‘I had to. She went nuts. Must be claustrophobic or something.’
Dan kept glancing up the corridor at the two illegals, who were talking.
‘I’m going to have to call Pike,’ said Skin.
‘Fucking hell,’ said Dan, under his breath.
Skin pulled Dan out with him, made the phone call, had a muttered conversation, Dan waiting, looking as if he wanted a piss. Skin hung up, drew a finger across his neck. Dan felt his guts shudder, mouthed: ‘Fuck’.
They eased out the silenced hand guns from inside their black coats, went back into the house, holding them down by their sides.
‘What the fuck is this?’ said the cabbie, seeing them immediately.
‘Wake the girl. Get her ready,’ said Skin, taking him by the arm, pushing him up the corridor.
‘Ready for what?’
‘To go. What do you think?’
‘What are you going to do with the guns?’ he asked.
‘You didn’t follow the fucking instructions,’ said Skin, red lips from within the black cloth hole. ‘Now we’ve got our orders. Wake the girl.’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ said the cabbie.
‘Just do it,’ said Skin, and pushed the cabbie towards the bedroom door.
The illegals turned and stood as Skin and Dan came in, to have their expectations suddenly reduced to a small black hole in a fat barrel, which kept coming until it was the eye’s whole universe. White latex hands collared them, hauled them away from their chairs. They kicked the illegals to their knees, denting the undulating lino floor, the fat barrels pressed hard into the fuzz of their shorn heads. The illegals looked up, eyes desperate, lips drawn bloodless across their teeth, breathing quick as they realised their true value in the system that had brought them to the black, glittering mouth of the insatiable metropolis. Skin and Dan pulled the ligatures from their pockets, slipped the guns back inside their coats and looped the cords over the shorn heads of the men kneeling before them, tightened them around their necks. The cabbie closed the bedroom door behind him.
Alyshia was still asleep. The noise from the next room woke her. The fear came alive in her as soon as she saw the cabbie. The whites of her eyes quivered at the edges as she looked at the door. The animal noise of a terrible struggle came through it. She started as something thudded against the other side. The cabbie held onto his head with both hands, looking at the ceiling.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked, her voice barely audible.
The cabbie didn’t answer. Through the grunting and gasping of effort came the noise of heels clawing against lino. Then a rigid, pent-up silence, followed by a collapse. The cabbie let his hands drop to his sides, shook his head. Alyshia, back against the wall, stared unblinking at the door. No sound.
‘All right,’ said the cabbie, who couldn’t wait any longer. ‘Let’s get you out of here.’
He opened the door. The room had filled with a shocking stink.
‘Not yet, you fucking moron,’ said Skin.
Alyshia saw the hooded men, looked down at the dead illegals’ swollen faces, their new horror masks. She vomited. The cabbie pulled her back into the room.
‘Get her cleaned up,’ said Skin. ‘Got anything we can roll these two up in?’
‘In the garage,’ said the cabbie. ‘There’s some plastic tarps.’
Dan left the room, staggered to the garage, dazed by what he’d just done. He came back with the tarpaulins. They rolled the illegals into them, secured them at both ends, coughing against the stink in the room. They took them into the garage. Dan went out the back and down the side of the house, checked the street. Empty. He tapped on the garage, opened the rear of the transit. They lifted the bodies into the back, closed the doors, went back for the girl.
The cabbie had opened the window in the room and the stink was leaving, but slowly, because of the thickness of the blinds.
‘Shouldn’t have done that ’n’ all,’ said Skin. ‘You’re not paying attention to the fucking instructions.’
‘Yes, well, I didn’t know that was on the cards, did I?’ said the cabbie. ‘You got my money?’
Skin handed him a fat envelope. They went into the bedroom. Alyshia’s skirt and blouse were on the floor, streaked with vomit and topped by a brown blur of tights. She looked up from the bed in bra and knickers, the fear streaming out of her.
‘You got the alarm code to her flat?’ asked Dan.
The cabbie shook his head, counting the money. Skin and Dan looked to Alyshia. She gave them the code. Skin made a call, gave the number, hung up.
