Shredder (13 page)

“Might I suggest you check again, Officer?” said Amobi, but the guy ignored him, droning like a droid
into his lapel radio, conferring with his nick about a male IC3 in a blue Ford saloon—IC3 was Met police code for black, I knew—and requesting backup. I'd been stopped and harassed by surly cops myself enough times to know this encounter wasn't going well—and unlike Amobi, I'd never made the mistake of having dark skin.

“Thing is,” said the first copper, with that same fake-friendly singsong tone in his voice, “there seems to be a problem with your car's registration. It doesn't appear to be on the database, which suggests it's a false registration. So I need to see some ID from you and a registration for this vehicle.”

I could hear the exasperation creeping into Amobi's voice when he started to respond, and so could the copper, because he didn't wait to hear Amobi's explanation.

“Word of advice, calm down, all right, and we'll get this straightened out. Now, I've asked you twice—”

“I'm a police officer, OK? This is an official vehicle,” snapped Amobi at last, struggling to keep his voice low and even. “Detective Sergeant Philip Amobi, seconded to the NCA, and I'm actually on a case—”

“Seconded to who?” said the first copper, as if he couldn't decipher Amobi's faint Nigerian accent.

“The NCA—National Crime Agency—”

“You mean SOCA?” said the first cop. They'd clearly never heard of the NCA.

“Yes, SOCA!” replied Amobi, at the end of his tether.

“Well, that's not the NCA, is it?” snorted the spotty copper.

“Look, I'm going to get my ID out, OK?” I saw both cops tense as Amobi raised his hands from his sides.

“Slowly, all right?” said the first copper.

Amobi brought his right hand down to his rear pocket, dipped his fingers in and rooted about. “Damn it,” he said, “it's in my jacket—in the back of the car—”

“No, step away from the car, all right, mate?” said the spotty copper. “I'll take a look.” He pulled open the rear door, unhooked Amobi's expensive suit jacket, tugged it out and started patting it down for a wallet, letting it dangle inside out and drag along the gutter. Pens and papers started falling out of the pockets.

“Oh, for God's sake, let—” Amobi reached for
his jacket, and the first copper grabbed his arm and Amobi pulled it free, and an instant later he was slammed facedown onto the hood of his car with his right arm up in a lock behind him, the first copper pinning him down with all his weight while he yelled in indignation, “I'm a police officer! I'm a police officer!”

I pushed my own door open and climbed out. The first copper glared at me as he tried to control the writhing Amobi. “Back in the car, sonny, all right? We'll come to you in a minute.”

“Forget it,” I said. “I don't do guys in uniform.” From the look on their faces I could tell they'd already leaped to the wrong conclusions—that I was a rent boy and Amobi was a john—just as I'd hoped they would.

Amobi raised his head. “For God's sake, Finn, tell them who I—” was as far as he got before the first copper slammed his head down again so hard it bounced off the hood. Amobi roared, incoherent with fury by now, and the second copper waded in too, ratcheting a handcuff tightly round one of Amobi's wrists and fishing for the other wrist with the hook of the second, all the while shouting at me, “Don't you move, all right? Get back in that car—now!”

I tilted my head to meet Amobi's eye. “Really sorry, sweetie,” I said. “But you're on your own.”

And I started to walk away. The second copper left the cuffs dangling and his mate wrestling with Amobi while he scrambled to grab me, but I ran for it. He was young and fit, but I was younger and fitter, and I wasn't weighed down with half a ton of blunt weaponry, a stab vest and a bellyful of doughnuts. I avoided the crowds of pedestrians by running up the middle of the street, dodging the roaring buses and blaring cars, making sure I was heading in the opposite direction from the approaching sirens. Before I'd gone half a block a glance over my shoulder told me the copper had given up the chase and was bent over panting in the heat, ready to collapse. As I rounded the next corner I slowed to a walk, then immediately ducked into the blissful cool of an air-conditioned shopping mall, where I wandered for the next few minutes among cable TV sales stands and acrylic racks of fluorescent jelly sweets. I kept checking around and behind me to see if any would-be vigilantes had taken up the chase, but there was no one. Making my way through a side exit, I emerged into a bus station, where the hot stale air shook with the steady throb of huge diesel engines. A litter bin nearby overflowed with plastic bottles
and greasy sandwich wrappers, and I paused, took Amobi's NCA ID out of my pocket and tossed it in.

