‘A message. You need to impress me, Danny boy. Now take this, and you show me just how you deliver a message.’ Aaron pulled a large hunting knife from his waistband and held the handle towards Danny. Danny reached out and took it. The knife immediately felt heavy in his hand. He knew the weapon: it was one of the first he had held when he was growing up. He had been nine years old on the streets of Lambeth, and Aaron was in his middle teens. He was talking about the gang, about the life you could have, about belonging to something. It had resonated with Danny: it was all he had ever wanted — to belong. It was an easy sell and at nine years old he was cut on the palm by that very knife. Brothers bonded in blood. He’d had no idea what it meant then.
Aaron took a step to the side and looked over at Danny expectantly. Danny knew that he meant for him to take the lead. He walked towards the bedroom door. It was pulled closed. He heard Aaron behind him.
‘What the fuck’s been going on in here?’
Danny looked over into the kitchen. He could see some bags of rubbish spilling out over the floor. The smell of the place was stronger than he remembered.
‘Dirty BASTARD!’ Aaron shouted — for the rummy’s benefit.
Danny reached out for the door handle with his left hand. His right held the knife, tight in his knuckles and ready to go. It was heavy, a good quality weapon. He had seen Aaron use it in anger before too. It could do serious damage.
‘We go in hard. Get him on the floor and don’t start cutting him straight away.’ Danny heard the words whispered into his ear, he felt Aaron’s breath. Danny exhaled, then pushed down on the handle and pushed the door. He entered quickly; he could feel Aaron pushing him in the back.
Empty. Danny stepped to the left side of the mattress while Aaron stayed by the door.
‘Shit!’ Danny said, hoping he didn’t lack conviction. Aaron was swearing too but there could be no doubting he was genuinely upset. He kicked out at the mattress.
‘Give me that,’ he said, gesturing at the knife. Danny passed it over. Aaron snatched it off him and immediately dropped to his knees. He slashed at the mattress, two long lines that crossed each other to form a giant X. He stood back up, his chest rising and falling from the exertion. Danny looked over and saw movement in the wardrobe behind. Just the tiniest amount, the blink of an eye perhaps, or a tremor. The wardrobe was three doors wide, but the middle one was missing. From this angle he could see just a slither of Rhiannon stood behind the right side door. She was inches from Aaron. He could see one of her hands held up, the palm flat against the wood, her right foot angled out like a clown’s so she could fit. Aaron was straight on to where she was hiding; he wouldn’t be able see her — but the tips of her trainers would be visible if Aaron was really looking. He was sideways on to her, the knife in his right hand and down by his side, his nostrils flared. Rhiannon stared right at Danny, her eyes wide. He stared right back. She mouthed a word, Danny was sure it was please!
‘We need to find this fucker. Him and the fucking girl. Every hour we don’t find them it looks worse on us.’ Aaron rubbed at his forehead.
Danny moved his attention away from the wardrobe. ‘Don’t worry. I don’t think the rummy will be hard to find.’
‘We haven’t found him though, have we? They’re taking the piss out of us, Danny. It only takes one and all of a sudden you got a real problem. Everyone starts thinking they can take the piss. This will start affecting business, you can take my word on that.’
‘We’ll find him. He won’t be far away.’
‘Find him? Find her! Find them when?’ Aaron lashed out with the knife in his right hand. He slammed it with all his might into the wardrobe door. The doors were thin and the point embedded itself in the wood. It pushed so far in, it was stuck. Aaron had to wiggle it up and down to get it free. Danny stepped instinctively towards the wardrobe, raised his hands and made a noise like a grunt. Aaron immediately turned to him. He held the freed knife up. Danny could see the tip was tainted red.
‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘I, uh . . . Look, we’ll find him, Aaron — the rummy. Give me the knife boss, yeah? When we do find him I want to be the one pointing it at him. You said I could.’ Danny reached out and took the knife. Aaron offered no resistance and then turned for the bedroom door. Danny held, waiting for him to go, but he didn’t make it out of the room before he turned back to Danny.
