To Die For (5 page)

I put the travelling bag by the front door and looked around the flat. It was no bother to dump my old life. There was no point wiping the place down. I could spend hours trying to clear all traces that I’d lived there and still miss something. Besides, they’d still get my DNA. No, I had to go, leave it all behind. The flat was under a false name, anyway. I hadn’t used my real name since I’d left the Paras. So long as I didn’t get caught, I’d be okay. I’d have to lie low, though, go to ground for a while. I needed a new car. If, as I thought, these were Cole’s men, my car would soon be known.

Back in the kitchen, I checked through the dead man’s pockets. I pulled out £500 in new fifty-pound notes and £100 in used twenties, a key ring with various keys, including one for a car, and a bank card in the name of Brian Dirkin. I took the money and the keys. I considered taking whatever vehicle this Dirkin had used, but that would be as hot as mine once his body was discovered, and from the look on Akram’s grandmother’s face, that wouldn’t be long.

The boy out in the hallway hadn’t moved. I stood and looked at him for a moment. He had a black tribal tattoo on his upper right arm. Something tweaked at the back of my mind and I felt as though a far-off part of me was crying out a warning. It was like a horror lurking.

I crouched down and searched his pockets. There was a condom, a penknife and, as with Dirkin, £500 in fifty-pound notes and £100 in twenties. There was something strange about that. I looked at both bundles of fifties and checked the serial numbers. They were sequential. It looked like someone had paid these men a grand to do this job on me.

I wondered how far they were supposed to take it. Had they been paid to kill me? A thousand didn’t seem much for that kind of thing. And baseball bats weren’t the best choice of weapon. No, they’d been paid to beat me badly. But then, Simpson had been beaten to death. And maybe the £500 each was a down payment. It was strange, though, for Cole to do it like this. He had men on his payroll, he wouldn’t need to employ a couple of outsiders, and amateurs at that.

I heard a rasping sound and froze. The boy was trying to breathe. I watched him for a while, then went into the living room, where I pulled the skirting board away from the wall and reached into the recess behind. I had a driving licence and a British passport made out in a new name. The passport was okay as long as I didn’t try to leave the country, but the driving licence was one of those old paper ones. I wasn’t sure if they were still valid. I grabbed my large overcoat and a balaclava from a hook in the hall.

It was then that I saw the canvas bag. It was the kind that athletes carry with them. I opened it up. It was empty. Two men wouldn’t bring an empty bag to my flat. Either they were going to take something or they’d left something. I went back to the boy in the hallway. His eyes were open now. They rolled around and looked up. He jerked back and that made him cry out.

‘Who sent you?’ I said.

‘Can’t move my leg.’ He started crying. His lips quivered; snot dripped from his nose. ‘Help me.’

‘Who sent you?’

‘I don’t know. Brian knows him.’

His eyelids flickered and fell. I checked his neck for a pulse. It was there, but weak. I slapped him a couple of times to bring him round. After a while, his eyes opened. When he saw me, he panicked and a spasm jolted him. But he couldn’t move.

‘Don’t...’ he said, his voice breaking.

‘What was in the bag?’

The boy mouthed the word before finding a voice.

‘Money.’

‘What money? Why?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Bath – ’

‘Bathroom?’

He tried to nod and grimaced in pain.

I went into the bathroom. I looked in the cabinet and around the sink. I opened up the cistern and there it was: a clear plastic bag with tape around it. I pulled the bag out and ripped it open. Water poured over the floor and bundles of rolled fifty- and twenty-pound notes fell out. Each roll was £1,000 thick. All the notes looked new. I counted the rolls. There were twenty-four of them. I thought about that and realized that the £1,000 I’d taken from the two men had come from this pile. Likely, they’d been paid £100 each and had then decided to steal £1,000 and split it. So, they weren’t paid to do me any kind of harm, they had been paid to plant the money. The baseball bats could have been for protection. They’d probably thought of that themselves. When I’d come back, they’d panicked. There was no way out of the flat except through the front door. They must’ve thought they’d beat me and leg it. It was guesswork, but it did fit. I decided to keep the notes for the time being. They were evidence that I’d been in on the casino job, but then, if I was caught, they’d hang me for more than robbery.

