The man sitting beside her in the back seat of the car was younger. Late teens maybe, his head shaven, a tattoo on the side of his head of a soldier bearing arms.
‘But you have no right to do this…’
‘Give her a smack, will ya? She doesn’t understand the Queen’s English.’
The youth grabbed her by the hair with one hand and with the other gripped her chin and squeezed. As he let go he slapped her across the mouth and laughed.
‘Any more cheek and you’ll lose that pretty face of yours,’ said the man in front. ‘Whatever you think you’re doing here, leave it. Forget about it. Keep your nose out of what doesn’t concern you. Go back to Liverpool and forget you were ever here, understand? You don’t know who you’re dealing with. And like I said, be a shame to lose those good looks by doing something daft.’
Suddenly, the car slowed and turned left. When she glanced out she saw the entrance to her hotel and felt some relief. The car braked abruptly at the drop-off space, and the youth leaned across her and opened the door.
‘We’ll not charge you for the taxi fare,’ the man in front said. ‘Safe home.’
She stumbled out of the car, and it sped off before the door was closed behind her. Too shaken to even attempt to note the number plate, her hand went to her mouth, still stinging from the slap by the youth. Her shoulder ached as she walked unsteadily into the foyer, unsure for a moment of where she was or what she was supposed to do. Should she call for the police, for Rory Ferguson? She took the lift to the fourth floor, then followed the corridor to her room. Somehow, she’d managed to keep hold of her handbag and rummaged inside to retrieve her keycard. It took several swipes for the door to unlock, but at last she felt sanctuary as she closed and locked it behind her. All of her actions from that point seemed instinctive, as if her body knew how to repair itself after the frightening encounter. She stripped off and went to the bathroom. In a few seconds, her stomach parted company with her evening’s food and drink when she dropped to her knees at the toilet. Her eyes watered and stung, her mouth rancid.
When she could yield no more she got to her feet and turned on the shower. She couldn’t help glancing in the mirror. Her face looked ghastly — reddened and drawn. She had hardly realised she was crying. Her slight body, now trembling, didn’t seem cut out for this sort of life, certainly not for such terrifying activity. She felt so alone, so helpless. Hot water was insufficient balm for her pain.
Now clean and wearing the hotel-issued bathrobe, she managed to find a couple of paracetamol that had been languishing in the bottom of her handbag. She swallowed them down with a glass of water from the tap and felt her stomach lurch with ingestion of the cold liquid. She hoped the tablets would stay down.
Her final act of obedience to instinct that evening was to flop onto the bed and fall asleep.
*
She awoke just after six, to find the lights still on. It took her a few moments to get her bearings and to recall what had befallen her the night before. Another ten minutes passed before she rose gingerly from the bed and shuffled to the bathroom. Glancing in the mirror, she thought she looked even worse than the last time. Hair awry, bags below her watery eyes. But how could she expect any better?
Back in the room, she checked her mobile for missed calls but found only a couple of WhatsApp texts from Aisling. One asked how she was getting on, the other reported Aisling’s latest deliberations over the purchase of a pair of shoes, and came with photograph attached. Tara tossed the phone on the bed without replying and went for a shower.
When eventually she made it to Musgrave Station at nine o’clock, Gina Marshall was waiting eagerly to see her.
‘Morning, mam. Are you okay?’
Tara wondered exactly how obvious her state of distress was, to others.
‘I’m fine, Gina. I’ll catch up with you later. Have to speak with DS Ferguson first.’
‘Okay, mam. I have quite a lot to tell you.’
‘Good. I’ll come straight back to you.’
She left the detective constable and went in search of Ferguson, one floor above. He was at his desk, browsing a newspaper.
‘Ah, good morning mam. How was your night? What did you think of the restaurant?’
‘Restaurant was fine, but unfortunately the rest of the evening proved unpleasant.’
‘How so?’
She rested her bottom against the edge of his desk, nursing her right arm across her stomach, and related the story of her encounter with the men in the Audi.
‘Are you all right? Were you hurt?’
‘I’m fine, just a bit stiff and shaken.’ She had already mused on how her abductors had either been following her all evening or had been tipped off as to her whereabouts. The only person who could have tipped them off was Ferguson. Only he had known which restaurant she was going to.
‘Further to our conversation yesterday,’ she continued, ‘I suppose my little adventure is related to the order from on high, as you put it, to step away from investigating the McHughs.’
She couldn’t come right out and accuse the DS of passing information to a criminal gang, but she wanted to judge his reaction to her words.
‘Did you recognise any of them?’
‘No. I’m quite sure they knew what they were doing. No point in providing me with evidence to go after them.’
‘I suppose not. Probably just sabre rattling. Making sure you stay away from the case.’
‘If I had enough evidence to charge her, I would be ordering Carly McHugh’s arrest this morning, regardless of what was said by you yesterday afternoon.’
Ferguson grimaced but did not offer any argument. The PSNI had jurisdiction here and not Merseyside Police. He was probably comforted by that fact, she thought. But she didn’t think much of his reaction. A police officer had been bundled into a car on a city street, hit and threatened, and this DS was writing it off as sabre-rattling. For now, she would let it pass. The investigation into Ryan Boswell’s murder would continue in Liverpool, but if necessary she would come back to Belfast and have this gang for murder. And DS Ferguson, involved or not in the conspiracy, would not stop her.
