by Emma Tallon
Freddie and Paul melted back further into the darkness and quickly knelt down behind two large trees, Sammy still between them. They exchanged a worried glance and then turned to stare at the newcomer as he approached. Whoever it was, he appeared to be running, as the light grew slowly clearer. Freddie squinted, trying to make out who it was in the dark. Calming his racing heart the way he’d taught himself over all the years he’d spent in dangerous situations, he focused on getting through the next few minutes. Next to him, he saw Paul slowly pull a knife from his inner pocket with a grim expression. Freddie’s jaw tightened. As much as he didn’t like the thought of threatening an innocent bystander, if they were seen they would have no choice. He just hoped it didn’t have to come to more than that.
The moon shone down, highlighting the man as he ran down the beaten path. He was dressed in jogging bottoms and a sports top, a sweat band around his head and a wire running from the phone in his hand up to his earphones. The sound of his music carried through the still night air.
Freddie licked his dry lips, not taking his eyes off the man for a second as he drew nearer. The tension in the air was palpable. He was almost at the edge of the treeline when, to everyone’s horror, a loud vibrating sound came from where Sarah was crouching. Freddie’s heart almost stopped and he turned to her with a furious glare. As quickly as she could and with shaking hands, Sarah reached into her pocket and turned off the phone. She stared back at Freddie with wide, terrified eyes before tearing her gaze back to the runner.
The runner slowed down to a stop right in front of them and for a few moments Freddie was certain that he had heard. But the man never turned to look in their direction, instead scrolling down his phone for another song. He selected his favoured tune and picked up the pace again, turning with the path and eventually disappearing from sight.
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Paul growled at Sarah as they all stood back up.
Freddie exhaled heavily through his nose and shot her a dark look, but decided to drop it. There was no time for pointing fingers and arguing now. The guy had gone, and they needed to hurry up and leave too if they were going to pull this off.
‘Why here?’ Freddie asked in a whisper, straightening his back before attempting to pick Sammy back up. Sammy had been a muscular hulk of a man. Carrying him was not the easiest task.
‘The rocks.’ She pointed at a mound of rocks pushing up out of the ground. ‘His positioning is too precise to leave him on a flat surface. It will be too obvious he’s been moved and they’ll start looking for the original murder site. Here…’ She pointed at the largest rock, glancing back over her shoulder to make sure the runner hadn’t reappeared. ‘This is where you need to lay him, face down over it. It should naturally look like they shot him and he landed there. I’m hoping anyway.’ She pulled a large pair of scissors out of her front hoody pocket and gave them to Paul. ‘Here, get the plastic off.’
As Paul set about doing as she’d asked, Sarah pulled a bottle of dark liquid from the same pocket and Freddie squinted, trying to make out what it was. ‘Is that…’
‘Blood, yes,’ she answered, unscrewing the lid.
‘Sammy’s?’ Freddie asked, frowning. Sarah nodded. ‘How did you get that?’
‘The rug under your desk was thick, as was the carpet beneath it. There was so much blood that even though a lot of it dried, they were both still wet. I cut through and wrung it out.’ She glanced at the bottle and suppressed the grimace the memory brought forth. ‘There isn’t a lot at all, not enough really. But I’m hoping if I place it to look like most of it was soaked into the mud, this will go unnoticed.’
‘Isn’t that a bit of a reach?’ Freddie asked, his frown deepening. They were pinning a lot on this and he was now worried they’d made a terrible mistake. Perhaps they should have buried Sammy somewhere he would never be found after all. But even as he thought this, he felt a pang of guilt. Sammy would never let him disappear without the funeral and burial site he deserved. And he couldn’t do that to Sammy either. No matter what the consequences could be.
Sarah shook her head. ‘This is my area. I’ll be assigned the case and I’ll make sure it’s classed as a low priority. He was a known criminal. Officers tend to have less sympathy for those anyway. Plus…’ She thought back to the conversation she’d had with Ben, her boss, only the day before, about taking on the Aleksei case. ‘My team will be stretched across a couple of large cases, so I can make sure they don’t give this one too much time.’
