To Die For

by Phillip Hunter

  I had to think things through, had to make sure I was right. I kept coming back to Dalston – the way the house had looked, the way Beckett and Walsh and Jenson had been killed, the way the locks were off and they’d been relaxing, watching TV, drinking beer. Cole hadn’t killed them, I was sure of that. Beckett had done the job for Cole but then double-crossed him. He was in league with someone else, someone close to Cole. Whoever it was, Beckett would have been careful about handing the money over. He would have arranged the time and place. He would’ve been ready. He wasn’t a stupid man. The night he was killed, he wasn’t ready. He’d been surprised.

  I kept thinking about the girl, too. The way she acted, the way she was scared, the way she looked at me. That look. It bothered me.

  There was something else. It was what she’d said. ‘I am sorry for those men.’ She’d said it so quietly that I hadn’t been able to make out the tone she’d used.

  I was thinking now that I’d been wrong about a lot of things.

  It was the look. Something in the look she’d given me. There was the key. She was the key.

  The more I thought about it, the more I knew I was right.

  When Browne saw the scratches on my face, he swore at me.

  ‘I don’t know why I bother,’ he said.

  I didn’t know either. He went to get some gauze and antiseptic cream, but I told him to leave it.

  ‘Those were done by a woman,’ he said.

  I agreed.

  ‘Where’s the girl?’ I said.

  He didn’t answer me. He was suddenly fearful. He put a hand out towards me. I don’t think he knew he’d done it. Above us, at the top of the stairs, a shadow moved. I looked up. The girl clung to the banister, her head no more than a foot above it. She peered down at us. Her eyes were large, but not from fear. She was looking at me with wonder, and for a second she was gone and I saw Brenda’s face.

  I hesitated.

  ‘Don’t,’ Browne said.

  He seemed to know what I was thinking. Maybe he saw something in my face. Maybe he just feared me with her. I eased him aside and walked heavily up the stairs. The girl watched me climb. I felt a hand on my arm. Browne was holding me with all his strength, trying to pull me back. I lost balance and back-stepped. I could have broken his hold on me easily enough. I could have pushed him aside and taken the girl and shaken it out of her.

  ‘I’m only going to talk to her,’ I said.

  ‘She’s just a girl.’

  ‘She killed them,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Beckett, Walsh, Jenson.’

  All the time she was watching us. She had the same expression on her face, but now it seemed not a look of wonder, but rather a look of nothing. She looked hollow.

  Browne reached up, grabbed weakly at my chest.

  ‘She’s just a girl.’

  ‘She killed them. Not with a gun, but she killed them all the same.’

  His head waved from side to side.

  ‘You can’t know that,’ he said. ‘You can’t know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How can you? How can you be certain?’

  ‘Her hair.’

  ‘What? What are you talking about?’

  ‘It’s braided.’

  He looked at me for a long time, his eyes holding on to mine, searching them.

  ‘You’re insane,’ he said finally. He believed it.

  I was tired of it all, worn out. Insane, Browne called me. The whole thing was insane. Maybe I was, too. I felt it.

  ‘Someone braided her hair.’ I said. ‘You can’t do it by yourself. I think it was someone close to her. But when she was here, she didn’t try to call anyone, she didn’t ask us to take her somewhere, she didn’t try to go home.’

  ‘They were too far away,’ he said.

  ‘No. She’d still try and contact this person. You said it yourself, the girl has suffered. Being stuck with an old drunk and a thug isn’t any place for her to be. She’d go to the police, or ask us to take her, or go get a cab, or try to walk home. Or something. But she did nothing.’

  I looked up at the girl. Browne looked up. There were tears in her eyes. I knew I was right. His hand dropped away from my chest. He knew it too.

  ‘You’re going round in circles,’ he said. ‘You say she’s close to someone, but then you say she doesn’t want to go to them. That’s a contradiction.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. It means the person she’s close to is close to someone she doesn’t want to be anywhere near.’

