Face Down

by Garry Bushell

  “Of course we know who you are,” said the woman. “You’re the man who let us all down. How many pieces of silver did it take to buy your soul, Mr Broadwick?”

  Ah, so this was Fleet Street’s finest, he looked a lot older than his newspaper by-line picture, a lot fatter too.

  “I don't know who the Devil you think you are...” the newcomer grumbled.

  “Oi! Shut the fuck up!” barked John.

  William Broadwick bit his lip.

  Bat Ears took the gun, and the brunette called Charlotte began to film us on her Blackberry.

  “This had better be for HBO, darlin’,” leered Johnny. “Here, get my good side.”

  Charlotte ignored him.

  “She's cocking a deaf'un, John,” I said.

  “She's playing hard to get, that’s all. But you have to know darling I like to be in charge. There's only one time I can suffer being under a woman.”

  “You've got a foul mind,” snarled the old man.

  “Just being friendly, pops. You don’t mind, do ya darling? It turns you on, don’t it?”

  Charlotte finished filming but still ignored him. I tried appealing to their better nature. “Listen both of you, you’ve already broken more laws than I can count. Why not stop this nonsense now? Let us go, and I’ll testify that you cooperated. I’ve got a great defence brief, who will take your case all the way to Strasbourg...”

  Big mistake. The old man flared up. “I would rather die than be judged by those jumped-up jackasses in Europe,” he seethed. “You’re a police officer, you know how much damage these foreign courts do. You should be on our side! We are doing your job for you. We're raining fire and brimstone down on those the Law should punish but won’t.”

  He had a point. “But with respect,” I said. “Who are you to take the place of the courts? I’m no fan of the EU, and the law needs reform, of that I’m in no doubt, but you can’t put yourself above it. You have made yourself judge, jury and executioner. Who gave you that authority?”

  “The only ones who can, Mr Tyler,” answered the brunette. “The people, and God Almighty.”

  “How did the people authorise what you're doing?” I asked, choosing to swerve the God squad guff.

  “It's happening today,” she replied. “In a very modern way. And tomorrow, God willing, we will see justice acted out. Mr Broadwick here will be our instrument, if he knows what's good for him.”

  “It will be his chance to redeem himself in the eyes of the followers he has let down,” the old man added.

  “But that makes you as bad as Baker,” I said, trying to find an angle that could penetrate his mental shield of certainty. “You’re a murderer too.”

  “No. Because I have a code. Without a code a man is just a thug, a murderer, a sociopath. I have the code!”

  The brunette weighed in with “If you can't beat the bad guys within the law, you have to beat them without it.”

  The old man's eyes glazed over. “Once war has been forced on society, then good men have no alternative but to end it as quickly as possible. The object of war is to win it, not to drag it out as long as possible. Endless violence is the product of indecision. No one wants that. When you’re in a war, as we are today, what you’re fighting for, the one thing you are fighting for, is victory. If you go for appeasement, like we did with Saddam in the 90s, we’re just postponing the inevitable, and postponing makes thing worse. Bloodier. More damaging.”

  “The liberals, the weak, the pacifists, give the enemy advantage after advantage,” said the brunette. “He knows that,” she pointed at Broadwick, adding bitterly. “At least, he did until yesterday.”

  “I come from a line of old soldiers,” said Bat Ears. “And we either die or fade away. I don’t mind dying, but fading away isn’t for me.”

  “I understand, and believe me as a cop I sympathise. But how can you be so certain about what’s right and wrong? What is this code you talk about?”

  “I told you," he snapped. “The good book. The Ten Commandments. Thus saith the Lord: ‘Keep justice and do righteousness for my salvation is about to come and my righteousness to be revealed...’”

  Ho boy!

  “I saw the light,” said John in a soft rasp, his eyes blazing with conviction. “In prison, about eighteen months in. I realised the errors of my way. I repented. I let the Lord into my life and was born again...”

