Bang: Memoirs of a Relationship Assassin

by Wailing, David

  And then Andy was sitting in the same seat as me.

  “You’re a cunt, Darren.”

  He blinked. “What?”

  “You vanished once you met her!” I spat. “Where have you been, man? I haven’t seen you for weeks!”

  His mouth flapped for a second – he’d never seen this side of me before. I’d made sure Andy and Darren never met. But now here they were, face to face.

  “Well… I’ve been busy, ain’t I? What with the flat, and before that we went to Spain, so I haven’t – ”

  “Bollocks! You just don’t give a shit. You got your bird now, long as you get your end away, what do you care? You’re sorted. Don’t need me any more.”

  Darren half-laughed. “Easy, mate! Bloody hell, where’s this come from? No big deal is it, I’ve just not had the time to go out as much as we used to. I’m here now, aren’t I?”

  “Yeah, right,” I sneered. “You’re only allowed to see me now ‘cos she’s here. You’re on the leash man, she’s the boss, you’re just too thick to see it!”

  Surprise on Darren’s face. Take it? Or fight back?

  “Fuck off!” he yelled. “You’re such a hypocrite, man! I don’t see you for weeks sometimes, when you’re off on one of your missions! You’ve been doing this for years, vanishing and then turning up again!”

  Missions. He said missions. “Jesus, shut up!”

  “Half the time you’re too busy shagging somebody’s misses to even go down the pub! So don’t give me grief about being busy! You’re well out of order!”

  I glanced round, suddenly terrified. Couples peering our way, the barman looking up from pulling a pint. What had they heard? Run, I thought, get out now!

  Like fuck, thought Andy. You don’t take shit from anyone. Not even a mate.

  “You don’t mind me earning the money though, do ya?” I shouted. “Not when it’s paying your rent every other month! And getting in about four rounds to every one of yours. God, the things I’ve done for you over the years…”

  “Oh it’s about money, is it!”

  Barman’s voice, as if off-stage: “Oi, you two! Keep it down!”

  Darren stood up sharpish, jogging the table and spilling his pint. He yanked his wallet out of his jeans and started flinging notes at me. “How much do I owe you then mate, just tell me, take the lot, go on! Take my credit card, PIN number’s six nine six nine, take it, use it!”

  His card hit me in the face. I leapt up, furious, grabbing the edge of the table and upturning it, sending the drinks crashing. The barman probably went ballistic, but I heard nothing except Andy’s voice ripping up from my guts: “Yeah, what if I do! What you gonna fuckin’ do about it!”

  “Do it, then! Come on, you…” Darren looked past me, startled.

  I spun round and there was Becky and Vicki, side by side. Speechless. Watching their boyfriends at war.

  The sense came back into Darren’s eyes. He snatched up his jacket. “Come on Vic, we’re going!”

  But I didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop the words, burning up my throat like vomit.

  “Look at you, so sensible now ain’t ya, so normal!” I bellowed. “You ain’t normal, you’re nowhere near normal, you’re an animal! Go on, tell her the truth, you’re just an animal! You’ve fucked a million girls, you’ll fuck anything, you’ve fucked everything! You fucked my Mum!”

  The pub froze.

  The barman, coming round the bar, stopped dead in his tracks. The couples at the other tables stared. The end of a song on the CD, fading to silence. Vicki’s hand over her mouth. Frozen. Andy’s voice, unable to stop:

  “You fucked my Mum! I was only fifteen and you came round every night and… you fucked my Mum!”

  Buried for fourteen years, never mentioned, never referred to. Detonating now like an unexploded landmine. The memory of going to the bathroom at 2am and bumping into my best mate. Standing there like a lemon, watching as Darren cleaned his teeth with my toothbrush, said goodnight then wandered down the hall, bollock naked, into my mother’s bedroom.

  The feelings I had made myself forget, but Andy Holloway never could.

  “You fucking freak, you fucked my Mum!”

  Darren’s face – raw with horror.

  “I was… I was just a kid! I never… she came on to me, man, she was all… what was I supposed to do! I didn’t, I didn’t know any better, I just thought with my dick!”

