by Dal Maclean
His head was still pulled back, but Will could strain his gaze down toward the purple chair.
Tom had pulled himself almost upright. He looked half-dead but there was certainty in his expression as he looked at the man holding the knife against Will’s throat. Tom knew him. And Will realized with incredulity that he should have known him too.
He’d never heard Eddie’s voice; never actually seen him in murderous action. Why hadn’t he realized at once? Of course it would be Joey—closing down Will and James. But . . . working with Nick?
“Who the fuck are you?” the man barked.
If this was Eddie, by identifying him Tom had signed his own death warrant.
“D’you wanna know . . . ’bout what happened to your brother Max?” Tom slurred.
The man’s body jerked with shock. His blade trembled and slackened, dropping away an inch from Will’s throat.
“What the fuck do you know about Max?” the man demanded. Eddie. It was Eddie.
“I’m . . . .” Tom’s face distorted with the effort of forming clear words. “I’m the reason he was killed.”
No one moved. Then Eddie hissed incredulously, “D’you ‘ave a death wish, you little cunt?”
“Shut up Tom!” Nick’s voice came, urgent and panicked, from behind them. “He’s high. He took some E.”
Will jerked forward, but Eddie’s grip on his hair dragged him back, holding him in place so tightly he felt as if he’d be scalped if he moved.
Then Eddie said in revelation, “Tom. You’re the model. The one Max went crazy for?” He pulled the knife away from Will’s neck and released his hold on his hair. Then he took a threatening step toward Tom.
“Max was killed to order,” Tom forced out.
Out of the corner of his eye Will could see Nick’s head had lowered, like a supplicant before a warlord.
Eddie’s fingers clenched white knuckled on the hilt of his knife. “I fuckin’ know that. I know what ‘appened. Ava fuckin’ Burchill.”
“Wrong,” Tom said. “Ava ordered it but she did what her brother told her.”
“Stop fuckin’ around man!” James’s captor burst out. His accent was pure Newcastle—his voice, high and thin. His gun was held steady against James’s head, but the man sounded wired, close to hysterical. “Let’s do it!”
Eddie gave an impatient shake of his head, still riveted on Tom. The Geordie subsided into sullen quiet.
Tom said, “Max wanted me.” The silence stretched. Tom struggled on. “So did David.” Tom swallowed. His toneless voice sounded exhausted. “So Max had to go.”
“What the fuck’s the point of telling me now?” Eddie snarled. “No one knows where the fucker is.”
“I know.”
Will caught his breath. Was Tom really going to do it? Surrender Nick to the vicious brutality of Eddie Butts?
Tom met his eyes. Will could read no emotion in them.
In the distance, there was the faint unmistakeable sound of police sirens. It might have nothing to do with them. But both of Eddie’s men looked to the window. Eddie’s focus though, remained riveted on Tom.
“What the fuck man!” the Geordie burst out again.
And the man by the door joined in. “We have to do it and go!” He sounded Mancunian and not much older than sixteen from the way his voice cracked. A child.
Eddie glanced at him, his first moment of uncertainty since he’d barged into the room. Then his decision was made. He swung back to Will, knife raised.
“He’s in this room,” Tom said.
Eddie stilled. His eyes fixed over Will’s shoulders, blank and shiny like a shark’s eyes. Then he swiveled to look toward the only possible candidate. At Nick, by the door, head was still ducked low.
“Show me,” Eddie snapped.
The kid hesitated for an unhappy second but he grabbed Nick’s hair and dragged his head up. Nick yelped with pain, his face twisted with it as Eddie studied him for agonizing seconds.
The wail of sirens grew louder.
“’E’ ain’t Burchill,” Eddie announced, but he didn’t take his eyes away from Nick, as if he expected him to transform at any second.
“New nose,” Tom slurred. “New . . . chin.” His head dropped as if it was too much effort to hold it up. Or perhaps he didn’t want to see what he was doing. “Look . . . closer.”
If Tom’s words alone hadn’t convinced Eddie, Will thought the terror on Nick’s face would have.