I stopped short. How had they got in? The lock hadn’t been forced and they couldn’t have entered through the window without a ladder and ropes, and even then they would’ve had to break the window, which they hadn’t. And I hadn’t found any picking tools. I took Dirkin’s keys from his pocket and compared them with my own. One of the keys matched: same cut, same dull khaki colour, same company.

I glanced at the boy as I went out. His eyes were open, but not focused. His breathing was short and rapid.

Akram was alone in his shop. He stood behind the counter with a ledger book and calculator in front of him, a look of concentration on his face. There was a faint smell of spicy food, but the smell was stale. There was no sound of music. Akram looked up at the sound of the door opening.

‘Hello, my friend,’ he called out. He held a hand up briefly and smiled. ‘What can I do for you? You need a phonecard?’

I stood for a moment, scanned the place. Pain pulsed from the base of my skull through to my forehead. I tried to push it away. I needed to think.

In the far corner of the shop, near the bead curtain, the lower magazine shelf was missing. The magazines had been stacked in a pile, but the top few had fallen off. Akram’s smile faded as he watched me approach. He looked back at his ledger book, ran a dirty finger down a column and punched some numbers into the calculator.

‘What happened to the shelf?’

He shrugged, keeping his eyes on the book.

‘Kids,’ he said. ‘They play around.’

‘Where’s your wife?’

‘My wife? She’s ill.’

‘What’s wrong with her?’

He looked up then, his finger on the ledger still.

‘Ill.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I said. ‘Tell me about your grandmother.’

‘My grandmother?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about her?’

‘She was in here Tuesday. She was upset.’

‘She’s always upset.’

‘She was telling you about some men who tried to break in, wasn’t she?’

‘Did she tell you that? She’s old, a bit crazy. She thinks everyone here is trying to rape her.’

‘Your wife’s ill, your grandmother’s crazy and your shop is vandalized by kids. Bad week, huh?’

He tried to smile. He couldn’t quite make it.

‘Is there anything you want, please?’ he said. ‘I’m busy.’

‘Did they have a key?’

‘What?’

‘When they went into my old flat, where your grandmother now lives. Did they have a key?’

‘She gets confused. I told her: no one has a key. You gave yours back.’

‘So she said they had a key, then?’

Akram looked flustered now. He ran a hand over his thick beard and glanced at the bead curtain.

‘How many keys are there for my new place?’ I said.

‘I have one. You have one.’

My head throbbed heavily and my right arm ached and felt like a dead weight. I didn’t want Akram to see that my arm was almost paralysed. I didn’t want Akram to see the pain I was in. I held my left hand out.

‘Let me see yours,’ I said.

‘What?’

I had to stay patient. I needed Akram to keep calm. Another time and I’d have torn his fucking, sweating head off.

‘The key you have to my place,’ I said. ‘Show it to me.’

‘What do you want it for?’

‘Give it to me, or I’ll come over there and take it.’

He hesitated, looking at me. His mouth hung open and he started to say something and stopped. He patted his pockets and looked inside a drawer.

‘I don’t have it on me,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come back, huh?’

‘They came in here,’ I said. ‘Two of them.’

‘What?’

‘They threatened you? Beat you?’

‘I don’t – ’

‘I haven’t got time for this bollocks. They came in here, right? Two men. One young, big, shaved head. The other older, smaller.’

He took a step back and slumped on to his stool. He was no hard man. His shoulders sagged. He looked at the missing shelf. He reached behind him and took a packet of cigarettes from the display, unwrapped it, pulled one out and lit it.

‘They beat my wife. With bats.’

‘Baseball bats?’

‘They smashed up my shop.’ He took a drag on his cigarette. ‘They’re bastards,’ he said. ‘I should have tried to stop them.’

‘Then they would have hurt you badly.’

‘But they wouldn’t have hurt my wife. She has got two broken ribs.’ He held up two fingers, a rush of anger forcing him from his stool. The anger shrivelled and he slumped back again. ‘Broken ribs. They said if I told you or the police they’d come back and beat my grandmother.’

‘They won’t come back.’

‘How do you know that? You can’t know.’

‘They won’t come back.’

