Incinerator

by Niall Leonard

  I realized I’d been placed in a kneeling position on the floor of Winnie’s front room with my hands handcuffed behind me, and my body bent forward so my head rested on the floor. I tried to topple over sideways but I was propped up against someone’s leg, and I felt another leg pressing into me from the other side. I’d seen old Chinese kung-fu movies where peasants kowtowed to their emperor, with their heads knocking the floor, and that was what I seemed to be doing. As soon as I realized that I tried to straighten up, but it was tricky. Not only were my hands cuffed behind me, but every gram of my flesh felt slashed and battered, and it seemed like I had half a dozen fractures between my toes and the crown of my head.

  I could smell blood, and carpet, and the stink of Dean’s cheap cigars, but there was another smell in the room that seemed oddly familiar—an expensive aftershave mingled with mint. I couldn’t place it. I realized too that nobody was saying anything, as if they were waiting respectfully for someone to speak. Somehow I doubted they were waiting for me.

  I snorted with amusement when the answer came to mind: I was in the presence of the Turk himself, prostrate before him. I could already visualize him—a burly guy in his forties with oiled hair, stubble you could strike a match on, and a shiny cheap suit with its buttons straining from holding in his belly. He’d be waiting for me to look up at him and cower.

  That realization made me try to straighten up again. The Turk must have noticed my efforts and nodded to the guys flanking me to help, because they each grabbed me by an armpit and hauled me upright. I lifted my head to see the great man properly, and when I did I gaped. I might even have gasped. I was so gobsmacked my left eye nearly opened properly.

  I was kneeling in front of Bruno. Bruno, the quiet, would-be boxer I’d thrown out of my gym for beating Nicky senseless in the ring. The room swam and spun, or maybe that was just my head. Bruno? Bruno was this Turk everyone was so scared of?

  Seeing my confusion Bruno grinned. Not the sunny, gormless grin of Bruno the boxer: this Bruno’s smile was hard and sharp as broken glass and his eyes glittered. He wore a white cotton shirt and a beautifully cut linen suit in dark blue, no jewellery, no rings, nothing ostentatious. There was nothing clumsy or gawky about him now. His movements were composed, almost graceful. But when he tilted his head to one side I remembered that look—he’d looked the same way at Nicky before he opened up on her. The look suggested I was a Rubik’s Cube he would solve by twisting my limbs around until he found the answer.

  “You’ve cost me a lot of money, Finn. And time and effort.” His accent was less London than I remembered, and more educated, but I couldn’t place it. I had no idea where he was from, or what his real name was. “Harry Anderson was going make me twenty million pounds in one afternoon.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” I said. “He was going to double-cross you, keep the money for himself.”

  Bruno nodded. “He was going to try, yes.” He shrugged as if that was to be expected. “And then there’s the matter of my warehouse.”

  Warehouse? What warehouse? “Oh, right …” The mansion where I’d found Nicky. The one they’d used for trafficking girls.

  “Right,” said Bruno. “That place cost me a small fortune to fit out. And thanks to you we had to walk away.”

  It’d had taken me half an hour after parting from Nicky, but I’d managed to locate the last public phone box in London and call an anonymous whistle-blower’s hotline. The next day I’d caught a radio news report about how five bodies had been found in the grounds of a stately home in Chelmsford that police suspected had been used by a sex trafficking ring. They were trying to trace the mansion’s owners, but they’d must have got nowhere, because the item soon slipped out of the news bulletins.

  I could guess what had happened: after finding Nicky missing and Tony dead, Kemal and the others had chucked Tony’s body into the same pit as the girls who’d fought back, then packed their bags and cleared out. It was gratifying to know I’d damaged their business, even a little.

  “And then there was Tony,” said Bruno. “He was a good man.”

  “Good, how, exactly?” I said.

  Bruno smiled. “OK, he was a bad man. But good bad men are hard to find. Look what you did to Dean here.”