Bidding him a curt goodbye, she left Ferguson and returned to Gina Marshall. Gina was brimming with excitement. She pulled a chair close to her desk for Tara to use.
‘Did some checking first on the name James Guy. Only nine people listed on the electoral register in Northern Ireland with that name. Four of those we can eliminate because the men are over sixty.’
‘Hold on, one of those could be his father.’
‘I understand that, mam, but the next piece of information will explain all.’
Marshall opened another window on her screen. ‘I ran a check for James Guy’s birth records. The father named on the birth certificate did not have the surname of Guy. The mother’s name, however, was given as Rachel Guy.’
‘So it’s possible that James Guy did not know his father, or at least his mother and father didn’t marry. Have you tried to trace Rachel Guy?’
‘That’s where it gets really interesting, mam. I checked the address given on the birth registration; there are members of the Guy family still living there.’
‘The mother, Rachel?’
Marshall shook her head.
‘No, mam. Rachel Guy disappeared twenty-eight years ago. She has never been found.
Chapter 36
Mikk Klavan had answered the mobile phone that he found lying on Janek’s desk. Janek had left it behind before going to the city to do some business. Aksel had taken a few days off. His head was still hurting after the attack on his car. That left only Mikk and Sepp to work in the breaker’s yard today. During the phone call, the man on the other end had all the right passwords to place an order. Only problem was, there was no one here to be the contact and make the sale. Mikk didn’t do the sales. Mostly it was Janek or Aksel.
Mikk was new here, new to Liverpool, new to England. Janek, his cousin, had put him to work
in the scrapyard, operating the crush machine. Mikk realised that Janek was being protective, taking care of him, aware that Mikk had a seriously ill mother and teenage sister to provide for, back in Tallinn. Under no circumstances was he to venture into the city on drug business. So during the call, Mikk had written down the details of the deal to be done and taken them to Sepp. He’d expected Sepp, in his grumpy manner, to scoff and tell him to leave the message for Janek to deal with when he returned. Or perhaps Sepp might go on the errand himself.
Instead, Sepp — sheltering from the rain and lounging in the front seat of a car ready for scrap, reading a porn magazine and already drinking vodka although it wasn’t yet lunchtime — tossed a set of keys at him.
‘You go. Don’t take all fucking day.’
Mikk gathered the drugs that he needed, coke and china white, from the locked cabinet in Janek’s office and jumped into the old Renault van that Sepp used for work. It didn’t have sat nav, but Mikk had a good sense of direction and he could read the road signs.
From the yard in Tranmere, he used the Kingsway crossing then followed signs for Bootle and then Bootle Golf Course. It was a foul day, with rain bouncing on the road and spray engulfing his windscreen. Once he reached the Dunnings Bridge Road, Mikk turned left into a retail park just beyond a McDonald’s. He parked in a space well away from other cars and looked around for his customer. Only then did he realise that he had no idea how they would arrive, or what they looked like.
Forty minutes later, he still had not seen anyone who might be wanting drugs. He watched cars come and go from the park. At times vehicles parked closer to his van than he would have liked. He knew that Janek was a cautious man, didn’t take too many risks, and he tried to be the same.
After an hour of waiting, a black BMW pulled into a space several yards away. There were two other vehicles between Mikk and this car. He watched as a young man got out from the passenger side of the BMW, but he couldn’t see the driver’s side. The young man wore a dark puffa jacket and baggy jeans. He had a red baseball cap pulled down over his face and was headed right for him. This was it. This was his customer.
Mikk lowered his window to be ready to do the deal. He nodded once at the man, when he reached his car.
‘You got it?’
Mikk leaned across to the passenger seat and lifted the small package of drugs. As he turned to face his customer he saw the gun in his hand. The gunman fired two shots, hitting Mikk in the face each time.
As Mikk slumped in his seat the youth reached for the package, tucked it into his pocket and coolly strolled back to the waiting BMW.
Chapter 37
At long last. She’s home. I wandered through the car park at her apartment building and saw her car in its usual space. Thank God for that. Three days I spent hanging around the airport, in between deliveries, waiting for her to step off a flight. I was getting seriously spooked and hacked off, wondering what the hell she was getting up to in Belfast. Could only have been about me. Why else would she have scooted off like that? She wanted to find out about the body they dragged out of the sea. Millie, I’d called her, but now the whole country knew her real name — Linda Meredith. Eight years she was safe at the bottom of the Irish Sea and now this.
The worst thought, and it’s been keeping me awake at night, is what if Tara already knows it was me who put Linda in the sea? What if she has already connected me with Terry Lawler’s sister and all of the others?
Things have settled down a bit at home with Kirsty. She’s got most of the wedding planned, and now she’s reading up on all things childbirth. Been talking about a birthing pool and breast feeding and prenatal classes. The other night, she asked me if I would be at the birth.
‘Of course I will.’ Just as long as I’m still free, I thought. She gave me a big hug.
