Not Dead Enough (18 page)

‘OK,’ she said.

‘What are you watching that crap for?’

Her eyes still flicked back to the screen. ‘I like it,’ she said, trying to calm him. ‘Poor guy. His wife’s in a wheelchair. He’s just blown the hundred and twenty-five thousand pound question.’

‘The whole show’s a con,’ he said.

‘No, it isn’t!’

‘Life’s a con. Haven’t you figured that one out yet?’

‘A con?’

Now it was his turn to point at the screen. ‘I don’t know who he is, nor did the rest of the world. A few minutes ago he sat in that chair and had nothing. Now he’s going to walk away with thirty-two thousand pounds and feel dissatisfied, when he should be rip-roaring with joy. You’re going to tell me that’s not a con?’

‘It’s a matter of perspective. I mean – from his point—’ ‘Turn the fucking thing off!’

Sophie was still shocked by the aggression in his voice, but at the same time a defiant streak made her reply, ‘No. I’m enjoying it.’

‘Want me to go, so you can watch your fucking sad little programme?’

She was already regretting what she had said. Despite her earlier resolve to end it with Brian, seeing him in the flesh made her realize she would a million times rather that he was here, with her, tonight than watch this show – or any show. And God, what the poor man must be going through . . . She punched the remote, turning it off. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

He was staring at her in a way she’d never seen before. As if blinds had come down behind his eyes.

‘I’m really sorry, OK? I’m just surprised you’re here.’

‘So you’re not pleased to see me?’

She sat up and threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips. His breath was rancid and he smelled sweaty, but she didn’t care. They were manly smells, his smells. She breathed them in as though they were the most intoxicating scents on the planet. ‘I’m more than pleased,’ she said. ‘I’m just . . .’ She looked into those hazel eyes she adored so much. ‘I’m just so surprised, you know – after what you said earlier when we spoke. Tell me. Please tell me what’s happened. Please tell me everything.’

‘Open it!’ he said, his voice rising.

She pulled away some of the tissue, but, like a Chinese box, there was another layer beneath, and then another again. Trying to bring him back down from whatever was angering him, she said, ‘OK, I’m trying to guess what this is. And I’m guessing that it’s a—’

Suddenly his face was inches in front of hers, so close their noses were almost touching.

‘Open it!’ he screeched. ‘Open it, you fucking bitch.’

38

Skunk, driving along in falling, purple-tinted darkness, clocked the bright headlights again in his mirror. They had appeared from nowhere moments after he left the Regency Square car park. Now they were accelerating past the line of traffic and cutting in behind a blacked-out BMW that was right on his tail.

It wasn’t necessarily anything to worry about, he thought. But as he reached the two solid lines of vehicles backed up at the roundabout in front of Brighton Pier, in his mirror he caught a fleeting glimpse of the face of the man in the passenger seat, flashlit under the neon glare of the street lighting, and began to panic.

He couldn’t be completely sure, but it looked too fucking much like that young plain-clothes cop called Paul Packer, whose finger he’d bitten off after a run-in over a stolen car, for which he had been banged up in a young offenders’ institute.

At full volume on the car’s radio, Lindsay Lohan was singing ‘Confessions of a Broken Heart’, but he barely heard the words; he was looking at the traffic flow in and out of the roundabout, trying to decide which exit to take. The car behind hooted. Skunk gave him the bird. There was a choice of four exits. One would take him towards the town centre and clogged-up traffic. Too risky, he could easily get trapped there. The second was Marine Parade, a wide street with plenty of side roads, plus fast open road beyond it. The third would take him along the seafront, but the danger there was, with just one exit at either end, he could get blocked in easily. The fourth would take him back in the direction he had just come from. But there were roadworks and heavy traffic.

He made his decision, pressing the pedal all the way down to the metal. The Audi shot forward, across the bows of a white van. Fiercely concentrating, Skunk continued accelerating along Marine Parade, past shops, then the flash Van Alen building. He checked in the mirror. No sign of the Vectra. Good. Must be stuck at the roundabout.

Traffic lights ahead were red. He braked, then cursed. In his mirrors he saw the Vectra again, overtaking on the wrong side, making up ground, driving like a maniac. The car pulled up behind him. Right behind him. Like, one inch from his rear bumper. All shiny clean. Radio aerial on the roof. Two men in the front seats. And now, lit up in the glare of his own brake lights, there really was no mistaking one of them.

