Dark Side (19 page)

‘Don't walk too closely behind me,' Patrick warned and set off up the stairs.

I never do. For one thing, my reactions are a lot slower than his.

When he was near the top I started to follow. The stairs did not creak, probably because the wood was saturated and swollen. Would this place ever re-open? was the inconsequential thought that flitted through my mind. Moments later I saw Patrick's torch beam illuminating a smallish space above me and reckoned that he was in some kind of corridor.

It was, and wet up here as well with a dirty tidemark about a foot up the walls. I kept right back as I saw two open doorways yawning blackly, one on each side, and through the nearest of which the draught seemed to be emanating. Patrick, who had drawn his Glock, went into each in turn, giving whatever lay within a swift reconnoitre and then emerged with a further shake of his head. Nothing to be found there, perhaps with the exception of an open window. I glanced in as I passed and saw that it was in fact broken.

‘Don't flash the light around,' Patrick scolded.

Yet another door, closed, was situated at the end of the passage. We stepped over the heap of filthy, oozing carpet that someone had begun to wrench up and then abandoned and made our way towards it. It was modern and well-fitting. Patrick shrugged in fatalistic fashion and tried the handle. It opened.

I was beginning to worry about all these inner doors being unlocked but then again, who the hell would want to get in here?

The police, that's who.

‘I do urge extreme caution,' I said under my breath. ‘You were once almost blown up in a mobster's flat in London.'

Patrick, who can be overly gung-ho at times, usually takes these kind of utterances by his oracle seriously. ‘Does he have the expertise?'

‘We did hear someone say, in this building, that he employs ex-service people.'

He nodded in acknowledgement and shone his light through the opened doorway, illuminating a room with an untidy muddle of chairs and a table roughly in the centre loaded with used crockery and drinks glasses. The curtains across the small window were closed. No one had attempted to lift this soaking carpet and our feet squelched on it as we cautiously went forward into what, I was sure, was the room where we had heard the men talking. Next door, then, must be the office.

Patrick was being extremely careful, shining his torch low in order to see any trip wires. We had both already noted the infra-red motion detectors in two corners of the ceiling but they were not working, which suggested that all power in the building had been turned off or had tripped – I guessed the former. Thinking along the same lines as I was, Patrick flipped down a light switch: nothing.

The door into the office was ajar and my nerves twitched as my cursed writer's imagination trotted out all kinds of scenarios of the bloodbath variety. Giving my partner plenty of room I fingered the Smith and Wesson in the pocket of my jacket, finding myself taking a deep breath, not having been aware of holding it. I could taste the stench at the back of my throat.

The office appeared to be roughly as we had seen it before. It possessed a couple of tall built-in cupboards, a filing cabinet, a few chairs and a desk with a computer on it surrounded by a jumble of dirty polystyrene cups. Discounting another soggy carpet, it looked just like any ordinary office. Patrick went first to look behind the curtain that covered the opening at the top of the stone stairs, wrenching it to one side and shining his light into the dark void beyond. He then went from sight for half a minute or so, checking the area below. Returning, he investigated the cupboards which were wooden and old and may well have been put in when the building was constructed. They appeared to be locked.

With no power in the premises it was pointless to investigate the computer, so we first turned our attention to the filing cabinet. This looked promising as there was so much jammed into the drawers they would not shut properly, never mind lock.

‘We'll be here for a week,' Patrick muttered, rifling through the stuff in the top drawer. He hefted out a whole armful of files and loose sheets of paper and dumped them on the desk, sweeping all the rubbish already on it on to the floor. ‘See what you can find. Did you bring spare torch batteries?'

I had.

I went through it all, initially carefully but then more quickly. None of the paperwork before me appeared to refer to the club at all but to a fashion shop in the city, in Union Street, with letters, bills and so forth dating as far back as thirty years. I did not recognize the name of it. Further down the pile were even older photocopied documents and correspondence that referred to another business in Trowbridge, a town fairly close by.

