by Rashad Salim
She had a point but I still didn’t like it. “I just don’t want them to know we’re onto them for sure now.”
“Maybe you two should keep your distance from the warehouses,” Sajid said.
I glanced at the alleyway. We were still over fifty feet away. I looked around for CCTV cameras but couldn’t spot any.
Sajid came closer and led the way alongside a nearby wall where the ground was covered with tall weeds. We walked roughly twenty feet further until we had a good view of the alleyway. Sajid stopped and motioned for us to do so too.
“We need to find out who owns that warehouse, right?” I asked them both.
Chantelle crept a little closer while staying low.
“You have to admit this is quite exciting, eh?” Sajid whispered to me and winked.
“This is just an adventure to you, ain’t it?” I said sternly and careful so that Chantelle didn’t hear. “Now what about those fucking warehouses?”
“There’s no telling from here. Even if you go right up to them, there’s no way. They all look the same. None of them have signs.”
He was right. I rushed towards Chantelle and grabbed her again.
“What?” she asked, more annoyed than I thought was fair. Before I could speak, she added, “If you’re too scared to take a better look, why don’t you go back to the car?”
I was breathing hard because of all the tension in what we were doing. She was right about me being scared but I was adamant about not backing out until I discovered some more clues about who owned the CCTV camera.
I called out to Sajid. “Go back to the car. We’re gonna see what we can find out.” I glanced at Chantelle for a second. “If anything happens to us, call the police.”
He looked at Chantelle and then at me. He didn’t argue, simply nodded and dashed back to his car.
“Let’s go,” I said to Chantelle and led the way.
45
Chantelle and I made our way to the entrance of the alley as quietly and as carefully as possible. When we were roughly ten feet away from the alleyway I heard a noise – movement within the alley – that stopped me in my tracks. Chantelle also froze.
She was a little ahead of me, leading the way and didn’t bother turning to meet my gaze. If she did, she’d have seen how scared I was.
Before I could croak out a warning to her, she suddenly rushed into the alleyway, leaving me behind.
“Who is that?” Her voice echoed in the dark.
I braced myself for the possibility the warehouse owners were about to emerge from the shadows and give me a heart attack.
It turned out the area hadn’t been as isolated as I had assumed upon arrival but it wasn’t the site owners who stepped out to reveal their presence.
A boy and girl in their teens jumped out from behind a dumpster with their backs to us and ran away, laughing and howling as they did.
I took a deep breath and watched them get further away. Memories of Chantelle and me in school came flooding back to me in that moment. We used to fool around like that too except we never went to anywhere as shady as where we were now.
Chantelle didn’t comment on who we had just seen. I had foolishly assumed she had recalled our younger selves too.
“Let’s hurry,” I said. I didn’t want to be on the industrial site any longer.
“Where’s the camera?” she asked and scanned the walls around us.
I searched our surroundings and after around a minute I finally found what I believed was a CCTV camera.
I pointed it out for Chantelle.
“Fucking sly bastards,” she said, staring at it.
We were studying a grill on the warehouse wall. It was around ten to twelve feet high and at the centre was what I believed to be a dark lens.
“Just think what else and who else they must have filmed?” she asked.
I said nothing. They’ve got us now, I wanted to say.
The sound of a car horn disturbed the silence and I spun around.
It was Sajid’s car horn. He had one hand out the car window and was gesturing for us to return.
“Fuck! Someone’s coming,” Chantelle said.
I glanced at the dirt road we had taken to get to the warehouses and saw a Land Rover-type vehicle coming down. Sajid’s car was a good hundred feet away from us. He was parked near a line of bushes and there was a van parked behind him. Sajid had his lights off and the car didn’t look too suspicious but it was out of reach for us.
I grabbed Chantelle by the arm. “We better hide.”
She didn’t argue.
We ran away from the warehouses, doing our best to keep low and ran down a bumpy hillside near us that would get us out of sight from our positions at the edge of the alleyway.
My heart raced as we sprinted to our hiding place and once we got down I prayed no one had spotted us.
We lay low and stuck our heads above brow of the hill to watch who had arrived.
When the vehicle reached the warehouse I saw it was a black Land Cruiser. The driver stopped the jeep besides the warehouse entrance but kept the headlights on. The doors opened and two men stepped out from both sides of the vehicle.
It was a dark night but the headlights illuminated the entire warehouse front allowing us to see the two men clearly.
“That little mother...” I was so blown away at who I was looking at I couldn’t think straight.
I couldn’t even breathe.
It was Anil and Vinod.
46
“What are they saying?” Chantelle whispered.
Anil was barking instructions to Vinod in Hindi. I told her he wanted Vinod to open the warehouse shutter.
Vinod went over to the shutter and fumbled around for a while. He couldn’t get it open and Anil cursed him with a string of insults. Anil shouted the driver to come out and help Vinod.
When the driver stepped out I saw it was Rishi, the man in his forties who, along with Vinod, worked for Anil’s father at their convenient store on Binford Lane.
