Family Business

by Mark Eklid

  About the last thing he wanted to do was to take a diversion in that direction but the figure was waving, beckoning him towards the gate.

  As much as he wanted to ignore the invitation, he had to go. Surely only a lunatic would be out in this weather, loitering on the perimeter of a transport depot, but it might not be a madman. It might be a customer or a… This was not the time to speculate who it might be but Graham cursed again and accepted that he had to make an unwanted 15-yard detour to find out.

  Whoever this person was, they had not been caught out by the weather. As he inched closer, Graham could tell it was a man but only his face was exposed. The rest of him was covered by a head-to-foot weatherproof outfit of canary yellow, broken by thick strips of black on the shoulders of his jacket and the length of the shins on his trousers, which made him look like he had just stepped off a trawler or an oil rig.

  He stood unflinching, leaning casually against the gate post as if the weather was simply an irrelevance, while Graham, in his flimsy summer coat and sodden polyester cotton trousers, battled to try to keep his umbrella from tearing inside out.

  Who was the madman now?

  ‘You’re Johnson’s real dad, aren’t you?’

  It was about the last line of query he expected to be dealing with right now.

  ‘What? What the hell is that…? Who the… Who wants to know?’

  ‘Your wonderful son just sacked me.’

  Graham squinted to try to get a clear view of the face beneath the yellow hood. His bulbous nose had been turned red raw by the driving rain, which streamed off the end of it onto his ill-kept grey-streaked beard. He had seen the man only once and briefly as he dropped off documentation at the end of another week-long run but he knew it had to be Chris Yates.

  ‘Look, if you’ve got a grievance, you’ll have to take it up with Andreas – or the union or whatever. There’s nothing I can do to help you.’

  He began the slow turn to resume his journey towards the depot yard but was made to stop again.

  ‘It’s more a matter of me helping you.’

  Graham peered at the smug expression which now lit up Yates’s face.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The man paused, enjoying the spell of intrigue his words had cast.

  ‘You need to be careful with that son of yours. You have no idea.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know things,’ he added. ‘I worked here for a long time and I know stuff about this company that people don’t want others to know and I might just be the one to put the word out. I can bring this company and everybody within it down. People will go to jail.’

  ‘Look, I don’t know what you ...’

  ‘Has he told you about the accident?’

  There was a deliberately scathing edge to the way he spat out the last word.

  ‘Did he tell you all about how his poor mummy and daddy died that night? Did he tell you about the motorbike? Oh, I bet he didn’t tell you about the motorbike.’

  Graham was no longer shivering in the face of the storm but had now been overtaken by a deeper chill, running the length of his spine.

  ‘Ask him about the motorbike, but be careful to watch your back after that. Ask him why he gave up the motorbike just after his mummy and daddy were killed. You ask him that.’

  Yates leered before spinning and sauntering away towards the main road.

  Graham could not tear his eyes from the yellow figure as he wandered away, leaving the shards of the slow-motion grenade he had tossed to tear through his victim.

  He stared until the wind changed direction and ripped the umbrella inside out.

  11

  Disgruntled former employee. They were the words he kept repeating to try to stop himself from becoming completely unsettled by the episode at the yard gates but the label was not robust enough to stop the poisonous allegations from seeping out from its edges.

  What did Yates mean?

  Could there actually be any truth in what he said?

  He told Janet what had happened as they drove home, the steam off his still-damp clothes causing them to keep the windscreen demister turned on for the full trip, but she was not in the mood to encourage any more conspiracy theories.

  ‘He’s been sacked, Graham. He’s not happy about it.’

  ‘Yeah, but what if ...’

  ‘What if, what? What if he feels like he wasn’t the only one doing a bit of a fiddle on the side and he’s bitter just because he got caught? And what was he even talking about with this motorbike thing? What has a motorbike got to do with those poor people dying in a road accident? I bet Andreas has never even had a motorbike. Can you really imagine Andreas on a motorbike?’

  He couldn’t, actually.

  ‘This Yates sounds to me like a nasty piece of work. Fancy coming around just to try to make you believe his scurrilous lies. It’s no wonder Andreas got rid of him.’

  Only the sound of the wipers scraping across the constantly rain-smeared windscreen disturbed the awkward silence in the car for the next couple of miles.

  The traffic was heavier than usual, but then it was a Friday evening. Janet occupied herself with paying close attention to the tail lights of the car immediately ahead and was getting increasingly exasperated by their lack of progress.

  The driver of the car in front of them seemed in less of a hurry and Janet kept glancing over her right shoulder, looking for a gap in the unbroken line of traffic in the outside lane for the opportunity to overtake. When the car in front was slow setting away and then pulled up sharply instead of running a traffic light that had just turned amber, Janet jumped on the brakes and jammed the heel of her hand on the horn, accompanying the blast with an irate yell.

  ‘Come on, you dickhead!’

  Graham said nothing. It was usually better to allow her to calm herself down on the rare occasions when her anger boiled over. Then she would be back to normal. She was usually far more composed behind the wheel than he was, so something must be bothering her. In his state of preoccupation with the Yates encounter he had not picked up on the signs and he felt selfish.

