Hit Back Harder

by Andy Maslen

He looked at her. Eyes unreadable. Sapphire chips glittering in the harsh light of the halogens overhead.

  “Yeah. One hundred percent.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying, I thought you’d be happier. That’s a lot of money.”

  “I am ’appy. Cos now, I’m going to help you get that cunt Collier. Whatever you need.”

  “Is it that much of a big deal?”

  His eyes flashed and he brought his right palm down hard on the glass table top, making the plates jump and the Glock rattle.

  “Yes, it fuckin’ is a big deal. You think I like livin’ out ’ere with all the other washed-up villains, reminiscin’ about jobs we done back in the fuckin’ eighties? I want to go home. Be with my family. Not out ’ere in the land of the fuckin’ fake-boob brigade.”

  His face flushed an unhealthy shade of red that made it through the tan to the surface. He was panting, as if the torrent of anger had physically exhausted him.

  “And you blame Collier.”

  He smacked his hands together in a burlesque of applause.

  “I can see why you were a DI, Stella. I mean, that’s a fuckin’ amazin’ bit of deduction. Like I said last time, he fitted me up.”

  “Then maybe things will change. Once he’s dead, I mean. There’ll be an outcry in the media. I’ll see to it. The civil liberties brigade will be shrieking about miscarriages of justice. They’ll have to reinvestigate all his old cases. Yours included.”

  Ronnie stroked his smooth jowls. Thinking.

  “Yeah, well, maybe you’re right.”

  She gestured at the bag.

  “You could pay for a lot of lawyers’ time with that.”

  Ronnie opened his mouth to speak, but before he could utter a word there was a call from the front door. Marilyn was home. He looked across at Stella. A worried look.

  “Listen, about just now. No need to tell Marilyn. Just a bit of harmless fun. OK?”

  She waited. Counted to five. Enjoying watching Ronnie squirm.

  “Fine.” A beat. “I meant what I said about your cock, by the way.”

  Marilyn shrieked from the hallway.

  “Ronnie! Get your arse out here before I drop the champagne.”

  45

  Tit for Tat

  RONNIE AND MARILYN reappeared in the kitchen laden with glossy carrier bags looped over their wrists on twisted silken handles. Bright yellow, cream, black, red-and-white, and burnt orange, each bearing a fancy logo printed, stamped or cut into its crackling side. Ronnie dumped one of his onto the table, its distended form clanking as the bottles within hit the glass top.

  “I tell you, Ronnie, if Cheryl mentions her fucking Ferrari one more time, I’ll—”

  “Hi, Marilyn,” Stella said.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Marilyn said, scowling as she deposited her carrier bags on the floor. She placed her hands on her hips. No leopard print today. A stylishly cut trouser suit in black and white with a black frill around the jacket’s hem. “You get our money? Because—”

  Ronnie interrupted his wife, unwisely, in Stella’s opinion, given that she’d just performed the same high-risk manoeuvre.

  “Stella came through, Min. It’s all there. In the holdall.”

  Marilyn didn’t take her eyes off Stella.

  “You count it yet?”

  “No, but it looks like—”

  Now Marilyn did break eye contact with Stella. She turned on her husband.

  “Oh, ‘it looks like,’ does it? What exactly does it look like, Ronnie?”

  Ronnie put his hands out in a placating gesture.

  “What’s up, Min? Why the aggro? Look, there’s two-point-three million there. It’ll be there. Stella’s too smart to’ve skimmed some.”

  Stella broke in before the simmering tension between husband and wife could heat up into a boiling row.

  “Er, hello? I am here, you know. And for the record, no, I didn’t take any. I’ve got my own money, thanks.”

  Marilyn spun on her high heel, eyes blazing.

  “Yeah, I’m sure you have. Bent coppers always do.”

  “I’m not bent!” Stella shouted, hoping that this calculated raising of the stakes might throw Marilyn Wilks off her stride.

  It didn’t.

