by Chris Thomas
‘Joe?’ The voice from the office door barely registered. ‘JOE?’ it repeated, louder.
He looked up from his screen to see the warehouse manager standing in the doorway. Past him, at the other side of the building, he could make out two people. In a warehouse of only five, it was fairly easy to spot people he didn’t recognise, and these two he didn’t recognise.
‘What?’ he replied.
‘There’s a couple of blokes here to see you, said they’re from a shipping company,’ replied the warehouse manager.
‘Can’t you see them?’ Joe said, barely able to conceal his lack of motivation.
‘No, I bloody well can’t,’ came the response. ‘We’re already behind on the Anderson order, and the lorry is coming in at midday to pick it up. Sorry, tough shit. You’ll have to deal with it. Plus they asked for you by name.’
‘Fuck me gently, they do my head in, these travelling sales wankers,’ he moaned, picking up his coffee and heading for the warehouse.
He strolled out into the middle of the warehouse where the two men stood, trying as best he could to give off an air of being both incredibly important and hugely inconvenienced. They weren’t dressed like ordinary salesmen. Instead of dark, pinstripe suits with shiny black shoes, they wore chinos, open-collared shirts, and loafers. Standing in the centre of the large open expanse of breeze block and corrugated metal walls, they conversed in whispers, periodically pointing to various parts of the room.
‘Good morning, gents,’ said Joe, with an outstretched hand. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Mister Henderson, nice to meet you,’ replied the first man, in an unseemly, loud voice, reciprocating the handshake. A tall, freckled man with a fast receding line of ginger hair, he gripped Joe’s hand firmly and squeezed it hard, looking him straight in the eyes as he did so. ‘Thank you for seeing us and please accept my apologies for turning up unannounced. I’m Colin Ziff, sales manager for Britten Rashford Freight—’
‘Never heard of you,’ interrupted Joe, as he slid the business card that had surreptitiously appeared in his hand during the handshake into his back pocket without looking at it.
‘We’re very specialised. We only handle very particular cargo for a select group of customers. Anyway, we are obviously aware of your operation from the Government’s importation records and, as we were passing, thought we would drop in and introduce our services. My apologies, this is Carl White, our finance director.’
The other man carried on surveying the work that was going on around him, turning only very briefly to shake Joe’s hand. This was a completely different handshake, the sort that made Joe take an instant dislike to him. A wet, flaccid handshake using only the fingers, which said, ‘I don’t want to shake your hand, but I will.’
‘This is quite an operation you’ve got here,’ said White, in a soft, gravelly voice that belied his large frame. ‘Yes, yes, this will do nicely. I think we’d able to handle this freight, no problem at all, don’t you, Mister Ziff?’
‘Agreed. As long as Mister Henderson’s finances are as good as they appear and he has no trouble paying his bills. Which I am sure you don’t, right, Mister Henderson?’
Joe was starting to become visibly irritated. He set his coffee cup down on a nearby forklift and tried his best at posturing in the hope that these men would just go away.
‘Of course we pay our bills. Look, we’re not after a new freight forwarder, the ones we use are perfectly good. So, gentlemen, if you wouldn’t mind, I am rather busy.’
‘Of course, Mister Henderson, our apologies for inconveniencing you,’ said Ziff, wiping his freckly forehead with a sleeve. ‘If I could just steal a couple more minutes of your time to really explain exactly what it is that we do, you may change your mind. See, most freight forwarders pride themselves on moving cargo quickly and safely, so that it arrives at its intended destination in as good a condition as when it left.’
‘Yes, I know how freight forwarding works,’ replied Joe, who had now had enough and had turned to walk back to the office.
‘But our customers rely on us for taking charge of their cargo and making sure that it is never seen again.’
Joe stopped in his tracks. His head was pounding and now these people had really begun to piss him off.
‘Look, I’m sorry, but that obviously has no relevance to my business. Why the hell would I want you to get rid of my freight?’