‘Let’s go then. You get the stuff out of the car. We can put it back in here for now. We’ve got a couple of lock barrels, too, right? We can swap that over. That should stop the rummy coming back here — or anyone else for that matter.’
‘You want to leave the stuff here?’
‘Yeah, no better place for it. We’ll change the locks, stick the stuff back up in the loft and go have a little look for the rummy and your little bitch. Once we get hold of them we can bring them back here and make all the mess we want. Then we get some time to get out and we can take the stuff with us. I don’t want it in the back of the car, we’re running the risk of getting tugged by the cops.’
‘Yeah, okay.’ Danny followed Aaron out. He pulled the bedroom door shut. He picked up a cereal box from the floor and tore one of the flaps off. He folded it in half and jammed it in the bedroom door.
‘What are you doing?’ Aaron was watching him.
‘Just in case we don’t catch up with the rummy. This way we know if he’s been back.’
‘I wouldn’t worry, Danny, we’re finding him today. I don’t see him coming back here without us knowing.’
‘I reckon you’re right. Just to be sure, though. Right?’
‘Whatever. Get the kit from the car. I’ll have a look at the front door.’
Danny walked out of the bungalow. His stomach was knotted with tension. Rhiannon was still in there, the cardboard ploy was more to keep Aaron from going back in there — not that he had any reason to anyway, but it wouldn’t stop him if he wanted to. And what about Rhiannon? She was hurt, he could be certain of that, but how badly? That knife was about chest height he reckoned, it had to be somewhere around there. He hadn’t been able to look at her — not even a glance. Maybe he should have stood up to Aaron right there and then. Maybe that was his moment to make a break, to get away from all this and to help Rhiannon. He shook his head. If he’d stood up to Aaron in there he would have been killed, and so would Rhiannon. Danny lifted the knife to inspect the point. The light was bad, he could just tell it was darker. He wiped it in the long grass.
He bent into the boot of the BMW. There was a void on the left side with a symbol for a first aid kit. He pulled it open. A small tool bag was concealed in there. It had a pack of Eurolocks, the standard barrel locks used in most doors across the UK. Each of them had a key hanging out. He took the whole tool bag out. It also had a small drill with which he would drill out the existing barrel and a few other bits. Changing locks was becoming a fairly regular occurrence; Aaron had a habit of moving in somewhere and quickly making it his. By the time he got back to the door, Aaron had put the split wood surround back together. He pulled a screwdriver from the tool bag and started on securing the metal plate that the lock would push into. Danny struggled to focus on the task of changing the lock; his attention was very much in the other room. It took just a couple of minutes. Danny was ordered back to the car to pick up two bags, one a holdall style that contained their stash of drugs and the other a backpack with the money. He could reach the loft hatch from standing on tiptoes in the kitchen. The hatch swung open easier than he remembered, he had to shoot a hand out to stop it from striking him in the head. He threw the two bags up and then pushed the hatch back shut.
‘That’ll do. We need to go find this fucker. Once we find out what he said, we’ll know where we can go from here.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Danny said.
‘You ready for this Danny?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I’m ready.’ The door clicked shut behind them and Danny watched as Aaron lifted the handle and tur
ned the key to deadlock the door. He pushed the key into his pocket and they walked away.
Chapter 22
In her rush to move, Rhiannon fell forward, the door pushed open and she sprawled out on the floor. The hand she put out to stop herself was slick with her own blood. She had been holding it as tight as she could against her left side to try and keep the pressure up, to restrict the bleeding.
She sat up and did her best to assess the wound. It was the left side of her chest. She wasn’t sure how far the point of the knife had pushed in but she had felt it all the way. It had stung at first, but it was when it had started wiggling that the pain had very nearly brought her to her knees. She didn’t know how bad it was but it bled profusely and she reckoned it would need a staple or stitches to make it stop. It still hurt like hell, perhaps more now than when the blade had first forced its way through the flimsy wooden panel, catching her completely by surprise. It had taken everything she had not to shout out. The wood panel had pushed in, too, and had caught her on the bridge of her nose. That was also spotted with blood and she heard the gristle creak as she surveyed it with her hand.
