Heartbreaker (50 page)

Hardly knowing what I’m doing I slip the tape into its case, switch off the machine and cram all the takeaway items back into the steel box. I also cram in Susanne’s five hundred pounds before I close the safe.

Back upstairs I dump the box on my bed and try to take deep breaths to stop myself shivering, but it’s no good, I have to go to the kitchen, pour myself a glass of wine and drink it straight off. Only then do I start to breathe normally. But I don’t drink more than one glass. When you’re travelling along the edge of the abyss and you’ve just looked down you don’t start tap-dancing if you want to avoid the long drop. You chill out and refocus.

With the drink finished I make a crucial decision: I’m not going to nick the Tucker tapes. Susanne was right to disapprove of this scheme and of course I can see now it was crazy. I’ll call Gil tomorrow, I’ll make sure he never goes to Asherton’s house, but I’m not retrieving those tapes—sorry, mate, but I can’t risk getting caught, can’t risk Tommy pulling a knife on me, can’t risk winding up at the Pain-Palace. Gavin Blake Dead Martyr is a role I’m just not gasping to play.

Having made this decision I glance at the steel box. No reason why that can’t go in my car straight away. I tie the lid down with string to compensate for the busted lock, and run downstairs but in the hall I hesitate. Better check on Tommy who by this time could be back from Austin Friars or wherever he went earlier. I open the front door a crack. Yes, his car’s back on its slot. Out on the front doorstep I glance down at the windows but all the blinds are drawn so I’m safe. I look quickly up and down the street to check for would-be car thieves, but although traffic’s thundering along the road, no one’s walking along the pavement. Darting to my car I stash the box in the boot and zip back into the house.

Upstairs again I make a big effort not to panic, not to rush as I continue the task of gathering together all I want to take with me. I’ve put on a CD to soothe my nerves, but I’m not playing opera. I don’t want to be reminded how Gavin Blake Prostitute used to anaesthetise himself, but on the other hand I know I need beautiful music, so I’ve chosen a piece which sounds like opera but isn’t. It’s become popular recently but so far nobody’s desecrated it by turning it into a chart-buster fit only for
Top of
the Pops.
It’s a Mozart number, it’s Wolfgang Amadeus talking directly to The Bloke, it’s that nape-tingling church piece known as the
Laudate
Dominum.

The famous lady’s singing. After a while I find myself singing along with her, can’t stop myself, each sequence of notes is so bloody beautiful, and suddenly it strikes me as miraculous that amidst all the filth I’m wading through tonight something beautiful should be alongside me, not blotted out by the filth but towering above it, and as I sing those Latin words it at last occurs to me to translate them.
Laudate Dominum:
Praise the Lord.

I tell myself this is one of the CDs I have to take with me. “Amen!” sings the famous lady as I make this decision. “Amen, ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ahhh . . .” The final amen spans an amazing number of notes but at last the music finishes and there’s silence.

I pause. The silence is unbroken, as my bedroom’s not on the side of the house which faces the road. Opening the window I lean out and see that no light’s shining from the basement into the back garden. Tommy must have gone out again. Or maybe he’s in his workroom. Or maybe he’s just having an early night after his orgies in Amsterdam. Anyway I don’t have to worry about him any more.

Up I go to the junk-room to retrieve a suitcase and the St. Benet’s fundraising brochures. No sense in leaving the brochures behind to provide Elizabeth with a big clue about where I might have gone. I don’t want her running away before the police can collar her. Let her just think I’ve beetled off into the blue with Susanne.

I’ve decided to take my large suitcase rather than the medium-sized one because this’ll enable me to pack more books and CDs. But when I reach the suitcases my scalp crawls. The large one isn’t quite covering the crucial floorboard. It’s been moved.

Okay, so Elizabeth’s now so suspicious that she’s searched my luggage for clues, but that needn’t mean . . . I drop to my knees, shove the case aside and lever up the floorboard.

The St. Benet’s brochures are still in a neatly stacked pile but they’re no longer exactly parallel to the pipe which runs under the floor. I always leave them exactly parallel to the pipe, always, so that I’ll know if—

Well, I know now.

She’s found them.

