Never Back Down

by Solomon Carter

  “If they are a time bomb, they already went off…” said Laura, laughing bitterly.

  Eva’s mobile trilled. She picked it up from the floor. The number belonged to Rowntree, the policeman who wanted to give her more than a cappuccino. By now Rowntree would know Eva had been at the scene of the crime. Eva didn’t want to risk losing any more time. She ignored the call.

  “So now you’re sure it’s Marka? And you believe it one hundred percent?”

  “As good as.”

  “Marka? And you still want to go for his jugular?”

  “You want to know what direct is, right, Jess?”

  “Yes. Marka owns a lot of businesses and masses of Real Estate in London. Where do we start?”

  “A little more research first. Spend an hour or two on looking up his restaurants, cafés and anything else you can dredge up. I’ll tackle his import-export stuff and the newspaper. Let’s call it two hours. In two hours, we need a list of possibilities because tomorrow we go for the top three, and we go hard.”

  “That could mean reviving the case that ended Dan’s career.”

  “Yes, you don’t need to remind me. It’s the same case that looks like it’s going to finish off Dan’s life. We have no choice.”

  “No,” said Jess. “I suppose we don’t.”

  “But you do have a choice, Jess. Remember that.”

  “So you keep saying.”

  “Yes, I will keep saying.”

  Eva didn’t have a choice. And she could trust no one. Rowntree and the cops had gone easy on the Mitkins and the Somalis for long enough, wasting time mopping up soft options like Galvan instead. With Dan missing for 48 hours already and the arrow pointing to his only significant enemy, Eva couldn’t avoid what she had been dreading. Victor Marka was in her sights. How close she could get to him was something else. But first of all, she didn’t need to get to him. She only needed to get to Dan, and surely that would be easier, wouldn’t it? She gulped on some cold white wine and typed ‘Daily London Offices’ into Google. It was time to dig deep and keep digging. Pretty soon the spade was going to strike something serious

