by Lee Stevens
Riley climbed out the Merc as Howden jumped down from the lorry and shook hands with the fat man, two chain-smokers together. When Anderson found his breath, he walked to Riley and offered him his hand also.
“Everything go well?” he asked, clearing his throat at the same time as speaking.
Riley shook the sweaty hand and nodded.
“There’s a present in the back for you,” Howden said and opened the back of the lorry.
Anderson tossed his cigarette away and looked inside. Whistled as if there was a naked supermodel in there.
“Audi A5, nice,” he said. “What does Nash want me to do with it?”
“That’s up to you,” Riley said. “It’s your problem now.”
“I wouldn’t call it a problem. So, Nash is just giving it to me?”
Riley nodded again.
“Nash doesn’t even know it exists.” Howden laughed.
Anderson laughed too - for about a second before his breath caught in his throat and he had a coughing fit. Then, as the fit trailed off into a tremor, he took a small tin from his trouser pocket, pulled out another home-made cigarette and lit it.
“Tell my old mate that if he ever needs to lend anything again he’s welcome to it.” He closed the back of the lorry. “And tell him I was sorry to hear about his kid. I hope the fuckers get what they deserve.” He jumped in the cab and drove inside the workshop, so Riley and Howden climbed back in the Merc.
Before they’d gotten out of the garage forecourt, Howden had lit up a cigarette of his own to stink the car out and asked, “So, where do you wanna go for a drink?”
Riley didn’t want a drink. However, he didn’t want to go back to the unit and watch Mark Dainton get hacked up.
“Wherever,” he said, uninterested.
“What’s up with you, you miserable bastard? Tonight went well. You should want to celebrate.”
“Celebrate what? This is just the start of things.”
Howden exhaled smoke. Nodded. “Yeah, this is going to be big. But Dainton and his boys don’t stand a chance against us. He fucked up big style this time.”
“You can say that again.”
“Dainton fucked up big style,” Howden repeated for effect. Then, surprisingly, the big man pulled a strange face, one he rarely wore. One that suggested he was thinking about something. When he spoke next, his voice was quiet, as if he were talking to himself. “Everything’s fucked up.”
Riley shot him a glance.
“What do you mean ‘everything’s fucked up?’”
Howden took a long drag on his cigarette. Blew the smoke in Riley’s direction. Not to be rude, but just because he’d obviously stopped thinking. The few seconds earlier must have been his quota for the night.
“It’s fucked up the way it happened,” he said.
“In what way?” Riley wanted to know if Howden felt the same as he did. That Dainton wouldn’t have pulled such a messy job as the one last night.
“Well I just think the timing’s a bit weird. Why now, after there’s been no trouble with Dainton for years? I mean, Dainton’s getting old and he has enough money. Why would he be bothered about taking Nash out now? Why cause all the trouble for himself?”
Riley nodded. Decided to take a chance.
“You ever thought it might not be Dainton?”
Howden paused, the cigarette clamped between his lips.
“Who else would it be?” he asked, but before Riley could answer (which was lucky because he didn’t really know what to say) Howden held up a hand to tell him to wait and rummaged in his pocket. He pulled out his phone and looked at the display as he tossed his cigarette out the window.
“It’s McCabe. A text.”
“And...?” Riley asked.
“The drink’ll have to wait. He was right when he said it wouldn’t take long. Dainton must’ve been as soft as he looked. He’s finished already. We better head back.”
They drove back to the industrial estate in silence, Riley keeping his eyes on the road and Howden keeping his lungs filled with smoke after lighting up again, and it was a little after two in the morning when they knocked on the door to the unit.
McCabe didn’t answer the door. Instead, he called Howden’s mobile and asked if it was them.
“Yeah, it’s us,” Howden said. “Who the fuck else would it be?”
McCabe soon opened the door. He had stripped down to his vest and was sweating. There was no blood on him but Riley knew a lot would have been spilt.
“Soft fucker told me all he knew before I’d even finished with his legs,” he said. “Spoilt my fun.”
“He admitted Dainton was behind the shooting?” Riley asked. He didn’t know whether to believe it or not. People would admit to anything when they were getting cut up.
McCabe stepped aside to allow them in and said, “Apparently he’s got this big deal going down with a couple of major dealers from the Netherlands. He wanted Nash out the way so he could take over the docks to get the stuff in the country.”
Riley didn’t believe the story one bit. If it was just about getting drugs into the country there would many other ways to do it than via the local docks. No, things didn’t add up. McCabe hadn’t proved his total innocence yet – despite his loyal act tonight.
Riley then saw that Mark Dainton was still strung up, his head hanging down to his chest, clearly dead, his toes broken and bloodied, his lower legs skinned in places, a couple of drill-holes in each kneecap. There was also a patch of dark blood on his chest and his torso was covered in vomit. The blood had pooled beneath him (along with the contents of his bowel and bladder) and the plastic sheeting was doing its job and keeping the slop from staining the floor. The tools were back on the table – a hammer, a pair of bloodstained pliers (for the toenails!), a Stanley knife and a battery-powered drill. Mark Dainton had paid for his past crimes with honours.
