by Tom Bale
He was still focused on Joe. The vans did a lot of mileage. From time to time things went wrong with them, so the breakdown could be genuine. On the other hand, it could mean he’d got wind of their plan and was doing a runner …
Victor Smith’s words came back to him: If I sold him to Danny Morton and couldn’t deliver, I’d be a dead man.
‘Keep on it,’ he told Kestle. ‘Let me know as soon as you speak to him.’
Glenn was ready with the next problem. ‘They want us to hand over our phones.’
As Leon marched over, one of the guards shifted his stance, his jacket falling open. ‘These are our standard security measures,’ the other one was saying. ‘Not negotiable, under any circumstances.’
‘What are they?’ Leon asked.
The guard turned to a small table and picked up two hand-held body scanners. ‘You submit to a check with these. No phones, watches, jewellery or electronic devices allowed through. And a maximum of three people go in.’ He pointed at Bruce. ‘I suggest he remains with us.’ His voice was well educated, with that strange honking tone people had in the South-East.
Talking through their noses as well as looking down them, Leon thought. He pulled Fenton aside. ‘Joe called to say his van broke down. Now he’s turned his phone off.’
Fenton’s eyes widened. He did his gulping-goldfish act.
‘Yeah, I dunno what it means either,’ Leon snarled. ‘Let’s just get this done.’
He stepped towards the guards, opening his arms in surrender.
Six days ago Joe had sat in a cafe with Alise and listened to the account of her sister’s disappearance. Now he heard the story of her own.
She’d been abducted by three or four men, just a couple of hours after parting from Joe. Probably while Leon was offering him a job. Later she got a look at them; from her descriptions he identified Reece and Todd, and possibly the man he’d met out on the deck the other day. Bruce somebody.
That night she’d been taken to Leon’s home and interrogated, brutally, by Leon himself. He had inflicted many of her injuries, the worst of which was a fracture to her eye socket. The doctors had told her she was lucky to have kept her sight.
Joe felt overcome: by shame, because he’d been so tempted to dismiss her allegations; then by shock at the severity of her injuries. Next came guilt, because essentially Alise had been punished for talking to him.
Finally, deep down, building slowly and methodically, there was rage, and a desire for vengeance.
Once Leon had had his fun, Alise was force-fed a bottle of vodka, driven to the Rame Peninsula, south of Plymouth, and thrown over a cliff. Her body had rolled down the steep grass bank and onto the rocky beach below. By pure fluke she’d landed just above the high-tide mark, otherwise she would have drowned.
‘A man with his dog found me the next morning. My body was so cold, he thought I was dead. In hospital they say I had one more hour, maybe less.’
Rushed to intensive care, Alise didn’t properly regain consciousness until Saturday. It was only when a duty psychiatrist came to conduct a mental-health assessment that she realised the assumption everyone had made.
‘They think I have tried to kill myself. Exactly as Leon plans it to be.’
Joe couldn’t argue with that. The fall onto the rocks conveniently explained her injuries, and her backstory – a futile search for her missing sister, the threatened loss of her job and her relationship – completed an ideal scenario for suicide. Joe felt certain that would have been the coroner’s verdict at the inquest.
‘Did you tell anyone what really happened?’
‘A policewoman came while I am still confused. The things I say make no sense. Later, when I start to feel better, I see there is no point telling the truth. I cannot prove it happened this way. So next time I say I don’t remember.’ She leaned towards him. ‘You see why Leon is so dangerous? You believe me now that he killed my sister?’
Alise’s hands were gripped together to stop them shaking. Joe placed his own hand over them. He nodded.
‘Yes, I do.’
Being patted down and checked with the electronic wand was humiliating. Leon endured it by closing his eyes and pretending he was at an airport, where everybody had to put up with this shit.
They gave his shoes a thorough going-over before handing them back, but they held on to his watch and his belt. Fenton and Glenn must have sensed how close he was to storming out because they shuffled into formation behind him, blocking his exit.
