To Kill For Read online

  He put the glass to his lips and tilted it up. There was only a drop left, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘He keeps telling himself it doesn’t matter,’ he said to the cooks on the TV, ‘because that’s how he survives, by not caring. But I’ve heard him scream at night. I know what haunts him. I know what he did. He can fight the whole bloody world, but he can’t fight what’s inside him.’

  He shook his head from side to side.

  ‘No, he can’t fight that.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I miss her.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see.’

  He didn’t say anything else.

  I stayed there a while longer, letting my head clear some more. Browne drank and we watched whatever it was on the TV. At some point I looked over and saw that he was asleep, the empty glass in his lap.

  I hauled myself up. I put his glass on the coffee table and left him to his hangover. I had things to do. Places to go, people to kill.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  It took me a while to find Cole. I tried his mobile and got no answer. I got through to his club and someone there passed me on to someone else and they wanted to know who I was and what I wanted. All this time, I was in Browne’s car, driving towards Cole’s house. I wanted to get a look at the damage.

  I called some other places and some other people and got nowhere. I turned into his road in Chigwell. The place was quiet enough. There didn’t seem to be any patrol cars around. I cruised along slowly. Lights were on in Cole’s house. I saw a few cars in his driveway. I parked at the kerb and walked towards the front of the house. Before I’d gone a few yards, I could see the front door open. A man came out and looked towards me. He spoke to someone behind him then disappeared back inside. I must’ve had a dozen eyes on me.

  After my trip to Dunham’s country place, Cole’s house looked like a doll’s house. Maybe that was why Dunham had dragged me out there.

  There wasn’t as much damage as I thought there might have been. There were a few dozen bullet holes in the brickwork, and the holes weren’t big. Not large calibre, anyway. I guessed the holes had been made from a couple of bursts from assault rifles. The holes were scattered over the whole front of the house and one of the large bay windows was boarded over. The double garage, separate from the rest of the house, had an area of charred brickwork, more so at the bottom.

  I went up to the front door. It opened without me knocking and the same small bald gammy-legged man who’d let me in before stood and peered up at me.

  ‘Cole?’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  He moved aside to let me in. Men were scattered around the place. They glanced at me. The last time I’d seen those men, they’d been sitting with drinks in their hands, watching Cole do his chief boss act. Then they’d seemed uneasy. Now they held guns, not martinis, and they didn’t have to pretend they were enjoying themselves. Now they looked like they belonged.

  I went upstairs. The landing was as plush as his lounge, and as fake. The white carpet was two inches thick, and on the walls hung more of those splurges of colour that he thought were art. From there, a half-dozen doors led to the bedrooms. From the furthest, at the back of the house, I could hear Cole snapping instructions to someone. I moved that way.

  Cole was throwing things into a suitcase with one hand and holding a mobile to his ear with the other.

  ‘I don’t give a flying fuck how much they get,’ he was saying to the phone. ‘Just sell them.’

  He looked tired. There was thick stubble around his chin and dark circles beneath his eyes. He was feeling the strain.

  When he’d finished with the phone, he tossed it onto the bed. It was only then I noticed that Cole’s wife was in the room. She sat with her back against the headboard of the bed and her feet out in front of her, and I thought she had the look of someone who had taken Valium. She didn’t seem to know where she was or why.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Cole said to me.

  He was striding around the room, collecting underwear from the chest of drawers, shirts from the wardrobe, chucking everything into the suitcases.

  ‘Trying to find Paget.’

  ‘You still bothered about that cunt. Fuck him. We got other problems.’

  At this, his wife let out a short laugh. Cole glanced at her.

  ‘Whyn’t you help?’ he said to her. She shrugged her reply.

  ‘Who did it?’ I said.

  ‘Who d’ya think? Fucking Albanian cunts.’

  ‘Why aren’t the law here?’

  ‘Them wankers? They questioned me for hours. I told them I didn’t know nothing.’

  ‘They believe you?’

  ‘Course they fucking didn’t. What can they do? I told them nobody was home. That bit was true, as it happens. The wife and I were up in the West End. So, no witnesses. I swore blind I didn’t have an enemy in the world. So they took some statements and made some measurements. Then they fucked off. In the end, if I want to live here, they can’t stop me.’

  ‘What was the damage?’

  ‘Are you blind?’

  ‘They shot the place up and threw a petrol bomb at the garage.’

  ‘You sound disappointed it wasn’t more.’

  ‘They didn’t storm the place? Didn’t throw anything through the windows?’

  ‘You can fucking see, can’t you.’

  He turned to his wife.

  ‘Where’s my address book?’

  She blinked.

  ‘Downstairs,’ she said. ‘By the phone.’

  ‘They didn’t concentrate their fire,’ I said. ‘That petrol bomb wouldn’t have done any damage, so why throw it? Why just shoot the place up bit?’

  Cole stopped packing his cases and looked at me.

  ‘What’s your game?’ he said.

  ‘I thought you said the Albanians were finished.’

  ‘I was wrong, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘There’s something wrong with all this. Haven’t you noticed?’

  ‘I tell you what I noticed, I noticed my fucking house getting shot to shit. That’s what I fucking noticed.’