Rishi unlocked the shutter with Vinod and the two of them lifted it wide open. Vinod went inside and switched on the warehouse lights.
I gasped.
“What is it?” Chantelle asked.
There was a blue car with tinted windows parked inside the warehouse right at the entrance. I had seen it before.
It was the same car driven by the gunmen who shot at me and Tyrone when I was questioning him.
Anil barked some more at his two henchman but I was too far away to make out what was being said. Judging by their body language I assumed he was ranting at them, telling them off for whatever reasons he had.
Rishi and Vinod listened without interrupting Anil.
When he was done being yelled at, Rishi went back to the Land Cruiser and killed the engine before running back to the warehouse. Once he was inside, he and Vinod lowered the shutter back down. The last I saw of Anil he was shaking his head at the two of them.
The industrial site was dark again. It was a poorly lit area and I was glad for it now.
Chantelle and I crawled back down until we were completely out of sight from where Anil’s crew were. We lay on our fronts for a moment and did not speak, both of us trying to figure out just what the hell was going on.
“That was Anil, right?” she asked.
I took a deep breath and grabbed her by the arm. “Come on. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
We ran as fast as we could all the way back to Sajid’s car.
“What happened?” Sajid asked us when we got inside and slammed the doors shut.
“That fucking motherfucker Anil!”
“What?” Sajid asked. “What he do now?”
I looked at him. “Where’s your gun?” I didn’t know exactly what I would do with it once I got it.
He said nothing and looked at Chantelle in the backseat.
“Give me your gun,” I said, feeling more impatient by the second.
“Why?” he asked calmly.
<
br /> “We need to get away from this place,” Chantelle said, fiddling with her phone.
“What the fuck did you see?” Sajid asked us.
“It was Anil,” I said. I was panting now. “That motherfucker, I swear I’m gonna kill him!” I struggled to get my breathing back to normal and decided to save my breath. “And you know when I was talking to Tyrone outside the house party and that car drove past shooting at us?”
“Yeah?”
“That was him! Anil!” I pointed at the warehouse. “The car was parked inside!”
“You serious?” He was just as shocked as I was. “No way, bre! No fucking way!” It was sinking in now.
“Anil and his fucking crew, Rishi and Vinod were in that car. He was probably driving. No way he knew how to fire a gun.”
“Don’t forget, he did miss!” Sajid pointed out.
I shook my head in disbelief. “And all that time I thought it was Tyrone’s enemies shooting at him and I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Just drive, Sajid,” Chantelle said. “Get us the fuck out of here.”
Sajid started the car and we began leaving the industrial site.
I looked over my shoulder at Chantelle. “He blackmailed Thom with the CCTV footage, right?”
Her jaw was tight and she nodded, still fiddling with her phone.
“That means he was likely to have blackmailed Carl and Marcus too,” I said.
“Yeah,” Chantelle said. “Like I told you.” She looked out of her window avoiding my gaze.
I turned back around and faced Sajid. “That fucking bastard! He killed Mark...” I put a hand on my heart to calm myself down. I felt like I was going to explode.
“He got them to petrol bomb your shop ‘cause of Seema?” Sajid asked.
I was suddenly wary of Chantelle hearing where this conversation was going.
“It can’t be,” I said. “I hadn’t seen or heard from her in years, not sinc-”
“You escaped us all,” Chantelle said.
Sajid and I exchanged looks. He shrugged.
“There’s no way he would’ve known about me being at the store. I had kept a low profile when I came back.”
“Then why your branch?” Chantelle asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Sajid asked her. “High street wars. He was taking out the competition.”
It was an obvious motive. One I had overlooked because of the arson being linked to a gang. “Fucking hell, why didn’t I think of that before?”
“Don’t blame yourself, bre. No one would’ve known. I doubt the cops know this.”
“No, they don’t,” I said, remembering Chantelle’s apprehension about talking to them. I looked over my shoulder at her.
Her eyes met mine. I pleaded silently that she go to the police now.
“Can you please drop me off home, Sajid?” she asked him without taking her eyes off me. “It’s been a long day.”
He said he would and we drove in silence for a while.
We arrived outside Chantelle’s flat. She thanked Sajid and got out of the car.
I got out too so I could walk her to her front door but got the feeling she was trying to get away from me.
“Chantelle.”
“What?” she said without slowing her pace.
I grabbed her arm again for the millionth time this night and stopped her in her tracks. “You’re gonna tell the police, right?”
She said nothing and pouted.
“...About everything – the girl they raped, Thom being blackmailed, what we saw tonight?”
“We don’t know what we saw.”
“Oh, bullshit, Chantelle! It was Anil behind all this. Maybe his dad too. We can finally get him. Make him pay for what he did. All the lives he took!”
She sighed and seemed to relent.
“I’m serious, babe. You’re the only one who can do this.”
“I’ll think about it.”
I studied her for a moment and nodded.
