‘Been some bother,’ Vincent said. A major understatement. He stood aside. Henderson went past him, looked down the cabin, then glanced at Vincent and sniffed up.
‘Crusher?’ he asked efficiently.
‘One of ’em, the other’s cat food.’
Callard had no idea what they were talking about. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Take a look,’ Vincent gestured in a ‘be my guest’ kind of way.
And from Callard’s reaction, Vincent knew that he was going to be a problem. Drunks always were. Untrustworthy, self-absorbed and pathetic.
Vincent now looked at his driver, having expected something like this. He wouldn’t have minded, but he knew of Callard’s past. There was violence in it, he’d once been a minder for a low-level drug dealer, had broken fingers in his younger days, made people squeal for mercy. Now he was an alcohol-riddled wimp. He said, ‘It’s gone beyond that, Larry. You’re too much a part of it now. All that drug transporting, now helping me to dispose of two bodies, one of which you took in the aggregate this morning.’ He smiled at Callard, his eyes hooded. ‘Accessory to murder at the very least. You’re locked in, pal.’
‘Jack, I won’t say anything… I just…’
‘Look, come in proper, don’t stand there. Let’s chat. This’ll be OK. Seriously. No worries.’
Callard hesitated, then stepped into the cabin, his eyes quickly moving to the far back wall on which most of the flesh and blood of the dead men had been splattered. Now you couldn’t tell. Once the bodies had been dragged out and disposed of, Vincent had set Callard to work with a power washer inside the cabin. As the furniture in that section was all cheap plastic, it hadn’t mattered about it getting soaked. Callard had covered his wooden desk with a plastic sheet, pulled open the drain plug in the cabin floor and got to work, hosing it all away. He’d gagged at first, then gone on to autopilot. Dazed, shocked and simply doing what he’d been told to do, terrified of the consequences of refusal. The washer had done a good job and Callard had spent extra time spraying the water jets into the nooks and crannies, transfixed as the resultant liquid mix gurgled away down the plughole.
And that was after he’d helped to get rid of the bodies.
He and Henderson, who had been completely unaffected by the task, had dragged the first body all the way to the stone crusher. Henderson adjusted the machine to spew out the finest grade of rock and then they’d hauled the body on to the conveyor belt, switched it on and watched it feed in.
The second body was more of a conundrum as far as Callard was concerned. He could see the reasoning in getting rid of a body through a crusher. It was pounded to nothing. Spat out on to a pile of hardcore, then tipped into a lorry and would eventually be part of the foundations underneath the stretch of motorway the hardcore was dumped at.
No body. No evidence. A very good way of disposing of it. Even Callard could see that.
But the second body?
He and Henderson had heaved it on to the back of Vincent’s Toyota four-wheel drive. Henderson drove up beyond the working quarry, on rough, deeply gouged tracks, up on to the rim of the disused quarry that Vincent also owned on the hillside behind his house. This was fenced off by a high, thick chain-link fence with many ‘Danger — No Entry’ signs posted on it. Henderson stopped at a gate, unlocked it and drove through, then around various tracks until they came to the old single-storey explosives store on the far edge of the quarry. Under Henderson’s instructions they dragged the dead body off the flat-back and dumped it inside the store, which was about the size of a small garage.
Henderson drove back to the cabin. Callard was told it was his job to clean up the mess, then power wash the back of the Toyota too, which was smeared with blood as though they’d had the carcass of a deer in it.
All these awful memories were still vivid in Callard’s brain as Vincent sat him down.
‘You owe me big style,’ Vincent said. ‘No one else would take you on, but I did. It’s not as though you didn’t know what you were getting into, is it?’
Callard stared numbly at his boss. Then blurted, ‘The drugs, yeah — but killing! Fuck me, Jack! You in a turf war or something?’
‘Sometimes the shit hits the fan. Bad things happen and they have to be dealt with — and that’s what happened here.’ Vincent slid open a desk drawer, took out the money box and opened it. His hand came out with a big roll of notes crushed in his palm, the same ones he had shown the now deceased H. Diller and his equally dead backup, Haltenorth. ‘But we always get good money for what we do, don’t we?’ He looked at the cash. ‘I don’t know how much there is here, but it’s yours for what you did yesterday.’ His hand stretched out to Callard, offering it.
‘Don’t want it,’ he said stubbornly. ‘Just want out. I can’t take what’s going on.’
Vincent’s mouth tightened. Slowly he slid the money back into the cash tin and locked it. He pocketed the small key and rested his right hand, fingers slightly outstretched, across the box, which was just small enough for him to pick up with the one hand, like a brick. He picked it up as though he was going to replace it in the drawer.
Then he smashed it across Callard’s head.
The tin wasn’t particularly heavy. But it was sturdy and well constructed. It was a secure money box, after all, made of quite thick metal. The force of the blow deformed Callard’s whole face for a moment and he crashed off the chair on to his hands and knees. Vincent discarded the box and reverted to his fists, pounding Callard’s head until, finished, he stood up slowly and breathless. Callard scuttled away across the cabin, whimpering and groaning. Vincent stood over him.
‘I decide,’ he gasped, ‘who comes, who stays, who goes and what you do. I own you. I decide. And you’ll do everything I tell you.’
EIGHT
During his time as a cop, Flynn had hammered on many doors, especially when he’d been on the drugs branch. Somehow an instinct was acquired as to whether anyone was at home, but on this occasion it didn’t take the greatest detective in the world to work out there was a reasonable chance someone was inside. The car in the garage was a bit of a clue, as was the presence of the dog. Maybe. Or maybe Tom was at work, had got a lift in, and no one was inside.
Flynn shrugged mentally. He thumped the side of his fist on the door, rattled the letter box and stuck his finger on the door bell, making enough noise to raise the dead.
They pushed against the worsening weather, heads bowed, for as they trudged northwards, the north-easterly came in at them from forty-five degrees to the right, continually buffeting them and making walking along some stretches of the narrow paths quite dangerous.
Henry led, Donaldson bringing up the rear, trapped in his own world. To the American it had all become a bit unreal and he was focused on nothing more than the function of putting one foot in front of the other and the huge effort that it took. What he wanted to do was succumb to the awful way he was feeling, the nausea that enveloped him, the pain that weakened him every time it shot across his lower guts, and the fact that he dared not even fart. He even chuckled at that thought — and then the pain wracked him again and sapped more energy. His knees were weakening all the time, his muscles beginning to feel soft and pudgy. He pushed on, hoping his physical fitness and his mental attitude would be his saviour.
Henry was maybe ten feet ahead of him, but as the sleet turned to proper snow and the wind whipped it around, it became a series of interplaying curtains in front of his eyes, making it hard to keep Henry in view.
A sudden panic came over Donaldson. He was a tough guy and had been in many life-and-death situations, but they had always been on level playing fields or, more usually, Donaldson had had the advantage. And with the exception of one major blip — when he’d come face to face with one of the world’s most wanted terrorists and almost lost his life — he had always come out on top. Because he was fit, healthy, strong and hadn’t eaten bad chicken the night before. He could hardly believe how terribly it was affecting him, how vulnerable it was making him feel.