Ferocious beasts, p.22
Ferocious Beasts, page 22
Squirming and trying hard not to vomit due to the terrible pain spreading up his stomach from his groin, Will muttered, “He promised me.”
“And so did I,” Tony said, looking over Will’s shoulder at the colossal Dave.
Will went to shout for help, but Dave, having done this countless times, was quick enough to stop it at the source when his huge hand came over Will’s mouth.
Tony began tutting and shaking his head while taking something from his back pocket. Dave let go of Will’s mouth and the latter made the stupid mistake of going to shout again. The opportunity was used by Tony to shove a thick pair of rolled-up socks right into Will’s mouth, so deep that they partially went down his throat. He began gagging and trying to breathe, finding that he was only able to do it through his nose. Tony was then quick to wrap sellotape around his head, fixing the sock inside his mouth.
Then he stood before Will and ran the edge of a hand down his cheek. “We’ll try to be gentle,” Tony told him. “But that depends on you, of course. If you’re a good boy, we won’t be too rough. But if you bite or fight us, we’ll mark you in ways you’d never think were possible.”
Realizing what was about to happen, Will threw his head back and caught Dave in the mouth. The arms loosened as the big man reeled backwards and Will ripped himself free of his clutches.
He flew for the door, but as he reached it, they grabbed him and ripped him back, throwing him onto the bunk, from where he burst up and smashed Tony in the chin with an uppercut.
Coming over Tony as the latter hit the wall, he went to hit him again but something hit him first, and his punch died the second it was launched. He was knocked sideways as if he’d been struck by a car and he knew that Dave had landed one of his huge fists into the side of his head.
Will stumbled to keep himself up, his vision doubling and filling with white spots.
Dave came towards him, getting in between Will and Tony like a dog protecting its master.
Wiping his mouth where Will had cut the lip, the leader of the wing said, “So rough it is.”
EIGHTY-NINE
Gordon Lovett parked his Mercedes-Benz in the lot at the back of his offices. Then he entered via the kitchen and came out in reception.
“Ah, Mr. Lovett,” the receptionist said.
“What’s up, Sandy?”
“I’m afraid there’s two police officers waiting for you in your office.”
Lovett frowned, threatening to undo the hard work of his facelift.
“Did they say what it was concerning?”
“No. Just that they’d wait for you. They were extremely rude.”
Fiery wrath erupted on the face of Gordon Lovett and it went florid. Having been a defense lawyer for well over thirty years, he knew the rudeness of police officers only too well.
Without saying another word, he marched up the single flight of stairs, ignored the people sat at their desks and burst into his office to find the two men lounging on a leather settee that sat in front of his fat mahogany desk.
“Ah,” the short bulky one said. “The guest of honor has arrived at long last.”
Coming into the middle of his office, his Italian leather shoes settling into the thick scrub of a rather expensive Persian rug, Gordon Lovett said in an officious and superior tone of voice, “I’d like to remind you gentlemen that unless you have some official business, you’re trespassing in this office.”
Neither detective said anything. Col merely stood up from the settee and came within an inch of the lawyer, Lovett leaning back from him ever so slightly.
Looking at him with a death stare, Col asked, “Who paid you to keep the Bainbridge custody battle going for two years?”
“Do you have a warrant for such information?”
Col remained impassive, the two men staring hard at each other, and the lawyer’s face slowly suffused with a knowing smile.
“I thought not,” he said, before leaving the standoff with Col and taking a seat behind his desk.
Col came before the desk and stood over it with a dead look. Jack remained on the settee with his arms across the back.
Col seethed at Lovett, “I asked a question, you snide prick. Now answer it.”
Jack adding, “Why don’t you just tell us the truth?”
“What is this?” Lovett said in a casual manner. “Good cop, bad cop?”
“No,” Col hissed down at him. “This is bad cop, worse cop.”
Lovett frowned and picked up the phone from his desk. “Abigail,” he said into it, “can you— Ugh!”
Col had swooped down and grabbed the end of the man’s tie. Then, using all his strength, he pulled the lawyer belly first over the desk while strangling him, everything being knocked off as Lovett was dragged across it, the computer screen falling and smashing, a coffee mug tipping off the edge and popping on the hardwood floor.
Jack was already out of his seat and closing the blinds as people began turning from their desks.
Lovett landed face first on the floor with a thud. Col flipped him easily onto his back. Lovett went to push him away and got kicked hard in the ribs for his troubles. He cried out and Col picked the tie back up, laid a foot on the guy’s chest for leverage, held the knot, and wrung the thing tight, so that it cut into the tanned and flabby neck. Then, he took the end and pulled so hard that it closed around the neck bone, the tie buried deep within flesh.
Lovett went purple, his arms flailing about, pale lips bulging, choking and gasping sounds rattling out of his mouth, Col pulling the tie so hard that it lifted the lawyer’s shoulders up from the floor, his eyes almost popping from the skull.
Jack observed the look on his face. The incredulous, terrified look. Col, whose fierce face watched it all, appeared to realize where he was at and let go the tie, stepping off the lawyer.