I'd filched it from Amobi's jacket when he'd climbed out of the car to reason with the chisel-faced cop; I'd been hoping to cause him trouble somewhere down the line, but as things turned out, I'd succeeded right away. I could guess what would happen now: those two dumb cops would frog-march Amobi to their car—cracking his head on the edge of the roof as they shoved him into the backseat—and on arrival at the station they'd drop him as they helped him out again, maybe standing on his hands accidentally-on-purpose. He'd be banged up in a cell for an hour or two while his story was checked out, and then the horrified duty sergeant would dash to unlock his cell door and the uniforms who'd busted him would be crawling to Amobi on their hands and knees, pleading with him not to make an official complaint.

The thought of it gave me a warm feeling of achievement, but that didn't last very long. The Turk was still holding Zoe, I had no idea where, and Amobi had been my final hope. Now he'd cut us both adrift.

There was only one person who might be willing
to help me, and that was McGovern. I was going to have to go back to him, ask him to take me in, and accept his hospitality and his protection. And then, at some point, I was going to have to kill him.

I headed back home the same way I'd come, by tube and bus, racking my brains all the way to try and figure out my options. There was no point in queuing up at the local precinct to report a kidnapping. Even if they believed me, I'd never trusted cops to do anything competently apart from batter drunks and claim overtime. Seeing two morons work over one of their own officers for being the wrong color in the wrong car hadn't done much to change my opinion, even if I'd helped to make it happen.

And this time it was worse—it wasn't that the cops would wade in and make a mess of it, but that they wouldn't wade in at all. The Turk's information had already foiled one bombing—he'd proved his worth. The authorities were so desperate for leads on the terrorists, of course they'd turn a blind eye to his dodgy business dealings. Why would they break up a gang war in order to save McGovern? They'd been trying to nail him for years, and had got nowhere; if the Turk could do it for them, the war
would be over that much sooner and the cops would only have one villain to sort out instead of two. Zoe and I would merely be collateral damage.

What if I could tip off the terrorists somehow, let them know that the Turk was informing the police about their operations? For once the Turk would be facing an enemy even more vicious and demented than he was. Yeah, great idea—I just needed to find the terrorists' website, or their email address. Maybe they had a Facebook page I could post on.

I felt bad about stitching up Amobi and getting him arrested, but not that bad. He hadn't even looked at that video of Zoe. He must have known that if he did, he would have had to get involved—at least get the footage analyzed somehow. Everybody knew how the government was keeping tabs on the public these days; they probably had the technology to identify the smartphone that had taken that video, right down to the model number and the IMEI. There might even be a location tag embedded in the footage—but outside of Government Communcations Headquarters, the only person I knew with that sort of IT genius was Zoe herself. Maybe if I watched the footage again…I'd seen a movie once where the cops traced a phone call by
analyzing the sounds they could hear in the background. Perhaps there'd be something in the footage I hadn't noticed—a glimpse through the window of that room where she was being held, a distinctive noise…. It had to be worth a go.

Alone in my musty kitchen I plugged the memory stick into the laptop again and took a deep breath. The prospect of sitting through the footage again made me feel tainted somehow, like the sort of sicko who slows down at motorway pile-ups in the hope of catching a glimpse of a corpse. But Zoe wasn't dead yet, of that much I was sure. And I was being prissy and pathetic—she was the one who actually had to go through the ordeal of being pawed and groped and God knew what else by Dean and the Turk's other gorillas, and she wouldn't give a toss right now how guilty or creepy I felt watching it. If there was any chance at all it could help her, I had to take it. I opened the memory stick's folder, navigated to the video file, and clicked “play.”

The footage of Zoe on campus at York I'd already seen—it would tell me nothing about where she was now. I slid the cursor to the fast-forward button, then hesitated. Could there something in there I'd missed all the other times? I'd never made myself scrutinize
it properly; I'd been squirming too much. I clicked on “play” and forced myself to concentrate, to focus on the moving image, to try and stay cold and analytical somehow. There was Zoe dragging her bike down the steps of her shared house…strolling through the campus…chatting to a girl…I'd seen that girl tagged in a Facebook picture—Molly somebody…?

I hit “pause” again. I opened up a browser and rooted around for the bookmark I'd set for Zoe's Facebook page.

With dyslexia as severe as mine, just trying to read postings in that tiny little text gave me a migraine, so I hardly ever used Facebook. That had been my excuse, anyhow—I didn't need to read her posts to know that Zoe was having a ball up there, far away from me. There were endless low-light pictures of her laughing at parties or moshing at gigs, and she always seemed to be among a crowd of hot girls and cool blokes, all at various stages of drunkenness. And lately Patrick Robinson's languid smile had been beaming through more and more of her pictures like a smug little crescent moon. There he was beside her, picnicking in a summer meadow, one arm draped across her shoulders—pulling her close,
or trying to. Here was a moody black-and-white picture of the pair of them hunched on a park bench in the rain, sharing what looked like a spliff.