  ‘What the bloody hell has all that got to do with those murders?’

  ‘You remember when that woman came over, the second time?’

  ‘You mean Sue? What about her?’

  ‘What did the girl do?’

  ‘She hid. In the cupboard.’

  ‘Right. Just like in Dalston. Remember what you told me? She was reliving it.’

  ‘Post-traumatic stress. Nothing unusual in that. She was scared and she did what she’d done previously.’

  ‘Think about what she said to you, the girl. What did she tell you? Why was she scared?’

  ‘She asked me not to let them take her away,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She asked you not to let them take her back. There’s a difference. She was only scared of being taken away because she thought she would be taken back.’

  ‘Yes. So?’

  ‘Back where?’

  Browne looked at the girl. She looked at him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand any of it. I don’t understand you, Joe.’

  ‘She didn’t want to go back to where she’d come from, back to the ones who’d sent her.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said weakly.

  ‘Christ. She hid in the cupboard at Dalston because she feared the men who were coming would take her back. You understand now? She knew the men who were coming to the house. She knew them. She knew they were coming because they were from the same place she was, the place she didn’t want to go back to. Put that together with everything else: she didn’t see the gunmen, she didn’t hear them, and yet she knew to hide in the cupboard; she knew to have a shooter handy and to use it on whoever opened the cupboard door.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you listening to yourself? One second you say she killed them, the next you say she hid from the gunmen.’

  ‘Beckett, Walsh and Jenson were killed where they sat. They hadn’t had time to react because they didn’t know the killers were in the house. There was only one way for that to happen – somebody else let the killers in. She was the only other one in the place. She opened the door for the killers, then went upstairs to hide.’

  He opened his mouth, then closed it. He put a hand on the wall to steady himself.

  ‘She’s just a girl, man.’

  ‘Beckett had a thing for girls. It was easy to plant her on them.’

  ‘But why? Why would she do it?’

  ‘Because she had no choice. Ever noticed how she talks about her family in the past tense, except for her sister?’ I looked up at the girl. ‘It’s your sister they’ve got, isn’t it?’

  Her head moved a bit up, a bit down.

  ‘My sister.’

  ‘And you had to telephone a number, give them an address?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘They would have known the address. They probably sent Beckett there.’

  ‘They gave me a telephone. My sister called me and told me what to do. I had to unlock the door and open it for them. She told me to do that. She told me to hide because the men would want to bring me back with them. I didn’t hear anything. I thought everyone had gone. I went downstairs.’

  ‘You saw them, darling?’ Browne said. ‘The dead men?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t you run?’ I said.

  ‘There was banging on the door. Loud bangs. I was scared. The door was b
reaking. I ran back upstairs.’

  Those bangs had been my bullets.

  ‘That’s why you were afraid to say anything?’ Browne said to her. ‘Because of what they made you do?’

  ‘They said they would hurt her,’ she said quietly.

  ‘And I thought it was trauma,’ he said.

  ‘It is trauma,’ I said.

  ‘Christ. Who was it?’ Browne said. ‘What bloody monster could use a bairn like that?’

  ‘There are people.’

  ‘I’m sorry I hurt you,’ she said. ‘I was scared.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  She whispered something I didn’t hear.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You saved me,’ she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. ‘You saved me from them. I was scared. And you came and saved me.’

  And then I understood. And Browne, looking at me with a kind of sadness, understood too. It was funny, in a terrible way.

  ‘I didn’t save you,’ I told the girl. ‘I never knew you were there. I went to that place to get some money and to kill some men.’

  There I was explaining myself. Fuck the girl. Fuck what she thought.

  ‘Let her believe it, man,’ Browne said to me. ‘For God’s sake, can’t you let her believe in something good? Even if it’s you.’

  He looked older. He looked like his insides had collapsed. He leaned back against the wall, not even trying to stop me now. I didn’t move. The girl didn’t move. Browne didn’t move. We all just hung there, like that fucking drop of water.