She moved carefully out into the kitchen and peered out from behind the dividing wall to make sure she was alone, then moved across into the bathroom where a few sheets of toilet paper clung apologetically to a cardboard roll. She snatched them up and dabbed at her wound. They were soaked instantly and it was clear that they were useless. For a few brief seconds, however, the blood was cleared enough for her to see a bright white gash of around a centimetre in length. She cursed and grimaced as she teased it apart. She could see it had gone deep enough to cut beyond the skin and into the fatty tissue below. It would definitely need some assistance to heal. Her Aunty Mel had been a nurse and had taught her the basics. She suddenly found herself wishing Mel was here with her more than ever. She searched the bathroom quickly for something that might help: more tissue, a clean towel — anything that she could use to assist with compression or cleaning. There was nothing. She moved back into the kitchen. The kitchen units were largely empty but the drawers were busy with unopened post, any number of keys, pillboxes, asthma pumps, lighters, empty bottles and other random items that painted a very clear picture of a man leading a chaotic life. There was no order, no sense to anything and nothing that could help. The last cupboard she checked was the largest of them all. It housed the boiler, a tool bag covered in thick spider webs, a dustpan with no brush and three paint pots stacked untidily. On top of the pots were a couple of brushes fused stiff with magnolia paint and a roll of Gorilla Tape. Finally, something that she could use.
She tugged at the tape, pulling out a decent length and she cut it with a kitchen knife that was so blunt she had to hack at it. The tape came free. She surveyed herself quickly. Her T-shirt was by no means clean. It was bloodstained around her wound and the rest was blackened from crawling around the loft space, but she reckoned it to be the cleanest material in the house. She used the knife to cut off one of her short sleeves. It came away in a good enough square. She pressed it over her wound and held it in place by wrapping the tape around her torso as tightly as she could manage. She took a moment to get her breath, the tape restricted her breathing a little but she could cope. At least this might stop the bleeding. She felt for her nose and her fingers came away with no fresh blood. She concentrated on breathing through her mouth.
Her attention turned to the loft hatch. Again she pulled herself up onto the kitchen bench. The pain in her left shoulder restricted her movements and she couldn’t lift her left arm up, but she managed to drag herself up using her right. She popped the catch — it was getting easier every time — and the loft door swung open immediately. It swung hard and fast but Rhiannon was ready for it this time. Once more, she used the light on her phone to see into the gloom. There were two bags on the loft floor: a rucksack that teetered on the edge and a longer bag behind it. She was able to reach up with the mop and knock the first bag down to the floor with ease. The second took a little longer but she was able to hook one of the handles and, with a little manipulation and ignoring the shooting pains in her left shoulder, it finally toppled over. She opened the rucksack first. It was stuffed to bursting with money — all paper money, ten- and twenty-pound notes. Each bundle was tied off with an elastic band in what looked like equal amounts. She couldn’t even guess how much was in there — thousands, surely. She zipped the bag back up and felt the weight of it. It was heavy. She pushed it to one side and pulled at the other bag. It was longer, rounded, but with a flat base and a zip along its full length. She pulled the zip all the way back to reveal brick-sized parcels wrapped in yellow-tinged plastic wrappers. Among these were zip bags of a solid white substance that looked to Rhiannon like lumps of chalk. This bag was heavy, too. She struggled to pull on the rucksack, having to grit her teeth to get her left arm through the strap. She could feel the tape pinching her skin. She dragged the other bag across the floor until she made it to the front door. It was time to leave. She leant on the door handle. It wouldn’t budge.
