by Peter Cocks
Disappeared without trace.
My breathing began to come in short, sharp gulps as the car drew to a halt. My whole body trembled, racked by uncontrollable spasms of fear. The boot opened, and the figure that loomed over me in the darkness cut away the tapes that were binding my wrists and ankles.
“Out you get,” he said. A new voice: harsher, more Belfast. “Stand by the car, put your hands on the roof and spread your legs.”
I did as he instructed, supporting my shaking body against the side of the car. I felt him come up behind me and braced myself for what was to come.
“You’re lucky I got here in time,” he said. “You did well, but another couple of hours with those two and God knows what they’d have done to you.”
I didn’t care to think what he meant, I simply willed him to get it over with. The wait was unbearable. I clenched my fists and teeth and drew a deep breath. I felt his hand touch my back. Was he steadying himself for a clean head-shot?
I flinched and felt my knees go weak.
“There’s a bus stop down the road,” he said. “Dawn will be breaking in an hour or so. The first bus will take you back into London. It goes along the Cromwell Road. When you get to the big junction with Earl’s Court Road, get off. Go to the Premier Inn and wait there. It’s just off Hogarth Road, big and anonymous. Check in as Kieran Kelly and don’t leave your room or contact anyone until you get further instructions.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“Now, I’m going to drive away. Don’t watch me go. Just wait till I’m gone. As far as the others know you’re a dead man, so keep your head down – you’ve had a close shave. Lucky you mentioned your connection with the Russian. His name is like a magic word in some circles. Remember that.”
“Who are you?” I wanted to ask, but the words wouldn’t form in my dry mouth. I guessed he didn’t want me to know anyway.
He got back in the car and I stood away. The ignition started and, before he slammed the door, he said softly, “Good luck, Eddie.”
Moments later, I heard a large jet screech over my head. I pulled off the blindfold and saw a wire fence in front of me. Over my head I saw the lights of an early plane coming in to land at Heathrow. It was low, I guessed I must be ten or twelve miles out of central London, somewhere on the Westway or the M4.
I looked at my feet and saw my bag.
I picked it up and pulled out clothes I hadn’t seen for a few days. I pulled them on and began to walk. As I stumbled along, hot tears of relief rolled down my cheeks. It was still dark, but through the tears I could see the pale beginnings of dawn across the wide stretch of road. After a hundred metres or so, I found the solitary bus stop. I sat down on the bench and when the trembling in my legs began to subside, the pain from my beating became the dominant sensation.
As it grew lighter a mist settled across the featureless suburban landscape. A growing number of cars hissed by until finally the headlights of the bus appeared like a vision through the mist. The doors hissed open and I stepped into warmth and light. There was still money in my pocket; I offered the driver a tenner, but he waved it away.
I was the only passenger.
I slumped into the plush seat of the bus. It was the most comfortable thing I’d sat on for some time and I drifted in and out of a light sleep as passengers got on the bus and dawn broke over London.
Half an hour later, I opened an eye. The outside was more familiar; we were past Hammersmith and heading towards West Kensington.
I asked the driver where the stop was for Earl’s Court.
“Next one,” he said. “Look like you had a rough night.”
“I did,” I said.
“Wish I was young again. Good luck to you.”
I got off the bus and walked through the underpass, legs smarting against my jeans. I glanced at an early morning busker, thinking how carefree and lucky he was, and wandered around in a dreamlike state, exhausted, until I turned right off Hogarth Road and found the Premier Inn, a curved, modern building that suggested everything I needed: anonymity, comfort and a safe haven.
Automatic doors whispered open and closed again behind me as I walked in to the piped music of the reception area. A pretty, dark-haired girl was behind the desk. She was wearing too much make-up and her puffy eyes suggested she had been there overnight. Her name badge said “Dawn”. She looked me up and down, betraying, for a second, that she wondered what on earth I was doing in there.
