Taking Pity (24 page)

Tonight, he extinguished a minor blaze. A man like him shouldn’t have had to deal with such little details, but he’d taken a personal interest in Roisin McAvoy and felt some degree of compulsion to see it through. He’d done the job as well as he could be expected to. Cut off the oxygen to the one problem that has been causing him disquiet. He’d enjoyed sending the text to Pharaoh. Enjoyed the clean precision of keeping his word and chopping the head off the snake that had been threatening to drag the Headhunters down. It’s all coming together. And he can’t help but feel pleased with himself.

Piers looks at the clock in the corner of the monitor. He should be in bed. Should be wearing his fine silk pajamas and sleeping in sheets of Egyptian cotton. Instead, he is sitting in the dining room of his sprawling home on Hull’s palatial Newland Park, drinking fifty-year-old Macallan and trying to develop a taste for Cuban cigars. He isn’t sure he will have much success with the latter. His mouth feels numb and tingly and his fingers smell like a damp ashtray. He fancies that he will stick to the vices he already knows. Will finish his drink, take a sleeping pill, and fall asleep looking at the little movie in his phone. It shows a tall, plain-faced detective constable pushing backward, naked and soaked with sweat, grinding against the toned body of a young man with an impassive face and immaculate tattoos. It is a film that represents victory. Ownership and power. He would have liked to have kept his word to Helen Tremberg and deleted the video when she did him a little favor a few months back. But the man in the video has gone from being an asset to a headache, and Piers enjoys watching him nude and vulnerable. It represents the situation the greedy bastard is about to find himself in. He wonders if Mahon would be willing to video his annihilation. It would be nice to watch the two clips side by side . . .

This is Piers’s little celebration. His toast to his own success. The house in Panama is bought and almost paid for. He needs to transfer another couple of million from his bank in Liechtenstein to the deeply private Panamanian account of the estate agency, but that is a mere formality. He has more money than he knows what to do with. It has been a good year. He had his doubts at first, of course. Didn’t know if he could pull it off. But the criminal anatomy is made up of brains, brawn, and balls, and Piers has two of those qualities in abundance. What he lacks in muscle he compensates for with an uncanny ability to persuade people to do what he wants. He is not a strong man. He’s short, overweight, and has only managed to disguise the burst capillaries and pockmarks in his face by growing a beard that seems to reach almost to his eyes. He is not an attractive man, but that will stop being a problem soon. He has enough money to buy whatever face he wants. He, and his partners, can stop this soon. Can stop pretending. Can stop putting on a show. His new associate has done what he was asked to do. The rotten apples who have been threatening his security have been pinpointed and will have been brought to heel before the day is over. Mahon has been a godsend. The Russians are good at what they do, of course. They’re blunt, brutal, and respect the chain of command. His employer had promised him as much when he first allayed his fears about his personal safety.

That’s the beauty,
his boss had said, soft and smooth and flawless.
Nobody knows who anybody is. They have their own teams, but under us. Under me. And they don’t know who I am. They respect the voice. The money. The results. It will work, Piers. It’s worked before. Back home. Back before . . .

The boss has never been proven wrong. The only slipups have been when the Headhunters have accidentally recruited somebody incompetent or psychopathic. Piers’s own crew is blessedly free of such idiosyncrasies. They do what they’re told. Pharaoh was no doubt trying it on when she said that Nikolai had lost Roisin. The lad is focused and resolute and will be calling Piers before the morning to get a new fix on her location. He’ll watch over her. Keep her safe. After all, a baited hook is no good if the worm wriggles free . . .

A shadow flickers across the computer screen, turning the blue ocean and perfect sky black.

Piers spins in his chair, sloshing whiskey on silk.

“I hear you’ve been trying to find me.”

Piers feels darkness creeping in. Feels his chest contract and the hairs rise on his skin.

“You’re in Hull, then,” says Piers, trying to keep his voice calm. “Excellent.”

He sniffs, hoping his nose won’t run. Gets a smell of rich aftershave. Of foreign cigarettes. Of sweat and body spray.

“Marvelous, yes. And can I say that it gratifies my heart to observe that you are in such prime physical condition . . .”

The man with the gun laughs. Shakes his head.

“Your fucking voice,” he says. “I hear it in my sleep. Sounds like there’s a dictionary half open in your head. Just stop talking. You can beg, of course. That’s always nice to hear. I thought you’d have a bit more about you, to be honest. Be a bit more of a looker. You’re a bit normal, aren’t you?”

Piers raises the crystal tumbler to his lips with a shaking hand. It had been so close to perfection. If he had just asked for a guard tonight. If he could just have kept himself safe and anonymous for another few hours, the man in front of him would be dead and Piers’s future would be rum and sunshine.

“You don’t have to do this. We’re doing so well. Everybody’s making money . . .”

The man scoffs. Scratches his head with the gun he holds in his right hand.

Piers drains his drink. Hopes the man doesn’t hear the glass rattling against his teeth.