It seemed all the more odd, then, that I hadn't seen Patrick in the video footage.

I jumped back to the start of the video, clicked on “play.”

Zoe dragging her bike down the steps. The camera was on the far side of the road, opposite Zoe's house. As I watched her yet again emerge and wrestle with her bike, I noticed again the guy coming in, who had to dodge out of her way—and there he was tagged on her Facebook page: Sunil, from her IT course. Now Zoe was chatting in the canteen, the camera zoomed in to the stud glinting in her nose—that girl she was giggling with, that was Molly again, with her hair pinned up, maybe because she hadn't washed it that morning…still no sign of handsome Patrick anywhere.

What was that?
The video had cut from the college canteen to Zoe in what looked like the library, but something had snagged on my consciousness, something so subtle I wasn't sure I hadn't imagined it. I hit the “pause” button, found the control that moved the footage forward in tiny increments, and
clicked on “reverse,” moving backwards one split second at a time.

Now we were back in the canteen. The image tight on Zoe's face…I found the button to creep forward, and clicked it, once, twice….

There
.

An instant before the cut, Zoe's eyes flicked to the right, and she looked straight down the lens, and on her lips was the beginning of a smile.

I rang the doorbell of Zoe's shared house in York and waited. And waited some more. Standing back, I squinted up at the windows, but there was no way of telling which of the residents were in or out. Maybe they'd split for the summer, maybe they were still asleep in bed at four in the afternoon. Either was possible—these were students, after all. I didn't even know which room was Zoe's, and it didn't matter anyway—I wasn't here to turn the place over for clues: I was here to talk to Patrick.

I took a seat on the cracked stone steps under the front door. Although it was old and crumbling, the house was pretty enough in its own way, with big sash windows that let in lots of light, and a long garden out the front that soaked up the noise of passing traffic. The grass was shaggy and full of dandelions—obviously none of the residents was
into gardening—but it was thinning now and going yellow, longing for the rain that never seemed to come. As the grass died back an old bicycle was emerging from its depths, rusty and decaying, like a skeleton exposed on a dried-up lake bed.

I'd prepared a cover story in case any of Zoe's other housemates turned up—that I'd come to visit Zoe, that I hadn't known she'd left, had she and Patrick had an argument? I needed to speak to him…. Hopefully they would take it for a lovers' tiff, some melodramatic triangle, and leave us to it.

If I was right about Patrick—that he had taken that footage of Zoe and passed it on to the Turk—it would take all my self-control not to leave his perfect smile looking like a row of broken bottles. He might hesitate before calling the cops, but his flatmates wouldn't, and if I got done for assault up here in York I could end up remanded in prison for a week with no friends to bail me out. I did have a lawyer once, but after tangling with the Turk herself she'd fled to South America. And I'd pretty much burned my boats with Amobi that morning.

I'd been staring into space while all this went through my mind, and Patrick was halfway up the path with his door keys in his hand before we saw
each other. Even on this hot sticky day he radiated cool—designer shades, loud baggy shirt, baggy cargo shorts exposing muscular tanned legs—but when he saw me he froze. For a second or two I could see him wondering how to play this—innocent, baffled, bored, amused? He had to assume I knew nothing about his sideline doing surveillance for the Turk; he'd pretend to be the brokenhearted boyfriend abruptly abandoned by his sweetheart after I'd come up to visit, and that he had no idea where she was now. He wouldn't invite me in—he'd ask me sullenly what I wanted.

“Hey, Finn. What can I do for you?”

“He's got Zoe,” I said.

“Who has?”

“The Turk,” I said. Patrick had decided to go for baffled, I could see, and I made an effort to hold on to my patience.

“I haven't seen Zoe since she ran after you,” said Patrick. “If you don't know where she is, I sure as hell don't. Excuse me, please, I'd like to go in.” He made to walk past me, but I didn't shift from the step.

“He said he was going to—” I stopped. I really didn't want to explain everything all over again,
especially to this tall, handsome, treacherous smartarse. But then, how much did he actually know? Maybe he'd never met the Turk in person. Maybe he hadn't known who or what the footage was for. Maybe this whole trip would turn out to have been for nothing.

I had to start with what I knew.

“The footage you shot of her,” I said. “Who did you give it to?”

