. Second rule a fighting is, you gotta be able to tell the difference between people who’re gonna put up a real fight and those who’re nothing but wind and piss. Those two kids in the boozer were just small-time low-life slag, good at beatin the crap outa frightened kids half their size like the poor little sod they were after that day. Shit-fire! My friggin sister coulda taken them out without workin on it. No, you never wanna take a crap over someone that ain’t worth a wet fart. Save the loosening bowels for the one who’s worth crappin yourself over. I’d guess from what you’ve told me this guy tonight’s worth a coupla strains over the can, an maybe you wipe it with one sheet a toilet paper, just to make sure. I don’t think he’s gonna prove dangerous. Hush now — somebody’s comin.”
The atmosphere instantly became more highly charged. They were parked in the darkest point in a very expensive mews in South Kensington, about twenty yards from Andrew Tyldesley’s address, which Stephen, feeling rather despicable, had managed to worm out of Graham. They heard steps approaching, and a moment later a man, above middle height, a little flabby but nonetheless quite formidably built, came into sight round the slight bend in the mews that concealed them from the main road it led off. As he came closer his features became clearly visible in the light from the street-lamp. “That’s him”, muttered Stephen, feeling the churning of his innards approach crisis point. “Shall we go?” asked Richard in a strangled voice.
“Wait”, said Terry calmly. Still they sat tight, until the man was so close that the boys would have sworn that he could see them inside the old van.
When he was twenty paces short of his own front door, Terry gave the order. “All right, lads. Put your gloves and the hoods on. As he gets to the door, rush him. But stay calm, and don’t run, just jog up to him. He’ll never know a thing. And let me do the talking”, he added, slipping a hand to his mouth.
The three of them put gloves and black balaclava helmets on. By the time they had completed this the man was almost at his door. “Come on”, murmured Terry, and slid out of the van, pushing the door gently to behind him. The boys piled out on the other side.
The first Andrew Tyldesley knew of the attack on him was when, as he arrived at his front door, three figures materialized as if out of the fabric of the building, or out of the darkness itself. One moment he was alone, fishing for his key. The next he was surrounded by the three men, all enormous and heavily muscled, as it seemed to him, and all utterly terrifying in jeans, dark shirts or sweaters and, most appalling of all, black balaclavas, such as he had seen the IRA and other terrorists wearing on television. He froze to the spot, his hand clenching into a claw in his pocket. A dank, rank sweat suddenly broke from him in every single part of his body, the parts that normally sweated and the parts that didn’t alike. The sweat was so cold it felt almost as if it was freezing. His breath stuck in his throat, and he didn’t even notice that he wasn’t breathing. And if the boys had come close to evacuating themselves as they waited in the van, he came even closer. A thin dribble of thick, hot fluid did actually squirt into his pants before his bodily reflexes, taking over from his paralyzed conscious, could slam his sphincter closed. Not that he noticed that, either, until later.
“Open your door, quietly and calmly”, said a soft voice from the largest and most terrifying of the assailants. There was something strange about the voice: afterwards he thought that perhaps the man had suffered from a cleft palate, or a hare lip or some such disorder. For the moment he was too stricken by the most abject terror to think at all.
“Come on”, said the same voice, still very soft but taking on a terrible cutting edge of menace. “Open the door and go in. If you try to sl
am it, I’ll cut your throat.” Tyldesley managed to pull himself together to the extent of doing as his terrifying assailant ordered, and opened the door. They filed silently into the large and luxurious mews house. “Lights”, said the voice. Tyldesley flicked a switch, and the long main room was suffused with soft light.
The three menacing figures wasted no more than a second or two on a swift glance round the beautifully and expensively furnished apartment “Draw those curtains”, ordered the spokesman”, and the other two, who looked, now, quite a lot younger, ran to the windows and obeyed.
“What’s the most valuable object in this room?” asked the spokesman, still speaking very quietly through his impediment, whatever it was. “Don’t even think about deceiving me.” The menace was back in the voice, rippling and coiling sinuously into Tyldesley’s imagination. He pointed to a picture on the far wall, of a Roman goddess in armour. It glowed and pulsed and danced with subtle lights, and none of the three needed Tyldesley’s quavering information that it was by Rembrandt. “Genuine?” grated the spokesman. Tyldesley nodded. “Get it”, said the spokesman tersely to the taller of his henchmen. The man ran noiselessly to the wall, fiddled behind the picture and brought it to the leader. “Hold him”, ordered the leader to the other henchman. Tyldesley felt strong arms pinion him from behind.
