Soho Angel

by Greg Keen

  ‘Initially, a remote part of Algeria. Two years later he was moved to an island near the Philippines, where he spent nearly a decade. For the last eight years he has been living in a South American country. You’ll forgive me if I don’t supply its name.’

  ‘Why did he take the Golden Road?’

  ‘The usual tedious reasons.’

  ‘What do you get out of it?’

  ‘We’re drifting towards a reef of specifics, Kenny. Let’s just say there are financial as well as philanthropic compensations for the organisation.’

  ‘And that’s where Castor Greaves is now? Hiding in South America?’

  ‘Correct. Although you almost certainly wouldn’t recognise him. A different lifestyle plus extensive cosmetic surgery have altered Castor’s appearance.’

  ‘What if he tells someone about the Golden Road?’

  ‘Who would believe him if he did?’

  ‘I’m guessing you haven’t managed to alter his DNA. All it would take is a drop of blood to prove who he really is.’

  ‘Which is one of the reasons he’s closely monitored. However, Castor is one of our more successful candidates and presents virtually zero flight risk.’

  ‘If Castor is so well tucked away, why’s the Golden Road concerned about me finding him? Surely there’s no danger of that happening.’

  A pause before George answered.

  ‘As you can imagine, the organisation is publicity-averse and you’ve created quite a bit of publicity over the last few days. We’re currently working with another candidate. It’s important nothing jeopardises her transit.’

  ‘Does that mean I get to go home now?’

  ‘Not before I’m absolutely happy that you have appreciated the gravity of your situation. Alex, would you please take Mr Gabriel to the chute?’

  Alex secured my legs with a thicker version of the nylon tie constricting the blood supply to my hands. He hauled me over his shoulders, carried me across the floor and laid me between the walls of the chute. The rough concrete reeked of the shit and blood of the animals that had met their ends there. The winch chain lowered and something hooked around my ankles. I was hoisted until my head was parallel with the tops of the walls. Coins fell out of my pockets and clattered over the floor.

  ‘Sorry about this, Kenny,’ George said. ‘But I have to be entirely convinced that you really are going to stop looking for Castor Greaves. Otherwise I’ll have no other option than to . . . Let’s just say that I have to be absolutely sure, shall we?

  ‘The orange contraption you’ve probably noticed is a static bolt gun. It hadn’t been used for over a decade and the mechanism had become rusted. Fortunately Alex is a savant when it comes to repairing mechanical instruments. Sourcing the bolts for such an old model turned out to be the difficult part. Thankfully, eBay came to our rescue. Alex, could you give Mr Gabriel a demonstration, please?’

  A small watermelon was balanced on a wall about eighteen inches from my head. Alex dropped something into the gun’s chamber and positioned it. The air was filled with flying flesh and black seeds, several of which spattered against my face.

  ‘Of course, the result is different on a cow or a horse,’ George said. ‘The bolt remains in the brainpan of the beast. Exactly what it would do to a human head, I’d prefer not to find out. But that’s entirely up to you, Kenny.’

  Alex wiped the sticky gunge from my face. He replaced the used cartridge and positioned the muzzle of the gun three inches from the centre of my forehead.

  ‘Have you ever come across visual accessing clues, Kenny? It’s a method psychologists have developed to tell whether a person is lying or not.’

  ‘All that NLP stuff is psychobabble bullshit,’ I said, echoing Odeerie’s sentiments. ‘As far as I’m concerned, the search for Castor Greaves is over.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right and maybe you aren’t,’ George said. ‘Although I’m afraid it’s all I have to go on right now, so I’ll ask you the question and Alex will decide whether he believes you. Are you going to stop searching for Castor Greaves?’

  I couldn’t remember whether looking left or right constituted a constructed truth (aka a lie) or whether it was the other way round. And of course I was upside down, which meant that the positions might be reversed. Not that I could be sure that Alex would take this into account anyway. I stared directly into Donald Trump’s face and tried to sound as sincere as possible. Not hard under the circumstances.