“It was working,” snaps Piers. “Small teams. Big rewards. Nobody knowing who they represented, save their own team leader. It was perfect. You had to risk it. You had to try and take more than your share. Did we not treat you right? We paid you for every job you did. Look, I can help you. Your friend . . . up in Newcastle . . . he’s in danger . . .”

The man with the gun clamps his teeth together with a noise like snapping wood. Gives a terse shake of the head.

“You’re talking shit, Piers. You do it better than anybody else, but right now it’s staining your teeth. You promised me the earth and you gave me pennies. You made me charm the pants off that lass. You promised I’d get my time in the sun. I’m not rich enough. I’m here for the same reasons you are. I want money and I want respect. It’s time for you to go, mate. I don’t care who your boss is, though I have a bloody good idea. He can come after me if he wants, though I think it’s more likely he’ll see the benefits of putting things in my hands. You have to go. This is mine now. You can’t run a protection racket for criminals, Piers. You can’t run a recruitment firm for villains. It was never going to work.”

“But it has worked,” he says, turning desperately to the computer screen. “I’m just a bloke! A man at the end of the phone. And I have lifelong bloody criminals coughing up a fortune and trembling when they speak to me. Look at this house. How much do you think the boss is pocketing if I can buy a place like this? A year. Two years, tops. That was how long he said we had before people got wise. We’re making a fortune. Why do you have to spoil it all?”

The man says nothing. Blows out air through his nose.

“They’ll come for you,” says Piers, his voice growing high-pitched and excited. “You might have your own little team, but we’ve been doing this awhile. The boss’s boys will hunt you down. There’s a beast coming for you. A monster. He’s hurting your friend right now. Carving him up . . .”

“A monster? Do you mean the old bloke with the wrecked face? The one who works for the breathing corpse? Don’t you worry, Piers. We have plans for him. The copper, too. All of them. You’ve had a good run, Piers. But you can consider this the most hostile of takeovers.”

The man steps forward and hits Piers across the face with the barrel of the gun. Blood sprays across the computer screen; crimson droplets splattering over perfect blue waters and high, vaulted roofs.

“We’ve got a lot to talk about before the morning, Mr. Mouthpiece,” says the man. “And you know how you love to talk.”

Piers Fordham dies within the hour.

It’s the longest hour of his life.

P
RETTY
,
THINKS
R
AY
as he sits in his dark car and examines the impressive detached property across the quaint, curving street.
Pays well, being a cunt.

He shouldn’t be here. Should be back in his minging bed, having a tug beneath yellow-stained sheets in a room that smells of socks and spilled wine. Places like Newland Park make him feel like some vile and contagious specimen. Make him feel like shit on a shoe. He could never afford a house like this. Could never get a woman who could afford it, either.

Hull doesn’t have many luxurious neighborhoods. Newland Park is part of a truly exclusive club. Most of the people with money in East Yorkshire move out to the towns and villages. Hull itself is a virtual sink estate for a much larger region. Those who find themselves longing for an HU postcode fight long and hard to get a place on this quiet, tree-lined road, where Porsches and Land Rovers sleep behind wrought iron gates and workmen give well-tanned women the kind of gardens they can show off in one of the local glossy mags.

Piers Fordham’s house is an old-fashioned, three-story construction with big bay windows and a modern conservatory, facing a neat front garden that has been given over to tarmac and a few potted plants. The property is in darkness, save for a faint glow from a downstairs window.

Sleeping,
thinks Ray, grinding his back teeth.
Dozing on goose feathers, under cotton that feels like a virgin’s thighs
. He sniffs deeply and spits out the open window.

It is still an hour until dawn. He parted company with Helen Tremberg a couple of hours ago. Dropped her back at the train station without a good-bye and went for a couple of shorts in one of the pubs he can rely on for an after-hours drinking session. He’s pissed now. Soaked through with alcohol and sodden from the tumble he took as he staggered from the watering hole and toppled into one of the larger puddles in the curb off Spring Bank.

“Smarmy fucker,” he says under his breath as he opens the car door and feels the light rain on his red face. “Tolerate me, will you? Fucking tolerate me?”

Ray lays his face on the cold, damp metal of the car roof. His argument with Archer has hurt him in a way he cannot really explain. He supposes he just wanted more from her. Some thanks. Some praise. Some words of wonder at his abilities as a detective. He doesn’t give a shit about what most people think of him, but Archer’s opinion matters, and as he stood on her doorstep and kept her from her new man, he had felt like he was an embarrassment to her. He doesn’t know how to deal with his feelings. He wants to lash out. Wants to hurt someone. And the only person he can picture on the receiving end of his fists is Piers Fordham.

“Dead man. Fucking dead . . .”

He staggers across the street. Leans against the green-painted lamppost until the world stops spinning and he breathes in the damp air, scented with wet grass, turned earth, and fresh herbs in a myriad of window boxes.

Ray doesn’t know what he intends to do. He fancies it will involve violence of some sort but he is more likely to simply stick his dick through the bastard’s letter box and piss all over his hallway carpet.

He staggers up the driveway. Thuds against the front door and slides down the wood. He rests his head against the glass of the bay window. Wonders if it would be a bad idea to fall asleep.