‘Just junk,' I said. ‘Nothing to do with anything here.'

‘Same here,' Patrick grunted, working on the second of the three drawers. ‘I reckon they inherited this thing with the building.'

‘What's behind it?'

‘I'll have a look in a minute.'

Concealed by the filing cabinet was a wall safe. It was open, the door just pushed to, the interior empty.

Wasting no time, we went back to the desk. The middle and two top side drawers were locked but yielded to the skeleton keys and a strong wrist. The former contained several A4 files, the top ones of which appeared to refer to the club but only to drinks and other similar orders from suppliers.

‘Ah,' Patrick exclaimed quietly, having flipped though the last of them. ‘Staff rotas, salary records and other stuff.' He removed all the papers from the file, folded them in half lengthways and handed them to me without further comment. Routine, this; I stuffed them into the back of the waistbands of my tracksuit and knickers, and pulled my top down to cover them.

The other top drawers contained a small amount of drugs, at a guess cocaine, a loaded Colt revolver and ammunition for it. Those lower down held a muddle of rubbish, pornographic magazines and chocolate bars, one deep bottom drawer jammed with spirits bottles, some half-full, some empty and one obviously having been spilt, the smell of booze penetrating even the room's resident stench for a moment.

One could describe this as a collection reflecting a misspent life, I thought.

This conclusion was further enhanced when the first cupboard we looked in was found to contain a jumble of costumes, bondage gear and whips. We exchanged glances and I giggled. There is a daft and irresponsible part of me that always makes me want to laugh in such otherwise nerve-racking circumstances.

‘If they're running a brothel here, where is it?' he wondered.

‘Somewhere on the other side of this other cupboard?' I suggested.

I could not really tell in the gloom away from the torch beams but had an idea I was then given a look that commented generally on the freakishness of authors' imaginations. So it was gratifying when, after the lock was forced and it broke, we discovered that we had before us yet another doorway.

‘If anyone's living here …' I murmured.

This door was alarmed, Patrick's gizmo beeping excitedly, and proved to have an electronic lock connected to it as there was a series of clicks and clunks and the door swung very slightly in our direction. I did not have to be told to stand to one side as Patrick opened it as wide as the outer cupboard door permitted, he on the other. Regrettably, I wanted to giggle a lot more, a legacy of watching Hammer House of Horror-style movies when I was younger, picturing a stone-dead Kev toppling like a wardrobe through the opening.

Mister I-know-your-every-foible's gaze was on me, a thousand-watt stare, in fact. I bit my lower lip hard and then noticed a sheen of sweat on his face.

There was some kind of dim illumination within and when we cautiously entered we saw that it was coming from a side room where the door was ajar. The rest of the doors in a short corridor were closed and there were three stairs with a door at the top at the other end of it. The flooding did not appear to have penetrated this far, perhaps because we had had to step up to go through the cupboard. Surely, now we were somewhere to the rear of the main room of the night club.

This was not Narnia.

Patrick was bow-taut; we had entered a potential death-trap with any number of hidden and sophisticated surveillance gadgets watching our every move. And here, we could assume, there was a separate electrical network which might power a security system in the rest of the building. It seemed inconceivable that a mobster like Hamsworth would not thus protect himself.

The fact that Patrick's reactions are a lot faster than mine was then forcefully demonstrated when the door at the end of the corridor was flung open and a powerful flashlamp was beamed directly on us. He went for the only option and shot it out, then dived to the floor, taking me with him. In the next few moments when men burst through the doors on either side he scrambled the short distance along the floor and shot out the lamp in the side room too. The men – several of them – shouted obscenities while kicking around on the floor, trying to find us. One boot made painful contact with my side and another must have been grabbed by Patrick as the owner was precipitantly upended, hitting his head hard on the wall by the sound of it.

‘Get hold of
him
!' someone yelled, perhaps whoever had been holding the flashlamp, as the voice did not come from immediately nearby.