“Bring him ‘ere,” Eddie snarled.
The kid hesitated again. The sirens were unnerving him and the Geordie holding James. Only Eddie seemed immune. But the kid let go of Nick’s head and shoved him forward.
Nick blurted. “My name’s Haining!”
Eddie took a step toward him.
That was the moment, Will realized. The moment of full distraction Tom had given them. “Christ, man!” the Geordie said again. “We hiv to . . . !” His panicked urgency exploded in a violent gasp of expelled air as James drove an elbow hard into his solar plexus. And as if they’d planned it, at the same instant Will jumped on Eddie’s back and looped his arm round his neck in a chokehold.
Eddie bucked and gurgled, slashing the switchblade back at Will’s face.
Will just managed to catch his wrist.
Eddie’s skin was hot and slick with sweat, Will’s own hand was slippery with it, but he dug his fingertips viciously into the flesh of Eddie’s wrist, and inch by inch, forced the knife blade back. Eddie drove his other elbow into Will’s ribs. Pain burst through his chest, but somehow his arm remained locked in that stranglehold around Eddie’s thick neck.
He could hear his own panting breath; the strained grunts of their primitive struggle; scuffling and cursing behind them as James fought his own assailant. And by the door the Mancunian kid screamed panicked obscenities as he held his gun against Nick’s head, to contain him.
Eddie threw his head back to try to nut Will with the back of his skull but instinct jerked Will’s face away. He thought—hoped—Eddie’s attack was weaker than it should have been. He jerked his arm with renewed viciousness around that bull neck and got a choked gasp as his reward. But still Eddie refused to drop the knife.
The sirens wailed louder. Closer.
“They’re almost here,” Will taunted, breathless. The Mancunian boy began to back toward the door, dragging Nick against him like a human shield. His eyes were crazy with panic behind the holes of his mask.
The deafening thunder of a gunshot stopped all movement. Then, a howl of disbelieving human agony.
Will whipped his head round to stare back over his shoulder.
“No!” he moaned.
James lay sprawled on his back on the black plastic sheeting, bright red blood all over his expensive gray suit jacket. The Geordie, slumped a few feet away from him, was already beginning to climb upright. But James was still.
Will jerked his arm brutally tight round Eddie’s neck in a surge of grief-fueled rage and vengeance. Anguish. He took Eddie’s gurgling gasps of pain as a reward.
But like a miracle, James lifted his head. He rolled onto his belly, then to his knees.
“Stay down!” Will yelled. “You’re hurt!”
He darted a look at the Geordie waiting for him to press his advantage. But he saw at last that the left shoulder of the man’s black anorak was shiny and wet. That blood ran down his right hand and his arm hung uselessly at his side. The Luger lay on the floor between them, and James lunged for it, but the Geordie didn’t even try.
His mouth made a round O of shock as he staggered toward the open door, toward the boy standing beside it, still holding Nick.
Will didn’t realize how much pure relief had relaxed his hold on Eddie, until Eddie wrenched free of it. He still had the knife. But instead of turning back to Will, he lunged toward the door, knocking the Mancunian kid into the wall as he dragged Nick out of his hold.
Nick screamed, “No! You have the wrong man!”
Eddie manhand
led him round, until he held him as the boy had held him. Nick’s back to his front—a shield—beefy arm closing off his air supply, knife in his other hand, rubbing his own throat with the back of his wrist.
James leveled the captured gun at them. “Stop!” he snapped. “Armed police!”
Eddie barked, “Port! Fucking shoot them you useless cunt!” His voice sounded hoarse. Damaged.
The Mancunian boy—Port—started upright and fumbled his gun up to level it at Will’s chest. The boy’s hand and the gun shook violently.
James said clearly, “You shoot, and I will blow your head off. Then Eddie’s.”
Port’s masked face turned toward him. His gun drooped an inch, then wavered uncertainly toward James.
The sirens sounded very close, loud and clamoring.