Shit.

In the mirror he saw Packer’s eyes, remembered them from before, big, calm eyes, that sort of locked on you like lasers. He remembered even when he’d bitten the fucker’s finger off, his eyes kept fixed on him, no surprise, no look of pain. Sort of weird, smiley eyes – almost like the man had been mocking him. And it was as if he was doing that again now, sitting there, neither cop making any move to get out of their car.

Why the fuck aren’t you arresting me?

His nerves were jumping about inside him, like there was some crazed animal on a trampoline inside his stomach. He nodded his head to the music. But he was jangling. Needed something. Needed another hit. The mean amount he’d taken was wearing off fast. Tried to think of the best route.

Tried to think why the cops weren’t getting out of their car.

The lights changed to green. He stamped on the pedal, accelerated halfway across the junction, then jerked the wheel hard left and slewed into Lower Rock Gardens, narrowly missing an oncoming taxi. In his mirror he saw, to his relief, the Vectra shoot over the junction.

He accelerated flat out up the Victorian terraced street, which was lined on both sides with cheap bed and breakfasts and bedsits. As he halted at another red light at the top, he saw the Vectra approaching quickly. And any last shred of doubt he might have had that he was being followed was now gone.

Checking both directions, he saw two buses were coming from his left, nose to tail. Waiting until the last possible moment, he accelerated, shooting across the front of the first bus, driving like the wind. He raced up Egremont Place, through a sharp S-bend, overtaking a dawdling Nissan on the wrong side, on a blind corner, but fortune was with him and nothing was coming from the other direction.

Then he waited anxiously at the junction with busy Elm Grove for a gap in the traffic. Two headlights suddenly pricked the darkness a long way back. Forgetting about a break in the traffic, he turned right, across it, ignoring squeals of brakes, blaring horns and flashing lights, laying a trail of rubber, up past Brighton racecourse, then down through the suburb of Woodingdean.

He debated about stopping to change the licence plate and revert back to the car’s original ones, as it almost certainly had not yet been reported stolen, but he didn’t want to take the risk of the Vectra catching him up again. So he pressed on, ignoring the flash of a speed camera with a wry smile.

Ten minutes later on a country road two miles inland from the Channel port of Newhaven, with his mirrors black and empty, and his windscreen spattered with dead insects, he slowed down and made a right turn at a sign which read Meades Farm.

He drove through a gap in a tall, ragged hedgerow on to a metalled, single-track farm road, following it through fields of corn overdue for harvesting, for half a mile, several kamikaze rabbits darting in and out of his path. He passed the massive derelict sheds that once housed battery hens, and an open-sided barn on his right contained a few shadowy pieces of long-disused and rusting farm machinery. Then, directly ahead, his headlights picked up the wall of a vast, steel-sided, enclosed barn.

He stopped the car. No light came from the building and there were no vehicles parked outside. Nothing at all to reveal that an active business was being carried on in here at this moment.

Pulling his mobile phone from his pocket, he called a number he knew by heart. ‘Outside,’ he said when it was answered.

Electronic doors slid open just wide enough to allow him to drive in, revealing a brightly lit, cavernous space, then began closing behind him instantly. Inside he saw about twenty cars, most of them the latest model, top-end luxury machines. He clocked two Ferraris, an Aston Martin DB9, a Bentley Continental, two Range Rovers, a Cayenne, as well as some less exotic cars, including a Golf GTI, a Mazda XR2, a classic yellow Triumph Stag and a new-looking MG TF. Some of the cars appeared to be intact, while others were in various stages of dismemberment. Despite the lateness of the hour, four boiler-suited mechanics were working on vehicles – two beneath open bonnets, one on his back under a jacked-up Lexus sports car, the fourth fitting a body panel to a Range Rover Sport.

Skunk switched off the engine and with that his music fell silent. Instead some cheesy old Gene Pitney song crackled out from a cheap radio somewhere in the building. A drill whined.

Barry Spiker stepped out of his glass-windowed office over on the far side, talking into a mobile, and walked towards him. A short, wiry, former regional champion flyweight boxer with close-cropped hair, he had a face hard enough to carve ice with. He was dressed in a blue boiler suit over a string vest, and flip-flops, and he reeked of a sickly sweet aftershave. A medallion hung from a gold chain around his neck. Without acknowledging Skunk, he walked all the way around the car, still talking on his phone, arguing, looking in a foul mood.