‘Shit!’ Rhiannon spun back into the room. She had been able to suppress the panic up to this point but now it threatened to consume her. She dropped the rucksack and it dragged at the tape again, this time pulling at her wound and making her yelp. She tried to focus, to think how she could get out. She walked with purpose back into the kitchen and tugged the large cupboard open where the toolbox sat under the boiler. She scooped the spider webs gingerly from the top and folded it open. Inside she found a couple of chisels and a screwdriver, all browned with rust and age. She pulled the whole box out into the light and saw what she needed: a claw hammer, consumed in rust but it would do. She pushed open the bedroom door and threw the hammer onto the floor under the window. She stepped onto the filthy mattress and looked outside. The overgrown grass, weeds and thistles ran for about ten metres to where there was a grey stone wall. Rhiannon assumed this marked the end of the garden. Beyond that she could see trees and bushes, but the next house was some distance away, as if the gardens backed onto each other. She retrieved the two bags from the living room and took in what she could see of the next-door neighbour’s garden. It was much better kept and smacked of an old person with a passion for a neat lawn, pots of colourful flowers and numerous cutesy ornaments. In the part of the garden that she could see, there was no movement.
Back in the bedroom she pulled the pillowcase off the only pillow and wrapped it around her right hand — ignoring its brown and yellow staining. She picked up the hammer and swung it hard, turning her head and closing her eyes when the hammer struck. It took three more blows to make a hole through both panes of glass. The hole wasn’t big enough and shards of glass pointed up like teeth from the bottom of the window. She used the head of the hammer to knock these out as best she could, then put the dirty-looking pillow over the frame.
She threw the bags out first. They landed among other items that looked like they hadn’t been there long: an old suitcase, a chest of drawers and some old novels that looked like they hadn’t gotten wet from the rain yet. She struggled over the lip of the window. Despite her efforts, small shards of glass remained, enough to pick and pull at her clothes, and scratch her bare arms as she clambered through. She picked up the bags and battled her way to the bottom of the garden where a full-length gate had been concealed in the worst of the weeds and tall grass. She pushed them aside. The gate opened into an overgrown alleyway that seemed to run along the backs of all the houses. To her left it ran into a dead end. She took a right and then immediately dropped the long bag on the ground. She had no use for it; she had only taken it so that Aaron didn’t have it anymore — or at least to make him think he didn’t. She got to the end of the alleyway and took off the rucksack. She dropped this over a low fence with a hedge the other side. It wasn’t a good hiding place but it would do — for now, at least. She peered around the corner, checking both ways. All was still and quiet. She moved quickly out onto the pavement.
; Chapter 23
Damon Allcott’s arm swung in long, smooth movements as he strutted down the steep slope towards the halfway point on the path where he could work discreetly. It was early evening. The moon was not long risen, but it was full and bright enough to cast its own shadows. He was on a footpath known locally as ‘the zig-zag path,’ which was very apt: it ran from the Leas, down the outside of the stone cliff, cutting back on itself regularly until it reached the coastal park at the bottom. At one point where the path turned, it dug into the rock to provide a natural shelter. This was where Damon was meeting Tony Jones. ‘Tone,’ as he was known, was a regular. He had been even before Damon had started out as a thirteen-year-old kid, acting as a lookout for his older brother. After his brother had died in prison Damon had lost his hold on the town they had once enjoyed exploiting. Now he was reduced to working as a small-time street dealer for whoever had a stranglehold on the town at that time. He had seen it change hands any number of times. Sometimes things had become bloody; sometimes a new setup was scared away by police action; sometimes they just upped and left for a bigger market.
Damon didn’t care. There would always be someone for him to work for. There would always be the Tony Joneses of the world. And there would always be a little something left over at the end of the day to satisfy his own addiction.
‘Hey, Tone.’
Tony Jones was already sitting on the makeshift bench. It was a simple design: wooden slats screwed into a shelf dug out of the rock face. Tone was little more than a silhouette with a red glow where a cigarette balanced between his lips. It jigged about as he spoke.
‘Damo.’
‘What’s new?’ Damon stood side-on, his attention sweeping all around him.
‘Ain’t nothing new round here, Damo. You know how it goes.’
‘Yeah, I do. What do you need today?’
Ruthless a Gripping and Gritty Crime Thriller Page 16