by J G Alva
Neil joined them from a door in the corner, carrying a brown envelope under his arm, and handed them to Nick with an overt carelessness that gave the impression he didn’t want them to know how proud he was of his work.
Nick pulled them out and looked at them, and was more than a little surprised.
“These are good,” Nick said, passing them one by one to Yilmaz to look at.
“Very good,” Yilmaz confirmed.
Neil didn’t say anything but Nick could tell he was pleased.
Nick forced a smile.
“This is going to be the funniest thing ever,” he told Neil.
Neil looked at him steadily for a beat and then said, “with friends like you, who needs enemies?”
◆◆◆
But before the visit to the gallery, and before they collected the photographs, in the penthouse with all the files spread around them, there were still the others to consider.
“I’ve got an idea about the daughter as well,” Nick said, holding up Melissa Keats’ picture.
Yilmaz was in the kitchen, making coffee.
“What are you thinking? The drugs?”
Nick nodded.
“It’s like you said. The drugs. This could be tricky though. I mean, risky.”
Yilmaz came across the marble floor with two cups, stepped carefully down on to the back tiles and then passed one of the cups to Nick.
“Because of the police?” Yilmaz asked.
“Mm.” Nick took a sip: too strong. “Do the police know who her dealer is? Who she’s getting the drugs from? In the file?”
Yilmaz sat on the leather sofa and flicked through some pages.
“Ah, a Karl Jamison. Well known drug dealer, it is saying here.”
“So if we could get to him, we could get to her.” Nick paused. “But this is too dangerous to ask anybody else to do it.”
Yilmaz looked at Nick.
“I could call someone. If it is ever found to be you, this could stop everything, my friend.”
“I know, but...” Nick shrugged. “If they do somehow find out who it is, it’s only going to lead back to a German man named Stephen Sommers. No, I’ll do this myself. Does it say in that file where I can find this Karl Jamison?”
Yilmaz spent some moments reading.
“Yes. There is an address. And a photo also.”
He showed it to Nick.
◆◆◆
Karl was in his twenties, but looked ten years older.
His nose was pierced, and his hair stood up in dirty, clotted spikes. He had a big frame, with large shoulders and long arms, but Nick wondered if he wasn’t sampling his own supply, as his arms were thin, the muscles wasted. His pale, slack face was spotted with acne.
“What can I do for you?”
His accent was thick and slow, like he was drunk, but his eyes never stopped moving, like a half mad cow. They looked at Nick, and flicked away, to a half dozen places along the street.
“You know a girl called Melissa Keats?” Nick asked.
“Huh? What? Who?”
“Melissa Keats.”
Karl started backing away.
“Uh-uh. No. Don’t know her.”
“Hey, where are you going?”
“You’re a fucking pig. Get the fuck away from me.”
He was backing away, gaining speed.
“No, no. I’m just a friend of Melissa’s. I know her. I’m here to buy her some stuff. You know. As a present.”
“Stuff?” Karl sneered. He was edging down the street. “Stuff? Fuck off.”
Karl stopped at the corner, tried to look everywhere at once, gave up, and turned to trot unsteadily down a side street. Nick silently debated, and then set out after him.
This street was deserted. Stokes Croft wasn’t an unpleasant part of Bristol, but it wasn't friendly; you could reasonably expect to get harassed, if you decided to hang around too long. Nick had only been here a couple of times, always a little nervous, but now he just didn’t care. He had killed a man, more than one, and he supposed that was something to do with his change in attitude; he knew he could kill again, if he had to. A confrontation on the street wouldn’t really bother him, not now. He had more important things to do.
He caught up with Karl, who was unaware of him until he grabbed the back of his T-shirt and threw him against the wall. Karl was surprisingly light, like a bag full of autumn leaves.
“Hey,” Karl said, backing off, his hands up. “Hey.”
“I’m not the fucking police,” Nick growled.