  Dean stood in the corner, clutching his face and trying not to whimper. By now blood and slobber from his broken teeth had soaked the front of his shirt under his leather jacket. I could guess how much it would hurt him to chew, and I hoped the pain would last all his life.

  “And Kemal!” Bruno—the Turk—laughed. “I don’t think I have ever seen Kemal bleed before.”

  I glanced up to my left. Kemal was staring down at me, his face calm and neutral, but a trickle of blood from his scalp was running down his neck and blotting around his collar.

  “What is the English expression?” said the Turk. “You are a bull in a china shop. And all breakages must be paid for.”

  I saw Kemal’s fist rise, and I knew I had no way to go with the punch. It came down like a piledriver on the side of my face and I felt my head try to part from my shoulders. The rings on his fingers had split the skin of my temple and my blood spattered Winnie’s good rug.

  I knew that was only the beginning, and groped in my foggy brain for some witty last words to say before Kemal broke my jaw. Preferably something so offensive they’d beat me to death that much quicker. Blood filled my mouth, and I hawked and spat. I still felt an absurd twinge of guilt watching it soak into Winnie’s rug. Cold water to clean up blood, she used to say.

  The Turk stepped forward, hitched up his linen trousers and stooped down so his mouth was close to my ear.

  “Where is Nicky Hale?” he murmured.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I looked at him as straight as I could. His brown eyes stared into mine. I don’t know what he saw; I saw a cold, gaping void. My eyes were throbbing and watering, but I knew if I looked away he’d think I was lying, and they’d keep on asking, and I wanted to get this over with.

  After an eternity he nodded. “Pity,” he said. “No woman has ever hit me like that before. I was hoping to finish our bout. You just can’t help interfering, can you?”

  That was why his people had been keeping Nicky alive—payback. For all his laid-back airs and lack of bling, the Turk was just another cocky punk, fuelled by ego and insecurity, and guys like that always ended up kissing the canvas. Must remember that, I thought, although the way things were going I wouldn’t have to remember it for very long.

  Even with my jaw knocked crooked I couldn’t help laughing, and I saw Bruno frown.

  “You want someone to slap you around?” I said. “Glove up.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw the piledriver rise again.

  “Kemal,” said Bruno. Kemal froze. “I do have many vices,” said Bruno softly. “But vanity is not one of them. I don’t care about Nicky. I wasn’t there to watch her.” He straightened up again and waited patiently for me to put it together.

  “You were watching me?” I said.

  “I wanted to know what sort of man you were. At first I thought the reports must be mistaken. He’s big and he’s tough, but he’s an idiot. He can’t read, he has no head for business. All his money will be gone in a year. That’s what gave me the idea.”

  “To clean out Nicky’s client account.”

  “Like your friend Delroy used to say—you want to really know a man, put him under pressure,” said the Turk. “And now I’ve seen what you are capable of, I have to admit, I’m impressed. Now I understand what he sees in “Who?” I asked. But deep down I knew.

  “Finn, why do you think you are still alive, and in one piece? I have a job for you.”

  “I’m not for hire,” I said.

  “Of course not,” said the Turk. Reaching into his pocket he took out a smartphone, unlocked it and started flicking at the screen. “You don’t need money, you have nothing to lose, there is no one you care about.”

  “Nicky’s gone,” I said.

  “And
her sister is dead, I know. I was thinking of this one.” He held out the phone so I could see the screen.

  The footage was smooth; whoever took it had been so close there was no need to zoom in. Close enough to see the stud glinting in Zoe’s nose as she laughed at some crack her friend had made. The two women were sitting in some huge cafeteria—a dining room at her college maybe. Now she was emerging from an old house, pushing a bike, wrestling with a bag of books. Every turn of her head and quirk of her mouth burned into my heart, and my aching guts tightened in fear. I couldn’t look up at the Turk—I knew I’d see triumph in his eyes.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “There is someone I would like to meet. A friend of yours. I need to put a proposition to him.”

  Something told me this proposition was going to involve a lot of lead and explosives.

  “I want you to introduce me to the Guvnor.” said the Turk.