  ‘I have zero intention of looking for Castor Greaves.’

  The next few seconds were the longest of my life. If Alex didn’t believe me then they would also be the last.

  ‘No fucking way,’ he said eventually.

  And then he pulled the trigger.

  I screamed and writhed on the end of the clanking chain. Still breathing. Still alive. Either the bolt had missed, which seemed improbable, or the gun had misfired. Death delayed rather than denied. Alex would reload, make a couple of adjustments, and then it would be lights out for real.

  George put me right on that.

  ‘Congratulations, Kenny,’ he said. ‘Most men would have soiled themselves in similar circumstances. You appear to have avoided that indignity.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ I shouted, although there was barely any volume to it. The pressure in my head was so great that it felt as though my eyes were about to pop out.

  ‘In case you were wondering,’ George said, ‘Alex used a blank cartridge. However, fail to keep your word, and next time you won’t be invited to your own murder. The job will be done as it’s usually done: efficiently and anonymously.’

  I attempted another obscenity. All that emerged was a croak.

  ‘No need to thank me, Kenny. It’s been a pleasure, but hopefully for your sake we won’t meet again.’

  The tannoy screeched and fell silent.

  Alex slashed the nylon tie around my legs with a knife that looked as though he’d borrowed it from Tarzan. My wrists he left bound. Being suspended upside down for ten minutes and taken to the brink of death isn’t great for your mental or physical well-being, with or without a brain tumour. It took five minutes for the shock to subside and the blood to redistribute around my system before I could be frogmarched out of the building.

  Darkness had properly gathered, although there was a full moon. Trees surrounded the slaughterhouse on both sides. It wouldn’t take long to identify its location online, although would there be any point? No doubt George and Alex had taken every precaution not to leave any evidence behind.

  I lay in a foetal position in the freezing Transit and tried to keep warm. I also tried to process what had happened. Was Castor Greaves living in Paraguay courtesy of the Golden Road, or had the story and the night’s events been specifically concocted to stop me looking for him? The van began to slow fifteen minutes after leaving the abattoir. It came to a halt and the engine was turned off. It hadn’t been nearly enough time for us to get back to Brewer Street. Fear blossomed in my stomach like a malign flower. Alex pulled the back doors open, still wearing the Trump mask.

  We were in a layby on a deserted country road. In the distance I could hear the sound of fast-moving traffic. Alex’s knife was out. He scraped its edge first against my left cheek and then my right before holding its needle-sharp tip against my throat.

  ‘You’re lucky to get a second chance, arsehole,’ he said, and allowed the point to sink in for emphasis.

  A trickle of blood slalomed down my neck. Then the knife was removed and used to cut through the nylon tie around my wrists. My hands were numb from the cold and the paucity of blood. I held them under my armpits in an attempt to warm them up.

  ‘M25’s over there,’ Alex said. ‘You can hitch into town.’

  He walked around the side of the Transit and got into the driver’s side. The engine started up and the van eased out of the layby. Within seconds its tail lights had disappeared from view. I stomped around on the track, swore loudly to combat the encroaching pain in my fingers, a
nd vomited into a nettle patch.

  Then I began to trudge towards the motorway.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I’d only been on the motorway fifteen minutes when a Dutch guy delivering a lorry-load of cut flowers picked me up and took me as far as Greenwich. From there I took a taxi to Brewer Street. The first thing I did was pour myself a quintuple Monarch; the second thing I did was call Odeerie. No answer, which was peculiar as the fat man tends to stay awake until at least two in the morning. I texted him to give me a call as soon as possible, and then settled down to try to drink myself to sleep.

  While the finest Scotch a tenner can buy did its best to calm my jangling nerves, I reviewed the last few days in an effort to identify who I’d seen or what I’d done that would warrant someone dry-firing a stun gun at my head in an attempt to warn me off. Whatever it was hadn’t surfaced by the time I stumbled to bed.