He could see Karl still needed convincing, so he bent down and punched Karl in the gut. Karl went down with a “huh!” of breath, falling to his knees and clutching Nick’s trouser leg for support.
He tried to draw breath, wheezing, his eyes rolling up to Nick, their mad bouncing and rolling finally come to a stop.
Nick swung at his face, so caught up in his disgust with Karl that only at the last minute realised he was throwing his fist at him with a little too much force, and eased off on it. Still, he caught Karl’s cheek with a meaty thwack and Karl’s head snapped back on his neck like he it was on a spring.
“Hey,” he said, his breath coming back to him, his hands fluttering like sheets in a breeze. “Hey.”
“Get up,” Nick said between clenched teeth, a little afraid of himself in that moment, and what he might do. It had felt good to hit Karl. Too good. “Get the fuck up, you asshole.”
Karl used the wall to help get himself to his feet. His cheek was red where Nick had hit him. He put his hand up to ward off Nick again, but as quickly as it had come Nick’s anger left him. This guy was so pathetic that Nick felt sorry for him.
“Do you know where you can find Melissa Keats?” Nick asked.
“Melissa who?”
Nick raised his fist; Karl saw it, his eyes going wide.
“Yeah, yeah, Melissa, yeah,” he said quickly.
“Here,” Nick said, taking a bundle of notes out of his pocket and stuffing it unceremoniously into a pocket of Karl’s jeans. It was about £500. The jeans were stiff with dirt and dried fluid, whatever that might be.
“What the fuck?” Karl said, taking some of the money out. He couldn’t seem to believe his luck. “What the fuck?”
“How much will that get her?” Nick asked.
Karl looked wonderingly at the money.
“All I got on me. And more.”
“Good. You give it to her. All you got. I want her to have a good time.”
Karl squinted at him.
“Who the fuck are you anyway?”
Nick smiled and something about it made Karl step back, a little worried.
“Good old saint Nick. You going to give it to her?”
“Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah.”
“Right. You go right now and give it to her. And if she doesn’t get it, if I find out you didn’t give it to her, I’ll beat the living shit out of you. Do you get me?”
Karl was a bug. He disgusted Nick.
“Yeah, yeah, sure, no worries. It’s done, mate. It’s done. No problem.”
“Good.” Nick patted Karl on the shoulder in a friendly way, but put a little force behind it. “And if you keep quiet about this, there might be a little more money coming your way. Know what I mean?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Now. You better get going, Karl. You don’t want to be late.”
◆◆◆
Karl was on the street for an hour, making his way across Bristol, down Gloucester Road and across the centre, before he turned in at a door near the top of Park Street.
Nick watched from the car. If anybody had seen anything, if anybody had noted what car he was driving, he would have no fears that it would lead the police to anything but the Sommers name, and where could they go from there? Answer: nowhere.
Nick looked up at the building that Karl had entered and wondered if he had given her the drugs yet. Nick felt a little sick in his stomach, and there was acid in the back of his
throat, but Nick consoled himself with the thought that Arthur Keats should have thought about what he had been doing when he agreed to help Michael Ross kill his boss. The guilt was still there however, much to Toad’s disgust, but he chose to ignore it.
A figure passed the windows three floors up, and Nick recognised Karl’s ungainly stumble. He saw who he hoped was Melissa moments later. There were more figures, and then Melissa stood in the window a moment, her head back, laughing, a cigarette cocked limply in one hand.
Nick took out his mobile and called the police.
◆◆◆
Two days earlier, when they had been sitting in the penthouse planning, Yilmaz had produced a picture of Michael Ross from the mess of papers on the large coffee table in the lounge and without a word had passed it to Nick.
Nick had looked at it, feeling nothing at first, feeling only curiosity; with the knowledge of who Michael Ross really was, and what he was capable of, Nick felt as if he was really seeing him for the first time.
The photograph showed Michael Ross looking over his shoulder as he put the key in the front door of his house. He was wearing a long tan trench coat, but with most of his back to the camera not much else of what he was wearing could be seen. In his right hand he held a brown leather briefcase.