‘Get us a plastic bag for her things,’ said Dan.
The cabbie went to the kitchen, came back with a bag, put Alyshia’s discarded clothes in it. Dan removed a small black box from his pocket, took out a capped syringe filled with a clear liquid. Alyshia pressed herself against the wall and whimpered as he flicked the air out of it, eased off the cap.
‘You done this before?’ asked the cabbie, looking over Dan’s shoulder.
‘First time,’ said Dan, rolling his eyes.
‘I’ll be quiet,’ said Alyshia. ‘Just don’t . . .’
‘This’ll keep you nice and relaxed,’ said Dan, and then to the cabbie, who was now looking at him intently: ‘You fancy a vodkatini ’n’ all?’
‘Who’s going to clean this shit up?’
‘There wouldn’t have been any shit to clear up,’ said Skin, hooded face up close to the cabbie’s, ‘if you’d done what you was fucking told.’
2
11.45 P.M., FRIDAY 9TH MARCH 2012
Hotel Olissipo, Parque das Nações, Lisbon
‘Business or pleasure?’ asked the receptionist from behind the black granite counter, unable to wrench herself away from Charles Boxer’s light green eyes, which she’d only ever seen before on gypsies. He looked foreign in his black leather jacket, faded jeans and black boots; not the usual business client.
A flicker of irritation as he relived being stood up at Heathrow airport. No pleasure and no business here for a freelance kidnap consultant, although he’d arranged to meet an old client later that evening.
‘Leisure,’ he said, smiling as he handed over his passport.
She filled in the form on screen, saw that he wasn’t far off his fortieth birthday.
‘You have a reservation for two people with breakfast included,’ she said.
‘Sorry, it’s just going to be me now,’ he said.
‘No problem,’ she said, smiling, and he liked her for that.
Some minutes later, Boxer was lying on one of the twin beds in his hotel room, staring at the ceiling, going over the phone call he’d had at the airport with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Amy.
‘I’m not coming,’ she said. ‘Didn’t Mum tell you?’
‘What do you mean, you’re not coming? Jesus Christ, Amy. We’ve planned this since Christmas and now you back out,’ he said. ‘And no, Mercy didn’t tell me. I haven’t spoken to her since Wednesday.’
‘She was probably too busy getting ready for that course she’s on this weekend. She told me to call you.’
‘And you left it to the last minute.’
He could feel her shrugging at the other end of the line, knew her timing had been critical. He wasn’t about to go back into town and drag her out, kicking and screaming. This was the usual Amy fait accompli.
‘So what’s this all about?’ he asked.
‘I’ve got to revise for my exams.’
‘At Karen’s house?’ he said, easing back on the sarcasm.
‘No, I’m just sleeping here. I’m working in my room at Mum’s. Call her. She’ll tell you. We had it all agreed before she left.’
‘But not with me,’ said Boxer. ‘And you know as well as I do that she’s out of mobile contact until the course is over.’
‘Oh yeah, right.’
‘And what am I going to do with your hundred and fifty quid ticket to Lisbon?’
Silence. Aggression started coming
over the airwaves. It didn’t take much these days.
‘You know why I didn’t want to come?’ she said, winding up to deliver.
‘You said. Your exams. Although I don’t remember you being such an assiduous student.’
‘That’s because you’re never around.’
‘Which was why we were going away together for the weekend.’
‘Was it?’
‘It was.’
‘The reason I didn’t want to come is that I knew you were going to leave me all night to go and play in one of your stupid card games.’
‘That was absolutely not my intention.’
‘So why did you book a hotel in the Parque das Nações, rather than in the centre of Lisbon?’
‘First, because it’s near an old client of mine, Bruno Dias, who wants to meet you, and second, because it’s close to the Oceanarium, where you said you wanted to go.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘It is.’
‘I looked it up online and, you know what, it’s even closer to the Lisbon Casino. A hundred metres, I’d say, and I know you: you’d come back at seven in the morning, in a good mood if you’d won and a bummer if you’d lost,’ she said. ‘And that was not how I wanted to spend my weekend: everything dependent on how the cards went for you.’