The Branson Suite was big enough for about fifty people. In one corner there was a stack of tables and chairs, piled up the way they used to be at school. A couple of tables had been placed end to end in the centre of the room, like a barrier, with chairs on each side. Three vacant seats with their backs to the door: for Leon’s team.
On the other side, three more chairs. The middle one was empty, the other two were occupied by men who looked far from comfortable in their tight suits. Not neat and civilised, like the guards on the door. One had long matted hair and the other had a buzz cut around a bald spot the size of a saucer. Both were unshaven, with bad skin and bad teeth. They looked mean and greasy and savage. Thugs.
At the sight of them, Leon relaxed a little. These were men from his own world: council estates, broken families, vicious competition for scarce resources and feral, ruthless violence from the moment you could grab and run.
Leon spotted movement across the room, almost lost in the shadows of the colossal floor-to-ceiling drapes. A man and a woman, standing close together. The woman had long black hair, in dazzling contrast to her crisp white blouse.
Glenn noticed her, too, and blew out a loud breath in appreciation. She was slim and curvy, in a tight grey pencil skirt, split to show a sliver of thigh. Like a secretary in a decent-quality porno, Leon thought.
By comparison, the man was pretty forgettable. Unlike the others, he was in jeans and a black T-shirt. He was average height, wiry, with short spiky brown hair. Although he must have heard them come in, he kept his back to them, as though he couldn’t give a shit who had just joined the party.
With a terse nod at the other two, Leon pulled the middle chair a foot or so back from the table and sat down. Glenn and Fenton followed suit, sitting each side of him.
Finally the man at the window turned and wandered towards them, sighing with vague irritation, as though this was another minor chore on a long list. He was rubbing absently at his cheek, and when he dropped his hand Leon saw the puckered scar of an old puncture wound.
‘Mr Morton?’ Fenton rose to his feet and extended his hand.
The man nodded. He sat down without responding to the handshake. Leon snorted, remembering how he’d done the same thing to the journalist.
‘Thank you for agreeing to this meeting,’ Fenton went on. ‘I’m confident that you’ll agree it will be tremendously beneficial—’
‘You’re in charge, yeah?’ Danny Morton flapped a hand at Leon. His eyes were small and dark, like buttons.
‘Yeah. I’m Leon Race.’
‘So how about you do the talking, while Mr Blobby here shuts his fucking cakehole?’
Silence. Morton’s men smirked. Leon couldn’t see Fenton or Glenn’s reaction, and he didn’t want to look. The woman was still by the far wall, ignoring them completely.
‘You ever heard the word “entrapment”?’ Morton asked.
‘What?’
‘Entrapment. You know what it means?’
Leon took a deep breath. Told himself this didn’t matter. It was like Glenn had said: Morton was trying to wind him up.
‘Course I know what it is. Why?’
‘Are you the filth?’
‘What? No, I’m not the fucking filth.’ The caution he’d given himself just a second before was instantly forgotten. He wanted to tear Morton’s heart out.
‘You’re working for them, though? An undercover agent or something?’
Fenton tried to speak: ‘Mr Morton, I can’t for t
he life of me conceive what—’
Morton silenced him with a shake of his head. ‘You were sent here by the cops, weren’t you?’
Leon was speechless. This was just about the worst insult he could imagine. He felt his pulse racing; the answering thump of his migraine as the bugle call of stress rang out: Yes, I’ll come and play …
He got hold of himself, took another deep, steadying breath and gave Danny Morton his best man-to-man, straight-talking look. ‘What the fuck do you mean by that?’
Morton raised one arm in the air, as if hailing a cab. The woman marched over and slapped a rolled-up newspaper into his hand like a relay racer passing the baton. Morton opened it out, slapped it down on the table and jabbed a finger at the photograph of Leon, glad-handing the mayor and the chief constable.
‘This,’ he said. ‘This is what I fucking mean.’
Sixty-Six
JOE ORDERED COFFEE and a ham sandwich. Alise accepted a glass of juice. She wasn’t eating much, she said, partly because the pain medication left her slightly nauseous, and partly because several teeth were loose. It was touch and go whether they’d heal.
