Robert Parker - Snow Storm

Campbell gave him a knowing look. “That seems unlikely.”

Burke punched him again with his free hand, before releasing his grip. He moved away, starting to turn but saw the smirking face and couldn’t resist another blow, side on this time, directly at Campbell’s jaw, and another and another, until everything became a blur.

When he became aware of his surroundings Campbell was gone.

McKay stood shivering outside the house in Morningside. Its manicured privet hedges twinkled with fairy lights, which along with its Victorian sandstone grandeur made it look like something off a Christmas card. A very expensive Christmas card at that. Nothing came cheap in this part of the city. If you were lucky you’d bought in the 80s when the Capital was still known for being the heroin capital of Europe and clung on for the property boom. If you weren’t you could just about forget it.

The judge was unlikely to have been happy at being woken at such an hour. If that was the case it didn’t show though. He seemed a fairly jovial character in his dressing gown. His white hair stood up off the sides of his otherwise bald head and his colour suggested an eventful night may have been had elsewhere earlier this evening. They’d been told he could be found at the Whisky Society if not at home.

It was all very cloak and dagger. The documents were signed and witnessed before being placed in sealed documents ready for receipt by the DI. He wished he’d had a cheeky swatch at them before they’d been sealed, but it was too late now and no point knowing anything if you felt someone might try to winkle it out of you. They were gossip hounds round the station, particularly CID.

The judge had bid him good evening, despite the fact it was well beyond that, maybe tipsy, maybe this was exciting to him. It couldn’t be a regular occurrence, getting dragged out of bed by the cops.

It had all happened at once, as tended to be the way of things; spend days doing heehaw, going through evidence, going through the motions, waiting for something to happen and then the boss recoils in his chair while reading the paper, like he’s spilled his coffee in his lap and it all kicks off.

Strange enough when he was wandering round talking to himself all the time. A lot of people in CID thought he’d still to get over that shooting business the year before, but that was just how things went. Bloody tragedy that. Losing those two.

Burke had immediately shot off rabbiting into his phone about something, before returning to his own office and pacing around again. Muttering to himself.

The next thing McKay knew he was being despatched to the judge’s house with the documents.

By the time he returned, that Edwards eejit was assembling his troops and they looked like they were tooling up for something big.

Victor knew things were getting complicated. Things were not to his liking at this end of the operation. There were too many unresolved problems. The kid was a waste management issue, nothing else for it. He’d been stupid, crossed the wrong people. How could he be allowed to go now? How could it be ensured that he wouldn’t say anything? There was no way and as much as he hated to end a life needlessly before its time he had to look after number one and of course numbers two and three in the forms of Boris and Sacha.

Family was all. There was no debate there. The kid should not have been so stupid. They all were nowadays. Still, he should not be expected to pay for their sins. He only had control over his world and he must do everything to retain that control.

Alexei held the blowtorch in one hand, his face glowing like some kind of demonic gargoyle. He should really see a dentist if he survived long enough, which, given his recent behaviour, seemed increasingly unlikely. In his other hand he held the bolt cutters, which glowed almost white at the end of their jaws. Occasional sparks drifted off into the air as Alexei’s fascinated eyes followed them.

He took too much pleasure in this to maintain any professional detachment. Victor could see that now. He took no such pleasure. Indeed it was as though he was not there. He could ignore the screams and the pleading, let it wash over him. He was nothing more than an observer in someone else’s nightmare, watching a man who looked like himself but registered no emotion, took no pain or pleasure and recognised this was just his lot. It was a job that had to be done in order to ensure the successful running of an operation.

He heard his voice address the lawyer with a kind of cold feigned empathy. “Fire.” He motioned towards Alexei and his burner. “It purifies, sanitises, cauterises.”

The lawyer pleaded with his eyes, struggling almost involuntarily. He couldn’t make out the moans of desperation from behind the gag but he could see the anxious contortions of the face.

“The jaws of this implement will cut through fingers as if they are not there, which of course they then won’t be.” He laughed at this, couldn’t help it. It had been a long day

The lawyer’s face ran with tears now as he contemplated this, undoubtedly wondering in what way he had failed his client in order to deserve such a fate.

“This is not a respectable way to behave, Mr Heriot-Watt,” he taunted. “Is this how your father brought you up to be a man? To cry like a little girl?”

The hired hands laughed and he hated them for it. Sycophantic nothings. How could men be so physically strong and yet so without backbone? “Did you think you had some kind of job for life? I suppose you did.” He laughed again. “But there’s no pension scheme in our business. This is not something you can do on a consultancy basis. We do not follow laws. We have our own. This has to be a clean operation. There can be no mess. Not when it’s all so dirty.” Again the sycophantic laughter. “Do you know where you are?”

The lawyer didn’t know how to respond so he just went back to the standard pleading.

“Physically?” Victor demanded. “Surely you know that? Do you know what this is? This is an empire. This is storage, logistics, production even, for everything I’m building. You don’t even know do you? This is the place where they regularly store white powder in bulk and truck the stuff all around the country. You think this is lime? This is Columbia’s finest cocaine. This place is its own airport, truck depot and even, God love your predecessor, money laundering operation. No one knows what’s going in and out of here and how much it costs. No one knows we have an oil tanker with an extra compartment for those girls you’re so fond of. Do you know we’re thirty miles from a port to Ireland, one where they’ve taken off the police presence because…” He paused and looked round at the others. “Well I don’t even know why. Do you know how they used to smuggle chemicals across that border? Do you? People would buy two newspapers, cut the pictures from one and paste them over the shots in the other just so they could squeeze a layer of heroin in between. Now I could drive a car through there and no one would notice and if we avoid the main routes when the pressure’s on and fly everything out of this place so be it. And if not, we have that boat you helped to launch the other day. Any sign of trouble at one end, we simply ditch the product in the sea and fish it out again like the most expensive catch you can imagine. So thank you. Thank you for your complicity and the fact that you knew what you were doing was wrong by your own bourgeois standards but didn’t care in any way.

Thank you for the publicity. The key to this was always to hide in plain sight.

Everything had swung into action beautifully. Edwards had materialised a task force from somewhere, like he’d been waiting for something like this to happen. He’d said as much of course though he probably never knew what it would be in any detail.