“I think I have a reservation,” I said. “Under Kieran Kelly?”
She tapped into a keyboard and looked at the screen, then rifled through a box of cards as if she was making absolutely sure that what she had seen on the screen was correct. It was. She placed a card in front of me.
“Name here, signature and car registration,” she said.
“I don’t have a car,” I said, writing Kieran Kelly and signing with an unsteady hand.
“And can you leave me a credit card for any extras?”
“I don’t have a card. It’s all on account,” I said.
She checked the screen again, and seemed to accept it.
“Room 417 on the fourth floor,” she said, validating a plastic passkey. “There’s a bag here for you.” She went into the left luggage room behind the desk and emerged with a soft black suitcase, which she brought to the front of the counter. “Early morning wake-up call for you?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Is there anything else I can do for you today?”
“No, thank you.”
“Enjoy your stay with us, Mr Kelly.”
“I will,” I said.
I put the bags on the bed and swigged down the whole of a complimentary litre of water. I checked myself in the full-length mirror by the door and realized why the receptionist had been reluctant to accommodate me. My face was dirty and battered, my shirt limp and sweaty.
I took my clothes off and stepped into the bathroom. White towels, shower.
The hot water helped clear my head and hot pin-pricks massaged my tense neck but stung my legs like hell. I looked down. The red weals had settled into blue and yellow bruised stripes, the skin broken in one or two places. I switched the shower to cold and the pain eased.
Wrapped in a towelling dressing gown, I felt a little better. I opened the black suitcase on the bed. Clean clothes, a phone, money and, more worryingly, a gun. I cocked it open; it was full of live rounds. Whoever was looking after me was telling me I was still in danger. I put it under the pillow and lay back on the bed, the feathery cushions and duvet supporting my aching body. My saviour, if that’s the word for him, had told me not to contact anyone; maybe using the phone would alert someone to my presence. In my paranoid state, locked in an anonymous hotel room, I did as I was told. I picked up the remote and scrolled through the channels until I found something to watch. An old episode of Frasier, one of those reassuring American sitcoms where you can revel in the glossiness of characters’ lives, where problems are suddenly resolved by a twist of fate in the plot. I settled back into the pillows and, as the jazzy theme tune played out, drifted into a deep sleep.
When I woke up I had no idea where I was.
I panicked, staring up at the ceiling, taking deep breaths. Gradually I put back together the pieces of my ordeal and how, miraculously, I had got here. There were news programmes on the TV, so I guessed I must have slept through till early evening.
My next sensation was hunger, so I looked at the room service menu. The poncy descriptions made my mouth water.
Our burgers are grilled to perfection by our expert chef. Made from 100% Aberdeen Angus beef and blanketed with your favourite topping. Choose from Irish Mature Cheddar, organic smoked bacon or the chef’s own secret recipe barbecue sauce.
Nothing was going to scratch my itch like a burger. I chose 8 oz, with barbecue sauce and onion rings, chips and coleslaw. Side salad. Then ice cream, plus a couple of bottles of Bud.
I pulled on a T-shirt and a pair o
f clean chinos from the bag. My food arrived fifteen minutes later.
“Room service.” The accent was eastern European.
I opened the door a little. The tray laden with food was a welcome sight and I opened the door wider to allow the man in.
“Thank you, sir.”
He put the tray on the low table in front of the TV and held out a docket for me to sign. I didn’t want to sign anything, so I left a biro squiggle on his receipt. As I signed, he took a moment to glance around the room, his eyes darting here and there. I had every reason to be paranoid, but I guessed my arrival early that morning, looking like a tramp, must have stirred some interest among the staff. He looked at me, now showered and dressed, and smiled. Perhaps now I fitted into the anonymity of the commercial hotel; I really needed a shiny grey suit and a briefcase and laptop full of sales figures to disappear in this environment.
“Enjoy,” he said, and left.
I did.