‘What made you come here?’ Joe asked. ‘Why not back to London?’
‘Because I have nothing there. In hospital I was able to check email. My company have made me redundant.’
Joe tutted. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Plus I am still seeing doctors in Plymouth. Someone had told me Looe was nice, so I thought … why not? I like it here. The lady at hotel is very kind.’
‘And what about the other reason?’
To her credit, Alise didn’t pretend to be confused by his question. What he got was a short, harsh sigh.
‘Now more than ever before, I have to know what happened to Kamila.’
‘Is that why you called me?’
‘I suppose. You believed in me. I went away so happy, so excited, sure that you would help me. Now Leon has done this, it is certain he hurt Kamila.’ Her voice became cold. ‘Killed her, probably. This is what we have to think now, yes?’
‘What happened to Kamila isn’t necessarily the same thing that happened to you.’ Alise started to protest, but Joe raised his hand to placate her. ‘I want to know more about Derek Cadwell. No one else seems to have heard this rumour you mentioned.’
She withdrew into herself. He could see pain in her eyes. And guilt.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘If you really know something, tell me how you found out.’
‘You remember the man we see in the cafe? Ben?’
‘He told you the secret?’ Joe recalled how the man had glared at Alise.
‘Yes. He was at the funeral home one night. Cadwell thought he had gone. There was the body of … a young girl.’ Alise shuddered. ‘Cadwell … was undressing.’
‘And Leon filmed it?’
‘Later Ben hears about a camera hidden in the room. Leon knew this is valuable information, but not if rumours get out, because then Cadwell’s business is finished. It is kept very secret.’
‘So how come Ben told you?’
Her eyes closed and opened in a slow, deliberate blink: You work it out.
And then he did. ‘Oh, Alise. I’m sorry.’
She gave a defiant flick of her head. ‘Why sorry? It is my decision, my shame. For Kamila, I become a whore.’ A quiet sob escaped from her throat.
‘That’s not what you are.’
Alise shrugged. ‘I don’t care. To stop Leon, I would do anything.’
This was the first time she’d stated an objective beyond learning what had become of her sister. It was perfectly understandable under the circumstances.
‘I can appreciate how you feel, but it’s not quite as simple as that.’
‘You tell me this? You think I do not know?’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘The police will not listen, so we must do something else.’
‘What?’
‘Kill him.’
Joe automatically glanced round, but the cafe’s other customers appeared to be taking no interest in them. When he looked back Alise was studying him carefully, a sympathetic smile on her face. Behind the smile, rock-solid determination.
‘If you say no, fine. I understand. I do it myself. I wait till I am stronger, and then kill him.’
‘What d’you come here for?’ Morton asked. He was slouched in his seat, legs splayed, as if to demonstrate how angry he could be when he was relaxed.
‘It’s a business proposition,’ Fenton offered.
‘Not the monkey. The organ grinder.’ Morton spat the words, staring hard at Leon.
‘We want to do a deal with you.’
‘What kind of deal?’
Once again, Leon was struck dumb. Start off cagey and it would look weak, suspicious. But if he came right out with it, he’d have no other cards to play.
‘I’m not going into detail till I know if we can trust you.’
Morton laughed. ‘Why’d you think I’d be interested in a deal with you?’ He put one foot on the table, stamping his heel on the newspaper. ‘This says you’re squeaky clean. Got your tongue up the arse of any number of cops and politicians and fucking journalists.’
Leon shook his head. ‘Ignore what that says. It has nothing to do with this meeting. I didn’t even realise it was coming out.’
‘You didn’t realise – or maybe you thought I wouldn’t see it,’ Morton echoed. ‘Either way, you fucked up big time.’
The comment drew sniggers from the men either side of him. Even the woman, who’d retreated to the back of the room, turned and smiled. Leon looked away in disgust and caught Glenn eyeing her up.
‘The article’s bullshit,’ he told Morton. ‘But it gets the police off my back.’
