The Choice: An absolutely gripping crime thriller you won’t be able to put down

by Jake Cross

  They faced each other for a time, silent. Then Ramirez said: ‘Okay, since we’re off the fucking record here, answer me one question. Do you think it was me?’

  ‘You got arrested, Ramirez. That means there was some evidence, and people will remember that. Even if we convict someone else for it, people will still wonder if you did it. They’ll fear you. They’ll respect you. You’ll love it. Bear that in m—’

  ‘Hey. I said do you think it was me?’

  ‘And you slipped here today, right? Accusations of police brutality give everyone headaches, too.’

  ‘Me, yes or fucking no?’

  ‘The truth will out, Mr Ramirez. But let’s just say you’re an idiot skinny runt wannabe with an ego problem, and no idiot skinny runt wannabe could have done this to Grafton.’

  Fifteen

  Mick

  Mick cursed almost all the way home, but mellowed a little when he started to think about Ronald Grafton. Specifically, his eyes. He dumped his bag of Grafton’s goodies in the hallway and turned off the light in his son’s bedroom. Then he called Brad.

  ‘The police are onto the Volvo,’ he snapped. ‘Tell me you two put that thing back in the garage, please?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Brad said. ‘Shit. Wait, if you have to ask that, it means they haven’t actually found it.’

  ‘Tell me you sterilised it?’

  ‘We sterilised it. Don’t worry. So they haven’t physically found it?’

  Mick sighed. Pure relief. ‘Some interfering and helpful good citizen saw us driving near Grafton’s, that’s all. Got the reg. Called it in when he saw flashing blue lights around Grafton’s place. But if it’s sterile, we’re okay. No CCTV near that garage.’

  ‘Have we got to move it?’

  ‘We can’t. If it’s seen on the roads, it’s grabbed and whoever’s in it. We’ll just leave it. No one goes there. If it’s sterile, they’ll get nothing from it.’

  ‘Okay. So that’s not bad news at all, really. What about Ramirez?’

  Mick quickly explained.

  ‘Of all the fucking alibis,’ Brad said. ‘What can you do about it?’

  Dave had watched Ramirez and his girlfriend enter the flat and determined that the couple was staying in for the night, so he’d looked good for a weak alibi. Except for the damn video camera. Ramirez’s home video had showed him fucking his girlfriend to a live football match on TV. They began at the opening whistle, and Ramirez tried to finish at the final blow, but got there as the players were swapping shirts. Right around the assumed time of death. And it wasn’t a pre-recorded or plus-one channel because there was a moment when an elbow caught the TV remote and flicked the channel onto a news show.

  ‘It was to buy time. It bought time.’

  ‘And maybe the arrest will be proof enough for Grafton’s men to take revenge.’

  There was a pause between the men. Mick turned on the TV because the silent house unnerved him. He still hadn’t got used to it.

  ‘Hey, do you remember how Grafton’s eyes changed when his head came off? Like his brain was still alive and registering? Is that possible?’

  More silence from Brad. Mick wondered if he was reliving earlier events. They hadn’t been out of Mick’s mind all night.

  He wasn’t: ‘I’m sure you hope so. I don’t remember. It’s all a blur. Fucking hope it stays that way. So Ramirez is no longer in the frame?’

  ‘Apparently not. But he got a headache.’ An idea popped into his own throbbing head. ‘Call someone to brick Ramirez’s mum’s windows. Write a note to make him think Grafton’s boys are coming for payback. He’ll jump at every sound for the next ten years. Hopefully they’ll really come for him.’

  ‘Sure. So, if he’s not part of this any more, it doesn’t matter if Liz Grafton saw a white face. It doesn’t matter what she tells the police, right? So, we don’t need to go after her. You should cancel Król.’

  That surprised him. Was Brad losing his nerve, or just not thinking straight? ‘Her dick husband is dead, Brad. When she learns that, she realises that there’s no reason not to tell everything. When a bad guy gets cut down, coppers don’t just look at the guy’s enemies, Brad. They look at his own people, too. Past and present. In case someone close to him decided to betray him. She’ll give names. One of those names will be Brad Smithfield. Maybe she even recognised him just from the eyes.’

