Southpaw, p.2
Southpaw, page 2
part #2 of Robert Hoon Series
“The fuck?” he spat, switching the scalpel to his left hand and snatching up the sock with the snooker ball inside.
The noise was excruciating. The sparks buzzed him like angry fireflies, smouldering where they landed on the foam, and making his naked captives twist and roll in a futile attempt to escape the brief burning pinpricks of pain.
And then, as suddenly as it had started, the racket stopped, and a ringing silence rushed in to fill the void. The last few sparks died in the air. For a moment, all was still.
Until, with a screech and a groan, both back doors of the van toppled outwards, and landed on the uneven tarmac of the alleyway.
There were guns. That was the first thing Hoon noticed. Three, all pointed at him. Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns. Even if the wielders hadn’t been wearing the black helmets with ‘Police’ emblazoned across them, he’d have recognised the weapons right away. He’d used them himself often enough.
A fourth man was lurking behind the firearms officers. Hoon took an immediate disliking to the smug-faced prick with his hair slicked back, and his hands tucked into the pockets of an expensive-looking wool coat. Unlike every other bastard making up the scene, he had a smile on his face, as if there was some sort of joke playing out here that only he was bright enough to get.
“First up, I’d just like to say, I’m a great admirer of yours, Mr Hoon,” he announced, and there was a self-assured, rich boy twang to the delivery that made him even more unpalatable. He smiled, maybe even winked, though the spots dancing in front of Hoon’s eyes made it hard to tell. “Now, how about you put down the torture instruments, and we can avoid any of these gentlemen having to shoot you in the face?”
CHAPTER TWO
Hoon had come quietly. Or as quietly as he was capable of, anyway. The Armed Response Unit hadn’t exactly left him with many options on that front. He’d promised Humpty Dumpty and Laser Tits that he’d see them again soon, and then had allowed himself to be handcuffed and led to the back seat of a blacked-out BMW.
The smug-looking bastard with the wool coat had slid into the driver’s seat a few moments later, while two of the armed officers squeezed in beside Hoon, flanking and squashing him with their bulky armour.
“What about those two fuckholes in the van?” Hoon asked.
Up front, the driver had flashed a smile in the rearview mirror. “The men you were about to torture, you mean?”
“Torture, my arse,” Hoon scoffed. “Since when did a few paperclips beneath the fingernails ever hurt anyone?”
“Since always. And, in answer to your other question, we’re letting them go. Assuming we haven’t already done so.”
“You let them fucking go?” Hoon had stared at the back of the driver’s head for a dangerously long time, his jaw clenching until his teeth groaned in their sockets. “You saw their fucking van, right? You know what they’ve been doing.”
“Oh, don’t you worry, Robert,” was the other man’s reply as he looked ahead and fired up the engine with the press of a button. “We know everything.”
That had been over an hour ago. Now, Hoon sat shackled to a table in a pokey wee interview room in a police station somewhere in east London. They’d crossed the river at one point, headed south, but Hoon hadn’t recognised his surroundings, and they’d bundled him in through the station’s back door so he hadn’t had a chance to clock the sign out front.
There was no mirror in the interview room. No fixed recording equipment, either. It was old school, which he appreciated. There must have been a dozen or more stations between here and where they’d lifted him. They’d brought him to this nick for a reason.
Either someone didn’t want a record of this meeting, or they intended to give him a thoroughly good kicking and wanted some privacy in which to do so. Whichever it was, it was going to make for a very interesting evening.
He’d gleaned very little on the car ride over. The ARU lads had kept their mouths shut the whole way, and the prick in the driver’s seat had mostly responded to Hoon’s questions with smirks and winks.
They hadn’t checked him in properly. No paperwork. No handover into custody. His request for a phone call had been met with a chuckle, and a, “We’ll see what we can do,” before he was brought in here to this room and cuffed to the metal loop that was fastened securely to the table.
He’d been in here alone for twenty minutes now. With no window and no cameras, it was pointless making a fuss, so he’d put his head down on the table and tried to catch up with some sleep.