McCabe walked behind the corpse, released the pulley system and Dainton’s lifeless body flopped heavily onto the plastic sheeting, smashing bones in his face and loosing teeth.
“Come and give me a hand,” McCabe told Howden as he loosened the chain from the handcuffs, leaving Dainton’s wrists still bound together. Then he unlocked the manacles with a home-made key he grabbed from the table before grabbing the dead man’s ankles and motioning for Howden to get his arms. “Help me get this fucker next door. Riley, throw the plastic sheeting in the oven. I’ll burn it later, along with his clothes.”
When both men began to heave the sagging body into the back room, Riley did as asked.
He rolled up the plastic sheeting, careful not to spill any of the coagulating blood or other contents and equally careful not to get any on himself. Luckily, McCabe had cut the plastic larger than needed and so there was plenty of width around the edges to catch what slopped about on the slick material. Once it was in the oven, Riley headed into the smaller room at the back of the unit.
The scene was so surreal it was almost comical.
Howden was taking a piss in the toilet with the door open as if he didn’t have a care in the world. McCabe was attending to a small package on the bench in front of him like a dedicated office clerk, scribbling something in black marker pen. Behind them both, Mark Dainton had been hung from his wrists, the handcuffs looped over a steel hook that had been fixed above the shower cubical. McCabe had wasted little time in the few minutes it had taken Riley to gather up the plastic sheeting and had slit Dainton’s throat, wrists and thighs, severing the main veins and arteries so that blood was running freely down into the plug hole beneath his dangling feet.
Riley had heard about McCabe’s methods but had never seen them before.
After the torture the person would be killed, usually by a stab wound to the heart, which explained the blood Riley had seen on Dainton’s chest. Then, after being dragged into the shower, the victim would be left to bleed out. Then, usually the next day, the corpse would be bundled into the deep freeze. A couple of days after that, the frozen
body would be cut up and the parts scattered all over the place, pieces buried in shallow graves or under concrete or weighed down and chucked in the deepest part of the river and voila – someone’s just disappeared!
“Right,” Howden said, zipping up and taking a final look at Dainton like it was nothing. “I guess that’s it for the night. I’m off. You’ll drop me at home, won’t you, Riley?”
“No,” McCabe said. He picked up the package he’d been writing on. “I’ll drop you at home when I’ve cleaned up. Riley has one more job to do.”
“One more job?” Riley asked, surprised. He’d come back to help tidy up and nothing more. What else was there?
McCabe handed him the package. It was very light, like a small empty box or carton wrapped in an envelope. DAINTON was written neatly in black marker on the top.
“I take it I’ve got to deliver this?” Riley said and McCabe nodded. “Why me?”
“Just sharing the duties,” McCabe said. “You deliver this and me and Howden get rid of the body. You wanna swop?”
“No thank you.”
McCabe smiled.
“Thought not.”
Riley looked at the package. Then at the corpse dangling from the rusty hook. He now saw what McCabe had done to the face.
And suddenly he understood what he held in his hands.
27
Ten minutes later, Riley crossed the Thirn Bridge into the north side of the city for the second time that night – possibly only the second time in a year or so.
He made sure he kept to the speed limit and indicated whenever necessary as the last thing he needed was to be pulled over and have the car searched when the package and his balaclava were both tucked into the spare tyre compartment in the boot. He even noticed that his hands were gripping the steering wheel in the ten-and-two positions when he usually drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting casually on the gear stick. But it was best to give the old bill as little reason as possible to pull him over and if you weren’t driving a taxi or ambulance or fire engine then you were likely to be stopped as a suspected drink-driver at this time in the morning. Not being a drinker, Riley often went for an early morning drive to wind down after his shifts on the doors and had been stopped and breathalysed on more than one occasion. The scary thing was that on each of those occasions he hadn’t done anything wrong. The stops had been ‘routine’. So had the breath tests. So had the car searches.
He double-checked his speed as he cruised along the near-deserted road. Seconds later, a car came zooming up behind him and Riley’s heart began to beat faster. He didn’t want things to end with him being stopped for a driving offence and being caught with a suspicious package on him. If they did, he’d have no option but to tell all he knew about Nash and McCabe and the others and hope they’d have the book thrown at them. But hope wasn’t a certainty. Imprisonment wasn’t necessarily a life sentence. Riley wanted to know that if he went down, Nash and the others would never get out.
He checked the rear view mirror again.
The vehicle was white but there were no blue lights on its roof. He relaxed a little, and when it overtook him without indicating Riley saw that it was a taxi, probably hurrying to its next pick up. Two more taxis sped past in the opposite direction. Then, as he turned left down the tree-lined road that led to Quayside Manor, it was suddenly deserted ahead once more, as if he were the only person out at such an ungodly hour.
He knew exactly where Dainton lived (as did most people in the city – local gangsters were minor celebrities after all) and knew he would have to park the car a hundred yards or so from the property to avoid the security cameras.
He flicked on his fog-lights as the road narrowed and the streetlights stopped. The trees either side grew denser, blocking out what little light the moon and stars offered and he killed his speed to twenty miles an hour, concentrating on where his headlights illuminated the tarmac road, watching for rabbits or hedgehogs or any other nocturnal animals with a death wish that might run out in front of him.
