by Mark Eklid
He can’t have been any older than I was. He had this filthy green jacket on and jeans but the light from the landing was behind him, so I didn’t really get a good look at him until he moved closer to me. I was terrified and screaming and crying. I managed to say ‘Please don’t hurt me! Please don’t hurt me!’ but he kept coming towards me and I thought he was going to attack me or rape me or kill me. I was so frightened.
That’s when I was able to make out his face. His hair was dirty brown and dank and even though it was a young face he had sores around his mouth but it was the eyes that got me. Heavy, like he hadn’t slept for a week, and lifeless. No spark there at all. No humanity. Classic druggie look, as I now know.
He reached a hand towards me and I couldn’t stand for him to touch me so I jumped off the other side of the bed and pressed myself into the corner of the room, still screaming for somebody to come and stop him.
Thankfully, he didn’t try to get across the bed to me. He said: ‘I just want money. Give me your money.’
I said: ‘I haven’t got any money’, which I hadn’t, but he said again: ‘Give me your money’ and his eyes were darting around the room, looking for whatever he could see to steal. I really believed he would attack me if he couldn’t get what he wanted but then I became aware that there was somebody else pushing at the door to get through.
I saw this second man. He was taller and a bit older. I noticed his spiky bleached blond hair but that was pretty much all I noticed about him before he rushed at the other guy and pinned him to the wall by the throat.
The druggie didn’t even try to fight back. His eyes were bulging and his hands were pawing at the blond guy’s arm, trying to get him to release the grip. He started making this gurgling, choking noise and I actually started wondering if the blond guy was going to kill him but he held him there, long enough to get his undivided attention, and spoke. He didn’t yell. He didn’t have to.
‘What have I told you about staying away from places you shouldn’t go?’ He was calm, measured, unambiguous.
‘If I ever catch you anywhere near this building again I’ll rip your fucking head off – do we understand each other?’
The druggie started nodding his head, frantically, desperate to be released.
‘I said, do you understand?’
The nodding was even more panicky. He looked as if his eyes were about to pop out of his sallow skull.
The blond guy let go and the druggie scampered out of the room like a chastised puppy.
Once he could hear the stumbling footsteps on the stairs and the sound of the front door crashing shut, the blond guy looked over to where I was cowering in the corner.
I was still pretty terrified. Of course I was. I was shaking and sobbing and whimpering. I’d never gone through anything like that before and it was horrific but the guy started moving slowly towards me, around the bed, and everything about him was so reassuring.
‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘He won’t bother you anymore.’
I still didn’t want him to come too close and he picked up on that. He kept his distance and did all he could to not appear intimidating but that wasn’t easy, looking as he did, to be honest.
He wore a black biker jacket and skinny blue bondage trousers with a bold yellow check and as well as that wild hair he had more piercings – his ears, through his nostrils, one just below his bottom lip – than I’d ever seen on any person before. If you’d seen him coming towards you on a dark street you’d definitely move out and hold on to your handbag tightly but once you saw past all that, he was the most gentle of men. I saw it in his face for the first time then and I began to feel safe again. You can just tell sometimes, can’t you?
He said: ‘Everybody calls me Polecat. What’s your name?’
I was still snivelling and I had tears and snot dribbling down my face but I managed to respond and he spoke again, ever so gently.
‘It’s OK now, Sarah. It’s all over.’ Then he started edging away, back towards the door, and said: ‘I’ll be straight back. Just stay calm. I’ll be straight back.’
He left and I thought that might be the last I saw of him but he did come straight back – with half a toilet roll. He tore off a length of it as he walked into the room and handed it to me, still staying as far from me as he could.
Gradually, I came down from my petrified state. He stayed with me for hours, until I was able to drift off to sleep, and then in the morning he was back with a screwdriver and some WD40 to get the lock working and fix the chain. We started seeing each other more and more and we fell in love.
He was the love of my life.
He saved me.
21
Graham listened to Sarah’s story in silence.
He had to listen, of course, but even if he had not been bound and confined he would have been powerless to move. This time, running away to avoid the awkwardness he had created was not an option.
The story took him from surprise to shock to shame to the heartfelt sadness that only guilt, the exposed deep-seated individual guilt of a serious wrong committed in our own past, can carry a person. It did not matter at all that it was ignorance rather than malice that was behind committing the deed. The sin was his, all the same. Confronting that revealed to him a capacity for remorse more profound than he previously realised he was capable of.
He listened and each word diminished him drop by drop by drop until he was a quarter of his normal size, sitting perched on the edge of a now-oversized chair with his legs dangling, like an infant sent to the naughty step.
‘You see,’ Sarah added, content she had left her victim hanging in silent reflection long enough. ‘We have had reason to keep a close watch on Johnson’s for several months now and when we were informed that there was a newcomer in the organisation and that his name was Graham Hasselhoff, my attention was caught. When we looked into this arrival further and were told that this newcomer was, in fact, the long-lost natural father of Andreas Johnson – well, the irony!’
