Stick or Twist

by Diane Janes

  Even so, the situation didn’t sound good. No, that was an understatement. The situation sounded dire. Jude had said Medlicott had no money. That surely couldn’t be right? This was their big one. The one which would allow them to retire. Alongside the sensation of icy fingers making a lingering descent of his spine, came the remembrance of his dream. The careful operation of building something up over time, only to see it crumble before his very eyes. It was creepy, very, very creepy – and he didn’t even believe in that sort of thing.

  How could they possibly have made a mistake? The old woman in Florida, well that had been another balls-up of the first order. Then again, how could they have guessed that the house and all the contents were entailed, so that the will leaving them everything she owned amounted to virtually squat? ‘Think of it as a trial run,’ Jude had said. At the end of the day, they had come out of it better than even, and no one had entertained the slightest suspicions that the old dear’s accident had not been what it seemed.

  Jude had talked her way around everything of course. She’d always been brilliant. A real loss to the stage. The ideas were mostly hers too, with him adding mere refinements. They had been working together for more than ten years, mostly pulling operations on ex-pats and the occasional gullible Americans, and they had only come badly unstuck twice, once over the old dame in Florida and now this …

  The trouble was that this was supposed to have been the big one. There was no way that they would be able to find a new victim and play the same scenario out again. Not in Britain, anyway. They had played their hand and lost. Or so it appeared … yet even now, he couldn’t quite believe it. He tried to work out what must have happened – not over Medlicott’s lack of fortune, that post-mortem would have to wait for another time – but how had Medlicott come to overhear Jude, then get hold of her phone?

  More importantly, what did Jude expect him to do now? He looked down at the phone, but it remained obstinately silent. Clearly he could not call or text her. They had an absolute rule against that. Presumably she would wait until the coast was clear and then call him again. Of course, that sort of opportunity might not arise for hours, and in the meantime, would she be expecting him to start putting the plan into operation?

  He sat on the edge of the bed, and attempted to consider the problem from a variety of different angles. Only a couple of hours earlier, she had texted to confirm their arrival at the cottage. How could everything have changed in the space of two hours? Could Jude have been telling the truth about Medlicott having no money? Or was it some kind of elaborate double bluff that he couldn’t quite figure out? If it was true, then Medlicott was of no further use to them, and his continued presence on the scene was no more than an unwanted complication. If she was wrong … well either way, the imperative to get rid of Medlicott probably still existed.

  For the moment however, there was nothing lost by simply waiting, in case Jude got the opportunity to communicate with him again. He knew Jude of old. She could talk her way out of anything. He had to trust her to work something out.

  THIRTY-NINE

  As soon as Rob stalked out of the room, Mark turned to Jude but she silenced him with a look, and he realized that she was listening in order to work out where the thug had gone. They heard him enter the kitchen, come out again and begin to mount the stairs, and as the heavy treads ascended, Jude whispered, ‘Can you reach your phone?’

  ‘No.’ He replied at the same volume. ‘I left it in the kitchen. Can you get yours?’

  ‘He’s broken it.’

  ‘What the hell is going on, anyway? I always thought your brother was a bit weird, but I didn’t realize that he’s a complete nutter.’

  ‘He’s not my brother.’

  ‘WHAT?’

  ‘Keep your voice down. We have to get out of here … Oh God, he’s coming back.’

  The thunder of Rob’s descent was unmistakable and seconds later he strode into the room. He had put the gun away, but there was a visible bulge of a holster under his jacket. In place of the gun, he had a cigarette lighter in his hand, which he flicked into life as he approached Jude, who instinctively cowered back as far as the sofa cushions would allow her.

  ‘Look … Rob – why don’t we sit down and talk about this?’ Mark wished that his voice carried a bit more conviction. The world was falling apart in a rapid and confusing way, but maybe it would still be possible to inject some rationality.