As was usual of late, sleep had failed to come for him.
He’d been so close. Those two lads. He’d been so close to a breakthrough, he was sure of it They knew something. They knew something about her.
And now, they were out there somewhere, and he was locked away in here.
And the girl—Caroline—was lost to him once more.
The door of the interview room opened. The face that appeared was not the snidey wee fuck he’d been expecting. She was dressed in a big waterproof jacket and a pair of saggy tracky bottoms instead of the pristine uniform she’d worn on the other occasions they’d met, and so it took Hoon a moment to recognise her.
“Deirdrie?” he said, once he’d concluded the necessary mental gymnastics. “The fuck are you doing here?”
“Please don’t call me that. You can address me as Chief Superintendent Bagshaw,” the new arrival instructed, her tone making it clear that she was in no mood for his shit. She wiped her eyes with a thumb, clearing away the last remnants of sleep. “And believe me, Mr Hoon, I’m not here through choice.”
Hoon looked her up and down as she took a seat across from him. She was one of the highest-ranking officers in the Met, and from what little he knew of her, not the sort of person to be easily bossed around. If she wasn’t here willingly, then someone powerful had to be pulling some strings.
He’d crossed paths with her a couple of times soon after arriving in London, and while she hadn’t helped him with his mission, she’d mostly stayed out of his way and left him to get on with it.
Until now.
“I thought I told you to keep your head down and stay out of trouble?” she said.
Hoon shrugged. “I did.”
“You call this staying out of trouble?”
“I’ve been doing the tourist thing,” Hoon said, glossing over his current situation. “Did some sightseeing. Ate jellied eels. Waved at the fucking Queen. All that bollocks. I even went to see Wicked last week.”
Bagshaw blinked in surprise. “Wicked?”
“Aye.”
“As in… the musical?”
Hoon tutted. “Naw, as in the actual witch of the west. Aye, of course the fucking musical.”
“Right. I see,” Bagshaw said, the furrows in her brow revealing how hard a time she was having processing this. “I have to say, you surprise me, Robert. That doesn’t exactly strike me as your scene.”
“Aye, well, I’ll try and no’ take offence at that. I’m a complex individual, Deirdrie. I’m a veritable fucking soufflé of hidden layers, me.”
“So it would seem.” The chief superintendent didn’t want to ask the question, but curiosity got the better of her. “And what did you think? Of Wicked, I mean.”
“Absolute fucking horseshit.”
Had it not been so late, and had she not still been resentful over being dragged here, Bagshaw might actually have smiled at that.
“Right. Well, maybe you don’t surprise me that much. The reason I’m here is that they wanted me to talk to you before they came in to speak to you,” she explained. “They thought you might trust me.”
“Well, they’re wrong. And anyway, who the fuck’s ‘they?’” Hoon demanded, but Bagshaw chose to ignore the question.
“They want…” She sighed. It turned into a yawn that she struggled to stifle. “They want to offer you some sort of deal. I don’t know what or why. I don’t care, and I didn’t ask.”
“Again with the ‘they.’ Who’s this fucking ‘they’ you keep talking about?’”
Bagshaw tutted and shook her head. Clearly, it wasn’t just Hoon’s shit she couldn’t be bothered with. This whole pantomime was getting on her nerves. “The Security Service,” she said, then she sat back and shrugged. “Like I say, I don’t know why, so don’t bother asking.”
“The Security Service?” Hoon looked to the door, frowning. “As in…?”
“As in MI5. Yes.”
Hoon sucked in his bottom lip, then spat it out again. “Aye, didn’t think that horse’s arse-crevice looked like polis, right enough,” he said. “Too smug looking. Which is fucking saying something, when you think about it. What does MI5 want to talk to me for?”
“Didn’t you hear what I just said? I have no idea.”
“Rhetorical question, sweetheart,” Hoon snapped back at her. “Don’t go getting your knickers in a fucking twist.”
Bagshaw slid a hand across the tabletop, slapped the scuffed wood, then stood up. “Right, well, that’s me done my bit. You’re on your own from here.”