‘A deliberate strategy on our part,’ Fenton confirmed. ‘Whatever your concerns, please believe that we are quite genuine. We have a very valuable proposal for you.’
Morton didn’t seem any more convinced. ‘Babe,’ he said, clicking his fingers.
The woman approached, her head tilted to one side. Her expression indicated that she was listening to something. Leon leaned slightly and saw she was wearing an earpiece.
‘We safe?’ Morton asked her. ‘Nobody listening in?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Good.’ He dragged his foot off the table, slapped his knees and sat up straight. ‘The thing is, Leon, I’m a villain. I make a living from the proceeds of crime, and I’m proud of it. I’m also proud that in more than twenty years I’ve only spent three of ’em inside, and I don’t intend to ever repeat that experience. But what I won’t do is go sucking up to the filth. If my picture’s in the paper it means something’s gone seriously fucking wrong.’
More laughter, but Morton wasn’t done yet. He signalled at the woman, who stood at his shoulder, gazing serenely into the middle distance. She cleared her throat and began to speak.
‘Leon Race, age thirty-six. Born and resides in North Cornwall. Parents deceased. Undistinguished family, no accomplishments of note.’
Her voice was like a TV newsreader’s, calm and smooth. The words rolled out so swiftly that Leon barely understood them, but he felt a sick heat prickling the pores on his face.
‘Raised on a council estate, Race was a hooligan and small-time criminal until the age of seventeen. He then spent approximately three years living in Cheltenham as a result of meeting Terence Povey-Jones, alias Raymond T. Lockhart, disgraced peer, convicted fraudster and predatory homosexual.’
‘What about that, eh?’ Danny was addressing Clive and Glenn, realising they were in the dark. ‘Your boss shacked up with Pervy Povey, as I think he used to be called.’
Leon was rigid with shock. He’d never told anybody about the man who had set him on the path of a careful, lucrative and seemingly law-abiding career.
‘He was a poof, but he never went near me,’ Leon said. Danny Morton just raised his eyebrows and motioned for the woman to continue.
‘The exact nature of their relat
ionship is unknown,’ she said, and somehow that snide phrase hurt Leon more than an outright accusation. ‘Following Povey-Jones’s death in 1994, from an AIDs-related illness, Leon returned to his home town with the funds to launch his first business. Originally involved in the drugs trade, in recent years his illegal activity has been restricted to money laundering on behalf of several long-term associates. His current earnings are primarily achieved through legitimate means.’ A brief smile, and she was done.
What followed was the most excruciating silence Leon had ever known. Danny Morton watched him through narrowed eyes, a born predator.
‘You think I’d let you come swanning in here without knowing anything about you?’ He shook his head. ‘Sure, you haven’t done bad, given your start in life. But you’re still a fucking hick, running a two-bit outfit in the back of beyond. What can you offer us?’
Fenton opened his mouth, shut it again at a look from Morton.
‘Either you’ve got ideas above your station, and you reckon I’ll agree to a deal where you do better out of it than me. Or it’s some kind of trick. Maybe your buddies in blue thought sending a dumbfuck yokel would make me less suspicious. But I ain’t falling for it.’
Leon didn’t respond. He wasn’t processing the words any more. Morton was just a noisy snarl of hate. Instead he concentrated on the voice in his head, working on him like anaesthetic, softly chanting: You’re never gonna get him. You’re never gonna get him. You’re never gonna get him.
Fenton made a last attempt at rescue. ‘Mr Morton, please. None of what you’ve said is relevant to the offer we have for you.’
‘So what is it?’ Danny said. ‘If you’re genuine, put your cards on the table right now. If you’re not, fuck off out of my sight and don’t ever come back.’
But Fenton wasn’t authorised to say. He sent Leon a silent plea: Please tell him. Put us all out of our misery.
Leon understood the desperation, but he couldn’t do it. He’d been humiliated to a point beyond his worst nightmares. He would rather die than give this man anything at all.
‘I don’t trust you,’ he said. He knew he sounded like an amateur. Compared to Morton, he was an amateur.