by M B Vincent
He played about. Tried a few different versions.
Then he sat up. Shouted, ‘Knott!’
‘Sarge?’ Knott was there on silent soles.
‘Jess is never wrong about this stuff,’ he said.
‘You what?’
‘I need a car and some warm bodies. I’m going to Molton Abbott Jolly Cook.’
***
‘Why my father?’ asked Jess. The ‘why’ of the crimes was still unclear, but she knew there had to be some dysfunction in the families he chose.
‘What’s that?’ asked the Judge, over his shoulder.
‘Nothing, Dad!’
The road ahead gleamed like ink. It had started to rain.
‘Take a left at the next junction, please,’ said Lasco.
‘Not a right? Are you sure?’ said Jess.
Lasco looked her up and down. ‘Am I sure?’ he repeated.
‘Guess you know best.’
‘I heard your brother talking about his dad. He had a lot to say and I could tell immediately what their relationship was like.’
‘My brother Stephen?’ Jess wondered how their paths had crossed.
‘You got another one? I recognised the resentment. The anger. Said your dad bullied him, ignored him, then bullied him again.’
‘But, Jesus, that’s just a stand-up routine!’ Jess remembered that Lasco had been in the audience when Bill Gladstone did his ten minutes. ‘Stephen and Dad get along fine. They were jokes.’ Conflict with the Judge was Jess’s department.
‘No such thing as a joke, according to Freud.’
A hum began, the sound of speeding cars approaching.
Jess let out a small noise, then smothered it.
Two cars, one of them Eden’s, swept past, on the way to Molton Abbott.
In the opposite direction to wherever the hell we’re going, thought Jess.
‘Look, here’s old Rupert,’ said the Judge.
On the road, Rupert stood by his car, parked awkwardly in a lay-by. He raised a hand.
Jess barely saw him. He was just a blur.
***
Rupert stood back to let the police cars shoot past.
He began to walk, then to jog, worried that the cars were headed for Harebell House. Jess might be home alone. When he reached the house, he was relieved to see no cop action.
Funny that her phone was off. It occurred to Rupert that she might be with Mitch.
Harebell House was lit up like a Christmas tree. If Jess was home, she could give him a lift. She’d like that. She’d tease him about his snazzy, unreliable car. She liked an opportunity to lord it over him and tell him off.
Rupert liked it too.
Collar up, dog-tired, Rupert never made it to the door.
The sound came first. A honking, gasping, hysterical sound. Then he was knocked to the ground by a llama that pelted around the corner of the house, followed by a lurching, lopsided Bogna.
‘Stupid Nic!’ shouted Bogna. She seemed triumphant. And filthy. ‘He don’t know there’s door from cellar up into paddock, isn’t it.’
Rupert sat her down, avoided the llama – up close they were bloody big – and called Eden. His heart rate was up. Considerably up. ‘Looks like Nic Lasco, that chef bloke, has kidnapped Jess and the Judge.’
‘I’m on it,’ said Eden. ‘We’re just pulling up at the Jolly Cook in Molton Abbot. Back up’s on the way. Radio silence please, Mr Lawson.’
‘Bogna, the police are already there,’ said Rupert.
Only then did Bogna cry.
He helped her round up the llama, whose name, it transpired, was Aleksy.
***
The dead-end lane was off an A-road but might have been on the moon. It was not south of Castle Kidbury. It was north. Horribly north.
The Judge was politely perplexed. ‘Um, are you quite sure you can cook a meal in there?’ he asked.
A huge breeze block cube rose up from broken ground like a jagged tooth. Boarded double doors were scarred with graffiti. The moon lit it as lovingly as if it was an alpine meadow but couldn’t improve its basic ugliness.
Jess recognised it. Last time she’d been here it had been painted in cheerful cherry reds and sunshine yellows. She’d been eight years old. Memories competed. The smell of fried onions. The back of her thighs sticking to a plastic seat. Her brother refusing to share his chips. Her brother’s friend, tall and dark and impossibly sophisticated in a rugby shirt. She had worshipped him then; Rupert hadn’t noticed.
I fell off that flat roof over there.
Jess considered running. But her father wouldn’t follow suit, and Lasco had a gun, and besides, nobody knew about this Jolly Cook. It didn’t appear on the police list.