‘You’d better be sure about this, Riley,’ Freddie warned, his eyes glinting hard under the moonlight.
‘I am sure,’ she barked back, bristling. It wasn’t going to be easy, but she had committed herself to it now. And if things went wrong, she would be going down alongside them. So she would make damn sure they didn’t. ‘Even if someone does smell something fishy, we’ve made sure they can’t put anything on you. That office is cleaner than a nun’s browser history. A damn bloodhound wouldn’t be able to find evidence in there now. So, let’s just get this done, shall we?’
Shrugging the tension off, Sarah eyed up the rock before pouring the blood where she estimated Sammy’s wound would drip, making sure to show it leaking into the ground. As the bottle almost emptied, she turned and splattered the last few drops in another direction. Small blood spatters would be expected, even with a wound as clean as this one. And the wound was very clean. Whoever had shot him had excellent marksmanship.
‘Come and lay him here, face down over the rock.’
Freddie and Paul hoisted Sammy up between them and tried not to look at what was left of their once so charismatic friend.
‘How long before he’s found here, do you think?’ Paul asked, trying to focus on anything other than Sammy as they placed him down carefully.
‘He’ll be found just after dawn,’ Sarah replied with a tone of certainty.
‘How do you know that?’ Freddie asked. ‘Have you set someone up to find him?’
‘No,’ she replied, checking they had laid him just right. ‘I just know people run through here in the morning. Had a case nearby once. Hadn’t expected anyone to be running through here so late at night though,’ she added.
She nodded as the brothers stepped back. She’d been right about the rock – Sammy looked as though he had slumped forward over it naturally. There would be no initial reason to believe he hadn’t died here. So long as the blood she had laid was accepted, this would be classed as the murder scene.
People commonly thought that cases like these were uncovered by the most minute detail, found by some geeky-looking forensic when no one else had thought to question things. In truth, if there was no reason to question something like place of death, it wouldn’t be questioned. Not deeply anyway. Even DNA wasn’t as hard as people thought to keep away from a scene like this. Sammy had been carefully preserved in plastic in the office. No one had touched or breathed too near the body. And the three of them in the woods were covered up from head to toe. Despite the minute or two that Sammy’s body had been exposed to these surroundings and moved by the Tylers, they were too well covered for DNA to find its way onto the body. The public watched far too much CSI, in her opinion.
‘This is all we can do for now,’ she said, stepping back and casting a critical eye over Sammy once more. ‘We need to go. Your clothes, gloves, shoes, everything needs to be burned tonight. And you need to firm up your alibis,’ she added.
As they walked out of the trees, Sarah used a broken branch to brush over where they had walked in case of any noticeable footprints, then looked up to see what had made Freddie pause.
He was staring back at the dark cluster of trees and for a moment under the moonlight she could have sworn she saw a tear form and fall from his eye as he said his silent goodbyes. But as he turned back towards her, she cast her gaze down, knowing better than to ever let him know she had seen.
Fifty
Freddie rubbed his tired eyes and gulped down the takeaway coffee
in the passenger seat as Paul drove them back out of London. It had been the longest and most shit-filled day known to man, so far as Freddie was concerned, and all he wanted now was for it to end. But they were a long way from that happening yet.
After leaving Sammy and parting ways with Sarah, they’d driven to the warehouse where Simon and Dean were burning the office carpet. They had already finished with the desk earlier in the day so all that remained were the metal handles from the drawers. Here the brothers washed down and changed and burned their clothes once more before heading back out.
Paul glanced sideways at Freddie, noting how drawn his brother looked. It was a hard day for them all but especially for Freddie, considering the news Mollie had imparted.
‘Fred?’
‘Mm?’
‘You sure you want to finish him?’ Paul asked.
‘He tried to blackmail Mum for half a mil, Paul,’ Freddie responded. ‘No one tries that and gets away with it, not in our family. You know that.’