‘I love you so much, James. You’ve made me very happy.’
‘I love you too, Kirsty,’ I replied, and I did really mean it. I’d never been in this situation before, someone loving me and me loving them. It’s just that I was worried sick that my past was coming back to haunt me. For the first time since taking any of my girls I began to regret ever having started. Why would I ever have taken a girl like Millie, if I’d had someone like Kirsty to love me?
I never thought anything like this would ever happen to me. No one was ever supposed to love me. My Granny had cared for me, but she never told me that she loved me. My mother, from what I could remember, never said that she loved me. For a few minutes, lying awake with Kirsty breathing lightly beside me, the desire, the longing to take another girl deserted me once more. I was going to have a family of my own. If we were to have a daughter, I wouldn’t like to think that in a few years there would be some mad man out there watching her, wanting her and finally taking her in the way I’d taken Millie and all the others. I rolled onto to my side and slipped my arm around Kirsty. We snuggled together, and finally I must have dozed off.
Soon I was awake and breathing hard. I felt the sweat on my forehead. I jerked away from Kirsty. Only then was I sure that it was a dream.
I was at Anfield with Kirsty’s da. And he was telling me over and over that I was part of his family now. That if I ever did anything to hurt Kirsty he would kill me. And the crowd and the players on the pitch, every last one of them, had the faces of all my girls, and the noise was deafening, and yet I could still make out the words of her da saying he would kill me.
For hours, it seemed, I lay awake thinking. What did Tara know? Maybe if I didn’t do any more girls, it would all go away quietly. I had something to protect now. It was about more than just self-preservation. I was going to have a family and the feeling was growing inside me that I would do anything to protect them.
So if Tara was really coming after me, I realised that I would have to get her first — before she got me.
Chapter 38
Tara made an appointment for the following day, to see her physio. Her arm still ached from the sudden twisting of it, inflicted by the men who’d pulled her off the street in Belfast. Grateful to be home safely, she lay on her bed staring at the ceiling, trying hard to force the horrible feelings of anxiety and fear from her mind. How many times would she have to endure a confrontation with ruthless men before she succumbed or decided that enough was enough? Would she know when it was time to get out?
Aisling was always nagging her to leave policing. To come and work with her in promotions, use her good looks and charm, to actually enjoy what she was doing. But bizarre as it probably seemed, she did enjoy her work. Not as Aisling did, not in the way that you ran around smiling, feeling bubbly inside and pondering what shoes you were going to buy with this month’s pay check. Tara found great satisfaction in solving a case, in knowing that she had pulled someone bad, someone evil, from the streets — and that somewhere there was a person who would live, who would sleep comfortably in their bed, thanks to what she had worked so hard to achieve. And she relished the challenges involved. Although Tara knew, if she was really honest, that there was a need to feel threatened, to experience fear and doubt, what better feelings could there be, to drive her on?
So now, she needed to focus on what to do about the threat from the men in Belfast. There was little doubt in her mind now that the effects of Ryan Boswell’s murder went further than the Treadwater Estate, and Liverpool, and were firmly connected to matters across the Irish Sea. They extended so far that a senior police officer, as yet unknown, had ordered that the investigation of Carly McHugh be halted. Was that done to protect Carly, or her father? Were the police in Belfast actively protecting criminal gangs? Or were the police merely trying to preserve their own operations? Specifically, an operation that she was stamping all over with her need to question Carly McHugh. If DCI Weir’s assessment of the Treadwater Vipers was accurate, and this gang was small fry, then what had those small fry got themselves into? Drugs appeared to be at the centre of the issue, but how were they connected to the gang in Belfast? What had Ryan Boswel
l done to get himself murdered? And why had men from Belfast shown up on the Treadwater Estate?
Tara’s recent experience of that well-known occupational hazard, insomnia — or at least. of getting no sleep before three in the morning — set her thinking of all she had learned about James Guy in Belfast. She had delayed her flight home so that she and Gina Marshall could call at the house in Bangor, twelve miles along the coast from Belfast, where members of the Guy family still lived.
A sister of Rachel Guy, Margaret, lived there with a son, daughter and grandson. She was a slim, petite woman in her mid-sixties, with tidy blonde hair in a bob, a small wrinkled face, with fine glasses on a tiny nose and a small mouth. She wore a fawn-coloured jumper and black jeans. For a second, Tara thought she knew the woman — or at least had seen her before. They were not invited inside the 1960s semi-detached, red-brick house and remained on the doorstep. Gina Marshall took the lead.
‘Can you confirm that a man named James Guy used to live here?’
‘He did, but it was years ago. James is my nephew, but I haven’t heard from him for a long time.’
‘Do you know where we could find him?’
‘Why, what’s he done?’
‘We would like to speak with him as part of an enquiry.’
Margaret Guy seemed perturbed by Marshall’s reply.
‘As I’ve said, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen him. He grew up in this house. Mostly raised by my mother, after Rachel took off.’
‘Took off?’ said Marshall.
‘Yes, upped sticks, walked out, disappeared. Call it what you like, but Rachel left my poor mother to bring up her son.’
Lethal Dose; Lethal Justice; Lethal Mind Page 63