“Gimme”, said the leader, and the taller henchman passed the picture over. The leader grasped it firmly halfway up each side of the frame, and held it out at arm’s length. He nodded to his assistant.
Stephen, hating what he was going to do, walked round to a position in front of Terry and the picture. He drew back his fist.
“NO!” screamed Tyldesley. The leader glanced his way, handed the picture back to his assistant, and stepped up to Tyldesley, who was now struggling wildly in his captor’s pinioning arms. He stopped struggling smartly enough, though, when the leader hit him very hard in the solar plexus. Then he simply flopped over, doubled in the other man’s arms, and if Richard hadn’t held onto him firmly he would have flopped to the floor, every morsel of breath cruelly expelled from his body by that terrible, paralyzing blow. The leader paid him no further attention, but motioned the other assistant to set the picture down against a chair. He did so. Then all three waited, one holding Tyldesley up, the others ranged in front of him.
“Door. Check” ordered the leader, and the taller acolyte scampered to the front door, opened it a crack and peeped out. He closed it silently, came quickly back, and shook his head.
The leader looked at Tyldesley and assessed that he was recovered enough to pay him attention. “Can you concentrate on what I say?” he asked. Tyldesley nodded, his eyes bugging out of his head to an extent that genuinely alarmed Stephen, watching from the security of his black anonymity. He wondered if they might actually bulge right out of his head. He imagined them popping out of their sockets and hanging bouncily down his cheeks on the ends of the thick, twisted cables of their optic nerves, boing, boinnngg, boinnnngggg.
“We’re not here to rob you”, said the leader in the thick, soft voice that he had used throughout. “We’re here to warn you. First I’m going to give you a choice. We’re here to teach you a lesson. You can have it yourself, or we’ll take it out on that picture there that you’re so obviously attached to. Which would you prefer?”
“Hit me, do anything”, cried Tyldesley. He was howling now, tears almost spurting from his eyes, and there was a long tendril of yellowy-grey snot running out of one nostril and squirming down his upper lip. “Do anything, but don’t hurt the painting. It’s a Rembrandt. Please, I beg you, have mercy on the picture. Do what you like to me, but Rembrandt never hurt you, whatever you’re doing this for. You can’t destroy something as beautiful as that because of something I’ve…” He broke off, overwhelmed and convulsed with hysterical tears.
Richard and Stephen were both feeling sick to their stomachs with disgust and revulsion at the spectacle, and both would gladly have ended it there and then. Not so the leader. He touched Stephen on the arm. “Hit him”, he said. He saw Stephen blench, saw the fastidious revulsion in his eyes, and his own glinted dangerously. “You’ve started this. Now you finish it”, he hissed into Stephen’s ear, so quietly that neither of the other two heard a word of it, but so ferociously that Stephen had no more idea of disobeying. He hardened his heart, aiding the process by thinking consciously of the misery Graham had suffered of late, and stepped in front of Tyldesley, still held firmly from behind by Richard. He signed to Richard to release him. As Richard did so he aimed a heavy, swinging punch at the point of Tyldesley’s jaw, hoping to finish the matter in one blow. Unfortunately the moment Richard let Tyldesley go he stumbled forward, and Stephen’s fierce right cross, instead of laying him out on the spot, made a fearsome mess of his left eye. He still went down as if pole-axed, however.
“Door”, said the leader. This time Richard cat-footed to the door, peeped out and came back putting a thumb up. The leader motioned him to the front and to Stephen to pick Tyldesley up. Richard had seen how much effect Stephen’s reluctance had had, so he didn’t even bother to offer any resistance. When Tyldesley was set on his feet again Richard hit him efficiently, as a man with an unpleasant task to get done, and Tyldesley’s lips were smashed and mangled against his teeth. There was a sharp cracking sound, astonishingly loud in the room, as one of his front teeth broke under Richard’s heavy blow.