For the second time that evening I feel fit to drop dead. It doesn’t take me long to piece together the probable sequence of events. When I told Nigel yesterday that I was bored with Serena and there was a special someone I wanted to shag, I wasn’t thinking of anyone in particular, not even Susanne. I was just trying to turn off the conversation so that I could escape from the house. But when Nigel found himself forced to repeat the conversation to Elizabeth, she’d have jumped to the conclusion I was referring to Carta. Elizabeth’s chronic paranoia about St. Benet’s would have ensured she then searched for evidence—and once she started messing around in the junk-room with my suitcases she must have noticed the floorboard. Proof at last, she thinks after uncovering the brochures. She now knows I’ve been disobedient on the grand scale and lying to the back teeth as I double-cross her in the biggest possible way. This has to be worse than anything Jason and Tony ever did. And look what happened to them.

I lurch to my feet as my thoughts skitter on, driven by a rising tide of panic. Forget the stories about Elizabeth meeting Eva and Nigel going to a party. All I really know is that Elizabeth’s decided to be out, she’s given Nigel the evening off and she’s even taken care to shoo Susanne from the premises. And why? Because something’s going to happen here tonight. The talent scouts are going to come recruiting for the new snuff movie.

I’m tiptoeing to the door of the junk-room. Why am I tiptoeing? Because the house is so quiet that even my muffled footsteps sound creepy. Shit, I’m scared! Supposing someone’s hiding in Nigel’s room?

I take a deep breath and shove open his door but the room’s empty. I’m about to relax when I notice a strange thing. All the surfaces are bare. There’s nothing lying around. I open the doors of the closet. That’s bare too.

Nigel’s gone. Sacked. Wiped. Whatever. Somebody’s said Gavin won’t be needing him any more.

The next thing I know I’ve grabbed a case—the smaller of the two, no time to pack the larger one—and I’m in my room hurling the essential stuff into it. Somehow I remember to add my mobile from the living-room. Then I lock the case and pull out my house keys so that I can slot the key on the same ring, but no, this is dumb because I don’t need the house keys any more. Abandoning them on the chest of drawers I slip the suitcase key into my pocket.

I switch off the lights but switch them on again. Let the talent scouts think I’m still up here. Skimming downstairs with my suitcase to the landing outside Elizabeth’s bedroom, I pause. The house is totally quiet, totally still as I edge to the banisters and look down into the hall.

Everything’s exactly as it should be. I relax in relief, but before I can skim on down the staircase, something happens which once more brings me to the brink of heart failure.

The door at the top of the basement stairs, the one Elizabeth always keeps locked and bolted, slowly starts to open.

I don’t wait to see who or what comes out. I shoot into Elizabeth’s bedroom and stand panting in the dark. As I wait I realise that Elizabeth must have left the door to the basement stairs unbolted and unlocked before she left. I never noticed the drawn bolts on my journeys through the hall that evening, but that’s not so surprising since the door’s just part of the hall furniture, not the kind of thing one would normally look at.

The intruders are on the next staircase now, the one that connects the ground floor to the first. Someone mutters a couple of words but someone else hisses: “Shhh!” and the voice ceases. But the stairs creak. Those Big Boys weigh a lot, all bulging grotesquely as the result of steroid abuse. Wondering how many of them have come I watch through the crack above the door hinge, and I’m hardly breathing as the procession comes into view. Tommy’s leading, showing everyone the way. He’s followed by three of the Big Boys, shaven-headed, black-clad, loaded with earrings, nose rings, all kinds of rings—two of the scumbags, I know, even have rings through their equipment. And behind the Big Boys prowls Asherton.

To ease the abduction along, the Big Boys are carrying a whip, a pair of handcuffs and a large roll of duct tape. They’ve probably got knives too, hidden in their leather jackets. Asherton’s so keen on knives.

Tommy opens the door onto the stairs that lead up to my flat, and the light from the second floor hallway illuminates all their faces. Asherton’s wet-lipped, bright-eyed, hardly able to wait for the joys of the sadism to come.

Up the stairs they go, quiet as rats in silk slippers. As soon as Asherton’s disappeared from view out I slip with the case and shoot down into the hall—but here’s the hell of a twist: the front door won’t open. It opened earlier when I dumped the steel box in the car, but now it’s stuck fast. Asherton must have borrowed Elizabeth’s keys and activated the Chubb lock as he came through the hall a moment ago. He’d have wanted to ensure that if I broke loose and made a run for it, I’d wind up either trapped in the house or else fatally delayed by pausing to use my house keys.

