Boring.
Chasing inside the building, it quickly became clear there was no working lift but there were two stairwells.
Fuck.
Two sides of the building he could come out of.
Unless he abseiled down?
Probably not.
I connected my phone to one of my computers back at base camp and set a perimeter around the building, tracking any devices in the vicinity.
I found one active device on the roof… and it was coming down the east-side stairway.
Bolting through the building to anticipate the shooter, I hung behind a corner and slid out my ceramic gun from the elastic strap which concealed the weapon up my sleeve.
Blood thundered through my body. This shit was easy, though.
Compared to loving Ciara, this was painting by numbers.
I heard tentative steps coming down the stairs.
Obviously these guys had anticipated me giving up the money, no question. Sexton had become a liability because he knew too much and was beginning to open up, so they’d taken him out.
I was still alive because I still had the money.
As I heard his feet hit the last few steps on the staircase, I turned and faced the shooter, my gun at my side. He raised his handgun and threatened, “Don’t move.”
He was hired help.
“Who are you working for?” I demanded.
“Nobody. Just me.”
I smirked. This guy had fucked up already – getting caught like this – so there was no way he’d been the one to plan the ransacking of my staff. Plus he had all the look of a gun for hire, a look of nothing but intent in his eyes.
No fear.
“Tell me who you are working for.”
“I don’t know. He just delivers orders via private messaging.”
“Show me.”
The shooter tossed me his phone and I looked it over.
There was something about staying cool that disarmed people.
In that moment his defences were down as I feigned studying the phone, so I roundhouse kicked him, knocking him straight out.
He never would have seen it coming.
Taking a breath, I looked through the phone as he lay still on the floor, right at my feet.
All of it was encrypted. All of it.
Was he agency employed?
What?
I doubted this was the same shooter that had killed my brother, but something told me he’d done over Shay. He carried the same size weapon which had killed her.
Without a moment’s thought, I shunted my shoe through his head. Sexton had been my friend throughout many a long year.
“Game over, sucker,” I murmured, and he jolted spasmodically for a few minutes, before he was definitely gone.
I went back to the vehicle and found nothing but Sexton, still sat there dead. The only mercy was he never would’ve felt a thing.
I checked the vehicle for anything interesting.
I found nothing.
No papers, receipts, nothing to tell me who owned this car.
I took down the registration and left.
Good job this area would soon be demolished.
As I got clear of the vehicle, I heard a blast and looked behind me. Sexton had been right; there were explosives rigged to the car. Now it sat there, going up in flames.
Obviously the culprit still wanted me alive.
Twenty-One
Dante
I THOUGHT I’D BEEN SO careful, sure only an infinitesimal margin of error existed between myself and perfection. I’d watched everyone carefully but not my own people, obviously. Shay I always worried about but, somehow I knew she would never hurt me personally. Ayda had a criminal past but seemed so fluffy on the surface – and during her interview, so to speak, she’d claimed she’d put that all behind her and I wasn’t one to judge when it came to past lives. Sexton had always been my faithful companion, so why had he allowed himself to get killed? I still didn’t know who was pulling the strings around here.
Leaving the Range Rover where it was, still smouldering, I left the demolition area and walked away, on foot.
I thought about Ayda as I headed for busier streets. Obviously she had harboured a deceitful, callous brand of hatred which had driven her to commit hateful acts, her heart a breeding ground for evil, her hate a poisonous disease seeping through the wounds of its victims, one to another.
As I headed back to civilisation, I realised I could become the hate too. Or I could turn my back on that hatred and finally do something good with my life. Something great, even.
I could leave behind my days of snooping and hiding behind aliases; behind an online presence and behind a hidden lens.
I could put my trust in real people, in family, rather than employees and others out to take their share of my family wealth.
I could make life better for so many people by putting myself out there for real.
I could start to find myself again instead of lurking in the shadows of the desperately sad times I endured in the immediate aftermath of Daltrey’s death – times that had never left me.
I’d lived so certain I was impenetrable, that I was untouchable, all my barriers in place; my failsafe tactics honed over many years having kept me alive all this time.
When it came down to it, it was the people I knew least who never questioned me. The people I knew least turned on me, and the people who knew me best said I was wasting my life.
They were right, all of them. Sexton, Mum, Dad, Daltrey, Teddy and Ciara – all knew it would come to this, eventually.
“Goodbye, Sexton,” I said, “god speed.”
I continued walking, leaving it all behind.
***
I’D been hanging around his waiting room for an hour when his door finally opened, a client or whoever hurrying from his office after some sort of lengthy discussion. I stood, hoping to be welcomed in, but he didn’t emerge. I peered inside the intimidating dark, wood-panelled office and saw him sporting a sharp charcoal suit. After seeing off his client, he got busy throwing on his wig and robe like he was off straight out. I noticed he wasn’t wearing silks yet but I didn’t doubt he would be held up as a QC before long. He was too good and too well connected not to become so.
