The Colour of Violence

by Jeffries, Roderic

  There was only room for one of them to dig, so Carver started and Ricard stood to one side with a second spade to throw the excavated soil well clear. Dunder waited with Weir, ready to give a hand when called upon to do so.

  Carver had only dug down a few inches and Weir was impatiently pacing a short section of the flagged floor, well clear of any soil, when suddenly there was a row from upstairs which shocked them so much that they froze, each man holding the position in which he’d been when the noise started. There was a shout, a thudding crash, and a second crash, almost as loud.

  Initially, they thought the “impossible” had happened, the police had broken in and there’d been a short, vicious fight up top. Initially, each man was concerned only with his chances of escape. Then, just as the first of them, Weir, moved, they heard a call. They recognised Farnes’ voice. “Lofty…Quick.”

  Clearly, whatever had happened, the police had not broken in. Weir raced up the cellar stairs, meeting Farnes at the top.

  “Lofty, Shocker’s taken a fall.”

  Weir’s reaction was typical. “So tell the stupid sod to get up.”

  “’E’s out cold and looks bad.” Farnes wasn’t panicking, but there was about him the air of a man who believed something had gone irretrievably wrong. “’E slipped on the stairs and Alf couldn’t ‘old on to the top end of the bottle. Shocker went flying and it landed on ‘im.”

  Weir, cursing, climbed the stairs, followed by Farnes. Shocker Turner, their electrical expert, an ugly man with perpetually dripping nose, lay a few feet away from the foot of the next flight of stairs up to the bedrooms, half curled up, his body slightly twisted. His eyes were closed, blood was running out of his nose, and from the side of his mouth, which was open to expose his miscoloured teeth, his complexion was dirty white, and his breathing was uneven.

  “Where did he get belted?” demanded Weir.

  “In the guts,” said Alf Gates, an Australian, who had been brought in with Carver as the last of the muscle men.

  As they stared at him, Turner died.

  *

  From the moment he’d fully regained his senses, Armitage had frantically been listening for the noise of the police rescue. For, of course, there had to be a rescue. There always was. But as time passed, his mind began to conceive the chilling thought that perhaps this wasn’t true.

  From where he lay, by the side of the chair he’d been sitting in when the men had first broken into the room, he could see Patricia quite clearly. Although she’d managed to work her skirt down a bit, most of her legs were still visible. Her face was twisted with fear, shock, and bewilderment and the sight of her suffering filled him with a mental pain that was as great as his physical pain.

  He strained his wrists behind his back to gauge the strength of the bindings and was able to gain just enough movement to make him believe there could be a chance of freeing himself. Then he tried to check on his feet, bringing them up to his hands, but this proved far more difficult.

  The hooded Smith — face made brutishly indistinguishable by the nylon — suddenly turned away from the window, where he’d been keeping watch through a gap between curtain and frame, and stared at him, then began to walk across. He wriggled his shoulders as if all he’d been trying to do was to cure an itch. Smith came to a stop, said nothing, but kicked him in the side. The pain was immediate and intense, but not quite intense enough to prevent his wondering, with renewed shocked disbelief, how anyone could inflict violence so casually? After a while, Smith returned to the window.

  The pain in his side slowly died down to a steady throb, matching the throb in his head. Had the world gone crazy? he thought wildly. Were these men inhuman?

  From beyond the door, but not very far beyond, he heard a shout of alarm. This was followed by a thud which sent a vibration along through the floorboards strong enough for him to feel clearly, then a second thud which produced a slightly lighter vibration. His immediate thought was the police had at last arrived. Smith seemed to be of the same belief because he spun round and stood in a boxer’s stance, as if expecting to have to defend himself at any second. When nothing more appeared to happen, Smith crossed to the door and very carefully opened it. As soon as he could see, he opened the door more fully and went outside.

  There were no shouts, no more thuds, no other sounds of battle and bitterly Armitage began to accept the fact that after all this could not have been a police rescue. Then he’d got to raise any alarm. Patricia was looking at him and he tried to tell her to start moving towards him, but the gag left him incapable of producing anything but meaningless grunts. He wriggled as quickly as he could, ignoring the added pain, and made progress across the floor until he came within reach of her. He rolled over, so that she could use the tips of her fingers to rip free the tape from his wrists.