  I woke at seven thirty with the kind of headache only whisky and brain tumours provide. Had the vision in my left eye not been quite so terrible, I’d have gone back to sleep. As it was like peering through frosted glass, I opted to keep my appointment at St Michael’s and hauled myself out of my pit.

  Odeerie rang while I was outside the hospital’s main building having a Marlboro prior to checking in at reception.

  ‘Where were you last night?’ I asked.

  ‘In bed,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to get into a better sleep routine.’

  ‘Remember the mysterious email?’ I said.

  ‘The one saying you’d get more info at six p.m.?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  I ground out my fag end and took the fat man through the previous night’s events. He interrupted a couple of times to make sure that he’d heard correctly, but I had the story covered off by the time I was due to enter the building.

  ‘You need to go to the police,’ was his verdict.

  ‘And say what? That I willingly accepted the invitation of a mythical organisation to find out the whereabouts of a rock star who’s been dead for twenty-odd years?’

  ‘That whoever it was threatened to murder you.’

  ‘Shaheen thought I was nuts when I told him someone tried to drown me at Pegler’s Wharf. If I start banging on about Donald Trump masks and disused slaughterhouses, he’ll have me arrested for wasting police time.’

  Odeerie breathed heavily. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘But why would someone want us off the job so badly?’

  ‘Because they think we’re close to something.’

  ‘Which means they could come after me next.’

  ‘They’re not stupid, Odeerie. Harming you would bring attention.’

  No response from the fat man.

  ‘If I text you the van’s registration, can you run a search?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, but why bother? I called Pam Ridley and told her that we’ve done as much as we can.’

  ‘You’re not curious, Odeerie?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course I am, but the plates are going to be false and you’ll be in hospital for quite a while, so what’s the point? And it sounds as though the Golden— as though these guys aren’t mucking around, Kenny. Maybe safest to let it slide.’

  ‘Are you sure about tracing the email? There’s no way to do it at all?’

  ‘It’s not completely impossible but it takes time, effort and luck.’

  ‘And could you take a look at disused abattoirs as well?’ I said. ‘It was within a fifteen-minute drive of Junction 5 on the M25. Place looked as though it had been abandoned for at least ten years, maybe longer.’

  ‘You’re not thinking of going back?’

  ‘Probably not, but it would be interesting to know where it is at least.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because two wankers strung me up and put a bolt gun to my head like I was a fucking animal, that’s why. And if there’s any way I can pay the bastards back then I’m taking it, regardless of the consequences.’

  An elderly gent in a chair and the medic who was wheeling him towards the main doors looked round at me. My angry rant had taken all three of us by surprise.

  ‘Okay, Kenny,’ Odeerie said. ‘Leave it with me.’

  They say that the older one becomes, the younger policemen appear to be. The same applies to consultant neurologists. Alison (call me Ali) McDonald didn’t seem to be much into her thirties. Curly dark hair fell as far as the collar of her jacket, and when she smiled a couple of dimples manifested in her cheeks. She was taller than me by a couple of inches and her Irish accent was easy on the ear.

  ‘You were out for about a minute on the roof, then?’ she said after I’d filled her in on my symptoms and the Emporium incident. I confirmed that was the case. ‘And there haven’t been any fainting incidents since?’ was her second question.

  ‘I’ve felt dizzy in the mornings, although I haven’t lost consciousness,’ I said.

  ‘But the vision in your left eye’s been affected?’

  ‘Only for about half an hour or so. And I could still see out of it.’

  ‘Did you have the same issues this morning?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Any nausea at all?’

  ‘A little, but it passed.’

  Ali reviewed the notes she’d made on her laptop. A wall clock with a loud tick read 10.18, which meant that we’d been in her consulting room almost fifteen minutes. I ran a finger around the inside of my collar. In common with the rest of St Michael’s Hospital, the room was stiflingly warm.

  Opting not to confess that the nausea might well have been due to having consumed half a bottle of Monarch the previous night, I told Ali that I’d been hearing, seeing and feeling things that almost certainly weren’t there.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘That’s actually quite rare but not unheard of.’