“I’m due in court, so this had better be quick,” he said in a hurried manner, as if he would charge me for anything more than a minute of his time.
I walked inside his domain despite virtually no welcome from him whatsoever. He stood with his hands on his waist, hardly able to look at me, his feet ready to carry him off at any moment.
“Did you think she killed Daltrey?”
His eyes shot to mine. “WHAT? That’s ludicrous.”
“I found a tape showing her shooting down my entire team. I saw her with my own eyes. She was a killer.”
Teddy took a deep breath. “I have thirty seconds otherwise I will be locked out of court and my client will be without representation.”
Aggravated, I begged, “You’ve got to help me.”
“I know no more than you, I swear.”
“Why were you fucking her?” I blurted angrily.
In exasperation, he slapped a hand against his forehead. “What the hell do you care? She meant nothing to you.”
I stared him down. “You’re wrong. There are things you don’t know… you don’t know everything.”
“What I know is that where you go, trouble follows,” he spat, shooting me an accusing set of eyes.
“I never wanted her like you did, you know,” I said, standing my ground opposite him, “but she seemed to know you had a crush on her, and she said she wanted help in putting you off. That was how she put it. But there was just something about her, I couldn’t help but be pulled towards her, you know? Anyway my point is, I never pursued her out of spite. She pursued me. The kindest thing she could’ve done was let you down gently or as I told her at the time, ‘fuck him and have done’.”
“I’m glad even back t
hen, even when we were young pricks full of cum, you still had my back. Wow. Such a gallant friend to the end, wow,” he repeated, gathering files, the sarcastic twat I once knew still very much existent.
I realised I had seconds to convince him I wasn’t a total dick.
“I didn’t exterminate her, by the way. I swear it. I wanted to ask her why her alibi for the night of his death was shoddy and then… she left Pernox in a hurry… and…”
“Dick murdered her, yeah. Amber called me. So I really don’t see the point of your sorry, sack-of-shit self existing in my space right now.”
I deserved that…
“We should catch up… you know? Properly. What do you say?”
“What’s the point?” He seemed impatient to go, staring at me with no interest, his hands full of the stuff he needed to get to court with.
“I have to go to Pernox tonight to do some paperwork. Come to the spa and we’ll talk. I think there’s a lot about Shay you need to know and I need to get off my chest.”
“Maybe.” He looked at the floor, not enamoured by my offer, but I could tell he was considering it.
“I’ll let you go. Call me later on the landline.”
“It’ll be late if I do get away.”
“I still never sleep.”
“Some things never change.”
He left the office immediately, leaving me alone in his chambers. I looked around for any clues as to what brand of Scotch he drank, but evidently he didn’t drink during the day.
IN a taxi on my way out of the city and heading towards Surrey, I dialled Ciara but there was no dial tone. Disconnected. What was going on? Had she made it to Ireland yet? I wondered…
Would it be better to make a grand gesture and visit her out in Ireland, where her family lived? Where I could do the gentlemanly thing and ask permission for her hand before taking it?
I pocketed my phone and decided I’d leave it for now. Somehow I knew she was safe.
She was a survivor.
Twenty-Two
Dante
TEDDY ARRIVED WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT, dragging his Lexus up the drive at such a slow pace, I thought it would take him forever to get to the house. Either he was watching his car, or the property. I wasn’t sure. His late arrival also whispered his reluctance to hear what I had to say, because perhaps he’d have his opinion on Shay changed. I think he needed to hear the truth, however.
I met him at the archway entrance, my arms folded, the dark moonlit night silhouetting his form as he parked the car, left it and walked towards me.
“Hey,” I said, trying to sound welcoming as he approached, his head slightly bowed.
“Well, I came.”
“I’m glad you did. Let’s go inside.”
“It’s a nice place you have here,” he said, his voice echoing around the empty, grand entranceway. “I often told Shay so. I understood why she wanted to hide here, keep away from the world. Most of us would like that now and again, right?”
“Of course. I guess she was seduced, in more ways than one. Some parts of the house can be dated back to the 1560s, such as the barns and outbuildings. A lot of it was modernised in the late 1800s.”
“You know I’ve been before? I don’t need a grand tour or anything.”
“Game was up a while ago on that one,” I warned, telling myself to quit the nervous chatter.
“Right.”
He followed me to the drawing room, which had no doubt bore witness to many insightful conversations like this over the centuries. I’d been stoking the fire all evening and it still rumbled in the hearth, keeping the cool evening at bay. In old houses like this, even a summer night could be freezing.
He sat in one of the wingbacks, in fact the wingback Shay herself had preferred. Maybe he knew this.
I poured and he didn’t refuse some port.
“You know,” I started, “I told Ciara the whole story and the thing she was most shocked about was that Shay was a true masochist.”
“What?” For the second time that day, he said the word with such venom, it gained an extra syllable.
“In the beginning I came here, to Pernox I mean… to the dungeon,” I recalled, looking at our surroundings, so well kept and antique, “because I wanted to know what all the fucking noise was about.”
