‘That’s right, I know all about your husband, Liz. Teflon Ron. Mr Invincible. Some kind of London ganglord. A bad guy. You were all at that cottage last night to celebrate yet another trial acquittal. And I know that’s why you don’t want the police in on this. Because he’s brainwashed you into believing the police can’t be trusted. That’s idiotic. Think about what happened last night. Rival gangsters came to hurt him. He could be tied up in a cellar somewhere. He could be dead. And that would put you all on your own. Only the police can help you now.’
The shock and fear of a moment ago were replaced by scorn. Not fear, which he’d tried to elicit in order to make her see sense. Just scorn, big and bright all over her face, as if he’d said something stupid. But, of course, this was Mr Invincible he was talking about. Teflon Ron bested by mere mortals? Impossible! How dare he even suggest that her perfect husband might not be in absolute control of everything in his bubble-wrapped world?
He didn’t care. ‘Bloody gangsters, Liz. That’s the shit you brought crashing down on my head. But now you’re going to fix it. Go to the cops or just go home, I don’t care. You just get out of here and fix this however you want and leave me out of it.’
‘I will, I will. I’m sorry.’
‘I told my wife. I wasn’t even going to come here after I found out that people tried to break into my house. But she told me to come and make sure you went to the police. That’s what you have to do.’
‘I will, I will. I’m sorry.’
‘She doesn’t need grief like this. I shouldn’t even be here. I need to get back, so you need to get out of here and find a phone and call the cops. She doesn’t need this hassle. These people could come back to my house, and she’s there alone, and she’s pr—’
‘You open yet?’ said a voice. Karl whirled to face the shutter, and took a step back as he saw a guy squirming through the three-foot gap. Karl flicked a look behind him, but Liz had vanished.
* * *
Then the guy was through, and inside, and standing upright, and Karl’s heart leaped into his mouth. Today the man just about six feet from him wore a blue tracksuit and a baseball cap, but his face had not changed. Grey stubble, pockmarked skin. He didn’t need to check the photo in his hand to know that this was the guy from the night before. One of the men who’d come for him. He hid the hand clutching the phone behind his back.
‘I need a computer,’ the guy said in an Eastern European accent.
‘How did you find me here?’ Karl replied before his brain could caution against it.
Luckily, though, the guy thought he was talking about the shop because he said: ‘Yellow Pages, my friend.’ His eyes were looking all around. ‘You Karl?’
‘Karl!’ Karl yelled up at the hatch. Then he mounted the ladder and started to climb. Slowly, so he didn’t look suspicious. ‘Karl, you’ve got a customer.’ It felt like a hollow, childish trick, and he expected a hand to grab his leg, and the man to say, Nice try.
Then his torso was through the hatch. His daft little ploy had worked. But that was when Liz appeared and grabbed his shirt to help haul him up. And the guy obviously saw her, because Karl heard a gasp of breath and a thud of feet, and a moment later the ladder was swept from under him. His ribs hit the edge of the hatch, legs swinging free. In order to grab the hatch, he had to drop his phone, or he’d thump down instead. He heard it clatter to the floor. Shit.
‘Come here, you cunt,’ the intruder said, and grabbed a foot.
Liz yelled. Karl kicked both feet like a drowning man and felt a heel hit something hard. Hopefully his nose. Then his foot was free, and he was scrambling through the hatch with Liz’s help.
Together they stared down at the man below. He stared right back, one hand on his ear, his other hand holding a massive knife.
Only it wasn’t a knife, Karl realised. It looked like a lawnmower blade, with a sharpened end. From his shed. Karl bit back a horrible image of this guy in his bedroom, standing over him in the dark with that nasty blade at his throat. Or Katie’s throat. Or her belly. The picture killed his nerves and anger washed into the void. He’d do anything to protect his wife and his unborn child.
‘Oh wow,’ the intruder said. ‘I know you, darlin’. You’re Mr Invincible’s missus. And what would my man want with you, eh?’
‘What the hell do you want?’ Karl yelled.
‘Her beside you,’ the man said with a leer. He pointed with the blade, as if Karl might not know who he meant.
Beside him, Liz was shaking. ‘My husband will kill you for this,’ she spat at him.
A flicker of fear, gone the next instant. ‘’Course he will. Down you come, sweetie, and I promise this will be easier.’
‘What do we do, Karl?’ Liz moaned.
Karl rushed over to the shoe rack that he’d last night warned Liz to stay away from. He selected one of the items.
‘Karl, he’s coming up! Do something.’
Karl returned to the hatch. Below them, the intruder set the ladder in place and started to climb.
Twenty-Two
Mick
Good news: a twelve-year-old girl went into cardiac arrest and died.
Some organs in the body could survive hours without blood, but not the brain. Measurable brain activity ceased about forty seconds after clinical death, and recovery after three minutes or more was unlikely. Yet there had been reports of people coming back after such time and recounting what they saw while dead, usually the hackneyed bright lights and God. Three minutes. Grafton lay dead for forty minutes before the chainsaw main event. Bad news for Mick.
And then he found a story about a Danish pre-teen who had been resuscitated after sixty-one minutes. She had floated above her own dead body on the operating table, and then she was snatched away by talented surgeons. One hour! By that time, Mick and Grafton had been dancing again. What might Grafton have seen and felt while Mick chopped and scooped and swiped with his Bosch AKE 30?
He was sitting low in the car and watching Sunrise Electronics from the road running past the entrance to the lock-ups. He was wearing a baseball cap pulled low, and had his jacket zipped up high. He put his phone away, and that was when sweet memories were swapped for a bad one: something Król had said on the drive over here. You’re not the only one with evidence of stuff, you know. Mick had replied: What’s that supposed to mean? Król had said: I got webcam, ain’t I?
Some weird shit from Król’s foreign mouth, that was all. Just bluster. And it had been left at that. But it was back, having marinated in Mick’s maelstrom of a mind, and it wasn’t bluster now. Now it was an admission: Król had recorded Mick in the flat at some point. Mick had made five or six visits to Król and had spouted all sorts of things within those walls; if Król had recorded him on webcam at any time, he would have evidence of Mick saying or doing something that Mick didn’t want immortalised. Something had to be done about that. But what?
He froze as he caught sight of something. Stark against the pale white clouds clogging the lightening sky, two figures had emerged onto the sloping roof of the building on the left side of the road. Seabury’s side. One in shirt and trousers, the other in a dress.
‘No fucking way,’ he said. He had come here hoping to learn the bitch’s location from Seabury, but it had been a long shot because there was no proof the guy had even picked her up. So, the chances that he’d hidden her here, at his shop, were… But even from 300 feet away, he recognised that dress. The bitch had been wearing it for Grafton’s final appearance in court.
Mick thumped the steering wheel and laughed. Impossible, implausible, illogical, but real nonetheless: Seabury and the bitch together, right before his eyes, and nary a witness about. He got a whiff of Fate.
The news wasn’t all sweet, though, because the pair were escaping across the roof. She’d slipped his clutches once before and was on the verge of doing so again.
Król emerged from the shop, staggering backwards, staring up. He was stupid enough to think they would try to climb down right where they’d escaped. But Mick knew their plan was to drop down into the land beyond the graffiti-covered wall at the end of the road. And sure enough the two figures, moving slowly, started towards the far end of the building, away from Mick.
He wound down his window and screamed at Król: ‘Go the way they went! Inside!’