“I don't know what you're talking about, and I'd really like to get into my bloody house now,” he said.

He tried to squeeze past me, practically shoving his crotch in my face, making my choice pretty straightforward. No room to swing a punch, so I just grabbed instead. Good thing he was wearing those baggy shorts—if he had been wearing tight jeans I would never have found his scrotum first time. If big Terry and the Guvnor's other gorillas could overcome their qualms about handling another bloke's tackle, so could I. I grabbed the ballsack beyond Patrick's dormant prick and held it firmly, without squeezing it. Yet.

His first reaction was gratifying—he let loose a high-pitched yelp, dropped his keys and clawed at my hands—and I squeezed, just a little, to let him know this wasn't a mistake and it wasn't going to
end anytime soon. He went for broke, and backhanded me across my bruised face with the bones of his wrist—a fancy fighting move I'd never encountered before, which hurt like hell. I'm not the best fighter I know, but one skill I do have is the ability to take a beating. Pain drains your strength and your spirit unless you can set it aside; it's a handy trick, and somehow I doubted Patrick had learned it. When he whacked me again across the mouth I held firm, stood up, and twisted his nuts, just a little. He squirmed and yelled and danced on the spot, and he stopped trying to hit me.

There's this medical condition called torsion of the testes where the tubes and veins feeding a man's testicles get tangled. It's excruciating, apparently, and sometimes the only cure is amputation. I wasn't planning to go that far with Patrick—the amount of pain he was in right now was plenty for my immediate purposes. He quickly stopped squirming and yelling and tried to hold still, scrabbling at my hands again. I was right up close to him—I had to be—and I could literally see beads of sweat oozing from his pores and trickling over his lovely tanned cheekbones.

“Please—” he whimpered. “Oh Christ, please stop—”

“Who did you give the footage to?” He still hesitated. I gave my wrist a tiny flick—just enough to remind him of his immediate priorities.

“The Turk, the Turk—I gave it to the Turk,” he babbled. He looked at the house, then over his shoulder down the path, wishing someone would come to his rescue. It was very likely someone would, and soon, and I couldn't let that happen. I held on, counting on him to keep babbling. “He never told me what it was for—he didn't want her to know about it—”

“How do you know him?” I said. “How did the Turk find you?”

“I did some coke,” gasped Patrick. By keeping my fist high I was making him teeter on the balls of his feet, his arms held out rigid by his sides, his fists clenching and unclenching uselessly. “The guy who sold me the stuff, he told the Turk about me. I'm studying law, if I get done for drugs—!”

So he'd been blackmailed, and he'd sold Zoe out to save his own skin. This guy was a real prince. I just hoped I'd get the chance to let Zoe know.

“Did you take that last shot?”

Patrick frowned and opened his mouth and shut it again, clearly confused.

“The shot of Zoe being tied to a bed and felt up by
Dean and those other guys. You were there, weren't you? You didn't just watch—you joined in.”

He looked appalled and terrified. “No! No, I swear to God, they told me they weren't going to hurt her, or do anything to her! I just shot the stuff up here, I never—Please, I can't—”

This had been a fool's errand after all—Patrick couldn't tell me anything I didn't know already. At the thought of failing, of having to leave Zoe in that cesspit, my fist closed tighter, without my even being aware of it.

And Patrick screamed. “Oh God oh God please stop I just took her there I didn't talk to anyone they didn't tell me oh PLEASE!”

I loosened my grip—in fact, I was so surprised and relieved I nearly let go altogether.

“She needed a place to stay in London, and she called me—” Interesting: relief from pain was as great an incentive to talk as the pain had been…. I'd probably make a good torturer. I shoved that qualm aside—there'd be plenty of time for guilt later.

“The Turk told me to bring her to this flat in Clapham,” Patrick groaned. “I can give you the address.”

“Forget that,” I said. “You're going take me there.”

I had intended to make him come back to London with me on the train. But after I'd let go of his scrotum and let him bend over and gag, and walk up and down for a bit, Patrick picked up his keys and led me to an old but shiny soft-top Mini parked on the street outside. He unlocked it with a remote, pressing the button twice—once for each door—and we both climbed in.

Traveling by car to London would make my task a lot simpler; on the train I would have had to stick by him all the way to ensure he didn't call the Turk with a warning, and that would have been tricky. I couldn't confiscate his phone either—he might call a cop over and make up some story that I'd robbed him, and if I had his handset in my pocket it would have been hard to deny. And with his own phone he could have gone to the loo at any time and made that call, unless I followed him in there, and I'd had enough intimate contact with his genitals for one afternoon. Sitting in the passenger seat while he drove down to London would present far fewer problems.