  Twelve

  The Germans, Austrians, or whomever they were, had been taking snaps of the scars they had given Dan. Dan decided they were Germans because one looked like an emaciated Didi Hamann, the ex-footballer who spoke fluent Liverpudlian, and the shorter guy looked like a cross between your average raincoat flasher and Joseph Goebbels. He hadn’t told them this because even though life was hard right now, he’d heard it was even harder being dead. The freaks took photographs of him on their Smartphones. Trust Joe to take a joke too far. He even took a selfie beside Dan, scar flashing. That Joe, what a guy. Sometimes they even showed him a photo so he could inspect the freshest wounds and bruises on his face, legs and arms. The light in the room where they kept him was so poor that he had never seen himself properly. Only the camera flash on Didi’s Smartphone allowed him a glimpse of his cage and a fleeting moment to look left and right to discover more of his trap. It was a wide room with a low ceiling. There was some kind of bulky machinery on one side of the room, lost mostly in the shadows, and to his right was a thick, sprung fire-door. He was always in perpetual darkness so he could not tell what type of environment he was in. But the heavy functional doors and big bunker room made Dan certain that it was definitely a place of work. His back was pressed to a wall and although he could shuffle his backside and heels away from it if he wanted; his hands were tied. He could not tell what time it was and they would not tell him either. They mocked him, his wounds, the fear he guessed must have shown on his eyes from time to time, and they so enjoyed causing him pain, laughing at his groans and grimaces. Dan didn’t like giving in to the pain, he hated showing the bastards he was vulnerable, but there was no denying it; they had him all trussed up like a turkey and they did whatever they wanted with him. Mostly, they wanted to hurt him and make marks on his skin but he didn’t want to spend any time alone with Goebbels. He was the wrong sort of case. They did hurt him sparingly - he guessed they were saving some real highlights for later. He just knew there were far worse acts they were capable of. Both men had dark eyes without a glimmer of light. He had seen such eyes before – the eyes of killers. He wondered why they were keeping him alive and treating him so well. He was receiving water, and sometimes they removed his gag and stuffed cold sausages, crackers and crisps into his mouth. Some would spill to the floor and he hoped it would be left so he could flop to the floor and gnaw at it later, but little Joe read his mind every time, so it was swept up and taken away. They never gave him much, just enough to keep him alive. He knew this and the thought didn’t cheer him. Because although he didn’t know where he was, how he had gotten there, or how many days and nights he had been in this room, he knew 100% who his captor was. Therefore he had no illusions about the man’s ultimate intention. It was the Russian, always the Russian, finally exacting his revenge for the impudence shown when Dan had tried to take down Victor Marka for the attempted assassination of Yevgeny Tregenev, the journalist ex-KGB defector, along with his assorted criminal activities ranging from drug importing to a sex-slave business. There was huge public interest in the allegation that Marka had plotted to kill Tregenev, the man who had crossed their President, but Dan had also amassed whole files on the drug importation and dealing business that Marka had set up around the city to support his ostentatious lifestyle. Despite having destroyed his evidence, despite having already ruined his career, being sent to prison for forging the evidence that Marka had destroyed, in spite of terrorising him in prison and then ensuring his return to the outside was fraught with poverty and peril, Victor Marka was clearly not yet done with ruining his life. Dan’s struggle to survive, the fight with the Mitkin brothers and the Somalis - all of it had merely been the foreplay leading to the cruellest crisis. When he saw the Somalis get out of the big white car back at the Esso garage, he thought he was going to end up filleted live on CCTV. The evil-eyed bandits showed him their machetes under their jackets. There was nowhere to run. He knew their rep, so he guessed he was good as dead. Surprisingly, it didn’t happen. But here this was different. Here in the dark with his two new friends, Dan Bradley knew without a shadow of doubt that if he did not escape, he would soon be dead. And his death would not be pretty. It would be the kind that Victor Marka thought befitting someone who dared to bring down the Russian prince of London crime. He did not want to imagine what Marka had in mind. But it would be brutal, and it would be made public, to serve as a warning to all those who even dreamed of taking on Marka what would happen if they tried. It was the same evil cruelty which saw Tregenev slowly poisoned to death with radioactive Plutonium 2-10, a death of legendary suffering and pain. Pure and simple, Marka was a villain with reputation in the forefront of his mind. He wanted to be Scarface, he wanted to be cold-blood, and he wanted fear to be his calling card. In all these respects, Victor Marka had already achieved all his goals. No one wanted to mess with him, but a great many people wanted to see him wiped off the planet. Right now he was untouchable. But not if Dan survived. It was a sweet thought and he nurtured it. While he lived, revenge was always possible. The image of the Somalis still span around his mind. They worked with the Mitkins, and the Mitkins knew about the conspiracy against him… but the Mitkins didn’t do the kidnapping. The Somalis did. He made guesses without substance. All the evil bastards seemed to be working together. They were an army. But an army falls with a king. He would kill the king.