  He sounded so sincere he almost had me believing him. The woman called Charlotte smiled. “Nice try, Baker. Unfortunately for you, I met you at a party remember? A party where you drank alcohol, offered me cocaine and was prepared to leave your girlfriend on the dance floor while you came and had sex with me in the back of a car. Your soul is more lost than the British Empire. A man like you can no more be reformed than a feral dog.”

  “Okay, you've got me. So here's another idea, come back here and drain me spuds.Old Batman can film that for you. That’ll get you viewers. It might even spur you on it. Who was it said that sexual excess is the engine for violence?”

  “Gandhi,” she replied coldly. “You know I was thinking, before we do the execution, maybe we should give the public a taste of the righteous joy to come. You're a very virile, sexy man Johnny, so perhaps a free, freelance penile amputation would appeal. With anaesthetic of course, we're not animals.”

  He shot her a glare she could have shaved her legs with. “That will never ever happen.”

  “We'll see. I can't think of a more wretched end for a big strutting macho man than losing his manhood on YouTube before his life devoted to the service of Satan is snuffed out in the name of the Lord.”

  Satan? FFS!“Once you see it, you'll want it,” John replied, as cocky as you like.

  She scowled at him. “And after that, castration Mr Baker. Complete emasculation. It’s only right and fitting, after all we all know that the Devil is smooth between the legs.”

  For once, even Johnny Too kept quiet. Charlotte turned and followed her father upstairs.

  “I bet your dick just got a whole lot shorter, John.”

  “Thanks for that, arsehole.”

  William Broadwick was shaking. “What did she mean, I’ll be her instrument?” he asked.

  “Fuck knows, I'll be her fucking instrument for sure though after I’ve topped that bat-eared fuck. Fuckin' Satan? I'll make sure she has the Devil in her before all this is over – smoothly, between her legs. Or roughly. I'm not fussed.”

  “But she said I’d...”

  “Shut it, prick. It ain’t all about you.”

  “Except that you’ve been their inspiration from the start, Mr Broadwick,” I said calmly. “You've been thundering away in your column, giving it large as the likes of us would say, and they've been acting on it. What has happened to make them change their mind about you?”

  “I umm, I denounced them, or at least him, at a public meeting last night. The girl was posing as a backstage assistant. She took me back to my room afterwards and the next thing I can remember is coming round in this hell-hole.”

  “Ah, I get it. You disowned the old boy’s vigilante crusade. He thought he was doing what you wanted him to do, and in his eyes you stabbed him in the back.”

  “I have never condoned violence.”

  “Maybe not, but I seem to remember you making excuses for the man or men who killed a paedophile and a porn baron, which to him would have read like an endorsement. There is no way he and that weird bird are going to let you get off the ride now. What was it Chandler wrote? Ah yeah, ‘There’s no trap so deadly as the trap you set yourself’..."

  I looked at the blubbery writer and tried hard not to stare at the rapidly spreading wet patch on his hand-tailored Prince Of Wales check suit trousers.

  “John,” I said. “No disrespect, but to them you are the enemy, I’m a good guy and Broadwick here is an idol with feet of clay; so next time they come down here, let me and Billy boy do the talking. If we stay calm, and speak their language, we might just be able to talk them out of w
hatever they have got in mind.”

  “Nice theory Harry, but the talking ship has sailed, alongside any ships you might be thinking of marked peaceful resolution or sanity. These people are beyond nuts. They’ve killed, they’ve bombed and they’ve kidnapped. We’re talking bats in the belfry. Their oars ain’t touching the water, bruv. They’ll no more listen to you than these brick walls will. This is down to us, bruv, you and me. We’ve got to figure out a way to get out of here. Otherwise we’re all brown bread.”

  William Broadwick made a strange whining high-pitched noise, like a bagpiper drowning slowly in mucus, and passed out. I ignored him.

  “Okay, we know they’re both crazy, but they’re also straight. They’re clever, not cunning. They have a set of rules that they stick to, whereas we know how to break and bend them.”

  “It’s what I’ve done all of me life.”