Boxer swung his legs off the bed, rested his elbows on his knees. The black hole was back, about fist-sized in his centre. He’d felt it there since he was a seven-year-old when his father had left him, disappeared, never to come back, never to contact him ever again. It was the rejection hole. Over the years he’d got it down to a point where he almost believed it had disappeared. But recently he’d found he had less control over it, especially where Amy was concerned. She was the one who could open it out in him with a look, a line, a curl of lip, and he’d feel the dark, swirling emptiness of something lost.
It was like this now. Eighteen months ago he’d given up his salaried job as a kidnap consultant with GRM, the private security company that ran seventy per cent of worldwide kidnap negotiations, in order to go freelance and give himself more time to spend with his daughter. And that had been the start of it. The loss of that corporate structure and the camaraderie of close colleagues seemed to have done something to his mind. Freed it up in a way – a bad way.
Amy had responded to his new ubiquitousness by reminding him for how much of her short life he’d consistently not been around. Standing him up for this weekend in Lisbon was her way of telling him that his little sweeteners were no recompense for more than fifteen years of abandonment. What opened up the black hole was that she was right.
He’d done mental battle with his inability to connect with her, thinking it was because he was too used to being a loner, holed up in Mexico City, Bogota or Karachi, reading thrillers, playing cards, waiting for a gang’s next move. Now he knew it was far more dangerous than that; this feeling, the deadliness of it, and what he had to do to make it go away. Or nearly go away.
He needed help.
He had to learn a new way of being.
But not tonight. That was too much for tonight.
‘How d’you like that?’ said Skin, furious, Hammers cap back on, taking rip drags from his cigarette, cornered against the door of the van, foot up on the dashboard.
Dan said nothing, drove, still shaken from his first killing. Why did it have to be strangulation? He still had the feeling of it in his hands and forearms.
‘Not “thank you very much for delivering the girl in perfect condition”. Not “thank you very much for killing the two sheep who weren’t in your fucking contract”. Not “thank you very much for remembering to get the alarm code to the bitch’s flat”. Not “thank you very much for putting the whatsitsname in her arm”. No. It’s “fuck off and get shot of the mutton . . . and be careful about it”. I fuckin’ hate that.’
‘What?’ said Dan, barely thinking, irritated by Skin’s ridiculous outrage.
‘Offing people when I’m not jacked up for it,’ said Skin.
‘Right,’ said Dan, thinking: ‘offing people’, is that what I do now? Why did I do that? ‘It’s called a cannula, by the way . . . the whatsitsname.’
‘And where did you learn that fancy needlework?’ asked Skin. ‘You a junkie or what?’
Silence from Dan as they crossed the Royal Albert Dock, him thinking how easily he’d stepped over the line. What had made him do that?
‘Hey, fucker?’ said Skin. ‘It’s just you and me.’
Dan looked across at him and back out through the windscreen.
‘I used to be a nurse,’ he said.
Skin guffawed, took his cap off, scratched his shaved head with a thumbnail.
‘You’re a big fucker for a nurse.’
‘You should have seen the girls,’ said Dan.
‘Fuck me,’ said Skin, shaking his head. ‘How d’you end up in this game?’
Good question.
‘Had a girlfriend in the club scene, with a bunch of celebrity friends into prescription drugs. I lifted them, she flogged them until . . . I got caught. Did three years in Wandsworth. So here I am: in this game.’
‘Ah right, is that where you met Pike?’ asked Skin. ‘He had the Royal Suite in Wandsworth.’
‘I administered his daily medication,’ said Dan. ‘He didn’t want some harebrained junkie doing it for him.’
Skin chuckled, playing with that bit of gossip in his head.
‘Still see the girlfriend?’ he asked.
‘What do you think?’ said Dan, making a big ‘O’ with his thumb and forefinger. ‘That’s how many times she came to see me inside. Anyway, where are we going to dump these two?’
‘The only place I know,’ said Skin. ‘Keep going up here, take a right onto Barking Road.’
‘I thought you were lost east of Limehouse.’
‘I’ll tell you when we get there,’ said Skin, enjoying himself. ‘No speeding. Don’t want the cops stopping us with this lot in the back.’
