One Night (13 page)

"Are you sure this is the right room?" said Danny.

Joel took a step back onto the landing and looked at the door again and then the ones to either side of it.

"I'm sure." He examined the room, it was a bedroom, probably the master bedroom. It had the feel of recent use, the bed was neatly made but other things made Joel think this wasn't just a guest room. There was a dressing table against one of the walls with makeup and other feminine items on it and a pair of slippers underneath it. On one of the nightstands sat a paperback book, a bookmark poking out of it. There was also a smell lingering, the delicate scent of expensive perfume.

The room was large, probably thirty feet along each side. There were two doors set wide apart in the wall facing Joel. He walked to the one nearest him and opened it to reveal a bathroom. Paterson had walked to the other door; he'd opened it and was looking through into the room beyond. "It's a walk in wardrobe. Big bloody one too, goes back twelve feet I'd say."

Reynolds spoke up, “It’s not the right
fucking room is it, Joel? Because if it was the guy would be in here.”

“He might have moved to a different room,” said Paterson.

Joel shook his head. “I saw him close the door behind him, why would he do that if he was wasn’t going to stay in the room? It was only a few minutes ago.” He sniffed the air again. How long would you be able to smell perfume after the woman wearing it had walked through? He hadn’t seen her on the camera, just the man.

He tried to put the pieces together in his head. The man and the woman were here alone, probably eating or watching TV or something. They heard the gunshot. What then? The woman must have been in here fairly recently...
had she been here anyway, getting ready for an early night? Or had she come up here after hearing the shot? The latter seemed more likely. And the man. He’d gone to the safe in the study downstairs, taken the picture down, opened the safe and emptied it. If Fuller was right the safe had money in it. Lots of money. The bag, thought Joel, the man had put the money into the large bag he’d been carrying on the video feed. Filled it and then run up the stairs with it and to the room to join his wife. And then what?

Reynolds was on his knees looking under the bed. “Nothing.”

“We’re wasting time,” said Danny. “We need to find the fucker and get the money off him.”

Joel looked around the room again. He looked at Paterson.

“How big did you say it was?”

“About t
welve foot deep, maybe six wide...” The Scot looked back at Joel, “Oh bugger.”

“What?” said
Danny. “What are you two talking about?”

“The rooms aren’t big enough,” said Joel. “The bathroom is about twelve feet wide. The wardrobe is six. There’s ten feet in the middle missing.”

“Missing?” said Reynolds. “What do you mean missing?”

"They've got a panic room," Joel said.

“Fuck,” said Danny. He picked up a hairbrush from the dressing table and threw it across the room. It hit the wall and bounced off it to land on the bed. “We need to phone fucking Fuller and find out why he didn’t tell us about this.”

“We can’t, mate,” said Joel. “We’re jamming the mobile frequencies aren’t
we. So they can’t call out.”

They all still had their masks on so Joel couldn’t see Danny’s face. He could picture it though.

“You need to get it open then, son,” Danny said. “That’s what you’re here for, to get things open.”

He looked at his watch. Seven minutes and ten seconds. Was that enough time to get into the room? He’d find out.

He ran to Paterson and past him into the walk in wardrobe. The entrance to the hideaway must be in there somewhere. To his right, lining the wall that the panic room must be beyond was shelving. He pulled at it quickly but it was solid with none of the give that might suggest it hid a secret door. Further down was a rail, Joel parted the coats hanging from it to reveal the wall behind. The wardrobe was well lit with ceiling lamps that had switched on when Paterson had opened the door, Joel examined the wall but couldn’t see anything unusual. He pulled a small torch from his jacket and shone it at the plaster. Under the brighter light he was it, a thin seam running down the wall. He searched near it and found a small very slightly recessed square in the wall at waist height. When he pushed it a portion of the wall slid to the side revealing a steel door.

“One down,” he muttered. Unfortunately that had probably been the easy bit.

Danny was watching him. “How long?” he said.

Joel shook his head. “I won’t know until I start.”