Graham raised his chin off his chest for the first time in several minutes to look towards his torturer, cringing in anticipation of the next slicing blow.
‘What were the odds, eh? I knew it had to be you. Sure enough, here you are.’
She stood and meandered towards him, startling him as she raised a high-heeled foot to rest it against the edge of the chair, between his legs.
‘You must have some dynamite in those bollocks of yours.’
She turned back towards the desk, all the way to the other side this time, and lowered herself into the high-backed executive chair.
Graham steeled himself to speak for the first time in what seemed an age, though he hardly dare ask the question.
‘So, Jason?’
Sarah smiled broadly.
‘That’s right. Big strapping boy, isn’t he? You must be so proud.’
Pride was not his overwhelming emotion. If pride was in there, it was having to battle against a torrent of more dominant, conflicting emotions for attention.
‘I wouldn’t really think about playing daddy with Jason, though, if I was you. He’s not the sentimental type, our Jase. Not like Andreas. I thought it better not to mention the full extent of our connection from university to him earlier because I’m not certain he would take it that well. He knows that I was abandoned by his biological father before he was born and he’s always sort of resented that. He is very protective towards his mother and prone to express himself, shall we say, a little more violently than some might find acceptable. Anyway, I’d not raise the subject, if I was you. Just to be on the safe side. I may tell him myself some day, if I need to.’
The implied threat caught his attention. Is that why he had been brought here?
‘What do you want from me, Sarah? I can’t undo any of the wrong decisions I made in the past and I can’t make up for any of the trouble I put you through. If I could, I would, but it’s too late for that. I don’t know what else I can say. Sorry doesn’t quite
cover it, I know.’
She eased back in the chair.
‘You’re right. It doesn’t come close but I didn’t bring you here to apologise, Graham. What would be the point in that? We have more urgent issues to address in the present day, haven’t we?’
He screwed up his eyes as he gazed towards her but there were no further clues. What could she mean?
‘I don’t understand.’
Sarah rose to her feet and folded her arms.
‘Oh, I think you do. Don’t play games with me, Graham. I’d prefer us to sort this out between the two of us but Jason and the two boys are in the next room, just the other side of that door, and they might not show the same levels of patience that I have.’
‘I truly do not know what you are talking about, Sarah.’ There was desperation in his voice. ‘Please tell me what it is you want from me.’
She sighed and walked to the two-seat sofa, sitting to face him and crossing her legs.
‘Why did he bring you to Johnson’s, Graham?’
What did she want to know that for?
‘He offered me a job. Me and my wife, Janet, he offered us both jobs. Andreas came around to my house in Derby one day, out of the blue, and told me his parents had died in a car accident and then asked me if I remembered Lena, which I did, from uni, and then he told me I was his natural father. We met up again and I told him that I’d been made redundant from a job I really enjoyed and that the only other job I’d been able to find was soul-destroying and he offered me a job. He offered us a fresh start and set us up with accommodation and everything. I think he felt the loss of his parents deeply and he saw nurturing a new relationship with Janet and myself as a way of filling the void in his life and we were grateful for that as well. I like him. He’s a bit strange at times but I think he’s a good guy and I want to get to know him better, so that’s why I came to Johnson’s. I’m a transport administrator. I allocate drivers and vehicles to the schedule, I liaise with customers, I arrange driver cover with the agencies, I operate the transport management system and I make sure the right orders are processed by the warehouse to get to the right customers at the right time. That’s what I do.’
‘And that’s all you do?’
‘Well, it’s not all I do. There are other tasks which crop up along the way but that’s basically it. I’m a transport administrator for a road haulage company – what else do you want me to say?’
Sarah watched him closely, assessing all the time.
‘What about Andreas. Can you tell me what he does?’
‘What? Andreas runs the company. He splits his time between the depots in Sheffield and Southampton and he’s the man in charge. I don’t get what you’re driving at.’
There was an increasingly frantic edge to his tone.
‘Do you know what else he does through the company? Apart from move crates of baked beans or whatever around the country, that is.’
Graham’s chin dropped to his chest again, this time through a different form of confusion, a different kind of despair.
‘I really do not understand. He runs a road haulage company. What else could he do?’
Sarah was on the move again. She stood a yard in front of him, her hands on her hips.
‘Do you really expect me to believe you?’
‘Yes! I’m telling you the truth. Just give me some sort of clue. Let me know what else it is you want me to tell you.’
She ambled towards the coffee machine and topped up the glass of water she had left there from the jug, then took a sip. Graham watched with his mouth and throat now parched dry but she did not offer him a drink.
‘When things started getting serious between me and Paul – that was his name, by the way. Paul Catt. You can probably work out how the nickname came about. Anyway, when things started getting serious between me and Paul, I moved out of the council place to share his flat. It wasn’t exactly luxurious but it was a damn sight better than the house and it was a better environment for when I had the baby. It worked out just fine.