Well, I don’t have my house keys, do I? I abandoned them in my room.

So I’m trapped.

Sounds indicate that my absence from the lower part of my flat’s been discovered, but the bastards’ll check the attic before they double back. Still gripping my case I streak down the basement stairs to Tommy’s flat but fucking hell, the front door there’s locked too—well, yes, it would be, wouldn’t it, since Asherton’s been busy closing down my options. I glance in Tommy’s bedroom nearby and see the steel shutters are now masking the windows.

I start thinking of the back of the house—of the French windows opening onto the patio—but any escape I try to make through the garden would be doomed because the back gardens of all the houses in the block are surrounded by the houses themselves—it’s a no-exit scene. But I could smash those windows—no steel shutters at the back—I could create a diversion, make the buggers
think
I’ve gone out into the garden. Then I could double back upstairs to get my keys—no, wait, there’s a spare set in Elizabeth’s kitchen—but no, you can bet the spare set won’t be there now.

I dump my suitcase behind the door of Tommy’s bedroom and head for the back of the flat, but as I pass his workroom a memory hits me and I flick on the light. The Tucker tapes are still sitting on the counter. Instantly I grab them. In the kitchen I snaffle a supermarket bag from a pile by the swingbin and shove the tapes inside. Then I snag a saucepan from the stove and start bashing the French windows—and let’s hope to God the bust is audible at the top of the house.

The glass is still falling as I drop the saucepan, grab the bag of tapes and dive back to the front of the house where I rejoin my suitcase behind Tommy’s bedroom door. Have the scumbags heard or haven’t they? And if they haven’t—

They have. Down they come, crashing like a herd of elephants. Tommy charges past and the Big Boys pound along behind him. I wait till they’ve rushed outside, footsteps crunching on the broken glass, and then I’m tearing up the stairs again on the journey to retrieve my keys.

I burst into the main hall.

Too late I realise that something’s wrong. The light’s on in the living-room and it shouldn’t be on because when I came downstairs it was off. I suddenly realise—too late again—that in the basement I only saw Tommy and the Big Boys. Someone else has chosen to wait in comfort while the riff-raff go milling around in the gardens. Someone else is busy helping himself to Elizabeth’s scotch. Someone else has a perfect view of me through the wide open living-room door.

It’s Asherton.

I never hesitate. I’m so hyped up, so wired with panic, terror and the absolute determination to survive that I’m no longer creeping along the edge of the abyss—I’m surfing it on a giant wave of adrenaline.

As the glass jerks from his hands with shock I dump the suitcase, dump the shopping bag and streak into the room to knock the shit out of him.

“PAYBACK TIME, MOTHERFUCKER!” I yell, and he’s terrified, so terrified that he beetles gasping behind the sofa. At that perfect moment, stripped of his musclemen, he’s just another middle-aged suit who doesn’t bother to keep fit. I can punch his lights out in seconds and he knows it. I can almost hear his filthy brain screeching as he tries to figure out what the fuck he can do.

He screams for the Big Boys, the Devil shrieking for his demons, but they’re not here, they’re long gone. It’s just him and me. He cowers, he slavers, he whimpers—could be he’s even shitting himself with fright, he’s disgusting, I want to kill him, but no, that would mean he’d dragged me down to his own filthy level, that would mean he’d won. I just need him out of action so that I can retrieve the keys, but by God I’m going to make him sweat blood first.

In a flash I’ve heaved the sofa aside and I’m diving for him, but sheer terror makes him agile and he darts away. I jump up and close in on him again but he flings a vase at me, and as I duck I lose my footing and crash to the carpet. Up I spring with only a couple of seconds lost and I see he’s backed against the wall at an odd angle, one arm curving behind his back, the other bent upwards to protect his face. Coward! Rage rushes through me as I remember all I suffered in his house, and I blast forward to grab him.

But the swine’s outplayed me. He’s faked the fear which lures me on, and the moment I’m poised for the big grab, the arm behind his back whips around me with the knife he must have whisked from his pocket when I was carpeted.