  ‘You can’t find Paget. I can’t find him. No sign of him. Nothing.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘And these Albanians; why would they hit you now? They’ve got the law all over them. Why would they risk it?’

  ‘Because they’re fucking nuts, that’s why.’

  ‘All because they want you to pay up a million quid. How is this going to make you pay up?’

  ‘What the fuck you on about? It was a warning. That’s why there was no real damage.’

  It was possible. I didn’t like it, though.

  ‘Who said this was the Albanians?’

  ‘Who else would it be?’

  ‘Who said it was Albanians?’

  ‘I got the word. You think I just sat on my arse and wondered why my house was developing holes? I got my boys out and they put the screws on a few people.’

  ‘It’s not that easy,’ I said. ‘There’s something wrong. They wouldn’t risk coming out of the woodwork just to set fire to your garage. There’s something else going on. Something to do with the law.’

  Cole looked at me steadily for a while. Then he turned to his wife.

  ‘Fuck off a moment, will you?’

  She tutted and made a big gesture out of swinging her legs round and climbing off the bed. She gave us both a dirty look as she walked unsteadily from the room. Cole walked over to the window and looked down at the back garden, oaks and shrubs and half an acre of perfect lawn.

  ‘You’ve been busy,’ he said. ‘And you’ve been holding out on me. I should be angry with you.’

  ‘You didn’t think I’d let you get Paget before me.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I suppose I didn’t. Now, perhaps you’d better tell me what’s been going on in your life recently.’

  I hadn’t wanted to give him too
much information. I wanted to keep one step ahead so that I could get to Paget first.

  But now things had changed. Now I thought I might need an ally, and Cole was as good as I was going to get. But he was about to go to war, and if I wasn’t careful he’d get wiped out and I’d be left alone. I had to clue him in to a point.

  ‘The law’s involved somehow,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The one you took that night I’d gone to kill Paget – Derek Hayward.’

  ‘The one you shot?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s a copper. I found him in a hospital in Cambridge.’

  He thought about that.

  ‘We dumped him in Essex. What the fuck was he doing in Cambridge?’

  ‘His friends on the force fixed it. They put him there with a false name, cleaned up the mess at Ponders End. They didn’t want the local law knowing about it.’

  Cole pulled a hand across his chin. The whiskers rustled.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ he said. ‘Are they bent? Putting the screws on Paget?’

  ‘Something like that. There’s more. That night there was another man in the car. You missed him. He scarpered before you hit us. His name’s Glazer. He’s connected to Paget somehow, but I don’t know how.’

  ‘And you didn’t think to tell me about this Glazer?’

  ‘No.’

  He sighed.

  ‘Well, what does he matter?’

  ‘I don’t know who he is.’

  ‘Who cares. If he gets in my way, I’ll wipe him out too.’

  ‘And I don’t trust Dunham. He’s up to something. He’s pulled me in a couple of times for little chats, trying to send me and you round in circles.’

  ‘He was right about the Albanians, wasn’t he? I should’ve finished them off when I had the chance.’

  ‘It’s wrong,’ I said. ‘There’s something mad about it all, something twisted.’

  He turned and looked through the bedroom window at his garden below. He didn’t say anything for a long time. I could see his shoulders rise an inch, fall an inch as he breathed heavily. Then he put a hand on the glass as if to steady himself.

  ‘When I was a kid, sixteen, seventeen, I used to do manual labour. I used to work for a firm that put in swimming pools. I used to go to houses like this one and get filthy from the mud. I had a job out here once, one of these houses. I thought, that’s what I want. I want to be the bloke who hires someone to dig for him. Now I’m that bloke, I got the house. My wife wants a swimming pool. I tell her to dig it herself.’

  I think he believed what he was saying, that this was his dream, away from the hardships of his youth. Like Dunham, he was trying to justify his life. Or hide from it, make like he’d succeeded through graft and brains, not from the blood he’d spilled or the lives he’d ruined. In the end, they all pretend they’re clean.

  ‘Why was this other bloke there?’ he said, still looking out over his dream. ‘This Glazer character. I know what you arranged with Bowker; he was supposed to tell Paget you were going to be at Ponders End and he was supposed to go and kill you, right?’

  ‘That was the idea,’ I said.

  ‘So why would Glazer show up instead? He must work for Paget.’

  ‘So why haven’t we heard of him? There are things going on that I don’t understand and I think I’m being played, we’re being played, and I want to know why.’

  Now he turned to me, and the strain wasn’t showing so much. Now he was feeding off his anger, or his fear.

  ‘Look, Joe. I’m hitting these cunts.’

  ‘Give me time.’

  ‘It’s funny. I got people telling me you’ve got brain damage, that you’re paranoid or fucked up somehow. I look at you and I think they’re right. You look like you’ve been stitched together from broken bits. What do you care about me anyway?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Then why not let me carry on?’

  ‘Because for the moment we’re tied together and I might need you, and I’ll need you in a state to help me. Right now, you’re acting stupidly and you could get yourself in trouble.’

  ‘Could I?’

  ‘You want revenge. At any cost.’