  “That’s the difference John, we're crafty as well as smart, and when we get the chance we will be absolutely merciless. The Marquis of Queensberry is out the door.”

  68

  Royal Tunbridge Wells, midday.

  Gary Shaw got to the Toad Rock Retreat as soon as it opened and was relieved to see Thelma behind the jump. She seemed to have a warm glow about her today. The detective ordered a pint of light and bitter and offered her “one for yourself”, which she accepted “for later” as was her custom.

  “Have you seen Mick lately, Thelma? Do you know where he is now?”

  “You must be psychic, officer, he’s upstairs fixing the electrics. I’ll give him a shout.”

  She buzzed the intercom and said, “Michael, there's someone to see you, it’s dinner time anyway so you might as well take a break. We don’t want to tire you out...”

  An unusually cheerful Mick Neale materialised in moments. He was unshaven and wearing an orange T-shirt with a slogan that read ‘Praia de Burgau beach bum’.

  “I take it that’s Portugal,” said Gary Shaw, shaking his hand. “Pint?”

  “I'll have a Guinness with you, Gal. Great sardines, amazing cataplanas...”

  “I’ll check it out; I'll need somewhere to live when I take early retirement, which frankly can’t come soon enough. Guinness here please, Thelma.”

  “Will you be wanting dinner too, Mr Shaw?” she asked. “Roast beef, chicken or lamb today with all the trimmings.”

  “Lamb will do a treat, thanks. Can I run a tab?”

  “I’m not so sure,” she smiled. “You look a shady character to me.”

  “Definitely a wrong’un,” agreed Mick. “All these Londoners coming down here with their funny ways...”

  They moved to a small table.

  “So have you got anywhere with the vigilante, Gary?”

  “I'm off it, Mick. You know it escalated?”

  “I saw the papers. A double kidnapping now...”

  “And a bomb that went off a couple of hours ago, blew the front windows off a solicitor’s in town. Almost certainly the same deal as the one at Europe House. Home-made, rudimentary timer. At least no casualties this time.”

  “So you’re off the case completely?”

  “Yeah, big boys’ rules now. You sure you’ve got no idea who could be behind this? We’re pretty sure it’s someone local.”

  “No. Well. Maybe. I dunno. I was pretty certain that it couldn’t be old man Stevens because he’s so gaga these days. But Len the landlord at this place bumped into him in the week and said he was absolutely the full shilling, alert, coherent, and almost perky. Then I ran into Charlie on Thursday and she was quite off with me, told me not to come round for a while, said they didn't have the money to pay me...”

  “Which is possible because everyone’s business is up shit creek at the moment and the banks are busy confiscating all the paddles...”

  “True, but hear me out, Gary. One other thing, I heard a report on that first bomb, how it was made. The last time I was at the Stevens farm, I saw a load of chemicals in one of the barns, ones I'd never seen there before.”

  “Which again could be a coincidence, but...”

  “But put that all together and that’s enough to set off the old mental alarm bells.”

  “So it could be worth giving the Stevens place a spin...”

  “How quickly can you get a search warrant?”

  69

  Woking, Surrey

  Fiona Broadwick had been annoyed when her husband had not returned home last night, wrongly assuming William had spent the night with his tart. And when her home phone started ringing off the hook, she chose to ignore it, suspecting it was Willie hoping to placate her with a fresh load of lies, apologies and assurances. She didn't get around to bringing the Sunday papers in from the porch until half past ten and was alarmed to see a pack of press at her fence, along with photographers who started clicking the moment she opened her front door.

  Fiona sat down to absorb the headlines. Willie kidnapped? Held hostage? She thought for a moment and then did what any well-connected wronged wife would do in such a dreadful situation. She found her husband’s contact book and rang Max Clifford at home. She’d met the publicist at a charity event near his Surrey home when William had been booked as auctioneer – a last minute replacement for Jeffrey Archer. Their telephone conversation was brief but extremely profitable. He told her to stay in the house, and not to answer the phone. Her exclusive story – he called it a buy-up – was probably worth £40,000 to the right newspaper, more if they negotiated a tie-in piece in Hello or OK!, and much more if she held some sensational revelations for the ghost-written autobiography he could also arrange. True to his word, Max had done the deal in under an hour.