  He turned to Vicki, hands out as if to convince her. “I was just a kid!”

  She backed away, hand still across her mouth, shaking her head violently. She looked like a girl about to be sick. Sick at the sight of her bloke. Mask ripped off, seeing the creature underneath.

  “Don’t!” called Darren as she ran out the exit. “Vicki! I’m not…”

  Gone.

  Unlucky, mate! I heard Andy laugh.

  Darren’s hands dropped by his side. He looked at Becky, then at me. And then he exploded.

  “Tell her!” he screamed. “Tell her the truth about you, then! You ain’t normal either! You lying bastard, if I’m a freak what are you, you’re ten times worse than me, you do it for money!”

  Oh my God.

  “Tell her about the women you’ve shagged, all the couples you’ve split up! You fuck anything too AND YOU DO IT FOR MONEY!”

  My fist stabbed out.

  Aaaaaaaaaaah – freak out!

  Crunch against his nose, blood spurting down his Brand t-shirt.

  Le freak – c’est chic!

  His own fist cracking against my jaw.

  Freak out!

  And then we were a tangle of bone-hard punches and kicks and spitting, swearing, screaming bloody viciousness. I felt the barman’s arms pulling me away, a few guys leaping up from other tables to drag me and Darren apart. I glimpsed his face, soaked with blood, teeth bared. Everything whited out for a second when his fist slammed into my left eye, and with my arms pinned I kicked out, feeling his ribs crack. My voice screaming, his voice screaming, girls at tables screaming, the barman and other blokes yelling for us to stop, Le Freak blaring from the speakers.

  And off to the side, Becky’s silence. Staring at my face like she’d never seen it before.

  They threw me out. Pavement scraped my forearms. I was up and running instantly. Couldn’t see straight, legs like jelly, noise and music behind me – All that pressure, got you down, has your head spinning all around – but I hauled myself up and ran. Staggering, gasping with pain, I ran through the night streets, people veering away from me.

  And in the pit of my stomach, a sick emptiness.

  Game over. All over. Nothing now but the mission, nothing but me and Megan MacLeod. Tomorrow night was the night, the night I’d make the kill, the night I’d kidnap the Face of Scotland, I had to get home and prepare for that, concentrate on that. Nothing else mattered now. Nothing but the mission. Game on. Game on, for God’s sake, game on!

  Nothing else.

  There’s nothing else.

  Chapter 20

  He’s Got A Brand New Car

  Sunset in Shepherd’s Bush. In front of the grey, doughnut-shaped BBC Television Centre building, Megan MacLeod wandered casually through the car park, at the end of another hard day’s filming.

  Her limo was waiting a few rows down. No bodyguard, no studio escort, nobody in sight. She walked alone.

  A red shark knifed towards her.

  Headlights like dead eyes, rear wheel vents like open gills, the shark slid to a halt right beside her. Door open, burst of music. Megan jumped in. Slam, screech, burning rubber as the shark sped away.

  And that, believe it or not, is how you kidnap a TV star.

  Inside, we sang at the top of our voices: “He’s got a CD PLAYER-PLAYER-PLAYER-PLAYER!”

  We laughed long and hard as I drove like a maniac away from the BBC studios, with Feeder’s Buck Rogers blaring from the stereo. The perfect soundtrack! Megan whooped, hands pressed up against the car’s low ceiling. I twisted the wheel, weaving in and out of
the traffic on Wood Lane as if all the other cars were parked. The engine growled as we sped away from the scene of the crime.

  ”Oh my God, this is so cool!” cried Megan. “Look at you! You evil kidnapper!”

  Jason King had ditched his suit for jeans and t-shirt, but I was also wearing a full-length Matrix-style leather coat and wraparound shades. Just a little role play. Over the music, I yelled “Stop struggling, will you! Stop fighting me like that! Just accept it!”

  Megan thrashed her arms wildly. “No, no, let me go, you brute!” And then: “Hay-ulp! Hay-ulp!”

  The two of us couldn’t stop laughing. Adrenalin pumping, music thumping, engine roaring and the world outside whipping past like we’d been fired from a gun. Together we sang “I think we’re gooooonna make it, I think we’re gooooonna save it yeah!” like we were secret lovers escaping from our horrible lives. Megan squeezed my arm, excited, exhilarated.