  Turn the page for a preview of the companion novel …

  The day Finn Maguire discovers his dad bludgeoned to death in a pool of blood, his dreary life is turned upside down. Prime suspect in his father’s murder, Finn must race against time to clear his name and find out who hated his dad enough to kill him.

  Excerpt copyright © 2012 by Niall Leonard. Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  one

  It was a bit early for someone to be banging on the front door. I hurried down the stairs, hair still dripping from the shower, and turned the latch.

  “Sorry, son, locked myself out,” said Dad, shivering as he stepped in. He’d been out in his slippers, I noticed. I wondered why, until I saw the TV trade mag folded in his hand, and my heart sank.

  Dad looked pretty rough. His pale blue eyes were red-rimmed and his fair hair was standing up in spikes that weren’t dishevelled or trendy, but made him look like he’d slept in a doorway. I’d heard him come home late last night and stumble around trying not to make a noise, crashing into the furniture and cursing under his breath. But he’d got up the same time he always did, while I was out running, and the breakfast he’d made was still warm on the table: old eggs, thin salty bacon and instant coffee, white. I’d nab a glass of orange juice when I got to work, though the most orange thing about the stuff we sold was its colour.

  “Bollocks,” said my dad, squinting through his crooked glasses at the magazine’s first inside page. That hadn’t taken long.

  “What’s up?”

  “Bill Winchester’s got a second series of that time-travelling cop show. Jammy sod.”

  “Future Perfect?”

  My dad gave a look as if I was being disloyal.

  “Never seen it.” I shrugged. “I’ve heard of it, that’s all.”

  “Me and Bill worked together years ago, on Henby General.”

  “Yeah, you said.” But he didn’t say it very often.

  Dad had been big in the early nineties. For a while he was everyone’s favourite twinkly-eyed Irish actor—he’d even won an award for Best Newcomer. The bronze statuette still stood on the mantelpiece, gathering ironic dust. From then on it had all been downhill. He didn’t keep the statuette on display out of nostalgia or vanity—it was there to fuel his envy. Envy keeps you hungry, Dad would say, which I’d never understood, because I was hungry all the time and I’d never got to like it. But all Dad’s old acting mates were doing better than him. If it had been true that every time a friend succeeds a little part of you dies, by now my dad would have been a really ripe zombie.

  He saw himself as a passionate, committed and challenging performer. Directors soon got to see him as temperamental, pig-headed and impossible to work with. The jobs had already started to dry up when he met my mother, and his last role had been years ago, eating imaginary pizza on a desert island in a commercial, for insurance, I think … it might have been for pizzas, or desert islands. He never officially retired, but he grew a beard and stopped going to auditions and quit pestering his agent for work.

  He wasn’t going to wait for the phone to ring, he said. He was going to make his own luck. He was going to write a TV epic so gripping and authentic that producers would be ripping each other’s throats out to make it, and he’d write a really good part for himself, so they’d have to cast him. Not the lead, of course—he had to be realistic, he said. The lead could go to one of his more famous old mates, to help get the show commissioned. He had it all worked out. He’d had it all worked out for years now, and it never seemed to happen.

  “Don’t sweat it, Dad. You always say success is the best revenge.”

  “Yeah, but I might be wrong,” said Dad. “Maybe the best revenge is cutting someone’s head off with a rusty saw. Maybe I should try that instead.”

  I carried our empty plates out to the kitchen to wash up.

  “So what are you doing today?” I said, more out of politeness than interest.

  “Working,” he said.

  Dad used the term loosely. A lot of his work seemed to consist of staring out the window. He had read every book on writing screenplays the local library could scrape together, and he was always quoting aphorisms and mottos about inspiration and perspiration and pants being applied to the seat of a chair, and he always wrote ten pages a day. The only problem was, next day he’d tear up nine of them. Some days he’d go traipsing round London doing “research,” and the notes and jottings and cuttings would pile up on the dining table beside his laptop, and over dinner he’d try to tell me about his latest story idea, but I’d stopped listening long ago.