  The lights turned green and they edged away again.

  ‘You all right?’ he enquired.

  ‘Sorry, Gray. Bit of a frustrating day.’ She was calm again, though still flustered.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Oh, I’m just trying to get my head around everything that needs doing in this new job. Lots of it, like raising invoices and credit control, is like what I used to do at Royce’s but there’s other stuff like processing orders for tyres and oil and sorting accident repairs that I’m not used to yet and I had a list of jobs I wanted to get out of the way this afternoon, before the weekend, but I wasn’t sure how they were done. So I had to wait around most of the morning for Mr Arnold to have the time to run through a few things with me and we’d no sooner sat down in his office when his phone went off and he said he had to pop out to take the call. Anyway, out he went, left me sitting there like a lemon for 20 minutes, and then when he came back he said something had cropped up and we’d have to do it another day. There’s a pile of stuff on my desk that I couldn’t clear and it’ll still be waiting for me on Monday and I just hope it’s not going to be like this all the time, working for him. I hate this feeling of not knowing what to do. I knew everything about the job at Royce’s.’

  The words spilled out in a stream of ire.

  ‘It’ll just take a little time, that’s all, love,’ Graham said. ‘You’ve only been there two weeks. You’re expecting too much of yourself. You’ll get used to everything soon. Before long, all you’ll need the boss for will be to sign the papers.’

  She drew a deep breath and exhaled.

  ‘I know. I’m just finding it harder than I thought to adjust after being at Royce’s all those years and moving house and all that and then you’re coming out with all this stuff about Andreas being this and that and I really don’t want to hear it, Gray. I don’t want you to think like
that. I feel like I’ve got enough on and then you’re telling me things that are doing my head in.’

  The message was clear enough and was heard. He nodded. He had not considered Janet’s feelings while he was spouting his wild theories.

  ‘Sorry, love. I won’t go on about it again.’

  The traffic was flowing more freely now and, before long, they were home. They had planned to go back to Derby over the weekend, to see a few people and catch up on their news. It would do them good. It would do Janet good.

  He tried to block out Yates and what he said. He tried to think more kindly about Andreas and his peculiar ways.

  But there were too many loose ends, too much he didn’t yet fully understand.

  And Graham didn’t like loose ends.

  **********

  Almost there now. Chris Yates passed the Norfolk Arms and began to accelerate towards the stone circle that marked the boundary of the Peak District, out to where the bleak vastness of Burbage Moor stretched beyond the dry stone walls. He had driven out on this road many, many times before and whenever he reached that point in the road, past that marker, it always felt like he was making a break for freedom. An escape.

  This road was his shortest escape route; the one from which all the rest spread like arteries across the National Park. Over the years, he had explored so much of the open ground between the farms and small communities that the terrain was impressed on his brain as clearly as any road route. Other people might need maps and compasses, but he could read every peak and undulation so well that he always knew where he was and which direction he had to go to get to wherever he wanted to be. He was in his element there. Out on the moors he could walk for miles and miles and not see another human being, yet he never felt lonely. He felt far more isolated in the city, surrounded by people. Out there, he was content. His was the only company he ever wanted to keep.

  Whenever he set out, he liked to decide where he was heading by abandoning himself to whim instead of plotting his route in advance. That was real freedom. It was also the perfect antidote to the limitations of his working life, where he was confined to following motorways and A roads as rigidly as if the tyres on his truck had been removed and he was stuck on rails. Up and down, up and down. Same roads, same destinations, same tedious fools at the same stops trying to strike up the same conversations, like they expect they should share some sort of affinity just because they do the same work.

  God, how he had come to hate that job. He’d been doing it for 23 years and had covered millions of miles and yet it had got him precisely nowhere. Now, just when he thought he had begun his real break for freedom, a proper escape rather than the temporary retreat of the Peak District, this happens.

  But this was not the end of it. Not by a long way. They couldn’t just drop him like that, discarded like damaged goods. He was entitled to compensation. He had been the one taking the big risks and he had taken the hit for them by keeping his mouth shut when their scheme was discovered. He’d been sacked but if he’d spoken out then, said who was really responsible, the whole conspiracy would have crumbled into the dirt. That meant they owed him – call it recompense for loss of earnings. That’s only fair. And if they didn’t do fair by him, then he might not be as willing to keep his mouth shut any more. He could make life very awkward for certain people. With what he knew, he could get them sent to prison for a very long time.

  That was what he had told them. He had let them know they had better not fuck him about.

  He had set the meeting place. They were going to do this on his terms. He was not going to let them tell him what to do. He told them – lay-by, three-quarters of a mile up the Ringinglow Road after the Norfolk Arms at 11.30. Be there. He told them he wanted cash. He told them he wanted no funny business or he would go to the police. He let them know they were not going to be able to just drop him like a dead weight.

  He knew he was close now, even though he was not used to taking this route in the pitch dark of night. He spotted the lay-by ahead in his headlights, on the right, and pulled in, manoeuvring to complete a U-turn so that he was facing the way he had just come from. He wanted to see their car as it approached.