  “Not bent?” she shrieked, throwing her head back and cackling, exposing a pale crescent beneath her chin that the sun hadn’t reached. “That’s fucking rich. You just helped us get a couple of million quid out of the UK so we’d help you top your boss. If that isn’t bent I’d love to know what is.” She turned back to Ronnie, who had the look of a man caught in a tropical storm in shorts and a T-shirt. “And by the way, what’s with all the Stella-this and Stella-that? You getting all cosy in ’ere while I was out, were you?”

  Ronnie blushed.

  “Idiot!” Other Stella whispered in Stella’s right ear. Stella decided to take control before Marilyn Wilks took a straight razor to her husband.

  “He tried to flirt with me. I told him I’d cut his cock off.”

  Marilyn blinked, once, and Stella waited to see what she’d do next, tensing and readying herself to fight, if it came to it. Then she spoke, and Stella was relieved to see that the fire had gone out, at least for now.

  “Huh. That sounds like Ronnie. You’ve got stones, I’ll give you that. You want a drink?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Champagne all right?”

  “Mm hmm.”

  “Ronnie!” she barked. “Don’t stand there like a fucking statue. Open a bottle of Roederer and pour me and Stella a glass. I’m going to count the money. Why don’t you take the SL out for a drive?”

  Ronnie shrugged and … was that just the hint of a pout on his hard-man face? Stella smiled inwardly. Marilyn’s McTiernan genes were on full show.

  “But, Min, the boxing’s on Sky in a few minutes. I was going to watch it.”

  She shot him a hard look.

  “Drive down to the pub, then.”

  It was a command, not a suggestion. Everyone in the room knew it, though Stella was the only one pretending she didn’t. After he’d popped the cork on a bottle of champagne from the huge fridge, Ronnie disappeared, plucking car keys from a translucent sea-green bowl on the counter top on his way out.

  Once they heard the front door close, Marilyn sat opposite Stella and raised her glass.

  “Cheers.”

  “Cheers.”

  Stella watched Marilyn’s throat bobbing as she emptied the glass of champagne. Her facial skin was taut and unlined, but the neck was always the giveaway. The slack skin was stretched into narrow folds as she drank. Maybe that was how she knew Yiannis Terzi, the disgraced plastic surgeon. It would account for her magnificent cleavage at any rate.

  “So … assuming the money’s all there, you want to get in touch with my friend Yiannis?”

  “That’s right. You said he could remove fingerprints so they don’t come back.”

  Marilyn refilled her glass and topped up Stella’s, even though there was barely an inch gone from the brimming flute.

  “Wait there,” she said, then she got up from the table, bumping the edge with her hip and spilling a little champagne from her glass.

  She returned a few minutes later with a small, red leather-covered notebook. She looked at Stella. “You going to write this down or what?”

  Stella pulled her phone out.

  “Go on.”

  “Yiannis Terzi,” she said, spelling out both names with exaggerated care, then adding a phone number.

  “Thanks. Look, it’s probably better if we don’t have any contact after this. You’ve got your money and I’ve got what I need to go after Collier.”

  Marilyn shook her head.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. He was a slippery little cunt before he started this vigilante gang of his, and I wouldn’t bet it’s made him any easier to get at. You want to be careful. Plus, me and Ronnie have our own unfinished business with him.”

  “Yes, I know. But
you have to understand. He’s mine, OK? I’m dealing with them one at a time, and he’s going to be last. So he knows what’s going to happen to him.”

  “Yeah, well, you’d better get a move on, then. Ronnie’s had a hard-on for Collier ever since he fitted him up. Now he’s got the cash, there’s no telling what he’ll do.”

  Stella finished her champagne then stifled a belch with the back of her hand, blinking.

  “Please don’t tell me I’m in a bloody race to get to him before Ronnie.”

  “Oh, it’s not Ronnie you need to worry about.”

  She smiled at Stella, clearly waiting for the next question.

  “Go on. Who is it, then?”

  “You know what my maiden name was?”

  “Unlike those journalists reporting at Ronnie’s trial, yes, I do. You’re Freddie McTiernan’s daughter.”

