Storms

by Menon, David

  His annoyance at his own failings had stopped him from trying to figure out the reality of his situation. He was naked. There was tape over his eyes and his mouth. He was lying flat on his back and spread eagled with his wrists and ankles cuffed tightly and with no room for him to move his hands or feet by even a small amount. There was some kind of bulky apparatus around his neck that separated his head from the rest of his body and his wrists were restrained to what felt like either end of it. What the hell was this sick bastard going to do to him? Leroy Williams had been garotted. He’d been told about it when he’d reported in to DCI Phillips. He wanted to cry but was determined not to crack for as long as he could hold on. He’d wanted this undercover operation. He’d suggested it and volunteered himself to carry it out. The only way to get the information they needed on the Gorton boys was to get inside it. He’d discovered a level of criminality that had surpassed his expectations. Melanie Patterson was not someone to be messed with. She was callous and she was cruel. She’d ordered so many beatings of young boys who wouldn’t tow the line that she’d lost count. She had no conscience. He’d give anything to be back in her house arguing with her right now. He’d give anything to be tucking into his mother’s jerk chicken. It was always his favourite. She loved doing it for him. She’d been getting anxious lately because he hadn’t been home for a while. God knows what she was going to make of whatever was about to be done to him. How was she going to cope?

  He flinched when he heard a door opening behind him and someone’s footsteps come close.

  ‘I’m glad you’re awake, Jackson’ said the man who was standing behind Tyler. ‘It’s so much more fun when the person I’m tormenting is conscious and able to feel every horror of what he’s about to go through. I’m enjoying this, you see Tyler. Do you know why I’m doing it? Have you worked out just who I am yet? Or is it beyond your tiny little excuse for a brain?’ He took out his packet of cigarettes and got one out. As he was lighting it he went on. ‘I started a little ritual with Leroy. I light a cigarette and I stub it out on a part of your body where the pain will be unbearable and then I let you suffer it all night before I come back in the morning to complete your execution’. He dragged on his cigarette and then he stubbed it out right on Tyler’s neck. He watched as Tyler shifted as best he could to try and quell the pain but it was no good. The man then knelt down so he was close to Tyler’s face. ‘I’m going to get every single one of you until I feel you’ve paid for what you did. And even then I might just carry on. You must be wondering how you’re going to be passing from this world and into the next? Well I’ll keep you guessing for now. See you in the morning, Jackson. Hope you have a … restless night’.

  Tyler hadn’t slept at all when the man returned hours later. He had no conception of it being night or day. His neck was so bloody stiff and it ached like hell. The cuffs around his wrists and ankles were cutting into his skin like sharp knives. This must’ve been what it was like for Leroy. But why was this sick fucker doing this? What did he have against the Gorton boys? He had to try and keep his mind on rational thoughts for as long as he could or else he could quite literally go mad with terror.

  ‘Good morning, Jackson’ said the man when he came into the room. ‘It’s a beautiful day out there. Shame I can’t let you see any of it. Shame this is your last day on the old mortal coil. Shame you’ve been such a bloody useless bastard whilst you’ve been on this earth. But look, I digress. I’ve got a lot to do today. You know the usual stuff like shopping, going to the dry cleaners, watching some TV. But first I have to deal with you. Holding your neck in place is a kind of round cut in a set of stocks which are part of a guillotine. You heard of one of those, Jackson? It’s the traditional way the French used to execute people going all the way back to the revolution. I can’t stand the French personally. All that garlic and snails and frogs legs. And throughout history they’ve never been there when we needed them. But they did devise a quite magnificent way of killing people. And I’ve added my own little twist especially for you, Jackson. You see, the usual way to place the prisoner for execution was to get them face down with their hands cuffed behind their back. But as you can tell I’ve restrained you on your back with your head facing upwards. That’s so when the time comes you’ll be able to watch the blade come down at rapid speed and chop your head off’. He watched as Tyler tried to struggle. ‘It’s no use Tyler. You won’t be able to break free. But I will let you have one final word or two before dying’.

  The man ripped the tape from across Tyler’s mouth and he immediately spoke. ‘I’m not Jackson Williams. My real name is Tyler Moore and I’m an undercover police officer. I’ve been undercover gathering information on Melanie Patterson who is the real power in the Gorton boys’ gang and who controls everything and everyone. I don’t know what it is you’ve got against them but I’m not part of them, I never have been. I just pretended because of being undercover. Please mate, please let me go. I’ve done nothing to you. Please! Please!’

  The man was incensed. ‘You mean to tell me that the police had someone on the inside who could’ve protected … you rotten little bastard!’

  And before Tyler could plead for his life any further the man angrily ripped the tape from his eyes and Tyler immediately recognized him. Then he looked up and screamed as the man cut the tightly held rope and the blade was released.

  Tyler was dead in seconds. There was blood everywhere.