Nobody was coming to their rescue.
‘Shall we tell him?’ Lasco revealed the gun.
The Judge was stupefied. For a second he looked old. Old old.
‘Inside, your honour,’ said Lasco. He was happy; it was horrible to see.
‘I’m not taking one step,’ said the Judge, ‘until you put that stupid thing away and explain yourself.’
Lasco cocked the gun and tapped Jess’s temple with it. ‘Go on, use the side door. I broke the lock earlier; you can just walk in.’
The Judge did as he was told.
Love makes blackmail easy.
***
The roadside recovery van was coy. Texts arriving said it would reach Rupert in ten minutes, then twenty. Then an hour.
‘Sit and eat,’ said Bogna. This was her answer to everything and she was usually right.
‘You have to come clean,’ said Rupert, as he watched an egg frying, ‘about the llamas, Bogna.’
‘They will send away my Aleksy and my Meghan Markle.’ The hot fat hissed along with Bogna’s anger. ‘Did you know that llamas cannot live alone, they have to have other llama?’
Rupert liked the llamas for that. ‘The Castles are softies,’ he said. ‘They’ll let you keep—’ He shut up. He stood up. ‘Bogna, the Judge’s car wasn’t going towards Molton Abbott.’
He had driven past a dead-end earlier that day. He had wondered why it tugged at his mind. Now he knew. Now he saw in full Technicolor the Jolly Cook that everybody had forgotten.
‘Bogna, Jess’s car keys. Quick! The police are headed for the wrong place.’
‘Keys are in bag, and it’s gone,’ said Bogna. She let the egg burn. ‘My car is having MOT in Richleigh.’ She hobbled after Rupert as he tore out of the front door. ‘Go on, good boy, go get them!’
Nothing, nothing out on the road. It was late, it was dead, it was dark. Rupert cursed, paced, called Eden but got an automated response.
Headlights came out of the night. Rupert, elated, stood in the middle of the road. The vehicle slowed.
‘Fuck,’ said Rupert to himself.
‘What you doing, mate?’ Mitch leaned out of the truck’s window. As ever, his children were on the flatbed section behind him.
‘I need your truck. It’s urgent.’ Rupert was at the driver’s door, pulling it open.
Mitch pulled it shut. ‘With respect, sod off. We’ve been out all day, taking the pig to be slaughtered, and then the girls rebelled and yeah, I know it’s soppy, but I gave in, so I’ve got to get them all home.’
Rupert, whose professional eloquence was AWOL, shouted buzzwords. Jess. Danger. Kidnapping. Kidbury Kannibal.
‘Kids! Out!’
Bogna held out her arms beneath the porch light and the girls ran towards her like ducklings.
‘You’ll have to jump in the back,’ said Mitch. He gestured to the passenger seat, piled high with engine parts. ‘She won’t mind.’
‘She?’ Rupert took a couple of goes to get onto the flatbed; tailored cashmere coats and city shoes are not designed for jumping onto trucks.
‘Margaret, say hello to our passenger.’
The pig grunted. The truck took off. Rupert fell onto the pig.
***
The wolf had finally eaten up all th
e light.
It was pitch black inside the Jolly Cook.
‘Dad?’ whispered Jess, feeling for his arm.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ he said.
A bright light dazzled them and illuminated their surroundings. With no police surveillance to worry about, Lasco had set up a large industrial light, along with his tools and props.
A plastic chair. Some rope. A Formica-topped table. A leather roll full of knives. Two nails. A hammer.
‘This place stinks, Lasco,’ said the Judge.
‘It’s all this spilled oil.’ Lasco gestured to the floor, part of which was ripped up and scattered with lumps of masonry. ‘It’ll have to do. Now, please.’ He slapped the seat of the chair.
‘Dad, no,’ said Jess, but the Judge removed her fingers from his arm and did as he was bid.
‘Excuse the rope. Usually by this time, my dads are, well, compliant.’ Lasco lashed the Judge to the chair with quick efficiency. He picked up a cast-iron frying pan, looked it over lovingly, and said, ‘This is my favourite, I used it when I cooked for the Beckhams,’ and glanced it against the back of the Judge’s head.