  Often, when he had driven past this lay-by the spaces were taken up by the kind of people he loathed. They were the ones in their family saloons and their faux four-by-fours who would clog up the roads every time the sun shone, driving out with their pampered dogs and their despicable kids so they could take photos of themselves in front of the Ox Stones and prove to their friends they had experienced the wonders of the Peak District, like they were the last of the great explorers. Most of them would shit themselves if they wandered off more than 10 minutes away from their cars. He had nothing but contempt for those people. They had no place in his environment.

  There was not a soul around now and that was the way he preferred it. It also meant there would be no-one snooping around to witness what was about to take place.

  He climbed out of the car and strolled to the back to open the boot, taking out the hefty rusting wheel nut wrench he had decided to bring with him, as insurance. If they refused to give him what he wanted and thought they could try to bully him, the threat of a few blows with the wrench might make them think again. He closed the boot and placed the wrench under the car by the rear wheel – out of sight but close to hand, in case he needed it.

  He had arrived deliberately early so that he could stay in charge. He reckoned that by already being there when they arrived he could show he was the one dictating the situation. And so he was happy to wait patiently by the side of the car, unperturbed by the emptiness all around him, his eyes fixed on the road back towards Sheffield.

  Ten minutes later, he saw it, the full beam of its headlights becoming increasingly dazzling as it roared closer. Yates turned his head to shield his eyes and stepped back, deeper into the cloak of the night, so that he might not be seen, in case it was not them. The car slowed as it drew closer and pulled into the lay-by so that the front bumpers of the cars were facing. Yates stepped close to his own car again, touching the toe of his boot against the wheel wrench where he had left it, reassuringly.

  He could not see who was in the other car because its headlights were still full on and neither could he see them when the lights and the engine were switched off. It was only when the passenger door opened and the internal light ignited that he could make out the figure which emerged from behind it.

  The man rose slowly, as if his considerable bulk needed time to re-form from being compressed into such a compact vehicle. When it was free of the restraint, it rose to twice the height of the car and filled out to almost match its width. He was a large man and Yates stiffened. This was not who he was expecting to see.

  The man spoke. ‘You Yates?’

  It was hard not to be menaced by the sheer size of him, but Yates had resolved he would not be intimidated, not under any circumstances.

  ‘And who the fuck are you?’ he challenged in reply.

  As he spoke, the driver’s door opened and another formidable shape began to unfurl to its full substantial expanse. The two men stood and stared, directing the extent of their seething aggression towards the older, smaller, unaccompanied figure in front of them. The one they had been sent to deal with.

  Yates nodded, accepting and understanding his situation. They had sent their answer to his demands. His terms had been declined.

  ‘So that’s how you’re going to play it, is it?’ He bent to pick up the wrench. ‘Come on then.’

  The driver edged towards him as Yates tightened his grip on the wrench and lifted it to shoulder height, ready to strike. He waited until the man nudged closer, to a few feet away, and then he lunged, swinging the tool wildly, one way and then the other. It moved with a whoosh through the still night air but he had not judged the distance well enough in the gloom and the driver was able to sway comfortably out of harm’s way.

  Nevertheless, the act had been enough to deter the man from movi
ng any nearer but then Yates noticed the passenger, his eyes fixed on his prey, approaching stealthily around the other side of the car. They were closing in on him from both sides and he stepped back, still crouched and alert with the wrench ready to strike, to keep both his assailants in his sight.

  The passenger was closest now and Yates aimed a blow at him, with no great expectation of inflicting damage. His belligerence was quickly dissipating and all he had left was the forlorn hope of keeping them at bay as an increasing sense of helplessness started to overwhelm him. His fighting instinct would not allow him to abandon his defence but it could not mask the realisation that this was not going to end anything other than badly. He was cornered, outnumbered, with no chance of rescue. His breathing became shallow and desperate, his eyes wild, darting between the two imposing figures, waiting to see which of them would make the next move.

  The slightest of movements from his right triggered another frantic swing of the wrench and the momentum of it exposed him. Yates felt the blow of a heavy boot as it sank into his ribs from the left. His knees dipped and he groaned, the air rushing from his lungs with the force of the kick. Then, from his right, a short, hefty cosh was brought down against the hand in which he held the wrench. He heard the crack of the bones and felt a searing pain shoot up the length of his arm. He was unable to hold on to the weapon and it dropped with a clang on to the hard surface.

  Yates fell to his knees, defeated. There was no more fight left in him. He was at their mercy but he would not seek it. He would not give them that satisfaction. He raised his eyes.

  The driver had snatched up the wrench. He held it to his chest and grinned, sadistically.

  12

  Just to be on the safe side, he decided to walk down to the warehouse himself to check. The warehouse manager was on annual leave and Graham wasn’t completely confident his deputy had understood clearly how the 58 pallets of electrical components were to be distributed correctly between the five customers. The last thing he wanted on a Monday morning was a cock-up borne of confusion, but he need not have worried. It was better to make sure, though.