Lovett immediately began clawing at his neck, picking the tie out of the flesh, choking and gasping, lying on his side for some time afterwards staring into space and trying to breathe.
As he lay there, Col crouched before him and said, “You thought you were going to die, didn’t you?”
Lovett said nothing. Merely stared through him as if Col was made of glass.
Col went on, “Answer the question truthfully or I’ll finish the job.”
In a hoarse and scratched voice, Lovett replied, “You’re mad.”
“No,” Col replied, holding a finger up to him, “I’m desperate. So tell me, and please answer truthfully, who paid you to represent Peter Warne?”
NINETY
Bert Samuels was standing in a bedroom of his parents’ cottage smoking a cigarette and talking on the phone.
“I know, baby,” he was saying, “I miss you, too. But soon we’ll be together… I can’t wait either. Just you and me… And you’re sure there’s no way you can get away?… I know, but my parents are going to church soon… Yes, I know we can’t be seen together, but there’s no one around… All right, then. How about meeting up for a little quickie? Find some deserted country lane somewhere… Oh, yes,” he purred into the phone, stretching his toes and feeling extra warm. “Exactly that. You on the bonnet. Legs over my shoulders… Okay. Okay. I get it. You can’t escape and I’m just making you horny… Well, me too, baby… Okay. Goodbye.”
Bert put the phone down and admired himself before an oval dress mirror. He may not have the handsome good looks of Will, but at least he was much smarter.
Ever since they were adolescent boys, he’d watched women flock to Will like geese to a pond. All he had to do was sit somewhere and eventually his good looks would attract some moth into his light.
For Will it was effortless, and, over their many years of association, Bert had grown to hate that ease with which his friend would pursue the opposite sex; or, more like it, be pursued. There was a saying Bert was fond of: fending them off with a long stick. Well, Will had always had to fend them off with a long stick, while Bert, so much smarter and more charismatic than his friend, would have to deal with being fended off himself by sticks.
But not now.
Now Will would spend the rest of his days locked up, and it would be Bert who had a beautiful woman to love. A beautiful woman whom he would spend the rest of his life with. Not some folly like Mandy King or Gabby Jones.
What was all that guff about going to Spain? he wondered. I would have given it a month before she came home to find him in bed with some pretty little señorita.
Bert laughed at his own thoughts, a wry smile lifting his cheeks, and was feeling on top of the world when his mother called his name up the stairs.
“Robert?”
His parents had returned early that morning, taking their house back and making him feel, as they always did when he stayed at his childhood home, as though he were still a boy to be looked after.
“Yes, Mother?” he called down to her.
“We’re off to church now.”
“Okay.”
Then his father chimed in. “Don’t go inviting anyone over. I don’t want any more damage done to my drinks cabinet.”
Bert rolled his eyes and then listened to them leave, his mother fussing over his father, telling him she doesn’t care that it’s hot, he’s not taking off his jacket until after the service. Then the car engine started and the sounds of the tires crunching across the shingle drive.
Bert was glad they were gone. He went over to his stereo and switched it on, Nirvana’s “All Apologies” shrieking out of the speakers, the melody lifting up the groaning voice of Cobain.
I wish I was like you,
Easily amused!
It was some time before he heard the knocking at the door, the sound only coming apparent after the shouting match that was the song’s chorus had finished.
Bert lowered the volume and cocked an ear. The knocker was being brutally slammed and he went to the front bedroom to see who it was.
Two men he didn’t recognize stood there and he watched them for a moment, when one of them suddenly looked up and pointed.
Bert came away from the window and was about to descend the stairs to see what they wanted when he was alarmed to hear them suddenly kick the door in, the thing swinging inside and bashing the wall.
“Really?” he called out as he ran out of his room and headed down the stairs.
He was met at the bottom by a short and stocky man with a mean face.
“What the—?” was as far as he got before the man grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt and tossed him towards his partner.
The taller one grabbed him roughly. Bert, realizing he was in danger, swung a punch, but the man knew it was coming before Bert knew he was going to swing it, and he ducked back and countered with a right hook that caught Bert on the chin as he fell forward with the weight of his own misplaced punch.
His teeth shook and he saw stars and before he could readjust his feet, another blow caught him in the ribs and he fell onto his front.
Click!
They’d handcuffed his arms behind his back and Bert was filled with panic.
Both men lifted him up and dragged him into a large living room with an open brick fireplace and ancient wood beams flowing across the ceiling. They dumped him down on a pretty sofa covered in embroidered flowers.
“What’s going on?” Bert said in a trembling voice.
The short stocky one came before him.
“You can cut the shit,” he snarled down at him. “We know it was you who was paying Peter Warne’s lawyer.”
Panic erupted on Bert’s face and he swallowed a lump down.
Jack stepped forward and said, “Why would you do something like that, Robert?”
Bert flicked his gaze at him and then back at Col.
“I don’t know what you think you have,” he struggled to say, “but it’s got nothing to do with me.”
“We’ve seen the invoices,” Col said. “It’s you who paid for it all. You who got Gordon Lovett for Peter. You’ve even gone so far as to have him represent Will. I wonder what advice he would have given him.”