  STORMS SEVEN

  Annabel Matheson was sitting on the top of the cliffs opposite the hotel where she worked and having a crafty cigarette before going into work. It was a beautiful day and as she smoked she gazed out over the Irish Sea and wondered where it had all gone wrong because here she was at thirty-two with a broken marriage behind her and a lover who was married to another woman. She had her lovely son Kyle and she wouldn’t change that for the world but she could do without all the letters that kept on arriving on the doorstep demanding money that she hadn’t got. She wished she could sleep without having to down a bottle and sometimes more of wine a night. She wished those moments with her lover Dermot could last way beyond the time they spent in bed, outstanding as that was. They’d just spent the most wonderful Saturday together when they’d only gone downstairs to get some food and wine out of the fridge which they then consumed back in bed. She’d been depressed after he’d gone home. Her spirits had plummeted through the floor and even her son Kyle had noticed after he’d spent what he called a ‘fantastic’ day with her friend Tim who’d taken him to the pleasure beach and spent a fortune on him with a new pair of jeans and a couple of shirts. It made her feel bad. She knew that Tim didn’t earn much. None of them at the hotel did. The place had supposedly been bought out by some other concern but it was still all being kept a secret from the staff. Annabel wished the new owners would declare themselves and start addressing some long held staff grievances like the peanuts they were paid. Her step-father had told her to find another job if she couldn’t manage. As if it was that bloody easy. But that was typical of the pig ignorant bastard. He’d never wasted any sympathy on her no matter what predicament she’d found herself in.

  It could all have been so different if she’d been allowed to do what she wanted which was to be an actress. She’d always got her highest marks at school in her drama classes and took the leading role in the annual school play for the last two years she was there. Her performances received glowing praise from teachers, governors and fellow students. But her mother and step-father never went to see her in her hour of glory and that had really hurt. And they then proved to be an immovable obstacle in the way of her acting ambitions.

  Her own father had been a married man who her mother had an affair with. He ditched her as soon as she told him she was pregnant. Then when Annabel was five her mother married her step-father. Right from the start he made it clear to her that he was never going to replace her father and was only ‘tolerating’ her because she had to come with her mother. He’d provide for her. He�
��d make sure there was food on the table and a roof over her head but any love would be reserved for the children he had with her mother and they subsequently had two. She got on well with her half-siblings, her brother and sister, but her step-father made it obvious that they had all his love and care and not her. Her mother never seemed to bother that Annabel was always left out of everything as far as her step-father was concerned. She didn’t seem to care that her eldest daughter felt like a stranger in what should have been her family home.

  But her drama classes were where she found a respite from all the pain and hurt at home. They were her salvation. It was a bit of an old cliché but she could escape from herself by being someone else even if it was only for a couple of hours a night. It got her through. But her mother and step-father were adamant. She was to get a job and join all the other followers of school, work, marriage, kids, grandkids, death. They weren’t the sort of family who had ‘dreams’. They just knuckled down and got on with finding a ‘proper’ job so that they’d never be a burden on anyone. It had been the first time they’d used the word ‘family’ when talking about her and that had made her blood boil because it was so bloody unfair. But it was no good. She earned herself a slap across the face for arguing although not from her step-father. It came from her mother who told her she should respect her step-father, the man who’d never even tried to love her. Sometimes she hated her step-father. But at other times she hated her mother even more because she never acknowledged her daughters pain. It’s true what some say about your parents screwing you up. She just prayed to God that she didn’t end up doing that to her own son Kyle.

  It wasn’t long after she left school that she did the classic thing of many unhappy teenage girls and fell for the first man who showed her any real interest. Clive then became her husband and then she was pregnant with Kyle. It was after Kyle had been born that she decided to try and trace her real father. It wasn’t terribly difficult. She had his name and where he lived at the time which was in Oldham. She made contact but it wasn’t easy. Her step-mother didn’t want to have anything to do with her and she didn’t really like her father. She met his other children, his daughter and his two sons and she got on particularly well with the sons, her half-brothers. She’s still sort of in touch with them. They exchange Christmas and birthday cards but not much else. She doesn’t have any contact with her father.

  She stubbed out her cigarette and stood up. She straightened down her jacket with the palms of her hands and then turned to work across the tram line and then the road into work. As she was waiting for the ‘Fleetwood Ferry’ northbound tram to pass she looked up and saw her friend Tim being dropped off outside the hotel. There was nobody else in the car except for the driver who was a man although she couldn’t really make out what he looked like. But the car was something else. It was a very flash looking sports car with a long bonnet and short boot and a beautiful dark burgundy colour.

  ‘So who was that who dropped you off?’ she asked Tim as she walked up to the reception desk where Tim was already making himself at home for the afternoon and evening shift they were about to share.

  ‘What?’

  There he goes again, thought Annabel. For a brief moment he looked like some little boy who’d been found out doing something naughty. So she decided to play with it a little.

  ‘Have you been up to no good?’ she asked coyly.

  ‘What? Me? No. I most definitely have not’.

  ‘So who was the guy in the very nice car?’

  ‘Oh he’s … he’s a friend of mine. Just a friend, nothing else. Don’t go putting two and two together and making a hundred’.

  And that was it he closed down. No more discussion of the mystery man in the flash car.