As Jess recovered from the noise it made and from watching her father’s head loll forwards, Lasco touched his knives, putting them right. Moving one a millimetre to the left. ‘It doesn’t feel right, leaving out the cooked meal, but it’s just not possible in this set-up.’
‘Honestly, don’t apologise,’ said Jess. She stood, irresolute, ten feet away.
‘You can run towards me if you feel heroic,’ said Lasco. He was conversational. Pleasant. ‘But I’ll shoot if you do. Not you. Him.’ He gestured to the Judge. ‘Right. Where was I?’
‘Fred kept the menu,’ said Jess.
‘What?’
‘The menu from the last time you saw him. He didn’t realise it’d be the last time of course, but he still has it. He treasures it.’
‘Funny, isn’t it?’ Nic laid the Judge’s hands palm down on the table. ‘He kept the menu but threw away his son.’
He positioned a nail against a tendon on the Judge’s hand and lifted the hammer.
***
Margaret rolled into Rupert as they took a corner. She was alarmed by the speed. Or so Rupert assumed; he knew no other pigs to compare her to.
She was dense and heavy and covered in green mud that Rupert was trying hard not to smell.
‘Don’t go through town!’ yelled Rupert. ‘We might hit the traffic lights.’
‘What?’
Rupert yelled again. He was hoarse. The spiteful wind simply ate his words.
Backing up was unwieldy.
Rupert tipped over Margaret’s back.
Margaret kicked and flailed and made demonic noises.
‘This way?’ yelled Mitch.
‘No, you bloody idiot!’ yelled Rupert.
The Druid’s Head had only just ejected its last drinker. Under Mary’s reign, the licensing hours were elastic. Hearing the commotion, she stepped out into the moonlight.
‘Whoa!’ She stood in the middle of the road, giving Mitch no chance but to slam on the brakes and send Rupert back into Margaret’s embrace. She listened to the explanation. ‘My Jess?’ she said. She hauled Mitch out of the cab and barely gave him time to scramble onto the back before she put her foot down and screeched down the sleeping street.
***
‘I know what you’re doing,’ said Lasco. ‘You’re trying to distract me with questions so I don’t hammer this nail through your father’s hand.’
‘Well, yeah, but I’m genuinely intrigued. How’d you do it?’ It was agony staying put, but Jess knew she mustn’t startle Lasco into further violence. ‘No signs of a break-in at any of the murder sites. Then, you managed to kill J P Barreau while the police were watching the place the whole time.’ She hoped her admiration was convincing.
It seemed to be. ‘Well, when you’re the famous guy who’s turning around the company’s fortunes, nobody sees you as a security risk. When I visited Jolly Cooks with the PR guys, they didn’t bother hiding the entrance codes from me. I couldn’t believe my luck when the code was the same at every single branch. Jokers, the lot of them. They should pay me double to lend my name to these dumps.’
Lasco wasn’t at home to Mr Irony; presumably the serial killings breached the terms of his contract.
‘J P Barreau was easy. I’m very big in France. He was thrilled when I introduced myself in the playground and told him I wanted him to be part of a special night shoot. As for getting in, well, I watched those cops and they didn’t like leaving their nice cosy cars. They only strolled the perimeter four times an hour. I moved a big bin during the day, when I was signing autographs for kitchen staff. The bin meant I was invisible from the road if I approached from the woods. J P Barreau thought that was all part of the fun.’
‘And then the fun stopped for him.’ The hammer was paused in mid-air over the Judge’s long, pale hand. Jess fought her instinct to stare at it. ‘Why him, though? Why Denis Heap? Why Timothy Wong? And Eddie?’
If Jess thought she’d kick-start his humanity by naming his victims, she was wrong.
‘They all deserved it.’ Lasco went still, remembering. ‘J P Barreau had two lovely
lads, both of them asking him to push them on the swings or throw a ball. But no. He had his phone glued to his ear. People like him,’ he said, intense and somehow changed, ‘shouldn’t be allowed to have kids. That Heap bloke. I was being shown around the Yonder Street Jolly Cook when he was throwing a so-called party for his little boy. He kept shouting at him to be quiet and moaning about how much it was all costing him. I keep my eyes and ears open, you see. Always on the lookout. They’re everywhere. Men who don’t try, who don’t care, who don’t love.’ Lasco put down the hammer.