‘Paul was not what you might call ambitious, in the conventional sense. It didn’t really fit with the whole punk rock ethos. What modest income he did bring into the flat came from supplying and distributing drugs. Strictly small-time but he also used occasionally, so it became a bit of a hobby that paid. Innocent little thing as I was, I was shocked at first but then I was a homeless teenage single mum, so it wasn’t really my place to judge. Anyway, Paul’s dealing put food on the table and he was careful; never kept his stash in the flat so that on the couple of occasions we did get a visit from Her Majesty’s constabulary, they went away empty-handed.
‘As I said, he was careful and he was a good father to Jason and he took care of me and we loved each other. In his later years, however, he began to enjoy using a little more than he should have and he got careless. That was what killed him in the end.’
‘Overdose?’
Sarah took another sip.
‘Sepsis. He left it too long before getting treated.’
Graham nodded sympathetically. ‘I’m sorry.’
She ignored the gesture.
‘Anyway, when Paul died around eight years ago we had a decision to make. The obvious answer was to take over his little distribution network but my thoughts had become bigger than that. Paul could never be bothered building his business but I could see potential for expansion. A gap in the market, you might say. At the same time, I thought it would be foolish to just wade in and start dealing larger quantities of drugs, extending the range and such like, because that could attract unwanted attention. I’d also taken on board the lessons of being careful at all times and keeping as low a profile as possible, so I decided to start up this business as well. My reckoning was that if I established a legitimate, mainstream business and started moving drugs in the background, as it were, we’d be less likely to arouse suspicion from the police and, I must say, the plan has worked out very nicely.
‘I handle the running of this business and Jason takes care of the day-to-day running of the other. Quite a little family enterprise, don’t you think?’
Graham did not think she was truly looking to see if he was impressed. That was just as well. He was appalled. The thought of dealing drugs and the misery that must cause was abhorrent to him. The idea of hiding the vile trade behind a veneer of respectability struck him as obscene.
How bad must her life have been since their brief time together at uni to make Sarah believe what she is doing is acceptable?
Then another thought occurred.
Am I responsible for that?
‘I still don’t see where I come into this – unless you’re trying to make me feel worse about what I did 38 years ago. If that’s what you wanted, you’ve succeeded.’
Sarah pulled a stern face and moved to the front of the desk again.
‘Oh, Graham, Graham, Graham! Are you really so good a liar or can you be this innocent?’
She leaned against the desk again and folded her arms.
‘I want you to very seriously consider your response to what I’m about to tell you next. Bear in mind that if I believe you are lying to me, it could turn out very badly for you. OK?’
He nodded timidly. He had no doubt she meant it.
‘We’re not the only business to hide our less-lawful activities behind a facade of legitimacy. A few months ago, at around the turn of the year, it came to our attention that there were drugs on the market in our territory which had not been supplied by us. Somebody was moving in on our patch. It wasn’t a large quantity, but somebody was selling where they shouldn’t and we didn’t like it.
‘After we tracked down a couple of the foot soldiers for our new rival, we encouraged them to tell us a little more about the source of this new supply and, after making a few inquiries with our sources in Belgium, we found out that it was coming into the country on the back of Harry Johnson Global Logistics trucks.’
She paused. Graham swallowed hard. He felt sick.<
br />
‘This created a problem. As I said, we built our business on a foundation of discretion and we could have taken out the people involved in distribution, but turf wars are never discreet. The police tend to notice that sort of thing. That meant we had to cut off the supply.
‘Now Jason, impetuous and forthright as he is, thought we should go straight to the top. He wanted us to snatch Andreas and persuade him that it would be in his best interests if he stuck to his business and kept out of ours, but I could see that might potentially create too many problems. Andreas is quite a high-profile person and, as I said, the quantity of drugs we were talking about was relatively small. I thought it might be using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. I favoured getting his attention by hurting him in his back yard and that was why Jason carried out the two little demonstrations of our intent.’
‘The fires.’
‘Exactly. We hoped – rather, I hoped – it would show Andreas that what he was dabbling in was going to create more trouble than it was worth. I hoped he would take the hint.’
‘Hang on a sec.’ Graham’s mind was racing now. ‘Did you cause the accident that killed his parents?’
‘Of course not.’ Sarah was emphatic, indignant. ‘That happened well before this new supply became an issue. It was only after Andreas took over that the new supply opened up. That’s one of the reasons why we’re sure he’s behind this.’
‘You can’t be sure of that.’
‘Oh, we’re sure. It’s not only the timing. Does he strike you as the kind of person who would allow something like this to go on within his business without his knowledge?’
Graham could not find a response to that.
‘We even managed to find out the identity of his mule and were informed of the location where the drugs were loaded off the truck and on to the next stage of distribution. We planned to move in and put a stop to all this the next time there was a shipment but then we heard that the mule had met with an untimely end.’
‘Chris Yates?’
‘Maybe Yates demanded a larger share of the profits. Is that why Andreas had him killed?’