Face Down

by Garry Bushell

  “Sit down,” he commanded. A woman, the brunette from the club, appeared behind him holding a gun. I complied. The old boy came down to me, removed my gag and then untied my hands. He stank of BO. The creases in his face looked positively geological.

  “What's this about, granddad?” I asked as he did the same for Johnny, who still looked out for the count.

  “Dinner,” he grunted.

  “No, why are you doing this to us?”

  “Justice, Mr Tyler,” said the woman. “Justice.”

  “No justice, just us,” mumbled the bloke, as she turned and left. Even at this low point in my rollercoaster life, I found myself thinking that she had great legs. A woman this fucked-up had no business looking so hot; she had a butt that would make Pippa swoon.

  “I need a slash,” exclaimed Johnny, in a voice loaded with anger and menace.

  “Bucket’s there.”

  “What if I need a crap?”

  “As I said, the bucket’s there.”

  John stood up defiantly, unzipped his flies and started pissing at the old man's boots.

  He shrugged. “You animals have got to live with the stink,” he said; and then he turned and walked back up the steps.

  “I'll break your fucking neck, you old shit-cunt,” John hollered.

  Moments later the man returned and threw two bog rolls at us. Fucking Izal! I hated that at school. Just when you thought life couldn't get any worse. Still at least he left the light on.

  Johnny tugged at the chain but it remained stubbornly attached to the brick wall.

  “Well,” I said glumly. “Looks like we've found our serial killer.”

  “Killers,” he said equally morosely. “Just think I've got from a nice cosy berth at Her Majesty's pleasure, to this hole. How did they get you, H?”

  “I tailed you to the NCP.”

  “What was you after, sloppy seconds?”

  “Ha. Something like that.”

  “I wasn't expecting anything other than a bunk-up, she seemed so sweet and bright...and up for it.”

  “I had her at gun-point, then crack!”

  “Enter the old bastard, stage right.”

  “Karma, John.”

  “Karma my arse. What is it with you filth? All Old Bill believe in fate. It's a myth, mate, another handy lie. You make your own luck in life, and that's the truth.”

  “D'you think?”

  “I know.”

  “Well we'd better start making some of our own before these two clowns snuff it out for us.”

  “He’s fucking mad – not in the sense of being angry, but as in carpet-chewing barking, bonkers, whacko, loony-tunes, doolally-tap.”

  John mimed playing a banjo, singing the opening notes of the music from Deliverance.“Think they're related?” he asked.

  “She's too good-looking, surely? I'll try and a look at her lug-holes next time. He's got ears like a fruit-bat.”

  Baker laughed. “That's it, the Man wanted to rub me out so they sent for fuckin' Batman...Batman and Throbbin', at least she'll get my throbbin' cock up her arse before I cut a throat.”

  “Attaboy Johnny, think positive.”

  “And as for soppy bollocks, that retarded fuckin' fuck-weasel...”

  “How do you do it, JT?”

  “Do what?”

  “Swear like Gordon Ramsay without getting any of those ugly furrows in your forehead?”

  “Just natural charm, I guess.”

  63

  Westminster, London. Seven hours later

  It had been Ken’s idea to hire Church House Conference Centre for the rally. In an upmarket variation on his usual meeting room con, McManus had persuaded a sympathetic hereditary peer to book the centre under the name of ‘Hope & Progress Solutions’, although quite what the church janitor made of the motley crew who had turned up was anybody’s guess. There were activists and representatives from all over Britain, a strange mix of types and ages. Tattooed young men and women straight from the terraces didn’t exactly blend in with older fellows who looked like they'd be happier in a Masonic hall, and middle-aged ladies dressed for a church fete. Among their ranks were people from every shade of what the media would call far-Right opinion, ranging from the EDL to Ulster Loyalists, but also trade unionists and councillors, libertarians and populists, animal activists, active hooligans, ex-punks, ex-skinheads, police agents, spies, invited reporters and the odd vicar. Mostly they were white, with a few black and Asian faces, including a party of Sikhs. The security men looked they’d feel more at home on an ID parade or in a 1920s chain gang. A close look at their tattoos would have shown that there was nothing English about the ideology they actually followed.

