Cucumber Coolie (11 page)

I avoided eye contact with Martha. “Enlighten me, shrink.”

“You’re worried about failing. About losing Danielle for good. And you figure that if you don’t even try, then at least you’ll have nothing to fail. But if I… if you leave it all to me, if I fail, you’ll have someone other than yourself to blame forever.”

I did meet Martha’s eyes now. She was tearing up. A rare sight, for sure.

I wanted to respond. I wanted to tell her how bloody wrong she was for thinking about me in that way. I wanted to tell her to get stuffed and leave saving Danielle to me.

But I couldn’t. Because I knew she was right.

“A great old writer friend once told me something: dare to be bad.”

“Sounds like a recipe for disaster,” I mumbled.

She stepped forward. Grabbed my hands. “It’s better to try and fail than to not try at all. Always. Dare to be bad, hun. Don’t leave this to me.”

I felt Martha’s hands tighten, and I let them. She half-smiled at me, and I felt a warmth inside.

Dare to be bad.

It’s better to try and fail than to not try at all.

“If you get your bloody hands off me, I’ll consider it.”

Martha laughed as I yanked my hands away. I could see she was full-on crying, too, but then again I could taste salt on my lips so I was hardly one to talk.

“Come on, Colombo. Let’s get to work.”

Martha and I spent a good half an hour calling numbers from her little—or big—pad of contacts. Time went so quickly, and still no progress was made.

Two thirty. Eleven and a half hours. That was nothing. No time at all.

I puffed out my lips as I reached the bottom of the page. I’d just been on to a part-time “mechanic” called Stuart who seemed absolutely clueless about lock picking, even though Martha insisted he was an arms dealer with side business ventures in burglary kit and drugs and things like that.

“Yeah?” Martha said. She frowned. Jotted down a few things, even though she seemed to have something to jot for every number, no matter how much info they had. “That’s… that’s interesting. Very interesting. Thanks, Jared.”

She put the phone down. Wrote another few things.

“Well?”

She looked at me with an expression that I’d not yet seen since we started our mass calling.

A smile tickled the corners of her mouth.

“Jared Kowlwhite,” she said. “Runs a jewellers down in Broughton.”

“As well as…”

“Burglary equipment, knives, prepper kit like gas masks. All sorts of barely legal things.”

She smiled some more. Did all she could to stop it bustling over.

“Martha, time’s ticking. We don’t have all day to dick around—”

“Jared sold a huge batch of lock picking equipment three weeks ago, including the newest item in his repertoire—a Wilko’s SawDoor.”

“A SawDoor?”

“The electronic chainsaw knife thing you saw in Hose’s video?”

My stomach turned as I imagined the “SawDoor” cutting off Danielle’s ear…

“Yes. Great. But that doesn’t necessarily mean this Jared guy sold Hose the SawDoor. There must be other dodgy dealers selling this type of thing.”

Martha tilted her head either side and doodled on her pad. “You’re right. Sure.”

And then she stopped doodling and looked right at me.

“He also sold a top of the range VaiTox to the same guy at the same time.”

I scratched at my nose and scanned the next page of Martha’s list. “VaiTox? What’s that?”

“A voice alteration device,” she said.

I let go of the page. Looked at Martha. Her smile was wide.

“I think we should pay Jared a visit, hun. Don’t you?”

NINETEEN

It didn’t take Martha and I long to get ourselves down to Jared’s Jewellers in Broughton, which was just what you needed when a psycho killer was threatening to murder your girlfriend in eleven and a half hours.

I stepped out of the car. Got a whiff of fish and chips from a local chippy. Broughton was a quiet little village, a bit in the middle of nowhere. Decent place, though. I used to go to school here a long, long time ago. Now, I had little reason to visit.

They didn’t have an electronics shop. Therefore, there was no use for me being here.

“This Jared guy isn’t like your other pals is he?” I asked.

Martha squinted at me. She was wearing a cream wool coat even though it wasn’t remotely cold. “Like my other pals? What’s that supposed to mean?”

I fished around for the right words as we approached the all-glass front of Jared’s Jewellers. “Oh, you know. Hostile. Bit of a dick.”

“I’m sure they’re full of praise for you too, grumpy. Now come on. He’s waiting for us. Let’s get him chatted to.”

