I had to start with what I knew.
“The footage you shot of her,” I said. “Who did you give it to?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I’d really like to get into my bloody house now,” he said.
He tried to squeeze past me, practically shoving his crotch in my face, making my choice pretty straightforward. No room to swing a punch, so I just grabbed instead. Good thing he was wearing those baggy shorts—if he had been wearing tight jeans I would never have found his scrotum first time. If big Terry and the Guvnor’s other gorillas could overcome their qualms about handling another bloke’s tackle, so could I. I grabbed the ballsack beyond Patrick’s dormant prick and held it firmly, without squeezing it. Yet.
His first reaction was gratifying—he let loose a high-pitched yelp, dropped his keys and clawed at my hands—and I squeezed, just a little, to let him know this wasn’t a mistake and it wasn’t going to end anytime soon. He went for broke, and backhanded me across my bruised face with the bones of his wrist—a fancy fighting move I’d never encountered before, which hurt like hell. I’m not the best fighter I know, but one skill I do have is the ability to take a beating. Pain drains your strength and your spirit unless you can set it aside; it’s a handy trick, and somehow I doubted Patrick had learned it. When he whacked me again across the mouth I held firm, stood up, and twisted his nuts, just a little. He squirmed and yelled and danced on the spot, and he stopped trying to hit me.
There’s this medical condition called torsion of the testes where the tubes and veins feeding a man’s testicles get tangled. It’s excruciating, apparently, and sometimes the only cure is amputation. I wasn’t planning to go that far with Patrick—the amount of pain he was in right now was plenty for my immediate purposes. He quickly stopped squirming and yelling and tried to hold still, scrabbling at my hands again. I was right up close to him—I had to be—and I could literally see beads of sweat oozing from his pores and trickling over his lovely tanned cheekbones.
“Please—” he whimpered. “Oh Christ, please stop—”
“Who did you give the footage to?” He still hesitated. I gave my wrist a tiny flick—just enough to remind him of his immediate priorities.
“The Turk, the Turk—I gave it to the Turk,” he babbled. He looked at the house, then over his shoulder down the path, wishing someone would come to his rescue. It was very likely someone would, and soon, and I couldn’t let that happen. I held on, counting on him to keep babbling. “He never told me what it was for—he didn’t want her to know about it—”
“How do you know him?” I said. “How did the Turk find you?”
“I did some coke,” gasped Patrick. By keeping my fist high I was making him teeter on the balls of his feet, his arms held out rigid by his sides, his fists clenching and unclenching uselessly. “The guy who sold me the stuff, he told the Turk about me. I’m studying law, if I get done for drugs—!”
So he’d been blackmailed, and he’d sold Zoe out to save his own skin. This guy was a real prince. I just hoped I’d get the chance to let Zoe know.
“Did you take that last shot?”
Patrick frowned and opened his mouth and shut it again, clearly confused.
“The shot of Zoe being tied to a bed and felt up by Dean and those other guys. You were there, weren’t you? You didn’t just watch—you joined in.”
He looked appalled and terrified. “No! No, I swear to God, they told me they weren’t going to hurt her, or do anything to her! I just shot the stuff up here, I never—Please, I can’t—”
This had been a fool’s errand after all—Patrick couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t know already. At the thought of failing, of having to leave Zoe in that cesspit, my fist closed tighter, without my even being aware of it.
And Patrick screamed. “Oh God oh God please stop I just took her there I didn’t talk to anyone they didn’t tell me oh PLEASE!”
I loosened my grip—in fact, I was so surprised and relieved I nearly let go altogether.
“She needed a place to stay in London, and she called me—” Interesting: relief from pain was as great an incentive to talk as the pain had been…. I’d probably make a good torturer. I shoved that qualm aside—there’d be plenty of time for guilt later.
“The Turk told me to bring her to this flat in Clapham,” Patrick groaned. “I can give you the address.”
“Forget that,” I said. “You’re going take me there.”