  First things first - his location – he needed to know where he was before he could plan any move. The big machine hiding in the darkness of his cell gave him an inkling. The vast machine was dome shaped on one side, with vents all over the flat face he could see. There was a conveyor belt contraption coming from its lower centre. The machine had not been in use the whole time he’d been there, and when the Teutonic’s’ Smartphone light occasionally burst into his eyes, he could see dull dust over its surface. The machine had a stran
ge embossed logo brand name on it, a German or Eastern European name he reckoned, Gezetner or Gezekner, a specialist manufacturer of something rare and maybe now obsolete. He guessed the firm made only this kind of get up, only these machines and then not very often. This prompted a few ideas, but still nothing solid. All he knew so far was he was being kept in a work environment with a lot of space, enough space that this vast dark room could be given over as a prison without any interruption to work or anyone noticing a prisoner on site. But the room stored machinery for a purpose… Now he had ideas. Survival gave him every reason to use his detective brain to invent, analyse and second guess. It took him a while to reach a conclusion, time he could only measure through the beatings and slicing of his skin… and because of a beating he was able to gain another vital clue. As they battered him with a short bat, and dirty Joe Goebbels cut new thin lines into his cheeks with a Stanley knife, Dan saw the screwed up receipt flutter from the thin man’s pocket as he leaned in toward Dan’s face to obtain the best angle for the perfect slice. The screwed up receipt had some kind of logo on it which Dan could make out in part, but not yet understand. He had shifted his leg in exaggerated pain, to hide the ball of the receipt from them. He bled and stung for a while without moving his leg away from it. By the time of his meal he had it unfolded, and when it was time to show him his beauty snaps he had the receipt unfurled ready in his hand. He read it before it was confiscated. He managed to see it all. The date, the items purchased, the time, the cost and the name and address of the shop. It was a Starbucks coffee shop, two tall skinny lattes had been ordered along with a meatball Panini. The price was £9.80. Starbucks, 49 Shad Thames, London. In something so small, he found the greatest encouragement he had known in days. Two years ago, Dan Bradley had been obsessed with Victor Marka, as knowledgeable on the Russian Mafioso as a train spotter on his Great Eastern routes and model numbers. He had followed Marka’s messengers between outposts of the Marka Empire across town and beyond, from the glinting glass façades of the city, to the cracked and moulding walls of his Canning Town garages. He had followed Marka’s henchmen so closely he knew many of their names, their wives names, their hidden secrets, sexual proclivities and the ways they had been cheating their boss. He had managed to research and create a diagram for the entire network of Marka’s businesses to a kind of family tree including how they were supplied and who their main customers were. Yet almost all of this information disappeared from the office of Roberts Bradley Investigations on December 12th 2010. Dan lost control. There was nothing he could do, more than a year’s worth of full time investigating was simply gone. He spiralled into a nervous breakdown full of anger and terror at the implications of his loss, and at the same time, Dan’s contacts continued to let him know those people who double-crossed their boss Victor Marka were going missing. Marka was using the information discovered by Dan to destroy the enemies within the camp. They were all being expunged. Not long after this, even some of his special contacts also disappeared. If Parker was right - that there was a list of people being pursued and killed - Dan knew he could have supplied the very first hit list into Marka’s hands. It was an awful notion, but it rang true in his chest, his gut. Dan had never seen these Didi Hamann or Joe Goebbels before this –the killers as cold and silent and boring as school lab technicians, and as brutal as two professional psychopaths could ever be. They were a Neo-Nazi’s wet dream. So, things had changed in Marka’s world. But not by much. New faces, new killers, new ways to profit perhaps, but places of work couldn’t change too quickly. Real Estate didn’t change hands quickly, especially when a gangster had to build a legit façade for his criminal empire. Legit people kept their assets for a longer time than bare-faced criminals, which meant Marka had to do likewise in order to keep up appearances.

  Dan’s face was bitterly sore from all the way beneath his eyes the whole way down to his chin, caked in dry blood. Didi and Joe photographed him again before they left the room. Dan wondered if the snaps were for Marka or their own kinky fetish collection. They showed him the pic, and what he saw looked like Freddy Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street. Bastards, evil sick twisted Nazi bastards. But even with his hatred, Dan was determined to be positive, absolutely committed to look everywhere but at the most obvious outcome. He thought about the receipt and made a tortuous smile. Didi and Joe had slipped up. The spell of total darkness was broken. He pretty much knew where he was now. Dan had been able to visit some of Marka’s businesses under various guises, as a delivery man, as a decorator, as a lost tourist, even once pretending to be a deaf charity collector. Long story. His utter obsession with bringing down the mad Russian as the biggest scalp of his career, the one that would make him famous, had utterly destroyed his entire life. Yet here and now his obsession provided him with a potential key to his escape. Dan decided it had happened for a reason. Right now, he needed to believe in fate, God, lady luck, the tooth fairy or whoever was out there was looking out for him again. Sure, this crazy benefactor had taken their bloody time. And yes, they had dumped him in a whole skip of the proverbial for more than two years, but now they were smiling on him once again. There was a scrap of hope. Dan pored over it for all he was worth. It was almost nothing at all. But he chose to believe. I will escape. I will make a plan. I am going to get out of here. The words were circling round his head like a mantra on automatic pilot. And then another thought broke through the waves on the shore of his consciousness, bringing the widest smile of all. And then I will find some evidence. Any evidence. And I will take Victor Marka down once and for all. And in spite of his sliced and diced face, this widest ever smile didn’t hurt one bit.