  “You wouldn’t believe the stuff I heard last night,” said Dad. “London gangland is like the court of Caligula—they’re all stabbing each other in the back. That’s the real drama, and it’s right under our noses, and nobody ever wants to hear about it.” Then why the hell are you writing about it? I thought. But I didn’t say it. The best thing about Dad was his eternal optimism. Someday, with a lot of effort and a little luck, he’d be rich and famous, and we wouldn’t have to scrape by on his shrinking royalty payments and my minimum wage from Max Snax.

  “You want me to bring something back for dinner?” I said.

  “Nah,” said Dad. “I’ll probably go down the shops later.” He wouldn’t go into the shops, I knew, until he’d checked the skips outside for ready meals chucked out after their sell-by date. He’d serve them up with a sermon about the evils of the consumer society and the wastage it produced. I used to think, if wastage keeps us in dinners, I’m all for it.

  “You know where the spare keys are?” asked Dad as I laced up my trainers.

  “Hanging up,” I said. “Rough night?”

  “Never mind,” said Dad. “Mine will turn up.”

  “I’ll see you later, yeah?” I rose to go, expecting his routine grunted goodbye, but he put the magazine down and looked at me.

  “Finn?” he said. “We’re all right, aren’t we? You and me?”

  All right? How were we all right? I was an illiterate dropout with no GCSEs stuck in a dead-end job, and he was an ex-nobody who spent his days writing a script that would never be finished and that no one would ever want to read anyway.

  “Yeah, Dad, sure. I have to go.”

  “See ya,” said Dad.

  I pulled the door shut behind me, jogged a short distance to warm up, then started to run.

  “Yeah, I want the Texas Chicken Special, no salad, no sauce, none of that.”

  “What, just chicken and bread?”

  “Yeah.”

  He was about five foot tall and five foot round the middle, and I could see why. I always used to wonder how guys like Mr. Spherical kept their trousers up—were their belts stapled to their stomachs? Anyway, without the sauce it wasn’t a Texas Chicken Special, it was just fried chicken in pappy white bread, but I wasn’t there to quibble with the customers about what the stuff was called, I was there to sell it to them. And smile. And say thank you. “Sm
iles and thanks—money in the bank!” Andy used to recite that at our weekly pep talks. He was fond of morale-boosting slogans, and thought he had a knack for coining them, but his own were even crappier than the ones on the Max Snax staff training videos.

  I punched the order into the programmed till and handed Mr. Spherical his change. Jerry in the kitchen slid the foil-wrapped package into the chute while I filled a litre beaker with half a litre of ice followed by half a litre of fizzy aerated syrup, wondering for the thousandth time how anyone could consider this chemically reconstituted muck to be food, and how I’d ended up selling it. I pushed the thoughts aside for the thousandth time, but they kept flopping back into my mind, like an annoying greasy fringe you can’t cut off getting into your eyes. And it was only bloody Monday.

  Hands on automatic, mind anywhere else but here, bish, bosh, sandwich, regulation single paper napkin, drink, tray, deep breath, stab at a smile, recite the fast-food blessing: “Thank you, sir, and enjoy—have a great day.” The tubby punter grunted, turned and waddled off to the door, turned round again and bumped out backwards, into the bright April morning that I was pissing away behind this overheated counter in this sweaty polyester shirt.

  “Yo, Maguire!” hissed Jerry from the kitchen. “Thanking time is wanking time!” Not quite the approved formula, but he had the Max Snax high-pitched, hysterical delivery down pat. I didn’t mind Jerry. He was almost bearable, as long as you didn’t try having an actual conversation with him. You couldn’t look him in the eye, anyway—either he had curvature of the spine or he spent too much time bent over computer porn, jerking off. Andy wouldn’t let him serve the customers, insisting that I gave a better impression of Max Snax. If I did, it was because I ran ten kilometres a day and never ate anything we sold, but I didn’t say that to Andy. I flicked Jerry a cheery middle finger. He sniggered and ducked back towards the fryers, while I cursed myself.