  And she was mine.

  “So don’t you tryyyyy to fake it… anymore… anymore…”

  Just a little role play. But it’s easy to get carried away.

  I was using Emma’s car, the red shark that had followed me in Kensington the week before, which I now knew to be a customised Lotus Elise 2dr Roadster. Christ, it could move. Sudden bursts of speed at my slightest foot pressure, like it was hungry for a race, which it wasn’t going to get in London traffic.

  Megan glanced back (over her shoulder, instead of in the rear mirror – the mark of a non-driver). “So are we expecting them to come after us? Your people?”

  “Well, if they were on the ball, then yes, they should be in hot pursuit. But it’s looking like we got you out under their radar. Which is exactly the sort of thing this exercise is meant to tell us. So let’s see how far we can take it.” I grinned at her. “Don’t want our adventure to end too soon, do we?”

  “No!” Megan clapped her hands. “Oh, this is brilliant!”

  There would be no hot pursuit – Larry had seen to that. There was a mysterious gap between security shifts that evening, only for an hour, but that was enough for me to get Megan out without anyone noticing. Nothing more than an ‘administrative error’ that would look like mild incompetence in any subsequent investigation. No conspiracy, just a simple mistake. Global Investigations would never know that its own boss had pulled the wool over its eyes.

  So far so good. I heaved a deep breath. “So, um… so is this a bit of a relief for you, then? I mean, you know, getting away from your schedule for a bit…”

  Megan nodded. “It is, actually. It’s been ages since I’ve done anything that wasn’t, you know, planned to the last detail. I’ve kind of forgotten what it feels like to just do something out of the blue…”

  Green light. I accelerated.

  “Perhaps I should just keep going,” I purred, the way Simon Templar would have done. The way he had done with Amanda Bentley-Foster, down in the deserted car park of her husband’s company, pouring on the charm with his fingers: “Perhaps I should just keep going, Amanda…”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “I can very easily take you away from that life, you know. You and me and the open road, driving into the sunset…” My hand dropped away from the gear stick, heading towards her thigh.

  Megan smiled, assuming I was still fooling around. “Hmm, that’s very sweet Jason, but somehow I don’t think Declan would be too happy.”

  I snatched my hand back as if burnt. Jason. I wasn’t Simon any more, I was Jason. Idiot. I nearly touched up the Leg of Scotland.

  Keep talking! “Um, no, I suppose not. He, er, didn’t look too happy the other day, in fact.”

  Megan’s laugh became polite. “Well, yeah, he can be a bit moody sometimes. Got a lot on his plate, he’s even busier than me.” She pulled the seatbelt around her, snapping it securely into place.

  Amber light. I slowed.

  What was I doing? You can’t cock this up! Concentrate!

  But I couldn’t. I was jumpy, my thoughts leapfrogging from one thing to another. Couldn’t focus. No sleep whatsoever the night before, lying awake trying not to think about what had happened in the Anchorage. Trying to focus on what was at stake now: Barry and Emma and a quarter of a million quid. Everything was slippery in my head. I felt fractured.

  The fear seeped back in, making my arms tremble slightly – the fear of losing control.

  I asked Megan how her week had been, hoping she would just chatter on and give me some breathing space. Thank God she did – she hated silences too. She talked about EastEnders and how she had filmed some scenes today where Danielle Ferguson was saying emotional goodbyes prior to leaving the country for a bit, to account for Megan’s absence while she filmed the Channel 4 drama. I let her talk while I pulled myself together. Her sing-song Scots accent was literally music to my ears, making the words bounce along melodically. I could listen to this girl all day, I thought. Might have to.

  So much like Becky… lively, fun, cheeky. It was almost like having her there next to me, chatting away. I swallowed hard, trying to forget.

  “Oh, and I met with the script editors yesterday,” Megan said. “That was bloody ridiculous. They were telling me about this new storyline they had planned for Danielle, for when I come back in September. You know how they keep having these blokes from my past turn up in the Square, like old boyfriends and married men I’ve had affairs with and all that?”

