#taken

by Tony Parsons

  I buzzed down the car window.

  ‘He kept the pizza,’ he said. ‘He’s a hungry man.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ I said.

  Jordan glanced up at the flat above the shop.

  ‘Like that boxer in the olden days, man. Muhammad Ali. Can I go, miss?’

  Whitestone nodded. ‘Thanks for your help, Jordan.’

  Without looking at his sister, Jordan mounted his bike and pedalled off at top speed. Whitestone was already speaking to the wireless radio microphone on her lapel.

  ‘Delta 1, we have positive visual ID on Bravo 1,’ she said, dead calm.

  And then there was white noise and a familiar voice in my earbud receiver.

  ‘Copy that,’ Jackson said. And then, to the men and women in the back of that florist’s van. ‘On my command …’

  The back doors of the florist’s van parked outside the abandoned Jamaican supermarket flew open and they came out in their body armour and their PASGT helmets, assault rifles already going to their shoulder. They headed for the stone stairs but even before they reached the top, glass had begun to fall into the street.

  The window of the flat above the burned-out shop was being kicked out.

  ‘Your little brother,’ I said to Joy. ‘He tipped him off.’

  Ruben Shavers leaped out of the first-floor window just as we were getting out of the car. He must have got caught on some broken glass as he was jumping out because he twisted in the air as he fell.

  The plan must have been that the red, gold and green awning above the supermarket would break his fall.

  But that awning had been there for a while, in all kinds of weathers and in quite a few fires, and Ruben Shavers went straight through it as if it was made of wet tissue.

  He hit the ground with enormous force, howling with pain as Joy cuffed him. Whitestone told him his rights. I helped the big man to his feet as Jackson’s face appeared at the first-floor window, grinning down at me.

  ‘Can you walk?’ I asked Shavers. He didn’t answer me.

  His face was busted up pretty bad but nothing seemed to be broken. He hung his head, as if something was over.

  We started back to the car.

  Across the street, outside Pizza Paradise, a crowd had gathered. It was the children we had seen with Jordan but now they had been joined by older men and women.

  They crossed the road and began shouting and screaming and spitting at our feet and in our faces.

  Most of their hatred seemed to be directed at Joy.

  ‘Pig! Pig! Pig! Pig! Pig!’

  ‘Go,’ Whitestone told me. ‘Go, go, go.’

  I started shoving my way through the crowds, the ignition keys in one hand, the scruff of Ruben Shavers’ shirt in the other.

  I threw Shavers in the back seat. He was a big man, much stronger than me, but far too banged up to resist. Joy climbed in beside him. Whitestone got into the passenger seat but a man stopped her shutting the door. Someone was beating on the roof. And then someone was standing on the roof. Angry faces appeared at the windows, all the windows, twisted with hatred, banging on the glass, and all around me I saw the palms of hands slapping against the glass. I started the engine but I couldn’t shut the door because bodies were in the way, their hands clawing at me. Every door, I realised, was still open. People were attempting to pull Shavers out of the back seat. I stuck the car in drive and eased forward, trying not to hit anyone, the doors all still open, bodies everywhere now.

  ‘Pig! Pig! Pig! Pig! Pig!’

  Then I put on the blues-and-twos. The sudden flare of light and noise made the mob back off for just a moment.

  And a moment was all I needed.

  We got out of there, the doors flapping, the sirens screaming, the flashing blue lights the brightest thing in that ruined neighbourhood.

  I glanced in the rear-view mirror.

  Ruben Shavers was doubled up and moaning.

  Joy Adams stared straight ahead, her face wet and gleaming, although you could not tell where the spit from the mob ended and where her tears began.

  28

  ‘Where is she?’ Whitestone said.

  Ruben Shavers looked at a point somewhere over her shoulder, as if he knew but he could not bring himself to say.

  ‘I remember you well now,’ I told Shavers. ‘I must have seen you fight a few times. You were so fast for a heavyweight.’

  ‘Phase one,’ he laughed, staring at the table, as if quoting from the police handbook. ‘Establish rapport.’