  There was so little time. Face-to-face interviews and gumshoe plodding was out of the question. In her line of work Eva had always valued face-to-face meetings way above telephone calls. Obviously more clues and nuances could be gleaned from a meeting, and rapport that led to uncovering the truth could hardly be built through faceless interrogations. But she had to work with what she had. From the early morning, she had been on the phone to people who were distant satellites in the old Marka case. She hoped they would answer the phone at ridiculous o’clock. Nobody liked being called before 8 in the morning. Least of all Eva, but good manners were out of the question. From the shoebox containing all the remaining fragments of Dan Bradley’s days in the old Roberts Bradley agency, Eva pulled a curly paged notebook of numbers and names slapped on the pages in Dan’s big hasty scrawl. There were scribblings, and doodles, mind maps, and doodles of Road Runner and Wile E Coyote jotted in the margins. In between the biro drawn characters, there were names and numbers, some of which she recognised from the old Tregenev/Marka investigation. The job that never paid started out as Dan Bradley’s hobby and within six weeks was an all-consuming obsession, a conspiracy which Dan peeled apart and peeled him apart in turn. It ended up with Eva doing all the paid jobs - the cases which Dan found tedious compared with his international drama. Fault lines of resentment appeared in their working relationship as soon as the Marka case began. Eva identified it as the point Dan stopped being her partner and started being her problem. The acid of his obsession poured through the cracks of work into their love life too, which grew cooler and colder and then hateful by turns. The mere sight of the notebook brought back a swirl of unpleasant feelings from the past; she would put them aside. The old desperate Dan had little in common with the one held hostage somewhere in London. The old Dan deserved scorn, this one deserved pity. She had rejected him, and let him wither to the point of fading out of existence. Marka had been intent on giving him a slow lingering death, a journey through prison, poverty and despair. And for a long while, almost willingly Eva participated in a kind of unconscious revenge. She felt the heat of shame and twiddled her mobile phone in her hands. She picked the first name from the worn out notebook, and began to dial just as an incoming call appeared on the screen of her phone.

  Richard

  The phone buzzed in her hand. She shook her head, put
the phone down on her lap. Then she picked it up quickly and pressed it to her ear. Jess looked on, reading Eva’s face as quickly as a very cheap novel.

  “Richard.”

  “What’s up? I’ve missed you, Eva.”

  “Yes… It does feel like ages since we talked.”

  “That’s because it is. What’s going on? You could have called me by now. I was worried something was up.” His voice was syrupy and comforting, but she heard the new firmness in his voice too. She didn’t like it. Nobody, from Dan to Parker, from her old drunk father and her pushy Czech mother, all the men she’d ever known all the way through to Dan Bradley – no one was allowed to tell Eva Roberts what to do. Especially not now.

  “No, Richard. You’re the man, remember, the one who does the wooing? The suitor? You really should have called me.”

  There was silence because the academic was stung. She could feel it.

  “Richard, I’m working against the clock on this case. I really haven’t got time to talk right now. Can we do this later?”

  “I thought you didn’t like being pursued, Eva.”

  Richard was right. She didn’t. She had told him that herself.

  “Richard. That’s right. So you’ll understand when I tell you.”

  “Tell me then.”

  “No, Richard. Not now. There is too much happening here and not enough time.”

  “This isn’t to do with those bloody murders in Southchurch last night? I want you to be safe.”

  Even this prickled her. She wanted to shout at him, and she knew it wasn’t fair. The lines simply had to be clean.