  ‘The poor girl,’ he said. ‘I can’t – ’

  That was when the front door exploded.

  They were on us in seconds, bursting in like rats, pouring over each other to get to us. Browne cried out and tried to block them. He lasted a second, less. He was hit and fell and was kicked. I saw him go limp. I heard the back door smash open. I threw one off me and started to climb the stairs. I felt punches on my body as a couple of men threw themselves at me and clung on. I threw out my elbow and heard cartilage crack. I reached round and grabbed hair and yanked it and heard a scream. I smashed a face into the stairs. There were no knives, no guns. They’d been told to take me alive. I couldn’t stand and fight: there were too many. I looked up. Kid was frozen, clinging to the banister, her knuckles pale, her mouth open, her eyes wide, her chest heaving. I stumbled up the stairs, kicking out, throwing my arms back in a desperate attempt to get to higher ground. I got closer. I didn’t look back. I knew I wouldn’t make it. The girl had a chance, though. They were all over the stairs, reaching up for me, grappling for my shirt, my jacket. I leaned forward, touched the stairs with my good arm. I felt them crawl up on to my back. I pushed back with all my strength, roaring with the effort, flinging back my arm, my head. I heard shouts and cries and felt them fall off me. I was free of them for a moment. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. I staggered up the rest of the stairs and reached the top. I grabbed Kid and lurched into the bedroom. I threw open the window, lifted her through and dangled her below me. I was leaning as far over as I could so that she was only ten feet or so from the ground. She tried to cling to me but I shook her off and tossed her into the bushes. She cried out as she landed, but she was okay. She got to her feet and stood below the window and looked up at me, lifting her hands as high as she could.

  ‘Run,’ I said. ‘Go to your sister.’

  ‘Please – ’

  ‘Go.’

  She didn’t budge. They were almost on me.

  ‘I’ll come for you,’ I said. ‘RUN.’

  When I turned, they were all over me.

  26

  I was in a warehouse, or some kind of workshop. I had no idea what time it was. There were no windows. The strip lighting was bright and made my eyes hurt. It felt like night. There was a long metal bench along the wall to my right with cardboard boxes beneath. Tools and cans of oil and stuff like that were spattered around. I turned my head as far as I could. The far end was in shadow. I couldn’t see the door.

  I was in a chair, one of the type used in offices with thick plastic armrests and chrome legs. The chair was small for me, but strong. I pulled against the ropes around my wrists and ankles. They didn’t give, not a millimetre.

  My head felt light and dull. It was good that it didn’t hurt. It was bad that I was woozy. I didn’t know what they’d used. Chloroform, probably.

  I wanted to close my eyes and sleep. I wanted to close my eyes and not wake up, not have to deal with this shit, with this world. I couldn’t afford to feel like that. I fought it, biting my lip and tasting blood. I pulled against the ropes, knowing it was useless but trying to build up the rage, get the adrenalin going.

  A door opened somewhere behind. I felt the chill of air on my neck. I was cold with sweat. Men walked in. If I’d been thinking more clearly, I would’ve feared what was to come. I knew I should’ve done, and yet I didn’t. I seemed away from it all, as if I could stand back and watch myself. I knew I was probably going to die, but the thought didn’t mean anything to me; it was just an idea. I tried to make myself think about it, about my death. I should have felt terror or panic or something, but I didn’t, and it occurred to me that I didn’t care that much anyway. The door closed. I braced myself.

  Two men, both in suits, walked to positions in front and to either side of me. I didn’t know these men. One was lean and blond and in his forties. He was sinew and tight muscle. The other was shorter and younger with brown hair and a stud earring. The men stood looking down at me. I knew the game. I’d stood where they stood.

  I heard another man walk towards me. These two were waiting for him. He came forward and stood between them, facing me. He was short and his stocky build was edging towards fatness, stretching the suit he wore. His square face shone with grease and sweat so that it looked as if, with effort, he was trying to contain himself. He had a nice tan and an expensive haircut, but they couldn’t hide his sixty-odd years.