  ‘A few days ago, I was thinking the same thing about you. You were going mad for blood, like some wild dog.’

  ‘You’re right. I was. Now I’m thinking.’

  He looked at his garden some more.

  ‘Whatever people think of you,’ he said, ‘I know there’s something there. You ain’t dumb.’

  He turned and went over to his suitcase and snapped it shut.

  ‘I’ve got people out looking for the Albanians. It might take a while. I’ll give you twelve hours.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The street was one of those seventies suburban jobs; the kind they used to show in TV sitcoms and magazine adverts, with rows of neat bungalows and neat kids playing on the neat grass verges, and family cars, neatly parked in the driveways, and the odd small thin tree swaying neatly in the wind.

  It was pissing down now and the trees had gone and cars were parked solid along both sides and what grass verges were left were sodden and torn up with tire tracks and the pavement looked slick and dark like an oil spill and all the neat people were shuttered in their homes. It was still a popular kind of place, just not good enough to feature in adverts and sitcoms.

  There was no movement, as far as I could see, no flickering lights, no odd shapes. No cars went past, no people. There was no sound except the distant blur of traffic and the endless pattering of rain.

  I was starting to put things together, but I was still groping. I didn’t have anything on Glazer. I didn’t know where Paget was or what he was up to, or what Dunham wanted with him. I didn’t know Hayward’s role, but I was pretty sure he was bent. Things made sense that way. Still, something was wrong. So now I was trying the only thing I could think of.

  I found the house I was after: a detached bungalow, halfway along the road. There was a light in the front room, but the curtains were drawn. I walked past and carried on around the block to recce the area. It was all the same, all fucking neat, nothing out of place.

  When I reached the house again, I edged past the car in the driveway and stepped over the wrought iron gate. I stopped and waited. Nothing happened. No alarms, no shouts from neighbours, no barking dogs. Rainwater had pooled on the asphalt and I stepped over the puddles, keeping my footfalls as quiet as possible. The back garden was a large dark mass, shrubs and bushes around the edges, a large lawn, trimmed. Neat. There were no kids’ toys, no mess.

  There was a door at the back, which opened into the kitchen. The door was glass panelled and I could see through to the hallway. All the lights were off except the one in the front room. When I was sure there was nobody in the darkened kitchen, I tried the door knob. The door opened and I pushed it slowly. Warm air pushed past me. It was heavy with the smell of cooking and laundry. I eased in and let the door back slowly, and closed it quietly. I took the gun from my pocket.

  I stood a moment and waited, listening. The only sound was the murmur of the television coming from the front room along the hallway. I moved slowly towards it, letting my feet roll on the carpet. The lounge door was ajar, the light was on inside. I peered through the crack in the door and saw the television in one corner facing towards the wall on my right. That meant the sofa was there, along the wall out of my sight. I pushed the door open and stepped in quickly, raising the Makarov.

  The blow hammered into the back of my head and sent a shaft of pain through my neck and into my skull. A woman yelped. A man grunted. My legs buckled and I staggered and fell to one knee. When I tried to swing the Makarov round, it fell from my hand and skittered across the carpet. I tried to stand, but the floor moved and spun about me. I tried again and my head exploded for an instant and I lurched forward and saw the floor rushing to slam into my face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I was on my back. I saw a white ceiling. It took
me a moment to remember where I was. I thought my hands and feet would be tied, but they weren’t. I guessed I’d been out for only a few seconds. Pain moved around my head, as if it was full of molten lead. Shapes went in and out of focus.

  I shifted my sight and Hayward came into view, looking down at me. He had my Makarov in his left hand. His right arm was in a sling. At his feet was a blackjack. He must’ve put all his strength into it.

  Behind Hayward was a woman who stared at me. She was small and thin. Her eyes were large and brown, and her dark skin looked pale. She was scared, but she was staying close to Hayward, trusting that he was in control.

  ‘I’ve called for support,’ Hayward said.

  Hayward was on the other side of the room, a good distance. But, because he’d hit me when I came in the door, the only way he could cover me and feel safe was by boxing himself into the corner of the room. Behind him was a cabinet with fancy plates, and a heavy armchair.

  He was calm enough, but wary.

  ‘Don’t try anything,’ he said. ‘The only reason you’re not tied up is because my arm’s not too good and my wife won’t go near you.’

  I tried to say something, but it came out in a slur and I had to shake my head to try and clear it. I’d been there a hundred times before. When the world is swirling around, you keep still and wait and hope that it’ll stop moving some time.

  I rolled over and pushed myself up. The woman took a step back, but Hayward didn’t move. He was confident with my gun in his hand.

  ‘I want to talk,’ I said.

  He held the gun up.

  ‘With this? You come into my home with this and you want to talk?’

  ‘Precaution.’

  ‘Do you know him?’ the woman said.

  ‘He’s the man who shot me.’

  Her hands went up to her mouth, but she didn’t scream, didn’t get hysterical. I had to give her that.

  ‘We had a feeling you’d come here.’

  The woman shot a glance at Hayward. There was some small surprise in her look. I thought it odd that Hayward would expose her like this. I thought I might have something I could use. I said, ‘We?’

  ‘Never mind. Did you come alone?’