“Your bit?” Hoon gave her another look up and down. “What, that’s it? They brought you in just to say that?”
“Oh, no. No, they wanted me to say a lot more. Gave me a big list,” the chief superintendent replied. “I was supposed to soften you up. Throw my weight around a bit. Warn against the consequences of vigilante justice. Threaten you with prosecution. All that. They wanted me to, and I quote, ‘make you nervous.’”
“But?”
“But it’s been a long day, Mr Hoon, and it’s late. It’s late, and frankly, to use the sort of parlance you’re most familiar with, I cannot be fucked with any of it.” She put a foot up on the chair she’d just vacated, tied the lace of a battered old white trainer, then returned it to the floor. “And we both know you’re too far gone to be concerned by anything I have to tell you, don’t we?”
Hoon ejected a throaty laugh that lasted all of two seconds. “Flattery will get you everywhere, Chief Superintendent,” he said, then he gave Bagshaw a nod. “Cheers for no’ wasting either of our time trying.”
“I assure you, that was entirely for my benefit, not yours.” She crossed to the door, knocked twice, and gave a nod to the guard on the other side when the hatch slid aside. “Good luck, Mr Hoon,” she told him as she waited to be let out. “With… whatever this is.”
“Always a fucking pleasure to see you, Deirdrie,” Hoon replied. “I’ll keep you posted.”
“God, no. Please don’t,” Bagshaw said, then the door opened and she vanished out into the hall without so much as a backward glance.
Hoon strained to hear the whispered conversation that took place out in the corridor, but other than the odd word and a general sense of annoyance from both parties, he didn’t pick up very much.
The discussion didn’t last long, and almost as soon as the whispering stopped, footsteps squeaked along the corridor in the direction of the interview room.
The same self-satisfied scrote from earlier knocked a couple of times on the open door, then practically skipped on in. He’d ditched the wool coat now, revealing a crisply-pressed light blue shirt buttoned all the way to the neck, and sleeves rolled up with such precision that they could be mistaken for mirror images of each other.
He’d wrestled his tie into a full Windsor with the same degree of skill and accuracy, and then tucked it out of the way over his shoulder like he was about to eat soup and wasn’t willing to risk the stains.
Without the coat, he looked smaller. He wasn’t short—a touch below average height, maybe—but he had a physical frame that didn’t seem to have heard of testosterone, much less ever produced any. Cover his face, and you’d be forgiven for thinking he was yet to enter puberty.
Include everything above the neck, though, and his age became more apparent, although it was still difficult to pin down. He could’ve been mid-thirties with a hard life behind him, or late forties with a charmed one. His gelled hair looked almost plastic, like it had been moulded onto the top of his head back at whatever Chinese sweatshop of a toy factory had shat him out.
His footwear was a little unexpected. While the rest of his outfit looked like it could’ve come as part of a Mormon fancy dress costume, he wore an ageing pair of black and white trainers on his feet. Comfier than dress shoes, no doubt, but they didn’t exactly fit with the rest of his getup.
He carried a box file, jamming it between his forearm and his ribs so as to keep his hands free for carrying a steaming hot takeaway coffee cup in one, and a shiny silver pen in the other.
“You good, Bob?” he asked, lowering himself onto the recently vacated chair on the other side of the table. He sat the cup down, and placed the pen and box file on the table beside it. The smell of the coffee was so strong that Hoon could almost inhale the caffeine hit.
“I’d say I’m quite some fucking distance from ‘good,’ now that you’re asking.”
This made the other man laugh. “No, I’d imagine it’s not how you planned your evening going. Apologies for spoiling your fun out there. We wanted to talk to you.”
“And it couldn’t have waited twenty minutes?” Hoon asked.
“What, until you’d finished your little chat with your two new friends, you mean? No. Sorry. We couldn’t just stand by and let you do… well. Whatever it was you were going to do.”
“I was just going to pursue one or two lines of inquiry, that’s all,” Hoon said. He shrugged. “And then, depending on how things went from there, maybe set them both on fire. I hadn’t planned that far ahead.”