In two years, he hadn’t changed much. Still had the thick dark hair, long enough to cover his ears, but now flecked with a little grey at the temples. Maybe he had a few more lines around the eyes and mouth. Nick looked again and noted with some surprise that the moustache was gone. It made him look younger, he thought.
“Michael Ross,” Nick said calmly, still not feeling much of anything. “A likeable man. Part of his job, to be likeable, I suppose, but good company. But I’ve seen a little steel in him at times. You know, a hardness. We went to visit one of our long term customers once, a house account, that was thinking of going elsewhere unless we could improve on the price. Well, me and Mike worked out that, at the price they were asking, we would only just be breaking even. We hummed and hawed about it for a while, but in the end we decided we had to call their bluff. If that’s what it was. We gave them the lowest price we could, but basically we told them to piss or get off the pot, take it or leave it. Mike handled it well. Every now and then a little fire came out, and the guys on the other side of the table shut their mouths with a snap. I was impressed.” Nick thought about it, and then smiled at Yilmaz. “Three months later, this customer came back to us with their tail between their legs. By then of course the minimum price we’d given them had gone up. You know, inflation.” Nick paused again, thinking. “He goes after what he wants. And he doesn’t mind bending the rules to get it. I remember once we were having a clean-up of the site, you know, around Mitchell Cole; we had an important customer visiting that week, so we wanted to look our best. We were in a café down the street and a guy in a road sweeper went by, you know, one of those little machines that clean up the streets? So Mike just leaves the table and goes out to the guy and asks him if he wouldn’t mind doing Mitchell Cole’s yard. Off the books, cash in hand. The guy thought about it, then agreed. It was funny to watch.”
“So he is good with people,” Yilmaz said thoughtfully.
“Very good,” Nick said. “He’s got a such a wide range of interests he can pretty much talk to anybody about anything, at least for a while. And, well...” Nick sought for the right words to describe Mike Ross. “He’s the sort of guy everybody wants to be. Tall, funny, good looking. He’s a sporty type, does rock climbing, sailing, sky diving, that sort of thing. I remember once, one of my guys, one of my CNC operators, was doing a sponsored walk for charity, you know, all the highest peaks in England, Ben Nevis, all of those. Mike agreed to do it with him, for charity. Anyway, as I understand it, it wasn’t a competition, just a sponsored walk, but Mike always beat everyone to the top.” Nick shrugged. “That’s just the way he is.”
“So he likes to win,” Yilmaz said.
“Definitely. And he’ll do whatever it takes to make sure he does.”
“Ah, yes. Even kill the boss.”
“Well. Try to. And almost succeed.” He thought a moment, and felt the first threads of anger begin to unravel. “He won’t win this time.”
“This is good,” Yilmaz said.
“Oh?”
“Yes.” Yilmaz nodded emphatically. “A man who is wishing to win at any cost can be trapped. His pride will not allow him to walk away.”
“Mm.”
“What about family?” Yilmaz asked, looking for the file with personal information on it.
“No surviving family, I don’t think,” Nick said, rubbing the side of his nose. “I think he was adopted.”
“Yes.” Yilmaz had found the relevant document. “Adopted parents deceased.”
“How did they die?” Nick asked.
“The father died of a heart attack,” Yilmaz said, “and the mother died three months later. Pneumonia.”
“Okay. How old was he when they died?”
“Uh...” Yilmaz read for a moment. “Twenty four.” Yilmaz read more of the page. “It does not say that he was ever married.”
“No, I don’t think he was. Any sort of event we’d have – Christmas party, that sort of thing – he’d always have a woman on his arm, but he never kept them for long. He was always the bachelor sort.” Nick paused, the anger in full force now. “Well. I always thought he was. It seems not now.”
“Hm.”
