For Those Who Know the Ending (23 page)

‘Right then, we’re here. This’ll be quick, just meet and greet and confirm the deal. Keep it quiet, no talking back, and don’t go acting all surprised with things either.’

‘Sure, no, I got it,’ Aiden said with an authoritative nod. These guys were being more respectful than Duffy, treating him almost like an equal, so he was going to play at being casual with them. Agree with them; make this run as smooth as possible. Well, the driver was respectful anyway. The other guy, the one in the back with the gun, he was just silent. Looked bored and miserable. Maybe he knew he wasn’t needed and that annoyed him. Well, it was too bad, because this was going to go the right way. Everything was going the right way for Aiden all of a sudden.

Usman got out of the van and slid the side door open. It opened on Martin’s side, but the gunman nodded for Aiden to go first. Didn’t bother Aiden. They were being cautious. Ultra cautious, in fact, and that was actually reassuring. People around Don Park probably always behaved like this with new people. Just something else to get used to when you’re moving in these elevated circles.

‘In the barn,’ Usman said, leading the way across to the sliding double doors.

Aiden laughed, then stopped himself. If this was how Don Park did his security then good luck to him. Why not? Places people wouldn’t ever expect you to have a meeting were the safest places of all. He walked behind Usman, heard Martin stepping out of the van. Usman fiddled with the lock and slid open one of the barn doors. He stepped through, waiting for the other two to follow him.

It was quite dark inside. There was one window but it was small, at the back of the barn, and didn’t allow a lot of light in. The place was completely empty. The stalls that had been intended to hold animals were gone. Just the concrete floor, scratched as people dragged equipment and valuable metal away.

Aiden looked around, couldn’t see Park, or anyone else, anywhere. That was okay, made some sense when you stopped to think about it. Get the less important people into the barn first, and then Park comes over from the house. Better that than Park waiting around in here when he didn’t know how long Aiden would be. There was really no scenario here that Aiden couldn’t find a justification for in his own mind. Everything was fine, everything was going to be brilliant, just play along with it.

The barn door scraped shut. Aiden turned round to smile again, keep it casual. He turned to see the silent one pointing a gun at his head. A flash and a bang. He never worked out what was happening to him, not even in that last second. He kept the smile on his face as he collapsed backward and crashed onto the floor.

It happened much faster than Usman expected. He was standing back by the door, waiting for Martin to say something first. He didn’t. He stepped forward and raised the gun, Aiden turned round and Martin shot him in the head. It took three seconds, tops. The bang was louder than Usman had expected as well. He had ducked, trying to escape the sound. He gasped a few times, and saw Martin look round at him, expressionless. That forced Usman to stand up straight, try and match the cold and professional stance of his colleague.

‘You have the tools to bury him with?’ Martin asked.

‘Yeah,’ Usman nodded. ‘I got the stuff, in the van. I’ll, uh, I’ll get it.’

He slid the door open and stepped out into the bracing air. Thank God for fresh air. He looked off down the track as he went back to the van, nobody coming. No way anyone was close enough to hear that gunshot, not with the sound kept mostly inside the barn; but someone might have seen the van, might be curious. He had explanations lined up. Working for an engineering company or the plumbers, come to do a repair on the property before it goes back on the market, something like that. Good enough at a pinch, but it wasn’t going to explain them burying a body here.

While Usman got the gear, Martin was in the barn, leaning down beside Aiden. Checking for the kind of trouble that could spoil a good job. Good old Aiden, making this as easy as possible. His thick head had kept the bullet in. An exit wound would have meant more cleaning up; looking for bullet fragments and bits of skull. Now there was much less blood, too. The place wouldn’t be forensically clean, but there would be nothing for the naked eye to see. He took a cloth from his pocket and wiped at the small stain on the concrete beside the body, then pressed it onto the entry wound. He slid his hand into Aiden’s pockets. There was a wallet and some keys that would be ditched. The phone he found was much more of a problem. Couldn’t have done anything about it while the dealer was still alive. Aiden had been dumb enough to take it with him, but not so dumb as to have it switched on. That was a start. The door slid open and Usman came back in with a couple of sheets and a couple of shovels.