—
I had intended to make him come back to London with me on the train. But after I’d let go of his scrotum and let him bend over and gag, and walk up and down for a bit, Patrick picked up his keys and led me to an old but shiny soft-top Mini parked on the street outside. He unlocked it with a remote, pressing the button twice—once for each door—and we both climbed in.
Traveling by car to London would make my task a lot simpler; on the train I would have had to stick by him all the way to ensure he didn’t call the Turk with a warning, and that would have been tricky. I couldn’t confiscate his phone either—he might call a cop over and make up some story that I’d robbed him, and if I had his handset in my pocket it would have been hard to deny. And with his own phone he could have gone to the loo at any time and made that call, unless I followed him in there, and I’d had enough intimate contact with his genitals for one afternoon. Sitting in the passenger seat while he drove down to London would present far fewer problems.
Except, of course, York was hundreds of miles from London. On the train it took roughly two hours, but even at eighty miles per hour it was going to take us about four to get as far as the North Circular. His convertible was comfortable enough, but kind of cramped. I imagined the female students Patrick gave lifts to enjoyed rubbing thighs with him, hoping eventually to help him get his top down. I didn’t, and I wasn’t, and as we headed south an awkward silence settled over us. I stared out the windows at the endless flat northern vista of scorched crops wilting for want of water and sheep slowly cooking in their woolly coats, while Patrick stared impassively ahead at the motorway unrolling before us. Normally I fall asleep on long car journeys but there was too much tension in that tiny space to let me relax. Patrick’s face was half hidden behind mirrored shades, but the half I could see looked sulky and bullied rather than guilty. I could imagine his growing indignation at finding himself obliged—forced, even—to drive Zoe’s violent thug of an ex-boyfriend, two years younger than him, all the way down to London.
“This is so stupid,” he said eventually. “I mean, what do you hope to achieve?”
I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but that was none of his business, so I just looked at him.
“It’s a bluff,” Patrick said. The Turk’s not actually going to do anything to her, he told me.”
This guy’s too stupid to be a lawyer, I thought. He’s too stupid even to be a cop. “Shut up and drive” was all I said.
“He just wants you to think that, so you’ll do a job for him.”
“When he told you he’d shop you to the cops for snorting coke,” I said, “did you think he was bluffing then?”
He rolled his eyes like I was being stubborn for the sake of it. “Either way,” he said, “this, what we’re doing now, this is just stupid. When he finds out I’ve taken you there, maybe he really will hurt her, and me and you, and it’ll be your bloody fault.”
I wanted to thump him just to stop the sniveling self-justification, but at eighty miles an hour that wouldn’t have been a good idea.
“Seriously, Patrick, just shut up and drive,” I said.
—
And he did, mostly. Two hours past Leeds he grunted he was hungry and pulled into some services. When he went for a piss I took one at the next urinal, and when he went to buy a sandwich I stuck to him like a shadow and bought the same thing as him. Stuffing our faces, we headed back to the car. He pulled the keys from his pocket.
“Gimme those,” I said, spitting crumbs.
“You
’re not insured to drive it,” he said. I held out my hand and he sighed impatiently. “Have you even passed your test?”
“Not a driving test, no. But I got a medal once for punching people in the face.”
He tossed them to me, sulkily. I hit the unlocking blipper on the fob, once for the driver’s door, a second time for mine. “Just in case you were planning to drive off without me,” I said. When I saw him clench his jaw, and the muscles flexing in his lovely sculpted cheeks, I knew that was exactly what he’d been planning. I clambered in, and he folded his long limbs into the driver’s seat, and I passed the keys back to him. He snatched them from me and started the engine.
—
It was nine in the evening by the time we hit the North Circular, and coming up to ten when we crossed Battersea Bridge heading towards Clapham. We’d missed the worst of the traffic; the roads were quiet, but the pavements outside pubs were crowded with men in shirtsleeves and women in skimpy dresses, clutching drinks, hooting and sniggering in the hot night. Patrick seemed to know exactly where he was going—I didn’t see him check any road signs or look at a map on his phone—and when he stopped in a shopping street, shifted into reverse and slipped neatly backwards into a parking spot it took me by surprise. He pulled on the handbrake, switched off the engine and sighed as some of the tension of the long drive subsided.
