The Elephant Tree (27 page)

‘I’ll give them till morning and there’s been no call by then I’m gonna go looking,’ Putty said; a resolution showed on his face and Scott knew it was pointless to try and change his mind. He just hoped the call would come before then and that Angela was unharmed.

Keep brought some blankets in for them in case anyone felt they could sleep. Jeff took one and said after the painkillers he’d been given, he’d more than likely be sleeping soon.

‘Did the doctor ask how you got the damage?’ Scott asked him.

‘I told him I’d done it falling down the stairs but he looked anything but convinced.’

‘Yeah he kept looking at me like I was the one that done it,’ Keep said, shaking his head. ‘Fucking racist.’

‘The doctor was Chinese,’ Jeff said, and winced as he chuckled.

‘Don’t matter, they’re just as bad.’

Putty smiled and patted his friend on the shoulder.

Scott checked that his phone had both a strong signal and battery power and placed it on the coffee table in front of him. Within the hour Jeff was sleeping and Putty and Keep had pulled both of the armchairs together and were talking conspiratorially in the corner of the room. The events of the day hadn’t dampened their appetite though and joints were steadily rolled and smoked between them. Scott turned down all offers extended his way. He wanted to keep a clear head for whatever was to come next.

At 5am the next morning the silence in the flat was shattered by a sudden ring as Scott’s phone came to life. Startled out of sleep he lurched forward and snatched it up. Everyone else was awake now and listening. The incoming number had been withheld; Scott connected the call.

‘Yeah?’

‘Scott, I hope I didn’t wake you,’ McBlane’s voice rang out jovially on the other end, ‘but I have a friend of yours here and she’d like to say hi.’

A muffled sound as the phone was handed over and then Angela spoke.

‘Scott?’

‘Are you OK, have they hurt you?’ he asked, trying to keep his voice level. Putty was over beside Scott now and knelt down so he could listen in better on the call.

‘I’m fine. Apart from the nausea from looking at their disgusting fucking faces all this....’ The phone was snatched away from Angela before McBlane spoke again.

‘Right, now you know she’s OK I’ll see you and Jeff at his house this afternoon. Don’t try and do anything stupid, Angela won’t be with us, but once our business is concluded I’ll make a call and she’ll be released in the same condition we picked her up in. Understand?’

‘Yeah, I understand.’

‘Oh, and I’ll be keeping the bag she was carrying as a token of your gratitude that she gets to walk away unharmed.’

With that the line went dead, with McBlane’s laughter still ringing in Scott’s ears. He placed the phone back down on the table and relayed what had been said for the benefit of Jeff and Keep and in case Putty had missed anything.

‘Angela sounded OK?’ Keep asked.

‘Yeah, she’s keeping her spirits up. They’ll probably be glad to see the back of her,’ Putty said, and forced a smile that looked as natural as a horse on ice.

Within the hour Scott and Jeff were in the car and driving back up into the mountains. Putty had taken some persuasion that the best thing he could do was wait by the phone. He’d taken even more persuasion to keep the shotgun with him.

‘Just in case,’ he’d said, attempting to thrust the weapon, wrapped loosely back in the plastic bag into the car with Scott.

‘If they don’t release Angela then maybe you’ll need it. But McBlane said on the phone she won’t be up there anyway. If I take that along and they see it it’s gonna fuck everything up and put Angela in even more danger.’

Reluctantly Putty agreed and went back up to the flat with Keep.

Jeff, having managed to sit upright in the front seat, armed with the painkillers he’d got from the hospital and his old revolver tucked inside his coat, seemed fresher but remained tight lipped about the afternoon ahead of them. His face was still swollen and bruising crept out from under his beard, now an angry purple and black. The hospital had cleaned him up and he looked better for it but his sweater still displayed medals of blood earned from their encounter the day before.

The weather had taken a turn for the better and as the altitude rose the closer they got to the mountains, there had still been no sign of frost on the ground.

Scott slowed as they approached the turn up towards the house. He steered the car under the archway, swallowing against the lump he could feel rising in his throat, and cautiously drove the half mile to the house.