  Rob paid him not the slightest attention, not even bothering to turn his head. ‘Now then, Princess.’ He continued to advance until he was almost toe to toe with Jude, and holding the flickering lighter flame within inches of her nose. ‘You’d better start talking, unless you want me to make a mess of that pretty face.’

  ‘I will, I will. Please, get that lighter away from me.’

  Making no attempt to reduce the distance between his victim and the flame, Rob said, ‘You can start by telling me who you were talking to just now on the phone.’

  ‘His name is Stefan.’

  ‘Who the fuck is Stefan?’

  ‘Rob – please – I—’

  From his position on the other sofa Mark saw Rob move forward and in the same instant heard Jude’s shriek.

  ‘Stop it, leave her alone,’ he shouted, but fell instantly silent as he realized that Jude was already sobbing out a monologue which he also needed to hear.

  ‘Stefan is a friend. He was in on things. He’s been in from the start. I wanted us to have back up, in case Mark put up a fight. Stefan was going to help make it look like an accident.’

  At this point Jude’s account was interrupted by a series of sobs and wails as Rob, apparently losing interest in the cigarette lighter, set about her with his bare hands. ‘Liar!’ he yelled. ‘Liar, liar! I knew there was something. That’s why I decided to come down a few hours early. It wasn’t just Mark who was going to have an accident, was it? This Stefan is there to do me as well.’

  Mark observed this activity with what might have appeared to Jude as frozen detachment, though his mind was in turmoil as he attempted to process the information. Rob was not Jude’s brother. The two of them had planned for him to have ‘an accident’. But unbeknown to Rob, a third person called Stefan was also involved and he had intended that Rob should also perish in this ‘accident’. The exact details were both confusing and irrelevant. The key point seemed to be that he was currently tied up in an isolated property, and the only people who knew his whereabouts were an unknown bloke called Stefan, a madman with a gun, and a double-crossing bitch who had tricked him into matrimony – and essentially all three of them intended him dead. A question earlier that afternoon regarding his life insurance policies or lack of them abruptly acquired a sinister significance.

  Rob paused his onslaught to snap out another enquiry. ‘Is it true what you were telling him? That Medlicott has no money.’

  ‘That’s absolutely true,’ Mark cut in, deciding that it was time to get involved. It was a risk, of course, directing the vicious attention which had previously been focussed on Jude back to himself, but perhaps if he could make Rob see that there was no profit in killing him, the guy might have a rethink and calm down. ‘I’m afraid I suffered some bad losses – investments that went wrong, a few misplaced bets – and I’m quite badly in debt, actually.’

  ‘He married me for my money.’ Jude’s voice sounded shrill, as if the humour of the situation – her newlywed husband’s utter folly – was in itself a cause for hysteria.

  ‘So we’ve done it all for nothing.’ Rob digested the information as an alchemist, the results of whose life’s endeavours has just turned into base metal. He turned on Jude again. ‘What about this Stefan? When do you expect him to turn up? I warn you now, if you try to lie to me again, I’ll kill you.’

  ‘Why? Why? There’s no point harming me. I love you, you know that.’

  ‘Then why Stefan? That’s who you’re screwing now, isn’t it? You disgust me. I ought to kill you right now.’

&nb
sp; ‘No – please.’ Jude was shrieking now. ‘I’ll tell you the truth. I swear I will. Stefan is coming tonight. I was going to let him into the house. He was going to help you deal with Mark.’

  ‘Like hell he was. I think it’s pretty obvious that having dealt with him—’ Rob jerked his head momentarily in Mark’s direction – ‘he would be ready and waiting to try to deal with me, when I turned up a few hours later.’ He ruminated on the point for a moment, looking from one to another of his captives.

  Mark attempted to adopt an appropriate expression, nothing too challenging or too craven, while he tried to remember how to breathe, and wondered whether Rob was contemplating which one of them to shoot first. Across the room he could see that Jude had fallen sideways across the couch. There was blood on her face and fear in her eyes. He remembered that she was supposed to be, in fact legally was, his wife. He knew that he was not feeling everything that a good husband ought to feel on seeing his wife repeatedly pummelled by a violent ruffian. On the contrary, he tended toward the opinion just expressed by the man who he had, until a short while ago, assumed to be his brother-in-law: that she was a conniving bitch. Nevertheless, he suspected that in their current circumstances, she might be the closest thing he had to an ally. It was definitely something to bear in mind.