Panic rooms weren’t Joel’s speciality but he knew a little about them. In their purest form they were secret rooms that could only be locked or unlocked from inside. The idea was that the occupants of a house could flee to the room in an emergency and any intruders would be completely unable to get to them. The only way to get someone out of a panic room was to starve them out.

The first thing Joel realised when he saw the steel door was that this wasn’t really a panic room.

Whilst the idea of a completely secure place to hide was appealing on some levels there were problems with it. The biggest one, especially if you had kids (and Fuller had said that the dealer did) was that if one of your loved ones locked themselves in there was no way to get them out unless they wanted to come. Any parent who’d ever had to use a coin to rescue a child who’d locked themselves in the bathroom would have a heart attack at the idea of a panic room.

So this was the compromise, the family friendly solution. A hidden room with a combination lock on the door. A big safe in other words. Joel smiled. Panic rooms weren’t his speciality. Safes were.

He opened his bag of tools and set to work.

Two minutes later the lock clicked open. Joel whistled and the others joined them. Danny had the pistol in his hand again and Joel could feel the tension coming off him in waves. Reynolds was limbering up, rolling his shoulders and clenching and unclenching his fists. Paterson was at the back. “Shall we do this then, guys?” he said.

“Go for it big man,” said Danny. Joel watched as Reynolds stepped up to the door and kicked it open with obvious glee.

Through the frame of the door Joel could see that there were two people in there as he’d expected. The problem was that the man he’d seen on the video screen wasn’t one of them. Instead he found himself facing a terrified looking woman and a crying boy.

Eve felt like someone had pulled away a chair she was about to sit on. She felt like she was falling hard, that feeling you get that jerks you back to reality just as you are sinking blissfully into a dream. She had known she didn't have him for long but she needed more than this, more than to just soothe his wounds and then be pushed aside. She didn't want to be his nurse or his mother, she wanted all of him.

At that moment she wasn’t sure if she felt angry or sad. Then she decided it was both, the two emotions fighting inside her like scrapping dogs. Circling each other in an endless, pointless fight to the death. They were emotions that consumed each other and the person experiencing them, she knew that from experience. That was her life for a while when Dad went. Rage and sorrow. Then as now she didn’t know who she was angry at. Dad for dying, the world for taking him, Joel for leaving, herself for loving him.

She stood upright and looked down at her hands, they were shaking. On her fingertips she could still feel the warmth of his skin. She knew if she raised them to her face she would smell the masculine scent of him. At the moment he had moved her hand away and told her he was going she had been imagining what it would feel like to have that lean, muscled torso pressed against hers. To have her arms wrapped around him, the heat of his back against her forearms as he thrust into her.

She looked at him
as he pulled his torn T-shirt on. He looked so different, so small. His eyes were cast downwards. Was it so he could see what he was doing or so he didn't have to look her in the eye? He was like a little boy who knew he'd done something wrong but couldn’t take it back. She wanted to hold him, kiss that slightly scruffy hair of his, run her finger down that scar, and make it all better somehow. God how he confused her, this man. Strong and assertive one minute, humorous and affectionate the next and now sad, child-like, unable to handle the emotions inside him. She could see it in the dejected slump of his shoulders. He didn't want this but his stupid male pride, his hero complex, told him he had to do it. That he had to protect her. It was that same basic male need to protect that had killed Dad.

She took Joel’s chin in her hand, the stubble scratching her fingers, and tilted his head back so he was looking up at her. His eyes glistened. "No," she said. "You're not getting rid of me that easily."

The hint of a smile crossed his face but his eyes still looked sad. That battle was still raging inside him. She needed to convince him.

“You need me,” she said. “I won’t let you go back out there alone, it isn’t safe. Besides, they’ve seen me. We’re in this together now whether you like it or not. You’re stuck with me for tonight at least. Until you leave Southend.”