‘To ensure that no-one knows what you’ve done,’ said White, walking over to Joe and placing a hand on his shoulder. To the warehouse workers whizzing past on their forklift trucks and carrying metal bars from one side to the other, it looked as though the two men were old acquaintances having a jovial time. What they couldn’t see was the amount of pressure with which White squeezed the back of Joe’s neck. Joe’s heavy hangover prevented any sort of reaction other than bewilderment at the sudden turn of aggression.
Maintaining pressure, White positioned himself in front of Joe’s face.
‘But don’t worry, Mister Henderson, we charge very reasonable rates. What’s more, we accept most forms of currency. British Pounds, U.S. Dollars, the Euro … bitcoins.’
Any strength that Joe felt flushed away as the sense of realisation hit him like a brick to the face. All of a sudden, his hangover seemed to vanish and was replaced with a heartbeat pounding so fast he could hear it in his head. The two men stood silently and stared at him.
‘Joe,’ came the shout from the other side of the warehouse, temporarily snapping Joe out of his trance. ‘Can you come here and sign these certificates please?’
White relinquished his grip and patted Joe on the shoulder. ‘Go on then, Mister Henderson, I think you’re needed. Tell you what, you go and sort your colleague out. We’ll head to your meeting room upstairs and then, when you’re done, you can come and join us so we can thrash out the Ts and Cs. OK? Good.’
With that, the two men walked off, leaving Joe stranded in the middle of the large blue expanse of concrete floor. He pulled the card from his back pocket and turned it over to see the large embossed logo, ‘B.R.’
He swallowed hard and whispered to himself, ‘Oh fuck.’
JOE COULD SEE the two men through the glass partition of the meeting room, helping themselves to a drink from the water cooler. Taking a deep breath, he tentatively opened the door, feeling somewhat like a naughty pupil who had been summoned to see the head teacher. Closing the door behind him, he remained standing in the corner of the room with his hands crossed defensively in front of his body.
‘Please, sit down, Joe,’ said Ziff. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. Obviously, if we had wanted to kill you we would have done it by now.’
The two men burst out laughing. Joe laughed along nervously, feeling a bead of sweat drip down the side of his face as he scratched his forehead. He pulled one of the faux-leather black chairs back from the table and sat down, keeping a couple of feet back. As quickly as they started laughing, the two men abruptly stopped, and their demeanours switched from jovial to thoroughly menacing.
‘But seriously, please understand that the option is still open to us. And given what you’ve seen of our organisation, you would be foolish to assume otherwise,’ said Ziff, staring at Joe, who was now resting his head in his hands and had started chewing the skin on his thumb.
‘Look guys,’ said Joe, his voice audibly cracking as he glanced at the two men staring back at him, ‘I know that you are proper pissed off with me…’
‘Uh-huh,’ replied Ziff.
‘We most certainly are,’ agreed White.
‘But, OK, I’m sorry. I don’t really know what more you want from me or what more I could possibly give an organisation such as your good selves. I’ll pay you the money I tried to send. Right now; I’ll go and transfer the bitcoins to your account this instant. And I promise I won’t say anything about what I saw. If it helps, I think what you’re doing is great. That’s why I watched and made my bid—’
‘Which fai
led.’
‘Yes, which failed, I get that. But my point is that I’m on your side. I think these scumbags that you deal with deserve everything that’s coming to them …’
‘Did he say he was sorry, Mister Ziff?’ interrupted White.
‘Yes, I believe so, Mister White.’
Joe’s eyes flicked back and forth between the two men as they conversed.
‘Yes, I thought that’s what he said.’ White paused. There was a moment of silence before he stood up sharply, slamming his fist down on the desk as he did so. ‘Sorry?’ he shouted. ‘You enter our domain, watch our work, and then by some ridiculous act of fuck-witted buffoonery put the whole thing in jeopardy. Do you realise the amount of work that goes in to doing what we do? The amount of preparation? The amount of care needed? But it’s OK, because you’re fucking sorry?’
