Read One Night Online

Authors: Oliver Clarke

One Night (29 page)

BOOK: One Night
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Chapter Sixty Three

 

Joel stopped and grabbed the railing, he’d made it. Got to where he needed to be. Staring back down the pier, he could see the town waking up, the traffic increasing on the coastal road. People driving to work, going about their lives. Adventure Island sat at the other end of the pier. The rides were dark and still. Lifeless compared to the growing activity in the town. He thought of Eve, of the feel and the smell of her and of what she did to his heart. He knew he had to make this work, this plan, so he could see her again.

He could see the men running towards him as well. They weren’t far away now and they slowed the closer they got to him. One at the front raised a gun and pointed it at him.

Joel kept still, his back against the railing, the cold sea behind him. The rhythmic sounds of the waves was almost calming. He waited.

The end of the pier was home to one of Southend’s two lifeboat stations. The other inland and housing a hovercraft that was used for rescues on the mudflats that lined the coast. Joel stood now outside the end of the pier station. This was where he had come earlier with Eve. Their plan had seemed plausible at the time, like it might actually work. Hearing the crash of the waves behind him he began to wonder. He had no choice though. He hadn’t then and he didn’t now. It was this or nothing.

He counted eight men walking towards him, four close by, maybe ten feet from him. The other four were further back, one of them had bandages covering the side of his face. Joel stared at him. It couldn’t be, could it?

The closest four stopped and stood watching him, the one with the gun up kept it levelled at him. The other armed man held his weapon down by his thigh. Not aimed but ready. His eyes were fixed on Joel.

Joel ignored them, stared past at the other four walking up behind. His eyes focussed on the bandaged man and the closer he got the surer he was. It was Danny. Danny who he’d trusted. Danny who he’d seen shot in the face and had left for dead in the panic room. The man next to him was familiar too. His presence was almost as surprising as Danny’s. It was Fuller, the planner. What the hell was he doing here?

No one said anything until all eight of the men were in front of him. They stood six feet away in a loose semi-circle around him. There was nowhere for him to run now, not that he had the energy for it. Now that he’d stopped he was more tired than ever.

Danny spoke first, he couldn’t work his mouth properly, either because of his wound or the bandage, but Joel could still understand.

“Hello Joel, nice to see you.” His eyes were glittering. “That was a classy move the other day, leaving me to die. Lucky for me the bullet passed right through. I’m going to have a nasty scar but I guess if you can live with one so can I. Not that you’re going to have to live with yours for much longer because I owe you now. I really do.”

Joel didn’t say anything, there was no point. He could think of a hundred responses but he didn’t have anything to say to Danny any more.

“Enough chit chat,” said Fuller. “You two have caused me enough pain the last two days.”

Joel looked at him surprised. Fuller sounded different from any time he had spoken to him before. Confident. In charge.

Fuller saw the look and laughed. “You still think I’m just the planner? We weren’t working together Joel, you were working for me. I’m like the reverse Wizard of Oz, everyone thinks I’m this meek little guy bent over his plans but really I’m great and powerful. I’ll be honest I was disappointed, Joel. I had big plans for you. Big plans. But you had to play the good guy. There’s no room for good guys anymore. Hasn’t your life taught you that?”

Joel was about to respond but Fuller dismissed him with a wave. “Enough talk. Where’s my money?” 

“I don’t have it, Harry took it. I’m lucky he didn’t kill me. He went crazy, beat the shit out of niece and her mother and ran.” He pointed at Paulie, “You were there, you saw what he did.”

Fuller turned to Paulie, “What did you see?”

Paulie shrugged. When he spoke his voice came out as a rasping whisper and Joel saw now the blood stained bandage wrapped around his damaged throat.

“I saw Harry lose it before this prick choked me. When I came round it was just the two women there. Harry’s car was gone. The money was gone. Then I got the text and I came here.”

“Show it to me,” said Fuller. “The text.” Paulie passed his phone over and Fuller stared at it. Joel could see he was thinking, putting the pieces together in his head. He turned to the man next to him. “I bet you got it too didn’t you? A text from Harry.”

“Yeah,” the man pointed at Joel. “It said he’d taken the van and headed this way. That’s how I knew where he was when you rang.”