“For fuck’s sake!” Eddie spat. He coughed and rubbed his throat again. “Go an’ start the engine!” The Geordie who’d been leaning, moaning against the doorjamb staggered out into the hallway. “And don’t fuckin’ think of leavin’ without me!”
It seemed a pointless warning. Neither the wounded man nor the terrified boy had run away. They’d be far more scared of Eddie than any coppers.
They could hear the Geordie’s banging, stumbling retreat down the stairs as Eddie began to back out too, dragging Nick with him. The chokehold had subdued him completely. Eddie’s eyes were wide open, hyped up, crazed. But not afraid. Then he moved from view. Port backed out after him, waving his gun from Will to James and back again. Seconds later, the flat door slammed closed and Will could hear them thundering down the stairs to the street door.
Will and James looked at each other for a desperate beat. Then they plunged after them.
They made it out onto the front steps in time to see Nick being thrown through the side door of the white transit van across the street, his body sprawling boneless onto the steel floor. Port, already inside the van, loosed a few wild shots out of the open door, bullets whizzing past Will and James’s heads like demented hornets. They both hit the ground at the same time, landing on manicured patches of grass on either side of the concrete path.
If there were bystanders, Will hoped the fuck they had the sense to run away.
He and James had minimal cover from the low wall onto the pavement but he could hear the van engine revving wildly, Eddie screaming to go. Then James raised himself high enough to let off a couple of shots over the wall at the van’s tires as it took off from the curb with the side door still half-open, and careered wildly down the road.
“Fuck!” Will spat, as he watched it swerve left round the corner at the end of the street, and disappear.
He closed his eyes and let his head drop again until his face pressed against the grass, reveling in the cool, tickling realness of it; the distinctive smell of earth.
He raised his head again and looked across at James, who stared back, wide-eyed, wordless.
Then James pushed himself to his knees and up onto his feet. He still held the gun in his right hand, but it had finally begun to shake.
“Fuck, Jamie.” Will levered himself upright too. “We should be dead.” His voice sounded bizarrely normal. Maybe it was a benign effect of shock.
“We would be,” James said, equally unmoved. “If Nick Haining hadn’t . . . .” He closed his eyes. “Upstaged us.” He opened them again and scowled down at the blood staining his suit. “Tom,” he said. “Fuck, I’m going to make him my best man. Alec won’t mind sharing.”
Will loosed an embarrassingly high-pitched sound of amusement drowned by the ever-rising wail of sirens. “One thing. Eddie wont be singing opera for a while.”
“We should call it in,” James said, grinning. “Those sirens aren’t likely to be for us.”
Will’s fingers felt too big and clumsy to handle his phone, as if they’d swelled to twice their size since he’d picked it up last.
There was a message notification on the lock screen.
He didn’t recognize the number, but he could see it had been sent at 11:17, not long after the end of his conversation with Pixie.
It said: Trap.
20
The sirens were for them.
As Will handed his phone to James to show him the message, two marked police cars, sirens blaring, screeched round the corner of Durham Terrace and stopped several houses away.
Will wondered what residents were making of the second major police incident in a year.
James handed back the phone and they began to move toward the police cars, eyes ahead, holding up their warrant cards.
“Who’d take the risk of fucking over Joey to warn you?” James asked.
Will shrugged. His brain felt like sponge. “Someone not far gone enough to sanction killing cops. It’s probably a nontraceable phone.” They came to a halt yards from the police cars.
“And they knew your number,” James pointed out. “For that matter . . . who called 999?”
They looked at each other. “Maybe we shouldn’t try too hard to find whoever it is,” Will said. “For the sake of their continued existence.”
“Agreed,” James said.
A uniformed PC had emerged warily from the passenger seat of one of the cars and stood shielded by the open door.
James and Will knelt down on the tarmac and held their hands up and open, their warrant cards in view.
“DI Foster and DI Henderson,” Will shouted. “South Ken MIT!”
“We had a report of armed gunmen sir,” the officer called back “We have orders not to engage. SCO19’s been alerted.” The armed response unit.