  “His favourite daughter. He wasn’t best pleased when me and Ronnie got married, but he came round in the end. Him and Ronnie had big plans. They were going to take over the whole of the drugs trade east of Commercial Street. Then Collier fitted Ronnie up and in the process let in this new lot of fucking immigrants. Albanians!” She uttered this last word as if it were an affront to her patriotism. “Fucking Albanians! I mean, the Greeks, well, you know where you are with them, but this lot, fucking psychos, the lot of them. Anyway, Dad’s the one holding a grudge against your former boss.”

  “So why hasn’t he done anything about it?”

  “Why? Because he’s not a fucking idiot, that’s why. These things take time and a lot of patience, not to mention planning. You don’t just walk into Paddington Green nick, pull out a shooter and kill a detective chief superintendent.”

  “I don’t know,” that laconic voice said in Stella’s ear. “Doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me.”

  “How does this change things?”

  “Because,” Marilyn pointed a bright red fingernail at Stella, “now I know you’re after Collier, maybe this is the time to let Dad in on the act. You can kill Collier, but maybe Dad can get what he needs, too. Something to put the Albanians back in their box. Oh, and one last thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t ever call me ‘Min’ or you’ll be eating through a straw.”

  46

  Yiannis Terzi, MD

  THE BLUE VEIN bulges in the crook of Terzi’s elbow. He slaps the skin a few more times and flexes the joint. Then he slides the needle into the blood vessel with a whistling outbreath through his pinched nostrils. Down goes the plunger under the yellow-nailed thumb. Into his bloodstream go the five ccs of medical-grade heroin. Unlike the junkies down by the docks or lounging about on the beach, Terzi is able to feed his addiction with 98% pure diamorphine, procured by a doctor friend in the local hospital. It has its risks, of course, but dying from the toxic effects of undissolved strychnine used by the local Bulgarian gang to cut the heroin isn’t one of them.

  He gasps.

  Then he groans, as the drug knocks politely but forcefully at the doors to his perception, before pushing through.

  An observer, chancing by the open window of his house and looking in past the slatted wooden shutters, would see a man in his mid-forties, dressed in white trousers and a loose, turquoise shirt, reclining on a couch, eyes closed as if asleep. His short brown hair neatly combed, full lips wide in a lazy smile. They might conclude that the man was enjoying an erotic dream. And they would be half-right.

  Terzi soars on the currents of euphoria that buoy him up, high, high above the Earth’s surface, flying, arms outstretched in ecstasy, from his clinic in Marbella on the Costa del Sol, all the way to the Middlesex Hospital in London, on Mortimer Street, where he first trained as a doctor and then on, on, over the Atlantic to Mount Sinai Hospital in Denver to train as first a general surgeon, then as a reconstructive plastic surgeon; and at every stop along the way, beautiful women – nurses, secretaries, fellow medical students, shop assistants, school mums dropping their kids off in the morning before gathering for coffee with their friends, office workers, prostitutes returning to their flats after a hard night, bus drivers, executives, housewives, politicians on the TV who break off from their speeches to wink lasciviously at him – bare their breasts, stroke themselves between their legs and lick their lips in an obscene parody of desire; until he cruises in to land at the private clinic on the Spanish coast where he has established his reputation as a plastic surgeon and enhancer of women’s figures, to be sought out by the wives and girlfriends of rich men; beautiful already, they come to him for bigger breasts, smaller noses, tauter faces, smoother skin, plumper lips, rounder bottoms, and all the while his slide into addiction has gathered pace, and the favours he’s done for the husbands who run criminal operations as well as legal businesses grow and grow, earning him enough money to pay the bribes and fees he needs to procure his purest-of-the-pure heroin, and the fly-beneath-the-radar anonymity that only a new face or a scrubbed-clean set of fingertips can provide, and right now none of that matters as the joy speeding through his arteries and swirling unchecked into his brain is unconfined, such is the power of the drug to erase all guilt, all sadness, all anxiety and replace them all with this godlike sense of power and serenity, because he, Yiannis Hera lion Aristophanes Terzi, knows in his soul that he is good and that nothing can touch him, not the police inspector, not the crusading magistrate, not the local investigative journalist, and, oh, the beautiful feeling of the women’s skin beneath his skilful fingertips and the colours of their eyes, the minute flecks of iridescent blue in their irises and he leans forwards to slide through the widening black tunnels of their pupils to slip unseen into their minds and sport there, conjoined with their spirits, and then in a rush to burst free and take to the sky once more to fly up, away from the Earth’s surface, first to the cloud layer and then beyond into the limitless blue and onwards to the point the oxygen leaks away and the colour darkens to midnight, indigo and the deep, deep, blue-black of space and those trillions of bright-white needle-pricks in the velvet, twinkling in his brain as he flies on, his flesh dissolving and leaving him, then the bones, then the organs and their secretions until he is simply will, and perception, joining with the universe, and he knows he could recreate himself and escape into the realm beyond all the stars and planets and then …