“Where?” I said.
He’d taken his shades off two hours ago when dusk fell, but he was still avoiding my eye. He nodded at a row of shops up ahead. “The electricals store at the end,” he said. “The flat upstairs.”
“You took her there?”
“She called me, told me she’d been staying in a safe house, but that the cops had called off the operation and told her to go back to York. Asked me if I knew a place she could crash in London.”
“And you called the Turk?”
“He told me to take her here. I didn’t know what he—He promised me she wouldn’t be hurt, it was only going to be for a day or two—”
“Yeah, yeah, you said. How many guys did you see? When you delivered her?”
He shrugged in clueless exasperation.
“OK, how many rooms are up there?”
“I didn’t go in,” he said. “Look, this is insane. Why don’t you just do what he says, whatever it is? If Zoe gets hurt, it’ll be your fault, not mine—”
His words were abruptly cut off, because I’d grabbed him by the throat. I could feel the blood pulsing through his carotid artery, urgent and pressured, and the air rattling through his windpipe as he struggled to breathe and fumbled at my fingers.
“Sit still and shut up,” I said. “I’m going to let go in a minute, and then I’m going to get out of this car. And you’re going to drive straight back to York, and you’re not going to call anyone. You’re not going to tell anyone I’m here or that I know about this flat. If you do, and the Turk’s people catch me, I’m going to say you brought me here because you were worried about Zoe. And they’ll cut your face off and feed it to you, and God knows what else, because they don’t need you anymore, and that’s the sort of thing they do to anyone who pisses them off. Do you understand?”
With my thumb digging into his larynx, all Patrick could manage was a tiny flick of his head. It was enough. I let him go and he clutched at his throat, gasping, and trying to curse, but no words came out. I heaved open my door, climbed out, slammed it and walked away. Behind me I heard the Mini’s engine fire up and roar as Patrick cranked the steering wheel, pulled out of the parking space into a tight U-turn and roared off into the night, heading north.
I’d forgotten about him already; I was surveying the flat where Zoe was being held prisoner, the shop below it, the other shops in that block and the flats above them. I strode down the street, trying to look as if I was headed somewhere, trying not to make my reconnoiter too obvious. As I passed on the far side of the road I raised my hand to scratch my forehead, to hide my profile in case anyone was watching from the flat. A hairdresser’s nearly opposite had a deep unlit doorway piled with litter; they’d gone out of business months ago, by the look of it, so there was no light from inside to silhouette me. I stepped into the doorway, pushing myself back into the shadows, and took a good look.
The Turk’s place was on a corner where a smaller road joined the main shopping precinct; the junction was a mini-roundabout. The flat took up the top two floors of a three-story building, and its lower windows were nine or ten meters above the level of the street. To the front, facing the main drag, were two windows on each floor; round the corner, three more on each floor, plus small frosted panes that must have been bathrooms. A big flat, then, five or six bedrooms at least. Were they all occupied? I knew Zoe could be a handful, but surely she didn’t need six guards, especially when she was lashed to a bed?
Unless this flat was a lodging-house for some of the Turk’s heavies, and they had locked Zoe in one room there rather than find a new place just for the purpose of holding her…. That made depressingly good sense.
The electrical goods shop on the ground floor was a small independent, not part of a chain; its windows were piled high with assorted toasters, microwaves and vacuums, and even the odd laptop and music player. It was probably struggling—didn’t everyone buy that sort of stuff online these days?—but the owners weren’t going down without a fight. The place was neat, secure, and well maintained. The double gates onto the side street were freshly painted, massive and solid, set into a brick wall. No weakness there. The door to the stairs up to the flat opened onto the main street, and it too was solid and forbidding. One way in, one way out, unless I climbed onto the roof and squeezed down the chimney. Absurd as the idea was, I checked out the roofline. The building didn’t even have a chimney.
