Talking to the Dead (39 page)

I’m relieved to see just the one car. Two would have scared me, but it’s just the one.

But then I see something that I don’t like at all.

Along the coast, maybe four hundred yards along, there’s a boat moored offshore. A blue boat with a dirty white stripe along the side. Martyn Roberts’s boat, if the image on his website is to be trusted.

Martyn Roberts, the only charter-boat captain in South Wales who didn’t want me to check his sailing log. Martyn Roberts, who hung up on me when I was at Rattigan Transport, making inquiries. Martyn Roberts, the ex-con.

As I watch, a rubber dinghy chugs out from the shore. It’s hard to tell from this distance, but it looks like there are three figures onboard. Hard to tell, but I’d say that two of them were male, one female.

I suddenly feel unprepared. An amateur.

I feel the way I feel when I’ve seen Lev fight for real. Still practice fights—I’ve never seen him try to hurt anyone—but fights where he’s up against someone with almost his own level of training and ability. I realize, when I watch those things, that I’m a million miles from being ready for serious conflict. I realize how vulnerable I truly am.

I should have brought binoculars. I should have been here two or three hours ago. I should have come with Penry, or Lev, or Brydon, or all three of them.

I should have forced a meeting with D.C.I. Jackson and insisted on his sending a full armed response unit to the scene and threatened to resign if he refused.

I could do that even now. Call Jackson, tell him where I am, tell him what I think is going on. Tell him that I need helicopters and divers and marksmen and vehicles here ASAP. But those things can’t be here ASAP. All that’s here is me and no time to lose.

I take the gun out of my pocket and start running.

Running fast through the sheep field. Then there’s another field—a long slope of cropped grass and lichened limestone—running down to the sea’s edge and the lighthouse. The windows are angled away from my direction of approach. The door opens right onto it. I need to hope the door doesn’t open. I need to hope no one walks around the side of the building.

Fifty yards from the lighthouse, I stop. Heart yammering, blood racing.

This is it. What Lev prepared me for.

You never get a fight where or when you want it. You never get the fight you prepared for. You only ever get the fight when it reaches out for you. And that moment is now. Battle music.

I let my pulse rate slow, then scale the locked gate and walk resolutely toward the lighthouse door. I keep my eyes on the door. Every five paces, I sweep my gaze round everything else. The dinghy has reached the boat. There is nothing stirring in the car park. There’s a little shack housing a woodpile and some basic tools. There is no one moving to either side or behind me. The sun and the sea are my only audience. Seagulls yell their disapproval.

I get to the base of the stone steps.

I can’t tell if the door is locked.

There is no sound from anywhere, except sea, sky, and gulls.

If the door is locked, I’ll shoot the lock out. If the door is unlocked, I’ll sweep it open with my left hand and have my gun up and ready in my right. I visualize both motions, then ascend the steps.

I’m there in an instant. Time seems to be moving in jerks. Quantum jumps from one state to another, no smooth passage in between. I’m at the door. Ready. Go.

My left hand tries the catch. It’s free. Sweep the door open. Gun up and ready to fire. Heart in my mouth isn’t quite accurate. Heart somewhere through the top of my head and thumping around in the ceiling joists.

But there’s no threat inside the room.

Just carnage.

Huw Fletcher is there all right. The man I wanted to catch. Alive and catchable.

He’s not going to offer much resistance either. Not the way he is now. Poor old Fletcher is in a state of disassembly. He lies against the wall, mute, unmoving, eyes staring through me and beyond into the ruins of his future. On the floor next to him lie the fingers of his right hand. His ears. His tongue. And, grotesquely, his scrotum, looking like the scraps that butchers feed their dogs. Blood leaks from between his legs, from his mouth, arm, and the side of his head. He’s alive, but the loss of blood may yet collect his soul.

I don’t feel sorry for him. Instead, I feel a fierce rage, made fiercer by coming face-to-face with its target. These are strong feelings, but they are mine and they are human. They belong to me and I am not afraid.

I say nothing to Fletcher. I do nothing to help him. I care about him not at all.

Stepping round the pools and splashes of his blood, careful not to make a footprint, I make for the flight of steps heading down to the cellar.