  He examined the back of his hands and stared at the round white scars on the dark skin where someone had gone to work on him with a hammer for taking the wrong wife – or daughter, or mother, or sister, or girlfriend – to his bed. The professional hazard of the compulsive womaniser.

  ‘You danced,’ I said, and although he knew I was buttering him up – establishing rapport with the suspect, as he said, like they told you in all the police textbooks – for me it was more than that. Because I truly wondered. How did someone with that much talent go down such a wrong road?

  ‘Like Muhammad Ali before they stopped him fighting because he wouldn’t go to Vietnam,’ I said. ‘Like a big Sugar Ray Leonard.’

  ‘I was no Ali,’ he said. ‘There’s only one Ali.’

  ‘I didn’t say you were as good as Ali,’ I said. ‘And I didn’t say you were as brave as Ali. And I didn’t say you hit as hard as Ali. I said you were fast for your size like Ali.’

  And just like Muhammad Ali, Ruben Shavers was one of those men who would never be short of sexual opportunities. There was no need to tell him that. He knew already. That’s what had happened to his hands.

  He still hadn’t looked at me.

  He sat on the other side of the interview table, his handsome face scuffed and bruised from the fall, his young female lawyer flipping through paperwork by his side.

  The lawyer glanced at her watch, as if the day was running out and she had somewhere else to be. But Ruben Shavers sat there with his arms folded across his chest, as if aware that he would have nowhere else to be for years and years and years.

  ‘What happened to you, Ruben?’ I said.

  Now he looked at me.

  ‘You still trying to bond with me?’ he said. ‘How’s that working out for you?’

  ‘No bonding in here,’ I said. ‘Just trying to work out how you wasted your life.’

  He exhaled, and placed his hands on the table, as if he would never really grow used to the sight of the dark skin stamped with all those circles of white scars.

  ‘Who did that to your hands, Ruben? Did Flowers ruin your hands? Is that why you hate his guts?’

  ‘The hands have got nothing to do with it,’ he said. ‘It was some old boxing big shot who was rich enough to get a young wife but not man enough to keep her happy. He’s long dead. So is she, as it happens. No great mystery. Nothing to see. Move on.’

  ‘Where is Jessica Lyle?’ Whitestone said.

  We call it an interview, but it is nothing like an interview. An interview implies a degree of mutual respect and polite interest.

  What the police conduct are interrogations.

  He shook his head and Whitestone glanced at me. He knew but he wasn’t saying. Dead or alive or somewhere in between, he knew exactly where Jessica Lyle was right now.

  ‘Did she die immediately?’ I said.

  ‘Or did you and your steroid-sucking friend Bumpus have a little fun first?’ Whitestone said.

  He looked affronted. ‘Do you think I need to assault women?’ he said. ‘That’s not me.’

  ‘Your friend Bumpus told me to look in the graveyard,’ I said. ‘What graveyard was he talking about, Ruben?’

  Now he looked at us.

  ‘If she really was in a graveyard, do you think he would be stupid enough to tell you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do. I think your pal Big Del is that stupid. Who do you think you are exactly? Stephen Hawking? Frankly, I don’t see either of you as cri
minal masterminds, Ruben.’

  ‘And who killed Jessica Lyle?’ Whitestone said. ‘You or Derek Bumpus?’

  The lawyer languidly stirred. ‘My client is not charged with murder,’ she said with a pained little smile, as if it was socially awkward to mention it.

  Whitestone stared at her, letting the silence build.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said.

  Then she turned back to Shavers.

  ‘At this point, your kind are usually blaming their partner for everything that went wrong,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to do that? You’re not going to put it all on your friend?’

  ‘Derek Bumpus is not my friend.’ He paused, wanting to tell us something. ‘We had a row.’

  ‘What did you row about?’ I said.

  He took a breath.

  ‘Everything,’ he said.

  ‘Why, Ruben?’ I said. ‘That’s what I don’t get. Did someone hire you – some old enemy of Harry Flowers, or some new business rival – or did you do it because you just wanted to get back at him? Is that what it was? Pure spite?’