Joe sat, shaking. The original video call and the texts, he could discount those as just pranks, brush them aside as if they weren’t there. It’s on the internet, it’s not real life. But now the reality of his situation was starting to hit home. He chewed harder, and from somewhere found a little of bit of fight, although secretly knew that anything would be largely futile.
‘I’ll just go to the police after you’re gone and tell them the whole—’
‘The whole what?’ interrupted White, banging his hand down on the table again, causing Joe to look away. ‘That you tried to pay money to an online gameshow in which someone was killed on your orders? Come on, no sensible police officer is going to give you any sort of plea bargain for that. The minute you hit enter on your keyboard to send the bid you started your involvement, but you could have still backed out. Instead, you went further. You wrote down a specific method by which to end someone’s life. Once you hit enter on that, there was never going to be any turning back. If you hadn’t fucked up your transaction, we wouldn’t be here and you would have nothing to worry about. You would be free to marry your sweetheart in a few months, safe in the knowledge that you hadn’t upset a very powerful group of people.’
‘Please leave Ellie out of this,’ begged Joe, sniffing as his nose started to run. ‘She doesn’t know anything about any of this and—’
‘Joe, Joe, Joe,’ said Ziff, calmly, as he got up from his seat and walked around the other side of the table to Joe’s chair. ‘It’s good that she doesn’t know anything about this. It’s in all of our interests; the fewer people know about this, the better. What we need to do now is work on a solution.’
‘What kind of solution?’
‘Well, Joe, we’re in it,’ replied Ziff.
‘What, this meeting room?’
‘Give me strength. No, this building.’
Joe stood up instantly and began pacing up and down the length of the meeting table, shaking his head.
‘No, no. No way. You are not taking this warehouse, it’s my family’s. It would destroy my parents, and me for that matter. I can’t let you take it.’
‘Joe, I realise this situation might be a little stressful for you, but please stop being such a gibbering simpleton for just a second. Sit down,’ replied Ziff. ‘It’s fairly straightforward. We don’t want your building, the paperwork would leave an audit trail as long as your arm. No. We just want to borrow it. And if you refuse, we will make your life very, very difficult.’
‘Or whatever would be left of it,’ interjected White.
Again the two men laughed. Never in Joe’s life had he ever regretted anything as much as he regretted clicking on the link to the Red Room. Even going back to Billy’s flat; if he had just gone home that night, his life would be normal. The same boring, stuck-in-a-rut routine day in day out. But normal at least.
‘What precisely would borrowing it entail?’ asked Joe.
‘Well, we would have our team come and prepare the venue for the night of the show. Take over your security cameras, tap into your internet …’
‘And your neighbours’ …’
‘Yes, and theirs too. Then on the day we bring the volunteer here, we film the show. Well you know how that all works, having seen it. Hopefully, we would be here no longer than about half an hour, forty minutes. See, the last episode took a lot longer, what with there being two of them. Longer than we were comfortable transmitting live to the internet. The longer it takes, the more vulnerable you are to being tracked down. We ran it close to the mark last time. Not so close as to put us at risk, but still close. Hence, this episode we need an entirely neutral location, with nothing to link it to us. This would be a much slicker, quicker episode.’
Joe paced up and down the office, chewing like crazy. ‘But then what? What about forensics?’
Ziff sat back down in his chair, pulled another away from the table and put his feet up on it.
‘We take care of that. We’ve been doing this a while now and have become adept at leaving zero traces. Otherwise, we would put our entire operation in jeopardy. Your warehouse will be as it was before the show.’
‘But how the fuck can I be sure that you won’t just wait until after the show and kill me then?’
‘You can’t,’ laughed Ziff, his laughter echoed by White. ‘But I can tell you that it won’t happen before then, for certain. After that, well you’ll just have to trust me.’
Just then there was a knock at the door. It was Sandra, the lady from accounts. Ziff removed his feet from the chair and the two men smiled at her. She smiled back.
‘Joe, are you going to be much longer, only there’s a whole load more paperwork that needs to be signed off.’
