Costain turned to look at this nervous little man, lost in his baggy suit, unexpectedly having to deal this evening with someone to whom his usual signifiers of power didn’t apply. He’d called earlier to summon the man over here from his home. And he tried not to enjoy the experience of dominating him, while looking him up and down. Perhaps he should say something reassuring? That would be the good thing to do. But, no, that would be breaking character, and also working against a greater good. This man still thought of him as an enforcer called Blake.
‘Leave it with me,’ he said instead, and reached out a gloved hand. The man put a bunch of keys in it, then quickly retreated to his car.
Costain unlocked the door of the unit, and locked it again behind him. The interior smelt of newness. Certainly it didn’t feel as if anyone had been in here lately. So that meant he was still safe. Hmm. The thought made him smile grimly for a moment. He ignored the office and found a back room with an aged carpet, a sprinkle of loose plaster, a stack of three chairs with a corporate desk calendar on top, and a kettle. He pulled aside a thick-piled rug that smelt of dog, uncovering a stack of metal chests of the sort photographers used. He opened the first with one of the annoyingly many keys, and inside saw. .
They were still there. He let out a sigh of relief. He’d picked this place because the manager had been on Rob Toshack’s protection list, after a few of his illegal Chinese employees had suffered nasty accidents, but had only had contact with himself and a couple of the other soldiers. At this stage, the man didn’t know who he was paying off, and that’s how it would have stayed until Rob had got confidently used to his reliability. Then this site might have indeed become a drop box for Rob, for certain items that needed to be kept far away from Bermondsey. ‘Anthony Blake’, on the other hand, had immediately decided that it would do for his own purposes.
He pulled the two Heckler amp; Koch MP7 personal defence weapons from the case, possessing the firepower of an assault rifle, but easily concealable. And now, having just seen boxes of ammunition in the lock-up they’d accessed by the spinning boxes, Costain had a supply of it for these babies. Rob must have commissioned that London ammo manufacturer to make suitable rounds, ones that could potentially take down Losley.
Costain put the guns on the table, then found the second box. He couldn’t resist a smile at what he’d left hidden inside it: six kilo bags of cocaine hydrochloride. Not cut with anything. It would have been assumed, by whatever remained of the Toshack set, to have been stashed in a particular satellite house when the final raid against the firm went down, and thus now seized in evidence. But actually it had been here, as a result of a little juggling act that could only have been performed by someone with his facility of access. He’d set this up as his last payday and, if required, his emergency exit. Two hundred and forty grand of coke, and who knew how much value for the guns? It had been a game he’d been looking forward to playing, taking them to a port somewhere up north and spending a weekend operating as an arms dealer. Yeah, his comrades had been, to some extent, right about him all along. But now he had to do the right thing — with a gun to his head, as Sefton had said.
He stopped suddenly, stock still. He could sense that there was someone else in the room with him. There had been just that little change in the air pressure, a little moment of cold. It was something derived from the world of the Sight, but it was very subtle. Was it that smiling bastard come for him, now he could be found red-handed? No. He’d always appear red-handed to that one. And, anyway, he knew who this was going to be, didn’t he? He’d known it when Ross had told them about seeing her dad. He knew who, in his own life, filled that special place of pain.
He stood up slowly and turned to look. ‘Look at you,’ he said, ‘my very own ghost.’
The deceased informer Sammy Cliff stood there, the original Tiger Feet, his arms wrapped round himself, shivering. Not so triumphant as when Costain had seen him waiting for him on the edge of Hell. But a good deal more whole than when he’d last seen the same man in the flesh: a corpse hanging from the ceiling with his feet burned off. Actually, though, Costain realized that now he could see straight through the man. The figure was wavering like a mirage, but the expression on his face said there was still something of the real Sammy in there. Costain watched calmly while that pathetic fear turned to fury, as Sammy realized he hadn’t got the rise out of him that he’d wanted.
With a shaking hand, the ghost pointed at him. ‘You’ll be joining me soon,’ he said. It sounded like a user playing at amateur dramatics. Doing his best and failing. Like they always did.
Costain supposed that he should feel either fear or pity, those being the options that would keep him out of Hell. But now that he saw what he’d expected to see, he didn’t feel either. ‘You reckon?’
‘“Reckon?” Of course I do! Look at you, you’re a fucking liar. You just set people up and let them take the fall for you. And now you’re doing it to your friends, too!’ He was getting more and more solid as he yelled at Costain in that screeching, lost voice that demanded some sort of justice that just wasn’t present in the world. He was a lot like Harry’s dad, and Costain wondered distantly what the difference was between a ghost that was made by being ‘remembered’ and some genuinely dead individual. Because, right now, Sammy seemed bloody artificial, as if he was a story rather than a person. All the time Costain had known him, Sammy had spoken and acted for something else, either for Costain or for the smack. He was continuing in that pattern now, doing this because that smiling bastard wanted him to.
Costain knew now that he could never be someone like that, someone who just played a role, said the expected lines, felt the expected emotions, in response to someone or something that was itself acting. Costain knew himself to be a shit, but inside that — because of that — he was honest.
‘Sammy,’ he said, ‘Tiger Feet, old mate, let me explain something to you. No, tell you what, let me show you.’ He grabbed the box containing the bags of coke, and hauled it through the door to the toilet cubicle in the little hallway. He could feel Sammy watching him as he ripped open each bag and dropped it into the toilet bowl, flushing between every one, until he was down to the last bag. Then he looked up, into those eyes that always sought to appear so demanding and always failed so completely. ‘You’re only a ghost for me, you sad fuck, if I let you be.’ He flushed away the contents of the last bag, too, leaving just a pinch in the bag’s bottom corner. Then he marched back into the room he’d come from. He dropped the remnant of the splendidly fine product onto the table, extracted the blade from his multi-knife, and started to line it up and chop it. ‘It all depends on what I think of myself, on what I can live with — that’s my standard. I’m not going to let you or anyone fucking else judge me when I came out here to help save the life of a child.’
He took a drinking straw from the storage cupboard, looked the astonished ghost in the eye, and snorted up the last of his emergency exit. He felt it surge into his head, then he straightened up and laughed. ‘You know who I am, Sammy. You remember me. I’m not someone who lets himself get fucking haunted.’ He marched forward until he was looking right into the ghost’s empty eyes. ‘And I’m not someone who plays at being a nice young man just to get a free pass out of Hell. If I’m doing the right thing, I’m doing it for real. And if I go to Hell, I’ll end up fucking ruling it.’ And he stared at Sammy as the ghost faded further, and further, simultaneous with the rush of exultation in Costain’s veins.