  ‘Is it due to the size of the tumour?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably. Here’s the image we took during your scan.’

  The wall-mounted screen above her head flickered into life. I’d expected Ali to slap a piece of film against it. Instead she pressed a couple of keys on her laptop and a monochrome image appeared that resembled a Rorschach inkblot.

  ‘If you look here you can see the mass,’ she said. ‘It’s benign, which is one of the reasons it has such well-defined borders.’

  The bleached white area stood out from the frogspawn grey.

  ‘Still looks pretty big,’ I said.

  ‘That’s why I’d like to operate as soon as possible,’ Ali said. ‘Although the tumour isn’t malignant, it will continue to grow. That’s going to mean increased pressure and could result in a stroke. To be honest, you’ve been fortunate to avoid that up to now. I’m going to increase the medication Dr Arbuthnot prescribed. That should cut down on some of the more unusual symptoms you’ve been having. Just to emphasise that you need complete rest, though, Kenny. No exertion whatsoever . . .’

  Did exertion include undergoing a mock execution in a disused abattoir by a guy wearing a Donald Trump mask? Probably.

  ‘When d’you suggest I come in?’ I asked.

  ‘Before the end of the week. You have comprehensive medical insurance, so that shouldn’t be a problem.’

  ‘How long will it take?’

  ‘Usually four to six hours. You’ll need a few weeks to recuperate and we may elect to do some radiotherapy pending the biopsy results.’

  ‘What’s the best outcome?’ I asked.

  ‘That the tumour is removed without complications and you make a successful and speedy recovery.’

  ‘And the worst?’

  ‘There’s a degree of bleeding.’

  ‘What would that mean?’

  Ali clicked the screen off and leant forward in her chair. ‘Partial or total loss of vision in your left eye, or even both eyes, might be a possibility,’ she said. ‘And there may be some physiological issues including fits, seizures and difficulty speaking.’

  ‘What about the absolute worst outcome?’

  ‘You’re asking
me whether it could prove fatal?’

  ‘That’s what I’m asking.’

  ‘I won’t lie to you, Kenny, this type of procedure is complex and it’s difficult to predict how it will unfold with any certainty. The chances of you not regaining consciousness are significant, although each case is unique to itself.’

  ‘My doctor said there was a ten per cent chance I wouldn’t make it.’

  I’d hoped that Ali would raise her eyebrows to indicate that Arbuthnot’s assessment had been wildly pessimistic. They remained neutral.

  ‘Mortality is less likely than likely, although there’s a chance it may occur. It might be an idea to make the appropriate arrangements before you come into hospital, if you haven’t done so already.’

  ‘Put my affairs in order, you mean?’

  Ali gave me a sympathetic smile. I stared at a large cowrie shell on her desk and wondered what would be left behind when I was gone. A wardrobe full of budget clothes, a few dozen records and a mermaid cigarette lighter whose nipples lit up when you depressed the tail. Except her batteries were flat.

  ‘What d’you want to do, Kenny?’ Ali prompted.

  ‘What choice do I have?’ I replied.

  Nothing quite like seeing an image of your brain to make a philosopher out of you. Particularly when it looks as though a chunk of it has been Tippexed over. Had Ali not expressly forbidden alcohol, I would have left St Michael’s, headed to the nearest pub and sunk a waga or six. Mercifully, she hadn’t said anything about cigarettes.

  I lit a Marlboro and considered my situation. Three days until I went under the knife. They might represent my final seventy-two hours on earth. How best to use them was the question. What were my chances of tracking down the abattoir twins? Not sensational, and Odeerie hadn’t exactly sounded certain about cracking the email. He’d be able to locate the slaughterhouse, though. If I could find out who owned it then at least I could make a few enquiries, beginning with how and when the electricity had been restored.

  However careful they think they’ve been, people make mistakes. It’s usually just a matter of looking hard enough and long enough. Chances were that I’d be no wiser in three days’ time, but at least it would give me something to do until my skull was shaved and the anaesthetist instructed me to start counting back from a hundred.