  ‘So,’ Rob finally spoke again, ‘what’s the plan now that Stefan’ – he managed to invest the name with all the enthusiasm of a vegetarian confronted by a plate of medium rare steak – ‘has found out that Medlicott’s nothing but a useless sack of shit?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jude whimpered. ‘I honestly don’t know.’

  ‘You must know. You told him that Medlicott had no money. What then?’

  ‘That was it. You came out from behind the wall and I cut off the call. Then you called him back. The next voice he would have heard on my phone was yours. He would have known that it had all gone wrong.’ She collapsed into a bout of sobs, trying to bury her face in the cushions, but Rob grabbed her by the hair again and forced her to look at him.

  ‘What was the back-up plan? Does he come straight here? Head for the hills? What happens now?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. We didn’t have a back-up plan. He might come here. He might wait for me to ring again. I just don’t know.’

  Rob glanced towards the window, where dusk was deepening into darkness.

  ‘Has he got a key?’

  ‘No. I was going to let him in.’

  ‘Which door?’

  ‘The kitchen.’

  ‘What was your signal?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The signal. The signal you’d arranged, so that he would know the coast was clear.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Her words were punctuated by another stinging blow across the side of her face.

  ‘Don’t mess with me, Jude. I know the way you think. What was the signal you’d arranged with him?’

  ‘The lamp in the front upstairs bedroom window would be on,’ she said. ‘Everything else would be in darkness.’

  He hesitated, clearly looking for flaws. ‘So if it was dark, how would you see to let him into the kitchen?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to wait in there for him, I just had to leave the door unlocked. There’s quite a bit of light in the kitchen anyway, from the clocks on the oven and the microwave.’

  Mark noticed that she was struggling to speak. Possibly Rob had dislodged a couple of teeth. He tried to suppress the thought that it was no more than she deserved. A would-be murderess, as coldly calculating as her brother – no wait, he would really have to keep remembering that Rob wasn’t her brother.

  ‘OK. Get up both of you.’ Rob reached into his jacket and removed the gun from its shoulder holster as he spoke.

  Mark stared at him, immobile. This was it. The coward dies a thousand deaths. Hadn’t some brute of a PE teacher once mocked him with those words, when he funked it during some sort of outward bound exercise? Well, chucking yourself off some cliff, rigged up with abseiling gear was no preparation for this. ‘Look,’ he said hesitantly. ‘Why don’t we calm down and try to talk about this—’

  ‘UP!’ Rob roared and this time Mark struggled to his feet without any further attempt at argument, his secured hands providing an awkward encumbrance which set him off balance.

  On the opposite side of the room, Jude needed to be half-dragged to her feet and propelled towards the door.

  ‘You first.’ Rob jerked his weapon in Mark’s direction. ‘Out of here, up the stairs, into the main bedroom. Don’t try anything clever.’

  His relief that they were not to be immediately shot rendered Mark only too willing to lead the way. As for trying anything, he could not even think of anything stupid to try, let alone anything clever. He walked ahead of the others, stepping slowly and carefully, lest a minor slip suggested to Rob that something clever, stupid, or in any way contrary to his instructions, was afoot. It was dark in the rest of the house, but Rob switched the lights on as they went along, activating the switch just inside the bedroom door last of all.

  ‘Lie face down on the bed, both of you.’

  As they obeyed, Mark could feel a sick sense of panic rising up through his chest. Wasn’t this a typical position of execution? In his mind’s eye he could see their bodies, lying still as if in sleep, with their blood seeping steadily down through the bedding until it reached the carpet. He waited, flinching as he heard a click behind him, but it was the light switch, plunging the room into darkness. He heard the door close and a key turn in the lock. He had noticed the key in the old-fashioned lock much earlier, considering it one of the few touches which gave the place character. When he had first spotted the key, it had been on the inside of the door, but Rob had evidently transferred it to the outer side of the lock, and having used it to secure the room, his feet could now be heard descending the stairs.