  ‘Disgruntled employees,’ Whitestone said with a twisted smile. ‘You’re a cliché, Ruben, do you know that? The disgruntled employee who lashes out at the wicked boss.’

  ‘You don’t take a woman because you’ve had a bad day at work,’ he said.

  ‘Then why did you take Jessica Lyle?’

  He shook his head, as if it was a mystery to him too.

  ‘The big man’s scared,’ Whitestone told me. ‘He’s terrified! He knows the old story about Harry Flowers and the can of petrol. He knows about the visit to see the Mahone family when they were having their Sunday lunch.’

  ‘I really must object,’ the lawyer said, not seeming that outraged.

  Whitestone paused, as if something had just occurred to her.

  ‘Or was it you who went to see the Mahone family with Harry Flowers?’ she said. ‘Were you the mystery man with the petrol can, Ruben? Were you the hired hand who soaked that family – Mahone and his wife and those small children – in petrol and threatened to set it alight?’

  The lawyer said nothing. It was Shavers who spoke first.

  ‘Harry says that never happened,’ he said quietly. ‘Not the way that people talk about it.’ He looked Whitestone in the eye. ‘And I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Ruben here has lied through his teeth about everything else,’ I told Whitestone, who was still watching Shavers. ‘Why would he tell the truth about that?’

  I took a matchbox out of my pocket.

  I took one of the pills inside it and held it up between my thumb and index finger, the sleepy emoji facing Ruben Shavers and his lawyer.

  ‘You know what that is, Ruben? It’s not a vitamin pill. This is what your boss built his business on. Loopers, they’re called. Very powerful, very addictive. They don’t get you high. They just get you out of it. They just put a glass wall between you and the world. Take one of these and you just don’t care about anything any more.’

  ‘It was long ago,’ Ruben said. ‘In a galaxy far, far away. You think Harry Flowers is still dealing Loopers that someone cooked up in their basement? He’s a legitimate businessman. You’ve been to the yard. You’ve been to Auto Waste Solutions.’

  I was still holding up the pill with the sleeping emoji.

  ‘If you’re depressed before you take them, you’ll be suicidal on the morning after,’ I said. ‘Kids like them. Young people with all sorts of problems. Bad skin. Exams. Trouble at home. Anxiety. Low self-esteem. Loneliness. The usual stuff. The standard shopping list of human misery. These magic pills promise to make it all go away. The anxiety. The stress.’ I put the Looper back in its box. ‘You’ve got children, haven’t you, Ruben?’

  ‘What we suspect is that your boss is not quite as respectable as he is cracked up to be,’ Whitestone said. ‘And maybe some other drug-dealing low life wants him to back off. So they hired you and your fat friend to kill the thing that Harry Flowers loves most. Just to send him a message. Just to let him know that they are deadly serious in any negotiations. Or just to even the score.’

  He shook his head, and there was something final about the gesture.

  ‘But why not tell us everything?’ I said. ‘You know how it works. The more you help us, the more you help yourself. You’re going down – nothing can stop that.’

  He glanced at his lawyer.

  The lawyer studied her files.

  Whitestone laughed.

  ‘Your brief can’t help you, Ruben,’ she said. ‘Because she knows you are going to get a life sentence for the abduction and murder of Jessica Lyle. It’s up to you if that really means a whole life tariff with no possibility of parole. You understand what a whole life tariff means?’

  ‘It means dying inside,’ he said.

  ‘It means it is up to you how hard you go down,’ I said. ‘Tell us what happened – who hired you, why they hired you, what you did to Jessica Lyle and where the body is buried – and maybe one day you will walk in the park with your grandchildren. How old are your kids?’

  For the first time there was some real emotion on his face.

  I never saw a hard, heartless bastard in an interview room who was not capable of self-pity.

  ‘Louis is six and Lilly is eight.’