We stepped inside Jared’s Jewellers. Now I knew exactly why Martha had brought her coat along. It was bloody freezing in here, as air conditioning blasted through the main room, sheltered from the glare of the sun.

At the other side of the quiet shop floor, there was a man sitting behind the counter. He was dressed in a black suit, with a white shirt underneath. Jesus, he looked clean cut as hell, and—turn for the books here—he was actually
smiling
.

“That’s not him, is it?”

“Why?” Martha asked. “Got yourself a mancrush?”

I couldn’t deny that Jared was an extremely handsome fella. “Just looks a bit high class for you to be mixing with.”

“Sometimes, hun, I wonder why I help you out.”

“Cause you love me?”

“Definitely not that. Jared! Nice to see you.”

Jared smiled at Martha. Shook her hand. “Pleasure to see you again, Martha. You’re looking well.”

“Oh, you. Such a charmer.”

I listened to them chat like old friends catching up for what felt like forever before Smooth Guy Jared finally looked at me.

“And you must be Blake?” he said.

I held out a hand for him.

He turned away and pointed to the back room. “If you’d like to follow me.”

I stood there with my hand propped out.

Okay, maybe Jared was a douche after all.

Martha and I followed Jared into the back room of the jewellers. We took a left and went through another door, which Jared had just unlocked. It was dark, and it smelled damp.

“There’s a light around here somewhere… ah!”

The light flickered on.

I was stunned by what I saw.

“Of course, it goes without saying that the moment you leave this place, you’ll
unsee
everything you’ve seen. That okay with you, Blake?”

I nodded and mumbled, but no way was I forgetting this place.

There were guns of all kinds lining the back wall. Machine guns, shotguns, handguns, all just stacked up in the back of this quiet little jewellers in the middle of a sleepy village.

But it was the wall to my left that made my heart pick up.

Gadgets. Gadgets of all shapes and sizes. Lasers. Top of the range laptops. Jesus—was that a bloody Google Glass? I was in absolute heaven.

“Like the stuff?” Jared asked.

“Don’t mind him,” Martha said. “He’s the biggest gadget nerd you’ll ever meet.”

I salivated at the thought of all the toys I could spend my Fun Funds on. Holy hell, why had I not been told about this place in the past?

“Is that…” I pointed to the slick black phone sitting on top of a MacBook Pro Retina.

“An iPhone 7? Yep,” Jared said. “One of the first prototype models in from China.”

I examined the beautiful 5.5 inch screen, the curved back… “But they—but they aren’t even—”

“Available yet? Nope. But it helps to have contacts. Anyway, about your guy.”

I had to pinch my own side to remind myself that I was here to save Danielle’s life, not get horny over an iPhone 7.

Jared propped some thick-rimmed glasses on his face and scanned through a file. “Yeah, I remember him. 29
^th
July. Came in here with the passwords and bought the VaiTox, the SawDoor, and a load of other lock picking things.”

“What was he like?” I asked.

Jared tapped his perfectly white tooth with the end of his Parker pen. God, I could marry this bloke for all his gadgets. “Hmm. Well I remember him for a reason. He was in his fifties, I’d say. Balding. Quite… quite professional-looking, actually. You know, suited and booted. He looked like a typical rich-man coming in to buy his wife a new diamond necklace, something like that. So it surprised me when he gave me the passwords for this room.”

“Do you have CCTV footage of him?”

Jared nodded. “Sure. Got it right here for you.”

He pushed a DVD into an unreleased Mac Pro and we waited for it to load up.

I squinted at the screen.

“Here he is. 2 p.m, he wanders in the shop. You can get a real good look at him here.” He zoomed in with his Touchpad.

The guy was just as Jared had described him. Balding, in his fifties or sixties. Wearing a decent-looking suit, although it was a bit baggy for his skinny body.

But his hands. His shaking hands and his wide eyes. They were the main things.

“He looks like he’s shitting himself,” Martha said.

“Right,” Jared said. “I noticed that too. Which is usually fine, especially when we have new back room clients. But I dunno. He always stuck in my mind for just how nervous he was.”

I watched him mutter something to Jared. Watched, as the pair of them disappeared through the back door.

One moment he was there, the next, he was gone.

“Can we get this to the police?” Martha asked.

Jared shrugged. “As long as it doesn’t trace back to me, you can do what you want with it.”