‘Yeah but…’
‘But what?’ Freddie frowned, irritated.
Paul exhaled slowly through his nose. ‘I just mean he’s… Well, I don’t know.’ He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Don’t you have questions for him or anything?’
Freddie turned towards Paul, his expression resolute. ‘I have nothing to say to or ask of that scumbag. I don’t give a shit what part he played in things back then, he never has been and never will be any part of our family.’ He turned back to stare out of the window into the darkness. ‘You know Dad told Mum that it didn’t matter how I came about, what mattered was who raised me. And you know what, he was right. I won’t pretend it don’t stick me in the gut to know that I don’t have his blood in my veins…’ Freddie felt the familiar twist in his stomach as he thought about it. ‘But he was the one who moulded me into the person I am today. He taught me all the things I needed to become who I am. Mum’s still Mum, we’re still brothers and our family is still the same family it was yesterday.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cigarettes, lighting one up and cracking open the window. ‘And that’s all there is to it,’ he concluded, blowing out a long plume of smoke. ‘So that piece of shit in there,’ he continued darkly, ‘the one who tried to steal from us, who hurt Mum and apparently drugged Dad to make a quick buck – he’s going to regret the day he was born.’ Freddie’s expression clouded over. ‘He’s going to beg me for death until I finally see ending his life as a fucking kindness.’
Ten minutes later Paul drew the car to a stop outside the dark barn and switched off the engine. He pulled on his gloves, ready for the task ahead. It was clear that Freddie was not in the mood to make this quick, so it was set to be a very long night indeed. He checked his watch. It would only be a few hours before the sun came up. He made a mental note to remind Freddie of this in a little while. They would still need to dispose of Jim’s remains. It wouldn’t be the most pleasant task, but at least it would be easier than what they had just been through. Placing a body somewhere it would never be found again was oddly a lot easier than placing it somewhere it would be found.
Freddie took one last drag on the cigarette in his hand. He’d been chain smoking all evening, another indicator of exactly how stressed he was right now. Exhaling, he flicked the butt to one side and clamped his jaw. He knew that he was letting his emotions get the better of him, drawing out Jim’s demise this way. But the thought of being in any way related to a snake like him was eating him up, and after all he had done to Mollie Freddie was ready to make him pay the ultimate price.
It was rare for Freddie to find any pleasure in this side of things. Violence and murder came with the territory, but he wasn’t a savage. He did what needed to be done to remain on top and for his family to thrive. It was never done for pleasure. Tonight, though, Freddie wanted to hear every ounce of pain and suffering that he could draw from the creature his mother had once trusted.
Freddie walked over to the barn and pulled the door open, walking a couple of feet in and pausing to allow his eyes to adjust. It was dark outside, but they’d had the moon to guide them. In here, barely any of the moonlight reached the centre of the room where they had set themselves up.
‘Did you miss us, Jim?’ he taunted, in a low deadly growl.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out his phone and switched on the torch. They had a portable camping lamp on the table with their tools, but he needed to be able to find it first before he could switch it on. Shining it over towards the table, he went to locate it, eager to get on.
‘What the fuck?’ Paul suddenly cried.
‘What?’ Freddie turned with a frown which quickly deepened as he saw what had caused Paul to curse.
Where Jim should have been sat, still tied to the chair, possibly unconscious from loss of blood, there was no one. The chair was on its side, the ropes that were holding him in a messy pile on the floor and a trail of blood led across the floor and out of the barn the way they had just entered.
‘Fuck!’ Freddie roared. He bolted to the door and ran outside, frantically searching the immediate area as if Jim might reappear. When this didn’t happen he ran his hands through his hair in frustration and turned back to find Paul. ‘How the hell did he get out of that? I thought you had him held tight?’
‘I did!’ Paul replied, stressed. ‘He shouldn’t have been able to get out.’ He turned in a circle, looking into the corners desperately as though he might still find Jim hiding in one.