‘By the way, d’you know who she is?’
‘Who?’ asked Skin.
‘The girl we just delivered.’
‘No,’ said Skin. ‘She was pretty tasty, mind. Not Pike’s normal line of work. You reckon he’s moving into the sex business? Trafficking girls? There’s money in that.’
‘What do you know?’
‘Been to a house in Forest Gate a few times. Nice girls from Moldova or Moldavia. I dunno. Belorussia. Those kind of places. Can’t speak a word of English, mind. Who does with their mouth full?’
Dan looked across at him slowly, not impressed. Skin laughed to himself.
‘Take a right under the flyover,’ he said. ‘Don’t go up on it. There’s a little road right next to . . . that’s the one.’
They drove past some factory buildings, the odd car flashing past on the flyover.
‘Take a left here and pull up on the bridge,’ said Skin.
Dan turned, slowed and stopped. They sat in silence. Dan still wrestling with himself. Skin leaning forward. The peak of his cap pecking at the windscreen.
‘Now let’s take a good look around,’ he said. ‘A gander. That’s what my old man used to say. Let’s take a gander.’
‘I thought a gander was a quick look,’ said Dan.
‘You know fucking everything, don’t you, Nurse?’
‘I’d get shot of the cap if I was you,’ said Dan.
Skin tossed it in the glove. They got out the van. No cars.
‘What’s this?’ asked Dan, looking over the rail of the bridge, shivering.
‘Don’t know, but it ends up going past the Beckton Sewage Works,’ said Skin. ‘Looks clear to me. Let’s do it.’
They lifted the first body out, humped it up onto the rail, Skin grunting with effort, Dan breezing it.
‘Hold these tarps back,’ said Dan. ‘Our prints are all over them now.’
They held onto the nylon ropes at the corners, rolled the body forward. The tarp unfurled. The body dropped
with a loud splash.
‘Fucking noise of that,’ said Skin.
They did the same with the second body. Folded the tarpaulins, stuck them in the back. Glanced over the rail, the bodies not visible in the black water.
Back into the van. Dan pulled away while Skin flexed his biceps.
‘I suppose you did a lot of that, you know, when you were a nurse,’ said Skin.
‘Dumping bodies in the river?’ said Dan. ‘Did it all the time.’
‘No, you twat,’ said Skin. ‘Lifting bodies, you know, Casualty – one, two, three, hup.’
‘I did weights when I was inside. Helped pass the time.’
They got back onto the Barking Road, heading home.
‘I fuckin’ hate that,’ said Skin, cap back on, taking rip drags from another cigarette.
‘What now?’ asked Dan.
‘Those two,’ said Skin.
‘You mean, if it can happen to them, it can happen to us?’
Skin shrugged.
‘The difference being,’ said Dan, hopefully, ‘they’re not missed.’
‘They will be, by somebody, somewhere,’ said Skin. ‘The older one had plaster down his front. Means he’s working, so . . .’
‘So what?’
‘You ask me, this isn’t over yet,’ said Skin. ‘Not by a long way.’
Boxer got the call from Bruno Dias just before midnight as he was finishing a plate of sashimi at a Japanese restaurant near the Oceanarium.
Ten minutes later, he was walking through the modern development that had grown up around the Expo ground and passing the black glass casino where he knew he’d end up later. He headed towards the swooping roof of the new railway station and one of the landmark towers of luxury apartments in front of it.
Bruno Dias was a Brazilian businessman who had been Boxer’s second client as a freelance kidnap consultant for the private security company Pavis Risk Management. Boxer had conducted the kidnap negotiations for the return of Dias’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Bianca. Everything seemed to have gone perfectly. The kidnappers had appeared to be calm and non-violent and only interested in the money. At six hundred thousand dollars, they’d agreed a ransom larger than Boxer would have liked to pay, but Dias had been desperate to settle. A final proof of life had been received and verified. Dias’s brother had driven Boxer out of São Paulo and dropped him at the side of a country road. The chief kidnapper had directed him to a deserted farm building where he’d left the money.