Martha nodded. “Nice one. Right, Blake?”

I stared at the screen. “What was in his pocket?”

Jared squinted. “His pocket?”

“Rewind a second. There was something in his pocket.”

Jared whistled as he fiddled with the Mac Pro, then rewound a little, back to when the guy entered the jewellers.

I watched. Watched closely, focused on his right hand, his right pocket.

“There,” I said.

Jared zoomed in on the pocket, the CCTV footage refreshingly crystal clear.

“It’s a glove,” Martha said.

I nodded. “A clear protective glove. Like the sort a dentist wears?”

“Why would he be fumbling around with a glove?”

Jared shrugged. “Look, the footage is all yours. For what it’s worth, I hope it helps.”

I waited for him to tell me he wanted something in return, but of course, what would a man with every bloody gadget in the world want in return?

“Don’t leave it as long next time,” Jared said, as Martha and I walked out to her car.

“Oh, you,” she said. “Oh you.”

We got into Martha’s car, CCTV DVD in hand.

“So what now?” Martha asked.

I thought about the guy’s face. His bald head. His shaking hands.

“I suppose we organise a meet with Lenny somehow. Get this footage to him so he can get an ID on the guy ASAP.”

Martha started up the car. Turned out onto the A6. “See, I’m feeling positive now. Really positive. Eleven hours to go and we’re doing alright—”

“Please don’t keep giving me minutely updates on how long I have left to save my torture-victim girlfriend.”

We slowed down as we hit traffic.

“Typical traffic time, eh?” Martha said, fiddling about with the radio.

I looked out at the row of shops in Broughton. Looked at the suit shop. The newsagents. The Indian restaurant. “Typical traffic… wait.”

I saw something.

Something that didn’t add up in my head. Only it did add up, too. It didn’t make sense and it did make sense in a crazy frigging way.

“Stop the car,” I said.

“Blake, we’re in moving traffic. I’m not stopping the car.”

I undid my seatbelt. Opened the door.

“Hun! What the hell are you—”

“José’s Waxwork Route,” I said. I pointed at the building beside us, tall and black-bricked. Underneath José’s Waxwork Route, “Look around & use your mind!” was written.

“What?” Martha asked. Cars behind her honked as the traffic moved. “Get back in the bloody—”

“It isn’t ‘Hose’,” I said. “It’s José. The note, Martha. Remember what it said? ‘
Look around. The route is nearby. Use your mind’.
” I pointed back at José’s Waxwork Route, the honking horns getting louder.

“It’s all there, Martha. It’s… This is it.”

TWENTY

“Good girl. Grade A performance. No wonder your hero boyfriend likes you so much.”

He steps away from Subject C as she sits, gagged and shaven-headed, on her knees. He curls the wax ear up under his fingers. Takes a sniff of it. It smells so fresh, so perfect. And to look at it, it is so real. So convincing.

Convincing enough to have Hero Blake Dent crying like a little baby while he watched Subject C and Hose’s little performance.

He slips the wax ear into his pocket. He must remember to dispose of it later. Maybe he’ll burn a candle. A candle for his victims.

Or a candle to use as part of the mise en scène of his next shot. A very viable option.

He crouches down opposite Subject C. She stares at him with tearless eyes. Sure, she looks tired, but anyone would look tired in her position.

“What are we gonna do to make you cry, eh?” he says.

He rubs his hand over her smooth, shaven head and she doesn’t even flinch.

He moves his hand down to where her right ear is still pinned back against her head, and he pulls it free.

“Your poor boyfriend thinks you’ve lost an ear.” He smiles. “He thinks that’s as far as I’m going to go. A sliced off ear. How wrong is he, hmm? How wrong is he?”

Subject C stares at him blankly. She breathes deeply through her nostrils, the duct tape gag completely cutting off her mouth.

“Funny. You girls always piss. Always, without fail. But I don’t smell anything.”

He reaches in between her legs. Rubs his hand around her naked vag. It’s dry. Completely dry.

“No piss at all. You are a tough nut, aren’t you?”

Still, just that blank stare.

Still, not a speck of emotion.

He sniffs his fingers and he looks around the room. Looks at the tarp, which rests over his equipment, his toys. Looks at his camcorder, sitting and waiting for a new scene to be shot.