‘Fuck.’ Freddie slammed his fist into the barn door. ‘Fuck!’ he yelled again, his anger echoing into the night.
Fifty-One
Jim leaned back against the cool leather of the back seat of the car and tried to control the shaking. He held his hand upright, the rag too bloodstained to soak up any more. He had lost so much blood at this point, he was amazed he’d made it this far without passing out.
After the brothers had gone, he’d tried to come to terms with what was happening – then he realised there was a bit of give in the rope that held the hand Paul had hastily retied before they’d left. The pain had nearly killed him, but he had wriggled that hand around until eventually, and with great difficulty, he’d managed to pull it free. With the two fingers and thumb remaining on that hand he had worked the knots tying his other hand, then untied his ankles. He’d barely dared to believe it, but he was actually about to escape. Through every second that passed as he worked on the ropes, he expected to hear the brothers return. When they didn’t, Jim turned his face to the heavens and thanked God for the first time in his entire life. He’d grabbed his phone and keys from where Paul had slung them and jogged out as fast as his weakened body would allow. It had taken until halfway down the road before he’d found a phone signal and as the little bars on the screen flashed up, he’d placed his call for help.
Sophia turned back to him from the passenger seat and stared critically at the rag covering his hand. ‘Did you pick up the fingers?’ she asked.
‘No, I didn’t think,’ Jim replied. ‘Shit, I should have…’ He kicked himself for not thinking of that before he ran away.
‘No, it doesn’t matter.’ Sophia shook her head. ‘It is likely too late to reattach them now anyway. We’ll go back to mine and then Ali will stitch you up.’
‘What?’ Jim blinked. ‘No, I need a hospital. And painkillers. Morphine, something,’ Jim replied in a panic.
‘No.’ Sophia’s tone was harsh. ‘You have Ali and vodka. That will do. Now, tell me everything about what happened. What did they say to you?’ she urged. ‘And who the hell did I shoot, if it wasn’t Freddie? Why was he not there himself?’
She still couldn’t believe that Freddie was alive. It had been dark, but she had been so sure it was him. He was supposed to have been there.
‘It was Sammy, their right-hand man. I think I got the wrong club.’ Despite his wounds, Jim’s cheeks coloured in embarrassment. ‘I think Freddie was waiting for me at his other club.’
; ‘You fool,’ she hissed. ‘How the hell could you get this so wrong?’ Sophia felt rage begin to boil inside her at the man’s stupidity.
‘I know, I know.’ Jim hung his head.
Sophia swallowed her anger and tried to compose herself. Now was not the time to lose her head, there was too much at stake. ‘How did they know it was me? How did they realise you had helped me?’ she asked. They had picked Jim up so quickly, she must have missed something.
Jim’s head shot back up and his gaze met hers. ‘Oh, they don’t know any of that,’ he said, his face brightening slightly. ‘This was for something else, something personal. I’ll explain all that later, but the good news is that they’re still in the dark.’ He leaned forward. ‘They have no idea we had anything to do with Sammy. Absolutely none at all.’
Fifty-Two
Sarah arrived on the scene bright and early, coffee in hand, dressed in her smartest trouser suit and made up to the nines. Today she had taken extra special care to ensure her make-up covered the bags under her eyes. The last thing she needed was someone questioning why she looked so tired.
Dan, the newly promoted DI she had requested as her second-in-command, rushed over to greet her. ‘Ma’am,’ he said respectfully. ‘The forensics are all set up ready to go. The body’s over here.’
Sarah felt her insides freeze at the mention of forensics. She calmed herself, remembering the lengths she had gone to to ensure nothing of significance would be found. She forced herself forward, following Dan through to where she could see two people in full white suits cordoning off the area.
‘We have an IC1 male, I’d guess somewhere in his early to mid thirties. Gunshot wound to the back of the head,’ Dan continued.
‘Well, no need to guess at cause of death then,’ Sarah replied, taking a sip of her coffee.