A moment later, Ray opens his eyes with a start. He feels dull-headed and fuzzy. Feels dry-mouthed and bruised, as though he has been put in a sack and hit with a rubber hose. He blinks, hard, and focuses on the warm, low light that shines from the downstairs window. He presses his face against the glass. Focuses a little. Lets the light and the dark swim and mesh together until he can make sense of what he sees.

Piers Fordham is lying on his back on the tiled floor of an L-shaped kitchen. In this light, it’s hard to tell how much of his face is beard and how much is thick black blood.

Ray sobers up instantly. Opens his mouth wide and feels his jawbone crack as he takes a deep breath of cold air.

The front door doesn’t give as he puts his boot to it. He has to pick up a brick from the loose slabs of the doorway. He smashes it against the brass handle of the front door, then hoofs it again, putting his weight behind it. The door bursts open and Ray stumbles into the hallway. In half a dozen steps he is into the kitchen.

Piers is still breathing. His chest is rising and falling like that of a sleeping dog. But each breath produces a fresh spray of warm, crimson blood, which settles on his face in a mist.

“Fordham,” says Ray, crossing to his side and squatting down beside him. “Fordham, can you hear me? Fordham? Who did this, mate? Who did this?”

For months Colin Ray has wanted to stand over the fallen, bleeding body of this man. For months he has fantasized about finding him and taking his revenge. Here, now, he cannot think of the dying man on the floor as anything other than a victim needing help. There will be time for questions and justice later. For now, he simply needs this man to live.

“Piers. Piers, mate, can you hear me? Can you hear me, son?”

Ray turns away from the broken face of the man who has taunted and tantalized the police for a year. He pulls his phone from his pocket and dials the first 9 of the three digits that could save Fordham’s life.

He feels a sudden pressure at his sleeve.

“Please,” says Fordham through broken teeth and fading eyes. “Please . . .”

Ray closes the phone and sits down next to Fordham. He leans forward to hear what the man is saying. Smells blood and filth and floor polish. Something else, too. Around his throat. Where a forearm has been pushed up into his beard. That familiar, pungent perfume. That stench . . .

“Clever fucker,” says Ray, and puts his face in Fordham’s.

The man is close to death. Whoever did this to him left him to choke on his own blood. Beat him within an inch of his life, then asked him to crawl the rest of the way.

“Shaz,” says Ray under his breath. “You silly bitch.”

Fordham’s eyes lose focus. He coughs and a stream of blood and mucus splatters the front of Ray’s shirt. “Shouldn’t . . . Should never . . . wouldn’t listen . . .”

Ray nods. Takes Fordham’s hand and holds it as his breathing slows and the light in his eyes begins to wink out.

“Panama,” he says, his voice a hiss. “Just . . . jus’ tryin’ to make a living . . .”

“What did he get from you?” asks Ray, holding the man’s hand as the warmth leaches from it. “Why does he want McAvoy’s wife? Why were you there, in Sheffield?”

Fordham seems to shrink. He becomes smaller, as if squeezed in a fist. “The Scotsman. Wants to hurt him . . . for what he did . . .”

“And the Russian?”

“Protection . . .”

“And where’s yours, Piers? Where’s your protection?”

Fordham seems to be trying to speak. Seems to be trying to move. His head lolls and one hand weakly flails to his left, as though swatting at a fly.

Piers Fordham takes a last breath.

Dies.

For a minute, Ray does nothing but sit and think, rubbing a thumb at the blood on his shirt. Then he follows the line of Fordham’s dead eyes. Follows the line of his outstretched hand.

The sirens are drawing closer by the time Ray has prized up the floorboard. He shines his phone into the darkness. Gives a humorless laugh as he spots dozens of mobile phones; all without batteries and memory cards, sitting on a pile of ledgers and polythene bags full of memory cards.

He reaches in. Presses the floorboard down again. Hammers in a nail with the flat of his hand.

Slips out the front door and is back in his car before the blue light of the police car rounds the corner and causes curtains to twitch in this most palatial of neighborhoods.

Two lads jump from the car as it screeches to a halt. A neighbor, illuminated by yellow light and framed in his doorway, points to the property where he heard the bang.

In the darkness of the car, Ray clumsily slots in the battery and memory card from the phone he had managed to grab. After a few seconds, the screen is illuminated. He starts to scroll through messages. Names. Contacts . . .

Mutters to himself through a grimace.

“Oh, Colin, they’re gonna welcome you back with open arms. You could have had all the glory, Shaz. Could have shared—”

He freezes where he sits. Lets his thoughts dwell for a fraction of a second on his only friend.

Ray knows he won’t sleep until he answers. Knows, too, that the slick, perfumed bastard will be long gone.

Ray stays in his car until the first of the CID men start to arrive. He could step out and join them. Could come clean. Say he had been following a lead and found the bugger dead. Instead, he eases the car from its parking space and moves away before any of the uniforms can take down the plate.

Two words beating in his head.

Shaz.

Bitch.