  The pause of a man weighing up dangerous news. Finally, Brad said: ‘That won’t stand up in court.’

  ‘Court is okay for you? You’re okay with a murder trial? You’re okay with the police suspecting you and snooping into your life? I’m surprised. Not something I’m willing to risk.’

  ‘Mick, this isn’t about security, it’s about revenge.’

  Now Mick fell silent for a time. Something Brad had said flashed in his brain: I’m sure you hope so. Now he understood: Brad assumed that Mick was only concerned with causing more suffering. Clearly, he was underestimating Grafton’s wife’s role in all of this. ‘Grafton was what he was because of her. Behind every great man stands a great woman, you know?’

  Brad said: ‘She hasn’t got a bad bone in her body, Mick. You think she turned him into a criminal? He hid ninety per cent of what he did from her. She didn’t like it. She only settled for his lifestyle because she was there way before he stole his first pound. Creeping normality, that’s the term. He was a gangster before she knew it.’

  ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man. Heard that one? Maybe she made him exactly who he was. Maybe without her he would have been a priest. Maybe she ran the fucking empire from behind the scenes, new-world-order style.’

  Brad chuckled again. ‘Okay, Mick. Whatever floats your boat.’

  Mick’s voice raised a notch. ‘She was part of him, Brad. They were one together. You’ve seen that fucking tattoo, haven’t you? She’s a piece of him, and I want every piece of him dead.’ There, he had admitted it. He’d said it out loud. ‘I don’t even know why I’m bothering to explain this to you. You need to concentrate on the fact that she could fuck everything up for you. No more bar in Thailand. You can say goodbye to that dream.’

  ‘Look, we’ll do her, fine, okay. You’re right, she could fuck things up for me. I’m in. Just keep your own weird reasons to yourself, okay? Did you call Król?’

  Mick didn’t want to let it go. He felt he was being mocked. But so what? If Brad didn’t understand, it didn’t matter. Results mattered. Satisfaction mattered. He took a breath.

  ‘He’s on it. Her and the guy who picked her up. Both will cease to be by morning.’

  ‘And then who’s next?’

  ‘What?’

  Brad sighed. ‘Nothing. So I can go back to sleep, then?’ he said, and hung up without waiting for an answer.

  * * *

  Mick found sleep impossible. He loaded Facebook Messenger and sent a message to Alize, a girl in Germany he’d been corresponding with for a few months now. She was always quick to reply, no matter how late, but he was too wired to sit and await her response. He wandered the house. He felt burdened and had a load of pent-up energy to get rid of. He took the rubbish out to the wheelie bin, making the loose change in his jacket jingle. When he tossed the coins into Tim’s money jar, a large container once bearing boiled sweets, he felt the cogs slicken once more.

  Alize got back to him.

  Evening, babe. I sold three chairs today. You good?

  She crafted and sold bamboo chairs for a living, an art he was planning to have her teach him. He told her he was good, couldn’t wait to see her soon, and then stripped and put on a pair of shorts. A thirty-minute workout, with a photo of Grafton’s face stuck on the punchbag, turned placidity into euphoria. A feeling no drug could match. A feeling he hadn’t experienced since he turned off the chainsaw, seemingly days ago.

  Sixteen

  In The Night

  Two of them came during the Devil’s Hour. The street was silent and empty, and they rode up on a Beta 300 RR of
f-road bike. It had been doing eighty miles an hour 1,000 feet away when the engine was killed, and now it coasted silently along the road and turned into an alleyway. Two men in black plastic tracksuits with the hoods up exited, climbed a fence and ran across someone’s backyard. Scaling another fence put them in the garden they wanted.

  The back door was a sturdy uPVC affair, but it had been compromised by the installation of a cat flap. The smaller of the two men prised away the outer frame with the claw end of a hammer. The inner frame fell away into the kitchen with barely a noise. The hole cut into the door was big enough to let him slip through. The key was in the other side of the door, which meant a few seconds later his partner was able to step through like someone who belonged.