The white van was already parked up around back when they got there. Dominic and Shugg were sat smoking cigarettes on the bench beside the firewood and McBlane came out from the back door of the house. He was dressed in another impeccably tailored suit, and couldn’t have looked more out of place surrounded by the rugged wilderness. Despite this he was calm and self assured, as if he’d just stepped out of a plush city centre office for a lunch meeting.

‘Scott, Jeff,’ McBlane greeted them and glanced at his watch. ‘Thank you for being so punctual. This won’t take much of your time and my associates and I will be on our way.’

Scott took out a cigarette and lit it. Fighting the revulsion he now felt for these men. It was beyond fear now. He just wanted this meeting over, for Angela to be freed and to never see any of them again.

‘The reason we came up here for you yesterday Scott, was simply to show you the error of your ways and bring you back into the fold. What happened with Twinkle was unfortunate but you were the one I wanted to work with.’

‘You killed him didn’t you? You had something in the van recording what we said on that job, when you heard him talk about ripping you off you had him killed.’

‘You understand that I can’t tolerate any insubordination from anyone working for me. Twinkle was a blunt object that could have been employed for certain duties from time to time. Perhaps even earned himself a tidy sum to go with it, but when I heard what he said in the van I knew he could never be trusted. If he’d been caught on an actual job he would have given every one of us up. If he was prepared to risk taking me on, then he would have given your name without a second thought.’

‘Twinkle panicked, that’s all it was. He got past it. You could have just not hired him again and left it at that.’

‘No. He got past it because of what you said. That reinforced the strength of character I’d been led to believe you had in you Scott. And besides, when someone talks out of turn like that a message has to be sent. It was regrettable,’ he said, with counterfeit sympathy, ‘but unavoidable.’

‘Anyway, that’s all in the past. We came up yesterday to give you a little reminder that you’re one of us and that it was time you came back to work. A tracking device planted on your car when you parked in the city the day before was all it took. Of course your having to abandon the car when you got stuck in the snow caused a bit of a problem. We waited for a while not knowing what to do next until that old guy came along and towed it to the village. That was handy but there was nothing else we could do by then. It was dark and I knew you wouldn’t return that night so we came back the next morning. Your car was in the same spot and no-one in the pub knew anything. We were just gonna sit and wait it out again until I had a word with the fella in the shop. He’s chatty isn’t he? I’d heard folk in remote places like this were unlikely to talk to strangers, thought maybe we’d have to twist his arm or something but once he heard we were old friends his lips loosened up no end. Must be quite fond of you Scott. He gave this place up right away, so up we came. Seeing old Jeff here was quite a surprise I must admit. I’ve thought about you over the years,’ he said looking at Jeff, ‘but I never expected our paths would cross again. Strange how things turn out. Two birds, one stone and all that.’ McBlane chuckled at his own impromptu joke.

‘But things have worked out for the best and now we all get to work together,’ McBlane said, and a smile spread across his face as easy as a politician’s lie. He waited for the obvious question to be asked but neither one of them spoke. Unperturbed, he continued.

‘When you and the young lady made off down that hole like Alice in fucking Wonderland I was quite surprised, but once I saw that big door down there and with old Jeff being here as well the pieces all came together quite nicely. You’ve taken the plan we’d made years ago and made it happen here. Well good for you Jeff but now that I am aware of the situation I think I quite fancy being a partner.’

‘You can have the place,’ Jeff said bitterly. ‘It’s yours, once Angela is safe.’

‘Angela is fine, I’m not a monster,’ he said holding his arms apart in a gesture of innocence, ’and she’ll stay that way as long as there are no problems. But you seem to have misunderstood my intentions for our future. I don’t want to work underground like some kind of fucking goblin doing whatever it is you do down there. You two will stay here and grow the plants. I will take care of the sales and the money will be divided up. It might not be an even split but you’ll get a fair wage.’

‘If you think me and Scott are gonna stay up here growing cannabis plants so you can get rich you must be mad. I said you can have the place so take it. Get those two meat-heads to do the work,’ Jeff said, pointing at Shugg and Dominic.