‘I’ll be down in a bit,’ Joe snapped back.
‘OK, don’t get your knickers in a twist, but you have been up here quite a while. We’ve got orders waiting to go out,’ replied Sandra.
‘Apologies, my dear, it’s our fault. Joe’s been grilling us on our freight rates. He’s quite the master negotiator,’ said Ziff. ‘We’re nearly done and then I promise we’ll give him back to you in one piece. Is that Chanel Chance you are wearing? May I just say that it suits you down to the ground?’
Sandra looked flattered that someone in the building had finally paid her any attention that didn’t involve asking for photocopying or to make the tea.
‘Why yes it is, sir, thank you very much.’
Ziff winked and nodded.
‘Yes, thank you, Sandra. Like I said, I’ll be down in a minute. I’ll have a coffee as well please,’ said Joe, trying to maintain a vague air of authority.
Sandra rolled her eyes and closed the door behind her as she left the room.
‘So, I think we understand each other then, Joe?’ said Ziff, more as a statement of fact than a question.
As the sweat dripped from Joe’s head, and a small patch of blood formed around the cuticle of his thumbnail, he drummed his fingers across his front teeth, kicking the legs of the chairs as he paced past them, shaking his head.
‘No, no,’ he started saying, as a whisper, waving his hand around, before getting louder. ‘No, no, no. I can’t. You can’t do this, hold me to ransom. I don’t care what you say, I’ll go to the police. I won’t do this.’
The two men stared at each other, slightly taken aback by this sudden and unexpected burst of bravado. They stood up, collected their leather portfolios from the table, and made for the exit. As he walked past Joe holding the door open, Ziff gently cupped his hand around Joe’s cheek.
‘Yes you will,’ he said, gently, raising his eyebrows and staring deep into Joe’s eyes.
They walked from the office and out into the lobby. As they left the building, Joe slammed the door shut behind them. Turning round, he bumped straight into Sandra.
‘Bloody hell,’ she exclaimed. ‘What’s the matter with you? You look like shit.’
‘Nothing,’ replied Joe, curtly. ‘They were just giving it the hard sell, nothing I haven’t seen before.’
He watched through the window as the two men drove past, and he became slightly more relaxed. Their words still rung in his head, but
at least they were gone and he could get on with his life.
AS THE CAR turned out of the trading estate, it drove for a couple of miles and then pulled over in a country lane. Turning the engine off, Ziff tilted his head back, unbuttoned his shirt collar, and began to peel a layer of latex away from his neck. He rolled the thin rubber up and over his face until eventually the whole mask, including hair, separated from his head. White did the same.
‘I fucking hate these things,’ said Stan.
‘I told you, you should have shaved,’ replied Eric. ‘Ring Alistair while I sort the number plates out.’
Stan pulled a mobile phone from inside his jacket. ‘It’s me. He’s rattled but I think he’s going to need a final push … Yes … Yes, there’s someone we can use to convince him … We’ll get on it straight away.’
JOE PULLED up in his driveway and paused for a minute before leaving the car. He looked up at his house, his ordinary, non-descript house. The windows were open and he could hear the television blaring out in the lounge. As he put the key in the lock and turned it, he thought about the men who had come to his office today, about their threats and the mess in which he now found himself. He had so much to look forward to and his lack of satisfaction with his lot had led him to put it all at risk.
And he began to hate himself for it.
Opening the door, he glanced down the hallway into the kitchen. He pushed the door to the lounge ajar to look for Ellie, but she was not in there. As he walked closer to the kitchen, he saw a silver, shiny object lying on the floor.
‘No,’ he whispered.
It was the large chef’s knife that they had been given as an engagement present. Then he noticed the trail of blood. A thin spatter had sprayed up the tiles, all over the white gloss kitchen cupboards and across the tiled floor. His heart began to race and the sweat began to pour, for what seemed like the hundredth time today. He looked around for Ellie, terrible thoughts of what these people had done to his fiancée racing through his head.