‘Put the sheets beside him, open,’ Martin said. He was prepared to talk Usman through the process if he needed to. It didn’t seem as though the younger man had any experience at this, so the gunman needed to find his voice. People with no experience always got jittery in front of the body, always made mistakes. People thought they were tough, thought that working in the business made them immune to the terror of this, but they were wrong. Death, when it was lying right in front of you, was always horrifying. Even to Martin, who had met it many times before. It was too big, too final, the consequences of being involved too huge, to ever stop being frightening.

That Usman didn’t seem nervous was a testament to his acting ability. He moved quickly across, put the shovels down out of the way, and laid out the sheets next to the body. He did it quickly and quietly. Noticed the wedding ring on Comrie’s left hand, cursed the fact that someone would be waiting for him to come home. Without being told, he moved to grab Aiden’s feet and lift him up. Martin took the top end, where the blood was coming from. They placed him near the edge of the larger sheet, lined up straight and pulled it tight over the top of him.

Martin opened the back of the phone and took the SIM card out, doing his best to fold and damage it, make it unreadable. He put the phone down on the sheet and ground his heel into it, listening to the satisfying crunch of plastic. He would throw the SIM card out the window on the way back into the city. It wasn’t perfect, or anything close, but it was the best of a bad situation. A compromise solution because this was a job done on the hoof.

They began to roll Aiden into the sheets. It wasn’t as tight as Martin would have liked, but it was good enough.

‘We’ll take the shovels first,’ Martin said. ‘You show me where.’

Usman led him round the back of the house and down a small hill to a copse of trees. The trees looked young, relatively, and there weren’t enough of them to provide a perfect shield, but it would do. There was no other building in view, little likelihood of being spotted. There was a longer-term worry. How long would it be before anyone stumbled across the body? In a place like this, it should be years. If they buried it deep enough, maybe decades. Not much chance people would be digging around here for housing or industry, so it should be safe long enough. But it wouldn’t be as good as burying in proper woods, way off in a national park somewhere. There, you know the body will probably never be found, unless you make some stupid mistake. Here, a future farm owner could just decide to pull up the trees and build on the spot, however unlikely it seemed. That was the risk.

They found what Martin judged to be the best spot, as far out of view as possible, and they started to dig. It was tough, exhausting, neither of them used to that sort of physical effort. Martin huffed and made noises indicating misery; Usman didn’t feel he had earned the right to complain, although the sweat was pouring off him and his arms burned. He hadn’t pulled the trigger. Wouldn’t matter much to a judge, but it mattered to him. Someone else had done the worst part, done it without hesitation, without thought, so that he didn’t have to. Martin was a killer with experience.

‘That will be enough,’ Martin said.

It seemed deep to Usman. It had seemed deep enough for a while, but, again, he wasn’t going to be the first to suggest it. The man who pulled the trigger called the shots. Martin was the calm one, the expert in this situation, and Usman would follow where he led.

They clambered out of the hole, making more mess as they did, and walked back up the hill to the barn. It was starting to get gloomy overhead. The cover story about being tradesmen working on the house would start to get flimsy if they were there late into the night. If they could fill the grave in quickly, they would be out of there in half an hour. That would do.

Aiden felt heavier than he looked. Usman took the headend this time; it seemed like the decent thing to do. He was bigger than Martin, younger.

It was a struggle getting the body down the hill, and Usman wished he had picked out sheets that weren’t a dazzling white. Hadn’t thought about them increasing their chances of being seen when he took them out of his cupboard and put them into the van.

They weren’t gentle with him at the grave. Dropped him in heavily, grabbed their shovels and started to fill in the hole. The truth was that Martin didn’t have a lot of experience with burials either. Killing he had done before, but his usual routine was to pull the trigger and then make an escape. He’d only been involved in one burial before this and had no idea if what he was confidently claiming was the right way to do it was indeed correct. But the body was in the hole, the soil filled in and the turf back on top and that much felt right to both of them. There was, though, some extra soil in the grass around them and you could see that a rectangular hole had been dug here. It didn’t look great.

