“Yeah,” she said under her breath. “Like you have a friend called Mr. White. I suppose he’s a fan of that awful movie Reservoir Dogs like you.” She squatted down. “Lucy, you know you shouldn’t talk to people you don’t know, or take things from them.”
My daughter got tearful again. “But he knows Daddy,” she said, giving me a heartbreaking look. “He said so. And Daddy knows him.”
“It’s all right, sweetie,” I said, patting her head.
“What the hell are you doing down here, anyway, Matt?” Caroline said as she stood up. “You know the rules. Saturday is my day with Lucy.” Her eyes widened. “Were you following us?”
“No, of course not,” I said, glancing away. The couple I’d spoken to were watching us anxiously. I waved to show that things were okay, but they didn’t look convinced.
“You better not have been,” my ex-wife said, taking Lucy’s hand. “You don’t want that piece of rubbish, darling,” she added, flicking the cap onto the grass.
Lucy raised her head and put on the haughty look that she’d inherited from Caroline. I could tell that she wanted the Tasmanian Devil cap. I picked it up and watched them leave. I wasn’t planning on giving it back to her, though. I was planning on jamming it down the madman’s throat. I couldn’t believe he’d taken the risk of talking to Lucy. He must have seen how close I was.
If he’d wanted to ram home the message that I was totally powerless to resist him, he couldn’t have chosen a better way.
The three men were standing around Terry Smail. He was hanging upside down from a joist in an abandoned warehouse. His captors had all taken off their caps and sunglasses, revealing close-cropped hair and scarred faces.
“I don’t know,” jabbered their naked victim. “Aah! I didn’t know Jimmy well. I…I don’t know who he drank with.”
The man in charge shook his head. His lips were only a couple of inches from Terry’s inverted ear. “You know that isn’t true. Do you want us to take you down again?”
Smail squealed and jerked his head forward. The sight of the red patch that was his groin made him shake violently, but his wrists were behind his back and the movements did nothing but give him more pain from the chain round his ankles.
“What we did to you the last time was only the start,” Wolfe said, grabbing him by the shoulders. “After all, your wedding tackle’s still intact.”
Rommel and Geronimo laughed harshly.
“So far,” continued Wolfe. “Next time we won’t just be removing your pubes with this high-tech instrument.” He held up the rusty and blood-spattered painter’s scraper. “Sorry we couldn’t find anything cleaner.” His glance cut off the others’ guffaws. “It’s very simple, Terry.” His eyes, dark as coal, the pupils unnaturally black, met the hanging man’s. “Either you spill your guts or we spill them.” He paused, watching Smail’s mouth open and close. “Tell me who Jimmy Tanner drank with.”
“I…oh fuckin’ hell, it hurts. All right, all right, I’ll tell you. Just let me down.”
The team leader gave him another thirty seconds in the air, then nodded to his colleagues. The chain was loosened and the captive dumped unceremoniously on the rough floor.
“We’re listening, Terry,” Wolfe said. “Talk and we’ll let you go.”
Smail looked at him disbelievingly, and then sobbed as he took in the bloody mess of his ankles. The chain had almost cut through to the bones.
“Jimmy Tanner drank with…?”
“Oh, Christ, I can’t. They’ll kill me.”
“And we won’t?”
“All right, all right. Jimmy, he didn’t much drink with anyone. He got vicious when he’d had a skin-full and we’d seen what he could do. He broke Big Mikey’s arm like it was a stick.” Terry Smail glanced at the three men around him. “Oh, I get it. You’re like him. You’re SAS like he said he used to be, ain’t you?”
“Keep talking,” said the leader, raising the scraper.
The captive gulped. “It must’ve been about six months ago. These two blokes turned up at the Hereward. We all reckoned they was dodgy, but they got talking to Knives, the landlord. I reckon money changed hands. Anyway, Knives introduces them to Jimmy and soon they’re getting on like a house on fire. I heard…I heard they wanted Jimmy to show them things.” He looked at his captors again. “The kind of things you people do.”
“What were their names?”
“I dunno. Aah-ee!” Smail tried to swing away from the rusty blade that was being dragged down his chest. “Corky. That’s all I know. One of them was called Corky. I dunno nothing about the other one.”
“And they used to drink with Jimmy till when?”
“Till about six weeks ago. When he…when he stopped coming. What’s this all about? What’s happened to Jimmy?”
Wolfe shook his head. “That’s what you’re going to tell us, Terry.”
“I…I dunno.” Smail’s eyes moved around frantically. “Honest I don’t.”
Wolfe pulled the scraper back. “Describe the men.”
Terry let out a long sigh of relief. “Um, the one called Corky was nothing special. Not too tall. He had a crappy beard that had bits of food in it and he always wore a woolly hat.” He broke off and looked up at the men. “Like you guys. His nose looked like it’d been flattened by a brick and his eyes were all bloodshot. He was a pisshead, I reckon, even though he only ever drank mineral water.”
“And the man with no name?”
“He was smaller than me. He always wore a baseball cap, red, with some cartoon character on it. He had this shitty long hair, black, in kinda rat’s tails. Oh, yeah, and he had these weird teeth. Pointed. Looked like he was a fuckin’ vampire. That’s what we used to call him. Count Dracula.” He let out a string of feeble, cracked laughs, and then stopped when he saw the three men’s faces. “That’s all I know. Honest. Can I go now?”
Wolfe stood up and looked at his companions. “Oh, you can go all right.” He leaned over the naked man. “You can go on the express elevator to hell. But first you’re going to tell us what you’re holding back. Who is the man with the pointed teeth? We want to meet him very badly.” He tossed the scraper to Geronimo.
Terence Smail’s screams echoed round the empty building. The seagulls outside took up a keening chant that obscured his travails from every passerby.
13
I went back to the Volvo and drove home, having placed the leather bag unopened on the front passenger seat. I felt even more intensely the mixture of rage and impotence that had weighed me down since the Devil first got his claws into me. But there was another emotion now. I tried to resist it because I knew he had planted it in me and was assiduously cultivating it-the desire for revenge. He had spoken to Lucy, he’d touched her. I was going to make him pay. He’d been studying me; he knew how my mind worked even though he’d never met me. But why did he want me to go after him? Did he have some weird kind of death wish, or was he sure that he could keep me at a distance?
I parked outside my place and went inside, the bag under my jacket. For some reason I didn’t want anyone to see me carrying it. As I was climbing the stairs, I understood why not. It was blood money, tainted by the deaths of the Devil’s victims. What was I going to do with it? Hide it in the loft? The money was another part of my tormentor’s plan that I didn’t understand. He’d made me his slave by threatening Lucy and everyone else I loved. He didn’t need to pay me. Did that betray a psychological weakness, that he had to pay for attention? Or was there something more subtle in his thinking?
I checked my e-mails. There was one from Sara, saying that she was tied up with the story and would ring me when she could. There was also one from my mother, and it made my heart pound again.
Dearest,
I hope this finds you well. I know we spoke on the phone the other day, but I wanted to get in touch and I feel more comfortable writing-you understand how writers are, defter by pen and keyboard than by tongue (that could be taken as rude!). You sounded troubled when I called you. I know that your problems with publishers and agents have been getting to you. Don’t let the bastards grind you down! You just have to get on with the next book and prove them wrong. I know you can do it!