James Craig - Acts of Violence

‘I am not a bloody cougar,’ Roche snapped, her voice a bit too loud. An older couple at the next table broke off their own conversation and started grinning at the two supposed lovebirds. The sergeant gripped her glass tightly. Dinner had been a mistake. She should have gone with the inspector to check out the Chinese bigwig instead. An hour in the presence of this snivelling brat had yielded no useful information whatsoever. Under the table, she felt a sweaty hand on her knee. ‘For God’s sake,’ she hissed, grabbing one of his fingers and pulling it sharply backwards, ‘behave.’

‘Ow.’ The boy sat upright, rubbing his finger. ‘What did you do that for?’

‘You can’t put your hands on me.’ Leaning across the table, her voice was barely a whisper now. ‘If you don’t get a grip, I’ll go and speak to your mum. Now, for the last time, explain to me why you didn’t properly log Gerald Howard’s video.’

Oli’s eyebrows knitted together as he struggled to assemble the building blocks of a vaguely credible story. ‘Who says I didn’t?’

‘I do,’ Roche insisted. ‘And if you don’t explain to me what’s going on, I will make a formal complaint. Your career will be toast before it’s even started.’ She felt uncomfortable bullying the boy like this, but it was for his own good. If he didn’t learn now, he would come a cropper sooner rather than later.

Oli took a sip of his beer and stifled a small burp.

God, Roche thought, some poor girl is really going to luck out, pulling you.

‘Craven told me to ignore it,’ Steed said finally, fingering Inspector John Craven, SO15’s second-in-command, sidekick to the boss, Chief Inspector Will Dick.

Finally, we’re making some progress . ‘Why?’

‘Dunno.’ Oli stared at the table. ‘He just said, this was going on the back burner. Not a priority.’ Looking up, he smiled maliciously. ‘And he said that I wasn’t to talk to you about it because you were a loose cannon who had a problem with authority.’

Keeping her anger in check, Roche glided over the personal slight. ‘Presumably this order came from Dick himself?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Don’t know much, do you?’

Stung by the barb, the boy retorted, ‘I heard some gossip that the spooks had asked for the matter to be shelved in the interests of national security.’

In the interests of national security, my arse , Roche reflected. In the interests of doing business with China, no doubt. ‘Is that it?’

‘That’s all I heard.’ Finishing his beer, the boy stood up. ‘I’ve told you everything I know, so I’m going to push off.’ He grabbed his jacket and began weaving his way past the other diners, heading for the door. The couple at the next table gave Roche a sympathetic smirk as she watched him disappear out into the street. With a sigh of relief, the sergeant took a final sip of her wine and signalled for the bill.

* * *

Slowly coming to his senses, Carlyle blinked twice and wiggled first his toes and then his fingers. Everything seemed to be in working order, more or less. He had a thumping headache but at least the room wasn’t spinning.

They had left him where he fell. Laboriously getting to his feet, the inspector headed out into the hallway. Moving at a glacial pace, he went from room to room in order to confirm what he already knew: the Chinese were gone.

He glanced at his watch.

‘They’re probably on a plane somewhere over Germany by now,’ he grumbled to himself.

He slowly realised that the throbbing in his head was being accompanied by a banging that was external to his skull. He tracked the noise to a large, spotless and apparently unused kitchen, where his gaze fell on a small wooden door in the far corner.

‘Hey. Open this bloody door!’ came a muffled voice.

Despite his condition, Carlyle managed to muster the feeblest of smiles. ‘Hold on a sec.’ Fortunately, they had left the key in the lock. Opening it, he took a step back as Amelia Elmhirst staggered out of the pantry.

‘The buggers locked me up,’ she scowled.

‘I can see that.’

Looking Carlyle up and down, her face darkened even further. ‘What the hell did you take that bloody drink for?’ she thundered.

Holding up his hand, Carlyle signalled that he was not in the mood for an argument; especially when the sergeant was one hundred per cent in the right. Turning, he headed for the door.

‘What do we do now?’ Elmhirst asked, following after him.

‘Go home. Try and get some sleep.’ Carlyle stopped and waggled a weary finger at his colleague. ‘I’ll see you in the office tomorrow.’

‘But-’

‘And,’ Carlyle talked over her, ‘most importantly, not a word about this to anyone.’

Werner Kortmann munched listlessly on a slice of pizza. ‘I have never really liked Italian food,’ he said, tossing the crust back into the box and closing the garishly coloured lid. The pizza firm had an address in a town he had never heard of and a phone number he had no way of dialling.

‘My most sincere apologies,’ said Sebastian Gregori, cranking up the sarcasm, ‘but the choice was rather limited.’ Grabbing a slice of his own pepperoni pizza, he wolfed it down in three speedy bites.

Kortmann washed the taste away with a mouthful of cola. ‘I have never really liked the Italians at all. Too theatrical, all of them. Everything has to be a drama . . . even lunch.’

‘Well, don’t worry,’ Gregori reassured him, ‘you won’t be going there any time soon.’

‘Why is that?’ Kortmann looked around the dirty room, feebly illuminated by a couple of battery-powered lamps, and shivered. The concrete floor was cold and damp; within hours of being moved here, he found himself thinking wistfully of the straw-filled cage that had been his previous home. Their current accommodation was another countryside retreat, on the ground floor of a shell of a house. Gregori had explained that the development, a ghost estate in the middle of nowhere, had been abandoned when the developer went bust after the financial crash and had never been completed.

Through the gloom, Kortmann looked his captor in the eye. ‘Are you going to kill me?’

Gregori patted the gun that bulged in his jacket pocket. ‘That depends.’

Kortmann rubbed his ankle. His leg had been chained to a metal hook embedded in a block of concrete abandoned in the middle of the room when the builders had left. The dull ache in his lower back never left him and he would have paid a fortune for a few hours in a clean, crisp bed. Catching a whiff of his own body odour, he recoiled. ‘Depends on what?’

The other man said nothing.

‘People will be looking for me.’ Kortmann tried to ignore his aching bladder. The chain only allowed him the freedom to move about a metre in any direction, and the place smelled enough like a toilet already.

Munching on another slice of pizza, Gregori nodded. ‘Let them look,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘Do you really think that useless English policeman will find you in this – or any other – lifetime?’

‘He almost found you once,’ Kortmann countered, recalling when he had been bundled away from the farmhouse, Gregori screaming like a madman about ‘those damn cops’.

‘Pure chance.’ Gregori spat a mouthful of pizza towards his captive, the semi-masticated ball of cheese, dough and sausage landing at Kortmann’s feet. ‘He’ll never manage it again.’

Kortmann sighed. Unfortunately, he shared his captor’s view of the lugubrious police inspector. As a boy, he had grown up believing that the British police were the best in the world. It had taken just two days in London to fully disabuse him of that notion. He tried to change tack. ‘So, what is it that you want?’