‘They are many things but I don’t suspect they’re particularly green fingered. You
will
both stay and you
will
grow the plants. I’ve already decided. And once you accept this I’ll make a call and Angela will walk, then we can all have a look behind that big door down there so I can see exactly what kind of setup you’ve managed to assemble for yourselves. Of course if you were to agree and then somehow vanish into the night, I would come after you but more importantly I’d come after Angela. She’s a pretty little thing isn’t she? I thought that the first time I saw her. Dominic and Shugg there, well they were rather looking forward to spending some quality time with her last night. They have quite an appetite for young ladies. Of course I didn’t let that happen. It would have been the wrong thing to do, but if ever our little arrangement here comes to a premature end, then you can guarantee that spending a night with those two will be the least of her worries. I’ll let them have her every way they want and when their appetite for her soft pink flesh has been satiated I’ll let the dogs finish off what’s left,’ McBlane said, any shred of humanity now gone. His eyes, ink black wells, soulless as they stared, challenging either Scott or Jeff to question the arrangement he had laid out before them. ‘Just ask Stephanie what happens when you go against an agreement you make with me. Oh that’s right,’ he said with a snap of his fingers, ‘you can’t now can you?’

Even without the revelation about Steph, Scott knew they were trapped. To go up against him now was useless, he held all the cards. If they agreed and then tried to vanish then McBlane would do everything in his power to find them. Twinkle was killed for even flirting with the idea of crossing McBlane and God knew what Stephanie had done and how she’d ended up. He looked at Jeff and saw his own feeling of hopelessness reflected back at him.

‘OK,’ Scott said, ‘now make the call and let her go.’

McBlane beckoned with two fingers and Shugg brought over what looked like a large mobile phone from decades earlier with an aerial like a silencer on a pistol.

‘Satellite phone,’ he explained, ‘for when I have business in locations without reception.’ He smiled at his own resourcefulness and began punching numbers.

‘Yeah, it’s agreed. She’s free to go,’ he said when the call connected, and then immediately hung up.

‘How do we know she’ll be OK?’ Jeff asked, looking at McBlane with obvious distrust.

‘We’re partners now, we really need to start trusting each other,’ McBlane answered dismissively. ‘Right lets go take a look at what’s behind the magic door.’

Reluctantly, Jeff led the way through the shattered workshop door and struggled down into the hatch. McBlane and Scott followed after, then Dominic and Shugg at the rear. It took a minute for Jeff to manoeuvre himself down the ladder and when he reached the bottom he popped another of the pain killers into his mouth and chewed it up. Scott handed the keys to Jeff who unlocked the door into the cave.

‘Fucking hell,’ McBlane exclaimed as he walked inside, ‘I knew you must have had a good thing down here judging from the amount of money that was in the bag but I didn’t expect anything on this scale.’

Shugg and Dominic walked past Scott and followed McBlane around the corner, equally in awe.

‘This is an absolute gold mine,’ McBlane said, more to himself than to any of them.

Jeff walked past Scott. A pained expression on his face that Scott wasn’t sure was more down to his labour of love being pillaged by gangsters than the discomfort from his injuries. McBlane had stopped to admire the rows of clones that were to fill up the main chamber, running his fingertips gently across the surface of their small leaves. The glee on his face illuminated a cool blue by the light from the fluorescent tubes.

‘We’re gonna make so much money from this we’ll be able to buy a fucking island,’ he said, almost musically, and laughed.

Scott’s hopes were crushed. He could see no way out for them now. He looked over at Jeff whose face was blank, almost uncomprehending. Jeff reached a hand slowly inside his jacket and Scott knew he was about to pull out the gun and shoot one of them. With that old revolver and no glasses he’d be lucky to do more than wound and would undoubtedly get himself killed right after. Instinctively, Scott pulled a fire extinguisher free from the wall beside him, held it aloft then brought it down as hard as he could onto the back of Shugg’s head. The large man crumpled face first into the plants he’d been so engrossed with. Dominic spun around and started towards Scott until he saw the unsteady hand of Jeff holding the revolver.

‘Oh this is just terrific,’ McBlane said jovially, ‘and what exactly is your next move going to be, eh?’

Scott hadn’t a clue and a look at Jeff indicated his actions hadn’t been premeditated either.