  … and then, a tiny red beetle crawls over his eyeball, which has grown to the size of the moon, and he tries to brush it away but his hand is ten million miles away so the beetle continues its scratchy progress across his cornea, its little, sharp clawed feet pricking the delicate membrane, drawing blood and making Terzi cry out until the beetle, irritated by his whimpering, turns and speaks to him and says, “Quiet, Yiannis, or I’ll show you what pain really is,” and thrusts its leading foot hard into his eye, drawing forth a scream from Terzi’s parched lips and making him shudder as the pain grows in intensity and he feels himself falling, gathering speed, his hand snapping back from wherever it has travelled to and he bats at his eye, trying to dislodge the foul insect, which is now clinging to his eye with all six hooked appendages, so that he is looking out through a film of red and weeping from the pain as he collapses back in on himself and all that joy, all that euphoria, dissolves and the wonderful feeling of rightness begins to drain from him along with the clear fluid from the centre of his eyeball as he crashes back into the outer layer of Earth’s atmosphere and his skin heats up and grows rough from the friction of the boiling, sandpapery air, his crooked fingers pulling at the beetle and its hundreds of friends who have climbed onto his naked body and are even now raking him with their claws as he hurtles down between the buildings, blood and fear streaming behind him in translucent pink trails through the sky, and there is his house with the drugs and the knives and the needles, the shutters open to receive him as he plummets through the gap and there he lies, eyes staring, mouth stretched wide, yellow teeth bared and tongue, white-furred and swollen, protruding beneath those gaping lips, sweat darkening his shirt, and fi
nally the grotesque creatures abandon him, unbuckling their claws from his screaming skin and dissolving into the air behind him as he smashes face first into his own body and the cannons began to roar and the bells begin to ring, getting louder and louder, demanding he answer their call, ringing, ringing, ringing

  47

  Mental Health

  UNBEKNOWNST TO HIS colleagues in the pathology department at Paddington Green, Dr Anthony Akuminde, its head, was an ally of Collier’s. The Nigerian’s support for Pro Patria Mori was of the sort its members referred to as “tacit.” He helped where he could, fudging an autopsy report here, misreporting a cause of death there, always ready to smooth the path for a cadaver to its resting place without the troublesome intervention of the coroner.

  Now he stood with Collier in the courtyard of the station, in a corner on the far side of the square, well away from the doors leading into the grassy space from the main building.

  “What can I do for you, Adam?” he asked in an almost comically upper-class accent, his head cocked to one side, his skin gleaming in the strong sunlight.

  “How do you get someone sectioned? Hypothetically?”

  “Under the Mental Health Act 1983, you mean? Well, there are various procedures, depending on the severity of the person’s mental health problem and the risk they pose to themselves or to others.”

  Collier nodded, digesting the doctor’s words.

  “What if this person were a serious danger and you urgently needed to stop them from hurting people?”

  “Well, then I would probably section them under Section Four.”

  “Which means?”

  Akuminde straightened, and looked Collier in the eye.

  “For this hypothetical patient?”

  “Yes.”

  “Section Four applies when it is urgently necessary for the,” he paused, “hypothetical person to be admitted to hospital and detained. You would also, in those circumstances, only need one doctor if waiting for a second would cause undesirable delay. If that’s of interest to you, Adam.”