Fuller threw back his head and let out a short sharp laugh. “Who’d have thought it,” he said. “That a small timer like Harry could pull off something like this.”

“I don’t get it,” said Danny. “Where’s the money?”

“Fuck knows,” said Fuller. “Long gone. Harry’s driven off with it while we’ve been chasing after Joel here. You know, I almost admire him for it.”

“It’s gone?” said Danny. “It can’t be gone. It can’t be.”

Joel thought back to what Danny had told him and knew that he was picturing his life without his family in it. He could almost hear the man’s heart breaking.

“It’s all your fucking fault,” Danny shouted and suddenly he was running at Joel. “Why did you have to take it you little prick? You’ve ruined everything.”

Danny’s right arm was in a splint but his left was working fine. Joel got his arms up in time to block the first of Danny’s punches but not the second. Danny dodged it round Joel’s raised forearm and slammed it into his already bruised cheek. The pain shot through Joel’s head and rocked him back against the railing. Danny came at him again, his bandaged right forearm up and slamming into Joel’s throat. Joel felt the hard plastic splint push into the flesh, squashing it, closing his airways. He got his foot onto the lowest of the railings, lifted himself up and away from Danny, trying to lessen pressure and suck in a breath.

Joel could see Fuller over Danny’s shoulder. The man was watching impassively, not caring if Joel lived or died. He had his phone out and was talking to someone.

Danny punched Joel again, rocking him. The top railing was against his buttocks and he realised that he was going to overbalance a split second before it happened.

You’re my twenty one, Eve, he thought and then he was falling. Tumbling through the air to the surface of the waves. The frigid water of the North Sea enveloped him, blotting out all of his senses. His nostrils and mouth filled with it, his eyes blurred a
s the salt water covered them. His ears were suddenly full only of the sound of the water and his beating heart. Every inch of his flesh was prickling from the shock of the cold.

 

Fuller walked to the railing and looked down at the churning water with Danny by his side. All that was left of Joel was a few extra ripples in the water but soon they faded too. He kept watching, waiting for the body to surface, needing to know for sure that Joel was dead. How long did it take a man to drown? Two minutes? Three? He finished his phone call and hung up. He had set the hounds running. Got the message out that whoever found him and the money would be very generously reward. He waited and watched the water, the rising sun in his face shining off the peaks of the waves and dazzling him. Finally it bobbed to the surface twenty feet or so from the pier. A dark silhouette, a shape that had once been a man floating out to sea.

 

Chapter Sixty Four

 

The phone call came a month later. For weeks every time it rang she hoped it would be him and this time it was.

“Hello, Eve,” he said and the sound of his voice made her cry. It was the first time she’d heard it since she’d left him at the van but she’d carried it in her head and the reality of it matched her memory perfectly.

He’d called her three hours after he’d fallen from the pier. Just three rings on her home phone from a payphone to let her know he was still alive and then nothing. That was what they had agreed. That any contact beyond that would risk everything.

The enforced separation had been one of the hardest things she’d ever done. Almost as hard as letting him go and knowing he might die. Every morning she’d woken with the memory of his face and his touch and the fear that he mi
ght not call on the agreed day; that he might vanish from her life as completely as he had from the world.

“It worked then,” she said. “You’re a lucky bugger, Joel Matheson, you know that don’t you.”

“I know,” he said.

She remembered the hour after Harry’s death. The frantic planning and then the flurry of activity to make it work. Joel climbing down onto the iron frame that supported the pier. Eve lowering Harry’s corpse down to him using the rope and winch at the lifeboat station, then leaning over the side to watch him secure it to the base of the pier’s iron legs just below the waterline so that he could release it for his pursuers to see. He’d refused to use the rope to haul himself back up again, insisting instead on climbing the metal framework to prove to both of them that he’d be able to do it again later.

When he’d left her he had looked so exhausted, so frail, that she didn’t see how he would have the strength to manage it. The fall from the pier, the desperate underwater swim to the safety underneath the structure, and then the climb back up once the other men had left. But he had.

“Are you coming then?” he said.

She laughed, the tears had stopped now and she was so full of happiness that she thought she might burst with it.

“Of course I am, packed and ready, I was just waiting for you to call and say go.”

“I love you, Eve,” he said. “Sago.”

 

THE END

BOOK: One Night
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