“The gunmen fled the scene,” Will called and reeled off van make and license plate. “One has a gunshot wound. They have a . . . .” He considered for a moment. What was Nick? “A hostage.” The officer’s eyes widened and he reached for the radio attached to his stab vest, relaying the details with new urgency.
But Tom was alive and whole. Tom, who’d saved both their lives. Will threw a glance over his shoulder at Nick’s flat.
“You go back. I’ll sort things here,” James murmured. “And report to Hansen.”
Will could have snogged him.
He commandeered a forensic suit from the boot of one of the fast response cars and pulled it on. His DNA would be all over the flat but he could take no chances of post-incident contamination. Behind him, he could hear James taking charge like a general whipping reservists into shape.
“We need to secure the scene! We need SOCO. We do not need SCO19. Has the on-call MIT been alerted? Who’s . . . ?”
His voice faded as Will jogged back to Nick’s front door, pulling up the hood of his suit and dragging on a pair of blue latex gloves as he went. Up the stairs, back into the flat, straight to the lounge.
The black plastic sheeting that had been meant to wrap their bodies for the grave, still lay on the floor, crumpled by their struggles. And Tom still sat in the odd purple chair, leaning forward with his head in his hands, face hidden by his fall of pale hair. His whole naked frame was shaking.
He raised his head and took in Will’s forensic suit, his blue-gloved hands. His face twisted; his eyes were tormented.
“Are your clothes in the bedroom?” Will asked. He hated how formal he sounded.
Tom grimaced, then nodded. Nick had him here for thirteen hours.
A new pit opened in Will’s stomach. Did Tom even want to be touched?
“I can’t walk yet.” Tom’s voice still sounded thick and slow.
“Let me help. Before the others come up.”
Tom’s grip was weak when he took Will’s hand, but Will hauled him upright easily. He slung Tom’s arm round his shoulder and slid his own suited arm round Tom’s bare waist. Even through the latex of Will’s glove, his skin felt icy.
They could hear voices outside the flat door already. Tom’s free hand cupped weakly over his naked genitals, and he was the one to initiate motion. He didn’t want to be seen like that.
Will all but carried him to the bedroom.
Like everything else in this flat it held bad memories.
He remembered watching Tom coming out of this door half- dressed, after a night with Nick, looking brutally sexy and totally out of Will’s reach. How it had stabbed and slashed at his heart.
The room was tidy and neutrally decorated with a rumpled king-size bed. It smelled even more strongly of lavender than the rest of the flat. Will pushed the door closed with the sole of his shoe.
Tom said, “When I woke up here, I thought it was a nightmare.”
“I know,” Will soothed. He helped Tom sit on the end of the bed, away from those guilty sheets.
Tom’s clothes were lovingly folded on a chair in the corner: blue jeans and a T-shirt, underpants and socks on top. Tom’s black leather biker’s jacket hung on a hanger on the wardrobe door and his big leather boots had been placed tidily under the chair. It all spoke of the joy Nick must have found at having Tom under his hands again.
Will’s mouth thinned, trying not to let his imagination run amok. But his worry for Tom was overwhelming.
He grabbed the underpants and T-shirt and turned back to the bed.
Tom was sitting in the same position as Will had found him in the lounge. Elbows on his knees; head in his hands. A position of despair.
Will couldn’t stand it. He moved quickly to crouch down in front of him.
“You saved us,” he said.
Tom didn’t look up. “I handed him over to his worst enemy.”
“If you hadn’t, we’d be dead.” Will countered, “How did you know? That it was Eddie?”
Tom raised his head as if it weighed too heavily on his neck. “He was wearing Max’s ring. Remember?”
Of course Will did; the plaited-gold ring they’d found on Max’s severed hand. Tom had noticed that in the terrifying madness of an impending execution.
“Fuck,” Will said. “You’re brilliant.”
A tear tracked down Tom’s cheek. He wiped it away.
“Brilliant? Nick pushed all my buttons. He knew I’d lose it over Hansen and you. He knew I’d go out to clear my head on the bike. Just like last time, when he used the dead cat to set me off. But this time . . . he wasn’t the only one pulling the strings.”