  Smith looked back into the room, saw what was happening, and raced across. He grabbed Armitage’s hair and dragged him free, then kicked him several times, as hard as he could thud his heavy boots home.

  *

  Weir, standing by the end of the table in the dining room, stared at the other six and saw uncertainty, even hostility, in their expressions. “I tell you, we get on with the job.”

  “It just ain’t on,” countered Gates, his Australian accent very marked as it usually was when he was excited or earnest. “With Shocker dead, we ain’t got a chance. Shocker was going to do the alarms.”

  There was no escaping the fact. They were a team of experts and muscle men: unlike the muscle men, experts were irreplaceable. Weir, stubbornly, tried to argue round the facts. “Once we’ve cut the wires in the conduit under the strong-room floor, there ain’t nothing to worry about.”

  “Are you joking?” demanded Gates. “Who’s to know now which wires is safe to cut and which isn’t: who’s to know how to stop triggering off alarms enough to bring the law along on skates?”

  They stared at Weir.

  Their resistance infuriated him, threatening to set alight his hasty temper, but he had the capacity of being able occasionally — certainly not always — to turn off his anger as if by a switch. He did so now. They were right, yet he wasn’t going to let them be right. A man who lost a big job became a figure of derisive amusement: there was no sympathy for failure amongst villains. Somehow, he had to persuade them to continue, even though…His quick mind began to pick out a solution, but he needed time to check it out and he recognised that it had to be sold to them because it could not be forced on them. And the way to grab them and keep them was to play on their cupidity. “You’ll never get another chance at three million.”

  They moved around the room, aimlessly walking from wall to wall, fidgeting with the backs of the chairs, bumping into each other as they turned.

  “There’s none of you getting less than two per cent: on three million, that makes sixty grand.”

  They’d worked the sums out time and time again, but they still now worked them out once more. Burner Aaron, the top expert and on ten per cent, could reach three hundred thousand.

  Gates, the sharpest realist amongst them, was the first to break the silence. “Lofty, it could be a million each, but we can’t cut the wires without Shocker.”

  Dunder and Carver sat down, their expressions bitter. Gates stared at Weir.

  “Don’t you like the sound of sixty grand?”

  “It’s not on,” said Aaron, speaking suddenly.

  “Ain’t it?” Weir spoke jeeringly. “Then I guess that’s an end to it.”

  “Well, is it?”

  “You’re tellin’ me, Burner. You’re tellin’ me you’re dropping three hundred grand.”

  “With Shocker dead…”

  Weir broke in, mimicking Burner’s voice. “There ain’t no way to cut the alarms…But suppose there is a way?”

  They stared at him with renewed intensity, desperately hoping he could prove them wrong.

  “Suppose there’s a way to keep the job going, despite Shocker being dead?”

&nbs
p; “How?” demanded Gates.

  “Bringing another electrician in to do the job.”

  “There ain’t the time between now and Monday.”

  “So we buy time.”

  Gates looked at the others to see if they understood, but it was clear that as yet none of them did. “What d’you mean, Lofty?”

  Weir spoke softly. “We buy time, using the woman. We take her off with us.”

  “Do what? You’re bleeding daft.”

  “For why?”

  “What about the bloke? D’you reckon he’s going to sit back and just keep quiet?”

  “I reckon.” Weir looked at each of them in turn. “I reckon he will, if he knows that if he opens his mouth to shout, we’ll rape his wife stupid, all ways, before ripping her up.”

  They were shocked, not by the suggestion, but by the obvious fact that Weir gained a special kind of pleasure from the prospect.

  Aaron was the first to speak. “If we leave ‘im on ‘is own, ‘e could talk easily on account of reckoning the cops‘ll get us in time to save the woman — then when we come back, the law’s waiting. If one of us stays with ‘im and the cops come in for any reason, that bloke’s for the nick. And maybe the rest of us.” He didn’t insult them by spelling out the fact that if the one who stayed was offered a light prison sentence in return for information, he’d possibly sing as hard as he knew how.