I have my gun in a double grip now, but it has become part of me. An instinct. A single being. I am Lev and my name is vengeance. What lies below me is worse, I know it, than anything that lies bleeding above. I kick open the cellar door and sweep the room through the sights of my gun.

I have found what I came for.

44

And what I find is horror. A horror beyond description. A horror which I know, even before my gunsight has finished sweeping the room, will last the rest of my days. Time’s ruinous fingers may one day muddle and obscure this moment, but what has been done here can never be set to rights, can never be undone.

What I see is four women. They are naked, except for long T-shirts, white once but grubby now. Each of the women is chained by her ankle to an hoop set into the wall. The floor is covered in straw. Lots of it, like in a freshly prepared cow barn. A bucket full of shit and piss steams in the corner under a single tiny window. The women are dirty. Their hair is rank and snarled. They’re all too thin. All bruised, some nastily. They’ve got the staring eyes of people who are shocked beyond shock, and steaming high on heroin to boot. There are ten iron hoops altogether. Six of them lie empty.

I take all this in and, in a movement as natural and spontaneous as drawing breath, I vomit. A single reflexive gag that splatters into the straw at my feet. Just one. Time is moving ahead again with its jerky quantum beat, and the reflex that made me retch is already jerking away from me into the past.

So it’s to be like this, is it? I’ve got to deal not just with Fletcher but with all Sikorsky’s ugly buddies too. So be it. Fuck ‘em all, every one. It is what it is and I am ready. I just hope Roberts’s shitty little trawler isn’t yet full. If it is, then I’ll hate myself forever for arriving too late.

It’s one of those situations, one of those blessed situations, where for once my instincts move faster and more wisely than my brain.

Before I know it, I’m signaling
shush
to the women—I doubt if any of them speak much English—and ripping my clothes off as fast as I can, hurling them into the angle of the cellar door, where they can’t be seen from the stairs. There’s a stack of more filthy white T-shirts in the corner of the room, piled on top of some Army surplus gray blankets. I grab one of the T-shirts and put it on. I hate the feel of it, the way it makes a slave of me, but in this place slaves are invisible, and invisibility is my friend.

I frisk my own clothes to grab ammo from my jacket pocket, then decide I need my boots, and put them on again. There are only ten bullets in my gun. If it comes to unarmed combat, I’ll be more effective if I can kick. Kneecaps, testicles, windpipes.

I make for the far corner of the room. There’s a single bulb in the center of the ceiling, but it doesn’t cast much light in my corner. I lie down, covering my booted feet with a blanket.

I make the
shush
signal hard and aggressively to the women, two of whom have started talking fast in what I think might be Romanian. They don’t stop talking, but then I aim my gun at their heads and they do. They are still all staring at me, and I try to gesture at them to look away. I’m only half successful, but half is better than not at all.

I lie there, in the straw, in the fuck pit created by Brendan Rattigan.

A place for him to bring girls from Eastern Europe. A place to get them high on heroin, to rape them, abuse them, half-starve them, knock them around, until they dropped dead or until he decided he wanted a fresh supply. Rattigan and whichever of his buddies happened to amuse themselves the same way. Rattigan and his rich little fuck buddies. Fuck buddies who pay 10 percent income tax, because they’ve got the same lawyers as he had.

I don’t know if Fletcher shared these tastes, or if he was just happy to be Rattigan’s fixer, the guy who made it all happen. I’m guessing a bit of both, but Fletcher was only ever really the ops man. The guy who got the girls onto the ships, then off again. A shipping guy. The logistics man.

Then Rattigan drops into the sea. Properly dead. No messing around. Just a regular plane crash. Stupid sod probably too vain to put on a life jacket, too arrogant to take orders from his pilot. And, with the boss’s body still bouncing around the floor of the Severn Estuary, the idiot Fletcher, a pygmy who mistook himself for a giant, decided to go it alone. Presumably there were clients that Rattigan chose to bill. Perhaps they chose to pay. Perhaps Fletcher thought this was a business venture he could expand.