“Yes, well,” the other man said, his smile dropping, if only for a moment.
It returned with gusto when he opened his box file. Rather than produce the stack of paperwork that Hoon had been expecting, he instead removed something square-ish wrapped in tinfoil, then peeled it open to reveal a white bread sandwich with the crusts cut off.
“Sorry, missed dinner. And lunch, actually,” he said. The sandwich had been cut diagonally into quarters. He picked one up, and Hoon caught a glimpse of a thick slice of cheddar before the whole triangle was shoved into the waiting mouth.
Hoon drummed his fingers impatiently while watching the other man struggling to chew and swallow the dry sandwich.
“Just you take your fucking time, son,” he said. “Don’t you mind me.”
There was some mumbling through the mouthful of partially masticated bread. “Sorry. Want a bit?”
“My maw always told me no’ to accept food from strangers,” Hoon replied. “Also, that’s about the most boring fucking cheese piece I’ve ever clapped eyes on in my life.”
“Piece? Do you mean sandwich?”
“I mean just what I said, pal. Now stop playing with it and fucking swallow, will you?” Hoon gave a grunt of amusement. “And I’m betting I’m not the first person to say that to you tonight, either.”
“Ha. Funny. They said you were funny, but… That’s good.” Hands were brushed together to dust off crumbs, then one was extended across the table. “Miles Crabtree. Sorry, should’ve said that earlier, but I was a bit, you know, starstruck.”
The cuffs weren’t restrictive enough to prevent Hoon from shaking the hand, he just chose not to. Miles kept the offer open for a few moments, then shrugged and began cleaning the back of his teeth with a pinkie finger, dislodging lumps of bread and cheese.
“How much did Chief Superintendent Bagshaw tell you?” he asked.
“Not a lot.”
“Right. Would you care to elaborate on that?” Miles asked.
“Would I fuck.”
“Ha. Right. Yes. It’s funny, she did tell me about your use of language. She said, and I quote, ‘It’s like he’s sponsored by the word fuck.’ But actually hearing it, and the… the venom you put into it, it’s really quite something.”
“Aye, very fucking good, son,” Hoon snapped back. “Do you want to remove your lips from around my bawbag for a minute, and crack on with whatever the fuck this is?”
“Fine. OK. Well… Here’s the thing, Bob.” Miles interlocked his fingers and sat forward, narrowing the gap between them. “I’ve been admiring your work for a couple of months now. Since all that stuff with the warehouse fire, and those women you rescued—good job on that, by the way—I am becoming… and please, don’t let this go to your head… but I am becoming quite the fan of yours.”
“Aye, well, I assure you that the feeling’s very much no’ fucking mutual,” Hoon retorted, which only seemed to please the other man further.
“That’s it. There it is, right there. It’s that attitude I love. You don’t care what you say, who you offend, nothing. Just call it as you see it. You just say whatever’s on your mind, and to hell with the consequences.”
It was Hoon’s turn to sit forward. His chair groaned under the shifting weight.
“Believe me, if I told you what’s on my mind right now, you’d be tearing up your fan club membership card, asking for your money back, then curling up in the foetal position and sobbing yourself into a fucking coma. You don’t want to know what’s on my mind, you cheesy-breaded wee fuck. You can’t handle what’s on my mind.”
For a moment, Miles sat there in a stunned sort of silence, then he clapped his approval, his face lighting up in a big, beaming smile.
“Brilliant! I loved that!” he said. “I mean, ‘cheesy-breaded wee fuck.’ It’s not even that offensive, but you manage to make it feel genuinely hurtful. It really is quite a gift you have.”
Hoon scowled. “Jesus Christ. What is it you want?”
Miles prised the lid off his coffee cup, reached back into the box file, and produced a small bundle of sugar packets. As he spoke, he tore a strip off the top of each packet and tipped the contents into his drink.
“What I want is to help you, Bob,” he said.
Hoon snorted, amused by the very notion. “You? A jumped-up wee prick with a face like a haunted Boglin? Help me? Aye, that I’d like to see, pal. What could a spudfingered wee spunksack like you help me with?”