Then, a few hundred yards ahead of him on the right, he saw the grey slate roof of Dainton’s mansion poke out from behind the foliage, looking foreboding and ominous, like a haunted house in a horror movie.
Riley flicked back to dipped headlights and visibility became close to zero. But he was better off killing his speed rather than lighting himself up for anyone looking out of an upstairs window to catch sight of.
He pulled over about a hundred yards from the gates of the mansion and did a three point turn so that the Mercedes was facing the way he’d come. This would be better if he had to make a quick getaway, maybe with bodyguards shooting at him or guard dogs after the scent of his blood.
Once out of the car and having retrieved the package from the boot, he pulled on his balaclava and hugged the trees and bushes on the right hand side of the road as he hurried towards the perimeter gates. He had to do this. Refusing would make Nash suspicious. He had no choice but to do as ordered.
Halfway there and more of the house came into view. The security lights above the front door and to the sides of the building were on, bathing the grounds within ten feet of the house in strong yellow light. It seemed to be locked tight, the occupants asleep. The guest house beyond the building was in total darkness. So were most of the grounds. On the side of the main gates farthest from him, Riley saw the post box fitted to the wall. Confidence filled his veins.
He should have known there would be post box outside the main house! A postman or delivery boy wouldn’t be expected to have to walk all of the way up to the front door to deliver something. He didn’t have to go anywhere near the front door. Just a little dash to the post box and then back to the car. Easy.
When Riley reached the edge of the gates, he stopped and looked up at the cameras fixed on the pillars either side of them. They were pointing at the road and not the narrow grass verge he was traversing. He could sneak under them no problem. The cameras inside the grounds, however, may catch him as he ran by the gates but he doubted Dainton had twenty-four hour staff manning them. He could drop off the package and probably not be noticed until the recordings were checked later – if Dainton even bothered to check them. Once the package was opened, he would surely know Nash was behind this anyway.
Riley gripped the package under his arm, counted to three and dashed under the cameras to the post box. He pulled the small, metal door open, tossed the package inside like it was a bomb ready to go off and hurried back the way he came.
Once back inside his car, he looked back at the house.
There was no sign of movement. No other security lights or internal lights had gone on, no one was shouting and no dogs were barking. He hadn’t been seen.
Riley started the engine and floored the accelerator. Headlights on and going twenty miles more then the speed limit, he couldn’t care less about being pulled over or making road-kill out of numerous cute and cuddly nocturnal species. He just wanted to get home. What he’d just done had sealed everyone’s fate. If the initial attack on Nash had been the start of this, then the delivery of the package, far from being a conclusion, was merely an added footnote.
Things were about to get a whole lot worse.
28
Six o’clock in the morning.
Three hours after Riley had delivered the package, two hours after he’d climbed into bed, and an hour after he’d managed to drift into an unsettled sleep, the sun was beginning to rise, lighting up what looked to be a perfect day with not a rain cloud in sight.
On the North side of the river, a gentle cool breeze stirred the newly blossomed leaves on the trees standing in the grounds of Lenny Dainton’s mansion and the birds that sat perched in the branches chirped and sang, the noise adding to the picture perfect setting of English Springtime.
Dainton rose from his bed and strolled to the window to look out on his land. He opened the shutter and drew in a few deep breaths of clean air, savouring the smell of the drying grass and the
sound of the sparrows and starlings hidden amongst the leaves in sycamores and beeches at the far end of the main garden. All was peaceful. Relaxing. The way it should be.
By seven, he was finishing his final lap in the indoor pool. Twenty laps before breakfast to keep him in shape. Sundays were no different to any other morning. Up early to exercise and eat a healthy breakfast. It prepared you for the day, both mentally and physically.
He climbed out, dried himself and pulled on his dressing gown and sandals. Breakfast was at seven-thirty, which gave him enough time to collect his newspaper. The delivery boy made sure it was delivered by seven each morning as the fifty pound tip he’d received last Christmas had made this delivery the first and most important one on his round.
After a four minute stroll down the drive to the gates, Dainton used the remote he carried in his pocket to unlock them and step out onto the road.
He looked in both directions, not for anything in particular, but just to check the coast was clear. This was a paranoia that had developed over the years when you made enemies rather than friends. He’d never had an attack at this property, but then again he’d only lived here eight years. He’d owned eleven properties in the last thirty years and all of them had either been firebombed or shot at. Not this one though. This was his retirement home, and he hadn’t stepped on anyone’s toes lately to warrant an attack. Despite what the police thought, Mike Nash meant nothing to him. He neither wished the man harm nor good will and he certainly hadn’t wished the death of his son in such violent circumstances. He had never been that sort of... ‘businessman’. If he had a problem with someone then that person was dealt with, not their wives or children or elderly parents. That wasn’t his style. As much as it sounded old fashioned, Dainton considered himself old-school through and through and despite having been on the wrong side of the law for the vast majority of his life he still had his values. No innocent people got hurt. No coppers got hurt. That’s how it should be. That’s how it used to be.