I hoovered down the burger and chips, simultaneously channel surfing until I found some cartoon channel. I watched SpongeBob flipping crabby patties and chuckled, probably from a sense of relief, at the optimistic way SpongeBob bumbled through life while others rang rings around him.
I wondered whether my own life was any less absurd than a sponge who lives in a pineapple under the sea. Probably not. Except I had lost that sense of optimism that carried Bob through.
I settled back, belching loudly, while a feeling of weariness crept over me again as blood rushed to my stomach and beer to my head. I inspected the red, angry cigarette burn on my forearm. Bubbles of yellow pus were forming and leaking around the edges and I began to think that I should probably find some disinfectant or a plaster, but I was too tired to do anything about it straight away and didn’t want to go down to reception. I felt safe locked in my room. Maybe my eastern European mate could bring me something up.
I didn’t have to wait long.
A knock at the door.
“Room service.” Same voice. I looked at the debris on the tray. The melting ice cream made me feel a little sick. I wanted it gone; it was an uneaten guilty pleasure lurking in the room.
I got up from the chair and went to the door, aware of SpongeBob’s banal chanting in the background: “I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready-eddy-eddy-eddy-eddy!”
I looked through the spyhole. Same man. I opened the door.
With the momentum gained by someone who is prepared, the door swung open hard and into my face. It smashed me back into the wall, the door handle stabbing me in the guts. As I half fell to the floor, my room service friend charged in, kneeing me in the nuts. I fell back and, as the door slammed shut, managed to aim my foot accurately up into his own. As he buckled, I levered myself up, smacking my head into his. He rocked back against the bathroom door and I hit him hard in the face. He grabbed hold of my arm, twisting and wrestling with it, the raw burn singing with pain. He still had a tea towel in his right hand and I could just see the tip of a short blade emerging from underneath it. I grabbed his wrist and we struggled against each other as he tried to turn the knife towards me.
Despite my tiredness, a mad, manic anger surged up inside me and I managed to bend the wrist back, smashing his knuckles against the handle of the bathroom door. I brought it crashing down again and again until his knuckles were skinned and smears of blood coloured the white gloss of the paintwork. Then I drew his wrist to me and bit, feeling tendons beneath my teeth, and drove my knee in between his legs. He yelled out and his hand finally lost its grip and the knife dropped. I drove my forehead into his face again, nutting him and feeling tooth and bone puncture my own skin.
I used my advantage to push him back into the main part of the room, across the low table, which caught him behind the knees and sent the remains of my dinner flying into the air. I leapt over the table and was on top of him, raining punch after punch into his face, my knees astride, digging into his twisting ribs.
I felt a ferocity I had never felt before. I had stabbed Gav Taylor in Spain, but that had been an accident and I had never before felt this animalistic feeling of destruction that had taken me over now.
It was as if all the brutality, pain and injustice that had been heaped upon me was being channelled into this moment. I drove two more punches into his face, then got up and knee-dropped him across the neck. I found my fingers tightening around his neck and my thumbs pressing into his throat before my anger began to subside.
He was no longer moving. He’d picked the wrong fight.
I looked around the room, found the dressing gown and tied his ankles with the cord, then rolled him over and looked for something else. I ripped down a curtain pull and tied his hands behind his back, then dragged him into the bathroom and manhandled him into the bath, gagging him with a face flannel. He groaned as I levered his legs into the bathtub and locked the door behind me.
I sat on the bed, panting, regaining my breath. I looked sideways at myself in the mirror. I didn’t like what was looking back at me, bloodied and bruised with feral aggression in the eyes. I had become brutalized, a killer, no better than the rest of them.
The bedside phone rang.
“This is reception, is everything OK there?” The voice was sing-song and corporate, but wary.
“Fine,” I said.
“We just had a complaint from 415.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll turn the TV down.”