  “Yeah.” I’d picked this up from my research. You’d think the ten million people who watched the show might get bored of the same old storyline. Apparently not.

  “Well their new twist was for this girl to turn up while I’m gone and claim she’s an old mate of mine. Then it turns out she had a fling with Danielle years back and now wants a proper relationship, and she tries it on by snogging me.”

  “…”

  I opened my mouth to say something. In that second of hesitation, I considered saying what John might say (“Have to set the recorder for that!”) or Simon’s slick reply (“Should you need practice before filming, my lips are at your disposal.”) and even, horribly, something crude and Andy-like (“Oh yeah, lesbo action, nice one!”). For God’s sake, who am I? Quick, pick one! Too late –

  “Well, I shot that idea down in flames, let me tell you!” Megan told me.

  “…Oh.” I hadn’t expected that. I glanced her way, pretty as a picture beside me in jeans and a burgundy blouse, green eyes angry.

  “Yeah, I told them, that’s going to do my career a fat lot of good, isn’t it! Having everyone thinking I’m a fucking lesbian! Like I’m going to do that!” And she shuddered like they’d asked her to lick a dog turd on camera.

  “Right,” I agreed. Changed gear. “I suppose it is a bit out of order.”

  “They’re taking the piss! All they care about is ratings, get more blokes watching, they’re not bothered how it’ll affect me. It’s not like there aren’t enough dykes on telly these days, is it? Anyway,” she smiled, “I’ve nipped that one in the bud so nothing to worry about, all back on track.”

  I wasn’t so sure. Something about the steering felt a little off.

  We drove on, my mind racing faster than the car. Megan talked, and I wondered how to react. Professional and polite? Crack jokes with a boyish grin? Stare into her eyes romantically? Leer down her blouse?

  I felt lost. Like I’d driven off the edge of the map.

  “Can you see with those shades on?” Megan asked. “Not saying you’re a bad driver or anything…”

  I took them off. I was prepared for this, at least.

  “Oh my God! What happened?”

  I smiled, knowing she was staring at the black eye left by my best mate’s fist. “Occupational hazard,” I shrugged. “That’s the security business for you.”

  I gave her the speech. I’d prepared it last night, to explain my injuries to Megan. I told her I’d been providing some personal security for another client (“Can’t tell you who, sorry, confidentiality and all that, you probably know
her though…”). I said it had been a while since I had done the bodyguard job, but it was an emergency and she asked for Jason King personally, said she felt safe with me. Had to be the night her fans went crazy, didn’t it? I got her out okay, but took an elbow in the face while doing it. No big deal, I’ve had worse in my time…

  “Oh my God!” said Megan more than once, hands over her mouth. “Your poor face! I can’t believe that’s your job.”

  “Well, it’s not as glamorous as The Bodyguard, it’s pretty boring looking after people most of the – ”

  “Oh, I love The Bodyguard! That’s my favourite movie! I watch that about once a year!”

  “You don’t have a sister, right?”

  “No!” she laughed wildly. “No sister to hire a hitman for me, you’re safe!”

  “Well don’t you go getting assassinated on me or anything, okay? I’ll take a bullet if I have to, but this is a new coat.”

  She beamed at me, admiringly. Her personal bodyguard, already wounded in battle. And protecting her against assassins, which just made me want to bark like a hyena. I relaxed a little, feeling like I was the one behind the wheel once more.

  By the time I pulled into my street, it was getting dark. The Lotus Elise’s throaty growl caused a lot of curtains to twitch as I slid along looking for a place to park. Just hope the local kids kept their hands off it. I could imagine Emma’s reaction if someone scratched WAYNE 4 SHARON into the bonnet of her baby. She’d hand me my own testicles.

  And yes, I know how it sounds, but I did actually take Megan MacLeod back to my flat.

  Not much choice. I’d hoped to hire out a hotel room, but Larry had only delivered the surveillance equipment that afternoon, so we didn’t have enough time to set the whole thing up anywhere else. Also, I thought it might help matters, bringing Megan back to my – to Jason King’s – home, rather than somewhere sterile like the Holiday Inn. She needed to feel comfortable, if she was going to let her guard down.