Someone else tripped over me and thumped down on to the floor, and I took the opportunity to do a swift crawl between various legs in the opposite direction, back towards the cupboard entrance. One of my feet was grabbed and hauled rapidly backwards. Praying fervently that it wasn't Patrick I kicked out with the other, high-ish, and my shoe crunched into what felt like a face and nose. There was a yell of pain. Offering thanks – wrong voice – I scuttled off on all fours, only to cannon into the side of the wall in the dark, seeing stars. At that moment an overhead light was switched on and I immediately rolled over and pulled the Smith and Wesson from my pocket.

They had Patrick on the floor: four, no five, of the most bottom-clenchingly ghastly yobs I had ever had the misfortune to come upon. One of them kicked Patrick in the chest but he managed to squirm over on to his face.

‘Drop the gun or he's dead!' shouted one of the men. He and another man were holding guns to Patrick's head.

‘Kill the bastard!' Patrick shouted to me.

They kicked him again, several times.

I bent down and put the revolver on the floor. The risk of trying to disable them both and failing was too great. And the light was poor, the same strange red illumination we had seen the first time we had come here.

The one who had spoken came over to me.

Snake eyes. This was Hamsworth, and he was gazing at me with scorn.

‘I expected something tougher-looking,' he said with a smile that was quite brave considering the number of bad teeth it displayed. ‘But you're quite a girl.'

‘You're all under arrest,' I told him.

He laughed out loud, turned to his henchmen and they obediently guffawed as well. Then he said, ‘Surely you don't expect us to take any notice of that.'

‘No, not at all,' I replied. ‘It just means that a charge of resisting arrest gets added to the final tally. Not that it will make much difference with several murders at the top of the list.'

He looked far older than his criminal records would suggest. In a word, raddled, his face pock-marked and, even in the strange light, an unhealthy putty colour. His eyes had a yellow tinge and were really reptilian; I was almost expecting his tongue to be forked and flick in and out of his mouth like a snake's.

‘Who then, duckie?' he mocked. ‘Do tell.'

‘Benny Cooper, for a start.' Could I kick this man where it hurt most, grab the gun from the floor where the moron had left it and shoot the other openly armed mobster before he killed Patrick? Each of the unsavoury quartet, one trying to staunch a nosebleed with a bloodstained handkerchief, had a foot on Patrick as though he was a big-game trophy.

‘Oh, no. Very, very sadly, Cooper was killed by a copper,' Hamsworth drawled.

‘How about Bob Downton, then?'

‘The little shit who ran a coffee bar with the Chinese woman in London? SOCA
has
been busy. Nah, wrong again. He got mixed up with some very nasty folk – I do know them, mind – and thought he could keep some of the proceeds for himself.' He glanced around quickly to check on what was going on behind him – not enough time for me to do anything. ‘You know what you read sometimes in the papers? “Their mutilated bodies were found on waste ground?” Well, duckie, that's what's going to happen to you. Right now. But we're going to have a little fun first, aren't we, boys?' Again he turned and there was general sniggering.

I risked everything and gave him a violent shove while he wasn't looking at me, followed him down, scooped up the Smith and Wesson and fired it, fairly high. The bullet found a target and one of the men went down like a skittle. Then, the wrist of the hand holding the gun received a blow from somewhere to the rear of me and a couple of arms like steel bars grasped me and hoisted me into the air as though I was made of feathers. The gun dropped from utterly numbed fingers. It felt as though my arm was broken.

‘Good old Kev!' one of the men roared.

I was dumped back on my feet but still restrained so tightly I could hardly breathe. Hamsworth had already picked himself up and now came over. I braced myself.

‘We want you in fairly good condition or you won't be able to play, will you?' he grated, visibly controlling the urge to lash out. ‘Now listen, duckie, the length of time your screwing-mate here takes to die depends on your being a good girl.' He regarded the group. ‘Get him up.' Turning back to me, he added, ‘It's a pity you are going to die really, because you won't be able to remember that Raptor was better than even a so-called top-class cop outfit.'