‘Was Timothy Wong a bad dad?’
‘I heard him.’ Lasco was growing more intense. ‘In the Jolly Cook, nagging, tearing his boy apart, telling him he was worthless because he wasn’t getting good enough grades. As if that matters! Your precious Eddie Barnes divorced the mother of his child and chose to live at the other end of the country from him.’
That had been Eddie’s ex-wife’s decision; now wasn’t the time to correct Lasco. ‘And your boy,’ asked Jess. She was on marshy ground now; this was a risk. ‘Would he tell me you’re a good dad?’
Lasco looked at her and said slowly, ‘My boy loves me.’
He knows I know the truth about his son, thought Jess.
Her gamble had altered the atmosphere. Lasco’s mood went up a gear.
‘It’s not fair.’ His voice had morphed. It was higher, petulant, only just escaping his lips. He repositioned the nail fussily over the Judge’s hand. ‘Daddies should be nicer to us.’ He picked up the hammer. ‘They should love us.’
Jess felt cold. This was a psychopath in the grip of his obsession. She had to knock him off track. She didn’t think she could bear the sound the nail would make, nor the sound her father would make.
Surreptitiously she dipped to the floor and picked up a half-brick. She threw it. Badly.
It ricocheted off the Judge’s shoulder and she winced.
‘Stop that!’ Lasco was outraged, but it was the outrage of a child. ‘You’re spoiling it! Don’t!’
Slowly, with no idea what she was doing, Jess began to walk towards him.
The hammer was thrown down with a clatter. Lasco snatched up the gun. ‘I’ll shoot you, stupid. You don’t matter.’ He wasn’t too juvenile to aim it squarely at her. ‘Only me and Daddy matter.’
The huge boarded doors behind him slapped down like playing cards.
Roaring like a dragon, the truck flew in.
All was noise and movement. The cracked ground cracked further.
The truck skidded on the oil and careered in a wide arc. It only just missed the unconscious Judge on his chair and sent Lasco leaping out of its path.
The truck stopped. Still growling as the engine idled.
Down jumpe
d Mitch from the back. He hit a patch of oil and went down with such force that he stayed there.
Down jumped Mary from the driver’s seat. She disappeared, swallowed by shadows.
Rupert, his top half visible, tussled with something in the back of the trunk. Something unearthly, which snorted and danced.
But Jess noticed none of them because she was over by the Judge, pulling at the rope. It was thick. The knots were tight. His head still fell forward. He was limp. Jess sobbed with frustration.
Coat flapping, Rupert leapt down from the truck. He ran past Jess. He ran towards Lasco.
An explosive pop baffled Jess. It sounded like the clearing of a throat, only violent, and amplified.
Rupert, too, looked baffled. He stood still, then staggered backwards and put his hand to his shoulder. He dropped to his knees.
As Rupert fell on his face, Lasco also staggered backwards. He was crying, stumbling; something had breached his manic self-belief.
He turned to run into the dark but Mary was there.
‘You little bollix,’ she said, as they stood toe to toe. Then she let him walk away. Her midriff was red and getting redder. She dropped like a broken doll.
‘Look what you made me do!’ Nic wheeled to Jess. He was unravelling. All action. ‘You’ve ruined my special day out.’ Knife in one hand, gun in the other, he shooed Jess away from the Judge. ‘This is my day! My rules! Daddy said!’ He stamped his foot.
Still, the banging from the truck, as if Satan was locked up in there.
‘Yes, of course, your rules, your day,’ babbled Jess. She had set him ticking and now Lasco was about to explode.
‘Daddy,’ said Lasco, to the Judge. ‘I love you.’ He took a step towards him.
Mary, who had been crawling and leaving a trail of vermillion on the concrete, stuck out her foot.
Lasco tripped. He sprawled. The knife made a clang on the dull floor.
Mary, groaning with the effort, kicked it away.
Recovering, Lasco kicked Mary soundly in the back.
She groaned again.
Mitch was up, leaden and limping. Instead of running to help Jess, he ran away from the unfolding violence.
It was the two of them again. Jess and Lasco. Ten feet apart. They both knew his gun was the trump card.