He knew she was right, that the point at which he could have, should have, walked away and left her in safety was long past, but he couldn’t do it. He shook his head. “Eve, I can’t,” he said. “I can’t make you walk into this storm with me.”

She looked at him, fixed him with eyes that he saw had a flash of anger in them. The wind was howling outside, whistling and rattling through the rides that surrounded the cafe. Eve started speaking.

“My Dad died when I was ten.” she said. The words came out of her mouth slowly, she didn’t know where she was going with it, where the sentence was going to take them.

“I know, Eve, you told me.”

“He was killed. I didn’t tell you that.”

He was
shocked, “Christ, what happened?”

“Dad was a carpenter but people stopped wanting carpenters. He worked for a building firm, doing kitchens and wardrobes and so on in new houses. He made toys in the evenings too in a workshop in the garden. Toys and children’s furniture. Beautiful things that he put his heart into. He used to say that woodwork was how he made his money but carpentry was how he fed his soul. Then the building firm went bust and he didn’t have a job any more. He’d sold a few of the things he made in the evenings, sold them as quickly as he could make them in fact. So he started doing that full time. He was so sure it would work. But it didn’t. Mum said it was because he put too much of himself into the pieces. He couldn’t let them go until they were perfect. And that meant he just couldn’t make enough of them.”

Joel watched her, he realised he liked just sitting there looking at her and listening to her. Taking her in.

“Dad was a good man. All he wanted to do was provide for us. Not being able to
broke his heart. I overheard him and Mum talking about it one night. Arguing really. He said it made him feel less of a man. His brother, my uncle, had offered him work before but Dad had always said no. In the end it got too much. It was my fault.” She stopped, she was crying now, the lump in her throat so big it hurt.

Joel reached out and took her hand. “Eve, I’m sure it wasn’t.”

She shook her head and carried on, he could see the pain on her face as she told the story.

“
It was my birthday. They didn’t have enough money to get me what I wanted, some stupid Barbie house one of my friends had. So Dad made one for me. God knows how long it took him. Hour and hours. It was beautiful but I was a kid and it wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t the one on the telly. I think I told him I hated it, ran out of the room screaming like a spoilt little bitch. That did it. After that he went to work for Uncle Harry.”

Joel squeezed her hand, it made the lump in her throat go down a bit.

“Harry was into all sorts of things, not good things. He still is. The very first time Dad went out to work with him something happened. I don’t know exactly what. I think they’d gone to collect money from someone who owed Harry. There was a fight and Dad got hit. Just a punch Harry said, that’s all it was. He died before he got to the hospital.”

“I’m so sorry, Eve.”
“Don’t be. I’m not telling you this to make you feel sorry for me I’m telling you so you know that I am not going to let another man get taken away from me because of his bloody pride. You think you’re walking into a storm? Fine I’m walking into it with you. I’m choosing to. Just you try and fucking stop me.”

Joel thought about what happened next many times afterwards, replayed the events in the panic room in his mind to see if he could have done anything differently. He decided he probably could have but only if he'd had some kind of weird sixth sense that had told him exactly what was going to happen. It was all too bloody random to be predictable. Like some surreal nightmare version of how things were supposed to have worked. The kind of dream that probably woke Fuller up in the middle of the night.

Things hadn't felt right from the start. The suburban house where they'd met was all wrong, hinting at a lack of control about the job. That lack of separation between home and work that had made him think the people
behind the job were desperate enough to risk someone's family.

Reynolds being part of it was definitely wrong, no matter what Danny said about him being a changed man. Joel should have had the resolve to walk as soon as he saw him.

And Danny showing up and then coming on the job for fuck's sake. Danny who had once been a respected player but now freaked out and pulled a gun at the slightest hint of anything going wrong. It made Joel wonder why Danny had stopped going on jobs in the first place and gone into the recruitment business. Was it just because he'd got too old for it like he always said or had he known he was losing his nerve?