‘It will do,’ Martin said quietly, and hoped he was right.

They walked back up the hill and put the shovels into the back of the van. Martin took a last look in the barn to make sure there was nothing they had missed, no visible blood spots or personal items that had fallen out of Aiden Comrie’s pockets. The place was clear, and they got into the van. It was a relief for them both to get out of there. They shut the gate behind them, and Martin dropped the SIM card out the window at high speed as they made their way back into the city. They stopped in a garage on the south side to switch out of the van and into Usman’s car.

‘I’ll come back for this later,’ he said.

They drove up to Usman’s flat and got the rucksack inside. They worked more quickly than they had after the bookies job, separating the cash into two piles and counting through it. Seventy-one thousand, two hundred pounds, exactly. Minus the cost of the gun and the unrecorded hire of the van, they were left with £35,050 each, in cash. It felt like an intimidating amount of money to carry around for both of them. They left the flat, Martin with his money bulging in a bag Usman gave him.

The van, the gun, the shovels, they were all Usman’s burden to shoulder. Up to him to get rid of everything they had used on the job. That’s how it was for Martin. It was a truth he learned early, you do the point and click of killing, other people usually do everything else. Usman dropped him off about half a mile from his house and Martin walked the rest of the way.

Joanne was in the kitchen. Skye was skulking about in the city somewhere, spreading her misery to the masses. Martin stuck his head round the door, didn’t go in.

‘I’m going up to change,’ he said quietly.

She heard him going upstairs but couldn’t hear what he was doing there. There was a good chance she would find out, see some hint that led her to work out what he’d been doing. She already knew she wouldn’t make a fuss about it. A relationship built on desperate silence. In his world, it probably had a better chance than one built on the old-fashioned cliché of openness.

Joanne heard him coming back downstairs.

‘Have you eaten?’ she asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said casually, after a split-second pause to think about it. He hadn’t eaten, but he wasn’t hungry. Nowhere close to hungry. Never was after that sort of job. Killing a man took all his energy away from him. He just wanted to go and sleep, but he wouldn’t, not with Joanne around. It would make her uncomfortable to see him behave differently from his routines, and he’d do nothing that made her uncomfortable. Nothing that might help her remember this day and his movements on it.

‘Busy day?’ she asked him. Looking at him with an expression that said she didn’t really want to know. A look that understood that the truth should have no place in his answer.

‘Quite busy. You?’

She smiled at his attempt to move the conversation away from his work. Joanne still got it. Martin did things he didn’t want to talk about and that she didn’t want to hear about. He made money in ways that he shouldn’t. She could accept that early on, when she wasn’t sure if this would last, but that acceptance would dim as the seriousness of their relationship became clearer. The more unmentionable work she thought he was doing, the more worried she’d get. At some point, she was sure, he would do something that horrified her. Or someone was going to do something to him that crushed her. The fear of that day arriving was beginning to make its mark.

1.29 a.m.

The pain in his wrists has dulled. The biting of the plastic strips has fallen into a steady ache that he can almost live with. Martin’s legs are stretched a little, he’s moving them as much as possible, getting the blood flowing. It’s taken some of the edge off the physical pain. He knows what’s happening. The dull aches will make it impossible to stand up when he needs to; will make it almost impossible to fight for his life. That’s why he’s moving, exercising, doing all he can to be ready for the moment they come back.

Think about the pain. Think about them coming for him. Don’t think about her. Joanne. Sitting at home, waiting for him. Knowing that he’s out on a job because this time he insisted on telling her. Worrying about what’s happened to him. Then he doesn’t turn up. She’ll wait days, hoping, believing there’s still a chance. Then what? Maybe she’ll just give up on him, decide that he might have done a runner, or that he might have been killed on a job. What can she do about it? She won’t go to the police, and he wouldn’t want her to. That would get her into trouble for hiding everything she suspected about Martin since they met, and get her into trouble with the people responsible for this, too.