  So at the end of the shift Annabel decided to do a little detective work. She was intrigued. She just wanted to know. She called Kyle and told him she’d be a little late back. He was old enough now to be left until she finished the late shift at ten o’clock, just like he could get himself up and ready for school in the morning after she’d left to start the early shift. She sometimes felt guilty about it and worried that she was forcing him to grow up too quickly but what could she do? She didn’t actually have any choice since Kyle’s father had washed his hands of them both.

  At the end of their shift she dropped Tim off at his flat just a few minutes from the hotel and then instead of carrying on down to the bottom of the road where she usually turned left towards her place in Cleveleys, she took the next right, turned the car around and parked where she could get a clear view of the door that led up to Tim’s flat which was one of four contained within a large converted Victorian terraced villa on the other side of the road. She knew that this was beyond insane but it wasn’t that she didn’t trust him as such. It was just that curiosity about this mysterious guy was getting the better of her. Was it a diversion away from her real troubles? Yes, it probably was but she was going to give in to it anyway. Whenever she asked him anything about his life it was as if he hadn’t got his story prepared. It may be nothing and if he wanted to keep her at arm’s length from his personal life then that was his business. Nothing wrong with that. But there was something niggling away at the back of her mind that she just couldn’t shift. Kyle wanted to spend more time with his new ‘Uncle’ then she needed some answers and if Tim wasn’t going to give them to her then she was going to find them out for herself.

  She only had to wait a few minutes before the flash red sports car drove up. Tim came out of the flat and got in. Then it drove off before turning round almost in front of where Annabel was parked and headed back towards the promenade. Annabel could see that it was being driven by the same guy who dropped Tim off at the hotel and she followed. Was he his boyfriend? Did Tim think he had to hide his sexuality from her because of Kyle? Well he’d got to know her well enough now to know that she didn’t have a homophobic bone in her body. She would never in a million years stop Kyle from seeing Tim because he was gay.

  The sports car turned left at the end and headed south along the promenade. He carried on all the way through the centre of town, past the tower and down to where the trams have their southern terminus at Starr Gate. He turned left there, went over the railway bridge, past the airport, and after a couple of miles he took another left and was going down what was signposted as a ‘Private’ road. Annabel had never been to this part of town before. She didn’t even know it existed. Sure enough it was right on the edge of the suburban limits of Blackpool but from the look of all the big detached houses with all their acres of ground it may as well be at the other end of the universe from the tackiness of the resort only a few miles away. It was like stepping into another world. There were no street lights and Annabel slowed down before bursting out laughing. This was crazy! What the hell did she think she was doing? It was dark. It was late. Kyle was waiting at home. She suddenly felt vulnerable and inconspicuous. Then she saw that the sports car with Tim inside had come to a stop outside the gates of what looked like the largest house along the road, large enough to be called a mansion, and seconds later the electronic gates opened and the car drove inside before the gates closed behind it.

  Annabel reversed her way round a corner and headed back to the main road. She hoped that neither Tim nor his companion had seen her.

  DI Rebecca Stockton and DS Ollie Wright were sitting across the interview table from Melanie Patterson.

  ‘You’re not helping yourself, Mrs. Patterson’ said Rebecca.

  ‘I want to speak with detective superintendent Jeff Barton’ Melanie repeated.

  ‘Mrs. Patterson, for the umpteenth time I’ve told you that Detective Superintendent Barton is not available, now can we get on with this interview, please?’

  ‘I do not answer the bidding of a stupid white bitch like you!’

  ‘Oh be my guest and carry on, Mrs. Patterson’ said Rebecca as calmly as she could given the provocation this woman was meting out to her. ‘Your attitude is only making your guil
t all the more believable’.

  ‘I am guilty of nothing’.

  ‘That’s not what it looks like to us, Mrs. Patterson’.

  ‘Well wherever you got your information from it’s wrong’.

  ‘Mrs. Patterson, did you order the murders of Alan Chaplin and Reggie Clayton?’

  ‘Those names mean nothing to me’.

  ‘Oh come on, Mrs. Patterson. They were the sons of neighbours of yours and you used to hang out with your own son Leroy’.

  ‘Do not mention my son’s name’.

  ‘Why don’t you want me to mention Leroy’s name, Mrs. Patterson?’

  ‘Because I buried him only two days ago and you’re not worthy to speak his name’ said Melanie. She was devastated by having been pulled in for questioning. She’d thought that if she made a connection with Jeff Barton she could avoid ever being under suspicion. Now it just looks like she was being naïve. And she hated herself for it. She was also nervous. Somebody must’ve been talking. Leroy had gone and her nephew Jackson had gone walkabout. Now she was in here being picked apart by this stupid bitch and the token black police officer who she considered to be a traitor to his race and history. How any self-respecting black so-called person could join the ranks of the oppressors of their own community was beyond her. ‘You’ll never be worthy to speak my son’s name. Do you hear me? Never’.

  ‘Well let’s move on’ said Rebecca. ‘Alan Chaplin and Reggie Clayton. Do you still insist you didn’t know them?’