  The audience represented different types of simmering resentment – the disillusioned, the disgruntled, the angry and the betrayed, all drawn to this promise of a new dawn – the birth of a British Tea Party.

  The venue capacity was 664, but as the Guardian would later work out, the two hard-working cameramen made that a handy 666 – all the better to demonise the faithful.

  The star speaker, William Broadwick, had arrived half an hour ago in a series seven BMW supplied by a sympathetic VIP chauffeur hire boss. It had helped cheer him up after a hectic couple of hours composing a special column for the Sunday edition disassociating himself from the lunatic vigilante. He still felt shaken by the revelations, they had left him mortified.

  William had been given a room, well stocked with fruit, bottled water and flowers. A stunning young woman who introduced herself as Charlotte knocked politely and told him she would be his PA for the evening. She looked a little French. He found her charming and she seemed in awe of him. Feeling flirtatious, William asked how she kept her figure so trim.

  “I'm on the Mediterranean diet,” she said with a smile that lit up the room.

  Broadwick nodded. He had no time for fashionable food fads. His idea of a Mediterranean diet was smoking Gauloises between mugs of Ouzo in a holiday beach bar, but he smiled and said “Excellent. Lovely to meet you, my dear. Are you one of the event organisers?”

  “No I’m just the hired help, but my father is a local activist. He’s a big admirer of your columns Mr Broadwick – all of us are. We feel that you could turn us from a loose alliance of pressure groups into a mass movement that politicians would fear as well as hate. Together, we can make a difference.”

  “Yes, good, good,” Broadwick responded, mentally calculating the positives and negatives of openly aligning himself with these people. Played right, it could net him a fortune.“As long as it stays within the law...,” he added, thinking aloud.

  “Oh yes. It’s no use being radical if you can’t present your ideas sensibly.”

  “Don’t scare the horses. Do you know the running order for this evening?”

  Charlotte produced a printed sheet. “You're the keynote speaker, Mr Broadwick. You're on at 8.30pm, after the warm-up speeches from our Southern co-ordinator Mike Phillips, and the Northern co-ordinator Ken McManus. After that, we'll take you straight to a smaller room for a press conference.”

  “And, umm, do I get paid after that?”

  “Yes, immediately. I'll come looking for you, and take you to the treasurer. Will cash be okay?”

  More than okay. Ideal, he thought.

  “Cash is fine.”

  “Ha ha. Good. No paperwork, no VAT, and no nosy bureaucrat needs to know a thing about it. Happy days.”

  He smiled, she was delightful. “Indeed.”

  “And if you have time, we’re laying on a little WS party for a select few afterwards.”

  Broadwick looked puzzled. WS? What the hell was that? Whores and swingers? WAGs and shags? Wank and spank?

  “Wine and sandwiches,” the exotic creature added, sensing his confusion. “Now we start in half an hour. Can I get you anything? Tea, coffee, a sandwich?”

  “Whisky if you can find one.”

  “Of course. No problem Mr Broadwick.”

  He sank into a ch
air and re-read his speech. He had asked the news desk for guidance on Hope & Progress as soon as his agent had received the £5,000 offer for tonight's appearance. To his relief, the chief political reporter had assured him that they were not connected with the British National Party, that blundering creature of darkness led by fools and neo-fascists. Rather, they were a loose alliance of people disenchanted by the traditional parties’ political myopia when it came to the everyday concerns of voters – the millions who dwelt in the vast hinterland beyond Westminster and Islington. His people.