“Bad, I reckon,” Jack added.
“Why?” Col asked. “He’s your mate, isn’t he?”
“This is nonsense. You can’t burst into people’s houses and beat things out of them.”
Col stepped forward and leaned down, making Bert recoil from him, leaning as far back as the sofa would allow.
“No, we can’t,” Col hissed. “And yet,” he stepped back, “here we are.”
With a sudden movement that defied the small and plump stature of the man, Col whizzed forward and cracked Bert Samuels right in the nose with a jab.
“Ah!” Bert cried out as he leaned forward, his snout doubling in size, a split running through its center and blood dribbling out. “You’ve broken my fucking nose!”
While he rocked back and forth, Jack and Col took seats either side of him, both of them placing a heavy arm across his shoulders. Like they were all on a date and they wanted to keep him cozy.
“Why,” Col began, “would you pay Gordon Lovett fifty thousand pounds to keep a custody battle going for someone you hardly know?”
“Peter asked me to,” was Bert’s reply.
“Peter Warne asked you to pay for his lawyer?” Col said incredulously, glancing sideways at Jack, who rolled his eyes. Leaning in and hissing the next part into Bert’s ear, Col told him, “You’re gonna have to do better than that.”
“I swear it,” Bert did his best to insist. “Peter got in contact. Asked if I knew a lawyer and asked if I’d help him pay the bill.”
Jack said, “You would have only known Peter through Will. And Will only knew him because he was his brother-in-law. I mean, Peter isn’t from here, and he never lived in Helm. You’d only possibly see him if you happened to be at the manor the same time as him. Not exactly the conditions for a friendship where one offers to pay the other’s expensive solicitor bills.”
“And why would you?” Col added.
“I wanted to help him,” Bert said with little confidence.
He suddenly cringed within their arms when Col took the back of his neck and squeezed hard.
“I’ll throttle it out of you,” the vicious copper snarled down his ear.
“Was he always part of your plan?” Jack asked.
Bert turned sharply to him. Terrified, nervous eyes. “There was no plan.”
“You were Will’s best mate,” Jack went on. “What could he have done to make you do this?”
Bert continued to freeze up, his whole body rigid.
Jack asked, “Did you shoot the family?”
Something in Bert’s eyes shone at him and he flinched. In a second, Jack saw it. The sign of a murderer.
“But why?” Jack wanted to know. “Why kill them all?”
“Fuck this!” Col shouted as he lifted himself up from the chair, taking Bert with him.
Driving him across the living room, knocking into things as they went, Col pressed him against a wall and volleyed a punch into his guts, sending Bert crumpling down to his knees.
Jack went to protest, to calm his partner down, but he was stopped when something moved outside the window. It was on the driveway. A man moving towards the front door.
It was then that he stood up sharp and shouted, “Col? Col? Quick.”
Col had Bert by the throat, his fist cocked back.
“What?” he said.
“We need to leave.”
“Why?”
Col looked at Jack, who stood rigid in the middle of the room, his eyes fixed to the window. He followed his partner’s gaze and spotted the hazy figure reaching the door.
“Fuck!” he exclaimed, and the man outside appeared to hear.
Because he turned to the window and widened his eyes.
A set of patio doors led out to an immaculate striped lawn. As they moved out, Bert in tow, the man came running around the side of the house.
“Police, don’t move!” he shouted.
“Help me!” Bert was crying out as they both dragged him over a small fence into the woods.
Glancing back over his shoulder, Jack spotted Philip Grayson coming to a stop in the middle of the garden, and, as they began running through the thick undergrowth with Bert Samuels, he shouted after them, “Come back! It’s all over!”
NINETY-ONE
Will Bainbridge was sitting at the end of his cell shivering and bloodied, his clothes ripped from him, trousers pulled and torn around his ankles.
Blood oozed from his broken nose and the cuts to his cheek and eye. He’d given a good account of himself in the beginning but lacked the stamina to fight both men off for much longer. In the end they’d knocked the fight out of him and easily bent him over the bottom bunk, tying his hands to the frame and then taking it in turns.
Afterwards, they’d thrown him like a piece of trash against the wall and left the cell, laughing and patting each other’s back.
At the door, Tony had turned back to him with a grin and said, “I’d get on to your mate about making sure the money’s in by the end of the week. Otherwise this’ll be a regular thing.”
Blood also oozed from between his legs, a thin thread of it working its way along the concrete floor towards the door, a certain thought burning a hole in his brain. The thought of this hell repeating itself over and over for the rest of his life. Trapped in this place with his rapists forever.
Then something happened as he sat there.
For some reason certain dreamlike apparitions began filling his head. Memories he’d blocked out for so long.
Closing his eyes, he could see things. The tree. The terrible tree and that terrible room. The things carved into it. Faces. Not animal or human, but both. Men with large teeth and claws. Bears with human faces. Dogs on all fours, looking up with a man’s expression. He was sitting in the middle of a large pentagram. Then he spotted other people.
Julia.
She was sobbing and repeating over and over, “I want to go home. I want to go home. Please let me go home.”