  I’d never met him, but I recognized him. His name was Bobby Cole.

  ‘You’ve caused me a lot of fucking trouble, boy,’ he said.

  He tapped Blondie.

  ‘Which arm?’

  ‘Left. Around the shoulder.’

  Cole looked around the room and wandered off for a moment. The other men didn’t move, didn’t take their eyes off me. When Cole came back, he had a ball hammer and I started to panic and felt my balls tighten and my stomach sink and the cold sweat break over me because I knew what was coming. He smashed the hammer into my left shoulder. The pain made me gasp; it spread through me and split me apart. I stretched the ropes with the agony. It was good. The anger, the rage, the need to destroy spread with the pain. The three men stood back and waited. I felt faint, but the adrenalin was flowing. I was soaked in sweat. I leaned my head forward and threw up on to the floor in front of me and over the seat. Blood leaked down my arm.

  ‘Where’s my fucking money?’

  I shook my head. I thought I was going to pass out. I couldn’t speak. Cole wasn’t stupid. He gave me a minute. He didn’t want a corpse. Not yet, anyway.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Haven’t got it.’

  Cole sighed.

  ‘Hit him.’

  The man with the earring stepped forward and planted a quick left-right combination on my face. They were powerful punches, short and sharp. He knew what he was doing, but I’d taken that kind of stuff all my life.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Beckett took it.’

  ‘I know Beckett fucking took it. I hired the cunt to take it.’

  ‘He set me up.’

  ‘Bollocks. Hit him.’

  I took some more pounding. It was okay, but it wouldn’t be if they kept it up.

  ‘I did the job. He took the money.’

  He lurched forward, his hands on my wrists, squeezing them.

  ‘Bollocks, you cunt. I know you and Beckett and Kendall fucked me over. And I know you fucked them over. You think
you can kill ’em and you’re safe? Huh? You ain’t fucking safe from me. I’m going to rip your fucking limbs off if you don’t tell me where my money is right fucking now.’

  He was in my face now, his eyes bulging and watery, phlegm in the corners of his mouth, and I thought, Christ, he’s panicking. He was shitting himself and that was bad. He wasn’t thinking clearly. My arm was a nightmare of pain and my head throbbed with dullness. He wasn’t going to believe my story. I wouldn’t believe it. I had no choice.

  ‘I can prove it,’ I said.

  ‘Fuck your proof. Give me my money, or tell me where it is, and maybe I’ll let you live.’

  That made me laugh. I don’t know why. It wasn’t funny.

  ‘You’ll kill me whatever I say. You’ll have to. Now, we can make this hard for both of us, you beating me, me telling you I was set up. Or you could shut the fuck up for a minute and listen.’

  He stood back and watched me. He breathed heavily through his mouth. Sweat trickled down his cheek. Blondie and Earring stood by and waited. Finally, Cole let out a long breath. He clenched his jaw. He was calming down, reason finally getting through some of the panic.

  ‘You’ve got bollocks, boy, I’ll say that.’

  ‘Untie me.’

  ‘You must think I’m some daft cunt. Is that what you think, eh? You think I’m a cunt?’

  ‘I don’t know you well enough.’

  Earring gave me a right to the jaw for that. I could taste blood. Cole watched while I spat it out. He eyed me curiously, though. I had him thinking.

  ‘Untie me,’ I said again.

  ‘So you can clobber me? Forget it.’

  ‘I’m not going to sit here and wait for you to put a bullet in my head. If you want me to talk, untie me.’

  ‘I’ll get you talking. Don’t worry about that.’

  If I could get him to untie me, I had a chance. Not much, but some.

  ‘You’re tooled up,’ I said. ‘I’m not. I can’t do anything without getting shot. You can try and make me talk all night and I’ll tell you the same thing: I didn’t take your money. I’m not getting killed tied to a chair.’