“I think...I think Jessica was looking for someone just like Mike. And maybe he was looking for someone just like her. Someone as...ruthless as him.” Nick smiled nastily. “They make a good couple. Both healthy, both ambitious. She told the doctor she was looking for something better. I think she found it.”
“I am not sure he is better,” Yilmaz said.
“No,” Nick admitted, “but he is certainly more...there, than I was. Do you know what I mean? I was happy. I was content to just float along. I had a company, money coming in, a beautiful wife...I was getting a little fat at the time, a little complacent. Maybe Jessica saw that, saw what I was going to become, a fat, happy, lazy old man. Maybe she didn’t like what she saw.”
“What is wrong with fat and happy?” Yilmaz said, and sat up and patted his stomach. The beginnings of a good sized belly were there. “I do not think this is so bad.”
Nick smiled at him.
“No.”
“How did you come to employ Michael Ross?” Yilmaz asked.
Nick sat back.
“One of our suppliers – Landover Trakk – held a meeting one night at their head office. I say meeting, but it was more of a party really. You know, buffet, drinks, that sort of thing. Mike was working for a company I was only vaguely familiar with, as a senior sales rep. I was introduced to him through a mutual friend. He impressed me as having a lot of technical knowledge – and he knew a lot about Mitchell Cole as well. He was very likeable, as I’ve said, but even then I sensed he was ambitious. My partner, Martin Cole, had died the year before, from throat cancer, and I was drowning, trying to handle his side of the business as well as mine. I’m not particularly business minded, Yilmaz, and I’ll be the first to admit that Mitchell Cole’s success is more luck than any sound game plan. Anyway, I asked around about Mike Ross and nobody had anything but good things to say about him. I needed somebody to pick up Martin’s side of the business, so I made him an offer. He thought about it, and eventually accepted. It was as simple as that.”
“He is successful,” Yilmaz said, “and people like him. He likes to be liked, no? We must ruin this reputation. We must make people avoid him. We must make people want to cross the street to avoid him. We could do photos as we have done for Mr Keats.”
“Mike having an affair?” Nick thought. “Most of the guys who know him would just think it was good old Mike, putting it around a bit. They’d slap him on the back and laugh about it with him. It might ruin his relationship with Jessica – and God knows, I’d love to destroy that – b
ut it wouldn’t destroy him. And I get the feeling we’re only going to have one chance at this, before he starts getting cautious and puts his guard up. I told you the story about why they called him Castle. We wouldn’t want to give him the chance to dig in; we’d never get to him. No. I think we need something more...destructive, for Mike Ross.”
They both sat in silence for a moment.
“I am thinking,” Yilmaz said, and paused.
“What?”
“Maybe we will use photographs, but not like the ones we are creating for Mr Keats,” he said, and explained what he meant.
“God,” Nick said, but he liked it. It was suitably hideous. “But somebody’ll have to get in to his house and on to his personal computer for it to work.”
“Yes. I am also thinking of that.” Yilmaz found one of the three pictures of Jessica and Mike on the doorstep of his house, Mike about to go to work, Jessica in her dressing gown with the bump waving goodbye to him. It still hurt Nick to see it, but it was a pain he could deal with now.
“What?” Nick said, confused.
Yilmaz pointed to the right side of the photo.
“This is his home, yes?”
Nick nodded.
“Yeah. I’ve been there a couple of times. Nice place. Big. He’s added about four rooms since he bought it. He was always doing something to the place, either knocking down a wall or having an extension built on to it. He’s got about two acres of land with the house.”
“And he is doing something now,” Yilmaz said, tapping the right side of the picture. Nick looked again, and saw the edge of some scaffolding attached to the front of the building. “I have a nephew who is an electrician. He has his own business. In London. If there are workmen in and out of the house, he will be able to go inside with no problem.”
Nick stared at him.
“My God, that’s brilliant.”
Yilmaz held up a finger.
“Ah. Also, my nephew, he is much good with computers.”
Nicked licked his lips, a dark unhealthy excitement growing in his belly.