And then there was the business at the electronics store with
the security guard and Reynolds. That was when it really started going south. A stupid mistake but one that had fractured the small amount of loyalty and professionalism they'd had as a team. It was then that Danny had pulled his gun for the first time. Joel still remembered the shock and fear he'd felt staring down the barrel of it.

There had been more mistakes once they got to the property. Danny getting over excited and moving too close to the guard. That had led to Reynolds getting shot, not that the hulking lunatic didn't deserve it. And that in turn had alerted the dealer who had emptied the fucking safe. It was like a bloody domino run.

And now this, the not quite panic room which the usually all seeing Fuller hadn't known about. The locked room that didn't seem to have in it the person they were expecting. It was like some Agatha Christie mystery.

Joel had never been on a job with this much bad luck. Maybe it was more than that, though. Maybe it was a sign. Danny had pulled a gun on him. Danny the man he'd trusted above all others, who he had looked up to and respected. He'd dragged Joel into a job that went against all his principles. A job which was starting to feel like it had massive planning holes in it. A job
that had now put a woman and a kid in the same room as two fucking psychos, one with a gun, one with fists that were almost as deadly.

Joel knew he couldn't blame anyone but himself. Whatever anyone else had done it was his decisions had led him here. He had chosen this path through life. One step after another from the day he came screaming into the world. He'd taken every damn one of those steps, every one. So, if he didn't like where he'd ended up that was his tough luck.

He remembered getting lectured by the old priest who used to visit the children's home. He'd come every Sunday afternoon and they'd be locked in the dining room with him for an hour of Old Testament stories of sin and divine retribution.

"God sees every wrong thing you do, children" the old man would say. He'd bang his walking stick on the floor as punctuation and spray spittle over the kids sitting nearest to him.

"Every lie!" (Bang)

"Every impure thought!" (Bang) Joel didn't even know what an impure thought was but some of the older boys sniggered at it.

"Every time you take something that isn't yours, or disrespect your elders, or covet something." (Bang bang bang)

"He sees into your heads and your hearts and he knows."

Maybe if I'd paid more attention to him I wouldn't be here now, thought Joel. Maybe I'd be a good man with a good life.

On a few Sundays a nun had come in place of the priest. She had been young, pretty and quiet. So shy she was unable to meet the eyes of the teenage boys.

One time she had told them about St Paul on the road to Damascus, the sign that had changed his life. Joel remembered her standing in that grotty dining room quietly preaching to them, even the boys who usually misbehaved sitting silently and watching her. Joel would have bet everything he had that they were all thinking the same thing as him. That they wished their lives could change like Paul's had.

And now in front of him Joel had a sign of his own. A big flashing neon sign that looked like it should be on the Las Vegas strip saying
: STOP! Don't do this anymore! Because it's going to take a miracle for you and the woman and the kid to all make it through the next five minutes alive and you, Joel, you don't deserve a fucking miracle.

This was it, he decided outside the not quite panic room. This was where his life had led him but he could chose to walk off the path he’d been on until now and make his own new one. His mind was made up, he was going, leaving
this life behind him. He would have turned and walked then and there if it hadn’t been for woman and child in the room.

So Joel
knew he couldn't have predicted what happened next but he supposed it shouldn't have been a surprise either.

He pushed open the door and saw the woman and child in there. They both stared out at him with a look of terror on their faces which made him feel sick.

The woman started screaming as soon as she saw them.

“What the fuck?” said Danny, looking at her and child
incredulously. “Where is he? Where the fuck is he?”

“Calm down, pal,” said Paterson and walked into the room, towards the woman and child. He had his hands held up in front of him, palms forward. Like
Jesus in one of the pictures the nun had brought with her when she visited.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Paterson started saying. At least that’s what Joel assumed he was going to say. He didn't get a chance to finish the sentence.

The sound of the gun in that small, hard room was deafening. It blotted out the woman's screaming and the boy's crying for a second. When it faded Joel could hear their cries again around the ringing in his ears. The acrid stink of spent gunpowder hit his nostrils, such an ugly burning smell. And beneath it the sour, coppery tang of blood.