“Didn’t we all?”
“I didn’t care about making sure it was giving me an income, I didn’t really care for women spanking me either… I just… I wanted to see it. That was all. But something kept me coming back.”
“Her?” he asked, eyeing me carefully.
“No,” I said in a firm tone, “eventually her, but not always her. I suppose I just wanted to be one of the men of Pernox, like you. Just, part of the club. Even though it was never for me.”
He shook his head slightly. “So then… years later… you train some teenager up to be your domme? How does that work.”
I laughed. It sounded as ludicrous as it was, but it was true.
“Let me start at the beginning,” I said, and I told him everything about Shay and me.
A couple of hours later, he sat with consternation written all over his face.
“I remember that night as though it was yesterday,” he said, jabbing his knee with a finger. We’d both had a lot of port by this stage and he slurred his words slightly as he talked. “She’d been all over you at the bar… whispering and tucking your hair behind your ear. Then you stayed late and I went, thinking that was it. The thought of her… with you, you know… put me off after that. I was done with lusting after her and I knew it in that moment, that I wouldn’t let myself go there if you’d had her. I couldn’t. It wasn’t anything about the bro code or any rubbish like that, it was just that… I don’t know… I just…”
“You knew that if she was with me, she really didn’t want you, not nearly as much as you wanted her.”
“Right.”
Teddy was a proud man and I understood completely.
“So it surprises you that she and I never slept together?”
“It does,” he said.
“One of the things I still think about to this day is why she ordinarily preferred women. I wonder if she just wanted me for my strength, for my controlling nature. I really do think some days, that I was more of a plaything to her than she was to me.”
“You might be right. Except… well…”
“Tell me…”
He looked shy, then opened up…
“One night about six months ago, she and I got talking. I’d been going through hell with Faith… and she’d noticed I wasn’t myself around the dungeon. Clem might have said something, I don’t know. I was being a bit more difficult than usual but I really didn’t think I was being that bad.” He took a breath, pausing for a sip. “Anyway, she and I got talking and I admitted my marriage had been one of convenience. I told her I’d gotten to thirty and looked around my female friends, picking one who was also single. I confessed that since giving Faith kids, she’d shown me no interest at all, as though I’d given her what she wanted and that was that. Shay and I discussed the situation at length and she said she’d missed being intimate with a man. She said I should ask Faith if she’d mind us casually fucking. At first, I was freaked out, really freaked out. But I found a way to broach it with Faith, who said she didn’t mind. So then we started up, a couple of nights a week. A few weeks after we started fucking, I felt worse than I’d ever felt before in my entire life. Here I was, my marriage a lie, and the woman I’d been secretly in love with for years… couldn’t make orgasm with me. She was happy to suck me, fuck me, anything… any hole… but… just… no climax. She got wet, but never… you know.”
I nodded. “She needed pain to make it. She described herself to me as an exclusive masochist.”
“Yes but I didn’t know that and when I asked if I was pleasing her, she said of course I was. Obviously she was lying to me. It got so that I stopped making a move and we stopped having sex. Eventually we’d just spend ev
enings in her office smoking and drinking, talking about music or art. She knew a lot about art. A great deal in fact.”
I smiled knowingly. “She could be so commanding and I guess, I somewhat modelled the fixer on her, on the character she played. I never knew how much she influenced me until I looked back recently, and when I did look back… well, I realised the imprint she’d left.”
He seemed to hang on my words like icicles to the roof of a cave buried deep in the Urals in deepest winter. For a moment, he didn’t breathe, his mind resting on these revelations, absorbing them.
“It’s true, we never had sexual intercourse but she got to me in other ways, and I got to her, and we had a relationship. It wasn’t conventional… but it was real. We broke each other apart but sex wasn’t the pinnacle of intimacy for her, giving her pain was. She only wanted me to give her pain. She thrived on it and knew nobody could give her pain like a man, a man as strong as me or you, not a woman terrified of breaking her. She wanted absolute dominance. Craved it. She worshipped me for it, but at the same time, it wasn’t what I wanted… but she persuaded me. She changed me.”
He watched me for a while, then said, “That first year we came to Pernox, I used to drink late into the night on my own, imagining how many positions you’d be out there fucking her in. I used to think all sorts.”
“The not fucking was what she got off on. The mind games. She played me as much as she did you.”
He scratched the growth of stubble surrounding his face, which bore signs of fatigue.
“Did you ever find out what made her the way she was? You know, once you got into fixing and made all your connections and stuff, did you look into her?”
I took a deep breath, unable to lie to him. “I did.”
My heart pounding fiercely, I couldn’t look at him. I could hardly bear to think about it.
“What did you find?”
“Her real name was Rebecca Marsh. She grew up in Luton and had a totally normal, working-class upbringing, her mother a supermarket worker, father a builder. Two sisters and a brother, loads of cousins, loads of aunties, uncles and grandmothers. I didn’t find anything that might tell me why she was the way she was.”
The Fix (Nightlong Series Book 2) Page 21