As Skunk got out of the car, Spiker ended his call, then, brandishing his phone like a dagger, walked up to him. ‘What the fuck’s this piece of shit? I wanted a three-point-two V6. This is a two-litre piss-pot. No use to me. Hope you’re not expecting me to buy it!’

Skunk’s heart sank. ‘You – you didn’t . . .’ He dug the crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, on which he had taken down the instructions this morning, and showed it to Spiker. On it was written, in his shaky handwriting, New-shape Audi A4 convertible, automatic, low mileage, metallic blue, silver or black.

‘You never specified the motor size,’ Skunk said.

‘So which fucking tree did you fall out of? People who buy nice cars happen to like nice engines to go with them.’

‘This goes like hot shit,’ Skunk said defensively.

Spiker shrugged, looked at the car again pensively. ‘Nah, not for me.’ His phone started ringing. ‘Don’t like the colour much either.’ He checked the display, brought the phone to his ear and said abruptly, ‘I’m busy. Call you back,’ then he hung up. ‘Sixty quid.’

‘What?’ Skunk had been expecting two hundred.

‘Take it or leave it.’

Skunk glared at him. The bastard always found some way to screw him. Either there was a mark on the paintwork, or the tyres were knackered, or it needed a new exhaust. Something. But at least he was making a secret profit on the car park, getting back at the man in his own small – but satisfying – way.

‘Where did you get it from?’

‘Regency Square.’

Spiker nodded. He was checking the interior carefully, and Skunk knew why. He was looking for any mark or scratch he could use to beat the price down lower. Then Spiker’s eyes alighted greedily on something in the passenger footwell. He opened the door, ducked down, then stood up, holding a small piece of paper, like a trophy, which he inspected carefully. ‘Brilliant!’ he said. ‘Nice one!’

‘What?’

‘Parking receipt from Regency Square. Twenty minutes ago. Just two quid! Top man, Skunk! So you owe me twenty-five quid back from that float I gave you.’

Skunk cursed his own stupidity.

39

His words shook her. Scared her. His eyes were glazed and bloodshot. Had he been drinking? Taken some drug?

‘Open it!’ he said again. ‘Open it, bitch!’

She was tempted to tell him to go to hell, and how dare he speak to her like that? But, knowing how much stress he must be under, she tried to humour him, to calm him down and bring him back from whatever place or space he was in. She removed another layer of tissue. This was one weird game. First we shout and swear at you, then we give you a present, right?

She removed another layer, balled it and dropped it on the bed beside her, but there was no thaw in his demeanour. Instead, he was worsening, quivering with anger.

‘Come on, bitch! Why are you taking so long?’

A shiver of anxiety wormed through her. Suddenly she did not want to be here, trapped in her room with him. She had no idea what she was going to find in the gift box. He’d never bought her a gift before, except some flowers a couple of times recently when he’d come over to her flat. But whatever it was, nothing felt right; it was as if the world was suddenly skewed on its axis.

And with every layer she removed she was starting to have a really bad feeling about what was in the box.

But then she got down to the last layer of tissue paper. She felt something that was part hard, part soft and yielding, as if it was made of leather, and she realized what it might be. And she relaxed. Smiled at him. The sod was teasing her, it was all a wind-up! ‘A handbag!’ she said with a squeal. ‘It’s a handbag, isn’t it? You darling! How did you know I desperately need a new bag? Did I tell you?’

But he wasn’t smiling back. ‘Just open it,’ he said again, coldly.

And that brief moment of good feeling evaporated as her world skewed again. There was not one shred of warmth coming back from his expression or his words. Her fear deepened. And just how strange was it that he was giving her a present on the day his wife was found dead? Then, finally, she removed the last layer of tissue.

And stared down in shock at the object that was revealed.

It wasn’t a handbag at all, but something strange and sinister-looking, a helmet of some kind, grey, with bug-eyed glass lenses and a strap, and a ribbed tube hanging down with some kind of filter on the end. A gas mask, she realized with dismay, the kind she’d seen on soldiers’ faces out in Iraq, or maybe it was older. It had a musty, rubbery smell.