I had gone to hell and back for this girl and felt like I had gotten no gratitude. But I couldn’t argue with her anymore. Not when I was under the belief there was a light at the end of all the bullshit the two of us had just been through – and still going through. Discovering Anil’s involvement in all these crimes had renewed my hopes for what was left of our futures.
“It’s not just about Thom, ya know. Don’t forget about Mark. Think about his sister.”
She nodded again and said goodnight before walking away.
I turned and got back in the car with Sajid.
“That little shit,” he said. “You realise he sent you that death threat because you were asking too many questions around here?”
I let my head fall and slumped in my seat. “Fucking cunt... I thought it was over Seema.”
“Might have been the sugar on top. The final straw for him.”
I was re-thinking everything that had happened since the store arson. Now that I knew Anil had a hand behind it all it changed everything. It all had a new meaning to it.
“...And if you just took your beating and fucked off forever he wouldn’t have come back at you with guns.”
I sighed. “Man, we really thought it was Tyrone’s fault... and they were actually after me.”
“You gonna tell him?”
“Nah,” I said, thinking about Tyrone’s corruption of Thom. “Fuck him.”
It was past midnight now and I told Sajid to drop me off at a local cab office. He parked outside.
“I’m sure Joe’s gonna want a word with Anil.”
The Lion Crew and their leader Joe had totally slipped my mind. It hadn’t occurred to me how both gang leaders would love to take Anil apart as much as I did.
“You ain’t gonna tell him, are you?” I asked.
He laughed. “Why not? Wouldn’t you mind Joe sorting him out?”
It was tempting but I reminded myself to go about this the right way. “Nah... let the cops handle it now.” That all depended on Chantelle. The ball was in her court for now.
47
The day after I discovered Anil had been responsible for Mark and Thom’s deaths, I had to go in to work. I cast Binford out of my mind as best as I could and tried to focus on the day-to-day life a world away from the malice of my hometown.
I didn’t bother calling Chantelle to remind her of her about telling the police what she knew. I decided to give her some time and hoped she would come to her senses soon enough.
The day after that I was at work when I got a call from Sajid around lunchtime.
Anil was dead. His main man Rishi too.
They had been killed the evening before. According to Sajid, they had been in that Land Cruiser of Anil’s when someone petrol bombed it. The two of them were roasted alive.
Sajid warned me to stay away this time. He said if the police found out what I discovered about Anil I would be the main suspect in his murder. Besides, there was no reason for me to keep digging – Mark’s killers were dead, right?
I told Sajid not to worry about me.
But I didn’t stop digging.
I still had a lot of questions and a few days after Anil’s death I phoned Seema.
She was very apologetic when she answered.
“I swear to god, Ali. I never knew he tried to shoot you!”
“How do you know about that?”
“I overheard him talking to his workers about it.” I assumed she was referring to Rishi and Vinod. “I swear on my mother’s life, Ali! I never knew he would do that. I told you how fucking mental he gets, didn’t I? He beat me up when he found out about me and you.”
It made me sick to hear listening to her. As if I had been implicit in what happened between us behind Anil’s back. “You okay?” I gripped the phone tighter.
She murmured a little too sensual. “Yeah, I’m fine. How are you?” This was a widow of a man murdered less than a week earlier.
I said nothing.
“You know, you don�
�t have to tell me anything. I won’t say anything, okay? You can trust me.”
“What you talking about?” I asked.
“I mean it. I don’t know about how it happened. And I don’t need to know why.”
I was confused. “What’s that suppose to mean...?” And then it hit me. “You think I had something to do with Anil’s death?”
“I don’t kn-”
“Fuck’s sake, Seema. I had nothing to do with it!”
This was not how I imagined the conversation would go.
“I don’t... look, I don’t care, okay? I know it sounds bad and makes me a bad wife but I don’t care...”
I wanted to ask her if she had ever loved Anil but thought against it. I didn’t call her to discuss her marriage.
“...He can’t beat me now,” she said.
I felt a pang of sympathy for her now that I knew where she was coming from. “Look, I need to know something. I need you to find out for me, okay?”
“What?”
“Can you do this for me, Seema? I need you to be strong.”
“What do you wanna know?”
From what I understood, Vinod was still alive and well. I needed to know what he knew and what Anil’s dad knew, for that matter too.
48
It didn’t take Seema as long as I thought it would for her to find out as much as she could about Anil’s motives and schemes. She got back to me two days later.
I was still in a daze about all that had happened to comprehend fully what Seema was so eager to share with me.
The death toll in Binford had risen to an unimaginable level but the local press didn’t connect Anil and Rishi’s murders to any of the other murders and I knew why.
The police didn’t know about Anil because Chantelle had not told them what she knew.
I hadn’t spoken to her since the night we went to the industrial site and made the shocking discovery. I decided to visit her a little over a week later on one evening I knew she’d most likely be at home.
This visit, I knew as I rang her doorbell, would be my last.
She opened the door and her eyes met mine. There was no telling what she was thinking. I knew she was still grieving over Thom and would for much longer.