He looked at me steadily.

‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘I believe you.’

‘Your grandmother?’ I said.

‘She didn’t want to come here,’ Akram was saying. ‘She said London was dangerous, gangs shooting each other. I told her it was safe.’

‘They used a key to get into her place, my old flat.’

‘Yes. She screamed at them and they ran. She kept telling me strange men had come into her flat. She’s old. I thought she must be crazy.’

‘And when they came in here, they wanted the key to my new place?’

‘Yes.’

‘What time?’

‘This evening.’

‘What time?’

‘What does it matter?’

‘What fucking time?’

Kendall’s wife was unconscious. Her jawbone jutted out, pushing into her cheek. I thought she might have a fractured skull too. There was a mess underneath her head. Kendall didn’t care about his wife just then – he had problems of his own. He was on his hands and knees spitting blood and teeth and trying to speak, trying to push words through a broken mouth, trying to tell me not to hurt him any more.

‘Please,’ he managed to say.

I lifted him up off the floor and threw him into the drinks cabinet. Glass and wood erupted.

I was sweating, snarling, my teeth bared. I hardly noticed the aching in my arm now, with the adrenalin pumping through me. I couldn’t understand it. I was shaking. I did this sort of thing all the time. I never lost it, like some. That was why people used me. I didn’t go manic. Now I was standing in the middle of Kendall’s living room and the place looked like Armageddon. Kendall’s wife still hadn’t moved, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that I needed Kendall conscious and talking, and if I wasn’t careful, I might kill the fucker.

There were suitcases lined up by the door. If I’d got there a few minutes later, Kendall and his wife would’ve gone.

I couldn’t think straight. Christ, the pain in my head was endless. It thrummed. It was like someone pumping molten lead into my skull. Lights danced before my eyes.

He moved, crawled from the wreckage of the cabinet. I stood above him, put my foot on his back and pushed him down.

‘You set me up.’

‘No,’ he said into the shag carpet.

‘You waited until I was out of the flat – at the Roxie, with you – and you called your boys and told them to go plant the money on me.’

‘Joe, please.’

‘They were too slow, and greedy.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Dirkin. I found him. I killed him. He’d gone to Akram and beaten his wife, taken the key to my flat.’

‘Please, Joe.’

I was soaked in sweat and each time the pain, in spasms, reached through me, more cold sweat broke out.

‘But you fucked up, Kendall. They tried before but you didn’t know I’d moved, did you? You sent them to the wrong flat.’

I put more weight on him, pressing him down into the carpet.

‘I can’t... breathe.’

‘You and Beckett were going to feed me to Cole. That it? That’s why I was on the job, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Get me on the job, keep me out of the way so I wouldn’t be with the others when they legged it with the cash.’

His feet pushed against the floor. His arms flapped around. He looked like a dying fish.

‘I... can’t...’

‘Talk, Kendall. Talk, you fuck. Simpson was beaten to death. Everyone knows I’m handy with my fists. Did Beckett do that?’

I pressed him further into the floor. He wasn’t breathing now. His face was red; his hands groped for something to help, but there was nothing there.

‘Joe,’ he said, his throat gargling.

‘That’s why you’ve been smearing my name with King and Daley, blaming me for that Ellis botch. You’ve been laying the ground, right?’

He’d stopped moving now. I lifted him up and threw him across the room. He crashed to the floor and didn’t move.

My head throbbed. I needed Kendall capable of talking. I went into the kitchen and put my head under the cold water tap. I filled a glass with water, took it back to the living room and threw the water over Kendall. He stirred and moaned.

I had to think. It didn’t all fit. Giving me up to Cole as one of the robbers wouldn’t make Beckett safe. Cole would still be looking for the man behind the job. He’d still be looking for his million.

I knelt down and flipped Kendall on to his back.

‘Don’t. No more. It was Beckett.’

‘Go on.’

I lifted him up and rested him against the wall. I found some vodka and poured it down his throat. He sputtered and coughed and pushed the vodka away. He spewed up blood and alcohol, and doubled up coughing. I forced myself to wait, to watch, to ignore the itch to destroy him, to rip him apart. After a few minutes, he straightened himself up. There were tears in his eyes.