  At 1.30pm, she was taken from the house with a coat over her head and sped away to a hotel in Surbiton in a 4x4 with blackened windows.

  70

  Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent

  Gary Shaw and Mick Neale finished their dinners, Mick sank the dregs of his second pint of Guinness, Shaw had switched to tea. He had a decision to make, go to his guv’nor or take a chance and go for a ‘freelance’ sniff about. At around 2.15pm, the breaking news on TV forced his hand. Headlined ‘New Vigilante Video’, Sky News cut to YouTube footage of the three hostages in their dingy basement cell while the traditional ‘voice of an actor’ recited the words of a press statement dictated to the PA. The message was straightforward and uncompromising. The public was invited to vote for and against the televised execution of the former South London gangster Johnny Baker, the task to be carried out by no less a media favourite than William Broadwick. To vote ‘Yes’ to kill, viewers had merely to ‘like’ the short YouTube clip. To save Baker, they should just ‘unlike’ it. Any attempt to remove the video from the site would be interpreted as a Yes vote.

  The method of execution was left unstated, but Gulliver Stevens had already decided that the gangster would be killed by being repeatedly Tasered through the skull. His electrified corpse would then be chopped up, put through the meat grinder and fed to the pigs – by which he meant turned into hamburgers and sold from a van outside Tonbridge cop shop. All except for his head. The farmer had considered sticking it on a pole like they used to do, but had decided that sewing it onto the corpse of an ass and depositing it outside the Old Bailey would be far more memorable, not to mention sweet poetic justice.

  71

  Tonbridge, Kent

  William Broadwick was dribbling, a revolting sight but marginally preferable to seeing and hearing weep and whine. John took great pleasure in winding him up and had embarked on a lengthy discussion with him on the contradictions between claiming to be a libertarian while opposing the decriminalisation of narcotics.

  Broadwick went into a rant about drug culture which had started around jazz and “degenerate rock ‘n’ roll sub-music” and had been fanned by Hollywood and “the evil of television.”

  Johnny laughed. “You’re supposed to be a Tory, pal, you’re supposed to believe in free markets, but you’re as much of a control freak as the fuck
in’ Reds. Now I happen to like some of the high classical music you like, but you like it not just because of its power and sweep but because you’re a snob and it makes you feel superior to me and ’im who drop our Hs...”

  “And break the law!” he snapped back. “Yes, what’s wrong with feeling superior to common criminals?”

  “Two points. One, I’m happy to break any law made up by pricks like you, and two, as you shouldn’t need reminding we are actually being held here by your fan club, a pair of fucked-up psycho-killers whose vigilante fantasies have been brought to the boil by years of reading your self-righteous bollocks, my son.”

  If William Broadwick had a clever reply to that, he kept it to himself. Instead the famously splenetic columnist just said sorry.

  “Sorry?" sneered Johnny. “That’s tits on a bull, pal. Useless.”

  The fucked-up psycho-killers turned up moments later, as if on cue, and they brought us the same poxy stew as they had done the night before. The old man seemed a little greyer than before, though.

  “I won 6 shillings and 4d yesterday,” he told me.

  “Really? That’s nice for you, grandad.”

  “6 shillings and 4d, playing three card brag.”

  “Come on Dad,” snapped the brunette, leading him away by the arm.

  “Stay frosty, darlin’,” Johnny shouted.

  “Don’t eat the stew,” I muttered under my breath to John, as they locked the cellar door behind them. “The more I think about it, the more I’m sure they’re drugging it, and we need to keep our wits about us.”

  “Fuck, okay. But I'm so hungry I’d eat the balls off a low-flying duck.”

  We never said anything to Broadwick, who despite his heightened emotional state managed to polish off two bowls of the stuff.

  “You want to eat some Alpen, son,” Johnny sneered. “Get yerself some more nuts.”