  ‘You know you’re not going to watch them grow up, right? That’s over. Forget about watching Louis and Lilly grow up. If Louis and Lilly see you before they are fully grown, it will be on visiting days at a high-security prison. So that’s all gone. You are going to watch Louis and Lilly grow up from behind bars. But twenty years from now, there might be a chance to get out. If you come clean. You know how many people there are inside who are considered too dangerous to ever be let out? Sixty-one, Ruben. That’s all. Just sixty-one. You have to ask yourself – do you really want to be number sixty-two?’

  He shook his head, almost too tired to move it, and folded his arms tightly across his chest, as if shutting down.

  I smashed my fists on the table.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  ‘Where is she?’ I said, one last time.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said, and it was hard to believe that such a big man could have such a small voice, a voice so shrivelled with terror.

  ‘Why the hell not?’ I said.

  ‘Because my family will burn,’ he said.

  29

  The holding cells below the Old Bailey lead directly up to the courtrooms and so Ruben Shavers appeared in the dock as if by magic, not there one second and there the next, a large man in handcuffs flanked by two police officers in blue short-sleeve shirts and black stab-proof jackets. They were both carrying assault rifles. One of them was Jackson Rose.

  There was a shocked silence at Shavers’ abrupt appearance that was broken by a suppressed cough from the public gallery.

  I looked up and saw it was Frank Lyle, leaning forward to stare as if in disbelief at one of the men who had taken his daughter. The old cop was painfully thin now, as if all his meals were fed into his arm by drip, and he had the ragged stubble of the long-term hospital patient. Sitting between his wife Jennifer and his son Tommy, holding their hands, he looked as though he been carried from his hospital bed. But terminal cancer was not going to stop him seeing justice done for his daughter.

  Further along the same row were Snezia Jones and her boyfriend. She wept soundlessly and shook her head, as if coming here had been a mistake.

  And in the back row on the end seat, looking like he was ready to make a quick getaway, was Harry Flowers.

  They sat surrounded by the usual occupants of the public gallery at the Central Criminal Court, that odd mix of the curious, tourists, and journalists who had not been able to find a place in the crowded press box. They all watched Ruben Shavers while he stared blankly at a random point on the wall, his thick arms limp and useless in handcuffs.

  Jackson caught my eye and nodded.

  There were two more SFOs at the back of the public gallery
, two at the rear of the courtroom and more around the main entrance of the Old Bailey, highly visible in their helmets, goggles and body armour, their assault rifles in that at-ease 45-degree angle.

  ‘All rise,’ the bailiff said.

  Court Two of the Old Bailey rose obediently to its feet as an elderly woman in the scarlet robes of a high court judge entered, her shoulder-length wig more mouldy grey than white. She took her time settling in her seat.

  Ruben Shavers was asked to confirm his name and the charges against him were read out.

  The kidnapping of Jessica Lyle.

  The false imprisonment of Jessica Lyle.

  The murder of Jessica Lyle.

  The judge peered at the defendant, her eyes bright and beady over the top of her reading glasses.

  ‘How do you plead?’

  Shavers cleared his throat.

  ‘Not guilty, My Lady.’

  I heard a broken whimper from the public gallery. I thought it was the family of Jessica Lyle. But the faces of Jessica’s parents and brother showed no visible emotion. The moan had come from a woman of about forty, her skin the light orange tan of the long-term sun-bed addict.

  I had taken her for a tourist. Now I saw her tears and knew this had to be the partner of Ruben Shavers, the mother of Louis, six, and Lilly, eight.

  The day’s proceedings were over in a few minutes.

  Ruben Shavers was remanded in custody and would come back around two months from today for his trial.

  ‘All rise,’ the bailiff said, and I could feel the sense of anticlimax in the public gallery but I had been in enough courtrooms to know that there would be no drama today.

  And then it happened.

  As the judge was turning to leave, Shavers swung his handcuffed wrists left and high, catching the armed officer next to him full on his chin and putting him down. Jackson, on the other side of Shavers, had a split moment to react and stepped back against the side of the dock, rolling with Shavers’ clubbing blow that caught him on the temple, hard enough to spin him around but not enough to put him on the ground.