A mistake. The worst of his life—a mistake which has currently cost him his ears, tongue, testicles, and fingers, not to mention the blood blackening the floorboards upstairs. Did Fletcher decide to keep the boss’s name? Rattigan’s name? Quite possibly. Ioana Balcescu reacted to Rattigan’s name as though he were alive. Perhaps Fletcher pretended that the boss had faked his own death, was still alive and still operating. Or maybe Balcescu was just behind the times. Either way, her reaction was one of the clues that led me to this place.

Anyway, for a while, Fletcher made some money. The business worked. But if you want to play hardball with the gangsters of Kaliningrad, you’ve got to be as tough and as hard and as ruthless as them. Rattigan was. He had the cash. More than that, he had the ability, the charisma, the swaggering drive, the aggression. And Fletcher was a pygmy waddling around in the clothes of a giant. Before too long, he tripped over his own hem, and his nice Russian friends took advantage. Probably they didn’t like someone making a fool of them. More than likely, they thought if Fletcher had an operation that was making money for him, it would make even more money for them. They decided to march in, take over Fletcher’s turf, tighten up.

Janet Mancini was the first victim. That debit card of Rattigan’s. Once upon a time, he screwed her, told her more than he should have but let her live. Janet, foolish girl, said more than she should have—to her friend, Stacey Edwards, I’d guess—and word got back to the lads from Russia. She heard a rumor that she was in danger. Escaped to her squat, but she needed to be on a different continent. A different street wouldn’t do. The people hunting her tracked her down and killed her. April too, for no reason beyond ensuring that her little six-year-old mouth kept its silence. No doubt Sikorsky was their killer, but he was just a hired man, small fry. The Mancini case, for me, was never about Sikorsky.

The same thing with Stacey Edwards. She talked too much. Threw accusations around. Made a noise. Sikorsky visited her too. Killed her in a way that sent a signal. The sort of signal that the Russian boys are so good at sending. Silence, or else.

All this I’d pretty much worked out. Speculation, most of it, as D.C.I. Jackson would certainly have told me, but you can’t always reach the truth—certainly no interesting truth—without a little wild surmise along the way. Perhaps the exact story will prove to be a little different in minor respects, but I’d bet my life that I’ve got the gist right. More than likely, the full details will never emerge. They usually don’t.

But I hadn’t reckoned on this particular endgame. It hadn’t occurred to me that the Russian cleanup would extend out here. I hadn’t guessed they might be this effective and this ruthless. I hadn’t thought laterally enough, because I thought the pygmy Fletcher would represent my only opposition.

More fool me. But you live and learn, as my granny would say. Of course it might be die and learn in this particular instance, but there are worse things than being dead, as I know better than most.

I wriggle down into the straw. I feel the prickle of its sharp ends through my T-shirt. Straw against my breasts and thighs and belly. You couldn’t live for long like this and not become half beast. Kept alive so a bunch of rich guys could fuck you, then beat you, then dump your body out at sea when they were done. It would be hard to stay human, living like that, dying like that.

The room is silent now. The two Romanians have ceased their chatter.

The gulls outside are inaudible here. There’s just the tick of straw settling down and possibly, unless it’s my imagination, the drip of Fletcher’s blood from upstairs.

I remember the targets at the firing range. Black and white. Black to congratulate you for a chest shot. White to mark you down for a shot anywhere else. I visualize my targets. Imagine their dark black centers. Bring to mind all the bull’s-eyes I scored, at longer range and in worse light conditions, that night in Llangattock.

Once again, I am ready. I am perfectly still and perfectly ready.

45

It takes longer than I think. Longer than I want. Perhaps my perceptions of time are altered. Perhaps the Russians are taking their boat out into the Irish Sea before coming back here. Or perhaps something else. Maybe something obvious, like stopping for tea or having a bite to eat. Must take it out of you, after all, slicing Fletcher’s body parts off, hauling women off to Roberts’s handy little motorboat. A comrade must want a bite to eat after all that work. Black tea and jam.

I don’t know how long it is, but I’d guess an hour, then I hear boots on the steps outside, the door opening and voices.

Voices and laughter. I don’t recognize the words, but I guess from the tone that they’re talking to Fletcher. Laughing at him.

I hope so. I hope Fletcher is still alive. I want him alive, and mute, and crippled, and behind bars for the rest of a very long life. He deserves no mercy.