  Deep breaths. Take deep, steady breaths. Ironic, he thought, that they were lying alongside one another on the king-size bed where they had been intending to spend their honeymoon together. He had envisaged that first night in any number of ways, none of which had included a scenario anything akin to his one.

  FORTY

  Hannah’s first text appeared while Peter was still hunting down a cup of coffee.

  May be several hours. Do you want to go?

  He did want to go, because let’s face it, who wants to sit for hours in a hospital car park, but then he considered the wording of the message. It didn’t say Go home, I’ll get a taxi.

  He texted back: Will wait for you here.

  Hannah’s reply came back immediately: Thanks. xxx.

  Whatever the future held, this was what Hannah needed him for right now. Unquestioning support with generous sex as an antidote to heartbreak and pain. He found himself humming ‘What’s love got to do with it?’

  Back in the car, nursing a paper cup of thin, vending machine coffee which tasted like mud, he continued to observe the comings and goings in the car park. Patients attending for routine appointments had been replaced by visitors, with the average age range dropping accordingly. Sitting in the car for hours reminded him of doing surveillance work. Not that he had ever done very much of that. At around nine o’clock he spotted a familiar face heading away from the main building and for a moment his mental antennae twitched, but even old lags like Bazza Chivers sometimes went on an innocent errand to visit a sick relative. Bazza was a wrong ’un. You knew it the minute you set eyes on him. It was the complete lowlife cocktail with Bazza, from the abundance of tattoos, and a hostile facial expression, to the chemical content of his inside pockets.

  Robin Thackeray could hardly have been more different in appearance. And yet … and yet, there was still something wrong about the bloke. It was not the obvious, lifelong ruffian-type wrongness of the kind which exuded from Bazza Chivers. You could have dressed old Bazza up in an Armani suit, put a fat wallet into his top pocket, seated him on a stool in a cocktail bar, with an heiress at his
side, and he would still have been recognizably a wrong ’un. The set of his mouth, the tattoos on his knuckles, his rough, ungrammatical utterances, in fact his entire being would still have given the game away in an instant.

  Peter opened the car door wide enough to pour half the contents of his coffee onto the tarmac (even alternating with bites from a Snicker bar hadn’t been enough to make it palatable) then shifted into a more comfortable position, as he pictured Robin Thackeray. The guy didn’t exactly look out of place in the clothes he wore, but there was something … He was supposed to be Jude Thackeray’s brother, but he didn’t look like her and more tellingly, he didn’t sound like her. Whereas she had retained a nice English accent, he had adopted an American drawl, which might easily have been concealing something else. He was one of those people who seemingly drifted through life with no visible means of support. He described himself as a company director, with various interests in the UK and abroad. Money and business interests which the Thackerays claimed they had mostly inherited from their parents. Had that checked out? Or was that what Hannah had been about to tell him? That maybe the Thackerays’ money, like their friends, relatives and ex-lovers, didn’t actually check out at all? They had enjoyed the use of several properties, but had anyone actually checked whether all those properties belonged to them?

  For a second he almost texted Hannah to ask if she could spare him a few minutes outside. He stopped himself just in time. He must be getting tired to even let such an idea cross his mind. That was it, he thought. He was just tired and basically being stupid, circling around and around something that wasn’t even there. What would be the point in pretending to wealth you didn’t possess, staging a kidnap, beating one of the participants black and blue, then disappearing into the ether again? It wasn’t an insurance scam. They hadn’t even tried to sell their story to the papers. It would have been an expensive stunt to set up, difficult to pull off, and in the final assessment, utterly pointless, which was probably why old Lingo hadn’t wasted too much effort on looking into their financial standing.