I was bone-tired, I suddenly realized, and ravenous. It had been hours since that service station sandwich. I needed to eat and I needed to rest and I needed to think. Stepping quickly out of the shop doorway, I looked up and down the street. There was a greasy spoon about five doors down, warm yellow light spilling onto the pavement.
I scurried up to it and shoved at the door, but it was locked. I didn’t have to decode the red notice hanging behind the glass from a plastic suction hook to know it said CLOSED. Of course the café was closed, at this time on a Sunday. All the same, it looked so warm and inviting the sight of it made my stomach rumble and my bones ache. The plastic tables had been wiped clean and were neatly laid ready for Monday morning, with pots holding packets of sugar, and salt in old-fashioned glass shakers, and squeezy plastic tomatoes filled with ketchup. It would probably open at six and immediately fill up with builders having huge fried breakfasts, reading the papers, exchanging dirty jokes and calling their clients to say they were stuck in traffic and would be there in twenty minutes, half an hour tops.
I glanced over my shoulder; the café offered a perfect vantage point to observe the flat. I’d come back first thing, settle in with a cup of tea, and I’d watch, and I’d think of something. I had to.
—
Eighteen hours later I still hadn’t.
I hadn’t gone home to West London; maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference, but I couldn’t leave Zoe in that place and slope off home to sleep in my own bed. If she was still in that place, and hadn’t been moved…I pushed that thought away.
The night, like every night for the last month or so, was warm and dry, with barely a breeze to dispel the dusty, stagnant air. I wandered the local streets until I found a park. The gates were closed and locked, but it wasn’t hard to scale the fence, and I went hunting for a bench to sleep on. The dark grass glittered with leftovers from the day’s boozy picnics—crisp packets, doughnut boxes and empty wine cooler and cider bottles glinting in the hot moonlight. I caught a scuffle nearby, low down by the bushes, and in the blue shadows made out two foxes fighting over the carcass of a roast chicken. One panicked at my presence and ran, and the other glanced at me in contempt before picking up his trophy in his jaws and va
nishing into the undergrowth.
I sat down on the first bench I came to, folded my arms, crossed my legs, bowed my head and tried to doze, but before very long I started to get shooting pains in my neck. I tried lying down instead, along the length of the bench. My thin clothes did little to blunt the hard edges of the slats, and I wished I had a blanket—even in that muggy heat, it was hard to sleep properly without the sense of something covering me—but from sheer exhaustion and willpower I managed to doze through the night and even miss the dawn.
I heard rather than saw the park workers unlocking the gates; if any of them saw me they ignored me. They probably hoped I’d wake up by myself and wander off, and that I wasn’t another of those punters who break into parks at night just to top themselves—finding a dead body can’t be the best start to anyone’s day. I was stiff, even a little cold, but I spent a few minutes stretching, then jogged round the park twice to warm myself up and loosen my joints and tendons. I tried not to work up a sweat; I planned to spend all day in these clothes, and I didn’t want to catch a chill from the damp of my own perspiration, or stink out that café.
It was already open by the time I got back to the shopping precinct, and two red-faced and fleshy women in butcher’s aprons were hard at work cutting rolls and setting out mugs, while a chef in greasy whites clattered around in the kitchen beyond. I ordered a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea and made my way to a table by the front window. Some really early bird had already been and gone, leaving a smear of fried egg and a discarded tabloid on the tabletop. The newspaper was a good prop; I could hold it up and pretend to read while I observed the flat across the road, and it would make the staff less likely to wonder what the hell I was up to.
As it turned out, the morning rush was so frantic the waitresses had no time to wonder, and by ten, when the rush had died down, the place was so quiet they didn’t seem to care why I was there or how long I was going to hog the table, provided I bought a cup of tea every hour or so. Maybe it would have been different if I’d been taking notes—that might have looked really dodgy—but I wasn’t going to bother with that; my handwriting is so bad even I can’t read it, so as usual I relied on my memory instead.
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