“Hold him up”, said the leader. Both boys helped Tyldesley to his feet and held him up as Terry stepped up in front of him. Tyldesley’s terror and pain were so huge, beyond any imagination of fear and pain in his direst nightmares, that he had ceased to make any sounds of pain or protest above a terrible, piteous whimpering that wrung the boys’ hearts. Neither of them would have had the stomach to go on with it then.
“We want you to know that this is a common reward for blackmail”, said the fearsome leader, whom Tyldesley would see in nightmares for long afterwards, and associate for the remainder of his life with the true meaning of the word terror. “There’s only one more thing to say. If you make any further attempt to commit blackmail, of anyone at all, you’ll get the same again, but a hundred times harder. You think you’ve been hurt now. Well, you’ve been given a mild reprimand, which we hope and trust will teach you the lesson you need. If you try again, we’ll show you what pain really feels like. You and Rembrandt there. We’re sparing the picture — this time. Not next time; so you’d better make sure there isn’t a next time, hadn’t you? Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” Tyldesley nodded.
“Okay”, said the leader. “We’re going now. If you call the police, we’ll be back, though you’ll never know when or where we’re going to pop out from round a corner, or be waiting for you when you walk back in here. If there’s any more blackmail, we’ll be back for you and Rembrandt. If you behave yourself, on the other hand, you’ll never see us again. Your choice.” He turned away, and Tyldesley’s face crumpled in relief. As he was beginning the long, agonizing process of relaxing, the leader turned with a fast, economical movement and hit him again in the same place as before, a deadly, killing blow which might indeed have killed if he had not pulled it slightly at the last moment to rob it of the last crucial fraction of its power. Tyldesley crumpled under it like a sheet of thin cardboard, and dropped almost without a sound into a broken, heaving tangle of loose limbs on the beautiful deep carpet. His bowels had opened in full by now, and a rank, noisome stench polluted the room.
The leader squatted beside him and shook and slapped him lightly with a black-gloved hand until he came to and raised his head. “Are we going to have any more trouble with you?” he asked gently.
Tyldesley, who was not without courage of a sort, was nowhere close to being able to cope with such treatment. He looked up at Terry’s empty, pitiless, expressionless eyes through blinding tears of agony, indignity and terror, and shook his head. “N-n-no more t-t-tuh-tuh-rouble”, he said in an almost inaudible, gargling moan. His bloodied
, badly torn tongue flicked in and out to moisten his lips, leaving bubbles of blood, fragments of tooth and bloody scraps of flesh from his smashed lips and tongue on his mouth. “Nuh-nuh-no m-m-more t-t-t…” His right eye rolled up, the left now completely closed and swollen like a tennis ball, and he slumped into a faint.
Terry shook him ruthlessly until he came to again, gazing at the terrifying form from his one eye in a despair that was almost palpable. “Tell me the name of a friend, and his telephone number”, Terry said, shaking him again.
“T-t-tuh-tuh-Trevor V-v-Vick-Vickers”, croaked Tyldesley, and managed to stammer a number. “Check it”, ordered Terry. One of the boys ran to the telephone, found the directories and checked the number. He stuck a thumb up.
“We’re going now”, said Terry. “Don’t forget what I’ve told you.”
He led the way quickly to the door, peeped out to see that there was no-one about, and left, a black shadow into black shadow, into the night, followed by the other two. They were in the van in ten seconds. In ten more they were under way, easing the van out into the deserted road into which the mews ran. “Gloves and hoods”, said Terry, once they had put a quarter of a mile between themselves and the mews. They handed them over. “I’ll get rid a these”, he said. “By Christ, it’s a relief to get rid of this, too”, he added, spitting a large pebble into his hand and dropping it into one of the balaclavas. Thirty seconds later he pulled up beside a telephone call-box, slipped out, leaving the engine running, and made a call.
“He didn’t want to get out of bed at first”, Terry said, grinning as he got back in and pulled away. “But I managed to convince him, I think, so our friend back there should be getting some sort of assistance shortly.” He drove on in silence for a while. Then he said “You boys wouldna gone on with it back there, would you?”
Out of Bounds Page 25