  Weir said softly: “Would you call the cops if you was a civilian and there just wasn’t no way of the splits finding where your wife was being held?”

  Some of them nodded. Civilians saw things in a very emotional light.

  “What ‘appens to the woman afterwards?” asked Ricard.

  “We kill her,” answered Weir, as if the question was a ridiculous one.

  “I don’t like it,” said Gates suddenly.

  “So if you’re that soft, kiss your sixty grand goodbye.”

  Gates looked away. Sixty thousand against a woman?

  “’E could see that’s the way we’d ‘ave to play it,” objected Dunder. “So then ‘e calls the cops, since things can’t get no worse.”

  “Lou, can’t you see? He’s a civilian. He’d never believe we could act so rough. But just in case something goes wrong, we watch the flat. That way, we know if the splits call.”

  “How?”

  “From the flat across the road what we paid six months’ rent for.”

  They began to see that the idea was feasible. Weir had shown them how to play it both ways. No civilian husband would dare risk having his wife raped and murdered. But just in case, they’d watch the flat and then if the splits called they’d know the job was blown — but they’d know it without further risk to themselves.

  “Where do you keep the woman?” asked Carver.

  “At the farm, which we took for three months.”

  The isolated farmhouse, at the end of a bleak valley, which they’d rented as a place to gather together and keep all the equipment and the stolen lorry and cars before coming down on this Saturday, offered an ideal place.

  “Well?” said Weir softly. He began to massage the soft, satiny skin of his right cheek.

  Gates still showed a hesitation. “It could work, Lofty, only I don’t like doing in the woman.”

  “Would you rather she had a good butchers at us all so as when we let her go she can have a long heart-to-heart with the splits?”

  “Why can’t we blindfold ‘er on the journey and then…”

  “So she listens to our voices and remembers ‘em. You talk Aussie. She tells that to the splits. How long after that are you staying outside the nick?”

  Gates made no answer.

  Farnes, speaking for the first time in a long while, said harshly: “She’s got to be done in.”

  Weir said to Gates: “I won’t be asking you to do it, Alf.”

  They understood what he intended and felt sorry for the woman, but they were more interested in their percentages of the three million.

  Weir knew he now had them with him. “All right. We stay until Sunday night, like we arranged, ‘cause there ain’t time to clear up, load the lorry, and get away by daylight. Then, Tony, you and Angel stay in the flat opposite and keep watch. If you see a split near this place, you get on the blower. Right?”

  Ricard nodded. “Sure, Lofty.”

  “And when you quit the flat, see there ain’t nothing left behind.”

  “There won’t be,” boasted Carver.

  *

  They had been fed and had been allowed at regular intervals to go along to the bathroom to relieve themselves and in some queer, inverted manner, Patricia and Armitage had come to accept their imprisonment with a degree of equanimity. But such acceptance rested on one unshakable belief — that soon they would be released so they could return to the normal world, the one they’d always lived in, where violence and brutality were things one only read about or saw on the television or cinema screen.

  They discovered their mistake early Monday morning, as the church clock struck the half-hour. Farnes, face hidden behind a nylon, came into the room, nodded at Smith, who’d been on guard, and crossed to where Armitage sat, propped up against the side of one of the armchairs. “We’re taking ‘er with us and you’re staying.”

  Armitage stared at him, then began to struggle with his bonds.

  “Keep your mouth shut about what’s ‘appened and she’ll be all right. Tell the splits any kind of a story and she’ll get raped stupid before we knock ‘er off slowly.” Unlike Weir, he spoke in a matter-of-fact voice. For him, this was just a straightforward threat.

  Armitage tried to speak.

  “We’ve a contact in the police, what’ll tell us if so much as a whisper gets through. One whisper and she’s dead — after a time.” Farnes waited a few seconds, then he brought from his pocket a cosh. Using seemingly little effort, he flicked the cosh down and Armitage was blasted into unconsciousness. He stripped off the plaster from Armitage’s legs and then crossed to the door and opened it. “O.K., Lofty.”

  Patricia saw a small man with uncovered face come into the room. He stared at her and in his very dark brown eyes there was an expression that, with feminine intuition, she immediately identified. She began to wriggle, to get away from him, but he grabbed her ankles and just for a second caressed them before he ripped off the plaster.