  ***

  The audience proved to be rowdy but good-natured. They clapped politely when Mike Phillips had turned his fire on UKIP, who he accused accurately of being “Thatcherite”, and less accurately “a one-man band”. He praised the party for keeping the European Union in the news but mocked its “extreme anti-racism policies” and “naive belief in the free market and the City of London”. Instead, he advocated protectionism, import tariffs and bank nationalisation, which received a mixed response. Ken’s speech went down much better, being a mix of solid jokes and tub-thumping populism; then William Broadwick was introduced. The columnist got a standing ovation before he’d even uttered a word.

  Broadwick’s speech was a clever one. It worked on two levels, playing to the audience here and the imagined one at Tory Central Office, whom he rightly suspected would be studying every word of it. Steering clear of anything that could be construed as extreme, William spoke about his “deep and undying love of Britain and England”, identifying the EU, Hampstead liberals and self-hating race relations bores as the reasons for “this island’s loss of culture, control, sovereignty and identity...the things our parents took for granted, the things they fought and died for, free speech, democracy, tolerance and decency NO LONGER EXIST.”

  There were cries of “Shame!”, “No!” and a plaintive “Why?”

  Broadwick warmed to his theme. He was British, he said, but he was English too and was “sickened to the pit of my stomach about being told that this was something to be ashamed of...”Then he threw in a decent joke, which he'd freshly purloined from Private Eye, about a secret government planning commission working on a redesign of the Union Jack. “They decided that they had to lose the red cross of St George, because its links to the Crusades made it offensive to non-Christians; they then decided to lose the red cross of St Patrick, as it was also a Christian reference not to mention a provocative reminder of Britain's imperialist oppression. They were then left with the blue saltire of St Andrew which obviously couldn’t be kept on its own because it would be identical to the Scottish flag. So the great liberals thought hard and decided that the only workable solution would be get shot of all three crosses, leaving them with a new look Union Jack – a flag that was completely white and therefore entirely suitable for waving during future EU negotiations...”

  Broadwick beamed as laughter engulfed the hall, and then he grew serious again for his big finish.“Yes it's a joke, but how far is it from the truth? The political class has betrayed us again and again. They are quislings, traitors, sell-outs and shameless, bare-faced liars.” The crowd cheered, Broadwick continued: “They tell us that the English people should be ashamed of our past. The opposite is true. The English have produced the greatest culture the world had ever seen...English genius still reverberates around the world. Not just Shakespeare, but Chaucer, Tallis, Purcell, Elgar, Kipling, Dickens, Browning and the rest. So when some jumped up Commie councillor tells you not to fly the English flag on St George’s Day in case it ‘offends’ some hyper-sensitive follower of a hostile foreign medieval religion, laugh in their face and kick them straight out of office.

  “You have the power, you, the English people, the Scots, the Welsh, the people of Northern Ireland, all of us British people – together, united, standing as one...we can make a difference, we must make a difference and by God we will shall make a difference, or else we will die trying.”

  The crowd were on their feet. They loved him, and they showed their love by cascading coins and notes into Ken’s collecting buckets. His Hope and Progress movement was truly born.

  Correction. Make that still-born. The press pack who were led to a smaller room for a question and answer session with the speakers were certainly smiling, but they were the smiles of a hungry crocodile waiting to strike. They pounced on Broadwick immediately, grilling him about the leaked links between his columns and the vigilante. On his back foot, William could do nothing except recycle quotes from tomorrow’s big article, condemning the killer’s unlawful actions unreservedly. A dark cloud embraced the pretty face of Charlotte, his temporary PA.

  Just when he thought the worst of it was over, a man from the Mail On Sunday who resembled Aleksandr the advertising meerkat, stood up asked if he had anything to say on the subject of Jackie Sutton. Talk about dog eat dog! With a furious cry of “No comment!” Broadwick leapt to his feet and stomped out of the room with Charlotte a few feet behind him, her brow more furrowed than her father’s fields.

  “Are you okay, Mr Broadwick?”

  “Yes. Yes,” he said, recovering his composure. “It’s just newspaper shenanigans.”

  “Jackie Sutton?”

  “A private matter. Just a friend, a contact really. Gossip and slurs.”

  She led him back to his room where a thick set man with protruding ears – presumably his driver – was waiting.