  They were seasoned burglars who had good night vision. They crossed a kitchen that had two islands and stools arranged around both without disturbing anything except a cat that shot past them. One man was white, the other dark-skinned. The dark-skinned guy checked the living room while his partner remained at the foot of the stairs. They had learned the hard way that sometimes couples grew apart, where one slept on the sofa downstairs. The dark-skinned guy, still carrying his hammer, returned and gave a thumbs up. All appeared to be good in this couple’s relationship.

  Both men climbed the stairs. Four doors led off a tiny landing at the top. Two were open. A bathroom and a small bedroom given over to storage. The dark-skinned guy opened one of the others to disclose a second bedroom, neat, and empty – no sex-starved husband sleeping in there. The white guy opened the other door slowly, exposing the main bedroom. The curtains were closed against the moonlight, but the couple in the bed had fallen asleep with a small lamp on the wall above the bed that gave off a soft orange glow. He could see two shapes under the thick quilt. The woman was on her back, mouth open, long dark hair fanned across the pillow, while the guy was on his side and facing away. Bare shoulders suggested both were naked.

  They’d already formulated a plan, so they rushed inside quickly, silently. The white guy threw the cover off the male, exposing his nakedness. His half of the quilt fell over his wife. The dark-skinned man leaped on the woman, forcing the quilt over her face. The couple jerked awake at the same time. The woman started to struggle and yell, but he kept his weight on her, smothering her and forcing a gloved hand over her face, using the thick fabric of the quilt to cover her mouth and dull her cries.

  The man tried to sit up, shock imprinted all over his sleepy face, but the white man headbutted him right in the nose, then sat astride him holding a shank made from a piece of wood and three four-inch nails jammed into his cheek. His other hand clamped over his mouth. Blood from the guy’s nose dribbled down his cheeks like war paint.

  ‘Where’s the woman?’ the white guy whispered right into his ear. ‘Make noise and I bleed you and the wife.’

  He released his hand from the man’s mouth. The guy’s expression was of pain and horror.

  ‘The woman you picked up earlier tonight. Where is she? And what did she say?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ the man squealed. ‘Please.’

  The white burglar twisted the wood back and forth, jamming the nails into the man’s face, scraping them against bone. Despite his hand over the man’s mouth again, a scream of pain emerged that only dead neighbours wouldn’t hear. Blood went everywhere. Two feet away, the dark-skinned man laughed as the woman thrashed beneath him.

  ‘Where’s the woman?’

  The hand was removed from his mouth. The man snatched a chance to scream for help. The white guy headbutted him again, then stabbed him five times in the same spot on his upper arm, fast, like a piston. Now he didn’t care about the guy’s screams. He jammed the lethal weapon under the man’s chin, right into his throat, and pressed in just shy of hard enough to draw blood.

  ‘Last chance! Where’s the fucking woman you picked up tonight?’

  Seventeen

  Mick

  Last night’s dream, for once, was different, but no less chilling than the one that had been replaying daily for weeks. Grafton survived the attack, his body parts were reattached in the cottage, and that very same night he walked right on out into a garden full of cheering fans. Weirdly, the worst part was that somehow his suit had managed to avoid getting a single drop of blood on it. Pristine and white, as always.

  As a man who craved control, Mick couldn’t let even an errant part of his own mind make decisions he didn’t like. So he lay there and imagined Grafton once again in that garden, but now his sea of admirers fell silent and parted, and Mick stepped forward to grab the bastard by the neck. He squeezed and the night darkened, and he squeezed and daylight broke over the cottage, and years might have passed before Mick became satisfied.

  I’m sure you hope so.

  But the vision flickered out when pain took over. He realised he’d been digging his fingers hard into his thigh.

  He grabbed his mobile, which said it was six in the morning. He got as far as loading the Internet before he stopped and laughed. His brain must still be waking up because he’d been about to check the news for Grafton’s superhuman recovery. Idiot.