  “Get up,” he ordered.

  She rolled over on to her side, got on her knees, and stood. The door was open and the doorway seemingly clear. She ran. Carver appeared from the kitchen and blocked the passage. “Going someplace, lady?” he jeered.

  She began to sob, deep sobs which made her body shake.

  A tall man came out of the kitchen and pushed past Carver. “Can’t you lay off ‘er,” he said.

  She identified his accent as Australian and stared at him with mute appeal, but he, as if annoyed that he had spoken, turned aside and went down the passage towards the back stairs.

  Weir came out of the sitting-room and stood close to her and there was little difference in their heights. He reached up and took hold of her shoulder and she could feel his fingers moving over her. “He’s back in there with a cord round his neck. It’ll be pulled tight if you don’t do what you’re told.”

  She was suddenly far more terrified for Armitage’s safety than she was for her own, which meant she had failed to realise that when they let her see their faces they were admitting they had condemned her to death.

  CHAPTER XII

  Armitage swallowed two more aspirins with the coffee and almost immediately gagged, yet there could be little left in his stomach to vomit. Pain squeezed his head with renewed fire and he closed his eyes and slumped back in the wooden chair.

  The fingers of shooting pain gradually eased away, leaving him only a pounding headache and with that he could just about cope. Desperately, he tried to think what to do, but his mind was still scrambled, as if that last blow had knocked all his senses into hopeless confusion. He forced himself to
stand up, used the kitchen table to steady himself with, and slowly, like an old man, stepped out into the passage. There’d been a body there — he’d walked round it on the way to the bathroom — lying crumpled half on the cheap, time-dirtied carpet and half on the floorboards. There was dried blood on carpet and floorboards.

  He stumbled into the sitting-room and virtually collapsed on to the chair by the telephone. All he had to do was dial 999 and the police would take over. But the men had claimed a contact in the local police who’d warn them. And then Patricia would be raped and murdered.

  He looked across the room and his eyes focused and he saw an empty champagne bottle on the drinks cupboard. Patricia and he had finished the last two glasses of champagne with the pudding. It was unbelievable, except it was true, that the normal world could be shattered with such terrifying speed and ruthlessness. He remembered how Patricia had looked, face distorted by fear, as she lay on the floor. What in the name of God had happened to her after he’d been knocked unconscious? Where had they taken her? What was happening to her now?

  He had to telephone the police to set in motion her rescue. But if he did that, the mob would immediately leam about the call and Patricia would be appallingly murdered because there was no hope the police could move quickly enough since what could he tell them other than that he’d seen two hooded men, neither of whom he could ever identify? Then he daren’t telephone the police. His head pounded more fiercely because of the turmoil in his mind.

  Gradually, he recognised he had no option other than to do exactly as they’d ordered him to — nothing. There must be no alarm because then, and only then, would Patricia return, safe, unharmed. So now? He must clear up the blood in order that Amanda, the daily woman, wouldn’t notice anything. Check there were no other signs…Dudley! How in the hell could he have forgotten Dudley? When he found Patricia was missing he was going to do what any husband would, move heaven and earth to find her.

  Armitage groaned. Just when there had seemed to be some chance it suddenly became clear there was none. The men had presumed he and Patricia were husband and wife, a belief he’d deliberately done nothing to destroy because of the consequences of doing so, and their mistaken belief now meant that their demands were quite impossible. If Dudley was told the truth, he’d go straight to the police: if he wasn’t told the truth, he’d inevitably go to the police and report his wife missing…His head became a ball of pain and he rested it on his hands. What could a man do when he must take one of two courses and yet either led to disaster? In his mind he saw men without faces ripping the clothes from Patricia, throwing her down on the floor, covering her as she screamed…Time passed. He returned to the sitting-room and here the early sunshine was coming in through the windows to streak the carpet. He took two more aspirins, careless about how many that made. When was Dudley due back? Would he immediately presume her missing? He surely would if he went home before going to the office. So how much time was left in which to reconcile a middle-aged husband to the fact that his young wife was missing, without his rushing round to search for her?