Except, of course, York was hundreds of miles from London. On the train it took roughly two hours,
but even at eighty miles per hour it was going to take us about four to get as far as the North Circular. His convertible was comfortable enough, but kind of cramped. I imagined the female students Patrick gave lifts to enjoyed rubbing thighs with him, hoping eventually to help him get his top down. I didn't, and I wasn't, and as we headed south an awkward silence settled over us. I stared out the windows at the endless flat northern vista of scorched crops wilting for want of water and sheep slowly cooking in their woolly coats, while Patrick stared impassively ahead at the motorway unrolling before us. Normally I fall asleep on long car journeys but there was too much tension in that tiny space to let me relax. Patrick's face was half hidden behind mirrored shades, but the half I could see looked sulky and bullied rather than guilty. I could imagine his growing indignation at finding himself obliged—forced, even—to drive Zoe's violent thug of an ex-boyfriend, two years younger than him, all the way down to London.

“This is so stupid,” he said eventually. “I mean, what do you hope to achieve?”

I hadn't thought that far ahead, but that was none of his business, so I just looked at him.

“It's a bluff,” Patrick said. The Turk's not actually going to do anything to her, he told me.”

This guy's too stupid to be a lawyer, I thought. He's too stupid even to be a cop. “Shut up and drive” was all I said.

“He just wants you to think that, so you'll do a job for him.”

“When he told you he'd shop you to the cops for snorting coke,” I said, “did you think he was bluffing then?”

He rolled his eyes like I was being stubborn for the sake of it. “Either way,” he said, “this, what we're doing now, this is just stupid. When he finds out I've taken you there, maybe he really will hurt her, and me and you, and it'll be your bloody fault.”

I wanted to thump him just to stop the sniveling self-justification, but at eighty miles an hour that wouldn't have been a good idea.

“Seriously, Patrick, just shut up and drive,” I said.

And he did, mostly. Two hours past Leeds he grunted he was hungry and pulled into some services. When he went for a piss I took one at the next urinal, and when he went to buy a sandwich I stuck to him like a shadow and bought the same thing as him. Stuffing
our faces, we headed back to the car. He pulled the keys from his pocket.

“Gimme those,” I said, spitting crumbs.

“You're not insured to drive it,” he said. I held out my hand and he sighed impatiently. “Have you even passed your test?”

“Not a driving test, no. But I got a medal once for punching people in the face.”

He tossed them to me, sulkily. I hit the unlocking blipper on the fob, once for the driver's door, a second time for mine. “Just in case you were planning to drive off without me,” I said. When I saw him clench his jaw, and the muscles flexing in his lovely sculpted cheeks, I knew that was exactly what he'd been planning. I clambered in, and he folded his long limbs into the driver's seat, and I passed the keys back to him. He snatched them from me and started the engine.

It was nine in the evening by the time we hit the North Circular, and coming up to ten when we crossed Battersea Bridge heading towards Clapham. We'd missed the worst of the traffic; the roads were quiet, but the pavements outside pubs were crowded with men in shirtsleeves and women in skimpy dresses,
clutching drinks, hooting and sniggering in the hot night. Patrick seemed to know exactly where he was going—I didn't see him check any road signs or look at a map on his phone—and when he stopped in a shopping street, shifted into reverse and slipped neatly backwards into a parking spot it took me by surprise. He pulled on the handbrake, switched off the engine and sighed as some of the tension of the long drive subsided.

“Where?” I said.

He'd taken his shades off two hours ago when dusk fell, but he was still avoiding my eye. He nodded at a row of shops up ahead. “The electricals store at the end,” he said. “The flat upstairs.”

“You took her there?”

“She called me, told me she'd been staying in a safe house, but that the cops had called off the operation and told her to go back to York. Asked me if I knew a place she could crash in London.”

“And you called the Turk?”

“He told me to take her here. I didn't know what he—He promised me she wouldn't be hurt, it was only going to be for a day or two—”

“Yeah, yeah, you said. How many guys did you see? When you delivered her?”

He shrugged in clueless exasperation.

“OK, how many rooms are up there?”

“I didn't go in,” he said. “Look, this is insane. Why don't you just do what he says, whatever it is? If Zoe gets hurt, it'll be your fault, not mine—”

His words were abruptly cut off, because I'd grabbed him by the throat. I could feel the blood pulsing through his carotid artery, urgent and pressured, and the air rattling through his windpipe as he struggled to breathe and fumbled at my fingers.