  “Did you mean what you said about the vigilante?”

  “Oh yes, absolutely. I can't endorse that sort of terrorism. He’s just as bad as the people he hunts down.”

  Charlotte held out her hand and stroked his cheek almost tenderly. “I'm so sorry you think like that,” she said softly.

  It was the last part of the night he would ever remember.

  64

  The Sunday papers had a field day. The Met authorised the release of Harry Tyler’s true identity, and a cover story explaining away earlier reports of his death and his long absence as a major undercover operation into an international crime network which apparently stretched from Greater Manchester to the Urals.

  The tale of the ex-con and the hero cop both kidnapped by a fringe terrorist group caught the imagination of editors and headline writers, and squeezed the story of William Broadwick’s affair into second place, except in the Mail On Sunday which ran both news items as a split splash and the Express Group titles which ignored the sex scandal altogether. Both the Sunday Express and the Daily Star Sunday however were happy to run a prominent piece by their leading columnist condemning the vigilante “unreservedly”. In a democratic society, he wrote, ‘There can never be any excuse for taking the law into your own hands.’

  Jackie Sutton’s plan had worked perfectly. The Mail’s piece was unforgiving. It ran for five pages and included eight of Bang Bang Kirpachi’s pictures of them kissing and canoodling, all of his quotes about their sex life, faithfully recorded by Paul Leather, a glamorous studio shot of her that the paper just happened to have found, and an unflattering one of Fiona getting a stiff cuddle from her husband. Both were quoted refusing to comment, but the Mail did helpfully reproduce ten fairly recent Broadwick column extracts on the related subjects of morality, fidelity and probity, under a shot of William looking particularly overweight along with the stinging caption: ‘Broader-wick: putting the hippo in hypocrite.’ Ouch.

  Jackie was still chuckling about that as she enjoyed a luxurious full body massage in the spa she had booked for today. No one knew she was here; no one could contact her as she'd left her phone at home. She smiled as she relished the repercussions of the domestic train wreck she had set in motion, and looked forward to a full day of very expensive expert pampering. Tomorrow she’d meet Willie, tomorrow she’d tell him what she should have told him from day one: “It's my way, or the highway.”

  65

  Tonbridge, Kent

  “John. John!” I shook my sleeping cellmate, but he was still dead to the world. I had slept very deeply, far more deepl
y than anyone should on a wooden floor covered with hay. We must have been doped – they must have slipped something in the stew they gave us around midnight last night. What time was it? My watch was missing, I strained my eyes in the gloom. His was luminous; it said 11.57am.Something was different. What? Not the smell, the room still stank. Then I heard a murmur from the other side of John. It was someone else. They brought us a new play mate.

  “Hello,” I said loudly. “Who's there?” I shook John again. “Come on JB, we've got company.”

  66

  The decision to plant a bomb at the offices of Suszem, Tillett & Hertz had been an easy one to make. They were the solicitors who had represented the Tonbridge travellers in their battle against the local council. It had been planted last night, with some degree of poetic justice, with William Broadwick unconscious in the back of the Ford Transit. It was Broadwick who had condemned the firm as ‘rapacious parasites bloated on legal aid, defending the undefendable’.

  The bomb exploded late on Sunday morning, long after the comatose columnist had been deposited in the Stevens’ cellar. The farm stock had expanded to include one villain, one apparently heroic undercover police officer and their very own gutless Judas.

  Broadwick had proved to be as weak and worthless as the politicians whom he routinely denounced, and yet their new captive was an unexpected bonus, an instrument to be used for the benefit of the cause.

  67

  Tonbridge, Kent. 11.50am

  Bat Ears and the brunette turned up as before; him carrying sandwiches and water, her carrying a shotgun. Keeping his distance from John, he circled round to the third man and removed his gag.

  Not smart. The posh prick launched into a “Don’t you know who I am?” tirade, punctuated with fucks and threats. “What’s all this about, Charlotte?” he demanded.