I replaced the handset and felt under my pillow for the gun. I wondered what to do next. Locked in the bathroom, I had a semi-conscious eastern European who for whatever reason wanted to kill me, and I couldn’t leave the room.
Whoever he was, he’d got on my case pretty quickly. The eastern European link started to raise questions well beyond the reach of the IRA. I tried to put building blocks together in my mind but found no easy answers. Why would the IRA have planted me here simply for someone else to kill me? Had my mentioning Bashmakov simply made me a trade-off, and for what?
I delved into the bag for the phone, then picked up my battered and muddy trainers from the floor. I levered out the insole with the dinner knife and dug in the heel until I found the compartment that concealed a SIM card. I had not contacted anyone, and that had resulted in attempted murder. It was time to change tack, so I put the SIM in the phone and texted a couple of numbers.
Help.
Donnie had a headache, but he gratefully accepted the full English that Pam put in front of him and Dave. He hadn’t had black pudding in ages, and with two eggs, bacon, sausage, tomatoes, mushrooms and beans, it was what he called a proper breakfast.
“Thanks, Pam.”
Pam was about to take the fluffy white dog that yapped at Donnie’s ankles for a walk. She gathered up leads and poo bags.
“What kind of dog is he again, Dave?”
“She is a Bichon Frise,” Dave emphasized.
“More like a Bichon heat,” Donnie joked.
“Nice one, Don. Better mood today? Sleep all right?”
“Like a log, Dave.”
In fact, Donnie hadn’t slept well at all. He’d nearly fallen out of the narrow bed twice during the night, and later lost the duvet on the floor. Then, when he’d woken up at four, the smell of apricot and vanilla from the air freshener had made him feel gippy. It was only the medicinal qualities of half a bottle of whisky that had allowed him any sleep. Once he was awake, all he could think about was his possible conviction and jail or, failing that, skulking around continuing the firm’s dirty work.
After breakfast, Donnie took a cup of tea out into the garden and smoked a fag, looked at the sky while Dave pruned his roses. A plane squealed overhead, beginning its descent into London.
“Good of you and Pam to put me up,” Donnie said.
“No worries, Don. Like I said, can’t be for long. We need to get you somewhere safe.”
“Where?”
“I’m going to visit Tommy later, get an update.”
Donnie felt safer in the back garden in
Plumstead than he did in most places. He would happily have hidden in Dave’s shed rather than get back to the firm or, worse, a stretch.
In Donnie’s view, nowhere in London was safe any more.
Hold tight. Not far away.
Simon Sharp. I’d texted Anna, too, but Sharpie was quick on my case.
He was there within an hour. He rang the room from reception but I still let him in cautiously, checking the peephole. I wasn’t going to be caught out again.
He was flustered. Wide-eyed and wet from the rain.
“Shit,” he said. “This has been quite a couple of days.”
“Tell me about it.”
He grasped my shoulder and looked at me. “What a mess.”
“My face or the situation?”
“Fucking all of it,” Sharp said. He looked tired and drained. “I’m really sorry. I’ll get us a drink.”
“There’s the small problem of a waiter tied up in the bathroom to be dealt with first.” Sharpie looked confused. “He tried to kill me.”
“What? But only me and our Irish connection knew you were here,” he said.
“Our Irish connection?”
“You don’t think you got free without a bit of horse trading, do you? We had to work fast.”
“Well this bloke found me pretty quickly.” I nodded towards the bathroom. “Someone must have tipped him off.”
Sharp took the gun and went into the bathroom. I followed and watched from the door. He clicked the safety catch on the gun and held it to the man’s head. “No, please!”
Sharp barked a couple of questions in a foreign language. The waiter nodded and began to gabble in his native tongue. Sharpie replied, asking questions in short, sharp sentences. I didn’t understand a word. The waiter seemed to agree with most of what Sharp said, but he was battered, tied and had a gun at his head, why wouldn’t he? Eventually, Sharp clicked the safety back on and shut the man back in the bathroom.