  He stopped laughing when he realised he’d had no missed calls or texts during the night. No word from Król. He got out of bed and padded naked into the bathroom. In the mirror, his face was tired and angry-looking. He couldn’t blame the dream. It was a face he wore a lot these days. He was about to brush his teeth when he caught sight of them. Yellow, getting worse. He hadn’t brushed them ten times in the last year, and thought fuck it now. What good would it do? Who was he trying to impress?

  His jaw was hurting. He’d developed a habit of grinding his teeth, even while asleep. He had a Swan Vestas matchbox full of mints, which helped, and popped a couple into his mouth. Then he went into his son’s bedroom, and threw back the covers. ‘Wake up, sleepyhead. Breakfast.’

  * * *

  He entered the kitchen. A bowl of cornflakes was slid onto the table for Tim. For Mick, it was a fry-up, which was quick and convenient and all he seemed to eat these days, especially when working the streets. He’d stopped caring about cholesterol levels a long time ago. He put the kettle on and moved to the living room. In a corner, out of sight of the window, was a freestanding torso punching bag in realistic pink. It had a rope tied around the badly frayed neck, and a thousand slashes and holes from the knife now sticking out of its shoulder. The ruined picture of Grafton’s face had slid off during the night and lay on the floor. He stamped on it, then tore it up and put it in the bin. He should have covered it in tape to preserve it because he didn’t have many pictures left, and the hunger would be back time and again.

  I’m sure you hope so.

  He stepped up to the window. The sight of his neat lawn always made him relax. Even after the dream, even after the lack of contact from Król, it still worked.

  Silence, though. Silence had the opposite effect. The house had been silent these past three years, and he’d never become comfortable with it. He put the news on TV while he waited for the kettle, just for noise.

  His interest was instantly piqued when he saw police cars behind a cordon and a large warehouse. The news ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screen said:

  POLICE SEIZE HOARD OF PSYCHEDELIC DRUG ‘BUZZ’ WITH STREET WORTH OF––

  And that was as much as he could bear to see before jabbing a finger hard into the remote to change the channel.

  He flicked through channels until he heard canned laughter. An American sitcom. He took a breath to calm himself. He sat on the arm of his sofa and tried to concentrate on the TV. This was what Brad meant: his inability to relax, to do normal things. He got his cup of tea and sat on a sofa cushion, not on the arm. Curled his feet under him and cradled the cup. Just like a normal person. But it felt unnatural. He tried not to think about Król. Tried to concentrate on the TV, but it was no good. He couldn’t do it.

  Where the fuck was Król?

  The sitcom started to wear on hi
m quickly. Everything was too clean, the characters too fresh and neat. And one of them was called Theo, same as the dickhead who used to bully Tim at school. He wanted to smash their buoyant faces, see how perfect they’d be then. Welcome to the fucking real world. He turned off the TV before his brain got the chance to blame the device for what it had just been subjected to. Something else Brad had said he had a habit of doing. Nothing was ever Mick’s fault. Maybe it wasn’t: nobody knew him these days, certainly not Brad fucking Smithfield. In part, he knew, it was his own fault. He kept his emotions internal as best he could, never talked about himself, his tastes, likes, dislikes, any of that shit. But the one thing he couldn’t keep in check was his anger because it was like a disconnected part of him, something out of his control. Everybody in his orbit had witnessed it; he knew it defined him in their eyes. And it was too late to do anything about that.

  Brad and Dave often ribbed him about his anger, but what did they know? Dave had a wife, and Brad had a fucking boyfriend. Dave had a mortgage and plans for kids, and Brad had that pathetic dream about opening a bar in Thailand. What future did Mick have to look forward to, apart from more pain? They knew nothing about what it was like to be in Mick’s shoes. Most men would have sunk into a whirlpool of despair, while others would have migrated to a monastery in Tibet: you coped how you could. Mick’s way was to be, as Brad had put it, angry at the entire world. But it beat shrinking into nothing, or casting aside your entire life for something new. Both were weak responses to life’s cruel whip. Plus, it gave him that push needed to go and get what you wanted. Case in point: Grafton.